Wednesday, October 12, 2005

INTERFERON FUNNY GUY: PART 15

WEEK 15

This week I spaced my appointment with Dr. Bartley. Two more weeks before I get the word if treatment is working or not.

We went to Santa Paula in Ventura Co. on Sunday to Faulkner Farms Pumpkin Patch. It really is an awesome trip. The drive is beautiful through the hilly landscape north and west of L.A. It is a different California than sprawling Los Angeles. No freeway tie-ups, just clear sailing through picturesque rich farmland and terraced hillsides that call up the vision of a time when California was a crop-producing center of the West. There countless Mexican immigrants cleared land then sowed, tended, and harvested the produce of what must have seemed to be paradise. We flock to its aura with a small hoard of Metropolitans as though we had entered a museum of quaint and extinct culture. It is so refreshing. Leave the cell phone in the car, this is the hallowed glorious past. As all the originals tend to be swallowed up by capital seeking control and more capital, a precious few of us have located a truly gratifying weekend remnant of something honorable and uncomplicated. Faulkner Farm is 125 years old. It maintains a research facility for ecological study. There are hayrides, pony rides, music, barbeque, corn on the cob, cider, pumpkin pie, animals, sunflower fields, and some handsome looking Faulkner lasses to serve you. We happened to discover this place last year and remembered to come back again. Each year I buy a few fruit crate labels from an elderly Hispanic man and his wife. Some of his labels are so rare and beautiful that they are priced at hundreds of dollars apiece. The ones I buy are 3 for $20. The paintings/ pictures on them are indescribably beautiful in their design and content - very art deco. Of course, we bought pumpkins, and made stops at roadside fruit stands too. Maybe every place has a harvest celebration of its own. Ours is pretty special, and it gives us Californians a touch of reality we need.

I’m still having trouble with my skin. I itch all the time, all over. It’s like measles or chickenpox, but not those things. It’s enough to drive you mad. My lip continues to bother me, as it still isn’t right. I can’t wait to know if I’m getting rid of the virus. So, I wait just the same. And yes, I’m tired a lot of the time, but gotten used to that. I can only maintain a faith that one day I can get free of this pharmacological lifestyle, and clean the medicine cabinet of all the little brown plastic vials.

Lots of old friends from the past are coming into my picture. People I hardly thought I’d ever see or talk to again are in my life again. A distant relative has come forward with startling information about my family that had been lost in the web of time. It’s a time of return to the beginning. It’s a time of return to the source; APOCATESTASIS. Thirtysix years ago Raeanne Rubinstein did a center spread photo collage of me in The East Village Other, an underground newspaper from lower Manhattan. She titled the piece APOCATESTASIS, a Greek word meaning return to the source. I never understood what I had to do with that. I saw Raeanne last year at our show at The House of Blues in Anaheim. When I asked her about the East Village Other photo piece, she said she didn’t remember it.

Talk more next week. M.D.

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sdRay said...
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