Journal

How Days Are Past

It is the wait. We have a lot of time to wait. We live in the South Side. You cross the bridge just as you come into town, instead of going into town. We are the neighborhood on the road to Westport, just below the hill where the local college sits. We are not students. We sometimes work in the shake mill or longshore. Some of us finished high school but some didn’t and mostly we are in our twenties now. We are too old to hang around the pool hall now or the bowling alley and so sometimes we get a six pack and play cards and wait at the union hall. And on days we don’t get called, we just hang out.

Hank there has a job delivering mail at the P.O. It turns out that Hank buys most of the groceries. There are four of us guys renting this house. The most ambitious one of us here is John; he free lances for the Aberdeen Daily World. John used to write for the O.B. in Aberdeen High School. He mainly writes about his trips to Seattle and sometimes he covers court cases, but his mainstay is obituaries. Then Sam here spends most of his time with Sally and baby sits her four-year-old boy when she waits on tables at Duffy’s. Sam is the poet among the four of us. At night he subs at the Morck Hotel, again part-time. That leaves me unaccounted for. I do occasional gardening and yard work for senior citizens in the neighborhood. The rest of the time I just read.

We are four guys that didn’t have much help from our families, because they didn’t either. We are struggling to keep the rent paid and figuring a way to get out of this depressed area. I guess it started first in 1972 with the oil spill at Ocean Shores. Many birds died from petroleum covered bodies and so did literally hundreds of thousands of clams. Then they planted millions of baby clams but they got washed ashore by the waves. Only a few took hold of the sand. It will be another 10 or 20 years before the beach can recover. Then the environmentalists in Olympia managed to pass the spotted owl bill, which to save the endangered species they outlawed logging. And so that practically shut down our town. No more lumber and pulp mills. No more jobs and alcoholism and teen age pregnancies went up and so did welfare. And petty crime.

Sometimes all the housemates are out except me and I lay around and read. John kids me that he would come up with some money and set up a little used bookstore for me and I could read every book in the damn store before we sell it. I said to John that he should write a few books to put in the store. We had a few laughs over that and we split a bottle of wine. He went to sleep because he was driving up to Seattle to cover a case in the Federal Court for the Daily World. The case had to do with some tribal gambling case. Increasingly there has been more violence at Ocean Shores. The Native Americans opened up casinos and so drugs and prostitutions are moving in. Some rumors these people come up from California or even as far as New Jersey. It is up to people like John to tell us ignorant people in the Harbor what really is going on. I like to read the articles John writes for the Daily World. I hope he will be another Hemmingway some day. Or another John Dos Pasos. And I could be another John Ciardi. The other guys Hank and John are pretty much Aberdeen people, you know what I mean. Hank goes fishing when he isn’t carrying the mail. And Sam likes to hang around Sally and her kid and screws her except the nights he clerks at the Morck. We are just waiting for something to happen and the days to pass.

Koon Woon

February 4, 2010

I realize that I am falling behind in class, and why is that so? I


Today I had slept until 4AM from 9pm last night. I was out like a light. I had a moral crisis because I found out I am no longer smart compared to my classmates in the Philosophy of Mind class. My logic is clumsy and my arguments don’t cut to the quick.

My mind is fuzzy in other words.

But I am going to try still. I haven’t done anything rigorous because I done poetry for a long time and not formal poetry either. My mind is kind of loosely connected --- those neurons that randomly fire control my thoughts.

Today I have a way to get started on my learning autobiography and I will follow the guideline in our handbook closely. I must start learning and following rules. They are not always despotic and arbitrary like my late father was. It is an insight. The world is not according to GARP. Know that, and come up with your own existential reasons for living, Koon Woon.

February 4, 2010

I realize that suddenly I am falling behind in class. I have not read much of the assigned reading. So, given what little I know of Rogers at this point, I want to follow his example and be a little more empirical in my self-evaluation. I must be less subjective. Just starting with that, what should I write and how should I write it?

For one thing, I can list down some things that I have done, wanted to do, and like to see how others do it and what they have accomplished. One such topic is learning how to play the guitar.

When I was 16, and that was in 1965, the Beatles and the English invasion of rock ‘n roll swept America. Elvis Presley was on his way out or maybe had already died. It seemed to me that if you played the guitar well, you would have at least one girl thinking highly of you! I bought a guitar.

I took lessons from the teacher at the music store. She taught me how to strum the Beach Boys’ “My Little Deuce Coup.” Apparently I did well enough that she wanted me to play rhythm guitar for a teenage band. I didn’t think I was good enough. Eventually I couldn’t afford to pay for my lessons and I hang up my guitar.

There was a couple that came to our café quite regularly to drink coffee. They came in the middle of the afternoon when usually at those slow hours they were the only customers. I fill their coffee as much as they wanted to drink. Then one day, as the man reached into his pocket for coins to pay for the coffee, I saw that he had a guitar pick in his hand. I was happily surprised and I asked him if he played the guitar and was willing to give lessons. He said yes and said that he had been doing that for some time. He said he called himself, “El Guitaro.” Since he was only charging half as much as the lady at the music store, I gladly took up the chance to learn more on the guitar.

I drove to the address they gave me and found that it was at a poor neighborhood in the adjacent town of Hoquiam. As soon as I went in, I was assailed by this odor. Later on, when I started smoking in college, I knew it was cigarette tar and nicotine smell. Apparently El Guitaro was living with a woman on welfare and she had 3 small children. And so from then on, each time I showed up for lessons I would bring a large bag of fruit – apples, oranges, and bananas, the usual kinds found in the fruit section of a supermarket.

First thing that El Guitaro showed me was the flamenco tremolo and he said his right little finger didn’t work right because he had been in the army and was mowing the lawn and the mower blew up on him. He taught me for the first song, “My little brown jug.”
He had a Xeroxed and stapled book that he showed me, and he also showed me a letter that some guy had sent him threatened to get him for mail fraud. Apparently El Guitaro sold his books through ads in magazines. Apparently the buyer in question claimed that he did not receive the book he paid for. And he suspected fraud because the check was cashed at a tavern. I was alarmed but El Guitaro said that the FBI wasn’t’ going to get involved for $10. And besides, he sent the book to the guy. Maybe it got lost in the mail. There was no way to trace it since neither party paid for certified mail.

As I got to know El Guitaro and his girl friend and her kids from my weekly lessons, I became more realistic about my potential to make it in the music world. I can’t read music although I tried with the help of a musical theory booklet. Soon, I went away to college.

What I did learn was that El Guitaro really enjoyed his guitar playing and was moderately good, but he had an alcohol problem. Later on I had an alcohol problem myself when I dropped in and out of college. And that’s the way I played the guitar --- on and off, off and on. In the end, I bought a Martin a couple of years ago, and finally I got to perform one song at a local Cabaret.

I realize now that not all childhood dreams are fulfilled. I still think it is ok to have picked up the guitar because I have learned to appreciate another dimension of life – music.

While I did not excel in the guitar, I listened to enough music that it seeped into my poetry. I love poets who have musical ears – Theodore Roethke for example and also possibly the greatest Spanish poet of all times – Federico Garcia Lorca. Lorca died during the Spanish Revolution. Possibly he was murdered by the Spanish Civil Guard. He disappeared when he was 36 and his body was never found.

While El Guitaro was not a maestro at the Julliard, I enjoyed what little I learned from him. I realize that we can’t all be Carlos Montoya or Julian Bream. Having fun is part of life. I still have my guitar and now I can make CD’s of my playing on my iMACK G 3 computer. Although it is appreciated by only a few friends, my music pleases me, and sometimes, I figure, perhaps that is the most important thing.