pit bulls on pot

in da jingle-jangle jungle
collage by "Morris Armstrong Jr. proudly a.k.a. Little Mo"
of found internet objects plus Virgen de Guadalupe &
forearm sleeves by Srayla Tip

by Steve Porter

If I could I would paint a portrait
of a person who lies dying in bed.

There would be an open window
somewhere in the background,
two floors up and rather small
but vivid as a postage stamp,
and chartreuse curtains curtsy
as a silky breeze flutters in and
the eye decides where to look.

Outside the window can be seen
the counterpoint that is nature-
tree, bird, sky, the rolling hills
bright and green with life, and a
road leading somewhere far away.

If I could I would paint
a wry smile on your face,
your blue eyes open, your
skin pink as a peach and
hands in prayerful repose,
folded around a book of
your favorite poems.

Oh, if only I could I would paint
large roses just like de Longpre,
and they would be white and
beautiful and blooming with life
in a crystal vase, in a corner
on a table off to the right.

Finally, one who loves you,
sitting in a plumb cast chair
beside the big mahogany bed,
reading to you from the book
that you hold in your hands,
the art of becoming invisible.

by Doug Millison

I find bugs in the flowers,
take it for a sign:
creepy-crawlies
crawling ugly, deep,
spewing come-on
tracks of waste
inside me,
certainly.
That's how this mind works.
No metaphors,
these bugs,
sucking my life
sure as invisible
worm ever
sapped flower.

–El Cerrito, 23 June 2006

The billiard table metaphor feels worth pursuing. It's complex enough to represent something like the multifaceted nature of what was happening with us at TCU. So the table was solid, but the game was rigged - that's about right. God lets the rain fall on the rich and poor alike, I forget who said that, but it's truth.

Part of what I do, have been doing for a long time, is a sort of obsessive reassessment of the past, woulda-coulda-shoulda, as a half-assed defense against the depression that started to intrude quite a few years ago. I'd start to despair, feeling like a loser, flailing about looking for positives to hang onto: yeah, their game was fucked so I walked away, fuck them, but at the same time I'm telling myself, No, they're correct, They saw the real me and decided they didn't want me there, I wasn't good enough for them, I failed again. That's how it felt, and gradually that feeling, plus time, pushed completely out of my mind a lot of the detail of that year, details of the way that I, we, acted and reacted in response to the environment and its various stimuli.

(Same thing happened in the wake of the magazine company blow-up, even knowing how much of that was completely out of my hands and truly the responsibility of other people, the worst consequences were the direct result of actions and decisions over which I had little influence and no control - and what a fucked-up helpless feeling that is - blaming myself and beating myself up for getting myself, my family, into that situation, and the very sick feeling that, there I was, rubbing shoulders with heavy-hitters in the computer software and hardware, and magazine industries -- I was doing business with United Features Syndicate, Ally Oop, Ann Landers, Dear Abby, that's the kind of scale we're talking, they were going to pick up and syndicate the comic strips I had developed for Morph's Outpost and Blaster magazines, we were discussing having me write a weekly (to start out, then increase frequency in steps to daily) column about this exciting new world of interactive multimedia computing for newspapers in the US and around the world, the Interactive Superhighway, Cyberspace, I was interviewed on the radio, the big time was just around the corner, I was already developing a line of books to publish, a TV channel, in fact I did design an online version of the magazine for Apple's ill-fated eWorld, the first really cool online environment, in my humble opinion, which crashed and burned far too soon...in other words, major mass media exposure was within my grasp for the last half of 1993 and 1994 until just before Christmas when it all came crashing down, and I watched that big media career evaporate, smoke on the water, to coin a phrase -- a, and they saw me for what I really was, a loser, and as quickly as they had showered my partner and I with millions of dollars because they thought my ideas were smart, they just as quickly pulled the rug out from underneath us.

If I could hold more of that in my mind - more of the evidence that I wasn't completely out of control and fucked up, more evidence that I was, to some degree at least, following a conscious program, maybe not hitting my intended objectives, but at least somewhat proactive, not a completely passive puppet of fate - maybe I could feel better about myself. Or something like that. Twisted thinking, I know, but that's where I've been for a long time.

The good news is that I've managed to emerge from the worst of that morass and have been feeling increasingly energetic, positive, able to do things. As a result, I've been doing more things, keeping busier, less time to mope and second-guess myself. Steadily, since the beginning of the year, the depression that has been kicking my ass for too long, has been lifting, and I'm feeling pretty human again. A welcome development.

Why not? You can headtrip anything. Video cameras are cheap, edit desktop video on this iBook or other pc. I've got a software tool called Soundtrack that lets you produce a very snappy, well, soundtrack.

Just an idea. I don't know much about shooting video or film. But, I know that you and I have stories to tell, and I think we should have fun telling them, and document the process to whatever degree feels like fun along the way.

A series of panels/pages/chapters/whatever, rounding up and introducing the inhabitants (and main characters) of No-name/New Hall, with physical descriptions and character sketches of each, and enough details here and there to start giving some sense of story lines brewing.

UNCLE TED

MR. BUFORD
[I forget now which subject he taught - not English, that was some lady; maybe history, or religion?] A Yale younger poet in 1959, he wound up at TCU when he got tired of "living in funny little apartments," wanted to settle down and stretch out. His wife, never seen around No Name New Hall, was working on a book about the Marquis de Sade, he said. He showed an interest in Doug, purely academic and intellectual as far as he could tell, heard Doug play guitar and loaned him a book to read about the flamenco scene in Spain, and he's never been able to find a copy of that book anywhere, he's looked in bookstores and libraries every where he's been these past 35 years, and he encouraged Doug to write poems, so there's a fine influence for Doug in the midst of everything else that he encountered at TCU. At some point in their talking, in the classroom or lobby of No Name New Hall, Doug told Mr. Buford something about reading Moby Dick, how he liked towards the end when they're bearing down on the White Whale, the drama, the romance of it... Buford says, "Read the novel again, then read it again when you're 40." Advice that Doug followed, religiously, hell he may yet read the beautiful heart-breaking blood-pounding mystically profound novel from cover to cover again, a fourth time, one of these days....)

ENGLISH TEACHER
Doug resisted her lessons.

DOUG
Straight outta Phoenix, but his parents moved after he left to go to TCU and he's not exactly sure, yet, where they live. He continues to assume they will let him know; relations aren't quite bad between them as all that, although they are certainly trending in that direction. He's already got a bad attitude because Princeton rejected him and he wound up in this resort for the children of rich Texans scared to let their kids go to the East or West Coasts, and he's looking for inspiration, or trouble, or both. Short, nervous, with visible grey hair that adds yet another reason to worry about this guy's stability and sanity, Doug can talk non-stop and will if you let him.....etc. & etc....

STEVE


SCOTT "BUGGS" WORTHEN (R.I.P.)
What's up, doc? He told Doug he was putting himself through college with the help of a little blackmail; he had, he said – and Doug never knew if Buggs was putting him on or not – a series of 8 X 10 glossy photographs locked up in a safe deposit box, pix of his father and a girlfriend, and the old man was sending him hush money. No doubt Buggs had the herb to fuel our alternative take on TCU...


CLYDE KIRK "SMIRK" RHEIN, JR. (R.I.P.)
"Just imagine," he said, again and again, as we listened to Jefferson Starship on acid or mescaline or psilocybin, settling in for the night in an East Texas dorm room, on one of the best of many fine road trips that year.

BRUCE
The local boy.

POTATO-HEAD
"I've got reams of this shit in my closet," says this cosmic dude, referring to the poetry he for once has correctly characterized. (Bitchy, but this is art, after all.)

MEATHOOK
Doug's needy, star-crossed lover, trapped in a cycle of strange karma that began when her Mother surprised the two of them in her room one lovely she-should-have-been-at-the-Little-League-game summer afternoon in Midland, Texas, the summer before their sophomore year in high school. As an adult, on the receiving end of millions of dollars in oil money from her wildcatter Daddy, she became addicted to alcohol, AA, cocaine, methamphetamine, marijuana, tattoos, and plastic surgery.


CONVENIENCE STORE CLERK
The poor sucker who was tending the cash register - this was one night the year after I had left TCU and was driving back and forth to Morgan City, Louisiana to catch the helicopter to Chevron Mobile Drilling Platform No. 9, 150 miles out in the Gulf of Mexico; I remember digging those solo road trips, listening to the radio, that's when I got my most complete survey of extreme right-wing ideology of the John Birch Society stripe ("The is Freedom Talk No. 79"), but I digress, - at some local 7-11 when we (you, me, Buggs) tripping our brains out, made a raid on the joint, somebody, maybe you, maybe me, wearing huge rubber clown feet, Buggs done up as a pirate with his moustache and a wicked-looking cutlass that appeared out of God knows where, we descend on the establishment in the middle of the night in search of goodies and cigarettes & etc., swinging that cutlass, "Avast ye, landlubbers!", flopping those big clown feet....

[add more characters as appropriate]



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Another panel/scene, location tbd

It’s a miracle I’m not one of the babbling dazed, agitated, drooling nutcases on Telegraph Avenue, like the “street people” I found so “cute and colorful” when I first got here from Texas – Hate Man, Orange Man, Graduate Student Defending Thesis & the rest. God knows, I’ve been there, often enough, in the years since, I’ve even done some screaming in addition to wandering around confused and robotic. But I’ve been lucky, I always had people around to reel me back in and take care of me, and, I firmly believe, God helped me, too. And, I’ve always been, from time to time, as crazy in mind (if not in street) as anybody I’ve ever seen acting out on the public stage.

New panel. Set in front of the house Steve lived in (rented together with Bob?) the year after I left TCU, where I visited during my time off from Chevron Mobile Drilling Platform No. 9. Harsh shadows cast by the streetlights collide with winter-bare tree branches. WHOOSH of passing cars on icing rain-slick streets. DOUG and STEVE have just come outside to catch some air. They are very high. Steve presses the back of his right hand against his forehead and staggers.












They manage to ignore a sudden chill, and the suggestive throb of the orchestra playing the soundtrack to this scene.


Another panel/scene, setting tbd.



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DOUG sits in the gleaming white vinyl cannabis growing chamber and continues his tortured monologue.

I guess one of the most embarassing things for me is thinking about the way I got to TCU and embraced the by-then sentimentalized Beatnik poet lifestyle of the late 1950s - taking drugs, taking road trips, talking talking talking topics both nonsensical and profound and everywhere on the spectrum in between, but I didn't do much writing, only a few poems scribbled that year (among them, a handful that I, amazingly, turned in to my English teacher instead of the essays she asked us to write, and, even more amazingly, couldn't comprehend why she gave me a D for the semester.) Nor did I manage to keep a journal that year - in fact, several years passed before I realized that I could keep a journal and write in it everyday, recording my thoughts, feelings, dreams, observations of the passing scene, ideas for creative projects, rough drafts of stories and poems. Not much of a writer, judging from my production. O but the flame was burning inside, and I'm sorry I didn't learn how to use it, where to channel it, instead I believe that I sought simultaneously to extinguish that blaze and kindle it anew, with frantic applications of alcohol, acid, attitude. Had I been willing to listen and engage, did I have a teacher at TCU who could have showed me what to do?

Thirty-six years later, here I sit, still struggling to write the books that I envisioned writing when I got to college and realized I had things happening inside of me that I could write down and shape into poems and stories and maybe just maybe even a novel, and realizing that this could be my life's work, and I'm still struggling to overcome the bad habits that I developed back when I could have been establishing a solid creative practice just by scribbling a page or two a day. That's what kills me - not the pose or the partying, but the lack of production, and the hypocrisy of adopting the writer's life-style without doing the actual writing.

And I did pretty much the same damn thing during my college junior year abroad in France, lived a lot and wrote very little, although I did keep a journal, only it got lost several years later, in 1980, stolen along with my leather bag, several hundred dollars cash earnings from my Humboldt County pot processing gig, and an ounce of sinsemilla, from beneath my seat in the Parkways movie theater in East Oakland, on the eve of my intended trip to Lafayette, Louisiana to re-connect with a childhood sweetheart. I cancelled the trip, stayed in the Bay Area, and the rest is history, as they say.

I may even have been watching Woodstock, with old UCB classmate (and fellow veteran of Prof. Todd Willly’s revelatory Rhetoric of the Novel course) Peter Smith, in fact: robbed while in the act of sentimentalizing our generation’s collective past.

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DOUG sits on a plain wooden chair, behind him stretches row on row on row of bushy green cannabis plants, in a chamber draped from polished concrete floor to 10-foot timber ceiling, in glistening white vinyl, the fabric blazing in the light of a 1000 watt high-pressure sodium lamp. Nothing escapes the bulb's withering glare; folds in the drapery shade barely to bone. The gentle bubbling sound of the hydroponic garden system soothes the gleaming white sanctuary. Marijuana smoke wreathes Doug's head, eyes shut, his face creased in a stoned smile, life is good, the joint burns in his left hand, he holds his eyeglasses in his right hand, the lenses flash tiny 1000-watt reflections when he gestures with the eyeglasses, as he continues the story....

DOUG: Ultimately, I'm interested in understanding, at a deeper level, what went on in that period of our lives. What forces came into play? Why did things work out they way they did? What impact might this all have on life now? Heavy questions. Boring, perhaps, at a certain level. But, this sort of thinking is what I do, I look back and reflect, and I write about it. "How did we survive?" is an excellent question, directed both to the way we made it through the mad crush of events of freshman year...and to the way we've made it through the years down-and-up to the present moment, 36 years later. 36 years.

He shakes his head, then gestures with his eyeglasses, indicating the pot plants.

DOUG: I have finally liberated my inner pot-head! When I think about some of the stuff we smoked back then. And, no, I don't mean to bad-mouth Buggs' stash, which clearly helped to animate the dormitory scene in those early days of moving in, wiping the scales from our eyes. First time I met him, I think this is it, he's loping down the hall, that peculiar stride of his, kind of leaning forward urgent-like moving into the day, next thing I know we're introducing ourselves, and he says, "You like marijuana?" To which I could answer only, "Yes." Which brought the by-now-not-altogether-unexpected, "Let's go smoke some!" And that's what we did. We went on to do it with frightening regularity for the rest of the school year, and when I came back from Korea but was still in the Army down at Kileen, six long months to go before my discharge, and I used to come up and hang out with you guys in Fort Worth, and after I got out of the Army, those months hanging out, smoking and drugging and drinking and shooting pool and playing pinball at The Stables ("Where Incredible Friendships Begin"), before I moved on to the West Coast, to college, Berkeley, the dark years, marriage to Alice, early business success, spectacular bankruptcy, public humiliation, re-hab, recovery, 12 Steps, one day at a time.... But, no, I was back in the dormitory at TCU, we are meeting each other for the first time, the potential is so fresh and dynamic that it CRACKLES in the otherwise soggy August air.... So long ago, that time. So long ago.

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Two 50-something men sit side by side on an upholstered bench in front of a picture window of a house overlooking San Francisco and the Bay, a panorama that stretches from the Port of Oakland where giant cranes advance against the horizon like mega-mantis-robots (don’t know exactly what that is, but it looks mean), Bay Bridge, City with lights beginning to sparkle as the last of the sunset fades, Golden Gate Bridge, Angel Island’s dark mass. Dreamy, evocative jazz – Monk & Coltrane at Carnegie Hall working modernist pianosax alchemy – unspools in the background as the two old friends enjoy each other’s company, reliving their college days. Night rises at the end of a glorious day as the last little bit of the sun’s disk disappears behind the Marin Headlands. They pass a fat joint back and forth, inhaling deeply and blowing huge clouds of fragrant smoke into the air around their heads, sniffing the wisps as they rise and dissipate.






STEVE: It ain’t coming back.

DOUG: I remember that. We were tripping, out in the country, a day trip, wound up sitting on a hillside watching the sun go down. It felt as if the sun was pulling my heart with it, heart-wrenching, heart-tugging, but with sweet overtones, I couldn’t believe it was gone...

STEVE: You kept watching the spot where the sun went down, like a kid watching somebody else eating the last piece of pie.

DOUG: ...and you said, “It ain’t coming back.” I’ve remembered it since as an excellent observation and cue to let go and move on to the next thing.

STEVE: Haven’t we become philosophical in our old age.

DOUG: No shit. Hey, man....God, I knew we’d get together and get loaded and start sounding like Cheech & Chong.

STEVE: Not forgetting that I turned you on to them in the first place.

DOUG: Dude, that’s what I was just getting ready to say. That night, the year after I left college, as I recall it, when I drove up from Louisiana to spend my seven days off from that job I had out in the Gulf, parked the car in front of that apartment where you were living off-campus, and you jumped out of the tree in front of the car.

STEVE: Scared the shit out of you!

DOUG: And when I came in you slapped the headphones on me, stuck a joint in my mouth, and said, “You’ve got to listen to this.”

STEVE: Laughed your ass off, too, didn’t you.

DOUG: Fuck an A. (PAUSE) Was that the same trip where we wound up on the Road to Nowhere, which lead to the horror movie courthouse...

STEVE: Where the trees were packed with a huge flock of ravens, dead birds littering the town square....

They sit in silence for a moment. Each of the men takes a final toke, then Steve stubs the roach out in an ashtray.

STEVE: You going to thank me again for taking the time, making the effort, to look you up and get in touch.…

DOUG: Don’t push it, amigo. (CHUCKLES) Forever in your debt, good buddy.


Montage of images from STEVE & DOUG’s freshman year at TCU: New Hall intruding on Greek Hill, dorm life, student hijinx, billiard table with balls colliding and bouncing off the walls, etc. Wisps of marijuana smoke curl and twist in among the images.

DOUG (narration over montage): At a certain level, the 50,000-foot level attainable only in certain grace-filled moments or with the application of otherwise harmless vegetable substances, I look back and see myself, newly arrived at TCU, as a billiard ball among others on a brand-new pool table - to use a metaphor that's been nagging at me all morning, and which may or may not be interesting, beautiful, appropriate, or effective. The billiard table is solidly constructed, with precisely defined dimensions, where movement occurs as described by mathematical and physical laws, predictable, controlled...until a ball leaps off the table, adding a new dimension to the game, new possibilities for motion, response, new trajectories.

I try to look beneath the hard, shining surface of the billiard ball that represents me, but the center is not visible to me. I see only a hard, shining sphere that responds to the shocks inflicted by others, up to the moment when it flies off the table. I now know that I held a lot of anger and fear wrapped up in the center, which managed to break free, changing the game radically once again, in the years after I left TCU.

That's where the metaphor dissipates. A billiard ball rolls until it stops, sits until somebody picks it up and whacks it again. That's not me, since leaving TCU, although God knows I've received my share of whacks along the way. I'm a billiard ball that grew legs, able to try to scramble out of the way of collisions mapped with mathematical certainty; rarely have I succeeded in avoiding a collision.

STEVE: The billiard ball metaphor is appropriate and it reminded me of a scene that went down shortly after I arrived at TCU. I was a lonely dude, man, no friends, no connections, no nothing, down in the dumps, depressed, surrounded by squares, unable to score, nada. I walked over to the student center and was shooting a game of pool when some upper classman introduced himself and asked me if I wanted to play. I said sure. Somewhere in the middle of this friendly game of pool he started hitting me up to join his fraternity, but I told him, not in an unfriendly way, that I had no plans to join any frat house. Well, that's when the motherfucker proceeded to run the table on me and walk off without even a see you later, asshole. Cocksucker.

You see, our trajectories were bound to fly off of that table, that plane, so to speak, because, yes, it was of solid construction and predictable carom, but, you know, I don't think the fucker was level or the roll was true...so we just jumped off.

Regrets? Who doesn't have regrets, but still, we did what we felt had to be done. I still remember Bruce's cryptic description of TCU as a high school with ashtrays, and that damn Living/Learning program was so bogus that we had to rebel. Remember Uncle Ted, the top dog of that insipid creation? We used to trade fantasies about burying him and his whole miserable family in the pillars of the dorm with no name. We were removed from the main campus, stuck on Greek Hill, mired the most unbelievingly boring and mediocre curriculum, and a few of us realized it for what it was and said fuck it, I'm off. Whack! And it was quite a ride, buddy, quite a ride. So, let's put some thought into this and try to come up with a central theme, plotline, etc. and see about putting some shape to this thing. One thing's for certain: if it ever hits the silver screen it'll have a killer soundtrack.


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