Slouching Towards....

College of the Desert.....start of fall semester....the late-August-humid shuffle through unbelievably long distances in suffocation humidity/high temperatures....the fountain at mid-campus drained, and the rest of the place torn up, fenced off, construction and expensive new buildings in the midst of state economic collapse....unable to get cash from the ATM machine in cafeteria building....and brightly, a stack of Solstice 2006 with cosmic, vibrant, orange painting by a talented student and portrait artist from Thailand. It was exactly ten years ago, August, 1999 that I walked into a classroom filled with English 50 students, my first session at COD. Tarah was entering 6th grade at nearby Marywood Country Day School. I was renting a house on Silver Moon Trail in the Silver Spur neighborhood in south Palm Desert from my friend Bob Kretschmar, where I lived for three years.


"A Philosophy of Buddha and Three Daughters of Buddha" by Chusit Wijarnjoragij

Best of all, a new adjunct instructor, waiting to meet with the dean, sitting in a chair and thumbing through the book with great interest....flashback to my job interview at Cochise College in southern Arizona in 1998, when I was in a similar seat and waiting for my interview and was lured in by a copy of Mosaic, their lit-mag....my inspiration for generating the Solstice lit-mag program at COD, in fact! A beautiful repast.

City of Palm Desert Mural.....

Here I am, im-muralized as poetess laureate of College of the Desert....love the cosmic colors!



For more info on this painting - I'm a small part of a large mural that covers several walls - go to the City of Palm Desert public art site.....the mural on the wall of the library community room is online, along with a description of the project, which was painted by my friend, the artist Susan Evans....if you look REAL close, just to the left/below the exit sign in the photograph, you'll see me....reading from a book of poetry....yes, it's true! I've been immortalized as the COD poet laureate in this mural...I posed a few years ago for Susan while I was wearing a yellow shirt, and the book I'm reading from is a copy of the COD Solstice, the college lit-visual arts magazine I founded, issue #1. Dig it!

http://www.palm-desert.org/arts-culture/public-art/art-details?id=173

Ladyfest I.E. Sunday, August 2nd, 2-11 pm.

Everyone is welcome to attend! This is a community-based one-day art and music event. Ladyfest I.E. will feature creative workshops and music at Back to the Grind coffee shop in downtown Riverside, CA from 2-11 p.m. I'm presenting:
4:00 p.m. power poetry: the magic to transform
8:00 p.m. Ruth Nolan poetry reading



here is a more detailed schedule (Pharaoh's den is upstairs at the Grind)
2:00-2:50 p.m.
RYPA at Pharaoh's Den
Planned Parenthood at Back to the Grind

3:00-3:50 p.m.
Self-Defense at Back to the Grind
Zine Making at Pharaoh's Den

4:00-4:50 p.m.
Consent at Pharaoh's Den
poetry workshop/Ruth Nolan/at Back to the Grind

5:00-6:00 p.m.
Machismo in the Punk scene whole group discussion

6:15-7:15 p.m.
Food Not Bombs Dinner

7:15-7:35 p.m.
Jackie Joice Spoken Word

7:35-8:00 p.m.
Tuberculosis

8:00-8:20
Ruth Nolan Poetry Reading

8:20-8:45 p.m..
Coke Bust

8:55-9:20 p.m.
Sick Fix

9:30-9:55 p.m.
Parche de Ira

10:05-10:30 p.m.
For Fuck Sake

10:40-11:05 p.m.
all or nothing hc

this image can also be viewed at
http://i720.photobucket.com/albums/ww204/radical_grita/August2ladyfestflyer.jpg

Circus Circus Hotel Casino, Reno + Vegas and a Slinky T-Shirt

Ruth and baby Tarah wearing Irish sweater + Ruth and Tarah high school graduation party

So I realize she's doing the same thing I was doing at her age, and that is getting her own place to live. And she turns 21 on Tuesday. I'm going shopping for some bling for her, and maybe for me, too, and having a surprise party for her at her workplace-doctor's office next week (ice cream cake, same kind I had at her baby shower 21 Julys ago) and a nice dinner with the grandparents at Wally's Desert Turtle, a classic 50's place in Rancho Mirage. Lovely stuff. And I had to borrow $350from her in cash because I lost my ATM card last week, and she's parked her Lexus on the street overnight because her and Alex are out and about in his Camaro, and I'm putting together issue #3 of Phantom Seed literary magazine. Life in a shimmer world of mirage, we are so Palm Springs. I'm mom and I drive a modest Toyota RAV4. I do have a classic 1989 Nissan Pulsar T-Top that's parked in driveway next to the missing palo verde tree, with a cover on it, but it needs a battery.

OK, who writes about this stuff? I am starting to understand the idea of mid-life-crisis in its full blows.....this isn't a temporary hitch, it's a knockout in a glaring boxing ring, and, how did I get here? I'm only 46, and I feel 23. So, when did all this life procession itself by? I'm contracting images of trapeze artists and sword-swallowing strong men, baby elephants in pink skirts and a full bar that revolves on a kiddy merry-go-round.....the idea of "circus" of the absurd drives itself into the garage of my head. What hugely outgrown outfit is this costume of a three bedroom, two-bath, two-car-garage, swimming pool + jacuzzi house falling around my ankles? Weight has poured off of me in recent months, and the ceiling caves in. I'm the star of a one-woman-disintegration in slo-mo, happening too-fast. A wire slinky, uncoiling apart and together back and forth descending the stairs. The old kind, from when I was a kid. And when the wires got ever so slightly bent, the slinky wouldn't work anymore. And the wiring harness in that RAV4 was chewed through by a big rat that got under my engine hood a few years ago. Cost $6,000 mostly covered by AAA.


Tarah in Kaui, Hawaii at age 13

I am reeling from this sense of a sledgehammer coming down on my head. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I'm so single my teeth hurt. I'm so alone in this house the dog has now appropriated the wicker couch where my star blanket and panda bear live. My abandoned bed by night, the sleeping couch by day. I'm so single I'm digging up old coffee cups from a 1989 stopover in Las Vegas (Apple Valley to Zion National Park) to remember when she was a wee little thing. I'm so single I'm listening to the New York Dolls at full blast on a crappy PC speaker. I'm so single I'm abandoning my rubber bands. I'm so single I have my shiva deity parked at my left wrist. I'm so single a dusty printer is staring me down. I'm so single I might go buy a bitch on a rope soap set for one and a small bottle of marijuana-infused shampoo. It's time to go visit my cool, always-humorous and humor-finding D.J. and rockstar guitar and bassist brother Jerry, who lives in Silver Lake, L.A. and drives a smooth Mercedes. He'll ferret me around town to clubs and fun things and music scenes and help me get my mojo back, and he'll laugh at the wildest stories I tell, he's only 15 months younger than me and we always were close as kids.

I'm so single I don't remember how to hang shower curtains, and so single I think the overhead fluourescent lighting in her vintage 1960 Palm Desert Country Club micro-apartment is cool. I'm so single I'm weeping gratefully that she is only 2 miles down the road. I'm on the other end of golf from her. Wildly swinging at a solo game I don't know how to play and have long resisted learning, all stubborn ten tennis years I've spent here (I used to be a tournament player as a teen/young adult, so that stuff is easy for me,) a tiny white ball bending in an arc towards the sun, and then out of site, the idea of finding the hole, a blackhearted joke of the lonely desert soul, nevermind the basket of yellow-green tennis balls parked in the garage, waiting to be hit into precise square courts, that's one game I know how to win. As if it mattered, my most-valuable-varsity-tennis-player trophy sitting on a shelf. Long before Tarah was born. We're not in high school anymore. Neither is she. Singlehood, a lightweight paperback book waiting to be put into script.


Tarah wearing the Slinky t-shirt + Mom, Catalina Island camping trip....Tarah high school graduation, 17, in 2006

My daughter, and most memorable recent lovers, are blue eyed with blonde hair. Except for Tarah's dad, black & brown and tall, stunningly handsome guy of Sioux Indian ancestry, former Army Ranger. A picture of him at 23 melts my eyes into summer ice cream, shirt off, red beret at perfect asshole tilt, and cold-blooded stare. I've gotta find those pictures he self-took of us in the desert back in the day, both of us holding AK 47's and bullet belts draped around my chest and waist, and the ubiqitous 12-pack of beer perched on a rock behind us...he runs a good sweatlodge and has good tattoos, he lives in Denver. I have been a superb mom. Even today, on moving day. I thought she'd take more furniture from her room but she doesn't want the dresser or bed. She did come back to do a load of towels and raid the cupboard: chicken soup, a box of couscous (I raised her eating exceptionally well) and other things I'll never realize are missing, I'm sure.

At least (or most) I have my writing career, they all say. Shit, I was never one of those late 80's, big-haired, reebok-wearing, Jane Fonda aerobic wannabes (though I did once do a gym workout to songs by the Pet Shop Boys with my friend Suzy, who had just had a breast enlargement.) No malls for us, just river rafting, camping, hiking, trips to Hawaii and Ireland, New York and the east coast.....and all kinds of museums and poetry readings, of course. She did the coolest kid things, like posh private schools and trips to Disneyland in limos with rich girflriends, ASB and proms, she was the only grandkid on both sides for years and all the expensive presents under the Xmas tree from childless aunts and uncles were for her, she even had her own pony in the backyard at one time! How might one such as I feel such angst, so independent I hiked remote desert peaks while 6 months pregnant, by myself, stayed on the mountain bike till my 8th month, and ventured to carry Tarah to the top of Mt. San Jacinto in a kiddy backpack at 15 months? "When she is out of high school, I get to do what I want!!!!"

To paraphrase my writer-friend Mary Sojourner, writing of one of her own perilous life passages, it's a bit like traversing one of the too-tight lava tubes that lace the underground around Flagstaff, Arizona, where we both lived in the mid 1990's (she helped me with my master's thesis of poetry, "Negotiating With Testosterone), walls sharp and unyielding but no other way through, and blacker than dark. Gloves, gloves, I need gloves. And new brake pads. Oh, forgot, my friend Mike just did the front brakes on the Toyota the other night, just in time. Now what, now what.


Tarah and some of the hands that fed, or ate....

Ruth's KCET Arts Block Poetry Interview

For anyone interested in hearing my poetry interview and reading on KCET Arts Block live.....

http://kcet.org/explore-ca/on-demand/podcasts/archive-page2.php

Scroll down on the KCET Arts Block column on the above link and you'll see the link to my interview.

In the interview, I expound somewhat diametrically on poetry, the desert, and...you guessed it, desert poetry, along with some of my own poetry.

Thanks to Ching-In Chen, my terrific and kindly interviewer (and stellar poet!) and my poetic consort and role model Juan Felipe Herrera, whose interview is coupled with mine on the link.

Lykken Trail

I read a newspaper headline while I was at Del Taco in Palm Desert, where there are no drive throughs, and I ordered two hard shell bean tacos and a green burrito and read the story of how two hikers' bodies were found on the Lykken Trail just above Palm Springs, they both went out mid-afternoon last Saturday when it was about 115 degrees and super humid, it happens every year. Why don't the trailheads out here have severe heat warnings? You can't even fly an airplane when it's this hot. Extreme heat can, and does, ground flights here. There's a big disconnect between landing here in a new car with hella A/C, and stepping out....

Having been hospitalized several times for dehydration in recent years myself, and that with drinking mega-water and gatorade and doing all the right things (stay in shade, wear heat and sunscreen) and STILL getting way messed up, well, yeah, it's hotter than hell, and that's a concrete statement emblazoned in melting roads. Us and Death Valley sharing the nation's top temps last weekend. Even in the middle of the night. There is zero shade on these desert hiking trails. Barely even a bush. Shade is THE essential desert survival tool, that, and water. Lots of it, carry at least a gallon, not in plastic because the heat leaches poisons out, maybe a virgin gas can, in the car wherever you drive. More water, more water in a place with virtually none than most people can imagine drinking in their entire lives.

The weirdest thing is you can look right down onto Palm Springs, a thumbprint away, just below all those trails looping across the mountain flanks, so this adds to the sense of very false security. But the town is its own artifice, its own temporary erection on the waves of heat on its sand-scraped surface, so buying into any of it as real is a fallacy. A distortion of light on sand. Bending the mind. That's why people come here to drink and play, do things they would never dream of doing anywhere else - you've heard of what happens in Vegas stays in Vegas?

To begin to attempt an articulation of the dishonesty of this place: how about the covered naked bridge (how oxymoronic can it get?) above Indian Canyon Blvd, arching from one nude hot springs resort to another.....and, the fact that my daughter went to school with a young man whose parents own the resort....I've long gone to nudist-flying Deep Creek Hot Springs, on the naked high desert backside of the San Bernardino Mountains, so it was no shock to either of us. Over the top is an understatement for this place. Anyway, it's a lot better, but less interesting for sure, than an all-expenses-paid three day trip to the small town of Muscoy, wedged between Rialto-at the edge of Frisbee Park - and the murder-capital-of-the-U.S. west side of San Bernardino. I heard that one of my former poetry professors from CSUSB was murdered with a baseball bat in downtown Muscoy some years ago.

Maybe people are trying too hard. To get the the top of Mt. San Jacinto and back down in a day, and various folks have died attempting that one in both summer (120) and winter (ice), Cactus to Clouds is not recommended for the weak. A friend of mine, Jack, who is highly educated, from Vermont, and looks just like a young Richard Burton, has invited me to go, but, uh, well, maybe the Bump n'Grind, another hike down here, is more my style now, only 4 miles not twenty, and a mere 1,000 foot elevation gain and drop, not 10,000. Growing up in the remote desert, like I did, the only thing to do is drive way on dirt powerline roads and hike in the desert during the nicer months of the year; almost-frozen beer is for summer.

Well, what happens in Palm Springs doesn't even happen in Vegas. And those hikers may looked down and thought they were hallucinating, before they succumbed to the psychotic horrors of quick heatstroke and death, which probably set in within a few hours or less from when they handily started their hikes, the nursing home where my stalker's father died a few years ago in a blizzard of 120 + degree days, it's on Ramon Road near Kirk Douglas Drive and the waterfall at the Palm Springs Airport. Superglide.

Redlands Boulevard