YEAR

I want you to understand who I am. I haven't the energy to be a poet right now. It is the last day of the year. I own four houses and no mortgages. The Argument known as America died sometime mid-year. No one is budging. It is a stalemate and I am leaving. I have been self-deporting for the last two years. 

I am looking to buy a fifth house in Mexico where I can live when it snows and when it doesn't snow. An American tourist was shot on the street in Guerrero yesterday by drug men. Guerrero means "war maker." An innocent gamer was shot in his own home in Kansas City by policeman yesterday, victim of a prank. Five deputies were shot in Colorado today by a disgruntled husband. I don't care why. 

I feel safe everywhere. My fear gene was sanded away during a religious childhood. That same childhood turned me into a pacifist. Spending six months in Cook County Jail during the 1960s helped, too. I never feared. No one came close to harming me. Maybe I'm wrong on pacifism. I will take my chances. Maybe I'm wrong for leaving the country. It is my choice. It is my answer to the Argument. I have faith. I will tell you about my sons later. 

I haven't the mind to be a poet right now. I repeat myself. Someone called me an old white man recently. Two people called me a racist. One called me a racist because I greeted him by saying "hola." He was Latino. I had just come back from teaching in Guatemala for a month. I had been speaking Spanish for a month. I said "Hola." He said that was racist. I met him on Grindr. That is another story. Maybe I will tell that story later. Maybe I will tell those stories later, although they are many and it is unlikely you would want to hear them. 

I boast. I go to my therapist to boast. It's his job to listen to me boast. He doesn't mind. I'm not as smart as a lot of people. Smart people voted for Jill Stein. There are white supremacists and there are intellectual supremacists. They all suffer from the same malady. They think it is important that they are better or smarter than other people. That is one thing I don't think. I don't ever boast about being better to my therapist. My boasts are indistinguishable from my apologies. Jim Carrey says he doesn't exist. I don't either.

I have three sons. The world isn't worth worrying about right now. We will all die. I give money to anyone on the street who asks for it. I gave a dollar to a barefooted black young guy in downtown Los Angeles. He complained about the prostitutes. He was hard to understand. My hearing may be going. I walked to the house in Venice Beach where I lived when I was an aspiring hippy. That was also in the 1960s. The man who lives there now rides a bicycle. This is my year-end letter. I am not hung up on the 1960s any more. Today is also interesting.

My son Henry is careening down Hollywood Boulevard flashing a deck of cards. He is a magician. He smokes. Lee died. Lee is Henry's mother. She died 19 months ago. Nineteen months accounts for 1/29th of our time together. I will have to live to the age of 92 to have lived as many years without her as with her. Even then, she would have been with me half my life. That sentence uses the conditional perfect tense, I guess. I had to look it up. In Spanish, one would say ella habría estado conmigo la mitad de mi vida. Lee wasn't perfect. Neither was I. Possibly we were perfect together though.

My son Ernie got married. He is most like me. He has my genes. My son Myles doesn't have my genes. We usually get along. He lives close and I see him often. He is young. I want him to be healthy. I don't want to have to take care of him when he is older and I live in Mexico. I am selfish that way. I want all my children to take care of themselves. That was my job, probably. 

I don't want to travel the world or grandchildren. I've seen the world. I want to live in Mexico and Guatemala. I know people. That is enough. I might like to go to Portugal, if there is a cheap flight. I fly cheaply. I flew to South America twice for $200 round trip. I fly to New York for $50. It just happens.

The Samsung smart watch I bought in Medellin, Colombia, told me it is time to get on my feet. I have been sitting for 50 minutes. I don't think digital technology is any worse than a bicycle. They used to call the bicycle a devil's tool, too. We will all die.

The church I was raised in used to be filled with the salt of the earth. That's what we called ourselves behind our backs. Energy never dies. The salt has lost its savor. It is a dead sea. I am leaving.

That is my letter for 2017. I have five blogs or more. I have an unpublished blog that holds my secrets. My therapist suggested it. My children may find it when I die. I won't care at that point. I wonder if they will. If Lee were still alive, I would have her read this before I publish it. She always knew. I miss her. If I never see another car chase or space battle at the movies, I'll die happy. I should have been an artist/actor/urologist. Choose one. I only hate lies. Sometimes I lie.

Virus-free. www.avast.com

ALL THAT IS HOLY

Yesterday I began teaching English to a handful of twenty-something students in Huaraz. We sang "You've Got a Friend" and "Imagine," practicing pronunciation. 

They are shy, but eager to learn. We discussed media and I gave homework. For today, they should find a Spanish article or program and describe it in English in a few sentences. 

There are no movie theaters in Huaraz. But the festival of el Señor de la Soledad continues all week, massive, explosive, dancing, drinking, and celebration, fireworks.

Neighborhoods and civic groups prepare for years to perform in elaborate regalia with complex choreography, sometimes in competition, with drumming and shakers and whistles, continuing some nights until dawn. 

"It is impossible not to dance" is printed on the back of one group's brightly colored costumes, with feathered headdress and masks that blur facial features and gender. 

Dogs and children enter the church, where the crowds light candles and pray and the priests say ritual mass, with singing, all at the same time. It is dizzying, exhilarating.

In the pulsing crowd of people watching and participating, I appear to be the only tourist.

While it doesn't seem like a drug culture in Peru, there are daily reminders of the historic religious use of psychedelic substances. In several areas, there are ayahuasca ceremonies and shamans. School children can be seen poking at the mescaline laden San Pedro cactus growing in the yard. Coca leaves are sold at the market, a full bag for 30 cents. 

With the religious activities here outside the church of el Señor de la Soledad, adding additional substances seems entirely unnecessary. 

I like the appropriateness of honoring "soledad," or solitude, at this church. I am alone on this trip, but I have not felt alone even for a minute.

Maybe it's because I just finished reading George Saunders' "Lincoln in the Bardo," where the dead live on, speaking and passing through the bodies of the living.  But it has never seemed so real to me that Lee is here. Everything I see and hear and do, I feel she is experiencing as well, her vision restored. The children, the colors, the scenery, the tradition, the majesty, all are hers, fully, finally.

This is the afterlife. 

https://goo.gl/photos/rvKTynWjVpgSkncN7

LOVING THE TOURIST

Into wide mouths they risk all kind of strange

Sour sacraments of such they never dreamed,

Channel the tribes extinct and rituals gleaned,

And both let blood their savior. Naught will change.

Blond trekkers come, ascend and gape and soar

By tracks once worn by pilgrims then aglow.

Two worlds, two dreams, and yet it is as though

Each traveller trod in search of heaven's door.

Instead of votives, selfies light their claim,

Instead of lambs their currency is bills,

The chatter, thrill, enlightenment and ills...

The centuries though pass remain the same.

My pensive path leads slowly. Let them be.

My stuff destructs with separate bliss and free.

– Emily Dickinson

5/14/2017

SOLITARY REFINEMENT

After teaching English to seven beaming and recalcitrant students in the morning:

Up the hill to the edge of town, 

to the cemetery vaults, 

the maze of familiar names, Robles Sanchez Mejia Ochoa, 

children are playing sliding down slanted burial vaults, 

visiting the park with ancestors to greet you, 

high above Huaraz, looking down, 

what color is Huaraz, this red brown corrugated canvas of houses,

sprawling below, seemingly contented 

explosions and piercing flutes of those practicing for tonight, 

yet another evening in the Señor de la Soledad celebration, the drums, 

and in the distance, the snow-covered Cordillera Blanca, impassive, 

daring you not to gasp in awe at their majesty, day after day

the likely rain of the afternoon en route 

as augured by the darkened clouds approaching

the christ of loneliness

this festival welcomes me

the lone traveler, widowed, 

walking with ghosts in the graveyard, on the streets, in life

to be solitary and never alone

holding hands with those passed away

the placid Bodhisattva amid the excited tourists, 

blotting their noise and letting the rays of centuries 

of power and mind swoop past them, 

over and around their Teflon pre-packaged vacations,

the daytripping noisemakers 

and, thunk! sink like perfectly aimed arrows into my heart, 

my lonely heart, my empty heart

taking each piercing, blinding truth with a gulp

saint sebastian of the quotidian banalities

the day, the month, the season 

disappearing from consciousness

from the need to know

with the clocks mostly stopped

my hiking shoes washed 

by Miguel in the Plaza de Armas 

with his box of brushes and polishes

the mud removed 

the dung streams of 16000 feet of altitude

where one survives by

practicing falling, calling it sitting

knowing how to collapse on these rocks, 

alone and free to fall, fall,

far from the old new world abandoned 

to its sins and quarrels,

testing the resiliency of knees 

denying their age

with perfect wonderment

HISTORY LESSON

With only 24 hours, I forgave myself for being a tourist for one day, hopping a Uber to Miraflores Parque Kennedy, hiking over to the Huaca Pucllana ruins, and then boarding a Miratour bus to circle the highlights of Lima, the capital city.

Freaking yummy street food, I heard myself thinking. Maybe I simply got caught up in the Peruvian foodie mystique. 

In the park, actors were performing (or rehearsing) a dramatic play and drawing a small crowd. The park is known for the cats living there, sleeping under bushes. Signs warn against dropping off more cats and urge people to "adopt, don't buy" the feline creatures.

The pre-Incan Huaca Pucllana ruins from about 400AD were a center for sacred congregation and human sacrifice. But covered with mounds of dirt, they were used as a motocross racing hills up until 36 years ago, when the ruins were discovered and excavated. 

They were built with vertical bricks -- resembling arrays of bookshelves -- to withstand tremors of earthquakes, something the Quechua speaking people apparently understood well.

So far, the Peruvian people strike me as very neat or orderly, in speech as well as city planning and care. The places I've been are cleaner than the ticking of a Swiss watch. 

Riding al fresco on the top of the double decker bus, I manage to take in more sun than was good for me. My face is red. 

A young Australian guy tells me of his six month plan in the country, a trip he intends to culminate with an ayahuasca ceremony in Iquitos.

"I'm ready for it now," he said.

Apart from chewing coca leaves for the altitude, and sampling various cervezas and pisco, I probably won't take the psychedelic trip this round. 

Our three-hour tour passes the parks and buildings, with a stop at the Iglesia de San Francisco and Convent. 

This could be the most impressive Catholic structure I've seen. Every inch is a work of meticulously crafted art, with ancient library, winding staircases, a pipe organ, and a room where the friars gathered to sing. A few dozen monks  live nearby and continue the traditions. 

And underneath the church itself are the catacombs, where some 25,000 bodies have been buried, their bones visible to visitors who must crouch to walk through the labyrinth beneath the church.  No pictures are allowed, supposedly, although everything about the place cries out to be photographed. 

Somehow a photo of the mass grave managed to turn up on my phone!

I wanted to go to Peru since I was 22 years old. In fact, in 1972 Kevin Casey and I embarked on a hitchhiking trip with that destination in mind.  We had set out from Denver on the ramp to the interstate with a cardboard sign that read simply, "LIMA".

Lee had planned to go with us, but the veterinarian at the animal hospital where she worked talked her out of it. He thought I was a bad influence on her.  So she baked us Logan Bread, a protein rich molasses concoction, that Kevin and I lugged all the way to Guatemala in a black garbage bag when we finally ate the last of it.  

Of course, the veterinarian was right.  I'm glad Lee ultimately didn't listen to him. 

When she and I decided to get married and Lee told her parents she was getting married, her father Clyde looked at her and said, "Not to Greg, I hope."  

Pastors turned down our request to be married. No one believed it could work. Then, a wise Mennonite preacher counseled us and agreed to perform the ceremony. We didn't lie about our steep differences. But he must have seen something that convinced him it would work. I always believed that the strength of his faith in us was a factor in the longevity of our times shared.

A New York Times headline just popped up in my phone notifications, "DJT prepares to sign new executive order..." 

I'd rather puke ayahuasca than dwell even a moment on such news. I deleted it, unread.

SWITCH CONTINENT, HEMISPHERE, WORLD

I am in Lima in an apartment. A dog is barking. It's an unusual apartment complex. Every window faces another apartment. It's very clean and a woman just showed up to prepare me breakfast and coffee. Could be worse.

In the hours before I left Urbana, I sensed Lee more than I had in a very long time.

A sort of vision occurred. She was downstairs in the hammock, as real as always. Those flashes of her presence have been happening with more regularity. I welcome them.

Somewhere in my papers, there is a poem I wrote about her in 1973, when we were living together in a trailer in the country. She could be so exasperating. It was part of her charm. Our whole 46-year relationship was like that, a wonderful wrestling match. 

In spite of our disagreements, I could be sitting in the trailer, tinkering with record albums and recording experimental soundtracks on a Dolby-enhanced cassette tape deck, and my heart would jump up, excited, to hear her coming home, tromping through the pasture, likely with horse shit on her shoes, whistling.

Joan Didion wrote about the year of magical thinking following the death of her husband, and sometimes it just doesn't seem that Lee is gone. 

I may never have another partner. Building a relationship is much work. I don't have 46 more years. I might be content to sort through the past and fill my days with recollection.

Our last months together were in one sense the best. We had no other agenda, nothing to accomplish but to love each other.

Amtrak arrived two hours late and I arrived in Chicago around midnight, walking the few blocks from Union Station to the CTA.

I sidestepped the throw-up on the floor of the Blue Line car, where a bizarrely burly cop watched three homeless men trying to sleep; They had asked me for money. I only had a quarter.

I knew I'd be spending the night in the airport. Minutes before I left home,  I checked what the Internet knew about places to crash. Someone recommended the Hilton Lobby, which was quiet and relatively comfortable, despite the three millennial girls across the way laughing and talking loudly and sleeping on the floor. Still , they gave me cover. I didn't look homeless, just another traveler.

Spirit Airlines are the chicken buses of the air. While others were complaining about no-show pilots, missed flights, thwarted vacations, I remained unperturbed. The screaming children – and there were many – didn't seem to be fazing me. I was in some kind of zone.

With zero amenities to distract us, my traveling companions were very pleasant, a young man with tattooed fingers by the window, a young Vanity Fair reading women in the middle and me, juggling to cram my cold weather hoodie, down jacket, stocking cap and the like – in preparation for the snow-capped mountains of Peru – into my pack while everyone else was dressed for disco night in sweltering Miami.

In the Ft. Lauderdale airport, I caught up on New Yorkers, reading profiles of Steve Bannon and Rod Dreher. Dreher has posited the Benedict Option, espousing withdrawing from engagement from the world by forming religious communities. Fleeing is a form of resistence. But I know enough about the Bruderhof and Amish communities, which he seems to revere, to know that all is not well in in those intentional paradises, either. 

At the last minute before the flight, I downloaded the ebook of Pierre: Or, The Ambiguities, the Herman Melville novel I've never even tried to crack. 

Charging my phone in the Cuban restaurant, I down a large beer and eat very dry chicken chunks covered with chicharones with rice and plantains. But lime cures all ills.

The Spanish/English spoken universally here in Florida is so Caribbean as to be slang and sometimes nigh onto indecipherable. I just use both simultaneously without thinking. No one seems to notice how tenuous my Spanish is, in this manner.

The 5 hour flight to Lima could have been excruciating, but I sat next to a 6 year old and his father, an "adult babysitter," his description of someone who owns and manages 31 properties in Detroit. Not exactly a slum landlord, but fascinating, with Asian wife and three sons, the 18 year old also on flight. The older son is also buying properties with money he earned in summer jobs.  

They fly all over the world, also using Spirit cut rate fares, escaping what they see as the inevitable coming of the end of the world. They home school.

The arrival is smooth. Customs a breeze. The money exchange convenient and the Spanish spoken here is rapid, clean, and easy to understand.  No one even tries to speak English to me.

I grab an Uber to my AirBnb, make myself at home, plug in the WiFi, and start chatting and video chatting with Peruvians on line. 

Just like home. 

I pour myself a Pisco from the cabinet. 

ONE YEAR AGO AND TOMORROW

New baby ducklings finally showed up this year in the Boneyard by our house. There are nine of them, swimming excitedly alongside their placid parents. They are late. 

 

Tomorrow morning at 7 a.m. I leave for Peru. 

 

Yesterday, I wrote a school in Huaraz to see about work. They wrote back. I'll be teaching English to young people while I'm there.  

Machu Picchu may have to wait. It has patiently done so for the past 40 years I've wanted to go, so I'm not worried. 

Last year, there were seven ducklings already swimming by the end of March. I always reported to Lee about the ducklings.  

Lee and I were taking walks together in March last year.  She couldn't see the ducks swimming below, so I described them to her.  

By May, she was in and out of the hospital, taking chemotherapy, having surgeries. There are gaps in my journal. We listened at her bedside to the new Radiohead album with the song "True Love Waits" and the lyrics, "Just don't  leave, don't leave..."  

We had listened to the audiobook of Jonathan Franzen's "Purity," something we argued about as we walked Honey in the park. We watched television series – Bosch, Justified, The Good Wife, The Closer – in their entirety. I described the action. 

There was so much purpose in every day, so much.  

I feel Lee more with me when I'm traveling than when I'm here in our house, where her absence is constantly present.  

In Peru, as in Mexico, Guatemala, and Honduras earlier this year, she will be constantly sprinkling her spirit over me.

I'm grateful and I'm gone.

PACKING

flitting like the flying crab-like bugs 

that have invaded the upstairs closet

i think about packing

distraction boils on the burner in the kitchen

the new foundation, the reduction for life soup

time for vitamins

download the books

tossing out New Yorkers half-read

a thousand dollars here

a thousand dollars there

expatriation begins

it already began

it is finished

one month here

one month there

Merida to be near friends

Antigua to eat at my restaurant

San Francisco de Yojoa to work in the mountains

to sleep with angels

Huaraz, Arequipa, Cuenca

there is nothing to pack

when you achieve austerity

wake up get out of bed

you are never late
you are always there

not even taking my vitamins

but which I must take now before I forget

Aspirin, Finasteride, Cialis, Niacin, 

Magnesium, Fish Oil, Tumeric

where's my freaking phone

take backpacker magazine

back to the library

I have socks I have underwear

have to renew that prescription 

for Finasteride

got to keep that prostate shrunk

although why

so I don't pee at night

keeping the volume 

of ejaculate low

keeping me faithful and old

when i would prefer

old faithful

should I take on celibacy

in my old age

so I don't carry disease

because if I carry disease 

I would have to become celibate

Ouroboros chokes

I'll be safe 

and not sorry

where was I

where did I put the question marks

and capitalization

packing

like the insects

or the lilies 

or the sparrow

they don't care

what they carry

or I could die

something I no longer

can be bothered

to consider

​

​4/28/2017​

PACKING

​A GLIMPSE

A

 glimpse through an interstice caught, 

​O

f a crowd of workmen and drivers in a bar

​-

room around the stove late of a winter night, and I unremark

​'​

d seated in a corner,

​O​

f a youth who loves me and who

​m I​

 love, silently approaching and se

​at​

ing himself near, that he may hold me by the hand, 

​A

 long while amid the noises of coming and going, of drinking and 

​oath

 and s

​mutty je​

st, 

​T

here we too, content, happy 

​in 

being together, speaking little, perhaps not a word

​.

- Walt Whitman​

​

If you tell people you aren't involved, you are involved.

If there are people you no longer acknowledge, how do you know who they are?

I am packing hardly anything: a pair of pants, two pair of socks, two underwear, two t-shirts, two shirts, a sweater, a raincoat, a stocking cap, a down vest, a hoodie, a wrap-around ear warmer (that can double as an eye mask on the plane), tiny gloves, a travel guide (or perhaps pages torn from a travel guide), a notebook, a flashlight, a few aspirin, a toothbrush, razor, comb, travel towel.

This is an experiment in owning and carrying little.

My phone.

The fool on the hill

I still haven't unpacked entirely from New York and already I am starting to panic about how to prepare for Peru, one week from today.

It doesn't matter so much. Thanks to Andrea, who trekked with me in Guatemala, I've determined to go first to Huaraz, north of Lima, for a couple of short treks. I don't want to pack much, just enough to fill a small backpack that Spirit Airlines will allow on board without charges.

That bare bones airline is the reason I am going to Peru at all.  I was working in Honduras with a medical mission team in March when I got the email telling me of the sale. A $192 round trip, Chicago to Lima, fare, which had to be purchased on the day it was announced, is responsible for the impulse buy.

I still consider money. I don't understand it, but I have to respect it.

The impulse, though, leaves me without a specific purpose in the travel, other than indulgence. I do not like to travel without something in mind, someone to visit, some work to do, some tangible goal. I am fairly confident that meaning will arise.  

I could do an ayahuasca ceremony or go to Machu Picchu, but both those things have become tourism and I no longer feel much inclination to psychedelics. Their effect has become incorporated into the current collective consciousness. We know it already. 

In the meantime, I continue to purse the idea that fleeing is a form of resistance. Leaving is a kind of salvation and antidote to an America currently governed and dominated by the very worst of human impulses, fears, hatreds, and ignorance.  

My escape itself is strategic. My withdrawal from engagement is a test, an upheaval of the dualism of Tweedledum and Tweedledee.

Bob Dylan stopped singing protest songs and went electric. Did he make a difference? Why did he do it? 

If nothing else, I currently have this freedom to seek another pathway. I flatter myself to think this is not unlike the explorers of old, who set out to find both the ancient and unknown ways.  

For the past 45 years, I have practiced a specific form of Eastern meditation twice daily. Without making the least claim to any mystical knowledge, I do draw and accept the following premises, which may be solely of interest and value for myself.  But I have always been willing and prepared to accept ridicule. 

1) Eternity is now.  If eternity is real, and time but a trick of the human mind, then this very moment is as it has always been and always will be. You think you are going to heaven when you die? Think that if it helps you. To my mind, it's all literally now. 

2) The afterlife is now as well. (This is somewhat the premise behind the Tibetan philosophy that the Grateful Dead borrowed for their name.) It is hard for the human mind to comprehend the idea of infinity. People have wondered if there is life after death. In eternity, we would have to be living the same, now as in the afterlife. Consider that there is no difference between life and the afterlife.  They are just two terms for the same thing.

3) We are free. I don't believe the existentialists accomplished much, but they did unburden the idea of freedom. They mostly thought it was a curse, because it implied responsibility. But evangelical Christians love to proclaim that they are set free by Jesus. They are, but they seem to have a lot of regulation to enforce the idea.  Free means free. 

4) Speaking of Jesus, he already came again. 

I may only take a single pair of pants. Still undecided on that point. Maybe just two t-shirts, too. It gets cold up in the mountains. The altitude of Huaraz is 10,000 feet. That's 2000 feet higher than Machu Picchu and almost twice as high as Denver. 

Coca leaves.