Couch Surfing at 70

It’s just beyond noon on this Thursday and I’ve done a few things for sure – early walk, all the morning routines, a zoom into Oakland, another shopping visit to Trader Joe’s, a walk over to the Encinitas Senior Center where – here comes delusional me – everyone seemed older and with enough friends and…

I had a phone call today. I made the call. It was a long call, and the person to whom I was speaking – no, make that begging for help – hung in the whole time. Second hand, minute hand spinning round and round. Doofus on this end of the line a technical no-nothing, and,…

Today I got interviewed. I got fingerprinted. I got stuck in traffic on the 5 (again). I got a sweet drive on the Ted Williams Freeway. I got to think about Ted. I got ten thousand grand hummingbirds and butterflies and morning doves. I got a cranky up-and-down morning walk (yuck) and a special, lovely…

I was explaining to someone from La Paz, Mexico this morning, a current housemate, that when I announced the third week in January of this year I was going to begin a daily Monday through Friday Blog post that what I would be reporting on any given of those days would be what I called…

Lots of little things today. Dots at the ends of sentences – the sentences left, the ones I think of. The last hours. Thursday, the first of July, covid apparently wanes, my marriage is over. I went out into Kate’s back yard, under a spreading apple tree, and trimmed my beard and hair with the…

All of this, everything since the ides of April, all the everything of it, and I’ve layed it out as a blogger as best I could these last days – these damaged and these improving days, 78 of ’em. All of it. None of this was my idea. I imagine it fell out of me…

out early on the lop-sided track, beating the ongoing heat, I realized I was missing walking with my wife. My all-time favorite walking-with-human. They say we don’t regret the past – I don’t know. yesterday it reached 114, they predict 97 today, like some cold front’s gone through, people looking forward to 97. Life’s kind…

I just left Encinitas – electricly, on the computer winds of the internet. Zoom-traveler. It won’t always be that way, the ethernet coming and goings. Forth to and back from Encinitas. It won’t be that way next week. I said to my fellow Encinitas Zoomers this morning that a very terrible thing had happened to…

Today’s Friday and between you and me, this time exactly one week from now – it’s 3:41 pm Friday June 25 – I’ll be in some state of mesmerizement, gunning it south on the 5, having left the greater Portland metro one last time , driving since daylight and hopefully driving another hour or two…

Out early this morning, on the lop-sided track, I heard my Higher Power say to me, very clearly — “Welcome to the party.”

I emailed and/or FB messaged 15 of the 18 people who’s names I have on a list on a page in a steno pad with the title “Keep these folks updated always” (underlines included) – people who have reached out to me persistently and lovingly with kindness and generosity far beyond any expectations I may…

I was just out trimming a number of bushes in Kate’s yard – in preparation for a new windows operation early tomorrow – and helping some to earn my keep for days past and days remaining here in a sacred space of generosity in Milwaukie, Oregon. I’ll be off in an hour to make the…

I was married in a large bed/breakfast kind of place on top of a mountain in Luray, Virginia. There was a woman (Zeta) who was legally certified to perform the ceremony by Page County and the state of Virginia. There was the woman filling in and running the ‘Inn” that day. There was the bride…

I went walking down the very steep hill from the Eastmoreland parking lot into Oaks Bottom today, this Friday. It’s a sacred place for me and it’s felt entirely sacred and generous in its natural abundance for all 10 or 11 of the last years I’ve been one of its visitors. I’ve probably averaged four…

It’s 12:33. I innocently began completing the job application for the job I may – it’s possible – I could have one of these not-too-far-in-the-future days in a sunny southern California beach-side town. I figured it would take 20 minutes – 30 tops. I began at 10:18. You remember that song by The Who –…

Real early quickie today. The plan is to head up to Gresham and visit with Spenser. He returned later last night from a week in Idaho with the new family and in-laws – all of whom he adores. Therefore it was not a surprise when he indicated little to no interest hanging out with Dad…

Here’s the second dictionary definition of “labile” – “Of or characterized by emotions that are easily aroused or freely expressed, and that tend to alter quickly and spontaneously; emotionally unstable.” Someone’s been reading my mail. But first, let me take a stroll down memory lane all the way back to 1984, 1985, some of ’86.…

I sat down here, Monday 1:20, leaning over a small ottoman on which sits my laptop. On which I’m typing this – amazingly slowly – my first ever Blog from here, and what I remember as a kid’s song – “Here we go loop de loop” came floating on into my head, I guess the…

Kind of a Cure anagram there, if you can dig that. And coming is stream of consciousness, no available topic, updates to friends including a call from my bosom pal Garden State Mike from over there by the Jersey shore, lost track of time and logged on wicked late to the second Zoom meeting of…

Today has been a day of irrationalities. It began well, up on time, crack ‘o dawn, all morning rituals, Morning Pages completed in the notebook resting on a hardcover Pablo Picasso Retrospective, which I carry around to open and be artistically stimulated but these days only serves as a desktop on the futon in Kate’s…

I had a vision yesterday of how this particular post would look, sound, and read. But that’s all gone. The idea of living life one day at a time had never been more vivid and tangible for me, ever, 72 years worth and (thankfully) still counting. So I (thank you Great Spirit) wake up today…

It’s just after six Tuesday night. Somehow the plans to write an early afternoon post got scuttled. Actually, I’m sure I could relate in detail pretty much exactly how that happened – Bad phone call with perspective roommate – a big “No.” Lost touch with angel offering two weeks from which to reconnoiter locally (not…

Grace Slick said that at Woodstock, with the Airplane. “It’s a new dawn.” Right before she said her kind of famous “Good morning people.” I myself wasn’t at Woodstock, kind of blew it skipping that, but my younger sister went. I know what Grace said, though, because I’ve seen the movie a bunch and listened…

Hello. This will be my lost post in the Couch Surfing Blog I submit from Portland, OR. I’m leaving Sunday. It feels like it’s been a real good run, being here in Portland, on my own (mostly) for the first year and then luckily going on a ‘Match’ blind date and meeting a woman who…

I sit here at my computer, late Thursday morning, and I could and maybe want to write many things here at Couch Surfing that – even me hearing them as I consider the words – would sound like feeling sorry for myself. I don’t want to do that because that’s not how I feel. I…

Late to the party, ho-hay, I made a thing with myself (vow seems too heavy, commitment too math-like), anyway I told myself I would write my first post from the laptop today – what with the imminent dissembling of the computer, day after tomorrow or next, and I better make sure I can get it…

These are the final five days in this house for me. This house into which I moved in May of 2010. The house in which I became an artist again after a quite long gap from the fourth grade. The house in which I wrote and published eight books, in the process becoming a poet…

This Blog space remains silent today – in honor.

Oh, late Friday afternoon, is it me or are the minutes, hours, and days whizzing by. Like it was just Tuesday when I was dropping Spenser at his soon-to-be new home over with Aaron in the next town of Gresham, 15 miles in driving distance but a route from one of Dante’s lower levels of…

On April 14th, a Wednesday, at almost exactly 11 o’clock in the morning my wife – beginning the talk she said she wanted to have, said to me, “This is going to be hard, especially for you, but I want a divorce.” Yeah, it was hard, harder than almost anything, and it still is. That…

I felt I had a long, organized, well-thought-out, word piece for this Couch Surfing home for today, this Wednesday, exactly six weeks since my life flipped over and the world changed in an instant – my world anyways, and my kid’s. So this morning up in the recliner, say 5:45, I had this cool idea…

It’s days like today I wish I’d started keeping a journal back from like when I was 10 up until yesterday. The ongoing scribbled story of my life. First, I think journaling is cool, and lately for me this Blog space has felt something what I expect writing in a journal feels like, especially since…

The keyboard on which I’m typing this Monday morning sits on the old Cushman kitchen table from when I was a kid living with my parents and two sisters in Wareham, Massachusetts and which my mother gifted to me some 50 years ago and which has been hauled and motorvated and delivered back and forth…

I got on a bus in Laguna Beach, CA New Year’s Eve 1982 and hopped off in downtown Boston at the Park Street station four days and 96 hours later. A guy named Bob was there to pick me up and take me back to his apartment in Medford for what I hoped would be…

Sometime early in the 1990’s I was living in Florida and working in Deland as a “Delinquency Case Manager”. That was a formal, human service-y name for a juvenile probation officer – employed by the State of Florida. At any given time I had 20-30 kids on my caseload, almost all of whom were good…

Strung out, busy, dusty, and productive. Not in a bad way. The kid’s shining today too. This Wednesday.

Late afternoon, empty mind, dust in the nose and down the lungs, serious Spenser room diving in – him the “Star”, me his “employee” – now late and nothing here (Couchsurfing) yet and the promise, the vow, of M-F posts will be kept, and I was thinking of Dr. Wayne Dyer, who’s cassette tapes I…

If you’re older, like me, you probably remember the Jackson Browne song “Running on Empty”. It came to my mind in the recliner this morning, second cup of coffee dwindling, notebooks askew, and when the song arrived I knew through and through there was not a thing metaphoric about it. These days (another Browne piece…

My computer was hit by a trillion virus-like intrusions today. I kept being kicked out and away from the things I was trying to do – scary “Fatal Error” blue-screen messages and no cursor to be see, I had to manually shut the computer off then turn back-on, try to recover the Word docs and…

Late to the keyboard today, most of which has struggled past. I’ll be brief. This has been a wipe out day. I was wiped out, fully, by 7:30 am, where I could be found at the basement table, weeping over my then-unfinished Morning Pages. Earlier, at 5:30, I’d read two texts from a former college…

On a walk last night I got to thinking about yin and yang – yin-yang. In fact, those three words have slipped into and through my mind a number of times the last few weeks. To be honest, I’ve never truly understood their meaning or if yin was the ‘good’ one and yang the ‘bad’,…

Monday’s a recycle day on this street. This street in Portland, Oregon where I magically appeared some 11 years ago, and from which I will leave one final time at month’s end. I admit that the water’s around me have grown, and the times are a-changing. Anyway, sometime late morning or early afternoon the recycle…

Henry David Thoreau said the kindest thing a human being can do is to allow another human being to help them. Maybe not in those words exactly, but that was his point – be kind….let somebody help. Those don’t-drink-one-day-at-a-time people have, I’m told, a saying which says this – “You’ve got to give it away…

I saw I’d received a (disturbing) text from my wife last night – who was two rooms away when she sent it – and I said to myself don’t read it right before bed (9:30) and I read it and alarms and crazies and fears and emotions went off in my head and I was…

My son Spenser and I began this afternoon the work of cleaning out his closet. For the upcoming move. Like some crash sale – everything must go. Regular readers of the Blog likely know Spenser has Down Syndrome. Which means his thinking process is unique and works just fine for him except when it doesn’t.…

Some days the dreams flow back.

In the mornings I think about stuff. With two or three coffees, and even more (thinking) lately since I stopped reading three weeks ago. Can’t get a grip on the words. So it’s me and coffee and three steno pads and one wire-bound notebook, a Bic medium pen, and whatever random thoughts stroll in, float…

It’s hard. Some days are hard. I woke at 3 a.m. and could not fall back asleep a long time – whirring and swirling, wondering, wondering – and I fell asleep at some point and woke up into this Monday and my thought was, it’s hard. Last night, on a walk, a friend I don’t…

Emperor Wu of Liang asked the great master Bodhidharma, “What is the main point of this holy teaching?” “Vast emptiness, nothing holy,” said Bodhidharma. “Who are you, standing in front of me?” asked the emperor. ” “I do not know,” said Bodhidharma. The emperor didn’t understand. Bodhidharma crossed the Yangtze River and went to the…

Back in the early eighties I had a mentor kind of guy named Dick M. That was his name. He was one of those don’t drink just today folks, and as he was indeed a mentor to me, I guess I was to. I sure liked him a lot, and he seemed to like me.…

I think it was this past Friday, out on one of these real long walks I’ve been taking twice a day the last couple of weeks, a thought came to me, each word clear in my head, the thought resonating through my entire being – soul and all. It was this: “Give all my energy…

I’ve always liked that saying, from whenever I first heard it, I think maybe with the don’t drink one day people, or it could have been in one or another residential setting with some loopy adolescents. Don’t remember. But, I always liked it, with its implicit action of course: Do the next right thing. Lately…

I can see it like it was yesterday. Summer into fall, 2007, the sun is shining, the days are balmy, welcoming. The Red Sox are winning. There’s me, crashing on a loft bed wide open above the kitchen of my sister Sandy’s house. Her house along with my brother-in-law DeeDee. Yeah, he’s got a more…

In all my life I have never felt more than right now, right here today, that it is my life’s work – my true path – to sit at the keyboard and rave on. Rave on, Brah. Say it.

“No man is a failure who has friends.” If you are like me, and kind of stuck on the holiday movie “It’s a Wonderful Life”, you know that is what the angel Clarence writes to George Bailey after dramatically showing him he, George, had indeed lived a wonderful life. I bring this up because a…