Coast Starlight

Singing field holler Clarksdale blues, “Don’t cha know no’thin child?” I channel Elmore James and Robert Johnson by living, learning, laughing and loving.

Standing with my heart in bleeding hands down at the crossroads I traded my soul to the devil to play the blues.

Train whistles blew.

Above platform #5 long neck cranes flew west over Puget Sound.

“ALL ABOARD,” yelled porter Jon. I got on, the door closed and the Coast Starlight slid south.

“This is where you sleep. Upstairs is the observation car. They serve a continental breakfast at 10. Meals are included in your fare. You will be asked if you want the early or late dinner seating in the dining car.”

Train #11 rolled south along the Pacific Coast toward a railroad museum in Sacramento. Historical engines, freight cars, silver diners and big black coal stoking locomotives collected dust.

Construction maps, massive oil murals and Andrew Russell paintings of exhausted immigrants and eastern big shots in tuxedos.

15,000 Chinese workers laid 700 miles of track from Sack-of-Tomatoes to Promise Me A Story, Utah. They shoveled twenty pounds of rocks 400 times a day. 1,000 Chinese died hammering transportation rails. The Chinese built the West, Mormons the middle and Irish the East. The last spike in 1869 connected East-West railroads.

Travelers in the dome liner discussed characters. “He’s three French fries short of a happy meal,” said a Las Vegas nutrition teacher, pointing at a man.

“Eat fruits and veggies to reduce internal temperature for healthy results,” said CC, a doctor from central Mexico. We exchanged books about Eastern spiritual warriors.

CC read my palm lines. “You will come back as a bird, not a snake.”

“I am a screaming eagle.”

Her nails were perfect. “You have a long lifeline.” 

“What do you see?”

“Your fate line indicates either a strong profession chosen by self or higher spirit. You have a strong will and there is conflict with a hidden self in your dreams.”

“I am a higher spirit.”

“The girdle of Venus indicates promiscuity. You have protection. A deep heart line shows a heavy first love. Other deep lines show lots of anger and resentment.”

I nodded. “An early life of confusion, separation, loss, and fear of emotional trust. Abandonment. Orphan heart awareness. Alcohol played a later role with manipulation and trust.”

“You had a lot of turmoil in early life and had to overcome a struggle and nourishment issues.”

“True. My mother contracted polio when I was five. I felt abandoned. It wasn’t my fault however I felt guilty. She had my brother then a sister. I was angry coping with the responsibility, emotional distance and siblings. She became angry and abusive. She died at forty-two. I escaped the house, hitched the country, survived Vietnam and explored the planet.” 

“I see. You are a sucker for love but not a pushover. You are generous and not concerned about money. The height of your little finger indicates a high level of creativity.”

“What you say may not be real but it’s true. Or it’s not true and real. I’m working on detachment and discernment with clarity. You’re very good.”

“Thanks,” she said, smiling. “I don’t do many hands anymore, but I like you.”

Miles of rails tracking open land said hello big world. Spikes lay coast to coast. Labor. Rosie the Riveter sang her song.

“Rosie” was Rose Will Monroe, a riveter on B-29 and B-24 military planes at a Michigan production plant in WW II. She was selected by the War Department for patriotic promotional films portraying a rosy-cheeked woman in overalls working outside the home. Her image was accepted by millions of women and she was credited, according to statistics of American Economic History, with increasing the number of employed women to twenty million in four years.

Named “Rosie” by her male co-workers, she symbolized women on assembly lines in defense industry jobs producing military hardware. After the war Rose drove a taxi, opened a beauty shop and started an Indiana construction company named Rose Builders. She died in 1997 of natural causes.

Rail music sang click, clack, click and clack.

In a dome liner, children ate watermelon and spit seeds into sky. A red haired female magician made poverty disappear. Passengers formed quick intense transient relationships between whistle stops before, during and after industrial wastelands.

We zoomed past small town wrecking yards with cars and trucks collecting rust, abandoned swings, toys, dishwashers, gardens, guillotines, baskets of severed heads, shredded tires and water soaked concave fences collapsing into community soil.

I hammered word spikes while waving to strangers stranded in their present perfect tense seeing trains carry perfect continuous tense strangers into new futures. Down the line riding the rails. Further along the road of iron deficiencies.

At a remote train station a furious man with his shopping cart home and a whiskey bottle in a bag sagged against a brick wall yelling at his slumped wife. Her old sad eyes stared far away wondering how she managed to get herself in this fucking mess away from social services, respect, dignity and love. Her heart knew if she had any common sense any strength or power she’d get up and start walking.

Her dilemma was to find a way out of the quicksand swallowing her life. She was conditioned to having someone save her. She loved being a victim and needed a martyr.

Downstairs in a converted baggage car I met a 15-year old kid going home.

“Man,” he said, “you wouldn’t believe it. I’m from Chicago, the east side, ya know, projects and all that shit and just spent the summer with relatives in Sacramento. Would you believe there are no pregnant girls out there? No guns either. Back where I’m from everybody’s pregnant and you’d better get your ass through the projects after school and home right quick or else somebody’s gonna shoot ya. My poor mom is worried sick every time I leave our place.”

He smokes, pacing the cage talking up a storm.

“Yeah, man, like I go out at night in Sacramento with friends and there were no gangs at all. People were real nice. I couldn't believe it. I’m moving back out there as soon as possible, man. I’m gonna finish school and get out of the projects. Man, I’m telling ya, I learned a lot out there. It’s all about friends and family.”

A wild deep river dancing under a full moon illuminated the boy’s silver shadow.

Passengers in a rolling living room talked about Richmond, Chicago, Washington D.C., Atlanta, and New Orleans. “Wherever this train takes us,” said a man. A retired couple from Philly saw wild Montana after thirty years in Freedom City where he worked underground connecting subconscious wires to the grid.

Clear cold thin Rocky Mountain air quickened blood streams. We’ve enjoyed rail’s clicking clacking trestle music exchanging laughter and awareness. Visions of starlight sky blends with engine headlights shattering blackness. We arrive at Union Station in Denver.

I know the field behind the station where the headless homeless heartbroken hoboes, drifters and transients exist, hide and run for their lives.

It’s a tricky place at night. It runs north way up to the stockyards near the old Coliseum, not to be confused with the one in Rome where they fed you-know-who to you-know-what. Where every cold frostbitten February, cowboys, cowgirls and plain old city folk put on the Stockman’s extravaganza awarding prizes to animals and the field runs south past the main Post Office Terminal annex and westward toward immigrant hopes and dreams up to Federal Boulevard on a rise with a church and laundromats and renovated upscale posh neighborhoods overlooking a gleaming screaming downtown Silver City skyline. The killing field is filled with tall weeds in the Platte River flood plain.

There’s a fine view of the Rocky Mountains from the field amid random acts of pre-meditated violence around small fires as drifters pray to stay invisible long enough to ride rails out of town away from the mean old street.

In the summer, children scream on the roller coaster at Elitch Gardens up on 38th and Tennyson where my aunt and uncle ran a drugstore and pharmacy after WWII. They worked their fingers to the bone, sweated their lives out and never asked for a thing. My aunt was so scarred by the Depression she maintained thirty-seven folders budgeting the cash flow by counting every penny every night.

It ain’t no field of dreams in that big lonely weed choked undeveloped tract of real estate where freights and Amtrak dome liners blow long sad whistles as buttoned waiters serve blood red Colorado tenderloin down wind from the smell of meat grilling at Coors Field where boys of summer play hardball.

The Coast Starlight sliding toward Kansas curves into a space-time bend.

Moon drinks rainwater.

Walking rails I sing with Robert Johnson…“Woke up this morning and looked around for my shoes…I got them walking blues.”

I savor impermanence. Cool blood decorates hot black keys as I bleed words.

ART - Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Blues Music

Kids banging on piss pots, chair spokes and life support systems gave the harp player a backbeat. They had lyrics down.

“Blues are a healer.”

“The blues ain’t nothing but a good woman feeling bad.”

“Let’s invent the future,” said one. “The day after tomorrow belongs to me. Know any Little Walter? I love Juke.”

“Sure do,” said the player. “Let’s have a look see at our repertoire. How about some Sonny Boy? His real name was Chester Burnett, born in Mississippi, down in the Delta. Have you heard Help Me? It’s a classic. He sang, ‘If you don’t help me I’m going to have find me somebody else.’ He had the blues with a feeling. Speaking of healers, my mom does vision quests. Helps people see their way through personal dark slime and muck. She makes womb lodges. People go in there. Can you imagine, going back into the womb? Dark and spooky floating in wet stuff. You can’t see a thing. It’s scary and cool. She says it allows people to process old grief and memories. She calls it regressing. It takes a lot out of her.”

“It’s like entering a cave,” said Tran. “I heard about amazing Paleolithic paintings in Benaojan, Spain near Ronda. They are really old stone stories of 26,000-year old bison, archers, deer, fish traps and sex stuff. I met a wandering ghostwriter named Omar in Morocco after 9/11 and…”

“Probably metaphorical,” said an abstract kid. “They used their imagination and daily struggle to survive. They created internal and external dream images and stories. It’s all about survival, meaning and metaphor. A cave. A womb. Birth. Life. Death. Transformation.”

“Yeah, they painted their experiences. They weren’t dreams silly. They were real. They were hunters-gathers like us. They shared visions and story-truth with family, clan and tribe. They created honest magical creation stories. They expanded the known and unknown in their universe.”

“Oh yeah?” said a skeptic. “I mean where’s the scientific proof? Scientists will never reconcile the two abstract theories into a unified field theory of the universe, matter, anti-matter and evolutionary hypothesis with Time & Being & Nothingness.”

“I heard scientists dated them.”

“When you get that old no one will date you.”

Blues harp music echoed through the ward. “Who wrote that?” said one.

“Willie Dixon. He wrote some great music. Everybody recorded his tunes. Stones, Muddy Waters, you name it. The guys at Chess Records jerked him around big time. Talk about paying your dues.”

“If you want to play you have to pay.”

“Did he mate at Chess or was he a figure of speech like a metaphor?” said a linguistic kid. “Sound check.”

“He was a lyricist,” said the blues player, “and he also played the bass.”

“I know the words but forgot the music.”

“Music is the fuel,” said harp dude.

ART

Healing

Rose, a healing clown, wove her way through Intensive Care pushing a cart of snacks, books and toys.

“One size fits all,” Rose yelled above children’s laughter. “Come and get it.”

Children accepted rabbits, bears, yaks, animist tribal masks, elephants, snow leopards, tigers, panthers, and turtles wearing hexagrams.

Rose gifted wolves, foxes, spiders, eagles, ravens, fire breathing dragons, watercolor brushes, Chimayo blankets, Hopi Kachina Earth spirits, 232 butterfly species from Cambodia and Tibetan prayer wheels.

“Hey,” shouted a child, “what’s your name?”

“Rose. What’s yours?”

“Ash,” smiled the kid, “short for Ashley.”

“Well,” said Rose, “you don’t look so short to me. In fact, you look larger than life, if you know what I mean, jelly bean.”

“That’s funny,” laughed Ash, reaching her thin arm into the space of Rose dancing fingers in a dervish whirl.

“Here, have some colors Ash.” Rose zapped her with a rainbow spilling laughter, prisms and stardust.

“Wow, cool. Thanks Rose.”

Rose shared extra crunchy peanut butter, strawberry jam, green tea, fresh pitta bread, grape juice, bananas, apples, milk, eggs, cheese, tomatoes, rice and toothbrushes. She offered mint-flavored dental and mental floss.

She gifted fragrant soaps, candles, multicolored silk threads, bells, gongs, cymbals, looms, shuttles and bilingual dictionaries.

Rose dispersed gamelan orchestras, watercolors, camelhair brushes, calligraphy ink, Laotian silk, papyrus sheets and illustrated poetry books. Multifaceted mirrors reflected and refracted waves of eternity.

A Lao child carries the world on their back.

“Wow,” said a dreaming child, “this is beautiful,” beaming innocence around the room in a spiral vortex.

“You are beautiful,” said Martha Ann. “Mad and innocent.”

“Make my day,” yelled a boy looking through a telescope into the infinite expanding universe composed of 13.5 billion-year-old stardust. Children swarmed like bees making honey, “Let me see, let me see.”

“Guess what?” said astronomer. “There are more stars in the universe than grains of sand on all the beaches on the planet.”

“May I see?” said a kid.

“It’s a see saw,” said a joker, “around and around we go and where we stop nobody knows.”

“Am I this or am I dreaming?” said a child. “I am real. I invent your dream. Tran and I with our Dream Sweeper Machine decipher and reconfigure old dreams to create new memories.”

Voices sang a cold mountain poem. “Am I the soft sand of sleep that calms your tortured heart?”

“What strange mixture of life and death am I?”

“I am a wanderer searching for a Who to What I am.”

“You can indicate everything you see.”

“I am a butterfly dreaming I am a healthy child.”

A rational child said, “Pain is a sickness leaving my body. I feel free.”

“You is what you is,” said a small voice. “My mother was appointed to have me.”

“That must have been terrible.”

“It was her karma. Intention is karma.”

“What’s that?”

“It’s being aware of your actions and how they return in new forms and opportunities in your life. How they manifest your destiny. Today is our destiny. We accept responsibility for our choices and actions. We accept responsibility for our freedom.”

“Are you one with everything?” said one.

“Yes,” said a wise child. “We are a singularity. We are a witness. It’s part of the sacred contract. We are not in this room, we witness it.”

“Is absorbing our parent’s pain and suffering expensive?”

“Can be to be or not to be is the question,” said a kid named Shake Your Sphere.

“My mom says anger is expensive,” said a child.

“That explains why I can’t find the price tag,” said the joker child playing with a full deck. Ace high. Play the hand you get. Run the table. Outside hospitable windows a sparrow seeking crumbs darted from branch to branch on the Tree of Life.

“You betcha,” said Rose, grinning ear-to-ear not fear-to-fear through her Tantric death mask. “You are one third the life of the universe.”

“Like a rolling stone,” sang a child playing a riff on her blues harp in the key of C. “Ain’t it a crying shame. That old feeling is gone.”

“Ain’t nothing but the blues talking sweet thing,” said a sanguine one.

“Sometimes I blow and sometimes I draw. People should talk less and draw more. Ha ha ha.”

ART

 

ART

Adventure, Risk, Transformation

Blues - TLC 41

In Fujian, China using flakey chalk Lucky wrote Blues Music Story on a broken green board for eighty classless university students.

He spoke of the African Diaspora, history and slavery in America and how indentured humans gathered to make music and dance after long hard days in the sunshine of their love.

The blues manifested stories and songs as men and women left rural villages on economic migrations for city jobs like China now. Floating people in a floating world.

The blues expressed physical and spiritual loss from family, friends and communities. It’s “feeling, emotional, deep in your spirit soul” music. He pulled out his blues harp and they said, “Oh it’s a cochin.”

“Want to hear some blues?” 

“Yes.”

He blew sweet slow stuff, picking up the tempo blasting rifts of wailing train whistles and a sense of loss forever.

“This is called, ‘If you don’t help me I’ll find someone else,’ by Howling Wolf. When you’re a wandering minstrel or a Griot - a West African performer who perpetuates oral traditions of a family or village by singing histories and tales, considered by musicologists to be a link with the acoustic blues - or a Seanachai - a traditional Irish storyteller of truths, myths and legends - or a shaman, seer and adept it’s natural. I am a conduit for music. It comes through me.”

After hearing and feeling the blues students practiced making a Western sandwich: bread, tomatoes, mayo, relish, turkey slices, mustard, onions and lettuce. How do you consume a sand wish with chopsticks?

Let’s eat, said 1.6 billion peasants. We’ll eat anything with wings and legs except tables and planes.

New music echoed outside Room 317. Students ran to painless windows. 

Across the street a young Indonesian boy sat on a piece of plywood in the shadow of a long tall Sally art deco three-story concrete building.

It towered above a gated Jakarta middle-class community filled with designer homes, wild tropical blossoming fruit trees and displaced dysfunctional spoiled offspring spinning yoyos. 

In his left hand he held a silver chisel. In his right a flat edged hammer. He slammed metal against metal on a bronze bridge between stone and iron ages.

Between knowledge and wisdom.

Between an object and a concept.

Tap-tap-tap. Music flaked dust. Wind-spirits carried his chorale and tribal memories of family, rice paddies, nature and seasons.

Accompanying him a girl using a brothel broom of tree branches whisked a gentle rhythm creating their symphony of sadness, loss and neglect. They went on tour. Standing Room Only. Sold out forever and a day.