Shiftless Seattlite Tour : Ventura (Stop 1)

Since January, I’ve been working to make the money to afford the most extensive travel season of my life to date, which will stretch from Austin to Kona, from Red Rocks to Canada and points beyond and between. As I expunged myself of inner landscape chaos over the last few months, pounded out the churn methodically through the machine-gun tapped key and the blinking vertical bar, I thought about these journeys, knowing exactly what I hoped to achieve. For this was a pilgrimage of the mystic to the meeting place, a walkabout of a different kind, one in which I planned not only to find God, but to bring him, her, them and it back with me.

The scene is Ventura, California, seventy miles north of Los Angeles proper, along the Pacific Coast Highway. This is stop one of the Shiftless Seattlite tour, 2004.



I collapsed in the bed, sank down into the luxury of the well-loved mattress as the night sounds pressed upon the black window glass, promising a tomorrow of sun and heat and the secret hearts of palm trees. Around me, all manner of fairy, statues and matchbooks, booklets and drawings, lingered in corners and on shelves. Above me, the gold-flair of 1970’s starlight rose from the angled, square fixture, the same fixture I had in my bedroom as a child.

There was a significance about this that deeply affected me, and since mine and my hosts’ sleep and wake schedules were slightly at odds, I was afforded many hours of time alone in that room to reflect on it. The days were spent lounging in the fragrant garden, slathering on sun-screen and walking the shores, strolling the neighborhoods with dog in tow and watching for butterflies. But the nights were spent among the Host, nestled down under layers of covers, feeling that faraway thing inside of me wriggle and shake awake as tiny eyes observed and tiny wings gave merely a hint of flutter in the shadows.

This was my wellspring growing up, my sense of how things were as I walked with a staff down the riverbank and talked to sparrows, too young to know anything was different or strange about it. There was a feeling of wildness in me, a hearing of things on the fringe of sound, a respect, a belief that was beyond books and ritualized learning. As I grew, I systematically ignored, then repulsed and finally accepted, but the order that an adult gathers as age grows locked itself around these memories and this source, categorizing, dogmatizing and eventually taking for granted.

At the end of the days of talk and laughter in Ventura, of complete utter displacement among the hot, hot winds and under the spreading palms, there was this wonderful world of fairies, light fixture, and the past.

But the daylight hours were far from normal either.

As Seattle is the sleepy exhalation of magick that spreads slowly and collects in corners in strange but relatively harmless combinations, as San Francisco is the type of lush, well-ordered chaos of old magick that rises vortexes and sweeps along girders and stone paths, Ventura is something else entirely. Ventura is like the gassy mess of the early formation of a universe, the sort of lax, yet frenetic testing ground of creatures and realities that in Hollywood terms would be a marriage of David Lynch and the Cohen Brothers in a screenplay written by Hunter S. Thompson edited and aired by ABC Family.

I walked those streets where new-school punks met dropout beachcombers at the Busy Bee diner, where the blue-blood windowshopped at boutiques with extraneously-accented-lettered names while men in ridiculously oversized self-woven hats trolled at thrift stores. This was a place where Acupuncturists worked at the Carpeteria and Mormons tried to sell religion to Rainbow Family off-the-gridders. It had the scent of the beginnings of things, that baby-flesh scent of morphing bones and hesitant manifestations, the pure smell of realities trying hard to mesh together in too many places at the same time. This was a rag-doll-body outline, a jagged edge that somehow remained fluid, set upon a thousand various directives colliding randomly and violently in an excited, catalyst-fed reaction.

This was a place where coffee-shops had gift merchandising and hidden, Narnia-through-the-wardrobe-type wine bars way in the back. This was a place where soybeans, beekeeping and sunlight formed a crackpot’s theory of stem-cell replacement while pitching a rob-the-Indian-casino petition to Trader Joe shoppers. This was a place where old frontier men in coonskin caps drank at the end of piers and took turns on high-powered motor scooters or simply cursed at brown-feathered seagulls.

I couldn’t have imagined a stranger universe. I certainly cannot describe it well enough to give it credit. Still, what could be a better start for my journey than the reminder of things that lie beneath, of that sort of roiling, primal magick that feeds the mind of belief and the heart of creation? And what better way to begin this exploration than with the wings and fingers of the dark, mossy veil around me as I dreamt?

The words lapped at the shoreline, around rock-towers and between pier posts, falling in great sheets of pollen, playing out in the eyes and lips of the spice-sand affected. We are here. We are here. We are here. Remember.

When I returned, nothing was the same. That kind of oddness jumped into my suitcase and made the long flight back up the coast, where I returned to find that my garbage can had inexplicably been stolen. So to close, and to glorify the weird of the Wyrd, a short, open letter to the garbage thief:

Dear Garbage Thief,

I knew #1 for two years and we had been through many a time together. How his brothers, #2-#5 will miss him. Were you attracted to his black, plastic, droid-type body, or were you drawn to the large #1 on his side, hoping that through him YOU could be #1 as well? He certainly was beautiful, the way that the old trash sludge slid around inside him and the dents on his frame in the right light looked rugged and heroic.

What sort of ninja activity did you engage in to spirit him away? Had you been stalking him for weeks? Did you rearrange the other cans, filling in the gap left by his abduction in the hopes that I’d think that I never actually had a garbage can?

I’m hoping for, but not expecting, any of a number of excuses, that perhaps you and he eloped together and I was too blind to see it coming, that maybe you took him to save a nun from drowning in the mud puddle or to give the orphans a toy for their games of basketball. Perhaps you could not afford the money to make a phone call to the city to get a free sanitation-provided garbage can like I did today.

Whatever the case, I hope you are taking good care of #1, and I’m also hoping you are enjoying the overfull bag of very used kitty litter you have found inside.

Yours truly,
Canless in Seattle