Dead Folks in Old Photographs

All they could do was act oblivious
holding their bodies still for the camera,
sometimes one of them thinking to move
and leave a blur for posterity.

Most just held their smiles, forever.
The young couple, he in a vest three
sizes too large, her in a flapper’s skirt
and Cloche hat, with a tulip in it.

Two sisters sitting on a low curb
above a dirt street, a horse behind them,
the sun casting their shadows diagonally
behind them like knives, or long fingers.

A squinting man outside a bus station
playing the guitar and singing.
A young boy in a bowler hat very close to the camera,
winking and sticking his tongue out.

 

Wherein I attempt to read you a poem, but am interrupted by Time, Death, the Cosmos, and Wailing Guitars

Watch this video, fearless reader:

 

This is a five stanza poem but for some reason today, WordPress is not listening to me when I tell it to put spaces in.  So this looks like one long unbroken poem.  Also, of you are a glutton for punishment and would like to see me read the entire poem (without the long intro) that is viewable by clicking here.

Aubade
by Philip Larkin

I work all day, and get half-drunk at night.

Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare.

In time the curtain-edges will grow light.

Till then I see what’s really always there:

Unresting death, a whole day nearer now,

Making all thought impossible but how

And where and when I shall myself die.

Arid interrogation: yet the dread

Of dying, and being dead,

Flashes afresh to hold and horrify.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

—The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

This is a special way of being afraid

No trick dispels. Religion used to try,

That vast moth-eaten musical brocade

Created to pretend we never die,

And specious stuff that says No rational being

Can fear a thing it will not feel, not seeing

That this is what we fear—no sight, no sound,

No touch or taste or smell, nothing to think with,

Nothing to love or link with,

The anaesthetic from which none come round.

And so it stays just on the edge of vision,

A small unfocused blur, a standing chill

That slows each impulse down to indecision.

Most things may never happen: this one will,

And realisation of it rages out

In furnace-fear when we are caught without

People or drink. Courage is no good:

It means not scaring others. Being brave

Lets no one off the grave.

Death is no different whined at than withstood.

Slowly light strengthens, and the room takes shape.

It stands plain as a wardrobe, what we know,

Have always known, know that we can’t escape,

Yet can’t accept. One side will have to go.

Meanwhile telephones crouch, getting ready to ring

In locked-up offices, and all the uncaring

Intricate rented world begins to rouse.

The sky is white as clay, with no sun.

Work has to be done.

Postmen like doctors go from house to house.

Who Needs You to Shovel

My neighbors are obsessed with shoveling snow.  Every time it snows more than an inch, there is continual shoveling going on on my street, in the immediate vicinity of my house, for approximately 36 hours straight.  I am talking about perhaps my ten closest neighbors.  The shoveling NEVER.  STOPS.  Shoveling, scraping, pounding of ice in cracks.  It’s like they need to dust for some fingerprints on the concrete.  And listen, each one of these houses has approximately a three-foot-wide sidewalk that stretches the length of their house…maybe 20 feet.  Every time it snows, I shovel my sidewalk, as completely as would be necessary on a street upon which nobody travels, in about five minutes as soon as I get home from work.  After working ten hours.  And riding my bike two miles.  I’m saying: it’s not hard to do.  Now, don’t get me wrong here.  I’m not “complaining” about this.  I know I’ve got a reputation for “complaining” about things (I interpret it as “having opinions”, which comes from “being super fucking intelligent and awake to the machinations of the wider world and structure of reality”, but whatever, if you think I’m a complainer, I’m a complainer), so I don’t want to be seen as particularly complaining about this.  It’s whatever.  You want to shovel your sidewalk ten times after it snows, go for it.  More than anything I just find it peculiar.  Are they just bored?  Or is it a situation of trying to out-do the Joneses?  Plus it is SO COLD right now.  You KNOW I’m a trooper with weather but no way would I be going out repeatedly into that cold just to get my sidewalk–which in all likelihood only the mailman and my own family will walk on—perfect.

I know we don’t live in a world anymore—if ever we did—in which a significant amount of people care about the performances of musicians on late night talk shows.  For quite a few years (as should surprise almost nobody) I was such a person, one who actually paid attention to that world.  I knew the performance lineup from all the shows, almost every week, for about 4 years, I stayed on top of that.  Although lately that world has faded from my attention.  But last week, a band called The Orwells (I can only assume named after author George Orwell)

I hate to seem like a bumpkin, but this is a picture from my very first (solo and sober) cab ride yesterday…I think I’m finally a city boy.

performed their new song “Who Needs You” on the David Letterman show and it was a pretty authentic, impassioned performance, which made some waves big enough that it made its way to my attention.  Now, there was nothing especially outrageous about this performance (other than the lyrics to the song, which nobody seems to have noticed, which include lines like “You better burn that flag/ Cause it aint against the law”…and for the record everybody…it isn’t against the law), except it wasn’t a cookie-cutter, “Let’s nail this!” performance.  It was just a little quirky, a lot impassioned, and fairly off-key.  I like it, but they’re probably not going to become a favorite band of mine (although I have put their album on my “to-buy” list). Although I don’t want to take too much away from the legitimacy of their performance; it WAS reminiscent of the early days of some great bands (who would later, inevitably, lose steam and passion) like the Rolling Stones, Pearl Jam, or The Doors before Morrison died (take note: I hate The Doors).   The more pertinent point of discussion, for me, is: what kind of artistic culture have we fostered where a band simply playing with a bit of abandon on a talk show makes the front page of Rolling Stone‘s website?  How neutered has our art become?  How boring are we?  Watch the performance here, and make sure you stay all the way to the end to see how unexpected Dave and Paul found the performance:

37 of the Worst Oatmeal Beers

What is up with this trend of inane lists on the internet that have a purposefully odd and senseless amount of items in them?  38 Things White People Don’t Know or 16 Ways I Blew My Marriage or The 42 Most Haunted Places in Ireland.  When they first started popping up, I just assumed the list makers had gotten lazy and didn’t feel like making a list that made it to an even number, but it soon became obvious that the trend was too prevalent and too consistent to be an accident or a product of laziness.  Something about this odd-number list is a draw to readers–or at least a proven click generator–and I just can’t figure out why.  Why would an oddly numbered list prove to be more attractive to a reader?  Is it just a curiosity thing?  Maybe the number itself jumps off the screen at you more, because our brains are trained to scan past numbers we see all the time, like 10, 20, etc?  No matter the cause, it should surprise nobody that this annoys the shit out of me.  I like my lists nice and tidy with rounded numbers, you know, like you were kind of trying.  And don’t get me started on the silly, needless lists that this tactic has caused to pop up on my news feed.  Sigh.  I really do kinda hate the internet.  But it’s definitely a love-hate kinda hate.

I still have yet to be able to find any information about those piers in my video on my previous blog.  Of course, I’m just Googling.  Does a more in-depth way of researching things still exist?  Does going to a library and…I don’t know, doing something there increase my likelihood of figuring something like this out?  I mean, not everything is on the internet, believe it or not, but I seem to have lost the ability or the know-how to do any research aside from internet searches.  Don’t get me wrong, I’m really good at internet searches, but still…

Sometimes in life you say something, maybe just a few words, a sentence, and you regret saying it.  Even twenty years later, you regret it, and maybe you regret it for the rest of your life.  Because saying something is an action, and maybe something you said hurt somebody, and somewhere deep inside us we know that some things do last forever.  And you wish you hadn’t hurt that person.  You wish you hadn’t said or done the thing.  People love to talk about not having regret, but you do.  You have regret because you’re a human being and having regrets is as much an ingrained part of the human experience as pooping, or stretching in the morning, or hating the Pittsburgh Penguins.  You can get into some stupid language game like well to me regret means blah blah blah, but I don’t, I just use experiences to blah blah blah.  Whatever.  Stop watching daytime TV.  Life aint tidy.  Own your regret.

I’m sure glad I stopped drinking before this whole “craft beer” thing started happening.  I certainly would not like these sludgy beasts.  Oatmeal beer and wheaty stuff and dark beers with bits of rice floating in them, or whatever.  Of course, I am sure that many people are constantly forced to pretend to like these things by a hipsterish peer pressure.  I can tell just by looking at these bottles that these “micro-brews” (once you’re bringing science into beer, you’ve probably lost the plot) are like beer syrup.  They probably make Guinness look like Coors Light.  No thanks.  Thank you, sobriety!

Here is me, looking at The Signer:

 

I’m a Kind of Portion, I Guess

I had a long conversation last night with one of my employees about demonyms.  Demonyms are the words we use to describe where we are from, that you are a person from a specific place.  For instance, Philadelphian is a demonym, and so is Israeli and Marylander.  I have always found demonyms very interesting.  They come in so many shapes and sizes, and there are no rules about how it is formed (and typically, there aren’t even official demonyms).  I first became really aware of and curious about them when I first moved to Erie, PA, and realized I had become an Erieite.  That is a helluva word!  Ever since, I have been intrigued by each place’s demonym.  You can usually guess it, but not always.  In addition, what REALLY blows my mind is that there is a demonym for everywhere.  I mean, continents have them…European, Asian, South American, etc.  Obviously, countries and states, too.  But you really start to slither down the rabbit hole when you think that every town has one!  Not every city, every town has it’s own demonym.  Just thinking about the people likely to be reading this blog…Dad, obviously I know you are a Newvillian.  So am I, to a degree.  Mom and Adi and Brian are Mantuans.  Kyle…what are you, a Ridgecrester?  I hope that’s what it is.  Cory K. lives in Racine, WI…that one boggles my mind.  I could look it up but I hope he reads this and tells us in the comments.  My best guess is Racineite.  But in my conversation with my employee last night, we took it one step further.  Sure, we were both Philadelphians, but we also lived in sections of the town that had names.  Did they, too, have demonyms?  Of course they do!  But we don’t know what they are.  He lives in Society Hill so he settled on Society Hiller, and I like Pennsportian (rhymes with portion).  I seriously could think about demonyms all damn day.

I stumbled onto something pretty interesting today.  Watch this video I made.  I don’t even make you listen to any hip music in this one:

Things I don’t understand in life include, but are not limited to: hopscotch, red licorice, the stock market, bandwidth, point spreads, football’s “secondary”, tort reform, Celsius, 12 bar blues, and the aeronautical concept of lift.  Also, unrelated,

For those with a passing interest in architecture, these apartment buildings near the Delaware River in Philly are Frank Gehry buildings.

there is a place in Maryland called Big Assawoman Bay.  It’s a bay.  Really.

Why does my phone die faster when it’s cold out?  seriously, is there someone who can explain this to me?  And why, why, does there not exist a device which is portable, with which we can charge our phones using stores solar power?  I know I am sounding like some green tree-hugger (I kinda am) but for real, I hate how when I leave the house for extended periods of time, I now have to plan where and when I’ll be charging my phone (losing the car option has changed things a tad; that was always a go-to charging area).  With these smartphones being power sieves nowadays, after an hour and a half out of the house on foot, I find myself having to conserve battery power.  Not cool, world.  Figure something better out!

I bought this mini-figurine of William Penn because I am good with money:

I Wear My Heartburn at Night

There is something very unique about living alone.  Obviously, I guess.  Certainly it is not for everyone.  Mostly, it is for loners and pricks, I guess, but I must say it does agree with me.  I know I’ve covered this area a lot in things previously written, but I just can’t get over how…interesting…it is to not utter one word to a human being some days other than while I am at work.  Of course, my job requires me to say A LOT (“verbally exhausted” is the industry slang) so oftentimes, the break from speech is quite welcome.  This isn’t important.  Just thinking out loud.

I was riding my bike down Snyder Ave. in the bike lane this morning and three teenagers were standing in the lane, craning their necks down the street, presumably looking for their bus.  As I neared them they didn’t budge one bit.  I also did not alter my course.  I buzzed by them, inches away.  I made eye contact with them as I passed, and they were obviously pissed.  One of them started to say something, but I wasn’t sure what, and I didn’t even let him remotely finish before I blurted out “Get the fuck off the road, kids.”  Either: A) I am a badass motherfucker or B) what the hell is wrong with me?

I have watched the movie “Meek’s Cutoff” three times this week.  It is an exceptional film.  I watched it when it first came out, in 2011 (and it even took second place in my top ten movie list of that year) and I promptly bought it on DVD, but I waited until this week to even view it a second time.  But then a second time became a third, and then a fourth.  It is an extraordinary film.  It is now one of the things that I will come to associate with this, the winter I moved into Philadelphia.  Watch this clip:

I rarely hear my neighbors, despite sharing walls with them on two sides.  However, when I do hear them, it is a bed squeaking rhythmically.  Sex or masturbation, I don’t know, but I guess I’ve lucked out, since there are no vocalizations to go along with it.  It’s just awkward, is all.

My mom and I went to the Hard Rock Café in Center City for my birthday.  Here is my mom there:

Oh, my birthday, by the way.  I turned 36.  So it goes.  That sounds pretty old to me, but I guess if I’m lucky, someday it will sound young.  People say life is short but it seems pretty long to me.  Longest thing you’ll ever do, anyway.

This blog entry just took a turn for the sour because I have heartburn now.  That’s what I get for drinking coffee after midnight.  There, as far as I know, is no certified medical reason for drinking coffee after midnight to give you heartburn, but alas, it always does so, to me.  And yet, I continue to do it.  Lesson learning is not, nor has it ever been, my strongest trait.

It is unseasonably warm.  Can’t argue with that.  Everyone likes unseasonably warm.  Everyone.

Not Here, Not Now

Of course, being a man who writes poetry and also thinks about himself a good deal, I have written multiple poems on my birthdays.  Here are my two favorites.  The first, “Upon My Birthday”, was written the day I turned 26.  If you like it, you can hear me read it aloud if you click here.  Here it is:

Upon My Birthday

I’ve spoken at length with you about years rolling by unhinged
like breathless wagons drawn by crazed stallions;
I’ve sat with you in the hushed cellars of our
toilsome peers devising machines of immortality;
I have calmly stepped with you through the doorways of hospitals and morgues,
scoffing at the gall of centuries to lay claim to my soul;
I have laid upon you, dear, halfnaked in dawn’s presence,
sucking sweetly through my nose the air you just breathed out,
heaving my breath in time to yours,
and even then, dear,
(even then!)
I did not feel as truly alive as I do now
upon my birthday,
this day with the earth in a precise arc in it’s trembling orbit
which somehow belongs to me,
this day swinging stubbornly around once a calendar year
so that I may live with true vigor and purpose these scant hours,
and be reminded there was a time
I was not even alive!

 

And here is another favorite of mine, obviously written on the day I turned 30.  There is also an audio version of this one here.

 

On Turning Thirty

Of course everyone knows there is something ridiculous about the way
time moves,
slithering into and out of crevasses,
ravines, serpentine granite chapels like a freezing-cold
underground liquidway,
usually unseen,
usually only the merest mention of it on the barest surface
of these real things we do,
flowing through sand checkout lines and sky traffic jams
like the most unpredictable ubiquitous damned thing you ever did see;

It is when turning back,
craning your head to see the vast vermilion horizon
of your own crusty underpants
learner’s permits
snot smeared on windowpanes
itchy petting zoos
women left in the rain
tears shed in amusement parks
vomit on the lady’s pants
that certain incense in that certain basement
pennies crushed by trains
soaking wet suede sneakers
pot smoked from soda cans
dad catching you peeing in the yard
naked in the car
alone on campus
malls with grandma
the nipple like a bullet in your mouth
and the loudest music you ever heard
that this queerest thing about time is more evident than words;
when you see yourself inside of it, it seems so long,
but when you try to look back on it,
it’s like there was never any time at all,
that all instants happened at once.

Somewhere I am eight,
and somewhere I am wrestling,
and somewhere my mother cradles my tiny head
and somewhere my leg is broken
and somewhere I am drunker than hell
and somewhere I am one-hundred and ten pounds
and somewhere I am dancing dancing dancing
and somewhere I am in those mountains watching those two rattlesnakes have sex and you were there too
and somewhere we stand around a swimming pool full of glow sticks
and somewhere a goose is chasing me
and somewhere a man in a chariot just yelled at me to slow down
and somewhere I am on a couch stricken unable to move
and somewhere my father and I are driving around town wearing Halloween masks and it is funny funny funny
and somewhere I am thirty and somehow remembering the loudest music I ever heard but that place is not here, not now.

 

 

 

Well Up In the Blessings

Well up in the blessings we all know
there’s the blessedness of knowing
when things are going:
that vision, skin, body, brain
have all started going.

For how it is with death
is how it is with anything else:
much easier to accept
when it’s already happening.

Philly Journal, 1/9/14

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Polar Vortex, Schmolar Schmortex

I am the first to admit in many areas I am a huge wuss. In many facets of life, I am just a fantastic pansy. I am not afraid to admit this. But it should also be noted, especially for the purposes of this blog entry, that there’s some areas of life in which I am a total fucking champ. I suspect this dichotomy is true of most of us. My champings do happen to include working my ass off,  functioning amazingly on very little sleep, and successfully and with very little comment braving the elements. Granted, I complain about the cold a lot and how much I dislike winter, but a brief review of my record I am sure would show I am usually a pretty big champ when it comes to the cold. I begin with these caveats in order to illustrate the true gravity of the story I am about to relate to you. This morning was one of the more terrifying moments of my life.

As most of you know, even if you don’t live in the Northeast, or Midwest, today was one of the coldest days in history of the entire world. (sarcasm, but only kinda) Something called the “polar vortex” snuck down into our region bringing with it arctic temperatures. Now, every winter we are used to seeing a few days of single digit or even negative degrees. What made this day unique was that unlike usual, the temperature was never going to climb into the teens. Today’s high was forecasted to be somewhere around nine, with a low around three. That is, quite frankly, ludicrous. Depending on where you live, wind chills were forecasted to make the temperature feel in the negative 20s all the way up to the negative 50s. I wasn’t too worried about this. This is not the sort of thing I’m ever too worried about. However, there was one small hitch: I was scheduled to open my store today.

Now, I haven’t been opening the store very much lately. For the past five or six months I’ve been working mostly evenings. This has not really been by choice, but a necessity born out of the availabilities of my employees. I’m currently very close to getting back to being able to work daylights, even though I am a night owl by nature, my role as the store manager dictates that things would go easier for me if I was there during the daylight hours. Nonetheless, I am still very much in the nighttime sleep pattern. This morning marked only the second time since I moved to Philadelphia a month and a half ago that I actually worked an opening shift. Now, I did not work extremely late last night. I got home around seven last night, so it wasn’t a brutal turnaround. But nonetheless, my sleep pattern lately dictated that I still didn’t fall asleep until almost 2 AM, so when my alarm went off at 4 AM, it wasn’t exactly pleasant. Of course, I saw all this coming. For quite a few days we had known that Tuesday was going to be the most frigid day in the history of the known universe. And of course, I could do nothing but shake my head with grim resignation knowing that that would be the day I would have to pedal my bike 2 miles in the city at 4:30 in the morning. But what can you do? This is not the sort of thing I dwell on, because what was done was done, and I was going to have to do it. I knew that I would not get much sleep. I knew that I would be very very cold. I knew that I would be very very tired. I knew it was going to suck.

Let me now say also, it has come to my attention over the past month and a half that while it may not have been a problem when I was younger, riding my bike in any serious fashion in the extreme cold is not nearly as easy as I expected it to be. Even before the polar vortex showed up in Philadelphia, winter has not been an easy time to be a bicycle commuter for me. My leg muscles simply do not want to work as hard as I need them to work in subfreezing temperatures. I know that it is the temperatures causing it, because any day there is a brief and sudden warm-up, I ride my bike like a champ again. But once again, this was not something I was going to worry about. What can I do about it? Sure, I could’ve looked into taking a cab or the buses to work, but at that time of day that sort of thing seemed almost as much of a pain the ass as actually writing my bike there. So while there was certainly some dread on my part going into the commute, it was just one of those things that I do. Brave the elements, and just fucking do it.

So I begrudgingly rolled out of bed after two hours of sleep. I was really really tired. But this is not a sensation that is new to me. Working as long as I have in the service industry, one becomes accustomed to such turnarounds. Sometimes we called them doublebacks, some places refer to them as Clopens (close+open, get it?), but nonetheless, they will always happen occasionally. They happen to me much less now in my capacity as a Starbucks manager than they did in my capacity as a restaurant manager, but they are still an occasional fact of life. The sensation was not new to me. I got out of bed, and not having left enough time for me to take a shower, pulled on some fresh work clothes and quickly walked down to my living room. I hadn’t planned what I was going to wear. I just knew I had to wear a lot. The news had been talking for a few days now about how easy it would it be for people to get frostbite in these temperatures. It wasn’t something I worried about too much, but I couldn’t have avoided thinking about it even if I wanted to, with all the media coverage. I figured I would just bundle up, go outside and ride to work and I was going to be really cold. But it hadn’t escaped me that I needed to have all of my extremities as covered as possible, and the media stories had made it very clear that no flesh should be exposed for even a few minutes in such frigid temperatures. Overtop of my work clothes I put on a hoodie, followed by my winter coat. I put the hood up over my head, and then put on my big fuzzy extremely warm Eagles hat. Then I wrapped a scarf around my face, put on some gloves, and that was that.  I got my bike and took it out of the house and locked the door behind me.

At this point I will detail for you the two major mistakes I made before I even left the house. On this particular morning, I was opening the store with two other employees. Usually a manager only opens the store with one other employee, but one of them today is a trainee who I am on my way to getting trained to be a manager, so that I can work a better schedule my own self in the near future. And the other one is a normal opening employee. As happenstance would have it (and when I say happenstance I mean my own poor planning) these are actually the only two employees whose phone numbers I don’t have stored in my cell phone. That was a major error.

Just yesterday I had told both of these employees that they should not be in any way early. I instructed both of them to show up right at 5 AM, or later if need be. The idea being that I was going to do I best to show up exactly at 5 o’clock, and as cold as it was forecasted to be, I didn’t want them waiting outside even for a few minutes before I got there. The second major error then would be that I did not leave with more time than normal for me to get there. It takes me about 20 minutes to get from my apartment to where I work on my bicycle, I usually leave about 25 minutes before I want to get there, owing for some time for red lights or cars or whatnot. I did the same this morning, leaving my apartment at about 4:35, to get there at 5 AM. That was my second major error.

When I first walked outside with my bicycle, it seemed cold, but not anything out of the ordinary. Just really cold. I said to myself, I can handle this no problem. I got on top of my bike and started pedaling, and rounded the corner of my block onto Front Street. It was immediately apparent, immediately, that this was not normal. Within moments of being outside and pedaling , the bone chilling cold was absolute. I hadn’t put on any layers on my legs, I was only wearing my work slacks, and I could feel the skin on the tops of my thighs begin to sting within 30 seconds of riding my bike. I hadn’t gotten 100 yards away from my house before I realized that I had fucked up a lot.

My employees were going to be outside the store in 25 minutes as per my instructions, in this freezing ridiculous cold. I had to pedal 2 miles to get there, in conditions that were inhospitable after 100 yards. I could not turn back and look for an alternate way to get there, such as a bus or a taxi, because I had not left myself enough time to search for an alternate way. I could have backtracked and looked for an alternate way and opened the store late, if I had the cell phone number of even one of those two employees, so I could instruct them to stay home or seek shelter somewhere. But I did not. I had no choice but to ride my bike there and to do so in the normal amount of time.

After a few blocks on Front Street, I then turn left onto Snyder, which is a main thorofare and hence much wider and open. It is here that the wind started for real. This wind would be prohibitive to riding a bicycle in 70° temperatures. As soon as I started down Snyder my progress almost completely stopped. The wind was blowing directly against me, and I had to work with all my might to move the bicycle. Neverminding for a moment the cold, this is where the fact that I only got two hours of sleep the night before, and had just rode home from work less than 12 hours ago, comes into play. The cold was restricting my muscles, they hadn’t rested, I hadn’t had time to recuperate from my previous ride, etc etc.  There were just too many factors working against me.  I had yet to travel even 1/16th the length of my journey, and with every cycle of my legs, I was grunting out loud.  Oof, oof, oof. I was almost immediately desperate. I didn’t know what I was going to do. It became abundantly clear that I might not get there in time, and it is something that is rare for me to do, but I began to panic. Started breathing heavier, my breath making the inside of my scarf against my face moist, and ironically hot. I was grunting and yelling with every cycle, I couldn’t even move this bike faster than I could walk it. The wind started to make my eyes dry up, maybe even freeze a little bit. I could feel the cold on the tops of my thighs like pinpricks, and I began to suspect I might get frostbite through my pants. I veered off the street and onto the sidewalks, thinking if I got closer to the buildings the wind might be lessened. There were absolutely no signs of human beings about at this point in time. No cars, no pedestrians, not even lights on in houses. The wind did not seem lessened on the sidewalks, but I continued to ride on them anyway. After about a quarter of a mile on the sidewalk on Snyder Avenue, I was passing under a tree when somehow, someway, a bunch of branches hit my bicycle. I wasn’t sure what happened at first, except that I noticed that my pedaling was causing a noise that had never happened before. It was like that moment when you know that something is wrong with your car. I couldn’t imagine actually stopping to look at what was happening. The bike was still moving, but it was even more labored than before, and there was this sawing kind of noise. After three minutes or so of continuing to ride, and weighing what appeared to be incredibly difficult options, I decided to stop my bike and get off and look at it. This might not actually seem like a huge deal to read, but at that moment, making the decision to stop the bike and get off and look at it was one of the hardest decisions I’ve ever had to make. I could feel my body starting to get colder than it has ever been before, and I was still well over a mile from my destination, with no options for help, and time running short. Stopping my forward motion was not an easy decision. But I was afraid that whatever was wrong with my bike might get worse, and then I would be in an even bigger world of hurt.

I plunked down my kickstand and disengaged myself from my bicycle. There were not incredibly bright streetlights around, but I began inspecting my chain housing for any sort of foreign bodies. The chain around the rear wheel had something poking out of it. I couldn’t tell quite what it was. It looked at first glance like some sort of man-made object, a cigar length rigid piece of plastic. I couldn’t be sure, in the light and in my panic, if it was a piece of the bike that had come off or was in some way damaged, or was some foreign body that had become attached to the bike. I remembered the branches hitting the bike, but wasn’t sure what that had caused. I looked closer at it, but still couldn’t tell in the light. I have very little time to figure it out, and I knew that I had to either keep going or fix it quick. I put my hands down to feel this thing, but through my thick winter gloves, I still couldn’t tell what it was. I knew that taking my gloves off was going to be a huge mistake. There was no way that I wanted to expose my extremities to the direct cold. But I saw no choice. So, despite all my thinking screaming otherwise, I took my gloves off, both of them, and reached out for the object. It was in fact just a stick. It had somehow gotten lodged inside the chain mechanism. I wrapped my already freezing hand around it and pulled, but of course it would not come out easily. I had to try for a good 30 seconds of swiveling it, turning it, and bending it before it finally broke free of the chain. I attempted to put my gloves back on, but found that my hands were already so numb that putting the gloves on was difficult. I was looking at the gloves but could not feel them. After slowing my breathing down and concentrating, I got both back on and mounted again on my bicycle. It was only when I was back on my bicycle seat that I realized that in my panic with the stick, I had actually taken my scarf off. I had draped it over my handlebars. I have no memory of doing it, nor am certain why I thought it necessary subconsciously, but there it was. It wasn’t until I saw the scarf that I realized the entire front of my face was now exposed to the wind and cold, and as soon as I realized it, I felt it.

It was a sudden, jolting pain, like having a face covered in hair, and having them all suddenly and simultaneously plucked.  I groaned, loud and suddenly and without any thought for who might hear.  I now had to get my scarf back onto my face–with hands that had gone numb and were inside bulky winter gloves.  It soon became completely evident that I needed to take the gloves back off in order to get the scarf on.  What followed–including then getting the gloves back onto my hands–was a flurry of disbelief and trauma beyond what I could describe.

I do understand that if one is reading this account from a bit of a remove, it might seem a bit tedious and overwrought; yes, here is a man trying to put his gloves and scarf on in the cold.  Yawn.  But understand: this felt very much like a life or death situation to me, and I’m confident that is exactly what it was.  Here I stood, at a time that is basically the middle of the night, on a dark city street with no humans around me, in temperatures that are lethally cold, in turns again and again exposing my extremities to the air, in a position in which I am responsible for the well-being–some might even say the lives–of two other human beings over a mile away from me, whom I have no method of contacting, who will soon be waiting outside a building which I have the only key to, and the only way I can get to them in time is to stop this foolhardiness and somehow make my bicycle take me there, using my own physical movements to power the bike through astonishing wind.

Add to this maelstrom of physical and psychological plight the fact that my cell phone is the only way I could tell time during this ordeal, and there was no real way for me to get it out and look at it, and so I couldn’t really tell how much time had passed and how much I had left.  Obviously, if I was a few minutes late, these employees were not going to die, but they’d be far from happy, and it was no doubt dangerous to make them stand out there.  And God forbid I would be more than a few minutes late.  I had no was of knowing how well they were dressed, how prepared they were, how desperate their own situations were.

Somehow, someway, I got back on the bike with gloves and scarf on and started pedaling.  But the damage was done.  My hands and face were the coldest I’d ever felt them, and the gloves and scarf were not going to warm them back up now.  For the rest of the trip, my extremities will exist in a realm of frigid pain that I can’t come close to describing, but I was almost certainly close to frostbite.  Add to that the continuing deterioration of the tops of my thighs—getting so cold they felt like they were on fire–and you have a definition of a certain kind of misery.

Now back to pedaling, I had been counting on my adrenaline to kick in to at least power me there, but it was not to be.  My body had withdrawn from the race.  Each pedal was the hardest thing I could remember doing.  For over a mile, I yelled/ screamed/groaned with every single downstroke of my legs.  At some points I even resorted to very dramatic, pathetic cries of “Why?!” or “No!” and other sad things of that nature, and I became more and more certain I was imply not going to be able to continue.

But I did start getting closer.  Finally, somehow only 5 or 6 blocks away, I allowed myself some positive thinking–and my scarf promptly flew off my head.  I have no idea how, or where it went.  It just flew off and my face was now fully exposed.  I didn’t spend any time debating whether to stop and look for it and try to put it back on.  I was very well aware that riding the last six blocks with no scarf was incredibly dangerous (especially since I was actually going quite slowly), but I knew without a doubt that stopping to look for it and then trying to get it back on would be even more dangerous.

(I have skipped over quite a few things, really—run-ins with a car or two, skidding on some ice, a child watching me out of a ground floor window, etc)

I did make it, obviously.  I pulled up to the store door at what turned out to be 4:59, to the sight of two bundled-up employees who were very cold.  As I stepped off my bike and fumbled numbly in my pocket for the door key, I managed to utter to them both, That was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, to which they chuckled, obviously assuming I was exaggerating.

We walked inside, and began our workday.

 

Philly Journal, 1/6/14

The Light From Everywhere

A long time ago, what must be over 10 years ago now, I was a man just recovering from alcoholism—a long bout of sickness— and the first few weeks and months were filled with a special kind of freedom.  But aside from all the weighty big topics that came up in such a time, I also was just able to start discovering the internet. It had been there during my drinking but it wasn’t something I had much interest in or capacity to utilize. My very first blog was on some sort of AOL blogging community.  I loved everything about it. I loved that I could write was on my mind, and write whatever I wanted to say, however I wanted to say it, and some people would actually read it! This is back before everyone was doing it (and way before everybody stopped doing it!) But of course, basically still nobody was reading. Anyway, one of the first entries I ever wrote was called “The light from everywhere, the light from nowhere”. It had just snowed the first snow of the year, which must have been 2004. I was in love with a woman at that point in time who was a pain in the ass, but I was in love with her anyway. That night, as the snow was coming down, I drove her home to where she lived on the side of a mountain, and in the cold snowy wind, we shared a kiss on her doorstep. I wrote a lovely blog entry about it on that AOL website, which has long since been erased by the great internet gods. I wish I could remember most of it, or  that I had saved it somewhere, because I know even now it was a doozy.  I talked about that ambient light which those of us who live in wintry states are very familiar with, which seems to slowly take over the nighttime in the first few hours after a snowfall, seemingly coming from nowhere and everywhere all at once.  And then I made an analogy between this light, which I had just seen that night for the first time in my sobriety, and the slow sneaky way that love overtakes a person. It was a really great piece of writing. Well, I am a 10 years older old fart now, and a little more cynical. Still happy as a clam, but I kind of hate snow, and I don’t plan on falling in love anytime soon. I often think of that blog entry when I see the light from everywhere. Tonight, as a big nor’easter blew into Philadelphia, I had already done all the outside things I needed to do for the day, and was just planning on settling in for the night, putting on my sweatpants and maybe putting in my DVD of “Picnic at Hanging Rock”, and eating some rice and drinking some diet soda. But as I got up to go to the bathroom and walked past the front door, I saw the light from everywhere and the light from nowhere, and I was drawn outside. I can’t re-create for you the magic of that first blog entry 10 years ago, but I did take some video, and I was feeling pretty good about the world:

Some Things I Like

Some things I like include, but are not limited to:

Dreams about dinosaurs.  Gel pens.  When fog actually rolls.  Itches you can scratch.  Falsetto.  Twine.  Cheesy films about the struggle for civil rights.  Pepperoni pizza.  A Prairie Home Companion.  Long, slow things that almost hurt.  Pointillist paintings.  My own long shadow dancing in front of me on dying summer afternoons.  Loud guitars.  White-out.  Bobbleheads.  Bubble baths in the dark.  My own horrible Jimmy Stewart impression.  Musty smell of books and basements.  Gallagher smashing watermelons.  The pop and hiss of old vinyl records, and the absence of the pop and hiss on new vinyl records.  Things that just barely tickle.  American cheese.  Cheddar cheese.  New socks.  Neil Young.  When lightning strikes again and again and again really fast but far away.  Plays by Luigi Pirandello.  Socially brazen stray cats.  Funiculars.  Regional history.  Keith Olberman. Those Easter Island statues.  Pandora Radio.  Russian nesting dolls.  Cola.  When pimples pop themselves.  Early Streisand films.  O Canada.  Major League Baseball’s National League rules.  Women wearing fingerless gloves, or who put their thumbs through self-made holes in their hoodie sleeves.  Also women who wear shower caps.  The charming and endearing music of Henry Mancini.  Cheese crackers.  The moment when you know you’re dreaming, but you’re still dreaming.  Lightning bugs.  Unexpectedly making a roomful of people laugh.  Backscratchers.  Dave Eggers.  French kissing.  A good game of hide-and-seek.  Hanging things on walls.  Sporks.  The New York Times.  Lava lamps.  Peeing when you had to pee so bad.  Those pull-down ladders that let you into crawl-space attics.  Polaroids.  Campfires.  Q-tips.  Shoe horns, although I’ve never used one.  Snuggies.  Drum solos.  Red Bull.  Sweating.  Owls.  Notebooks.  The WWII poetry of Randall Jarrell.  Text messages.  Blistex medicated lip ointment.  Umpires who scream every single strike call, all game long, and point emphatically.  Secondhand clothing.  Airplanes.  The Revolutionary War.  Summer, as hot as possible.  The United States Postal Service.  Protein shakes.  Riding my bike.  Skylines.  What people in the past thought the future was going to be like.  Kate Winslet.  The Appalachians.  Discover magazine.  Recently stained wood.  Looking up television commercials from my childhood on YouTube.  Coffee.  Those station wagons with wood paneling.  Anderson Cooper.  Pictures of my parents when they were children.  The Beatles.  Salt.  The Philadelphia concert venue The Electric Factory.  Hotel rooms, and showers in hotel rooms.  Cleveland.  The moment when you know they are bringing your food to the table.  Multi-colored thumb tacks.  The Philadelphia 76ers.  Brita filtered water.  80s movies about small, strange monsters.  When you can see the clouds overhead moving so fast, so fast.  Pennsylvania.  The free purple-ink pens that Planet Fitness gives out.  President Obama.  Flannel.  Escalators.  24 (the TV show).  Yogurt-covered pretzels.  “Boyshorts”.  Dueling pianos.  Postcards, both current and vintage.  The Johnstown Flood.  Big League Chew.  Those moments when you understand life is just life and enjoy a slice of peace.  Aaron Burr. Skinnydipping.  Hiking.  The moment the lights go down in a movie theater.   Black and white photography.  The ACLU.  Advil.  Instant mashed potatoes.  People playing instruments on the street for money.  The Golden Girls.  Pistachio-flavored anything.  The film scores of Hans Zimmer. Craft stores.  Meatloaf.  Roku.  The Philadelphia Inquirer.  Vermeer.  Putting lotion on my feet.  My mother’s lasagna.  The Erie Seawolves.  The ocean.  I’ve never been to the Cape of Good Hope, but I like it.    Netflix.  Elephants.  The Fourth of July.  Kitchen-cut green beans.  Snapchat.  Early-to-mid-90s Marvel Comics.  The Christmas music of Mariah Carey.  Ten minute naps.  Deep dark secrets.  Mall food courts.  Actually just malls in general.  FORA.tv.  Stoppage time.  Planned Parenthood.  Post-its.  Mirror Balls.  Women wearing anklets or makeup with glitter in it.  Amusement parks, even though I don’t ride rides.  Sundae bars.  Waking up four hours before your alarm is set to go off and contentedly drifting back to sleep.  Stretching.  The best poem I’ve ever read and imagine I ever will read, “Aubade” by Philip Larkin.  Sugar plums.  Newville, Pennsylvania, and its “Fountain Festival”.  The Mullica Hill Amish Farmer’s Market, of South Jersey. Gremlins, one and two.  Moments when I think I might have it all figured out.