Arizona Day 6

First thing in the morning, we got in the truck to search Kingman’s yard and estate sales for shelving to organize the drunk wife’s wall-high cardboard box pile. 

We failed.

Kingman estate sale 

Instead, my mother found leather and silver gauntlets for motorcycle riding, and I paid a dollar for a mini growler with the Kingman Kwik Stop logo on it. My aunt had us stop at the Kwik Stop to fill it with one of the 300 beers on tap while we cashed in our lotto tickets for more tickets. 

“I think I am losing the battle against vice,” I said, looking at my loot. My mother took this as her opportunity to try to get me to buy a $400 gun at the swap meet. I absolutely do not need a $400 painting prop I can shoot myself with, but we hung around for a bit in the shade, drinking Gatorade and chatting with the gun guys about their homemade bullets. 

“Made all of those myself. I make silver ones, too. Good for werewolves, vampires, and zombies.”

“Zombies? Would silver make a difference to a zombie? Seems like a shame to use silver when a crowbar would do the job.”

“I’m not gonna ask. Can’t hurt.”

All the vices 

Good thing this was empty, because I would have had three holes in me just by the time she was done messing with it 

Shiny things 

Went to dinner with the Mormon cousins in their house on the nice side of the tracks, where the homes have yards of designer gravel instead of dirt. We ate tacos, swapped stories, I played with the 5 and 2 year olds, and folks were on the point of getting into the pool when Drunk Wife started sobering up and whining to go home. My mother got pissed off, words were exchanged, and I spent the rest of the evening doing peacekeeping in a chair next to the pool while she stewed in the water like an angry wonton. 

Yep, ready to go home.

Arizona Day 5

Some asshole spilled fish juice in the rental car, and spent the day trying to sniff out the stinky spot and clean it instead of taking nice pictures.

Went to Walmart and found a pamphlet that said “TRUST ME!” next to the toilet. Not sure which cult they wanted me to join, because I at least have enough sense not to pick up literature out of public toilets, but I love that somebody thought a sneaky crooked finger would be a good way to entice people to their doomsday ideology.

Not today, Walmart 

Spent some time painting the toothless decapitated deer that watched us eat dinner at the Hualapai lodge.

4th of July fireworks are everywhere, and it looks like sparklers are not illegal in the Wild West. I thought about stuffing a few packs of $2 sparklers into the suitcase for the kids, then decided that $2 was a good price to pay to not go to jail for smuggling fireworks. 

Today: cashing in my scratch ticket for what will surely be the winning card this time.

Temptation and vice everywhere over here.

Arizona day 4

Grandpa needed a day of down time, so we got out of their hair. Hit the wagon wheel trail for breakfast burritos and a hike before the sun was hot enough to ignite our hats.

Help

Walked around downtown at lunch, looking around in the little shops and spending an embarrassing amount of money on yarn.

The Rickety Cricket is a local brewery that used the wood from great-grandma’s demolished barn to build the second floor. We ordered a flight of ales and porters, and I tried a prickly pear beer that was very delicious.

All that dark wood is from the family barn. It lives!

“You have to go see Gran in the window,” everyone told us. This is word salad. Gran is dead. I wondered if they had put a window in her coffin. “No, it’s at the old hotel. There’s a mannequin operating a switchboard, and that was her job, so they named it after her.” Well, okay.

The old hotel is next to the train tracks. My uncle kept the truck running while I ran up and took a couple quick pictures. Out of nowhere, a leathery-faced man with stiff legs came lurching toward me, and my uncle jumped out to intercept him while I ran back to the truck. Quest ACHIEVED.

Uncle in reflection, rounding the truck to save me from being murdered by a walking beef stick

I’m going to be thinking about Gran trapped as a mannequin in an abandoned hotel for the rest of my life

Uncle assembled the barbecue and I made the mistake of listening to my mom when she suggested we might grill some fish. Fish does not grow in the desert, I thought, but I like making people happy through cooking, so I bought the freshest piece of salmon at the mega grocery, brought it back to marinate, and immediately filled the camper with the stench of rank fishy fish. The smell stained my hands. And my pants. And the fridge. Then I went and dropped it into the fire anyway. Disagreeable desert salmon. Good thing there were hamburgers.

Still messing up the sketchbook.

Arizona day 3

Grandpa’s drunk wife is having a hard time figuring out if she should feel appreciative that we’re all here setting up in-home hospice care and meal delivery, or feel insulted that we don’t think she can care for grandpa because she’s a nonfunctional alcoholic. 

The answer is: yes.

(She’s the daughter of his dead best friend, they teamed up after my grandma and her dad died, about 30 years ago. We care about her in an annoyed way.)

This time we had a family of quail along with the rabbit outside the camper. A puma went by, but she strolled into the beige brush with her beige fur before I could flatten myself to the window with my phone.

Spot the quail and the cottontail

Won $3 on a $3 scratch lotto ticket. Feeling pretty damn smug about that.

In the afternoon, I took my mom thrift shopping, which in Kingman means picking a path through piles of paint cans and confederate flags (“We have WWII German flags! See owner!”) and peering into dusty glass cases full of marbles and switchblades. Mom wouldn’t let me get a suitcase full of knives and gun-shaped lighters, because she doesn’t know how to shop for kid souvenirs, I guess.

The furniture goes outside, where it is safe from water damage

I am used to being comfortably invisible, as a middle-aged middle-sized haole, but suddenly there are big men with big beards who are looking at me like a pork chop. Sorry, boys, I am a piece of old salt fish in a pork chop suit. Run for it.

Arizona day 2

Been trying to figure out how to steal my grandpa’s dog. His name is “Dog”. He will probably fit under my shirt through airport security.

 

Our job today was to get grandpa telling stories. Because I have no shame about snooping through everything with my librarian raccoon hands, I got into the junk piles under the tables and found all the old photo albums to go through with him.

Hey, it’s me

My mom 

Grandma and grandpa making fun of very serious artists 

Great grandpa Casey, who never grew old and died smoking hot

Grandpa covering for me by making the same noise for the camera  

The story he told was about the kid in the navy who stood ahead of him alphabetically every time they had to form a line. On the day of their first weekly physical, they lined up bare ass naked in rows while nurses roamed up and down the lines between them. The first needle was the blood draw with the big slurping needle, and the second was the little measles prick. Everybody got through the blood draw okay, but when they went down the rows with the vaccinations, Anderson got his prick on the arm and suddenly went down like a big naked log, WHAM, and just laid there taking up half the floor. Barez turned around slowly with his eyes as round as saucers, “I don’t want what he got!” Every Thursday night, before Friday’s weekly physical and needle jab, that kid tried to get everyone to hop the fence and run away with him, and the rest of them would tell him it would be alright - sure, they were going to use the square needles, but it would only hurt for an hour or two.

Haven’t ruined the sketchbook yet.

Arizona day 1

The view from the camper this morning. 

Find the cottontail rabbit.

Tiny plane took a hard landing on a short runway in Las Vegas. The pilot let out a long exhalation on the overhead and everyone laughed. There was a big animated sign visible from the strip that said “HYDRATION!” Fancy.

Expected to walk out into a blast of heat and melt, but it felt like home. Smelled like home. Picked up a car and drove across Nevada, the only car on an endless road in an hours-long sunset while my mother chatted about the bird life and took pictures out the window, and I felt so happy.

My uncle is a long-haul trucker and drove out from Indiana to meet us at grandpa’s house with his recreational camper. We stayed up late and slept in bunks, boiled water for coffee on the gas stove, and watched the buzzards worry the cottontail rabbits from the window seat. 

Reconsidering my position on dirt farming. Sorry, kids.

I'll be in the back room, call me when it's over

The rescued murder chicks were finally big enough to re-home, and the very next morning I heard a noise that made me throw my oatmeal bowl aside and run out onto the porch. One of the girls walked by with five freshly baked chicks. She settled into the old coop with the babies and won’t budge. I need a bigger farm.

We don’t even have a rooster

Bought a new sketchbook to travel with. Every time you hold a new sketchbook or journal, you think, This is the one. This will be the book my descendants find in an attic trunk a hundred years after my death; a meaningful documentation of a life, without eraser gouges and torn out pages and phrases like "dick owl" scribbled in the margins without context.

I'm scared to write in it. I did glue a badge that says "Anti-Anti-Braffet-Alliance-Alliance" inside the cover, though.

After a week of super stupid confrontations with people who really want to spend their free time fighting with librarians about wearing a mask for 10 minutes, a trip to the scorching desert is looking like a nice relaxing vacation. “It’s called HIPAA! I challenge you to look it up!” Lady, I have a master’s degree in looking shit up, and HIPAA doesn’t mean a fucking thing to mask policy enforcement. Want me to go grab a stack of good books for your kids and bring them out to your car? “No, I want my country back! The managers at Walmart understand, once I educate them!” Ffs. Take the free mask and go find a book about better hobbies you could have.

I’m out of here.

Where Is My Mind

My grandfather is dying, and the family has been called together to see him while there is still time (weeks, but not months). We lived with my grandparents until I was 8, while my mother went to university. He never tried to be my father, but he was the man I had as a role model, which is probably where I learned to accept a level of misuse in exchange for stability and homemade bread.

I spent hours comparing flight dates and times and prices, until the numbers on the screen stopped meaning anything. Closed it up and drove to work, chewing on everything and listening to music. Wondered if I was developing premature dementia. Lately I’ve been forgetting stuff and having momentary confusion about minor things.

Ffs, you're not getting senile. You've had a very compressed year of adult bullshit, and now your grandpa is dying and you're conflicted because you love an old man who punched your mother in front of you when you were a kid. That is stress, not dementia.

Just then, Pixies started playing.

 

haha synchronicity oh shit I’m dissociating because my grandpa is dying

So I did the damn thing and got the trip booked. A week from Monday, I'm hopping a plane and taking my mother to meet her sisters and say goodbye to her dad; a funny, smart, artistic, banjo-playing professor who was also kind of a bad father. I probably won't tell him I'm glad my mom kicked him flat that last time.

For over a century, our ancestors lived in the verdant hills of the Hudson Valley. After leaving a trail of arrest records for robbery and a couple of stabbings, the family decided to make their way out West to seek their fortunes as dirt farmers in the Mojave Desert (and spawning the "Anti-Braffet Alliance" in Utah along the way - see page 43). The cemetery in Kingman is full of our bones. Some of them planted by our own relatives, because we were also the grave diggers. And maybe the murderers. Our family still insists the boys were shooting rattlesnakes when cousin Jack got a bullet through the heart by "accident" back in the 70s. Grandpa got as far as Guam, Yap, and Newfoundland before finally getting rounded up and carted back to the scorched homeland in his old age.

It'll be about 115 degrees when we get there. I am not worried about flying into wildfire, because there is nothing living to burn. Except the residents. 

 

I love Arizona deeply, and our years on Black Mesa were among our best. Kingman itself may be a blast furnace filled with tumbleweeds and scoundrels, but I’m looking forward to bringing my living bones back for a visit. And if I die of heatstroke or the Anti-Braffet Alliance takes me out while I’m there, someone please come dig me up and stuff me in a duffel bag back to Hawaii, because fuck that place.

You are not supposed to actually throw the pottery

You would think, with a shelf full of drying mugs, that I would be getting the hang of this thing. 

You would be wrong. 

Half the time I can’t center the clay, it just bangs my arms around until I muster all my strength to wrestle it still, and then it torques and smears everywhere. 

Who is throwing who here, wheel?

When it does decide to center, the cups are whatever shape they want to be, I don’t have any control over it. Flat things are probably easy, I thought. I will make a plate.

I did not make a plate. I made a frisbee. It was not flat, but it flew anyway. 

Cleaned up my mess and painted the cat, racing the setting sun in 45 minutes because I was too lazy to go find a lamp. I’m working out all the problems before ruining the official contest panel.

 

 Problem 1: background needs to be dark enough to contrast the light on the nose. 

Problem 2: paint with A LAMP.

I wish I had one of those thin slinky dogs with a face like a horse that went through a playdoh extruder. Or a really handsome goat.

Better health through cake and cat modeling

The arm strengthening that comes with pottery inspired me to put on my stretchy pants and do some workout videos, and now I'm playing phone tag with the cardiologist again. 

 

Doubled up the vitamins and iron supplements I’ve been throwing back with my coffee. Made a banana pudding cake for Sunday dinner, reasoning that a protective shell of cholesterol might fortify those arterial valves. Internal armament through saturated fats, a thesis.

The annual Trekell pet portrait contest is on again, and this year Zenny wanted a shot at losing it along with me, so we ordered two panels and have started chasing the cats around to get a good pose. It is going as well as last year.

caterpillar eyes 

glamour shot setup

I guess I could paint some chickens. You know who wins these things? Dogs. Paintings of dogs, not dog painters - although a dog who could paint would probably sweep the awards, too. The only dog I know is the chick-snaffler across the street, and if I start hiding in the bushes with a telescopic lens trying to get pictures of their dog, the neighbors will think I’m doing a murder investigation and call the chicken police on me.

Cats it is.