Revenge of the Lawn

I’m haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.

I’ve been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happened like lint.

—Richard Brautigan

March 26, 2009, 9:13pm  

Oh, pretty girl, you have trapped
yourself in the wrong body.  Twenty
extra pounds hang like a lumpy
tapestry on your perfect mammal nature.

Three months ago you were like a
deer staring at the first winter snow.

Now Aphrodite thumbs her nose at you
and tells stories behind your back

—Richard Brautigan

March 24, 2009, 6:35pm  

‘…three German Shepherd puppies wandered away from their home up near the County line.’
North County Journal
Serving Northern Santa Cruz County

I have been thinking about this little item that I read in the North County Journal for a couple of months now. It contains the boundaries of a small tragedy. I know we are surrounded by so much blossoming horror in the world (Vietnam, starvation, rioting, living in hopeless fear, etc) that three puppies wandering off isn’t very much, but I worry about it and see this simple event as the possible telescope for a larger agony.

‘…three German Shepherd puppies wandered away from their home up near the County line.’ It sounds like something from a Bob Dylan song.

Perhaps they vanished playing, barking and chasing each other, into the woods where lost they are to this very day, cringing around like scraps of dogs, looking for any small thing to eat, intellectually unable to comprehend what has happened to them because their brains are welded to their stomachs.

Their voices are used now only to cry out in fear and hunger, and all their playing days are over, those days of careless pleasure that led them into the terrible woods.

I fear that these poor lost dogs may be a shadow of a future journey if we don’t watch out.

—Richard Brautigan

March 19, 2009, 6:22pm  

For Marcia

I want your hair
to cover me with maps
of new places,

so everywhere I go
will be as beautiful
as your hair

—Richard Brautigan

March 16, 2009, 5:49pm  

she tries to get things
out of men
that she can’t get
because she’s not
15% prettier

—Richard Brautigan

March 15, 2009, 2:02pm  

There are thousands of stories with original beginnings. This is not one of them. I think the only way to start a story about contemporary life in California is to do it the way Jack London started The Sea-Wolf. I have confidence in that beginning.

It worked in 1904 and it can work in 1969. I believe that beginning can reach across the decades and serve the purpose of this story because this is California — we can do anything we want to do — and a rich young literary critic is taking a ferryboat from Sausalito to San Francisco. He has just finished spending a few days at a friend’s cabin in Mill Valley. The friend uses the cabin to read Schopenhauer and Nietzsche during the winter. They all have great times together.

While travelling across the bay in the fog he thinks about writing an essay called The Necessity for Freedom: A Plea for the Artist.

Of course Wolf Larsen torpedoes the ferryboat and captures the rich young literary critic who is changed instantly into a cabin boy and has to wear funny clothes and have to take a shit off everybody, has great intellectual conversations with old Wolf, gets kicked in the ass, grabbed by the throat, promoted to mate, grows up, meets his true love Maud, escapes from Wolf, bounces around the damn Pacific Ocean in little better than a half-assed rowboat, finds an island, builds a stone hut, clubs seals, fixes a broken sailing ship, buries Wolf at sea, gets kissed, etc: all to end this story about contemporary life in California sixty-five years later.

Thank God.

—Richard Brautigan

March 14, 2009, 6:12pm