Seattle (cont'd)

Bill, and Susan, and Virginia thanked me
for delivering the eulogy. As did several
members of the congregation. They said I did
a good job. It was a moving speech.
I thanked them for saying so, and thanked
the 30 or so members of Mom's church
who came for coming. I thanked the pastor,
the two ministers of music, who played and sang,
and the two women in the kitchen who
prepared the food. Coffee and assorted cookies.
I met several of Susan's co-workers who came out
in support of her. I thought about marching to the cemetery,
like a jazz funeral in New Orleans. Later, at home, we had,
not a Methodist, but a Saunders family wake, with food
and beer and wine (no whiskey) and pictures from
the family album, loose photographs of relatives from Norway,
Depression-era clothes, Dad in his naval officer's uniform,
kids on Christmas morning. High school graduations, sports, the band,
me in the Air Force, Bill running the filling station.
After Ginny and Molly left, Sue went to bed, and Bill and I
stayed up and told fishing stories, cars and outboard motors.
It's 6:00 a.m. I'm up, and on the patio, writing in my journal.
After three days of clear skies it's overcast, and raining.

Yesterday, I saw how this book
and the next two books are related
to each other, form a series of three books,
Underground, like the old Monk lp,
about my life outside the mainstream.
A life in art, and out of commerce.
A life indifferent to material gain
on principle. A life of struggle, hardship,
loneliness. and misunderstanding,
being misunderstood, but also not realizing
I was bringing the misery down on my own head
by not letting go of the outcome and focusing on process.

There's a time to sow and a time to reap.
But you don't control, and cannot even influence
the arrival of the payback, if it comes. It may not come.
Many are called but few are chosen.
The evil that men do lives after them.
But so does the good. On balance I lead
a virtuous life. A virtuous life
is its own reward

In the midst of life we are in death.
Instead of writing a book about Mom's death,
and memorial service, and private wake,
I put them in where they happened, between
two zine fests, the publication of my book,
a reading and a workshop, seeing Owen play,
driving to Georgia with Brenda in a rental car,
a mini-vacation, storm damage from Hurricane Dennis,
a FEMA grant to fix our roof, an inheritance,
Sue sold her one-bedroom condominium, an investment
property, we cut three live oaks down, I brought a cutting
from a butterfly bush from Mom to Brenda, and she will give
a cutting of it to Owen and Balder, when it grows.
Do you have any firearms, narcotics, citrus fruit?
No sir. No corkscrews with a knife on it to cut
the foil around the cork. No cigarette lighter, no kitchen matches.
My book is like a ticking time bomb for the Enron Administration
and its War on Totemism. Bush calls it the War on Totoism,
but we know what he means. Run, Toto, run.
Football is a game of inches.

Bill and I are going to help Sue clean out
her garage, so she can get her car in.
We'll throw some stuff away and give some to
the Goodwill. Bill buys all his clothes at the Goodwill.
I buy mine from L. L. Bean, but I used to use the Goodwill when
the boys were young. In all their school photographs they look like
ragamuffins, because they washed and dried their own clothes
and didn't iron the cotton shirts, sew buttons on, or mend them.

I went to a Border's in Redmond, in Town Center,
bought a Seattle's Best coffee and sat out on the sidewalk,
under a Cinzano awning, so to speak, and watched the locals
on the stroll, the tourists, displaying their full Eddie Bauer decal package
finery. I saw mountain climbers and canoeists. I thought the Harlem Globetrotters
were in town. I saw archers and shotgun owners. The Kunitachi Philharmonic.
The Bartok Quartet. Welder's goggles. Swim masks. A stethoscope and scrubs.
No grunge music or graphic novel comic books, like I saw in Philadelphia.
No punk rock movement. More microserfs from the computer software industry
talking shop on their cell phones. Saltwater kayakers, cross-country skiers.
What Thorstein Veblen called conspicuous consumption.

In The Higher Learning in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Universities
by Business Men, Thorstein Veblen took Captains of Erudition to task for debasing
their product, higher learning. I do the same for Captains of Belles-Lettres. In my
Literature in America: A Memorandum on the Conduct of Publishing by Business Men.
Thoreau said the curse of trade attaches to anything it touches, "though you trade
in messages from heaven." Tart up or water down the goods, then resort to Newspeak
and doublethink, in Orwell's phrase. Veblen got himself blacklisted as an academic,
and I have had my entire oeuvre suppressed by the New York Literary Establishment.
Thoreau and Orwell broke through to classic essayist status and popular novelist.
I wonder how Bukowski Never Did This will do in the marketplace.
My career is launched. Or my non-career continues.

Me, I just write, you.
Like some kind of dumb coonass.
The 10% that didn't get the word.
The salvage archeologist of the Mall Builder culture.
I'm glad I'm not a florist, a funeral home operator,
the pastor of a church. When I die let the raptorial birds
and dermestid beetles pick my bones clean in an ossuary.
The scavengers. On my gravestone say I was a bricoleur.
A knacker in an abattoir, making art out of scrap. The 10%
that didn't get the word. Or got the word and wouldn't heed it.
A hardhead. A recalcitrant, or rebel. A troublemaker. I sing of Olaf,
glad and big. A conscientious objector. I grow old, I grow old,
I shall wear cut-offs and flip-flops from the Goodwill store.