Backwards Through the Peralta Creek

Don Carpenter is (arguably) the best 20th century novelist you never heard of. His books are long out of print. He killed himself in 1995. Shot himself one summer day. They didn't find his body for a couple of days so it bloated and festered. Which is exactly the type of detail you might expect to find in one of his books.

Anyway, in the extraordinarily vivid dream I had early this morning, Don Carpenter and I had undertaken a mapping project together which involved plotting the courses of the creeks running in culverts underneath the Fruitvale neighborhood in Oakland.

In the early nineties, I had lived in this very neighborhood. In a very cute, very old little cottage – rumor had it that this cottage at one time had been an outbuilding on the huge Peralta land-grant, part of the 45,000 acres granted to Luis Peralta in the twilight of Alta California. A few blocks away moldered the Peralta House itself, an old adobe with a hideous Gothic Victorian façade. I understand that a state bond has since been passed and the house, refurbished, is now a local park.

Right behind my cottage flowed the Peralta Creek. It was a hideous combination of garbage dump and a shooting gallery, yet enchanting in its own way: wild watercress and other exotic herbs grew along its banks and on Sunday mornings you would see groups of Vietnamese harvesting the plants. (Or maybe they were Laotians. I watched from a distance. They all had those red strings around their wrists – that's Hmong, isn't it?)

Anyway, in my dream the Peralta Creek had utterly disappeared and Don Carpenter was the only person who believed me when I said it had once been there. And I was getting more and more frantic trying to prove its existence. I had hit upon this novel means of persuasion: it was defined by its very absence! Think about it! Everything else that doesn't exist could exist if the conditions were right. But the Peralta Creek! There wasn't even speculation about it.

"Right, right," said Don, nodding smoothly. I think he was managing me the way all crazy people have to be managed. You pretend to speak their language. "But see, here's the thing. In his own lifetime, Vincent Van Gough was a failure."

"So what?" I said.

But Don Carpenter kept looking at me expectantly as though it was obvious what he was telling me and he didn't want to insult my intelligence explaining it.

And then I woke up.

A very Jungian dream…

###

A few hours before, raging insomnia had coaxed me into watching Wall Street. What a bad movie. B woke up right in time to catch Gordon Gecko's famous monologue. He chanted it along with Michael Douglas, "Greed is good."

"So," B asked conversationally during the commercial break, "do you think Michael Douglas is the one who corrupted Charlie Sheen? I mean, Michael Douglas was a famous sex addict, wasn't he? Before he married Whatshername. Zorro's girlfriend."

"I don't know," I said. "I kinda like Darryl Hanna's outfit. That red suit with the herringbone stripe. But that's the only thing I like about this movie. Why does Oliver Stone have a career?"

"Well, he doesn't. Anymore."

"How many hours a day do you think people spend watching television."

B laughed. "A lot! Look at you! I think it's a distraction designed to keep intelligent people from realizing we live at the behest of a corrupt corporate oligarchy. You don't have to have a life if you have a video-enabled I-Phone and three seasons of Lost!"

Shortly after he fell back to sleep.

It took me another episode and a half of that strange show about the crooked cop starring that actor who was once The Commish but then took steroids.

###

A few hours before that, I was driving Robin to karate and he was complaining about the house.

"So-o-o what you're saying is that you're ashamed of the house –"

"Well, yeah," said Robin.

"— and that's why you don't have your friends over."

"Well, sometimes I have Wells over. But Jojo and Gigi –" the Colton Middle School Italian posse. He shook his head. "They're really rich."

I sigh. "Well, you're not wrong about the house being an incredible dump. I never have time to fix it up. And your father's aesthetic tastes tend to run to circus posters and vintage Socialist petitions."

"The thing is, it smells," said Robin. "Like dogs."

"Well, yeah," I said. "You could wash the dogs, of course."

"I'm not a maid," said Robin loftily.

This is a thing that really infuriates me about Robin. He feels so goddamn entitled. When Max was Robin's age, B came down really hard on him about doing his chores. Max had to take out the garbage; clean the bathroom; walk, feed and bath the dogs before he saw a nickel of his allowance.

Robin is just so unpleasant to deal with when he's made to do something he doesn't want to do that it's easiest just to do those things myself. I'm not doing him any favors, I realize. I'm doing myself one.

Except I'm so busy eking out the revenue to run this operation that household maintenance and upkeep never gets done.

###

And a few hours before that I was cruising around town running errands – bank deposit, Little Store rent check, a package to be mailed to a place called Plantation, Florida. I wondered idly whether there's an African American population in Plantation, Florida, whether the word "plantation" is -- or can become in the near future -- politically incorrect. The dogs are in the car too; when the errands are over, I'm going to run them on the northern side of the beach since most unaccountably, the animal control people have suddenly decided to start enforcing leash laws on the southern side of the beach. I'm hoping the city of Monterey goes bankrupt in the near future and the animal control people all lose their jobs. The northern side of the beach isn't nearly as nice as the southern side of the beach although you do get to watch jellyfish in the tides like so:



Anyway I am listening to Dr. Dean on KGO. Dr. Dean is describing this graph that National Geographic just put together that compiles all the number of human beings who died in the 20th century due to war or war-related causes. Number is something like 80 million people. It's a staggering number until you consider how many billions of people lived on this planet in the 20th century.

And it hit me. War is completely natural. War is the planet's way of reducing the population.

And I began to cry because even though the murderous chimpanzee is the primate with whom I share the most chromosomal loci, I don't want war to be completely natural.

I don't want there to be this many people either.

How can I be special when there are ten billion other people whose inner life is just as intense and absorbing as my own?