Tuesday Jan 31st 2007
Our next city is Redding, California about 3 hours north of Vacaville. Driving I start talking note of the small towns that we pass:
Yolo,
Zamora
Arbuckle
Willows
Artois
Coming ( a very satisfied town)
Gerber
Proberta
Narnia
Red Bluff
Girvand
Redding
We arrive pretty late, put our bags into the room and look for something open, to quench our thirst. Across the street is a 24 hour Casino. Inside on the right is a bar with about 10 people, mostly hip kids in their Dickey uniformity, but somehow not quite right, like the kid with tattoos a Dickey hat and jacket, regulation facial side burns, but light blue jeans and puffy white skater shoes. Leaning against the bar is a larger woman with an orange dress and red scarf around her neck. She is droaning a slowed down power balad Karaoke version of Whitesnake. We walk further back into the "Casino" looking for the casino. In the back there are about 4 poker tables and two are full. Here to things seem scripted, the two younger men in proscribed goatees smoking cheap cigars, the woman leaning back in a black ill fitting dress showing the obligatory clevage and cheap perfume. Here they are big rollers, sitting in torn fake leather chairs, thread bare tables and dreams of a different life.
We go back to the bar and get a few drinks and the same woman is singing Karaoke. We go to the patio to have a smoke. A thirty something, leather faced but once attractive woman comes out and sits at the table across from us. She comments on our suits and asks what we do. She tells us that jeans would work better in Redding than suits. I notice that her shirt says Misiltoe. I ask her if I am under the misiltoe where do I kiss." She gives us a blank look and then we have to explain her shirt to her. She still doesn't get it. She goes on talking and talking about real estate, and her voice became a frustration of flies buzzing in our ears.
We leave the bar, walking past the same woman singing yet another dirge of some popular hit and walk out into the night air.
Wednesday
During the seminar there is a lot of down time for us as the presenter goes through his sales pitch. I am reading Helene Cixous and amazing writer and feminist theorist.
" We are criminals and we do not know how to express or prove that we are criminals. The problem is, as criminals we were recognized as such, we would have to pay for the crime. Yet if we paid, the crime would disappear and our debt wiped out.
We must keep our crime safe, to avoid the terrible fate of being forgiven."
Helene Cixous
This seminar is larger than usual and it makes it harder to make connections with people. One man says he is a writer and his book is in its tenth printing. I am curious about this book. He tells me that it is a book about financial independence through window washing. Books on window washing sell more than poetry in the US. America, a country not of poets, but of Bankers and Window Washers!
I am also reading Book of Sketches by Keroauc and decide to write one of my own.
Late morning
Red lion
Hotel Parking
Redding, California
Staring at Big Ass
Gas station sign
Orange &
Blue 76.
And the stretched
Out brown line horizon.
Electrical
Tower arms
stretched out
forty feet,
Farther out
Old White
Volcano
Shasta
Stares back.
The seminar ends and Mykul wants to stop by at Chico where he used to live and go to school. Chico is college town and is known as a party school.
In Chico we park and hang out at a locals coffee shop. The town is mostly dead. Mykul finds out that we missed an open mic poetry reading by 30 min, we bow our heads. While we are sitting there, three hybrid hippie/skaters come up to us and start talking. One is dancing on some kind of stilts. They ask Mykul for rolling papers and start rolling a few joints. One of the kid is a magician and starts doing tricks for us.
Mykul has some friends that live near by so go see if we can hook up with them. They have a good time talking about old times and catching up. The guys are smart and we talk and laugh about topics from Korean culture, Poe, Andrew's horrible Texas accent when he tries to speak Japanese. Andrew tells us of a short cut back to Sacramento and we leave about 2 am. Our flight leaves at 6:30am so its another departure day without sleep.
The drive is down a state road past working orchards. The moon is half full and lights the bare trees. There are patches of fog across the road and in the fields. These feel like the true field of dreams where the dead wander at night hidding behind trees as our headlights come to view. Here they hunt for fading memories of the living, among the roots of bare fruit trees and give off their sad light of longing.
Almost to airport, we can't stay awake so sleep at a rest stop. We wake up two hours later and meet the rest of the team curbside. We land in Salt Lake City and the only thing we can think of is sleep.
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