Livin’ Large and Guilt-Free

On Feltist Time.

The Feltist blew into Sin City the other day.

He called me on a Saturday afternoon as I was busy cleaning the house, mopping floors, scrubbing toilets. I was sweating bullets and had Elvis Costello cranked up loud, the way his early music simply must be played.

He was an hour away, Felt Boy said, and was headed in my direction.

Right on.

I look forward to each Feltist visit as a way to reset my over-hyped and all-too-stressed-out biological clock, the frenetic sense of duty to fill every hour of every day with so-called productive activity.

Mostly work stuff.

It’s the neurotic existence of a freelance writer who believes he must constantly have not just one, but many, projects going on all at once.

Finding stories to write, and then places to publish them.

Repeat.

A day without much to do, when the sound of checks not cashing is deafening, trouble waits.

At least that’s what my accountant wife tells me.

In a way, she’s my parole agent, and I am a man with crimes under my belt.

For his part, Joe Parnell doesn’t suffer any such pressures. He’s unmarried, for one. He calls his own shots, rolls at his own speed.

He does stuff, don’t get me wrong, but it’s stuff he wants to do. And it doesn’t always include work. Mostly, it’s athletics and the job of being Joe, which is full-time employment.

The Feltist just doesn’t operate on regular time. Those who know him best have called it child time — unhurried, unrushed, always in the present.

Joe Time.

The Man eventually pulled up outside my suburban tract house in a mammoth white industrial-sized passenger van, the kind you might take from the airport terminal to your offsite rental car lot.

The van is overstuffed with the necessities of Joe’s life.

Junk, many might say.

There’s the life-sized bear outfit he dons when he feels like it, just to get a rise out of people. I think he may have the tiger outfit on this trip as well.

And there are the accoutrements of his Feltist art, the scattered pieces of multi-colored fabric, scissors, the little plastic figurines such a grizzlies and moose and fish he places on the brims of his special hand-decorated hats for that special Feltist touch.

It’s all just so Joe, and it’s precisely what I love about him. The phrase free-spirit just doesn’t capture the man, doesn’t do him full justice.

Joe says he digs Vegas, which kind of surprises me, because the very vibe of a city based on the seven deadly sins doesn’t seem to jibe with what Joe is all about.

The Feltist is a man of principal. His liberal politics are mixed with a dose of top-shelf ethics, and a sense of justice, instilled in him by his religious, conservative parents in rural Ohio, a place and a lifestyle Joe early on decided wasn’t for him.

So he fled.

Joe is an athlete, pure and simple. He’s a big strapping man — 6-foot-4, with some bulk to him. Not at, but the kind of once-sinewy muscle that starts to atrophy when you reach your late 50s.

In college, Joe was a walk-in backup quarterback for two major university football teams. He surfs. He can hit a golf ball a mile, and then some.

When Joe left Ohio, he kicked around. He built a house in Mexico, lived as a surf bum whose sole passion was to catch the perfect wave, and then later wash down the entire experience with a few bottles of Tecate beer. With lime.

I met Joe in Haines, Alaska where I sojourned a few years ago while working for a weekly newspaper there, the Chilkat Valley News.

I liked Haines and its sense of rugged individualism — the hunters, fishermen, bust-outs and people with PhDs, who bickered and fought like at a family reunion on crack cocaine.

Joe stood out.

He’d lived in Haines for years, doing whatever he could to survive in an area without all that much employment. He built his own house on the woods, worked on the local dock, drove a tour bus and briefly ran a pizza joint.

Many people in Haines still know him as Pizza Joe.

For me, though, he’ll always be The Feltist.

The artist in an athlete’s body.

Because while Joe was snow-skiing and working, he was also writing poetry. He wrote a couple of self-published books and wrote a column for the local paper. Every year, he makes and distributes his Feltist calendar, that he gives free to friends. I anxiously await mine every year.

And he made his Feltist hats, with his cartoonish statements about preserving nature and leaving the animals alone. Sometimes, Joe volunteered at a wildlife sanctuary outside Haines. And he formed a band he calls the Bandimals, where the musicians dress in animal outfits.

And that’s not the half of it. All of Joe’s art is wacky, fun-loving and sensitive.

Not everyone, though, likes the bear costume. Joe once wore it in the presence of some feeding bears at a riverside outside Haines and people called the Forest Service. Joe almost got arrested, and made national news.

Joe also developed social causes. He didn’t like the way the fishermen had so much so say about how the town was developed, ganging up to channel funds for projects that benefitted them first, and everybody else later.

Like the construction of an expensive new boat dock, when the old one worked just fine. And he had his eye on the police department and its hesitancy to release information Joe thought should be made public.

I liked Joe from the get-go. We drank beer together. He took me to places in Haines that others were too busy to bother with.

I was only in Haines for six weeks at the onset of winter. When I left, I knew I’d see Joe again.

And sure enough, I have.

Each winter, Joe leaves Haines. He closes down his house, and heads south in his white utility van. He takes the ferry off of southeastern Alaska, crosses into British Columbia and down into the Lower 48.

He visits his parents in Ohio for Christmas and then heads for warmer climes. He drops in on friends and stays awhile. This year, he played golf every day in Arizona. Two years ago, he spent a few weeks in Moab, Utah, living out of a youth hostel, or sleeping in his van.

He hiked a lot, saw the Grand Canyon, met new friends.

And then he did something that was just so Joe, so Feltist.

Joe knows how to work with his hands. One year, he did some plumbing at my house. He knows carpentry, too.

So, that year in Moab, he decided to build a series of wooden benches and place them in subtle public areas where people might feel the need to sit down, if only for a few moments. He paid for everything himself, and wrote a few little lines in each bench, funny Doctor Seussian phrases that make Joe who he is.

This year, Joe has a new passion.

Pickleball.

He can’t get enough of the sport, which is a combination of tennis and badminton. And Joe is good. He’s ranked at a level 4 out of 5.

The day he arrived in Las Vegas, he got online to find out where the nearest pickleball courts were. Every day, before I got up to grab some coffee and hit my home office, Joe was already on the road for the 45-minute drive to North Las Vegas, where he played pickleball all morning and then in the evening.

He’d come home tired and hungry and we’d drink wine and talk shit.

Then he told me an only-Feltist story.

Joe decided that the courts where he had played for just a few days needed a practice board, so people could hit the plastic pickleball to themselves.

He went out to a Home Depot and bought enough wood to make his board. He came home and showed me pictures he’d taken.

He was proud of his work.

The next day, he retuned with some paint and finished his little project. He was in the parking lot, painting the wood, when a park official stopped by and asked what he was doing.

Oh, here it comes, I thought when he told me. Here’s the back slap someone gets when they take it upon themselves to make the world a slightly better place.

But that’s not what happened.

When Joe told him about making the practice board, the guy said, “Hey, that’s pretty cool.”

He got it. He realized something I’ve known all along.

The Feltist is just a Good Citizen.

The days are winding down before Joe must point his van back northwards. He has to be back in Haines by mid-April, when he starts a summer job working for a film crew up there.

Meanwhile, Joe does Sin City his own unique way.

The other evening, to celebrate his 57the birthday, he rolled over to the South Point casino to play some poker. Sitting around the green felt table, surrounded by strangers, the Feltist got his art work out and started making his wonderous felt creations.

He showed me the picture to prove it.

And I thought, “There’s a man who has Vegas, and life, for that matter, figured out.”

The other night, we took a walk on the strip and, strolling along amid the madness and cattle-call of Las Vegas Boulevard, I told Joe that I liked to take walks with my wife because it was the perfect venue to talk real talk, settling any lingers burrs between us.

Joe was quiet for a moment. And then he said that he’d been a long, long time since he’d taken a walk with a woman.

And that just broke my heart.

I hope Joe finally finds the woman who really gets him. He deserves it more than any other human being I know.

Meanwhile, just thinking of Joe just made a tiny spring break in my own wound-up, messed-up, life clock.

Time to kick back and live large.

Guilt-free.

On Feltist Time.