I didn't pursue it. Ten or 12 days later, getting toward Christmas, I got a little package in the mail: from Alexa, just a note, thanks for dinner, and a key chain with one of those glitter-filled magic wands attached, and a key painted with purple nail polish. And a Seattle phone number.
Well, what's a guy to do? I called her. She was in the tub. Great, warm telephone voice. "Thanks for the note. What's the key?" "The key to your heart," she said. Oh. Well, want to get together some time? Sure, how about Saturday? We agreed she'd come up to visit me because I was still feeling much too independent and cocky to go down there. But there must have been something going on with me because when I called the Black Swan to book a table I asked the proprietor to order in a bottle of Roederer Cristal, so I can't claim to have been entirely oblivious.
Rick Dahms
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Next morning over a truck-stop breakfast of biscuits and gravy and long-neck Buds she mentioned that she'd been psychic since adolescence and that she made her living reading the Tarot. So I said, "You should read the cards for me sometime," and she looked at me with these green wolf eyes and said, "I already did." And I said, Oh reaaally, what did they say? And she said, "Well, essentially, they said you were going to lose your heart." And I, still cocky, said, "To whom?" And she just looked at me and shook her head, like "You Kartoffelkopf, you just don't get it, do you?" And I didn't. But I soon did. January 17. We'll have been together 13 years and three months on Monday.
On his readers
I love my readers, they seem to me to be nimble-minded and fun. This always hasn't been true, it certainly wasn't in the '80s, but my audience these days is probably 80 percent kids in their teens and 20s: the generation we've been told were not going to read, the hackers and the slackers. And I think they're great, I love hanging out with them; the kids are all right.
Ten books everybody should read because they're not remotely enlightened until they do
Understanding Media by Marshall MacLuhan
The Archaic Revival by Terence McKenna
The Tao of Physics by Frijdof Capra
The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing Who You Are by Alan Watts
The Masks of God by Joseph Campbell
On Glory Roads by Eleanor Munro
The Banquet Years by Roger Shattuck
The Women's Encyclopedia of Myths and Secrets compiled by Barbara G. Walker
News of the Universe by Robert Bly
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James
Six things I'm glad I wrote
I never go back and read my books; I'm saving that for my golden years. But I retain a strong affection for:
*the passage in Even Cowgirls Get the Blues building up to the first description of Sissy Hankshaw's enormous thumbs
*the opening gambit in Jitterbug Perfume: "The beet is the most intense of vegetables. . . ."
*the bed mite passage from Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas
In the new book I'm fond of:
*the riff on Jahweh and Lucifer settling out of court
*the place on page 272 about making a morning social call without showering: "He'd awakened too late to bathe properly, and Cupid's briny chlorines clung to him like clamskin britches."
*page 314's metaphors in celebration of the hymen
Five men of wisdom and power who set an example for us all
*Alan Watts, the greatest philosopher of the 20th century in his own right, not merely as an interpreter of Eastern systems of liberation. Like very few philosophers, he actually lived his philosophy.
*Morris Graves
*Oscar Wilde, for his example and his writing both. He had an intense social conscience, he was generous to everyone, accurately observant of his time, enlightened in many areas as well as wonderfully witty. He was a great man who happened to fall in love with a jerk.
*Friedrich Nietzsche
*Allan Ginsburg. Somebody was talking about visiting a Third World village and seeing the children suffering from undernourishment and disease, and he said, I just wanted to go up to those children and hug them. And the person he was talking to said, If you'd been Ginsburg you would have.
Seven albums I'd want with me if I was marooned on a desert island
*Dylan: Blonde on Blonde, probably, or Blood on the Tracks
*The opera choruses of Verdi, 'specially the lament of the Hebrew slaves from Nabucco
*Laurie Anderson's Big Science
*The Threepenny Opera (1959 original cast with Lotte Lenya)
*Leonard Cohen's I'm Your Man
*The Beatles' Greatest Hits, if there is such an album; I would choose the one with "All My Loving" and "I Want to Hold Your Hand," because I am convinced that time will prove they are right up there with the best of Schubert.
*Perez Prado's Havana 3 AM, so if I were stuck on the island alone I could dance by myself
Read Tom Robbin's Here in Geoduck Junction.
