WEEKLY WTF
12-16-24 Edition
Lucky 13
I awoke at 0313 this morning with a singular thought: it’s Friday the 13th… lucky thirteen. In my fitful half awake fog I see the number 13 floating and pulsing in my minds eye, it bobs across a slowly forming scene in the background, a figure begins to take shape and the number evaporates giving way to the manifesting memory.
I’m a kid, 4th grade maybe, and I’m walking with my Grandfather. He’s a World War II vet and an old cowboy with a good deal of Cherokee blood giving him jet black hair even into old age which he combed straight back into a slick widows peak giving him a vampire vibe. He’s a bit bowlegged from years of riding and he has a network of spiderweb veins that stretch across his cheeks. When I asked him about those once he replied “that’s the Irish in me.” He wasn’t Irish.
As we walked, my small pink hand grasped within his grizzled palm, I recall excitedly informing him: “Be careful today Grandpa it’s Friday the 13th!” To which he replied: “Friday the 13th is my lucky day!” And he really meant it. Such a small thing in retrospect, that declaration, but it stuck with me. It was an invitation to color outside of the lines of life, an implication that I could make up my own damn rules. Such a small statement, like a pebble dropped into the waters of my memory, the temporal ripples of which shape who I am even now. Luck 13 indeed.
Kristen and I had just pulled out of our campsite near Area 51 when we finally got cell service and heard the news of Maisie’s accident. I recall during that 10 hour hell ride from the desolation of SE Nevada to the ICU in Chico, Ca. that everything in me seemed to slough away each mile closer to our dreadful destination. Everything I thought I was or wanted peeled like paint- the chips of which were lost to those hot dry winds. I felt everything in me turn towards her. I lost layer after layer, expelled as gas through my screaming throat and washed away with my torrential tears. So thoroughly stripped I had become that I thought I’d never post a single fucking thing ever again. But of course, dear reader, we know that wasn’t to be.
And so here we are. Me writing you reading. It’s a thing I find both compulsory and cathartic. I don’t plan it or think about it as such, I just start tapping on this rectangular piece of glass with my big clumsy thumbs and then shit happens. I thought I’d never post again but ironically, if it weren’t for this “unlucky” turn of events, I’d probably have never fully gotten over the major hurdle of writing which is: not giving a single fuck what people think about it. A funny effect born of a terrible cause.
Tragedy- when it strikes it seems so senseless. We don’t do very well with chaos and we are quite often challenged by the realization that we really don’t have any control over anything other than how we react to life’s surprises. I have found that grief is like a tsunami that washes everything within you away and I have resisted the urge to replace those things with new paradigms or belief systems designed as a scaffolding of comfort. It’s not easy but I won’t waste this purifying wave.
The truth is not found by gathering, it is revealed by letting go.
I am finally able to step back just enough to see things a bit clearer. I observe from the inside looking out. It’s become clear that making Maisie’s accident public has been a veritable boulder kerplunked into the collective consciousness, the ripples of which are tangible. Some say they hug their kids a bit tighter. Others have admitted that the perspective has alleviated, or at least shrunk, some of the problems they thought were so big and difficult before. The outpouring of support has been incalculable and has enabled so many to act with compassion creating further waves through each others lives. It has also tenderized my old leather heart.
I like to think too, that this tale of tragedy has hopefully caused at least a pause in people who are facing a fateful decision to do this or to do that, to zig or to zag, to perhaps call a fucking uber and save themselves and/ or others an injury or death.
But we humans are often dumbasses and in response to this fact a friend of mine, who deeply felt Maisie’s kerplunk, did a thing, another act of kindness. His name is Kelly Crigger. A fellow curmudgeon and a fellow vet (of the Army Ranger variety) and whose day job is doing something or other at the pentagon, made this bag you see me holding: the “Maisie Mae Vehicle Survival Kit" Kelly’s side action is a little business called “Dash Bugout” and as you may surmise he makes bugout bags, I have collected several of his bags over the years my own self. Kelly, as a Father of 5 and also having had 5 friends in college who died in a car accident, felt compelled to make this bag and is donating all the profit to Maisie’s recovery. Another extraordinary ripple.
I cannot possibly fathom all of the ripples that are caused by our situation but I like to think that by living this with grace, fortitude and expressing it with raw and vulnerable honesty maybe someone out there will be spared such devastating heartache. There will never be a time that I ask anyone to give us money or to buy this thing or that thing and I won’t start now but if you want to check out Kelly’s kind gesture I’ll put a link below or you can google: Dash Bugout. The idea that it might save one single life helps me to make some sense of our suffering. But it’s a bag I hope no one ever needs to open. Perhaps it’s enough to have this glowing orange thing sitting there in a car as a reminder of what happened to Maisie, a reminder to yourself or your kid or friend (especially the dumbass ones) or whomever to slow down or not fucking drive if they’re hammered. An orange “don’t be a dumbass” beacon if you will. We won’t be leaving home without ours.
I can see some of the ways in which the ripples have affected me. I can feel things more than I ever could before, the damn dam finally broke. I can cry. I have completely changed how and what I eat and I exercise like a motherfucker. Fat is melting and muscle is growing. I’ve made the cold plunge my bitch and am up to 9 minutes like it’s nothing. I cannot, after all, sit around like a lump watching my Daughter work so hard. I cannot, also, be a fat fuck with a bad back and expect to be able to safely transfer her from bed to wheelchair and back. The ripples are reshaping my meat tractor into a motherfucking meat race car. Ok well, maybe a meat deisel truck, an old rusty one, but whatever- I’ll take it.
I am seeing the effects of these quantum ripples in my mind in so many ways. I don’t really have a great or descriptive synopsis of those effects because they are ever changing- moment to moment. When the initial wave wipes everything away it is much more obvious when those old ways of thinking or worrying or reacting arise. There is a brief moment in which you can neutrally observe them come into being, just enough of a buffer to decide whether to allow them to blossom or to kill them on the vine of awareness. At the same time I am committed to dealing fully with certain emotions for the first time as an adult.
Grief- it’s too much to hold in. If we create a dam it will spring leaks in unfortunate ways in other areas of our lives- anger, panic attacks, depression, etc. We can also divert it and ride the stream into some kind of altruistic action or we can ride that current down a waterfall of entropy into our own destruction- we always have that choice. My personal proclivity is to surrender to the torrent. To let the motion erode those things within me that are not me. So rare in life do we get this sort of opportunity, but it comes at a terrible price.
Whatever we are going through, someone else has had it worse. I don’t say that to lessen or invalidate anyone’s experience. I find it to be a helpful exercise in gratitude. I can conjure so many images of how humans have suffered since ancient times. My Daughter is paralyzed, for the moment, but she is here and she is herself. It’s easy to cascade into despair if all we look at is what’s fucked up about our lives but interestingly the more fucked up our life is the more opportunity we have to find reasons to be grateful by way of contrast- the rub being that we have to actually look for it to find it. We eventually have to employ our intellect as opposed to being ruled by our emotional default. I’m finally feeling the catharsis of allowing emotions to express and as this flow eases up a bit there is the possibility of climbing back into the boat of the intellect in order to remember to simply accept what is.
My Grandad was a turret gunner on a B-52 bomber. A bullet once whizzed by his head and embedded itself into the metal ceiling. He dug it out and wore it as a “lucky” necklace. I’m not sure how I feel about luck. When shit consistently goes right in our lives we proclaim ourselves lucky. When things go to shit we say our luck has run out. It’s always a retrospective declaration though. We are constantly looking backwards to define our “now” and we extrapolate that into a hopeful “lucky” future or we fear our “unlucky” streak will continue and expand and thus we are never really present. We are wrapping ourselves in a narrative and that comforting, or fearful bubble, keeps us from fully experiencing our life as it is.
I don’t know much but I know this: suffering is simply an aversion to what is. Being “lucky” or being “unlucky” is an amorphous kissing cousin to attraction and aversion, both of which prevent us from acceptance. Luck or the lack thereof is determined by life’s experiences and our interpretation of those experiences. Of the very few things I know, another is: everything in reality changes. If you’re “unlucky” just wait a while. If you’re “lucky” you are in for inevitable disappointment. Fuck luck. To become a master of the only thing you have true control over- which is your response to life’s changes, is to dispense with the vacillating concept of luck itself. A master of living doesn’t waste bandwidth with definitions or declarations of alleged prideful manifestations. A master of life simply doesn’t mind what happens. A master doesn’t “mind” what happens, feel me? What better way to be a master than to always consider yourself a student? And what better way to learn to let go than when we so drastically see ourselves grasping?
In this day and age we are all graspers. We squeeze balls and shit to strengthen our forearms. Our fingers are in a constant curl from keyboards and phones. In China there is a martial arts hand opening exercise. You plunge your hand into a bucket of dry rice and force your fingers open improving finger strength and dexterity. We are good at grasping and holding but terrible when it comes to letting go.
Our minds are the same way. We have been taught to gather and collect. Who we are is simply who we think we are. An electrical daisy chain of gathered and linked memories within our wrinkly pink meat computer. What we actually are, our substratum, lies behind that daisy chain and the entire thought plane itself. You don’t learn about it by reading or hearing- thus activating thought, you experience it by letting go of all your adopted bullshit. We can’t stick our brain into a bucket of rice but I find that life constantly gives us opportunities to let go. It’s not easy for we are such fucking graspers. It’s not pleasant because we constantly seek comfort. It’s not for everyone.
So happy Friday the 13th. Make your own luck or lament the lack of it in your life- you are the boss of you. Or, perhaps, learn to accept what is. You do that by letting go. We make the best choices we can at any given moment then instead of mindless reaction we act with conscious will as best we can. If we fuck it up- we forgive ourselves and try again- over and over until we die. We just have to remember somehow. I don’t know if an orange bag in your car will help you remember or not, but whatever the fuck works right?
If luck is a thing then I consider myself lucky that I am not bound by luck. We can be free agents, we just have to own it. We can move without resistance through this strange quantum soup called life if we accept the hard chunks. Everything seems like it’s here to teach us, a contrived ineffable network like ethereal conscious mycelium popping up mushrooms of experience. Every quivering leaf, every sparkle of dew. Every slowly morphing cloud. Every loved one and every asshole. Every circumstance, every problem. Every joy and, especially, every tragedy. Happy Friday the 13th, go forth and try not to be a dumbass, or do, I’m not the fucking boss of you
Toodaloo
The Last Day
(Oh hello, dear reader. I just found the following in my phone. I had forgotten all about it. It’s the last thing I wrote before we found out about Maisie’s accident. Written, in fact, the actual day that she broke her spine. It feels weird, reading this but… shame to waste it so here it is, if you give a shit)
Aug 29th 2024
WTF, has it only been 3 days and already I’m one of those desert fuckers? Wild eyed wandering alone in the scraggly desolations tickling the Joshua trees and whispering incoherencies to the cacti. Cackling at the sky with glee, adorned with wicker halo and pissing a fluorescent viscous stream into the sand that speaks of dehydration? Well, maybe not that far gone… yet. And no, I’m not high on anything. Reality gets high on me, it’s a thing.
I write this account from deep within a vast and hot desert stillness known as the Tikaboo valley located in Southeastern Nevada. There’s not even a sliver of service out here so who knows when I’ll be able to post this but if you’re reading it then clearly we survived and are likely moving through one of the tiny ramshackle towns out here headed once again to parts unknown.
But, back to this moment in which I sit painfully pink skinned and gazing squinty eyed into the hot & blurry desert. Our view of Tikaboo valley from our camp boasts an impressive forest of Joshua trees; both the Yuccu brevifolia and the Yucca jaegeriana species. Or; the Western “tree looking” kind, and the Eastern “big gangly bush like” fuckers, all merging here in this location, a definite rarety. Growing side by side they do, and imagine that- they get along just fine… unlike an appendaged meat tree species I know and to whom the substrate that houses my consciousness belongs.
I spy with my rusty eye rolling paragraphs of spiny foliage written upon the sun bleached pages of earth that eventually blur out of existence, drowned in the distant shimmering lake of heat. Punctuated by the occasional crooked comma- like Cholla cactus and strangely plump, pink-spined barrel cacti popping up like painful periods. Foregone perceptual pauses in the lava ink spilled eons ago by the desert gods… engorged green spiky globes spread about like an improbable pumpkin patch planted in an upper, and strangely tolerable, dimension of hell.
That’s not to say this is hell. Some, most definitely would think so, 100 degree heat and no AC. But also no people, none, nor the accompanying pollution of noise and light and social tensions. Zero cell service reverts us back into kids growing up in the 70’s: find a way to entertain your own damn self. Wifey poo has the willies about the lack of comms. We are officially empty nesters but she is the consummate Mom and told me she doesn’t like it- “What if something happened to Maisie?” I told her Maisie is at college now it’s not like she’s somewhere alone. But I conceded that we’d get a satellite thingy for next time to ease her worry. As an added boon to our solitude, a mere 15 miles from our camp, and in our direct view, is the infamous back gate of Area 51. This is one of the most remote and desolate places I’ve ever been. You know you’re out there when there’s not even a single telephone pole or cattle fence.
Our 3 days here in the Tikaboo valley have been surprisingly eventful. Maybe I’m getting fucking quirky… Or maybe my wrinkly pink meat is turning into jerky? Perhaps both but we have indeed seen some interesting shit. Shit that even managed to penetrate my leather like heart skin and made me feel some kinda way on several occasions while camped out here. A mere three sunsets consisting of pleasantly long hours and strangely short days.
On our first night here I caught, on timelapse, an extraordinary aerial phenomenon over Area 51. No shit , I still can’t believe I caught it. It occurred amidst the orange layer of light still managing to hold back the deep blues and eventual black of encroaching night as the sun set behind the legendary not so “secret” base. It was something that shared characteristics with first a jet letting loose a brief trail of smoke and then immediately after it behaved like a quickly darting bug, as judged by its acrobatics, before it just popped out of existence. If it hadn’t left behind a brief but lingering chem trail like fart in the sky I would have probably figured it to be either a close up illuminated dust mote caught in an erratic wind current, a flying insect or perhaps some sort of light anomaly. It was definitely none of those.
Bats delightedly darted around us and through our firelit camp every evening and once an enormous white Owl flew low directly over our fire then upon reaching our smoke column it banked hard with a “woosh”towards the South which left an exhilarated electric aftertaste in my very bones- owls represent death you see. Not as in actual dying, more like the death tarot card. They seem to show up before a great change, harbingers of inevitability.
Our first night a strange light appeared in the mountains just East of Area 51 and when I shined my laser on it, it immediately went out, then back on. When I tried to film it, it extinguished itself one second before I hit record and remained off until the moment I stopped recording. It then proceeded to phase from an amber half moon shape to a red oval and eventually disappeared. It was like having a strange light based conversation with who fucking knows who or what. Last night the light returned, I shined my laser on it and it went out, re-illuminating only after we had gone to bed which I observed as the inky night swallowed my steaming piss stream in the cold wee hours.
I’m still very much my opened minded and healthily skeptical self, but marinating in such a desert solitude does something to you. Especially when you have ZERO cell reception. It’s that old desert thing of which I’ve always loved, but been unable to name, since I was a kid and first wandered through her stark and barren beauty. It’s not just that you’re potentially one dumbass mistake away from dying. Nor is it the natural insistence to acclimate to the extreme environment, to go slow and be smart in the mid day heat and become active at night and thus sync up with an unfamiliar cycle. It’s not only being able to observe the unclothed naked and sweeping hips and thighs of her valley’s or the the swelling windswept sandy sideboobs of her exposed desert contours. It’s just fucking magical out here, that’s what it is, its fucking magical. There’s something that makes my teeth vibrate and ignites a dull electricity that pulses in my gut. It’s something that eminates directly from the desert and sort of goes through you, irreverent of any lines of demarcation implied by skin or thought. It gives zero fucks about the word “me” and consumes the very concept of individuality in her indifferent inferno. A vibe, so ancient, vast and impersonal that it dwarfs your thoughts and your mind becomes temporarily cowed and will actually shut the fuck up for a minute.
Night 2 we sat under the milky illuminated curdle of distant stars strewn across the desert sky whilst listening to classical music. Upturned faces awash in the amber firelight, a bit of whiskey warmth numbing our bellies. Some strange download occurred in me in which the absolute fucking enormity of my view of the cosmos somehow turned inside out and perceptively reduced itself into a single reference point: little ole’ me, standing in the middle of this vast, to me, but ultimately tiny desert ecosystem listening to this beautiful vibratory sonata that was born of a long dead consciousness and the incredible juxtaposition of it all; big & small, vastly impersonal & deeply personal, got into me in some kinda way… in a good way, and made my eyeballs sweat. Even more than that actually, I’m weirdly proud to say I cried a little. Just a cluck or 2 and barely a tear but for me that’s a big and long sought after fucking deal and the strange release of that very brief, sweaty eyed, ugly faced moment seemed to expunge some long stagnant tensions. Like I said, it’s fucking magic out here.
As I sit in the shaded lee of our trailer writing this on our final day- day three, the angry mid day sun has finally diverted its scrutinous gaze upon my skin and has begun looking West to sink towards the horizon and take its nightly leave. The shadows are growing pleasantly long and the syrupy silence is shattered by the occasional deep blunt bass rumbling of unseen military aircraft high above and although we can never see the fuckers we feel their reverberations deep within our ribcages. A warm but welcome wind whispers promises of night across our sweat moistened skin and flies who never seem to land circle my head singing to me, buzzing little hymns about life and death and I feel- at peace, without tension or worry and that’s just fucking fine by me.
We did, of course, drive to the back gate of Area 51. You come to a sign that says the following:
“WARNING
IF YOU ARE CONSIDERING TRESPASSING ON THE NEVADA TEST AND TRAINING RANGE BOUNDARY
PLEASE CONSIDER THE FOLLOWING CONSEQUENCES:
1. YOU WILL BE REQUIRED TO PAY $1000 FINE.
2. YOU WILL HAVE YOUR CAR TOWED AT YOUR EXPENSE.
3. YOU WILL HAVE YOUR CAR IMPOUNDED AT YOUR EXPENSE
4. YOU WILL BE BROUGHT TO HIKO, NV TO BE PROCESSED.
5. ONCE RELEASED YOU WILL BE RESPONSIBLE FOR TRANSPORTATION TO YOUR NEXT DESIRED TRAVEL LOCATION.”
Sooo, naturally, we kept driving past the sign and made it all the way to the actual gate of Area 51. At the gate there are signs that say things like: “Do not film this area”. Don’t worry, I filmed the fuck out of it. There is a white truck parked atop an adjacent hill, the famed “Camo dudes” ever vigilant and elusive standing guard. As to the rest of what went down, like a white truck appearing out of the dust behind my truck then disappearing back into the white dust…you’ll just have to wait for the video.
As I mentioned, if you are reading this then we are not in fact dead and are likely back on the road with another 6 days of roadtrip laying before us and no fucking idea where we are going other than “East”. Who knows what other weird shit will go down or what next we shall behold. Thanks, devoted reader, for reading all my bullshit, I appreciate you, toodaloo.
Dedicated to Miracle Maisie Mae
Toodaloo
