Howling of the Wolves

I am sitting in the College Market — a bookstore and coffeeshop that I established nearly 35 years ago and it is still going strong. The owners who took over after me were lackluster (to be very generous). They were uncreative and not nice people. The current owner and manager seem to be great. The place has a nice vibe, good energy, and a consistent stream of customers.

And now all these years later I am sitting here working on a novel that I literally first started thinking about around the same time as I started the Market. This goddamned story has been germinating for that long. It needs to get out and find its way onto paper. I say this knowing that authors will likely be obsolete before I even get published — AI robots will be doing all the book signings very soon now. Little fuckers that they are. 

We had a great little mini-western trip. But now back into reality. Ram and I are pushing hard on TOOM. Trying to build a mobile app that finds traction in a crowded space. Hopefully by January we will have a product to debut. Our app is at the crossroads of e-commerce and social media — and is based purely on exercising gestures of kindness towards one another. No devious algorithms to divide our users with manufactured drama. 

To this end, we meet on-line with our development and design team every night at 11:30pm. This is late for me but managing. Will probably need to make a trip to India before end of year.

Brit and I took a monster 18-mile hike up East Fork Trail to the top of Scout Mountain, then around the mountain  and down Crestline and back up to our car. It was a warmish sunny day and we had amazing views over Arbon and Marsh Valleys. A lovely day in the mountains before going down to watch rugby. 

Stunningly beautiful day here today. Blue sky with only a hint of a whisper of a thread of a cloud way out somewhere over Indiana. I got here early to read the paper, maybe write a bit. Next I will meet Brit and Marti at the dog park. I haven’t seen Marti for 8 days which is a LONG time. I miss her. Once we reunite we will head to our own home and unpack and then join the family for a Labor Day shindig. 

Marti and I reunited and then hustled over to BDR to check on progress. In a word. Amazing. I suppose the playfulness and neato factor of a treehouse never fully leaves a man. Because I am in fact, building a tree house. A very modern, very comfortable, and not inexpensive treehouse. But it is going to be so cool. 

I’m now reading ‘Echo Loba’. I picked it up in Jackson Hole as my obligatory book purchase from every single independent bookstore I enter. This particular store is one of my favorites. Echo is informative and interesting and immensely heart-breaking. Wolves have been misunderstood and demonized by white people for hundreds of years. Indigenous cultures simply are more at peace with nature and balance than we are, with our singular focus on greed and accumulation. We have killed wolves by the hundreds and thousands with bullets and poison. And not just kill them outright, but create a sort of torture by disrupting the pack dynamics. Killing the alpha completely confuses the pack and they often disband or starve or wander alone without food.

We have done this because ranchers and farmers continue to characterize wolves as dangerous predators who eat their lifestock. That happens far less than what we are led to believe. Rarely in fact. And nearly always because we have disrupted their hunting territories or otherwise pushed the wolves into vulnerable positions where they have no choice but to come close to humans. They are smart and know that being near humans is nearly always bad for them. So they only come around when they have no choice.

In the modern environment, these ranchers and farmers are wealthy. Many are millionaires and some many times over. And they are compensated for wolf kills on their herd. They are made whole. Yet they continue to propagate this myth. As recently as 2021, Idaho authorized the killing of up to 90% of their wolf population. 

I really really really hate this. I mourn the loss of most humans less than a vulnerable animal that is mistreated or viciously hunted and finally killed after being fully exhausted and fighting for its life. It sickens me to be part of this species that is manically committed to the destruction of all the life forms on the planet in pursuit of wealth and power — and which mostly does not bring happiness to the architects of the destruction. Does Elon Musk seem happy to you? Bezos? Larry Ellison? Miserable sons of bitches down to the last one. 

I partied with a couple of Exxon Mobile executives once at a private suite in a luxurious hotel in Hong Kong. These dipshits were whining and dining clients and hooking them up with booze and women and generally trying their best to act like players, but came across as community college frat-house nerds. I work with a lot of execs now and in the past and I find that characterization true far more than not. Most are dim and uncreative and only marginally effectual. 

I read a very interesting passage by Also Leopold — one of the earliest and most influential environmentalists and activists. He was raised in Minnesota and came of age in the early 1900’s and so was a hunter. But an experience when he was young completely changed his view of animals and nature and thus began his new journey. 

“In those days we had never heard of passing up a chance to kill a wolf. In a second we were pumping lead into the pack, but with more excitement than accuracy; how to aim a steep downhill shot is always confusing. When our rifles were empty, the old wolf was down, and a pup was dragging a leg into impassable side-rocks”.

“We reached the old wolf in time to watch a fierce green fire dying in her eyes. I realized then, and have known ever since, that there was something new to me in those eyes—something known only to her and to the mountain. I was young then, and full of trigger-itch; I thought that because fewer wolves meant more deer, that no wolves would mean hunters’ paradise. But after seeing the green fire die, I sensed that neither the wolf nor the mountain agreed with such a view”

“Since then I have lived to see state after state extirpate its wolves. I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anaemic desuetude, and then to death. I have seen every edible tree defoliated to the height of a saddlehorn. Such a mountain looks as if someone had given God a new pruning shears, and forbidden Him all other exercise. In the end the starved bones of the hoped-for deer herd, dead of its own too-much, bleach with the bones of the dead sage, or molder under the high-lined junipers.”

Marti is sitting in the chair where she sits while I am in my chair reading or writing in the early mornings. It is in fact, her chair in every sense. Speaking of wolves. My other home in Ohio is a small town that has a loud siren that goes off when there is an emergency such as a car crash or a fire or something that needs to alert people to be aware or call in the volunteer firefighters. When that siren goes off, Martini runs outside and howls into the air. There is no way to hear that howl and deny her heritage. She is nearly a pint-sized wolf in dna and in demeanor. And she is letting her ancestors know she is still here and ready to be called up when necessary. We are her pack now, such as it is. We are inferior in every way to wolves, but we do the best we can.

Earlier this year, I went through a few months of dark depression and anxiety. The manifestation for me is nearly always breathing difficulties. I can’t seem to bring enough oxygen into my lungs no matter how deeply I breathe. This goes on for 10 minutes or so, me growing increasingly anxious as my labored deep breaths leave me short of oxygen. Finally, at some point, I seem to tip over the edge and my oxygen levels are restored for the moment, and then the cycle begins again. I lived with this for years and years until a spiritual healer in Sydney in 2004 ‘cured me‘.

But this year it has returned. Not systemically, but occasionally. 

In the first chapter of ‘Echo Loba’, the author describes in detail the various ways humans have killed wolves by the thousands (guns, poison, traps, helicopters etc). I immediately started having trouble breathing. I had to put the book down. 

I watched a documentary called ‘Happy People. A Year in the Taiga’. The dogs follow their masters, who are on snowmachines, on long treks — all day and all night. Up to 150km at a time. The dogs running faithfully behind through the deep snow. 

They are better than us.

I’m sitting on the deck pretending to write. Brittany is pretending to watch ‘Breaking Bad’. Both of us are looking at the river flowing below us, winding its way eventually to the Mississippi and the  Gulf of Mexico.

Some words of wisdom from the Great poet philosopher Charles Bukowski. A man I return to often for a dose of hardscrabble reality. Buk viewed the world from a very different angle and yet still somehow conveyed a soft sort of compassion and generosity while simultaneously poking fun at status quo. He lived a hard life of booze, cigarettes, gambling, day labor jobs, women, and dive bars. And, always, reading, writing and listening to classical music.

The courage it takes to live that sort of hard life in exchange for freedom of decision is interesting to me. I’ve always craved solitude and more freedoms of choice, but never had the courage to turn away completely.

1. Great art is horse shit, buy tacos.
2. An intellectual says a simple thing in a hard way. An artist says a hard thing in a simple way.
3. Find what you love and let it kill you.
4. Sometimes you climb out of bed in the morning and you think, I’m not going to make it, but you laugh inside – remembering all the times you’ve felt that way.
5. People run from rain but sit in bathtubs full of water.
6. Baby, I said, I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.
7. I guess the only time most people think about injustice is when it happens to them.
8. The tigers have found me and I do not care.
9. And yet women –– good women –– frightened me because they eventually wanted your soul, and what was left of mine, I wanted to keep.
10. Bad taste creates many more millionaires than good taste.
11. The nine-to-five is one of the greatest atrocities sprung upon mankind. You give your life away to a function that doesn’t interest you.
12. I wanted the whole world or nothing.
13. How the hell could a person enjoy being awakened at 6:30AM, by an alarm clock, leap out of bed, dress, force-feed, shit, piss, brush teeth and hair, and fight traffic to get to a place where essentially you made lots of money for somebody else and were asked to be grateful for the opportunity to do so.
14. Sometimes you just have to pee in the sink.
15. If you get married they think you’re finished and if you are without a woman they think you’re incomplete.
16. Poetry is what happens when nothing else can.
17. The free soul is rare, but you know it when you see it – basically because you feel good, very good, when you are near or with them.
18. I want so much that is not here and do not know where to go.
19. My beer drunk soul is sadder than all the dead Christmas trees of the world.
20. In my work, as a writer, I only photograph, in words, what I see.
21. If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind. It could mean not eating for three or four days. It could mean freezing on a park bench. It could mean jail. It could mean derision. It could mean mockery–isolation. Isolation is the gift. All the others are a test of your endurance, of how much you really want to do it. And, you’ll do it, despite rejection and the worst odds. And it will be better than anything else you can imagine. If you’re going to try, go all the way. There is no other feeling like that. You will be alone with the gods, and the nights will flame with fire. You will ride life straight to perfect laughter. It’s the only good fight there is.
22. What matters most is how well you walk through the fire.
23. We are here to drink beer. We are here to kill war. We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that death will tremble to take us.
24. Dogs and angels are not very far apart.
25. Anything is a waste of time unless you are fucking well or creating well or getting well or looming toward a kind of phantom-love-happiness.
26. Genius might be the ability to say a profound thing in a simple way.
27. People are strange: they are constantly angered by trivial things, but on a major matter like totally wasting their lives, they hardly seem to notice.
28. You begin saving the world by saving one man at a time; all else is grandiose romanticism or politics.
29. The best often die by their own hand just to get away, and those left behind can never quite understand why anybody would ever want to get away from them.
30. Some people never go crazy. What truly horrible lives they must live.
31. I don’t like the clean-shaven boy with the necktie and the good job. I like desperate men, men with broken teeth and broken minds and broken ways. They interest me. They are full of surprises and explosions.
32. Beware of those who seek constant crowds; they are nothing alone.
33. He asked, What makes a man a writer? Well, I said, it’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or jump off a bridge.
34. In this land some of us fuck more than we die but most of us die better than we fuck.
35. I loved you like a man loves a woman he never touches, only writes to, keeps little photographs of.
36. We drink our coffee and pretend not to look at each other.
37. Still, I kept thinking about Lydia. The good parts of our relationship felt like a rat walking around and gnawing at the inside of my stomach.
38. The worst thing for a writer is to know another writer, and worse than that, to know a number of other writers. Like flies on the same turd.
39. Why was it that every time you saw a woman like that you were with another woman?
40. But your eyes –– they’re beautiful. They’re wild, crazy, like some animal peering out of a forest on fire.
41. Human relationships were strange. I mean, you were with one person a while, eating and sleeping and living with them, loving them, talking to them, going places together, and then it stopped. Then there was a short period when you weren’t with anybody, then another woman arrived, and you ate with her and fucked her, and it all seemed so normal, as if you had been waiting just for her and she had been waiting for you. I never felt right being alone; sometimes it felt good but it never felt right.
42. I heard a long insane wail like a wolverine shot in the arctic snow and left to bleed and die alone…
43. The lobster tasted good in my mouth, and I drank him down with fine wine. Good fellow. I always liked you in your pink-red shell, dangerous and slow.
44. It was best to stay away from other writers and just do your work…
45. People were usually much better in their letters than in reality. They were much like poets in this way.
46. There isn’t a better way to drink than at a small table over a white tablecloth with a good-looking woman.
47. Fiction is an improvement on life.
48. I’m just an alcoholic who became a writer so that I would be able to stay in bed until noon.
49. I was sentimental about many things: a woman’s shoes under the bed; one hairpin left behind on the dresser; hair ribbons; walking down the boulevard with them at 1:30 in the afternoon, just two people walking together; the long nights of drinking and smoking; talking; the arguments; thinking of suicide; eating together and feeling good; the jokes; the laughter out of nowhere; feeling miracles in the air; being in a parked car together; comparing past loves at 3am; being told you snore; hearing her snore; mothers, daughters, sons, cats, dogs; sometimes death and sometimes divorce; but always carrying on, always seeing it through; reading a newspaper alone in a sandwich joint and feeling nausea because she’s now married to a dentist with an I.Q. of 95; racetracks, parks, park picnics; even jails; her dull friends; your dull friends; your drinking, her dancing; your flirting, her flirting; her pills, your fucking on the side and her doing the same; sleeping together.
50. But then if you lied to a man about his talent just because he was sitting across from you, that was the most unforgivable lie of them all, because that was telling him to go on, to continue which was the worst way for a man without real talent to waste his life, finally. But many people did just that, friends and relatives mostly.
51. Hello, Death. But I’ve had almost 6 decades. I’ve given you so many clean shots at me what I should have been yours long ago. I want to be buried near the racetrack… where I can hear the stretch run.
52. Sandra is the slim tall ear-ringed bedroom damsel dressed in a long gown, she’s always high in heels, spirit, pills and booze.
53. My 6 foot goddess makes me laugh the laughter of the mutilated who still need love.
54. She was always thinking of sex, she carried it around with her like something in a paper bag.
55. Your boys can keep your virgins give me hot old women in high heels with asses that forgot to get old.
56. Your poems about the girls will still be around 50 years from now when the girls are gone, my editor phones me.
57. She’s from Texas and weighs 103 pounds and stands before the mirror combing oceans of reddish hard which falls all the way down her back to her ass.
58. When I think of her life and compare it to other lives more dazzling, original and beautiful I realized that she has hurt fewer people than anybody I know (and by hurt I simply mean hurt). She has had some terrible times, times when maybe I should have helped her more for she is the mother of my only child and we were once great lovers, but she has come through, like I said she, has hurt fewer people than anybody I know, and if you look at it like that, well, she has created a better world. She has won. Frances, this poem is for you.
59. She knew what she wanted and it wasn’t me.
60. I know this poet: he’s just like the rest of us: he’ll vomit anywhere for money.
61. That’s what they want: a God damned shows a lit billboard in the middle of hell. That’s what they want, that bunch of dull inarticulate safe, dreary admirers of carnivals.
62. And if you have the ability to love, love yourself first.
63. And nobody finds the one but they keep looking crawling in and out of beds.
64. I could have had her once. I wonder if she thinks I could have saved her?
65. They disgust me, the way they wait for death with as much passion as a traffic signal.
66. Watching the bull get the matador, that’s the best.
67. I saw a beautiful blonde girl embrace a young man there and kiss him with what seemed hunger and I stood and watched until they broke away.
68. When I think of myself dead, I think of someone making love to you when I’m not around.
69. And you invented me and I invented you and that’s why we don’t get along.
70. There is always one woman to save you from another.
71. We see it too late: after the cock gets swallowed the heart follows
72. She’s got red hair like lightning from heaven.
73. I am going to die alone just the way I live.
74. I was a man who thrived on solitude; without it I was like another man without food or water. Each day without solitude weakened me.
75. Cheer up. Maybe you’ll be famous after you’re dead.
76. Look at his hands. He has the most beautiful hands. You can see that he has never worked.
77. I took the salt and the pepper, seasoned the broth, broke the crackers into it, and spooned it into my illness.
78. When you drank the world was still out there, but for the moment it didn’t have you by the throat.
79. I’m a genius but nobody knows it but me.
80. As usual Carmen was wearing a very tight knitted dress that fit her like a balloon fits the trapped air, maybe tighter.
81. We really had nothing to do but drink wine and make love.
82. She was desperate and she was choosey at the same time and, in a way, beautiful, but she didn’t have quite enough going for her to become what she imagined herself to be.
83. Some people don’t like anybody who is famous. Some people don’t like anybody who isn’t.
84. In the sun and in the rain, in the day and in the night, pain is a flower, pain is flowers, blooming all the time.
85. All people start to come apart finally and there it is: just empty ashtrays in a room or wisps of hair on a comb in the dissolving moonlight.
86. When things get bad enough, the kitten will kill the lion.
87. Death comes slowly like ants to a fallen fig.
88. My typewriter at this hour would scream like a raped bear.
89. It is hard to find a man whose poems don’t finally disappoint you.
90. She’s more dangerous than all the armies of all time.
91. Forget my brother, I am my own keeper.
92. There is loneliness in this world so great that you can see it in the slow movement of a clock’s hand.

Humbly Submitted
Robert Myres – Flanker, Portneuf Valley Rugby Football Club (ret.)