Information Blues.

I just sold a family heirloom on eBay. It is an early 70’s Japanese acoustic guitar in the OO/OM shape, manufactured by Yamaki, model Folk, caliber DELUXE. It’s a wonky guitar but it’s loud, and has a neat workingman’s vibe, but I always felt like it was fighting me when I tried to play it. That’s a bad feeling; I had an 80’s stratocaster that fought me too, so I submitted it to craigslist.

(STANDING WARNING FOR MY GUITAR COLLECTION: fight me and I will unload you.)

Somebody gave this guitar to my Dad as a wedding gift. (It’s okay, he said I could sell it.) I wish I was able to bond with it, because it contains great memories. My dad used to sing John Prine songs for me with this guitar and I used to go nuts. I remember hopping around to Froggy Went A’Courtin, getting misty-eyed at the injustice of Paradise—-O Daddy won’t you take me back to won’t you take me back to Muhlenberg County, down by the Green River where Paradise lay? Well, I’m sorry my son, but you’re too late in asking; Mister Peabody’s coal train has hauled it away. I think it was my dad’s playing and folksinging for me that got me interested in music; the songs touched me, and I couldn’t get enough.

As I was boxing it up to ship to New Hudson, Michigan I felt sad. The pocket in the case contained two John Prine lyrics sheets, a hexagonal paisley paper box full of guitar picks, and a really awesome drawing from 1972 that my dad made of the status of the two screws at the bridge pre and post adjustment: right screw, before and after, plus a quarter turn to lower the action. The inside of the case smells something like incense and musk and maybe Zig-Zags. Whatever the smell is, it transports me back to being small, when everything in my parents’ world seemed so mysterious—-like especially the naked lady playing cards and those strange scissor/tweezers with the flat ends. For me it was a time of great curiousity, California sunshine and happiness.

So of course I took the Prine lyrics for myself, and the pick collection, save one. I gave the new owner—-his name is Louie—-a floppy marblized one that says “PURLOINED FROM McCABE’S.” Don’t worry, I kept a McCabe’s pick for my own enjoyment. And while I really really liked the drawing of the bridge bolts, I felt that that belonged with the guitar, just so Louie might learn a thing or two about history.

Adios Folk Deluxe, and thank you.

Hang gliders hung in the draft above the cliffs. They looked like strange butterfly men suspended in sleeping bags. They drifted back and forth, up and down; they were grasping the draft carefully, like throwing a pot. A raven hung still in the wind, not going anywhere, a carefree shimmering black shaman floating on his belly above the swimming pool.

It’s been a craving that kept coming up: I wanted to re-see the sunset over the ocean, to watch our ball of fire sink below the distant edge of an overwhelming basin.

The wind chopped the ocean into fragments. Container ships crept along the horizon. Leaning back on a blanket across a sandstone bench I found myself hoping that maybe the sun would fall behind a ship, though that wasn’t really what I’d been wanting: I wanted to see it take a dip. I wanted to feel that primal flat land mysticism that makes it seem like a magic trick. I needed to see the ocean eat the sun.

As the ball dropped the light went orange and everybody’s cheeks started to glow. When the surge coated the sand it reflected the sun in a golden column. As the water retreated the golden road disappeared, but we watched it get formed again and again as sandpipers sprinted into the foam to sink their beaks into the sand and suck out invertebrates.

When the sun hit the water it looked fat and wide. Then it was extinguished, drawn down into the ocean, but it wasn’t dark yet. It wasn’t really any darker, but you couldn’t see the sun any longer. It was the solemn moment of Sunday at dusk, when everything seems a bit more sad than usual, and the show was over, it was time to go home.

Baseball season is back. I spent the offseason tracking baseball gossip, dreaming of summer. But then a week ago the season began and I wasn’t quite ready; I’d forgotten how emotional/crazy it is. The season was moving ahead and suddenly I felt like Odysseus tied to the mast of his ship. I’d bonded myself to something external that I couldn’t control, and as the ship sailed on I’d hear the Sirens sing and start to lose my mind. I’d want to get closer to baseball, smash myself on the rocks, lose perspective in the drastic highs and stinging lows—-what had I done? (Again?!)

It’s funny how easy it is to bond with a team, but I’d like to believe it’s enriching. It’s uncomfortable sometimes, but in the end I think it can make you a deeper person.

Last night the A’s were down one to nothing in the bottom of the ninth. They led off with two straight singles, then the two power hitters in the lineup struck out. With one out to go, they brought in a pinch hitter, Todd Walker, who got two strikes on him–one strike left to end the game!–before going the other way on a curveball to tie it. Then they won when Mark Ellis lined a pitch off the scoreboard.

Today I checked the score before I left for lunch at Naan N’ Curry: A’s up three to one in the top of the seventh! With how great their bullpen is, there seemed like no way they could lose this one: I banked away the victory in my head early.

But then when I got back, the game was over and they’d lost, six to three. The White Sox had burst out of their slumber to erupt runs all over the Coliseum against the best pitchers the A’s have.

When a closing pitcher blows a save like this it’s backbreaking; the emotional image I get in my head is literally of spines cracking. To see the A’s do it to the White Sox yesterday, then have them turn around and do it to the A’s the next day feels like witnessing ultraviolence. It’s viscerally crestfalling: to be on top and then quick, with a lightning bolt, down on the floor.

Wow. It’s a great game.

I was a civil war mustached man in the desert—-Death Valley National Park—-accompanied by a sweet girl on spring break. We were looking for the overwhelming brand of peace you find in sandy lowlands: the astonishing stars, rainbow rocks and alien plantlife. Wide empty spaces with roads that never bend. Kangaroo Rats hopped around our campfire at night, my truck went offroad and we got dusty and salty like the land. We camped primitively and went out of our way to watch the sunset.

(Dirrrrtty hippppieeesss…)

In the middle of the sand we found an oasis—-The Christian 4wheelers found it too—-deep in a dry canyon a waterfall fell into a shady pool of faerie lettuce. High in the Panamints below Wildrose Peak are 10 charcoal kilns that look like beehives; they were built 100 years ago by Chinese laborers to burn pinion into charcoal.

An old man ranger with faded, blotchy Navy tattoos on his forearms told us, “Aww, you don’t need a permit to camp in the backcountry! That’s just for the bean counters. Go have fun.”

On the arrow straight road to Mesquite Springs I had to stop the car in the midst of painted dunes to perform a spontaneous dance. In my head I was dancing to The Godfather of Soul, live in the DV basin, just about sea level, sunken down between a crush of mountain ranges. The mountains are pushing the ‘Valley deeper and deeper like an elevator going down to the center of the earth.

We took a day long hike up Fall Canyon in low 90’s heat. It was a slot canyon made of tortured volcanic rock. Ribbons of stone were bent and spun; the land cracked and then eroded and when it rains the water drag races through the canyons carving corners like a bobsled. We climbed a chimney around the impassable 15′ fall to find tighter passages. Mini barrel cactuses grew a hundred feet up on the walls with fuzzy pink spines. We paused to lie down in a canyon composed of angled sheets of compressed bedrock; it was easy to imagine the land at war, the rock was frozen in a perennial draw. On the way out we ran out of water, then watched the sunset eating chips and salsa from the bed of my minitruck.

The heat melted our tub of miniature peanut butter cups into a soup that Bete ate with a spoon. I was excited to peel my Uniq Fruit, but it wasn’t that awesome. We had been in the desert for a while and suddenly found ourselves possessed by Kokopelli, building spontaneous rock cairns in the belly of The Ubehebe Crater’s little brother: The Little Hebe Crater.

We visited the Devil’s Cornfield, the Devil’s Golf Course, Dante’s View, and the Devil’s Hole where brilliant turquoise springs gushed into pools in the middle of a dusty plain. There the Death Valley Pupfish were breeding, the males clad in iridescent blue tuxedos. They looked like neon blue tetras in a gurgling tropical aquarium. But don’t swim—-you’ll get the itch.

It’s not a real trip to Death Valley until you need to consult the owner’s manual of your car to reacquaint yourself with how many gallons the tank holds then begin frantically adding up roadmap mileages.

We camped in the backcountry, two miles up a washboard dirt avenue in the Greenwater Valley. Besides a renegade silver Eurovan in the distance that went to bed early we had the valley to ourselves and the night was extraordinary. There was a dramatic stillness as the stars rose and we sat in the truckbed in our sleeping bags absorbing the panorama. The desert was waking up; the night life is where it’s at—-that’s when the stars begin to shoot and the kangaroo rats dance and the chuckwallas down in the burrows bang on their rooves and yell, “Calmate, guey!!”

And on the last day, in the high desert, we woke up in our tent to a high wind advisory and then it started to rain and we laughed about how we were going to die, but then the rain got into the tent and I found myself running around the desert in my underwear with no shoes trying to break camp, and then the rain turned to sleet and the ice was sticking. The dunes were turning white and my arms were going numb as we threw it all in the back of the truck and blasted the heater back to civilization for a breakfast with whipped butter and fake syrup and soggy hashbrowns.

Yes it’s The Land of Extremes! Death Valley National Park, California USA.