Category: Blog Posts

I was enjoying the dubious honor of teaching English to Vallejo freshmen when, while getting ready one morning, a national news program featured a fellow word warrior from somewhere in the Midwest who had been fired when it was discovered that she had the temerity to have been writing Harlequin romances on the side.

Now, let us just set aside the injustice of high school teachers having to do anything else besides the insanely demanding job listed on their CV, and let’s hope that the woman in question was writing for the same reason the rest of us do: she had to, or burst.

Let’s look instead at the shortsightedness of a corn-fed school board deciding that they didn’t want someone, and I fight the impulse to use all caps here, who had actually written and published books to teach their children how to (checking notes)… write.

I have never had the pleasure of reading a Harlequin, but as a kid who devoured Stephen King, William S. Burroughs, and Charles Bukowski, I am fascinated to know how much damage the board thought a formulaic romance might inflict on a young, impressionable mind. (We aren’t going to mention Clive Barker here as there may have been some actual scarring from those stories, although nothing some Richard Brautigan didn’t smooth over.)

My point being, one would be hard pressed to find someone who had been driven to a life of debauchery and indulgence from something they read, and if they had, good for them. Given that I was working on my first novel at the time, however, and considering the amount of sex, drugs, and… Sasquatch it contained, I started thinking that a nom de plume, might be called for, perhaps even a nom de guerre.

I’m sorry if my wife’s inappropriate comment and our sudden departure may have upset your delicate sensibilities, but what you are doing, sir, is an affront to nature. Just because you play a Taylor guitar does not mean—under any circumstances—that you need to run through the catalog of a similarly named “artist.”

If you were playing a Gibson would you have felt the need to play only Debbie Gibson songs? A Fender… Freddy Fender? Either one of those scenarios would have been easier to sit through. Might I suggest you trade for a Takamine?

We did appreciate the attempt to throw in the Beatles cover. Your fingerpicking on Blackbird was nice, but you can’t just not sing the word if you can’t hit the note. “Blackbird singing in the dead of _” The dead of what? Do you see how there is now a gaping hole in the narrative structure of the song? And by no means should a flagging set list be shored up by another James Taylor song.

You are very lucky that Mr. Taylor himself—either one—didn’t walk in, take that guitar away from you, and smack you with it.

Good day, sir.

I was 10 years old in the bicentennial year of 1976. America had just been through the Watergate-spurred spin-out of the Nixon presidency, the fall of Saigon, an oil crisis, and the resulting economic stagflation. We needed a reset, something to celebrate, and along came our 200th anniversary.

My father worked at the C&H sugar factory, across the water in Crockett, which, since the ships were coming direct from the Hawaiian cane fields, allowed for all sorts of interesting contraband to slip into the mainland undetected. Most importantly—for a ten-year-old boy—this meant illegal firecrackers: bricks of Black Cats and batteries of bottle rockets.

One of dad’s co-workers, a Portuguese man named Frank Freitas, had been on a Liberty ship in WWII and somehow ended up with the ship’s pilot bell, which he had spiffed up with a fresh coat of silver paint for the occasion. Frank installed the bell on the back fence of our grandmother’s backyard where we were gleefully trying to blow up any and everything we could with the “Super Charged Flashlight Crackers.”

Between the black-market Black Cats, rockets bursting in air, the cutting toll of the bell, and the guy across the street with an unlicensed shotgun, a joyous noise was made, starting early afternoon and only taking a short break for everyone to gorge themselves on dad’s famous barbecued lemon chicken before it got dark.

As soon as the Sun went down, we all gathered on the front porch of the house my family had lived in since the turn of the century. With the cars all moved safely out of harm’s way, it wasn’t difficult to imagine what the scene could have looked like 50, 60, or even 70 years previously.

With all-appropriate pomp, our giant box of fireworks was carried down to the sidewalk, as this was back when you could buy as much ordinance as you could afford from an alarming number of stands in town run by boosters of every stripe.

The following ritual followed a carefully-proscribed pattern: first up were always the snakes, as the last of the light allowed us to watch the intumescent ropes of black ash grow and writhe on the cement, scarring the walk for weeks afterward.

Snakes were followed by the ceremonial passing out of the sparklers, which we all enjoyed waving around as showers of hot sparks of potassium perchlorate, titanium, aluminum, and God-knows-what burned down the metal wire toward bare hands young and old. The first act was always capped off by some Tasmanian devil-like Ground Bloom Flowers that were sure to set the dry grass afire if you let them.

The next chapter was possibly was the most ill-considered, and I seem to recall, the first to be banned outright. We nailed cardboard Catherine wheels ringed with angled rockets to the trees that bordered the property. Trees made of… well, July-dry wood. As the discs ignited and began to spin, sparks were hurled in every direction to the delight of everyone except perhaps the fire department five blocks away.

The stars of the show were always the big fountains. Dad always handled the lighting of these as apparently one needed just the right levels of Olympia and gin & tonics in the blood to sufficiently steady one’s hand.

As we got older we never outgrew the delight in patriotic pyromania. The city itself went big for many years probably in an attempt to draw the breakout flareups to one centralized spot making it easier to put out fires and haul off pugilistic drunks.

I only bring all this up as next year is the our 250 anniversary as a nation, and we find ourselves in—if not a similar spot, one plainly as uncertain. As the explosions began last night, I could not tamp down my dismay at the state of our country at this point in history and actually broke into tears.

The reactionary-led Congress had just signed off on a bill that will turn ICE into a police force larger than most militaries, while depriving millions of Americans of the healthcare they need to survive. SNAP benefits have been slashed, taking food out of the mouth of hungry kids to give billionaires more tax breaks.

This time around, there hasn’t even been the feeble pretense of Reagan-era trickle-down theory. It’s piss. Everyone knows it’s piss, and they’ll have that hat as well if you don’t mind, or even if you do. Tragically, as I took in the flag on the night of the Fourth, I knew I would not be putting it back up until the current regime is out of power. I cannot support this culture of spitefulness for its own sake.

When I think about the gleefulness with which a concentration camp was built in the Everglades, complete with “Alligator Alcatraz” merchandise, it makes me sick to my stomach. Within my lifetime, we have gone from celebrating freedom with toxic black snakes to the toxic idea of using real snakes to terrorize immigrants.

This are not the values that Frank Freitas boarded the Liberty ship to go defend. This is not the country that we celebrated 50 years ago. I only hope that we can turn this thing around before it is too late. On that day, I will gladly hoist the Stars and Stripes once again.

Maybe I’ll even find some Black Cats.

There are few situations more awkward than someone who wants to collar you to tell you about their weird dream. Nothing can jinx the old water cooler vibe than an unexpected plunge into your cohort’s psyche when all you want is a cup of coffee. That said—bear with me, now—this one was a doozie:

A neoteric visionary had collected hundreds of boomerang tips—just the very ends of the boomerang wing—and hot glued them to his car so that they stood up like little shark fins.

His rationale was: if he got lost, tired, or too drunk to drive, he could just climb in the backseat and the car would find its way home.

Hang on, is that actually how those Waymo self-driving cars work?

I had been student teaching 12th grade English at a high school in Vallejo for a couple of weeks. It was a relatively new campus built close to the last vestige of green hills left in that part of the Bay Area. To celebrate the first day of spring, the master teacher took her classes, with me in tow, out to the back of the school to soak up the seasonal vibes and write a haiku.

I was tickled to see that the view included the very same craggy rock cliffs that my best friend Pat Kennedy and I rode our bikes—all the way from the neighboring town of Benicia—to explore when we were kids. In those days, that area was still pretty rural and an angry bull chased us when we had the temerity to cut across his field.

Here was my example:

The smell of new grass
and really fresh manure
Here comes the bull, run!

I was quickly becoming inured to the utter indifference of senior English students, so when one kid slowly raised his hand, I jumped on the opportunity to… well, teach.

“Mr. Larsen,” he started, his face a curious mask of confusion and wonder, “you got chased by a bull… in Vallejo?”

I told him, “yes,” which didn’t close the matter, but only caused further consternation to play upon his eager young countenance. I could tell there was a follow up in the works, so I employed my soon-to-be-patented “raised eyebrow“ technique, giving him the floor. The boy seemed to be struggling with how to phrase his question, before finally just blurting it out.

“Did y’all make your own clothes back then?”

The music magazine where I used to work once received a questionnaire on the future of music from a group of college students doing some sort of art project. Somehow it fell to me to fill it out and send it back. I approached it in my usual flippant manner, but later realized that I had come pretty close to what I actually think.

1) What is music?

Music is our small attempt to tap into the power of the cosmic vibrations that make up all matter and reality. By imposing an agreed upon order to that small part of the spectrum that humans can sense, we can use these vibrations to mimic certain emotional states and thus communicate with each other via a deeper meta-language.

2) What is your favorite song?

“Beat on the Brat” by the Ramones

3) Is Rock and Roll dead? Why?

No. Jerry Lee Lewis still walks the earth.*

4) How will music change in the future?

I think “Western” music will rely less on false Eurocentric measurements and begin to get closer to true expression of individual soul states with little-to-no commercial value.

At some point, the Rolling Stones will be replaced by cloned versions of themselves and people will still pay hundreds of dollars a ticket to see them.**

5) How has music affected your life?

It has made me taller.***

*Tragically, this is no longer the case. Is it pure coincidence that everything has gone to total shit since we lost The Killer? You cannot convince me of that.

**Hundreds? How innocent we once were.

***OK, not by much, but I am the same size as Bobs Dylan and Marley. In the words of Lindsey Buckingham, That’s Enough for Me.

It was our last morning on Kaua‘i and I was determined to get a photo of the sunrise over the beach at Kapa‘a. I set the alarm on several other occasions, only to awaken to the sound of rain—which, for Kaua‘i, is not wholly unprecedented, unexpected, or unwelcome.

This was my last chance. I listened for a moment, and not hearing falling sheets of water, I pulled on a pair of shorts, grabbed my camera, and jogged down to greet the day. I staked out a spot on the sand and waited for the sun to break over the horizon.

The dawn began to color the bottoms of the clouds pink, then orange, and then… an interloper, an older, bandy-legged gentleman with a massive camera setup, staggered down to the water’s edge just in time to stand right in front of me as the sun exploded into dazzling light.

My first thought was, “What the… ? Buddy, you’re wrecking my shot!” To be quickly followed by, “He doesn’t look like he has many sunrises left, let him have this moment.” I ceded the beach and turned around to go grab a much-needed cup of coffee when I was given this gift.

Everyone else on the strand was focused on the arrival of the Sun, and I stood facing the “wrong” way—basking in the spirit of aloha.

Photo/Ray Larsen

I got home from band practice tonight and found that in the four short hours I was gone, one of the tomato plants I have growing in an EarthBox had fallen over on its side. Upon closer inspection, I found a friggin’ slug munching on the base of the plant.

After picking it off and grinding it into the cement with my boot, I realized that I know absolutely nothing about the life cycle and habits of the the gray field slug; commonly called the gray garden slug, or Deroceras reticulatum.

OK, I know one habit: munching tomato plants, but how the hell did it get there? The Earth Box is an outdoor hydroponic setup—totally contained, even down to the neoprene shower cap that completely covers the soil except for holes for the plants to poke though, and apparently, for slugs to munch at.

The beauty of the self-contained nature of the box is that one could grow things anywhere, even on the second landing of a ’60s-era apartment building’s cement staircase.

Which brings me to my question. Where the fuck did that slug come from? There was no slimy trail leading up the stairs, and anyway, wouldn’t climbing two flights of stairs take, like, two years in slug time?

Having no empirical evidence, I felt like a medieval scientist trying to explain away things with magic, spontaneous generation, and evil curses. Have I been beset by slugs because of my errant ways?

That’s gonna take a lot of stompin’.