Life imitates Art Who?

Reading "Dharma Bums" again, for the fourth time. The author often gets criticized, but this book still makes my top ten. The first time I read it was during my last summer in Tucson, at a time when I'd just finished college but was not yet willing to give up the lifestyle. It was a summer of record heat waves and broken air-conditioners, forcing my housemates and I to take the party outside and play acoustic music from the roof. (That was the first time I realized I had a voice good enough to sing with.) During the day I worked as a whistle-toting wrangler of poolside children, nights I waited tables. But mostly I read, getting to those things not included in the playlist for my creative writing degree, devouring the oeuvre of Kerouac, Henry Miller, Edward Abbey (then, a recently deceased Tucson native), and for some reason, Tom McGuane. "Dharma Bums" and its protagonist stayed with me.

In Santa Barbara, I took the Far Eastern-spiced Boho simplicity thing to the extreme of living in my 1973 VW bus. I was really busy taking anthro classes at the university, plus working two jobs in a fish restaurant and used book store. Figuring I spent most of my free time outside anyway, I thought I'd save on rent and help pay my way to Japan. What I didn't foresee was the rainiest winter in 50 years. Instead of passing my days on the trails or at the beach, I instead found myself holed up at the library and in various cafes around UCSB, living quite well on less than 10 bucks a day. After about four months of this, the engine of my bus caught fire an hour out of Phoenix. Back in SB, I did the couch tour awhile, eventually squatting in what had been my last house. It was here, on the steep hillsides of the Riviera that I refound the book. The utilities of the house had recently been cut off, allowing me to look at it as a cabin lifestyle--reading by candlelight, cold showers as waterfall misogi, hikes down to the city for food.

And as "Dharma Bums" led me to Japan, the book naturally followed. My beat up, page-sheared 40 cent paperback copy now haunts the shelves of the city library back in the 'Nog. Somewhere I acquired another. And so it was today, reading in the bath, thinking how cool it would be to live in Japhy's pseudo-Japanese shack in the hills of Berkeley, until I realized, Hey man, you're living in an actual Japanese house on a mountainside in Kyoto, 'in the hills back of Northern-White-Water', where Japhy was gonna go hiking.



On the turntable: Ustad Zakir Hussein, "& Maestros"
On the nighttable: Jack Kerouac, 'The Dharma Bums"

(The saxophone solo poetics playing fine lines over the raga.)