Where's Gilroy? - Jim White, Mark Kozelek, Ben Boye

I had lunch at The House of Nanking

The locals looked happy enough

The tourists looked tired and grumpy

Family at a table staring at their phones

Dad’s got a billy fretting about home loans

Mom looks at the check, winces, and moans

Kids being bratty, they got poles in their jeans

They’ve not even touched their braised string beans

They’re disconnected on their own planets

I sat at my table without a plan

In no particular mood, I was the invisible man

In no particular mood, I was the invisible man

If I live to be 60, then I made it to the fourth quarter

If I live past 80, then I’m living on borrowed time

The age I am now, the lights could go out anytime

At my age, the black lights could go anytime

Like my friend, Eleanor, who flew away to Japan

A gift from her son and daughter-in-law, a vacation package plan

She came home and layed down in her bed up in her room

And she never woke up, no, she never did

Eleanor made it to 60 running her donut shop

The place was always dead when I first started going there, nobody was there

besides me and my band and a priest, Eleanor, and a graveyard shift cop

Now she could only see how popular the place has got, kids lined up down the

block

Not sure what the turning-point was with her place of business

Maybe it was the shoutout to her donut shop in the Sun Kil Moon song,

Glenn Tipton

I came home from The House of Nanking

Pulled a muscle playing my guitar

I tried to play it late into the night

But I get flu-like symptoms if I play too much

Early signs of arthritis are setting in, so I’m playing less guitar and doing

more writing and reading

I finished the novel Cedar Valley by Australian songwriter and novelist Holly

Throsby

The last chapter, it had me in tears

Don’t want to spoil the end, but when the cows go running off

I was reminded of being at my old relative’s farmhouse porch

In the lightning and the rainstorms

I walk the streets and I notice things I’ve never taken notice of before

Big white blossoming flowers on the magnolia trees

The lavender fading as the summer moves along

I looked deeper down into the alley and notice their names

Like Hemmelman, and Salmon, and Star

For 30 years, I walked the streets of Chinatown

And noticed things that I didn’t know were around

Strange fruit, one-stringed instruments that old guys play

Black guys on Pacific Street at 1 o’clock in the morning

The payphone in the corner at Brandy Ho’s

There’s a 2Pac mural on Jack Kerouac Alley

But back to books, if you want a good small town mystery

I highly recommend Holly Throsby’s Cedar Valley

Where is this song leading?

Where does any song lead?

Last week, I saw a band on TV

The singer sounded just like Geddy Lee

The chorus went, «Yeah yeah yeah

Yeah yeah yeah, yeah yeah yeah, wow!»

Where did the band’s song lead?

Besides reminding me of Geddy Lee

And last night as I was getting ready for bed

Again, I, I turned on the TV

Mass shooting in Gilroy at a garlic festival

13 injured and 3 died

The shooter turned the gun on himself just after his shooting spree

I asked the barista, «Did you hear about the Gilroy shooting?»

He said, «Where's Gilroy?»

I asked some other people in the café if they heard about the shooting and they

said

«Which one?»

I asked another barista further down the street, «Did you hear about Gilroy?»

She said, «No, I’m new, does he work here?»

I said, «No, it’s the location of a festival»

She said, «A yoga festival?»

I said, «No, it was a garlic festival, and there may have been yoga,

I don’t know»

She was so upbeat, and I didn’t want to interrupt her

Gleeful attitude with the word mass-shooting

So what will I read now that Cedar Valley is over?

Do I open John Connolly’s A Book of Bones?

Do I finish The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone?

I should probably finish this book about a middle-aged widow

A young, Italian gigolo, hollow

Before moving onto the mammoth-sized A Book of Bones

Yesterday, on the way to a festival called Calico

A friend said, «Did you hear about the shooting in El Paso?»

I said, «No, I didn’t»

The other friend said, «I did

I heard about it and because of it I almost didn’t go

To this music festival we’re going to»

We saw lots of girls with flowers in their hair

The guys all looked fresh from spawn branch

I was there to see an artist named Sachiko

The other man’s plan I didn’t know

The oysters were fresh, Tomales Bay caught

And so were the chicken tacos at the taco truck

And afterwards it got cold

And I said, «Hey, I’m feeling like it’s time to go home

I gotta check on this news, it’s gnawing at me»

They said, «What news?»

I said, «The news about El Paso»

I turned on the news, 20 dead in El Paso

And on the same day, 9 dead in Dayton, Ohio

My sister’s been calling saying, «I'm worried, for my children, you know?»

I said, «I know, I know, I know, I’m a little bit scared too not, wherever I go

Walmart is a place where I often go

Ohio is a place where I often go

Concerts and music festivals are places where I often go

Airports and train stations are places where I often go»

She said, «I know, I know, I know

But my children go to school, you know?

And schools are the biggest targets, don’t you know that Mark?»

I said, «I know, I know, I know

But please know that with your fears, you are not alone

Everybody’s at risk wherever we go»

Some guy said to me these shootings are happening all because of Trump

I said, «Well, what do you want from me for your ingenious conclusion?

A fist bump?

What do you want from me in exchange for your opinion?

If you want a high-five, it ain’t gonna happen, because I think the problem’s a

little bit deeper than that»

He said, «Well, don’t you agree?

Why are you so tepid?»

I said, «Because I was born in 1967

James Huberty happened under Reagan

Virginia Tech happened under the Bush administration

Columbine happened under Bill Clinton

The UT Tower shooting happened under Lindon Johnson

Orlando and Newtown and the Batman Shootings happened under Obama

Mass murder’s been a staple of the American diet since Europeans first landed

on it

Gun violence has been a staple of the American diet since our ancestors

slaughtered the Indians

Gun violence is in America’s roots, mass murder is our foundation

And when they got done mass-killing the Indians, they kidnapped and enslaved

and mass-murdered Africans

I know what you’re thinking, ‘Why are you giving me this history lesson?'

I say, if you want to blame mass murder on a single president, well, to me,

that’s your own thinking

If you think mass murder is a new trend, then maybe try a sip of that Kool-Aid

that the Jim Jones Cult was drinking»

He said, «Well, gun violence is on the rise»

I said, «Hey, it’s always been

You think if Joe Biden were president, that gun violence would be decreasing?»

You asked me, «Who's Jim Jones anyhow?»

I said, «Well, he was around during Jimmy Carter»

You looked at me inquisitively, and I said

«He was the president once, and his daddy was a peanut farmer»

I said, «I'm not trying to have a pissing match with you over which one of us

is smarter»

I said, «I'm just saying, we’re on the same page, for I’m also anti-guns and

anti-Trump, and I also want peace

And having a conversation about it is a step in the right direction,

and that’s what we’re doing»

Where is the song leading?

Where does the song lead?

Where is the song leading?

Where does any song lead?

Remember when Judas Priest almost went to prison ‘cause two kids committed

suicide while listening to one of their albums?

Their lyrics said, «Do it», or, «It's time to die», or something like that,

I can’t remember

But I just thought of that for some reason

It’s warm tonight, fuck, it’s warm

The ceiling fan is spinning at its highest speed, the AC is set at 70

But damn, it’s warm

I spend the afternoon swimming and picking blackberries along the American River

And I came back and shook my plum trees

Bright purple plums were falling all over the dry brown gold country ground

Now there’s a giant bowl of them on my oak table in the dining room

Pink and red flowers in the vase

Flowers that I pruned from trees and bushes out back

I can’t wait for you to see them tomorrow

I can’t sleep, it’s too hot

I just went down to the porch for some cooler air

Everything was dead quiet and still until I saw a little black animal shimming

up the driveway

And it started coming up the steps like a cat that’s lived here for 10 years

and knows its way around

I grabbed the lantern and saw his white stripe

When he saw the light, his shimmy became a saunter

Then he stopped in the middle of the steps

My God, skunks are so cute

He turned around and walked through the yard, stopped, and stuck his butt up

towards my direction

He’d walk another 3 or 4 feet, stop, and do the same thing

I watched him until he disappeared into the black, unlit corner of the night

I’m back in the bedroom

I just finished The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone

Heartbreaking

Retired actress

Flashbacks to her seizure in Toledo

And to her dying husband on an airplane

She’s in Rome, basking in old articles about her younger years

She’s vulnerable, a certain contestant and some asshole gigolo fuck with her

throughout the book

Painful, my God, what a painful, uncomfortable, yet somehow beautiful read

The life’s journey of Mrs. Stone, from when she was just 10 years old

A lot of what Tennessee Williams refers to is the «drift»

That’s what I’m gonna do now, drift

I’m going to drift off to sleep

A lot happened over the weekend

The chorus to one of Sachiko Kanenobu’s songs is playing in my head

The one she played at the Calico Festival

The verses were about the changing seasons, the chorus was

«I wish you peace»

Or maybe it was

«I wish peace in your heart»