Even Further

So, $600.00 smak-a-roos?

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I read a quote this morning from Woody Guthrie.

“Just decide what you want to write about. Then you decide why you don’t want to write about it. Then you climb gently and sweetly up to your paper, and with a pen, pencil or typewriter thoroughly cocked and primed … just go ahead and WRITE IT.”

This is the third day I have woke up at almost 6 a.m. on the dot. I love waking up early before everyone else. Today what I want to write about is writing. What I don’t want to write about is anxiety and depression … and finding a way to fund-raise for projects. Or just the business side of writing at all. What I certainly don’t want to write about is AI writing. So lets save writing about Artificial Intelligence for another day and write about anxiety, depression, writing and money. Let’s call that supporting the arts. The money part, that is. One of the first books I can remember reading all the way through was Seven Arrows by Hyemeyohsts Storm. I was about seventeen when I read it. The reason I mention that I read it all the way through was because in my schooling, not once did I read a book cover to cover and not once did I write a paper. I did what is called fall through the cracks. I quit school at sixteen and got a General Education on Decency. GED.

When I found at age seventeen or so L.S.D., Native American books, Bob Marley, Pink Floyd and the Grateful Dead … reading was not something I was into. Listening certainly was my way of learning and to make things easier Seven Arrows had pictures and a teaching story that has stuck with me all the way to where I sit, even now, cuddled up to my laptop sweetly writing just as Woody Guthrie suggested in that Instagram Post from the Woody Guthrie center. That post with the quote was the first thing I saw today on a screen. Wake and scroll some might call it.

The teaching story in the book Seven Arrows is a public domain story that has been passed down from several different sources. It is a classic hero’s journey story where the hero in the story, a small mouse, leaves the comforts of home to travel down life’s long lonesome highway straight into the riding off into the sunset motif. Transformation with a happy ending. The story is like one of those old AAA Triptick flippable road-maps, or for the new generation of folks, the story is like Google Maps for what happens when you decide to finally do that thing that you have just got to do against all advice. Partly, anxiety can be from not knowing what is going to happen. Depression can come from dealing with the result of what happened and not knowing how to navigate the truth of the matter, when life shows you the raw details of just how mean and nasty this world and people can be. Especially to seekers and visionaries.

One of the life lessons to be learned from the story is when the little mouse finally up and leaves the small community of other mice and goes off in the direction of what has been driving the little mouse crazy. It was a roaring sound. It was that rolling thunder of thoughts that can drive a person crazy when they just got to get the fuck outta whatever they might be stuck at. The mouse runs off, leaving its friends behind and then something wild and wonderful happens. The little mouse comes back to the circle of friends and finds that all the friends are just the same and now suspicious of the little mouse. The, You Can’t Go Home Again, idea. Back when I was doing acid and being all hippie this story meant something different than it does now. What that story is now and has become over time is more like a mirror. Every time I read it, it does more to reflect what I am doing now, like what am I thinking about when I read it. Where am I in the Medicine Wheel of life.

I think I should have been a Psychologist. Or maybe a Spiritual Leader or something, however, the last thing I would want to do is be all groovy and weird or creepy and cheesy. Seven Arrows is a Native American “spiritual” book. Many of the books that I actually read after leaving school were what would be called “spiritual.” Back in my Pink Floyd, Grateful Dead, Bob Marley days, I was losing my religion so far as to say and needed something else to guide me into what was soon going to be one of the hardest, and sometimes when reflecting back on it, embarrassing times in my life. When manic depression gets a hold of ya, thoughts and prayers, just let go and let God just isn’t enough. At least not for me. I needed a road map to show me how to get back from the end. In my very humble opinion, this is what I find listening to many younger folks now. They lack the connective stories and life lessons that can come from teaching stories and mentoring.

I went into the kitchen a minute ago and had a thought about one of my other favorite teaching stories. It seems I learn a-lot from rodents. It is a Sufi teaching story, called The Cat Swami and the Rats, told by Muhammad Raheem Bawa Muhaiyaddeen. It’s a story about a sly cat in a grain house that tricks rats to trust him. To make a great story short, he ends up eating them one by one. What I learned from that story is to not take the guru spiritual thing too seriously and always questions the motives of anything I take on to be my guide. Back in my day, new age religion was back in town and everyone in my circle was doing something with crystals, gurus, goddess stuff, mandalas, magnetic channeling of Thomas Merton, drums, drugs, acid whatever … palm reading, tarot cards.

So, to get back to what I don’t want to write about and do what to write about, I enjoy telling my life story, so as it helps others who may be questioning their faith, or thinking about doing drugs or goddess forbid, thinking about killing themselves. I can’t really talk about that subject because I never got that depressed and when talking about that subject, I can not offer anything except get expert help. But what I can talk about is transformation and going head first into places that you can not go back to, or even look back at, until you actually do that thing that some folks call, kill your self. The ego. The self. That sound inside your head that takes you places that sometimes you can not control. And that is what I think LSD taught me the most, was that I was not in control. Anxiety is sometimes that feeling of not being in control and wanting to be. To a control freak, LSD might help because for many hours, something else is guiding your mind, or at least has a grip on it and no matter how much you think you can, you can not make it stop.

My Son, who was eighteen at the time, took a whole bunch of mushrooms and ended up at the hospital getting his stomach pumped. He blacked out and was uncontrollable and somewhere in the trip, he broke one of his teeth. He told me when I asked him what he learned from his trip that he would not do mushrooms again. I told him good idea, but that doing something like that for many cultures is not something all that out of the ordinary. He is living with Native People out in Oklahoma and one of his Elders suggested he should visit the Peyote Church and do his trip with folks who know how to handle an eruption such as he experienced.

As a Father, I made a rule with my kid that we would not talk about drugs and smoking weed all the time. Kinda that, “I don’t want to hear about it, I am your Dad.” Like I don’t want to watch him climb up a very tall tree, or climb down the path of a 300 foot log slide that is so steep that you can’t see the bottom. He did that once. I had to walk away. I walked away from smoking weed, LSD and other intoxicants such as those drugs to work with kids and eventually work for the railroad. So let’s cut to the chase. Let’s get right down in the dirt about what I really don’t want to write about but I do and that is making money from writing.

I am a musician as well as a writer. I am also an Outlaw, but that is another topic I want to write about. Money. Yuk, I am an Anti Capitalist, so making money requires a serious discussion on commodities and the movement of cash through a system of economics. One of the ways you make money is by using a tool, and somehow possessing the tool makes you a crafts-person, and then you go and get a job and then the money comes rolling in. Like, busking for example. Standing out in the street where people are and using your guitar or whatever and singing a tune and the folks empty their pockets of spare change into a hat or some sort of bucket. But who has spare change anymore and what tool does a writer use? And who wants to “commodify” their hobby or turn their hobby in the arts into a job? Henry David Thoreau in his book, Walden Pond, uses his first chapter as a tool to let his critics and readers know what he did with his money all the way down to the penny. My dream would be to make about $600.00 dollars a month doing what I love. That doesn’t to me seem to much of a wild hair up my ass or what some might call a get rich quick scheme or even a hair brained idea.

Over the last few days of mentioning on Facebook that there is a way to support my writing fund, I raised $30 dollars. $10 dollars from three people. So in the vein of Thoreau, let’s talk. What would I do with $600.00 dollars and how would I make it? And even more important … you won’t get help unless you ask … so, please support my work and that means now you have a responsibility and you will have to use a tool, such as a debit card and Pay Pal. And see how cringe this whole topic can be? I am three hours into just this post and I will edit it and tweak it a bit. By the time I post this, I will have worked six or more hours with my laptop, mind and soul and be pretty wore out. I will think to myself and worry about some of the topics covered. Should I have said that stuff about suicide? And then I’ll hit the publish button and throw my work out into the world for all to see and that is somewhat of a liability and opening myself up for critical judgment. That is what this work is. Writing. It’s no joke and can be hard and exhausting.

So, $600.00 smak-a-roos? Where I am living now, I have health coverage because of socialized medicine. My rent is very low and I don’t consume that much. I like the small things in life such as rocks and feathers. So, my money goes pretty far. I am blessed and humbled by being taken care of by my situation in life. I am not rich by any means. I smoke and drink coffee. So, that is the worst place YOUR money might go. Into my belly might be another place. I may use some of it to support another writer or musician. If I do then we would have to have another conversation of circles and money moving in a localized free market system. Then we would be right back to square one talking about money. So, let’s get back to talking about the things we don’t want to write about. Politics, Religion and Drugs! Shall we?

I don’t like labeling things. Like socialist or spiritual or crazy. When things get a label, things are sent into the generalization bin and run a risk of being “too” something. Too radical, too religious, that kinda talk. One of the things I hope I can achieve by telling my thoughts like I do, is that it will help somebody get through life, whatever this is. I borrowed that from Kurt Vonnegut’s son. Vonnegut said something close to that was one of his favorite quotes. So to label myself, to generalize myself into a pigeon hole and paint myself with a wide brush, I might suggest that I am a spiritual person who believes in cooperative social circles that are created and maintained for the necessity of providing help or in the service of need. I would also call myself a person who has mental health issues because I have learned to deal with my manic/depressive mental illness. I am a fearless person sometimes and now we are back at that word, Outlaw.

I don’t have any tattoos and I don’t use drugs. So how could that make me an Outlaw? Well, I am not an Outlaw, but Willie Nelson is and Waylon Jennings was, no? There is a real gang from where I am from called the Outlaws Motor Cycle Club, MC. They are what is called 1 percenters because they represent the 1 percent of people in this world who do not give a fuck at all and will do whatever they want, whenever they want, and make no bones about it. I am not that. I am the other side of the spectrum from that. I am more like an Anarchist. And these days, being a socialist or anything in the shades of what some might call red can get you killed, or silenced, or removed from your position. That is why I like the word Outlaw. I live outside the law of whatever it might be that is said to be the rule. That is why I as a rule, don’t plan to make my blog a subscriber per month kinda thing. I have been told by some that that is the way to go. I would rather state my need and see if I can get that need met. We all need money in this pre-apocalypse clepto-capitalist global economy. No? I am non-violent as well and dedicated to non-violence almost as a religion.

So here we are at the conclusion of this post. Now I will wrap it all up and move on so I can get to the editing and tweaking part of this work. What I wanted to write about was faith, mental health and drugs. What I didn’t want to write about was money and the need for it. I did get to name drop some of my favorite famous people. Willie Nelson’s recording Red Headed Stranger got me through a divorce and that leads to another thing I wanted to write about and that was teaching stories and mentors. I hope you made it through this OK. Any questions? Ideas? Leave a comment and don’t forget to subscribe … (hehe). In conclusion, see ya soon and chow chow … Auf Wiedersehen –

Tschüss!

John Paul
Lustenau, Austria

circa 1990 in Cherokee Park, Louisville

To My Brothers in the Brotherhood

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To My Brothers in the Brotherhood

(When I left work – exhausted and hot.
Our secretary was hanging directions
to our meeting on the union board.)

Peace be with you.
And also with you.

It is my direct action to love!
Go home directly, hug my boy –
kiss the wife and hit the sack.

Peace be with you.
And also with you.

Let us pray.

Brothers, one day you will take
this union as sacrament.
This power we seek is to unite human
heart with sacred vision.
To be forward thinking – with resolve.
Our kinship, our favor.
Our love for one another,
will be our saving grace.
It is radical to speak without kind intention.
It is what it is, is the mantra of the broken.
Reality dictates that our strength comes in numbers.
It is ignorance that expects people
to come, who have not been invited.
It is morality that guides us to be all inviting.
Conscience that tells of our failure.

Peace be with you.
And also with you.

Let us pray.

Let us not fall to fear of what might
happen if we raise our voices on high.
They will say, “they won’t stick together!”
They will say, “they don’t care!”
They will say, “they have fallen to
greed and don’t understand!”
Let us be like the tree,
planted by the water.

For I was happy but now I’m not.
I was lost but now, I’m found.
Was blind … but now I see.
I am employed by your favor!
Let’s not get lost in arguments.
Peace be with you.
And also with you.

Let us now greet each other &
feel open hands meet &
raise our voices on high!
Sing:

There is power in a band of working folks
when they stand hand in hand.

Amen.
In solidarity!

P.S
I make motion to change
the name of our union to also
include the word.
Sisterhood.
Can I get a witness?

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Mulberry Hill

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Mulberry Hill

1.
To
be
raised
on the Clark
family home place –
George Rodgers Clark Park –
my front yard – Mulberry Hill –
where Louisville’s first family settled.
I’m sure there is plenty to say about George.
I’m sure they were privileged. It was a blessing –
to play in the rich Grey Kentucky clay! Play war in our
grass forts, throwing walnuts at each other. My
Brother and Sister at my core – our undaunted childhood
discovery. We were privileged to be free to play.
To be told not
to come home
until the sun
was sinking low.
2.
I remember “no niggers” painted on the roof of the
lodge, in the park where we swam. We played basketball
together – they had big family picnics, family reunions.
I remember when they painted over the
wrong words with white paint. And then
the letters would eventually bleed through –
like some sort of cruel joke, like a stain.

I don’t remember seeing any “niggers” in the park!
My mother told me the word on the roof was
wrong. I remember “stop busing” painted on the
stop signs. I remember the two black kids in
my neighborhood catholic school. They stuck out
like a sore thumb. They didn’t stay long …

I remember the mean man who would run us off
when us kids would get too wild.
He ran the park from a little office in the lodge.
His name I don’t remember. He carried a five gallon
bucket and picked up trash.

I remember majestic grandfather cottonwood
trees blowing in the hot humid summer breeze –
sapping cherry trees and the flooded creek.
The tree that was surrounded by a large fence –
the story behind it. They said an Indian woman
sat there with her dead child in her arms.

Her tears watered the tree as it grew around her.
They said you can still hear her weeping if you put
your ear up to the tree. They also said it grew from
George Rodgers Clark’s sword.

Oh how I remember walking across that park …
to find my Dad. At the end of the bar at Tim Tams.

– I would stand under his shadow.
His work truck parked in the lot.
Oh how I remember the real cherry
cokes! Pickled bologna and crackers –
the men and their work conversations.
The wooden shuffle board game and
the heavy metal pucks.
Falls City beer in ten ounce glasses,
salt shakers on the bar –
the telephone that would ring –
the bartender telling the woman on the
other end – “ no, he is not here.” –

4.
Privilege is relative, not a good place to start
a conversation. Political correctness is relative too!
Triggers are pulled and buttons pushed! We can
only be so careful not to offend.

It was a privilege to be a free child –
before Anne Gottlieb was stolen –
before those Trinity boys were raped –
before they beat to death that gay man in
Cherokee Park with a Louisville Slugger.
Before media told us who we were supposed to be –
before AIDS became a household word.
Before cable T.V. terrorized our airwaves
with a constant droning.
5.
Times are a changing. Time has been known to do
that. Naturally. I act out in defiance of the norm. I rebel –
taught to question – raised by resilient men
and women. People who were trying to dream. In America.
The land where their fathers and mothers died.

It is a privilege to be alive –
it is work to tread water –
to keep your head above it all.
6.
May peace be with you.

*** BREAKING *** Appalachian Coal Report – Boom or Bust, You Decide …

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Leave the Lights On For Me is a song that I wrote on the day that the CSX railroad announced that it was going to shut down the Clinchfield coal division section of the railroad. I started writing the tune on a train heading to Nashville and finished it up at the hotel.
Many of my coworkers were being relocated due to the bust situation in the Appalachian coal regions. This tune represents what I was seeing happening to my friends. It is also an honoring of the rich folk music tradition of the Clinchfield Mountains.

How Tomorrow Moves is a CSX railroad slogan and Coal Keeps The Lights On, is the slogan of the coal industry’s propaganda arm, Friends of Coal. Because our Conductor and Locomotive Engineer seniority districts cover almost the entire country southeast of the Ohio River, railroaders were being forced to move from places that they had lived for generations.

Because of short-sighted union contracts and an aggressive / abusive employer, workers were being expected to spend 30 days working for free with the threat of not being able to “hold” a position when they were finished with their territory qualifications. Folks were being expected to “qualify” for upwards of 30 days. No pay!

lyrics

Leave The Lights On For Me
07-07-2016

I left my darlin’ family in a little ol country town
chasin’ these trains across the state.
When I call my little children they ask me
“daddy when ya coming home?” and
I just don’t know what to say.

This railroad says I have to train on my own dime, for thirty days.
Well, no one should be expected to work for free.
When I ask my union brothers, they say “it is what it is”
Now that we have southern system seniority.

[chorus]

So I am, moving to the city to be employed or unemployed
Workin’ for this railroad for free.
I wonder how my kids are doin?
Wonder how my wife is holdin’ up.
And will those friends keep the lights on for me.

They say “coal keeps the lights on” but I can’t pay my utility bills.
And there ain’t no guarantee there’ll l be a spot for me to fill.
Then ill have to go somewhere’s else for 30 more days.
I guess this is “How Tomorrow Moves”

[chorus]

My family’s lived in eastern Kentucky for a really long time.
Working for the railroad, or down in some dark mine.
I’m proud to be a miner’s son,
never signed up to live a life on the run.
I wonder where those friends of coal are now.

[chorus]

*disclaimer

In a boom or bust economy – this song has been the breaking news for generations.
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Glenda Sue Mellick – My Mom

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To celebrate Mother’s’ Day, here is a draft chapter from the book I am writing that is about my Mother. The chapter sort of hints to what it was like growing up the son of a radical activist.

The Anti-Apartheid divestment battle of the 1980’s, at the University of Louisville, was organized around my kitchen table. My mother was a 30-year-old college student at the time. She opened our family home to her new-found friends at the University.

The Progressive Student League (PSL) spent many a night, meeting in my home, around our kitchen table. I was in my early teens.

Normal for me was fear of arrest. My mother didn’t talk about that fear, but thinking back on it, and thinking back on what that campaign was … my Mother and her friends were fighting monolithic power and greed. My little brother, sister and me, always in tow to an action. My step-father on call, just in case mom was hauled off to jail.

That was my teenage years. After we won that fight and U of L was forced to divest, my Mother was invited to speak at the United Nations on the issue.

Enjoy this sneak peek of my book ‘Even Further’ – The Red Diaper Diaries and

Happy Mother’s Day! 

Chapter 3 – Glenda the good witch

Every year for my birthday parties in my teens, I would have all my hippie deadhead friends over and we would watch Harold and Maude, the cult movie with the Cat Stevens soundtrack. I loved watching the faces of the new attendees of my parties when the main character in the opening scene shoots himself in the face. My mom, my brother and sister were always part of this party. We were/are a tight-knit bunch. My step father was a signal maintainer for the railroad and was working six days’ home and eight days gone, so … us kids and my mother had two family situations. One when my step-dad was home and one existence that found my mother raising three kids, alone.

Glenda the “good witch,” was the youngest of 12 children – of a Lebanese immigrant who owned a bar on east Jefferson street in Louisville, Kentucky. The bar was very close to one of the oldest housing projects in town and around the corner from the Louisville Outlaws motorcycle gang clubhouse. She was a Lebanese lesbian, Buddhist political activist, who went to school late in life to become a teacher.

She married my first father when she was 19 and had my sister 3 years later and then my brother right before she divorced my beer drinking Germantown Catholic electrician father. My mother fondly would tell stories of my father. I suspect he fell in love with her ethnic beauty and her dark Lebanese eyes. She somewhat described my dad as the guy who swept her off her feet and took her from the bar to their little piece of the American Dream.

My grandfather was a chanter at the Greek orthodox church. I remember sitting in the back of the bar playing with beer caps, making large pyramids with my Grandma. That is about all I can remember. My father remembers the time when he went to meet the elders so he could ask “pop” for my mother’s hand. The old men from the church were always hanging out at grandpa’s bar and my dad tells about eating weird food, Lebanese wine and dancing and swords.

I can only imagine this Germantown catholic boy going down to the beer joint and the ceremony atmosphere of his third world experience. My mother told stories of the little ghosts that would hang in the back room of her home. Pop, Grandpa Mellick, made Feta cheese for the Lebanese community and would hang the cheese to dry in little cheese cloths on a clothes line. She told not so fond stories about as a young girl, working at the Burlap Bag company that had been contracted to make body bags for the Vietnam war.

Pops bar was a beer joint and the family home. He sold beer, rolled oysters and fish sandwiches. I remember mom telling stories about mopping the bar early in the morning and then going to school smelling like fish. Except for pictures, I can’t remember much of this place but through the pictures I have a fond thought of where I come from. Wire frame Coca Cola chairs, a big Wurlitzer juke box, a long stout wooden bar with a big phone booth out front. Grandma Catherine the big German – Baptist Swiss country woman, sitting in the back, at the family table, smoking cigarettes. Her Lebanese gold snake head bracelet wrapped around her wrist.

I can see my Lebanese bartender grandfather wearing an apron. A dark-skinned immigrant owing a bar and raising a large family in a town that was included and not so far removed from the Jim Crow South. He didn’t teach any of his kids how to speak Arabic. My mother told me several times that he didn’t want his kids treated unfairly. Hell, the civil rights war was raging and hipsterly speaking, right? My Grandma Catherine was his second wife. My mother didn’t tell fond stories of watching her mother die of cancer. She did explain to me why she stopped doing her activist work when she got a job teaching.

There is a scene in the Harold and Maude movie when Harold asks Maude about an umbrella that was hanging above a big cabinet filled with musical instruments in her railcar home. Maude tells Harold that the umbrella was something of a remembrance of an old-time when she used to frequent political rallies. The umbrella was used as a defense against thugs and police. My mom said that she, like Maude in the movie, didn’t feel a need after college, to fight the powers that be. She explained that she stopped doing her activist work publicly and continued her activist work quietly with her school kids.

Back when she did, us kids were always in tow. I grew up with her activist friends organizing around our kitchen table and with her new-found lesbian life that would become her divorce from her second beer drinkin’, pot smokin’, pool shootin’ Germantown railroad man. We sang the theme song from Harold and Maude at my mother’s wake. Not to mention we read Joe Hill’s Last Will. So, I guess, I am a red diaper baby. I guess. Hipsterly speaking, right?

I am a city boy except, however and hipsterly speaking, right? I grew up across the street from a forty something acre park that is named George Rodgers Clark Park. It was the Clark family home until the early 1900’s. I spent lots of time reading books next to a very large tree that grew next to where the Clark family situated their spring house. The spring house is gone now however, water still gathers and pools close to the large cypress tree that is majestically still there.

The tree is a massive. A 150-year-old grandfather of a tree. It was at this tree at one point at the other side mania, that I collapsed – in an early morning fog and woke up exhausted and confused. This event, my near death, vision, whatever the hell – my knowing that something was too much to deal with – somewhat spookily, I knew I was way too far out or possibly getting somewhere. I was depressed, mentally exhausted and scared.

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