Week 5: Intentionality and the Blackhawk Blues

In which the podcaster sees a ghost of his television, escapes from nuns, and gets unintentionally lost.

Transcript

MY 12-MONTH VIDEO FAST 

EPISODE 6 – WEEK 5:  Intentionality and the Blackhawk Blues

This is Richard Loranger hoping that everyone has had a fun-filled week of [fireworks sounds] explosions in America…and in Gaza, and in Ukraine, and in Sudan…

[muffled CRITICAL VOICE, fireworks fade]: You shouldn’t be talkin about that.

[ME]: Wait, what?

[muffled CRITICAL VOICE]: You’re gonna lose half your listeners.

[ME]: Whaddaya mean I just lost half my listeners? Who the hell is listening to this?

[muffled CRITICAL VOICE]: Shouldn’t be talkin politics!

[ME]: Get outta here before I throw a bucket of water on you!

[muffled CRITICAL VOICE, a little clearer]: What a world! What a world!

[ME]: Get out!

Hehe, um, hi, this is Richard Loranger wishing you a Happy 6th of July (or whatever date it is for you), and a Happy 6th Episode covering Week 5 of my 12-Month Video Fast.

Politics aside, which I’m pretty sure are unintentional, I would like to explore the idea of intentionality a little more today, as I discussed last week with musical accompaniment, of ways to potentially change your wiring for the better (or mine at least). But first I think I owe you an update on my post-television condition. I love that word “condition” – it’s like something my great-aunts would say: “She’s got a condition.” Anyway.

A few folks have asked if I’m still having those shaky spaced-out sort of withdrawal thingies in the evening, and yeah there’s still a bit of space going on, but I should tell you the strangest thing that’s been happening. Just this week, though not before, I’ve walked into my front room a couple of times and seen my TV and video equipment right there where it used to be. It’s either been peripheral or just a flash, but it kind of freaked me out, like seeing a friend who’s died walking toward you down the street, you know? I mean, do televisions have ghosts, do you think? Although my TV isn’t dead, it’s just stowed away in the back room, but that wouldn’t preclude…oh never mind. It’s just my brain being a bit tweaky.

As for those shakes, haven’t noticed them much but I was sitting here reading one evening this week and realized that my heart was pounding like crazy. I was reading Stephen King but it felt like a panic attack or fight or flight reaction. Then I looked at the time and it was 7:00 exactly. “Jesus,” I said, “Leave me alone. I’m busy!” And it still took a few minutes and a tall glass of water to calm down. I’m not sayin that’s proof of nothin. I’m just sayin.

So I’m reading more – a lot more – and yeah some of it is Stephen King, whose work I’ve always enjoyed. (Any of my literaturista friends out there wanna have a debate on his merits, bring it so I can go all Cujo on you.) I’ve learned a lot about plot and character development and pacing and all the gorgeous details from him, and right now I’m reading the Holly Gibney books because she’s one of my favorite King characters, and one of his apparently. I don’t believe he describes her this way explicitly, but she’s a kind of spectrum savant with some trauma she learns to take power from; mostly she has a shining intelligence that is fascinating to watch in motion. She appears in five long novels and a novella, and I’m tearing through the fourth novel right now (The Outsider). I think I’ll take a break after this one and veer into some Michael Ondaatje fiction, because his characters also tend to have intelligence all over the place, and my appetite is up for that. Plus it’s amazing to be tearing through books, more or less, for the first time in years. My reading brain practically feels like it’s in its twenties again, ‘cept I might know a few more words and a ton more in general than I did back then.

Also taking in some poetry-oriented stuff. Right now I’m reading through Things You May Find Hidden in My Ear, a 2022 pub by Palestinian poet Mosab Abu Toha – and noting the year doesn’t mean you don’t get a sense of what’s been going on there since, just one of how ongoing that conflict is and how one lives amidst. And that’s a lot and powerful as hell. Last week I read Hand Me the Limits by Ted Rees, a multi-genre text written after the author survived a really nasty cancer in his late 30s (or so). In essays, a letter, a performance proposal, an academic talk, and both lyrical and abstract poetry he covers the medical horror of living in an altered body, and so much more – his queer punk past (and present), his sense of belonging and not belonging in various cultural settings and literary circles, and a great deal of intimacy both recalled and lost. I sat down one night to jot down a few reflections on the book for my website and wrote for three hours straight. If you’re curious you can read the whole thing at richardloranger.com – it turned out pretty good – along with a series of flash prose pieces titled “My Pronouns”, also written recently. So I’m writing more as well, a lot more, which is exactly, exactly, exactly what I was hoping would happen.

I have also found myself scrolling through the news feed on my phone again – we live in such exciting unintentional times – more frequently than I’d like. It’s creepy how insidious and addictive that is; 90% of the time I’m staring at words and thinking I’m reading, and so much of it is such bullshit, except the articles about gaming and upcoming films, of course. Those I’ll read, then I find myself halfway through a movie trailer before I even know I’m watching it and I’m like aaahh! You’re not supposed to do that! Am I not supposed to do that? And why am I asking you? It’s my fast! But there’s something more behind this that I’ve been avoiding telling you, which is that I went to the AMC on Wednesday to get out of the heat, and yes I am allowed to do that and I’m surprised at how weird I felt afterward. I didn’t even care for the two films I ended up seeing. They were Kinds of Kindness by Yorgos Lanthimos’, an extraordinarily well-written, directed, and acted 164-minute zero-empathy tongue-in-cheek bleakfest. (Take that one home and cook with it, Roger Ebert!), and A Quiet Place: Day One, an alien invasion movie about two people running. Both films actually left me with an aftertaste of stale Marlboros. Yet I somehow managed to get stuck with this little shame/guilt thing, even though I clearly made an exception for this at the beginning of the fast, and I did need to cool down. So why the fudge should this trigger me, much as I was triggered the other day by a quippy one-minute trailer for Deadpool and Wolverine, and all the little nuns in full habits pour out of my ears and clamber around on my neck and shoulders, hanging from my beard and climbing in what’s left of my hair, with all their miniature squawking and tsking and wagging of fingers. Sheesh! Those nuns have been hanging around for a long time and this isn’t the first occasion where they’ve made my life unnecessarily rueful, and not the worst by far, no sir no ma’am.

My first epic encounter with the nuns, which at the time would appear as just one full-sized nun, was in my late 20s. I’d fallen in love with someone who was already in a relationship (and I was about to learn a lesson I’d learned before, but who remembers those things, right?). But I didn’t just fall in regular love this time; this love was more of the head-over-ass bottomless pit I-don’t-know-who-or-what-I-am variety. The dangerous variety. But he said it was totally mutual and I believed him and we had two full months of faceless bliss until he walked in and said, “I want you to know that I love you more, but I made a commitment and I need to keep it, so we’re done, sorry,” and walked out. And I felt like a rocket that had just reached maximum velocity and hit a brick wall – you know, one strong enough to stop a rocket – oh never mind.

♫ Tainted love, o-o-oo [bam bam] ♫

My world turned inside-out and without warning all my fave places in my beloved San Francisco felt, yeah, tainted. [muffled CRITICAL VOICE: Goddamn borderlines! What? Hey!] Maybe it was a little borderline, but regardless I was freaked and full of shame as if I’d done something horrible. Which I hadn’t. Whenever I was out and about, I felt flushed and anxious and like I had blinders on, you know, like the blinkers they put on horses. Tunnel vision. Which sucked, especially because I knew it was all in my head and I was furious, and I couldn’t let it go on. So I made a visualization exercise for when it happened. I would make the shame into a nun standing in front of me with that wagging finger, and I’d say to her, “Fuck you! You’re not real and you’re not welcome here. Go away. Go away now,” and so forth until she’d turn and waddle off like a brow-beat penguin. (It’s not that I think all nuns are evil, by the way, but those yardsticks tho.) It was pretty effective for a while, kind of like an OTC for temporary blinker relief. But it was only temporary, and I definitely needed something stronger, because a switch had flipped in my #brainchemistry, I had settled into my first clinical depression. Oh joy.

So here this becomes a story of intentionality, because I had no intention of letting this get the better of me or ruin my favorite city. I was certain that I could climb my own way out of this pit or whatever it was – I just had to find the right act of magical circumstance, the right situation, the right force that would snap that hope and happiness switch back on.

My first thought was to get out of town, see some new places and breathe some new air. For a couple of months I’d been doing nothing but going to work in a warehouse on Hunter’s Point, and coming home to sit morosely in the dim light of my garret room under the peaked roof of an old house in the Mission. So yeah, out-of-town sounded real good, and the long Memorial Day weekend was coming up, so there was my chance. My usual getaway was to head south to Santa Cruz, where I had a couple of friends and I found the town refreshing back then. But that’s also where my ex’s partner lived and he went down there frequently, and I didn’t savor hiding in my friend’s backyard for fear of an encounter, so S.C. was a big N-O. Option two was the annual bike messenger’s ride up 101 North to Guerneville (I had been one for a few years) for a weekend of camping, which sounded great until it dawned on me that would actually entail riding 70 miles or so on the side of a major highway with a couple dozen drunken dudes, then taking acid, yelling, and setting fires in the woods – which didn’t really sound contemplative enough for my purpose. Going west could just get me wet, so that left east. What was east? Then my friend Ann called to invite me camping with her and her boyfriend on Memorial Day weekend on Mount Diablo, which was 40 miles due east of my bedroom window. How perfect was that? Yes, I told her, I’ll come with but I won’t camp with you. I’m going on a vision quest!  O-kay, she said.

My little garret of mopedom really had been an attic, and accordingly had just one small window at each end. The one to the west faced the brick wall of an elementary school across the street, and the one to the east, improbably, peered between two building across the backyard with a view, way in the distance, of the peak of Mount Diablo. Did I mention perfect? For the week before, in between moping I would sit there talking to it: Mi amigo Diablo. Que pasa? Muy bien? etc. My Spanish wasn’t so good back then. (It still isn’t.) Then I stuffed my old rucksack, borrowed my roommate’s tent, hopped in Ann’s old car, and was off.

I had them drop me by the South Gate, so we wouldn’t have to pay for an extra person, and I took off. I didn’t want to camp or be in the populated areas anyway, or climb the mountain with my gear; I just wanted to find a quiet, secluded place where I could walk around, sit and process, maybe do a little ritual to clear my head with a few objects I had brought. And guess what – I found one – this winding steep-sided valley filled with foliage and hummingbirds (magical enough for you?), off the beaten trail with no signs of anyone around. (I didn’t see a name and haven’t been able to locate it on a map, but I’m sure it was there.) I explored the brief length of it (maybe half a mile?), and didn’t spot an open patch to pitch camp, so I stashed my gear in some brush and hiked around the outside of the valley back to some scary cow pastures at the top (not the pastures; I’m scared of cows), and wandered back into the valley. About halfway down I spotted what looked like a huge boulder halfway up the steep slope to the right. I’m compelled sometimes to sit on large rocks, so I clambered up the slope and found something even better and totally unanticipated. It was a big sandstone boulder, all right, maybe ten-fifteen feet high and firmly embedded in the side of the valley, but somehow, by some (I assume) natural process I couldn’t piece together, the bottom half of the boulder had hollowed out to about six feet in height, forming essentially a mini-cave maybe ten feet long and six deep. It was not precarious in any way I could see, and in fact seemed quite solid, almost like a covered terrace by Frank Lloyd Wright but much cooler, from which you could look down and view at least half the valley. It was amazing, and far more than clearly the spot I was meant to stay. And that’s how I spent three days living in a cave on Mount Diablo, where there are no caves.

There was more than enough room for my gear and I didn’t need the tent or a pad since I had a roof and a floor of the softest sand you can imagine. There was even a raised bit of flat rock on which I made a little altar with the objects I’d brought. I don’t remember what they were, and in fact I have much more of this written down somewhere, currently misplaced (lucky you), but I know I put a few little things in the center and around them a necklace I’d beaded and a shred from an old silk scarf I’d worn as a bike messenger. I decided all I needed to do was find one more object on site to use as a third ring to power those babies (or my psyche) up. Had a pita and soup-in-the-can and took a midnight walk on the loop I’d taken that led me to the cave. It was a different place, after all, at midnight, and incredibly bright, one day shy of a full moon and a blue moon (look it up – May 31, 1988) and I didn’t need a flashlight for the walk. Outside of the valley it had been misting and every blade of grass, every leaf and stone was beaded with shining droplets. As I wandered again through that pasture at the top (no cows at night – whew!), my eye caught something gleaming in the grass. I approached carefully and picked it up, and it was a full, intact, freshly-shed rattlesnake skin with its head by the hole to its den. Needless to say I scampered off quickly, amazed even more that I’d found such a gift to use for the third ring of my altar. I know this shit sounds unbelievable, but you know what? It happened. I fell asleep in that luxurious bed above the hushed valley to the faintest sounds of  tk  tk    tk  grains of sand dropping from the roof.

It rained pretty hard that night and I woke dry as a bone. I spent the day hiking to the summit and back, and like me we’re moving along more quickly now because the most important part of the story is over. Slept a second peaceful night and woke on Monday, Memorial Day, to find that something had scampered through the altar in the middle of the night and moved things around (augury time!), opening up the outer two rings (the scarf and the snakeskin), which I took to be a good sign. Ate the rest of my vittles (I had packed well), gathered my stuff, and took off into the sunny day to find the South Gate Road and hitchhike home. Except I didn’t find it. I wasn’t using a map and relied on my (usually) excellent sense of direction, but I guess I was a little too blissed out by that cave and found myself meandering over dried golden slopes for an hour or two in the increasingly hot and overbright sun. I knew I’d find a road somewhere and also knew I’d made a bad mistake – I was out of water and overheated, dehydrated and skittish and probably approaching heat stroke, and at some point I actually spotted two vultures circling overhead (at least I think they were real). Then I stumbled over yet another little hill and found myself looking down at an expanse of greenery and water – it’d be so cool if it were a mirage but it wasn’t – it was a walled and gated new community, the first I’d ever seen, part of Blackhawk, CA, filled with McMansions and landscaping and swimming pools, none of which I could get to. But I could follow it around to a road, and did, and got picked up right away by a kind fellow who could see how overheated I was and handed me a can of warm soda. Best warm soda I ever drank. 

So: intentionality. Did this little vision quest manage to sandblast away that depression? No, it did not. But it started me looking for something that would, and really revved up that engine. I was convinced that I’d find something on my own, and in fact I did, nine months into my “condition” but I actually did, after lots of trial and error. I beaded necklaces in my garret. I took ecstasy in bars (bad idea for this purpose anyway). Played lots of gigs with my band. Got involved in a radical culture festival and took part in my first group performance piece. Got me a sweet new bf for a while who didn’t mind the depression. Attended the wildest, most anarchistic Thanksgiving feast ever on the planet. In all of that there was joy, and all of that joy was sullied, weighted down, never pure. Then one night toward the end of the year I’m out seeing bands and someone says, “Hey, let’s check out these dance performances at this warehouse,” and I say, “Okay,” and we head over there and the guy at the door looks at me and says, “Who are you?” and I say, “Who are you?” And I end up taking dance classes with him and eventually performing in his troupe with a bunch of most excellent people who become close friends and mostly still are, and a few weeks into those classes, I’m sitting after one in that warehouse that I stepped into practically by accident, goofing around with my new friends and I’m actually struck through with joy and my body starts ejecting that depression in a black river from my gut and throat and the top of my head for two full days and I can feel it gushing out day and night until it finally comes to a trickle and is gone.

That’s what I mean by intentionality.

So here I am starting it up again, not for the second or fifth or tenth time but again, trying to rewire my something with some kind of self-agency. Last week was just a start and while I’ve picked up the instruments once or twice since, it doesn’t mean I’ll become suddenly musicianal (or something), it means there’s an engine running now not made of exploding fossil fuels but of everything else, and I’m curious to see where it might take me. I need to. And I know that I need to drive it myself because I’m the only one that change myself (whatever that is), at least to find a direction that feels right for the moment. And since we all get our wiring fucked by idiots and pain, it’s up to each of us to rewire ourselves – nobody can do it for you, ask any psychologist, not a psychiatrist with a pharma-demon on their shoulder, but a real therapist. They all know the patient does the work. Be sweet if we could change each other for the better – and just as evil to think we know what’s better for anyone – and much as I’d like to convince everyone, for instance, to address ongoing human conflicts from personal to international in the same ways that we address other compulsive, un-intentional, addictive behaviors, which it so clearly is (what a world! what a world!), well, that’s something, one of a gigillion things, that each human has to arrive at on their own – or not. But I do think that a well-placed word or two can get folks considering an alternative view, an upgrade, a bit of their own new wiring, and I figure it can’t hurt to try. So I keep trying.

In the meantime, I’ve got this little mo-mo purring over here, so please excuse me while I hit the accelerator.

This has been Episode 6 covering Week 5 of my 12-Month Video Fast.

Thanks for listening and have a great week.