Category Archives: Mount Lemmon Fire

I’m at poolside now, late into dusk. In the distance an immense cloud is above the Catalinas. It’s as if a big fist gave a shiner to the sky. A covey of birds, new to me, strut linearly about the pool, mother and chicks. Offbeat bird sounds punctuate the lambent air, now warmly cool. It is quiet now, a stillness, except for outdoor compressors kicking in to cool the interiors — machine hum. A bird spits across the sky like a thrown lance. Swallows are above, or are they bats? In any case, this Jew is out of here.
Safely ensconced, I’ll continue. I can’t wait to meet up with my first scorpion. Woody Allen, I am not. But why is that Jewish stars never ward off vampire bats, and why did a Hungarian Jew, Bela Lugosi, become the bloodsucker par excellence. What I love about the movies are often unintended subtexts. The bi-sexuality of Garbo and Dietrich, Randolph Scott and Cary Grant, and Tallulah Bankhead are delights. Only in America can a gorilla climb the Empire State Building in search of cross-species sex and have his cock and balls airbrushed out. No wonder he was furious with those bi-planes. And I don’t want to get started on Pinocchio’s nose. Aladdin warming up his lamp, and a tranvestite wolf in Little Red Riding Hood. See Betteleheims’ The Uses of Enchantment to get the low-down.

Most of all, most of everything, reduced to barest essentials are openings, portals, holes or entries — from Alice in Wonderland to Italian arias, to Martin Luther’s thunderous constipation. Shit or sing, that’s what I say. We are primitives, animals –never forget that, and that is all right, just get it! It is reductive, I agree, but so endlessly interesting to contemplate, so on target. Leave it to American science to label the creation of the universe as the Big Bang. Oh, the market economy lives. We even hype creation, tacky, tacky.

Last night at the Vistoso Commerce loop exit on to Oracle Road, I stopped the car and put off the lights. Dozens of small fires crept down the ridges of the Catalinas. It seemed a fitting salute to the July Fourth Holiday several days away. This morning the gullies and ravines that lead down to the foothills and then to Oracle Road were filled with smoke, as if a giant corncob pipe was puffing out blasts. The crests from about 3 to 4 miles away seemed charred, like burnt popcorn. The heat today was intense even in the morning hours and I came home after running a few errands to pay bills. Mt. Lemmon’s fire, we are told, is now contained. Of course, Mt. Lemmon hasn’t a care in the world. The only analogue I have for it is cutting hair; imagine if we felt that shearing. I view the universe as unfeeling as scissored tresses, a space-time continuum of monstrous indifference. I see no meaning to it all, which only serves me to become more vigilant with my fellow sentient fools as they run to and fro, establishing religions, creating systems, rule-making, and all the idiocies of the human race.

I imagine societal efforts are very much like putty-filler. We continue to fill in holes in ourselves and our communities as if this effort counts. It does not. We are busy little bees who can’t let it be, no pun intended. It took some time before the Beatles “Let It be,” got through our sullen and stubborn minds, if it ever did. We just can’t resist tinkering with others, ourselves and the planet. Madonna, for one, continually changes from one video to another; by chance last night I saw her in the latest disguise. A question — doesn’t she really have a boy’s musculature with a face-shifting attractiveness? A thousand years hence, as we flip through images of this time, she will remind us of the pages in comic books of yore, the pages we never read, the filler between stories, the pages that advertised come-ons to the adolescent mind. Poor Madona, curbside detritus. And don’t get me on to Jennifer Lopez — the rear end that changed the world in 10 days. What would Lenin have given for a ride on that Ninotchka? She is a body part, inanimate, like Ulysses’s sirens, calling out to inanimates in general.

I scurry about, irascible soul that I am. I mumble and grumble to myself. I don’t like most people. I am quiet when I have to be. I don’t aggress others. I am not a socializer. I am affabe, but not too mucyh so that I kiss up. I don’t like others who kiss up. I am in a constant state of dislike — I find that “healthy,” for i see through, at times, the bullshit we call human interaction. I have an enormous crap detector behind my eyes. I listen well. And then I really listen, depending on the the person before me, mensch, schmuck, jerk, fool, brown-noser or nincompoop. Good people I attend to.

This bristling affect, this edgy persona, this near nastiness is how I greet the world. I couldn’t care a whit about its history. I use to. I see no point to that now. It is how I manage myself and the world. I couldn’t about whether or not it gets in my “way,” or makes life difficult for me — and others, often kin. It is not an orneriness wanting to remain ornery. I think it is much more. It is my kettle of fish. An octopus spits out ink. I spit out this self. I could never entirely tease out its roots, or reduce it to a pablum of insights and interpretations. It is not reductive.

Simply said, I have come into this persona as a bud enters into bloom. Unplanned, without design, evolving and evolved, my puny efforts to canalize its positive and negative features have led only to cosmetic affects. Like oil and vinegar in a cruet, after awhile, they precipitate out and rest one liquid upon another. The most we can do in life is to vigorously shake the cruet, from time to time, to integrate the flavors; but who are we kidding? After decades we precipitate out again — look at the infant and the child: fast forward 60 years. Same child in the same adult. All that growing and human effort for nought. We are much like fields of grain, more imposing as a group fluorishing than as an individual head of grain. And, ultimately, all this grain becomes a box of rice krispies.

There’s a haze along the ridge, Pusch Ridge, as they call it after an early settler of Oro Valley. Small plumes of smoke sully the slopes for a few miles like a sulphuric mountain acne. The heat of the day compounds all this, so that the light itself seems to have been smudged by an artist’s gum eraser. After a half hour at a Verizon store, bombarded by high tech verbal jazz, I am fit to be tied and speed back to Rancho Vistoso Boulevard where my condo rental is. I swallow cold seltzer and take a few herbals for my enlarged prostate. The heat saps strength and I feel spent. Not much comes to mind at the moment, and I am waiting to be surprised as to what will flow from me. It feels good not tohave designs on myself, to cede control, to let the machinery just hum along to do its job.

Mt. Lemmon has no consciousness. It is an inanimate there. And what happens to it is of no importance to it. The mountain affects us, esthetically, geographically, and so on. It is our habitat, much like the earth itself. Time can do with it as it will; we can set fire to it if we choose, or inhabit parts of its wilderness. It simply is. We identify with, we project upon it. We can make it part of an ecological ethic, if we decide to. Awareness will never dawn upon its crest. It has no meaning other than what intentions we give it. Mt. Lemmon has no present meaning, no past, and not future. It is an inanimate there.

The more I contemplate the mountain, try to get inside its inanimateness, the more I cast light upon myself. Several times this week — at a bank, with a community management office — I’ve had to prove I exist, that I reside at a specific address, and any variations thereof. The fact that I’m not at my residence, but at a nearby rental until a paint job is completed, makes the authorities more and more adamant. They speak of identity fraud as a frightful and on the rise crime; they bridle when I say it is a harassment of a kind, given the circumstances. And have you noticed the voices  all these young women have, the rpm of a Milwaukee drill. Rigid, calcified, poorly educated, their orgasms conditioned to go off like a bank vault alarm, orderly, regularly, swiftly — smoothly calibrated — the brain dead zombies of corporate Amerika. “You have a nice day now,” they croon. Their good-bys a kind of hideous and unreal expectation. What if I don’t want a nice day? Pressure. Sometimes I can get under the nails of the suicidally inclined and almost taste their life-weariness in this grossly conditioned culture. To feel intensely in America is to teeter-totter on the edge of doing away with oneself. Mt. Lemmon and many of the sentients that observe it are inanimate. When I deal with an inanimate sentient, it is as much as expecting Mt. Lemmon to rear up on its granite loins, and yell “Fire!”

I can sense-feel their annoyance with this old cocker, this disruptive soul, this “grumpy old man,” this Walter Matthau who is in their faces. And why do I identify with good old Matthau? In short, he sees through shit. And he wants nothing of it. Moreover, he implicitly, often explicitly, demands an adherence to some reasonable value system. W.C. Fields, who for a part of his young life lived in a hole in the ground, saw through the shit as well. The anarchic Fields knew very well that governments kill men, democratic ones do it with hypocrisy and guile, not quite as honest as a good dictatorship. Perhaps a well-intended sucide says more about the failure of culture than it does about its victim. Thus, suicide can be an act of courage, of an inner tiredness with the struggle of getting through to others, of getting through the night.

Make no light of it, these guardians at the gate are mean-spirited, stony, cold little shits. The geriatric fears is that when he comes to pass, the medicos at the hospital have the same attitude, a “by-pass” attitude to this elderly piece of “junk” they are taking care of. When was the last time we each met a human being who had enought spit, hair and gristle, to be with us when the going got tough. When my wife died in 1999 in an awful car crash, her closest friend, and at nurse at that, made the grandest commitment to be there for me, my son and my hospitalized daughter, also a victim of the same accident. In short, she faded, couldn’t be found, disappeared, in effect. Her cowardice was appalling, her explanations for her absence weak, absurd, lacking incredibility. When it came down to crunch time, she folded. I have prided myself on the fact that I don’t fold. So our friendship was rendered asunder. Much like a Jewish rabbi and Catholic priest who cannot agree on first principles — he rose or he didn’t rise? On this we part. Stand tall, don’t fold — or don’t stand tall. After all I lost a wife and almost my second daughter. This bag of sand had lost nothing, for she had no inner grit. She was an inanimate soul. I thought there was more to her. There wasn’t. She was a cacophony of Mes. And I and my remaining family was betrayed. I recall now as I write how her daughter called upon me to help her as her mother was crying hysterically, for she was in the middle of a divorce, and had been cheated upon. I remember how her own daughter could not handle her mother’s melt down and left, (it must run in the family) leaving me to hold and soothe her mother who had apparently lost it. I expected nothing in return. I did this as a friend, as a human being not wanting to see such pain. Like a rat, her daughter fled. I stayed to pick up the pieces. Years later I learned I had to pick up my own pieces — don’t we all?

She tried to reach my kids to contact me, when she thought better of it; I would not let her in. In a note, I advised her to let us be and aptly diagnosed her behaviors as “parasitic.” She later went on to become a social worker. To all her clients, run. She is invasive, she will leave you bereft like an empty shell. As the psychoanalyst Robert Langs would have it, a disturbed therapist — and there are many — will drive his or her patient nuts.

As one of Langs interviewees in his book Madness and Cure, I should know. I was Mr. Edwards in that book. I fought off a disturbed shrink — and won out. And the ultimate irony was that I, in turn, became a therapist. Like the old cliche of the wounded soldier falling in love with his nurse, I chose not to do that and to become a psychotherapist!

Is it in Hamlet that the phrase “sterner stuff” is used? I like to think that I am of that fabric; for there is something in me that has always admired antique courage, the 300 Spartans versus Xerxes, Shadrach, Meschach and Abendigo, Churchill, in our time, and so on. It is a folly of mine, but I prefer, in fantasy, to think I am capable of a beau geste. If it is in mind, it is real close to actuality. I am sometimes pressed by the exigencies of good acts in mind so that intentionality takes over and I use what expertise i have to bring them about. On my stone, write: He was there. However, I am not Mt. Lemmon

To be free to agonize is better to me than not to be free, enjoying all the conditional glut a market economy can afford. Flick on the tube, stand 20 paces away, fine tune your mind and what do you behold: pollution. I was in Target the other night browsing for a sunshade to ward off the Tucson sun and I passed several 10 or 11-year-olds, no older, holding pistol-like grips in their hands, playing games on a console that had several screens. I made a judgment quickly which is my way and I recalled how playing marbles held me entranced on a different level, for marbles combined winning and losing — greed, but they also involved skill at a much slower pace. It was tactile, not visual — that’s not exactly accurate; one did need to assess the positions on the playing field, measuring perspectives. Whatever I saw at Target was fast time versus slow time, durational versus exponential time, quickness as opposed to thinking and evaluating. I saw my “old” time, and did not favor this “new” time. I do not care for it, but as Krishnamurti said, that is: what is.

One generation unfolds into another, like ocean foam crashing against evolutionary reefs and rocks. I go into a dither when I come close to expressing the swooning, reeling effect of being alive without a designed purpose. What fools we are to try to “carve” out some meaning in the ridiculously short spans we inhabit. All is nought, yet our very DNA compels us, like the waves, to go smashing into something. Are we fleshened cyclotrons? Are we matter examiners? Or does it not matter? Or are we deluded, as if all about us is matter-of-fact? Hi-diddle, hi-diddle, I go.

What comes next is not up to me. I cannot say, predict, know or sense as I write words, how they might conceptualize themselves. I suppose any writer is ultimately an orderer of what flows, a word-shaper. Some shape and order better than others. What intrigues me is the idea that the flow within, the innateness of the writer, may be more interesting than what he turns it into. So Hemingway and Doestoevsky — one a great stylist and shaper of words; the other more profound internally than the other, but not as felciitous. Grandiosely, I feel that my art does not equal who I am; so here I am a ventriloquest’s dummy and he moves his lips too much. Charlie McCarthy versus Jerry Mahoney. One, a smartass salacious, woodpecker, the other a buoyant soul with better voice control. So I write what I have to say, not too happy with the artifice I can muster. I just put it out there.

If I had to write like another, Nikos Kazantzakis would be the one. When he describes rain hitting mother earth in the desert, you feel the warm pulse of each drop. He had the balls to continue the Odyssey in two volumes of verse and by all accounts equaled Homer. And his Report to Greco is the greatest confessional of the 20th century. “Reach what you cannot, Nikos,” his stern, Cretan grandfather urges him. And he met that task in his spiritual life. An amazing soul.

I am always stirred by the spiritually great, how they transcend without the mealy-mouth urgings of the Dyers, Chopras, and the Dr. Phils. “Overdraw me, Lord, and who cares if I break!” This is authentic, not a namby-pamby platitude. There is a picture of Wayne Dyer on the cover of one of his books in which he looks deeply and spiritually entranced. The question to ask: how many crisp hundreds are in his billfold?

I am watching a made for TV film, “Caesar,” on TNT while I write and the sponsor is Immodium, the film a farrago of logorrhea and diarrhea. I digress.

As I returned home from visiting my sister on Oracle Road, I could see the plumes of smoke on the Catalinas, small ashtrays littering the hillsides. I’ve heard that they are making a breakfire, and all will be well, the fire contained. I passed a man and his parked car. He had a tripod set up and he was taking pictures of the mountains. A recorder and a rememberer, I imagine. What will he say when he shows his photos of this fired up mountain? That he was there; that he captured a once-in-a-lifetime event — when next will Mt. Lemmon be aflame, smoking; that he captured, for all time, what his eyes and events had brought him to. He is indeed a metaphor for his own life; can he capture it, shag it, net it, make it utile and efficacious?

If only we could encapsulate on silver nitrate what our lives are; better yet, instead of recording might not we live it, whatever we are capable of living. We live as if in lieu of. Perhaps we might be better human beings if we acted out of amnesia. I am not so sure about memory; it feels like an inhibitor.

When we lose our loved ones, a wife, a daughter, as I have, we are destroyed — if we feel. We become molecular dust, incorporeal, flattened, deadened, motes. And the gravitas of time itself sabotages our intensities, our unwillingess to “get on” with life and things. We begin to forget. Time creates ruins of the lost loved one in mind, crumbled desert palaces. An Atlantis is created in mind, a lost, wondrous city. I’ve heard mourners bewail the passing of time for it was the final death knell of their dear one. I feel we lose our dear ones more than once. Erosive memory kills the odors, perfumes, the shapes, the face, and oh, the voice, of the one we knew so well, so intimately. I cannot remember my mother’s voice who I lost at 20; 43 years have silenced it. Is that why we have all this videotaping and recording?

We create archives of our loved ones amidst the vibrancy of their lives so that years hence we can review them alive and heartily well on tape and CD s — ghastly. We do not engage them while alive, for we are disengaged; and we remember them as images or pixels on computers. I think it was Mailer who said that film was, in effect, death. George Raft refused to watch his movies because he knew they showed him aging — good for you, George. At least you didn’t buy into this ghoulishness, although vanity played a part no less.

Massive vaults of archives exist for the 20th century, and what will we learn from all this? It is beyond comprehension how this visual glut will be transmogrified into some new kind of learning — or insight, perhaps intelligence. I will not argue the case. I only feel that visual satiety is like eating a Gummy Bear — of little nutritional value. Someone recently asked me how he can stop being so anxious; he wanted an answer, an anodyne now. When I told him his anxiety had value, for he was attentive and vigilant as a housepainter, he passed it over. He didn’t hear me. And when I said that you don’t go around anxiety, but wisdom says you go through it, I had completely lost his attention. Calling Wayne Dyer! And so he will continue until life, relationship or event does him in and he sees a little, or he is never awakened and he ends his life with a primer and then a final coat of Benjamin Moore flat.