DANN’S ART





This picture by Mr. Irish shows you exactly the sort of wry humor that he is capable of. To see some more of his work, go to Honeychunks. I've got hanging in my own art hallway, one of Dann's works myself.










DEAR EDITOR

The following is a letter I sent off to Newsweek magazine which was generated by an extended piece they did on Facebook:

“One of the saddest most incomprehensible claims to arise out of your Facebook article was the statement by one of your respondents that he has 1,042 “closest friends.” How does anyone make time to personally get to know a thousand people on the one on one basis required for real friendship? I’m a 69 year old blogger myself, and I’ve poked around in some of these social networking sites. I’m astounded by the long lists of friends that participants claim to have. Many bloggers are obviously performing to attract attention rather than to develop close personal ties. A lot of what appears on Facebook and elsewhere seems to be the, "hey look at me I need attention" sort of relationship that one finds hollow and unrewarding in real life.

“I think one’s close friends are people who are physically close, people who one actually talks to face to face or has known personally for extended times in the past. I admit to emailing and phoning old friends who are now physically distant, who I haven’t seen in many years, but our friendships are still based on close past personal experiences, and we try from time to time to actually get together. Somewhere in the past, I came across the statement by a social commentator that one is lucky if he can claim one or two really true friendships in his whole life. I think I can count, perhaps, five close friends myself, maybe a few more. People I really trust with the facts rather than my performance piece, and the older I get, the less range my performances have.

“I’m honestly puzzled by this internet friendship phenomena. I wish someone would explain to me the huge psychological shift by which someone can imagine he or she has thousands of personal friends. Making friends face to face, as I know it, is such a daunting risky enterprise. Is the fact that website friendships don’t have to risk personal encounters that allows people to imagine they have more friends than they do? Is it social naiveté on their part or have I missed something along the way? Has the definition of “close friend” radically changed?”

PROPHETIC CASSADY

Because I happen to be reading, as I told you, On The Road for the many such time, I came across this passage. Cassady has showed up from California at Kerouac’s brother’s house in Virginia at Christmas 1948. They are involved in moving furniture and Jack’s mom from Virginia to New York. Kerouac says as they bop into New York, “He [Cassady] said we were a band of Arabs coming in to blow up New York.”

ON THE ROAD ROAD

Yep—I’m not making regular entries and, if you’ve been reading this, you know why.

As most of you know, literate enough to be reading a blog and not listening to some music on it or just wanting to see movin’ pitchurs [sic], this month we been celebrating the 50th year since Jack K’s great book, On The Road, was published in 1957. So I’ve commenced givin’ it my fifth or sixth read in my life, counting in that first read I give it back in my 20s, in the sixties sometime ago. This passage is near the beginning of Jack’s first trip West and it rings two bells with me. The photo below is out of Newsweek.

First, he’s stopped in Des Moines, Iowa to spend a night in a cheap hotel down by the rail yards. Well—I was a child in Des Moines when the Second World War ended. My stepmom, dad and I was living in a motel by a highway and I was out on the grass in front, playing, when all the car horns on the highway started to honking, and I ran in to ask my stepmom what was going on, and she was the one to tell me that the war was over. I must’ve been about eight years old I guess.

But more interesting to me is Jack’s state of mind in the following passage. I’ve experienced the same feeling more than once, and I know I’ve got friends that have also. And some who still do too. Most recently for me was just in the past few months. In Jack’s case, it’s cause he’s halfway between psychic places in himself. For me, the same. I’m still adjusting to this move from Spokane to Vancouver after 31 years in Spokane. And just two weeks ago, I had this feeling that I no longer knew who I was. Who am I here in Vancouver, all my friends back in Spokane, what’s left of family in Dayton, Ohio or down in Florida? Me being the oldest still alive in my family, the oldest of all the cousins, me next to step off the diving board into permanent unconsciousness. Also I’ve given up AA and Codependents Anonymous because my spiritual program just isn’t spiritual enough to fit anymore. So for the briefest of moments, I shared Jack’s feeling in the following paragraph. When I was adrift, I often didn’t know what I was feeling when I felt this stuff. This time, I wasn’t so shook up, and I realized that I had to get busy getting myself involved back into my life. So I’ve started writing a novel. That’s familiar. And working on poetry, also familiar. Then I’ve gone and joined the Portland area Humanists so I got a place to go have lunch with people I feel comfortable around on Sundays, and, soon, I think I’ll become a volunteer with the Vancouver library system, also familiar, as I was a friend of the library back in Spokane.

Anyhow, here’s Jack’s take on that certain feeling.


“I woke up as the sun was reddening; and that was the one distinct time in my life, the strangest moment of all, when I didn't know who I was—I was far away from home, haunted, and tired with travel, in a cheap hotel room I'd never seen, hearing the hiss of steam outside, and the creak of the old wood of the hotel, and footsteps upstairs, and all the sad sounds, and I looked at the cracked high ceiling and really didn't know who I was for about fifteen strange seconds. I wasn't scared; I was just somebody else, some stranger, and my whole life was a haunted life, the life of a ghost. I was half¬way across America, at the dividing line between the East of my youth and the West of my future, and maybe that's why¬ it happened right there and then, that strange red afternoon.” —Jack K.

PS: When you realize how often Jack went back and forth, he was always between one future and another, East or West, during his lifetime. He died in the same city my birth mother died in, St. Petersburg, Florida, of alcoholism. Like so many of my favorite authors.

OKAY. I GOT LITTLE TO SAY.


This is like, well, feeling orphaned. In this same issue of Newsweek is the celebration of the 50th anniversary since Jack Kerouac's On The Road was published. Can you believe it? Funny thing is that I know most modern young people could only sigh that this old man was once inspired, depressed, challenged . . . by these beings from a diminishing pantheon of artist/gods.

Moreso than by any church affiliation or incarnation of gods in Jesus form, these men asked me to think, to ponder my situation in this life, my home in the universe. My relationship with them was fraught with pain and change. They kicked me down the steps, and I had to, later, pick myself up and dust myself off. They gave me no hypothetical superbeing to do the job for me. They left me on my own, thank goodness.