The Black Sage Journal

Every summer when I was young, my family would vacation in southern Alberta. The neighborhood kids I called my friends all thought it was quite exotic, but the reality was more ordinary. My parents were both from Raymond, a small farming town on the prairie that, aside from its dirt roads and residents who had the habit of ending every sentence with the interjection “eh?,” wasn’t much different than any small town in America. In fact, because of western Canadians’ contempt for the French-speaking eastern provinces that forced them to suffer the indignity of bilingual milk cartons, they viewed themselves as more American than Canadian. So going to Canada for vacation was about as alien and romantic as going to Tehachapi. For my parents, it was an obligation. We typically tried to schedule our visit around the first of July, the Canadian equivalent of Independence Day. That was when aunts, uncles, and cousins that I knew of but didn’t really know all made the pilgrimage to dusty Raymond ...

  My pops has been dead for almost two years now. I was angry at him for those two years too. Not because he died. He held no sway over death. No one does. I was angry at my dad because he didn’t live. Or at least he didn’t live my definition of the term. It was a dark emotion to carry around, particularly given how raw his passing still was. It isn’t proper to feel anger at someone who has recently passed. Sympathy and sadness are the only officially-approved emotions. As a child in particular, you don’t have the right to be mad at a dead parent. Regardless of age. The culturally-engrained and reinforced parent-child hierarchy forbids that kind of rebellion. So I knew my feelings were both impolite and inappropriate. But I just couldn’t help myself. My disobedient spirit wouldn’t allow me to simply let my dad lie.    Before dad died, I knew that day was on the near horizon. Dad had been diagnosed with inoperable and incurable cancer and had quickly been placed on hospice...

Carl Spackler : So I jump ship in Hong Kong and I make my way over to Tibet, and I get on as a looper at a course over in the Himalayas. Angie D. Annunzio : A looper? Carl Spackler : A looper, you know, a caddy, a looper, a jock. So I tell them I’m a pro jock, and who do you think they give me? The Dalai Lama himself. Twelfth son of the Lama. The flowing robes, the grace, bald…striking. So, I’m on the first tee with him. I give him the driver. He hauls off and whacks one – big hitter the Lama – long, into a ten-thousand foot crevasse, right at the base of this glacier. Do you know what the Lama says? Gunga galunga…gunga, gunga-lagunga. So we finish the eighteenth and he’s gonna stiff me. And I say, “Hey Lama, hey, how about a little something, you know, for the effort, you know.” And he says, “Oh, uh, there won’t be any money, but when you die, on your deathbed, you will receive total consciousness.” So I go that goin’ for me, which is nice. _________________________________________...

  "If you're honest, you sooner or later have to confront your values.  Then you're forced to separate what is right from what is merely legal.  This puts you metaphysically on the run. America is full of metaphysical outlaws." -Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker I don’t now recall exactly when I met Frank, but it must have been around 1977 when I was in the 9th grade. Frank didn’t live in my neighborhood and wasn’t a member of “the Ward” so I must have met him at school or through mutual friends. When we first connected, he lived a couple of miles away with his divorcee mom in a small condominium at the corner of Murray Holiday Road and Wander Lane.  I wasn’t very worldly at the time and neither were most of my pals. In large part, that was a result of my conservative upbringing. My parents were both good and obedient members of the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and they were grooming me and my siblings to be the same. Consequently, my friends wer...

  My eyes pop open and I know it’s 5:00 a.m. Without even looking at the clock I know. Because it’s always 5:00 a.m. when Joji sleeps over. The awakening starts with the ritual shaking. The flapping of ears and jowls accompanied by the tinkling of collar tags. Then the huffing and sneezing begins. And the pacing back and forth across the bed. It’s all performative art of course. Joji doesn’t need to clear the stardust from his system. He just wants me to get up. I hold the line, hoping that he’ll go back to sleep if I just ignore his antics long enough. But Joji knows it’s a ruse because he’s seen it before. He also understands that my resistance is no match for his German will and terrier-like determination. So he starts in on the vocalizations. At first, it’s not much more than a series of muffled snorts. As he becomes more insistent, the snorts morph into soft, guttural growls which themselves ultimately evolve into outright barking. The whole thing would be hilarious and endear...