Monthly Archives: August 2008

Blown Back to Ashland: the Windiad no. 4

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The Wind Bag
Aeolus is the wind god, or he controlled the winds anyway. In exchange for stories from Odysseus, Aeolus gave a bag of winds that would help Odysseus find his way back home. Odysseus told mostly stories from the Trojan War, with other tales of fishing trips and crazy relatives in between to pad the mostly uneventful decade of half-heartedly laying siege to Troy. Aeolus wasn’t really into the stories, but he liked to listen to people talk while he cracked open a beer.

The bag of winds was really big, made of blue silk and lined with the feathers of doves and peacocks. Odysseus’s men thought it was treasure that he didn’t want to share, so they opened the bag to see what was inside. The winds were released and the ships got blown back to where they started.

One place I find myself blown back to often is Ashland.

Shakespeareville
Ashland and I go back a long way. Back when I was in high school I first visited my buddy Kevin who had just moved here. For a Southern California boy, my image of Oregon was of log cabins, rednecks, bears and forests. They all certainly exist here, but I also found a town full of artists, musicians, dancers, hippies, America’s largest Shakespeare festival, fresh air, rivers, and a sky full of stars I’d never seen through the haze of Los Angeles.

It was a revelatory vacation. I got to see an alternative to the materialistic, status-loving, car culture of Hollywood. And I questioned everything about the superficial life that I felt I’d been living. Once I returned to LA, I went through more than a decade of navel-gazing, studying religions and philosophies, to try to break through the veil of the illusory, physical world. I read a lot. And pondered over Sartre, Nietzsche, Chuang Tzu, Krishnamurti, Alan Watts, bell hooks and many others.

That was a heavy time. Since them I’ve discovered the meaning of life and I’d like to share it with you. Just send $49.99 to: Universal Secrets, P.O. Box 13, Lagos, Nigeria.

lithia fountain detail

Ramana
If you really want answers to the big questions you want to consult with my long-time friend, Ramana.

We met with her and her husband, Stacy, at a Japanese restaurant called Kobe. Surprisingly the sushi was outstanding, but very California. The delicious rolls had stereotypical names like, Red Dragon and Kamikaze, with sushi ingredients never seen in Japan like avocado and sun-dried tomatoes. When we asked for more shoyu, the waitress had a perplexed look on her face until we said, soy sauce.

Ramana is a dedicated Soto Zen practitioner. She’s the seer in my life story. She’s a combination of spacey mystic and grounded explorer. At various times in her life, she went to a prestigious art school to study film, wandered in the desert as an apprentice shaman, collected lovers in Europe like Starbuck’s city mugs, lived in Buddhist monasteries, wrote erotica.

During one of the many times I’ve crashed at her place, she kept parakeets and lived in a charming house with a sloping floor. Another time she lived in an even cuter house behind the bakery where she worked. Now as a mother and wife, she still has a priestly vibe to her, and her house is like a redwood cathedral.

In short, she’s led a fascinating life. And she’s filled my bag of winds many times over.

Bloomsbury Café
Cafes are the best places to find meaning. One café I get blown back to often, and so I guess is my favorite Ashland café, is Bloomsbury Café. It’s upstairs from the Bloomsbury bookstore. They have a large shady outdoor seating area, a cozy interior with lots of stuffed chairs. Here, I suggest reading children’s books with dark themes, after meeting a friend you haven’t seen since you were a teenager.

sycamore bark

Lithia Park
Nature is also a good place to seek answers. One of my favorite parks in the world is Lithia Park. It’s enormous, stretching for miles it seems, along Lithia Creek, which has natural lithium. Lithium water tastes like rotten eggs and the element is used to treat schizophrenia. So it’s an excellent place to stop hearing the voices in your head. The park has a pond with a pair of swans (though I didn’t see them this time around), a sycamore tree grove, a crumbling white fountain, an amphitheatre, tennis courts, roses, deer, and at one time had monkeys.

Yup, I love Ashland.

Eating Sacred Cows: The Windiad no. 3

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the lumberjack slam

The Cattle of Helios
My Odysseus references are all out of order. This one happened sometime during the middle of the voyage, but literary allusions are not bound by time. So there.

Odysseus’s fleet landed in Thrinacia, an island where a herd of beautiful cattle were raised. They were tended by Helios, the sun god. But he was busy doing sun god things so he put his daughters in charge. This bit of the story really should be called the Cattle of Phaethusa and Lampetia. They did all the hard work.

Though they were hungry, Odysseus warned his men not to eat the cattle because they were grown for the gods. But nothing can stand between a sailor and a juicy hamburger, so the men slaughtered a few cows and had themselves a feast.

In retrospect, the men should have portrayed themselves as freedom fighters, fighting for equal rights, opening up fair access to all resources, especially the choice magical beef. Instead, history knows them as a bunch of greedy, impatient louts.

The daughters told Helios, but since he was busy doing sun god things, he told Zeus, knowing that Zeus was a hothead. Sure enough, Zeus destroyed Odysseus’s last ship, and they all ended up adrift at sea on loose planks and masts.

The Sacred Cow Slam at Denny’s
On the drive up to Oregon today we stopped off at a Denny’s for dinner. T wanted to see what a real American Denny’s was like. The Denny’s in Japan has totally different food. For instance, one of my favorite dishes there is a sashimi rice bowl. At the Denny’s in Yreka (the last California town before entering Oregon), I ordered the Lumberjack Slam, and T ordered the All-American Slam. Mine came with grits (which is just fancy talk for polenta), bacon, sausages, pancakes with a pile of creamed butter on top, an extra thing of creamed butter on the side just in case I wanted to increase my chances of a heart attack, and some kind of bread.

You can have white, whole wheat, sourdough, rye, English muffin, or ciabatta with buttered garlic. With the butter shortage in Japan, I ordered the ciabatta, just to stock up, because that creamed butter on the side wasn’t really enough. Then of course, how would you like your eggs? I like mine as an omelette lightly fried in olive oil and garlic folded with whole basil leaf and avocado, but I settled for scrambled. So many choices.

Also: free refills of coffee. Miss that. It was pretty good too.

In the past, whenever I ate at a diner in a small town like Yreka, little white kids would stare at me, and mustachioed white men would eye me suspiciously from under their caps. I’m sure it was because I was so good-looking. But probably it was because they didn’t see too many people of color.

I also had waitresses talk loud and slow to me. Maybe they thought people of Asian descent were genetically predisposed to deafness. I’ll tell you one thing though. I was impressed at how well the waitresses could speak English.

This time around, at this Denny’s anyway, I didn’t feel like I attracted much attention. Maybe America has evolved. Or I theorize that maybe they think I’m a soldier. So they afford me a little more respect and less gawking. Ever since the Iraq War began, I get more people assuming that I’m a marine. It’s probably my excellent posture, and penchant for military colors. Or maybe I have a look on my face that says, “I’ve killed men, but I’d rather not talk about it. More butter, please.”

In the 1980’s, there were numerous instances of African-Americans and Asian-Americans being refused service, being given atrocious service, forced to pay in advance, or pay more than white customers at Denny’s. There were other uglier incidents of these customers being forcibly removed by security for demanding to be served.

In 1994, a large class-action lawsuit was successfully filed against Denny’s. After that, the company implemented sensitivity training for all its employees. And by 2001, Denny’s was deemed by Fortune Magazine as “the best company for minorities”. So maybe America did evolve a little more in the last decade. Now we all have equal access to more butter and increased risks for heart disease!

The Spiderwick Chronicles

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Spiderwick_chronicles_poster.jpg

On the plane ride over the Pacific there were no individual TV screens. This made me not watch 3 movies, play video games, and stay up for the whole flight. I didn’t even read anything or write. I closed my eyes and slept. That was new. It also helped that the movies being shown on the overhead screens were a a movie I’d never heard about, The Spiderwick Chronicles, and I Am Sam.

I did watch The Spiderwick Chronicles though. The movie was about a notebook writen long ago that held secrets of supernatural creatures, collected by Mr. Spiderwick. An ogre and his evil toad-like followers want this book so he could have power over all magical creatures.

The adventures center around a boy with anger issues who blames his mom for his dad leaving. His sister is tough and wields a saber. His twin brother often exclaims, “I don’t do conflict.”

There are fairies, sprites, brownies, a griffon, hobgoblins. And the elderly daughter of Dr. Spiderwick, who’s dealing with abandonment issues of her own.

Seeing imaginary creatures is always cool and the allegory of moving beyond daddy wasn’t tiresome. Clearly the writer had an absent father. The more interesting subtext is about the misuse and dangers of knowledge. Because Spiderwick refused to destroy his notebook, the bits of knowledge that leaked out to the ogre was used to hurt others, including his own family. And the message? Maybe we should just experience the wonders of the world instead of trying to unlock it’s secrets.

Eating Lotus in California: The Windiad no. 2

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The Lotus Eaters
Early in Odysseus’s voyage, his ships anchored among the Lotus Eaters. They were a friendly, easy-going people, who fed the tired travelers tasty lotus. There was lotus tempura, lotus meatballs, lotus dip, lotus frappucinos, and best of all, lotus tiramisu. Even the women were clothed only in skimpy lotus bikinis.

Eating all this lotus made the men not care about anything. Many of them fell asleep and stayed asleep. Some of them were just spaced out and spent their time lighting lotus incense, doodling, and eating lotus chips and lotus brownies. Fortunately, Odysseus wasn’t a big fan of lotus since he was forced to eat the canned stuff in pre-school, so he stayed awake. Once he figured out what was happening, he woke the men who were wakeable and left that decadent land.

horseback

Space
I’m back in the land of shopping carts the size of small boats, gallon jugs of juice, thick fluffy q-tips, cheap fruit, bulk buying, second refrigerators, decaf (!), honey, organic food, doggy bags, creamy sweet soy milk, Mexican beers for $1.25 each, outdoor barbecues, turkey jerky,

Three-car garages, SUVs, car trunks stuffed with expensive speakers blaring out into the wide empty streets, cars being washed on driveways filled with autos for each family member, free street parking, expansive parking lots, clearly marked streets, pedestrian right-of-way,

swimming pools, tennis and basketball courts in every neighborhood, sunglasses, baseball caps, sweats, minimal make-up, sun-damaged skin, non-smokers,

walk-in closets, media rooms, vaulted ceilings, master bedrooms, hired gardeners, termites and dry rot,

and space. Lots and lots of space. In the clear blue skies, the supermarket aisles, the loose pants, the unused sidewalks, the sparkling ocean to my left, the prickly hills of oak and manzanita to my right. Room to breathe, room to walk around without having to worry about bumping into people. Space and room and breath.

Greeting Strangers
It’s great to have T here with me because she’s always noticing things I’ve taken for granted. For instance, she pointed out that there was no short size for drinks at cafes. The smallest is tall. And a small drink here at a restaurant would be considered a medium or large in Japan or Europe. Or the way restaurant servers and store clerks casually chat with customers.

Then there are the myriad of things about California or West Coast culture that makes me feel more at ease. Like I can wear sunglasses without people suspiciously looking at me as if I could be a gangster. Here, everyone wears sunglasses.

And on the drive from the airport to my parents’ place I observed a total of 5 men wearing tank tops, my upper body attire of choice. Here, the men wear loose pants, a t-shirt, a baseball cap, sneakers, and are good to go. No $50 haircuts, designer t-shirts referencing rural Americana, and pointy alligator-skin shoes. I’m not putting the alligator-skin crowd down. I just don’t relate to that. Of course, many young men here wear $200 sneakers. And I don’t get that either.

On the walk down to the neighborhood tennis courts, we passed by a total of two people on the sidewalk. They, strangers both, smiled and said hi. I forgot about this ritual, of greeting strangers on the street. But it made me happy to be back home.

I’m happy to eat lotus again. For a while anyway.

industrialia