First I got too close to the Great Yowling. This is never a good way to start your day.

I can be such a gentle, newfound peaceful soul. No, really. It comes with practice, and I have the yowling to thank for motivation. Sometimes it expands suddenly from beyond the mountains like the flash of an unholy bomb, telling me I have some seconds yet to duck before the shock wave hits—at other times, it’s only barking in the night. The metaphors will have to do for now, but just you wait.

And while you do, how about some coffee??

This, the other bookend to my day, is keeping me awake with stark biological efficiency. What happened was, just for the fun of it, I fired up the new stovetop percolator I bought last week in Solano. (You should go to Solano and ponder the immense mystery of those words…) In so doing, I have rediscovered coffee.

I knew how to set up the device, but as soon as it started to perc, I realized I didn’t know how long to let it go. A quick Google detour gave me information that I read wrong and applied, but all worked out well in the end. Apparently I could have brewed it longer, but the main thing is, coffee brewed this old-fashioned way gets you HIGH! I can’t believe how zinged I am three hours later, and I swear it wasn’t strong or bitter.

A little research revealed that there are something like 250 identifiable compounds in roasted coffee beans, and that most of these require an extended period at high temperature—though not boiling— to be released. This is absolutely covered by the five to seven minutes recommended for a perc, but the quick wash-through of drip coffee reportedly releases only six of these same compounds! Good Lord, how much coffee have I been wasting? And look: no filters! (No “Dammit, no #6s again!”) No filter cone! Easier to pack!

Whether any of this is true or not, I’m not the one to say. But damn, chilluns, the brew is good. Not too strong or harsh at all, just bloody powerful, and it tastes fabulous. Maybe piss-ant drip coffee is all that’s wrong with the world. What I had tonight makes me want to go thrash some pistons and drive real fast. That would fix a few things, right?

I may never sleep again, but I think it’s worth it.

Post from: FarrFeed

Perc it Up

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Some of the plums had already fallen, so I knew the others were ready to pick. As I stood there pulling them into the colander one by two, I heard the steady, whispered “whoop, whoop, whoop” of raven wings. At beat four he flew overhead and whoop-whooped out of sight. There were a lot of plums.

On the way back to the kitchen, I passed by the carved stone fish from Michoacán my wife bought from a roadside vendor there in ’78. Yesterday I spontaneously hosed it down for no particular reason, and it was like something popped inside! The instinctive ritual blew more than a few circuits, connecting me with something normally obscured (meaning that the symbolism worked). It’s just the thing to do, so this morning I set up the camera and watered the fish again. You have no idea how good that feels, but maybe this video will help.

The soundtrack is from an early instrumental version of “Thank You Jesus for the Nails,” a work of dark vigor and questionable taste fortunately still very much in progress, as the part where I play the keyboard with my knuckles will attest.

[That's an HD version above. You probably want to play with the settings in your YouTube toolbar and play it again, anyway.]

UPDATE: You know, last night I had to watch this over and over. Something completely unintended happened as a result of pouring the water: the drab, dry, dusty fish is completely transformed, with the water on the flagstone reflecting the blue of the sky—air, water, and earth in triumphant oneness! It’s like an inadvertent manual for earth wizards.

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Watering the Fish

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“Teresa idolized you, did you know that?” (Thus wrote cousin Joyce…)

No, I didn’t, actually. As I told my wife this afternoon, “Maybe if I had, I’d have behaved better.” The last 10 years, especially. What with the chaos of the move to New Mexico and subsequent turmoil, lack of funds, and generally having my head up my ass, I didn’t manage to get down to Austin once in all that time. She made it up here twice, though. [Pictured below with her husband at our rented digs in San Cristobal in early 2001]

I had a tendency to hide out then, feeling ashamed at not living up to my full potential, if that makes any sense. The incredibly stressful relocation and subsequent impoverishment, especially after the dot-com bust, left me feeling like one miserable excuse for a grownup, and I wanted to be able to “walk tall” if I went down to visit, instead of being such a distraught, needy bastard.

During one of my lowest periods ever, after my wife had moved to Dubuque to save herself and take care of her mother, when I had literally nothing, living off credit card checks and freezing to death, Teresa sent me a care package from the second-hand clothing stores of Austin containing a vest, heavy knit long-sleeved shirts, and other items. They probably saved my life—they certainly made me more comfortable—and I still wear them! Once during a similar period of grinding poverty and uncertainty in my bachelor days in Maryland, she sent me a giant Tupperware container filled with homemade chocolate chip cookies. Just knowing somebody loved me and hadn’t forgotten about me made a huge difference in my life both times, and those weren’t the only instances where she reached out or did something spontaneous to brighten my life.

And then there was the time of my colossal jerkness. This one is hard:

I’d been living in Austin from December, ’71 into the spring of ’75. We didn’t socialize or see each other a lot, but it was comforting to be living in the same town with family. I remember she was taking photography classes while I was working on the University of Texas grounds crew, raking leaves with a master’s degree. That was nothing unusual at the time—jobs were hard to come by, and half the members of my crew had advanced degrees—but the irony of the situation was remarkable. She found me one day mowing the grass at my alma mater and took a picture that she later mounted and gave me as a present. (I don’t think I realized until writing this what an honoring that was.)

By the summer of ’75, however, I was in the middle of ending a relationship and getting on with my life, which meant leaving Texas to move to Maine and later, Maryland. I was so screwed up and crazy with fear, in fact, that when the day before my departure arrived, I hadn’t yet gone over to her place to say good-bye and would have left town without doing so, if she hadn’t taken it upon herself to come see ME instead.

I can still see her when I opened the door, her eyes red from crying…

On Monday morning, though, I was the one with the tear-streaked face and a broken heart. Not that these are equivalent events, but remembering that time from 35 years ago, the similarity is striking. What we do always comes back, one way or the other.

Better watch your step then, and never, ever turn away from love!

A memorial Life Celebration for Teresa V. Farr will take place at Nia Space, 3212 S. Congress, Austin, TX on September 12th, 2010 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. This festive, informal tribute is open to all. For more info, please contact Mary Farr or William Gulley.

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Sister Stories

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My sister died last night. I can’t imagine life without her on this earth. Teresa my buddy, my friend, my teacher…

She found out sometime in May that she had terminal liver cancer. For the record, that means you starve and swell up until something breaks. Last night it did, apparently while I was lying in the bathtub worrying about my own stupid future, the work I haven’t done, the home we don’t have, and half a million other things. Her husband went upstairs to check on her at 1:00 a.m., and she was already cold. That’s the way this happens in the real world.

Teresa was an artist. A life artist, I should say, because she lived her life like no other, doing everything her own way, including dying. She never spent a single day in the hospital and didn’t want to—no medical/industrial complex slavery for her, no sir! Short of breath and hemorrhaging, she slipped away in her sleep, all alone and without making a fuss. That’s my sister, as brave and compassionate as anyone who ever lived.

I can’t believe she’s gone. I just can’t.

A memorial Life Celebration for Teresa V. Farr (“T.Farr” to most of her Austin friends) will take place at Nia Space, 3212 S. Congress, Austin, TX on September 12th, 2010 from 2:00 to 4:00 p.m. This festive, informal tribute is open to all. For more info, please contact Mary Farr or William Gulley.

Post from: FarrFeed

The Best Sister Any Brother Ever Had

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In the old days, and I mean old days, I could always depend on the Nighthawk when I wanted coffee and a piece of pie at midnight.

There were at least two locations in a much smaller Austin, including one by the University that never closed. The tall red naugahyde booths were brightly lit islands of security, the food “American,” with righteous breakfasts, burgers, and the like, and the waitresses would top off your coffee every 30 seconds—just my kind of place, in other words.

My longtime friend and associate Bob M., his wife, Bob B., and I made up a frequent Sunday morning foursome in the days when I was pretending to be a junior college instructor in Wharton, Texas, teaching remedial English (!), English Comp, and basic German to poor doomed goat-ropers and surfers in exchange for a draft deferment to keep me out of Vietnam. On weekends I would flee the flat, repressive environs of Wharton—where the sheriff parked outside my home and tried to peer through oiled rice paper windows with binoculars—for more amenable surroundings in incense-scented hippie ghettos of old Austin neighborhoods.

Sunday mornings started with smoking excellent dope at Bob M.’s house. Bob B. would come over, and then all four of us would head off for the Nighthawk or a similar venue to load up on waffles and coffee until the hot black liquid came running out our ears. After this, it was back to Bob M.’s place for yet another joint and our much-anticipated Sunday jam session.

I’m talking real jazz flute, standup bass, and my guitar, sometimes electrified. We didn’t play “tunes,” you understand, but freely improvised and played for hours. Each song would somehow magically end when all three players landed on the exact same note without expecting it, at which point we’d collapse in laughter and have another toke. The music was occasionally that good, and sometimes strangers would wander in off the street to sit and listen. (In the age of YouTube, we might have ruled the world.) I couldn’t imagine a better way to spend a Sunday afternoon and probably still can’t.

Flash forward now to earlier this month, when I was back in Austin visiting my dying sister (how glibly the phrase falls now, how great the pain behind the dam):

I needed a place to eat and didn’t feel like looking up old haunts, assuming they even still existed. But the southside Threadgill’s Restaurant, occupying the same hallowed ground once home to Armadillo World Headquarters, was 200 yards from my hotel, so off I went. After requesting seating in the bar—much quieter than the larger rooms—I found myself quite pleasantly situated in a space decorated with old commercial signs from defunct Austin landmarks. Not little placards, folks, but great huge things, hanging from a nice tall ceiling. For the most part, these were known to me and rang the big bell in my ancient heart where all the good things are: “Hey, I remember that place!”

And then something nudged me, a flicker of light from the corner of my eye, perhaps. Slowly I turned to look over my left shoulder, and behold: a NIGHTHAWK SIGN eight feet above my head, with the neon flying nighthawk flashing on and off! Well, that settles that, I realized, although it took me half a cheeseburger to avert my gaze. I hadn’t asked the question, but I got my answer, anyway.

O Nighthawk, o sister on my mind…

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Red Naugahyde Booths

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Moving right along…

A while back I realized that I had come to the useful end of life as I had lived it. Nothing that had ever “worked” in the past was going to do me any good from that point forward. I was, in a word, stumped, although realizing I hadn’t a clue how to behave actually took a lot of the pressure off. Then three weeks later, this turned into The Summer My Sister Got Cancer—talk about not knowing what to do—and life herded me through the cosmic dip tank for a treat. Who knows, maybe a few ticks fell off.

Take my lifelong obsession with fixing people, for example (me, you, them, the world). The curmudgeon is just a wounded idealist, I think, encased in guilt. But whether a symptom of moral degradation or a perk of aging, today I finally felt, at least a little bit, that all I had to do was watch and be amazed—all I could do, really.

To the extent this holds, we have a different kind of journey.

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Clearance Sale

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Whew…

I’ve been working on my network, shoring up a couple of neglected websites. My old JHFarr.com domain, for example, was just sitting there with a lot of dead content but with links to this blog, and a surprising number of people coming here go through there. (Don’t ask me why!) So I decided to spiff it up with the latest beta version of the Thesis theme—I’m running all my own sites on WordPress/Thesis now, by the way.

The other site I whipped up yesterday (!) is ZooPilot.com. I’ve owned the domain for ages, using it for a little one-page site for Zoo Pilot Design that I hosted with Mac.com. But I’m not doing Web work now except for a couple of steady business clients—note that this doesn’t mean I’m out of the business, just taking time out for myself to get my ebook publishing and marketing enterprise underway. The entity I conceptualized for doing this is “Zoo Pilot Publishing,” which now lives at ZooPilot.com, proudly hosted at Brownrice Internet here in Taos.

Naturally, I had to do some work on FarrFeed while I was at it. This being the main website, it needed to look like what I’d just created for the other two.

And so on, and so forth. [yawn] Since I went to bed last night at 3:45 a.m., do not remember falling asleep, and got up at 7:30 this morning, I think I will now attempt sleep…

[That animated GIF above is an old one of mine, built with ClarisWorks and GIFBuilder on a Mac LC II maybe 14 years ago, frame by frame!]

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Hard-Working Guy

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The first one just ran across the road about 20 miles outside of Austin as I was heading back to Taos.

That was pretty funny, though, like encountering a chimney sweep sweeping a chimney. What else was the bird supposed to do? He (?) ran all the way across the road without stopping or flying, and when he got to the grass on the shoulder, he ran even faster. This was a satisfying moment and a nice present for my birthday, as it had been quite a few years since I’d seen one of the long (24″) skinny birds. Later that day, however, things turned weird.

I was at a remarkable spot somewhere in the Texas Panhandle. In fact, when looking over the map again just now, I couldn’t even find it! Maybe it doesn’t exist any more. What it was, was an abandoned “lake,” one of those artificial lakes you find all over Texas where people fish and water ski in muddy brown water. Only this post-apocalyptic recreation area had seen better days: for reasons of drought or other calamity, the water level was less than half its original depth. The boat ramp ended just part-way down a dry, parched hillside. The ruins of a concession stand stood nearby in the weeds. Here and there were battered examples of cheap “lakeside” real estate with broken windows. It was one of the saddest, strangest places I have ever seen.

Oddly, I wasn’t alone. Far below the empty parking lot where I had stopped was a family with three kids, parked on a dried-out mud flat that had once been lake bottom (and before that, an arroyo). They were actually fishing and apparently having a wonderful time, as an occasional squeal drifted up to where I was watching. Then suddenly I heard a very different sound: “COO!” or something close to it, unlike any sort of “coo” I’d ever heard before. “COO,” then “COO” again. Finally, I saw the culprit: no more than 15 feet away, sitting on a stump with a beakful of nesting material, was another roadrunner!

Its head was turned sideways toward me, so we maintained eye contact for the longest time. The bird continued to coo. I decided to walk slowly over to the car and retrieve my camera, keeping the bird in sight the whole time. But the instant I turned away to reach for the strap, POOF!—it vanished in an instant.

I couldn’t find it afterwards, of course, and it wasn’t making any more calls, though I knew there had to be a nest down in the bushes somewhere. Still, two roadrunners in one day, after years of not seeing any—had I acquired a new totem animal?

Building a nest amidst the ruins sort of fits, after all.

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Double Roadrunner Birthday

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I know I promised to talk about why Plainview, Texas is like Paris compared to Dimmitt, but my heart’s not in it. Yours wouldn’t be either, if you’d been to Dimmitt.

Suffice it to say that farming (corn, cotton, sorghum, wheat) and feedlots operate on a massive industrial scale in the Panhandle. If you like heavy machinery, chemicals, and miles and miles of Texas, you’re all set. I doubt there’s a natural acre of ground anywhere in those parts, though. The way it comes across to me is societal earth rape: they run so many fertilizers and herbicides through that soil, it doesn’t look like dirt any more. The little towns you go by seem just as impermanent. Maybe that’s why so many people have big trucks!

Be that as it may, I did have a fine time after Dimmitt. From Hereford on west into New Mexico, the land slowly lifted up to meet the sky, and there was green grass everywhere: less farming, more cattle. I had no trouble continuing with my backroads adventure, because if anything, there were even fewer people in New Mexico. Harding County, for example, where I passed through several hours later, has a population density of three persons per square mile. No wonder people there call it the “Big Empty.”

It was beautiful, of course. And I was determined to take NM Rt. 161 from Interstate 25 (which I was on only briefly) on to Rt. 518 and Mora. This was important, as I was running out of gas but figured I could make it that far. First, however, I ended up here after eight miles on what turned out to be a dead-end road:

The truth is, there are TWO consecutive exits for Rt. 161, two miles apart, on I-25! The first one leads to Fort Union National Monument (that’s the old post hospital above), and the second goes to Mora. Don’t ever take it, by the way: there are heaps of broken pavement lying around in big chunks, huge holes, and unannounced sections with nothing but rocks. (You can drive it, but you’ll hate yourself.) At any rate, I’m so glad I made this “mistake,” because how else would I ever have visited the ruins of the largest fort in the Southwest?

The Army built Fort Union in 1851 to protect travelers on the Santa Fe Trail and generally make life difficult for the Comanches, Apaches and the Utes. By the time the railroad came through in 1891, the area was considered “pacified” and the fort abandoned, but what history it must have witnessed. You can still see the ruts from the Santa Fe Trail, of course, since the trail predates the fort by 30 years at least. It’s good to get the landscape in your brain for places like this, to understand the past. If you visit the fort, you’ll understand why the wagons went that way.

(And yes, I did make it to Mora, running on tension and fumes…)

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The Mysterious Fort Union

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