Dead Reckoning LongLiner Notes

DEAD RECKONING (Going Extinct Project)
(For Dennis Callaci,with infinite gratitude) (Also dedicated to synesthesiac
enthusiasts everywhere)
( The Forest 4 the Trees,a song to accompany Chapter 1 ,Adventures of Wonton & Wasabi Vol
1: Going Extinct) (for Marta Beckett)
There's a whole forest of singing birds
They clear your your head
There is the stream even though your feet feel like lead
You keep chasing the bluebirds of happiness you once knew
like you once dreamed there was a theater where she'd paint her audience
on the walls the balconies
and dance Swan Lake for the Amargosa wild horses out in the desert
in an old ghost town
you keep chasing the wild blue yonder down
Putting on costumes and war paint
studying some words you haven't used from a dictionary
and a book of Chance
you would dance Swan Lake
if you knew this time around
you wouldn't fall down ,as if it really mattered
you wouldn't hide, you wouldn't faint
or question are you good enough
a sinner or a saint
these questions have no answers
they are temporary shelters

you visit like old friends you hardly knew them
and you are homeless and look like a depression era
hobo off the rails
partial to the company round a fire
still missing someone
still chasing still making a life
that isn't really yours to lose
or hold onto In the first place
before time erases you.
1.George Jones Pink Pills (Live, Probably a PRS guitar)
2. GOLDEN MEAN
I wonder if that song line on cassette tapes is stringing me along across the miles of
open desert sky
A lineman high on a pole far in the distance a train bell tolls its lonesome sound
like the wolves
What to take and what to leave behind has been the question
all of these come along lately years
What is Fake and what is real has been the question all of these years out here in the
wilderness
(Gonna have to sing my way out while I still can a banjo in my hand with some
leftover
songs in the car (g)love box I stole from a snowman)
If we are only as strong as the weakest link
I can't keep carrying this like a ten ton sack of boulders
can't you see it hurts my shoulders ?
We're gonna have to start a new kind of chain reaction
cause we are the missing link to repair this chain of fools
misadventure
(Sorry it's the way I think whistle down the wind while I work
I know there's a Golden Mean but this ain't the one I've been looking for)
Parking lots littered with lost angel artists shoveling their paintings out of trunks of
black limousines.
THE feather you gave me in the parking lot of our favorite cafe sinking like Venice
Beach
is laying on a blank white notecard next to me

with the letter I wrote in invisible ink but never sent you
until lately
Carried by the last wild passenger pigeons ,they thought they killed em all ,but they
are like the Russian thistle tumbleweed underground.
Escape while I still can on a wing and a prayer while I still can sing real loud in the
car I stole from my dad
Mr. Sandman….keeper of dreams
(Sorry it's the way I think,whistle down the wind while I work…I know there's a Golden
Mean,but this ain't the one I been looking for…
(Golden Mean SOng Written Live 8/23/17 on You Tube. ( all works a result of
struggles with Memorexia,for which there's no cure)
Musical typing,real hummingbirds, usb rockstar mic, macbook circa 2007 still working
after being thrown out of a pick up truck by a child,confident there'd be a newer
shinier one provided by American expires , Out of desperate need for rain and
birdsong. https://youtu.be/bDr-H_U5-OY)
3. MERCURY

Fabric softener sheets cheat the air
Mountain tops are bare in late December
a little ice age everywhere
here the days are everclear
crisscrossed skies like the second coming
any second now we're all behind the time
I'm stuck here broke down in anytown
the trial lawyers bail bondsman diagnosed my cure
you can plead the 5th addict's despair
the prison of anyman's own making
Styrofoam cups stuck on cactus spines
dogs defending crimes hidden behind chain link fences
kids on skateboards hollow stares
outside the library in a mall of broken dreams the stores are bare
the mountains burning there's no snow this year
a day of rain don't take seven days it's seven years of drought in the making
(heads all buried in the sand
I am just an anchor in the storm
bashed around
but still in a holding pattern
Mercury plays tricks on me
tonight we'll see Saturn's rings

and a super moon on the horizon
A waterfall of shooting stars
I wished on them every one
that the long dark nights would soon be gone for everyone
and that everyone could find their way to freedom )
The kingdom you are stubbornly defending
where you are your own worst enemy
it takes so much energy to set your course to hoist the sails
to be once again ascending
to be only another force of nature
a tree bending
a seed unfurling
It takes a human heart so long in the mending
to become a burning meteor circling around the sun.
( This is A ROUND ,chorus meant to be sung by many voices. A PUN A Round the
sun.1/13/18 For Ranger Barnes on his solar return, Poet of the Pasturelands
(Recorded mono on media circa 1967 ,plus 1971 guitar, 1955 red tambourine, 2009
Rock Star Mic USB , Sergei's snare at the end, assorte

d percussion…bell tree ,Vox: Alizarus , Yucca Mesa,Joshua Tree,California . Had fun
blending the chorused guitar with voice in there,an exchange with computers this has
become,so why not include them? Sometimes the voice pings off the guitar like a
planet gone awry,colliding with asteroids.)

4. VENUS
VENUS was high and bright in the heavens
Thought she was a satellite
In the early morning hours on the window pane
I stenciled your name in white
(sprayed from a can of fake snow
to the sound of rain I'm playing on the headphones.)

Come to me like we are on a road trip
Songs are like polished stones
You can skip across oceans holdin your locket cameo
( FIND THE LOST HORSES! SEE YOUR OWN BREATH! PROVE YOU'RE
ALIVE! (said to someone who is Someone speaking
in runes)
Old wine fermenters I am only painting
northern light landscapers now
Magnets in the crows' beaks a steady migration
magnetic tide tables and clouds
(the old folks at home on the porch rocking chairs
now you're one of those saved from certain death)
They who are few would have us all believing,have us all believing
in.
That's why the story I'm telling is BLARNEY
and the story I'm telling's too long
Been busy making deals with devils in glass houses
who live at the crossroads of time.
(the phantom limb you gave me is imaginary it still aches
but it won't leave a scar)
It wasn't just any old car jacking
and it's no ordinary fable of love.
(with a QUESTioning skidmark
when you're on the streets,shameless
homesick,bereft
and it's Christmastime too. )
Making deals with the devils who live out in tinseltown
at the Roadhouse of the Desert Moon.
COME TO ME like an outlaw so I can feel ya in my bones
COME TO ME we'll build a luminaria
save every fire fly we know.
Old Wine Fermenters I am only looking for northern light mainliners
now
Old WIne Fermenters , they are only booking

Southern Cross headliners now (laughter)
Old time fermenters ,I am only looking for northern light longliners
now
Magnets in the crows' beaks MULTIPLICATION
Magnetic time tables and clouds
Magic in the heart beats ,a heavy rotation
Magnetic turntables and crones.
(recorded using built-in mic on aforementioned macbook in a futile
attempt to keep noise threshold down. Loved doing it though for
compatriots at the 2018 WInter Solstice and making a clumsy but
possibly lovable video for it to live in and preserve its message in a
canning jar or a wine bottle corked with a balloon.https://
youtu.be/6ihC7wQU5hk A weather balloon with reference to * Just
Like)Tom Thumb's Blues as annotation.These are the days of the
great Posada,no room at any inn.On the same day,news of a 7
year-old refugee child from Guatemala dying in American custody
at the border. Oh,and snowflake Obsidian,a recurring touchstone. I
like all the references to stones,which only realized after recording
it and that's why I chose the snow fx filter for the video ,because it
looked like snowflake obsidian. Otherwise known as synesthesia or
Marcel Proust's brain condition.)
5. DEAD RECKONING
2AM I AM remembering when in a summer dress in a summer desert solar wind
with a false sense of dead reckoning false omens of monsoons that never come
I never saw you cry and I never stopped crying
Maybe you bottled all your tears up in a jar
saving them up for a special occasion that just hasn't happened yet
when you collect so many things like that like little medals
can't understand in a million years how you can know nothing at all
come back to the beginning find out nothing weighs a ton
I'm off the map. Off the clock
Can't talk to anyone about measurements anymore
It's not that kind of map like the one on your wall
where there's a way back to the Great Woods,wind in the willows sherwood,King

Arthur and Robin Hood
Grandma's House,my house,your house and the little engine that said it could and
the wicked witch of the West
Some things you just can't ignore
it's all just a question of scale
My oars slice silvery water cut in two split the shimmering moon right into twi light
Red tailed hawks soar so high up above
Out paddling way past the civil hour for conversation bar hour 2AM
the magic hour for making movies of a dry drunk who's way over his limit
Sorcerers and Vampires as real as day come out to play here in Californi AY But
there's no real silver bullets
Is it better to have one best day or a string of ho hum drums you don't even play no
more
ANYWAY as you say AS IF WHATEVER just happened though I notice YOU
DON'T SAY
WHATEVER much anymore as a way out as if WHATEVER never happened
ANYWAY.
Old enough to be almost anyone's mother and nobody's baby
Yeah I moved away to a planet where we're listening for sounds and signs of rain
Talking to birds who tell me
don't make the same mistake twice again Measure Once Cut twice have jumper
cables handy
free on the road again after miles of a bad back road what about a balance beam
to calculate the many errors in judgement I made of anyone or anything even proving
to myself by tightrope walking
Old enough to know I ain't in charge of anybody's feelings
and it ain't nobody's business if I do
(Just don't ask me what's in it for you)
Not much call for lone wolves or shape shifting wind walking clouds these days
Who's to say? Could make a picnic, drink a toast under the Mulberry trees out of the
heavy weather storm I've been chasing. My love is not a fragile thing.To think,silly me
I chose this suit of clothes
from an old suitcase long ago the years incarnate only to learn this one thing
how to draw a map of the world that would bring me back to you. Out of the
underworld with the pomegranate and golden thread A new Spring. We'd still be
ahead of the game enough to make our own rules wouldn't that be something ,baby?
(and I 'd still be loving you.This song line is 11 couplets long times 2 once removed
equals me skating a figure 8 on a Northern lake with the loons.)
(A talking blues ,a talkie ! It is an orchestral blues I hear and there are
moments ,movements within,transitions with the droid alter ego helium child voice.
Yucca Valley,California)
CODA A Poem about DEAD RECKONING:

@2AM Version 1 or The Moon is only resting ,void of course….
If you think of me
think of the story you would wish at the end of the book you are
hazily reading ,maybe evenly writing
in a journal you are
secretly hiding
the end of the novelty you wish for me in the end
i will think of an end for you
that's what it is with you and me
frozen thin slices of California sushi
each piece a little thinner than the last
i'll think of summer in a magic garden
abandoned too soon after a rain storm
a phrase en français we can't read anymore
sealed inside a cryptographer's bubble blown
across a beach where we had high hopes once
of these poems being more than
just a subtle influence
or a nuance just a voicing never something
you could declare a new chord or a planet we knew existed
all along so where's the news in that?
I must have dreamed you as a nuance a voicing a voiding course an avalanche
colored my days
with a sunny disposition pentatonic scale like chopsticks
that everyone can play
if they have the heart and soul for it.
some rainy day on a street piano, 3 D illusions in chalked graffiti here today gone
tomorrow
turned into a legal dissertation.
You leave your life
as unfinished sentences hanging phrases ,unanswered flower in buttonhole chance
meetings
familiar tunes with no names
but no table pedigrees and moonlit perigrees no rhapsodies
panamas not pork pies
emulating actors playing Sherlock Holmes british accents
fedoras not sombreros
on a Don Quixote mule now
suddenly tired at the prospect of another windowsill
or surveyor or appraiser
that's a different story
some place else the Chef raises his knife
sharp with obsidian glittering
a Japanese bar of polished granite karaoke

song he whistles through his teeth like sayonara
sung by an all knowing chanteuse who is not well known
unknowable
but only guessing at the answers ,if the truth be told.
Version 2 3 AM
Or think of it as an epic
never ending
the lost poems
found in an old trunk
the ones i never knew you'd written
it was as if you were already familiar with them
like i found Women In Love
in a drawer when I was 10 had to call an ambulance
your heart constricted lying in a bathtub
maybe you were already dead
but they brought you back for an encore
for a while nothing was as it was before
or has been ever since
you making donuts and singing with the radio
in an english country garden a theme song
but whose what where and when
as the cat knocked all the apple blossoms from the trees
you had such high hopes for
that year until moving above a pool hall
abandoned as you described so well
what I was feeling on the beach alone
with my transistor motown and a crush
on a boy who shot peas from a pea shooter
and never gave me the time of day
do we choose the ones
who not so much are playing hard to get
if only you had told me
it was a planetary influence
passing already passed
though the rational choices i made
the few i made when i made them
as if riding my bike up the hill
to your house i took a different way
just for a change got lost
and never found you again
after that day when you stopped believing in my stories
said they were only JUST stories anyway.
As IF we had something
more important to be doing later

and poems could never be a balanced meal for strong and sturdy bones
slow motion tai chi longevity
in the park when you stopped believing in me
or whoever you thought i was or was supposed to be.
Version 3 4AM
MISSING:
- a knit hat with dog ears from the free box
-a book of Neruda and the owl and the pussycat
-the pea green boat
-the wood stove fire for telling stories by
- circling the wagons
-snow falling on a dreamless sleep
-a constellation
-hexagram 65
-two degrees on the compass
-the cardinal points
-indigo buntings
- a storage locker filled with paintings and a river
-5000 books
-a last will and testament
-a shade of blue replaced
the honorable man
-a rock hammer
-a jingle dress
a red selectric typewriter
-the compleat Childe ballades
-a large format rolleiflex
-dual record turntable
-dogs and cats and a magic chicken
-a home
PART 2 (Flip SIde)
6. The Amp & I
7. TWIN
Drivin around this lonesome desert town
Not a lucky penny in my pocket now
Like a fish out of water since you been gone
Lost my color vision chasing a mirage

looked like an ocean I could swim through to get to
your EyeLand fall
Don't tell me it all comes down to money
all the things we do and did not do
There's a guard at this border crossing
telling me there's no way I can get through
with a mouth full of see ya later and I didn't mean the words I said
All the love I've been saving up
All the things I never did say to you
You don't think I know how you feel
but I do
You think I don't know how you're feeling,
but I do, I sure do
Supposing you hate yourself
and love is a stranger comes knocking at your door
late one night
You think she's asking for favors you can't give
Because you think you might lose
What is it you think you're gonna lose,my friend?
Same story on all our faces
Our fall from graces we all once knew
You think I don't know you,but I do
You think I don't know you and who you are
but I do
You are my twin (under the skin)
(Recorded live at a roadhouse with one central mic hung from the cathedral ceiling .
Tucson Bill,bass Kid A ,percussion,Liz electric guitar/vox . It is an improvisation words
and all . Something didn't exist and then it did. There was a small "audience" for this
one so they are a part of it,bless everyone's hearts.)
8. RULES
(Music for Stringbands and Androids.)
If playing by the rules
had an ethical compass
I could buy off the internet
help me see in the dark
turn the headlights on and off and off and on
to get to the truth
of what I will and will not do
I'd do it in a heartbeat.
(If Playing by the Rules
which you will or will not do

what you will or will not do
in getting to the truth
what you will or will not do
in a heartbeat matters. )
If not playing by the rules
made up by someone we never knew
made brainstorming all afternoon
in their room in the basement
is the way we get things done these days
in getting to the truth
what we will or will not do
in a heartbeat matters
(Chorus…)
(Recorded on a phone live December 2018,Joshua Tree the day the song was born.
Banjo,vocoder looping and occasional crack of wood pitch from the wood stove fire
and a truly fantastic group of human beings.I so miss playing with you all. It's kinda
lonesome out here in America.)
9. SKYWRITING
Rolodex in the sky
a card fell out
and it fluttered to the earth
He picked it up on a street in Miami near the beach
and it made him think
about John Lee Hooker
Somewhere cross the country
a woman heard the card falling
and it made a high lonesome whistling sound
as it fell
like the long gone locomotive
steaming through the tunnels
or the tea kettle building up pressure
on the hearth at home
They say heat is energy mass and power
electricity conjures up this planet
spinning backwards faster than before
The promise of a home at the end of the rainbow
where the tea kettle whistles
and it feels like a French cafe caught inside a bell jar
where you can while away the hours
and nobody cares where you are

eading Plath and Eliot
holding poems' unadorned truth
like a desert in your hands
Peeling an orange,eating a peach
roll up your sleeves to give your blood
will there be time enough left for everything?
These are the notes I left for my accompanist
I buried them out in the desert today
These are the notes I left for my accompanist
Skywriting
I'm flying solo now
in my little airplane.
(Recorded on a Motorola Droid Live,Wonder Valley,Mojave Desert,California. Part of
ALizarus in Wonderland Project )

10. WITNESS
The Red Selectric in the kitchen
I always will remember how I left it there.
The Pax Britannica in a flooded water tower
in the god forsaken desert
I was just trying to rescue you
Got stuck in the mud
now watching fast food people
who can't see me behind the glass
so where does that leave me
alone where I always seem to land
The prairie dog the white tailed squirrel pink salmon rivers running pure and free
I've been trying to rescue them to save me
Their life will go on without me just fine
Today it's like an all you can eat buffet
It's gotta end some time
It's now full circle cause I say to myself that it is
So now I'm just trying to rescue me
It started when they wheeled me down that tunnel tranquilized
& I realized it was the same tunnel as a child
was told later I'd been color blind
that proved to me we make the world we see become
Cause I saw all the colors ,the colors I think I see
becoming stars and galaxies
Just trying to rescue dreams
I write letters to dead and dying people
I admire they speak to me
in an immortal language of wilderness and love
I run a distillery for divine fools

only a few come by to visit me they never stay on the open road
where love takes you. But I always keep the light on
a candle burning always hoping you'll come visit me
Hoping you'll send a love letter back to me
(before it's late)
I'm just trying to rescue me
I'm just trying to rescue you
I'm just trying to rescue them to save me
I'm just trying to rescue dreams (the hour is late)
(background ….love,love ,love will save us)
(Super lo fi on Macbook with usb mic .These recordings don't sound too good on
earbuds(too compressed). Monitoring with cheap Sony headphones,so that would be
at least normative listening experience.Only choice for mixing is relative volume,eq
and panning. What does this sound like on good reference monitors? Is there really
such a thing as normalization of sound? Oh well! Also,these recordings have gone
through a format spin dry to reach your unsuspecting ears,and are all over the map
so to speak. Mp3,Aiff ,some the raw tracks lost forever,hard drives that got rained on
etc. Such is life.Do your best with what is given!)
11. BUDDHA AT THE CROSSROADS
He's been carving a buddha
with a chainsaw
for a few years now
The old wood is cracking
he gets up from his sickbed
to see if he can stop
the cracking under pressure
the old wood
to see if he could calm down his angry mind
that wants to create and then destroy
like a god.
Is he carving the buddha
to replace the blown up buddhas
at the crossroads?
So many pilgrims passed them
A thousand years in a single detonation gone
Are we planting our gardens
to replace the beauty of the walled Persian paradise?
Am I singing this song to remind me
that I took the path with heart
and then I lost the way?
The ancient story with its riddles and its
magic locks and keys

Do you already know who's calling when the telephone rings?
And have you felt the spirit ascending
when someone you love becomes a ghost?
(Recorded late one cold night in Pinyon Pines,California using a borrowed guitar and
harmonica . Even with a roaring fire,it was freezing. There is a video of a live version
of this in Idyllwild ,California with the buddha.I declared the site an Artists' Park that
day despite its For Sale sign.https://youtu.be/aqscqPgjhBY)

12. ALEXANDRIA
My banjo's in the pawnshop
the phone is finally cut off
the children who were never ours
are finally grown up
The fuzzy lines in blue
we drew around maps of the world
North faces ,polar bears and penguins
great expectations of our youth
If it's not to be today
then it'll be tomorrow
We have every frame of reference ever known
Unlocked the secrets of Alexandria not so long ago
The lighthouse and the library
Millions of books we haven't read
We're post the big extinction
It hurts to be human evolution
The unknown heroine sings a ballad and
is hard to see
in a life sequestered from his story
The armies just beyond the lawn
the apples falling.

Detail of Remedios Varo painting "Harmony"
BONUS: Live video performance of Under Milkweed and the Magpie Songs The
volume on the phone broadcasting is loud so recommend turning it down,if we can't
fix it in the meantime. (Tip: The auto generated Closed Captioning translation is a
hoot) https://youtu.be/LRORL21YaOI
Set List: (Begins at 18:00. Beforehand ,as audience drifting in, recommend playing at
2 X speed for a laugh. ) 1. Knockin 2.Debit/Credit 3. Abandoned (a poem) 4.Runaway
Train 5. Riverboat Man (For Charles Kading & Huck Finn) 6.Dead Ringers 7.Rodeo
Romeo (wage slave) 8.Certain Light segues into In a Certain Light 9.3-D Printed

Plastic Shaman 10. Under Milkweed & The Magpie Song 11. The Mandela Effect
(Poem)