The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

There are people reserved for the people who come to the place where they can’t take another step. Moxy is one of those people. So is Albert. Me and my mama are those people, I guess, for people who are truly those people, me for Moxy, mama for Albert. Me for Albert, too, I guess. I guess when you think about what a family is and what it’s for there is no one person designated for any other. You’re all thrown in together like some family stew. If one dream you have concerns one particular family member you can rest assured that you’ll have another one about a different one. I think that’s where Albert is wrong with his rock opera. He thinks that one person deserves all the glory for having loved- Diana. But that’s not true at all if you look at Diana’s family. Look at William and Harry. These are two lovable kids. Each one of them deserves a rock opera too, but Albert only wrote one and I’m not about to make him write another one for William and another one after that for Harry. Knowing Albert’s salvation complex he would probably try to do it too.

Starting off on this journey of an account of my life I thought the power behind my story would go on forever, but I’m just about out of words to describe a story that doesn’t have much of a plot. I can’t trace the places that I’ve been because like I said those fifteen years are just as good as gone for me. I don’t want to dwell on them because they went by without me really there except in some strange, dream-like way. I’m not bitter at myself for having done what I’ve done, but I am a little bit disturbed over the time I’ve wasted. If it could have been possible that I would have met Moxy and had Minnie fifteen years ago I would have done it, would have stayed at the supermarket like Albert did. But I can’t go on thinking like that. Lost years can’t be made up. If I miss the story that was never written about them I can’t cry. I’ve got a story that is just as good, but sadder concerning where I went. Mine is a history of the needle.
But if this is such a history then I must use the language of mythology to describe it. As my mind wanders over the people in my pantheon I divine the depths of my drug addicted sorrow only from what they have to say to me now. If I were to go back to some of the faces that I stared at while high and let them be my storytellers then I would just as soon as die. For I’m away from there now. I don’t play rock and roll anymore except occasionally and for what I’m doing for Albert. I’m not mad at it. I’m not bitter that it took me into dope harder than I’d ever thought I could go when I first started experimenting. But I’m not one out to gather pain. No reason could there be for me to recount the scum that I became to you, to purge something in my soul as though my families prayers had not been enough.

So let me tell you more about my family. I know there’s no real story here, but I think there’s some meaning that could get through, something that might relate a thought to you that will remind you of a story that will take the place of my inability to remember things well about how things happened, their order in the universe and all that. You do that. I will concentrate now on what I want to, namely, the look in Minnie’s eye the other day when she got so mad at me for lying to her. We were talking about heaven. I don’t know why. Minnie said to me,”Daddy, if angels ain’t got no wings like Albert says, then how come they can fly?” I wasn’t sure if this was a Minnieism or not. I thought about it, wondered what it was exactly that Albert told my child, gathered that it went much deeper than I could ever imagine therefore giving Minnie the upper hand already. I thought about calling Moxy in, but Moxy would have been in the same boat I was if she chose to be. She wouldn’t. I take everything that Minnie says as important and it’s not because I’m a new age dad either. I just do. So I sat there with the girl on the ground where she played with her little toy of sticks of some sort out on the sand and I thought about it. I thought about it. I thought about it. And I thought about it. Then I said, “Angels are spirits, baby, they fly because God didn’t give them a body like you or I got.” Minnie says, “Then they don’t fly. They more kind of float.” I say, “Okay.” Then she looks at me, looks me in the eye real hard the way she does and she twists up her face and puts her little wrist on her thigh, the palm facing up. She’s suddenly this little Marilyn Monroe but with an attitude much saltier. She looks at me and says, “Daddy, you never seen God have you?” I said, “No.” She says, “Albert has.” Now I’d thought a lot about God by then. I thought I’d seen him a couple times too, I mean, really seen him. I knew I shouldn’t have taken it on, the challenge of showing my little girl the truth as I know it, but I was tired by then of being a hero and I thought that maybe some day my daughter would love me more for not being one by, at least, attempting to tell her the truth even if it wasn’t within my power to do so. So I thought about Albert and what he might have said, again. I thought of my brother Albert, working in the market, writing his stories now that I’ve taken on the work of doing his music for Petals and waiting for me to finish. And I thought that if I never finished he would keep waiting for me as long as I promised that I would finish. Taking into account this and the fact he came for me and the fact that, well, somehow, the fact that Minnie’d seen Teardrop lowered into the ground and I had yet to understand completely the look on her face as we done it to her. Taking all this into account, I thought the best thing to say to my baby was that I’d seen God and God’s angels all have wings and even though I didn’t lie, that they are spirit, spirit is just a powerful as flesh when it comes to being real. So, yes, I told her. Angels fly on wings of spirit, flapping away, making sure little kids don’t fall off mountains. But I shouldn’t a told her that. “Annnabelle fell off the mountain,” she said. “I know, baby.” And she didn’t say anything to me, but she looked down and away the way you don’t want your baby to look ever because it seems like her mind is too close to a truth and inwardly she might be dying a little bit or, maybe worse, growing up which is, I guess, both.
I don’t think she was angry at me, but she didn’t want to play anymore so I went into the house and talked to Moxy. Moxy was always busy doing this or that. She still had dealings in New York. She was a producer now and sometimes when she could get me to we’d go into town and to Vincennes Pizza and they’d let us set up and she’d sing and I’d play and a guy named Rick would play the drums for us and a kid named Ian would play bass and we had a little band and we’d draw a crowd without any advertising except for Albert who was good enough to be his own public relations firm if he chose to be, because, I guess, people remember Moxy Priestess. And now and then someone comes up to me and shakes my hand and looks me in the eye, usually someone about my own age who played guitar once. I never deny a soul an autograph. Somehow its like denying them a breath. I know that sounds egotistical, but you don’t want to say no to someone whose heart is still beating. It’s like saying no to the idea of their heart beating and since mine almost stopped a couple of times I respect it just like I respect Minnie’s looking away, there being that something in her head that made her think of something, know something, rather, even though I didn’t want her to.

10  wrecking ball, anus freeze, Tom’s boy. Breathe.
9 ain’t seen Jed for awhile, bullet or shot?, in or out?, dead or alive?
8 ain’t seen. That’s three thoughts since I shot. In or out?
7 glad I got here. Glad when I wake up I can still see. Don’t want any more pain. In or out? They say when your daddy is a good man he don’t die he just goes to heaven. Getting heavy to believe in angels. Down corridors now. Angels go wherever they want to go. Go. Can’t spell oxy’s name anymore. Oxy. No more M. M’s disappear. Never rely on an M to stay in a name cuz they’re like flying carpets m’s.
6 ain’t. Fives ain’t fours nor threes nor twos nor ones nor negative ones, nor negative twos nor negative threes nor negative fours nor negative fives.

5 thoughts. Six. Breathe in and out with tongue slipping out touching air like some snake dying. With tongue slipping out like some snake dying to its own way of doing. Like some snake dying to its own way of not having arms, of not having heart or soul, of having only cold blood. No fours. Could magic carpets really be eyelids that fall down with death?
3 Bah.
2 Albert and mama. Millsville, Tennessee. The Lady. Forgot the o. xy. No mo Mo. Only xy. I gotta go.

Jed! Jed! Jed, you hear me? Jed! It’s Isabella, baby. Jed? It’s The Lady. Feel me. How soft The Lady is. Jed!

1 Go.

Jed! Goddamn you, Jed! Darryl, Jed’s leaving!
Get out of my way, Daryl.
Man, don’t do this to yourself, Jed.
Get out of my way, man.
Darryl, stop him!
I’m sorry, man. I’m sorry.
You son of a shit. Darryl, you shouldn’t be touching me.
Darryl, what are you doing! Stop playing with him!
Lady, he can fight!
Don’t let him go! Jed! No!
Sorry about that, Lady. He’ll be alright. I just planted it between his eyes. I’m trained. I’m trained. I gotta go. MO!

I haven’t talked a lot about my mom. Mama said when we were kids that, well, when I was a kid, Albert wasn’t around then, that I would grow up to be a big strong man like my father. Only trouble was that my father died when I was ten. Did I mention a man took a gun to my dad because my dad didn’t like people picking on women. So my dad was a big strong man, but he got killed for it. I didn’t know what to do about some guy picking on my dad, killing him. When Albert was born just before my dad died I promised nobody would ever hurt that kid. And I promised that nobody would ever hurt my mama and I promised that nobody would ever hurt me. Turns out I hurt all of them myself eventually. That’s what growing up means, learning that you’re often times your own worst enemy.

But this philosophy of being the man in the house only made me mean. It also made me pick up my father’s guitar so I’d have some sort of peace in my head. Then it made me start drinking booze with the other junior high kids, then weed, then speed, then coke, then heroin. Then something like fifteen years went by and it all just became a matter of picking up the pieces.
I don’t know where to go when I talk about that period, the heroin years. I don’t feel like using metaphors for something so real. My mind goes back to Teardrop trying to make it up the mountain. Teardrop knew. It’s like looking at the place where you know isn’t there anymore, like a house that you grew up in that burned down. It’s like being non-existent to yourself. It’s like slowed time. It’s like using your nerve-endings as soul when all you’ve got is heart left anymore. It’s the look in my mule’s eye when he turns around and questions whether or not there is a God at all, but he knows that he’s got to keep moving forward. It’s like a single teardrop falling into the sea.

But this same philosophy made me a tiger, too. It gave me something that I still wouldn’t trade away for anything in the world except for pure unadulterated love. It made me what I am today, a man who survived. The same thing that almost killed me, the same trick of fate which seemingly was put forth by the very hand of God, the killing of my father, was the thing that I took with me so that I would survive the killing hand of fate. To blame me for running scared my whole life is unfair. Show me a man who doesn’t and isn’t running scared in some way as we speak and I’ll show you a man who isn’t a whit afraid of death and dying. That’s a hard man, but it’s a true man if he’s still got the skin on his face. He’s lying, of course. We’re all afraid of the big black hole where God may or may not be living. We’re afraid because we’re afraid of the unknown. So it’s true what Minnie says about hamster cages. I just wish I’d been able to come up with that one myself. You got to make due with what you got. If you live in a hamster cage, you gotta make it the most comfortable hamster cage you can or else you’ll go down like I went down, alone and afraid, into the bottom of the cage under all that straw and never come up again like I didn’t think I ever would. I was even burrowing away from Moxy after awhile, but then Minnie came on the scene and I just felt stupid, felt like a hamster, like a ratty old hamster with a baby and Moxy all clean cause she’s licked herself every day knowing why she was put on the earth and Minnie all red and meowie and meepie like a baby is and then Moxy coming over to me and helping me to stand up so I could help her care for the baby, then Albert coming along like God sent him, literally like God sent him, which might just be the case, I don’t know, and me coming home with my baby and giving her over to mama like it was the only thing I knew I could hand to her that would allow her to forgive me for shooting up in front of her when I was seventeen and dead on my feet and hating the sight of anything that reminded me of the fact that some bastard killed my dad and left me to be the man, a job I just wasn’t cut out for and I proved it. Minnie did all that for me and now I’m just proud and humble at the same time working on Albert’s rock opera like I wish I was writer enough to have written but aren’t.

It seems like I should give a little bit about the history of Annabelle Mountain. The people who lived here first were the _____ Indians, of course. But since I’m no story teller I’ll tell you only what I know. It got its name from a man who’d lost everything ultimately in a bad business dealing during the Civil War, Henry Mills. There was no real sense of who he was by anybody around here. He didn’t seem to have any heroic qualities that I can tell, but he did once own half of the county. The story goes that his wife Mary and his daughter Annabelle lived on a hill not nearly so far up as we did and one day Annabelle, only about five or six, not much older if at all older than Minnie, walked outside one night and ended up lying on top of boulder dead. Nobody knows how she got out or why she went. After that the man supposedly spent all of his time looking for reasons that weren’t there until it made his wife go crazy and he had to put her in a sanitarium. It was about then that he lost all his land, mostly in poker games and some say died a drunk sitting at a bar in Millsville that he used to be part owner of. As far as history goes that’s all I know about Annabelle Mountain.

I like to think there is something of Annabelle’s spirit still on the mountain and when I think about how Teardrop made it up the hill I tend to think that maybe Annabelle helped him out a little bit, was there with a helping hand, was a night wind that blew warm for just that second that would allow Teardrop to stop shivering, was a rough patch of rock instead of slick mossy one that allowed Teardrop to gain that next step that he eventually did or else he never would have made it home. So I thank that little girl for the blessing of Teardrop’s return and I like to think that if someday Minnie takes a walk she’ll be there for her too.
We’re lucky, we can afford to keep Minnie at home with us. Sometimes I think it unfair that the biggest screw ups in life sometimes become the richest. While I was shooting my portion of rock and roll earnings into my veins, Helen Capowitz was stuffing hers into the same bank that her parents The Capowitz’s of Stony Brook, Long Island did business through. Moxy bought the house on Annabelle Mountain. I haven’t felt like working for over ten years. It sort of boggles my mind and makes me feel like a loser. Mmmmm. But I’ve got Albert’s rock opera on my lap right now and every time I see it I think about the music that I used to play. It’s funny, but the music in my head is coming back to me, but it’s not pressing me, not killing me like it used to, not making me need to understand it, to decipher it so that I need to go out and have a shot so I can just get it all first hand. First hand heaven which eventually became my first hand hell. How can I hate the world anymore or rant at it when the author is my brother and all that I had foisted on him was a need for more love since not only did his father leave, but so did his brother. I made Albert an only child.
Let me quote directly from the play. This is Trevor Rees-Jones, the only one in the car to survive the wreck: “I think Diana would want us to love. Love. Love everybody. Everybody. Love Everybody. Love. Everybody love. Love. Can’t we just do that now, at least, for her? We must to make it through the storm…”

A friend of mine who I knew a long time ago in L.A. who was of the Bahai faith told me that all you need is one scripture to last you through a lifetime. That thing that Albert wrote seemed to me to be a scripture. It was enough to last me a lifetime since I’d spent a lifetime already not doing it. So I took it on. It’s not easy. Albert expects a lot from me and I’m not sure I’ve got what it takes. I’m no classical musician, I’m just a rocker, but that’s what he really wants. He wants a rocker with heart, but even more, a rocker with soul because he wants to play the role of Trevor Rees-Jones himself and at the end of the play when Diana is dead and Dodi is dead and Henri is on top of his flying saucer all whacked out like I was on dope, he wants to sit there in a wheelchair in the mayhem of lights and lasers and smoke and God personified and cry like a baby. I think just the thought is admirable enough for me to say yes to the play.
We’ve decided we’re going to self-educate Minnie, at least for a few years. Moxy takes her into town and she’s decided to join the local Methodist church so Minnie will have little friends. Moxy doesn’t care if Minnie becomes Methodist or Jewish or Muslim or Gay. Moxy already knows the kind of person that Minnie will become and that is simply this: a woman with heart and soul, the kind of person Albert wants to compose the music for his play and the kind of person that he’s forcing me to become by doing it. I never thought I’d be working for my brother though. Yet I owe it to him. I think I’ve already said that.

Then you know your eyes are closed and you wonder whether you are asleep, whether Jed is dead, and whether Diana was right for bringing Henri off of the flying saucer, if maybe she just should have let him go since the guilt of killing her was way too much for him to handle.  And night falls, eyelids slope down.  We die or we don’t or we sleep only.  Which?
(Albert’s dream, uncovered by his soul at 4:22 a.m., Tennessee time):
The Angel Gabriel falls from the sky, his wings flat, dirty, beaten, and torn.  He’s fallen from a window fourteen tenement floors above.  Copper water flushes through his open mouth as he lies in a city gutter.  He doesn’t drown.  Instead of accepting death, he turns over and breaks off a wing accidently.  His leg kicks at the curb once, then twice, then three times, until the cement cracks, and his eyes are flashed open, and he stands.  He thrashes about trying to capture his broken wing, twirls madly, raging at the demons that fear him now more than he ever did them.  He stops and looks up.  He cannot fly so he begins to climb the building.  He climbs the fourteen floors to the room from which he fell.  He pulls himself up and lands in water.  He floats and sighs out in relief.  The water continues to rise as he floats and he wonders if he has fallen asleep again.  It rises and rises and then reaches the tip of the sill and begins to fall out of the window.  He inches closer and closer to the window sill, watching it pull him towards it as he floats half-asleep, the lip of the water smooth as the lip of a woman, yet not so beguiling, plainer, worthy of far less fear or care.
He goes over the sill again.  Albert is there. He reaches for him, almost jumping out of the window to hold him.  He’s got him by the broken wing.  But Gabriel is heavy because Gabriel has become Jed and Jed doesn’t want to stop this time.  The floating was too nice.  But Albert holds him, crying, screaming in pain at the weight at the end of his arms, arms too weak to hold anything anymore, but arms not about to let go.
Then, after a few moments of this agony, their eyes meet.  Albert watches as Jed’s eye unwinds, his pre-birth, killer stare unraveling before his brother’s sight.  Jed never was the angel Gabriel.  Gabriel had momentarily become the man known as Jed.  Jed was dead then, having given up the knot in his eye, the only thing that had kept him connected to life. Gabriel, mended, flew away, his wings causing wind as he departed.

this is a short story of desperation

a guy is born. Later he dies. It doesn’t matter to him because the way he feels he could care less. That’s the way of life. Death. Simple. Not that he wanted it, to die, no, he wanted to live, but it felt better to him to consider being alone in a warm grave for the rest of his life, or death, whatever it became. He couldn’t consider which was real. Life or death. The christians say that death is more like life than life is more like life. They call life death and call death new life. It’s odd. This is what all the presidents tell us and Billy Graham and the senate when they say a christian prayer. Death is better than life, so don’t have too much fun I guess. I guess that’s what it means. Look forward to death after which you will have fun. What is fun then? I guess fun is being warm in a grave for the rest of your life or death, whichever it is like I said. So I guess I’m pretty straight on target, middle of the road for my views. I’ve never been much of a non conformist. Most christians would call me dour though. I guess I’m dour then. Isn’t that what they want us to be? Makes you think if maybe there isn’t money involved in this ludicrous argument. Fuck it. I believe in God, but I’m not going to freak out about it. The entire system of our christian faith is wrong. We don’t worship Christ anymore but the devil. We watch television and go to church on Sunday. I’m not criticizing the television except its the most flagrant advertising scheme ever put out in front of the world and called by some “art.” it’s not art. It’s shit and an addictive behavior. The networks are enablers. Some will say that there are some good programs on television and its up to you to choose the ones you watch wisely. Well, they don’t live at my house where my dad sits around and drinks beer and farts his life away all the while watching Jerry Springer. We’ve become a potential case for the Jerry Springer show just by watching Jerry Springer what seems about four times a day. Is that possible? It sure seems like we see it four times a day. Fuck Jerry Springer and my dad. Fuck em all.

My mother’s cool though. She gave me four hundred dollars to get me by last month. She’s cool. Gotta buy weed and shit, but she don’t know about that and she thinks it all goes to my rent. I don’t say my mom is stupid, but she does give me a lot of money when I don’t really deserve it because I admit it that I’m a fuck up to some degree just like my old man is. I get stoned too much and I eat out a lot and I’m getting fat like my dad. I don’t work and that sucks, but I don’t give a shit. It’s what I want to do. When I get stoned it feels alright. I know, it’s an artificial high, but what else am I going to do? I got a dog that doesn’t stop barking. Barks at everything. It’s winter, got bronchitis. What the fuck else is new? Why not just get stoned and wait for better days to come in the mail. And they will. Sent out a rock musical and hope it will catch on. Created the tunes at home stoned of course. Everything stoned. Nothing held back and that’s my claim to literature like henry miller did, but, well, you can’t say better. Henry Miller wrote exactly what was on his mind. No messing around. Good writer. I try and look for ways to claim that the shit that I write is a short story or something so maybe I can sell it and get some money so I don’t die of starvation or consumption or stupidity or something or just die of being plain just stoned, scared and uncared for like most people do, I think. (to be cont.)

Even my stove doesn’t fuckin work. The mind is a terrible thing to attempt to use. I was going to say waste. No need to say waste. The mind is a waste of time anyway. You don’t need to press it for it to be a stupid fucking waste of time. All us writers are writing for money now. There is no such thing as literature anymore except for those who have been lucky enough to make money writing. They can write literature. The rest of us have to turn on our fucking stoves to get heat in our houses because the heat doesn’t work. Many of us want to die. Myself included. I’ve reconciled to the fact that nothing I ever say on paper will matter to anybody, ever. My childish belief in immortality through the written word is dead. I failed to do everything in life that would make me a success because I thought I had a higher ideal. I didn’t.
So it’s as though I’ve got nothing left to lose. The stove finally kicked on and it’s cooking my left ear. My right ear is about frozen off. I look at a magazine called Poets and Writers for yuppies who want to make a lot of money from their writing. I’m looking at the face of a poet named Ai. Everybody has such names in this magazine. They all try to be literary when they’re getting literarily screwed too. The greatest of them get their faces placed inside because they won a contest or something. Then there are interviews inside too with the Ai’s of the world. These Ai’s supposedly have some sort of ability to tap into the world’s unconscious psyche and reveal it to the rest of us piglets.  Ai’s making money. I respect her.
In college they tell you all about these great writers. They never tell you about the shit writers, the ones who failed. The many who killed themselves AND never wrote a word the rest of the shitheads considered valuable. They’re brushed aside as the crazies. The winners don’t know that they know how to play the system which includes having the ability to lick stamp after fucking stamp against all odds. The rest of us see it as a waste of immortality. Time’s little joke on us we figure is to make us give up our supposed art for the sake of office supplies. The Buddhists wouldn’t complain about this. But I’m not a Buddhist. I’m a writer who doesn’t write most of the time, who gave up, who was looking for something in the written word that he couldn’t find in the reality of this world where words don’t mean shit, who didn’t know that he was just hiding by writing, hoping by writing, praying by writing and ultimately dying by writing. His soul is dead now because he thought he could make a living out of writing. Now that he’s realized this impossibility he’s awoken to the fact that he has no way to make a living. No woman wants to be by his side because of his insanity and commitment to the higher arts which had no commitment to him, only loathing that he would attempt to aspire there. And all of the other brothers and sisters say hallelujah the foolish boy has gone home. He’s not trying to knock on the door of heaven anymore. Everybody knows he’s not pretty enough. As they step up to the door, head held high, finger outstretched poised to press a doorbell a million miles up hanging there like the Man hanging on the moon. Good luck.

So to quit is to begin. This is the lesson. To let it all go is to allow it all to come again, but in a different form. Ai sits there knowing something that I never will. She looks at me as if my thoughts of the end can be combated no matter how hard I try against that look in her eye. She says to me that I may be wise in some regards, but her poetry can handle even my wisdom and if she has her way then I’m not going to die, but rise, but rise, but rise.
And the writer in me says keep writing to find out the answer to this predicament which has no name and only begs more exposition simply so the lights don’t go out completely. Ai’s eyes will die someday and what will then keep me alive? I don’t know. I think it’s the next word, but nobody reads my words anyway and everybody says i’m not supposed to just write for the hell of it.
Just thought that maybe I’d call this a diary. Who cares what this is called? It doesn’t matter. I thought if I called it a diary then maybe I could hone it later and sell it.

Depressed today more than usual.  Didn’t drink becuase I ran out of whisky.  Sitting here in the middle of nowhere.  Tell me there’s a little town called Carpinteria up here somewhere. Say you can trade with the Indians .  Where there’s Indians theres usually whiskey. Hoping  things will change for the better here real soon.  Thinking a lot about Mary.
Its funny how love is.  When you don’t got the one that you love anymore you wonder why love couldn’t have been strong enough to keep you together.  What kind of evil forces are there out there that can tear two people together who have taken the time to look into each others souls for the benefit of each.  What kind of God is it that would make these two people split apart from each other forever? What kind of evil in the world is there, floating around up there, making sure that two people with two good eyes, two good ears, two beating hearts, don’t survive.  Love is a special thing.  It is a rarity, really.  There is no reason to make believe that love, if had, isn’t the greatest thing on earth.  But truly it’s not the strongest.
Things that are more powerful than love: the sun, the wind, inner desires unspoken, music, caring too much about yourself, blindness, heartlessness, coldness.  I guess there’s a million things that are beating down the door of love so that love finally just gives up and lets it all in.  I think blindness is the worst.  It’s when you lose sight of the beauty of love that you start being blinded and when you’re blinded you can’t see to feel somebody. It’s not that we lose the ability to feel, but that we lose sight of the person to which we would pin our feelings upon.  We’re so used to being alone with our own crazy selves I guess.
But, anyway, I can’t hold on forever to those pink and polka dot dreams of the past.  When something or somebody is gone you can’t sit around hoping that they’ll come back or it will drive you crazy forever.  If you got life in you I guess there is a chance that God might send somebody new to you to make up for what he’d taken away.  It’s just when you’re in the state that I am in right now it don’t seem so much that it’s possible.  I guess I ain’t letting Mary go just yet.  She’s still too big inside of me. I guess she always will be if I let her be, for right now I’m letting her be. It ain’t as though I really have a choice.
I sit here on this rock and see the ocean, the mighty Pacific, and the landscape above me, the green hills, green mountains further behind me.  Just come to these hills, finally made it and it’s like I’m entering a tropical island.  I just keep to the water and everything is alright.  There’s a road here too so sometimes I see a few people, but mostly its just me on this Pacific coast road to nowhere.  Hear a lot about gold being found up north. Guess i’ll go as far as San Francisco and then figure out whether or not I want to try and pan some of the stuff myself.  For now I don’t care much.  I do these odd jobs and they just about kill my back.  But there ain’t a lot of cities up along these roads anymore.