Attention & Other Stories

It's all about attention: we all want it, we all need it, so how we gonna get it?

There is a finite amount and social media is sucking up most of it. Thousands of engineers are working on ways to get more. Hundreds of millions of photos and videos come into Facebook data centers every day.

With selfies taking priority problems like climate change aren't getting enough attention and smart phones disrupt the pleasure of reading a really good book.

Sometimes I want to walk into a coffeeshop and announce “People! Look around! Get off your phones! Talk to me! Listen to my stories.” 

It's an epidemic of loneliness. If you don't have good friends, lovers, or family then latching on to the electronic nipple is a hollow palliative, a solution which gets you by

like eating greasy cans of Rosarita refried beans and Bien Padre cardboard tortillas everyday.

If you have few or no visitors, phone calls, emails, or “likes” then the emptiness endemic to modern life is crushing.

Too much attention can also be a problem if you are stuck in a bad situation with vampires: delinquent kids, annoying spouses, and other unfortunate creatures.

So get out there to the social bonfire and take a risk, bust a move, and don't be afraid to make a fool of yourself. Game?

It's all about attention.

* * *

Life in the Weird Lane

A week ago this crazy lady invites me out to her family's 500 acre ranch in Ettersburg for dinner. I have a big NBA playoff game on but welcome the chance to get away from the TV and out of the house. When I arrive with the wine she has another guy there, a young dude from LA she just picked up on the streets of Garberville to build her a chicken coop. He's a good-looking, well-read fella, already an ex-speed freak at twenty but seems like a nice guy.

She has us make dinner while she drinks wine on the couch then puts her legs across my lap so I can massage them. After dinner the boy is dumbed down to the back bedroom and I go to bed with the lady who is married with three kids. We had an exciting one night stand the year before and I haven't seen her since I visited her at Singing Trees rehab where her family forced her to go. I only hear from her when she is upset or in crisis so I figure she is doing well after a year with no contact. 

We're in bed, I produce the condom she requests, and I can't feel a thing-- if you ask me did I get laid I don't know! I maniacally giggle and explain that I just don't use condoms much as I'm used to steady girlfriends where that's not necessary.

We give it up and I try to go to sleep. She's sleeping in the middle of the narrow bed and I'm off to the edge wondering if I'm going to fall off. Her little dog is yapping up at my feet trying to get into the bed, then barking at my head seeking entry that way. My ear is plugged with wax and the bed is lumpy and uncomfortable--it might be the worst night of my life. 

I look at my watch: 1:00a, then 1:20a, and think I would really rather just be home alone in my comfortable bed. What to do? Wake her up and ask her to give me some space? I feel her stirring and whine at her to please move over: 2:30a, 3:00a...

I wake up and its 5a--I made it! In the middle of the night I had considered getting up and driving home but that hour drive through the mountains after half a bottle of wine seemed worse. 

We get up and I walk the grounds through beautiful misty meadows, one of the most amazing places I've ever been--a deer let me get within twenty-five feet of her. 

Back at the house she's made coffee and though I had planned on getting right out of there we sit and talk and I ask her about her family which has had the place for five generations. I wonder if there were any scandals and she tells me her granny was committed a few times and her father was really her aunt's child but was given to her grandmother who couldn't have kids. The original house burned down when someone left a smoldering cigarette butt in the couch after a party a few decades back.

I drive out of there and get home in time for the next basketball game. That evening there is a knock on the door and she tells me the rest of the story: Her father arrives unannounced to the ranch and catches her naked in bed with the twenty year old. (She's thirty-seven.) 

They leave in a hurry driving to her place in Eureka to feed the ducks, chickens, and rabbits, and so Jamie can take a shower. When they stop in the driveway her husband, who wasn't due back till the next day, pulls up behind them. Her father had called the husband telling him what he found at the ranch. The husband threatens to kill the kid but they make it out of there to her mother's house to take that shower.

"Did your father arrive pre- or post-consummation?” I ask.

"Post," she says. "You really need to learn how to use a condom--we did."

I set her up in the guest cabin to crash and ask, "Do you have enough blankets?"

"Can we cuddle together?" she says.

"No!” I say. “That was the worst night of my life--I want my space!"

"Well I might go cuddle with this guy in Ferndale who I'm going to get together with if I leave my husband," she says.

She leaves a few minutes later and in the morning I find chewed bones on my chairs and couch even though she knows I don't like dogs inside.

She calls a couple days later. "You want to go to Napa?"

"Nooo!" I say.

* * *

Whale Gulch Memories

In 1973 I returned to Whitethorn and found a place to crash at the old school house where Little Black Bobby and another guy were staying. In the morning Bobby walked out into the living room naked with a big smile on his face and his morning wood proudly on display. 

Henry and Laurie, who I met camping at Nooning Creek the year before, had become Jesus freaks and invited me to dinner at Living Waters, the new name for Gopherville. It was a revival meeting and an attractive young woman with long curly blond hair confessed her sins. She cried loudly with copious tears and her face turned red as we all watched. Praise the Lord!

It was the middle of winter, nothing was happening, and after a few days I was thinking of going back to Indiana when I saw the sign in the post office announcing a “Walk for Edible Plants” on the Yellow Dirt Road. We learned about and picked sorrel, nettles, Indian lettuce and other plants and when we got to the end of the road by the creek Tim Clark took a bottle of home-made salad dressing out of the weeds and we ate the day's harvest.

On the walk I met some people from the Big House back in Thompson Creek who invited me for dinner. I spent the night, moved in, and worked at their daycare center called “Jan's Experience” for room and board. 

Nicky had taken a lesbian lover named Tess (an imposing woman of about 29), bought a rustic house on 40 acres, and moved to the woods with her three teenagers. The girls Elaine and Marilyn were comely lasses while the boy Paul was an odd one who probably became a computer genius and made millions. Since there was already a Paul I needed a new hippie name and like most things I didn't give it much thought. “Let's see, I'm into food, umm, Zucchini? Okay Zukini!” 

The family was into est, a cult-like self-help group developed by Werner Erhard based in the Bay Area. (It's still around today known as the Landmark Forum.) The hippie neighbors eagerly brought their children to the nursery school and I and others watched over them. One day I was preparing bread dough, giving the kids a hands-on demo, when a little boy named Carl wandered off. No one noticed at first but later someone said, “Where's Carl?” It might have been his mother Freya coming to pick him up. 

The search was a circus as Gulchers converged on the Big House, neighbors came from nearby communities, the police arrived with cruisers and a helicopter, and even the Jesus freaks showed up to look for the three-year-old into the darkness. “Carl!” was the shout heard all night long. 

Elaine was a brooding, big-breasted girl of about fifteen who I had a crush on. We walked together down the road with flashlights talking for hours about est, life, and other topics as we sort of searched for the lost boy. (In est you were discouraged from saying “but” or “because” she told me because those words implied a rationalization, and to this day I hesitate a millisecond when I use them.) 

After Carl was found alive and well by Della the next morning not far off the Thompson Creek back trail, things settled down. One night we listened in our beds downstairs while Barry, who lived in the Plastic Palace just down from Lewis and Anna's house, went at it with Vickie, one of the nursery school teachers, up in the loft. An innocent wanna-be hippie kid from Indiana, I was learning how it was in California. (Decades later I liked to kid the grown children like Jessica and Ali that I had wiped their asses when they were three.)

Before I hitchhiked back across the country to Indiana to try to find a woman to live with me in a plastic house in Whale Gulch I bloodied the author Ray Raphael's lip in a game of one on one--he had a hoop on the skid road above his cabin on the Yellow Dirt Road. That began a decades-long sports friendship including golf, softball and even tennis a few times. For the softball teams Ray was the organizational brain and I was the brawn, the home run hitter, the enthusiastic youth who didn't know anything except growing weed and eating canned beans and cardboard tortillas.

(Many years later we were in a big tournament game and the other team was giving me shit as I pitched. They hung an oversized zucchini behind home plate and were chanting, “Nuke the Zuke!” When I got back to the bench I started razzing and screaming at the other team but Ray wanted me to settle down and relax so he had his wife hold my hand for awhile. It worked.)