My name is Bob and I live in the Oregon Cascades. I’m 64 years old. I’m one person on a planet that has 7 billion people on it. One thing I have learned in my time on the planet is this: what I have to say about my life, the experiences I’ve had, the wisdom and answers I’ve found and the questions I still have are all far more interesting to me than others.
In the mountains here, on a walk with my wife Lenore and our dog Charlie, when I’m in the middle of that certain quality of air and light among ancient trees and lush ferns and the cascades of the glacier-fed river near our home, I’m not even that interesting to me.
The mountains and the river have been here a long time. The trees are far older than I will ever be. I will be here, and then I will be gone – an infinitesimal mote on the timeline of the universe. I will have been an individual, I will have been unique. I am here, and then I will be gone from here, incorporated into the grand gestalt of the universe.
I’m an anonymous writer. I’ve written all my life. I started with numbers on a Big Chief tablet and a pencil when I was four. My parents allowed me to stay up late that night because they wanted to see how long I’d last. One thousand, one hundred, eleven. I was sleepy, but I wanted to get to all those ones lined up in a row, and I hung in there. I also started in on the alphabet at that age, and by now it is quite done with me and wishes I would give it a rest.
In 1969 I turned 21. It was the best time in the 20th century for an anonymous writer to come of age, a time when nobody surfed the tsunami of America into adulthood. We were churned by it and spat out, dazed and hammered, onto the shores of the next decade. I wrote full-time from 1971 to 1975. Experimental, unconventional, outlaw art. In the days when Hunter S. Thompson was laying the foundation of Gonzo Journalism I was writing in a steaming, chaotic chrysalis of gonzo literature. I wrote essays, vignettes, stream of consciousness roller coasters, fragments, prose photographs. I tied them together with simple threads to create strange, jigsaw-puzzle novels and short stories that unfolded in nine separate panes of a window, or were shaped like an hourglass.
The more I wrote the more I became aware how words fractured the truth of being I sensed and sought. The more I wrote, the more I fractured the truth I wanted to reflect. I knew that I was young, and that while I had already acquired an extraordinary and unusual breadth and depth of life experience which very few, if any, of my peers could share, I still needed to experience even more of life. They say be careful what you ask for. At some point I asked for “a great gestalt of being” to be in me as the result of much experience. I got both.
Later, I would write this about writing:
Words. Could there ever be words that would catch such a place? No, not now. How would he do it? Once he would have tried; he had been a writer once. Long ago, it seemed.
It had fallen away from him — or he from it, more likely, considering the wide-arcing spirals of the life behind him. But that had been a good thing, the writing. With the exuberance of youth he had worn the raging, passionate persona of a poet well, but inconclusively. The outward trappings and strife had later fallen away and left him for the most part still. The heart of it had been good. He recalled when he had yearned for a great measure of living to be within him, when his time upon the earth would have provided him with a wealth of events, characters, places and wisdom. It had not turned out to be so. His past was rich and wild with these things, but they had not remained separate or clarified. They had run together and merged and flown apart and shifted until now nothing occurred cleanly in recall. His life had become a gestalt, the events and characters and places of his living funneled into a cumulative focus that became only a single event, a single character, a single place.
There had always been an uneasiness with the writing, the manipulating-god aspect of it, the contrived chiaroscuro biases between the poles of light and darkness, the forced orchestral constructs. A growing discomfort with profane fragments as a singular wholeness welled up around him everywhere. For a time he had traced; drawn and shaded as honestly as he could, seeking tones that were not contrived or certain. Even his slightest touch, he found, had shattered his subject into pieces, and finally he had stopped.
It had been a portion of his path. It had been good to catch the exquisite images whirling in the world of emerging youth, had been a necessary step into the greater mystery which followed when each shattered piece began to fit with every other.
He felt now as though his path had been more of a free and dizzying fall, where the velocity of wind had stripped him clean on his way to an absolute destination. A fall still in progress. He thought of the shards that had so far been torn away, wondered what fastenings now unknown would prove to be more excess, to be flung away too in this constant, inexorable cleansing…
I still write, obviously. For the most part, though, I am an anonymous and lazy wanderer in the Oregon Cascade mountain range, where I live my life.
The Cascadian Wanderer 
6 Responses to The Antipodes of the Dead Bang Mean
I’m thinking that before you mentioned this no one could hover over both reference points simultaneously. But now the Universe has had a chance to say, “That sounds interesting and just may be fun.” It will probably let us all do it now – perhaps changing the mean to a mode – or creating a mean a la mode.
AHA! Time to get out the old pie chart. Sometimes the classic methodology is still the best way to go. I’m thinking a wedge of tart cherry with French vanilla. Coffee, of course. And since the concept has been conceived and so achieved we can muse idly on Heisenberg’s monkey wrench or, as an option, just chew and slurp and grin at each other.
I’m thinking we should probably stay away from Heisenberg unless we want to risk having the waitress come around and see me being a swamp brain again. It’s not the condition that bothers me so much, it’s just the exquisite disdain, you know?
I have this theory that waitresses, like angels, are satellite extensions of the cosmic enlightened Master, and everything they say and do is for our benefit. Once I went into a diner for breakfast and decided I’d had enough instruction for now, so I just said up front and straight out, “Look, I’m in no hurry for enlightenment here. I’d just like a cup of coffee and a good breakfast.”
She took a good long look at me and replied, “That’s cool. That’s very cool. You got it.”
How often do you hear something like that from the Master? It made my day.
Haha, speaking of swamp brain… Where are we, really? Quantum physics made a muck of that one, didn’t it. Here or there? Here AND there? Everywhere, nowhere? And let’s not even get started on When, or What (electrically controlled meat-suit, sure, but what’s doing the driving?), and certainly not WHY. I’m hard pressed to find anybody who even has a decent grip on Who and that’s supposedly the easy one. Please, Lord, don’t make my purpose in life to write a scientifically sound essay on existence that includes the Five W’s and all the salient points of the Scientific Method. My head will cave in. (Now, where’d that kill switch go? Does it involve pie?)
Speaking of Pie — You saw that movie “Waitress,” right? She seemed to be able to invent a pie for any and every state of mind. I’ve just invented another one for her: “Thinking too hard and can’t seem to quit” Pie. Pecans in salted caramel and melted unsweetened chocolate in a greasy, too-tough crust. Bittersweet, lots of work to chew, and a lead ball in the gut. (Flambe, naturally.)
Of course then there’s always “Reset Button” pie. (Blackberry. Always. Never underestimate the power of good blackberry pie.)
The 5 W’s versus blackberry pie… Decisions, decisions. It appears to me that quantum physics and string theory are doing quite nicely in closing in on metaphysics and creating an even more intricate model of the 5 W’s. That’s good enough for me, I’ll let them carry on with that. Pie it is.
With coffee. Which, as I recall, returns us to the top of this page.
BTW – your pie recipe is just too good for words! A surefire recipe for a double dose of rational over-exercise and all the “heartburn” it creates…
““Thinking too hard and can’t seem to quit” Pie. Pecans in salted caramel and melted unsweetened chocolate in a greasy, too-tough crust. Bittersweet, lots of work to chew, and a lead ball in the gut. (Flambe, naturally.)”
L.O.L. *delightedly*
We came up with a good one in the car on the way into town for groceries today:
“A highly developed mind is not necessarily a realized mind.” Not as funny as pie, but we both laughed when it came up in the course of conversation, then got suddenly quiet, and then looked at each other and simultaneously said, “Exactly!” And laughed again.