Mental Disorder
poems essays
stories images
Crawdad Nelson
This is my work, collected and annotated, unless otherwise noted. I've been writing as long as I can remember, with permission or without, and I bought my first camera--a 110 format mini-camera--with lawn-mowing money when I was in high school. Much of my published work is or was ephemeral in nature: newsprint weeklies, obscure mimeographed litmags, vanished periodicals of all sorts. My attempts to create and maintain an archive or record have not gone well. Even much of my work that has appeared in various forms on the web has disappeared. Amazon has some old copies of some published work on sale, but I 'm all for boycotting Amazon so my advice is to visit used bookstores and root through the cardboard boxes they keep out back, near the dumpster. You are likely to find my work in places like that.
Experience
1958-today
Fort Bragg, California 1958-1988
Tunnel Hill was a virtual paradise as far as growing up was concerned. We had a nice location on the ridge, within an easy walk of the Noyo River on one side and Pudding Creek on the other. Swimming, fishing and hunting small game were typical amusements. We played baseball in several different pastures, some flatter than others, and we had forts, go-karts and stilts. Everyone rode a bike except my sister, who preferred a horse. I rented a small red house from the neighbors while working at the mill in the early 1980s, so I got to stay on Tunnel Hill a few more years.
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Arcata, California 1988-2003
Moving to Arcata wasn't, in retrospect, that great for me. I never made enough money to enjoy any of what was up there, although I started a small business that stayed alive for most of two years, and was intimately involved in the creation and growth of a feisty, independent, iconoclastic little journal.
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Sacramento, California 2003-present
Sacramento is hot, flat and congested, but it offers employment and cultural advantages.
Work
I washed the picture windows at Adams' Shoes on Franklin Street starting sometime around 1972. The pay was a dollar or two a week for a quick soap and squeegee job. I carried water in a galvanized bucket from the sink in the back of the store to the front, worked out on the sidewalk in front of the store, smiling at people. I spent what I made on fishing tackle and radio batteries.
I worked around town whenever someone needed a weed pulled or a lawn mowed.
Painted a house or two, a barn here and there, some fences. Made a fair amount of firewood.
After high school I loafed around for several months--although that summer I rode my old 3-speed 15 miles to work on a long-term landscaping job for a particularly obnoxious Fort Bragg businessman who had just bought himself a parcel at the fringe of the Pygmy Forest south of town. The property included the head of a draw, where the landscape sank from hardpan and stunted pine to the more typical coastal redwood-tanoak-huckleberry pattern on thin forest loam.
I engineered a trail for him to stroll down, drinking coffee and smoking menthols, dreaming his dreams. His business lasted until the mid-80s. I sometimes wonder whatever became of that trail.
This was 1976. The Giants were on the radio every day but they were no good, really.
One day, as I was digging and raking on that trail, a Navy recruiter showed up. He had tracked me down to the job site to give me his pitch. Compared to riding a 3-speed 30 miles a day so I could run a shovel and hoe, he pointed out, the Navy looked pretty good. I had no resistance. At 17, I needed my old man's signature to sign up for the induction center appointment.
I got a Greyhound ticket to Oakland and a night at the Hotel Leamington. I remember buying a cigar and a red windbreaker. I had a bowl of chili at the greyhound station. It was all very exotic.
At the induction center, I realized that, while the Navy might work for some people, it wasn't going to work for me. This came to me as a growing awareness, as if I had sat on a tack with several layers of clothing to protect me, then slowly leaned into it. As I sat in a hard plastic chair with a roomful of inductees, filling out forms, a sergeant read us a comprehensive list of diseases and maladies we may have had suffered, without looking at the form--he had obviously given this presentation countless times. I was impressed in a negative way. I couldn't imagine spending any amount of time, much less years, with a bunch of people who took this kind of rigamarole seriously. This had nothing to do with opinions about peace and war. In 1976 it was easy to imagine serving out a long career as a sailor without hurting yourself--it was about being able to endure systemization, routine, and the mindless discipline required of a sailor. When the rest of my little group, including my roommates from the Leamington--at least one of whom I now knew for certain to be a functioning late-night onanist--as many 18-year-old males are, headed through the steel door to the swearing-in room, I grabbed my suitcase and found the exit.
More Work
That's how I ended up working for Lee Geoble Security, my first job with tax deductions. My shift was fire watch at the mill. Graveyard. Starting at midnight, when the swing shifts were still roaring in the Planing Mills, the Big Mill, the Joiners and Kilns.
I sat in a little shack by the Sea Fair gate for part of each hour, then at the top of the hour headed through the store to find all the keys located on its various levels and alcoves. The Sea Fair had been the company store in earlier times, but 1n 1977 it was a two-story supermarket with everything from ladies fashions to chicken feed. It was more like a WalMart of today than the kind of small town stores WalMart has destroyed over the past twenty or thirty years. The building is still there, occupied by numerous small businesses.
From there I went through the Roundhouse, a fascinating old building constructed to maintain the California Western Railroad's engines. It was dark, stinky, and lonesome at midnight, full of vintage but working railroad equipment, greasy wood, shining steel, massive lifts and turntables.
I emerged into the steamy atmosphere around the Dry Kilns. Units of redwood lumber were stacked three high and run through a series of long barns, on rails. At the far end the units were pushed out, then taken by forklift into other sheds, unless they went directly to the Planers.
By the time I passed those buildings they were nearly shutting down for the night. People threw chalk and told elaborate jokes. The guys I knew always said hello; sometimes we might pass the time briefly.
Then I went down the greenchain. The swing shift crew was a gang of old-timers, bikers, hippies, unreconstructed rednecks, drifters and people, like me, with no idea what else to do. Some of the veterans had worked in that mill or other mills for thirty or forty years, going back to an era when things were quite a bit more old-fashioned.
I would get to know them well in the next year or two.
The greenchain emerged from the Big Mill, a true relic, massive, mysterious and powerful. I had taken the tour with my high school forestry class, but walking through it alone eight times every night was a real experience.
The basement was full of giant underpinnings, steel floors, hissing pipes. My first time through each night it was still running, and the sound was an indescribably loud blend of screaming, thumping, crashing and howling. Everything trembled and shook, water dripped and steam drifted.
One night a giant water pipe burst less than a foot from my head, with force enough to have taken my head right off. I was thrilled to call it in and moments later watch the plumbers struggle with turning the giant valve, which happened to be in the stream of spray. It was like watching a sailor try to plug a torpedo hole in a battleship's hull. A real dramatic moment.
By June I had found a spot in the mill itself: the Resorter.
I spent seven years in that mill, until it got me in the back.
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Education
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1958-present
I went to school in Fort Bragg, California, part of a cohort large enough to fill five or six classrooms at a time. I graduated on time, although without much enthusiasm--there was no talk of college although sometimes I thought about it.
Because I was always writing in my spare time I found it necessary to do a lot of reading on my own after high school. I bought one of those sets of the Great Books of Western Man for $150 at a used book store and made a serious attempt to follow the course that came with it, reading Herodotus, Plato, and a few others before it began to feel a bit stale and I started looking at more contemporary work. Much of my education has been, therefore, on my own, or with mentors rather than in a formal classroom setting. When I started spending time in actual classrooms, I discovered that my autodidactic approach was actually pretty effective at surveying what was out there and zeroing in on matters of particular interest. Of course, the focused approach taken in a typical college class is more efficient and effective at specific learning outcomes, but the generalist approach I have followed on my own provided my with a solid background for the more formal approach.
2003-present
Sacramento City College
I enrolled at City College in 2003, to study graphic arts. I'm not really a graphic artist, it turns out, but I learned how to use some software that graphic artists use.
I also signed up for the school newspaper, which was a pretty good decision. I ended up as editor in chief for a semester before going on to a more academically rigorous course beginning a bit later.
Overall my experience at City College has been positive.
In 2008 I started working as a writing tutor at City College.
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