Feels Like Fire, Isn’t Fire

I was born and I’ll die.  This is shit you already know.  All of this—everything after this that I’ve written—is shit you all already know.  So, why bother?  Gotta do something, right?  Gotta do something. Mostly I think life is grand but sometimes I get melancholy.  I think it’s probably good to get melancholy sometimes, it sort of flushes your system out, presses some sort of existential reset button. I used to have a dog but he died recently.  One day he was there and the next day he wasn’t.  We paid a man in a white coat to give him drugs that made him die.  It was awful. I say again: it was awful.  Then we drove him into the country and buried him in a hole in the ground.  At night we used let our dog—Benji– out into the backyard. It wasn’t a very large backyard, but he stayed out there for as long as he could. He’d stay out there for hours if you let him. It looked like he was eating dirt but he was not eating during periods; he pulled at the ground with his paws, then flicked his tongue at it, again and again and again. I’m not sure what he was getting in there, but he was getting something. Some itty-bitty creature that was minding its own business. And probably scared the shit out of them and then killed them. Meanwhile Benji would have run away and never came back probably, if I opened the garage door and let him out. He’d been with us for years and was a member of the family, but still we held him hostage. In order for him to walk around the neighborhood he had to be put on a leash, dragged along behind us when he wasn’t not moving fast enough. What is all this? What’s going on here? Who are these animals, what are these critters, what are these lights blinking in the sky? It seems that everything is so far away from everything else. The things that are really close to you, like that glass on the kitchen counter, the magazine on the coffee table, are such a vanishingly small percentage of all the things in the universe, that technically everything in the universe is very far away from you. So far away from you you couldn’t even imagine it, and if you could imagine it, it would terrify you directly to death. Everything is far away from you and has no idea about you, no idea but your dog in the backyard eating moles or slugs buried underneath the dirt. Here on Earth there are immense caves, caverns deep beyond imagining, miles below the Earth’s surface, right now, as you read this, engulfed in a darkness beyond imagining, little tributaries or streams or even gushing rivers bounding through large hollow openings, intense chambers, drilling though soft limestone, they are there right now, incredibly far away from you. They must, despite their static nature, have some clue of themselves, some sense of awareness, an idea of their singularity. The timelessness, the long drawn-out affair of this plane, is it within them?  They don’t know anything about you though.  Somewhere a fifty-year-old newspaper deliveryman wakes up in the dead of night to put the papers in the bags, look at his new delivery list.  He gets in the car without a sound.  Rough tattooed men working in sewers for great pay light cigarettes.  A fourteen year old girl plays a piano in a suburban house all by herself.  This happens all the time.  Someone stands at the edge of a bridge, looking down, wondering what it would feel like, what it would look like, to leap, to soar, to fall, to end, but they don’t.  They don’t jump.  Elementary school kids stop their bikes in front of soda machines.  Other kids are out past curfew.  The professor imagines sleeping with the student, then on his way home, buys a diet soda at the gas station and pays in exact change.  Quiet dirgelike music plays in darkened living rooms, shades drawn, incense, incense.  Alleverywhere all over the world this is happening, so far from everything else.  The geese are eating the flowers, and why not.  The bills come in the house and flop down on the table. Yesterday I left the gas cap hang open on my car after I filled my tank, what a fool am I! Cosmic tomfoolery! The restauranteur arrives in their cold kitchen, turns the knobs on the flat grill, the pilot clicks, the gas whirrs.  Somewhere, lathes are expertly operated.  Sirens wail with someone behind a distant wheel.  Ships rise and fall in the bay.  The boy is made to mow the grass, he sweats.  A woman is flying an airplane, looks down, she sees a forest, she wishes she was in those trees, smelling it, smelling it all.  When I was young I used to have nightmares. They would repeat themselves, but they weren’t always the same, necessarily. There wasn’t anything inherently scary about these nightmares. In one, it would be me and strange people that I didn’t know, working feverishly to build a spaceship to win some sort of contest. The spaceships that we built were massive structures, disc-like in shape in most of my memories, and we would get up on scaffolding, pouring the cement to make them. That is about all I remember, except that somehow, also, this contest was accompanied by a constant persistent dread and sadness. I would wake up sweatier than you can imagine, lingering in the depth of my little kid’s psyche, not knowing why a dream about building a spaceship should be so sad. I would beckon my parents for what must be their superior insight to come but of course they could tell me nothing. Who could? Who could possibly understand such a thing? Nobody. Nobody could understand such a thing. Everything about us is a mystery, everything about the world around us is a mystery. Time marches on but it doesn’t. Of course time doesn’t march, the smartest people in the world can barely even accurately define time.  Everything lasts forever but it’s over in an instant. Everything is to be celebrated and joyous but ultimately is flat, only dreadfully horrifyingly sad.  Twenty years (or so) ago I thought I was going to die.  I was relentlessly addicted to alcohol and life was a blurred mess of agony, with an oddly high amount of joy thrown in for good measure. So many forgotten nights, so much haze. Some nights, though, I do remember.  Like a night a bunch of us drove to The Duck Pond.  The Duck Pond, the actual name of which is Children’s Lake, is a shallow, man-made lake in the scenic town of Boiling Springs.  It is about fifty feet across, and perhaps four-hundred feet long.  At its deepest point, it is perhaps five feet deep.  Large, multi-colored, boulder-sized rocks line its bottom.  It attracts a wide array of wildlife: ducks, geese, swans, turtles, beavers.  There are manicured walkways all the way around it, red park benches at regular intervals, and little vending machines that dispense corn, in case you may want to feed the ducks.  You are not supposed to go there at night, although I often have.  As my friends and I pull into the gravel parking lot, I make myself a fresh drink in the Super-Size McDonalds cup I always seem to have with me.  Someone retrieves a few beers from the trunk.  We all make sure we have our cigarettes.  We set off, to walk around the Duck Pond.  At night, you can hear the ducks, the geese, out on the water, but you can’t see them.  They aren’t very active at night, but every now and then, you hear a splash, the flap of a wing against the heavy air, a short quick quack.  It is melancholy in that worst way: dreary foreboding.  There is a place where the path kind of ends, and you are left to walk through grass for a bit, and under the canopy of some Willows.  In the sunshine, this part of the lake is the most beautiful.  At night, its majesty is lost.  You can feel the grass, and perhaps the spray of the dew against your shins, but the Willows are lost in the night.  The copse has disappeared.  If you were standing at this spot during the day, you would see that a narrow cement platform has been constructed, extending about fifteen feet into the lake.  This is like a small concrete dock, which serve as a place for the birds to hang out without being in direct contact with human passers-by.  During the day, this concrete dock is covered by birds; squaking, flapping, quacking birds.  During the night, it is abandoned, and is covered only in bird shit.  But it is truly covered in bird shit, like some foul Pollock.  As a group, we stop here.  We are mostly silent.  We are smoking, drinking, thinking.  I start to take my pants off.  Someone asks me, “What are you doing?”  “I’m going to run down that cement dock and jump in.”  They try to tell me not to.  They warn me that the water is very shallow here, and that the concrete dock is awash in bird shit.  I wave off their warnings.  Have these guys stopped wanting to see how far they can go?  I take off my shoes, my socks, my pants, my underwear.  I’m a naked man at the Duck Pond.  The guys have warned me, so they are no longer worried.  They are watching, smiling, ready to laugh and tell me they told me so.  I take a long sip of my drink.  I start running, down through the grass and then suddenly my feet hit concrete.  It is terribly slippery, and even while I am running, I can feel the bird shit sticking to my heels, squishing between my toes.  It is a gross feeling.  In this light, it’s not easy to see where the platform ends.  Just in time, I realize I can see the moon’s reflection in the water; I use this as a guide.  At the end of the platform, I jump hard and high, as if from a diving board.  I pull my legs up under my ass and clasp my hands under my shins: the cannonball position.  And I freeze there; I hover.  Time seemingly stands still.  See me from the back: my shaggy, rarely groomed brown hair, my pimpled back, a bit of flabby belly spilling over into view, my two half-moon ghost-white butt cheeks, and directly below that, the soles of my feet.  And in front of me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water.  Now, rotate around me, as if you were a movie camera.  Stop when you are beside me, at my profile.  My mouth, wide like Pac-Man, my ample gut, spilling forth like a sack of oatmeal, the curve of my haunches, my arms flung below me, seeming to hold me in place, to levitate me.  And behind me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water.  Now, rotate around me further.  Stop when you are in front of me.  See that look on my face?  That excruciating yawp of desperate living, desperate to feel these moony waters; see that fat, oatmealy belly, my hairy, caveman chest, nipples erect by the night wind, the pale fronts of my wobbly knees.  Now look behind me: look at those guys standing there, their faces frozen in various forms of laughter, disbelief, worry, apathy.  Look at those guys!  Oh, they are probably worried about so many things; I am sure they are worried that I am about to hurt myself.  Also, looking at the set of their mouths and the glint in their eyes, I’m willing to wager they’re worried about drowning in a ferry accident with two-hundred strangers in icy cold water somewhere, or whether they’ll ever get to walk the length of South America, or what they’d do if they found a dead body in a hotel hallway, or if they’ll keep having that dream where they show up to the wrong building for a college final exam, or if they have syphilis, or if they’ll ever be the father they want to be, or marry a woman as great as their mother, and in there somewhere are the realizations, too, the realizations we are having every moment of every day: the lines of morality and sanity we keep drawing and moving and drawing again with everything we observe, and the list of Hopes and Dreams that is under constant revision without us knowing, the importance of breath and bras and bicycles all neatly ordered and the smells we love so much like old books and stale cake and the things we know we’ll never do like fly a jumbo jet or hide in a refrigerator to scare the crap out of somebody and oh look at the list of regrets written all over these guys faces the women they wanted to fuck the cars they wanted to buy the movies they wanted to see as though they were already dead as though their whole story had been told but that’s not the truth now is it we lived, we were burning to live, we were burning to live!  And we did live, at least most of us, although now in our late thirties and early forites, a few of us have started to go. I have a thing like fire, but it isn’t fire.  It’s something I can feel on my skin, in my hair, even see it on my eyelids when I close them.  It flickers like flames and tingles like sparks, it’s love, truest love, and it burns like fire but isn’t fire, and it’s the only reason for anything at all, but I’ll be damned if I know what it actually is, from whence it comes or what it is made out of. But like I said, all those guys did live, even if maybe they were trying to die.  You can die really young, if you try hard enough.  I knew a girl from Chicago once. We met on the internet way back before that was the sort of thing that happened with any regularity. I was up really late at night, drunk of course, smoking cigarettes and using the different chat rooms available on America Online, back when chat rooms were the cutting edge of communication. I can’t remember what chatroom I found her in, but I’m sure it wasn’t anything incredibly respectable. Somehow we hit it off right away, finding a mutual interest in Pearl Jam, smoking cigarettes, and talking filthy. This is even before it was easy to send each other pictures, digital photography was just really something people had heard of, but nothing that regular people were doing on any grand scale. We chatted online quite a bit for a few weeks, then graduated to phone calls, and eventually she boarded a plane and came to see me. I picked her up at BWI and was immediately disappointed with her.  Something about how she wasn’t up to my standards physically. But I was not a cruel man, so I hid my disappointment as much as I could and spent the next few days with her. We had a fling, although I did not threw myself into it wholeheartedly, but almost out of a sense of obligation. I would spend the next few years basically dodging her, until for whatever reason I decided to take a trip to Chicago with another friend of mine, he knew a girl there that he was into, and I could see this girl from Chicago again. We took an over-land trip, he drove and I drank vodka the whole way. I remember almost nothing about the car trip. I remember talking about Stephen King and the band Red Hot Chili Peppers, smoking lots of cigarettes and crawling around in the backseat looking for a bottle that had somehow gotten back there. It was incredibly dangerous, but we did it anyway. Once we got to Chicago, I once again couldn’t really throw myself fully into the fling with this woman, we hung out in a hotel room with her, drank beer that was in the sink filled with ice. We watched the movie “At Close Range”, and talked like Christopher Walken. Then my friend and I drove home. I would talk to her off and on over the next few years, sometimes having phone calls frequently, oftentimes not talking for a year or more. Slowly we drifted into our thirties, becoming very different people as I emerged into addiction recovery and she drifted further into…everything else.  Her depression was immense.  We were very different people, ultimately, but once removed from our false fling we grew close, albeit from afar.  Suddenly in our mid-thirties she was calling me every day; she was falling deep into despair.  I had little advice for her.  After four or five days of phone calls, her Facebook profile lit up with her friends messages about how sad they were at her passing.  I guess she didn’t make it.  I’m too much about me, like to think about me, write about me, do my own thing, yada yada, et cetera et cetera, and on and on. Life is hard enough to figure out as it is, hard enough inside our own heads to figure out what is right, what it means to be a good and nice person who isn’t offensive without reason and who is kind and helpful without losing one’s authentic self, am I right?  Oh geez it’s complicated to even state the problem without creating a run-on sentence.  I mean it’s like, here we are, in our own heads, all alone, wondering what everyone else makes of us, worrying about all kinds of stuff we never say out loud like money and death (especially death) and how our breath smells and if we should cross the street yet or if we have some disease or are going bald or menopause is setting in and while we’re trying to silently figure all this out in our own heads all by ourselves we’ve got to interact with all these other damned people and you never really know (do you?) if you’re being nice or being a prick or hurting people unnecessarily or using guilt just to get your own way or maybe overreacting to other people’s harmless bullshit—and how can you figure all this stuff out?  How can you be nice and helpful without actually being someone else for a bit and observing how you are?  And then maybe it’s just your blood sugar, and you’re having a down day, and you need a nap, but who knows?  Maybe it’s more than that, maybe negativity has infested you, or you are finally and actually and once and for all egotistical—I mean, it happens to some people, right?  Why not you, why not me?  I think maybe it already happened to me, I think maybe I’m lost inside myself.  Once, when I was in rehab for not being able to stop drinking (the second time) the keepers ushered us outside to play kickball.  A bunch of grown or half-grown people who days or weeks before had been sleeping in our own vomit or living drowsy lives in crack houses were now being ushered outside to play kickball.  It was an unusually hot spring morning and I was a very unhappy man—I wasn’t quite done withdrawing yet and I hated everyone—and regardless of my mood, I was in no physical shape to play kickball.  I was quite overweight and hadn’t been eating anything close to a proper diet for years, in addition to smoking two packs a day and drinking a gallon of gin every two days.  My cardiovascular system was fucked, my vision still wasn’t right from all the drink and withdrawal and lack of proper vitamin absorption—that’s a real side effect of alcoholism, look it up— frankly I was having trouble sitting in a chair straight, and here I was being suddenly expected to play kickball.  Oh and one other thing: the woman I was in love with was in this rehab with me, at the same exact time.  I was head-over-heels for her (whatever passed for my head in those days) and despite my intense and fragile emotional and physical condition, I remained unable to extricate myself from those feelings—and from the macho bullshit that I thought was required of me in front of her.  She’d seen me crying almost endlessly for days since we arrived at the rehab (for reasons even I myself didn’t understand) but out here, on this sun-drenched kickball field, I was afraid I might not impress her with my physical prowess while playing a child’s playground game.  Needless to say, I did not excel that day.  Running to first base made me so winded I had to go out of the game.  I couldn’t coordinate my hands with my eyes to catch a lofty, slow-flying red playground ball.  I laid on the outfield grass and heaved breaths, sobbed for no discernible reason, was an unsolveable mess, and had to go back indoors before everyone else.  I thought I had failed as a man, that she would never want me (turned out she never did, but for reasons other than kickball).  There, then, at a moment in which I was almost completely divorced from my body and the pressures of the regular outside world, I remained unable to understand how others might perceive me, was unable to correctly order what was important from what was trivial and ludicrous, was so set in my mind how I viewed myself that I laid in the outfield grass not worried about why I could literally see my heartbeat in my thumb, but about appearing unmanly.  Damned idiot, always a damned idiot even when I’m just inside my head.  Is this what our lot is, as human, to be stuck in this vacuum tube of a skull and never know who or what we are?  Even now, almost two decades removed from that day on the kickball field and any bottle of any type, I don’t know what kind of a person I am. I have made strides toward goodness, oh I have made major strides, but I don’t know, at my core, what kind of person I am.  Do you?  I spend time being grateful for this wonderful little life I have all the time, and yet daily find myself drifting into needless trifles; how much is that magazine I want? Can that person actually park there?  Maybe I should shave this goatee.  What time is Walking Dead on?  Is that even on on Sundays?  I think it’s Mondays this season.  Do you think my high school teachers remember me?  Maybe I don’t make enough of an impression on people.  Or do I try too hard to make a good impression?  Maybe I’m over-bearing.  I need to work on that, start thinking about it more clearly, with more resolve.  Is that black mold over there?  I don’t know much about black mold, I should look it up.  In endless loops.  All that shit in endless loops and at the end of each day (if you measure your life in days) you are no closer to knowing if you are a good person, a good and true person who is true to yourself and doesn’t hurt other people.  How can you know?  How can you know?  I just got home from visiting my father, who still lives in the house I grew up in, in the rural central part of Pennsylvania—all rolling hills, clusters of trees, right at the foot of the Appalachians in the Cumberland Valley.  The house sits on a neat rectangular acre across the street from an expansive Mennonite farm.  It’s calm and still, and the days pass with mostly silence outdoors, the grass growing and the animals making noises in the brush, a car passing every five minutes, fading into the static as quickly as it came.  Dad has hummingbird feeders set up by the porch and we sit out there and watch them, their wings moving as fast as lightning, flitting to and fro, drinking, drinking, then buzzing off to some other urgent affair.  Occasionally one will rest on the pole that holds their feeders, sitting still for a few moments, its head moving up and down and all around, as if to contemplate the surroundings.  But we know better.  It isn’t contemplating a damned thing.  It’s just guarding its territory waiting to eat again, waiting to reproduce again, getting ready to fly again, just simply waiting to respond to impulses.  It’s a beautiful, adorable little creature, but it is not contemplating shit, and it doesn’t give a damn what you think.  What is an abyss?  Is there an abyss, beyond us?  If when we die, nothing happens, what does it look like?  Feel like?  I’ve opened a portal between this world and the next and it looks just like a big red door, a front door, you know, a house door.  What nonsense.  Christ, everything is nonsense.  How can there be meaning?  There is no meaning.  There can be no meaning.  It’s just atoms and electrons buzzing around, and they certainly do not mean a damned thing.  But can we arrange things just so? John Sloan and the ashcan school.  Now there is meaning.  Beautiful, dense paint thrown up on a canvas and arranged just so, just properly.  But if the electrons don’t mean anything how can we paint meaning?  All I know is The Wake of the Ferry makes me feel something, something primal despite not being primal.  I am not primal.  I am a soft man molded by the modern world.  Oh how I have tried not to be so.  I have labored with gusto to not be pampered by the time and place I was born but I don’t have the guts to do what it takes.  Instead I have allowed myself to be carried away by the world like a cow in a cattle chute—the poor thing like that mole my dog so callously eats—and made soft.  No, I am not primal.  I am secondary, and yet somehow The Wake of the Ferry—paint arranged on canvas—awakens something within me from when I was another species.  From when I grunted.  From when I howled.  It might even come from the abyss.  Holy crap where does it come from.  I sure do like blue skies, clear wide-open blue skies and the wind on my face.  Getting tan.  Getting tan is like taking the outside world into yourself and then shooting it back out.  And all those vitamins and good vibes.  Also I like movies.  I like watching movies in air conditioned rooms while sweat dries on my skin.  I like rice with salt on it, and dogs who smile.  Really, there’s just art.  Immense, wide skies with cumulus clouds to the horizon, the prairie spread out in the foreground.  A poem that makes you tear up, but not really cry.  That toe-tapping song, that movie that makes you feel afraid like you did when you were ten.  Shadows in the corner, a swirling dervish of a dance.  That’s really all there ever really is, just the art and some sort of meaning.  There’s not really a word for the opposite of loneliness, but that’s what I experience, all the time.  Not because there are so many people around me—there are often none.  And it’s not because I don’t feel lonely; that would just be the absence of loneliness.  No, it is the opposite of loneliness, a filling-up of things, a carrying of weight, a total contentedness with the order of things.  I also often feel the desire for time to stop.  I can have sickening longings for the past.  I am not afraid to grow old, nor do I wish to relive past experiences; but I miss eras, phases, periods of my life.  I miss the way your apartment smelled in the summer and I want to smell it again.  I was like a god, those days.  I don’t want you to live in that apartment again.   And then there was that time so many of us lived in like a five block radius of one another, and there were coffee shops and open mic nights and warm summer nights when the noises of different venues mixed on the streets with the smells of coffee beans and rum and cigarette smoke and Liz Claiborne perfume.  I don’t need to live it again.  Good lord, I don’t need to live it again.  Just let’s stop everything and smell it and look at it and grow old in that world, in that place, in that feeling.  Let’s have the rings of Saturn stand still for just an epoch.  Then we can start time again.  I live in the opposite of loneliness and I’d like more of it.  Also I don’t want to die, ever.  moonless dark country nights.  there’s a sound to it.  a cricket sound, a buzzing, a silent sheath.  the sound of the nights of my teenage years, accompanied by the smell of beer, loud talk, and the first Violent Femmes album, the one with Country Death Song.  nowadays I want to take pictures of everything.  I try not to but I do anyway.  I don’t know what the penalty is for allowing a beautiful moment to pass unrecorded but nobody is ever going to levy it upon me.  I wonder about things like the shape of the land, the hills, how much we made to suit our own purposes like roads and drainage and sewage and how much the earth made, how long was it like this, how did it get this way?  eventualities swirl around and around and around, and around yet.  I have very much to say about many things.  mostly I don’t say them.  often I will say two or three sentences but I know it’s more than most people want.  it is just as well.  I’m a prick with my ideas and opinions and there’s no need to spew them out entirely; the big old universe with its Saturn’s rings and open mic nights does not give one fig about what I am saying.  and so on and so on and so on.  dark country nights with their sounds and their memories and time stopping and who couldn’t be lonely in all this immensity, anyway?  it’s all so damned big and careless and spinning with no plan, so I say, so I think, if you really want to know, and the wind blows like a motherfucker and the flags are stretched out at the tops of their poles and we’re all so lonely and the opposite of lonely.  really, there’s just art.  immense, wide skies with cumulus clouds to the horizon, the prairie spread out in the foreground.  a poem that makes you tear up, but not really cry.  that toe-tapping song, that movie that makes you feel afraid like you did when you were ten.  shadows in the corner, a swirling dervish of a dance.  that’s really all there ever really is, just the art and some sort of meaning.

Willis Earl Beal’s Circular Victory

Turn.  Circle.  Sun.  Moon.

These are the four words that comprise the title of the latest collection of songs by Willis Earl Beal.  The title is not only succinct–it also could not be more apt.

(the album doesn’t have a physical release yet but can be purchased for download at this link.)

All four of the words imply a kind of motion, an orbital, cyclical, or circuital movement (in the case of sun and moon, these motions are dependent on the motions of others).  Beal–who professionally wishes you’d call him Nobody–doesn’t choose words (or melodies, or masks) carelessly.

Sonically, these songs–like much of his recent material–consist of rising and falling keyboard dirges that weave in and out of prominence, often cycling back to where they started, but just as often running like a steady current behind Beal’s  plaintive vocals.  Within the framework of this wide-open musical canvas, Beal still manages to find unexpected nooks and crannies to place his vocal rhythms–he’s suddenly jumping out at you from a corner you didn’t even see–or he’s hiding in it.  Add to this a production value of lo-fi immediacy (I often felt like I could hear him change positions in a chair) and the cumulative effect is one of urgency, despite the modest tempo of the tunes, each song still manages to make you feel as though you are in the grip of strong stuff that is racing to an end.

But to “review” this album in any typical way would be like trying to review a cloud, or dirt.  That statement sounds preposterous, I know, but there it is, just the same.  As he continues to evolve as a songwriter and musician, Beal keeps mining material that gets closer and closer to the elemental; this is art like wind, or the subliminal functioning of a gland.  One feels these songs pass through you like quarks.

Beal has often layered the vocals one on top of another, giving the impression that they rotate around one another (like, for instance, the moon around the Earth and the Earth around the Sun); it’s like Beal orbiting Beal, at first the words just one more sonic tool, one more instrument, but eventually the words start to coagulate and meaning attaches to the dirge.

They are songs of loneliness, and love, and helplessness, and yearning.  From the opening song “Stroll”, where we are taken on a midnight constitutional with our narrator contemplating the greater meanings of the universe, to the closing number “Sun & Moon” with it’s sad binary truth (“I am night/ And you are day”), I felt connected to every song; ultimately, they are deeply human.  We experience the resignation to hopelessness, but also perfect hope (again in “Sun & Moon”: ‘But I will see you tomorrow”).  As we continue orbiting and turning, we experience the push and pull of our contrary desires: to be alone, but to be loved.  To be anonymous, but to be great.  When I invested myself in these songs, I felt understood, but also complex.

In “Cowboy”, we are presented with lyrics so brazen, bold, and current as to warrant presenting some without comment: “Passing places through the mall/ Empty faces filling all/ Hear the laughter off the walls/ Birthday presents for you all/ Know resistance while you can/ Avoid incessant clapping hands/ Put your face in garbage cans/ Take the trash do what you can/Recycle all your wasted shit/ There are people trying to quit/ (You’re a cowwwwwwwwboy/Roping all your bulls.)”

In “Release” we are presented with the lyric “You must let go of all the linear victories”, which is a boy-howdy of a line; you could chew on that line for days.  What is a linear victory?  How do we let go of it?  Like the best art, the songs offer some answers, but not all of them.  However, who knows? If you let these quark-songs flow through you enough, maybe the answers will find you.

The art of Willis Earl Beal–Nobody–has been an undercurrent in my life for years now, and this album more than any others before is like a chameleon, a changeling.  As I listen to it it darts away into my peripheral vision and changes shape, form.  It’s hard to hold onto.

Currently, “Turn, Circle, Sun & Moon” does not have a physical release, but can be purchased for download by clicking this link.  If you buy it, it will almost certainly be a linear victory for you–but at the moment, that’s still the only kind I know how to get.

Our Dewey Walk

I just went out for a very late night walk with Benji. The moon was so bright, a brazen beacon up there, like some alternate version of the sun, and it is so warm, like nights I remember from technicolor teenagehood, and the smell of grass, always the smell of grass, and tonight the tiny insects that swarmed Benji and I even seemed pleased, seemed to be telling us their happiest secrets. Barely midnight and already dew droplets leapt from the ground with each step we took, Benji looking for the perfect place to pee, different every time we come out but always perfect.  I was bathing in the moonlight like it was sunlight, turning my face toward it and soaking it in, staring at the gray ball, stunned as I often am by the thought that there’s a world there, that I’m looking at another world and it’s there right now, the surface of the moon, sitting there waiting for something, or maybe not waiting at all but just happy all alone, its craters and mountains just perfect, silent and airless and pockmarked, goddamn what a beautiful night with the insects and Benji looking back over his shoulder at me, his big black eyes pleading something, something I can’t know and can never know , and tucked inside our little air conditioned house my Love sleeps, her of the fine features and deep understanding, she sleeps in there like the surface of the moon and she has chosen me and aint it grand, aint it grand indeed.  Tomorrow we’ll wake up without an alarm and have mango and basmati rice for breakfast, and a pot of coffee, too, and maybe Schubert on the stereo.  Oh, life is probably pointless, ultimately, just atoms and electrons and consciousness happening by accident, the whole damned scene just one ludicrous accident, but who can argue with this, with the moon so serious and luminous and the dog looking over his shoulder and the air conditioning inside and basmati rice tomorrow, who would ever want to call any of it an accident?  Oh Karla I love you so much!

Be a Bright Blue

Sound the alarm bells.  The ship, it is sinking.  Our shoes are on fire and our water is a virus.  Good god, sound the alarm–run.  It’s the same old damned thing, the same tired emergency.  It’s the same old lie.

Run the white cloth up the flag pole.  Watch it hang there, limp.  Shut your windows and turn on the AC.  I’m exhausted from defending my lifestyle, and I’m exhausted from checking my phone.  Turn up the static.  Lean back into something.  Grill some putrid items.  Excoriate your neighbor.

A new batch of people have come along now.  They’re old enough now.  They see evidence of lies, control.  Someone has spotted a two party system.  THEY’RE ALL LIARS, they shout.  They sense something not genuine.  They sense they are not in control of this world.  They see they are inside a machine, and they cannot even see who controls the machine, or even the walls or the floor.  It’s a machine, they say, vote for Jill Stein!

As though someone polling at 5% of the national population isn’t part of the damned machine.  Hey listen.  If you’re in a machine, you’re in it.  You think the machine lets you out?

The machine was here long before you and promises to outlive you.

Sound the alarm bells, by golly!  The construct is about to swallow another generation whole.  Like zygotes.  Like plankton.  Like dust.

Of course you can fight things inside the machine and change things.  But until you understand the actual nature of your plight, you’ll attack the wrong parts, the wrong cogs and pulleys.

You have taken the blindfold off without realizing there was a second blindfold overtop the first one.

Recognize the machine.  Feel its rhythm.  Do not doubt its omnipresence.  You speak hushed of the politicians who control you while you sit in a strip mall restaurant.  How did the strip mall get there?  Why is it there, instead of elsewhere?  How many red lights did you wait at to drive there?  Have you registered the car you drove with the government?  The gas you put in the car–where did it come from, and who decided how much it cost?

Welcome to the fucking construct.  Jill Stein will take your order now.

Be a shiny countertop.  Be a chemtrail.  Be a smiling dog.

When I was a kid, I played little league baseball for two years.  I had waited too long to get started though.  Whereas most kids in my town started very young, I waited until I was ten or eleven.  Mostly I waited so long because I had never really wanted to play little league baseball.  I was scared of the ball, and I was scared of organized sports.  I wasn’t pressured to play.  I just wanted to participate in a thing that made the other kids look cool.  They looked like major league ball players to me.  So I did it even though I didn’t want to.

Be a lazy Sunday.  Be Madison, Wisconsin.  Be a suspicious cough.

Since I waited so long to start playing baseball, I was behind kids my age, when it came to skill level.  So the people who ran the little league put me on the teams with the younger boys.  My plan to do something I didn’t want to do to be cooler had backfired.  My friends and classmates were playing on teams I never saw, and I was playing with boy 2 or 3 years younger than me.  And they were still better than me.  I was a very bad baseball player.  My coach–whose son was on the team–was frequently disappointed in me.  He thought since I was older, I’d be his star, when in fact I was the worst player on the team.  It was mortifying.  The little league had a rule that every single player had to get an at-bat every single game.  One game I did not get an at-bat.  I wasn’t very sad, since batting was just another opportunity for me to be embarrassed.  But my parents were quite mad.  Because they are good parents.  After the game they told me to go wait by the concession stand while they spoke to the coach.  I waited.  About five minutes later they came into view, laughing.  They were laughing.  What happened?, I asked.  They informed me they confronted the coach about me not having an at-bat and he had freaked out, screaming at them, somehow finding a reason to rake them over the coals for having the audacity to question him.  They said he had become red in the face with anger.  The next game, he had me bat leadoff, despite being the worst hitter on the team.  My humiliation was complete.

Be a light early-morning mist.  Be a fully-trimmed Christmas tree.  Be a cardinal direction.  Be a traffic-free commute.  Be the paint that dries.  Be a clear radio station.  Be a marching band in the distance.  Be Jimmy Stewart.  Be a sun-dappled cave entrance.  Be a bright blue.  Be your grandmother’s afghan.  Be Connect Four.  Be the olive-skinned belly dancer.  Be a stunning cul-de-sac.  Be an early dismissal.  Be a crescendo.  Be the young girl that stops to help you, when she doesn’t have to, when you’ve dropped all your groceries and the sun is starting kiss the horizon, and she is beautiful, and the air reminds you of perfect childhood, and you don’t have to work the next day.  You, too, are part of the machine.

 

Badass Harrisburg, Media vs. Trump, Eraser, Alexander Supertramp

It has now been over a year and a half since we moved to Harrisburg. Like every time I’ve made a large move, it’s been interesting how at first there is a large amount of culture shock, and then just a few weeks or months later, it’s almost like you’ve always lived there. It’s hard to imagine there was a time that I lived in Philadelphia, or Erie,  or Carlisle.  It’s hard to imagine there was a time when I actually could not imagine moving back to Central Pennsylvania. Did I ever actually move away from here? But also, the first time I lived here, I couldn’t have imagined living in Harrisburg, but now it seems the natural center of this area. Harrisburg gets a bad rap from many people, for those are people who are afraid of it, or have never spent much time in it. Granted, it is a city with its troubles, both financial and otherwise. There are plenty of areas that are downtrodden, poor, and wanting of many of the services that the surrounding areas take for granted. But there is a lot to love here, and plenty of neighborhoods that you can feel safe in, and with nice modern housing. There’s more than enough to do, more than enough beautiful views, and a vibrant arts scene. In fact, there are more things that we have not been able to do than those we have been able to do. And it seems clear to me that the city is still on the move. I know there have been lots of stories over the decades about the revitalization of Harrisburg, but this time it does seem legitimate. The independent music scene, hipster coffee shops, art galleries opening all over the place. Even a vegan coffee shop close to the state capitol building! There’s a lot to love here, and although there are certainly times when I’m riding my bike down a side street here that I miss being right in the middle of traffic on Broad Street in Philadelphia, there’s also something to be said for walking out of my job every night, looking to my right, and seeing the beautiful Capitol Dome less than a mile away, or walking my dog six blocks and being along the Susquehanna River Trail, almost always as the sun sets.

 

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The fact is, the system IS rigged against Trump, in the sense that the media (hold up; did I say the MEDIA?? You hate the media, don’t you? [I’m probably not talking to YOU here, but to about 30 people on my Facebook who bitch more about the media than the atrocities they report on}  But what is it you are talking about, when you say “the media”? It’s an institution with hundreds of thousands of outlets, platforms, and systems, and it’s actually one of the best things about our country–one of the things that really DOES keep us free. But see, you gotta do some work, too. You have to sift through some things, figure out what sources you trust, the nuances of how to best receive information from the media, and where and when you receive it. You have to READ things. Hey, quick–who’s your favorite columnist? Don’t have one? How do you HATE the media when you’ve never really consumed it to begin with? Stop being lazy. The American freedom of press truly does set us apart–and I’m not one for “American Exceptionalism”. But yeah–most of the media operates by making a profit, so be careful, and above all READ things. And it does make a difference if it’s printed on paper; it’s harder to trick your eye into only reading the “interesting” stuff or items you already agree with. Just read the news. Hating and callously dismissing “the media” is just active laziness. And memes are not the media. FYI) are not obligated to report on an aspiring despot who would end the American experiment like it was no big deal. The “media”–contrary to what many seem to think–are not obligated to be neutral observers of facts only at all times. They are to report facts, yes–but also interpret them (again, this is where understanding media nuance will serve you well: there ARE places you can go for just fact, and places you can go for opinion, and places you can go for analysis. If you go to one place expecting it to be something it isn’t, you might think it’s corrupt, when in fact you’re just a novice). So yes, the media are biased against Trump because they are reporting on a man who would destroy our nation–and harm the world. And it is not their DUTY to remain neutral. The media IS biased–but not against Trump; they’re biased against evil.

********************************************************************

 

I wasn’t ready for Thom Yorke’s solo album, The Eraser, when it came out in 2006.  I was baffled by it, listened to it twice, and put it away–not knowing if it was bad or I was daft.  I put it in on a whim today and it turns out I am ready for it.

 

***********************************************************************

 

Two nights ago, I got to meet Jon Krakauer, an author who is currently among America’s top 3 or 4 nonfiction authors.  I’ve admittedly only read two of Jon’s books–“Into the Wild” being his most famous book and a work that has touched my life very deeply.  In it, Krakauer tells the story of Christopher McCandless, who left a very comfprtable and promising life, wandered the country with little to no money and no contact with anyone for over a year, eventually hiking into the Alaskan wilderness where he would eventually die.  Chris’s story is complex and multi-layered–it can’t be reduced to one single element.  When I was at very low points in my life–still drinking and in deep depressions–Chris’s decision to disappear and walk into the wild until he died appealed to me.  Later, sober and happy, other elements of Chris’s philosophy and his journey resonated with me.  Here is an excerpt from a letter he wrote to a man he met on his sojourn across the country.  The man–who had been deeply affected by a month or so he spent with Chris–received the postcard after Chris died:

“So many people live within unhappy circumstances and yet will not take the initiative to change their situation because they are conditioned to a life of security, conformity, and conservatism, all of which may appear to give one peace of mind, but in reality nothing is more damaging to the adventurous spirit within a man than a secure future. The very basic core of a man’s living spirit is his passion for adventure. The joy of life comes from our encounters with new experiences and hence there is no greater joy than to have an endlessly changing horizon, for each day to have a new and different sun.” –Christopher McCandless

While it was McCandless whose story has so impacted me, Krakauer’s decision to tell it, and the respect he gave the story, resonated.  In the many years since “Into the Wild” was published, Chris’s story has become of major import to a growing legion of people who find something inspiring about him, and Krakauer does not shy away from his role as a steward of the story.  It was an intense honor to meet him.

****************************************************************************

The sun goes up, the sun goes down. The wind begins to whistle through branches now bare with late months.  The sky grays, the wind grays, everywhere color mutes, curls into itself.  Even the insects look at you with worry.

 

 

 

Things Sweep You Up

How did this happen?  How did I become thirty-eight?  How did I get chest hairs, and then bushy gray ones, and then flab all-everywhere, and a 401(k)?  How do I know about local taxes, how do I know how to drive a stick shift?  Many people say something to the effect of, no matter how old I get, inside, I always feel eighteen years old.  I know what they mean but I can’t agree entirely; inside, deep inside, I’m perpetually eight.  Helpless, dewy-eyed, flailing, wiping the eyesnot onto my pillow on sun-dappled mornings as I start to hear the first birds’ chirp through the box fan next to my bed.  How did I get from there to here?  This is an immense amount of life to happen to an eight year old boy.

Things sweep you up.  You get swept up in them.  Time isn’t what we’re told it is–it’s a gel extending in all directions.  You get moving and your momentum just carries you.  You start to age and change and the person you were becomes invisible to you–an unknowable shadow stranger.

How did I become this man?  Decades have passed since I was the first me, the child me.  I’ve known thousands of people; how much did they matter?  I’ve been countless places- were any of them real?  I drank and ate and fell in love and tipped poorly and took advantage of people and swam on perfect summer nights and refused to do things–oh have I ever refused to do things!–and I knew people that died and I sent people mail and I flew on a plane and I lied to people who loved me and I shaved my head and I bought the perfect Christmas gift and then, every now and then, every so often, I go back to the places that things happened, and I look at those places that I stood, that we stood together, and I see myself there, I see those things happening.  It’s like a double-image–the past overlaid on the place, and finally, in those moments, I simply can’t understand any of it.  How can I be here again, when I was already here?  How many times can I be here?  How old can I get?  I’m only eight, after all.

Things sweep you up, they carry you with them, but not like a stream but like a mouse running across a darkened floor and you are the cheese.  Things sweep you up and carry you, they zig and they zag, holy moly do they ever zig and zag.  When you get a moment to breathe you might look back and say, oh my, how did I get from there to here? I’m only eight.  And the answer is simple: you did not get from there to here.  You are still there, you are still here, everything is everything all at once.  I’m just energy, you are energy, this table is energy, the perfect Christmas gift is energy, my eight year old self recycling his electrons into a thirty-eight year old self, all of us unknowable to our future versions, forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever and forever.

Gravity Works

It’s so exciting, watching a baby, a baby on the edge, just into the toddle, the toddler on the edge of everything, getting into everything. He must be watched constantly, and it is exciting and boring at the same time, this monitoring as the child tries, assays, everything over and over. We have developed a restraint. We call it a high chair and bundle the baby off to it. It looks downright medieval, this highchair with its belts and its sliding, lipped tray table that pins her into it. The baby, so encumbered, writhes and wriggles, all ampersands. We have learned to throw things onto the tray, distractions. Often it is cereal. It is almost always Cheerios. Why Cheerios, cheerless Cheerios? But it is, and the baby immediately responds, gasping and grasping, O-ing for the little o’s. They are like little stem-less keys, all thumbs, that he then inserts into any and all holes, tests the fit (nose, ears, eyes even). Even as we begin to remember something about the hazard of choking, choking hazard, the kid has found where the Cheerios work. The mouth, yes, that’s the ticket. And the child will commence to push all these buttons of oats down this open hatch. Then what do we do? We have played the Cheerio card. The baby looks up at us intently, a brown study of crumbs. And then we do it; we do it even though we know we shouldn’t. We dig deep in our pockets and withdraw our keyring. Now here is an authentic choking hazard, but we are at our wit’s end, too tired (and we can’t leave her worming in that high chair) to go look for the oversized toothy teething keys (pastel colored, soft-edged), designed and marketed for this very moment, when we are about to serve up our real keys. The keys spread eagle on the tray. Instantly, the child attempts to unlock this mystery (the empty vessel he is—ears, nose, mouth), scratching the tabula rasa of his still-soft skull. Suddenly, the baby leans over, off to the side of the chair, and drops the keys. They fall, make a confused clatter on the kitchen floor. Then the baby does this: she looks at us. She looks at the keys. She looks at us. She looks at the keys. Us. We know what we are to do, what we will do. We pick up the keys and place them on the tray once more. And immediately they are once more on the floor. Again with the looking. Again with the picking up and the dropping. This can go on, it seems, for hours. “Gravity works,” we cry out. But for the kid it doesn’t. The next release the keys might drop up. The keys are key as they fall. As they fall they open for us, they open us (if we can just get past the tedium) to possibility, that space to wonder about wonder.

No Greater Purpose

Everything Is the Same Everywhere

Every few years I seem to move. Not some massive distance jumping continents, but far enough away that you leave the old people behind and find new ones, with new regional slang and different football allegiances. This kind of move is always jarring. For brief moments during and then shortly after the move, tiny realities of life pop into focus, then fizzle away like fireworks. These aren’t life truths that can really be communicated through language—these aren’t things I can necessarily tell you now, although you’ve probably seen them, too, at some point in your life. Realities about people and place, and the general size and scope of the damned universe. So many things feel the same everywhere. Certain barometric qualities of certain mornings remind you of moments from your childhood, but very specific moments, maybe times that happened only for a two week stretch when you were eight years old—you can’t really remember anything that happened on those mornings, what you did or said of course, but more a general sense of people and place, your mother on the side patio in early summer husking corn and everything felt green and dewy—and no matter where you go to live, there are those mornings and times of the year that take you there. It’s in that damn barometric pressure, but in other things, too. It’s the way the light comes through the shade when the Earth is tilted to that exact degree, and the way the hairs stand up on your arms even though you are only barely cold, just the hint of chilly, that very pleasing kind of cold like hotel air conditioning. It’s the way the outside world interacts with your cocoon, your husk—this body that houses you. There’s a universality to this interaction. The light and the dew and the pressure and your clothes just ever-so-lightly rubbing your skin. How old are you now? Now you are twentyfive, now you are eight, now you are sixty. Innumerable things change within you during this process of the body aging but the way these things feel to you doesn’t change. The world is insufferably static. Even the particulars of place have a way of replicating themselves. Say you spend a few years living in an area that feels quite unique. Say this area has a one-of-a-kind geologic feature, a vibrant arts scene, quirky culinary traditions. This area also has a storied local college, a claim to fame as the home of a major manufacturer of some kind of goods, and a very vital part of early history took place there. You bask in the perfectly unique quality of this area you live in. Then suddenly you find yourself moving again, maybe a few hours away, maybe across a continent. You are sad to say goodbye to your unique home but you will love it always, and now you look forward to getting to know the stunningly fresh attributes of your new home. At first things seem dazzlingly new (aside from the barometric pressure) but soon enough an uneasy feeling comes over you. A feeling of looking into a mirror pointed at a mirror, or hearing a constant hum underneath everything that you can’t quite identify. You are pondering this hum and mirror feeling when you are enjoying an introspective moment at the one-of-a-kind geologic feature your new home boasts. It is very one of a kind! You are pondering what this odd feeling is as you tour the world famous factory at your new home—you are so proud to now live in a place that builds such famous products! You wonder about this gnawing sensation as you drive past historical markers, as you chow down on the quirky local fare. You can never, ever put your finger on what exactly it is you are trying to think, what revelation has always bubbled just underneath the surface of your consciousness. But there it is, right in front of you for the taking, all the time. Things are the same everywhere. They have different faces. They sing vastly different alma maters but beneath their masks the world is all one school, one geologic feature, one colossal historical site. You don’t want to feel it. It is an uneasy reality. More uneasy still is the truth about people, which is the same truth of the world just shrunk down to more appropriate size. Every time I make one of these moves, I will be walking down a street somewhere, about to enter some quaint coffee shop or boutique, when, as I reach for the door handle, I freeze because the person coming out the door is my boss—but the boss from the area I just moved away from, 400 miles away. It can’t be! I tell myself, He couldn’t be here! And then a moment later I realize of course it was not them, it couldn’t have been them. But as I walk further into the coffee shop, I am still haunted by the humming sound, the double-mirror feeling. The thought I have trouble forming? What difference does it make, anyway? A boss is a stranger is an uncle is a judge. One big world with tons of masks.

The Moon is Down

Rivers of items pour into the thrift store.  Hats and golf clubs and rusty saws; side tables and lamps with no cords and plush prairie dogs and embroidered pillows.  All day long these pieces of lives slide into the thrift store, glimpses past your neighbors window, views into the locked houses.  Sometimes it’s collections; thirty John Wayne movies, complete sets of Alex Haley figurines, fifteen Danielle Steele hardcovers.  It’s when you see the large collections of things that you know–you know someone died.  Dad died and the kids might have looked over his stuff, piled in the deepest corners of the den and stacked like waffles in the garage, and just not known what to do with it all.  Do you want this? they asked each other, nobody wanting to say no, not wanting to seem careless, but he made them watch “The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance” ten times as kids and they can’t imagine keeping it, even if they did love Dad.  These collections terrify me when I see them.  I have collections.  I have lots of collections.    The ability of someone else’s–some poor dead someone else–amassed material goods to bring me face to face with the abyss seems unfair.  There are so many other ways to find yourself face to face with the abyss, to have Danielle Steele novels from 1982 do the trick makes me think I’m getting too easy.  I like to be near water.  Any body of water will do. Oceans, rivers, lakes, creeks or rivulets, what-have-you.  There’s something about depths.  Fathoms.  Great distances and quantities unknowable.  My mind can fixate for hours on the questions of depth.  It must be so dark down below so much water, it must be so muddy, so briny, so devoid of light and life.  And yet things do live down there.  Organisms thrive.  Little creatures scurry about amidst all the pressure, never knowing sunlight.  I currently live very close to a river.  Not a huge river but it’s a river.  I like to ride my bicycle across a nearby bridge onto an island that is smack center in the river.  I ride out to the tip of the island where the water is spliced, diverted to either side.  I watch the river roll toward me in vast sheets, then split in two and slide past.  It is best to do in the summer.  The boats are out.  Fishermen in tiny outboards, their high-pitched whine echoing off the banks.  The heat of the summer makes the sound pungent.  Pungent whiny motor sound bouncing off river banks, and the sky above can get so blue, so blue.  Then there are river birds, usually.  Some white egrets off in the distance, a heron or two swooping by occasionally.  They call out to one another and their calls mix with boats, the lapping of the water, my own measured, shallow breaths.  It’s enormous things that get me, see?  The enormity of the river–it doesn’t care about me.  It doesn’t know who I am or even acknowledge my life.  It is benign but it is still a faceless monster.  It doesn’t feel but it will keep sliding past this island long after I am gone.  There is comfort in my littleness.  The river is pure and elemental and outside of time.  The river is not nearly as big as the ocean but it might as well be, next to me.  I take my boy to playgrounds.  We go to playgrounds frequently, almost daily in the summer.  We walk there through the humid city streets.  He likes to point at things and name the ones he knows–like house and truck–and ask questions about the ones he doesn’t know yet.  I tell him how water comes down the spouts when it rains.  He can say rain, but not water, not yet. We get to the playgrounds hoping other kids are there for him to play with, but usually there aren’t.  I play with him as much as I can on the tiny kids playground equipment.  It is fun.  It is not at all a task or a burden.  Just a few months ago the little guy was all burbles and gurgles and now here he is holding conversations with me.  It’s electric.  It’s just as elemental as the river.  Often I end up putting him in the little kid swing–the one that looks like a vinyl diaper.  I push him and make faces and he giggles.  It’s usually early evening and he sees the sun starting to nuzzle the horizon.  Sun down?  he asks.  He doesn’t want the sun to go down because he knows that means we have to go home.  Is it down yet?  I ask him.  No, he says, moon down.  That’s right.  The sun is up, the moon is down, all is well with the world.  Often on my days off–while my love is at work and our boy at the sitter–I like to take walks by myself.  It’s astonishing how few people are out, physically, in the world during the day.  Actually walking on sidewalks.  There seems to be very little need for it any more, even in a city.  I walk mostly alone from block to block, neighborhood to neighborhood.  In the hot summer months it feels even more deliciously lonesome, the hot, heavy air pushing in on everything.  The abandoned tricycle on the street corner seems pressurized by the hot air, more solitary but more graceful.  The squirrels in the dogwoods seem to know me, turning their nuts over in their hands like airborne otters, they seem to say It is hot and pressurized and we know you, we are out here, too.  I look at all the houses–so many of them!–with all the windows dark in the middle of the day, and everything so quiet.  I wonder about all the dark quiet houses.  Where are the people?  At their jobs, working to pay for the houses we rarely get to be in, and the cars to get them there (and keep them from having to walk on sidewalks).  Life doesn’t happen here, in the houses, but elsewhere.  Life happens on the move, in transit, on vinyl swings, we swing, we swing, we swing.  I walk until I get sweaty and thirsty and I turn around and head back home. I turn the air conditioning up and pull the blinds and turn on the television.  Everything out there is so big and elemental and universal and here on the screen everything is so small and incomplete and digestible.  I suppose we need the small to balance out the large.  The massive iron oceanliner swaying in a distant harbor at night, the moonlight on its riveted hull.  Things so huge, if you think about them hard enough, just the thought will crush you.

Origin Story, or: Where I Started

1.

I hunched inside my filthy, smoke-laden 1983 Ford Escort in the parking lot of the corporate office. It had been a three hour drive in the early morning, from my home in Central Pennsylvania to where I was now in Pittsburgh. I had worked for the company for eight years, but this was the first time I was seeing the home office. Although my excitement and nervousness was palpable, I couldn’t deny some disappointment with the plainness of the building. It wasn’t in bustling downtown Pittsburgh like I expected, but in some suburban shopping village, and although it was not a small building, its common brick exterior and clean design was reminiscent more of an upscale middle school than what I had been expecting. But nonetheless, here I was nervous. I was preparing finally for an interview to get into management. I had been a dishwasher and then a cook while I struggled and slouched through my early twenties, and now that I had begun to straighten myself out, my boss was taking notice, and suggested I become an actual manager. It seemed ludicrous to me at first, the idea that people would let me be in charge of something. But more and more, the idea took hold within me. I had, after all, basically been running the kitchen in that restaurant for years. The more that my bosses told me I had a bright future with the company, the more comfortable I became with the idea that I was a leader, that I was already a leader. I didn’t know anything about doing it officially, but it did start to seem like a natural idea. I was nervous as heck though. I had no idea how to answer questions for a job that entailed real-world grownup things. And now that I had been thinking about it so long, it became something I wanted very much, so I did not know what I would do if I just bombed the whole thing. My manager had done the best he could to prepare me, but this was all uncharted territory for me. I was wearing a clip-on tie that I had stolen from my father’s closet. And pants that I had gotten from JCPenney just for the occasion. I swung open the Escort’s door, and, putting on a fake face of bravery and confidence as much as I possibly could muster, I walked toward the bland brick building. Once I swung open the big glass doors and walked inside, I ceased being unimpressed.

2.

I’m in high school.  I think I’m probably 17.  Maybe I’m 16.  Who can remember details like that all these years later?  Details like how old you were.  Those kinds of details or statistics rarely matter.  Anyway I was a kid still, a teenager, you know?  I don’t remember anything about the evening that lead up to this night I’m telling you about.  I know I was with three of my friends–or more accurately, two of my friends and one of their girlfriends.  I began the evening in the backseat of one of the friends’ cars.  We were going somewhere to drink, to get drunk.  But this was a special night, because I had never drank before, or at least, I had never been drunk.  Sure, I’d had a few glasses of watered-down wine at some family wedding when I was a tyke, but I’d never felt any effects.  My friends and I had never snuck or stolen any kind of alcohol yet. Tonight was our first.  One of my friends–the one with the car and the girlfriend–knew a grown man named something like Darius who lived in Carlisle, which was the bigger town closest to our smaller town. I have no idea how he knew this man.  We arrived at his house sometime after sundown.  I didn’t know Carlisle very well then but later I would end up having my first apartment by myself very close to this Darius’ place.  Life is cuckoo like that, no?  So I settle into a deep, plush chair in this guy’s apartment–he has a girlfriend there, too, and they’re so much older than us I assume they’re married.  Darius has procured us all “forties”, or malt liquor that comes in 40 oz bottles.  I crack open the cap with a high level of anticipation.  It tastes horrible.  Wretched.  Very, very hard to drink the whole thing.  But I want it.  I want the buzz, the feeling, whatever it is–I’ve seen other people have it and I want it.  We all sit there nursing our 40s for awhile–I can’t tell you how long, who can remember those details?–and it gets a little easier to get it down as the night goes on.  I feel slightly light-headed but nothing to write home about.  I was disappointed to slowly learn throughout the evening that there was no more alcohol, just one 40 for each of us.  At some point I said to Darius (or whatever his name was), “Hey, I’ll give you a few buck to go get me just one beer.”  Everyone laughed, because you can’t go buy just one beer to-go, but I didn’t know, I didn’t know.  We left then shortly thereafter and by the time I got home, even my light-headedness was gone.  I knew, as I lay there in my bed, that I was gonna chase that feeling, that I was gonna find it.

3.

It’s 5 AM. It is still very dark outside, and it’s cold. I’m taking my very inexpensive bicycle out of the back of my car. I’m in Presque Isle State Park, in Erie, Pennsylvania, way up in the upper left-hand corner of the state. Presque Isle is a forested peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie–Pennsylvania’s northernmost point and only seven miles from (still not-visible) Canada.  It’s about seven years since I started my management career, about 16 years since I took my first drink in that cushy chair with Darius, and about eight years since I had my last drink. I am putting a bicycle on a road that goes the length of Presque Isle, tracing the peninsula’s outer edge. I had set my alarm for 4:30. I wanted to be the very first person out on the peninsula this morning. It was awfully fun loading my car up in what seemed like the middle of the night, driving the 15 minutes through the city out to the lake, but when I got to the entrance to the park, there was a car already there waiting. But shortly after the gates opened, the car went a different direction, so I still felt like I had the entire peninsula all to myself. The crooning of the insects, the chirping of the birds, seems all for me. This solitary performance of nature is just another extension of my current life, the manner in which I am completely alone. Five hours from all my family and friends, when even a trip to the local Walmart poses zero possibility of running into anyone I know, it’s easy to begin to think that the birds and insects sing only for you. As I hoist myself onto my bike, I smile more broadly that I have in years. I recently discovered the joy of bicycling, and having this peninsula cutting into Lake Erie all to myself on this chilly but slowly brightening, slowly warming morning, somehow becomes the most delicious moment I could have possibly imagined for myself. As I pedal faster and faster, following the road that faces the outer limits of the peninsula, that happiness simply grows and grows. How did I come to live this life? How did I come to be so lucky? The birds and insects above increase in volume, as the lake reveals itself on my right, at this time of morning still a black mirror stretching out farther than I ever would’ve imagined, more vast than I want to ponder.

4.

I haven’t experienced as much death in my life as many folks have, but I have seen more than a few people I knew and loved shuffle off.  What a strange thing, too, when people die, right?  Suddenly they’re just not there anymore, like a phantom limb, or a dream you can’t shake.  What always rattles me most is how often the person truly fades from our lives.  Sure, we mourn them, we miss them, we still love them.  But usually we get rid of their stuff right away, clear out everything they spent their whole lives acquiring.  We loved them but not their stuff.  Then shortly after they die we consider it poor form to talk about them too much; why dwell on the past?  It might be considered obsessive to ask too many questions about what their life meant, what it meant to you or the universe, and what they might be experiencing now.  When I used to think about my death a lot–when I was sad, which isn’t now–I would imagine my loved ones saving the books and movies from my shelves, saying Oh Seth loved these, I will read them all as a tribute!  But I know now they won’t, and even that they shouldn’t.  I’ll just be gone, and this mountain I spent my whole journey climbing, crafting myself carefully out of nothing, will just fade, fade, fade.

5.

The boy had me in a headlock.  I’d never been in a headlock before—at least, not one that was meant to hurt—and so I was confused.  There’s not much worse than being confused, hurt, and restrained all at the same time.  Especially when you’re seven years old.

Really, I should have seen it coming.  Even though I was only seven and had never been in a fight in my life, I knew that the boy was bad news, and I had seen him in the church yard before I went in there myself.  And he’d been giving me awful, evil kid-signals for months.  I should have seen it coming.  But what do you want from me?  I was seven.

I walked into the church yard with a tennis ball and a baseball mitt, planning to throw my ball against the big wall on the south end of the church and catch the bounces; to this day, one of my favorite things to do.  But I saw him. The neighborhood’s resident bad kid.  The badass. His family lived in that gross house with all the trash in the back yard, and he never seemed clean; always had a brownish undercurrent to his skin, as if he’d just survived a house fire.  And the neighborhood was filled with the stories of the kids he’d beat up, spit on, ran his bike into.  I’d never been in his class at school but I’d seen him on the playground, and it seemed he lived up to his reputation.  But I must have assumed, for whatever reason, that I would somehow be safe from him.

And there he was, in the church yard on an otherwise abandoned afternoon.  Who knows what he was doing?  Probably breaking branches off of trees, throwing rocks into bushes.  Something pointless that seemed mildly primitive.  I chose to ignore him and walked around the church’s large beige utility shed toward the wall where I’d throw my ball.

(most of my life, this day at the church yard stood as my definition of terror.  Powerlessness.  Rigid cold fear.  What death might be like)

So I threw my ball.  Plunk, plop.  Plunk, plop.  Plunk, plop.  A joy in the mindlessness, in the solid feeling of the ball entering the glove’s sweet spot, in the lively reaction of tennis ball meeting brick wall.  And the emptiness of the church yard, the silence, the perfect echoes.  No cars, no distant sounds of grown-ups on telephone calls, just me, the ball, the mitt, and the echoes.

And then the boy was beside me.  I managed a weak “Hi” but I could see this wasn’t friendly.  The hairs on my neck stood up, my heart dropped to my knees.  He ran at me, but neither a fight nor a flight instinct kicked in.  I did not fully understand this development.  The moment before he struck me (with what the kids back then called a ‘clothesline’) I tried to speak, to say something, to reason him out of this, but it was too late, and I flew to the ground as though I’d been pulled by stage wires.

I stood up, not yet crying.  Bewildered and disoriented, trying to focus my vision,  trying to ask him why he did that.  I mean, I was just playing with my ball.  Had he mistaken me for someone else who had wronged him in the past?  Was he rabid, like the dogs my parents told me about?  Was he—

—and then I was hit again, with another clothesline, and was knocked down even harder than the first time.  I hadn’t even seen him coming, I simply felt the hit and went down without any warning.  But now I had wizened up just a little bit.  Still having no idea why the attack was occurring, I had at least figured out that it was occurring, and I got up immediately and began running.  I did not run toward home, as it was too far away and he would catch me for sure.  Instead I ran toward the swings and the slide.  Kids seem to figure out pretty early that playground slides are an excellent tactical position; once you’ve climbed the stairs of the slide and are safely perched atop it, others trying to get at you will have a tough time; if they try to come up the stairs, you can just slide down, then as they are coming down, you can go back up.  This is not a foolproof system, but it does buy time, and so it was to the slide that I presently ran.  And I made it to the landing at the top, swiveled around, scanning for the boy.  Sure enough, there he was, ten yards away, in front of the slide itself, as though I might be foolish enough of a child to just see a slide and go down it; as though I would have some Pavlovian play response.  He stood there grinning like the Devil himself, like he wanted to kill me.  And at that moment I believed he would.

As far as I knew, I was not just in some childhood tale of woe.  I was in a fight for my life, and I knew nothing about fighting.  I was a tiny kid by any standard.  Short, skinny.  I was also quiet, shy, a little withdrawn.  Nothing had prepared me for a moment like this.  I knew to go to the slide by watching other boys fight during recess.  It’s been largely my experience that contrary to what is portrayed in films and television, boys typically avoid beating up small boys.  It does little to advance their hierarchical positions and may even make them seem weak.  Up until this day in the church yard, I’d been left alone.

I held my ground on the slide fairly well.  He came up a few times, I escaped down the slide, and then I made it back up again after he came down after me.  A few times, as he lurked below, simply watching me atop the slide, I called down to him, asking him why he was doing this.  I imagine it must have sounded pathetic, pleading, like a man begging his executioner for his life when he knows he’s doomed.  I pleaded my innocence and the senselessness of what he was doing.  I did cry.  He was sinister.  Truly sinister.

After an interminable amount of time, he did a perplexing thing.  He sat on one of the swings that was directly beside the slide, and he started swinging.  I was, however, only perplexed for a short time.  I saw the ruse.  I would either think he was done with the attack and try to leave, whenupon he would murder me, or I’d actually go sit on the other swing to swing with him, whenupon he’d murder me.  I decided I could do neither, and so I simply continued to stand atop the slide, watching him swing.  It felt like days passed.  I wasn’t sure if maybe I could actually die atop the slide merely from the passage of time.  It seemed I probably could.  But leaving the safety of the slide also equaled death.  My young mind swam.

I finally made a run for it.  I wooshed down the slide steps, through the lawn of the playground area, onto the newly built, woodsmelling porch of the Newville Area Senior Center (an old house that stood and still stands on the church property), around the side of the Senior Center and into the bush-lined, circular sidewalk toward Big Spring Avenue.  Only about thirty more feet of church yard to go!  I could see Big Spring Avenue, and the houses that lined the street!  Civilization, and grown-ups, and policemen inhabited that street.  Certainly I couldn’t be killed within sight of the street!

But then he hit me from behind.  I catapulted through the bushes, off the Senior Center’s sidewalk, and out of sight of the street.  And then he was upon me.

He had me in a headlock.  I’d never been in a headlock before—at least, not one that was meant to hurt—and so I was confused.  There’s not much worse than being confused, hurt, and restrained all at the same time.  Especially when you’re seven years old.  But he was also seven—a thought that hasn’t occurred to me until just now.  How two boys can have such different breadths of experience with headlocks mystifies me.

I couldn’t breathe.  He had all his weight on me.  I was crying without breathing, the most alarming bout of terror I have ever experienced sweeping over me.  Here was death, here was the end.  I did not think of any of the cliché things dying folks supposedly think about.  I simply thought how horrible dying was going to be.  I was pretty sure nothing happened after you died—nothing at all.  Just an infinite blackness.  Why would he do this to me?  I had just been playing with my ball.

And then it was over.  He was off me.  I still don’t know how or why.  I never saw him get off me, or waited to speak to him.  When I felt him release me, I got up and ran as fast as I possibly could toward home, which was only one block away but to a seven year old it’s a decent little distance.  I was crying so hard I thought I’d throw up.  I was so mad, and sad, and confused.  Then, as now, being made helpless is about as bad as it gets.

I hated him for showing me that for the first time.  As I ran, I thought of the most horrible things a seven year old can conjure and wished they were at my command:  the light that shines on nothing, the mirror that reflects only another mirror, the fruit that ate itself.  These things were worse than helpless, they were hopeless, and I would engulf the world with them.

When I got home, Mom was working in the garden out back.  I hugged her so hard and cried so hard.  So much of my life has been about fear: about how much I had or how much I didn’t have.

6.

I was born on a frigid Friday in January of 1978.  There was a snowstorm, this much I know because the story is often told by my family.  It was snowing and maybe somewhat icy that day and it was a treacherous trip to the hospital.  Many of the finer details have been lost to time.  It seems as though maybe my father stayed home with my older sister–she also famously fell on some ice on the day of my birth, when she was home with Dad–but I have always got conflicting stories about when and how everyone arrived at the hospital.  It was cold.  It was snowy.  All these people that would become my family were probably very nervous and confused.  How challenging to think there was a day when you weren’t here, and the next day, you were.  Or: one hour you aren’t here, and the next hour, you are.  All crying and red and scrunched-up, a big ball of mushed-up senses.  You just…popped into existence.

7.

On this gloriously sunny and hot day just a little under a year ago, I found myself at a park about an hour from where I live, with the woman of my dreams and a delightful young boy. The boy is her son, who I am helping to raise, both of whom I found myself suddenly and joyfully living with. On this day, it’s a weekend that we all have off together, and my love has found this fantastic event for us to attend, a kind of history-themed craft and art fair. I have not been playing the role of family man for very long at this point, but already I know that this is what I want, what I need in order to become me, the real version of me. We walk together as a unit, commenting on the smell of the french fries, or the historical paintings made by local artisans. When our little man wanders away, I chase after him as he giggles, imploring him in a high-pitched comedic tone not to run too fast. My lady love buys me iced coffee, holds my hand tightly. We stop at the little kids’ events, little painting and craft tables, things where you spin wheels and automatically win tchotchkes. I love seeing his face light up, and I revel in taking pictures of her with him, as they are experiencing things together. In previous versions of my life, I would’ve come to this fair by myself, taking it in almost as a cultural anthropologist, loving the fact that I was able to be so alone amongst so many people. But here and now, I don’t miss that. I wonder who I was then, how was I like that? These two people are everything I could ever want. Eventually we make our way to one of the smaller event stages, where representatives from our local zoo will be bringing out animals to show kids. First there is a falcon, and the three of us, in the front row, are rightly impressed.  One after another more animals come out, and he shrieks, sits on her lap and then mine, and she leans into the crook of my neck, I can feel her smile against my skin, and when the zookeeper brings out the snake and walks just a few feet from us with it and the boy surprises us by saying snake, she squeezes my hand even tighter, we are so surprised together, and he squirms on my lap and coos at the animals, and I can feel myself, with such absolute astonishment, being born.

Jeremy, Where Have You Gone?

Jeremy, where have you gone?  It’s been so long.  I suppose in high school, you think you’ll know your friends forever, and I suppose that is foolish.  But Jeremy, you were a counterpoint to my soul through the roughest, most awkward young years, and then we immediately parted ways for no stated reason, never so much as a phone call ever again.

Jeremy, where have you gone?  In this day and age, we stay in touch with people we barely know, forever.  I know more about how my minor friends from middle school have turned out than I know about you, and where you are, and what you do, and how you’re doing.  It seems nobody else I know knows anything much about you, either.

Jeremy, where have you gone?  Did England break your heart?  Did you find God in a jet plane?  Does the sound of approaching thunder terrify you, or ominous rain clouds make you smile?  Are you a farmer, with overalls to your chin?  Do you have a beard?  What happened to your parents?  Do you shiver in an unheated room in the winter with a wife who loves you?  Do you wonder about me, and how I’m doing?  Do you ever feel completely alone?

Amber, You Died

An hour or so ago, I stepped out of the house to take an evening stroll.  This, it seems, is an unusual event for just about anybody this time of year.  It gets dark mid-afternoon and the temperature drops and the people disappear; they go somewhere but they’re no longer pedestrians.  I, too, am outside rarely now.  It was brisk but not frigid.  The sidewalks, being vacant, were also silent.  The cold, dark air sent every sound intact to my ears–the crunching of the leaves, the hiss of the light wind.  I studied the street lights’ faint glows as I walked past them, wondering who they shone for on this barren evening.  Television glows, like mini auroras, illuminated most of the ground floor windows.  I felt ensconced by the darkness; enclosed but not stifled.  The streets were like chilly wombs.

Amber, you died.  It wasn’t a shock–probably not even to you–but it’s still hard to believe.  It would be fair to say we didn’t know each other well; we worked together, briefly, seven or so years ago, and after that never saw each other in person again, but we communicated frequently (off and on) via electronic and written means.  But we didn’t know each other well still, because we only ever conversed about one subject.  Amber, you tried.  You tried so hard, I could barely stand to hear about how hard it was for you.  You tried so hard.

Your funeral was four days ago but I wasn’t able to be there.  I wanted to be.  I wanted to see your parents, and you.  I understood you.  The morning of your funeral I had to go to a training class for my new job.  It was an hour and a half away and it was a very wet and foggy morning and I thought of you as I drove there, as the fog kept stretching out before me, obscuring the tiny mountaintops on either side of the highway.  It was a dreary morning and it seemed appropriate.  I’m sorry I wasn’t there.

The older I get, obviously, the more people I know who die. Sometimes it seems like the list is growing rapidly.  Each time, it is disconcerting how easily people seem to take the event; sure, folks are upset that someone died, but if they weren’t extremely close or related to you, it might be an event that gets remarked upon, discussed briefly, and then perhaps dropped from discussion for the most part.  The deceased might be thought of in quiet, solitary moments, or memorialized in sappy throwback-Thursday Facebook pictures, but generally speaking, after some initial sadness, the dead are just the dead, and the living are the living.  It is disconcerting, but I’m not sure if there is another way to work it.

I could spend lots of time recounting the things we talked about, the things you told me, the many different ways I tried to approach the subject, but none of that history matters any more now than it did then.  I could groan about how I feel bad for not helping you more, how I shoulder blame for you dying–but everyone always does, of course I do, and of course I shouldn’t.  The nexus of this moment right now for me, Amber, is that I can’t stop thinking about how you died, and what it must have been like for you in those moments.  The depth of your pain and your desperation, and what you must have known.  What did you think of as you slipped away?  Did you know you’d never be back?  Was there–oh god–was there finally an easing of your burden in your last moments?  It is more than I can bear to think of.

If I were to write your parents a letter–which I might do still–there would be many things I’d like to tell them, many of which I don’t have ready to put into words yet.  But there are a few that I know:

There really was nothing you could have done.  Everybody says that to people in your position all the time, but I want you to know: it is not always the truth, but it is the truth now.  There was nothing you could have done.  There was nothing Amber could have done.  There was nothing I or any counselor or facility or even the penal system could have done.  Your daughter was gripped by something the likes of which I have never borne witness.  The strength of the affliction was beyond hope.  This might not make you feel better, but it’s the truth.  I’m by no means an expert but I know this to be true.  But also: throughout all her pain, and bottomless suffering, Amber shone a light of purity that nothing could extinguish.  She wrote me a little over a week before she died and she was still in love with that dog of her’s–what was that dog’s name?–the dog that is also dead now, she never stopped loving him, like the purest little girl hugging a blanket.  And horses.  And Olsen twin movies.  She held her things close to her and kept her flame alive, somewhere deep inside the onslaught.  I’m not sure what kind of lessons or truths we can get out of all that.  Like I said, I didn’t know her very well.  But I know those things about her.

Amber, you died.  I didn’t want you to think we didn’t notice.

 

She Drank

It’s now been many years since I was an active member of the “recovery community”, ie attending meetings of 12-Step programs, etc.  But my time in them as well as my outspoken status as a recovering alcoholic (which is just another way of saying addict) made me many friendships and relationships with people of just about every walk of life, and people of extremely varying success with staying clean and sober.

There’s a woman I’ve known for about 6 years now.  She’s about ten years younger than I am.  She is an alcoholic of the absolute most acute variety–she can get sober for a few months at the most but never, ever stay sober.  In the few years I’ve known her she must have relapsed fifty times and been to as many rehabs.  It got really heartbreaking.  We never stayed out of contact for long; according to her I was one of the only people who never, ever judged her, who really did stick to the story that her troubles didn’t make her a bad person, that no matter how hopeless it got, she could still write a good ending to her story.

She struggled so mightily with drink.  I’ve never met anyone who struggled so.

We’d been texting somewhat frequently in the last few months–her travels had taken her to a Recovery House very near where I lived.  We never got together, but our proximity did increase our communication.  In the five months that she lived near me she relapsed three times and went to rehab twice.  In the past few weeks she had moved back with her parents about twenty minutes away and was, for a time, sober.

I logged onto Facebook today to see posts about her death.  I felt sick and lightheaded.  We’d texted last less than a week ago.  She was massively troubled but was just a sweet little girl encased in all that mammoth pain.  I texted someone to ask how she died and I got this simple text back: She drank windshield washer fluid.  I have no great words of wisdom here, and no tidy sentence to end this thought.  This is what the human mind and body can drive some people to.  I breathe deeply for her tonight and mourn.

The Theme Was Hotels, the Theme Was the Absence of Worry

Some memories that seem somehow important:

Waking on a hotel bed as a young young boy–no older than 5–on a family vacation to Ocean City, Maryland.  I had apparently been allowed to sleep in.  I could see out of a high window (it was a high window to me then) and the sun was at it’s zenith.  I was suffering from my first sunburn, which if you remember is quite confusing.  What had awoken me was the sound of seagulls squaking.  I caught a glimpse of a clump of them flying by the window in my first few moments of consciousness.  The bed was the most comfortable and comforting thing I could imagine. The air conditioning was pumped up, and the cold air mixed with the warm sun created an elegant sensation. I was alone in the room. This is the definition of childhood happiness, and the absence of worry.

Waking on a hotel bed, trembling.  Where am I? Which hotel is this?  It is dark, and much too hot.  It smells of mushrooms and bile in here. Who is next to me?  Is it someone?  Perhaps it is her.  I didn’t think she’d return. I try to rise, but my peripheral swims with still motion, my stomach lurches, I knock the lamp over, lay back down.  The trembling rises, it crescendos, it is hot and shaky and moist in here.  This is depravity.  This is the sadness. Strangely, it is also the absence of worry.

Waking on a hotel bed, a man of nearly thirty.  I’m in town for my job interview.  The light through the drawn curtains is low and grey; it’s just past dawn.  I only slept an hour but am instantly awake.  My eyes focus and are aware. Standing before the mirror to tie my tie, I am fatter and older. I accept this and smile. I like my fat cheeks, the bulbous nose.  I earned them. I gather my things: the suitcase I bought, the journal I keep, the socks I wash myself.  Tomorrow I’ll drive home. Tomorrow I’ll be OK, I know.

Every Direction is North

I haven’t written about my addiction or my recovery for quite some time now. There was a time when it was by far my favored topic, but having been sober for twelve years now, the immediacy of it has faded, and I started to run out of new ways to write about it. And also it just gradually became a part of who I was, I no longer had to think about not drinking or how strange my past had been, because sometimes the past gets so long ago, it’s like it happened to somebody else.

However, since moving to Harrisburg, a few things keep pushing it back to the front of mind. (if you aren’t familiar with my story. here’s what’s relevant to this post: the day before I got sober, the rehab I was in dropped me off at a homeless shelter in Harrisburg, I spent all day walking around the city, ended up drinking, then got sober for good the next day.  I wrote detailed posts about it.  Part one is here and part two is here.) Karla and I now live just a few blocks away from the Bethesda Mission, the homeless shelter I couldn’t bring myself to sleep in. I also frequently walk past the Midtown Tavern, the last bar in which I ordered a drink, the last place I relapsed. Looking back to the version of me from that day, to the me that walked around the city of Harrisburg, for hours and hours and hours, contemplating what to do with his life, and then  to the me now, it is just a boggling and staggering transition. When I put myself in the shoes of that man, that poor, sad 25-year-old man who saw no way out, who somehow thought that his life was over despite all the options still left open him, I feel as though I am peering into the window of another person’s mind; who was he? Where has he gone? He was so troubled but I love him.

We’ve lived here for about four months now, but it was just last week that I for the very first time rode my bike over to the Bethesda Mission. I stood on the sidewalk where I made a phone call to a cab company that would take me to Carlisle, where I would get a room at Motel Six and drink my very last beers. The payphone is gone, but I found the holes in the wall where it had been anchored, and I stood in that same spot, and I felt the weight of time coalesce around me. I walked out to the curb, where I had stood on a much colder day twelve years ago, and waited what seemed hours for a cab to come. I remember there’d been an older man standing there with me, although he wasn’t waiting for a cab, and we struck up a brief conversation, but I don’t remember anything about it now. I looked around me and tried to remember what has changed in the scenery. Were the buildings different then? In some ways it seems so recent, but only the most fragmented memories remain.

Life isn’t a Hallmark card, and things don’t always turn out great.  Happy endings are not only the exception; they’re downright rare.  I don’t believe in any overarching system that raises humans out of the dungheap of existence–we live brief painstaking lives and then are thrust into a meaningless void.  But while we’re here, strange and beautiful things are bound to happen.  Time plays jokes on us but then draws back curtains we didn’t even know were there.  Suddenly we are standing beside younger versions of ourselves, older versions of ourselves, our loved ones, suddenly everything converges and every direction is north.  If it means anything I don’t know what it is; time is a wisp, a phantom, an unseen train in the night: the steady conveyance.  Versions of ourselves form, drop off behind us, vanish like they never existed.  Who were they?  We’ll never know them.

I stood there on the curb by the homeless shelter and looked achingly toward the house I live in now, just blocks away.  Only two more hours until Karla and our boy get home, and I was desperate to see them.

Karla

Despite the fact that it is an impossibility in this version of the universe, I sometimes imagine what it would be like to lose you.  It is, I understand, just a thought exercise.  But it is nonetheless intensely powerful, and a little debilitating.  The depth of sorrow I can experience in just these few moments alone with a hypothetical–it is indescribable.  You out in the wide world, somehow not in my orbit, no longer my anchor and my sail, and I am alone late at night (it is always late at night in this thought exercise) and I am always holding, for whatever reason, a corded landline phone, waiting for I don’t know what.
This isn’t a sad exercise; it’s glorious for reminding me that you are my lady, and you are a glorious lady.

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Tonight I drove to the movie theater and back.  It wasn’t incredibly late at night; 9pm on the way there, close to midnight on the way back, but it felt much later than that.  The roads were empty and even Dunkin Donuts was closed, but the night had that great mid-summer heat and glow, as though the whole world had been swimming all day in a very chlorinated pool.  I saw the new Mission: Impossible movie and it was pretty good.  I thought about you and the way your jaw juts out a little bit–really it’s practically imperceptible–when you are worrying about something.  It’s a small glimpse into your inner universe.  It’s a magical moment, when I get glimpses like that.  I wish I was in there with you.

I was listening to a Seven Mary Three mix disc I’ve made myself and I had the song Favorite Dog on repeat.  The lyrics have nothing (or very little, or who knows, really?) to do with me or us, but the dirge-like buildup and dreamy crescendo and Sisyphean lyrics bled into my ruminations.  That’s my other hand, open and empty. It wants one too, I guess. That’s my other jaw, swollen and shameless. It talks too much, I know.

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The neighborhood we live in is pockmarked; pockets of new buildings, swaths of blight, dozens of playgrounds: some new, some disgusting.  Office buildings and squalid churches and a new-ish Red Cross headquarters.  It doesn’t know what it wants to be, this neighborhood, although I’m confident some day it will sort everything out.  For now it’s enough that we live here, together, and our neighbors are nice and we have a huge bathtub and don’t worry about much and it’s a safe neighborhood.

There seem to be more people on motorized wheelchairs than I see elsewhere.  And chicken bones; a lot of people seem to eat chicken wings here and leave them on the ground, which is strange.  But the ice cream truck stops many places, and frequently, and plays cheery tunes with that twinkly horrible bell.  Sometimes when you’re up in bed, I slip out the front door and buy a cone.  They are creamy and luscious and melt down my hand by the time I’m back inside our air conditioned living room.

Last week we were driving down Harris Street toward Sixth and, outside an old barber shop that I had assumed was no longer in business, there were dozens of chairs sitting on the sidewalk; perhaps ten recliners, maybe three or four dining room chairs, and a few folding chairs.  At first we thought some small event was taking place, but as we pulled up beside them, it was obvious they were for sale.  Just chairs.  We were incredulous and we laughed and were baffled.

A few days ago I was walking our dog and just a few blocks from our house I came upon an old wooden chair that had been partially disassembled.  It sat boldly on the corner of the sidewalk as though it belonged there; I couldn’t help but remember the barber shop of a few days before.  I thought to myself, we live in a neighborhood of chairs.  I know this is nonsense and is not meaningful, but it sounds meaningful.

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…and they’re barking at me, yeah they’re working on me, just like my favorite dog.  Geronimo!  Look out below!  I love that rusty water like it was my favorite dog…

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Much, much more than most people (I assume) I become instantly and strongly aware that I am a creature scurrying across the outer crust of a planet in the massive and unpredictable universe.  You know how, in science fiction movies, sometimes the protagonists land on a planet they weren’t prepared for, and when they step out onto the surface, it is often something recognizable to us but also partly mystifying and different, and you think how you’d like to explore that world, see how it works?  I am frequently struck by that sensation on our own world.  From our current house, I need only walk six blocks to be standing beside the Susquehanna River–massive amounts of water which has all found its way into one spot, moving along together, flowing, flowing, never stopping, against a backdrop of a blue atmosphere and low mountains dappled with bushy green trees.  I’m on a planet, I think to myself, and nearly faint.

A few months ago I was at my father’s house out in the country when an especially intense weather pattern blew through the area and I stood outside with the neighbors, watching in awe as a tornado almost formed in the farmer’s field across the road. The massive dark and white clouds were moving faster than I could have imagined, swirling into and out of each other, turning on end, pitching and yawing, an intricate dance choreographed by pressures beyond my ability to fathom, powers pulled from even beyond the Earth but the laws of the universe itself.  Suddenly the pressures above turned their powers toward us and a gush of air was blown directly down, the strangely warm air like a very strong wind blowing at the ground.  A gargantuan black cloud passed over our heads so close it was almost fog, and so fast it was almost an airplane, and then in an instant, it was gone, had moved past us, onto the next crop of onlookers elsewhere.  As I walked inside I said to my father in the living room, I have never felt so much like I was on a planet!  As I was walking out to the kitchen to get a drink I heard him reply I already know I’m on a damned planet! 

Just a few days ago, my dear, we were driving on one of these lengthy but truly scenic highways that Central Pennsylvania supplies us with by the dozens, and when we rounded a bend, we saw the light coming through holes in a cloud, we could see the light’s rays dancing on the air, and we could see it land, slantingly, on the nearby bulbous mountaintop, lighting individual treetops.  It almost looked like a forest fire was raining from the sky.  I was breathless and you let me take your hand and you let me be amazed and you were amazed with me, here on the surface of this world.

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…that’s my other head, open and bleeding, it thinks too much, I guess. That’s my other eye, swollen but fearless. It’s seen too much I know.  Geronimo!  Look out below!  I love that rusty water like it was my favorite dog…

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It’s enough–it is so much more than enough–that your hair falls across your ear the way it does when you lay on the couch.  How you sigh after a long day’s work: it is tired but determined.  It is so much more than enough the way you always offer me water when I walk in the door, it is so much more than I ever would have asked for.  The way that your lips taste, always so sweet, like you had just put a dab of sugar on them, even that is all I need, all I could ever need, here in our neighborhood of chairs, here on the surface of our planet.

Chaos in Capitol Heights

My love and I live in a rebuilding section of a partially blighted/ partially hip neighborhood of a medium-small city in a region dominated by medium-sized towns.  Like most places in this world, the South-Central Pennsylvania area is chock-a-block full of places you could live; towns, villages, county seats, “townships” the East Shore, the West Shore, and on and on, and most of these places are all close enough to all the other places that, within reason, one could choose to live in most of them and commute to work in a nearby area.

When Karla and I were trying to figure out just how I could move from Philly to Central PA while I was working an aggressively high-responsibility job in Philly (which prevented me from helping her in the housing search in person), while also not knowing EXACTLY where in the region I would be working, we had a difficult time settling on where the housing search should focus.  Although I could commute to almost anywhere in the region from almost anywhere else, some places are certainly more central.  The uncertainty was a puzzling factor, and my astute love had to shoulder all the legwork herself.

Conveniently, she fell in love with the first place she looked at–the place we live now–in the Capitol Heights neighborhood of Harrisburg, the capital city around which the rest of the region orbits.  It is, quite literally, one of millions of places we could have ended up living, which is what makes this next part so interesting.

Almost directly across the street from our house–certainly less than 50 yards away–is a house that my father lived in for about a year of his life, when he was very, very young–maybe 2 or 3 years old.  He doesn’t remember living there, but my grandmother certainly does.

And this is one of dozens of places that both my father and grandmother have lived over the course of their lives–and for both of them, it is the only time they lived in Harrisburg.

Our neighborhood is one that has undergone many changes over the past decades.  Many city blocks have simply been knocked down and cleared–and are now populated by weeds, mounds of dirt, and conspicuous sewer hookups reaching into nowhere.  Sometimes, beside these long, narrow weed lots you will see townhouses that are over a hundred years old (and they look like it, too).  In isolated spots like this, the neighborhood resembles a “ghetto”.  But then a few blocks later, the empty lots have been built back up; within the last decade rows and rows of new, ultra-modern townhouses sprung up in an attempt to capture the gentrification overflow from the nearby hip “Midtown” enclave–the few blocks that sport the arthouse movie theater, swanky craft beer and local food eateries, the farmers market, and the independent playhouse.  Karla and I live on one of these new blocks; actually for three or four blocks in any direction of our house, all one will find are the brand new townhouses.

Except the house my father lived in, briefly, in his extremely early childhood.  It sits, probably 150 years old, like a beacon from the past nestled between new elephants.  It and it alone somehow escaped the revitalization.  And if my father hadn’t driven my grandmother past the house for a look at it–back when we had the address but I still lived in Philadelphia–none of us would ever have known the significance.

I don’t believe in a higher power.  Of any kind.  I don’t believe in fate or things happening for a reason.  It seems obvious to me that we make these things up to explain the world around us, especially when the chaos seems to clear for a moment into what looks like order.

The chaos doesn’t ever clear into order.  Events that seem pre-ordained or “fated” or just too coincidental to be coincidental, well, that’s just the chaos of the natural world lining up for a split second for you.  If you watch the static on a television screen for hours on end, occasionally you’ll see, for just a second, the outline of the United States, or a dog’s head.  It’s just chaos lining up in your mind.  Reaching for a larger explanation of order is how most human’s minds react to moments like that.  It’s tempting to say that my father’s childhood home being so improbably located next to mine is somehow significant, was for some reason supposed to happen, that it “can’t be coincidence”.  But nobody says that about the traffic they hit coming home from work yesterday, or stubbing their toe in the darkness when all they were after was a damned drink of water, or the three hours they spent in a mindless stupor watching their shows at night–three hours they have actually totally forgotten.  Nobody ever thinks it was “meant to happen” that their doctor is 45 minutes behind, and they have to spend all that time in the waiting room with the old magazines and they forgot to bring their Kindle.

But see, whatever the world is–whether it’s orderly or chaotic or ruled by a God or ruled by particles–it’s that way all the time, not just when neat shit happens.  If it’s all put together by some power or god or fate, then that entity ALSO MADE YOU STUB YOUR TOE.

There isn’t a reason my father’s childhood home is now across from mine, and I suggest that the lack of a plan makes a coincidence like this even more amazing.  The static on the television screen made a really pretty shape with that one.

These Secrets Are Being Recorded

My love and I just took quick day trip to Washington, D.C. to visit the National Museum of American history.  She, like me, is interested in most anything, although I must admit I funneled our decision toward that particular museum because I find our nation’s history particularly interesting.

There were people everywhere.  In this day and age of technology and immediacy, I must say I was surprised by the size of the crowd; and they were people who did seem to genuinely want to be there and were quite interested in the whole affair.

We started out on the third floor in the exhibit highlighting our nation’s many and varied armed conflicts.  We were tickled by some of the astonishing items on display from the Revolution and Civil Wars (Washington’s uniform!  The furniture from the surrender at Appomatox! Lots and lots of rifles!).  We took our time perusing the extensive collection.  There were even plenty of items from such footnotes as the War of 1812, the French and Indian War, and our conflict with Mexico (including Teddy Roosevelt’s San Juan Hill uniform).  Then a World War I display–tanks, bombs, more guns, and more of the same in World War II, including some amazing photographs of “nukes”.  By the time we got to the Chinook helicopter that flew missions in Vietnam, we looked at each other, seemingly reading the other’s thoughts.  “Do you want to move on?”  I asked.  She replied, “I’m just tired of war.”

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It’s an interesting time in our country, for sure.  Things seem to be getting a lot more “liberal”, which is good.  I recently told a friend I could sum up my political and social philosophy just by saying “I want to make sure everyone is alright”; apparently, this is a liberal ideology, and so be it.  I’m not afraid to put a label on it.  It is what it is.  Whatever that is.

At times when our nation goes through divisive growing pains like this, there is always a very vocal group that just wants everyone to get along.  “Why can’t we all just believe what we want and leave each other be???” they bemoan.  And it’s a lovely notion, even though it’s complete horseshit.  I don’t want anyone thrown in jail for thinking gays can’t get married or for pushing for the continuance of institutional racism, but I don’t want to just let them be.  What kind of complacent, docile, horrific world do these people want?  They’d rather the boat didn’t rock than actually stand for something.  Rock the fucking boat, you motherfuckers, rock the fucking boat.  I’d rather live in filth than in a land of complacent hatred.

And why is it that the people who most frequently tell you to read your history books are the ones who clearly have never read anything at all?  Doo-Doo, Dee-Dee.

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We live next door to an artist.  She doesn’t know we know she’s an artist, but we know.  A little sleuthing and a little circumstance led us to the knowledge.  She has a garage full of huge canvasses that look surprisingly like Mark Rothkos (I thought they were Rothko paintings at first).  Immense color fields, oranges, deep blues, with smaller squares of blacks and browns in the middles.  And a large, unfinished sculpture in wrought iron of what looks like a male ballerina, mid-adage.  I want to talk to her about it.  I want to name-drop Mark Rothko.  I want to tell her I love John Sloan and Auguste Rodin.  But I’m not going to.  But maybe she’ll catch me wearing my Rousseau hat.

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You try so hard at things in life that mostly will never matter.  Will anyone care, after I am gone, how close I got to my ideal weight?  How close of a shave I managed to get, how many points I racked up on my grocery store loyalty card, whether I had all the Arcade Fire albums on vinyl?  (I do).  Holy moly.  It seems so cliché and trite but I just try to be better everyday than I was the previous day.  Nicer and more caring and less selfish.  And it is so hard and it never gets easier.

But still.  I don’t want to gain my weight back, and I do LOVE my Arcade Fire vinyls.  Life, it sure is complicated.

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One thing I know to be true: it was a lot easier to like the Philadelphia Phillies when there are awful back when they had powder blue uniforms.

The Past is a Melted Glacier

The section of the Susquehanna River that flows past Harrisburg has, by far, the most bridges in close proximity I’ve ever seen in my life. At one point the vehicle, train, and pedestrian bridges are so close to each other, you might be tempted to think immense, 300-foot-high mirrors have been slid behind some of them.  The reflection off the water only heightens the effect.  When one first encounters and really ponders them, many natural questions follow.  Why so many, so close?  How did this come to pass?  The city, the river, and the bridges have, I suspect, a long tale to tell.

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It is this time of year that I am most alive. I can feel the air buzzing around me, the close buzzing of air and oxygen and the thickness of invisible moisture. All-everywhere life is springing forth, preparing to display its full self.  Today I was simply unable to stay indoors, needing to feel the pavement under my bicycle wheels, exploring this city which I have always kind of known but never known, letting the sun warm up my skin, feel my pigment change shade. I was made for heat.

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Once every few years I become immersed for a few weeks in one of my minor tangential interests, early polar exploration. It’s not something I’m interested in enough to become an expert, or to have it be a true hobby, but it’s definitely something that intrigues me, for reasons I don’t quite understand. I have a special interest in Franklin’s lost expedition and the great adventure of Shackleton’s Endurance.  I just finished reading the definitive book on Shackleton’s journey, “Endurance” by Alfred Lansing. I finished the last two thirds of it in a breathless sprint today, in coffee shops and under the summer sky by the river. My brain is filled with polar agony, soaked horsehair sleeping bags, salt water-filled mouths, brittle frozen beards. The thing that I always find in these tales is that despite some of the hardest and most intense human suffering you can imagine, they are always filled with joy, hope, and celebration. And also mystery, and the idea of being somewhere nobody else has ever been, or probably will ever be again, and the vast majestic mystic magical landscape, in a world that doesn’t give a shit about you. So yeah, cherry stuff. Good summer reading.

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In the quiet moments that I have, I’ve always spent an inordinate amount of time contemplating the bigger issues of the universe. Time, past, memory, and the nature of oneself. Not to sound hoity-toity, that is just what I do. Lately I have found myself mesmerized by the change that has occurred in the recently, and suddenly. I spent most of my adult life espousing the fact that being alone was my best gateway into the secrets of the universe. And I’m not backtracking now, I’m not saying I was wrong. Just that maybe these long years alone were perfectly setting me up to best experience the other side of the coin. Now I can see that living with a partner, child, and, yes, a dog, are enlightening parts of myself I’ve never even seen or thought of before. In the best possible ways, I don’t even know who I am anymore.

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Karla and I were taking a walk through our new neighborhood the other day, when we walked past an ornately and oddly built and designed church, sporting in huge block letters across the front PLACE OF PRAYER FOR ALL PEOPLE. We stopped to look at it and talk about its unique brickwork and design, when we noticed the two large angel statues at the top of the building on either side of the minaret. They were odd-looking men (both were identical). Unlike most religious imagery on most ornate churches, the faces of these male angels looked…modern.  Like some dude you might see in the mall.  But there was something else strange about them that we couldn’t quite put our finger on. Then it dawned on me.  I turned to Karla and said,  It looks just like George Carlin. After a moment’s hesitation, Karla burst out laughing. It was undeniable.

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I’m actually dictating this blog entry into my cell phone, while sitting on a bench in the black of night overlooking the vast but comprehendible Susquehanna River. It’s a warm night, warm enough for the bugs to be nibbling at my legs, but the breeze off of the river is calming and cooling, drying my sweat off my skin enough to keep me temperate. It reminds me of summer days and evenings in Erie, a period of my life that is not that long ago, but is also quite different than recent.  The temperature and the breeze transport me right inside my 2008 Saturn Aura, with the windows down driving down Peninsula Drive, heading out onto Presque isle, the peninsula that juts out into Lake Erie, making it also the northernmost point in the state of Pennsylvania. On one side you have Presque Isle Bay, the safe harbor formed by the city of Erie and the peninsula, and as you drive your car around the tip of the peninsula, it opens up to the vast lake, a body of water that climbs to the horizon like a mountain, not unlike an Arctic ice floe. I remember the wind through my car, the heat and humidity, the breeze off the water, an enormous plastic cup of Dunkin’ Donuts caramel iced coffee, the sugar crunching at the bottom as my straw tapped it, The National’s  “Squalor Victoria” blasting out of my stereo. It was quite a day, and quite a period in my life. But that guy, he and I don’t stay in touch anymore. I don’t know him. There’s a new me here to discover. The past is a melted glacier.

They Move on Shafts of Ever-Lasting Light

I woke up today January 26^th feeling uninspired.  It was dreary and wet and there was lots of snow in the forecast, the forecast, the forecast.  I had fallen asleep while watching something on Netflix about the Presidents, I dragged myself into the shower thinking about poor James Buchanan, with his bachelorhood and his rumors of homosexuality and eternally perched on the edge of the Civil War which he might have prevented but he didn’t, he didn’t, and so many people had to die, including Abraham Lincoln with his top hat and beard.  Oh, the Civil War! I bemoaned as I turned on the hot water, allowing it to bounce off my freshly-shaved scalp.  Hard to imagine so many people dying, so brutally.  My scalp burned as the water found the knicks I had inflicted upon myself the night before.  Even after shaving your own head hundreds of times over the course of decades, it is still never quite easy, and cutting that skin is worse than cutting the skin of your cheek.  It’s so sensitive.  Paper-thin.  Sometimes I feel as though I can see my skull under there, like my scalp is some sort of rice paper or cheese cloth.  It’s a skeleton, you know?  This thing that you are directing around through the world every day, it’s a freakin’ walking skeleton.  You still have all your flesh and whatnot on it, but under there is a skeleton that you yourself own.  And you’ll never even get to see it!  Sure, you might have some x-rays done at points in your life and you might experience that otherworldly thrill of seeing your insides, of meeting your skeleton, but that’s hardly the same.  That’s hardly the same as seeing your skeleton hung up on a hook in some old-timey medical office, some turn-of-the-century museum of curiosities.  I’d sure like to see that.  I stepped out of the shower and dried off with a towel still damp from my shower the night before and counted the minutes until I absolutely had to leave for work, counted the minutes until I passed that point of no return.  Who knows what life should really be like—many people seem to think we shouldn’t have to work at all, and that does sound awfully nice, but then I wonder exactly what we would do all the time and what we would find to dread and try to escape from, because we probably need something to dread—I certainly have no idea what life should be like.  It just probably should be fun and filled with a lot of love and maybe perspiration and something to think about, every now and then.  That sounds about right to me, but I can’t speak for anyone else.  After pulling on the appropriate work clothes I made my way down my steep and narrow stairs and was made to think (how? from where?) of the old horror flick The People Under the Stairs, which seems to have come out sometime in my early teens.  I can’t actually remember anything about the movie—not a single thing—I just remember the title being scary and the title alone being capable of filling my young impressionable mind with all kinds of terrors.  I didn’t even know I was scared of under the stairs until the movie came out and then it was obvious to me.  Many movies to me are like this; the specifics of them matter very little, but it is just the memory of them, the impression of them, the knowledge of their existence that matters.  They are, after all, just light and shadow; some of them end up residing solely as ideas, they move on shafts of ever-lasting light, that mystifying globe behind our skulls.  Opening my front door, I stepped out into the damp, gray morning.  Snow was gently falling in what looked like  thumb-sized clumps.  The temperature wasn’t very low so there were puddles of water on all the corners.  Ice falling into water, ice falling into water.  All everywhere the molecules were moving slowly, even inside my body, even inside my blood.  I walked the three blocks to the main thoroughfare and immediately hailed a cab.  Normally I’d be riding my bicycle to work but with the snow on the way, you have to plan ahead.  The car was blue and maroon with a huge Liberty Bell on the hood and the words Freedom Taxi on the door.  As we snaked through the city toward my place of employment, I was struck by how many people were standing out on the sidewalks.  It was so cold!  They were out there waiting for buses, most of them.  Working further away than I do, or not able to afford a cab, or simply just accustomed to the routine.  They stood along the curb, craning their necks, looking down the street as far as their eyes could see, like they were looking down a long dark tunnel, or into some ever-increasing middle distance, the abyss of anticipation.  They were all so bundled up in layers.  They needed protected from the world, from what this little blue globe can do to us, can inflict upon us little sufferers.  I watched them as we whizzed by, the Mexican and Cambodian immigrants in their large kit wool caps, puffy Gortex coats, the breath coming out of their mouths in temporary miniature clouds.  Skeletons, I thought.  They’re all skeletons.  They think they’re cold but they’re not cold, they’re just here for a second and then gone, here and gone, here and gone like the rest of us, so temporary, so temporary skimming the surface of this little blue globe, we’re here for a second like the little clouds of breath, and then gone but we leave a skeleton.  They’re not cold, they’re barely here. After six or seven blocks I imagined we must have passed 40 or 50 folks waiting for the bus.  It occurred to me that compared to the soldiers who died in the Civil War that figure was almost literally nothing.  Their bus fare will get them nowhere.  Like a movie plot forever forgotten, like the brigades drowning in a river of blood at Gettysburg, even James Buchanan can’t stop the tide of time.  I swiped my card through the cab’s card reader—apparently cabbies prefer cash but I always tip better with a card—and I stepped out once again into the melty snowy world, ready for another day of work.  The minutes had counted down and here I was.  And we’ll all do it again tomorrow.

A Letter to a Future Version of My Girlfriend’s Son

Dearest Z.,

Now that you’re older and maybe what the world calls “grown-up”, we can finally talk about what is really going on here, ie life, the real nuts and bolts of this whole charade.  I think we can all agree on one thing: it aint easy.

I hope things are clearing up for you now.  I know that, last summer, you were going through quite a few strains of some sort (as most of us do in our mid-twenties, and many folks do so forever) and I expect, like many another, you’ll spend your life oscillating between fierce relationships that become tunnel traps, and sudden escapes into wide freedom when the whole world seems to be just there for the taking.  Nobody’s solved it, at least not at your age.  You can solve it as you get older, when you’ve reached the point that you’ve tasted so much that you can somehow sacrifice things more easily, and you have a more tolerant view of things, and need certain things less, and you have a broader acceptance of the pains and the losses.  Then sometimes you can solve the oscillation, but even still.  Life is extreme.  I met your mother when I was 36, but to me, 36 felt like both 80 and 18.  She was roughly the same age–as she still is today–and we felt like the oldest kids who’d ever lived.

That was a very curious remark you made to me in your last letter (where did you send it from, anyway?) about how you still felt, occasionally, very childish, in certain situations, how you are never sure how you are as an adult.  Z., don’t you know about people  this first and most crucial fact: every single one of us is, and is painfully every moment aware of it, still a child.  To get beyond the age of about eight is not permitted to this primate–except in a very special way, which I’ll try to explain.  When I visited you this summer in Adelaide, it was quite obvious to me that in some of the most important ways you are much more mature than I am.  And your self-reliance, your independence, your general boldness in expressing yourself to new people, is the sort of real maturity that not one in a thousand ever come near.  Your mother Karla has it, always has, which is why I can never look away from her when she is near.  You understand.  But in many other ways obviously you are still childish–how could you not be, you alone among mankind?  It’s something people don’t discuss, because it’s something most people are aware of only as a general crisis, a sense of inadequacy, or helpless dependence, or pointless loneliness, or a sense of not having a strong enough ego to meet and master your own inner storms, your unexpected inner storms.  But not many people realize that it is, in fact, the suffering of the child inside them.

Everyone tries to protect this vulnerable two three four five six seven eight year old inside, and to acquire skills and aptitudes for dealing with situations that threaten to overwhelm it.  So everybody develops a whole armor of secondary self, the artificially constructed being that deals with the outside world, and the immense crush of circumstances we are forced to encounter.  And when we meet people this is what we usually meet: their armor that doesn’t know it is hiding a child.  And if this is the only part of them we meet, we’re likely to get a rough time from them, and end up making “no contact”.  But when you develop a fine divining sense for the child behind that armor, and you make your dealings and negotiations only with that child, you find that, in a sense, everybody becomes like your own child.  Have I perhaps talked you in a circle, Z.?  It’s a very intangible thing I am trying to say.  When you try to communicate with that child hiding inside other people, they, too, sense what it is you are appealing to, and they respond with an impulse of real life, and you get a little flash of the essential person, which is the child.  All of the tremendous things I have been credited with and all the monstrous things I have been accused of during the course of my life have all been the result of me reaching inside my armor to my eight year old–or trying to talk to the one inside others’.

Usually that child is a wretchedly isolated underdeveloped being.  It’s been protected by efficient armor, it’s never participated in life, it’s never been exposed to living and to managing the person’s affairs.  It has never properly lived, just crouched inside while the waves battered  it.  That’s how it is for almost everybody.  And that little creature is just sitting there, behind the armor, peering through the slits.  Every single person is vulnerable to unexpected defeat in this inmost emotional self.  At every moment, behind the most efficient-seeming adult exterior, the whole world of the person’s childhood is being carefully held like a glass of water bulging at the brim.

This is what I thought of during your troubles last summer, and as I read your most recent letter.  Of course you still feel like a child.  The oldest man in the world still does; he still is.  The key to dealing with it is to understand it and to communicate with yourself.  I’ll tell you a story, but I’m not sure what it means in this context: when I was very young–maybe 4 or 5–it had just recently snowed quite a bit.  This was when my family lived in the small town of Newville–remember Grandpa and I drove you past that ancient yellow house the April you got married–and the snow was piling up on our front sidewalk.  My mother got me suited up in a massive snowsuit and set me free to build things out of the fine powder.  We had a gnarly old gentle Dogwood out at the edge of our front sidewalk, and I built a big hill of snow up all around it.  I wanted to make a slide that I could zip down (away from the street and toward the house, of course).  I made the hill as slide-like as possible but it just wasn’t slippery enough.  I suddenly had the idea to pour water on it and turn it to ice!  I ran inside and asked my mom for some water.  Naturally she asked me what for.  When I told her my plan, she informed me that hot water would work better.  My mother wanted me to believe that hot water freezes faster!  Of course I didn’t believe her, so she bundled up and came outside with me, with one cup of cold water and one cup of hot water.  I am sure you already know she was correct.  I was baffled, but amazed!  What an odd, unexpected way for the world to work.  For many, many years, this was the most interesting fact I knew.  I don’t remember how my slide turned out (probably poorly, as most things built crudely from snow do).  Of course I now finally understand the mechanism at work there–it has to do with how quickly the molecules are moving and how susceptible they are to change.  Just about everything has to do with this.

I don’t know why that story should stand out to me so, except that as I wrote this letter, I kept going back to that moment.  Z., I suspect that is who I am–that exact boy, outside with the snow slide, learning rudimentary science.  Everything after that has been a construction of an armory around him.

Do not feel so alone, Z., and don’t worry about how old you act.  Your mother and I are here to understand you, even if we are children ourselves.  But to take the first steps, you must feel who you are inside, sense who is peering through the slits in your visor, and then try to find that little child in everyone you meet.  Only then will your experience be real.  And that’s how we measure our real respect and love for other people–by the degree of feeling they can register, the voltage of life they can carry and tolerate and enjoy.  Enjoy it, Z., enjoy it enjoy it enjoy it.

All my childish love,
Seth

I am Afraid of Food

Making a statement like I’ve struggled with weight all my life would be an exaggeration for me–but only a little bit.  Throughout my childhood and teens, I was a small guy; very much the opposite of heavy.  I’m short–I was then and, surprise, I still am–but I was also just small.  The perfect word for it is diminutive.  I wasn’t so tiny that I got mercilessly picked on, but I suspect this is more because I’m a badass dude with an enormous personality.  I grew up hearing the occasional snide remark about my size (one of my favorites is when my first girlfriend related a story to me about how she was talking to some alpha male redneck prick on the bus one morning, and when he found out she was dating me and asked if she loved me–to which she replied yes–he said to her How can you love him? He’s so short. Shit like that sticks with you for the rest of your life) but generally I skated through adolescence being able to forget I was a small guy.  I wrestled for two years in high school–I did it very poorly, but I did it–at the 103 weight class.

One-hundred and three pounds, ladies and germs.  In ninth and tenth grade, my most formative years, physically, I weighed as much as two big bags of flour.  I was little, although I was, I will say, swathed in a fine layer of muscle.

My early-to-mid  twenties saw me (like most folks nowadays, once we leave high school) plumping up.  I got bigger but not to any point of really being unhealthy.  I never watched what I ate or thought about exercising.  I gained a belly and a nice round face but generally didn’t really think about it.  There would be moments when someone I hadn’t seen in ages would make a comment about my weight gain (do I just know a lot of assholes or something?) but I didn’t really care.  I felt fine and women still seemed to really like me, so my weight, for the most part, wasn’t on my radar.

Sometime around age 25 or 26, however, I started getting plenty bigger, and this is where the “weight struggle” starts.  I’ll spare you the long version.  Let’s just say that from 25 until about 32, I would sometimes gain more weight than seemed practical, and then I would feel pretty bad about myself, and I would take great pains to lose that weight. Part of the problem there, however, was that I was still a heavy cigarette smoker, and smoking seemed to affect my respiratory and circulatory systems even more than most smokers.  For me, exercise was basically not even an option.  Losing weight meant starving myself, living off of Slim Fasts and developing coping mechanisms for the sensation of extreme hunger.  My only path to weight loss in those days was through simple calorie deprivation.  It would work to get my weight down to somewhat acceptable levels, but you don’t have to be Dr. Sanjay-fucking-Gupta to know how those kinds of diets work out.  Time and again, I’d be right back where I’d been just a short while before.  Plus, by this point in my life, I liked to eat REALLY bad food.  And lots of it.  So, when I wasn’t dieting, I was really going for it.

Then, around age 32 or 33, the company I worked for moved me to Erie, PA, about a five hour drive from everyone I knew.  I loved it!  But for reasons not fully within my grasp–I like to think I’m a fairly good self-evaluator but who can really make sense of all the nebulous bullshit stirring in our own depths?–I almost immediately started really going for it with food.  Now, there are surface reasons for this which I can testify to: I had recently quit smoking (some really smart people aren’t sure what this has to do with how much we eat, but most agree it affects it somehow), I was all alone and had more time to kill, I wasn’t afraid of what anyone thought of me because I didn’t know anyone there.  As I got more and more visibly fat, I was less and less concerned.  I wasn’t in the market for a woman, so I wasn’t trying to attract anyone, and like I said, I wasn’t going to run into anyone I knew.  I loved eating.  I loved eating whatever I wanted.  And at first, getting fat was kind of fun.  It was neat to see what it was like to get bigger in this area, that area, etc.  It was like I was growing more me, which seemed, at first, like a pretty cool thing to do.

After about a year this trend changed dramatically in my mind.  Suddenly I was physically unable to do some things properly, from tying my shoes to wiping myself.  Even though I was always alone it was humiliating.  Anytime a picture was taken of me, I would struggle with ways to make my wobbling underchin less disgusting, until eventually I had to admit that no matter what I did, I looked fat.  I was a fat dude who was terribly unhealthy.

So, another long story short: I lost the weight.  I had been cigarette-free for about two years, so I started going to a gym.  I devised a diet that worked for me; it was very, very low-calorie, but I wasn’t starving myself.  And quite miraculously, I lost just shy of 50 pounds in just a few months.  It was one of the most amazing things that ever happened to me.  I felt truly glorious.  I was ready to not just revel in my weight-loss, but totally do the “lifestyle change”: eat right, be active, live like a generally healthy person.  And I meant it.  I did.

Just a few months after my weight loss, I made a bunch of massive life changes all at once.  I quit my job at the company I’d worked for for 15 years (basically, my entire adult life); I moved from being all alone in a remote corner of Pennsylvania to living with my mother and four doors down from my sister, nephews, and bro-in-law, in rural South Jersey.  I also was working (for a new company, of course) in Philadelphia (meaning I had to learn how to navigate where I lived–the vast expanse of South Jersey–as well as where I worked, the fifth largest city in the United States, at the same time).  The changes don’t stop there; suffice it to say there were many.  And this is not to say this was not a fantastic move, and a golden era in my life: it surely was.  But my psyche buckled under the amount of change.  Again, I don’t understand my inner workings enough to know what really happened, but I know this: within two weeks, I was (this is a real thing I am about to tell you, I’m not making this up) waiting until my mother went to sleep, quietly sneaking out of the house, driving to the very close-by Taco Bell, purchasing the ten taco meal (ten!), bringing it home, eating all ten tacos, then either taking the trash directly to the outdoor trash can, or some days, hiding it in my work bag and throwing it out in the city the next day.  I was hiding Taco Bell from my mom.  And why?  I have no fucking idea.  I thought she’d be disappointed?  I thought she’d tell me to stop?  That’s not how she is.  It had nothing to do with her, of course (readers of my blog should already know I have a history of addiction, which is certainly tied up in all this, but this is a blog, not a book, so we’re skipping that conversation. But I will say this: it felt an awful lot like a relapse).

Another long story very short: I gained the weight back.  Not all of it, but most (I ended up gaining back 40 of the 50 pounds I lost).  This was, to me, one of the most depressing things I have ever experienced.  I had been so thrilled with my Erie weight loss; not just how I felt and looked but that I had accomplished it, I had set out a very ambitious goal and not just achieved it, but achieved it quickly, efficiently, in view of the whole world.  And now here I was, in what seemed like a matter of days, just a fat bastard again.  Again I had trouble performing some rudimentary household and hygienic tasks.  Again I struggled with what angle to hold my head at in photographs.  Again and again and again.  After all those countless hours in an Erie gym, after dozens and dozens of cans of low-calorie vegetables and oatmeal and writing down calorie counts on little notepads.  Somehow, someway, here I was again just a short time later, wheezing at the top of the stairs like an invalid.  I was so sad.

Here’s yet one more long story short:  I lost the weight again.  A year and a half after moving from Erie (and about 6 months after moving out of Mom’s to my own place in the city) I decided that if I’d done it once, I could do it again.  And so I did.  Almost the exact same way I did it the first time.  And once again, I feel really, really glorious.

Which brings me, finally, to the point of this entry: I am afraid of food.  Following my “New Jersey Food Relapse”, I am now painfully aware of how easy it is for me to slip into old habits, and how quickly I can gain my weight back, and how I can be overtaken by the physical as well as psychological lure of food almost as if it were gin (which is to say, in an almost hypnotic way, where I act without full self-awareness).  I have been very close to my goal weight for months now; I am no longer actively losing weight but instead simply improving my fitness and adding muscle mass.  I still think about my calorie count every day: I try to get about 1800 a day, with an emphasis on a very high amount of protein for muscle formation.  But I still weigh myself nearly obsessively: at least twice a day but sometime much, much more than that.  I usually hover around 145 (I wake up around 142); on days when I’ve eaten more than normal, or have a lot of liquid in my belly, or have gone a few days without “passing” my food (that means poop!) sometimes in the evenings I’ll still cross 150…and that makes me freak out.  My inner psyche will simply not allow a Food Relapse to happen again.  And it prevents me from really, truly enjoying food.

Food is an interesting thing to struggle with because it’s not a drug.  In fact, it is something you literally can’t quit.  You have to relapse every day.  Everyone around you is doing it all the time.  Sure, you can eat better, sure, you can create a delicious and nutritious meal, but the fact is, when food or weight become a problem, for you, you can’t simply find a way to quit and get “sober”; quitting gin and cigarettes was easy compared to quitting food…

So.  I don’t have an eating disorder, although I might almost have one.  I eat mostly good food, every day, and just about the right amount of it.  I don’t throw it back up, either.  No, my eating disorder is in my mind, where every bite I take terrifies me, as I think to myself What if it happens again?

 

 

My Estuary

I’ve never been able to ease into anything. The flow of life is like a torrent for me.  Even if on the surface the waters appear calm, underneath is all white water, broiling and frothing against the smooth-worn boulders; there is a reason my blog is Notes From the Fire; things froth, things flame, things roil.  There is no easing into anything. No easing.  And so much noise!  Even when living a life so alone, the noise is persistent, concussive.  Car commercials where celebrities I like encourage me to take on life-ruining debt, with shiny black wet city streets behind them.  Who can resist the allure of shiny wet black city streets?  And low-toned, vague voiceovers?  I am a sucker for those, they fool me every time into thinking they are genuine, real, thoughtful.  And handheld gadgets now, with push notifications that insist I stop what I am doing in order to read about the latest problems of the Italian Prime Minister, or Redbox wants me to rent the latest Ice Cube movie, or somebody liked my profile picture.  All the time with these gadgets, these gadgets.  I love them, but still, they yell at me. Screens during the day, screens at night, screens at dusk, inside and outside, my own screens and other people’s screens and screens larger than a house, they all want my attention, want to sell me things, want my fears and longings.  Worries about whether I should rearrange my furniture, or if I can get electrocuted simply by pounding a nail into a wall.  These are the things I worry about inside the torrent.  I worry about if people like me, even as I try desperately to be my most authentic self.  You can’t ever stop worrying if people like you, or if your parents are proud of you, or if your old friends wonder where you are because they won’t get Facebook, or if your elementary school teachers are dead, or what happened after the end of LOST, or why my bank charges me to use other ATMs, or why I feel so tired sometimes, and sometimes not tired for days or weeks or what seems like years, to the point that sometimes I miss being tired.  I wonder what kind of trees line my street, and I hope against hope that someday I’ll be the kind of man who can identify trees simply by looking at them; oh, that’s an elm, I’ll say someday, and everyone will be astonished, and I will be a successful man.  I want to impress people.  I worry so much about impressing people, while trying so very hard to not appear to be trying to impress them.  I don’t want to impress people with flashiness, but with content; I want to surprise people with my wit and intellect.  I suspect this is still not a positive trait.  And then there are things like train times, and bike tires, and inseams, and manscaping. Oh, the noise, the torrent of rushing life, it’s like the incessant beating of distant drums that will not stop, perhaps on a Friday night in the fall and it is the sound of a high school football game, just down the road in town, and the band is banging out a rousing rendition of some old classic, but it just won’t stop, won’t fade away, because that’s the real nature of things, isn’t it?  To not fade away? To persist, if only in memory or perception, and perception is where they get you.  And then there’s bills, of course, everyone hates bills, and the pulsating beat of work (go in! come back! go in! come back!) that heaves with the rise and fall of my sleeping chest as I dream about the same things that chase me as I’m awake, the bills and the Redbox notifications and the celebrities in the luxury cars or was it condos? Either way they want to ruin my life; either way I salivate at the thought of buying things—anything really—despite my abhorrence of it.  And it all (it’s all fears, really, right?) slops together in a big stew and rushes in frothy whitewater over the rocks (what are the rocks? Why, they’re everything, of course), rushes downhill without stopping forever in a painful deluge; at least, that’s what I thought.  That’s how it had always been. Then suddenly she floated downstream, too, and she found me and I held on.  Beyond her now I see the wide-open ocean, sloshing still, but not rushing and pounding—and behind us lay the rapids.  She bridges the gap, my estuary.

Catching One

Though the mouse opens its mouth there is no sound.  The head is full of gray space & the body careens as if at the end of a momentum.  The mouse is largely apathetic to greater things, no nose for news, no favorite fall TV show, only a vague indifference that tells us it is dead, is a dead mouse.  For the alacrity of the feet has ceased, & nothing suggests the mouse wishes to explore the mind, wander its outer banks.  The mouse lies sideways on balsawood like a surfer, anticipating waves with its tongue out.  We are rightly afraid of it, though, for it’s proof that we are the harshest monsters to that which we most dimly comprehend.

Stand Still Like the Hummingbird

I’m too much about me, like to think about me, write about me, do my own thing, yada yada, et cetera et cetera, and on and on. Life is hard enough to figure out as it is, hard enough inside our own heads to figure out what is right, what it means to be a good and nice person who isn’t offensive without reason and who is kind and helpful without losing one’s authentic self, am I right?  Oh geez it’s complicated to even state the problem without creating a run-on sentence.  I mean it’s like, here we are, in our own heads, all alone, wondering what everyone else makes of us, worrying about all kinds of stuff we never say out loud like money and death (especially death) and how our breath smells and if we should cross the street yet or if we have some disease or are going bald or menopause is setting in and while we’re trying to silently figure all this out in our own heads all by ourselves we’ve got to interact with all these other damned people and you never really know (do you?) if you’re being nice or being a prick or hurting people unnecessarily or using guilt just to get your own way or maybe overreacting to other people’s harmless bullshit—and how can you figure all this stuff out?  How can you be nice and helpful without actually being someone else for a bit and observing how you are?  And then maybe it’s just your blood sugar, and you’re having a down day, and you need a nap, but who knows?  Maybe it’s more than that, maybe negativity has infested you, or you are finally and actually and once and for all egotistical—I mean, it happens to some people, right?  Why not you, why not me?  I think maybe it already happened to me, I think maybe I’m lost inside myself.  Once, when I was in rehab for not being able to stop drinking (the second time) the keepers ushered us outside to play kickball.  A bunch of grown or half-grown people who days or weeks before had been sleeping in our own vomit or living drowsy lives in crack houses were now being ushered outside to play kickball.  It was an unusually hot spring morning and I was a very unhappy man—I wasn’t quite done withdrawing yet and I hated everyone—and regardless of my mood, I was in no physical shape to play kickball.  I was quite overweight and hadn’t been eating anything close to a proper diet for years, in addition to smoking two packs a day and drinking a gallon of gin every two days.  My cardiovascular system was fucked, my vision still wasn’t right from all the drink and withdrawal and lack of proper vitamin absorption—that’s a real side effect of alcoholism, look it up— frankly I was having trouble sitting in a chair straight, and here I was being suddenly expected to play kickball.  Oh and one other thing: the woman I was in love with was in this rehab with me, at the same exact time.  I was head-over-heels for her (whatever passed for my head in those days) and despite my intense and fragile emotional and physical condition, I remained unable to extricate myself from those feelings—and from the macho bullshit that I thought was required of me in front of her.  She’d seen me crying almost endlessly for days since we arrived at the rehab (for reasons even I myself didn’t understand) but out here, on this sun-drenched kickball field, I was afraid I might not impress her with my physical prowess while playing a child’s playground game.  Needless to say, I did not excel that day.  Running to first base made me so winded I had to go out of the game.  I couldn’t coordinate my hands with my eyes to catch a lofty, slow-flying red playground ball.  I laid on the outfield grass and heaved breaths, sobbed for no discernible reason, was an unsolveable mess, and had to go back indoors before everyone else.  I thought I had failed as a man, that she would never want me (turned out she never did, but for reasons other than kickball).  There, then, at a moment in which I was almost completely divorced from my body and the pressures of the regular outside world, I remained unable to understand how others might perceive me, was unable to correctly order what was important from what was trivial and ludicrous, was so set in my mind how I viewed myself that I laid in the outfield grass not worried about why I could literally see my heartbeat in my thumb, but about appearing unmanly.  Damned idiot, always a damned idiot even when I’m just inside my head.  Is this what our lot is, as human, to be stuck in this vacuum tube of a skull and never know who or what we are?  Even now, more than a decade removed from that day on the kickball field and any bottle of any type, I don’t know what kind of a person I am.  Do you?  I spend time being grateful for this wonderful little life I have all the time, and yet daily find myself drifting into needless trifles; how much is that magazine I want? Can that person actually park there?  Maybe I should shave this goatee.  What time is Under the Dome on?  Is that even on on Sundays?  I think it’s Mondays this season.  Do you think my high school teachers remember me?  Maybe I don’t make enough of an impression on people.  Or do I try too hard to make a good impression?  Maybe I’m over-bearing.  I need to work on that, start thinking about it more clearly, with more resolve.  Is that black mold over there?  I don’t know much about black mold, I should look it up.  In endless loops.  All that shit in endless loops and at the end of each day (if you measure your life in days) you are no closer to knowing if you are a good person, a good and true person who is true to yourself and doesn’t hurt other people.  How can you know?  How can you know?  I just got home from visiting my father, who still lives in the house I grew up in, in the rural central part of Pennsylvania—all rolling hills, clusters of trees, right at the foot of the Appalachians in the Cumberland Valley.  The house sits on a neat rectangular acre across the street from an expansive Mennonite farm.  It’s calm and still, and the days pass with mostly silence outdoors, the grass growing and the animals making noises in the brush, a car passing every five minutes, fading into the static as quickly as it came.  Dad has hummingbird feeders set up by the porch and we sit out there and watch them, their wings moving as fast as lightning, flitting to and fro, drinking, drinking, then buzzing off to some other urgent affair.  Occasionally one will rest on the pole that holds their feeders, sitting still for a few moments, its head moving up and down and all around, as if to contemplate the surroundings.  But we know better.  It isn’t contemplating a damned thing.  It’s just guarding its territory waiting to eat again, waiting to reproduce again, getting ready to fly again, just simply waiting to respond to impulses.  It’s a beautiful, adorable little creature, but it is not contemplating shit, and it doesn’t give a damn what you think.

Funeral Procession on the Banks of the Yangtze

 

It wasn’t long ago that I burned with a freshly-stoked fire, all the time.  It was piss and vinegar in equal parts.  Rave and rage, rave and rage; in my early thirties I was still writing poems about the horrible old days with too much booze and darkened rooms, and long screeds about our destructive system and the persistent search for personal authenticity.  I burned for the world.

I still burn for the world, of course, but now it’s more of a smoldering, smoking thing.  Now it’s more about vintage photographs and war documentaries and less about poems called “Labia”.  It seems to be an evolution of calming that all but the most robust must go through.  For every Iggy Pop there’s a dozen Dennis Learys, their shouts quieting to quaint heartwarming television shows about firefighters before their 50th birthday.  Where does the hot blue flame go?  Why must it?  What is the fuel inside us that burns off?

Fifteen years ago:

The Duck Pond, the actual name of which is Children’s Lake, is a shallow, man-made lake in the scenic town of Boiling Springs.  It is about fifty feet across, and perhaps four-hundred feet long.  At it’s deepest point, it is perhaps five feet deep.  Large, multi-colored, boulder-sized rocks line its bottom.  It attracts a wide array of wildlife: ducks, geese, swans, turtles, beavers.  There are manicured walkways all the way around it, red park benches at regular intervals, and little vending machines that dispense corn, in case you may want to feed the ducks.  You are not supposed to go there at night, although I often have.

I make myself a fresh gin and coke in the huge plastic McDonalds cup.  Someone retrieves a few beers from the trunk.  We all make sure we have our cigarettes.  We set off, to walk around the Duck Pond.

At night, you can hear the ducks, the geese, out on the water, but you can’t see them.  They aren’t very active at night, but every now and then, you hear a splash, the flap of a wing against the heavy air, a short quick quack.  It is melancholy in that worst way: dreary foreboding.

There is a place where the path kind of ends, and you are left to walk through grass for a bit, and under the canopy of some Willows.  In the sunshine, this part of the lake is the most beautiful.  At night, it’s majesty is lost.  You can feel the grass, and perhaps the spray of the dew against your shins, but the willows are lost in the night.  The copse has disappeared.

If you were standing at this spot during the day, you would see that a narrow cement platform has been constructed, extending about fifteen feet into the lake.  This is like a small concrete dock, which serve as a place for the birds to hang out without being in direct contact with human passers-by.  During the day, this concrete dock is covered by birds; squaking, flapping, quacking birds.  During the night, it is abandoned, and is covered only in bird shit.  But it is truly covered in bird shit, like some foul Pollock.

As a group, we stop here.  We are mostly silent.  We are smoking, drinking, thinking.  I start to take my pants off.

Someone asks me, “What are you doing?”

“I’m going to run down that cement dock and jump in.”

They try to tell me not to.  They warn me that the water is very shallow here, and that the concrete dock is awash in bird shit.  I wave off their warnings.  Have these guys stopped wanting to see how far they can go?

I take off my shoes, my socks, my pants, my underwear.  I’m a naked man at the Duck Pond.  The guys have warned me, so they are no longer worried.  They are watching, smiling, ready to laugh and tell me they told me so.

I take a long sip of my drink.

I start running, down through the grass and then suddenly my feet hit concrete.  It is terribly slippery, and even while I am running, I can feel the bird shit sticking to my heels, squishing between my toes.  It is a gross feeling.

In this light, it’s not easy to see where the platform ends.  Just in time, I realize I can see the moon’s reflection in the water; I use this as a guide.

At the end of the platform, I jump hard and high, as if from a diving board.  I pull my legs up under my ass and clasp my hands under my shins: the cannonball position.

And I freeze there; I hover.  Time seemingly stands still.  See me from the back: my shaggy, rarely groomed brown hair, my pimpled back, a bit of flabby belly spilling over into view, my two half-moon ghost-white butt cheeks, and directly below that, the soles of my feet.  And in front of me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water.  Now, rotate around me, as if you were a movie camera.  Stop when you are beside me, at my profile.  My mouth, wide like Pac-Man, my ample gut, spilling forth like a sack of oatmeal, the curve of my haunches, my arms flung below me, seeming to hold me in place, to levitate me.  And behind me, a nearly-black matte of stars, tree outlines and moony water.  Now, rotate around me further.  Stop when you are in front of me.  See that look on my face?  That excruciating yawp of desperate living, desperate to feel these moony waters; see that fat, oatmealy belly, my hairy, caveman chest, nipples erect by the night wind, the pale fronts of my wobbly knees, my black overgrown nest of pubics, my dangling penis reduced to a nub by a run through the darkness.  Now look behind me: look at those guys standing there, their faces frozen in various forms of laughter, disbelief, worry, apathy.  Look at those guys!  Oh, they are probably worried about so many things; I am sure they are worried that I am about to hurt myself.  Also, looking at the set of their mouths and the glint in their eyes, I’m willing to wager they’re worried about drowning in a ferry accident with two-hundred strangers in icy cold water somewhere, or whether they’ll ever get to walk the length of South America, or what they’d do if they found a dead body in a hotel hallway, or if they’ll keep having that dream where they show up to the wrong building for a college final exam, or if they have syphilis, or if they’ll ever be the father they want to be, or marry a woman as great as their mother, and in there somewhere are the realizations, too, the realizations we are having every moment of every day: the lines of morality and sanity we keep drawing and moving and drawing again with everything we observe, and the list of Hopes and Dreams that is under constant revision without us knowing, the importance of breath and bras and bicycles all neatly ordered and the smells we love so much like old books and stale cake and the things we know we’ll never do like fly a jumbo jet or hide in a refrigerator to scare the crap out of somebody and oh look at the list of regrets written all over these guys faces the women they wanted to fuck the cars they wanted to buy the movies they wanted to see as though they were already dead as though their whole story had been told but that’s not the truth now is it we lived, we were burning to live, we were burning to live!

 

Fifteen minutes ago:

I took a long walk this afternoon.  From my house, I went west down Jackson, all the way to Broad, where I stopped in a coffee shop for a huge iced coffee, which I then drank luxuriously slowly as I made my way south down Broad to Oregon, where I turned east and headed back home.  This is a journey of about two miles, at the end of a satisfying, long day.

You pass a lot of interesting people and places on this trek.  As I neared home (still on Oregon, though) I started seeing numerous dogs and their owners, almost all small dogs.  Dachshunds, Yorkies, that sort of thing.  They were all so nice and polite, the dogs as well as the owners.  Here we were, almost as south as you can get in the city of Philadelphia—a place with a reputation, and we’re all just smiling, saying hi, waving at little dogs.  It was nice.

I was listening to Glenn Miller on my headphones, that kind of sentimental Hallmark music with just enough swing to get your feet moving.  The trombones were sliding under the trumpets, and the stand-up bass was standing up while the guitars were laying it down in a lively rendition of “Johnson Rag”.  The sun was just starting to touch the tops of the brick row-homes, the intense angle beaming those cosmic particles onto the scruff of my neck, making me hot, hot.

At the corner of Oregon and 3rd I stopped and turned around, let the sun hit my face, felt the glory of the universe, et cetera, et cetera.  It was odd, facing that direction and the long, close-cropped street stretching out before me, how difficult it was to make out what I was seeing, with the sun directly in my eyes.  I knew I had just passed an old man on a lawn chair with a dachshund and a beer bottle at his feet, as well as a Korean Laundromat and a Little Caesars pizza joint, but the buildings and the wires and the cars, so backlit like that, could have been almost anything; one moment it was Oregon Avenue, the next, enormous Easter Island statue heads, bowing in unison, and then it was Oregon Avenue again, with the little dogs, then the sun dropped another millimeter, and I could have sworn for a fleeting moment I was standing on the ancient banks of the Yangtze, 7,000 years ago, watching a slow funeral procession walking along the shore.  Who are these people, the Hemudu?  They look so sad, so weighed-down.

 

 

First House

You can recreate the view from the balcony,
looking at the brown gray neighbor’s house
an arm’s length away.
You can recreate the slanting afternoon light
through the thin-paned windows
coated in dog-nose-snot.
You can recreate the padding dog feet
on hardwood floors,
the paisley relief-map kitchen wallpaper,
the cave-like musty humid basement,
the smell of oatmeal and warm sugar.
But you’ll never recreate (or even remember)
how you got from one room to the next,
or what order you kept things in
in that closet, or desk drawer,
or how many times you fell asleep
on the cold living room floor.
And no one will ever quite know
where that little figurine of the Asian-looking man
came from (the one next to the sink,
looking at the fridge.)

 

Philly Journal, 7/15/14

I’m not a video game player.  It’s not 100% accurate to say I’ve never been one, though.  In the dawn of the home video game console era, for just a small slice of time, I, like every single other kid my age, was video game crazy.

I’m talking about the era of the original Nintendo Entertainment System (or NES) and the original Nintendo Game Boy, the little hand-held guy.  Those two systems were as far as I went; I never even owned a Super Nintendo.  I do remember having plenty of fun with those systems; lots of good Mega Man memories, just to name one.  The era did last a few years.

Three or so years ago, when I was living in Erie, I got oddly nostalgic for a little while for this short video game part of my life.  I still owned my Game Boy and a smattering of games, but the Game Boy itself didn’t work anymore.  I had some extra cash flow, so I looked on eBay, and sure enough, there was a Game Boy in my price range.  I ordered it.

It came in the mail and I played a few of my old games once or twice and, just like I knew I would, put it away again.  I’m just not a gamer.

But I keep this little Game Boy with me anyway.  It made the move from Erie to New Jersey when I lived with my mom.  It lived in my bedroom, within clear sight, but I never ever picked it up.  It made the move from Jersey to Philly with me, about seven months ago.  A few weeks after I had moved in, I was still unpacking some boxes.  I came across the Game Boy and its attendant games and took them up to my room.  I decided to give the Judge Dredd game (which was inserted into the Game Boy at the time; also this game seemed a lot cooler before they made two bad movies out of the comic book character it is based on) a whirl, but nothing happened when I turned it on.  The batteries must be dead, I thought.  I turned the Game Boy over to take the cartridge out, but it wouldn’t budge.  I thought to myself, well, this thing is screwed.  And I put it as well as all the games in a little cabinet under my TV in my bedroom.  I have not opened that cabinet in the seven months I have lived here.

Today, when I got home from work, the first thing I did was go upstairs to use my bathroom.  Then, I went into my spare room, where I promptly disrobed, because A) it’s hot, and B) the first thing I do, lately, after getting home and peeing is I weigh myself.  The scale is in my bedroom.

So, naked as a jaybird (that’s a weird saying) I went into my room, but immediately upon entering, there was a really weird sound in the room.  At first I wasn’t sure if it was coming from outside or was in the room.  I followed it with my ear, toward the television, which was clearly off.  As I got closer, I knew without a doubt what it was, but could hardly believe it.  I flung open the cabinet below the TV, and there was the Game Boy, its screen aglow in the dark, with the Judge Dredd start screen demanding I select One Player or Two, the terrible arcade-style theme music playing over and over again.

Sideland

Hello, faithful blog readers!  It is with great excitement that I introduce you to a new project of mine, something I am calling Sideland. 

Sideland is a separate blog from the Notes, and it’s a little more unique.  In Sideland I will be chronicling my life living here in Philadelphia, but it’s only kind of me, and it’s only kind of Philadelphia.  It’s a difficult project to describe; I suppose one could say it is a series of fictionalized memoirs.  The narrator is me, and the city is Philadelphia, and a lot of it will be true stories from my life as well as my own thoughts on the world.  However, some of it will be exaggerations of the truth, or even pure fiction.  It is an alternate universe, but one not far removed from our own.  In addition, sometimes I shall even employ “magical realism”, as in, things may occur in these blogs that appear to be set in reality, when suddenly the impossible may happen (for instance, I begin to fly under my own power, etc)

The writing style and tone will be similar to what you’re used to here at the Notes, however, it will not be identical.  The style I’ll be using with Sideland is more cynical, colloquial, and dense.  In short, this is not going to be down everyone’s alley.

Some entries will have a distinct narrative feel, while others may be entirely free-form prose.  The main thing you need to know as a reader is, if you stick with me through many entries, you’ll be rewarded. It may seem like I’m not going anywhere at first, but I do have a plan and a larger framework.  Keep reading! I promise that, even though I’m writing about a semi-fictional version of myself, I’m going to be talking about and exploring concepts much larger than my own life.  But…it’s not going to be simple and straight-forward.  Fair warning.

(and just to put it out there for you English/ grammar folks: tenses will be changing in these entries on purpose [ie past and present], which is often a novice writer’s error, but I assure you, instances of it on this blog are quite intentional)

I’ll post updates here in the Notes at first when a new Sideland is up, but if you dig them, I recommend subscribing to that blog, as eventually it will exist independently of this blog.  And worry not…Notes from the Fire isn’t going anywhere, as I’ll continue to post as usual in here when I have random thoughts/ rants/ poetry/ pictures.  Oh also, return to Sideland frequently, just to see the image at the top of the page change…it randomly displays one of about 20 possibilities (each a photo I have taken) each time you visit the site.

So without further ado, please click the link below…

Take me to Sideland.

The Lock Just Keeps Spinning

I sure do like blue skies, clear wide-open blue skies and the wind on my face.  Getting tan.  Getting tan is like taking the outside world into yourself and then shooting it back out.  And all those vitamins and good vibes.  Also I like movies.  I like watching movies in air conditioned rooms while sweat dries on my skin.  I like rice with salt on it, and dogs who smile.

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I’ve been watching a lot of cable news lately, but I don’t necessarily think it’s good for me.  I’ve just become addicted to it, as I’ve been known to become addicted to just about anything from time to time.  I suppose it must just be cable news’ turn.  I mean, there is plenty that I like about it.  It really does inform you, and depending on what you’re watching, you usually learn about stuff you might not otherwise be following, like that shit in Iraq.  CNN is the way to go.  Typically they’re gonna tell you about the stuff that’s important, not just the tabloid stuff.  But regardless, most of it is rot.  You’re better off reading newspapers.  Please read newspapers.  They need you, and it’s still the best thing going.

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I’ve recently come across two different poems about turtles that really floored me.  It makes sense that turtles would make such rich poetic subjects: ugly, slow, and capable of withdrawing entirely into themselves.  They’re just begging for the poetic treatment.  The first is “Turtle” by Kay Ryan.  Watch her read it here, and the text of the poem is here.  The other is “To a Box Turtle” by John Updike.  Watch me read it to you!  Right here:

To a Box Turtle
by John Updike

Size of a small skull, and like a skull segmented,
of pentagons healed and varnished to form a dome,
you almost went unnoticed in the meadow,
among its tall grasses and serrated strawberry leaves
your mottle of amber and umber effective camouflage.

You were making your way through grave distances,
your forefeet just barely extended and as dainty as dried
coelacanth fins, as miniature sea-fans, your black nails
decadent like a Chinese empress’s, and your head
a triangular snake-head, eyes ringed with dull gold.

I pick you up. Your imperious head withdraws.
Your bottom plate, hinged once, presents a No
with its courteous waxed surface, a marquetry
of inlaid squares, fine-grained and tinted
tobacco-brown and the yellow of a pipe smoker’s teeth.

What are you thinking, thus sealed inside yourself?
My hand must have a Smell, a killer’s warmth.
It holds you upside down, aloft, undignified,
your leathery person amazed in the floating dark.
How much pure fear can your wrinkled brain contain?

I put you down. Your tentative, stalk-bending walk
resumes. The manifold jewel of you melts into grass.
Power mowers have been cruel to your race, and creatures
less ornate and unlikely have long gone extinct;
but nature’s tumults pool to form a giant peace.

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You may have noticed, on various and sundry platforms of social media, that I am losing weight (again!).  There will, of course, be a larger blog entry devoted to the subject once I hit a certain milestone, but I wanted to stop officially ignoring it on the blog.  So yes, I am once again losing weight.  If you’re a long-time reader, you may recall we’ve been down this road once before.    I’ll stop short of saying I’m a chronic “weight bouncer”—I’ve only done the up and down once, now going on twice—and I do think I’m going to be able to maintain it this time, seeing as how I actually do enjoy the “lifestyle” one must switch to in order to stop gaining the weight back.  I don’t want to go into too much detail, as the first of the “milestone” blogs on the topic should be coming soon.  But if you’ve noticed that I’m a little more energetic, happy as an idiot, and generally manic lately—this is the main cause.

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I don’t like, any more than you do, the way that things in our culture seem to have gotten so divisive.  Everything appears to be very “black and white” or “us vs. them”…either you agree with me, or I hate you.  All issues divided into two sides—usually liberal and conservative—so that most critical thought is now not required; you just have to know what team you’re on.  I don’t like it any more than you do.

But there seems to be, to most people, a thought that this is a terrible deviation from some Golden Era of American discourse.  That, not long ago now, everyone just kind of got along and accepted divergent opinions and engaged in a spirited and lively debate of the issues, before saying, ah, forget it! and heading out back for a barbeque.  This fever dream is made possible by the fact that nobody actually knows anything about our own history, and is cursed with the widely-held human belief that all things have just recently been much better than they are now.

Things have, of course, never been like that.  We’ve always been a country at one-another’s throats.  That’s because the issues that we disagree about are pretty fucking important and are not trifles.  If the biggest debate in America was chocolate vs. vanilla, I’d say some of us might be overreacting, but we debate about matters of deepest morality, life and death, and core philosophy.  If you’re not passionate about these things, get out of the ring.

The division seems more pronounced now that we’re on the internet all the time.  The biggest factor that plays into that is that we routinely interact with many people who we would previously not have been interacting with.  Before the internet, we just naturally and gradually gravitated to people of like-mind.  Now, we, in small ways, interact with dozens of people “on the other side” daily, which can cause little internet skirmishes which then, in turn, feel larger and more intense than real-world interactions, because we can’t gauge how the other is talking, as well as these skirmishes taking place in front of our 300 or so “friends” and remaining to view long after the words have been said.

The ease with which these divisive interactions can occur has given rise to something even worse than the “cultural division” itself: the everything is hunky-dorey crowd.  This “crowd” includes just about everybody.  We’re all so tired of having these online skirmishes with people with opposing views, almost nobody engages the argument anymore.  Nobody wants to appear “divisive”.  Everyone wants to make sure they are “accepting of other people’s views”.

The bottom line I’m trying to get to is this: I keep an open mind about things like calamari, the official naming of snow storms, and the future of the designated hitter in professional baseball.  But I’m an adult now, and I’ve thought a lot about my core beliefs, and I don’t have an open mind about abortion, gay rights, gun control, or even—yes, even the existence of a higher power.  I know what I think about these things.  Not only that, but having an open mind about these things would make me a man of feeble constitution.

Get rid of your open mind.

 

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WHAT DO YOU THINK ABOUT THIS JOHN SLOAN PAINTING????

 

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If you know me (and I think you do) you know that, obviously, I am a man with a ton of opinions.  Well, one of those opinions is that these things that pop up on social media as “photo challenges” are some of the stupidest things I’ve ever seen.  If you’re not familiar with them: they propose to be “30 day photo challenges” that list a thing you’re supposed to take a picture of once a day for thirty days.  First off, if you need a “challenge” to take interesting pictures of the world around you, you’re not interesting.  Period.  Secondly, the items in these challenges are never even remotely challenging or creative.  It’s like, “Day 1:  Selfie.  Day 2:  Food.  Day 3: Car”.  Really?  You spent time creating this, anonymous internet user?  How dreadful.

So, I thought I’d make an interesting one! Some things here are interpretable, whch, again, makes it interesting.  For instance, “Birth” wouldn’t necessarily be looking for a picture of something being born.  You decide what it means. If anyone actually wants to give this a spin, let me know, I’ll put it into a dedicated blog entry so it’s easier to reference.

Actually Interesting Photo Challenge

Day 1: An animal that you want to take home
Day 2:  Gum
Day 3:  Something Upside-Down
Day 4:  Paint
Day 5:  How you’d like to be perceived
Day 6:  How you feel inside
Day 7:  Something you hate
Day 8:  Birth
Day 9: A chair
Day 10:  The passage of time
Day 11:  Something you love but can’t have
Day 12:  Space, area, void
Day 13:  Underneath
Day 14:  Scar
Day 15:  Home
Day 16:  Your bathtub.
Day 17:  Work
Day 18:  The ground
Day 19: The sky
Day 20: Between the ground and the sky
Day 21:  What you believe
Day 22:  Utensils
Day 23:  Lights
Day 24:  Transportation
Day 25:  Idealized
Day 26:  Action!
Day 27:  Water
Day 28:  Unattainable
Day 29:  Before you were born
Day 30:  Celebrate

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Life, and all that stuff, is sometimes too interesting to bear.  What I mean is, it can be very cyclical, or circular, or appear to be laden with damned meaning.  See, I’m a man who doesn’t believe in much.  I mean, I believe in science, and form and order amidst the chaos, but not in any Fate or creator or grand design.  Just rules and laws that govern the movements and the heat of things, basically.  So when life seems to have plans, folks like me sit up and take notice.  Not because it’s changing the way I think—I have thrown away my open mind—but because coincidence or happenstance on any large sort of scale is just so unlikely.

Take, for instance, a story from my life.  When I first got sober, I was 25 years old.  This was a little over eleven years ago.  I went to live with my mother and her husband in a small town in New Jersey.  This was the first time I’d lived anywhere outside of Central Pennsylvania.  This small town in New Jersey was relatively close to Philadelphia…maybe an hour, I think?  At any rate, it was certainly the closest I’d ever lived to a big city.

Eleven years may not seem like that long ago, but I was inhabiting a very different world back then, and I was also a very different version of me.  I drove a 1983 Ford Escort, named Earl Grey.  This car was a bona fide piece of shit, and it broke down with an alarming regularity (chronic fuel pump issues).  I had no cell phone.  No GPS.  When I wanted to go somewhere I’d never been, I printed out MapQuest directions and read them as I drove.  If I needed to call someone, I found a payphone and retrieved my list of phone numbers, hand-written on a sheet of paper inside my wallet.  It was interesting.  It wasn’t as bad as it sounds.  I drank a lot of Red Bull and wrote poetry almost every waking moment and listened to Pearl Jam like it was my job.

I had a very close friend who I’d been through the addiction wringer with.  She had a similar problem as I did, and we’d gone to the same rehab, and really just been to Hell and back together.  She had landed in a Recovery House in Harrisburg, PA.  After the tumult of the end of our addictions, we now felt very far apart.  Recovery Houses don’t allow you much leeway with visitors and phone calls.  Remember, this is also before everyone was texting and Facebooking (it’s even before MySpace).  I missed her very much.

She did manage to e-mail on occasion, and, ill-advisedly, we planned for her to sneak out one night.  We would meet in Philadelphia.  We were going to walk South Street.

I drove old rickety Earl Grey the hour to South Street, paging through my MapQuest directions.  I drove right past South Street at one point and just decided to park as soon as I could.  I found a spot and hopped out of my car.  As I walked away, I realized I might later have no idea where I had parked.  I got back into the car and grabbed my journal, the sacred notebook where I wrote all my poetry.  I looked around for a landmark and wrote it down, and put the journal in my backpack.

I met up with her and it was glorious.  I treasured being in her company, if only for a night.  I don’t remember what we did on South Street.  I don’t remember what we did at all.  But it stands as one of the more significant nights of my life, on my long road to becoming the current version of me.

A week or so ago, I decided to go back through some of my old journals and see if I had missed anything of value, any pieces of writing I could turn into something good.  I never did get around to it, but I threw the two oldest ones into my backpack, planning to look at them the next time I came to rest in some park.  I promptly forgot about it.

This evening, I was riding my bike through what is now one of my favorite sections of Old City (technically, the neighborhood known as Society Hill).  I love this section for it’s old houses, churches with expansive, historic graveyards, and shade-dappled side alleys.  I came to one of the more significant landmarks to me, the house that Thaddeus Kosciuszko lived in when he lived in Philadelphia.  Kosciuszko is my favorite revolutionary.  I feel deeply connected to him across the vast gulf of time.  The version of me from eleven years ago wasn’t yet even interested in history.  He would have had zero interest in this Polish freedom fighter’s house.  But I certainly do now.

I recalled, tonight, how the last time I was in the house, the park ranger had told me the woman who owned it and rented it to Kosciuszko was buried in the cemetery across the street.  I have spent some time in that cemetery before (American painter Charles Wilson Peale is buried there, and so is George Dallas, who was Vice President under James K. Polk), but I thought I’d wander through again and look for her grave.

It didn’t take me long in there before I had to face the fact that I couldn’t remember her name, and my iPhone’s power was getting too low to make Googling a wise choice, so I decided to leave and ride my bike elsewhere.  But as I stepped onto the sidewalk, the shade of sense memory hit me.  I’d been here many times these past six months, but perhaps never at this time of evening, in this kind of mid-summer air.  Suddenly I wondered it I’d been here before, long before.

I sat my backpack on the ground an hurriedly opened it, finding the oldest journal.  I looked at many pages before I found it, scrawled in my own unmistakable hand:

4th St., across from St. Peters Church

I craned my neck at the cemetery gate above me, and sure enough:  St. Peters.

Sure, maybe no big deal.  So what, this is where I parked that night?  If I moved to the city, it stands to reason I would pass by the place I parked that night, eleven years ago.

But the way that it came to me out of the blue, the way I had that journal on me, which was extraordinarily unlikely, the way I’d never noticed before that this was the place.  It has been long ago enough now that it’s starting to feel like deep past; I felt my younger self there.  I felt her younger self there.  I saw me getting out of my Escort, completely oblivious to Thad Kosciuszko’s house a half block away, not caring, not caring, not caring.  And life is crammed full of these bizarre cycles, these glances-back, these cosmic happenstances.  Like combination locks clicking into place.  But then the lock, it just keeps on spinning.

I sure do like blue skies, clear wide-open blue skies and the wind on my face.  Getting tan.  Getting tan is like taking the outside world into yourself and then shooting it back out.  And all those vitamins and good vibes.  Also I like movies.  I like watching movies in air conditioned rooms while sweat dries on my skin.  I like rice with salt on it, and dogs who smile.