4-29-09 Wed. Received your letter-of-invitation yesterday.Dear Joe, Jeff, Joey, Maggie, and Kim:
As beautifully of a fantastic fantasy exercise my attendance at the reunion tantalizes me, the timing for me is all wrong. Just got tomato seeds sprouted, & almost have garden space worked up for planting tobacco, seeds now also in damp soil & will be sprouting toward the end of the first week of May; which just had to be when you guys decided to do this. Now in my 12th year living alone, over six miles up a graveled county road, plus six on pavement to town; as the proverbial Thoreau-like hermit recluse. On $650 monthly social security, I actually have money left over for some fun and games every month—read: buy more pot. But the extreme frugality I exert here just does not allow for me to be blowing the hundreds of $$s such an adventure would cost. My Scot sense of thrift has asserted itself into my ¼ scot thinker/ brain & had a pretty fair time of it, living on so little money; has grown to feel a smug sense of pride to've beaten the system as badly as I have. My only damn bill—and it pisses me off, because the state requires proof-of-insurance before they will renew my driver's license. Otherwise, I'd be able to brag here that I have NO bills—is the $1.20 a day auto insurance premium. The ranch recently retired me from further responsibilities to perform on their behalf, after a decade of them paying me $275 a month to be here! My cabin studio is my own. I built it 12 years ago, bypassing the building permit process entirely, out of almost exclusively re-used materials that I salvaged from the ranch's dump, plus a pile of 2” by 10s, and 8s doug fir cement forms left over from a house my cousin was building at that time, that just sufficed for the 7 eight feet wide walls of my 16 feet diameter septagon—18½ at the roof, because I leaned the walls out 12 degrees to give me more inside overhead storage space. Four feet square plate glass windows in the center of six of the walls and a glass 'patio' front door next to a double-glazed three feet wide unit filling the seventh wall. My cousins have never charged me rent, electricity, water, sewage, garbage, etcetera; and I have not had a phone (nor do I want to) since 1996. No insurance or health care debt, I have often referred to myself in correspondence as the happy camper, suffering (?) from happycamperitis, but calling me a pastoralist follower of nature law will be more accurate. I love it: The only bunch of rather absolute laws and they aren't written; they're just there and have always been there in plain sight for any and all to 'see,' if or when so inclined. I became so inclined early on in this remote, semi-wild corner of southwestern Oregon where I've set up 'shop.' Nine crowfly miles to the ocean, I occasionally can hear the surf rumbling against the shore when the southerlies get to whopping it up in winter.
Haven't played a stitch of music since the mice ate my piano in 2000, & I had to throw it away. I had the durn thang in purr-r-fect tune too. Drat. What have I done? Hey: I'm old now & don't have to do much more than get to the store, hardware, gas station once every 5 days—have made it 8 days once before being driven to have to fire up the (31 year old almost worn out 'beater!') beast & rumble & bounce down the road to the pavement and to town for more tobacco, coffee, cream, gasoline, oil, parts, etc. I've been driving since I was 12 & 14 years old and never have wrecked anything nor have I allowed anyone to run into me—no tickets since 1959, but you know what?: I hate to have to drive with such a passion that I hem & haw & put it off as long as I can force myself to go without. & even though I still do all my own mechanic-ing, I hate getting oily & greasy with petroleum distillates. And you know what?: These are two of only the three things that I will ever admit to truly feeling a hate about. The 3rd? Fool idiots who think that they're running the show, but cannot seem to do other than harm-after-harm. ¶ God, geez: I just have such a monster love in my heart's memory banks for each one of you. And'll die a bit, inside, for being such a putz that I can't just drop everything & go co-mingle for a day & a ½ or 2 down there. The Presidio Yacht Club?! Isn't that kind of hoity-toity for Thep Redlegs? You must have gotten yourself pretty plugged in since I last saw you in Jan.'97 for the Saus. Cruis. Club reunion too-doo, then. Joey: I love you, brother. You were the best drummer I've ever had the sweet pleasure to have had whamming away across stage from. Jeff: U 2, shoogah woogah. Kim: I don't know how I ever felt about you, other than to be glad it was you there & not dozens of other worse bass player wannabees that I have had the sore serious misfortune to have played music with. Maggie: What must I say, can I say, or should, would, or could I say to you that would convey the genuine sense of warmth that swells over my being for an instant or three when your visage comes floating to the surface in my consciousness—I'm blushing, so it must be some sort of a good-enough love . . . Now Joe: I aint even going to begin to try to describe what your images in my mind conjure up, because there are just too many different ways that your presence in my life has influenced and educated me. Grateful, gratitude, gracious admiration, astonished awe at all you've thought and done: a real man, yep, that's it. Well worth looking up to in my humble eyes' feeble brain. ¶ Another reason (or 2) I could throw into this mix of my lament and sorrowful nix on going down there, is some concern I have about how such an adventure might effect further deterioration of some already partially-deteriorated body parts. I'm not dying yet, but stuff is beginning to wear out. Not the big serious stuff, it's just the cumulative effect of aging that has me pretty skeptical about getting overly-enthusiastic about long-distance anything, & a whole helluva lotta short-distance as well. ¶ You all, each and every one of you is enshrined in the book I have written most of, now, but am still in re-writes & revisions. It was titled Hardway, but then Guilty Pleasures seemed a more 'fun' title. Send me your addresses and I will send you the chapter that includes you & us. And when the book actually gets to be more of a book book, then I'll send you each a copy. Just in the outside of outside chances that I somehow figure a way to get my ass down there in one piece in time for the Saus. Cruis. Club's gig, would you please make sure that the key to the lock on their piano will be available. I can still play that son of a bitch, no problem, and remember how great it felt to be playing it over in the corner while the other band was wailing away for show. Send me something interesting that you each have done, are doing or thinking about & I'll respond. No internet here, either; just a computer/ word processor is all.
all my best wishes for you and yours frum: Fourman, P.O. Box 162, Broadbent, OR 97414-0162
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