(click my CELEBS page for photo)
UPDATE: Canadian funny man Leslie Nielsen was presented the Award of Excellence by ACTRA at the home of Canada’s Consul General in Los Angeles. Fellow Canadians, Jeopardy host Alex Trebek and Love Story Director Arthur Hiller, showed up for the event.
by jim holt
It has nothing to do with elves,
it has nothing to do with
summer,
Mexico or any design of that
place we wanted to hang
on my wall,
nothing at all.
But, I did sweat so badly
one time
like a hot fish turning in my bed
when the desert was near
and the ocean was far away,
when you touched my leather face
to test my authenticity
as a pre-historic bird.
We were the doves of our
own time.
—-
i wrote this for P.D. in Toronto Jan. 13, 1984.
By jim holt
Find the garden gnome hiding somewhere in this picture. Go ahead. It’s fun.
Somewhere in this photo there should be a smiling gnome resting on his rake ….
Should be.
Are you looking?
Somewhere …. Somewhere …. If you look long and hard, there’s a garden gnome hiding in this photo of red flowers ….
Naw, I’m only messin’ with you.
There’s no gnome. That’s the whole point of these blogs I’ve been posting for the last couple of years.
It’s been a long long time since my mother’s yard has been home to a jolly portly wee guy in lederhosen, laughing at life among the wee firs …
Who’s laughing now? Right? Right?
Still looking, aren’t you?
Give it up, buddy. Face it. They’re just gone. Gone. Gone. Gone.
Where do they go? Right? Where DO they go? Am I right? These garden gnomes we love.
You like the wee party truck idea, don’t you? I know. I know.
Some days I wish I could just dwindle down to just a foot-and-a-half tall, get me a groovy leather vest, some John Lennon glasses, floppy rave-type hat, floppy knee-high matching boots, maybe a beer stein … just so I could stand in my mom’s front garden for a couple of nights until the party truck comes by …
Ooohhh …. Don’t know about the gnome party truck?
(In case you missed the first couple of blogs … the on-going theory here at Bloghouser is that all the garden gnomes in all the neighborhood yards go missing at night when the gnome party truck – the size of those motorized kids’ Jeeps – drives by, scouring the neighborhood waving waiting gnomes to join them).
Anyway, some days I’d like to be able to call the gnome home my home.
Forget the mile-high club … I say, give me an invite to the knee-high club. I think garden gnomes have got a pretty good thing going on … vehemently protecting the secret of their disappearance.
I spotted a garden gnome recently – in of all places, a garden. Can you believe it? A garden gnome still found in a bloody garden. Un-frickin’believable, I know.
It was the middle of the day …. Front yard …. There he stood, flanked by pink impatiens on his left and pink impatiens on his right … looking both pretty – and funky – in pink … boots like elf slippers, floppy hat of course (was there ever a time when those bloody hats actually stood erect? A weighty question perhaps for another day) … so there he was, smiling, looking up at me as I dared to walk up the driveway and stand over the little guy … there he was smiling, rosy cheeks …..
I looked around …. Squatted down in front of him (to give anyone watching the impression I was admiring some handiwork) ….
That smirk … oh that smirk …
“You’re hiding something, aren’t you buddy? Some big big secret, eh? A big big secret for a little guy, eh? Eh? Oh yeah, you know something.”
Of course he said nothing.
They’re trained like that. Trained to make it look like they’re working in your garden when in actual fact all they ever do is hold rakes and shovels and beer steins in just the right way so that you think they’re working …. They’re not.
“C’mon, buddy….. I’m onto you. You and your diminutive pals all vanishing without a trace and real human – ok, I’ll say it, tall – people are expected not to notice or ask questions …. Well, I’m asking …. What’s it all about? …. Eh? …. Big guy?”
Silence.
Oh, they’re so crafty …. To say nothing of smug … that smirk.
“C’mon … c’mon …. It’s just you and me. I won’t tell anyone … you guys disappear, meet at a secret location, hook up with garden chick gnomes, doff your lederhosen and kerchiefs, leave them in a tiny heap by some watering hole … yeah? Yeah? Is that it? Is that it?
Again, nothing.
Oh they’re good at keeping their mouths shut … Freemasons have nothing on these guys. Every now and then some wayward mason gets drunk and spills the beans on his memorizing pals only to end up disappearing … well, garden gnomes have never said a word and they ALL go missing.
Genius. Sheer, genius.
“Ok, buddy,” that’s what I said to this garden gnome I actually spotted in someone’s yard. “Ok, buddy. I’m hip to you.”
(I gave him one of those eye-to-eye hand gestures … where I make a peace sign with my fingers, then point them at my eyes and then point them at his eyes, then my eyes, then his eyes …)
“Are we good? Are we? Look at my eyes, fella’.”
At this point, he’s smiling up at me, hands on his hips.
“This isn’t over.” I tell him. “I’ll be back.”
I went back the next day with a shopping list of questions. I parked my car, got out, walked confidently over to the pink impatiens …..
You guessed it, my friend. You guessed it. You’ve obviously been there yourself. Yep. Gone.
Gone. Gone. Gone.
I stood there looking at the empty space between the pink impatiens …. Shaking my head, hands on hips, I looked up at the sky in wonder, shaking my head and I couldn’t help smiling….
I was suddenly aware of a larger being looking down and seeing in His garden, by the pink impatiens, a tiny figure of a person, kind of portly, standing with his hands on his hips, looking up at the sky, pretending to work ….
by jim holt
She was kneeling in the station
in a white cotton dress
like an angel
still weeping
about to confess.
—–
from my 2nd book of poetry, Axle My Youth, description at open library.
by jim holt
Before I left the club that night I stole the marquee.
I didn’t ask permission, I just took it.
Bright yellow cardboard panel, larger than a car door: Jim Carroll El Mocambo Dec. 10.
Now it hangs as a center piece in Jim’s Garage, anchoring the other things I hold close to my heart: framed photos of desert hikes; a Wolfman model I won by running as fast as I possibly could because I wanted it so badly; mason jars full of marbles and earrings and drum kit hardware….
It’s next to my ‘Running on the Sun’ poster – about the Badwater ultra-marathon, the most grueling footrace in the history of human beings, 135 miles through Death Valley at the hottest time of the year.
Jim Carroll died September 11.
When Catholic Boy was released just before Christmas 1980, I was working in A&A Records on Yonge Street.
We spun that record endlessly in the store, each time louder than the time before. We had a harvest of incredible albums from which to choose: London Calling (Clash); The Pretenders; The English Beat; Television …
But, Jim’s album we cranked up.
So, when he came to Toronto’s El Mocambo from NYC with his skinny ass band, Mikey and I went to see him. Absolutely.
I can still see that drum kit the size of those you get from K-Mart … watching him come out with his band (who all looked like he did) watching them as they huddled in front of that tiny drum set, sharing a cigarette, just before they turned around and rocked the house down.
oh yeah baby …. that was a kick-ass band. when people talk about a kick-ass band …. it’s not the size of woofers, baby …. it’s the size of fucking kickass…..
my ass is still sore … after 30 years … yeah, i stole the marquee that night and kept it all these years to remind me just how powerful that kick was.
and, that album, Catholic Boy, which for some bizarre reason you can’t find anywhere on CD (perhaps just as well) …. digital kicks far less ass and kicks it not near as far.
His words rang as true as concrete, steel … still ring.
The city drops into the night (abso-fucking-lutely leaving the record store each night at midnight) … people who died (sadly, yes) …..
I bought all his books: Basketball Diaries, Living at the Movies, Book of Nods …
After I graduated from journalism school, got a job covering crime in Hamilton …. His words, his grit, his stories – all sharpened into finer focus.
More friends … more cities dropping into night (Bridgeport, Connecticut, for a contract shooting; Detroit for a firefighters funeral; Fort Lauderdale for the start point of a drug route that ended in Hamilton) … each day on the police beat covering death, disease, dying and despair … a marathon of grief …. absolute clarity.
Nine years after the Jim Carroll show, the A&A staffers had all moved on. The store was sold. CDs were replacing vinyl.
On April 29, 1989, after two years of covering crash and burn in Canada’s steeltown, Jim Carroll was back in Toronto, at Lee’s Palace – no band, just the man. No music, just the lyrics to a life.
Absolutely I went. By myself this time, but yes.
The show ended. Walk back into the night.
Another three years go by, another three years on the police beat – day after day, just death and destruction – and Jim Carroll returns again, this time to the El Mocambo – where I had seen him 12 years earlier.
He came alone but the place was packed. No band, yet it was standing room only on Saturday night March 21, 1992.
It was hard getting to the bar – shoulder to shoulder, shoe toes to shoe heels – I ordered two beers whenever I squeezed me way through the crowd to the bar. They hadn’t come for music – they came to listen to one skinny ass man recite poetry, his poetry, in a wavering voice.
I stood at the back by the washrooms; two fisted with my two beers, arms crossed over my chest because there was no room to even relax them.
Since my hands were full I couldn’t clap, so every time a poem ended, I used my left arm to pin the beer to my chest while I whistled so loudly it sounded like I was hailing a cab two blocks away …
When the show ended, I just stood there waiting for everyone to move on, still two-fisted, most definitely teetering inside a beer nod, trying to keep my balance … when he walked by me – the man, Jimmy.
I smiled at him.
“You’re a fucking genius, man. Fucking brilliant.”
He reached out his hand …. I had to pin my second beer to my chest to shake his hand.
I play his words loudly in my head … he was someone who died, died …. He was a friend.
by jim holt
Day 3. Day of the Burn.
The man looked particularly dashing this year, poised atop a wooden salad of spiky crown points.
He is, of course, resolute in his posture – cool and casual and unafraid – standing on a stage inspired this year, it seemed, by the Belgian Waffle experience.
He is also, of course, by his design, the symbol of change and transformation; that grand change scheduled to happen on Day 3 of my art unfolding.
He was a big wooden guy – the Man; me, just a guy, smaller and shuffling around on nothing that resembles cloud or crown.
It would be so cool if I could return from the playa post-Burn, at the end of the night, turn the corner and see my art – the floating illuminated amoeba-like loop – my contribution to the year’s theme of Evolution, my beacon in the burbs of Burning Man.
That would be cool.
The construction of my art was done – thanks to my neighbor across Jurassic Street, Mike the Mech Man. My annual walking tour of the art installations on the playa done. Now it was time to kick back.
On Day 3, I woke up looking for coffee and found beer.
As I shuffled around getting my coffee pot together – my coffee, my water.
“Wanna beer?”
Why, it was Mike the Mech Man.
I looked at my watch. I don’t wear a watch. I did it to be funny. I couldn’t look at any clock on a wall either, since there were no walls.
“Sure.” I said.
Another beer, then a walk down Jurassic.
I passed the wee box house I recalled seeing the previous year – same exact location. The couple that live there, last year gave me a fruit I had never seen before. A little farther down the road, someone calls out.
“The turtle drum guy.” It was Larry.
He told me how his son was building drums from discarded propane tanks and that he was inspired after seeing; playing and hearing about my turtle drums I built out of barbeque lids…. Thanks, another beer.
Two doors down from Larry’s camp, a man handing out “cherry bombs” as a woman showered behind him – cherries soaked in rum, some in vodka … I was given a cup of bourbon –soaked cherries.
More walking, more beer, more margaritas, more beer, a cherry … by dinnertime I had come full circle along Jurassic, ending up about a stone’s throw from my camp and my art that hung dull and in the daylight.
I stopped by a soup line winding from a camp that boasted, by its banner “THE BEST PESTO IN THE UNIVERSE.”
Could it be?
Could evolution really have developed so far? So fast? As to deliver the best pesto in the universe?
I had some. It had. It was indeed the best pesto in the universe.
I began waxing philosophical, in my cherry-munching timeframe, arriving at the amoeba just in time to intercept my Russian friend, under the sweeping arc of 2-inch transparent tubing.
He was excited because he was able to get a signal on his cell phone. This was disturbing and sobering news to me. At first, I was excited as well thinking I could call my daughter. But, primarily, I was saddened.
I gave him some Maker’s Mark bourbon and heaped praise on the amoeba – it was right there after all.
Then it was party time – of course, after a full day of beer and margarita, bourbon and bourbon-soaked cherries – it was party time.
I went down to the playa with some Marines-turned-burners – they had some art car connections that we exploited fully on my first night there.
On the playa, where bigger and bigger crowds gather each year for the Big Burn, showing up earlier and earlier as people do for the Rose bowl Parade, I waited through hours of fire-twirlers for the Big Burn.
Holy cripes, blow shit up already … (that’s what I kept thinking).
They better torch that wooden waffle of two-by-fours. (That’s what I also kept thinking).
Finally, it was dark. The fire twirlers had stopped (thank goodness) and then the hush in the crowd of thousands … the man’s leg was on fire. Screams and howls.
They better blow that shit up …. ( I still thought about the Man’s wooden sea of raging lumber underneath him). They better blow that shit up.
Columns of jet fuel suddenly gushed geyser-like out of the ground and consumed the Man’s stage.
Wow. Now that’s more like it.
The Man burned for a long time. When his last unlit limbs crumbled under him, that’s when I left the playa.
Many people leave before the Burn. They had seen it before, I suppose. Just like me.
On Jurassic, my neighbors, the Couch Potato crew left earlier. So did their neighbors.
When I left my camp for the playa that night I turned on the amoeba. Mike the Mech Man had filled the generator with fuel.
The amoeba glowed benevolently.
The Couch Potato people must have seen it in their rear view mirror as they pulled out, the motorized couch on a flatbed they towed out of Black Rock City.
Before I left for the playa, before finding the Marines and still more margaritas, I took out my Swiss-style army knife ( It isn’t a Swiss army knife) it is a complex configuration of unfolding scissors and corkscrews that, over many years, I have pinched out – each implement – used for something – over the last 4 decades. I used that knife to crank open can lids of Spam and canned potatoes at Mississippi Lake with my best friend, during the best times of my life, making the tastiest meals of my life…. And here, at Burning Man, number 12, using the same knife to cut the transparent sleeves from a rigid red arm of my amoeba …. I didn’t like the way the arm shot up straight from the ground … to me, it looked un-amoeba like.
Snapping my not-so-Swiss army knife closed, I pulled the freed arm of my amoeba up to an adjacent post so that it hung limp under the hanging curve of white light….. It was suddenly brilliant and very much amoeba like.
At the very end of the night, after the Man had finally fallen, I walked across the playa, to center camp and down 6:00 …. Everywhere there were pockets of patchwork desert …. Empty lot spaces left by those leaving early….. the full moon blinked in and out of night clouds thick as gray tube socks … in those moments it was bleak and black out there.
There were far fewer landmarks lit up this year …. Some called it the Recessionary Burning Man … fewer people, fewer landmarks…..
As I walked in the dark, tilting my head up at the darkened street sign to let my headlamp light up the words: Humanoid – I thought (I won’t have to tilt my head to read the sign on Jurassic Street because I’ll just have to look to my right and I will see the amoeba – jellyfish bright and lighthouse strong, floating pretty and shining the way for wayward burners who have all week distanced themselves from the default world and were trying to find their way home, shining up Jurassic Street like a jewel they all deserve.
And, there it was.
As pretty as a campfire and simple as smoke in its design.
Many said it looked like lips. I can live with that. That’s nice. In fact, far nicer in evolutionary terms than a single cell ….
The Jurassic amoeba was as constant as a star and steadier than a moon in and out of cloud.
It was offset by acres of empty flat desert and buffeted by the gray sky rolled up in socks.
Everyone on the outer perimeter could have set their watch by the amoeba… if they had watches. They could have steered their ships (and there are ships in Black Rock City) to their homes.
Once at my own camp, I collapsed in my comfy foldy blue chair with the lazy-boy foot support and the cup holder arms. I had one of my last beers and admired the amoeba.
My face was lit up softly with white and red light.
This was the vision I had carried with me for months – suddenly a fixture on the landscape, a lighthouse in the desert ….
Before I crawled into my tent to sleep that night I turned off the generator. I thought “I should leave it on for Mike when he stumbles home from the playa.”
The generator made a lot of noise.
I went to sleep.
In the morning, Mike the Mech Man called out from across the street: “Wanna beer.”
I crossed the street.
“I should have left it on – the amoeba – I should have left it on for you. It was amazing.”
“I know,” he said. “I turned that sucker on, when I came home, I had another beer and just sat there watching it. It is beautiful.”
He was right.
The thing we created burned for a time, lit up the night, stood for something and then went out – a transformation.
We all turned away when the light went out, when the heat went cold, when it transformed, when we evolved …
By jim holt
I continued evolving through my second day of Burning Man 2009.
More specifically, my art – my car-swallowing amoeba floating with brilliant crimson and white-hot simulated bioluminescence – continued to evolve on Jurassic Road where I lived every year, for at least a week each time, since 1998.
This year, with any hope, I would suggest to my fellow citizens of Black Rock City that our dusty desert community was – at least at night, in the darkness – fathoms under the sea, in the deep deep blackness of the ocean – a single celled organism, drifting like many of us there, along independent timelines of our own evolution.
That was the plan, anyway.
I also wanted people to come by and change the arc and configuration of the beast. The heavy 2-inch tubing, however, proved difficult to manipulate. A swaying segment of exposed red rope light on the street-side of the structure, however, did allow anyone the option of augmenting its design.
A few did.
I did.
I liked playing with the moveable pseudo-cytoplasm. I unfurled a tight coil of copper tubing and stretched it between supports. This allowed me loop the red light in an arc.
But, as dusk approached, I still hadn’t solved my sustainability problem.
How do I keep it up and running long into the night? An age-old problem, to be sure.
“I’ve got a generator,” said Mike the Mech man.
I was suddenly thrilled at the prospect that my vision would be a well-lit vision for all to see on the playa.
I was excited.
I had purchased a gas-powered generator a couple of years ago but never saw a compelling need to bring it, even though I bought it specifically for Burning Man.
I won’t make that mistake next year.
When the sun set, inside a gentle deep-orange glow in the calm following the afternoon dust swells, as I was cooking my dinner to the sound of Roots reggae music, beside the open hatchback of my SUV, my knitted reggae cap proudly worn, I saw Mike the Mech Man drag the generator across Jurassic Road, past the amoeba to where I stood with my chili and my reggae.
Not only was I able to cook my dinner with butane, and power my reggae via my deep cycle solar-charged battery (something I learned at Burning Man 2000) now I was about to power up my art – thanks to Mech the Mike Man – you heard me, Mech the Mike Man.
He stretched an extension cord from the amoeba to his generator, poured in the gasoline and then looked at me.
This called for another beer.
I only had oranges, beer and bourbon to share at Burning Man 2009.
The time came to throw the switch.
I was eager to see the new design with its hump of arcing red exposed stretch of rope light and excited about the prospect of everyone around us seeing it.
After all, the well-meaning folk camped at the far perimeter of Black Rock City seek out such a well-lit landmark by which to guide their way home from a night of partying on the playa.
My amoeba – nay, our amoeba, the amoeba of Me and Mike the Mech Man – would be such a landmark, a Black Rock lighthouse at the bottom of the deep deep black night sea, guiding drunken playa sailors and the disoriented jellyfish of our community back to their wee beds….
That was our plan.
He threw the switch.
The amoeba hummed in the sunset. It was beautiful.
Time for another beer.
Wow, he said.
Wow, I said.
Take a photo, walk down the road, admire how it accented our street, walk back, have a beer, sit in my comfy lazy-boy foldy chair and bask in the slow red/white glow of our primitive design.
Mike the Mech Man sat in his own foldy chair, across Jurassic Road, also admiring the single celled beast.
The women at the Couch Potato camp were in awe.
They were, indeed, drawn to the amoeba – as so they should be.
“You boys deserve a margarita.”
Hell yeah.
More beer, more Margarita.
They approached the floating beast, umbrella drinks in hand, drawn to the ever-evolving creature the way wee fish in the deep ocean are drawn to fish dangling beautiful bioluminescence in the darkness.
They could not help themselves. They were consumed by the light; we, in turn, consumed their margaritas. Evolution was unmistakably at work.
It was – finally – the beacon we had worked diligently to develop.
It was party time, time to venture out onto the playa for the much-touted launch of the playa rocket. Thousands would attend. Those living in and around Jurassic on the next to outer rim – our neighbors – would have the luxury of finding their way home by seeking out the amoeba, our amoeba.
It was magnificent.
I got into my party dress (literally? Figuratively? Only burners know for sure).
The Couch Potato crew was about to venture out – also in their party dress, each costume dangling its own bioluminescence – swaying glow sticks, light tubing, LEDs …
Another beer, another margarita, just about to make our way to the rocket launch – and then it happened.
It went dead.
The amoeba died. Or at least, it appeared to have died. Its lights turned out.
No beacon.
No device by which to help sailors avoid obstacles as they stumbled home.
No lighthouse – just a setback to evolution.
I checked the extension cord. Everything was connected.
I turned off the generator.
Silence. Just the light wispy sound of breeze.
The Couch Potato women beckoned, bobbing in their own fibre-optic stage of devlopment.
On the first night, our amoeba magic lasted just 4 and a half minutes; on the second, for two hours.
Burning Man, in part, is about survival and with survival comes problem solving. Two years ago, I forgot my tent poles. One year, my Jeep battery died. I broke my coffee pot two years ago. Solutions respectively: PVC tubing, solar panel charger, duct tape.
In Burning Man 2009, year of thematic Evolution, I had a problem to solve in the evolution of my art – but first, the rocket, the cacophony of playa night life, the glowing fire art, laser-crafted designs, rockin’ art cars and friends.
Once we were on the playa, the Couch Potato crew and me, in the confusion and craziness, among thousands of wild rocket-lovers, a fellow burner whom I met in 2005 found me.
“Jim?”
“Keith, buddy”
“I looked on your street, I couldn’t find your Canadian flag?” he told me.
“I have an amoeba this year, a giant floating single cell-like amoeba. It could swallow a car –“
“I’ll come by tomorrow, I’ll look for it.”
I had a problem to solve.
The rocket never launched, at least not that I witnessed after 3 hours of waiting. It was a launch problem, I guess.
It didn’t matter. It was about anticipation – frenzied anticipation. The smell of evolution was palpable.
I could smell my amoeba unfolding ….
By jim holt
In my head, the amoeba I planned to build was big enough to swallow a pickup truck.
In my head, months before Burning Man actually happened, my amoeba would hang suspended in the air, lit up and looping with red and white rope lights.
This year’s theme was Evolution and I couldn’t think of a better place to begin than with a single-cell organism. And, since it was after all – Burning Man – I was going to call it my “Single Cell Orgasm”. How I intended to incorporate a sexual component into a wild light structure 30 feet in diameter and hanging in the desert air was a challenge I relished saving for later.
First things first. A certain degree of prep work had to be done before my art ever motioned to become complex and before it ever developed to the point of exiting the mud and ooze as a more elaborate creature.
50 feet of transparent plastic tubing, 2 inches in diameter – check.
3 times 18 feet of red rope light, 18 feet of white rope light – check.
2 deep cycle batteries, solar charging for an entire month in the California sun – check.
10-foot metal tubes and 3 smaller tubes, with assorted ropes and pegs to anchor them to the Black Rock City playa – check.
In previous years, I had brought drums to Burning Man – hand-carved wooden drum shells suspended 10 feet off the ground attainable only by bouncing on a mini trampoline with sticks of rebar, the same drum shells arranged xylophone-like in descending order over 20 feet and last year’s turtle drums made from BBQ lids spray painted green.
But, this is evolution.
Before we drum, we must walk and before we walk we must stretch our amoeba cytoplasm. We’re talking way back – way way back – back before sex …. OK, maybe not that far back …. But back there.
But, sex or no sex, I can’t really test my vision of a car-gobbling amoeba in my backyard … since I’m already a pariah in my neighborhood for even knowing about Burning Man.
They don’t know. They don’t get it. They’ve never been.
You know. You’ve been. You get it.
I arrived at Burning Man just as I habitually do – just after sunset, having driven from LA with a carload of give-away items that alert everyone about my destination: metal rods tied to the roof of my vehicle, PVC tubing that pokes out here and there, pillows and, of course, 50 feet of arm-wide plastic tubing.
I set up my tent quickly on Jurassic Street between 6:00 and 6:30 – jumping on those precious windless moments.
A walk to the porta-potties was delayed after meeting of new friends (in this case, Marines) determined to cut loose and hospitable enough to drag me along – art car tours of the playa, dancing at disco theme camps, margaritas, beer and more margaritas.
I woke up the next day to an amoeba screaming to be built.
A guy I call Mech watched me work up a sweat, shaking limp rope lighting through 50 feet of tube. He chuckled then stood up to cross Jurassic Street to my camp.
He didn’t know it but he was about to step over that threshold in the hero’s story when the hero – one day – walks a different path and undertakes a challenge that promises to transform an ordinary man into something quite extraordinary.
“You want some help?” he asked.
I looked up sweating, holding in my hands a tube that contained only 6 feet of light.
“Sure” I said.
“In my head –“ I said, explaining my vision of a floating amoeba.
That was it – we shook, we stuffed, we cursed, we elicited more help.
“Would you like to stand on the roof of our RV?” said a woman, my next-door neighbor.
“Sure” I said.
We weighted the rope light with rebar and dropped that sucker through the tube – more shaking, more cursing.
“You bastard. I never would have offered to help if I knew it was going to get this intense.”
Evolution is hard work, my friend.
Pop a beer; discuss anchoring my poles to the desert floor with rebar. Pop another beer, and then actually do it. Pop another beer to stand back and assess. More shaking, more drinking, more sweating.
“Get up higher. Step on the step that says ‘this is not a step,’” – bad advice, good advice, we had to do something to move 50 feet of constipated rope light through the 50 intestinal feet of tube.
More sweat. More beer.
“I’m giving you a D minus on planning,” the Mech man said. “An A for vision but you get a D minus on planning.”
I told him I had 2 deep cycle batteries recharged daily with solar panels.
“OK. You’re up to a C plus. Let’s finish this sucker.”
First, a beer – while it’s still cold.
Did I mention this is Burning Man? Before we walk or run, or dance or develop hands with fingers capable of touching thumbs, we must drink.
In my head, I envisioned the tube bubbling up between the two highest points. Wrong.
The tubing is heavy and has a tendency to droop.
Rigid, arcing and magnificent was my vision (edging closer apparently to a sexual component than perhaps I had fully appreciated initially) …. Not drooping.
“Do you want this to connect over here?” Mech asked at one point.
“Yeah sure.”
No.
No?
“NO. NO. NO. You bastard, you’re not quitting on me. I see what’s going on. We’re doing this. “
“Cripes I’ve known the guy for less than three hours and he’s calling me out.”
He was right.
“No, I want it to go this way first and then down,” I said, waiting for him to throw down a glove or a hammer or a roll of duct tape ….
“All right. Let’s get it done.”
First, another beer.
By mid-afternoon, my limping drooping – not bubbling – amoeba was a web of guide ropes, rebar, metal support rods and, of course, tubing that could have swallowed a pickup truck.
Mech retreated to his camp across the street. He had a beer. I watched him.
I sat under the sweeping cup of tubing, drinking a beer on my side of the street.
We were both waiting until dark.
Finally, at sunset, I plugged it in.
It was – in a word – beautiful. Brilliant sweeping red through white like blood through protoplasm – 30 feet in diameter, 10 feet off the ground at its apex. It was ready to grow vertebrae, baby. It was bucking for an evolutionary moment.
It was a statement.
Then it went out. Four and a half minutes later, it went out. That’s all it could muster was four and a half minutes.
“Well, it’s obviously a male amoeba,” the giggling women next-door concluded.
Four and a half minutes. That was it’s crowning moment Day One.
I looked at it, hands on hips, smirking and thinking to myself now it’s gonna want to sleep, then wake up soon ready for a slice of pizza and a beer.
At 54 and a dozen consecutive trips to Burning Man, I had a stamina problem to address – after a beer, and another margarita, then another beer, then another night on the playa dancing with creatures already safely out of the swamp.
Evolution would have to wait another day.
By jim holt
Magicians love me.
As long as there’s a beautiful woman standing beside them, smiling, they can pretty much do anything they want – badly – and I would still be impressed.
Why?
Because I’m so easily distracted.
They can drive a car onto the stage and make me believe they pulled it out of a hat as long as my feeble mind is distracted by cleavage.
Hell, they could have trouble starting the bloody car off stage, call in Triple A, get it fixed, drive it on stage and I would still clap believing they’ve performed something magical.
This is, partly, why I love the desert so much.
An uncluttered landscape and an open sky allow me to think … and assess ….and stay on track. Out there I am suddenly empowered … bolstered and encouraged by sun and wind and sky and sand.
It helps if I’m naked … not even jewelry.
Simple as sky.
Back here in the clutter, I’m just a bug in the junk.
The usual culprits pull me away from my focus, of course – ringing phone, chiming cell phone, humming blackberries, door bells, oven beeps, Skype (cripes, sometimes voices from Skype scare the crap out of me because they just start talking) pinging emails … then there’s the rest of the world to pull me away.
Everything has the power to distract me … a cup not near the sink, a pen (I wonder if it writes), something tiny on the floor that must be identified, a hummingbird, a lizard, ants, shirts and pants separated form hangers ….
TV programmers know that they rent my soul …. So I allow the TV to share my space during the day only as a flat black flutterless shiny box.
All things seem to have my magnetic code …
“Look at me, Jimmy … look at me. Look in my eyes. Look in my eyes, Jimmy. Now do you understand what I’ve told you?”
Cleavage. No.
This blog may have been an ordeal.
Write, sip coffee, write, sip coffee, write, go to the bathroom, spot drinks that should be put away, take the drinks, enter the garage, spot tools still outside their boxes, put drinks in the fridge, go to the tools, put them away, notice a record left out that I meant to listen to, read the liner notes, put the record on, tidy up as I listen, check out my shelf of writing projects – all in binders – including my novel, I should really get to it, pull out the novel binder, bring it back to the computer …. Oh yeah, my blog, sit down, sip coffee,
Write …
If Jupiter suddenly decided to pump up its gravitational pull, I’d probably start walking there….
Look at that, Jupiter just pulled a rabbit out of its hat …. Amazing.
And, check out those moons …
(click my CELEBS for photo)
UPDATE: Every year, Canadians nominated for an Academy Award are honored at the home of Canada’s Consul General in Los Angeles. This year, one of the guests included Laura Dern.
