(An Ode To Grandpa Jack Key, for his memorial)

The first thing you need to do is find a piece of wood shaped like wishbone. It might be out there in the backyard of your grandson’s home. You go out there for a while beneath the redwood tree and search the sticks in the yard and sift through the tree droppings on the ground. If you come up short, you lean against the cinderblock wall, and take out your pocketknife, and put the long blade against whatever piece of wood you did find and peel back the layers of bark, letting ribbons of redwood curl at your feet, as the smooth and pale bone below unsheathes itself. Sometimes you don't find that perfect wishbone right away. You have to sit and wait for a while. It'll show up eventually. That's the first thing about making a slingshot. Patience. And pocket knife comes in handy.

You might walk along Route 66 in Oklahoma to find the wishbone, or else drive drive a Ford Pickup Truck issued by the Oil Company in an all-night blitz across the Texas Panhandle to arrive the oil fields outside of San Antonio. You check into your motel at night after a day’s work. If you didn’t find the wishbone atop the oil rigs that day, maybe you'll find it hanging from the stars as you step outside and light the good end of a Viceroy cigarette and take a pull, still smelling of sweat, and oil, your name on the day’s work.

If you're going to make a perfect slingshot it's a good idea to enlist in the Army at 17. You’ll want to learn how to clean and fire an M1 rifle. You’ll board a ship bound across the Atlantic and you'll fall asleep listening to the boom of the bough against the water. As you dream, you hear the ship carving a straight line through the Atlantic. The motion will teach you how to work a blade. 

And you can sometimes find the wishbone buried in your backbone. And maybe you’ll toe the Morgan Line outside of Trieste where your backbone will cut its teeth. You turn into the army barracks one night and hear Bing Crosby on the radio singing I’ll Be Home For Christmas. And maybe that’s when you feel lonely, and you know, all the way across the world, that the wishbone might be back in Oklahoma somewhere. You turn down an offer for a promotion so you can head back to familiar Route 66. 

And on the way back, with little rank, you join the stage manager in the theater troupe on the ship in order to get out of KP and latrine duty. Bargain for meal tickets on the deck. You carve that redwood bark from end to end arriving back in Oklahoma and going to a high school basketball game. That's when you see a blond girl on the bleachers and you say “Sally is that you?”

And the next time you drive the Ford Pick Up Truck back from Texas you drive up and down main street trying to get the attention of that blond girl selling movie tickets. Show up at the high school dance dressed in a suit, a war behind you. Hold hands with the blond girl as her date sulks in the corner. You work for her mother as a typist and one night you take her mother on a drive and ask for her daughter’s hand in marriage. Her mother tells you that she'll have to fire you as the typist if she's to gain you as a son-in-law. Accept.

If you plan to get married in the afternoon, show up to work the oil fields anyway. Climb the oil tower and let your boss walk down and yell at you “to go home and shower because, son, isn't this your wedding day?” After you walk down the aisle, hop into a car and get out of dodge as soon as you can to avoid the good ol’ boys from tying you to a tree on your wedding night. You Honeymoon for only one night in a motel with no air conditioning. 

Have twin boys and a little girl and a dog named Tippy Boots. Pack your family in a 57 Chevy pulling a trailer and set out for California just like the Joad's in The Grapes Of Wrath. The road to California carves like the Atlantic, only the Chevy drives a little more steady.

The other part about making a slingshot is that you need a good rubber band. You need elasticity, and the willingness to stretch yourself. You get laid off Christmas Eve and come home to your family with a bottle of champagne in lieu of severance. Listen to Bing Crosby again. But this time it’s not so lonely.

Wait for the new year and then get a job at the post office where they have plenty of rubber bands to work that elasticity. Walk your route for 26 years. Take a few dog bites in the leg. This is the hard part— walking that route. Carrying, daily, that bag of love letters, bills, junk, invoices— be the conduit for mass communication of the world. Notch your knees into that great wheel, and with each turn grind them a little more to dust. Give up smoking while you're at it. Put safety pins in your breast pocket instead of The Viceroys. 

Lean on the backbone. Rest your knees when you can. Retire one day, by the ocean, a proud a union man.

Give your grandson a pocketknife and walk the backyard with him. Wait for the redwood to drop the wishbone. Don’t tell him of patience. Show him. And while you wait teach him how to open the knife, where the sharp end of the blade is, where the thumb should go, teach him to whittle. How to peel back a shield, little at a time, how it turns into curled ribbons at your feet. 

And when the redwood finally drops the wishbone pick it up, and admire it. And you’re ready. You put your blade to it. 

Wait for the post man to arrive with a pack of rubber bands.

Replace one knee. Then the next. With every visit to the hospital, inform the doctor that you plan to be around for a long time. Prove yourself right. 

And in your last days, as your grandson helps you from your easy chair into your bed on the night of your 90th birthday, tell him you hate to be a burden. Listen closely as he tells you that a man who gave so much to so many people could never be a burden. That his presence has only ever been relief. Smile with gums and teeth, and tell him goodnight.

And as you close your eyes know that you have tied well the bands of rubber onto the ends of the wishbone. That you have told him to be Careful. To Keep his hands steady and to never aim at people or animals. When your grandson asks what a slingshot is for, you close one eye, and pull back your good hand, and you let go… you release… fire into the air, and watch… as it keeps going higher and higher… out of sight… another star joining the firmament twinkling down on us… always… and with light.

A disgraced king walks off the mound, one hand hiding his soiled seat, the other shielding his eyes from the stadium lights searching for tears which threaten to fall. Two batters, 2 home runs. A crown left shimming in the dirt.

The former king, shut out from shelter by his daughters in the eighth, rides with deserting knights into the storm. The longest off-season he will ever know. He will spend winter in the hovel, holding a mock-trial for two pitches which exposed him beyond his days. The mighty redwood has fallen, chopped by Father Time and an underdog wildcard team who barely broke 90 games. He takes the bench and does not move. He knows his arm wanes like a moon, the crescent falling below the western foothills. 

The fans file out. A traffic jam won't be worth watching the bloodbath. His jersey is flattened on the pavement for cars to roll their tires over. The 31 million a year witch, burned not only on the mound, but at at the mound at The Ravine, his home.

The wildcard underdogs snap their photo on the same mound where he lost it all. A technician reaches for the light switch and darkness falls over the field. A quiet car drives him out from under the bowels of the stadium. The mansion the king walks into is held together by other giants, once felled, slaughtered, and repurposed to serve other kings, to await a brush fire or the cold and sickly rot of insects and bacteria, and time.

The Ravine will make a man and unman him in the same walls. Some say that it is just a game, but The Ravine knows better, the game is a test, and it is brutal, and everyone loses.

The Ravine is ground carved by meteors, and an unearthly energy flows from its soil. A disgruntled fan might dig below the stadium and find burial grounds, unsettled vendettas, ancient wrongs that control the destinies of men who've dared to tread the field; ghosts rise up and move the infinitesimal finger mechanics on the leather, and a low and inside goes high and in the zone for a meatball struck like lightning over the gate, a shooting star which deposes thrones, which shows clear the limits of mortal bone, and how Time always goes undefeated in the game.

The Ravine is full to the brim of secrets. Soaked into the green are the many misplacements of lost fathers, of settled-for lives, abandoned hopes, failed love, emotions too terrible to shake outside the walls of The Ravine. And here they are emptied onto the shoulders of men whom we beg to perform inhuman acrobatics, navigate chess at 100 miles per hour, and master the grip of a sphere— that is to say the whole world— stitched with a crooked equator, fingers nestled at each of the tropics. And when they fail, they shake these fetters from their shoulders, the soil of The Ravine swallows them whole, pitchforks are lit, and effigies rolled over tire by tire in the parking lot, like tanks desecrating a statue of a despot.

The Ravine knows that evil comes here to be tried. And some men, cursed by ghosts below, personify the unspoken words meant for a father gone, for the once-promised life destroyed by a few bad genes, for potential ruined by circumstance, for the darkness searching for light, these men are a repository for the shattered emptiness of existence; they are the chip rails for an emotional investment in chaos— the infinite unseen variables that outcome are heir to—the tightened fists on an armrest which try to land safely a plane rocked by turbulence; the anguished mind leaping out into nothingness shouting “God Save The King!” for they know nothing else will.

And when chaos roars, we leave The Ravine feeling empty, robbed, broken, racked by gnashing. And yet we also feel righteous in what we knew all along, that the prophets and sages were right, that life is empty, stolen, imperfect, and full of suffering. God did not save the King, God has forsaken us and now someone must be sent to the guillotine that we may feel some nudge of control over the wilderness.

The Ravine holds blood, not emptied since 1988, and it holds grudges, and fears. This is what is meant by a pitcher “on the mound.” A mass grave ready to blow the sorrows of the world over the fence; the hill which raises kings and severs them, publicly, in two pitches, two stars shot into the yard, two bolts of lightning high in the zone, hanging fruit plucked out of thin air to be swallowed whole, the seeds spat out by your rival onto your headstone.

The Ravine rests for the winter. The great beast without reverence or hope turns its belly over to digest the charnel and carrion, knowing its place and service to the world.

The coldest October 

They could remember,

And shortest.

What a thing 

To catch lightning

And miss.

In the seventh

You’re loved

And in the eighth,

Loathed.

A fight breaks out,

An ace pitcher weeps.

We skulk away

And talk of curses,

What we must do next season,

As if we ever had a say.

The gods must love 

The game. 

@ Dodger Stadium

Today marks 10 years of my daily practice of morning pages. If I have missed a day, I’m unaware of it. On days when the alarm clock broke, I did it later. On days when that became impossible I made it up the next day by doing double. Three pages or a half hour. Non-stop writing, non negotiable. It has become my little church, my tiny temple. More and more I’m a convert to the extraordinary power of small and constant acts.

I came across The Artist’s Way in the Brooklyn Library. I was dubious but it stayed in my bag for a week. I was seeing dead ends, half starts, bad jobs, and on one particularly devastating night on my Brooklyn rooftop I took inventory. Something needed to change. I went downstairs and read the first few chapters of the book, eyes rolling. ”Some of my students have done morning pages for a decade...” yeah right. But I set out a new journal and decided to try it first thing the next morning anyway. I had nothing to lose.

My heroes never needed a self help book on creativity. What failing did I possess that I needed one? These made up the laments of my first entry. I opened the journal the next day and did it again. I played along with the ruse, doing the book’s exercises, the check ins. “Get ready for radical shifts...” it warned. More eye rolling.

Within two weeks I was let go from my dead end golden handcuff job. I’d take side jobs landscaping rooftop gardens in Manhattan instead. I met a therapist on the upper west side I still see to this day. I pulled a lousy one-act out of the trash and would spend the next six months reworking it until it found a theatre, which today is my artistic home. By the autumn I’d left New York and was enrolled in a graduate school that would change my life.

I've come to these pages under-slept, hung over, sick, I wrote when the wind was fucking with the paper, on international flights where the hour of “morning” was unclear, in a tent deep in the Sierras, I wrote riding shotgun. They taught me to find rest while making something. .

Here is approximately 3 million words (Ten large novels). 1800 hours. 55 pounds of paper, filled front and back.

But this is not writing. No. It’s the patter of track shoes at dawn.  These are the folds in a bullpen catcher’s mitt. Here is the slide of petty detritus from which the occasional song arises. Here is where the apology, the business plan, and Act Two come to work themselves out. Here is the celluloid on the editing floor. The sawdust and scrap below the table. Here is indulgence in judgements and crank, bad moods, complaints, and my worst, so I can get onto my best. I often wrote while my coffee cooled, always to my left.

Julia Cameron taught me to rest at the page. Along the way I learned what a great poet once said of making— to trust that there is still time. And if there isn't time, that's okay too.

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As the sun passes from Pieces into Aries, so the new solar year begins, and so does the celebration of the New Year in Thailand. Songkran derives from a Sanskrit word meaning “to pass or move into.” The ritual of sprinkling water on statues of Buddha during this holiday as well as pouring water on the elderly and young to wash away the bad luck of the year is what gave way to the largest water fight on planet earth— the Songkran Festival in Chiang Mai. For three days (April 13-15) from noon til dusk restaurants set out large tubs and coolers full of water and city dwellers and tourists arm themselves with buckets and water guns. Others climb into the bed of a truck with a tub of water and splash anyone passing by. Woe to those who do not have their phones and wallets wrapped in watertight containers. There is little chance of not getting drenched, even in the back of a passing Tuk Tuk (poor souls, they were utterly defenseless). And why not? It’s also the hottest time of year. A splash or ten on your back is more than welcome. The tradition is not without controversy. Traffic fatalities double during this holiday. Public drunkenness is rampant. And I’m not sure where all these thousands of newly bought plastic water guns will end up in several days. But it was hard to not feel a joyous shout from the echoes of my twelve year old self as I stood my post on Rajvithi Road with new friends who greeted me with an ice cold hosing and as I sprayed my water gun and threw buckets of water at hundreds of passing strangers. And when dusk fell and the last drops dripped from my hair, you could see all the bad luck on the stones of Old City Chiang Mai streets, newly clean, glistening.

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Songkran had started (although technically the Laos new year starts on the 14th. Songkran is Thai, in Laos they call it Bun Pi Mai)

I decided to skip the monks this morning and sleep in until 7. But I made sure to walk to the morning market again and order an espresso from my coffee place which poured a mean Laotian Espresso.

At 9am the town was hosting a ceremony where they had elephants walk through town to the temple. A little before 9am five elephants walked through town with hundreds of tourists trying for good photos. It was very cool to watch. 

After that I checked out of my hotel and arranged a tuk tuk to pick me up at 4:30pm. I watched the first rough cut of The Stranded Pilot in the lobby. And then I went for lunch. As I started out I noticed people walking around with water guns. So I returned and made sure I had the plastic casing for my phone. I’m REALLY glad I did this.

On my way to lunch I crossed this main intersection and a little girl came up to me and dumped a bucket of water in my shoes. Her mother poured water down my neck. I had to laugh, they laughed too. I ordered lunch at a cafe and watched the water wars begin. This was only a small taste of what I’d see the next two days in Chiang Mai.

I went back to the hotel, changed into dry clothes and got in the back of a tuk tuk. 

BUT THE TUK TUK DRIVER HEADED FOR THE WATER FIGHT INTERSECTION!

I thought I’d be okay since I was in a kind of covered tuk tuk like yesterday. Harder to get me.

But nope… since the back was completely open, someone came up behind the truck as we went through the intersection and threw a whole bucket of water onto me in my new clothes and yelled “HAPPY NEW YEAR!” My backpack was soaked too… luckily my laptop was not.

So… THAT’S HOW YOU WANNA PLAY IT???

I arrived to the airport a little wet, but feeling very good. Oh, and even if you fly Economy on Bangkok Airways, you get a lounge!

I wouldn’t call it the Star Alliance lounge, but they had coffee and brownies!

I wrote an ode to Luang Prabang as we took off. I will surely miss this place. 

You can see the main part of town below, 

where the two rivers meet.

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Luang Prabang— Once the capital of Laos, the French withdrew in 1953 but they left behind their cafes, window shutters, and balconies. And though the United States dropped more bombs — many of which have yet to detonate— on Laos in the 60’s and 70’s than in all of Europe in WWII, I hear only peace: Where the Nam Khan river pays tribute to the Mekong, each morning before dawn the city rises to make offerings to the monks in silence. When you start your day like this, and continue to the morning market for mangos and coffee and coconut rice cakes, it’s not a wonder why your narrow streets—which murmur and do not bustle— beckon the heart to meander before settling into its bedrock. The air is hazy as farmers burn their land in preparation for the monsoon season, weeks away, to renew their crop. “The land of a million elephants” now has less than 800. I walked with five of them on the morn of the Lao new year. In the afternoon a little girl comes up to me and pours a bucket full of water into my shoes and says, “Happy New Year.” I count my resolutions carefully. At night, the murmur dims to make room for thoughts, the cafes close early— there is another offering to be made again tomorrow— and strings of light shimmer off the river. The stones in the temple sidewalks also absorb the faint glow in the night silence, and I try to do the same when I close my eyes as the plane sweeps me away into the air.

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Or, DO go chasing Waterfalls.

David and Lynn and I hired a Tuk Tuk driver for the day to take us up to see Kuang Si Falls.  Along the way we stopped at a Buffalo Farm where I got to milk my first water buffalo.  Then we stopped at the Elephant Camp, which did not seem to be a sanctuary, so I only opted to feed the elephant (though the place offered Elephant Rides, which I declined to take).

After that we headed up to the falls right as the day was getting hot.

The entrance to the trail was at the top of this small hill with vendors on either side. Lynn kindly paid for our entrance tickets and we walked in. The driver had given us towels to take with us from the hotel. Very nice service.

The first stop after you enter the trail is a BEAR SANCTUARY. Now this is a proper Bear Sanctuary, mostly for Black Bears who were part of Bear baiting or else injured or tortured. They get to live out their days in the cool jungle by a beautiful waterfall.

I also ran into Joe and Jodi for yet a third time. Small tourist town, you keep running into people. He was still wearing the Nevada Wolf Pack shirt. He said he wore it again the next day after meeting me and ran into someone else who knew about the team. So he said he was going to keep wearing it.

Jodi rolled her eyes, “I keep telling him he can’t wear the same shirt every day.”

It’s a short hike to the waterfalls. The water is blue and beautiful. You’re allowed to jump in and swim. I let David and Lynn go first while I watched our things, then I took my turn. It was by far the coldest water I’d been in in SE Asia, brisk, cool, but not quite chilly like Lake Tahoe. Just enough to give you a thrill, but not enough to give you the shivers.

I have a video of me diving in, might be worth checking my IG account…

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Legend goes, a wise old man was digging into the earth when he uncovered the waters of Nam Si. This revelation created a waterfall and a golden deer made his home under a large rock under the falls. The sound of the water falling on the deer’s home made an enchanting echo which drew people as far away as China to its cool blue pools. “Kuang” means deer. “Si” means dig. And now the sound calls people at least as far away as California.

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It felt so good to dive in and be by the falls. The water was deep, so you could really swim in it. I went up the base of the falls and sat below it and let the water thunder on my skull. Just an incredible moment. 

After that we walked up a little higher to the Upper Falls, which were much more dramatic and picturesque but you couldn’t swim there.

There was a trail which led to the top of the falls. David decided he’d wait for Lynn and I to explore it. Had we known how long it would take we probably wouldn’t have gone all the way to the top. 

But I’m glad that Lynn and I went because we made it all the way to the top. It was a hell of a hike, and switchback after switchback. The whole loop to the top and back took about an hour. Here are some steps along the way that have water running down them. Very slick, must hold the hand rails.

The top of the falls are really just a big quarry. But there was a small cafe up there (man I’d hate to be to poor son of a bitch who has to carry up a case of beer for tourists). 

Lynn and I stopped and chatted with some young folks from Spain. Lynn would be lecturing in Madrid this summer and asked for recommendations of where to go. They were all very nice and one of the gals was from Mexico City, she worked in production, her name was Lisette and she gave me her info— “in case you ever do a film in Mexico!”

Lynn and I took the long, steep steps back to the base of the Upper Falls. We met David who had several Chinese tourists lining up to take photos of him. “Must be my grey hair and my Hawaiian shirt?”

We took the truck back, feeling cool from the falls. As we were passing a small town two sets of children were lined up alongside the road. Less than three seconds after I saw them I was DRENCHED from a bucket of water. Lynn screamed. She was facing me and didn’t even see it coming. In the next second we were NAILED AGAIN from the other side of the road. This time David got soaked. 

We looked out the back of the truck as we sped off. The children were laughing and yelled “Happy New Year!”

Songkran had come a day early, I suppose.

I retired to my room and sat on my porch. And CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT MY PORCH FOR A MOMENT???

I mean… swoon city. A rocking chair? River view? 

That night I went to a Storytelling Theatre where one actor talked about the myths and legends of Laos while a musician played Laotian music. It was wonderful.

I ate at The Elephant again, and took a walk across a Bamboo Bridge, that is only set up during the dry season. When the rains come they have to pack up the bridge as the water gets too high. For their pains they ask 5,000 kip to cross, which is about seventy five cents. 

My last night in my room… and CAN WE PLEASE TALK ABOUT THIS ROOM???

I sat on the porch until quite late sipping tea. I didn’t want it to end. Laos was becoming my favorite place I’d been this whole time in Asia.