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1.

It is a funny feeling – funny strange – when someone threatens one.

It is a less funny feeling, ha ha, when she is right.

No. It wasn't Tere.

Someone else. Someone else threatened to erase me from the poetry group that I've been reading with for over a year, now. The organizer threatened to erase me IF I don't charge money for a personal reading I arranged on my own.

After all I've done, she said, to get people to pay for poets, as artists, I can't have you going off on your own for free.

I froze. She was right. I knew she was right.

How much should I charge, I asked.

She told me.

But I think, to myself, afterwards, nonetheless, that...

That that that I can smell the end of the road coming.

That our two roads are diverging in the woods and we won't be walking together much longer.

The one thing I have learned from years of quietly watching groups, groups of friends and work groups and arts groups and writing groups, is that any and all human groups have their beginnings and middles and ends. That people always Always ALWAYS come AND go.

And I feel now that my time is coming. Soon.

2.

I've felt for several days that something was up. Something about her emails were... was... different. Come to find out tonight when I see her at the magazine presentation in CECUT that I took too much time Friday night. Twenty-five minutes, she says, instead of ten. I honestly had no idea. I thought I had timed it pretty well. But no. Then, after I had apologized for that, she let the real shoe fall.

If I undermine her work, I will be deleted. Erased. Doubleplus ungood refs unpersons, as Winston Smith was told in 1984. No. Ungood. Doubleplus ungood.

And of course, it's my fault, San Andreas. Hit the road, Jack.

3.

Earlier this afternoon at sunset I was standing on the pedestrian bridge over the river, the one that runs between the Plaza Rio shopping mall and the palaces and gardens across the river. Earlier this afternoon as the sun sinks toward the horizon at 5:15 or something I am guessing you already know my time sense is way off well I stand there looking at the concrete river channel that now has a healthy stream (well, actually unhealthy and polluted) a fierce little stream rather let us say yes anyway a tough little stream of water running down the middle groove. I look down at it and upstream and then downstream while the sun sinks (wrong, the Earth turns) and I feel this whole feeling like of something ending.

I wonder if this might be my last year in Tijuana. Somehow I can sense forces in movement. Something is changing, I say to myself, wondering if it be only the Sun going down and the Moon growing crescent in the west, or if it is my old life that is changing, if I am about to transform something fundamental, basic, total, all.

This is the year my father died. I had thought I would stay in Tijuana for ten years, but...

Then the threat to be erased. If I don't charge money. And she was right. I should charge money.

But I do not take kindly to being threatened. As much as I like that woman, and admire everything she has done, and admire her poetry and manner of expressing herself, well...

I still do not take kindly to being threatened. Or even warned. Or advised. Never have. I am an arrogant, selfish, pig in that way. Yes, I am. And I know it, too.

Especially if the complainer/warner/threatener/adviser is right/correct. That, in a way, is even worse. Because I must submit, to the judgement, and decree, and decision.

4.

My last year in high school, Grossmont High School, I was in the library studying with a friend of mine who now has his own Hollywood rock'n'roll loving web site, yes, over there it is. He was a year younger than I, and in the eleventh grade. He asked me about transcendentalism. I started to answer him, and in the middle of talking, which was forbidden in the library, by the way, in the middle of talking, the librarian Dr. Kohrs came over and gave me a parking ticket. That's what he called his banned-from-the-library slips of paper he gave out when you talked in the library.

I had never gotten one, not in all my four years at Grossmont. I spent almost every lunch period, and often a half hour before classes, in the library, reading one thing or another. If you know me at all you know I am now and have always been addicted to the printed word. Holy cow what a nerd. Yeah.

Anyway I looked down at the "parking ticket" and saw that it banned me from the library for I forget how long not long only a week or two weeks I think. It was then February or March or something like that. I scratched out the date Dr. Kohrs had written on the ticket, and wrote in June, instead.

And I did not set foot in the library again until June. That's what kind of grudge-holding hijo-de-la-chingada soy yo. Didn't go in not once (unless I forget maybe had to with my English class but that doesn't count it was forced and every prisoner has a "right" to escape). But I Did Not Go In on my own volition until the last week of school when I finally had to go ask for his signature verifying that I didn't have any checked out books – and again that was forced on me. I couldn't have graduated without his signature. He signed it. And said "I have nothing against you, Daniel."

Good for him. A better man than I ever would be. I merely smiled and nodded. Did not want to speak with him. That's what kind of self-destructive little Hitler bastard I am, in the darkest sectors of my soul.

5.

You would think I might eventually have learned something from all this. Instead of just walking out on people when they kvetch at me. No, that's not a word in English, Roberta. It means "complain" – quejar, o a lo mejor, regañar – in Yiddish.

Well, actually, I have learned something. Instead of just shutting down and sour-grapes rejecting my friend when she threatened to erase me, like I did Dr. Kohrs forty years ago (no, thirty-nine, almost exactly to the week, if that isn't weird I am not knowing what is not), or like I did David when he yelled at me two years ago last September, instead, tonight I asked for her advice.

And she gave it. Told me her reasons why, let me know she would feel very hurt if, after all she has done to build up the economic strength of poets, if after everything she has hustled and arranged and organized, if I went out and gave a big reading (it will be almost an hour long, in April) for nothing. That I must charge them money for sponsoring my presence in their cafe.

So maybe I did learn something from Dr. Kohrs aside from reading all those books until I threw myself out. Aside from all the great classical music he used to play at lunch hour recorded concerts on Fridays. Maybe I learned, through the many years of self-destructive slashing since then, maybe I learned to slow up just a bit and explore why I have been threatened or, rather, reprimanded.

Maybe. Or... maybe not.