"Mention With Care"

Here’s exactly what happened.  

Mentioned with awe, and a humbling respect.  

As the elegant/slash/turning-ethnically Jewish-on-a-dime comedian Myron Cohen would describe it, I was “perambulating the thoroughfare” of Santa Monica California.  

By the “voddah”, no less.  (Meaning the Pacific.)

As I casually proceed – it is exercise, but I don’t push it – the invisible beachside Mariachi band, cousins to the identical, sacred mountain-dwelling ensemble at Rancho La Puerta, is regaling me with the newly-minted melody their Mariachi amigos sang me, culminating the “Woodlands” hike, on the last day of my visit.

The song went like this:

“We’re very glad you came

Hope you come back next year

Go live a happy life

And drink Tecate beer.” *

(* The Ranch is situated outside Tecate.)

Apparently, itinerant Mariachi bands, especially the invisible variety, unable to meet their financial obligations, augment their incomes with subsidizing “Product Placement.” (An alternate enterprising verse rhymes, “… stay a while” with “Tecate tile.”  For tea-tottling bathroom remodelers.)

Besides the demonstrated value of exercise – I hope that that’s true; otherwise, I’m missing television for nothing – I walk at the beach to commune with the wise and nourishing spirit of the ocean.  The ocean. The mountains.  The desert.  They are all the same thing.  The only difference is “taller”, “dryer” and “saltier.”

Beyond “It’s good for your heart”, I ask nothing of a walk but the walk itself.  

Honest.

I do not go to the beach, or on various alternate walks, believing a relaxing outdoor stroll will open my mind to new and necessary blog post ideas.  Expecting  inspirational certainly from a walk is the perfect recipe for imaginatorial failure. 

So I do not do that.

I mean it.

Though I get ideas on those occasions, surprisingly frequently.

Still, “Here I am. Pour on the blog post ideas”?

No.

I am simply there for the walk.

I hope that was sufficiently persuasive.  And I do not mean to you.  As I may have previously mentioned, there is a mysterious mechanism involved here I know better than to cross.

I don’t even like talking about this.  The process works, you leave it alone.  Otherwise, one day, you turn the spigot, and suddenly, there’s the gagging report of a totally dry well.

And then you can’t write anymore.  You are inarguably out of bullets.  The only way to receive needed replacements is, legitimately down to your core, 

Not to expect them.

Maybe other writers can deliberately think up ideas.  Me, I have to wait patiently till they externally arrive.  If for some reason they stop coming – including expecting they won’t– then I guess it’s golf.  Or some other desperate distraction from murkier mental meanderings, conjuring thoughts of a “Shiva”, the inevitable “Deli Platter” signaling, “That’s him, then.”

Still… because it was so amazing I had to tell you about it…

I am perambulating the thoroughfare of Santa Monica California, warmly content with a reprise of my latest Rancho La Puerta “Send-Off Song” played by the originators’ identical cousins, when, resulting from literally no active effort on my part – “active effort” being the poisoning Kryptonite of this delicate procedure – suddenly, within the course of five minutes, two new blog posts ideas float consecutively into my mind, one about a song, disclosing the buried reason for my unlikely career track (“When You Wish Upon A Star”) and one – that, again entirely on its own, became a recent two-parter, concerning a decades-old botched TV performance, derailed by a hostile fusillade of abuse. 

Before that fortuitous walk at the beach, there was no flicker of awareness of either of those ideas.

And then – I can only describe it as magically – 

There they were.

And I thought – at the risk of displeasing… whoever’s running this, quoting Sullivan’s Travels, “cockeyed caravan” – 

I would pass that experience along.

Not hoping there’s more of them.

Only hoping there mightbe.

Two ideas floated into my head.

And now, here's this third one.

Arriving unbidden, as a bonus.