Nutshell Kingdom from happyrobot - updated 6/9/2026 12:31:32 AM https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp en-us <![CDATA[Cora Lee's Poem of Carpe Diem]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=10291
 Cora Lee's Poem of Carpe Diem
 
Sniff every acorn while you may
For you never know with which ones squirrels did play.
On a limited walk, on a hot summer's day
Sniff every acorn while you may.
 
 
]]> <![CDATA[The Third Leg of American Educational Reform]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=10281 Never mind. Venting. 

Lee Hazlewood saved me - and saved you from reading this.
]]> <![CDATA[Three Things]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=10161  1. Wine: there's a bottle for the two of us. Just enough to make you sleepy and enough for me to want more. An age-old conundrum.

2. Women: there's more to these women than meets the eye. I would have to see them all undressed.

3. Song: February 1st the giant oak across the street where the old man lives with the five German Shepherds that all bark at the same time and drive my dog crazy is naked but for the flock of starlings filling its branches. Decades ago, I am told, this same old man used to keep beer in his backseat and never lock his car door. The neighborhood teenagers would steal the beer and get drunk. The starlings chatter and clatter, but you can hardly call it a song. Winter noise - although that may just be a matter of perspective. 

Sometimes, the wine is a woman singing about love. Sometimes, a woman may sing about wine. Other times, the song lives in a bottle corked and filled with women.
]]> <![CDATA[Publishing House in Hell]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=10035 I bound a book of poems once,
Submitted it to Hell.
Got a notice instantly,
"We just don't think it'd sell."

"There was a savior once," it read,
"He never wrote a word.
 But you keep writing, don't give up:
 See where that gets you."

]]> <![CDATA[Here Comes the Night]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=10024 Twenty years ago this summer, I moved to Wilmington and lived in a little one-bedroom condo with Matty J. I was nineteen years old and Matt was a mere 18. Can you imagine? Together, we went out every night, usually starting at Front Street News to hear dudes play the blues (not as bad as you may assume) and then off into the night with the locals we had met. When you're young, you meet everybody. I was a spindly 115 lbs and even in the heat and humidity, wore nothing short of long pants and flannel shirts. I didn't really drink much alcohol yet, but took No-Doz twice-a-day and occasionally washed them down with a shot of rum or vodka. We laid around a lot and I heard both Woody Guthrie and Leadbelly for the first time that summer.

I was in love for the first time and she was in Atlanta. There were letters received, signed with a lower-case a. and I would read them twenty times a day. I hung out with a lesbian named Novella, of all things. I'd let myself in the side door of her house in the Wilmington ghetto about midnight and sit in her kitchen writing poems until she finished up with whatever girl she had over. After, she'd take me out and we'd find Matt and roam the Wilmington night. Suffice it to say, I went a little crazy. I remember one time, I covered myself with all of my dirty laundry and just sat there on the couch, looking through the open zipper of dirty jeans. 

When you're nineteen, your world is wide open. That's a lot to be optimistic about, but if you're sensitive, you can't escape the simultaneous sense of foreboding - the knowledge that all that you know (which at that moment is EVERYTHING you know) - is going to fall apart and get replaced with other, unforeseen things. The only thing I couldn't account for is HOW MANY times that would happen in the ensuing twenty years. 

Anyway, I would do laundry in this hot little laundry room. I would always bring down a little boombox and listen to Van Morrison. Astral Weeks was my favorite, because my girlfriend gave it to me and because it is utterly perfect to this day. But in the laundry room, I would listen to T.B. Sheets, a reissue of very early Van Morrison songs. It wasn't better but it was bluesy and raw and young. I would try to write poems.

Outside, the humidity was what it is in coastal NC and I would sweat out my soul while the Spanish moss swung on the branches.  I wish you could have seen me. I really do. Not because I was so cool. I imagine I cut a remarkably ridiculous figure across the lives of the people I met that summer. I wish you could see me because I was so young and so pretty and so earnest. It's funny - I don't feel so very different tonight, sitting here in Arlington, Va, listening to Van Morrison, half drunk on Pabst Blue Ribbon. 

There is a difference though.  I incurred a hurt that summer that never healed. I can't explain it; maybe it's just an innocence lost that everyone feels at some point. Whatever it is, I can still feel it. It's like a an old war wound that tingles before a storm. If tonight I wish you were there, it's because I needed you. Even if I hadn't met you yet, I know you now - you could have talked me back from whatever ledge I jumped off of, twenty years ago. I was so scared of what was to come, so scared of today without even knowing it - I really wished you could have taken my hand and talked me down.

The train for Madame George was coming, that was all I knew. In mere years, it will have left the station. I find myself having done nothing but wave goodbye for twenty years.





]]> <![CDATA[I Remember You. You Were Wonderful.]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=10023 It's a record-setting heat, a dazed heat, 103 degree high temperature and I'm standing in Barracks Row smoking a cigarette. An old white man is staggering down the street and having trouble. He's disheveled, dirty shirttail out and weird plaid shorts; he has the gleam of the schizophrenic. I've seen it too many times. Full moon eyes hiding terrified under cardboard. He stops nearby and something in me shrinks, but he's not looking at me. Instead he's gazing at a point in space, empty air and he raises a finger and points at it. "I remember you," he says to the ghost. "You were wonderful." 

The man walks on, for all the world like Karloff in Frankenstein boots.

Like I said, it's too hot. Too hot for a city, at least. A man needs trees to breathe, some organic shade to unwind under.

I'm taking a fifteen minute break from my second job -- calling strangers on the phone asking for money for a local theatre. When the summer is over, I'm getting out of this town and I work two jobs to save up the cash. Eight hours of pointless, repetitive drudgery and four hours on the phone. I am savoring this cigarette, heat or no heat. 

This heavy, fine-tuned exhaustion brings me just close enough to a particular edge of crazy. This old man speaks to thin air and while my soul may shrink from it, for a brilliant second, I am him. I'm standing out of the sun, in the shade of a building and have about three more minutes before I go back inside and start back on the phones.

My friends, in case you ever wonder, I remember you. I may as well be talking to myself. You were wonderful.
]]> <![CDATA[The Saddest Story I Know Today]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9942  About ten years ago, my mother presented my grandfather with a tiny beagle pup for Christmas. She put her right in his lap and the poor little thing trembled in a room full of revelry and noise and all the while, my granddad stroked it till it calmed down. In those magical few hours, the mystery of imprinting occurred and that dog became my grandfather's.

It's sort of unfortunate, because my granddad was a man of little outward tenderness. The beagle, they call her L'il Bit, grew up as strange and prickly as her acknowledged master. He was the only person she would allow to touch her at all. No matter who fed her, who gently coaxed and wooed her, she was adamant in her loyalty. At family gatherings, she'd skulk around the crowd, growling and beating a quick retreat from anyone that would try and pet her. My granddad, however, she would follow from one end of the farm to the next, keeping close to his footsteps. She became a fixture around the place - you'd usually see her dashing around a corner, away from anyone who wasn't her master. 

All this time, my grandmother fed her until she grew ill and died in 2007 and then my mother took up the task. You couldn't touch her, only lay out some food and step away. Eventually, after you'd left, she'd sneak up and eat. She lived outdoors, shadowing the edge of the house. It's been this way for years. Occasionally, my grandfather would come outside and pet her a little. Rarely.

My grandfather died Saturday and we buried him yesterday. As we gathered at his house before the funeral, I noticed the little dog scoot around a corner. My mother inherits the house and with it, the beagle, but she isn't going to move there. I asked her what was going to happen to the dog and she said that she had thought about it and decided it was best to let her continue living at the house where she's most familiar. She'll be taken care of - at least as much as possible. 

But the saddest story I know today is the little beagle who lives at the little farmhouse in the country - a house no one lives in - waiting around for granddad to come out the door one day and stroke her ears a little.
]]> <![CDATA[Movies on Youtube - Mademoiselle Dinamite]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9941 I’ve started a new lifetime reading list regime this week and I suppose I’ll go into that with you at a later date, but for now I’d rather discuss my other current passion: Out-of-print movies on Youtube.

As I grow more and more interested in film, I find that there are a gajillion movies out there that have somehow failed to find their way onto DVD, at least in the U.S. Fortunately, however, there are curiosity freaks out there in Internetland who are passionate about these things and will post what they have on Youtube. The medium is unfortunate; the films have to be split up into 8-10 minute segments which can create a huge problem in flow. But if this is the price of seeing obscure treasures, I am willing to pay it.

Here’s what I do: I go through the schedules at the nation’s leading repertory theaters (Film Forum in NY, Cinefamily in LA, etc.) and find movies that I may want to see. Then I find them if I can and watch them. It’s that simple.

This week’s feature is a Victor Fleming double-header from the early 1930s: Red Dust and Bombshell. Both of these movies feature Jean Harlow, one of my favorites.

You all know Victor Fleming; he only directed The Wizard of Oz and Gone With the Wind – both in 1939. That’s a hell of a resume.

Red Dust came out in 1932 and it stars Clark Gable, Jean Harlow and Mary Astor. It takes place on a rubber plantation in Indochina of which Gable is the owner. Harlow plays a wisecracking prostitute (this is pre-code, so it has lots of suggestiveness and titlation) who stops over and falls for Gable. He, however, has the hots for Astor, who is married to one of his employees. It’s a sweaty soap opera for sure and there’s lots of bare skin to be seen – enough to satisfy anyone. This movie also features Harlow’s famous “rain barrel” scene, in which she appears to be completely naked in a barrel of water when Clark Gable grabs her by the hair and dunks her. Yes, this movie is like that.

Red Dust was remade twenty years (called Mogambo for some reason) later by the great John Ford. Clark Gable plays the same role except in Africa and he’s a big-game hunter. Ava Gardner and Grace Kelly play the female leads. It is surprisingly less sexy than the original. Neither movie is great, which must speak to the material, considering the outstanding directors and the casts.

Bombshell, on the other hand, is a FANTASTIC movie. I had actually seen this a few times before and it is one of my favorite movies. Made in 1933, Jean Harlow basically plays herself in a comic parody of the life of a Hollywood bombshell (the 'If' Girl, if you will - Fleming also made several movies with Clara Bow (Hollywood's original It Girl) in the previous decade). They even recreate the rain barrel scene from Red Dust, giving the movie a self-referential, Charlie Kaufmanesque feel. The great Lee Tracy plays the male lead – a perfect, fast-talking publicity man who works for the studio. This movie contains some of the best dialog ever written and spoken by some of the best comic actors in Hollywood history. Even the supporting cast is exceptionally strong. The movie is fast-paced and flat out hilarious.

Unfortunately, the version of Bombshell on Youtube is burdened with subtitles, but you get used to it. The movie is even called Mademoiselle Dinamite in the subtitles – which I find hysterical.
]]> <![CDATA[RIP Alex Chilton]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9939 St. Patrick’s Day and at about 8:30 I go online and check my favorite music blog to see what cool old records have been posted to download for free and there’s a post, barely ten minutes old, that tells me that Alex Chilton is dead and Jody Stephens has confirmed it.

Earlier that evening, I had been reading Plato’s Phaedo and in it Socrates (on the day of his own execution) goes on and on about how knowledge is nothing more or less than simple recollection and that how when one sees something as simple as a familiar garment or a lyre, one instantly knows not only that object but also the person that they know who regularly uses it. Thus knowledge of a cloak is also of a kind with knowledge of a person.

Likewise, the first thing that sprang to my mind after reading of Chilton’s death was a parade of familiar sounds. It started with the strings of ‘Take Care’ and soon made way for the line “you better not leave me here” from ‘Daisy Glaze’ and then the hook from ‘September Gurls’ and so many others that went through my head with such rapid connection that I didn’t have time to properly identify them. I was flooded with song - a simultaneous catalog - and with each song, a memory or two or six. Most of them involved driving somewhere with the windows down and singing along as loud as possible, not even knowing the words exactly but intimately familiar with every sound on every album and so I (and often we – as these were shared experiences) just sang what the words sounded like. Others were more solitary; dark college bedrooms listening to the final suite of Third/Sister Lovers over and over.

I’m not one to get choked up over death. My own grandfather (my last living grandparent) was admitted to the hospital not two weeks ago and is not expected to ever come out. Since getting that news, I have been a rock, strong and supportive for my mother. I have found every reason to continuously assert that this is “for the best” and that death, unknown as it is, cannot be a final end – not in nature as we know it. I really believe this.

But as I wrote before, I was flooded, and all floods do the same thing in the end: They devastate. And last night I sobbed, full-throated, wet and involuntary, for a good while before I stopped it up with a bottle of beer. Floods begetting rivulets.

I saw Chilton live once in the early 90s. It was a perverse and slightly contemptuous experience. Better for me is a memory of a Teenage Fanclub show I saw in Chapel Hill when, for the finale, the band gave their instruments to four randomly chosen members of the audience and those four people, along with the Fannies, banged out a sloppy and ecstatic version of ‘September Gurls.’ If Chilton had been in the room, he’d have hated it, I suppose. But we all loved every ringing chord, however poorly played. And that’s the gist of Chilton, oddly like Socrates before him – he wasn’t, to most of us who didn’t know him, a man who consisted of himself; but rather a man who consisted entirely of all the millions of people who loved him. 

Hopefully that’ll be true of all of us.
]]> <![CDATA[Love Letters]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9914  Lovelessness turns a person mean, bitter, as strange as an animal in a world of humans. Pay attention and they'll start to come out of the woodwork; the old man hunched on his porch six hours a day, the black boy who weighed 300 pounds by the time he's 13, the sour-faced woman on the train, all the folks who wrote their own pleading letters to Nathanael West's Miss Lonelyhearts. Watch for them in the streets, in restaurants alone, especially the supermarkets. Once you have marked them, you'll see that they are an army. They pass by your door from morning to night. All you have to do is open your eyes.

See the thing in their eyes? Do you see it? It's so foreign that it's obvious. We're not like that, of course - shining eyes, decent teeth, a charming way with words. We've gone through lovers the way a child goes from one toy to the next, each one outstripping the next. We could charm the pants off of anyone - and probably have in our youth, just for the hell of it. Perhaps we've finally settled on someone and started a little family, a life of our own and now our old lovers are funny stories that we tell by a quaint fireplace in a charming tavern when old friends come to visit.

And the letters - maybe we've kept them in an old shoebox, maybe we burned them in a fit of pique. Maybe we were just careless and now who knows where they've gone? But really, we should have kept them.  

By all means, keep the letters. 

These others, this army of the loveless - they'll never know what it's like for us. We'll have discarded and forgotten more love and adoration than the loveless ever dreamed could exist. We have romantic histories to make the characters in movies look chaste and old-fashioned, while they are a people to whom a mere kind word kindles something in their breast that can last a decade. They're not like us who can take a kindness or leave it, depending on the day and our blood sugar levels. And yet, you can't really share your surfeit of love with them. You'll wish you could, but it's an impossible situation. "People," an former girlfriend of mine used to say, "they break your heart."

We should keep our letters as a gesture at least  - not to our own vanity or history, not to reminisce ourselves, God forbid, but to show that we have seen these people, these Eleanor Rigbys of the world, to show that we have thoroughly read and understood 'A Rose for Emily', that we have lived inside their lonely skulls and empty breasts, even if just in imagining a life without love and pleasure and desire, even if it's just our little compassion game, and that we know just how lucky we are.
]]> <![CDATA[The Twentieth Century]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9896 Just a few years ago if you happened to be driving in downtown Durham on a muggy summer night with the windows down and catch the red light at the right cycle, you would be overwhelmed with the smell of books coming from The Book Exchange. This enormous bookstore sold remaindered books, publisher cast-offs much sadder than your ordinary used-book store, whose tomes at least had a chance at happiness and blew it. No, these books were orphaned from the beginning - these books of outdated Latin, cookbooks, archaic law. Organized by publisher rather than author, most people never got the hang of this retail labyrinth, yet the Book Exchange was in business for decades. Until last February, that is, when it closed for good, taking with it millions and millions of pages, each sheet of paper with its own olfactory combination of ink and mildew and dust that would come together with its peers and spread into the street like a revolutionary army of collective memory.

It's not the memory of that store I'm celebrating here. Or mourning, to be more exact. Nor is it the smell of books which is almost certainly going to disappear in the fairly near future. But those books represented something, something I already miss dearly, yet still cling to in an almost self-destructive passion. To me, the smell of those books was the smell of the twentieth century - after all, what was in all those pages? - and I will soon no longer have any hope of recovering it.  

The twentieth century didn't begin on the day I was born in 1971, nor did my memory of it. Memory is so much trickier than that. Early on, I was exposed to not just my own childhood but that of my parents also. Grandparents' houses filled with roasts and cakes that mirrored the exact smell of 1959, and so I knew what 1959 smelled like as much as I knew what 1979 smelled like. Wooden barns filled with the lingering odor of cured tobacco leaves. Pure 1930's. The wet metal smell from inside my Army surplus canteen - was that Korea or World War 2?  The rubber smell of a squeaky Donald Duck toy. What year am I in exactly? I could never be sure. My clothes were hand-me-downs, my books were used, even my toys were often passed down a generation. My grandfather's country store where we played as kids was filled with old soda bottles and a trove of even older ones could be found in the woods just off of his motor oil-scented parking lot. How old was that oil smell? My grandmother served me Coca Cola in a tiny yellow plastic cup that had a smell all its own. Tin can filled with black dirt and worms for fishing. How old was that can? Did my uncles use it when they were kids? The rusty, sooty feel and smell of the railroad tracks at night when I was older- impossible to pinpoint. Bus depots. Record stores. Pamphlets. Mimeograph. Newspaper crosswords and 40 cent coffee at Friar's Cellar in Greensboro. Curry chicken salad at the Skylight Exchange in Chapel Hill. Boxes of comic books, thumbing through them with soda sticky hands, and their paper cracked and their ads impossibly archaic even by the time I got to them. Keep On Truckin'? I had no idea what that meant but every comic I owned had an ad for jean patches with that cryptic remark. Mr. Natural. Keep On Truckin'.

That's just what happened. We all kept on truckin'. It's 2010 now and the twentieth century is all but gone and is replaced with sights and sounds and smells that mean nothing to me. I am a fish out of water. The topic was memory jogged by smell, but there is barely any smell left that can jog my memory to where it wants to go.  Some postulate that my beloved twentieth century was blown away by the foul odors that swept across New York City on September 11, 2001, but I don't feel that's true.  History is not changed in that broad of stroke.  But I am amazed at how fast it has happened, how fast the memories I long for are disappearing. 

I have tried to love this new century, to embrace it and accept and learn to live in it, but I just can't seem to do it. My heart is too spiteful. And it's not that I hate progress and change - I don't believe that time is linear in that fashion - but because I do so still love the twentieth century. I love it like a parent and in many ways it is my parent. It gave birth to me. 

And now it is dead and gone. So is the old Book Exchange, my grandfather's store, Friar's Cellar, The Skylight Exchange, etc.

The 21st century killed them all. 


]]> <![CDATA[Crazy as a Loon]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9871  I used to believe I was crazy as a loon. So I would sit very still so as to calm myself, push the crazy down under the dark water till it stopped bubbling. I would sit very still on my porch because fresh air is better for that than indoor air. It was winter and everything was the way it was with no embellishment and then it was spring. I sat still outside on the porch through a good portion of that time and watched the world fill itself in gradually like a painting done with just a few brush strokes a day. Things turned greener and a few flowers bloomed. Mostly though, I noticed the birds. I had never done that before, which is strange because, trust me, once you start looking, the birds are everywhere. I didn't know much about them. I knew cardinals, robins, sparrows. What I mean to say is that I recognized these birds, but I didn't know them at all. I had never tried.

Early spring there came to the yard a mockingbird. Drab gray in color, but "conspicuous in flight," as Roger Tory Peterson wrote, this mocker was flashy and aggressive. After awhile, it seemed to greet me when I came outside. He had a way of swooping down onto a branch of tangled honeysuckle, greening but not yet in bloom, and checking me out whenever it heard the screen door slam behind me. Eventually, it began to speak to me. Not that I knew what it meant. Mockingbirds, I have since learned, are very vocal. They are the ones you hear on moonlit nights in the South, singing 20 different songs in almost an autistic rotation of  exuberance and compulsion. They make a lot of noise, no doubt, but this bird -- this bird would swoop down mere feet from where I sat, look me straight in the eye and begin talking.

I entered a phase where I was putting a lot of thought into what this bird was trying to tell me. I still don't know. Those things aren't knowable. What happened, however, is that I became very interested in birds. By the next winter, I had gotten myself some binoculars and some field guides and I studied up on birdlife and went out into the woods and the marshes and the fields every chance I got. I went out in the cold and went out in the rain. I found an eagle's living-room sized nest and I now know where the wood ducks parade their ducklings on the backside of Roosevelt Island just across from the Kennedy Center. I have stood in forests so still you could anticipate a wren appearing on a log seconds before you would actually see it. I learned to look at the world a different way. I also learned a thing or two about birds. I learned that a loon isn't crazy at all. It just makes a crazy noise.]]> <![CDATA[Eleven]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9860  The crappy musical version of the classic film 10 1/2.]]> <![CDATA[Lack of Consideration - Dealbreaker]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9842  What is a deal but a contract? - and if I remember a tiny bit of my fancy private-school legal education, a contract can be declared null and void if there is a lack of consideration. So (or therefore in a legal document) if someone is inconsiderate to me, the deal is off. Any deal. And by inconsiderate I mean like for instance if someone borrowed something from me and never returned it. That's just flat out inconsiderate. A deal breaker. Legally. Look at the case law. Once, in the dreary Olde English countryside, a woman made a deal to give two of her family's cows to her neighbor in exchange for a discrete poison with which to murder her husband. The poison was delivered, the husband died and the cows were handed over. Unfortunately, the neighbor let the cows run rampant, would not fence them in and they moseyed back to their old home (mostly out of habit, as cows do). Well, this ticked the lady off. She wasn't fond of cows in the first place - that's why she was eager to make a deal regarding them - and now they were back, trampling her pretty rosebushes. She went to the neighbor and asked him to keep the cows fenced and he said sure, right-o. Well, two weeks later, the cows were back. The neighbor never built a fence and when pressed on the issue, admitted that he had no intention of doing so. Inconsiderate to say the least. Therefore (legal jargon again), the woman built her own fence and kept the cows for herself after all. she also returned what was left of the poison she had received. She dissolved it in a bottle of milk from those very cows and served it to her neighbor in his tea.

She was promptly hanged, it's true, but it is important to note in the court's findings that when they hanged her, it was for murder and not for breach of contract. ]]> <![CDATA[What Can I Think Of, To Get Back to You?]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9799 What Can I Think Of, To Get Back to You?

From the back row of the theater, dark,
I am on the move.
No plot can hold me. I am in barns. At night.
Kerosene hums and I once saw a ghost owl white
Swoop by the headlights of my car, roads along winter fields.
Living in New York, I dreamed of two-story buildings,
Ranch homes, parking spaces. I dreamed of grass.
Greener grass. Reading a novel, for instance,
And I think about sex. This is not a sexy novel,
I think, far too late, those poor paragraphs,
Well meant, precise, sweep before me like a blizzard
Migration of snowflakes, from one roof to the next,
From mirror to mailbox, powder a lawn chair, and restless,
Move on in a sudden, assault the front door or down the street;
A gang of snow, crystalline hooligans, disguised as cloud.
The same Arctic wind blows back a page, a robe, piece of silk,
And thighs like snowbanks drift higher than my head.

From the back row of the theater, dark,
I am not in the theater. From the front porch of my house,
I am not at home. I am not where I am at any given point.
You should know this; I knew it as a child,
When I would search for solitude I would find myself locked
Arm-in-arm with boon companions, drunk with song.
In the arms of love, I find myself lonesome, lonesome.
No space holds me; no thought grips me so completely.
I keep all my windows open; the cross breezes are maddening.

And after all this, my question is:
]]> <![CDATA[The Autumn Mushroom Camps of British Columbia]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9681 The cooler than usual summer has me thinking of the mushroom camps of British Columbia, working for $40 a day at a little roadside table, under the hemlock shade, listening to a cheap mono boombox as we sold to passers-by in the September migration; college kids heading back from Alaskan cannery adventures, retirees and their Recreation Vehicles - second homes as large as a Dakota schoolhouse - bikers, vets, hippies, Army families, and all sorts of assorted gypsy types I never could have imagined back East, sitting on the barstools of my youth.

The sun sets so much earlier than only a few weeks ago, and still the evening mellows for hours and hours, shadows moving east and slowly, stretching over the forest floor, the buckets, vats of pine mushrooms, bound for Japan, the morels, and the chanterelles - all surprisingly cool to the touch, smooth in your hand, earth become flesh.

And the tents. Four rows of four, Judy strung up lights between so as to resemble the tiniest of cities, jolly and glittering, we all sit around the picnic tables, around the little tape player. We had eight tapes; two Grateful Dead bootlegs, Hot Rocks by the Rolling Stones, The Velvet Underground and Nico, some REM thing, a Nina Simone mix, and our favorite, Elvis Presley's Christmas album. And there we'd sit after a hard day, in the early autumn chill of the Great North Woods, under a string of lights, beside our precious tent city, listening to "Blue Christmas," simultaneously feeling as happy as elves and homesick as hell.

When the lights went out at eleven or so, you spent two weeks (and only two weeks) coming into my tent. Standing there in my memory, backed by the firelight we never let die, your skin was the exact color of the golden chanterelles we'd spend all day handling. Pushing into my sleeping bag, like a spade in the black earth, the smell of fungus so strong on us both, there was no way to tell which of us was which in the dark.]]> <![CDATA[The Summer of Gabriel Garcia Marquez]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9672 ... I am reminded of my summer of One Hundred Years of Solitude. I was twenty and shared a two bedroom house with three women, three cats, and a dog. Two of the women were lovers who lived in the living room, behind a curtain. Their lovemaking was as loud as their fighting. It was summer in Greensboro and we had no air-conditioning. The bathroom door would swell tight with the humidity and more than once I found myself naked and trapped in the bathroom after a shower. The animals all had fleas and I remember trying to read as the punctuation in my book would suddenly jump off the page! Fleas! However, it was my first real home of my own and we liked each other and the rent was beyond cheap (I believe it was about $96 a person). Outside, the vines grew so as to take over the little shed where the lawnmower was kept. I was learning to cook; I was learning to drink. Our next-door neighbor was a constant visitor; he'd come over with fresh ears of corn to be shucked; his girlfriend had taken some LSD and tried to write a love note on the wall of his room with her own blood; the relationship had been ended. I read Garcia Marquez in a hallucinatory fever dream; sweaty, smelly, fleabitten, eager for escape and, to the contrary, eager to experience every hyper-aware moment of my new awakening (this was not how I had been raised to live; who were these incredibly strange people that I was learning to love?). I read always, sitting on the cool concrete of the front porch; there was always a thunderstorm about to break open over my head.]]> <![CDATA[There Are So Many Perfect Things]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9611

If I tell a perfect lie,
It is still perfect.
There are so many perfect things.

The Three Sisters, for one,
Corn, beans, squash -- Perfect Things,
A Holy Trinity you can really sink your teeth into.

Yet, even as I write that, I remember
the hours of planting, the sweat of summer,
blistered fingers, sharp stalks,
and all of those lean, hungry months
we so quickly forget.

It's as if the telling hides worms in the ears
and softens the squash.
It's as if the telling pours perfection
onto the dust and watches it disappear.

My brother claims to dream the truth.
He knows the exact date and method of his death.
Dreams it, he says. Who knows?
It's a secret. Who knows?

I do know that things happen in our sleep.
Time climbs up on our bodies like a cat.
Time purrs on our chest and steals our souls
with soft, invisible, blissful sucking
that makes us look adorable to the people who love us.

Adorable in our sleep, we hear perfect lies
Cast in the soft glow of an opened door, a nightlight,
We are watched and we are loved.
There are so many perfect things.
 

]]> <![CDATA[Lucifer on the Porch, Full of Beer]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9602 Springtime, and I am Lucifer on the porch,
full of cold beer and as human as you.
My soldiers arrayed, garish and erect.
An army of tulips
and one drowsy bee.

Such is my state these days.
Through the rains of April,
solid panels of water
and then a stillness of white fog
creeping from the earth
as I once did
when I was young.
Today the soil is wet and pliant,
the roots swollen to burst.
Sex is in the air.
I don't give a damn.

Springtime, and I am Lucifer on the porch,
Human as you and a little sad.
I've lodged my complaint for the last time.
We live under the same Tyrant, you and I,
and though I've been called the Prince of Lies,
in this, I speak the truth:

You are dying.
Every one of you.

You wait for the end of the world
and it happens every day.

Your house is built on someone's bones,
all loves - forgotten as stars.

Your second grade teacher had a stroke
yesterday. She'll recover, but for how long?

Time is The Man's guillotine.
He spares no tulip.
If you could see what I've seen...
(and still I don't know what eternity is).

Springtime, and I'm Lucifer on the porch,
The Prince of Lies and drunk to boot.
There is but one life (I swear it)
and it ends. So many
people never live at all.

When it's quiet like this, at night,
when the churchbells cease their racket,
I will hear the buzz of a hummingbird
somewhere in the darkness, moving north,
tiny and alone. Life demands it.
And I become Lucifer, full of cold beer,
and a little sad.
]]> <![CDATA[From my Birding Listserve]]> https://www.happyrobot.net/words/nutshell_kingdom.asp?id=9592 "I had my first hummer on Friday, April 10 at 6:30 pm--a male. He stayed around all weekend."]]>