Q: You took the kids on camping trips and to bluegrass festivals.
A: Yes, and on Sundays when we didn’t go anywhere, we’d drive out to the Loxahatchee Wildlife Reservation and look at the ducks.
Your mother wears GI boots.
Brenda wore GI boots.
But she could fan coon scat out with a twig and identify the bones of the small mammals, reptiles, and amphibians they’d been eating.
She could pitch a tent and buld a fire.
We hung out with men who could build a house and keep an old car running. Kill or catch game and fish, butcher it, and cook it.
Women who could sew and make their own yogurt. Raise a cottage garden.
They made their own wine and beer and grew their own pot.
No pink peignoir and silk mules. But they might go skinny-dipping in a pond.
Q: Let’s all get drunk and go naked and lay in a great big pile.
A: Health foods and clothes from the Goodwill and the Salvation Army.
My kids didn’t look down on me, they respected me.
They weren’t ashamed of me they were proud of me.
They didn’t hate me they loved me.
I loved them.
I didn’t resent them, or feel like they were dragging me down.
They were keeping me afloat.
Q: Did you think a
A: No. But I thought someone like John Martin, Black Sparrow Books, might.
You know. Like Blue Note, Prestige, and
There isn’t that equivalent in literature.
That’s why it’s not fanciful for me to say an avant-garde writer is beneath the jazz musician.
Hard as it is for him, a jazz musician can make a living.
I don’t know any underground writers, since Bukowski, who are making a living at it.
The infrastructure isn’t there.
Q: Mike Palacek, going on tour, for Wake The Eff Up From the American Dream.
A: Ask Mike Palacek if he is making a living at it.
It was an alien who went on tour.
And he’d go to a bookstore and there was nobody there.
And he’d go to a bookstore he’d been to a year ago and it had gone out of business.
No, I took up a dying art.
I went into a dying field.
I became something nobody wants.
But our hippie friends didn’t look down on me, and neither did my kids.
They would listen to the grown-ups tell stories around a fire.
And laugh. Laugh at the mainstream. Laugh at the earth people.
Those people are crazy.
Their values are all wrong.
Twisted.