the american files

It Was a Beautiful Day

2012-01-17T12:11:00.000-08:00

If your talking about the weather then today was a fine day. But then what day isn't that is bathed in the clear bright sun of winter. Sixty degrees, light cool breeze from the north. A day full of vast subtle colors and birds flitting about. Light sweaters and warm boots, a hat on your head if you want it. Yes a fine day today, when you are talking about the weather

Up and down the rows I go. Me, the vigneron and his wife Back and forth, back and forth. It's what I'm doing now. In the vines and in my life. Clermont and Plaissan, back and forth. Tomorrow back to Plaissan. Pack up the old kit bag. Smile, smile, smile. Back and forth, frown and smile, to and fro, laugh and cry, and along the way, all the things in between.

Order, and a lot of kilometers. The idea being that if things work out right in Plaissan, the back and forth will turn into something closer to straight forward.

Sap Mgmt.

2011-12-19T13:05:00.000-08:00

Just to let you know I’ll be in for the next six months. You see the days need a bit of order. It’s what I will be doing in the vines. Cutting back the old growth. Pruning. It’s all about sap management.

It’s what I’ll be doing too. In Plaissan in a yurt. Cutting back old growth. Learning to stretch into myself. In the vines it’s what makes everything fruitful, the control of the flow of sap. Having realized that we humans are all sap too, I figured it should work for me too. Sap Managment Inc. is what I am calling myself. It’s a total self-service business.

So for the next six months I’ll be in the vines, or my cell in the big house that’s just up the hill from the yurt, cutting back. Making room to breath new breaths. One after the other, like the years in the vines.

Order. Consciousness.

Clip-Clip-Clip.

Another Day

2011-12-13T13:20:00.000-08:00

I was back in the vines again today. The pause after the harvest is done. The last full moon before winter is waning, the cutting back begins. I was happy to see the vigneron and his wife, and they seemed happy to see me. We exchanged the stories of our lives from the last chapter which ended several months ago. I could say it was an uneventful day, but then what day that we are alive is un-event-full.

There is a woman, I don’t know, who is going to the psychiatrist. The psychiatrist uses images in situations to get into what the patients are feeling. This doctor uses the images as a relational object, a tool that allows her to ‘work’ with the patients. In this case the patient is the woman that I was talking about, the one I don’t know.

For example, the doctor says to this woman patient - you are standing in front of a sink and the faucet is running.

The patient replies to the doctor – I pull out the plug so that the water can run out, and I clean the sink out with my hands.

The conversation goes on. How do you feel about doing that, what are you thinking when you are doing that, what does that bring up for you etc. etc. Well they get to the crux when the woman, who is the patient I don’t know, starts remembering that at 8 years old when her alcoholic father was slapping her mother around, she had taken a frying pan and whacked the father. The father quickly proceeded to pass out on the ground.

She thought she had killed her father. Imagine what would run through your head at that point. It did for the woman and she consequently pushed aside, into the shadows, those reactions for the rest of her life until that moment with the doctor. When the doctor asked her what that invoked in her now she says two words. .Culpability. Guilt. Then is silent for a long time.

It seemed hard to believe she could forget such an event. At least that’s what I thought until I tried to think about myself at 8. It was long ago but still within my lifetime. It was me - and as I realize when I remember something from a long ago time – it is me. But thinking back to 8 years old I could remember nothing. Zero, neither good or bad. Just nothing.

I know something must have happened, and if you told me something from then I would probably remember it. But randomly I could bring up nothing. I suddenly thought how the woman I don’t know could have forgotten that episode and the soaring – Culpability and Guilt. – that came within that moment. Why would you want to remember it.

That’s who we are, the events we are made of. Remembered and forgotten, they etch themselves into our brains. Like deeply embedded lines of code on a computers hard drive, if the right buttons are pushed they dictate how our program operates.

We’re complex, we have code in our brains that was written tens of thousands of years ago that’s being added to at every moment we experience. With this we make our life. We are all working on our own hard drive which is connected to a network that spans all time. Meanwhile our shadow is constantly hiding, following us, shifting shapes, insinuating itself into who we are.

It’s amazing we aren’t all screaming and wailing in the streets. That is an event itself, and it happened today. That’s why it’s hard for me to say that it was an uneventful day even though it seems all I really did today was just more immigrant labor in the vines.

Perplexed

2011-12-11T06:06:00.000-08:00

Hank is way out on the edge. Every moment has become critical, and the moments just keep coming, one after another. Fatigued, broke, with everything on the horizon but nothing in hand. Hank is full of potential, but then again he has been all his life. It finally has dawned on him he has to act, that time is running out.

The realization did nothing however, to change anything. He still was ensconsed in his life, and everything had recently got more complicated. Perhaps that was the cause of his realization. He found it hard to remember which had come first – his crisis, or his need to act. In any case he had little idea what to do.

His first response was to run, flee, escape, but he had no where to go to. It was this fact that had left him, if not frantic, at least perplexed.

There were moments now when he felt pressed against something opaque and yielding. He could never break through it, but now he was so far in, that he saw no way back out. There was no light at the end of this tunnel, just an omnipresent dim glow which was so diffused that it seemed to come from everywhere. He was paralyzed with the thought of suffocating and cognizant of the fact that paralyzed folk can’t move. This was the edge he was on. An edge so far down that it was without a precipice, leaving Hank without his default option of falling to get started.

In his everyday exchanges Hank admitted to be worried. There was no way to explain more. Who could feel see his churning thoughts. How could he describe the weight of his limitless potential. And why describe it, no one cared for either his reason why all potential was limitless, or his explications of why his was un-actualized. Even Hank had tired of them.

No, the time had come to act, to move, to get on the ball. If he could just get started…

Carlo's Day

2011-11-30T01:48:00.000-08:00

Carlo woke up with an anxious sensation. He tried to ignore it and switched on the reading lamp above his head. He read a few pages absently. He realized it was futile and reluctantly got out of bed, something was pressing on him.

He went downstairs, saw a note on the table. It was written in the hand of his wife. Carlo discussed with himself and decided that he would read it later. He saw his shoes, slipped them on and went out to collect his mail.

He walked back into the house sorting a thick bundle of letters. When he entered the front door he fixed on the wall before him. He stared at the pictures grouped up in front of him - his friend Art, his brother in law David, his brother Al, his niece Alma. He remembered tomorrow was Art’s 81st birthday, he thought of the rendevous he had made with Art’s wife for tomorrow. He had told her he would call today to fix an appropriate time.

He felt a pang of sadness and doubt. An anxiety rose up in him. Carlo sifted through the mail, picked out a brightly colored envelope and began opening it. It had no return address and for that he chose it. It seemed to correspond to his feeling. He pulled the letter out of the envelope. The page contained just one word, large and precisely written, it covered the entire page. It said HAPPY. He quickly looked up again scanning the photos on the wall.

He looked at the page for a long moment. HAPPY. It was part of what he felt but there was a sensation much larger lurking behind it. There was a second page to the letter. Carlo wasn’t curious. He had no desire to look at that second page. He already knew what it would contain. He wanted to stay with just the word HAPPY.

Carlo turned his gaze away from the letter. His hand containing the letter fell heavily by his side. He stared at the photos hanging in front of him. He seemed to be divining some minute detail contained within them. He felt the anxiety rise, it spun around his brain before descending and coursing through the rest of his body.

He walked to the living room and sat down. He took the letter he had opened and turned to the second page. It contained a single number written over and over in large colorful script. 80, 80, 80…

Today was Carlo’s birthday. He was eighty years old. It seemed like an enourmous number. It seemed it had come upon suddenly, but he realized it had taken an entire lifetime. He breathed. He reflected. He wondered. Sometimes he felt sage, grateful, aware of the many good deeds he had witnessed and performed. Other times there was sadness, and doubt. He was anxious when he thought of his picture with the others on the wall of the entrance to his house.

He sat with the letter in his hand for a long time staring at the numbers covering the page before him. Eighty, for him it wasn’t a terminal number, but he knew it was close. He put the stack of letters down and thought of Art’s wife - Judith.

He needed to call her. Tomorrow was Art’s birthday. Last year they had all went out to dinner for Art’s 80th. He remembered them laughing at having made it so far in relatively fine form. He remembered the look in Art’s eye when they were singing happy birthday. Behind the laughter was the look of the anxious sensation Carlo was feeling right now.

He dialed the phone. No one answered for quite a long time.

- hello

- yes hello Judith, it’s Carlo.

- oh Carlo, I was just thinking of you. Happy Birthday.

- yes, yes Happy Birthday. Last year Art, this year Me. I guess I’m always just one step behind him. And if that’s the case this looks like it will be my year.

- don’t say that Carlo. Anyway, are you still coming with me tomorrow to visit Art, or should we just meet up there.

- No, let’s meet up first, I can’t go alone. It’s too sad.

- okay Carlo we’ll go see him together. It will be better that way, I’m pretty sure that’s how Art would like it. I can’t believe just last year we were all laughing together. It’s weird, one day laughing, two months later we’re not. Something just happens and it’s all gone.

- that’s whats making me so worried, I just keep seeing all the memories disappearing. It’s like when we cease to exist our memories are erased with us.

- Carlo, stop. Please.

- But what will become of all the memories I am.

- I don’t know Carlo, perhaps they just become some sort of energy. You’ve been a good man, you’ve created good feelings, happy memories. Think of that as energy, in the mean time remember what Art always said - Carpe Diem. And it’s your birthday today dammit.

- Okay Judith. What time do you want to me come get you tomorrow.

- Well the cemetary closes at 5, so come over for lunch and we’ll go from there. In case you change your mind and want to go alone, just leave me a message and I’ll meet you over there. Art’s in plot number 73842, you’ll need to talk to the man at the gate before you can get in.

Carlo hung up the phone and sat there looking at the letter opened before him. HAPPY. He breathed deeply, got up and prepared for the day.

Hanks Ongoing Future

2011-11-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

Hanks future arrived the other day. He’s in it right now.

It’s raining out. The windows are still open in a last attempt at forgetting it’s late fall, but the ‘a bit more than cool’ breeze blowing in won’t even allow that illusion any longer. You see Hanks future came with a certain amount of clarity. At least, he told himself, he had seen it coming.

In his moments of self professed clarity he would often see himself lying in an almost empty, carpeted room. There was an strange sense of order that came from the emptiness he found himself surrounded with. Within himself he felt a void that he couldn’t precisely place though it seemed rooted in a nostalgia for something that never existed. At times it came with the warmth and odor of a woman. Though that could have been just a whiff of the birthing process that he pictured himself in.

Hank readily acknowledged that he was a victim of false promises and exaggerated claims. He was less forthright with the fact that on occasion it had been him at the origin of those claims and promises. Whatever their origin, there was no longer any denying he had been living a clouded existence filled with noise and bluster.

Now there was no more psychiatric babble or ladder climbing dancers. This was the future. He was in it. It was as silent as death. It was dark and fecund. There was only the sound of breathing. In Hanks case that was a rasping, rattling, in and out that kept weakly pronouncing that something was still clinging to life.

In this future it was silent. Hank was alone. After one, there was nothing left to count. In his exagerrated states Hank would pass the time counting – one, one, one, one… just until it became limitless. He would feel exalted, graced, but eventually he had to stop. Immediatly a wave of nostalgia would wash in and Hank realized clarity had come with a stiff price.

Breath in, breath out. Breathing in the pain was like diving under a wave. It washes over and another is before you. Dive under again, and there’s another, over and over again. In this future it’s all he could do, breath in breath out.

Hope it would pass. Hope it would get better. Hope grace would be bestowed. Hope in, hope out. Limitless.

Seamlessly Integrating Endless Conflict - for Fun and Profit

2011-11-18T03:06:00.000-08:00

I just friended my childhood sweet-heart on facebook. Drole le vie, je dit ca parce que je suis en train de making moves on my current gal at this very moment. In short it made me think of something to do with determining the critical path. But that isn’t what I want to tell you.

I friended the old neighborhood girl and then went to check out her story on facebook. Not much different than most, husband, kids, friends, family. Her son is in the army somehow and there was a post that he was away somewhere learning to fire a FGM-148 Javelin. It’s a shoulder fired missile. There was a video attached from you-tube which showed a field demonstration of the latest Raytheon/Lockheed Martin (Hughes/Martin Marietta) must have weapon. Wow.

Thinking back to my childhood and that sweet little girl up the street, I remembered that having fireworks gave you a standing on the block. The bigger they were the higher your standing. Fireworks were good for getting girls. But at the time fireworks were not so much illegal, as expensive. So after seeing that rocket fired I was curious how much that little FMG-148 Javelin missile was costing us. And really what was the son of my childhood crush doing so far from his home blowing up expensive vehicles of someone he doesn’t know.

Well the cost was, of course, enormous - $125,000 for the launcher and $40,000 per missile, plus the support and repair and blah blah blah. In any case since the first missile came online in 1996 there have been approximately 30,000 missiles produced and the total project cost has been $4,5 Billion dollars.

But that isn’t that shocking. Just like banks receiving billion dollar benefits, it's just how it is nowadays, and who are we to ask how or why. What I came across looking for the cost of this little military jewel (it does has rave reviews from its producers and end users) was, however, a bit more shocking, .

Smell this – it stinks.

I googled: FMG-148 Javelin cost. The second hit had a figure in it and I went there for more detail. It turned out to be the Call of Duty Wiki site.
Call of Duty (a series running since 2003) is the popular video war game all the kids play on the x-box and playstations etc. (it’s 2010 edition - Call of Duty/Black Op’s - held the record for the largest ever entertainment launch in history for any form of entertainment. Sales from the game worldwide reached US$650 million within five days after its release. That record was broken by Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3.). This video game site has all the detailed info for playing at full action. The players go to this site to learn how to use the weapons to ‘improve’ their game.

There it is - the FMG-148 Javelin – in the game it looks like and is called exactly the same as in the battlefield. The site shows how to use it and in what scenarios it is most efficient. The description of the weapon and it’s highly detailed use in ‘game’ situations is coldly similar to the description and field use laid out in the Raytheon/Lockheed Martin web site.

Suddenly I saw the young son of my old flame and hundreds like him responding to the growling sergeant assigning positions. “Sure I’ll do it, I already know how.”

It dawned on me as I read this how sick we have become. We have been buying our kids expensive games so they can sit in their rooms not only being totally desensitized to killing but actually training for war with real life weapons in actual combat scenarios. It's too complexly integrated for it to be an accident, and so the question is always begging – who is it profiting from this illness.

Wonderful. P2

2011-06-16T14:47:00.000-07:00

I made the call from Heathrow on the transfer from Paris to Newark. I got my brother. He said the word - - my father had already flown out. I had, would upon my arrival have, missed him. He had been teetering on the precipice for months, I had misjudged his balance. He had fallen hours before I arrived. He fell silently, smoothly, everything in order. My presence, in the end, would have been for me. It’s the desire to see our kith and kin before they depart on grand voyages.

I thought about you today in the vines, it’s funny how present you’ve become in your super-flowering state, you command attention with your balancing act. I was working my way through the rows, taking out any, and I thought all, unnecessary growth when I came across a small birds nest built within one of the vines.

Oh. Four tiny brown speckled eggs huddled in a nest intricately woven within the new shoots. Alive - delicate, precise, against all odds, and yet there it was, and for the moment full of life. Ah - there you are.

When your friend and I had put together our little book of sweet smiles and you had critically given it a good look I remembered you being in disaccord with my statement that the beauty that surrounds us is less staggering than the beauty we can imagine. At the time I countered with my blasphemous reasoning, but upon seeing that nest today, so wonderously there, I suddenly became conscious that you were right. We are incapable of imagining something so unexpected and perfect – beautiful - in it’s being.

I spend a short moment with awe, and you, bonheur. I smiled out loud, then went on with my work. Did you hear me screaming your name – P.......

Do you hear me whispering it now – peace.

Falling Slowly Down the Stairs. P1

2011-06-16T10:31:00.000-07:00

I didn’t get a call at 3 :30 in the morning telling me that you had fallen, coming up/or going down the stairs we will never be sure of, and were not going to make it back to the plane we were flying on together.

Your call came in the early evening, though it seems like gravity has started pulling you down to your cellar floor too. From what you say, it sounds like you may be booking flight on the same plane my sister is on.

It seems the most shocking thing that can happen.

We pre-view so much, but there are some things that happen out of our fixed order. It bamboozles on fundamental levels. The future becomes limited. Time appears finite. The sense of loss/losing is unrelenting and sorrowful. I wish I could help you, but I am limited to thinking of you. The veil has opened to you, and only you know what that conjures up.

You may not know it but you have spared us. Kindly given to us the luxury of watching you, listening to you, feeling stunned along with you as you stumble slowly on the stairway. Your balance right now seems so tenuous. I am helpless to aid you regain it, in only that sense our frustration may be equal.

I am hoping for you, not even that you don’t tumble and fall, because we all do that eventually, but just hoping that if you do fall, the trip down isn’t so painful, that you are aware, and knowing that you are loved, and that you are LOVE.

I am so sad to hear of the route your trip calls for, I was really looking forward to seeing you.

If you need anything -

profit.

Just to Prove I'm Alive, I Will Send Out a Missive...

2011-05-02T12:39:00.000-07:00

Just to prove I'm alive, I will send out a missive...

Contemporary news... forget Japan, forget Libya, forget your inherent bonheur, Osama is Dead.
The word is out and the crowd is cheering the news! It's shaping up to be the happiest news since the great wall of iron rusted down when I was a boy.

Luckily I had my rendez-vous already in place at the U.S. embassy in Marseille to renew the kids passports. Worldwide heightened security and all. It's the last time they will need me to be present with them. It's times like this we are happy to be together. Marseille - the ancient port of shakanary and the American embassy that's been doing business there for some two hundred years. It's always a fun time, though with everyone at serious giddy level red it may be less so if they want to get technical about the photographs I've got (I took them at a photo booth for 3 bucks in lieu of the 20 buck official photographer), or then again more so (if they have a military helicopter hovering overhead, or even stationed on the top of the building).

Official government channels, they are our only remaining religious liturgy. Mysterious and exciting, damning or joy giving, they have it all. Or should I say they HAD it all. It seems like no one likes it visceral anymore. I mean, what's up with Osama Bin Laden. Will we see Osama dead, or do we just have to take the bosses word. Old school government channels had it we paraded the body through the streets. I realize we are civilized now but at least give us some blurry night vision navy seal helmet-cam video of the raid.

It seems like we are giving up everything and getting nothing back, it's so Vatican II. We are getting nothing. This story about throwing the body into the sea and all, how about at least a shot of that. The Heroic Seal with the corpus corporis at the door of the helicopter. The dead body shot would give a nice sort of closure to this whole disheartening chapter in the Al Queda story which is threatening to run longer then the entire Star Wars saga.

In any case, after cutting back the vines all winter, they have started growing again and are now demanding more cutbacks, so after the big day today with Osama literally dis-appearing, and the high security trip to Marseille tomorrow, it's back to the vines Wednesday. I thank Big Daddy for that, plants growing is the only old time religion I can get these days.

Everyday In the Vines

2010-12-13T12:56:00.000-08:00

Ca arrive.
Aujourd'hui c'etait le tour de la femme du vigneron.
11:55 CET.
Moi, je passait le après-midi dans le vigne seule.

:::::

It happens.
Today it was the vignerons wifes turn.
11:55 am CET.
I spent the afternoon in the vigne alone.

Round and Round We Go

2010-12-12T08:17:00.000-08:00

It’s time for the taille.

I’m in the vines again snipping and stripping at migrant wages. Like the taxi, which I’ve left behind for nostalgia to consume, the vines have the endless, repetitive, back and forth that draws me in. I am drawn to constant motion that goes nowhere. It allows me look around, inside and out.

It can get scary, like boots caked with icy mud. Cold wind all day long making you beg for the end of the shift. Or it can get beautiful, like a thin sliver of moon starting to shine in a newly night blue sky as the workday ends. Often it’s a mix of the two and I’m free to choose which side I glance towards. That’s when the choice of regard becomes critical.

The souche and my thoughts.
There’s a digression that goes on. A weaning away of the wasted distractions that suck energy for wild and unproductive growth. That’s what we are doing in the vines, getting the growth into the position that leads to a healthy, productive direction.

What can I say, it’s taille time again. It’s all I do. Wake, work, sleep. And perhaps something in between that is saturated with the thought of waking, working and when I can get to sleep.

But I digress, I wanted to tell you what I saw the other morning. It’s one of those moments that doesn’t lead in a productive direction because it already is in itself perfect. It needs nothing. It leads nowhere. It just is. It is direct, without distraction.

I am doing the taille. Cutting the vines back. The vines are carried on 3 horizontal lines of metal wire that are strung along the 100 yard rows on 10 metal poles. We cut the growth back to the vine stump which runs along the lowest wire.

It is December 7th. 8:30 am. Latitude 43.6291. 1° centigrade. In other words, it is cold and the sun is just rising. I am standing in the mud and the myth of southern france. I am starting my day of work. It will end when this same sun sets at 5:15 pm. But that is the end and this is just the beginning.

At this moment (that moment now), all along the now empty wires of the rows we have cut yesterday are drops of water. Each in perfect suspension and lined up one against the other along the wires. Frozen solid in their ‘drop’ form, they are back lit by the just rising sun and are gleaming. Thousands of drops of frozen water lined up like gleaming jewels row upon row just to the horizon.

For a moment I think of nothing else. Stunned by the perfection of the cold muddy world I am in.

Recipe.

2010-10-14T09:23:00.000-07:00

For a perfect day of autumn.

sleep.
wake.
quiet.
wave.
hug.
cry.
coffee.
smoke.
talk.
Wash the last traces of blood from the carpet which lied at the foot of the stairs. Your sisters final resting place. Or starting line.
food.
drink.

Family washing in on flowing waves of sadness.

Love.
Loss of losing
Love.

A perfect crescent moon falling.
behind the hill.

Chicago Time.

2010-10-05T15:40:00.000-07:00

Subject: what else
Date: October 5, 2010 21:53:46 CEST
To: you
Confirmation # : AF7681 - Voyageur

Another last favor. i am coming into town (hence 'what else') in november.
i want to stay with you for a week.

Be in town, but moving around. one fashion or another.
clearly becoming imperative.
need shaking up. 50 years.

if the gig is dying, crazy to still be trying.
but gotta keep it moving.
couldn't not come, how can i let it stop.
soon we could be dead. perhaps there are other ways to keep it happening.
that's what i want to see.
i'll get the pictures, bring the projects
i am coming incognito - my papers will say 'cabdriver' - though i am coming simply as another bon homme.
i'd love to land with you.
jeff
nancy
joe
sheila
christine
magda
lora lu
sergio
chuck
alma
gma

maybe more...

time is shrinking.
i need you condensed.

nov 4-dec 7.

more...

love.

Hey look up!

2010-09-12T09:20:00.000-07:00

As if the endless land-based cameras weren't enough... a 'breaking' story in todays news.

" An MQ-9 Predator B, [a.k.a. Reaper] an Unmaned Aircraft System, at a ceremony to celebrate the authorization from the FAA to use the aircraft to patrol the Texas-Mexico land border, Wednesday, Sept. 8, 2010, in Corpus Christi, Texas."

It seems to be news of a breaking nature, at least if you look at the date.

Missing from the headlines, or even the story -

The United States Homeland Security initially ordered one Reaper for border patrol duty, (referred to as MQ-9 CBP-101). It began operations 4 October 2005, but on 25 April 2006, this aircraft crashed in the Arizona desert.

A second Reaper, called "CBP-104", was delivered in September 2006, and commenced limited border protection operations on 18 October 2006.

There is no mention either of Project CHLOE - a research and development program of the Department of Homeland Security which (according to the DHS) has three objectives.

The third objective is to integrate unmanned planes into the air traffic control system and other law enforcement agencies for overall situational awareness. Security at any price you say?

price per plane: 10.5 million with sensors... or... four aircraft, four ground stations and five years of maintenance support, all valued at US$330 million.

But don't worry about spending your money just for someone to watch over others from above, there is sure to be one COMING SOON TO YOUR TOWN!

COMING SOON TO YOUR TOWN!

Patience (with a big stick) is a (profitable) Virtue.

2010-06-08T13:12:00.000-07:00

The Exxon Valdez oil spill occurred in Prince William Sound, Alaska, on March 24, 1989. It is considered to be one of the most devastating human-caused environmental disasters ever to occur in history.

AFTER more than 20 years EXXON (now Exxon/Mobil) is still working the EXXON VALDEZ oil spill in Alaska. Not on the beaches (that's work for old mother nature) but in the Courtrooms - where the real profits are made.

In the [Exxon Valdez oil spill] case of Baker v. Exxon, an Anchorage jury awarded $287 million for actual damages and $5 billion for punitive damages. The punitive damages amount was equal to a single year's profit by Exxon at that time.

(Big headlines everywhere announced/cheered the decision against greedy big oil)

Exxon appealed the ruling, and the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals ordered the original judge, Russel Holland, to reduce the punitive damages.
On December 6, 2002, the judge announced that he had reduced the damages to $4 billion.

(well that's still a lot of money)

Exxon appealed again
Judge Holland increased the punitive damages to $4.5 billion, plus interest.

(see justice works, it's fair)

After more appeals, and oral arguments heard by the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals on January 27, 2006, the damages award was cut to $2.5 billion on December 22, 2006.

(now justice is really working)

Exxon appealed again.
On May 23, 2007, the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals denied Exxon/Mobil's request for a third hearing and let stand its ruling that Exxon owes $2.5 billion in punitive damages.

(justice knows when it's got it right)

Exxon then appealed to the Supreme Court,
On February 27, 2008, the Supreme Court heard oral arguments for 90 minutes.
The Supreme Court vacated the $2.5 billion award remanding the case back to a lower court,

Exxon's actions were deemed "worse than negligent but less than malicious." The judgment limits punitive damages to the compensatory damages, which for this case were calculated as $507.5 million.

(Big justice takes time, and patience)

Exxon's official position is that punitive damages greater than $25 million are not justified because the spill resulted from an accident, and because Exxon spent an estimated $2 billion cleaning up the spill and a further $1 billion to settle related civil and criminal charges.

for a bit more of the devil in the (unheralded) details: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exxon_Valdez_oil_spill

Should I stay or Should I go. Now

2010-06-06T05:42:00.000-07:00

Hank was on the edge and he saw nowhere to go. Just at his back, the grey clouds were hanging right on top of the mountain, on the other side of the hallow. One little change in pressure and they would be right over him. Already, standing in full hot sunshine, the wind would gust and bring rain. It came in fine, almost imperceptible mists. It brought back memories of a summer terrace in a five star hotel where he had never been.

Which way to go. There were endless rows that needed tending. He went along the rows, bent down and tore away the ‘gourmands’ that sucked the plants force and returned nothing but fatigue. Each souche seem to thank him but always there was the next demanding. His body was breaking. His back was tanned.

Hank was on the edge and he saw nowhere to go. He stood up, the water that had gathered with the sweat rolled down his back. He felt the mist blow in and it cooled his face and chest. He had nothing but the back of his hand to wipe his face. He wondered where Veronica was now.
He looked up and saw an arch in the sky. It was banded in intense color. It was an intimate little thing stretching from the side of one hill to the next. Hank could see the rainbow touching ground in a the woods on the far side of the colline. The trees were illuminated in bright colors. Encasing this spectacle was another, much grander, far reaching, and vaguer hued, rainbow that was must have been evident at great distances.

Hank felt the edge, and suddenly decided to stop looking for somewhere to go. It dawned on him that it would be best to just stay where he was. He took one more look at the trees that the rainbow had dressed in psychedelic color, took a deep breathe and bent back down into the rows.

Tell me what you want, what you really, really want

2010-05-14T15:56:00.000-07:00

Dissection, deception. I smoke, I drink, I smoke again. I wanted to get at the core of the matter, now that I've gotten there, I just want to sleep. It all sounds pathetic when you break it down, but I can’t shake the feeling that it’s better than living a folly.

We sell our dreams so cheaply only because our dreams are so cheap. I want this, I want that. I want my cake and to eat it too. The oil is flowing into the gulf, our food, our beaches, are full of the shit, but still we want our cars. What's happening, let’s break it down, I’m begging you, even if it becomes to clear to handle.

We’re crazy now, let’s go all the way. Really, if you think about it, how much worse can it get. The raucous sleep of the insane seems more sane than the concept of a soundless sleep. Or am I supposed to believe that I am still a baby, or even worse, that babies sleep a peaceful sleep.

Yes, sleep. Let’s hide away in the land of dreams where things happen to us and we relinquish all control. Tonight I cut apart a heart and found only flaccid muscle.

Drink drink drink, sleep will come. It’s just another glass away. I’ll sleep like a baby. But if you look at the data who wants that. The truth is, that more than 70 percent of infants and toddlers have a Baby Sleeping pattern problem, at least according to the National Sleep Foundation. I have a sleeping pattern problem too, I thought I could dissect the cause and cure it. In the end I realized that I’m still a baby - I just want my needs met.

It’s amusing the constructs of us big babies. Self actualization is just one example. Sure, in theory it sounds so right. Pretty words, even from un-pretty faces, always sound so nice. The actions that follow, at least after the love fest that leaves our ears ringing is over, always seems a little bit more raw. Words, and their promise, never live up to their potential. But never mind, just sleep, tomorrow is another day.

I woke up at 4:16 with a slimy feeling and slimy grey skies. The remorse and questioning of a hebrew. My sleeping pattern was off, I just couldn’t forget. At 6:20 I smoked my first cigarette. Today I said, I will find out the truth, in reality it was the first thing I desired and the last thing I wanted. You see I am human too, a baby in an old mans body. The only difference is when I want to cry I can’t. I always remember the funny side of our folly. It’s not drama we live but comedy, no matter how tragic the outcome appears.

When you lie down, you will not be afraid; when you lie down, your sleep will be sweet. Really, I want to believe, but how do I remove the stains of the freshly dissected heart laying in my bed.

Love Note to Texas.

2010-05-02T13:55:00.000-07:00

My beautiful brother with whom one time, along with my father in heaven measured 100 straight lines to map the winding banks of a flowing river, is counting birds today in Texas. It's a 24 hour day for bragging rights of the beak geeks. Me, I was sitting in a garden in France eating and drinking on a beautiful day looking at the sky and each bird that passed. I was staring at the sky for it's population of birds that all wore his face.

He's an imitation texan, like I'm an imitation frenchman. I was happy to pass the day with him. It was him who activated the little palm tree that stood behind me while I sat there sitting in the sun after the coffee with a small glass of Mirabel in hand. With each breeze, it literally kept me turning my head with it's noise of a flock of birds taking flight. I got excited with the thought 'oh - goldmine' and laughed with his joy in a victory of a senseless and pure competition.

C'etait tres bon, texas inhabiting the south of france.

a nocens somnium

2010-03-11T11:39:00.000-08:00

- it’s starting again, he said.

She said nothing for a long moment, then walked away. She stopped in the doorway and turned back looking at him. Her mouth made a small clicking sound that let him know that inside her rigid body there was motion - it was her tongue breaking free from the roof of her mouth, she was about to say something.

- I want you to be as miserable as I am.

It had started again.

French Lesson - m/s 3. Indefinant, Negative pronouns, or, Lot's wife.

2010-01-26T10:13:00.000-08:00

Negative pronouns negate, refuse, or cast doubt
on the existence of the noun that they replace.

It’s an awful position to be in, he said,
the constant negating.
-It’s all people see in you.
It’s the unending plombe gray cloud that accompanies you - toujours les plaints.

Personne ne me connaît ici.
No one knows me here.
(PERSONNE/nobody is the subject)

Je ne vends aucun des livres.
I'm not selling any of the books.
(AUCUN/none is the direct object)

Elle ne pense à rien.
She's not thinking about anything.
(RIEN/nothing is the indirect object)

It comes from everywhere. It wears humans down, the lead filled skies, always heavy and threatening.

But whatever-
If you can’t change the weather, you just have to get out of it.
It even seems senseless to say fuck you. Negative pronouns like, she, must already know what people think.

But still - nobody, none, nothing...
For a noun, even a pronoun like, him,
it makes a dis-engaging atmo-sphere.

Selah - ms/2

2010-01-18T15:05:00.000-08:00

The rain had been constant. They were both hurrying to finish clearing the field.
-They are reeking havoc.
-Yes, yes that’s true, but look at them.
He cocked his head upwards, it shook slightly.
- Look what we can do.
In the distance, like four spinning points on a compass, a group of jets traced a great circle 2000 feet above the ground. In the distance they were pure grace, and their sound was simply power.

Henri glanced down at his boots, they were caked with mud. He shifted his regard, Paul’s were worse. As he looked back up, each point of the compass spun out of the circle taking a straight line. One would be over them in the time it took to bend back down into their work.
- we’ve got to hurry

High in the sky, a finger exerted an infinitesimal force. The roar of the jets rendered each screaming round silent as it sped earthward at 3500 miles per hour. Each unknowing, on it’s own individual trajectory.

Paul bent down. Henri paused, raising his hands as the plane sped over them. He could see the helmeted pilot turn his head briefly, and he was gone. Henri quickly turned and stooped back down to work. He saw Paul's boots were still muddy. It was a moment later Henri realized his fate. The rest of Paul was strewn about the field.

smack - ms/1

2010-01-14T12:48:00.000-08:00

He turned to her.
“is it true”.
She looked at him.
The long silence that ensued ended with the small cracking sound of tension breaking. The saliva sticking to the roof of her mouth broke free from her tongue with a sharp click that signaled the end of his ignorance. She began to form a word. He had a sharp twisting sensation in his belly.

Fields and Streets

2010-01-03T12:33:00.000-08:00

The vacation is over. It was a good time.
It started over there and ended here.

I drove ten thousand miles on chicago city streets, now I ready to attack ten thousand souche on the Larzac rise. In the meantime, among other delicious things, I’ve eaten carne asada and fois gras both made with grandmother hands. I’ve woken on snowy days and hot mornings. I haven’t been out of sight of friends or family or other loving beings for 16 straight days. The good times are wearing me down.

I like waking up to find my dream has finally changed, consequently I’m happy to be going back into the vines. I’ve forgotten, or at least misplaced for the moment, the fact that the vines are brutal. Like a party that doesn’t end, they wear you down until you are broken with fatigue, and longing the finish. But that’s at the end of the dream, and tomorrow is just the beginning.

Early morning sunrises with the view to the sea on the rise to Larzac Plateau. The sky and it’s weather in myriad flowing patterns. The order and potential of freshly tailled fields. Lunchtime naps in a car warmed with the sun. Yes it’s all good in the beginning.

Happy new year.

Before the Fire

2009-10-27T09:40:00.000-07:00

We are all invested with hope. It’s what keeps us holding onto the
side of the buoy, as we float among the dead bodies and wreckage of our just sunken ship. It’s what allows us to stay silent, stay hidden and unmoving under a stack of human corpses as the killers heap more atop us.

We go on no matter what the disasters swirling among us, we are bred with the instinct to just get through, to just keep going. But to what end. Is it more that just about continued living. What is it we go on for. What is this wish that living entails, that makes us want more, even while in the midst of suffering.

We are lucky. For the most part we haven’t had to live in times of famine, war or pestilence, or at least we are able to turn our back toward it when it becomes too much. Our hope consequently has become much grander than just to get through. It is lucky to have a chance to conceive dreams that are not perpetually clouded with nightmare. But unfettered dreams can haunt too.

They can leave a desire for content without limit. A taste for the sensation of the right place at the right time with the want of nothing more. The dream of a place were the desire for more never comes. Those types of dreams can leave a longing that inhabits every waking moment. It is a longing for the complete filling of desire that is not bounded with time.

It’s what keeps us moving on, this constant search for that moment of content without limit. For that waking time when we inhabit what we had hitherto only glimpsed in a dream. It’s a schizophrenic view of the self from outside, without any of the separation anxiety. The viewer and the viewed are one, and distinct too. It’s like watching the watcher, or inhabiting the mirror. It’s what we do so easily in dreams, but when that flashes in waking life, it can leave gaping chasms in our rock solid world.

-----------------------------------

The window panes are literally flowing. The ancient rock houses are
all huddled together against the sunny side of the coline. Its warm outside but inside a slow fire burns. It counters the cold that lingers within the rock walls. It adds a slow sound and a warm light that repeats wordlessly ‘hearth’. Smoke rises from the chimney and scatters, sending out the scent of another time.

In front of the fire, are a man and a woman. They sit, facing each other, in straight backed chairs. They both lean in slightly, one towards the other. They are holding hands and on occasion looking into the other, the fire, themselves. They say very little, what sounds they do make are absorbed by a denser, wordless utterance which is emanating between them. They are enshrouded in the shifting light of the fire. They sit like that - silent and content. She is blissful and beautiful and he has forgotten that no story ends happily ever after.

Their love flourishes amidst the end that rages around them, she flowers in its energy, he amazes at its calm. Each in their fashion knows the end will come, yet in that perfect moment in front of the fire, they just kept going and pretended not to notice. They know that sorrow will come, but not today.

Cloudy in the morning, raining in the afternoon.

2009-10-20T15:24:00.000-07:00

Letter to a Blank Page.

You are so zen. Haughty white and mighty.
You scare me with your blank stare.
So serene, so perfect just as you are
so full of potential.
Perhaps it’s that which makes me want to soil you.

Just to think of it, gets me in a mood.

Potential realized is
never perfection.
just realization.

That’s the beauty of it.

Just you, and me.
Some alone time.
We’ll go to the end,
get dirty and soiled, all marked up.

It’s like your begging for it, sitting there stainless and white. The way you call me, I know you want it. The only question left now is - how. It’s hard to believe something so pretty could support something so pedestrian. Then again you take all comers. Everyone says your so easy.

So come on, let’s take a whirl, waste some potential with me too. It’s what your all about. Let me mark you, fill you up. It’s what lovers do on rainy days. In a word it’s called gaspillage. But let’s do it anyway - come together and spill over each other. Potential. Action. Who cares if it finishes a mess.

Just to mark your unblemished face, and unfaltering ear, with my rainy days and wandering thoughts. Together we’ll make nothing and call it a good day. Make nothing, but do it together. In the end it doesn’t matter. Even the lucky finish as so much pulp.

I'll save you from your nothingness, and you'll save me from nothing. For a moment though I can remember and forget together. We'll do it together. Condense entire rainstorms in a single line. Oh sweet water from heaven making sound like breezes through brittle leaves of autumn.

Across the world we'll make rain falling. Just outside the door.
We’ll do that and be

silent too.

But not to, like the pure white bliss of zen it can seem a bit too much.

The shop window penetrated.
The bride stripped bare.
It won't matter.
You see - gaspillage - it can be a word that fills too.
Creative acts, rain falling.

Come with me you pretty blank bitch.

Stained

2009-10-02T06:38:00.000-07:00

In La Roquette, the village of my vigneron, there is a fountain. It's fed by a spring and so cool, fresh water fills it without stop. The fountain stands about three feet high. It has a deep rectangular basin which is always filled, being that it drains from the top. It looks like it would be perfect to water a horse, and I am sure at one point, not long ago, it did. You must keep in mind that until the 1970's most of the farming here was still done with horses. Until 1975, when my vignerons father got a tractor, it was Bijoux, their horse, that did all the heavy work.

Bijoux is gone now. The tractor that replaced him and which came with the ability to distribute great quantities of high production wonder products, is gone too. Those miracle products, in addition to increasing production were also much more toxic than the manure of Bijoux, consequently the father of my vigneron, along with quite a few other vignerons with the new modern capabilities, went not long after Bijoux - all with the same type of liver cancer. Modern farming, just like the farming that came before it, has it’s brutal side

My vigneron, his sister, and his mother, have all talked fondly of Bijoux, the family horse. One day when I asked the sister, after she had recounted a funny memory of the time Bijoux went astray, what they did with him after they had gotten the tractor, she matter of factly replied that they ate him. The way she said it made it seem the most logical thing one could do with a horse when it's utility is finished, after all a horse is an expense. On the farm everyone has to pull their weight.

I am sure Bijoux probably bellied up to the same fountain that I find myself pulling up to everyday as I pass through this village. I stop before, during and after work. You see picking grapes is a sticky and thirsty affair and that big basin full of cool sparkling, spring water wipes either of those problems away instantly. But any water will do that. The unique thing about this fountain is not the sweet water that runs into it, any of the local fountains have that, but the bench that sits across, and just down the street a bit from it.

The bench is inhabited with a rotating cast of the local senior citizens from this village. There aren't very many of them, these characters who look as though they have been sent over from central casting, the village has a population of perhaps 100, yet the bench always seems to be full. Perhaps it's the nice, sunny, almost autumn weather we are having. More likely it's the commotion of the tractors and the traffic of grapes rolling up and down the street that calls them out. It's the harvest, the money shot of the agricultural world. All these folks sitting on the bench have done their time in the world of grapes, and for a couple of weeks each year, the grapes, and their pasts, come parading down the road.

This village has harvested grapes since the times of the roman emperors. It runs on the cycle of the vines as steadily as the water that flows from the source feeds the fountain. Now I am here, at that fountain, several times a day, watering and washing, cooling down, just like they once did, or at least like their horses once did.

When I pull up, I see them. I see them watching me. They make no pretense about not, and why should they, it is their town, their fountain, and they are there to see the show. For the moment it is me. That undeniable fact casts me in a mood each time I step up to the fountain and see them out of the corner of my eye.

No doubt they are trying to sum up the somewhat recognizable stranger. They know I am here because I am picking grapes, but for who, and in what capacity is perhaps open. They may even know I am the american and who my vigneron is, information they got from the grapevine, in this case the grapevine being my vignerons mother. Her grandfather, father, husband, and son where all vignerons. She did her time on the bench too. She was in the fields last year when we did the harvest, a week later she was dead. It's the fate of everyone who drinks from the fountain, be it this one or any other.

But it's not the stares of the local seniors on the bench that get to me each time I step up to the fountain. It’s the memories lurking behind their stares that make me uneasy. I am the present, like at one time they were. I can see their thoughts churning, they are as visible as the dark purple stains on my hands. Each time it is shocking. They are just sitting there, watching, remembering. They look at me, I look at them. I smile and nod - bonjour, bonsoir, madame, monsieur. They remain without movement or response, but not without interest.

They can't be without interest. It's why they sit on the bench along the road, and not on the bench down by their vegetable gardens which they tend each day. It's the grapes that have brought them here. They are falling off the vines by the ton to make their way to the local caves to be turned into wine. The grapes are the continual present, the only constant, the life blood of this village and all the others around here. These people sitting on the bench have had wine running through their veins for uncountable generations.

At one time it was their turn. They picked the grapes, they got hot in the september sun, thirsty, sticky. They washed up and cooled down in the same fountain I am standing before now. They were young and fit and had families, and dreams for the future. They stood just where I am standing now, were stained like I am stained now.

Their memory of another time is what I see in their looks. And what gets borne with all the other thoughts, is that the experience I am having now - the pleasant sensation of standing before the fountain at the end of the day and washing off in its cool waters - they have already had. My present is their past. I am a part of a memory which I never had.

These folks on the bench shake my belief in a solid fixed present. They put me in a line that is constantly present, and yet continually ending. They are witnesses that only the line, and not the points that make it up, is infinite. It is this fact and not always the cool water on my hot skin that makes me shudder. This realization that those people sitting on the bench across from the fountain were me, before they became them. That I will be them. That we both will end, but the line will not. That each time someone falls off the bench, another sits down.

Holy mother of Jesus!

2009-09-13T12:40:00.000-07:00

It’s harvest time. The grapes are falling off the vines. The local streets are black and slick with spilling juice. Tractors, trucks, harvesting machines. Hands black and back brown. Tired, sticky, happy in my fashion.

The work takes up the entire day. Sunrise, sunset, just like the song goes, in the meantime the life moves on. Day by day, one step closer to the grave, it’s a long march though not without its pleasures. When you are busted from work, one of those pleasures is your day off. It’s just one day, but a day non the less.

But what to do when you are broken in body, if not in spirit. You push on, against all reason. It was like that I found myself aboard the big red lake salagou last night after work watching a theater piece and trying to stay awake. Ha-ha, it’s not really any good, but the setting was fantastic. The cool night after the hot day, the stars giving way to a moon that rose behind a ancient volcano that sits in the lake. And always the fact of no alarm in the morning giving rise to waves of lux.

Sunday in france, bells from the church, sweet sleepy love, warm bread, fresh cigarettes, coffee, another sunny 80 degree day. A short walk to a long lunch on the plaza in the shade. A nap, some sugar and another coffee. Woody Allen at the cinema in V.O. A walk home. Fresh soup for a chilly night. Bed. Sleep. 6 a.m. Grapes.

It was hot again in the vines.

2009-09-09T15:19:00.000-07:00

It was hot again in the vines. We followed the machine from the get-go at 7 a.m. The sun came up later, and was soon beating down. The machine is loud and dirty. The day was without romance or relief. It continued after work when I lit up my computer.

The quotes which follow are taken from the lead story on Yahoo/news which concerned the health care ‘debate’.

When I am slapped by these widgets of ‘information’ it makes me feel good to be away from the empire. Speech like this makes it seem as if the only way is down, and when things are falling it just seems safer to be out of the way. It also helps me feel correct as I am stooped over in the hot sun doing migrant field work. In the developed world, universal health care is considered a primary need. In my french back water town I feel good to live in a underdeveloped part of a civilized country, rather than living in a developed part of an uncivilized country.

In america, for all it’s good godly religious stridency, it seems any thought towards ‘the least of His brothers’ has been forgotten. I will leave it to you to decide what has happened to critical thinking and/or debate.

=====================
"That's the cart before the horse, as they say in Maine," said Sen. Olympia Snowe,

Sen. Charles Grassley, said talks were ongoing and included "some things that are very central."

"Clearly failure is not an option here," said Rep. Xavier Becerra,

"The status quo is unacceptable" said Mitch McConnell

"I hope he will call for a pragmatic, bipartisan approach," said Rep. Stephanie Herseth Sandlin...
=======================

Forget the sides, left and right, back down or fight; me or you, red and blue. Can anyone who talks meaningless, canned words, (without the tongue firmly implanted in their cheek) be of any value at discussing solutions to structural problems in the systems that we are operating in.

All that above mealy-mouthed, dribble-drabble just displays how pathetic, sad and just silly the popular discourse of our ‘learned and important’ men, and women, is. This paplum that they spew out as sage word and which is then fed out in never ending doses for mass consumption. It is part and parcel of a power structure that maintains, at all cause, it’s being. It’s their job, dammit! It’s what empires, viruses and man all try to do - continue on no matter what.

In the meantime Diogenes is still roaming, looking for his one good man. How many say no to a free case of booze. But all that is the problem of any falling empire. No one is out for anyone but themselves. I find it literally insane how the funding can be instantly found to carry on far flung wars of geo-political game-playing but health care for folk living in the richest country in the world is a boondoggle of unimaginable folly.

Everyone should have to work in the hot sun for a few years growing food for people they don’t know. It would give another perspective on whether the meager really will inherit the earth. In the meantime listen to your president from the same story.

"We do intend to get something done this year" "If you have a better idea, put it on the table." "I'm open to new ideas," "We're not being rigid and ideological about this thing."

I like Obama for his choice of language. As my father said, perhaps as a vestige of his running days, or residue of his water flow solutions, “lead or get out of the way”. But that is engineer thinking, not political, which is a different regard on systems and their functions.

It begins again

2009-09-08T12:43:00.000-07:00

In the vignes early on a crisp september morning that will turn into a perfect september day. Blue, blue, cloudless sky will come and last throughout the day. Softer light arrives with the sunny days now, it has begun to lose it’s scorching quality. The temperature is 80 degrees, give or take a few. It is the kind of day that makes the myth of the south of france continue.

For a couple of hours it was all the sentiments of the beautiful day beginning and more. I was happy to see the souches again. See how they fared during the summer. While I was frittering about here and there, they were working everyday. The new shoots I left have born fruit again. It’s really quite amazing that food (and in this case, drink) can grow.

I was in the vines to work, and though the grape harvest can conjure up romantic images, which do still exist, the overall reality of it is much different. The fact of the vendage in the time of mass production is that it is all day, low paying, stoop labor in unrelenting sun. I mean that how it is from my side. If you happened to be slowly passing by on the rising, sinewy country road that borders the vine we were in on the beautiful day that was today and saw the colorful peasants working in the fields, it may invoke a whole different feeling than the one I was having today. It was at least a different feeling than the one I was having after the first few hours of the day had past.

For me it was the first day picking this year, my vigneron started without me. He had begun last week. He is trying to save a few rubles by cutting back on the salary hours, even low paid workers add up to un-affordable when you already are on the financial edge.

For the first couple of hours today I was ecstatic to be in the vine again. Then we continued working, the sun came out. My hands and arms got sticky with grape juice. Wasps are all about the sweet juice, and consequently me too. The vines are low, I am tall, my back makes up the difference. The afternoon was beautiful, if you were sitting in a shaded cafe, in the field it was baking (which is admittedly different from scorching).

But the first few moments, cool just breaking morning, the grapes sweet with the summer sun and concentrated from lack of rain. Fresh, fresh, fresh in the morning. I had the heat on while heading to work, the boulanger at 6:30 am with a “hi, how you doing” and a good sandwich too. Yes, the vines in the morning for a few hours - fantastic, mythic, romantic. Then the rest of the day.

Just a little thing

2009-09-06T14:19:00.000-07:00

- Will you look at this, Hank practically shouted.
Sev looked at him and then dropped her gaze
- It’s just a small thing, you shouldn’t worry about it. It doesn’t really matter that much.
She was trying to be consoling but it didn’t quite come out the way she wanted and Hank (the consistently falling hero of our story) was becoming even more agitated.
He glared at her, then at it, the source of his agitation.
She didn’t get it, couldn’t get it. Sev had came from elsewhere, she had witnessed, but never lived in the belly of the relentlessly turning machine. She had seen it, but never felt it roll over her, without consideration or compassion, like it rolled over anything and everything else in it’s path. It left no safe haven, no refuge. It was, if nothing else, unceasingly efficient.
- look at it, they don’t miss a beat, he declared.
They had been working out the dates and schedules of his kids, her kids, the back to school, back to work, end of summer crunch time. Hank had gone to get the calendar that he had hanging up by his desk, he had picked it up on the counter of the neighborhood deli his last time through the states. As he walked into the kitchen he had flipped the calendar to the month of september and there it was, just below and to the right of the stock photo of autumn foliage.

Summer Memories
As summer comes to an end make sure that you preserve your memories. PostNet can scan and archive documents and family photos. We can print out a summer memory book or enlarge vacation photos.
Think PostNet

- look at this, he cried to her.
He threw down the calendar he held in his hand. She saw it but didn’t know why it caused him such consternation. What she couldn’t see was that another small, innocent space of his childhood had been thrown into the maw of the machine. Another formerly public space had gotten confiscated for the never ending production of consumption.

Hank knew it was just a small thing. On it’s face, it was innocuous. A little block of text. A simple plug for a product on a free calender where once an aphorism or poem, an idea or reflection, engendered by the changing month or season had sat.

The morns are meeker than they were,
The nuts are getting brown;
The berry's cheek is plumper,
The rose is out of town.

-Emily Dickinson

- it’s all over.
- what, she asked softly
- the remembering when the merchants were locals and every single viewable space wasn’t calculated to engender a desire for consumption. When the bludgeoning was frowned upon and brutality was vulgar.

But our hero is doomed (it is this that makes him a hero) to remember the time when spaces existed which weren’t always ‘available for purchase’. When thoughts and discourse could exist without becoming products and brands. When silence wasn’t wasted space.

Broke, Broken.

2009-09-01T15:39:00.000-07:00

The concrete is almost all broken up. It’s like the cash in my bank account, there is just a little more to go. In the meantime the rubble, like my debt is growing. It’s a metaphor that often springs to mind when working for free.

It’s good to have a job, it’s not good to have no money. Those are two lessons I learned in my qmerican youth that have stuck with me. It seemed implied at the time that the one came with the other. It’s another example of a lesson where I failed to fully grasp the details. Perhaps it is simply a case of cultural attention deficit disorder, and I should have been consuming ridalin instead of experience. In any case I am once again looking forward to physically draining, minimum wage work. Mind you I am not complaining, simply explaining - how you get to this state of impoverished paradise.

For a week or so I made rubble. Perhaps several tons of broken concrete are evidence of my travails. It's size runs the gamut from just lift-able with one hand, to dust. The rubble was of my own making, and it’s disposal also falls in my domain. It's a benefit of my vertically integrated lifestyle. The later part started today.

A borrowed trailer, a shovel, a pair of gloves, nothing else is needed, except time. Pick up the big pieces, shovel the rest into buckets, carry it to the trailer, drive it to the dump, shovel it out. Repeat until the dump closes. Do it again the next day. In this brute world, does it make sense to talk of the fluffy couscous, tender baby lamb chop, fresh vegetables, cheese coffee and wine the neighbor invited me to lunch on.

The vines start next week. Mmmigrant wages, physical fatigue. Paradise.

Forecasting

2009-08-28T13:48:00.000-07:00

The grapes are withering on the vine. It has been, and is again today, hot and dry. The grapes are small and concentrated, their juice is meager. They are thirsty.

It’s not even september and the machine has started up again like it has for the last 2000 or so years here. Sun, grapes, wine. Baaahhh, there is a sheep somewhere in the backround of the picture. Their mmmeeat and cheese with the red red wines, just like it always was. Wash it down, mmmm good.

Every year it is the same, with just a slightly different taste. This year is no different. Thirsty grapes make concentrated flavor. Too bad for the vigneron who needs the weight more than the flavor. That’s production, but oh well. That big rain that never came this year fills up the grapes with juice and hence weight. When you are paid by the pound, heavy is happy.

Picking in August sun, hot breeze that doesn’t stop. Hard rocky soil baking up from below. Oh yes, you’ll get your wine, some years it comes harder than others, but it always comes. Coteaux de Larzac, but it’s not all production. There are other vignes we are waiting on.

Each day now gives the chemical actions a bit more time to act. It’s a living system inside that raisin skin. The seeds floating in the soft flesh, the sugars agitating, the tannins rising, the seed softens. It’s a dance inside those purple membranes, it’s genetics remembering, way back when, when it was all about getting the seed ready to go back into the ground.

But that’s not what you think in the fields. Hot. Sun. Unending rows. Beginning. Again.

At least that’s what they say. I still have yet to see a tractor. Though I am rarely on the street. The local cave cooperative was open, though three of the four bay doors were shut. For me it starts anyday now, it’s vague the migrant work. When the convention season comes, the pimp doesn’t call his whores and tell them what dates they are starting. They just know that it arrives, they leave the details to their man and await his direction.

In the meantime I am crushing concrete with a jackhammer. This gig is so far off the books that I am not even getting paid for it. I am doing it just for the idea that I need to do something. It’s in a cave, so it is cooler, but it’s dusty. In the meantime it fills up time, next is the clear air of the vines and the spirit breaking heat of unrelenting sun. Don't worry, your wine will come.

On the label it will say - YOU.

2009-08-22T07:38:00.000-07:00

Suddenly, everyone is gone.

Perhaps it has been happening slowly and I only just noticed it now. The vacation is ending. Yes it’s still august and the days are still hot and we swim in the afternoon in the red waters of the Salagou, or the blue clair at the pont de diable. It still isn’t sure if we won’t have one more dip in the sparkling salty sea water before autumn. Never the less, it’s over. The summer has turned.

The flavor of the fruit at the market starts hinting of preserves on warm toast with hot tea. It’s color is darker and the flesh softer, like summer, it is rotting into fall. It’s a richer sweeter taste only because it is about to go bad. And by that I mean kaput, finis, over, gone.

The house is empty. Just me and her, and even she has gone for the day. I’ve been surrounded with people all summer, tens and tens of folks in ever rotating groups. Love love love. Everyday we were having a party, or planning, preparing or cleaning one up. It’s hectic and fun and, thanks to the fat sun that hangs long in the sky, well lit.

In a sense, one needs think of nothing.

Gin and tonic, riding high in the ice. Cool wine and cold beer. Shade, slight breezes, and quiet swims in cool black water reflecting starry nights. Oh there are moments. Were moments. Now distilling memories. Mmm good fruit makes sweet jam for cold dark winter days.

Chicago, La Roquette, New York, Clermont l’herault. New Jersey and Moureze. The Atlantic ocean and the Mediterranean sea. The great lake Michigan, and the Salagou. Indians lake, and the piscines publique. I was wet everywhere I went. And all because of you, never alone. Mmm you. Like a cool mist on hot skin, even the thought of you gives pleasure.

But the harvest of summer is almost over, and it’s evidence is the empty house. Fun in the sun is over again. It’s au boulot for tous les monde. School and factories, field hands and functionaries. Actors, artists, working class bores - watch the closing doors.

Here, the grapes are waiting. One more week, perhaps two, and for me it’s sore muscles and purple hands. In the meantime I can take care of some loose ends, cook down and put up the sweet memories before they go bad. I’ll label them - NOUS / summer 2009

My clothes are pleated because I am on vacation

2009-08-21T15:58:00.000-07:00

It hasn’t rained all beautiful summer. The heat is constant and dry. It has taken on a material quality that makes it seem almost tangible. It’s the summer and it’s inherent heat and vacations that I blame my laziness on. If you could see me panting like a dog sprawled out on a cool tile floor you might understand my position a bit better.

It’s not that I’ve been doing nothing, more so just that nothing is getting done. I’ve made my gestures, took my planes, trains, and automobiles in search of that elusive and requisite summer fun. Never the less the more I moved the less I got done when I got there. When I did move, it was always toward the water. It’s the only thing to do that doesn’t lead to hot and sticky. But then again, that’s all water really does - lead away from somewhere - starting with the shore line.

I caught a little cold on the beach in Spain,. Perhaps it was too much information in my summer reading choice. It was all about the C.I.A. post Korean war, biological weapons testing programs they were trying out on the world populations. Though there is plenty of documentation on how and why it began, there is no evidence that they have ever stopped. In any case, whoever fabricated it and then passed it on, this little bug shows no sign of weakening, not that it was ever so strong to begin with.

my malady in fact is almost non-existent, at least during the day. Each evening however my throat starts feeling rough, a few hours later I am hoarse, then I lose my voice. Silent, I am forced to go to bed. In the morning I wake up and for an hour or so cough up the nights production of solid flemmy colors. It’s more annoying then anything else, and really takes away the pleasure of my morning cigarette.

In addition to that I feel constantly tired, or perhaps that’s caused by the daily swims I’ve been taking in the cool bodies of water that flow through here. In any case I feel fatigued. It’s for that reason that tonight I won’t write you again. You know how much I would like to, so many things to say. You - you are really so kind to forgive my faults.

Bastille day +1

2009-07-15T15:55:00.000-07:00

I’m a mess. It was all france, all day today. It hit me hard from both the good and bad end. They both make me feel like crying. It would be easy to do, I just don’t have the time.

It started early today. It was five twenty five when something within me said time to wake. That simple action avoided the harsh wake up ring of the alarm five minutes later and consequently I was feeling good. I’m off to the vine for the morning, we’re cutting back the grape bunches, leaving less grappe per souche lets the remaining bunches achieve a more detailed and concentrated maturity. Think about it as culling the herd for fitter animals. It’s all about controlling the flow of energy. In this case it’s sap.

It’s a slower process than any other action during the year. It gives a longer look at each souche. It’s another pass, another time, and the vines are at their peak growth rate. We need to dig in through the leaves to see whats going on with the grapes. Then as usual it’s snip snip snip and on to the next. It’s how you make good wine. Start with a more manipulated (changed by artful means so as to serve one’s purpose) grape. There is a certain amount of art, perhaps even skill in it, but mostly it’s a lot of work. In any case it’s back and forth we go.

There is a lot of action inside the vines besides the raisins. They make nice cover for birds, small mammal, insects and other fun stuff. Yesterday I saw two fledglings in their well hidden nest. The parent swooped at me as I lifted my head. This morning I found the jaw bone of a wild boar with one giant, gleaming white tooth intact. It fit right in my pocket. As we were finishing up I got stung three times when I came across a wasp nest. I figured it was the price of the sanglier tooth. The vine is beautiful at six o’clock. Then the sun comes over the rise of the mountain and by noon it starts becoming unbearable. But it ends there.

We quit for the day.

Never the less the day goes on. Its french french french and that means paperwork, forms and bureau's. Today after lunch (mmm it’s market day, zucchini puree and horse meat, goat cheese and fresh melon for desert) and a nap, with a sweet wakeup call, I’m off to the local offices.

Today it’s the social service bureau and then the lawyer. My allocations have been suspended and my divorce runs on. First stop the MSA, mutual societe agricole, you see, I am a peasant now. Conveniently located in town I usually walk, but due to the wakeup call I am running late so I hop in the car and head there. There are two woman assigned to this office, one knows nothing and is a condescending bitch, the other is nice though she is also frequently stumped with the most basic of questions. I saw her walking out as I walked in.

I got the bitch.

I ask what happened to my monthly stipend, and why it never arrived in my thinning bank account. She punches in my number in her computer and looks at the screen for a long moment. She doesn’t know why, but can confirm that it wasn’t sent. It could be a lot of reasons, she tells me, then stares at me. I ask her - what can I do, she says she doesn’t know, because she doesn’t know why it was stopped. We go on like that for several minutes and then she says she will call the main office. She dials and waits about 10 seconds and says no one is answering. “It’s kind of late for them to pick up the phone”. I ask what time they close. She says “five o’clock”. The clock on the wall says 4:18. I, probably mistakingly, pointed this out.

She goes on a diatribe about how busy they are and that I will need to call for myself tomorrow (when her bureau is closed), she explains it’s summer and I can’t expect people to be available when their office is getting ready to close for the day. I see where we are going and say nothing but look at her skeptically. She writes down the number and says to try tomorrow earlier in the day. I get up and go out of the office and then into the lobby and out the door, she follows almost directly behind me. She locks the door on the way out. Her office closes at 4:30, exactly. I go to my car. It doesn’t start.

I left the car and walked home to get my papers for the lawyer. I walk over to his office quickly and arrive just in time, but in a sweat. His office is cool. He lets me wait for a half hour, while he talks on the phone, to enjoy it. We shuffle words and papers back and forth, he seems earnest and forthright but that may only be his job. I will have to wait another ten months at least to know. In the meantime my old wife will stay in the house with the kids and all the rest, rent free and still angry. Me, when I get a chance I will cry at the fortune bestowed upon me. Right now however I need to get to the kitchen, the ten pounds of just over the edge peaches and nectarines I recuperated at the end of the market today need to be cooked down and put up before I go to bed. Just so I can do it all again tomorrow.

Another time.

2009-06-25T13:50:00.000-07:00

Again I am with the vigneron out on the side of the hill, in the vines. When he called me last week and said he had a few days work I was excited - for many reasons. It had been beautiful weather almost all of the month and it was tops for working outside, sunny and warm but not really hot, a chance to work the muscles and bronze the skin before the summer swimsuit season. In reality I needed the money. April had been great and I moved around from one day to the next with plenty to do, but the funds are almost out and anything goes a long way when nothing is the regular course.

In any case I hop at the work for something between those two extremes, money and being outside.

It’s the third time we are meeting in the vineyard and when he tells me where we will meet he calls it by name. I don’t know that vigne, but he describes it and I get it and am also warmed by the fact that all the fields have names. It turns out they refer to events or persons associated with the fields acquisition. It is never without interest.

We are to start on the first of May, a holiday here. May Day - the day of the worker. The farmers world doesn’t run on the state calendar and to me every other day being a holiday it doesn’t really matter. He tells me we will start at 7.30, so that we can get some work in before it gets too hot. The fact that the sun is long up by that time and also that it has been getting kind of hot in the afternoon, all the lolling about recently gets me readily agreeing and looking forward to the three or four days work he says he’s got

We meet in the field at 7.30 sharp, it is grey and overcast and a bit windy but not really unpleasant. The field before me has 23 rows of vines, 120 souche per row. They are in full spring flourish. The green is that vibrant color of freshly sprung leaf, the grey skies giving it a contrast that makes the field seem to quiver with growth, perhaps it’s this quivering that gives the green an almost yellow look. I start to have a small affinity for the vines now this third time through for the year, the taille, the attachment, now we will be clipping back the beurgeon, the spring growth, tailoring the vine to grow up not out, reach up to the wire trellis. In reality today it is done so the machine can harvest maximum yield, but this work of training the vines to grow this way and not that way has always been a part of the history and the art of wine making.. It is not without its aesthetic moments.

Then comes the rain, cold wet muddy. By day three we are wearing more clothes than in january doing the taille. This is three days after a sunday picnic where we were swimming in the local river. But the storms rolling about give a great look into the weather currents of the region, one day from the south and the sea, another from the plateau to the north, then the Carroux mountains from the west. Each day presents a living 3D weather map as the storms come rolling in, the vigneron constantly pointing here and there explaining which town is receiving the rain,. Sometimes you see the storm dance around you, the sun at the sea, grey but calm. the view is tremendous.

Each day the storms come rolling in, as they trace a line towards us the vigneron gives me a detailed map of the area, the falling rain in the distance acting as a pointer to this town or that. Often with the towns name I get a short story of the towns high points/and or regional products/ a short souvenir of the vigneron - in dialog form. The vines continue.

more luck

2009-06-03T15:33:00.000-07:00

Cherries. Black. Ripe. Copious. Mmmm.

The beauty of cherries is their fleeting being. It gives their flesh a particular sweetness. The season when you can get cherries that are worth eating is perhaps only three weeks long. This scarce season when spring is fully ripe and summer just awaits it’s official installation is right now.. they seem to arrive at the same moment when you fully integrate the idea that the dark and cold have truly receded again. Cherries are the first real taste of the light and heat of summer. We just picked our fill. Our hands are stained with the blood of another fallen winter.

It was a group affair, my vigneron said we could have at one of his cherry trees. It sits right on the pretty edge of one of the vignes. He had had his fill and being pressed from all sides he just doesn’t have time to go and pick them all. And even if he did, then what. Without his country village mom alive any more to process them, picking them is just wasted work. He said we could take what we wanted. A little prime de panier for his ouvrier.

Cherries - everyone loves them, or at least the concept of them. Even so it was with difficulty that we got the five kids simultaneously rallied for the deluxe chance I was trying to convince this was. In the end we just forced them to go on grounds of fresh air and family time. We arrived in two cars, baskets and bags in tow. From a distance, across the vines, the tree looks pocked with dark red blight.

We swarmed on the tree like ants on sugar. Everyone exclaiming loudly at the quantity of perfectly ripe shiny blood red cherries hanging before us. We all are stunned to explicative. An hour later we have our fill. It’s at least 50 pounds. And we only took the best ones, the tree had five times more still hanging on it when we left. Ah richesse. It’s hard to leave it - “just one more, it’s perfect”.

Then the satisfaction of walking up the street with our baskets overflowing with black cherries. The public casts envious eyes as we mount to the house leaving a scattered trail of rolling cherries from the overloaded baskets. Like a stringer of fresh trout, others see your luck and it is magnified. Ha, the work commences.

It goes on all weekend and monday too. We have right at de-pitting them. Cut squeeze catch drop and again. Everything dripping blood red. Big pots of stewing cherries slowly bubbling on the stove all weekend. The table covered with cherries in all form. We eat them with anything, we all agree they go best with white colored foods. Cheese, yogurt, ice cream, bananas, cream, vodka, pancakes, but the chocolate was good too.

Now all the kids have gone away to their respective parents and the cupboard is stacked with jars of all sizes of black jams and syrups that will bring us all back to the tree of plenty until at least the summer heat goes away.

Journée complet

2009-06-01T01:20:00.000-07:00

Some days it just works out. Pop pop pop. It’s a rare day, but it does happen.

Off to Lodeve today, my old gray town pressed against the rise to the Larzac plateau. It’s the sous prefecture of the department of l’Herault which means for any type of official business dealings it’s where you need to go. I suddenly had some business to take care of there, it’s only by coincidence it’s also where I go to see the candy man.

My sweet tooth has been flaring up lately but I’ve been putting off the trip to Lodeve only because it seems far to go just to feed a habit. So I wasn’t that disappointed when I found out I only had two days left before my taxes were due. It’s not that I pay any income tax, but I still need to file the forms. You see my income is so small even the state doesn’t want to be bothered counting it.

It was also an opportunity to change my address on my car matriculation. It’s one of those things I kept putting off for another time. It is also one of those things that one day I find myself getting a ticket I can’t pay for and wondering, again, why I didn’t do earlier. I had tried to do it one other time but the bureau’s steel door automatically swung closed and locked literally before my eyes as I was heading towards it. It was quite impressive, even more so being that this solid black steel door was set in a 10 foot stone wall that ran around the complex of back water bureaucratic offices. There was something medieval about it that rang right.

I won’t mention how French it felt at that moment. I was in it, and again, stunned by that fact. It was 3:45 pm and though the bureau closes at 4:00, the outside door locks down at 3:45 so the functionaries can get out promptly. Extremely efficient in it’s unproductive way. But France isn’t about production, it’s about something else. I had been so close, but never the less would need to come back another time. So much for good intentions and ever more efficient bureau’s.

But today is a different day and the door is wide open. You see, like I said it’s a day where everything works out. I have all my papers and after a polite wait, I step right up to the counter. I give over my papers and the pleasant man behind the glass asks for the photocopies of my documents. Last time I was here they just photocopied them and gave you back your originals. Well this is France so everything doesn’t work out even on the good days.

The new system installs itself slowly and insidiously. It comes up slowly and then one day we wake up and realize we are ensconced within it. Today it was the paper savings that someone in a meeting thought would be a good idea, perhaps it is, I don’t know. In any case I went to the tabac shop across the street and got in line with the other surprised at the new system folk. The guy behind the counter was content, at 50 cents a copy, he has found himself a whole, hitherto unknown revenue source.

I ponied up my 1.50 euro and was back before the man behind the glass in five minutes. I noticed as I re-handed him the papers that my I.D, card didn’t have my updated address. I envisioned the steel door closing again just as I walked up to it. But not today. He smiled. He stamped my papers, stapled them together and told me to wait at the other window to be called. A few minutes later, my name was called and the new updated car matriculation was in my hand. Errand one - check.

I walked from there down the street to the maison d’impots, or tax house. I had nothing but my name and a question - How do I go about this task. A few minutes wait and I was before the lady at the information counter. I posed my question, she asked my name. Then she looked for a file and not finding anything put my name in the computer and out came a tax form with all my pertinent information enclosed. She said ‘here you are’.

I took the form to a table, corrected the address to where I currently live, and then became confused with the rest. I had no response appropriate for many of the questions posed. I went back up to the lady and explained my predicament. She laughed and said ‘it is all filled in already, just correct your address and sign the form’. I did. She took the form, stapled it together and said ‘drop it in the box’ which she pointed to. I did. Taxes complete for 2008. Errand two - check.

‘Sweet’ I thought as I held the door open for an incoming lady. I tipped my psychological chapeau and walked out into the sun. I called the local candy man and as luck would have it he was home. Who doesn’t love a treat when you are already feeling good.

I strolled across town and an hour later was back in the sun and still feeling good, if not better. Errand three - check.

I left Lodeve, went back home, ate lunch and took a nap. The afternoon was beginning. In the morning when I had seen that my I.D. card wasn’t updated with my new address, I had forgotten that I had already made the demand to change it, it only hit me as I woke from my nap. The bureau was just up the street from the crib at the local mayors office. Off I went. The bureau was crowded and I had to wait ten minutes but when I got to the desk the woman remembered me. It sometimes pays to talk like an alien. She stepped in the back and came out with my new I.D. all updated and shiny. Not only that she apologized for the delay. Check on errand number four.

It’s still only three o’clock and so I headed to the local hardware to purchase some material for the renovation job that is about to start on the old house we have acquired. Same thing. In - out and materials loaded up in a jiffy. I put in a few hours of work and got everything ready to begin the real work the next morning. I arrived back home at seven. But there was one more surprise to my day.

At nine there was a knock on the door. It is my vigneron, he stopped by to give me some money that he owed me, and if that wasn’t enough he tells me he won’t have time to harvest his cherry tree and that if we want we can take what we want. They are ripe and need to be picked quickly. ‘Oh yeah’ I tell him.

When he leaves my woman and I have a taste of the bon-bons from the candy man, recount the day, go to bed; make love and happily fall asleep. Journée complet. Some days it just all works out.

aîe aîe aîe

2009-05-24T06:32:00.000-07:00

It’s all so delicate, this little balancing act we are all carrying out. There is always another decision to be made, every moment of the day. This or that. When I am cutting back the vigne it’s the sarments, either this shoot or that one, it’s a complex decision but one with finite choices. Outside the vigne, it’s a different, less circumscribed set of options that I am constantly presented with. This outside world demands a more dynamic sensibility. It’s a sensibility which I find not always at the ready. In fact it’s the first question that is constantly confronting me. Can I muster up a sensibility dynamic enough to partake of the day, or will the day just happen. To do it or not to do it, that is the question.

Nike proffered their answer with the ‘Just do it’ campaign which swept across the globe like a totalitarian dream. It erased all questioning, but always left me wondering. They made it seem like not doing it was somehow effaced from possibility. I guess sometimes it is, but sometimes not. Like the Slow Family folk in Texas say, sometimes we’re better off not doing it.

Which might bring to mind ‘Just say No’. That was another force fed question stopping ad campaign that ran simultaneously with the ‘Just do it’ bombardment. The problem is both appeared as complete truths. Neither made any acknowledgment of the need for a dynamic balance of opposites. That’s the delicate question. It evidently isn’t anything new. Perhaps my problem is that I am just a product of my generations mass marketed catch phrases. It’s just that I can’t figure out which one fits where.

It’s all so banal, but I continue non the less. You see we are talking about ‘I’ right now, and we both know there is nothing of greater concern than that. It’s what’s forcing me to go on. I need it’s push on a constant basis. At times I am stunned by a sensibility that could best be described as lackadaisical. I feel like a flàneur who is too tired to walk, there is something about it that just doesn’t sit right.

What will set it straight, show the way? How to make order from the days random events. Maybe the I-ching, prayers, the tarot, meditation. Perhaps just waiting until something happens. On verra, but in the meantime I think I’ll simply follow the advice of the bored cop in front of the crime scene and 'just keep it moving'.
.

Return, again

2009-05-18T23:54:00.000-07:00

Now I am back on the place du marché. Poufff. The disappearing night is always a bit more fatiguing than the thirty hour day but I arrived in good spirits.It’s hard not to when the first thing that greets you is the soft blue Mediterranean glistening in the sun. We swung way out over the sea and came into the little airport from that direction. The landing strip runs right to the shore of the water. There is a moment just before touchdown when we get so low it’s as though we are in a boat. Then a jolt and I am back.

Terra-firma. At least that’s what they say. For me it often feels less stable than that. In any case it is dry land, and I step out onto it. Oh le soleil. Mmm ma chére. Yes back home, almost. When I do get there.everyone asks me what I did. My first response is ‘nothing’. But on reflection we are always doing something. What did I do?

I saw a cardinal build it’s nest, and drop one, two, three eggs into it. I trimmed trees, and made fires. I sat in summer weather looking out at winter foliage. I painted ceilings and paddled canoes. I saw fresh babies and great grandmothers. Uncles and sisters and brothers and cousins, aunts and nephews, nieces and others. My mother, some friends, romans and countrymen.

I flew to Chicago. It’s almost home there too. Actors, artists, working class bores, watch the closing doors. Shiny town. Sunny days and late nights, big buildings and a great lake that seemed to go on without end, just like the feelings it engendered. Mmm ma chére etait la aussi. We ate, drank and made merry. Then did it again. Five sweet days. It’s all just so much luck.

It’s a shower of good fortune that has turned into a downpour and I am soaking wet. Everywhere I am feels like home, it’s just that the people keep changing. It makes for complex feelings, this insisting impermanence that confronts me at every turn. When recognized, and acknowledged, it gives a rich flavor to each moment. But sometimes I forget, and become attached to particular moments, and then the change leaves a lingering sadness. Nothing stays the same, but that’s hard to remember.

So now I have to switch gears again, up or down I really can’t say. Little town France is a long way from big city USA. After a quick weekend with the kids, I wake to find myself alone. I need to make rendezvous of all sorts, lawyers and doctors, social workers and driving instructors, farmers and friends. Even a lucky life has it’s dark moments. I just have to keep believing it will all get sorted out, and that the fortune will continue to fall beneficially.

39,000 feet

2009-04-22T04:58:00.000-07:00

I woke up to more rain. Since we've finished the taille it seems to have rained every day. It seems such a waste, all the rainy days on days that I had off already. The funny thing is that it was just getting sunny where I was when I flew away.

Montpellier - New York.
A single thirty hour day and everything looks different.

Now when I get up and hear the rain falling it has a different sound. The rain is a much quieter sound here. It's a softer sound. Where I came from the rain hitting the tiled rooves and stone houses makes a smacking sound, you might say a tinging kind of noise in an attempt to be more precise. Here the soft earth and liquid lake soak up the falling rain, leaving only the sound of grey and mist. Even the commuter train across the lake slides silently through the dark morning.

The place du marche has been replaced with the open lake. Blue, grey, budding green just beginning again in replacing the winter black. It's always surprising to see a season step backwards. The forsythia is full yellow bloom but spring is just a bit less along and it makes me feel the fluidity of time. Just a slight cant is enough to put me off balance.

Then there is Good morning, good-bye. How are you? All the little words of the day tumbling out without translation. I was constructed with the language of my birth and now I am resconced in it. Without constraint of willfully forming my words I expand to the point of disappearing.

The place du marche', Indian lake. My people, and none of them too. Strange to be home and away from it too.

spring fever cures, for you

2009-04-06T15:22:00.000-07:00

It’s spring now. The sap is rising. Everything is pushing out. If I was a bear, a female bear, I would be bearing, or at least getting ready to. Being a human male however I am outside that call, and so I just watch the cycles. Spring is all about starting again. It’s hyper active and full of sap.

The vines are weeping right now on a daily basis. They are so full of sap that each press of the trigger on my electrocoup 2000 brings on tears. It makes me wonder - does it hurt to be in love with growing, or is that just surplus sap that needs to be drained. In any case, out in the vines it’s springtime, and consequently I’m often wet with sap.

We’re coming to the end now. There only remains a few hectares to trim and then it’s over. The days are longer and the weather soft. All around things are popping out. When my sap runs I feel like popping out too, it must be the warm weather. It distracts the thoughts.

I almost cut myself in the vines today. The blade was just against the skin, but there was no penetration. For a moment it made me giddy, then I realized how close I came to fucking myself up.

It was my own fault, I just got bored and stopped paying attention to what I was doing. It’s so easy to do, forget what you are doing, it’s as if the lack of intention has a way of calling a cutting blade. I was all ready to cut myself, I guess just to bleed off some sap.

The thing is, as humans, unlike vines, after a certain point we aren’t growing anymore. At least not physically. It’s more a psychological taille that needs to be carried out on a regular basis. Perhaps that was the story of the sharp blade pressed against the skin today. Just a dumb way to wake up, pay a bit more attention to how things need to be trimmed, and not only on needing trim. It makes a significant difference.

In any case I think it is going to help me grow, the psychological pruning I carried out today in the vines, just after the blade pressed against my skin. For that moment the hot pressure on my sweated skin was the sole sensation I was experiencing. The blood was gathered awaiting the cut and a chance to spill outward. It was like a hot flash for a menopausal man.

The shear luck of escaping the closing blade, the cut never coming, the sap never flowing. Like that it had a chance to flow elsewhere, and as I said it was a psychological taille that went on in the vines today. It really is much more sane for us humans.

2009-04-01T13:42:00.000-07:00

There’s a lot of luck that falls my way. That’s not to say it’s all good, but that does happen too. Most of the time it is hard to decipher which it is. Chance, both heureux and it’s sibling malheureux, have a way of looking so similar that they are often hard to tell apart.

I have a wife, she’s a bitch. I have a girl friend, she’s getting fat. I have two kids, they don’t need me. Like I said, it’s hard to find the good without the bad, and it’s like that with luck too. In the end it’s how you want to see it. My wife’s a bitch, but I don’t have to see her anymore. My womans getting fatter, but her ass is getting sweeter, and the kids, well, they are forging their independence. In the right light anything can be good lucky, but some days the light appears differently, not wanting change. It seems cast with a grey that is hard to navigate by.

Yet it is a light none the less, one I’ve always been drawn towards. It’s the twi-night light. Where that grey beacons originate from. This cast of shady light where even the firmest of perceptions can be altered this way and that. It often makes it hard to get a fix on what to do. Never the less, things need doing.

It was this color that I woke to today. Wednesday present. Grey color cast over all. What is that lead color that has replaced the gold. Not raining, but slick with wet. An imperceptible fog covering everything. I am presented with sensations as quick and profound as sunny and blue. My days are not fixed, it was part of the aleatory contract I signed. The color of the morning changes my entire day, but what about my disposition, what to do with that.

I decide to stay in bed. In fact I had half decided the night before when I stayed up to an unreasonable hour. But when I woke it wasn’t exactly raining, one could say misting at most. The rains had been predicted and yesterday as I was leaving work, when I told the vigneron I would keep my eye on the meteo and if it wasn’t raining would report an hour early at eight, I really believed it. I was so sure of the forecast or a reasonable semblance to it, that I even said it gladly. It’s why I’ll always be a fake farmer, I truly believe in cracking out early to beat the weather and get the work in, but in reality I am far too fond of the pleasure brought on by the annulation of work to be a real farmer.

So I stayed in bed. The vines will rest with me, at least that’s what I thought until my mack called at nine and wanted to know why I wasn’t on my corner where we said we would meet. I had work to do, the vines were lined up like hardware convention johns at the cat house. They can wait, but not forever. It wasn’t even raining he said. I weakly replied, that everything was wet. After he called a second time thirty minutes later to talk of obligations and agreements, I sputtered a complaint and vaguely said okay. For a long moment I didn't know what to do. Then I turned the phone off, finished the chapter of the book I was reading and went back to sleep.

You see, I never doubted the forecast, all the signs on the ground yesterday confirmed it . Wind, moisture, temperature, they all felt like rain, and god-dammit I was committed to it, and the day off it would bring. Misty and threatening was good enough for me, and it should have been for the vigneron too, at least that’s how I saw it. But he was less mad, then disappointed, like I had let him down. Though even a hookers love has it’s limits.

In effect the day was one indecision after another. I did nothing, read a book, watched a movie, dicked around on the computer. Later I found a message the vigneron left on my phone not long after his second call to say the rain had started, and not to bother coming. As I said, I am full of luck. Good luck or bad is harder to say, though they say tomorrow it will rain again.

Corporal pleasure

2009-03-31T15:52:00.000-07:00

My vigneron is still crying poor. In the meantime, I become like him, rich on paper, but not a cent in my pocket. It’s not easy being poor in paradise. And if I have want, can I really be in paradise? It’s true that money isn’t everything, but it is something. It’s one of those somethings that only becomes a problem when it starts becoming nothing. It’s like a body just before it dies, it has to consider breath, and breathing as something conscious. The less you have, the more important a little becomes.

It’s spring and I am seeing a lot of creatures going at it. Bee’s doing it, birds doing it, why oh why can’t we do it. Come on baby lets fall in love.

Imagine all the souls awaiting incarnation. Angels lining up until the end of the universe, past the point where the real nothing that is the outside of the universe begins. These angels (you must imagine them in fantastical corporal form with wing spans of enormous proportions, it’s the exact opposite of the pin-head theory) are lined up going far into the void our universe is only just spreading into.

This queue to enter into corporal form and play on earth in full sensation is endless. These angels are all awaiting corporeal incarnation. It’s a fantastical hit in the astral world of the collectively unconscious. In fact, it’s the only thing of it’s kind out there where time hasn’t yet been conceived (in this sense the ‘waiting line’ is without wait, it just is). It’s a chance to play in a human body for a few moments, a lifetime. It’s a little break in the monotony of eternal bliss.

Bill begged to give it a try. Everyone laughed, “you just got off, but have at it again if you want.”
“I think I will, it’s really a great ride.
“Go ahead, queue up, we’ve got plenty of time, and it is fun to watch you. We’ll wait here”.

It’s a trip this slipping into physical form, the diminution of dimensions into three, covered in skin and flexible, full of excitations of the senses. It’s a chance to be embodied with a heart that beats.

Imagine the hit here if one had an attraction, a game if you will, where we could inhabit just a single dimension. You could be a single point, anywhere and everywhere you wanted. It would be a global phenomena. The only problem is that once you stopped playing it you would forget it ever existed. Perhaps it’s not a problem, everyone would just line up again. I mean what does it feel like to be a single point in space, surrounded by an infinite amount of other, seemingly just like you, points? Points don’t really ponder, they just make up stuff.

It’s hard to fathom that once we were just a speck in someones eye, an idea in the back of the mind. It is difficult to believe that we can begin with the caress of a hand in a dance hall, a whisper at the window.
- can I just come in for a minute?
Et Voila, the queue of angels all step forward again. Everyone desiring to play again, and why not, it really can be quite a treat, exhilarating, exasperating, either way it’s exciting.

And where they are coming from it’s so perfect that it often feels (at least that’s what they say) like nothing. Like the weather on a late september evening, when the air against your skin feels like nothing. When your skin registers neither hot nor cold, no breeze or humidity or anything else. It’s a conscious, pleasant sensation of feeling no difference between yourself and all the space that surrounds you. It feels almost as though your body has no borders, it can expand freely into everything. Or is it nothing, either way I forget.

We’re all dying to try on this corporeal body, to live out this physical dream. The supreme comfort of being held in loving arms wrapped in flesh is a pleasure not even accessible to the highest of angels.

So all that to say among the daily worries, I am trying to feel the sensations that I came here to experience, like that the misery is just another strong sensation that passes into the next feeling. It’s quite a ride at this stage, the sensations on many ends come in fast and furious and with the semi-strange backdrop of small sunny france.

But like I said, it’s a long train of thought if I start asking how I got where I am. Suffice it to say, it began with desire and will end when I lose it. In the meantime the toiling in the vineyards goes on.

vigne sky

2009-03-29T10:09:00.000-07:00

Everyday the sky is the show. After long stretches of time stooped over, looking down into the souche, clipping, grabbing, clipping, pulling, clipping, tossing aside, next, to stand up straight, stretch backwards and see the sky - well it’s sometimes a shock. In the sky above, there’s always a show going on. Oh.
Perhaps the clouds dancing on blue fields, or just the blue blue blue limitless blue sky itself. A black crow, a silver flash of jetliner. Or layers of grey. Clouds gathering, sprinting on the wind. Zooom. A pair of Mirage jets tracing the contours of the hills. A great blue heron.

Stretch and follow them, and then back to the vines. The ten, twenty, thirty second break is over. Bend again, down into the vine, cut it back, then the next - stem, souche, row, field. Oh. My body. The earth. Dense.

Two black crows. Floating in circles. Laughing at the earth bound humans toiling below. Yellow and red forest fighting planes, in a pack, like whales, low and lumbering, back and forth to the lac du salagou. A hawk, a heron, a single ray of golden light. A rainbow, a snowfall, an eagle that flies to heights out of sight. The above, the sky. Near and far.

Now at the end of march, the cold only comes as a factor of wind speed, not temperature, which as far as the thermometer goes, is not greatly variable. But the days when the wind is blowing, damp and nonstop from the North, the cold still bites at any exposed skin and shortly thereafter goes after the hands and feet. If the sun pops up over the roche de la virge it will, after an hour or so, take the bite out of the wind, and then by noon it can be a fabulous day. If the sun doesn’t arrive, the day is long, and the toiling in the vineyards becomes more than just a parable.

“The sun has heated up the earth enough to create a constant rising front to block any cold air on the plateau from rushing in under it, it blocks the cold from descending into the valley. See the clouds, it will be overcast tonight” - the vigneron tells me. He has a concise and logical sounding explication of how each weather pattern runs, its possibilities, its cloud pattern, its foretelling of the weather to come.

Sometimes even through my deafness to the language (or perhaps because of it), the descriptions of the weather sometimes sounds like poetry. Yesterday, on a two minute break that extended into five and a cigarette, the vigneron stretched out beside me, pointing up. “Look at the clouds, they are like the sand on the floor of the sea” .

Then he took me to the sea with him on a rare voyage he once had once taken as a child with his family in Spain. He said it was one of his few memories of his father not in the vines. His father had explained to him as they were wading in the warm sea water how the clouds, which had the same rippled form as the sand they were standing in, were formed because of similar forces. The rise of each ripple in sand or cloud gave an indication of the force acting on it. The high, uniform ripples spoke of a force that wasn’t so strong, but was constant. Then the vigneron added that he thought that was the way one needed to be occupied when farming. He sounded wistful, as if he knew that was the way he would have liked to tend his vines but couldn’t. For him it was full force, full pressure, full time.

While he reminisced about what had been and what is, the sarment got a short reprieve before being clipped, thrown to the ground, churned back into the rocky earth to feed their progenitor.

In the meantime I fall in love with passing clouds I’ll never see again. I watch them float by, only to be replaced by another. I start to know their names and where they come from. I find if I stare at them long enough, pay them mind, they all become beautiful, even those that are spitting at me. Lately I’ve found they have responded to my glances and started to reveal their patterns, and that, more than the particular, is what really strikes my fancy. It pulls my regard upwards, away from my earthly toils, makes me fall deeper into their mystery, and their matrix, the sky that covers us all.

Another day.

2009-03-26T15:34:00.000-07:00

It’s a funny thing that happens to foreigners who have set up shop in a distant land for a while. They don’t stop being strangers as much as the place they inhabit becomes less strange. Things become familiar and then slowly forgotten. You can even begin forgetting that where you are is different from where you came from. It can happen though, that you find yourself in a situation, a room, a circumstance, that exposes the essence of the difference and suddenly you think, Shit, I live in France.

I go to work in the vines everyday and that thought rarely comes to me. Today it shot through me as I stood in the lawyers office. Actually it was the staircase that triggered the synopses that lead to that train of thought. Yes the lawyer office, I found someone to take my public defense coupon. That means going through all the initiation rigmarole again.

It’s like getting a new trick that you know will be frequenting for a while. You have to see what they’re like, how they like it done. It’s not complicated, it seems lawyers are like all the other tricks, most of them want it in a certain way that doesn’t really vary that much from all the others. Still, each has their variations and if you want it to work out to everyone’s benefit it’s best if it starts off on the right foot.

In any case I had some papers to give him. This being france, and being a legal matter to boot, these will be just the beginning of reams of paper that will filled out and filed. I have started a new one for round two of my ‘proceedings’. But that is another story. In any case thanks to my battling almost one day ex wife I had one of those hyper clear regards on the world around me.

It was something about the black and white tiled floor in the 18th century solid stone building in the middle of town where the lawyer has his office. The wood bumpered steps, the solid, yet light looking, cast iron railing that rose and twisted gracefully along with them. The look of the double wooden doors, the details of the window frame, cut from stone. It all said ‘made (unlike you) in france’.

On another regard it’s nice to be so at home in a place that you start taking exceptional things for granted. This doesn’t mean they go unnoticed, it just means you get in the habit of it not being a special occasion when you engage in it. Champagne is the obvious example, but that is the same good product everywhere, and more just of a cultural overlay.

The really good stuff is the stuff that doesn’t even present itself elsewhere. That may not even be in the lexicon of folks out of the region. I am talking about a local product, really local, like things that grow in the wild, but are reaped in certain areas at certain times like any other crop. Vegetables, fruits, mushrooms, herbs.

The other good thing about local wild products is that they are free, if you know where to get them. In a pinch they can usually be had at the market, but that involves prices, sometimes at champagne levels. In any case when they are in season they are available where they grow and out of season they don’t exist.

Being a fake farmer in a little village, I have a high level of access to both the products exact season and the places where they grow. This is not to mention that whatever particle tool may be needed (never complicated) I have at hand. Today it was a pioche. Also known as a pick ax. The vigneron has his in the back of the truck just for occasions like today.

Yes spring is not only forcing the buds to pop out on the vines, but everything else that grows is on the rise. Today it was poireau sauvage - wild leeks. We had noticed that they had popped up as we made our way up and down the rows. They look any other weed growing in the vines. And like many of the other things growing in and around the vines they are edible, and whats more they are full of very good taste. A taste that can’t be had otherwise.

We got the pick ax and started working up and down the rows again. Fifteen minutes later we each had a bag full and off we went. Everyone loves to eat them. The only problem with many of the wild products, no one likes to prep them. But that is all part of the deal, they arrive full of dirt, and long hairy roots. both of which, need to be eliminated.

The difference between being a real farmer and a fake farmer is that the real farmers woman does all that work, a fake farmer has to do it himself. Though in my womans defense she does prep and cook all the wild boar the vigneron lays on me. Mmm primes de panier.

Coming soon wild asparagus.

In black and white.

2009-03-21T13:00:00.000-07:00

I was going to take the road that leads to the vigne again today, but I keep getting pulled onto another route. It ended leaving the air of a sordid affair, and it continues to de-track my thoughts in a scandalizing sort of way. The curé and his beau, or at least that shot into my head when I saw him look around like an owl as he opened the presbytery door, just before the two of them stepped in. “No after you”.

I thought I was a bird, standing motionless, inconspicuous on the balcony above as they strolled from the car to the door. The beau was unaware, but the curie saw me, and shot me a look. I felt like a sparrow under the gaze of a hungry owl. Something from both our sides registered that the other had been ‘noted’.

It’s too bad, before I saw the padre and his beau I had been thinking of the group of professional folks I saw all gathered together on the side of the road that drops down into the little village of La Salces. It’s a road that has about all you could want in your southern france country road. It’s skinny and smooth and winding, and is surrounded by a patchwork of green. Forests and olive groves and vines cutting their lines among the rolling and rising hills. Coteaux de Larzac is their appellation If you see this road on a map, it’s colored with the mark of ‘scenic route’.

They were all in a pile these out of place characters who seem to pop up anywhere. They are always out of the scenes character, it’s the thing that makes you take notice. They were all young and hip and hyper-professional. Theirs is a profession that has all the attraction of a traveling gypsy circus. When you see them you think how wonderful it would be to run away with them. That is until you do, and then you realize the reality isn’t quite like the dream. Or perhaps their reality is too much like a dream, in the sense it is often chaotic and unsure.

In effect it is what this group fabricates. Dreams that is. They are the creators of illusion and attraction. It’s their business, and it’s most attractive illusion is themselves, as they go about weaving the dreams we will see in the future. Their was about a dozen of them. These expensively outfitted, good looking hipsters standing beside their shiny rented truck just in front of the vines I had put in order the other day.

They were surrounded by all their dream making equipment. The truck had disgorged it’s charge and everyone was demi-busy arranging this or that. Primping is really a better word - there is no real heavy work in this high paid world. I know, I spent a bit of time in their ranks when I was running away in Chicago.

It's a job that is all about primping, ceci, cela. The lights, and reflections, the makeup and cables. In this business the smoke and mirrors are real, and expensive. And everything right from the stars on down is precious. You keep your job with them by being precious too. It’s fun, and easy to do when you know your job is creating someones dream.

They had picked their spot well, though they almost always do. Beautiful settings are part of any good dream. It was a beautiful sunny morning and their backdrop was the freshly ordered black souche in the foreground and the rolling green checkerboard of field and forest behind. In the far distance there was a skyful of extremely calm blue reflecting off the morning sea. An idyllic setting for the pretty girl turning her head from her man, over and over again until she looks like she means it, and the director says ‘that’s a take”.

The vignerons wife saw them to on the road to work too. She was a-gaggle all morning with it. They were filming on her land and it excited her. A real film crew, they were on her property just in front of the vines we had worked two days ago. What if we were there working, she wondered - we were that close to being in a film.

I was happy for her. I felt kind of the same. it was something out of the ordinary and we talked about it all morning, I tried to say that since we had pruned the vines behind them, we were the films ‘greensman’ but my story was lost in translation. It didn’t matter though, I got it.

We could see them across the little valley from where we were working. She noticed when they left around 11:00. She suggested a break just then and I seconded it, so we took a cigarette and watched them break down. From the distance it looked no different from an olive man and his workers loading their truck, and yet she was pulled toward it like the local lass to the swarthy roustabout. Pure attraction. Here, then gone, what’s more romantic than that when you are tied to the land. It was an event I could see fixing itself in her memories like a dreamt image. Not of the heavy tossing and turning kind like the curé and his beau had left, but rather something lighter, quicker. Like a jet fighter cutting between mountains.

Habeus Coitus- avec juste un peu de romance. R/3

2009-03-17T16:08:00.000-07:00

So it’s off to the lawyers tomorrow. It is now just over three years of proceedings and two decisions made. My hopefully one day EX-wife didn’t like either one, so the process continues. The main reason for her displeasure seems to be she would like everything and that decision hasn’t yet be rendered. Little by little though she will wear the system down. It’s a big system, the justice department of the country of France, it takes time. Shit, it took me fifteen years before I couldn’t take it anymore, who knows how long it will be before our old blind friend Justice gives in and throws up her hands too saying
- okay, okay I've had enough of you, if I give you everything will you leave me alone?

That's what I finally ended up saying. She’s already got the kids and the house but it just doesn’t seem to be enough. She wants something intangible that a public institution just can’t deliver, like tranquility. She thinks it’s something someone should have to give her. It's her due for being so miserable. She is looking for retribution for her lack of it, and is now focused on me. In any case the process continues. As I said it’s already been three years and so far we haven’t budged from point zero.

It’s for that I have an appointment at the lawyers. It’s a new lawyer for stage three now. The other lawyer got tired of it and said a case like this could take many more years. For a flat fee it just didn’t seem worth it to her. Even though it’s her job, I can’t blame her. So now I have to find some other shyster who can see an angle in it. I just want to be done, be able to point her out in a crowd and say - yes, there, that’s her, my ex-wife. I mean I’ve already lost my two kids and the house I bought and rehabbed, what is in it for me. It all seems so pathetic.

The vines go on, we knock down field. They seem to never end too. The nice thing though is that unlike my wife they do and one day long before my divorce is declared we will be done. It’s hard to think that you could grow the grapes, process them, age the wine for a few years, and then drink it before a simple divorce can be decried. Imagine the time it would take to figure out the books that would eventually show just how screwed we got by AIG, Citigroup and the likes. And though that may before I am officially declare divorced, I wouldn’t wait for the book to come out anytime soon.

I am broken battered beaten bruised and bemused with it all. The spring has come on for the last week and the sun tans the skin and raises the sap. The vines are weeping with each slice of the scissors. Literally pouring sap from each new cut. It sometimes makes a small pool below the souche that is quickly absorbed by the dusty earth, leaving just a dark wet stain. I keep looking for some clue to things in the shape of the stain that is left on the ground. So far I have seen nothing but abstract forms. If I do see something I will be sure to let you know.

I did see something yesterday. Or should I say ‘heard’ something. because that’s how I first came to be aware of it. Two eagles copulating. It was a raucous event. It didn’t last long, and lacked any of the ‘hot’ aspect that we sometimes think of when copulating comes to mind, but it was something I never saw before, at least live and un-staged. It made me happy to be where I was for a moment, even if I was sweating it out for minimum wage at a dead end job.

It’s the unexpected that always attracts. It’s for that I am staring at the pools of sap that gather below the cut sarment. I am looking for something unexpected, but recognizable. Like the end of this divorce, or someone fucking someone else, but with love, not anger.

Business. The crisis, and it's contra-face, opportunity.

2009-03-14T16:04:00.000-07:00

The wheel spins on. The scenario heats up. The vigneron is hard pressed. He is long on capital and very short on liquidity. They are coming at him from all sides. The rent, the mortgage, the cars, the plaquiste, the plumber, and all the miscellaneous daily expenses that come with being him in his world.

In the meantime the taille of his vignes waits not. There is still a large chunk to go and his one ouvrier is threatening to go on strike until he is paid. It will be a walkout if he isn’t paid at least enough to have gas to get to work, and a few euro's left for some little somethings, what they used to call pin money, or the boys in jersey referred to as 'walking around money'.

The parcel in question had just been 'tailled'. The next day the vigneron came in with his first price. He has acknowledged he needs to sell something. He wants to sell it to his ouvrier to wipe out the debt owed him. He wants another ouvrier to possibly work ‘a la tache’ in some kind of barter. It’s a long shot but like that the vigneron might get his taille finished on time, and consequently the house construction too. It’s all open. Bargainable. The one thing is sure he needs cash as quick as possible.

His price was 4.25 brick. That’s francs. It is based on a half hectare +/- . HALF of which is carrignan and the other cinsault. Is there a use for that? When the vigneron said the price, the ouvrier said nothing. Only that of course the canadian would have to look at it, being that he knew those sorts of things. The vigneron said he would get the papers out regarding the parcel, it’s geometre, it’s production from last year. The deed.

The other question is do you want the ouvrier with the deal. Yes the ouvrier has said that wants in, and it’s true in a big way. For all the reasons you said, flagships floating back to the new world, the joy of the project that goes on with the seasons, the chance to be in on creating something of quality, and doing it with all from the land. And there is more.

You see the ouvrier wants a piece of the land, terroir in his french neighborhood. It’s where he has what pass for his nouveau french roots. It’s a zone of farmers. He wants to be a farmer too, but not a real one the everyday one. He just wants entry into the deeper roots of how to make the grapes grow and how they are fined into wine. This project seems to have all the parts that will work, and at the end he drink the fruits of the labors. Yes, the ouvrier wants in. How about you.

He brings labor, and cash, and a small but useful reseau. He wants in on at least the growing end. As for the vinification end that would be as much or as little as the canadian feels like sharing. So those are the things in play. The first offer has been made. 42575f. Rumor has it the canadian will be back the 18th.

They just keep coming

2009-03-09T14:18:00.000-07:00

The vines continue. They go on and on. The wind blows, the sun shines, the rain falls. We continue. We are always almost half way done. It’s as if in a dream where you run at full speed but get nowhere. The souche are like the federal soldiers charging the wall at Fredricksburg, or for that matter a Chinese soldier in Korea - they just keep coming. No matter how many are slain there are more behind them. The electrocoup 2000 like the confederate rifles, keeps firing all day until the barrel is too hot to touch. They arrive, they are cut down, and another presents itself. It goes on from sun rise, to sun set. It is psychologically brutal, even on a beautiful day.

But I won’t complain, if I started I would have to continue. Tell of my body that is racked with fatigue from the inside out. Speak of the groups of muscles that are stretched with the same motion so many times that they become sore when moved in any motion that varies from the ordained movement of the taille. I would end up telling of my hand that wakes up literally frozen in place, as if clenched around the handle of my tool, or the barrel of a gun. Talk about my legs that constantly feel, and sometimes move, as if they are made of stone. But as I said, I won’t complain.

After all we’re in a crisis, and so there are always worse scenarios. Like the vignerons. He started working this job when he was ten. He was fifteen when his father died and he became the head. He’s multiplied his holdings just to the point where all he can do now is work, and try to stay ahead of the bankers. They are all skittish nowadays and they are passing it on down the line. My vigneron is feeling it, and by consequence me too.

The reason I can’t really complain about my work, is that I am not really working. Work, or more specifically a job, implies completing a task and being remunerated for it. That’s not really my case. As I’ve said before, it’s more like the commercial lien between a hooker and her pimp. She does the work and he gives her what he thinks she needs, when he’s got it. My vigneron loves me, he would give me some money if he had it, he’s just a little short right now. It’s hard times right now with him having to pay for the new car he just got, and the new house he’s building for himself. He did promise me he’s going to get me a new pruning tool for next year. Also I don’t want to keep bothering him for some money or he may just let me go.

It was cold today, the winds were 50mph with gusts up to 80. The sun never really came out. We spent quite a bit of time in the truck with the heat on, drinking hot tea. For a farmer the truck is his office, and when we were warming up, my farmer was carrying out a little business on the phone. He was talking with the bank trying to get an advance on some money he’s got coming in. They weren’t too receptive, the crisis and all that. It also seems he is a bit over-extended already. Normally that might make me nervous, but I know better than to doubt him. When I told him I couldn't come to work tomorrow because I had no gas in my car, he pulled out a wad of cash and peeled a fifty off for me. I know my vigneron, he loves me. He’ll take care of me, just like a good pimp does.

It’s not romantic all the time. R/2

2009-03-04T16:12:00.000-08:00

Some days you wake up and look out the window and just see gray. The hero of our story, his name is Hank, woke up like that this morning. He woke up thinking with the letter he had read, and re-read last night. It was as if it had turned in his head all night, churning up the weather that made the windows he wanted to look out upon, appear as if they had been covered in lead.

Hank felt boxed in. Quelle salope were the words that the thought gave form to. Then he said it out loud, just vaguely moving his lips and expiring the phrase, so as to give it solid form and cast it out. He threw off the covers and sat up. Whatever his particular case, the day goes on.

It was gray and wet but it wasn’t raining and that meant suiting up and off to work. Hank wondered if he could still call it that. That witch had put a spell over that world too. The morning was giving off the same vibes as her, cold, wet and uninviting. A day that finishes with mud caked on your boots, the cold leaching into your feet and working its way around you. Yes, wet and cold and Hank would soon be in it again.

He realized this grinding weight of being boxed in could drive him over a line. It had already been three years. In the beginning he thought it would run it’s course and then finish. Now he was no longer sure of it’s terminus. In the meantime the battle mentality had become quotidian. It complicated every gesture and wrapped itself around every simple action. At one time he had thought the justice system would eventually see the folly of it, but now he realized why they said justice is blind.

Blind people stumble about, just like all the rest of us, when things aren’t clear. Hank was tired of stumbling, and was becoming angry at being tripped. He kept thinking it would just take one momentary release of the controls that were in place to put an end to the non reasoned unhappiness that swarmed around her, and which was constantly trying to imply itself on him. A momentary lapse into rage and action, what our blind friend Justice called a ‘crime of passion’, and everything would be much cleaner. Like that hard rain that will come and wash the trash from the streets.

But because he left just enough time to carry out his primordial duties in the morning, there wasn’t time for dreaming. The world around Hank was turning and he needed to move too. It’s hard to get up the courage. That’s why he took sugar with his tea. It was a little reward, which he needed sometimes, just for getting up.

The day was already happening outside his doors. He could hear the vendors setting up for the weekly market. He got ready and off he went. The bells said eight thirty just as he locked the door. It would have been hard to tell otherwise, everything he saw gave the appearance of it being much earlier in the morning. The vendors were few and still in the process of setting up their stalls. But even more convincing was that the lead gray sky gave no indication that the sun had risen behind it. It was so convincing a representation of seven o’clock in the morning that Hank had a fleeting sensation of pride at having got at it so early.

He liked going to work wendsday mornings. The market set up just in front of his apartment. It had a carnival like ambiance. It was active and loud and colorful and was full of paysans and merchants setting out their wares. It gave off a feeling that Hank imagined wasn’t much different than it had been in the middle ages. Aside from the fact that the vendors now arrived in motorized trucks instead of horse drawn carts, the form and function of the village market has remained exactly the same throughout time.

That continuity made Hank want to be within it and he got a sense of doing just that when he walked through the market to get to his car. It helped that he wore his red suspendered electrocoup 2000 slung over his shoulder. It identified him. Put him firmly in the peasant class. The merchants looked at him, they addressed him with their nods. The work Hank did had a continuity that went further back into the mists of human history than their own. Hank was the latest in that line. There was a recognized value to that.

The last year, crossing the market on the way to the vines, the flower girl whom Hank had seen several times before, had stuck a rose in his pocket as he walked by. When Hank thanked her she laughed in a way that was so attractive Hank felt himself physically drawn to her, and before he thought about doing it, he had taken a short step toward her. At the same moment, perhaps a very small moment before, she had stepped the same sized step toward him, and thanked him. Then she laughed again. Hank had the impression that they had just had an infinitesimal dance together, and he said so. I like the dances that last longer, she said as she conspicuously scanned his electrocoup 2000 trimming tool.

Hank laughed at that, and she smiled too. She said her father had been a vigneron and she remembered helping him with the taille when she was young, she wondered how it was with a power tool. Hank replied that it was just faster and less intimate. She had been disappointed to hear that, her father had always said that the tending of the grapes was extremely important because without wine none of us would even be here.

At first Hank had had a hard time understanding what she was saying, and he found himself listening to just the rhythm of her words. She spoke with a heavily accented voice and she borrowed frequently from the Occitan language - the langue d’oc. It had been Le lingua franca in this area before the Franks had smothered it with their own. In the end he had understood the main drift of it.

Her story was something about how before the world was inhabited, the spirits who were, had created, and then used wine to give their essence a corporeal body. The alcohol gave their ethereal beings a denser property and thus they could take a form with which to partake of the sensual which exists solely in the physical world. It was a realm of physical being which for all eternity before that had been denied them.

Then she rattled off in quick succession, distillation, spirits, specific gravity, density, body - listen to the words we use when we are talking about grapes and making wine. Civilizations have always linked wine with the Holy. Then she smiled and said ‘I’ve got to get back to work’. Hank had went to work too. He had never seen her again, but he could still breath her.

He remembered it as one of those infrequent moments of feeling fully connected and content with himself and the place he was inhabiting. The brief walk through the market, emblazoned with his tailleurs emblem hanging from him engendered an almost giddy feeling the he was playing his part. It was like a circus, and he was a traveling roustabout.

But today Hank was just stunned by the difference of time. The flower girl wasn’t there again but he saw some roses and so she flashed in him.
pt 2. Hanks day finishes much different than he had previewed

romance and the town dump. R/1

2009-03-01T13:17:00.000-08:00

I am back on the way to my mythical vines to work. Or should I say ‘watch the workers’. I know I said I wouldn’t make up any more stories, but I can’t just go on and forget the romance. I would have to leave out what happened on the road between Rabieux and St Jean today. It was some minutes just before nine o’clock.

At this time of the year the sun has just begun to crest the small hills on the east of the valley that this road runs through. Two weeks ago in this area, at this hour of the day, the sun was still firmly behind the hills. It’s always a pretty road to drive but this morning it was like a well lit dream. The landscape was highlighted here and there, where it could catch the new days rays, with a fresh yellow, almost golden light. In the little hollows the hoar frost was turning from white to glistening, just before it disappeared. The sky was the profound blue color it can be here.

There was one perfectly crowned almond tree in full, white petaled flower. Just the top half of it was catching the light. The tree sits at the end of a small parcel full of just pruned vines. The souche, all trimmed and orderly are like lines of gnarled dead soldiers. The vines like the trunk of the tree had yet to be touched by the light of the gold ball that was rising in the east. They both gave off a look of black, solid, dormant. All the more because of the immaterial and shimmering whiteness of the flowers that seemed to float in the sun rays just above them.

Moments like that make me feel romantic, whatever the case may be with ex-wives and specious incomes. It’s chance to come across them. That in itself engenders its own waves of love, regardless of the spectator and their regard. If by hazard, chance and a regard coincide... well, like Frank Sinatra says, it’s magic baby.

On my way to watch the workers I had to stop at the town dump. La dechetterie as they call it here. It was the one in the little town where I used to live. You know the cute little village in the South of France. Full of flowers and romance and old rock houses. Well just outside the town walls is the dump for all the refuse that this cute little town produces.

It’s a practical system. Over sized garbage, old furniture, old dead objects dragged from caves and greniers are all thrown over the hill just at the edge of town. It’s like a do it yourself land fill, or at least it was when I moved here, or there, if we are talking in a more specific case.

In the old system there was a vague mode of triage for the various types of garbage, but basically it was a throw it over the edge type of affair. Usually anything that might have some use to someone else was left aside to be picked over, and once a month or so a bulldozer would come and push everything flat, slowly filling in the ravine. It was always open and had functioned in more or less the same fashion since the town was built in the 12th century.

Needless to say not long after we got there the system changed. I don’t know if it is me, or just my epoch but once I get somewhere, whether it is Wicker Park in Chicago, or St Jean de la Blaquiere in France, the place changes not long after I get there. The thing that sucks about that is that it always seems to be changing for the worse. Worse in the sense of being less convenient, less fun, and more expensive.

I mean it may not be ecologically sound to crash a 1970’s epoch giant television into a rock filled ravine, but it sure was fun when my son and I did it back in the olden days of six years ago. The new system probably isn’t any more ecological when you account for all the carting around of containers, but it surely is more expensive and less fun.

Nowadays the dump is all fenced in. There is a surveillant there at all times when it is open, which is a total of thirty five hours a week. Everything is sorted into containers and he stands there and watches you to make sure you dump your things into the proper container. Metal, cardboard, biodegradable, construction debris, paints and hazardous materials. He is reluctant to let you go through the discards in the containers. It’s all clean and safe.

I often wonder how you go about getting a job like that. I mean basically you sit in a little mobile home all day and on occasion watch people throw out their garbage. When I asked, the guy was vague. I pried a bit more and it was like I figured, you really need to have a relative or other firm connection in the departmental offices where those jobs originate. I realized that’s one of the problems with be a foreigner, you no have connection anywhere.

I said so long to the garbage guard and got back in my car, I was running late for my mythical job in the vines. As I started up the car, one of the containers went rumbling by on the back of a big truck. I saw an old metal shelving unit sticking out of the container. It would have been perfect for the studio in the back of the garden where I live.

Instead it was being carted off to the smelter and perhaps a slow boat to china where it will be recast as something new and shiny then shipped somewhere in the world and sold. The idea of that seemed silly at best, lunatic at worse, and in either case less romantic than the discarded shelving unit coinciding with my regard and being reanimated in a little garden atelier in the south of France.

But it’s all part of the new world order of global motion. They say it’s better for all of us, but I miss the old order that included a town dump of trash and treasure and tumbling televisions. It just seemed less predictable, full of chance and in general a lot more fun and a bit more romantic. You know that’s how I like it.

The road running out of the dechetterie is small and windy, and now I was stuck behind the truck. If I had had a real job, with a real starting time I would have been late. It’s lucky for me that my vigneron is the kind of boss that doesn’t worry about that type of thing. At least he doesn't in my version of how things are.

Le temps des secrets. The heart of the V/series.

2009-02-25T15:15:00.000-08:00

I wish I really had work instead of just writing about it. It would be so much more fruitful. I mean how many stories can you wring out of just a few days work. You see I am a deadbeat here in france. It's not by choice I just can’t find work, even immigrant work. There are french people taking those minimum wage, off the book jobs that I wish were reserved for immigrant workers. Times are tough, la crise is here too.

I had my two days work and then it was good bye. My vigneron is just a guy who delivered my wood. He said he had a couple of days work. I did spend a few days in the vines and they were great. I have to admit though, the stories of work in the fields are conjured of old dreams from the days when I would walk around my village.

You know, the one where I used to live. The one that my, sometime hopefully in the future, ex-wife (unlike President Sarkozy who got his divorce in two months, mine now trains on into it’s fourth year. It is exactly where it started regardless of two decisions rendered. Did I just hear someone calling for another appeal) is still in. It’s where she hoards my children.

Being without a job does have it’s privileges. At the time (when I was married and in St Jean B) one of those was walks out in the french countryside. You must believe that all those beautiful things I told you that I saw in the vines are true, even if how I got to see them wasn’t. That little village was so romantic a place that everyone who moved there became some kind of writer, or at least a painter.

It had that kind of effect on me too when I walked around among the vineyards and olives and little garden plots. It’s deep south of france country, it makes you want to be a paysan. Not being able to become one, I tried for a Marcel Pagnol kind of thing. You know writing about the paysans as if you lived among the paysans.

I would sit in the fields and watch them go about their work. One season following another. Quite nice, but once back in the house my wife would walk in after her job and the romantic story would become a slasher film. I gave up one and by consequence the other. Now I have no house, kids or job. It’s for that I fell back to fabricating stories. Churning up the memories of walking in my little village town watching the workers in the vineyards made me nostalgic, romantic. All my free time got me wanting to be Marcel Pagnol again. Create a bit of that famous french romance.

I have a lot of romance, the only thing I don’t have is money Now thanks to my one time in the future ex-wife who just made a new appeal to the French Judiciary I won’t have any for the considerable future. I need a job, a lawyer, and a new file to go alongside the one on my desk which is already over filled with he said, she said, legal mumbo jumbo collected over 3 years.

I feel like I just got re-upped, against my will, for another stint in the army. In a romantic world I would say the french foreign legion, but I’m not feeling romantic. That’s why I figured I would confess and tell you that all the stories I’ve been telling you about my work in the vines were a lie, well not a lie, just a story. I don’t feel like any more stories about romantic worlds. In the future I promise to try to be more honest with mes petites histoires de mon vie en france. Starting today.

I wanted you to know, just so that in the end there won’t be any misunderstandings.

Psycho's and surprises.

2009-02-24T14:00:00.000-08:00

Some days just can’t be figured out until they happen. When I woke up this morning it seemed like it would be just a tuesday in the vines working. I didn’t know it would start off with a croissant, but it did. My son ran out to the boulanger before school and brought one home for everyone. It can all be so good if that’s the way you want to look at it.

Why not. I had to get gasoline this morning too. It was going to be a sunny day. Or so I thought. In any case at eight thirty it was golden red. I gassed up and then was feeling so good that I sugared up too. Oh yeah. Thanks to that little break, the timing was just right for an eagle to fly beside me and land on a bush just on the roadside as I drove to work. Who could have seen that coming.

I had a couple of minutes so I stopped and watched him until I had to go. I honked my horn before leaving and watched him glide off, all gold as he caught the rising sun along with the wind. Hmm.

I didn’t know my son was going to call before I got to work, upset and worrying he had done something wrong because his mothers car got broken into. Yes, how does that train of thought arise. I try not to speculate on that. It’s not any different than the parent who doesn’t look too hard when their kid is getting abused. What can I do, there is no legal provision for proving psychological damage. Though it seems that stressed children usually are a pointer.

The day went quickly. The sun warmed everything up and by the afternoon, we were stripped down to t-shirts. After yesterday’s cold 75mph winds, it was surprising. No surprise there.

The big surprise came when I got home. There was a letter for me from my divorce lawyer. After three years of one sided wrangling we finally got a decision. It was exactly what I offered (close to everything) in the beginning. She got the kids 80% of the time, and the house, I got to be unmarried to her. It was the only way to keep from dying a long sad death along with her. It had to be done.

So the letter came and it said my ex wife (one day) was appealing the decision. That was not expected, I mean how much more than everything can one get? But that is what this woman I once called wife wants. Everyone's heard that Hell has no fury like a scorned woman, but what they don't often hear is that Heaven has no joy like a divorced man. You see it's all how you look at. For better or worse, it seems like I'll have another few years to do just that.

Word from the eastern front V/15

2009-02-20T16:07:00.000-08:00

The battle wages on. We have breached the half way point. Six fields stripped down to the bare stumps. The old shoots churned up and now invisible, just a bit of organic matter that feeds the future. It’s not unlike an animal that eats its offspring to continue living. Or if you like it closer to home (homme), the Donner Party. They got snowed in for a winter in the Sierra Nevada mountains and ended up eating each other. Organic matter. We all need it.

So as the world in the vines advances, the outside world which demands my getting by as a stranger in a strange land doesn’t cease. If anything it becomes more insistent because of the lack of time I can donate to it. Being a fake farmer is even more tiring than being a real one.

The idea of one thing at a time doesn’t work when that one thing goes on for months. I’ve missed the deadline for the taxes, I haven’t made an appointment at the eye doctor, and I have a stack of various official looking letters sitting on the kitchen counter that haven’t been read yet, in part due to the unseen eye doctor.

It’s a rat race here too. It’s just slower and there is more cheese about. Perhaps field mouse marathon is closer to the just description of the pace here. In that case I could say that I am coming up on the 20 mile mark, otherwise known in the world of marathoners as ‘the wall’.

“The Wall.” It evades easy definition, but to borrow from Supreme Court Justice Potter Stewart’s famous definition of obscenity, you know it when you see it—or rather, hit it. It usually happens around mile 20, give or take a couple of miles. Your pace slows, sometimes considerably. You feel as though your legs have been filled with lead. Sometimes you can’t feel your feet at all. Thought processes become a little fuzzy. (“Mile 22, again? I thought I just passed mile 22!”) Muscle coordination goes out the window, and self-doubt casts a deep shadow over the soul.

Yes, self doubt and a deep shadow over the soul. It’s for this I crave the sunshine, it creates a chemical chain reaction that counteracts doubt. In fact it’s one of the reasons the vines attract me. If the sun is out, (which it often is here) the vines are in it. The vines whole life cycle is dependent on massive doses of sun. Mine too, after all, I am a Leo.

It was glowing bright light yesterday and eventually we stripped down to shirt sleeves. Hmm yes. The sun. It keeps the soul shadow free, the skin toned, and the muscles limber. But once again the French administrative world was knocking. Actually it was insistently pounding on the door in the form of the requisite monthly meeting for wards of the state. That includes me. I like to be included in things, but this meant that I had to quit both work and the sun before they were finished for the day.

At three o’clock I found myself sitting again in the windowless basement office of the Lodeve MSA office awaiting Mme. Montseratt. She is a cloud that casts a shadow of self doubt over souls throughout the department. It isn’t her as much as what she represents. Namely the numberless gate keepers of low ranking bureaucratic status who thrive on making access to the social system more complicated than it really is. I can’t really blame them, it’s a form of job protection, but to miss a sunny day for this kind of man-handling throws a deep shadow of doubt over my soul. I am not talking Thomas' questions but rather his teachers in Gethsemane when he wondered, at the most fundamental level, how he came to this. Oh. Where are my raisins in the sun.

By the time I leave the bureau it is five thirty. The sun is still up but it’s heat is gone and it is throwing off that low angled sharp light of late winter afternoons. That glaring dirty light that arrives just before dusk and which flattens out everything in it’s path. It’s a heat-less light which highlights all the blemishes of our human constructions, our improvements on this earth. It throws long, harsh shadows.

By the time I get home the sun is down. In the western sky, in a limitlessly dark blue sky Venus is like a beacon. In the moment when I step out of my car and look up at the transparent dark blueness that fills the distance between that planet and myself I am stunned into forgetting everything mundane and un-wonderful that comprised my day. The warmth of the sun, the dark blue transparency of the sky, and the house full of souls on vacation rested.

A little vacation romance.

2009-02-18T12:20:00.000-08:00

A little romance for you today, after all st valentine shouldn’t be forgotten just because his day has past. It’s also a vacation week and the house is stocked with nine souls, and a few others that pass through to visit. It puts me in a romantic mood, the warm house in winter with a lot of activity. During vacation everything seems romantic, even work.

Even migrant work. That’s why I put the three boys in the car after lunch and we headed to the vines. Vacation in the south of france countryside. Pruning vines in the sun that glimmers on the Mediterranean in the distance. What sounds more romantic than that.

Not much, and for a short afternoon it is just that. The taille, like coal mining, is work that kids are actually well suited for. Their short stature gives them a decided advantage - their little backs don’t have to stoop to reach the vines.

They do the pre-taille. Cut the vines back, leaving them long and ripping the tangled rest out of the metal guide wires they cling to. We come along after and just clip the rest down to where they need to be.

For boys, these three were 10,12, and 14, it’s ideal work. At least in it’s concept, if not it’s duration. The basic job involves cutting and ripping and pulling out. You also get furnished with very sharp hand shears. You are outside. You can make as much noise as you want. You also have long whips of various shapes and lengths in your hand at all times with which to flog your co-workers. In short it’s ideal.

The only problem with kids today is they refuse to work all day long. They're just not as productive a in the olden days. Then, I guess you would just take a vine and whip them until they worked efficiently and silently, like those racially mixed kids in the cave, in the Indiana Jones Movie, did. But being neither in the olden days (at least currently they aren’t old, though they said the same thing in 1909, or 1209 for that matter), or in the movies, we just aren’t allowed to whip kids to get them to work. In short, the work day was brief.

Which conveniently worked out well for me. Because even though I work sporadically, I like vacation too, and this kind of workday is just that On vacation one goes to the office with pleasure because you know you can leave when you want. It doesn’t seem like work when you don’t have to do it. Consequently the concept of work is removed from the workplace. It’s a lovely state of being.

After our pancake breakfast at 11:30, we made our thermos of tea, got our shears and off we went to the vines. It was our days outing. It’s like going to a museum, it’s interactive. But in a real way. You are on the land. The french land, and you are in a vineyard.

The work is good for about a half hour of attack mode, a half hour of encouragment mode, a half an hour of prodding mode, and a half hour of horseplay before the shears are discarded and they are romping around in the woods which border the vines. It is all just as I previewed. It’s sunny and we’re all outside. The boys play and I work with the vigneron and his wife for another hour before I call it quits. My good will (and fake farmer status) validated by my even showing up. We were all packed up and leaving long before the sun went down.

After everyone over bandages their tiny blisters we head out to eat. The project being to earn some money and then spend it. We spend it on pizza. What else can you get for 5 euros a head, which is just what the vigneron slipped them all before we left. They are like fisherman back on land after a month at sea. They recount their stories of the work, the tears and travail. I couldn’t be happier - they all agree that migrant farm work should be for someone else.

Be brief. V/14

2009-02-12T14:50:00.000-08:00

We go up and down the rows. Each day the swath grows larger until one day we are finished. Then we move on.

Like the weather, today there was everything. Weather of all sorts, the leitmotif was the wind. It just kept coming, hard, cold, non stop. There was sun and then clouds and then more sun. The jackets came off and the jackets went back on. Over and over. Hot, cold, and always the wind. Loud, biting. It’s a strange mix with the full sun.

I woke up from my nap hot. My car was like a little green house protected from the north wind and baking in the sun. Five minutes later it was snowing. I saw it come in from just up the road. Wild. A little storm. full of angry dark clouds sneaking down from the mountain ridge and moving through the colline. It was coming right towards me. The wind was screaming and the little storm was moving at a good clip even though it looked heavy with moisture. I could see the sun disappearing on the ground as it advanced. It was isolated but intense.

The sun was still shining just until the rain, hail, snow fell. It came with an advanced guard of small rainbows. There was one that I saw advance through the field in front of me. Literally a light beam of color sweeping across the ground. It was a like a little personal storm to wake up by. It wasn't even big enough to darken the surrounding hills.

When the rainbow advanced to within a hundred yards of me the wind stopped dead for a moment. Then the rainbow went out and the tiny hail hit, the wind recommenced with full force, and the snow fell. For two or three minutes it came down like crazy and then it stopped and the sun was back out within a minute or two. Intense.

I watched the dark little storm drop a glimmering white light below it as the little storm moved across the valley. The wind continued, we continued. Little by little we advance. They say that little steps make the great voyage, but we just go back and forth. Like a day in the cab, no matter how far you drive, you end up in the same place as you started. In the meantime there are naps in the car and violent storms.

them bones, them bones, them funny bones. V/13 pt.1

2009-02-11T16:03:00.000-08:00

I am in the vines and wet. It spit rain on and off today. In the end we quit early because of it. There were an amazing quantity of rainbows today - small intimate ones. They span a field or two. You can often see both feet of the arch touching down. They are so many that unless they have some special rainbow quality, like the full arc or glimmering color, you tend to ignore them.

That was just a side show to the big fight that was going on all day up high over our heads. It featured two heavy weight contenders - the massif central and the Mediterranean sea. We were on the front line. Hence the rainbows appearing like mushrooms on a moonless night.

The massive central was throwing down some wind at full force. Backed up with monster clouds and wet, gray biting rain that the vigneron called melted snow. The whole mass was hanging on the top of the plateau, just to our backs all day. Every hour or so it would make a push, overtaking the blue skies in an attempt at reaching the sea. It would rain, never hard, but constant. Just enough so that you thought you could continue working... at least the vigneron thought we could, though in the end it was him who called the day finished. I actually was ready to stay. It’s my fake farmer pride that doesn’t let me pussy out, at least not on the exterior.

It was four thirty when we quit. The vines we’re working are up the road a bit from the town where, when I moved to France, I had a house. A little maison de village, a 700 year old rock townhouse. I had a wife and two kids there too. They are all still there, I am not. I still see them on my small quantities of court appointed time, at least the two kids , the wife and the house are ‘interdit’. It kind of takes some of the romance out of me each time I pass there. Wicked.

So as I passed through my old little village in the drizzling rain I came across a hitchhiker. I had seen him a half an hour earlier in the vines. He was walking along the trail of Saint Jacques de Compostelle that runs right through the vines. You know le chemin de St Jacques - The Way of St. James, it’s the pilgrimage to the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela in Galicia in northwestern Spain. Tradition has it that the remains of the apostle, Saint James, are buried. In fact the church is built upon the grave site.

There is another tradition (without the press and consequently the pilgrams) that claims that the bodily remains at Santiago belong to Priscillian, the fourth-century Galician leader of an ascetic Christian sect - Priscillianism. He was one of the first Christian heretics to be executed. You remember Pricillian and his ism - it was derived from the Gnostic-Manichean doctrines taught by Marcus, an Egyptian from Memphis, and later considered a heresy by the Roman Catholic Church. Remember? - at the synod at Saragossa in 380. There are a lot of battles that are waged, and which like the weather, pass and get forgotten.

At the time it was a giant battle for the newly forming Christ network. There were a lot of hot human beings fighting on both sides. A locale ward boss, a certain Hyginus (a.k.a. mr. clean) made his fears known about Priscillianism to Hydatius Bishop of Emerita (Mérida), and Ithacius of Ossanoba. The bishops of Hispania and Aquitaine then held that synod at Sargossa and well, Priscillian and his leaders were excommunicated for there ‘heresies’.

The wrap they officially got them on was the Priscillianian's were talking dualism. The old light/dark thing. The side of Light was the Twelve Patriarchs, heavenly spirits, who corresponded to certain of man's higher powers, and on the side of Darkness, the Signs of the Zodiac, the symbols of matter and the lower kingdom. Not only bad dogma, but black magic said Rome. Priscillian gets the heretics torch, and 150 later Priscillianism, for better or worse, was a non-existant religion.

You see there are always the forgotten in history. Even though for centuries they looked ‘historic’. It always comes down to who will be making the rules, and therefore collecting the tribute. It costs to run an efficient business. It was all about control of the expanding client base. Imperial Rome was going out of business and the catholic church was stepping in. They were pushing a growth strategy. There was an extreme interest to increase territories while maintaining rigid control on already existing markets. Just simple good business.

Iberia was Rome’s and though the Visigoths where rapidly replacing the ceasars, holy Rome would truck no competitors for the flocks’ spiritual dominion. Rome’s strategy was simple, The first step for any upstarts with their local interpretations of the good word was a sit down with a proposition they couldn’t refuse.

Excommunication came next. Excommunication was the black hand of fate as controlled by it’s earthly stewards. You get excommunicated and you are not only out of business, you are eliminated. Think of it like being Will Smith in ‘Enemy of the State’ with Gene Hackman as St Augustine.

In the end the church won and so the bones are St. James the apostle. The pilgrimage came much later in the 800’s when a miracle revealed the whereabouts and identity of these bones. The local bishop pushed it (“G-D dammit don’t you know what an apostle can bring in”) and by the 12th century it ranked with Jerusalem and Rome on the pilgrimage tour. For centuries it was the Mecca of European Christiandom.

By the 15th century the pilgrim traffic had died way down and it wasn’t until the 20th that it picked back up. In any case one of the routes runs right through the vines where I work. I often see folks all backpacked up making the route, alone or in groups. They mostly do small sections of the route, step by step they might make it all before they die, like doing the Appalachian trail.

Pt. 2 the hitchhiker...

The guy I picked up was making his way, all the way, to the holy shrine of old bones in the Cathedral of Santiago de Compostela, (and not the Cathedral of Proscillian of Galicia) in the northwestern coast of Spain, in one shot. He’s been on the road for the last three months. he started in Antwerp.

He looked a bit odd when he first stepped in the car...

It has set in. V/12

2009-02-09T14:04:00.000-08:00

It has set in. I always know when it has. The are little signs that start to appear. It’s usually about a third of the way into the job, or season. You see being a seasonal worker the jobs, and the seasons, come and go. Seasonal worker, it’s one step up from being a migrant worker. In the agricultural world the migrants are the street whores and the local seasonal workers are the call girls. We're not, yet, totally beaten up.

The fall is gradual. At times imperceptible. But it is. There are little signs that mark the descent. Like I said, they start appearing about a third of the way in. Which is where we are now, give or take a week. We just finished the grenache blanc today. I woke up this morning and the ring finger of my right hand was locked into a clenched position. That’s a sign.

This happened last year at the end of the taille, and well, it’s happening again now. Street whores are often ex-call girls, the leading cause for their descent to the lower paying/status job being a physical disfigurement. It's always better to look pretty when your being told what to do. It's also pays to keep your mouth shut.

I got to work at nine this morning. The day was still. No wind, fifty degrees. The sky was covered all day, the sun never came out but the light was clear. I was alone when I got there. I decided I would sugar up a bit. That's a sign too. The vigneron and his wife came at ten. The day passed quickly. I took an hour nap in the car. Dead - Calm.

I picked up a little prime de panier today. (something for your basket) The vigneron told me to come up to the house for a drink after work. His kids are at grandma’s for the week school vacation and he and his wife are feeling good. When I got there he laid a little bonus on me - a couple of big steaks, and a leg of sanglier - fresh from saturdays hunt. Oh yeah.

The sangliers are everywhere here but unless you hunt them, or pay out in the rare restaurant you rarely get to eat any. I was feeling good driving home today. Like a call girl when she leaves the trick’s room with an eight ball of coke as her prime de panier. Me, I get boar meat, but we both feel good about our jobs.

Oh Beziers.

2009-02-08T13:36:00.000-08:00

It’s sunday again. It is sunny. From inside the house it is a beautiful day. Outside there is a fierce wind blowing from the North. It comes bleak and with an existential force. It seems deceitful - the beautiful look with the raw feel.

But it's sunday, no need to stop looking. There are always reasons to be cheerful - three.

number 1. prunes are like tobacco, if you sprinkle a little water in their bag they both can rehydrate and consequently taste better.

number 2. From the hottest book in that old great book, the Song of Songs... "My love peers through the lattices" - "meitzitz min ha charakim" - HOT - that act of looking, peeking in. A strange tongue. G-d is hiding in the tzitzit, the fringes, longing to catch our attention.

Number 3. I was in Beziers yesterday and the date wasn’t july 22, 1209. If it had been, I would most likely be dead. You see that was the day the crusaders under the command of Arnaud-Amaury, the legate of pope Innocent III in bed with the king of France against the cathers (albigensiens if you will) got his way in Beziers. The orders seemed to be kill everyone inside the city. When asked by a Crusader how to tell Catholics from Cathars once they had taken the city, the abbot supposedly replied, "Kill them all, God will know His own" - or perhaps it sounded more like this - "Neca eos omnes. Deus suos agnoscet

Beziers has seemed damned ever since. Maudit is perhaps closer to the feel. In any sense Beziers has all the reasons to be attractive, and yet it always leaves a taste you want to rinse from your mouth. Perhaps that’s the reason for the unending stalls of beer in town for the feria in august. It’s a big carnival of blood letting proportions. For five days a hot crowded swill drinking mass converges for the festive killing of the bull in the towns arena. At night they swarm about. The crowd is a volatile mix of Nascar and the middle ages, and only ends when the riot police go home.

Oh Beziers. I want to be in love with you and your prime sunny location on the ancient coastal route of the mer Mediterranean. I want to romance in your grand parks and among the confectioned buildings that stand within you. Oh Beziers, with your beautiful old bridge spanning the river orb, and your city wall layed with stone carved by roman hands, why are you so sad...

So its 2009 and not 1209, consequently when I was in Beziers yesterday I didn’t get killed, but I did feel Damned. I went to Beziers for a children's gymnastics competition. The wind was blowing, even inside. The thing went on for hours. It was cold and there were no seats. So many little Tanya Hardings, but without the talent, being pursued, preserved on digital devices of every kind. The town was gray even in the windy sun - the garbage blowing and gathering in corners. It's hard to be old and attractive when you've seen so much suffering. Beziers. Brutal.

Take what belongs to you, and go. V/11

2009-02-07T14:58:00.000-08:00

I want to say nothing happened today but that wouldn’t really be true. Lots of things happened today, just not to me.

The work remains the same, the weather is the only thing that changes. It was a bit of everything. I put on, and took off, and then put on again, almost every article of clothing I had today. It was cold and cloudy and windy, sunny and warm, cloudy and still. It rained a bit after lunch.

A damp breeze and banks of dark, loaded, gray clouds, some tinged in radiant white were cruising in one after the other from the sea. Boom. They would run into what the A.O.C. calls the Terraces du Larzac, get caught in the colines and storm. All morning we were just a bit too low and in the wrong coline to get rained out. As I hunkered in for my after lunch siesta in the car, it was dark enough to dream of rain.

My dream became real. It rained in the afternoon but not enough to stop working. It just as well, I can use the hours. That’s all I really earn, is hours, because I get most of the money when I finish working and me and my vigneron say à la prochain and square up the ledgers - Take what belongs to you, and go. Until then it’s on something of an account. Meanwhile I am like a whore who asks her mac for a bit of spending money when the basic needs, or a night out with the girls arises.

It’s low budget, this migrant work. Literally toiling in the vineyards. The moments though, arrive. They just weren’t today.

One moment without the rest V/10

2009-02-04T14:53:00.000-08:00

It’s a critical regard I’m after. If it’s all good, why will it get better. Tell me what you think. At least let me know you see me. That’s what I got today in the vines. A regard from on high.

There is a military base 60 kilometers up the road as the crow flies, or rather as the Mirage F1 flies. It’s up on the scrubby open land of the Larzac Plateau. It’s just around the corner from Roquefort, where they make the cheese. You see, the sheep like that scrubby, open, high plateau land too.

The sheep have been grazing up there for centuries. The Romans got it started, but it was cardinal Richelieu who really made it go. He turned the Larzac into an high performance economic engine when he funneled the contract for the royal army uniforms into the parish of Lodeve. Family connections or something like that. Thanks to that contract Lodeve became a center of wool fabrication in France. It was still a center up until the 1970’s. Just before everyone went to Asia.

Now what comes down from the Larzac are the jets. High end, state of the art fighter jets. In the vines you see them almost everyday. They fly low and fast and high and supersonic. They rip along at altitudes often lower than the surrounding hills. At a distance they are graceful, sweeping and rolling, in long smooth arcs, in and around the volcanic hills that form this zone. When they go right overhead it’s a bit more corporal. Graceful is replaced with crazy. Pounding. Screaming. Raw.

There were two planes that swept right overhead today. Much lower than the close-in clouds that wafted by the other day. I saw them from a long distance. When the sound fills the entire sky I have to stop and look. You need to sweep the sky to spot them. I picked these two up right above the horizon, coming from the direction south west, les mountains carroux. They were tracking right towards me.

I was working alone this morning. So I paused. I stood all the way up, raised my arms and waved at them like you would if you were stranded on a desert island. The two planes were one behind the other and low to the point where you could make out the silhouette of the pilot under the canopy.

The first plane roared over head. In a second the next came screaming by. As it did it rolled a quarter left, turned quickly upright, and then quickly a quarter right before leveling out and continuing with a ‘saw you’ quick thin trail of smoke spit out from each wing tip. All-right!

In an afternoon mission they will burn the quantity of gas the average car driver uses in two years. But so what, right. Flying that low, and a hello - from up there to the middle of nowhere. That’s what I call a very critical regard. It's nice to get it returned, it’s what I am giving all day long - before each squeeze of the trigger.

more of the same

2009-02-03T09:05:00.000-08:00

It’s raining again today. Another day off isn’t as fun as I thought. I am always a victim of my weakest desires. Sloth slips into the mindset and reflects up from the rainy streets of my little backwater town. My town is just like yours, sometimes it looks ugly. But don’t be overly concerned, it’s only a reflection.

I wanted another day off even though I have nothing to do. It’s four days now of rain. I haven’t left the house for three. I find myself a bit antsy at getting back into the vines, and antsy about having to go back there too. It’s winter. The work is outside. Without the sunshine the taille is just hard core migrant stoop work. But without the taille, I am just an exile in the backwaters of France, on a nasty, gray, rainy day. Do you see my dilemma?

Oh, winter rain. This isn’t the light, silver mist of spring, that highlights the almost florescent green, just budding landscape as it shocks itself back to life. This is a flat out, gray-nearing black, winter incident. It’ s the feeling of a three day nor’easter when it runs into five and all the big storm excitement has dissipated and just the nagging wind and the insistent wet gray remain.

I stand at the doors in the kitchen to smoke my endless cigarettes. From here, I look out onto the place. Sometimes I see other smokers on their little balconies, or hanging out their windows, but we are far enough away to be anonymous. In the sun, this little balcony where I look out from is the full-on romantic vision of the south of france. Today it is not.

Today it looks out onto what you might refer to as a crumbling forgotten town. Grey and cold, and half deserted. Like a Nebraska town in winter. Scattered with old wind blown snow piles on the main street, with no signs of active life anywhere. There is no center of action. A weak light in a shop windows reveals no one behind it. In another, you glimpse a man sitting motionless at his desk. The barber shop looks like it closed one day and no ones returned in years. You think - my god - how do they do it. How do they come to live here, what do they do here, why do they stay?

The rain is falling. Slowly, constantly. There is a clear precise light on the wet buildings, wet trees, wet ground. It contrasts sharply with the diffuse, vague gray mass that hovers just above the town. It throws some details, usually blanched out by the sun, starkly into focus. They aren’t pretty. The stains of a thousand years of patched living are leaching out of the mortar that holds this town together. The shutters are rotting and the wrought iron rusting. The cars are all dented and the crown of the statue chipped. The garage doors are tagged and the garbage overflowing. Nebraska, France. Bienvenue!

It will be better tomorrow. At least that’s what they say. I have to believe them when they say the weathers changing. It always does. Nothing lasts forever.

My vigneron, S., told M. Guy he would stop over as soon as they had a rain day. That way they would have time to talk, quietly, in detail. He said that last friday just as the nor’easter was heading into town. It’s rained ever since. I guess he really wants those parcels.

I had an idea today V/9 pt. 2

2009-02-02T06:13:00.000-08:00

The old farmer from St. Jean came by today. He has the four hectares my vigneron is working. They are nice parcels, down by the river. He wanted my vigneron to come over to the house to ‘talk’. In the field they talked about the weather, hospital care for the elderly and funereal concerns, something about the daughter in Lyon. All briefly. We were working. Details take time. Hence the sit-down.

The old man is dying. His wife is dying too. She will probably go first he says. He sounds like he won’t wait much longer after she does go. He is fed up. Not bitter, but something that hints of that same taste, touches that same area of strong, not pleasant sensation. In the end there are doctors and hospitals. He finds himself operating in a world of people who don’t care or have time, and right now those are the only two things he wants. In spite of that the life goes on. In the meantime there are affairs to be arranged.

M. Guy was a gardener in Paris for 20 years. He was employed by the abdicated king of England, Edward VIII. Re-titled as Duke of Windsor, Edward lived in Paris with his forbidden bride until he died in 1972. It was then that M. Guy left Paris and installed with his wife in St Jean. He said they were all given a nice bonus when he left. That gesture made the rest of M. Guys life more secure, less fraught with stress. Perhaps in consequence M. Guy is a generally pleasant and happy man. He attributes a lot of that regard on life to the Gardens of the Duke of Windsor

So M. Guy got his vines in the village, and made the world in his order. Along his vines he had all kinds of flowers, and fruit trees. There was plenty of water from the stream that runs along his vines. The life flourished and he lived it among the paysans with a constant and quiet knowledge of his earthy but not peasant past. They had at least one daughter. The daughter is 40ish, perhaps she was even born in St Jean, but in any case now lives in Lyon and visits once in a while with her family.

Alors... now it is 2009 and this couple is I guess in their eighties. He is dying, running out of steam as he says it. He sounds so British when he says “Running out of Steam” even though he is speaking French. He is French, but his time under Edward changed him, “given me an English color” he said. He seemed happy at having acquired it.

That’s why he had an interest in me. For him the Americans were some kind of stranger, shinier offspring of the already strange English. He had taken a liking to them during his time tending the Paris garden of the expatriated English King and his American wife. That story was sold as a heroic English love story. It played out, like the war that was brewing in 1936 (and perhaps because of it) on a global scale. The old vigneron standing in front of me had witnessed a part of that global love story on a very intimate scale. He thought well towards the Duke’s wife, Ms. Wallis Warfield Simpson. Hence the vigneron of St Jean’s kind, glaucoma-ed, eye towards me.

I’m an American too, now tending his vines in France. His own heroic love story of personal proportions is ending. His wife didn’t even recognize him the other day in the hospital. When he asked the nurse how she was doing, the nurse had responded ‘fine’. He was exasperated.

He said it was then that he saw the funny little circle he had run on. We all run on. Even an abdicated king of England. We all finish old and if we are lucky in our gardens. But we finish, and it is never without that slight taste of bitterness that it is that way. Now the old vigneron was seeing it first hand. It was that taste he was trying to spit out. He was a gardener, a vigneron, a self willed paysan, he knew the only thing that would rinse that bitter taste from him was the earth. It was for that he was prodding about in the vines looking for the vigneron.

‘That’s what the doctors should be for. They should have a solution for the bitter tastes of life that we have acquired and need rinsed away". He knows the doctors aren’t going to ‘cure’ his wife, or for that matter him. But he couldn’t accept that they end up adding more bitterness because old age and dying was a business. He was asking for something different. He was simply asking, as any good citizen should have the right to do, for a bit of respectful concern and accompaniment on the way out.

There was something in his demand for a bit of simple justice that struck me as very English in its upright manner and, for the good of mankind, delivery. I could almost see a powdered and wigged courtier leaning over to the dethroned king and in his fay, proper English accent saying, “It was stated properly and was just on level, wouldn’t you agree your Royal Highness?

So the four hectares need to be dispersed with. It makes no sense for the daughter to take them, by the time she deals with all the other heritage matters the vines will have gone to seed. My vigneron has been working them for the past two years for costs and the sale of the grapes, which isn’t much, up until this point. There are four parcels, two with new vines that are just about to start producing. I stooped over for several days in a hot May sun and put those new vines in the ground two years ago.

So there was the old farmer from St. Jean. He has the four hectares my vigneron is working. They are nice parcels, down by the river. They are going to exchange hands, we know which pair is giving them over, we don’t know yet whose will be receiving them. Those things are not always clear, even after the notary has stamped the papers.

After I left the vines that night, I stopped at a friends house. His wife is in the wine making business, she deals with my vigneron and M. Guy amongst others. He does whatever needs being done. He’s a stranger here too, his roots come from gardens a long way from here.

He has envy to lay down roots here, but even a house and some kids don’t seem deep enough. He dreams of a little plot where he can sink down in the earth. A hectare or two in St Jean. Tend some grapes that his wife will change into wine. He wants to build a tiny flagship. I’m trying to convince them to do, and that they’ll need a partner.

The old vigneron said the abdicated king always told him that the further you strayed from your land, the more important your garden became. He said that was why the exiled Edward valued him so highly, he tended his gardens. It is also why M. Guy wants to see his vines settled before he departs. He wants to believe they’ll continue to be tended, to feel the weather change when he no longer can.

Carte SIM pas prete.

2009-02-02T02:52:00.000-08:00

It’s monday morning, nine fifteen. I should be crooked over with my electro-coup 2000 attacking the grenache blanc. That’s the field we are working in now. But it’s raining out, just like it was yesterday and the day before. All weekend it has been gray, quiet. I haven’t left the house, save the small expedition for cigarettes saturday morning.

Most people complain about rainy weekends after beautiful weekdays, for me it's the opposite. I like the office to be sunny. The rain, it is a god send. But all weather is god sent, this just happened to fall on the right day. You see my back is a wreck, perhaps because of the rain. Perhaps not. Either way I can use another day of rest. There have been few times in my life when one more day of rest wasn't a good idea.

In any case there is a fixed quantity of work, so the more it gets spread out the better it is for me. The rich man-broken man, poor man -healthy cycle can only be run so many more times. I’m often curious what my children really think of my life, or more so, what they will think of it in twenty years.

It’s raining and monday and all the other kids, who slowly become my engagements too, are off to school. It’s funny my back being all stiff and twisted again. I wonder how these farmers do it all their lives. They just put balm on the pain and get back at it. They seem to be broken all the time, but they just keep going. In between there are brief moments I’ve seen that are hyper-rich. It makes me wonder if I just complain too much, or if there really is a better way.

I guess in the farm world the extreme pains are always short lived. The season is finished and the part of the body that was over used due to the constant repetitive motion demanded can rest for another year. The seasons change and another part of the body takes the brunt of the destruction upon it. In that way the entire person can keep functioning while different parts of the body withstand the brutal assault that it is weathering year after year. Funny, this desire that every living thing has to continue.

The strange thing is my desire to get back to the rows. Doing the taille is like very slowly vacuuming a very dusty rug, or for that matter doing a puzzle. They are all repetitive tasks that in themselves are not fun, but the the more you do, the better it looks. I’m also wondering if getting back into it’s proper stooped position wouldn’t ease my back a little. Whip it back into shape, as they say. It’s sometimes effective, as least in the short term. That’s all I really have. The weather is going to change.

COMING SOON V/9 Pt. II
The old farmer from St. Jean came by the other day. He has the four hectares my vigneron is working. They are nice parcels, down by the river. He wanted my vigneron to come over to the house to ‘talk’. In the field they talked hospital care for the elderly and funereal concerns, something about the daughter in Lyon. All briefly. We were working. Details take time. Hence the sit-down.

The old man is dying. His wife is dying too, he says she will probably go first...

I had an idea today. V/9 pt. I

2009-02-01T05:48:00.000-08:00

So I had an idea today. I got it just after lunch.

It was a pleasant day today - in a way. I took a nap in the car after lunch. The sun was radiant. The windows were all open, j’etais torso nu and the heat of the sun was like on a summer beach. The kind of heat that gets you in the eyes. The heat that makes you think of those little double plastic spoons that fit over the eyes that you always see funny people sporting when you are on that beach in the summertime. Oh yes, c’etait une bonne sieste dans le vigne.

It was just a few minutes after three thirty when I had the idea. I remember it because it came in a flash. Though I must say there was a harbinger of its coming just after my nap when I stepped out of the car. A slight detail that perceptually changed. A quick variation that came and went and said ‘prepare for the heat to give way’.

We started work as usual at 1:30. We went up a row and then back and were working our way up the next when right in the middle of the row we all felt the heat give it up as a breeze from the south kicked in. We all stood up and looked in the breezes direction. I looked at Sandrine's watch.

The change brought with it a high covering of thin cloud that filtered the suns heat rays down a few degrees. When we got to the end of the row it was three thirty and where we stood, we directly faced the sea (30 miles away but never the less a direct and unobstructed view upon this source of the wind). We felt the humid, colder than simply cool, but not yet cold, air with it.

I am a fake farmer now, but none the less a farmer. You didn’t need to tell me it was going to rain. It wasn’t going to come right away, but it was coming. Everyone agreed. The weather was changing. We all agreed too, that it was for the worse. The sun and warmth make everything march better here. It was just then that I got the idea.

It was an idea for a story where nobody would be the protagonist. The story would be the weather. It was the weather, it always has been the weather. The weather is the only story that doesn’t have an end. At least an end that can be predicted. The humans in comparison are meager. After a while, our stories all become somewhat predictable, or at the least, you can give a good guess where they are going. We all know the end of our story.

That’s why farmers always talk about the weather, like fortune it is constantly changing, like chance it is perpetually coming. It is intimate without being personal. It contains destiny.

Part II.

The old farmer from St. Jean came by today. He has the four hectares my vigneron is working. They are nice parcels, down by the river...

Oh today V/8

2009-01-29T14:31:00.000-08:00

It was the kind of day in January you dream of. A morning that starts out tinged with golden light. That’s right, golden. I could see the thin line of gold light in the east as I woke. I hit the vines just as the sun was making it’s appearance above the hills. There was ice on the puddles of water left from the last rain but all signs pointed up. There wasn’t the slightest breeze and it was so still you could hear every sound in the surrounding valley.

Yes the good days come too. It changes everything. This is the day where everywhere you go in the area you see workers in the field. The smaller producers can wait for nice days to do the taille and today was that day. It is the kind of day that when you see the workers out in the fields you think, oh that looks pleasant, I wouldn’t mind doing that. And you would be right.

We were an equipe de choc today. Humming along up and down the rows All three of us were in good form because of the happy weather. We cracked at it and finished up the field we have been working for the last two weeks. It was 5:54 when the sun set with the same golden color it rose with.

I know I said math and minimum wage work don’t go together but on the way home today I was juggling some numbers in my head. The field we just finished is 1.8 hectares (only 18 more to go) There are 4000 souche (vine stumps if you will) per hectare. That is 7200. There are roughly twenty cuts per souche. Overall I did about half the field myself. That is 72,000 squeezes on the trigger of my electro-coup 2000 pruning pistol. If you take my wage and divide it by the number of cuts I made, I earn about seven tenths of a penny per trigger pull. Ah, it’s a good life in the south of France.

I did get a good look at a Bonelli eagle today. They aren’t rare but they aren’t commonplace either. I heard it screaming before I saw it. It was on the other side of the little valley where we were working. It was floating around looking for an air current. It came within a hundred yards of us before it got what it was looking for and circled out of sight. Yes, on some days the migrant worker is just who you want to be.

Relentless V/7

2009-01-28T23:08:00.000-08:00

I left work early today. It’s wednesday and my kids have a half day. They are old enough that they don’t need me to watch them, but being that the judge saw fit to have them reside most of the time at their mothers, it seemed like a good idea to quit early and profit with their presence. If I work the whole day I am too spent at night to do anything. I miss my kids being around and yet I was conflicted about taking a half day off when I woke this morning.

It wasn’t about the money. I need every centime I can get but the thirty one euros less isn’t going to change my world. It was more the sun. From my bed this morning I could see the sky was perfectly clear. Today would be a sunny day of full proportion.

I didn’t see the wind, in town that kind of detail is well hidden. It wasn’t until I hit the vines that I realized just how hard it was blowing. It blew unceasingly, this wind with a name - le vent Tramontane. It is the little cousin of the Mistral. It is dry, cold and often violent. It carries air from the polar regions. In summer it brings clear blue skies and a bit of relief from the heat. In winter it just brings cold air.

It isn’t only the cold that the wind brings. It brings forlornness. The cold I can dress for. I lived in Chicago for twenty years, we have a wind there called the Hawk. I wear six layers of clothes that are made of every material known to man. Cotton, silk, wool, synthetic, topped by a down jacket that is a hand me down from my deceased father. He got this jacket in the seventies, and wore it often. It’s my work jacket now and is still going strong. It was made when the ‘made in the USA’ label meant quality and not crap. In any case I can dress for the cold, the forlorn character of the days like today I am less prepared for.

My father used to always say “ there is no heavier burden than a great potential”. I think of it often in my latest in a long string of dead end jobs. I wish I could blame my current hard luck job on the fact that I am a stranger in France, but even in the states, though I gained a bit more money, I never had a job that could lead somewhere. I don’t know what happened, it did seem that I was full of potential. It’s these types of thoughts that the unceasing wind blows in. They are the opposite of sunny and mild.

At noon time I was happy to be leaving the vines behind. In the car, it was warm and quiet, and I was heading home. It made me recall when I drove taxi in Chicago. How stunning the sunny, but ice cold days in the cab could be. How the folks all frozen and distressed would enter the warm cab and say to me “how lucky you are”. Little did they know.

It wasn’t Sunday today V/6

2009-01-27T14:43:00.000-08:00

The clouds rolled in on top of the great weather we had yesterday and the temperature dropped thirty degrees. In winter, low pressure zones around here are tolerated like a Sunni in a Shite neighborhood. They get pushed out in a rough and rapid manner. In any case the wind pushed in at great speed and continues to blow.

Cold constant air from the north was rolling down off the Larzac which, as I left for work this morning had a white shadow of snow around its peaks. The Larzac Plateau is at 2700 feet, the vines are on the slope up to it at about 700 feet. Standing in the vines you look North to the plateau. To the South the Herault valley and then the sea on the horizon. It’s really quite spectacular as far as the view goes.

The weather and the view. It’s rare that you actually see either one but both are omnipresent on the terrain. Today it was grey and cold and windy. It felt like work. Hard miserable work, all day long. I did see some cool looking clouds at around five o’clock when the sun was setting. Little wispy, passers by, separated from the giant mass of grey that made up todays sky. They were low flying. They looked exactly how they are painted in impressionist paintings. All gestural streaks of slightly varied shades to each stroke of the brush that made them up. Bold slashes of flashy, nuanced orange and red on a textured grey background.

Yeah there are moments. But aren’t there always. A friend of mine who got punched in the eye one time told me the pain was so intense that each time his heart beat he saw a flashing light in his eye. He remembers it as a fluid, electric blue color, which sadly he said, he has never seen again. In a short time I will forget today, except for those funny little clouds.

Thanks to the miserable weather the vignerons wife couldn’t let me eat and nap in my car as is my habit. No sun makes for a cold lunch. So I headed up to their house, half happy to be eating in warmth and half sorry to be missing my nap, for lunch. Eating lunch there is a quick look into the farmer world. French style. That means we start off with a quick appetizer and a drink. It’s sweet gold wine. Muscat from the the neighbor. With it we have some olives from the vignerons trees. His mother put them up before she died in october. They were Luques olives, green firm olives that are the specialty of this area. He says when he went to school, he had a math teacher who each time you got a correct answer at the blackboard, would let you take an olive from the jar on his desk to eat in class. There were some small black olives the vignerons wife Sandrine made. Now that the mom has died someone has else has to do it.

It’s a quick meal because of that but it’s all ready to go. The vigneron has the meat already cooking on the braise of the fireplace when I walk in. It’s sanglier, wild boar, which he and his hunting club bagged last weekend. It’s a marcassin, a baby, very tender. Soft like pork but with more flavors. mmm. He opens a bottle of wine from the grapes we picked last year. Primeur, the first wine of the harvest, it’s like Beaujolais nouveau, without the marketing campaign behind it. Good cheap, plentiful wine of the region.

Sandrine apologizes there are no vegetables as she passes around the goat cheese that the lady up the street makes. Another glass of wine. Some peaches put up from the trees that sit beside one of the vineyards. Then a coffee, a cigarette, and the moment over, we all head back to work.

It is still cold, perhaps the wind has even picked up. The constant noise of the wind forces us to work in silence. By three o’clock the three glasses of wine mixed with the full meal, instead of my sandwich, orange and a nap begin to make the work heavy. Just when I start to feel sorry for myself, I see the funny little clouds start wisping past.

Sun day

2009-01-25T13:19:00.000-08:00

Today was Sunday. I woke up at nine o’clock. The sun was in full flower. The room was golden, the sky deep blue. Out the glass doors through the garden and onto the steeple of the church it was still. It formed a picture you might see in a slick travel brochure on the South of France. It was the type of day that makes you feel lucky.

I stayed in bed a while finishing the short story I left when my woman slid into bed last night. She was all fresh and French smelling last night. This morning she was pressed up against me sleeping. All the kids too, were still asleep upstairs. The sun, the colors, the free day stretching out before me, us. Mmm, some days you wake seeing dreams.

One by one everyone wakes, comes down. I step out to the boulanger and get some sunday breakfast goods. At eleven o’clock we are all seven in the kitchen, and each attacks their sunny sunday feeling large and spacious idea of the perfect breakfast. The table is spread out with croissants, pain chocolat, and baguettes. Tea, coffee, hot chocolate, milk, butter, marmalade and nutella. There are mandarins and oranges, bananas, grapefruit and lemons. Knives, spoons, bowls, plates and cups in various states of use. So we all lounge in the kitchen, doors and windows thrown open to let the sun have it’s full play. It’s a moment of excess that isn’t too much. We all wordlessly agree, it’s a good day.

But the sun is calling. It will be gone at five o’clock. You’ve got to get it when and where you can, and the close quarters of the villages aren’t where it’s at. I can’t help but think that it is a great day to be in the vines. They are laid out with maximum exposure to the sun in mind, which is just what I have in mind too. If you get a day like today in the vines you finish in a t-shirt and come home with a bit of color. It does well for the internal and external myth of good living in the south of France.

But unless you are a vigneron, the vines are attractive only in the ideal. They are still hard stooping work and that is never the best option for a sunday afternoon. So I call my friend with a sunny garden and offer to come over and taille his trees. It’s really the ideal compromise, he has just a few and I get to strap on my electric pruner. It’s the perfect mix of 100 percent sun with 10 percent work and 90 leisure. I take my son with me. We work easy. We drink a couple of glasses, sit at the garden table in the sun and chat until the sun starts going down. Some days, being a fake farmer in the South of France is best way to be a real artist.

It’s raining today and 43° V/5

2009-01-23T10:10:00.000-08:00

When it is raining in the morning we don’t work. That’s not to say we don’t work in the rain. If it rains when we are working we continue until it persists and then insists and then we stop. I work for a mad man. Like his profile dictates (you could say the stars if that's your predilection) he is a worker. He can clear fields with his bare hands. Build houses in a single year. And who described as Clark Kent (or the french equivalent - Charles Roi) fights for Truth Justice and the American (French) way.

My vigneron is the kind who would settle the wild west if they had one here. They fix planes in wars and tractors in peace. Have rock solid unwavering beliefs (often to the detriment of those most intimate to them) that can fluctuate when the change leans to their account. They live by numbers - square meters and costs, hectares and production. They spend their life chasing. It's a hard life in many ways.

They miss the softer symbols of value. They make complex figures they can't understand. They can’t calculate children, so they have to believe in tradition. They disappear in their fields and leave their wives and children to calculate the cost of absence. They can’t believe in softness, it’s implications are too many. In short, they are the type who work in the rain. So sometimes I do too.

But this is the south of France, the Mediterranean has its own well know effect on even the hardest of workers. The sun and sea that color this part of the world have been wearing down the steel of hard workers since the first go-getters wandered out of Africa. Hence here we are all aware that there is no sense to be miserable just on principle, the vines can wait until monday.

So what do all the tailleurs of vigne do if they are not out in the vines. At this point of the year we are omnipresent in the fields. Everywhere you go you see the cars parked in the vines, the red suspendered and battery packed hunched figures slowly (from a passing car they are motionless, like giant insects devouring a crop, after days of time they leave a field bare then swarm to another) going about their business.

For me, when it rains I feel good. I lay in bed while the house gets up and moves about its daily business of school and work. Then I get up slowly and let the idea of a ‘free’ day spread out before me. Morning tea, all sugared up. I smoke on the terrace and watch the masons, wet and cold, preparing a new roof in the rain across the street. Two young dudes with diplomas, they are ill dressed for the weather and their work reflects it. Ah, les artisans, long from downtown. Their miserable look pushes my day into luxuriousness.

I love my work when I am not doing it. For the next few months I am a tailleur of vigne again. A platelet in the economic life blood of the region. The boulanger where I get my sandwich greets me each morning and gives me a little break on the price. Like the rest of my caste I hobble slowly down the streets each night at dusk in medieval villages with my Electo-coup tool box in my hand. I except the nods from the neighbors like a returning soldier in an ongoing war. They often ask news from the front. I can only recount that it goes on.

But today a reprieve in the battle. All quiet on the southern front. Like a rainbow, the sun suddenly appears in the late afternoon. Just in time to tidy the house, attente les enfants, the weekend. Everybody, and Cash - in the house.

Back in the bureau

2009-01-22T15:39:00.000-08:00

I had a rendezvous with my public aid lady. They want me to start inserting myself into the economy - on a non-black status. They are willing to help me, they just want to know what it is I do here other than ‘being a stranger’. If really pressed I say I am an artist. Even so, they set me up with the rendezvous today. It was with a group funded by the state who is in charge of doing something with artists. In France they believe artists still exist. But here, like everywhere else, no one knows what to do with them.

So to get my 390 units of currency mailed into my checking account each month I need to get myself a statute. You know, something a little more concrete than ward of the state. But it’s still socialized here, everyone is a ward of the state in different degrees. Everyone is getting something. Everyone is paying something too. That’s how it goes.

On my end at least it all goes back into the pot. Gas, food, a few items for the home front and voila I have seeded the local and national economies with my little economic germs. If they gave me more I would buy a car. You could think of it as an economic bailout of minuscule dimensions.

Couldn’t everyone in the USA have bought a car with the 825 billion dollars that they are doling out now. Or for that matter everyone in Iraq could have bought a Ford Chrysler or Chevy too. Who doesn’t love a new pick-up, it keeps the Indians from fucking us up, why wouldn’t it work in Iraq. We’ve spent 650 billion there and what do we have. Even worse what do they have. We should have attacked Saddam with 22 million Ford F250 pickups.

But that seems to be old business now that Bush has rounded up his wagons (well protected by the Wells, Fargo, and Brinks brothers) and headed back to Texas. Back at the ranch they’ll discourse again how it helps the little man when a new office building goes up in Dubai. Those dudes are artists with serious black projects. I need a project too. That’s what the public aid lady said. She says if I can’t get something going after six months they will start talking street sweeper. Hmmm? a union job.

But I have a job. Though I can’t say that it’s artistic. I can’t even say it’s a job. You see it’s black work. That means when in the social service building we all adhere to a don’t ask - don’t tell policy. It has to be that way, that is how the farm lands run here. We are all itinerant workers. The monthly checks are for the butter and cheese, perhaps a bottle of wine, with the fantastic local bread. Think of it as a bailout without the need for a crisis. Now that is an artistic project.

To make my rendezvous I had to leave the vines early again today. It was a good day for the taille. I was happy to go but would have liked to stay too. Though it wasn’t sunny, It wasn’t windy or cold or raining either. The vigneron took a break in the afternoon from tiling the well subsidized dream house he built, is building, in his natal village where he has his vines. For the first time this year we are three in the field. The work seems to progress rapidly, the rows fall every hour, we go back and forth at seemingly great rates of speed. But just in comparison. Quickly it will seem plodding again, like Washington politics perhaps. But for a moment it seemed fast, we were moving quickly in the right direction. A sensation that had me half wanting to participate, just to see how far we could get.

Go tell it to the mountain. V/3

2009-01-21T14:20:00.000-08:00

Well today came again. In fact it's still happening. Though I am getting pressed to get my small tasks completed before bedtime. Work is perhaps just work because it takes up so much time. Even when you quit early like I did today the day seems too short. I had to stop early to file some papers for my divorce. It’s been going on for three years so it wasn’t really pressing. It seemed like a good reason to leave early. At least for a moment I thought so.

I started the day out with the thoughts of my sister who said talk to the vines about how their harvest went. I figured why not, I wasn’t sure if I had eight hours of listening in me, but how much could they really have to say anyway. I would be working alone most of the day so I smoked up on the route to work. I was feeling ready for anything they had to say. At least I thought so.

I left the house all geared up. I had thought the sky was clear when I first woke up, but it’s just getting light out at that hour and so it is sometimes hard to tell totally covered from perfectly clear. Upon leaving the house I saw it was both. Clear in one direction, and dense gray clouds in mine.

The sun just coming up was still low enough to pass below the line of clouds. It created the kind of light photographers snap with. Shocking. In any case by the time I was sugared-up and half way to work a fine drizzle was falling. I was still in sunshine, but I could see the pack of clouds hugging the edge of the Larzac plateau (which is the southern end of the Massif Central). Small smoking clouds would break off from the mass and slide down the colines spitting rain and cold. All day long this advance guard tested the barometrics for an all out assault that threatened but never came. It did bring one thing that made me start thinking that plants can talk.

The road to work is a splendor, well half of it. It’s about ten kilometers total but the last six run through a landscape of hard core beauty which takes too many words to describe. Suffice it to say it is where the flat plain of the sea meets the rise of the massif central. It’s a land of seabed thrown up with volcanoes and the colors and shapes are rugged and distinct.

All that to say, on the route to work I can see the rise of the plateau where the vineyards are. They are easily noticed ordered squared shapes in the hazard of green forest they are cut out of. As I turned a corner I saw a rainbow. The end of it was smack in the middle of the vine where I am working. My immediate thought was ‘well isn’t that something’.

I’m so rigid in my ways. I want to believe but can’t. I want to talk with plants, or even humans for that matter, but constantly get stuck on the fact that we speak different languages. That they, or perhaps me, don’t really have anything to say anyway. But at the least every living thing speaks of life. I’ve never taken stock until then that I need to listen better.

The rainbow, like the thoughts, passed away. I worked all morning alone. Slow. The rows fall half as quickly with one. The key is to never look ahead. Keep your head down. Focus on the line. All the work is at knee height. Chop-chop-chop. One souche to the next. Clearing off their out-spread arms. Zip-zip-zip go the shears. Rip-rip-rip go the shoots pulled from the metal wires. What-what-what am I doing here.

The last harvest was good. For the farmer. The vines gave up record tons of grapes. Fat and Juicy they were. Vast quantities of raisins were produced. The vines are tired. They were pushed to their limit. They are fatigued, and concerned for their longevity. Some stand like the others but are wasted inside. They probably won’t make it through next year.

Over burdened is what they were all saying. Too much fertilizer, too much water, too many shoots, too many buds. Too many raisins crowded together vying for the limited resources of the root system. Too Much. Too many leaves leaves not enough airflow, not enough sunlight, hence fungicides. I can’t breath.

At harvest a giant diesel machine rode over the rows and shook the raisins off the stems, stored them and vomited them half juiced into a waiting truck. The raisins were picked and crushed before they had a chance to even mature. It was a disaster. The vines know they can’t go on like this. I saw some today that have already given up the ghost. Most of the others are like jews in the barracks at Auschwitz. Resting but dazed by the world they inhabit.

It is out of their reason to think it was planned this way. That the dying but still functioning system that they are caught in runs on quantity not quality. Their functional lifespan in this system is 15 years. Because of their genetic makeup they think they should live much much longer than that. But they won’t. Once they pass peak output after ten to fifteen years they are ripped out and replanted. Young vines produce quantity even if they don’t have the roots to make quality. The vines life for production wine is like Upton Sinclair’s Jungle, but for fruit. It’s harsh, violent and short lived. The vines are screaming fatigue. I heard that when I went down my row today.

Like a red cross nurse in world war one I do what I can to ease the suffering, but know it is helpless. I follow the vignerons rule. It’s his field, his life. When the decision arises, I do lean towards cutting them back a bit harsher to curtail their deadly abundance. But it won’t stop the system they are caught in.

In the afternoon the vignerons wife was there. It was windy, wet, and unpleasant. Then we saw a rainbow of vibrating colors. The whole arch was visible. It was very close and we could see the two ends where they touched the ground. The colors reached a point where they were glimmering and then suddenly another rainbow appeared just above it. Two rainbows always makes me think of Indian lands in the southwest. Indians are like the vines, they have been around since the beginning. They seem to just keep going no matter how hard the conditions become. Me, I left work early.

It sets in. V/2

2009-01-20T12:22:00.000-08:00

There was no rain today. I worked thursday and friday last week, then had the weekend off. After work last night (yes it was only monday) I was already begging for rain. It was like a kid who goes to sleep amidst blizzard warnings and wakes up to wet roads, grey skies and school as usual. The shear folly of this stint in the vines has set in. Today the football field sized vine is just about half finished being trimmed back. There lay in wait at least ten more terrains to do after this one.

I was talking with the wife of the vigneron, she was working in the vines with me. For a moment we paused when we reached the end of a row. She looked back at all the neatly shorn souche we had just put in order. It was one more on the side of the finished. 'It seems to be going faster this year' she said. I looked at her strangely, which usually means I don't understand her local french words, which sometimes slide by me. I did understand the words but couldn't comprehend fwhy she would say that. So she added ‘we finished april 20 last year’. I said ‘yeah, that seems about right’. I can vaguely remember because I had scheduled a voyage for the end of april and I was getting nervous about making it. 'I always think we won't get it done, but we do'

When she said that I thought, how do I do it. That's assuming I forget the fact that I have to do it. It’s part of my romantic myth that I have some money in my pocket. But a myth doesn’t ever take stock of daily aches and pains. None the less I have to keep selling, and buying my myth to keep myself going. My body is already broken. So is my budget. I just keep at it.

I couldn’t help wonder what happens if my pockets are empty and my body can’t do it. A bit of misery is good on any resume, but the people who are interviewing you don’t want to see that it’s the first and last position you’ve held. Like math though, it's a subject I don't want to go to deep into.

My body, it’s working. I am working. In between I eat, sleep, and prepare for tomorrow. Mmm tomorrow, another whole day. I can do it. Tomorrow.

Happy says listen, perhaps the vines might be saying something. I think why not, it goes with the myth I want to tell myself. I mean just speaking practically, who could look away from 'vine listener' on a resumé.

Kenny V/1

2009-01-19T13:03:00.000-08:00

Well I am back in the vines. Sunrise to Sunset. You can do that in the winter and still not have enough hours at the end of the week to make a big check. You know, one that makes you think the pressure is off for a while. That’s why the pay is in cash, liquide is how they say it here. They’re perfect the two words together in my head. The cash folds up in your pocket and the liquide flows right out again. All these small chunks of cash that I harvest in the vines.

It’s work. Clipping clipping clipping. Not unpleasant, at moments. It’s the continuousness of it that is the work. This field is like a football field, picture it in meters, yards, acres, hectares, whichever you can best sum up. The vines are planted in rows, each a meter (or 40 inches if you prefer - ladies which do you prefer) apart. The rows are two meters apart. It only takes two minutes per vine, but there are thousands all lined up and waiting to be shorn of their latest seasons matrix.

If you start doing the math (especially with a clock) it becomes brutal. In the farm world, simple mathematics lead to a sum that is futile, often depressing. |t is better to just look than think. Juggling with idle numbers you might inadvertently snip when you should’ve snapped. Look don’t think. Where will I put next, the blade of my electric shear? There is a year’s worth of the vines work you erase with each squeeze of the trigger. The future is altered, one way or the other. Quickly decide. Quickly decide. Quickly decide. All day long.

There are moments when you stop.

To smoke a cigarette, take on or off clothes, to look around, stretch your mono-positioned back (lean down and into the vine with your left shoulder, with left arm sweep together the serment, right hand position shear at correct height, finger pull trigger, left hand grab shoots and cast behind you). It always feels good to move into other formations, even if for a brief time.

Today the sky was full of clouds that were an assortment of blues that one would normally associate with tropical waters. It was stunning in the sense that I had never seen that before, a sky totally blue with clouds.

Limo Ride p. 1

2009-01-12T10:58:00.000-08:00

It just fell to me, it was as if I had no choice in it.

Some one said to me one Tuesday night.
-hey you probably qualify to have a free transit card. You know because of your situation and all.
Proof, once again, that even in the worst of positions there is always a facet that shines, a face with a grin. An official who is officious. That’s what I’m looking for. It’s not always so evident in the land of babel.

In any case it was a project, something to do, a direction to head. The next morning I turned on the computer and searched some info on how to go about acquiring a free transit card. There was nothing precise but the right did seem to existed, and it appeared that I filled all the requirements. A few weak leads pointed to a bureau in town here. If I didn't dally I could catch them open. I brushed my teeth, shodded up and headed over to the bureau.

After receiving the requisite not our department run around, I was given a vague route towards another bureau where they might be able to answer my questions ‘avec plus de precision’. I went to this office and it was more of the same. (the gatekeeper, a pretty young girl of very local roots, was suspicious of my status - unwealthy american. She scoffs me when I jokingly apologize for breaking her myth that is, evidently, still active regarding us folk from the empire). I did glean one key piece of information - she let slip the magic words while on the phone with her superior asking what to do with me. (I never let on I have this same problem).
As she cocked the phone away from me, she inquired if the benefit I was looking for wasn’t the ‘carte mandarine. (see the orange on the bus? it’s all so clever, so coded, so hidden just in front of your face.)

I immediately went home, searched the word ‘carte mandarine’ and voila! No need for all the bureau’s and the bureaucrats. Trips in cars and forms and letters - not even the post. Transport L’Herault run by the Department of L’Herault, has all the info on a hard to find (without the secret words - carte mandarine.) web page. I dashed off an E-pistle about what was needed to secure this Carte Mandarine.

The next day the reply was in my e-mail in-box. They needed my address and a justification of my official situation. (Here I can say that ‘officially’ I am a wreck, how much this bleeds into my ‘unofficial’ personal life is another subject that I will surely reflect on during my upcoming bus rides). Everything could be done via email. I immediately scanned in the single sheet of paper necessary that shows my address and the fact that I am officially wanting and sent it off. It was France at its best. Fraternity Equality Liberty all with the friendly efficiency of the modern day technology.

Just 6 days later I open my mailbox and found an orange and blue themed envelope which upon opening revealed a similarly colored magnetically readable pass for all transit within the region. I was now holder of an all access, free pass on all modes of transit in the department. All grace of an aside from a stranger at a party on a Tuesday night. Long live les fetes. Vive le republic. I am full of dreams.

Oh. You.

2009-01-10T11:32:00.000-08:00

Yes, you know. How I would like to write to you in your language, but again I will write with mine - addressed to you. I’d like to say it so you can hear it without any work. Mais je begaye dans ta langue maternal, and I want each word to drip into you.

You see I want to be filled with you. So each word I think and then scrawl across the screen is just a murmuring of your name, mmmmmm. I wish I could send it to you in the beautiful hand of Pierre I saw the other day. That script learned at the time when, if the letters weren’t formed just right, your hand got smacked. With a ruler or a pipe or whatever implement the teacher thought would spur you on to improvement. Sometimes it left scars, but more often it left letters, then words, which, like the spoken word here, flowed fluidly one into the other.

If I could write with that hand it would sound beautiful. You would believe for the rest of your life in unending love. But alas...

...I am a project of not a different time, but only a different priority. My work with numbers is excellent - they stand blocked and straight and clear when figured. In any case, nowadays, the words are instantly mediated as the fingers slap the keys. Just imagine the sentiment of these words written in an illuminated manner.

But in revenge words are free, and come easily when they are directed at you - the object of my desire. I want to say how wonderful it would be to sit beside you, drinking talking eating looking hearing, together, in gleaming full flowered France.

The other day was like that. With Pierre there was Paul reading. To hear the hand of Peter read by Paul was quite a treat, especially after having attended catholic school for so long.

That idea Pierre was fleshing out - a voice of directness - one talking to the other. Letters written alone, one sided. One voiced letters, one to another (Paul wanted to know who that one is, never mind about the other). In the directness of that voice comes the sound of pained wondering, a longing for the other to hear, not the words, but just the silent sounds attempting to vibrate with love for another.

The words trying to re-create the sound of one expressing fully to another.

oh

mmmmmmmmmmmm

They’re so romantic, slow, objectifiable, words scratched across paper. In letters, like fantasies, only your physical body is denied.

The physical body of my car checked out fine the other day at the control tecnique. They said - okay - I was relieved. When I went out to get it yesterday it was missing. I was confused because I thought I was sure where I had left it. Then I remembered - the marché. I had forgotten to move it for the weekly market. I checked with the local police and they said
-yes. It had been towed.

Strange, how after two years of moving the car every tuesday night, suddenly it is forgotten. What does that mean other than I ride a bus to the pound to fetch it and pay the145 euros of fees. In one forgotten action, half of my months disposable income vanishes. What else beside the budget is broken when the mind slips. What is this action, of forgetting.

In this case it led to you. On the walk from the bus stop to the tow lot I suddenly thought of you. It isn’t that I am not often thinking of you, it was just that it seemed as if you were there with me. As if you weren’t so far away.

Everyone has a dream.

2009-01-06T14:27:00.000-08:00

I put a cork in 2300 bottles of wine today. It was part of the dream of the English doctor and his wife. They wanted to be wine makers, so they packed up jolly old england and traded it in for sunny south of France. He acquired some terrains and outfitted the barn at the back of their house with some modern but not fancy vintners equipment and, well, he’s making some wine.

On paper the dream always looks rosy, in real life it can get a little sloppy. Between working a few days in the local clinic, and trying to make a go in the wine business, a little baby and another on the way, a 200 year old house that is quaint but needs work, he is often a bit pressed. Even in a small operation one man can’t do it all.

He called me the other day to see if I was available to help him put his latest batch of wine in bottles. It’s a precise, if not exact time frame that dictates everything done in the wine making process. Now was the time to get it in the bottle. He called me a bit frantic wondering if I could help him the next day. I am beginning to get a reputation as a worker who is usually available, and cheap, one could almost say easy.

I said “yes, okay, tomorrow at eight”

Now, I have my dream too, I would be hard pressed to say exactly what it is, but it seems to have something to do with watching others go about theirs. In effect, it’s how I make my living here in this land of dreamers. I restore their centuries old building, pick their olives, bottle their wine, prune their vines, construct their new vacation home. Even my woman is working on hers, she’s about to get her masters degree. They all came here with an active dream. I mean what kind of image do you pull up when you say the phrase ‘South of France’.

I would guess that it often includes a few bottles of wine (which i did get as a prime de panier) but I’d also say that your revery would rarely include a work day which leaves you with 45 euros in your pocket. Which is almost the equivalent of a tank of gasoline for a small automobile. This nagging lack of cash that lingers like a chronic cough is one reason I concentrate on watching other folks go about living their dreams. It reinforces a myth that I can’t psychologically afford to let die. The dream that the life in the south of France is gay and colorful and full of rich tastes. It’s not that always being broke prevents you from dreaming, it’s just that the actual living out of the dream is a bit more difficult without a full fledged income.

Poor though is relative. The fact that I eat regularly and have a roof over my head makes me rich in comparison to the vast percentage of the worlds population. There are times though when the others misery isn’t enough to rinse the bitter taste from my own mouth.

I went to get two new tires today so I can pass the automobile control this week. It has to be done every two years and my time is up. Premier prix. Rock bottom. A hundred and ten euros. I gave the guy my bank card. It came up wanting. I thought I had a bit left. The tire guy, though he had to listen, didn’t really care. He just heard - DENIED. The more I explained, the more lame it sounded. I told him I would come back. I had to leave the car there and hoof it back to my womans house to get a check from her.

There was nothing romantic or myth producing about the two mile walk. It runs along an ugly, busy road that runs through the industrial zone. If there were still railroad tracks it would have been on the other side of them. The route was wet and noisy. It was somewhat sunny out, but the general feeling was windy and cold. Like the failure of the boy scout that I am, I wasn’t prepared. For the bad card, for the walk, for being poor, even for being in France. I just wasn’t prepared.

Oh no, Another Feast

2009-01-03T12:04:00.000-08:00

Back from the vacation again. A quick trip to the Arriege. The Pyrenees and Montsegur, last stronghold of the Cathars. The mountains are still there but not the Cathars, at least not in any organized form. So instead we visited grandma. We stopped in to eat the goose and see about her broken elbow that kept us from eating that goose on Christmas.

In France it’s all about the food, and at the holiday time this is more present than normal. Everyone is laying it out and at the start of the holiday week, sitting in a little local wine bar with a few friends we splurged and ordered a bit of foie gras. Somehow it led to a discussion about the methods of going about enlarging the liver of the geese or ducks to acquire this very tender delicacy. Unfortunately the night ended with a discourse on the habit of eating foods packed with ‘bad spirits’ and well, I could only agree and consequently swore off my now tainted habit that reaches a peak at this time of the year. At the time it seemed not only logical and sane, but fairly easy to do. I mean who wants to feast on the fruits of torture.

As I said it seemed like a simple thing to do. Like all other seemingly simple acts it required a lot more than I bargained for. It started in the Pyrenees, which accounts for a good part of the 17,000 tons of fois gras produced annually in France. We weren’t at grandma’s house more than an hour before the food started coming out. She was preparing the diner for the village new years fete and there was no limit to the quantity of delicacies lying about in the kitchen. The first thing she offered was some foie gras, which she was in train of stuffing into prunes which would be served hot with the filet mignon the next evening. I looked at her daughter who had been with me that infamous night two days earlier. She looked at me and smiled. I am not sure if it was because of my fresh dilemma or because she is hip to my frequent late night testimonies of good will that are quickly forgotten the next morning. In any case I remained mute for a moment and then I heard from the kitchen, “I have some with truffles too”.

Well I took that as a sign that I had been too excessive in my recent proclamation. I don’t know if you have ever tasted foie gras or truffles, both of which are exceedingly tasty. Perhaps you have, and if you have tasted them together then you already know my response. I decided that it would be impolite to my host to refuse. I quickly added aloud to my wife that it made much more sense to make my decision effective at the beginning of the new year. We all need resolutions for the new year and now I had one . The sauterne was opened and the fattened livered consumed. Delicately laced with the perfume of truffle it danced in my mouth and left flavors that didn’t stop giving. Simply put, it was very, very good.

Little did I know then that my holiday crisis was just beginning. The next day on the table at a friends there was the foie gras again. I ate it. I reiterated the story of the tasty but bad spirits and my decision for that nights resolution. If it was possible, it almost tasted better knowing it would be my last. Then we got ready for the new years party.

It was like any other new years party, a few friends, a lot of champagne, a lot of good food, a bit of dancing. The only thing that was different was that there was one guest who was a butcher and his wife from the area. They fondly call him the pig man because he deals in pork of very high quality. He picks and chooses his animals from the farmers themselves. All small local producers, all traditional and all sane. The meats and sausages he produces are fantastic and often best just eaten raw. They have flavor that you wouldn’t know existed if you’ve only eaten mass produced products.

We were at the table again about one o’clock when he comes in from the kitchen with an entire ducks liver, pinkish brown and just a bit shiny sitting on a plate. Everyone at the table almost oohing and ahhing as he set it down. Everyone that is but me. I am groaning at the folly of my attempt. They all say his foie gras is the best. Subtle, smooth, full of taste. Having eaten many of his other products I can’t doubt it.

Again the discussion, and then he explains where he acquires it, how he prepares it. About the traditional method of gavage, the stuffing of the geese and ducks. From ancient Egypt, then Rome, now here still. You see the fowl have a natural attitude towards over eating, a stockage of fat for the migratory season. Sure the local farmers push that natural aptitude but if you let the birds go they will regain their natural form just as they do in the wild. It all made sense. Being still within the past years calendar (technically it was still December 31st evening) I served myself a small piece. They were right it was a perfect texture, delicious, the best I can remember eating. Just before serving myself more I saw all the bad spirits leave the liver that was before me. It was then that I firmly decided never to make a new years resolution again.

The Return p.1 - Back to Business

2008-12-18T17:00:00.000-08:00

I just dropped back into my other worldly existence. The skies were full of sun, blue. It seemed the sea was too. Some pink flamingo’s just off the shore then immediately, the runway. Boom. We landed and with that this life lived temporarily began again in earnest.

The immediate idea is the paperwork, grab on to the social security net and let that support me awhile. In the meantime I can find some menial labor here or there to fill the holes that are inherent in every net no matter how finely they may be stitched. Luckily France has as finely stitched a net as perhaps anywhere in the world. They lay it out for everyone, even for the likes of me.

The work though is to weave yourself through the multitudinous layers of official levels that string this net together. Each bureau, consulate, minister, society or administration has its own degree of superfluous weight that it is forced to carry just so that it can seem more necessary, official, and weighty than the actual sum of its functions. It leads to much bluster and confusion. My terrible accent though sparking curiosity, doesn't help any and I am passed around like a joint at Woodstock.

I need to get to the Assedic, the Caf. the MSA, the CCAS. You see I need to sign up for the RMI, CMU, perhaps HLM or any other allocations that will keep me from becoming an SDF.

The return p.2 - At the RMI bureau

2008-12-18T05:49:00.000-08:00

It's a folly this world of papers Francaise. I arrive back in the little bureau / basement apartment for what has become my weekly rendezvous with Mme. M. I descend the stairs as usual and arrive in an empty office. I guess the one good thing is that there is never a wait. I’ve never seen another person in here. The office is barren of souls save Mme Montserrat’s. Though on one occasion I did see the long gone maintenance man and his wife haunting about.

Mme comes out and I notice her face fall a bit when she sees it is me. She tells me to wait a bit and crosses across the waiting room (the ancient living/dining room) into the kitchen. She begins fiddling with the hot water tank, evidently trying to get it to work. I sit and watch her for a few minutes before speaking.
“problems with the heat?” I ask.
“it won’t come on, and It’s cold in here”
“yes” I respond “these basement apartments are damp and cold on a day like today”.
You have to hear that just as sounds when I say it in French.
“Oui, il fait froid et humide dans les aparts sous niveau. Specialement sut les journees comme aujourd’hui.
Short, direct, curt almost, and with an american accent as thick as your local qwickie-mart man.
She turns and says nothing, evidently aggravated by my reference to her place of business as a basement apartment.

I get up from my seat to go over and have a look, it seems obligatory. The fact of it being a question about the functioning of a hot water heater and me being a man, her a woman. Never mind the fact that I know nothing about their operation - you see my predicament. I couldn’t just sit there watching.

She explains that normally she just turns the thermostat and voila, the heat arrives, but today no luck. She opens and closes the cover to the control panel once again. She stares at the three dials, one button and two flashing lights - one yellow and constant, the other red and intermittent. I join her with my stare. I then re-turn the button which she just turned. I say something inconsequential along the lines of “these things are always breaking down” and then, add that perhaps she should burn the cardboard cartons in the long abandoned fireplace behind the chairs in the waiting room.

She cracks her gum. She has all the chutzpah of a big american city welfare worker, but with just a little bit less of the hard edge they carry and that she seemingly aspires to. But it’s a little village here and well, that edge is hard to come by without having been brought up under its tutelage.

“How about this button” I proffer as I push the only button that is there.
“I don’t know what that’s for
“Sometimes that will work” I add with de rigour’ manly confidence.

She looks at me with her pretender bad ass look as all the lights go out. Then in the next instant I can see that it immediately goes soft as the yellow light pops back on. Then the machine clicks, then the gas ignites. At each rapid fired event she outwardly maintains her bad ass office bitch look while it simultaneously melts from her eyes. I gesture her gallantly towards her office, “ it should be warm in a little while”.
I see clearly that Mme. M will be helping me today.

High on the mountain

2008-12-18T02:43:00.000-08:00

Some days there is nothing to do here. Or at least nothing gets done. It’s profitable to remember your myth and carry on even if that means climbing up the road to Roqueronde to score some high grade local product. You know it’s not the best thing to be doing with your scarce resources and borderline state of mental health. You persuade yourself that at least it gets you out of the house and into the exterior world. It does. The road that climbs up the mountainside is only less dizzying in relation to the descent, but there is almost no one else on the road and the views down into the cirque below are spectacular in all senses.

They said in the provinces, on the out lining edges of the empire, that the land was sunny and cheap. The way of living was easy and one could eat from a table of plenty. In a way that was all true. But there are other truths they didn’t talk about. They didn’t talk about the solitude and despair of distance, and so neither will I, but only because they both seem best out-fitted in silence. It’s just to say that whether your going from JFK to Charles de Gaule on air france or from Rome to le Gaul on the via Dominitia, your home is a long way away.

The ride up the hill was a success. We met on a road above the forest. We talked, smoked, then hunted down some mushrooms. Cepe du chataigne, not the top, but not too bad either, and they were plentiful, lightly toasted brown colors, sometimes with streaks the color of dried blood red. The ride down was like a private carnival ride of grand scale. There are moments when we forget ourselves, and the petite psychological pains we nourish.

Do you have something better than first class

2008-12-14T11:21:00.000-08:00

It’s funny the little things that we don’t realize we need until we have them. It’s all part of the weight of being rich. This access to a world of extreme material comfort. The ways of ease we have at our disposal are so many. But it never seems enough.

Slowly an item, once deluxe, becomes commonplace, then a necessity. Then we begin to feel need again. It’s a vicious cycle, and it is this I speak of when I say the weight of being rich. Perhaps this weight is the reason Jesus spoke about how it was easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of heaven. This access to more can have grave negative effects.

It’s a dilemma, this fact of living with so much. Mind you I am not complaining - just explaining - and only because it has happened again. I must tell you too, that by modern western world standards, I am a poor man. What’s even worse is when, forgetting the other 90 percent of the world population, I begin to believe it myself.

I came back from the states the other day to my home in France on the Newark to Paris Flight. Yes, already the needles eye is shrinking, but it can always get smaller. I had come in for a party in Manhattan, at the university of my deceased father. It was a big fete in his honor and it was five days of food and drink and family without end. I imbibed them all just to the point that I could no longer keep it all inside me, and the next day I left.

As I was getting on the plane, and here I tell you I am also rich in that I am neither grossly disfigured or mentally debilitated, I chatted with one of the flight attendants who evidently took a shining to me. Through a series of maneuvers she got me bumped up to first class. Being a member of the working leisure class I had often walked through this section of the plane, but had never spent any flight time in its confines.

I can tell you now it is so much better than being cramped in the back. There is a seat that folds into a bed, a full screen movie monitor in front of you, and a stewardess literally at your beck and call. You watch a movie, eat dinner, have a cocktail and go to bed. You wake up comfortably as a soft spoken attendant opens your window shade onto a new day, a hot towel at the ready, “orange juice, coffee, perhaps an espresso?” Do you have enough of everything, if not, just ask.

For the first time I walked off the plane rested and feeling good. I had always felt good just having the luxury of flying back and forth as I needed, but that was before. Now, rich man that I am, I have a new need.

Hanging by a wire

2008-12-13T09:13:00.000-08:00

My story is unraveling. It has become much too confusing. The trajectory has just taken a turn for the worse. I should have known the story would turn like this, they always do. Sure there is the one or two that don’t and they’re held up as the model that is looked to, but look at the untold numbers following that model. Statistically it’s a very long shot. But that’s the seductive nature of the model, it’s so attractive it refuses shear logic; or the clarity of numbers.

The whole thing just peaked out, the gradual slope upwards just ended, I hit the peak at 1:48 pm on may 14th 2007. I had just spent the morning in the vigne. It’s like a guardian angel that I refuse to listen to, it’s always gently whispering in my ear when I listen. It always has something to say about the beauty of consistent action. The rows, up and down, back and forth, put up one wire, put down another, move to the next. Pause at the end of each row, regard where you are, what you have done, what needs to be done next. All the while earning your daily bread. I mean really what more can I want.

The work is as mentally focusing as a word jumble on a crowded plane. It’s the one repetitive job I’ve done in the vine that isn’t physically debilitating, that doesn’t consistently pick at one tendon or muscle in your body until it swells, aches or both. It’s just like taking a hike in a beautiful spot, only you have to stop every three quick strides at a metal pole, attach the hanging metal wire on the middle hook (that was taken down last month) and detach the metal wire on the top hook and let it hang down (to be hooked back up in two weeks). There are twenty hectares that need to be tended, two people, 25 hours each. It’s a lot of walking , but really not tiring, except for the fact that I can’t stop looking at it like work.

So today we started, and after a week off that was full of sun and fine times, at 8 am the skies were threatening. By ten the threat had been made good and we where in the rain again. At first, I don’t mind, it’s not cold and the rain is steady but light. The vigneron, with the first drops goes to his truck and pulls out the rain jackets. He has to force one on me with his constant offers of an extra lying in the truck. My laziness often passes into stupidity, if one can’t come inside when it’s raining, at least put a raincoat on, and if the coat has a hood, why not wear it. The vigneron, like a good mom, keeps telling me to use the hood. In any case in an hour, my pants are soaked, the last row of the grenache finished, and I gladly agree when he says “let’s have a coffee”..

At first when we got in the truck, I was expecting a thermos, which he often ports after lunch, but instead we start driving and I realize we’re heading up the road to his mother’s house. It appears the morning is over. I am always overjoyed to leave work early, even more so when it’s unexpected. It’s the same level of excitement I had as a kid when a snowstorm would cancel school in the middle of the day. We’re going to wait it out at her house, and if it keeps going I may be done for the whole day

I can use the money in a bad way. I am down to my last 700 increasingly faible US dollars from the last stint in the cab and I have 275 euros cash here - total. Even the 8.27 per hour for a few hours is starting to seem like big money, but like I said, I’m an addict to that ecstatic feeling of things being canceled, and having more time to do nothing. I have the same excitedly sleazy feeling as I had on Friday afternoons cutting out of the history of film class at the state college to kill that time at the pinball arcade. It was so strong, this attraction to laziness that even when I wanted to watch the film they were showing in class I would duck out. I’m a creature of repetition, even when it means my own demise.

“Don’t worry about the shoes” she says as I start taking off my muddy boots to enter the house.
I’m happy to see mrs. S. again. She is exactly as you would wish your french mom of the vigneron to be. She clucks at us to sit down and let her make us comfortable. She frets whether we are chilly or need dry clothes, she offers hot drinks of any sort as she puts out some cookies on the table.
“Christian get some slippers for him” she insists as I wash up in the sink.
She rubs my shoulder saying “oh you’re all wet, do you want a dry shirt”. I insist I am okay and she tsk’s at me, wagging her head lovingly at my stupidity.
It’s one of the few places in the french world that I feel wholly comfortable, happy, at ease to be.

“Ah, the weather is terrible” she says and I quickly add, thinking of the afternoon off, “yeah, and it looks like it is going to be this way all day long”
“That’s what they said on the forecast”. the vigneron adds. I get a rush of hope at these words.

As we drink the coffee and chat about this and that, the rain slows, but as we finish it recommences with renewed vigor. “If the weather doesn’t stop by noon it will rain all day” he proclaims. It’s 11:20, the morning is now officially finished, and as we have another cup of coffee, we all seem to silently agree that the whole day of work is probably over too. The talk turns to the forecast for the week, and the weather patterns in general.

I am sitting at the table as they describe again with a quiet pride the intricacies of the local weather and it’s particular patterns. The focus is on prediction, and the signs one can count on. At one point after pooh-poohing her son for his prediction of a hot summer because of the rainy springtime she says matter of factly, “If it is windy for three days after the feast of St. Mathias, it will be windy for forty more days”. Her son talks about the rain and the wind and the effects on the new vines, the weight of the water and the speed of the wind acting together to rip the new shoots from the vines. They go back and forth discussing weather trends and grape production.

She has watched the weather, and it’s subsequent effect on the vines, first with her father, then her husband, and now her son, from that little village on the side of the Larzac Plateau, in great detail. When she says “It always rains the week during the feast of St. Fulcran” (the patron saint of Lodeve) or “even though the Pentecost is in late may, it’s nine times out of ten chilly” I thoroughly believe her, who else would know. It seems to me it would be like not believing an indian chief when he says it looks like it will be a cold winter.

I am riding the wave of good feeling listening to them talk and knowing I will be heading home soon for the day. At 11:45 the vigneron says “well, I guess that’s it for the day, do you want to head back to your car”.. I feel the happy calm of a shot of morphine coursing through my vein, as I try to say unexcitedly
“we might as well, we can get at it tomorrow”.

I head home to Lodeve to eat with the kids on their lunch break, we are all feeling good about the weekend of fun just passed and they are riding too, the coats of my lazy mans freshly found day off buzz. We are all feeling good. At 1:40 my cell phone rings, I see the name of the vigneron on its screen. I quickly realize it has not only stopped raining but that the skies outside are markedly clearer. I answer the phone reluctantly.
“Hey it looks like its going to be clear this afternoon, do you want to come back to work”. I stutter something out, and then say with conviction, “oh, it’s still raining here”.
“Really”. he responds.
“Well just a little”.
“I know you’re in Lodeve, it’s your call, you don’t have to come in if you don’t want to” he says. I can think of no good reason to say no, but that is my goal, so for a while I just stutter away in incoherent french. Something about already showering and attacking it early tomorrow, and “I would but...”
“Well I’ll be out in the vines where we left off whatever you decide” I can hear his voice register a bit of disappointment but I stick to my guns, and then try to explain to my kids why I don’t feel like going to work even though I am always broke and have nothing to do at home. They look at me as I would imagine the vigneron would have looked at me had we been talking in person. They go back to school, I take a nap for an hour.

When I wake at 3:00pm I am rested and ready to go, but it is too late to go back to work, and I have nowhere else to go. I head into the other room of my tiny apartment and turn on the computer. I check my empty email, and then surf through some porn on the web before deciding to watch a quick pirated episode of the soprano’s before attacking something productive. It’s almost midnight when I’ve finished the whole fourth season of the sopranos series before I decide it’s time for bed. Work starts at seven tomorrow.