Friday, May 7, 2004

A goofy message (c.1990) On my day off from my job as newsweekly ad coordinator and proofreader (and occasional contributor), I often drove my old tan Beetle west from Chico to the empty landscape of golden grasses and valley oak trees that undulates between the Sacramento River and the Coast Range in the Central Valley of Northern California. I don't know why those back roads had such appeal for me. I just found the area to be very beautiful, and the emptiness brought me great peace of mind. One drizzly afternoon I packed some cheese and olives and a baguette and a canteen of water, as well as my notebook and pens, and set off in that direction. I drove twenty miles west, to the farming town of Orland, and went on past there for another five or ten miles. I turned left onto a side road, and when the blacktop turned to gravel I continued between and over the dry yellow hills. I followed this road as it circled around the lake that lies behind Black Butte Dam, and then I turned right onto a dirt track that led eventually to the lake itself. I parked where the road ended, about 100 feet from the lake, and got out. I hadn't seen a human, or even an animal, since I'd turned off the highway west of Orland. The wind was up. Big drops of rain were just starting to splatter around me. I started to walk down toward the lake edge. As I got close I noticed a small rectangle of something bobbing on the distant surface of the otherwise featureless water. It was making its way in a straight line toward shore--and toward me as I approached. As I arrived at the water's edge the rectangle arrived at the shore: it was an opened matchbook cover, black, bearing words in large white letters: "SO YOU WANT TO BE AN AUTHOR!" I kept that matchbook cover for years but I don't know where it is anymore. Perhaps it's lost. 12:33:32 PM    comment []

The mystery of the missing coin This happened sometime in 1982 or '83. One afternoon I was tossing I Ching coins, as I often did back then as an adjunct to meditation. I was alone in my "office" at the back of my little house in Chapmantown. The kids were at school. I sat cross-legged on the rug. I would narrow and unfocus my eyes and shake the coins as I concentrated, and then drop them from a height of maybe a foot or so, and then look to note the combination that had turned up. After one of these tosses I found that only two of the three coins lay on the rug in front of me. I thought one of them must have landed on edge and rolled somewhere. I didn't move but looked around me from where I sat.( The atmosphere was a little weird.) But I couldn't see the coin anywhere. After 30 seconds or so I heard and felt a >plop< on the rug directly behind me, as if an object had been dropped. I twisted around to look, and there was the third coin. The hair stood up on my head, and I didn't toss the coins for some time after this. 12:17:35 PM    comment []