The Coming of the Toads

A Notebook – Since 2007

  • Tucson to San Diego

    Fall now ahead, Sylvie’s baseball season over, we drove from Tucson to San Diego, where Sylvie was to attend a three day conference. Not in a hurry, we drove west to Why, then dropped south to the border crossing at Lukeville. Back in old Mexico, we stopped in Sonoyta to eat, dry and hot, folks moving slowly in the heat. After lunch we walked around some, surrounded but ignored by border business as usual. I had drunk a beer with a taco burrito full of red and black steaming beans and hot chilies, and with Sylvie now driving, I fell asleep. When I awoke we were on Mexico Federal Highway 2, driving west along the border. Desert, mesa, flat tan and sandy, rocky hills. We switched seats again and Sylvie slept while I drove and when she awoke she was surprised by crops and greenery reappearing around San Luis Rio Colorado. We crossed the border again at the portmanteau crossing of Mexicali and Calexico, picking up 8 west through chaparral forest to El Cajon and La Mesa, and finally drove into a muted San Diego night, where Sylvie had booked a bungalow near the water in Ocean Beach. We had encountered no gods in the desert, had not felt watched. The desert gods are heavy sleepers, Sylvie said. Now back to the city gods, I said. The beach gods are my favorites, Sylvie said. I should move the team to a beach city next year. You can never be sure about the gods, I said, how they’re going to act, or react. I unpacked the car while Sylvie opened up the bungalow windows to the ocean breeze. We sat out on the front porch facing a narrow road that led down to the beach, and Sylvie poured herself a glass of chardonnay and I drank a beer and then we went to sleep for the night.

    “Tucson to San Diego” is episode 61 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Intransitive

    Sylvie and I drove southeast and south from Tucson, stayed a couple of nights as tourists in Tombstone, crossing the border at Naco into old Mexico, where we spent a night in Motel Cowboy, and a few nights farther out, in a rough cabin in a shady grove near a dry stream bed. Attempt no profit from your epiphanies, Dr. Lao had said. No worries, since I wasn’t having any, though the desert was lovely in its apparent simplicity. One story trailers, shacks, lean-to structures, adobe and brick block dwellings, old pickup trucks. Little commotion, no one about. No plots brewing that I could see. The prickly pear grows little opportunities, another Dr. Lao ambiguous comment. Life is a mystery only to be enjoyed, he said, not to be grasped mentally. That I got. When the beer and wine and food ran out we drove back north, cutting west after the border crossing to Sierra Vista and north past Fort Huachuca, and on up back to Tucson. Sylvie said what she got from Dr. Lao was motifs, like string theory. Life seemed made up of motifs, but her theory never went much beyond that. Life is made up of moods, I said. Moody. Life is a mood, and mostly a bad one. Very moodily said, Sylvie replied. Yes, an adverb chasing after some runaway verb, now ahead, now behind, a sentence with its noun cut off. And no object. No, and no object. Intransitive. In transit, anyway. Where to now? I don’t know.

    “Intransitive” is episode 60 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • The Circus of Dr. Lao

    We drove over to Abalone to visit Dr. Lao, his circus in town for a few days, as it was every few days, and I had not seen him in a few hundred years. He hasn’t changed a bit, Sylvie said, you’ll see.

    “The Circus of Dr. Lao” is episode 59 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Blue Skies

    History, a day game, his story, a looper machine, a rhythm continuously churning the same old fat. The past cannot cure this present precious moment as it is devoured by his own story. The ark sinks, the birds do not return, the sacrifice runs on and on and on. He was so Goddy Dodgy that he gave his only Son so that no one would need to sacrifice or be sacrificed again, to bring peace, yet every son and daughter is still sacrificed. Moloch. The Earth rolls forward, will not be stopped, leaves no tracks, nothing motionless as this tiny airplane 8 miles high begins its descent to a 9 inning game where I sit in the center field bleachers in the Tucson sun for an inning before retreating to Sylvie’s air conditioned suite next to the press box over home plate, with a glass of iced tea with a slice of lemon and a sprig of spearmint stick. Perado grounds to short, out at first. Alofme strikes out, looking hot and dehydrated, too exhausted to swing the bat. Carmone drives a hard ball to deep right center and already rounds first when Waltzer up against the fence leaps and pockets the shooting star. Sylvie mentions a few fine restaurants where we might later dine. She likes to eat out, under the blue skies, in the open air, and there’s a one story place she knows in South Tucson with a roof patio, with shade palms in huge buckets and fine water misters cooling the outside tables and a water fountain running against the traffic noise, bubbling and burbling, colorful umbrellas. The game was booked, we left the ballpark for the restaurant, and on the menu we found Berkshire Pig Tacos, Ossobuco with Gremolata, Peruvian Roasted Chicken. Sylvie ordered a bottle of cold dry white Merlot and another of dusty purple Sangiovese. The skies were blue, the sun setting solid gold, the heat lifting quickly in the cloudless desert evening. Your skies are never blue, Sylvie said. Always cloudy, or foggy, grey, cold. Why don’t you come live in the desert for some time away. There are ways to cool off. Swimming holes, sunhats, shorts and t shirts and sandals. The shade of the Tipu trees, Velvet Mesquite, the Blue Verde. Why do you gotta be so desperate all the time? Find some blue skies, enjoy the porch shade, relax. Stop worrying about the world. You’re the King of Anhedonia. Take off that crown of thorns. Feel some joy. Joie de vivre. Sit out with me and talk and dine and let the blue skies seep deep into your body. She reached across the table for my hand and I let her take it in hers and I tried to feel some pleasure in it.

    “Blue Skies” is episode 58 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • The Interventionists

    Jim and Jack were interventionists, private eyes specializing in surveillance, tracking down missing persons, stakeouts. They accessed systems, great and small. They could hack into a kid’s video game, a city’s traffic grid, banks, email, purchases, sales, the International Space Station. They’d been following me using outside smart home and building security cameras as I walked north through Venice, hired by Sylvie, my faithful half goddess counselor and once part time partner, my Cassandra, whose love for me I could not believe, who called out my bad decisions, my financial planner who set me up on my hobo trek through time and place after I’d borrowed the $300 million from the Walter Group for a day to syphon off just enough to pay my own separate future way before returning the file to its rightful owners, with interest. Fate is the decisions you make, Sylvie repeated, but I’d not been greedy, and that too was a fateful decision. And somewhere along the way Sylvie had purchased a minor league baseball team, fell in love with the green fields under lights at night, with the game, with the travel, with the players. Jim and Jack informed me I was invited down as Sylvie’s guest to Tucson for a three game series with the Desert Wavers versus the Northwest Roadtrippers. I spent the afternoon supervised by Jim and Jack in a professional makeup artist’s studio in Culver City, where I got a real washing followed by haircut and shave and some new duds. They fixed me up with a new cell phone and ID. We would catch a flight out of LA for Tucson come morning. Meantime I was their guest in their suite at Hotel Olumposh overlooking the Marina del Rey, where we dined, in the hotel’s Lighthouse Lounge, on butter seared scallops with prosecco, filet mignon petite medallions with truffles in a tangy orange sauce, squid soup, crab and oyster shooters, rosemary garlic and olive bread, Palos Verdes Pinot Noir – a jazz trio playing, a vocalist appearing during dessert (custard raspberry tarts, tiramisu) singing a set of songs all with the word moon in the titles.

    “The Interventionists” is episode 57 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Under Surveillance

    To hobo is to work gig to gig while wandering. I was not a bum or a tramp, not to disparage those good folks. I was not a beatnik or a hippie. I ran out of Sylvie’s pills but the chip on my shoulder did not grow back. I did not run around or stand on street corners with a veteran sign hanging around my neck. I was not a superhero, nor an antihero. To look at me, talk to me, you would never guess I was a god. I was not a surfer or a hodad, a punk or a hood. In terms of socio economic demographic analysis, Venice was a good fit for me, where, it was sometimes said, figuratively, by those not in know, ignorant of street life, the Los Angeles sewer meets the sea (literally, the sewer meets the sea in El Segundo, at the Hyperion Water Reclamation Plant). I was not part of some well intentioned social worker’s caseload. I was not out on parole, had no record, though I stood ready to assist with whatever community service might come my way. I was not on the run. Neither was I looking to put down any roots. I had a few old connections still, friends, if you didn’t ask for too much: Sylvie, Wormy, Ray, Walter. As I may have mentioned earlier in these episodes, I remained aware of my privileged position, and would not claim that I was in any way independent of society, though I would argue I was free of many of the systemic webs most are caught up in, often unawares, even if caught for a lifetime. I had few needs and even fewer wants. I had effectively disappeared. I was no longer a person. My only daily target action plan was to avoid impeding another’s notion of progress, physical or mental, to avoid falling into a bucket of crabs. So I was briefly startled, continuing my way north along the Venice Boardwalk, seeing the yellow hummer reappear at the end of a side street, two obviously holding thugs hopping out to greet me. The inside of the hummer, its back windows blacked out, was modified and equipped with high tech surveillance tools: computers, high powered scopes, cameras, radios, closed circuit electronics, biometric kits, affective computing tools, face recognition and thermogram devices and screens, wireless tracking devices, microchip implant kits, covert listening and GPS tools. The yellow hummer was a spider in a webbed Internet of person things (IoPT). We’re private not government the thugs were quick to assure me. Sylvie asked us to set up a Zoom chat with you. She’s concerned you’ve not been answering her text messages.

    “Under Surveillance” is episode 56 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Now I Out Walking

    Somewhere between my time travel stay at Tin Can Beach and being abandoned by Tilde in the Venice canals, I’d lost my cell phone. I had not missed it because no one ever calls me, nor did I ever call them. Occasionally I got a text from Sylvie giving me the score of some obscure baseball game. And I also sometimes spaced out playing any number of chess puzzles in an app I’d downloaded. But my use of the cell phone was sporadic, and most of the time I didn’t bother leaving the phone on. Walking away from Tilde’s folks’ place on the canal I thought of calling Wormy, but I couldn’t find my phone. I figured he was probably off time travelling on the Vespa anyway, and wouldn’t pick up. I crossed Speedway, continued north on Ocean Front, and cut over to the Boardwalk at Muscle Beach. North of the Venice Breakwater, where the beach is wider, deeper, I walked down to the water. I dropped my kit just above the water line and stripped down to my swimming trunks and walked out into the surf, close enough to keep an eye on my stuff up on the beach, far enough out to get a good washing. I slipped off my trunks and scrubbed them in the sandy salty foam, keeping just my head and shoulders out of the water. The trunks nearly got away from me in the surf. The beach was not crowded. I got the trunks back on and dove under a few small waves and swam out just beyond the break, turning and treading water, looking back at the beach, up and down the coast, out to sea, thinking about my trophic level in the food chains, walking about, in the water, up on the beach, in the Walter Group, in the Army, in the Church, in the library, in schools, on the streets, walking through the Los Angeles Basin with the hobos tramps and bums, with the blue pink and white collar workers, rich and poor sick and skaters bikers surfers and hodads, police preachers thieves detectives buskers, moms dads and kids, dogs cats coyotes racoons rats mice pigeons and opossums, work shifts, job gigs, sleeping on the beach, hiking up through the canyons, onto the Santa Monica Mountain trails, hiking through downtown, sleeping under an overpass, the traffic sound ongoing like the surf, day and night, night and day.

    “Now I Out Walking” is episode 55 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Cut and Run

    By the time we finished packing and loading up the car with goods for the girls and Tilde it was too late to start out for the long drive to Frisco, so it was decided we would stay the night at Tilde’s parents on the canal in Venice and get an early start up Highway 1 come morning. Tilde insisted I install car restraint seats for the girls, the full rig for Harriet, who was under 8, and a booster seat for Nancy – thus we’d be legal and safe. But it took some time for me to modify the seat belts for proper fit, and I had to make a trip in her father’s pickup to a local auto parts store. Meantime, the girls were helpful in packing and loading up their own gear: dolls and teddy bear; blankets and pillows; notebooks, crayons, and pencils and pens; magnifying glasses; a violin and a Martin Backpacker guitar; books; sunhats; backpacks with clothes, water bottles, cell phones and chargers (this last forcing another errand to the auto parts store for an adaptor that would allow for charging devices using the dashboard cigarette lighter); dog food and dish and water bowl. With Tilde’s father’s help I attached a surfboard rack to the roof of the car and tied off the girls’ two bicycles. Tilde packed into the trunk a 5 man camping tent, a camp stove and lantern, and a bigger cooler stuffed with food, ice, and drinks. Tilde’s father, the girls called him Papa Papa, wasn’t a bad guy, and we got to talking about life in Venice living on the canals, but as an alleged close friend of Wormy, I got the cold shoulder from her mother, and was consigned to the front porch on the canal for sleeping quarters for the night. Tilde slept with the girls in their room, her mom stowed away in the master upstairs for the night, and Papa Papa and I sat out on the porch watching the water and drinking beers and when the beer was all gone turned to a bottle of Scotch Whiskey. We talked into the wee hours, and I awoke late in the morning, the house closed up and quiet, a note taped conspicuously to the porch door: Dear Glaucus, I am perfectly capable of driving myself and the girls to San Francisco, but thanks for your help. Good luck, Tilde. Out back, I saw that Wormy’s ’56 Chevy Two-ten packed to the gills was gone. Tilde had left my cowboy roll on the porch for me, and I hooked up and headed off in the direction of the Venice beach and boardwalk, first letting loose with a vociferous hobo piss in the empty alley, footloose.

    “Cut and Run” is episode 54 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Room for Two More

    We didn’t get far, off Vista del Mar and onto Culver, when Bridgid let it be known she needed a pit stop, and I pulled off the side of the road in the Ballona Wetlands. Tilde put Brigid on a short leash and walked her into what I guessed was sagebrush. I stayed with the car, the traffic on Culver heavy in both directions. The basin was lovely though in the noon sun, buggy and birdy, hot wild flowers, liquorice, a stew of smells. Tilde got back to the car, turned, and whispered, oh look, and we stilled and watched a blue butterfly bopping around what Tilde said was buckwheat. Back in the car we crossed over Ballona Creek and came around onto Lincoln, then the first left and onto Admiralty Way to continue north around Marina del Rey, then left on Washington to Pacific Avenue. And that was where and when Tilde blessed me with the second surprise of the trip (this one a gobsmack bit more of a bell-ring than the dog) Wormy had neglected to mention. We were to stop off at Tilde’s parents’ place on Court D in the Venice Canals, where we would pick up Tilde’s two daughters, Nancy and Harriet, aged 10 and 6, who would be making the trip north to San Francisco with us.

    “Room for Two More” is episode 53 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Three for the Road

    Quiet finally filled Wormy’s place as an early morning fog rose over the dunes from the ocean beach. His plan to slough off Tilde awoke a sleeping shrew. They fought and argued and cried and wrestled and scratched, clawed and scolded each other all night long, Tilde’s wails crescendoing up and down scales like fiddles in flight. Why he couldn’t wait till morning to tell her I don’t know. Something about he wanted to give her time to pack and say goodbye. Late morning I got up and went inside and made coffee. On my way to the bathroom I passed their bedroom and saw them sleeping head to toe. The ’56 Chevy two-ten was gassed up and ready to go. I packed my bedroll kit and stashed it in the trunk with a small cooler of ice, a couple of beers, a chunk of cheese, and a loaf of bread. I waited outside with Brigid, sipping coffee, feeling the breeze begin to shift offshore to onshore. We were not getting the early start I had asked for. Wormy came out with his coffee. We heard the shower come on through the open bathroom window. Tilde came out, her hair still wet, her backpack fully rigged, and walked straight to the car without a word. She stowed her stuff in the trunk and climbed into the back and whistled for Brigid who jumped into the back seat, the two of them hugging and snuggling in a way that did not suggest goodbye. I gave Wormy a questioning look. Oh, yeah, he said, turns out Brigid is Tilde’s dog, not mine, and she wants to keep her. We were now three for the road as I pulled onto Grand Avenue and drove down to Vista del Mar where I turned north to San Francisco.

    “Three for the Road” is episode 52 of Inventories, a Novel in Progress in Serial Format at The Coming of the Toads.

  • Intermission: A Smoky Sea

    On the floor of a sea of smoke
    crawling to an empty conch
    I pass a woman out walking
    her dog neither with a mask
    and she smoking a cigarette.

    And some bony lady jogging
    thru the smoke and fog up
    and down the local side
    walks a serious jogger in
    deed sans nuisance mask.

    Toodeloo, I whistle in my
    mask, in my car, windows
    rolled, destooled, the bars
    all closed, on my way to
    the store for milk and beer.

    Now a Worst World Air Award
    for this smoke covered coast
    an Atlantis sunk in smoke
    a coal drenched London
    an orange Tambora scarf.