Days: Fifteen Years Sober

Prologue

There were chandeliers.  I had rarely been around chandeliers, and even then, never so many, never so shiny.  In fact, nearly everything was shiny—the centerpieces, the candle holders, the forks and knives had glints and sparkles.  Light seemed to reflect and refract from everywhere all at once, off of balloons and from under tables, men’s wingtip shoes had tiny stars in them, large wire-rimmed glasses on women’s faces beamed chandelier light into my eyes.  The whole ballroom was like a universe.

I should have expected to be dazzled at the first wedding I ever attended.  I’d seen depictions of weddings in some movies, sure, but being only eight or nine years old, I didn’t have a lot to go on.  I knew there would be a ceremony, and they’d kiss, and then I heard we threw rice at them, oddly enough.  I must have expected there to be a party afterward, but if I did, I certainly had no idea what to expect from it.  And all this shininess—I hadn’t been prepared for that.

My cousins were there—some that I liked and some that I didn’t, but we all kept playing together, regardless.  That’s what you do with cousins when you’re a kid, after all—you play with them no matter how much you like them.  Once the pomp and trope of the adult rituals during the reception began to wear thin for us (how many times does an eight-year-old think it’s interesting to watch two grown-ups kiss? Just because someone tapped their glass?) we found our way to each other and began exploring.  We found an elevator in the lobby that we rode up and down and up and down, getting off on random floors, running to the ends of the halls.  We made a game where you tried to touch the wall at the end of the hall and get back to the elevator before the doors closed.  It wasn’t easy.  We also devised a contest to see who could, when controlling the floor buttons, go longest without the doors opening to let a stranger onto the elevator.  Again and again we were tempted to press the Emergency Stop button, but we never did.  Eventually, an employee caught onto the fact that some kids were playing fast and loose with their elevator and we got yelled at and told to stop, and, feeling like we’d just been dressed down by a Supreme Court justice, we ran out of the elevator, through the lobby, and back into the ballroom.

We played under vacant tables.  We made forts under there by using spare tablecloths and draping them over the chairs.  We moved the large potted plants out a few feet from the walls and hid behind them until grown-ups gave us weird looks.  We took M&Ms out of our gift baskets and threw them long distances into each other’s mouths.  By and large, nobody was watching us.  The adults were having a grand old time and we were left to play, to run around.  It was a unique environment for us.  Dressed in our little spiffy clothes—suspenders, skirts, ties—we felt like miniature grown-ups, doing our kid things under the shiny lights.

Occasionally, the action in the grown-up world would halt briefly while they did another of their inexplicable rituals—shoving cake at each other, somebody’s dad dancing with somebody else, and on and on.  At one point, everyone stopped what they were doing for the throwing of the bouquet, which did not sound remotely interesting to me, but my cousins ran to the crowd to watch.  I was thirsty and a little tired, so I made my way back to my family’s table to regroup and hydrate.

Nobody was there, as they were off watching something happen to a bouquet.  I pulled myself up to the table, the empty food plates still scattered around, and my mother’s purse hanging on the side of her chair, and more M&Ms in clear mason jars.  I found my Sprite and gulped it down.  It was nice to have a moment alone.  Then my eye fell upon it: the champagne flute.  Full, bubbles creeping up the sides, mysterious presences.  I glanced around and verified I was unwatched.  I took the glass, using both hands to steady it, and brought it to my lips, surprised by the blast of carbon dioxide as the carbonation hit my nose.  I barely tasted anything as I downed the beverage in one quick movement.  I sat back in my chair, looked around myself again to see if I had been observed.  In a moment, the warmth hit my stomach.  A smile crept at my lips.

 

Days of Nothing

 

It had been a hot summer. Summers are always hot, and Pennsylvania summers get that special kind of humidity working for them, but this summer had just been a rainforest ordeal. We spent every day with a thin sheen of sweat on us almost all the time, even indoors, even in the dark in the basement. It was a summer of Sloe Gin Fizzes, chain-smoking Newports, sitting on the front porch.  It was a stoop, really, but we called it a porch, although you entered through the side door, not the front.

I was staying quite suddenly and unexpectedly with two of my friends who were renting a house in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside. And I mean Countryside. At least a 20-minute drive from where anyone might consider civilization. The view from that front porch was actual and real rolling Pennsylvania Hills, green as Ireland, constantly sun-dappled, you could see the shadows of clouds as they passed overhead, rolling down the hills like boulders. Cows and sheep on the periphery, small tree outcroppings dotting the very tops of the horizons. I make it sound kind of lovely, but in fact, it was a pretty awful time for everybody.

See, if you are from Pennsylvania, it would mean something if I told you this was in Perry County, and really far out in the middle of Perry County. How these friends rented the house, how they found it, I’ll never know. But there I found myself, immediately after giving up on a semester of college, literally walking away from classes that were over three-quarters of the way done, because I couldn’t stop drinking long enough to wake up in the morning, or do homework or even read Mark Twain books. I simply threw in the towel, and after spending a couple weeks tooling around campus aimlessly, I decided to just jump ship entirely, threw what little belongings I had into the back of my 1983 Ford Escort, and drove an hour from my college out into the middle of the rolling god-damned Hills. I did this in order to spend the summer with two people who were likewise as troubled as I was, but in different ways, and we were miserable as hell together. We’d spend entire mornings out in front of the house with a two-by-four, swatting at the huge bumble bees as they flew past us, drinking 20 ounce cans of Busch beer, trying to kill as many of those bees as we could, for no reason other than there was nothing else to do. We’d sit on our plastic lawn chairs on that porch, with our view of the field, secretly hoping that it was manure spreading day, just so that there was something to look at, something to talk about, something to complain about other than the heat and the damn bees.

We spent our nights inside, in the dark basement, lit only by multiple strings of Christmas lights, the smell of must and tobacco smoke, no television, no stereo. Just imbibing and talking, and sometimes in full silence. I spent the whole summer reading one issue of Guitar World magazine, articles I didn’t even understand, once everybody else was asleep, reading these damn guitar articles in the almost total darkness, falling asleep on a dust-covered couch. It was terrible and wonderful.

One morning, as we were sitting on our stoop smoking our cigarettes watching the distant rolling hills as though something might erupt from them, an Amish boy strolled past on the street in front of our yard, walking his ancient bike beside him. He stood and looked at us, as though he were seeing something for the very first time, some true curiosity. Thinking we were some sort of cultural emissaries, we approached him and struck up a conversation. I can’t remember now what was said between us, what inane questions we must have asked in the name of science, but after a 20-minute conversation, he went his way and we went back to the stoop, thinking we had just crossed some cultural divide. I can’t be sure what we said, but I know who I was back then, so I know I was an asshole.

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In my early twenties there was a short time period when I stayed with my mother in a small apartment she was renting in the small Pennsylvania town of Dillsburg. This was during a time when she went on frequent extended trips for her job, so even though it was a place where I wasn’t paying any rent, I would find myself with my own apartment for a couple days at a time, here and there. Living the kind of life I was living then, which is to say, mildly indigent, alone time was a fairly sacrosanct rarity. On these times when she was gone, I would wake up on the couch, still mildly dizzy from my stupor the night before, find some water to drink, and commence sitting there, absorbing cable television, mixing large amounts of Diet Coke with larger amounts of cheap gin, chainsmoking generic menthol light cigarettes until the whole room was suffused with a haze as if it were packing material. Somehow having that apartment to myself, and enough booze and cigarettes and food I hadn’t paid for to last me through a couple days, felt like I had a luxury a room on a cruise liner. I would crank up the air-conditioning, raid her collection of compact discs, listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” over and over again at an incredibly high volume. One such night, after a lengthy day of solo debauchery, I found myself inexplicably out in the parking lot of the apartment complex, wandering aimlessly, smoking my cigarette with a gin and Coke in a supersize McDonald’s cup. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly I heard from behind me someone yell my name. It took me awhile to realize what I was witnessing, but it was one of my more lengthy roommates from college, suddenly here in this parking lot, 45 minutes from the town we went to school in. At this point, I must have been out of college for about two years and hadn’t heard from him since (this is pre-Facebook and even pre-MySpace). I couldn’t believe my eyes! After getting over both of our initial confusions, I learned that not only did he live in the same apartment complex, but he lived with a man that we were also roommates with. The three of us had shared an apartment for about a year in college, and now they were living together and working in the town of Dillsburg, while I was mooching off my mother in the same apartment complex! It was almost too much to handle. Excited for the reunion, we both walked into their apartment, and sure enough, there was the third roommate, and he was just as shocked as us! We spent about half an hour catching up on what we had done since school, and then sat there in a kind of dazed boredom. We had nothing to talk about. It hadn’t been that long ago we were in college, pulling pranks, making silly movies, running all over the town like young people who would never die, would never have a problem in the world. But now just a few years later here we were, clearly at different crossroads. We sat in silence and watched a movie, and then I left and never went back there again.

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I don’t really remember how it happened, but I know for a fact that once, stone drunk, I found myself walking down the Carlisle Pike in the middle of night, just past the 81 North entrance ramp, headed away from Carlisle. I had just past the entrance ramp when I saw a tractor-trailer pulled over on the side of the road, presumably for the driver to sleep there for the night. None of the lights were on and the engine was off. I thought to myself, ‘I could just roll underneath a truck right there and sleep for the night. I could just lay under there, be sheltered from view and the wind, look up at the underside of that trailer, let this drunkenness and tiredness wash over me, and sleep there for the night.’ And I did roll under that truck, and I looked at the underside of it. I put my hands behind my head and stretched out in the gravel parking lot. I laid there for a little while, I have no idea how long, but even in my drunken stupor, and as low as I was in every aspect of life at that moment, even I knew this was a bad idea. I rolled back out and kept on walking, and I have no idea where I went.

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Time is a sad, dense fog over a sea, and places are lighted buoys.  The people?  I don’t know, maybe they’re boats, or fishes.  The days stretch out like dreams in a desert.

 

Days of Something

 

Just a few months after getting sober, I found myself living back in Pennsylvania, after a short stint in New Jersey.  I had moved in with a friend of mine who had a spare bedroom. I got my old job back, the same job cooking greasy diner food for a company that kept giving me chances.  I would come home everyday and see some of my friends there, hanging around this house I had moved into. Sometimes playing music, or fiddling with the communal telescope, or playing board games.   A few weeks into this living arrangement, I decided that I was going to go out that night by myself.  I ended up going to a movie, “Million Dollar Baby”, and it was a good movie, I thought to myself, ‘Maybe I’ll start watching good movies.’  I walked out of the theater, and it was a late showing, and it was winter, so it was dark and frigid everywhere, and I was the only one in the parking lot, and it suddenly dawned on me that I could do anything I wanted. I wasn’t a slave to anything like I had been before. Nothing drove me to a bar or a convenience store to get a fix. Nothing told me I had to be somewhere that I could fall asleep anytime soon. I didn’t have to work in the morning. I didn’t have anybody who knew where I was or was expecting me somewhere. I walked across the frigid parking lot to the adjacent Walmart, bought a Butterfinger candy bar and a Red Bull, walked back to my car, and drove into the countryside, smoking cigarettes, laughing my ass off at freedom.

 

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Philadelphia is a great city, but there’s nothing special about it in the winter. It becomes winter just like every place else becomes the winter: slowly, and then all at once. My first winter in the city was also the first winter I’d spent anywhere without a car. During the summer I had learned to get around by riding my bike and walking, and was just getting pretty good at it when the gradual winter hit all of a sudden. It was cold and it was windy, but didn’t snow for the first few months, and then one day, a day that I also happened to have off work, the sky opened up and dumped down about eight inches. It was a very different experience than my previous winters elsewhere, where you might go outside and walk around, do some shoveling, maybe go see a few of the local landmarks covered in the fluffy cliches. In a densely packed urban area that stretches out for miles and miles in any direction, and where local landmarks are a dime a dozen but breathtaking beauty might be a little scarce, I wasn’t sure exactly what to do with myself, other than sit on my couch and watch Netflix. Eventually I decided to just bundle up, put on some heavy shoes (since I never really am in the habit of keeping boots around) and venture out into the snow and see what happened. I started walking through the streets of my South Philly neighborhood, unplowed, unshoveled, the houses squished up against each other like sandwich bread, snow building up in the trashy pedestrian alleys between them, choking the tops of open the trash cans, pawprints sometimes the only sign anyone had been down a sidewalk.  And I kept walking and walking, taking note how it was different than my previous experience, and also ways in which it was similar, compare and contrast, compare and contrast, that is essentially how I Live every moment of my life. One experience must always be similar or different from previous ones; otherwise, how do you measure anything?  Eventually the neighborhood started to change as I kept walking, buildings got farther apart, the roads got wider, the streets were starting to be plowed, cars started moving around, the city seemed to wake up. I started passing people on the street and there was an air of conviviality, of shared experience. Everyone was saying hello, commenting on the snow, and it wasn’t just what people were saying, but the attitude, the feeling, like we were all finally together, not that we were undergoing any major hardship, but just that the presence of something so different, something so sudden, almost held us together like a web. Connection.  Eventually I realized I was closer to Independence Mall, which is the cluster of extremely significant historical sites in the city, than I was to home, so I just kept on walking. I arrived behind Independence Hall probably an hour and a half after leaving my house, still trudging through almost a foot of snow, surprised to see that there were a few people milling around, but only a few, much less than the hundreds and hundreds that crammed into this park in the summer months. I circled the building, taking note of what the roof looked like covered in snow, imagining it would have looked the same to George Washington or Thomas Jefferson when it snowed in the late 1700s. I crossed Chestnut Street, which is directly in front of Independence Hall, my feet not quite hitting the cobblestones, but still feeling the unevenness of the walk, as the snow impacted into the cracks around the cobblestones, as it surely has done to other foot travelers for centuries. I trudged across the open space in front of Independence Hall, the Liberty Bell to my left, taking note that it was still open, the Park Service still there and operating, but I didn’t see a soul in line to see the famed bell. I kept on going, heading towards the visitor center, with its bright glass interiors, newly built restrooms, shiny gift shop and concession stand. I often used to stop at the visitor center in the summer, as I was riding my bike around the city, for its quick and easy access to a restroom and bottled water.  As I swung open the heavy glass and stainless steel doors, it was clear to me that everyone inside the visitor center was surprised to see me, not because of anything about me, but simply because I was a human being. I was literally the only non-employee in this entire visitor center. It’s amazing what snow does to history tourism. Despite the fact that it was winter and snowing, I was sweating greatly, and was glad of the opportunity to take my coat off, breathe a little bit, stomp the snow out of every crease and crevice. I was thirsty and hungry, as I didn’t leave the house with the intention to walk halfway across the city, so I went straight to the concession stand, got me a bottle of water, a hot coffee, and some sort of breakfast sandwich.  I sat alone in the bright, metal cafeteria, my belly growing content as I fed it.  I took note that outside, it had begun snowing again, and heavier this time.  It was quiet in the visitor center.  I was far from home.

 

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This day started very early. I woke up around 4am not knowing what I was going to do with the day, but knowing that I wanted to wake up early enough to have a really thorough day, if you know what I mean. I was living by myself in Erie Pennsylvania, in an apartment, one bedroom, on the second level of an old house that was nearing dilapidation, but still teetering on the edge of respectability. It was smack-dab in the middle of summer, and waking up at 4am, the whole apartment was already laden with a heat, an oppressive second floor apartment kind of heat; a thin layer of sweat somehow on everything you looked at. I rolled out of bed, made myself a latte on my proudly-acquired home espresso machine, and set about pondering what to do with such a lengthy, summery kind of day all to myself.  I took a long, overly hot shower while the local morning news played on the television which I had crammed into my tiny bathroom. I stayed in the shower for the whole newscast, mind mostly blank. After the shower, while air drying mostly to cool off, I randomly selected a DVD from my bloated collection, and came up with “The 40 Year Old Virgin”, a movie that I don’t know how it ended up in my collection and no longer resides there, but at the time, a mindless comedy seemed just the ticket. I laid on my couch and let the Steve Carell comedy wash over me. Having gotten up so early that an immense amount of day still laid stretched out before me, even after my lengthy ablutions. What to do? Living by one’s self for so long, and so far from everyone you know, turns days and 31316_1458245861882_8379455_nmornings into quiet studies of one’s inner mechanics, and if you linger too long without plans, your cogs and belts begin to make a lot of noise. Suddenly it hit me: Niagara Falls. I’d been living relatively close to Niagara Falls for almost a year at this point, and it was always something bouncing around the periphery of what I wanted to do, but I never quite made it there, never quite made that my actual plan. Almost the moment that it struck me, I bounded off the couch, went to my computer to MapQuest the directions, threw on some clothes and some essentials into a backpack, and I was out the door.  I don’t remember much about the drive, although certainly there had to be a drive. It was close but not incredibly close, probably something like an hour and 15 minutes. A decent trip, but then again, much closer than almost anyone else in the world lives to such landmark. I remember having trouble figuring out where to park when I got close to it, the town itself surrounding it not exactly being incredibly helpful with instructions.  Finally I did get my car parked, and walked across a large grassy mall, the sound of the falls quite distinct, just like you expect the sound of Niagara Falls to be: thunderous, droning, like a white noise that comes from within.  I remember hearing the falls, I remember a large grassy area you had to walk across to get to it, but I don’t remember actually arriving at the falls.  In fact, the order of what I did that day and the specifics of how I did it, are lost in the labyrinth of my brain. I did the touristy things, I rode the boat, I walked up and down the path alongside the falls, I wore the poncho they provide you. I took selfies on the boat, all by myself, surrounded by revelers and families and church groups. After doing the requisite attractions, I found myself walking around the grounds, reading the historical markers, interpreting the interpretive maps. I noticed that there was a small landmass called Goat Island, out of the middle of the river, one of the features that gives the Falls that look, where it is divided occasionally, not one big solid Falls. It was accessible quite easily via a pedestrian bridge across the river, so I went out there, reading the Wikipedia entry on my phone as I went, the long and somewhat interesting history of the island, its ownership and various names. I arrived on the island to find a sweltering patch of grass, the heat dense with liquid, the roar of the falls now like a white noise outside myself, like a curtain descending. The island itself was no larger than a small park, and trees lined the northern edge, so that one couldn’t actually see the land fall away at the end.  I had the island entirely to myself. Of course the only thing to do on an island like that is to walk toward the edge. Walking through the grass I was assaulted by bugs everywhere, insects nipping at my legs, bouncing off my knees like miniature Kamikazes. The closer and closer I got to the river, the more amazed I was that there were no protections of any kind in place. One expects to find some sort of railing here, some warning signs, maybe even Park Rangers or something. But no, the island just walks right up to the river, and right up to the falls, anyone with dark designs would be in no way dissuaded.  The design of the island makes it challenging to walk right up to the falls, but instead it is very easy to sit at a clearing about twenty yards away from the actual precipice. I took my backpack off and sat in the grass, and looked out across the Niagara River, just beginning to get a real good head of steam up, just beginning to get its little whitecaps and wavelets, the water not knowing it was about to fly.  The heat washed over me, the insect buzzing began to mesh with the white noise of the falls, it all became a hot buzzing constant, I laid my head on the grass and sunk in, sunk down into the dirt, I was so far from home, and for a moment, I had no idea where I was, or maybe even who I was.

 

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“Ticking away the moments that make up a dull day
Fritter and waste the hours in an offhand way.
Kicking around on a piece of ground in your hometown
Waiting for something or someone to show you the way.

Tired of lying in the sunshine, staying home to watch the rain.
You are young and life is long and there is time to kill today.
And then one day you find, ten years have got behind you.
No one told you when to run. You missed the starting gun!”

‘Time’, by Pink Floyd

 

Days of Everything

 

It was a cold night, but not too cold, which was fortunate, because we had to park very far away from the arena. I unbuckled Boy from his car seat and heaved him into the air, bringing him next to my cheek to give him a kiss in the crisp evening air. “This soccer game?” He asked. “Yes,” I told him. “This is the big building I told you about.” I sat him down and stuck out my hand for him to grab, as we strolled quickly through the immense parking lot together. He had lots of questions. He kept calling it football, which was interesting, I thought, since most of the world referred to soccer as football, but he couldn’t possibly know that, could he? Most of his questions weren’t really about the sport we were about to go watch, but the building it was in. How could a building be so big that you could play soccer inside of it? How tall was it, was it taller than the telephone poles? Taller than our house? Will there be snacks? Soft pretzels? I’ve become accustomed to the constant barrage of questions at this point, pulling from deep within me a patience I honestly did not think I possessed.  Not that this patience is without limits—but at any rate, I seem to have more than I thought.  I suspect a toddler will prove this to be true of most anyone.

I was surprised by the patience he displayed as we waited in a long line to buy tickets. It seems every day, he is making leaps and bounds, growing in things like patience, understanding, and empathy. Which is not to say he’s still not a little ball of emotions that doesn’t know how to act, just maybe a little less so than a few months ago or a year ago. He’s becoming much more of a companion as opposed to a force of nature to wrangle and watch. While for the most part, time with Boy is still all about teaching, there are moments now of truly just being.  And “just being” with a little guy like boy is more magic than I’m accustomed to.

Finally, tickets procured, we entered the concourse, looking for our section. I hadn’t studied the arena map extensively, and had chosen seats in the section on the complete opposite side of the concourse, so we had to walk past countless souvenir stands and snack bars, him wanting desperately to stop at each, and also wanting to enter into each section as we passed, with me constantly trying to tell him that it wasn’t much farther, not much farther. But through it all, he didn’t freak out or melt down or cry, just implored me strongly. Finally we came upon our entrance to the arena, and I picked him up because I knew the stairs were going to be steep and he was probably going to be shocked by the sight of walking into the big room. Carrying him on my side, we entered the arena proper, and although an indoor soccer field lacks the nebulous breathtaking quality of a baseball field, the sudden shock of green and the expanse of a sudden cavernous room had its desired effect on the countencance of Boy, which is to say, it produced a certain amount of awe. After pausing to allow him to soak it in, we climbed up the steep steps, to find our seats. We were all alone in our section, something I had to ask the ticket man to do, in case it did not go very well. Boy was beyond excited to sit here. He was very into his seat, enamored with the idea that the number on it matched  the number on his ticket, and in this enormous room, this seat was his and his alone. He was not restless as I had feared, his eyes trained on the action on the field. I would steal sidelong glances at him, see his eyes glued to the action, his head swiveling as the ball bounced back and forth, his complete concentration and immersion something only possible in the earliest years of life, and during a first exposure to things; the sights and sounds meshing with dawning understanding, realization writ large across his face. He would sometimes stop his concentration to ask questions about the goalies, which he called The Goal Guys, their different colored jerseys causing him no end of confusion. Later, as he was able to again float back into our world, he would watch me for cues whenever the arena sound system would play the tropes of modern sporting events: the “Charge!” song, the “De-Fense!” chant, and on and on. He saw and understood there was an audience participation element and he wanted to learn.  I would raise my fist and yell “Charge!”, glancing over to see him mimic it, his tiny voice bursting forth its own “Charge!”  This moment, especially, nearly crippled me with emotion.

He paid close attention to the game and stayed quite interested for well over an hour and a half when he started to fall asleep on my shoulder. I told him I thought it was time to go, and he protested quite strongly, saying he didn’t want to miss anything. And I kept giving in, saying we could stay, and then he kept falling asleep again, until eventually I picked him up, went up the stairs to the upper concourse, and told him he should get down and walk around and look at all the empty chairs, all the sections without anybody in them. The arena was quite empty, in fact, especially once one got up to the upper reaches. We got to a very high section, a corner section so high up you could almost touch the roof in a few of the spots, and as we emerged into it, it became clear that it had not even been cleaned out or looked at after the preceding weekend’s Motocross event in the arena. Everywhere there was trash, even half-eaten food and some beer cans on their sides. It was an astonishing array of trash and smells to walk into amid what appeared to be an otherwise normal arena. It was immediately too late for me to backtrack and take him out of this section, he was much too interested in the hows or whys this could have happened. I explained as best I could that they assumed they would not sell any tickets in this section for the soccer game, so they must be waiting to clean up from the Motocross. He did not want to walk around the section, but he also didn’t want to leave. I picked him up and we watched the soccer from way high up near the ceiling, looking down on all that old trash and beer cans, until he looked at me and told me he was ready to go home. I felt that I had a companion here, a little guy who I could teach and learn from, who was now going to be interested in things, who was present with me.

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It wasn’t too long ago that we had a little get-together for Boy’s birthday. My Love’s father was there—and let me tell you, I like Love’s father so much it’s nearly criminal–as well as both of my parents and my paternal grandmother. My parents have been divorced for quite a few years, and yet they get along like the best of friends, and there was my dad’s mother, chatting it up with his ex-wife, all while boy ran around and told everyone he loves them all the time, and climbed on everybody, and climbed on me, while I held Loves hand, while the room was full of talk and laughter, while there was warmth everywhere, and everywhere I looked there was future, future, future.

 

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My love and I put on our light spring jackets and walked into the crisp evening. Just the two of us, we interlocked our hands, and headed down the street toward Midtown. It is one of the benefits of living where we do, that usually, given the right weather and the right child care situation, we can walk to some of the places that we like to spend time together. This night it was simple: we were going out to eat. It was one of the last walkable nights of the year, and we knew it. The cold was setting in, soon we would be driving everywhere and stuck inside like prisoners.  So tonight, we knew, was a walking night.

There was a very popular and artsy restaurant in the middle of Midtown, which somehow we still had not made it to. Recently they had started serving a very popular veggie burger, that all of our friends were talking about, and we still hadn’t tried. It had been on our list for weeks.

The thing about taking a somewhat lengthy walk with the person that you love is that it forces conversation you don’t normally have inside the house or perhaps in a moving car. You see things that you don’t normally see, are reminded of things you might only see or think of by yourself, you’re moving at an interesting pace, a different speed. I love holding hands and walking with my love. I love the way her hand feels, I love being connected to her physically in that way, I love being able to look at her face from the side so often. I love being able to point out things, and have her point out things to me, elements of our neighborhood that we only see when we are walking the dog by ourselves.  I love kissing her outside. Many people spend most of their lives in relationships and begin to take things like this for granted, maybe even very early on in life, they assume they will have a companion in this form. Having spent so long single, small things like holding hands, walking down the street, these things never seem anything other than magical to me. My love thrills me.  Literally every single thing about her. It’s electric.

Twenty minutes later we found ourselves the only customers in the artsy eating establishment, it being only five o’clock. We were talking about the art on the wall, the interesting sculptures, the funny man who kept looking at us askance from inside the kitchen. We talked about the interesting ordering system the restaurant used, the haphazard way salt was placed on some of the tables but not others, we talked about our days, we held hands and looked at each other. Sometimes we didn’t say anything and that was lovely in its own way. When you know someone is your true partner, being in their presence is a constant salve.

The food came and it was delicious, just as delicious as everyone says it is was, and it was fantastic to share a meal with someone who shares so many of my worldviews, who has the compassion in the same places I do, love and freedom in the same proportions, to share a meal with a woman who has taught me so much. As I was finishing off my Diet Pepsi, stealing glances at this woman, I kept thinking some of the same thoughts I come back to all the time.  How I waited so long to find her.  How, when I did find her, I couldn’t and still can’t believe how perfect she is.  How my journey to find her wasn’t about me, or even the journey, but it was about her, about us.  How I still learn about her every day and she’s such a delicious mystery.  How she fits so well.  I looked at her as I sat there, finishing my Diet Pepsi, and I said to her the only thing one can say, given the unbearable weight of the world:  I can’t believe you’re finally here.

 

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The days, good or bad, really do just stretch out like deserts, uncountable deserts, again and again and again.  Some, you find, contain nothing: plodding marches under a bored sun.  But sometimes, they are filled up, filled with everything you ever dreamed, brazen neon signs of days, confetti and love love love.  I don’t know about you, but I’m trying to figure out how to keep them filled up.  I want the days of everything, forever.

Days of Nothing

It had been a hot summer. Summers are always hot, and Pennsylvania summers get that special kind of humidity working for them, but this summer had just been a rainforest ordeal. We spent every day with a thin sheen of sweat on us almost all the time, even indoors, even in the dark in the basement. It was a summer of Sloe Gin Fizzes, chain-smoking Newports, sitting on the front porch.  It was a stoop, really, but we called it a porch, although you entered through the side door, not the front.

I was staying quite suddenly and unexpectedly with two of my friends who were renting a house in the middle of the Pennsylvania countryside. And I mean Countryside. At least a 20-minute drive from where anyone might consider civilization. The view from that front porch was actual and real rolling Pennsylvania Hills, green as Ireland, constantly sun-dappled, you could see the shadows of clouds as they passed overhead, rolling down the hills like boulders. Cows and sheep on the periphery, small tree outcroppings dotting the very tops of the horizons. I make it sound kind of lovely, but in fact, it was a pretty awful time for everybody.

See, if you are from Pennsylvania, it would mean something if I told you this was in Perry County, and really far out in the middle of Perry County. How these friends rented the house, how they found it, I’ll never know. But there I found myself, immediately after giving up on a semester of college, literally walking away from classes that were over three-quarters of the way done, because I couldn’t stop drinking long enough to wake up in the morning, or do homework or even read Mark Twain books. I simply threw in the towel, and after spending a couple weeks tooling around campus aimlessly, I decided to just jump ship entirely, threw what little belongings I had into the back of my 1983 Ford Escort, and drove an hour from my college out into the middle of the rolling god-damned Hills. I did this in order to spend the summer with two people who were likewise as troubled as I was, but in different ways, and we were miserable as hell together. We’d spend entire mornings out in front of the house with a two-by-four, swatting at the huge bumble bees as they flew past us, drinking 20 ounce cans of Busch beer, trying to kill as many of those bees as we could, for no reason other than there was nothing else to do. We’d sit on our plastic lawn chairs on that porch, with our view of the field, secretly hoping that it was manure spreading day, just so that there was something to look at, something to talk about, something to complain about other than the heat and the damn bees.

We spent our nights inside, in the dark basement, lit only by multiple strings of Christmas lights, the smell of must and tobacco smoke, no television, no stereo. Just imbibing and talking, and sometimes in full silence. I spent the whole summer reading one issue of Guitar World magazine, articles I didn’t even understand, once everybody else was asleep, reading these damn guitar articles in the almost total darkness, falling asleep on a dust-covered couch. It was terrible and wonderful.

One morning, as we were sitting on our stoop smoking our cigarettes watching the distant rolling hills as though something might erupt from them, an Amish boy strolled past on the street in front of our yard, walking his ancient bike beside him. He stood and looked at us, as though he were seeing something for the very first time, some true curiosity. Thinking we were some sort of cultural emissaries, we approached him and struck up a conversation. I can’t remember now what was said between us, what inane questions we must have asked in the name of science, but after a 20-minute conversation, he went his way and we went back to the stoop, thinking we had just crossed some cultural divide. I can’t be sure what we said, but I know who I was back then, so I know I was an asshole.

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In my early twenties there was a short time period when I stayed with my mother in a small apartment she was renting in the small Pennsylvania town of Dillsburg. This was during a time when she went on frequent extended trips for her job, so even though it was a place where I wasn’t paying any rent, I would find myself with my own apartment for a couple days at a time, here and there. Living the kind of life I was living then, which is to say, mildly indigent, alone time was a fairly sacrosanct rarity. On these times when she was gone, I would wake up on the couch, still mildly dizzy from my stupor the night before, find some water to drink, and commence sitting there, absorbing cable television, mixing large amounts of Diet Coke with larger amounts of cheap gin, chainsmoking generic menthol light cigarettes until the whole room was suffused with a haze as if it were packing material. Somehow having that apartment to myself, and enough booze and cigarettes and food I hadn’t paid for to last me through a couple days, felt like I had a luxury a room on a cruise liner. I would crank up the air-conditioning, raid her collection of compact discs, listen to Led Zeppelin’s “Gallows Pole” over and over again at an incredibly high volume. One such night, after a lengthy day of solo debauchery, I found myself inexplicably out in the parking lot of the apartment complex, wandering aimlessly, smoking my cigarette with a gin and Coke in a supersize McDonald’s cup. Suddenly and quite unexpectedly I heard from behind me someone yell my name. It took me awhile to realize what I was witnessing, but it was one of my more lengthy roommates from college, suddenly here in this parking lot, 45 minutes from the town we went to school in. At this point, I must have been out of college for about two years and hadn’t heard from him since (this is pre-Facebook and even pre-MySpace). I couldn’t believe my eyes! After getting over both of our initial confusions, I learned that not only did he live in the same apartment complex, but he lived with a man that we were also roommates with. The three of us had shared an apartment for about a year in college, and now they were living together and working in the town of Dillsburg, while I was mooching off my mother in the same apartment complex! It was almost too much to handle. Excited for the reunion, we both walked into their apartment, and sure enough, there was the third roommate, and he was just as shocked as us! We spent about half an hour catching up on what we had done since school, and then sat there in a kind of dazed boredom. We had nothing to talk about. It hadn’t been that long ago we were in college, pulling pranks, making silly movies, running all over the town like young people who would never die,  would never have a problem in the world. But now just a few years later here we were, clearly at different crossroads. We sat in silence and watched a movie, and then I left and never went back there again.

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Time is a sad, dense fog over a sea, and places are lighted buoys.  The people?  I don’t know, maybe they’re boats, or fishes.  The days stretch out like dreams in a desert.

It is possible to grow up and still let the juice run down your chin.

Our culture is full of tales that suggest there is a prime way to live life; movies, music and books that implore you to chase your dreams, to leave the safe confines of your daily routine, to reach out and grab life by the whatevers, because, you know, you only live once.  It’s a moving, inspiring narrative.  The thing is, you see, in our society, typically when someone does that sort of thing, we all look at them like they’re crazy.  I can’t believe she just up and moved to New York—to be an actress!  She had a pretty good job here, too.  She’s nuts!

And so on.

This is not going to be a piece of writing where I tell you how you should be living.  For the most part, how you are living is between you and, possibly, those closest to you.  It’s got nothing to do with me.  They make so many movies etc suggesting you grab life by the armpits because those kinds of things make money.  People love to be told how they are pissing away their existence.  Why?  Because almost everyone is, in some way, convinced they actually are pissing away their existence.

It’s hard to know how to live your life, right?  By the time you get one thing figured out, one part of you fully colored in, you’ve changed in other ways, and now you’re chasing other ghosts, ironing out new parts of you, nursing new interests.  The songs tell you to chase your dream but very few of us have just one enormous dream.  Most of us are a collection of dozens of itsy bitsy dreams.  I don’t suggest driving your car off a cliff over an itsy bitsy dream.

All I’m personally concerned with is being passionate, living with vigor.  I keep changing, evolving; it’s like I’m in the center of an orchard that is spinning around me and I’m leaping at fruit as they fly past.  Even as I near my fortieth year, I find my changes accelerating: I would be unrecognizable even to my thirty-year-old self.  With so much swirling into and out of my crosshairs, it’s impossible to laser-focus on something.  What I need is passion for everything.  The racing heart, smelling the book, walking outside in the cold to take the photograph, the peach juice running down your chin, holding Her as tight as I can.  I don’t need to move to New York to be an actress to squeeze the juice out—but maybe you do, so maybe you should.

And maybe you’re OK with rote routine, eating your food and drinking your water just to stay alive as long as possible.  That’s fine, too.  Like I said, this isn’t a piece of writing to tell you how to live your life.  That’s got nothing to do with me, because nobody’s paying me to write this.

But me, I need passion.

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For a few years in my early twenties I was passionate about Alcoholics Anonymous.  I mean that’s who I was for a little while.  I thought it was the life for me.  After being tentative and gradually going into that world, I fully immersed myself once comfortable.  I would get phone calls late at night and go talk to a drunk in need.  I gave a talk to troubled teens attending an early intervention class at a local church.  Almost all of my friends were members of AA.  We went to meetings together, then went out for coffee afterward, then sometimes even back to an apartment or house for a movie night after the coffee.  We took road trips together to meetings and seminars.  At the time, I was still considered a “young person in sobriety” (I was 25-26) and my closest AA buddies and I went to the Pennsylvania Convention of Young People in Alcoholics Anonymous (known as “Pennsypaa”).  We took over a hotel in downtown Baltimore (that’s right, it was in Baltimore–they like to make it a nice trip for everyone no matter where you live in the state) for three whole days.  That’s how passionate I was about Alcoholics Anonymous.  In addition to tons of panels and activities, there was also a room where they had round-the-clock meetings, one an hour, for the whole three days.  I made it my mission to do a stretch of 24 hours straight, but I think I only got 7 or 8 before I had to go sleep.  I had my favorite AA jokes (“They asked me to go to that meeting and give a talk on humility, but I said I’d only do it if enough people showed up”), I had my favorite chapters in the Big Book (“Us Agnostics”), and on and on.  It was my life and I thought it would always be.  It isn’t my life anymore, though.  It hasn’t been for a very long time.  Those guys I went to Baltimore with–there is only one of them I am still in touch with.  But that’s how it is supposed to be, back before social media changed our expectations; people, like passions, are allowed to come and go.  You can let them go.

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Like most of my blog entries lately, I’m just kind of thinking out loud here.  Don’t look too hard for an overarching theme or thesis.  As my birthday approaches I’m doing a little taking stock.  Certainly my life right now is the most amazing it’s ever been–it is not putting on a front to say that.  People think that if you say your life is amazing on the internet that you must be lying, but they think that because their lives are not amazing.  I assure you mine is.

No, I am not taking stock of my life in some way that implies it needs improved, but rather, to discern just how I have changed so much.  This is one of the more massive themes of all the blog entries I’ve ever written: how the old me becomes the new me becomes the old me becomes the new me and on and on and on.  And why do I think you’d want to read about this?  Why, because I assume the same thing is happening to you.

I suppose it’s possible this is not happening to you.  It’s possible the old you became the new you and then you stayed right there, and now you’re just you.  But again, that’s none of my business.

What I want to get at is, how much of those old me’s are still part of me?  Are there fundamental bits of Seth mixed up inside me, that have always been there and shall always remain?  Or do we change, piece by piece, insidiously, until the person we see in the mirror bears no relation to the people we were 10, 20 years ago?

Is there even a way to know the answer?

Sometimes I think the only thing in this world that cuts to any part of the truth of existence is music–music without words–and the only thing I can really create is words, but no music.  So there you have it.  Questions stacked on questions like mirrors looking into mirrors.

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I’ve seen Pearl Jam live 21 times.  Approximately.  It might be 17.  I know it is more than 15.  At some point in my life I knew that number very concretely.  That is how much has changed within me since I gave up the ghost on Pearl Jam.  For a very long stretch, the band was my life.  I bought everything you can possibly imagine–spending thousands of dollars on the band’s merchandise.  When they would tour, I would take vacations from work and follow them up and down the east coast, staying in hotels by myself in places as diverse as Jersey City to Virginia Beach.  I attended about 75% of those Pearl Jam shows all alone, and did not mind one bit.  I used to tell people I had to go to as many shows as possible because Pearl Jam concerts were “my church”.  Especially the long instrumental parts they would play in “Even Flow” and “rearviewmirror”; I would close my eyes during these times and replay my life up to that point, flipping through memory images, whatever came to mind and seemed significant, and then giving immense thanks that I had come through everything to be in a position to be standing there, right then, as this band was creating this music, and I had enough money to buy the poster and a t-shirt and my own hotel room.  When the band cycled back around to the climax of the song, I’d open my eyes, always tear-filled, and they’d pour down my cheeks, and I’d jump like a maniac as the music built to a catharsis, and I’d scream and pump my fists and let out my barbaric yawp.  It was my church.  I did that for a long time.  Seven or eight years.  But I don’t do that anymore.  I didn’t even look at the setlists for Pearl Jam’s last two tours.  I’m more of a Miles Davis kind of man now.

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People talk very poorly of “routine”.  They are afraid of falling into routine.  They think routine will just sap the authenticity directly out of your life.

Here is what they mean: they are afraid of getting old and having responsibilities.

Lord knows I was afraid of those things for a very long time.  I lived by myself for a decade and railed against the breakfast-nook-having, 401k-caring-about, child-rearing snoozevilles.  But guess what?  While I was living alone, bitching about all that, I still had a routine.  I may have been able to take road trips more often, stay out late, what-have-you, but ultimately, if what you fear is routine, then you are fucked, mister, because whoever you are and whatever you do, you are already in a routine.

I have a family now.  I am now living much closer to what some people would call a “normal adult life”, and yes, we have a routine.  Having a routine is how you make sure you get out the door in the morning (if that’s what you have to do), get food in your belly, pay the power company on time.  Having a routine and being in the flow of “normal” adult life doesn’t mean your passion has to be siphoned off.

But you gotta work at it.

The last thing I want, as I near forty and the changes inside me keep accelerating, is to live joylessly, simply existing, from one day to the next, sun up, sun down, alarm beeping, alarm beeping.  Luckily my partner is also a person with no interest in living an ordinary life, even if we do want to have breakfast nooks someday and pay attention to our 401ks.  Intense existence and successful adulthood, I think, are not mutually exclusive.

I want our family to be safe from harm but I don’t want to “be safe”.  I want desperately to reach further and further out of my comfort zones.  I want to do new stuff until the day I die.  I don’t want to only listen to the music I loved in high school.  The world is so damn huge.  We’re only here for a blink.

I have learned that it is possible to grow up and still let the juice run down your chin.

Baltimore, 1998

I suppose there’s always a lesson to be learned, whether in a filthy dive bar or over tea in a teahouse, whether in sweaty socks in a high school gym or walking onto stage in a vaunted theater, there’s always some lesson to be gleaned, whether it is for you or against you, whether it is exactly what you want to hear or it devastates you, it is going to be there, regardless.  Take, for example, standing on the balcony level of a thumping bar in Baltimore, peering down at the crowded dance floor below, my head already swirled with gin, watching three of my friends dance in a group, turning sluringly to the young girl next to me, who I’d never met or even spoken to before, Hey!  That one down there, with the orange hat?  Do you find him attractive?  Women are always into him instead of me, and when she grimaces and turns from me wordlessly, I amble over to the balcony bar, order a double of the top-shelf stuff, and settle into a corner table alone.  Even in my youth I saw this not as a lesson in the unfairness of having friends more desirable than yourself, or being a bad dancer or lacking social graces, but as a gut-punch reality check about a path I was trodding from which I could not return.  But what else did I know as the waitress lit the candle on my round table in the dark?  What did I know about anything?

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.

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.

I’m Not Me

My father was born into orchard country. Nestled deep in the heart of Pennsylvania’s Cumberland Valley, near the intersection of the Appalachian Trail and the South Mountain.  His youngest years were spent in rolling hills crowded by apple trees, which Mexican immigrants picked nearly year-round.  There were Mexican restaurants around unassuming bends in the country roads; I never saw them but I can imagine they might have looked out of place, if one stopped to think about them.  Dad told me a story once about a fancy-looking house that sat at the bottom of a gulley and was surrounded by Red Delicious trees.  I saw the house myself—it’s still there.  It looks like a small but stately plantation.  When Dad was a boy, the house had an in-ground swimming pool, which was quite a luxury in those days, and they’d let him and his friends swim there occasionally.  One Halloween, he was trick-or-treating and the family gave all the boys little pop guns—plastic guns that shot a cork out of a barrel.  He thought they must be rich.  He never forgot it.  He remembers it like it was yesterday.  My mother was born a mere 25 miles away, in a vanishingly small town surrounded by cow pastures, clumps of trees, and lean-to outbuildings.  Farm country.  In fact, she was born on a farm—a working farm, and she grew up doing the kinds of things you might imagine: collecting eggs from innocent chickens, watching her father and brothers shear sheep, waking up at the crack of dawn. Her dream as a little girl was to somehow, someway, move to the nearby small town and help her uncle run a pharmacy he owned there.  She pictured herself sweeping the floor, stocking the shelves, maybe keeping the books.  To her, this was a version of glamour.  Her family would take in kids from “the city” who needed places to stay; Fresh Air Kids, they called them.  Sometimes my mom’s country family swelled to great numbers; a surprising-looking bunch, I’m sure.  My genes—whatever they are—are a swirl of them.  I’ve got orchards in my blood, and my skeleton is a farm.

As a young child, I didn’t know much about my parents or where I’d come from. It wasn’t an issue I pondered.  I knew that I certainly felt like me.  I knew I liked to mostly not talk about what I felt inside.  I knew I liked drawing things, and that I sure did love the outdoors.  I liked playing with small boats in the bathtub, and Matchbox cars in the sandbox, and I hated going to sleep, and the dark scared me.  There were two neighbors who lived two doors down from us—at the time it felt far away, but it is literally just thirty yards, I just looked at it not six months ago—who must have been 50 years old at the time.  I considered them my best friends, although to them I must have seemed like a just occasional little person who happened by.  I liked talking to them and imagining what their grown-up lives were like inside that big red brick house—what the kitchen looked like, what they ate for dinner.  I miss them.  They’re dead now.

I was a fairly typical teenager. I was mostly about having fun; everything was a joke.  I could be cruel.  I smoked a lot of cigarettes and experimented with just about anything that could be experimented with.  I talked a lot.  I thought I was important and smart.  I hid secret desires and interests: poetry, philosophy, sexual confusion, the occult.  I got angry, I got sad, I read classic science fiction novels late at night in my bedroom with the door locked.  Women started to like me and it took me a long time to figure out what to do about it; when I did figure it out I tried very hard to be a “good guy” but still…I often failed.  I liked comic books, American Gladiators, and MTV.  Late in my teens I discovered Tumbling Run, a long hiking trail in the nearby Appalachians that follows a truly adorable stream, which is a trickle at the trail head and as you climb higher becomes a rushing set of falls and deep, clear pools.  I would hike it by myself, find perches away from the trail, pull out a notebook and write poems tailored after E.E. Cummings.  They were full of angst and love and fear.  I thought Tumbling Run would be like my Walden Pond, but mostly, I just forgot about it.

As a young man I encountered my problems: alcoholism and depression. But those weren’t the only defining elements of my life.  As I moved into adulthood I moved away from American Gladiators and even further from the tiny boats in the bathtub.  There were surface changes, like a deeper attraction to poetry and literature and “serious films”, but I changed for real, too.  I got angry.  Angry at everything.  I became of a mind that to judge everyone as harshly and vocally as possible was actually a good trait to have.  I smoked a lot of cigarettes, often two packs a day.  I was still funny, but now with more sarcasm and less joy.  I liked staying awake until the sunrise, never cleaning my car, and throbbing rock and roll.  I hated being alive.

After young adulthood up until this moment (what we shall refer to as life) I’ve just kept on changing.  There are always the obvious, cosmetic alterations: a sudden liking for big band music and Cary Grant films, corduroy jackets and Florsheim loafers, art museum memberships and mini-figurines of Felix Mendelssohn.  But also sea changes, but so fast; one moment I don’t want to talk to people at all, the next I enjoy the communion of strangers.  Seemingly one moment, an actual pastime of mine is driving my car through the country at night, the windows down, blasting music from my CD player, smoking cigarettes.  Last night I walked home through the city, listening to my music in my headphones, stopping to read the menu in a vegan restaurant. One moment I want to be single forever, the next I’m in love more than I ever have been.  A month or so ago, I made a short visit to the area I grew up in (somewhere between orchards and farms) and had breakfast with two of my oldest, dearest friends.  They looked the same as they always had, as I’m sure I did, and the little dirt-hole diner we ate in was the same as always, and the streets and parking lots were the same as they always were, when I was spending all my days there.  But having been largely gone from the area for four years, it all felt so different, so foreign.  Was that actually me that had lived here, had called these places home, these friends familiar?  Or was it a dream had by a being who calls himself me?  After breakfast one of the friends was driving me to my dad’s house, and as I climbed in his car,  I was thinking he has a car! (I no longer have a car).  I was nearly aghast (but without judgment) when I settled into the passenger seat and realized this was the car of a very serious cigarette smoker; ashes, crumpled empty packs everywhere, the stale pall of smoke infusing the upholstery.  And it looked like many cars I had in my day: old drink cups on the floor, change everywhere, ATM receipts and food wrappers.  I wasn’t grossed out; I felt oddly at home.  It had just been so long since that had been me.  It was like time travel.

If I’m able to look directly at the thought long enough, it becomes very clear that the notion of me doesn’t exist.  I’m a collection of moments, an intricate study in cause-and-effect.  I am the orchard, and the farm, and the boats in the bathtub, and the throbbing rock and roll, and walking home through the city last night.  I am time itself.  I’m not me.

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.)

 

Everything All At Once

Where you look for meaning, you will find it.  Where you look for symbols, you will find them.  If you dig deeper, more will come.  Look.  Look.

 

 

Every college has it’s “famous” apartment complexes which reside just off of campus, where Freshmen and Sophomores who are stuck in the dorms go to party.  At Shippensburg University, there are the Big Three: Bard, Chateau (I know, right?), and College Park apartments.  College Park is (or at least was) the most famous of these, as it sits right on the edge of campus, separated from University property by a mere 15 or so feet and an 8-foot-high chain-link fence.  It was into this famous apartment complex (with which I already had a rich history as a visitor) that I moved, following the house on Orange Street, with two of my buddies I had befriended while living in the dorms at Naugle Hall.

These weren’t bad apartments, nor were they great.  Fairly standard, three-room, one bath apartments with full kitchens.  Standard, flat-paint white walls, a blue-green loop carpet, ten-foot high ceilings.  The designers had taken great care to make each room have a bit of “shape” beyond a mere four-cornered room.  For instance, our living room was slightly “L-Shaped”, while my bedroom (which I shared with the other single roommate; the roommate with the girlfriend got his own room, which we all found to be fair) was not really a shape as much as it was a 6-cornered room.

I smoked in this apartment, though I was the only smoker who lived there.  We all drank there (we were all 21, and off-campus), although certainly I drank much more than them.  We listened to loud music all the time, watched great movies over and over (it was here that I discovered Magnolia; thank you Rob!), we played golf with Wiffle golf balls. We watched on CNN Headline News with apprehension and beers in our hands as George W. Bush got elected for the first time. I listened to live Pearl Jam bootlegs while playing air guitar on golf clubs for hours on end, while one roommate was playing computer games (or the Hollywood Stock Exchange online…feel like a real geek? Check out http://www.HSX.com) while the other did homework on one of our two horrible, horrible couches.  I have no idea whose couches they were.

The kitchen was, of course, a wretched disaster, as all male (and most female) college kitchens tend to be.  Dishes would pile up and just sit there, until the stench and the visual evidence of vile mold would drive somebody to wash them.  The refrigerator had everything we had decided to use on a regular basis pushed up front, while unwanted foodstuff got pushed to the back, gestating for months until, once again, the tell-tale signs of mold forced someone to do something about it.  And I have never seen anyone use a toaster oven as much as one of my roommates did; frankly, until I lived there, I had suspected toaster ovens were a myth.

These were most certainly my “wacky college days”, the kind of time I had always hoped to have in college which hadn’t materialized until now.  Nevermind that most of the time at this apartment I was more depressed than ever, and more debauched than ever (Henry Miller would blush…really), but at the same time, there was more lighthearted goofiness and exploration of our adulthood/childhood bridge than I had experienced yet.  I often slept on the couch in the living room, and this gave me great opportunities to fuck with the other guys as they slept in the bedrooms.  I was a big fan of finding new and inventive ways to make it impossible for them to open their doors in the morning.  Once I even upended both couched and put them both (standing on end) in front of Rob’s bedroom door (he was the one with his own bedroom), and then I went and slept on my bed.

It was also the only place I ever lived where we had our own beer pong table, which made me finally feel ‘college’.

One day, about halfway through our living adventure there, we got a call from the front office.  Some students who were interested in renting an apartment there next year would like to walk through one to see what they are like on the inside.  Could they walk through ours the next morning?  Sure, we said, and that was that.

Now, our apartment was not disgusting on the whole.  If it had been just me living there, it would have been, but my two roomies were not filthy. They were not clean, neat-freaks either, just standard guys who didn’t want to live in squalor.  We balanced each other out in a fairly democratic way; there were never fights about cleanliness, because there was not a huge gulf between our sensibilities, but there was a large enough difference to keep the apartment in a sort of “cluttered but not gross” stasis.  So it didn’t occur to us (as it most certainly would occur to me now) to clean the apartment for such a visit.

Late that night, the three of us were spending some leisurely hours watching television, sprawled out between our two couches and one obscenely large chair.  At some point, I said something like this:

We should do something that’ll really fuck with those people tomorrow morning.

 

The roommates agreed, but wondered what I had in mind.

We should, like, build a tower of stuff from the floor to the ceiling, right in the middle of the living room.

 

This intrigued them, and in fact, in my memory of the event, one of them was off his chair looking for stuff the moment the words were out of my mouth.

At first, we pulled the coffee table into the center of the room, with the intention of building from that as a sort of head start.  But after some deliberation we decided that building off the table would take away some of the effect.  We wanted the people (hopefully prissy Sorority chicks) to walk into this apartment and be greeted by a complete, narrow, impossible-looking tower of everyday items reaching from the floor to the ceiling…and we wanted it touching the ceiling.

So we started building on the floor.  First, a wall calendar to level out the carpet.  Then, on top of that, our largest text books.  The text books alone got us quite a bit of height, and a sturdy base, as well.

It’s difficult to remember what all we made the tower out of.  I know there were some empty two-liters in there, as well as empty half-gallons of White Tavern gin (what I almost exclusively drank) which gave the tower quite a sad but rebellious look.  There were smaller books in the middle, some cups and drinking glasses, some boxes of Kraft Macaroni and Cheese, and probably canisters of shaving cream and sticks of deodorant.  The main thing you need to know is that this tower should have been impossible.  When you looked at it, you really could not believe it was standing, or that is wasn’t glued together or didn’t have some wire running through the hollowed-out materials. And it really hadn’t been that difficult.  Things just seemed to keep fitting into one another and holding perfectly.  We only had one or two setbacks, and a few other moments where the tower teetered on the edge of collapse and then righted itself.  It couldn’t have taken more than an hour to get within 2 or 3 inches of the ceiling.  Then, however, we had a problem.

We wanted to tower to touch the ceiling, but to just touch it. We weren’t interested in fashioning a drinking straw to the top that would touch the ceiling and then bend and have an extra 3 inches dangling there.  We wanted it to be perfect, for the tower to be the exact height of the room from floor-to-ceiling.  And we tore our apartment apart looking for just the right thing.  We even measured the gap and then started measuring things, trying to find something that was exactly 2 and ¾ inches (or whatever it was).  We finally found what we needed in the form of a disposable Morton’s Pepper shaker, which had been hiding in the back of a cupboard.  It slid neatly into place (I was not able to participate in the final leg of construction, as, even standing on the chair, I was not tall enough, so I had to participate from the ground) and our tower was finished.

It was an absolute marvel, and we were rightly impressed.  We watched TV a bit longer, with what seemed to now be a fourth person in the room, this presence that was watching over everything.  We went to bed that night giddy in the knowledge that our tower would not be a secret for long; in fact, strangers would soon see it, which is probably the most satisfying knowledge anyone can have about a work of art they have created.

I awoke briefly to the sounds of people in the apartment the next morning.  I couldn’t tell what they were saying, but they were in fact girls.  We’ll never know if they were fully astonished, but I know they saw it.

If you dig deeper and look harder you can see everything all at once.

37 of the Worst Oatmeal Beers

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

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

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

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

Here is me, looking at The Signer:

 

My 47th Favorite Song

is:

“We Used to Vacation” by Cold War Kids

This barn-burner of a tale by Cold War Kids tells the story of an alcoholic father and husband whose family has been silently putting up with his slow slide into addiction, including a recent “accident”, which is not detailed but which “had everyone a little shook up”.  The title—which is not said in the song—gives a sly indication of the financial fallout from the man’s addiction.  So of course, being about the disease (I really don’t know where I fall on the disease debate) I have, and from a band I love, it’s always been a special song to me.  It helps that it is really badass.

My 55th Favorite Song of All-Time

is:

“Fell on Black Days” by Soundgarden

I’m actually not a very big Soundgarden fan, nor do I find “Fell on Black Days” to be especially gratifying as a song.  But on one specific occasion in my life, it may have kept me from just plain old losing my mind.

The story itself is far from interesting.  It was about 3/4 of the way through my alcoholic drinking, and things had just started to really fall apart around me.  I essentially had no place to live, my body was shutting down, and I was fading out of contact with a lot of my loved ones.  Then on this particular day, I was leaving my mom’s apartment in Dillsburg to go to work in Carlisle (about a 15-20 minute drive) and my car wouldn’t start.  This just seemed pretty horrible at the time.  I wasn’t yet fully aware of the fact that my dependence on alcohol was ruining my life, but this day aided in the dawning of the realization.

I called work and told them of my issue, and the main boss said he would come get me and even arrange for a ride home.  This is slightly before the age of everyone having cell phones and GPSs, so we had to do the let-me-tell-you-while-you-write-it-down directions, and it wasn’t an easy trip.

I stood outside on the sidewalk by the road for 20-25 minutes waiting for him.  I was very close to slipping into a serious depression about my life in general, when this song somehow popped into my head.  I didn’t know any of the lyrics except the chorus, but somehow it seemed a comfort as I kept replaying it in my mind.  Sure, the song itself is depressing, but it felt nice to know that other people had, well, fell on black days.  Throughout the rest of my trying times (in the parlance of my blog, before the fire), the song was always in the back of my head, telling me I wasn’t alone.  And the phrasing, fell on black days, seems to imply there is something less bad after them.

 

 

 

 

Like a Guilty Chimney

I was meandering around my apartment a few days ago, terribly close to feeling, for one split second, bored.  It was terrifying;  there is, for me, almost no worse sensation, and I’ve been successful for years in avoiding it.  To head it off, I walked over to one of my more neglected bookshelves and started nosing through books from my distant past.

I was almost immediately confronted with an unexpected sight: my own handwriting, on the inside cover of a book.  And then the memory came flooding back:  during a sizeable period of my 20s, I did a lot of writing inside of books.

First, I like to write things, as readers of my blog know.  And I’m not referring to the creative writing aspect of my interests, I mean I just like to write.  Even now, I fill notebooks with meaningless lists and jibber-jabber.  I’ve always been a writer-downer.  But during my mid-twenties—after I began drinking very seriously as an alcoholic but before my life became a miserable unlivable mess—I went through a period of two or three years when a majority of my nights were spent at friends’ houses, or friends of friends’ houses, or the house of a friend’s out-of-town grandparents, or a house a co-worker was house-sitting.  It wasn’t an unhappy time, just a time of listless drifting, half-hearted partying, and a fair amount of depravity.

For the majority of this time period, my faithful companion was a backpack, in which I kept my alcohol (White Tavern Gin, half gallon, almost always), clothes and/or toiletries if I had any, cigarettes, and whatever book I was currently reading.  This was quite often all I had with me in foreign homes.  And I often found myself the only person awake in these places.  Granted, as an alcoholic, there was a lot of sleeping in my life, but you’d also be surprised how drunk a practiced alcoholic can get after a few years of really going at it.  And so it was on many, many occasions, I found myself in homes where I felt slightly uncomfortable, often the only person awake very late at night, in complete silence for whatever reason (don’t wake the parents/wife, can’t figure out how to turn the TV on, cable bill didn’t get paid, or just plain no TV or stero to be found, etc), and after some time, I’d become largely too drunk to actually read the book I had with me.  This is when I started writing inside my books—because they were the only thing I could find to write on, and I had little else to do.

Not everything I found on my bookshelf was a great example of these writings.  Sometimes it was just me leaving these little markings for my future self, a little flag saying, “Hey!  You liked this part!”  I think it’s cute and optimistic.  Here is a “flag” from my copy of Joseph Heller’s “Catch 22”:

(clicking on any of the photos, and then click it again when it re-loads, to see the full-size scan)

And here’s another one not quite from lonely drunken nights, but from a golden era in a relationship I had with a marvelous woman named Cory.  We both took turns reading stories in the “Collected Short Stories” of Ray Bradbury.  We devised a coding system in the table of contents.  (there are 6 pages like this):

Now, for some of the “lonely night” book scribbling.  Here is a poem I wrote inside my “Selected Poems” of E.E. Cummings (a book I must have owned for almost 20 years now, and I still consult nearly every month, but I didn’t know this poem was in the back of it until I checked for this blog entry).  The text of the poem is this:

Richard Simmons is a terrible man.
He seems to be more happy than
a lazy sleeping noiseless cat
which doesn’t mind being fat.

Some incomprehensible blabber from the back cover of Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man is Hard to Find”.  It looks like academic notation, although I never had to read it for school:

From C.S. Lewis’ “The Problem of Pain”.  Also, there’s a phone number (I came across a lot of phone number’s written in books; this was before the cell phone).  Anyone recognize the number?

For a time, I stayed in the basement of some friends of mine.  This basement had zero entertainment modules in it…no television, radio, whatnot…in fact, it barely had light in it.  But it did contain, most of the time, thousands of dollars in musical equipment:  full drum kit, multiple guitars, 4-track recorders and all sorts of other gadgets and whirlygigs I never understood.  That’s because this basement was the de facto practice space of a band called Post Vintage (one of my friends who lived at this place was the bassist), and let me tell you, I loved this band.  Not just because my friend was in it or because I lived in their practice room, but because they ruled!  (listen to their stuff here; they’re unfortunately no longer active.)

Anyway, this is all a very long way of telling you that, apparently, one night in this dark, quiet basement, I decided to write the lyrics to their song “Next at Seven” inside the front cover of my copy of Sylvia Plath’s “Collected Poems”.  “Next at Seven”‘s lyrics are by Dave Peifer, whose solo work (as Isotope) can be heard here.

Anyway, this one kind of shocked me.  I have no memory of doing this.  Although I do distinctly recall having my Plath phase at the same time I lived in the basement here.  Not, largely, a very happy time in my life.

But here, for me, is the one that really tickled me.  A drunken poem (I can always tell when something I wrote was composed while intoxicated) inside the cover of Gregory Corso’s “Mindfield”.  Corso is (I think he’s still alive) a Beat poet who I liked very much back then but not so much now.  His poetry is also markedly different than the poem I wrote inside his book, which I think it interesting.  But what’s most interesting to me is that I really like this drunken poem I wrote.  That is very rare.  I wrote like shit when I was drunk.  But this one really seems to capture the whole feeling and environment I’ve descibed to you from this time period of my life:  being the only person, awake and drunk in a house that I am unfamiliar with, and the subtext of sorrow and addiction I was feeling.  This is the poem:

Upon finding myself too drunk to read
and too severed to cavort
with folks
I resign to my own posturing
amongst myselves
amidst sleeping zombie-me’s.

Twirling in this foreign apartment
thier slumbering noses
reflect the television screen
and I cannot find my shoes.

Like a guilty chimney I sit still.

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.

2011 Wasn’t Real

Time is of great concern to me.  It always has been.  The movement of it, the steady march of it.  The relentlessness of it.  I don’t think I fear death greatly; not more than is normal.  I don’t think I fear getting old; not more than is normal.  Nor is it a great desire to “live in the past”; I love the present and the future.  But it is a kind of mournfulness for the past; for moments passed; for selves I once was and other people once were.  An acknowledgement—however sideways-glanced and barely-thought about—of the frivolity of crafting a life if it all ends up in memories and tall tales told amongst friends in once-a-year get-back-togethers in Applebee’s.  Here is a picture of me as a little boy at the beach:

I’m a happy man but thinking about time makes me sad.  Happy people can get sad, sometimes, when they think about the right things.  I miss things.  I regret things.  There are things I would do different and things I would hold on to.  You should have these things, too.  Life is not so simple for it to be otherwise.

I’ve written lots of poems about time over the years, but this one is my favorite.  I wrote it in 2003:

Bother With Hours

Things which slowly trickle down
like snow, taxes, or a frown
arrive in fragments of desire
like matches held up to a fire.

This was almost evident
in the way the hours went
as you sat there, humming softly,
fanning flies and drinking coffee.

Why bother with hours, I saw you thinking,
in this day of moments, sinking?
If seconds piling aren’t enough
the minutes stack up like a bluff.

And then you stood, and blinked your eyes.
Imagine the size of my surprise!
That moment trickled by as well
and landed where the others fell.

Here is a picture of me, just a few days after finally getting sober for good, at my mother’s house in New Jersey, petting my favorite cat, Angel.  She’s dead now.

It’s this “new year’s” balderdash that’s got me so honed in on time.  Every year new year’s rolls around and people talk about it like it means something, and every year I just understand it less and less.  Time always moves for me.  I’m always marking new beginnings, sudden endings, tiny whirlpools and eddys of time, memory, sensation.  Existence for me glides through pockets of variation, like a plane through turbulence and smooth air.  I can’t imagine something more meaningless toward my greater understanding of life than a calendar date.  But I also rarely talk about “days”.  You will be hard pressed to hear me say “I had a bad day”; I will tell you a bad event just happened to me (if I tell you about it at all).  The rising and setting of the sun, the ticking off of dates in a month, are not the markers that I live within.

This is my dad teaching me how to ride a bike:

When I first got serious about writing poetry, for a short while, I thought I might be a fancy poet.  It turns out it’s too difficult to be a fancy poet, but I got away with a few good ones while I was at it.  Here is a fancy one I wrote about “time” that I think is brilliant but nobody else has ever seemed to care for.

Ebbing

The line passively rocks,
the weight of warm wool socks
freshly laundered.  Now dry.
I suddenly ask why
I can picture the wool
in the washer, still full.

You don’t get it, do you?  Don’t you hate when you’re the only one who *gets* your own stuff?  Does that happen to everyone, or just bad fancy poets?  When do you think we stop being the people we thought we were going to be?  Of course there’s nothing wrong with not ending up the way you envisioned—frankly I’m glad I’m not currently sitting in my university office between classes and writing my academic manuscript about some horrid Greek epic poem—but the way we change is absolutely fascinating.  Slowly, steadily, influenced by who-knows-how-many waxing and waning forces.  My friends and family, the books I read, the TV shows blaring in the background that I only think I’m ignoring, the weather outside, the paint on the wall.  Over the long, slow crawl of time, they all have their way.  How much is me, and how much is them?  Where did the old me go?

As far as I’m aware, the only surviving picture of me actually drinking from the first few years of my “addictive drinking”.  Aged approximately 22.

I love who I am now, but I mourn the fact that today’s version of me will someday pass, as well.  And I don’t mean death (although that, too), but just change, and that persistent drummer of time and the cosmic forces of influence, will drag me, almost without me noticing, into being a completely new and different man.  I will no doubt be very happy being that new man, but I will look back with a sad fondness on the loss of this current version of me.  I may even look back on this blog entry and think, What a fool he was.  And I’ll probably be right.  It is my experience that New-Version Seth is almost always smarter than Old-Version Seth.

Every 13 year old has fake vogue fights with their sister.

Portrait

Nature has a slow divinity.
Its blight and bounty bend
hushed with eons;
a single leaf swoops slowly
to join the dawdling portrait
beneath the blooming pews.

Nobody’s ever mentioned that poem to me, either.  I also wrote that one in 2003.  It is very fancy.  Now that is a poem that can’t get it’s mind off of “time”.  If you don’t mind me saying so, it’s really quite amazing.

One wonders how others view them after we are gone from their lives.  What has the passage of time done to their perception of me?  How do they remember the time that our lives intersected?

My first formal dance, with my first girlfriend.  I cut her out, as it is considered bad form to post pictures of others on the internet, especially old ones like this, without asking.  And I could ask her, but who knows how she thinks about me now?

Certainly there is probably a disconnect between how I view the past and how others who have shared experiences with me view the past.  Perhaps some women that I still love never think about me, and others who I barely recall think of me often.  How important is this to you?  I find I am rarely bothered by the thought that others may view our past unfavorably, or differently than I do.  Although the possibility of being completely forgotten seems to sting.  Has time really rendered me that inconsequential?  Have your husband and children completely erased three glorious summers, or even one sublime 15 minute car ride through sun-drenched countryside?  Where do those shelved moments exist for you, now?  How easily can you reach them, retrieve them, feel something of their ecstasy?  They are still real.  I am not afraid to admit that they are still real.  The past isn’t dead; it isn’t even past.  All moments are right there, right there, within your grasp.  Are they not?

I’ve Been Asleep For a Long, Long Time
song lyrics by Tim Baker

I’ve been asleep for a long, long time.
Blonde hair to brown, and brown to white.
My mom is buried beside my dad,
but I was asleep for all of that.

I shut my eyes for a moment’s rest,
’cause I get so tired.
But what things transpired while my body slept
and beset my mind?

The schools that we went to have all been closed,
and all of my teachers are dead I suppose.
The songs that we sung have all gone quiet.
What happens below as we sleep at night?

The river’s up, the reeds are caught
halfway across what never was.
The water rose and swept in slow.
When the reeds awoke, they were half below.

I’ve been asleep for a long, long time.

I Can’t Quit

When I quit drinking, I substituted caffeine for alcohol.  That wasn’t quite enough so I substituted buying Pearl Jam bootlegs for alcohol, as well.  And then I subsituted working extra hours for alcohol, as well.  And then I ran out of Pearl Jam bootlegs to buy so I substituted DVDs for Pearl Jam bootlegs.  And things still weren’t enough so I substituted sex for alcohol.  And then I tried to quit caffeine so I substituted lifting weights for caffeine.  But I still wanted alcohol so I substituted going to concerts for alcohol.  And I got tired of lifting weights so I substituted hiking for that.  And then I got re-addicted to caffeine.  And then I was having too much sex so I substituted eating for sex.  And then concerts were getting too expensive so I substituted going to the movies for concerts.  And then it was winter so I couldn’t hike so I substituted more eating for that.  And then I tried to quit caffeine again so I substituted going to concerts for that.  And then it was spring so I substituted hiking for going to concerts.  And then I got addicted to caffeine again.  And then I quit smoking and I substituted eating for that.  And then I was eating too much so I substituted working out for that.  But I did too much too fast so I had to substitute even more caffeine for working out.  And then I started eating again.  And I’m still buying a ton of DVDs.  I can’t quit.

Cheers

on the couch a few days ago, not doing much, maybe reading, half-dozing, maybe muttering to myself, was suddenly aware of the Cheers theme song on the television, and despite having heard it dozens of times over the past few years I suddenly remembered a connection I had to it, or it had to me, in the dark smoky years of my fire, during the bed-ridden gin-soaked sorrow, however, I cannot fully remember this connection, it remains submerged in the narrow ether, in the marrow of moments; perhaps, paralyzed on a couch in Shippensburg, during some of the darkest days, with my back turned to the television while my rommates did homework and I was dropped out of school and just drinking drinking drinking and masturbating, perhaps paralyzed on that couch the Cheers theme song came on and it with it’s positivity-laden lyrics but somehow melancholy tune it cemented for me an absolute feeling that existence is definitely worth experiencing while also being utter shit;  I can have no way of knowing if that is the connection I am recalling but it is a likely one and certainly not much different than whatever the truth is.  And while I was on my current couch pondering this connection it became clear to me through some back alley memory loophole that the Cheers theme song had been a source for and symbol of my extreme melancholy for quite a few of the hazy barely-formed years of my most earnest absentia; while I was off tra-la-la-ing in the Land of Drinkers Who’d Rather Be Dead, there seems to have been a lot of syndicated television on in backgrounds (in basements, bars, and bedrooms) and this everybody-knows-your-name trope became something of a razor to my wrist, whatever that means, and what I am now stuck figuring out is how in the world I know this, if I can’t remember any instance of hearing it during those years, and how I forgot this connection in the intervening years and succesfully watched Cheers without remembering that sadness.  None of this has anything to do with Cheers, of course, but instead I am concerned with the terrifying part of our lives which happens without our noticing it; without our ability to notice it if we tried; this submerged, bottom-of-the-iceberg life we all live (whether you drank yourself to death or not, whether you watch boorish sitcoms or not) that transpires below the waterline of our minds.  Suddenly out of nowhere you realize a part of you is dead that you forgot ever existed and then you forget your realization and go on with your day eating a Snickers, riding an escalator, with no idea that hidden parts of you are orbiting.  Suddenly you remember you used to be a different person, with different habits, with different thoughts, and for a moment you hold that image of your former self perfectly in your mind like a microscope snapshot of a snowflake but then just as quickly as it came the structure vanishes and you remember nothing except that you had been remembering something.  Life becomes reduced to shadow structures; edifices with no interiors.  You spend all day trying to figure out what your vivid dream from the night before meant, and then suddenly, at 6 in the afternoon when you go to think about it some more, you cannnot remember what happened in the dream (despite having thought about it all day).  How can this be?  What chased it away?  Where did it go?  Where does it live now?  Surely it lives.  Or you had a dream when you were eight years old that you have remembered your whole life; you go back to pondering it from time-to-time in your waking life.  But suddenly in your mid-twenties you start to think that maybe half of it was real; that your grandma really did take you to that park to see those geese, and that the only part that was a dream was when you rode a goose into the sky, but you never do ask your grandma if it was real and then she dies and now you’re not sure at all.  And then maybe one day you’re 40 years old and you ponder the dream again and you think, maybe the part where I rode the goose was a day-dream; yes, that’s right, I day-dreamed it sitting in school; so half of it was real, and half imagined, but none of it dreamt.  But it probably was dreamt.  How can one not know these things?  Where do we live, in the shadows, in the light?  In the great underneath?  I had a dream a few nights ago that involved a lot of driving, a friend of mine I almost never see, and somehow my old high school parking lot, and I was happy, happy, and I kept on living in that dream world for as long as I could in the minutes after I woke up, until the logic and sense of that universe faded; even now I can remember almost none of it, but I lived there, I tell you; it was me living there just as sure as it’s me typing this.  The dream-me, and the typing-me, and the Cheers-sadness me…I wonder if they are the same.  Or if I am many.  Perhaps it is like viewing something through a crystal, and there are many different versions of the same thing, but existing all at once.  But is the Cheers me, the Fire me, still here, or do I simply hear his echoes (maybe him and dream-me are in cahoots), see his footprints, feel the slouch-pangs of his sinister urges?  In the deepest moments of latest night these are the questions I have when I become convinced I am more than alive

Audio Poem: “The Salt Flats”

 

Year written:  2006
Collection:  The Salt Flats  

 

 

 

 The Salt Flats

 

Here be the salt flats of the soul;
the long wide white expanse,
the glowing blank field,
the loving wide glowing blank
salt flats of the soul.

When I used to drink everyday
I got so lonely sometimes
I could hear
(and see!)
my heart beating,
pumping gin & nicotine rapidly
to my confused organs;

I could get so drunk & lonely
and all I could ever think about
(and see when my stuttering eyes closed)
were those girls who’d taken their clothes off
for me,
who had whispered sweet things,
blown kisses across parking lots.

Near the end of the drinking
I began to get hotel rooms
for myself
so I could drink with no one seeing me.
I’d throw my bag on the bed
unwrap the complimentary plastic cup
mix a drink
(three-fourths gin one-fourth Coke)
& drain it like a marathon runner
drains water held out to him.

After the first drink
I was loose and steady
(and maybe grinning a little)
& I’d mix a second one,
take it into the shower with me.
I never used soap or shampoo
but just sat there
with hot hot water dancing on me
thinking and drinking in the dark.

For an hour or more I usually sat there.

Out of the shower
(the room now entirely humid everywhere,
the mirrors fogged, the sheets damp,
even the television needed wiping off)
I’d position myself at the round oak table
with the TV on
& old newspapers or magazines
spread everywhere,
the gin bottle & 2 liter of soda
by my socked feet.

It didn’t take much for the loneliness
to happen;
two drinks?  Three?
Soon the naked whispering women filled the room
(muttering about how great I was,
what a shame life was).
I rarely cried. I just tried not to think.

Sometimes they’d taunt me.
Sometimes they drank with me.
Sometimes we’d argue,
I’d call them whores and harlots
and apologize & apologize.
Usually they fucked me.
Once they were there,
they didn’t leave
(until sunrise).

After some weeks
(a month? Maybe more,
I’ll never know)
of performing this ritual
the newspapers, the magazines,
the pre-emptive shower were no longer enough
to hold off that miserable loneliness:
it began as I walked through the door.
Desperate, I tremblingly paged through
the Gideon’s Bible
(there was nothing there for me.
It never left the bedside table.)

And then I found the phone book.

I suppose I knew what I was looking for
because I turned right to it.
Escorts, right there in the open
for anybody to find.
I was amazed!
Women would actually come to my room
(and do whatever I asked).
The idea was a wonderment.

The first time I called
I requested an Asian woman
(I’d never so much as held hands
with a girl who wasn’t as white as
freshly painted parking lot spaces);
immediately after hanging up
I knew I wouldn’t sleep with her.

She got to my room an hour later.
She wasn’t Asian
(she was whiter than me)
and she wasn’t very pretty.
But she wasn’t ugly.

I told her I was a writer
(for a reputable magazine, no less)
doing a story on the lives of
young girls working for dreary escort services.
I just wanted to talk, I told her,
and she’d be paid for her time.

I mixed her a drink,
which she gladly took.

She told me all about herself,
but I don’t remember any of it now.
I just remember staring at her
(taking fake notes)
and smiling as she became more enchanting
with each drink I took,
each word out of her mouth.

After an hour she said it was time to go.
I gave her the money I owed her.
As she was gathering her things I managed to say
How much more would it be
for a quick handjob?

That’s not what you want,
she said. She shut the door behind her.

I just sat there, mixing another drink.
I remember it was snowing outside
and the roads were icy.
Letterman was on TV.

Here be the salt flats of the soul;
the long wide white expanse,
the glowing blank field,
the loving wide glowing blank
salt flats of the soul.

What Almost Happened to Me Today (or: Why You’ve Always Got to Be Really Careful)

Co-worker:  Hey, do you want this cupcake?

Me:  I don’t know.  I just ate.  Why don’t you want it?

Co-worker:  The person who made it is kind of dirty.  I don’t trust anything that comes out of her house.

Me:  Hmmmm.  I don’t know.  I mean, it looks really good.  *smells cupcake, inspects cupcake closely*  Nah.  I don’t think so. 

Co-worker:  Oh well.  If you don’t want it, I might eat it anyway.  There’s lots of alcohol in it.

Ten Mini-Memoirs

1.  The first concert I ever went to was 80s superstar Tiffany.  I remember being very excited, despite not really knowing who she was or what was going on.  I went with my mother and my sister; it was at The Forum in Harrisburg.  This is one of those memories that consists of just a few details and sensory portraits. Bright, colorful lights.  Standing on the cushioned chair.  So many people. 

2.  I’ve always thought that somehow I got my love of Dr. Pepper from my Grandma Allie, though I do not know where this belief comes from.  I have never seen her drink it, not does she ever have any at her house.  But I have a flash of a memory:  my family, on vacation in Ocean City, Maryland.  Grandma and I, somehow, are alone in the hotel room.  I am very young.  We are sitting at the dining room table together, discussing (to my memory) two things:  how much my allowance is, and Dr. Pepper.  On the table with us is a sweating, lovely crimson 2 liter bottle of Dr. Pepper.  This small, insignificant memory has forever welded Grandma Allie and Dr. Pepper together for me.

3.  I lost my virginity in the Subaru Legacy station wagon that had been passed down to me from my mother, on a dirt road in the far, far out country of Perry County, Pennsylvania, at the age of 16.  The rap album Regulate by Warren G. was playing, and I was 16 years old.  The car smelled of vanilla car air freshener.  I had one of those tree-shaped air fresheners hanging from the volume knob of the radio.  I used a green condom, for reasons unknown.

4.  My dad and I used to go to Harrisburg Senators games all the time.  They are the minor league baseball team for that city.  I remember very little of the games themselves.  What I remember most is the arrival and the departure, but especially the departure.  We’d usually leave early if the result was clear, so we walked past all the seated fans, then out to a largely empty parking lot.  Then, inside Dad’s car, he’d tune into the AM station broadcasting the Senator’s game.  The combination of drying sweat, kicking-in air conditioning, the calming sounds of a radio-broadcasted baseball game, and often gloaming sunset light—well, things don’t get much better than that, at any age, I dare say.

5.  I went on a vacation to Vermont with my friend Brock’s family, when Brock and I were teenagers.  At the time, it seemed like a pretty boring vacation, compared to my family’s beach vacations.  We stayed at a sleepy lake town called Lake Rescue, in a very posh cabin.  It all must have been very expensive.  Nowadays, it’s just the kind of vacation I’d like to take—grilling delicious meat on the stained-oak deck overlooking the sun setting over the lake, lazy days canoeing, hiking the flat trails, falling asleep to the sound of ducks diving for food.  At the time, though, Brock and I were miserably bored, though we did invent a sport called Twizzling, the rules of which I have long since forgotten.

6.  My first real drink of alcohol—other than a few sips of champagne at somebody’s wedding sometime—was what the kids call a “40” (a 40-ounce bottle of Malt Liquor) and a few Zimas.  I was 16.  It was at the apartment of an adult who I did not know, but who knew one of my friends.  He supplied us the alcohol.  We just sat around, consuming, and it was frankly a little boring.  I didn’t feel much.  After completing my allotment of Zimas, I asked the adult friend-of-a-friend if he could go back to the bar (which was just across the street) and buy me “a beer”, which I thought might put me over some sort of edge.  I didn’t know you couldn’t just buy one can of beer, and I got laughed at.  I wouldn’t have my “a-ha moment” with alcohol until the second time I drank it, though I usually combine these two stories for a more powerful “alcoholic’s first drink” story, but that version is not true.  The bar where the adult frind-of-a-friend bought the alcohol went out of business and recently became a pizza shop, less than a block from my last apartment in Carlisle.  I used to go there for pizza all the time.

7.  I have had sex in the projection room of a movie theater.

8.  While I have never been a grade-A athlete, there were, for a time, things I excelled at, though none of them were of any use to me in organized sports.  I was very good at gym class type things, like floor hockey.  At my high school, we played a lot of a specific type of dodgeball called “bombardment”, and I was freaking amazing at bombardment.  Two years running, it was offered as a ‘club’ (a fun class of your choosing you had once a week) and I took it, along with my more athletically-skewing pals.  We were on a team called the Pussycats, and we dominated for the entire two years it was offered as a club, winning all 4 championships (2 a year).  The only thing is, the first championship we won, I cheated.  I had been hit by a ball, and no one saw it, and I didn’t tell anyone, and I was the last man standing for our team.  So if I’d have been honest, we would have lost.

9.  I once saw my sister fly over the handlebars of her ten-speed bike after she tried jumping a hill I had urged her to jump, and it was one of the most terrifying moments of my life.  I thought she’d die!

10.  My father and I went golfing once, and little did we know that the water in the golf course’s drinking fountains actually had a high level of fecal matter in it.  It was a very hot day, and we drank a lot of it.  The next day, my mother, myself, and my grandma Cohick went to see WWF Live in Hershey.  On the way there, I ate (and swallowed) an entire pack of grape bugglegum.  Halfway through the show, I got very ill, and once we got home, I vomited and kept on vomiting for what seemed days (I think, in fact, it was days).  It wasn’t until later that we pieced together what all happened, after a class-action lawsuit was brought against the golf course.  To this day, I cannot chew grape bubblegum.

Vine Street, Newville, Pennsylvania

Act I

The stage is sparsely decorated: we see only an old, tattered couch and a matching loveseat, a used, varnished coffee table (which is very low to the ground) and an entertainment center which seems to have been bought in the early Nineties.  The entertainment center houses a 19-inch television, a VCR, a stereo, and some books.  It is not important what type of stereo it is, except that it is big.  The rest of the stage is black.  Lights should be concentrated mainly on the set dressing.  Director and Lighting Designer use discretion when lighting the wings of the stage.  A feeling of barrenness should be achieved.  Also, we should be made to feel that the entertainment center is, in fact, the “center” of this tableaux.  An armchair can be added to the set, but it will not be used.

 

Enter Cassie and Willie, a young married couple.  Willie is in his early thirties, thin, Bohemian.  Cassie is in her mid-twenties, short, artsy.  The couple stand and look at the couch for three beats, in silence.

 

Willie:  I really don’t know.  He could have peed on it.

Cassie:  I really don’t know.  I didn’t think he was that absurd.

Willie:  Absurd?  He’s just a drunk.  That’s not absurd, it’s terrifyingly standard.

Cassie:  Smell it.

Willie:  Why should I smell it?  I took care of that teenager he got drunk last week.  She wouldn’t stop crying.  I had to hold her down to keep her from running into the street!  You smell it.

Cassie:  Oh, what a way to begin our New Year’s Eve!  Why don’t we just pretend it’s not there?  Everything goes away eventually.

Willie:  What a way to see the world.

Cassie:  It’s no different than the way you see it.  I just word it more simply.

Willie (sitting on the loveseat): Neither of us sees the world that way at all, and you know it.  Nothing goes away.

Cassie:  Not even farts?

Willie: Not even farts.  Every fart that’s ever been farted is still hanging in a major pocket of collective fart consciousness, above Greenland somewhere.  Where’s my tea?

Cassie:  You’re going to turn into tea.

Willie:  Yes, Mother.

Cassie:  Maybe that’s tea on the couch.  It leaked out of you because your body was fully saturated.

Willie:  You become more ridiculous with each passing sentence.

Cassie (sitting on Willie’s lap):  Isn’t that why you love me?

Willie:  No.

Cassie:  Then why do you?

Willie:  Because you’ve always been willing to smell the couch when we suspect our roommate has peed on it.  Oh, and those canned hams you keep in the back of your pants.

Cassie:  I can never decide if that’s cute or annoying.

Willie:  Things are usually both.

Enter Seth.  He is short—about the same height as Cassie–, squat, and slovenly, yet possessing of a tremendously handsome face.  He is unshaven, with a two or three day growth of hair on his face. (Under no circumstances should Seth be portrayed with an actual beard.)  He enters and sits immediately on the couch, precisely in the spot Cassie and Willy had been looking at.

 

Seth:  So we ready for this New Year’s Eve or what, folks?!  I am ready to rock this house!

 

Willie:  I’ve never cared much about New Year’s Eve.

Seth:  Nobody does!  That’s why it’s such a popular holiday.

Cassie:  I have no idea what to do tonight.  It always seems like everyone in the whole world has something amazing planned and I—we—end up having an essentially normal evening.  Just once I would like to feel as though I—we—brought the New Year in with some kind of grand style, some form of eloquence or transcendence, something larger than life, or—hell, something smaller than life, so long as it was different from life.

Seth:  Now you’re talking, Cassie!  Bring on the world, I say!  Just make sure the world has gin, menthol cigarettes and a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

Willie:  I really don’t know.  Our friend Jen is coming over.  I just hope she’s not as crazy as she used to be.

Seth: What?  Who is this vixen?

Cassie:  A friend of Willie’s from college.  We hadn’t seen her in a few years, then we ran into her at the guitar store last week and invited her over.  You’ll probably really like her, Seth.

Seth:  Oh yeah?

Cassie:  Yeah.  She’s—

Enter Jen.  She is chubby and short, yet wholesomely attractive.  She is dressed ridiculously—a tall, multi-colored, plush hat, bright green pants, a Confederate Army uniform shirt, and a pink, feathery scarf which she never removes, and shin-length brown Doc Martin boots.  Costume Designer should add little or nothing to this outfit.  Jen is loud and animated.  Her body movements are fluid yet exaggerated.  Jen acts as though she knows she is in a play.

 

Jen:  I am so totally here!  Bring on 2002!  Who wants to get drunk?  Who wants to get high?  Who wants to run screaming outside just to show the world we’re here, just to show them they can’t stop us, just to take that proverbial road not taken, to shake up the Misters and Ma’ams and goody-two-shoes and the Elvis lovers and the floor boards of that great stoic brainiac in the sky?  Who wants to fuck my boots and shit in my hair?

Willy:  I really don’t know.

Curtain

Act II

Two hours later.

 

The stage is now set to resemble a front porch.  We see a white front door (with screen door), a white overhanging awning, two white plastic chairs and an ashtray on a milk crate.  Lighting should be even lower now, as we are out-of-doors at night.  We should feel intimate with a small set centered on the stage.  All four characters are present.  Willie and Cassie occupy the chairs, Seth and Jen are standing, although they are both frequently moving; their movements are short of pacing but more than fidgeting.  Everyone has a drink in their hands.  All four are smokers and occasionally light up. (Good luck finding a playhouse that allows this nowadays.  However, it is necessary.  ‘Miming’ the smoking will not do.)

 

Cassie:  But then where can feminism go from there?  I mean, is that it’s logical conclusion?

Jen:  Who knows?  Dworkin wouldn’t have it any other way, but of course, she’s dead now.

Cassie:  All the best ones die.

Seth:  Yes, and the worst ones, too.

Jen:  I just can’t get over the fact that your walls are white.  Off-white, no less!  I mean, c’mon, everyone’s walls are off-white!  I really pegged you two (addressing Cassie and Willie) as less conformist than that.  I thought I’d come over and find pink and camouflage and Sistine Chapel type stuff painted on your walls.

Willie:  They’re just walls.

Jen:  Nothing is just a wall!  A wall is a barrier or an enclosure, a comfort or a menace, a home or a prison.  You can’t just go through your life looking at what the last person who lived here thought was acceptable, was easy-on-the-eyes, was relaxing or comforting or homogenous or sane!  That’s like living someone else’s life—or someone else’s version of life, or what passed for life for some forty-year-old single mother with two kids who liked to watch Regis and Kathy Lee after she got the little squirts onto the school bus.  Did you keep her couch, too?  How about her shower curtain?  Willy, do you picture her face when you’re balls-deep in Cassie?  Of course not!  You’re not living her life, you’re living yours, so why do you want her walls?

Seth (to Jen): I’m in love with you.  (Nobody seems to hear him say this.)

 

Willie (to Jen): So what should we do about our carpet?  Rip that out, spend thousands of dollars just on principle?  Besides, we rent this place, we can’t do whatever we like.

Cassie:  And I quite like our carpet, anyway.

Jen:  Oh of course there are practical concerns here.  You have to live out loud, as far as you’re able.  I understand that.  But you’ve got to do what you can.  You’ve got to try to be heard.

Willie (to Jen):  Did you just use the phrase ‘live out loud’?  Because you can’t be Thoreau one minute, and Oprah the next.  If you’re going to be so on-message, you’ve got to choose your words carefully or you’ll dilute yourself.

Jen:  Thoreau?  I’ve never been Thoreau.  Seth, was I being Thoreau?

Seth:  I’m in love with you.

Jen:  See?  Seth thinks it’s more of a Kafka thing.

The lights all go down except for a spotlight on Seth.  The other three characters are now ‘miming’ having a conversation.  We see them, in the dark, talking and gesturing, but we cannot hear them.  Seth watches them for a full ten seconds, with visible beaming affection.  Then he turns from them and walks to the lip of the stage.  He now addresses the audience.

 

Seth:  Well, hello there.  I suppose this wasn’t much of a play, was it?  There’s not much of a plot.  It’s just some people talking for a few minutes.  We didn’t really follow those pesky “guidelines” (here Seth does ‘air quotes’) that people have set up for plays to follow.  Well—Act One is a rather nice, tidy Act One, but then it’s just like we got sick of pretense and just talked about our theme, like the playwright just wanted to get it over with so he or she could go take a long shower.  And I hope that they did.  But, what was our theme?  Was it about walls, or houses?  Or was it love?  Or roommates?  Or the change that comes with a new year, a new house, or a new love interest?  Well, I know, for me, I’ve gotta ask how much difference there is between Love, and a House, and Change, because maybe we’re dealing with just one theme, no?  I’m not suggesting there is no difference between a house and love—I’m just saying maybe it’s something we could think about.  Maybe it’s something we could put in our meat grinder and see if sausage comes out the other end.  Ah, I have no idea what I’m talking about anymore.  And I haven’t the energy to summon up a compelling and dramatic end to all this.  Thanks for being here and watching a caricature of a memory.  Now go home and paint your walls.  Or don’t.  That’s a choice that should always be up to you.

CURTAIN

Audio Poem: “Delirium Tremens”

Year Written: 2005
Collection: The Loosing of Clocks

Delirium Tremens

Your blood boils, and then
it seems that there
might be nothing
else; that this
time you may have
gotten away lucky;
a clearness as of
frigid water forced
over your sleeping
head.  But then
civilization crowds around
your peripheral
sight;
with every possible image
comes another
and yet another;
all feverish history
coalesced within your
optical nerve;
you can’t see
the sides of the
hallway, only
the carpet or ceiling;
the insects of progress
buzz swarmingly
around your outer
sockets,
visions forming in the
mass like grass clippings
or clouds:
not hallucinations
really
but cognizant unrealities:
Beaowulf sleeping
on the Golden Gate,
stiff underwear marching
over Leningrad,
broken pills in a dresser
drawer beside the scissors,
impossibly large globs
of mascara and gin syrup
banging on the door,
warm flashes of wanton islands
searching through
your soaked drunken pants
finding car keys
and onions,
printing presses moaning
and gurgling
under a moony sky
twitching about for the
relief of their burden,
your socks sprouting leaves
or maybe wings,
your own face
before you, magnified
a million times, people living
in the pores of your nose
criticizing your naked body,
the woman beside you
not a body but a
pencil, an amorous,
pensive pencil
laying purposefully inert,
the woman a mast of
swarming, cognizant
bugs within
the periphery of your
periphery,
not to be touched
or even contemplated upon.
Then amidst the visions—
among the boiling blood—
the most terrible:
quakes, small
at first like
tiny skeletal nudges,
barely
consequential spasms
of reversed desire,
years of stored-up
bodily indulgence
backfiring fumes
through your epidermis;
then gaining size,
quakes becoming
explosions, massive,
unending, will-less.
The lamp hits the floor,
maybe it shatters,
maybe it doesn’t,
the sheets torn
from the bed
in a heap
in the
corner,
everywhere you touch
you may destroy:
it is not up to you:
it is no longer up to you:
what once was a choice
now jumps through your
extremities
in a series of jolts
which have gone beyond
the warning stage
and entered
Delirium Tremens,
the last bastion of the blood you own
needing more,
while screaming for so much less.

New Bloomfield, Perry County, Pennsylvania

It’s a half a house, on the ‘main drag’ of this small country town.  New Bloomfield is a town a bit smaller than the small town I grew up in, with one main street and a few tiny offshoot streets, one diner, and a Uni-Mart.

            The house itself is old; it’s red brick, and the wooden parts of it’s structure are a dirt-brown, but have been painted over so many times, they are thick with hidden layers.

            The rooms inside are terribly narrow; this house was not designed to be split into two halves.  And since I’m essentially squatting here (with a married couple and an unmarried couple), the actual room for me to maneuver is minimal.  I have a couch (usually) and that is all; my room is the living room, which is also everyone else’s living room.

            It’s a two-story house, with a tiny kitchen that I barely even remember, and a winding, death-defying staircase which I ascended as rarely as possible (but frequently, anyway, as the only bathroom was upstairs.)

            My life in this house is partying.  I love to party here, and everyone else usually comes along for the ride.  Sure, I’m doing some depressed drinking alone late at night here, like everywhere else, but since this house has somehow become a gathering place for our ‘crew’ (which is odd, since we are at an outpost of civilization, half an hour from the closest supermarket and even further from where most of our friends live. Somehow, they make the trek out here often) I have found a renaissance of partying.  And we have all discovered “King Dickhead”.

            King Dickhead is a drinking game that utilizes playing cards, but you don’t really play cards.  Certain cards and suits do things like give players ‘powers’, force other players to do things, or kick off other ‘mini-games’ within the game, such as “Never Have I Ever”, in which  the player who drew the card says something like “Never have I ever blown a dude,” after which everyone who has blown a dude has to drink.

            These games could reach epic heights of ridiculousness in those days.  We were a group of people undergoing a stretching of our moral compasses, and the debauchery and elegant silliness that took place in that small living room was practically Roman.  During one particular game, I was made to sing “I’m a Little Teapot”, complete with all the body motions, completely nude in front of everyone, another friend was forced to disrobe, sit Indian Style, lean back, and place a lit cigarette in his asshole, for everyone to see.  That was gross. But hilarious.  And don’t get me started on the now-famous ‘parade of penises’.

            It was after one of these particularly raunchy games of King Dickhead that a bunch of us were sitting around the living room, relaxing, in various forms of drunkenness, that someone pulled out an acoustic guitar and began strumming it.  Almost immediately, one of the females turned to my close friend P—, and said, “Ooooh, can you sing that Seven Mary Three song? What’s it called?  I love it when you sing that song!”

            See, I had just recently introduced P— to the band Seven Mary Three, by way of the song that was being referenced, which is called “Lucky”.  For years I had been the only Seven Mary Three fan I knew, and I tried to convert just about everyone I knew, to no avail.  Everyone in that room had been subjected to my Just listen to this one! pleas and they had all summarily shot the band down.  Now, less than a month after P—‘s conversion, he is being enthusiastically asked to sing one of the band’s songs at a party! You can probably all see why this would be minorly annoying, but I was incensed beyond all belief.

            I stood up from my seat on the floor and ranted immediately.  Everyone was justifiably shocked by the level of my anger (later they would become accustomed to this sort of behavior).  When it became apparent that my wrath was not going to cause anyone to say “Why, Seth, I had forgotten you liked this band first! Why don’t you sing us the song instead?” I stormed out of the room, up the narrow, winding staircase and stopped in the hallway at the top of the stairs.  I was incredibly drunk and could barely see straight, and my anger was absolutely boiling.  I punched a wood-paneled wall as hard as I could, but would not feel it until the next day.  I paced.  I said terrible things under my breath.  But I didn’t fall apart until I heard the first few chords of “Lucky” float up the stairs to me, and shortly after, P—‘s soft, understated voice charming the first few lyrics out of his throat…Mean Mister Mustard says he’s bored…of life in the District…he can’t afford…the French Quarter high…

 

I began to cry, to bawl, to sob, as I slid down the wall and sat with my back against it, my body heaving and snot running down my face.  I was as twisted as the staircase in those days, and as immovable.

Orange Street, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

It is the narrowest house ever built.  It is comically narrow, as if it were built for a surreal Hollywood production—perhaps the latest David Lynch film.  From the street, it is less than half the width of it’s neighbors on either side; it’s a free-standing townhouse.  It’s white aluminum siding is only white in the clinical sense; years ago it must have become eggshell, and then the ceaseless machinations of weather and time pushed it over the brink all the way into a yellow, sponge-like hue.

The interior is very dark, everywhere.  Dark– almost menacing–wood-paneled walls soak up almost all of the light in the downstairs rooms, and a deep gray carpet takes any light that’s left over.  The kitchen linoleum is the color of shit, a bold, sickened shit, perhaps let out by a man with rectal cancer; it is shit that’s almost blood.  The cabinets are of the darkest oak the builder (re-modeler?)  could find, their swirly grains almost undetectable in the near-midnight of their varnish.  It is dark down here, and not welcoming.

Up the stairs—the narrowest stairs ever—it becomes lighter.  The walls in the stairwell are wood-paneled, but they’ve been painted over in an off-white.  The stairs are steep.  They are too steep.

On the second floor, the walls are a white Formica.  There are three bedrooms and a bathroom, all done in white Formica with brown hardwood floors (again, the color of death shit).  The bedrooms are small, and mine is the smallest.  I have one tiny window that looks directly at a neighbor’s blank wall.  The window had a fan in it the whole time I lived there, anyway.  I don’t have a closet.  This is the most unadorned room I’ll ever live in.  My posters and artwork didn’t make the move from the dorm.  My clothes are all in a basket on the floor, and on piles beside that, as well.  My bed sits in one corner, my television in another.  This room is remarkable mainly because I had a mini-fridge all to myself in my bedroom, an odd childhood dream of mine that would only be realized in this abode.  It turned out to be not as exciting as a 5-year-old had imagined, but handy, at least, for an active alcoholic.

I didn’t know the guys I lived with, and even now, I could not tell you their names, and barely what they looked like.  The previous school year had been ending and I was out of a place to live (a lot of college students are scrambling for places to live at the end of the year) and some guy I vaguely knew through someone else was scrambling to find a roommate.  I did what I had to do.  When I moved in to the house on Orange Street, I was beginning the heaviest drinking phase of my life, my parents had just gotten divorced, I was still reeling from the loss of Her, and I was secretly not going to classes.  I was beginning the only actual ‘depression’ of my life.  Hence, I did not like the house on Orange Street.

I remember very little.  I didn’t live there long, and most of my time was spent in my room, laying on my bed, trying not to kill myself.  I remember, probably, the smell more than anything.  The whole house was musty, pleasingly moldy, like a drawer with slightly old bananas in a brown paper bag.  I remember the sound of steps on the hardwood floors, sqeezey-echoes, monotonous soft-taps, everywhere the same; there were no floor spots that sounded different, no squeaky stairs or thudding corners.  I remember the pot my mother gave me, in some high hopes that I was becoming an adult (this was the first place I lived with a kitchen) sitting unused, forever, in the high cabinet over the sink.  I wonder who has it, now?

I remember, once, walking downstairs in the middle of the night.  Why? I can’t remember.  I stood in the darkened kitchen, listening to the sounds of the house, the sound of my heart beating, the sound of my brain churning.  Unexpectedly, I opened the door to the basement and went down.

I had only been down there once before, when I first moved in.  I had had to put my dresser down there because it wouldn’t fit up the stairs.  This basement is beyond an ‘unfinished’ basement.  It is a glorified crawl-space, with mud floors, stone walls, cob-webs, the works.  The furnace and water heater are down there, and that’s all it existed for.  That, and to store my dresser.

I stood there, halfdrunk, on the mud floor, with the tiny light of the bare swaying bulb casting moving shadows everywhere.  I didn’t have much time to soak it in, however, because moments after I flicked the light on, a bat flew out from behind the furnace, right past my head.

Of course, it scared the shit out of me, but I didn’t run out of there.  I turned to see where it had gone, but it had disappeared.  I distinctly remember smiling and feeling somehow content.  At the time I didn’t analyze why this should be, why I should feel this way.  Looking back, I suspect it was a comfort to know that something, at least, was alive in this house.

Seavers Apartments, Shippensburg University, Shippensburg, Pennsylvania

Read this.

Seaver’s Hall is the top-of-the-line dorm at Shippensburg University. Each dorm has three rooms (two bedrooms and one common room); six people live in each (three to a bedroom) but the rooms are huge. There is cable TV and air conditioning. You can put multiple couches in the common room. There is a massive walk-in closet in the common room, typically used as a food pantry, but almost big enough to fit another couch in (we used ours for food and guy junk).  The walls are an off-white wallpaper, and the ceiling is a tiled ceiling—in short, it’s kinda like a real apartment.

            I had five great roommates; we were almost like a season of The Real World, we were all so different. Except we were all straight, white males from the Northeast. But other than that we could not have been more different—or more well-suited to one another.

            This particular night that I am thinking of was quite a bad night.  I had endured a rather horrible break-up a few months prior and had not taken it well. I was drinking very heavily. I was writing tons of awful, angry, awful poetry, and I had collected this poetry into a little booklet that I called Ever-Always a Late Dream. Every poem in this collection was about Her, and every poem in it was awful.  I had finally convinced Her to come to my dorm room so I could give Her a copy of it. At least one-quarter of my desire for Her to come over was so my roommates could see how hot She was. The other three-quarters…well, that motivation was probably even uglier.

            I sat on the brown, smelly couch facing the television and got much more drunk than I should have. By the time She got there (around midnight) I was so wasted that I had entered that area where the things you are looking at, the things you are hearing and doing, do not seem real. If you concentrate very hard, you are in decent command of your faculties, but are vaguely unsure of who the people around you are, where you are, and why you are doing what you are doing.  A stage past this is blackout territory; in fact, this stage is often blackout territory.

            So. She arrives. I offer brief introductions to everyone and whisk Her into my bedroom, where I have kept a pristine copy of Ever-Always a Late Dream for Her.  I think I tried to talk to Her briefly about love, or forever, or some drunk whispy bullshit, and when She wasn’t hearing me, I started letting her have it. I was angry as hell with Her. How dare anyone break my heart? I was special!

            Well, I’m sure I had already spent the last two months guilting Her, and She figured (rightly so) that She didn’t deserve it anymore. After all, She was just trying to do what made Her happy, no? How much was She supposed to suffer, simply because I suffered?

            So she stormed out.

            At first, I paced the common room, gently sobbing, unresponsive to the questions and comforts of my numerous roommates. After a few minutes, though, I got angry again, and tried to flee the dorm room to go after Her and make Her feel terrible again. Either that, or make Her kiss me.

            But the roommates stopped me. Shippensburg University is, after all, a dry campus, and you can get in a lot of trouble for being drunk. Which I clearly was.  They spent a good 5 minutes trying to convince me to calm down, but I just got angrier and angrier, and louder and louder. And drunk, angry, and loud is bad even inside the dorm room, because some authority figure is bound to come check things out eventually, and then they’re all gonna get in trouble.

            So, they stuffed me in the closet.  They turned out the light. I’m sure they were thinking I’d just go to sleep or something, but I got even angrier. I got all turned-around and confused. It was pitch black and I couldn’t tell which way the door was or even which way was up or which way was down and I started to howl and claw at the walls I was so angry I couldn’t even remember Her name now I was just angry at everything and god oh so drunk I started throwing the food off the shelves the Slim Jims the Captains Wafers I stubbed my toe kicking the big Igloo cooler it hurt but just for a flaring moment I got angrier still and tore the shelving unit down on myself and howled even louder howled like I was outdoors or on a mountain not stuck in some pitch-black closet I got a full head of steam and ran into the wall hoping it was the door but it wasn’t I couldn’t find the door then somewhere in there I forgot where I was and then a moment later who I was I am not exaggerating this is not the only time this would happen to me and there is nothing more terrifying than being so drunk yet so cognizant that you are aware only that you are drunk at this point I stopped howling and forgot I was angry and became utterly terrified who was I? what was I doing here? why wouldn’t they help me? I knew there was a they somewhere who could help me but didn’t have the smallest clue who they were or where they were it was like being encapsulated in a huge malevolent concrete womb I slid my hands along every wall surface but it was all just smooth cold painted cinder blocks no knobs no windows no magic buttons I began to cry in earnest and wonder if in fact I was dead or in some kind of prison but at the moment I could not picture what prison looked like not even images from TV or that movie Escape From Alcatraz that my mother had helped me buy on VHS when I was ten I could remember that though I could remember my mother helping me buy Escape From Alcatraz from Hills department store but I couldn’t picture my mother I had no idea what she looked like or what her name was so maybe Escape From Alcatraz was all a dream…

When I emerged into the common room the next morning, the front of my pants were covered with piss and there was dried rancid shit in my ass crack.

An Evening

(originally posted to my MySpace blog June 22, 2006)

It is dark in my room and it’s thundering outside.  The fan by my feet cools the gathering sweat on my brow, my shirtless belly, my socked feet. The rainy breeze blows across the roof, stealthily into my window.

When I was a teenager once I had a pet frog.  I didn’t really want the pet frog, a freind bought it for me.  I named him Orson.  I did think he was adorable and made a nice addition to my bedroom.  But I had no interest in buying this thing crickets or whatever and feeding them to him.  It was a disgusting ritual. Once I bought five or so crickets and put them all in there at once, so I wouldn’t have to do it again anytime soon.  The next morning Orson and all five crickets were dead.  Orson’s belly was bloated to the size of a golf ball, and purple.

I tried lighting a candle in here a moment ago, but the fan won’t let me.  It blows it out after a few flickers.  It shouldn’t be so dark at this time of day, during this time of year.  It’s the clouds.

I was laying on the day-bed beside her, and it was around noon.  It felt like we had been kissing for hours.  That was all she’d let me do: kiss her, which was fine by me.  It was enough.  Just kissing her was enough.
      She pulled back, whispered in my ear, You’re the most intense guy I’ve ever met.
      I thought to myself, What a load of bullshit.  I’m barely even here.
      I was drunker than hell and she knew it.

I’ve turned on the small lamp on the bedside table and put a shirt on.  The damp air after the rain is pouring into my window like a gray fog; everywhere I have goosebumps.

I was laying awake the night before our fourth grade field trip.  We were going to go to Baltimore.  All week long we had been learning about the historical things we would see there.  Mainly, in my young boy’s mind, the USS Constellation, a retired wooden warship, that we would get to walk through.  But I was not laying awake out of excitement, but out of worry.  Outside my second story bedroom window raged a tremendous thunderstorm. From the moment I had been neatly tucked in by Mom, the cracks and bright bursts had come steadily, illuminating for brief moments the dancing branches of our sidewalk Elm.  The boughs looked like grabbing claws.
      I was picturing the USS Constellation, anchored in the harbor, riding huge waves, slamming the dock, taking hits of lightning to the main mast.  In some versions, it capsized, went under, never to be seen again.  In others, it rode out the storm, was there the next day, where I got to walk through it just like a soldier.  A little, tired soldier.

The clouds are moving away. Hovering above the horizon, you can still see the cracks of heat lightning.  My room is warm again.  I take my shirt back off, turn on the television.  Pour myself a glass of Dr. Pepper.  The warm air is mingling with the cold air, and the temperature is perfect.

Audio Poem–“My Janices”

I’m beginning what is to me a very exciting new blog series. Once a week (preferably on Sundays, when I’m able) I am going back into the vaults of my old poetry and re-posting some of my best (or your favorites–sometimes your favorites aren’t my best), with a twist–they are audio posts, and I’ll be reading the poems!  I used to be very opposed to this, as I thought it would make me seem like I thought I was famous.  But fuck it.  It sounds fun. 

For no particular reason, I’m going to be doing these as chronologically as I can.  I’m going to start with the oldest poems that I still think are any good and work my way up to present day.  One interesting effect of this (theoretically) is that it should show the gradual but very pronounced evolution of my poetic style and voice. 

I will also be posting the text, so you can read along if you choose.  I’m tempted to complain about the sound quality of these audio posts, but really, I think it gives it a “classic” sound that is pretty appropriate for my purposes here.

OK, so the first poem in the series is one that goes so far back, I was still an active alcoholic when I wrote it.  The poem “My Janices” appeared in my last collection as a drinker, the panicked and maudlin collection There is Something on Fire Downtown, which really, as far as the drinking poems go, was actually a pretty good collection.  In fact, “My Janices” is probably not even the best poem in it, but some of the better ones in that collection are so depressing I can barely read them, and “My Janices” always stuck out at me a rock song of a poem.  If I were to ever give a public reading, it would still be in the “setlist”, I think.  So, without further ado, here is “My Janices”  (click the little gray arrow to hear it):

My Janices

I wish I knew a girl named Janice,
for then I could yell across a crowded room,
“Hey Janice!”
Likewise, I wish I wore a size 10-and-a-half shoe
so I could say to the man at the bowling alley,
“Ten and a half, please.”
If I had an uncle with no arms, I would be happy.
I’d tell folks about him,
recount his terrible story.
I’m sure it would be gruesome.
If a shark had bit me and I survived
I’m sure I’d write an article
and maybe be on TV!
But oh, to be dying of some terrible nameless disease,
to break that to your friends,
to watch them cry.
To tell them you are about to drive
the car into the lake.
The priceless looks on their faces then!

This Blog Entry is Definitely Not It

Something you already know about me:  I used to drink every day and I was a miserable human being.  Pathetic, really, in a lot of ways.  This story, like many I’ve told, starts back then.  But this one is only half about me.

You might not like the me that is in this story very much.

I don’t know where I officially lived at the time, if in fact I officially lived anywhere.  I spent alot of time at my mom’s small Dillsburg apartment (which I’m convinced, to this day, is still set up exactly how she left it, just waiting for me to drop by, watch some DVDs, eat some leftover lasagna from the fridge), where I had a tiny bedroom in the back which I shared with a multitude of big plastic bins filled with Beanie Babies.  I liked this room.

When I was staying at my mom’s, I’d often be up all night, drunk as humanly possible, and addicted to my newest form of escape:  the internet.  I don’t need to tell you the kind of horrible, immoral things a depressed  horny alcoholic misanthrope can get up to on the internet, especially when the tool is rather new to him.  Sure, sometimes it was Pearl Jam message boards.  Other times, it was more than that.

One night, in an especially deep alcoholic stupor, I was perusing some very adult chat rooms.  I have no clear recollection of how my relationship with her formed–what we said, how we started talking.  No memory of it.  But I know that we somehow had a nice enough chat to exchange e-mails.  This was before cell phones, and giving out home phone numbers over the internet was a very big step.  So for a few weeks, we e-mailed, chatted when possible.  I even wrote a poem about her (quite horrible).  It was the lonely misanthrope’s version of falling in love.

And then we did exchange numbers.  She lived in Chicago, so we could never talk as long as we wanted.  We were always worried about the cost of the calls (remember, I don’t have a home at the time, so it’s always someone else’s phone.  I bought phone cards, and so did she).  I loved her voice.  It was sexy without being demur and unapproachable.  I loved the way she described herself physically–digital photography and sharing of such online was much less prevalant than it is now; I had not seen a photo of her, but I believed her descriptions and it sounded right down my alley.  She was an artist (a singer and lyricist), she was fun-loving, spontaneous, sharply sarcastic, very sexual, and she loved to drink.  I was actually waking up in the mornings with that “I’m in love” glow, despite the fact that I’d never seen this girl and she lived in freakin’ Chicago.

Sometimes I’d call her from work, assuming nobody would know who the hell called Chicago.  Nobody ever knew.

Eventually, we said enough is enough, and she came to see me.  She flew into Baltimore and I picked her up in my falling-apart 1983 Ford Escort that my mom helped me buy.  I’d never done something like pick someone up at an airport.  I felt very grown up.  I of course had no idea what I was doing and struggled to get to the correct terminal on time.  I remember I was sober when I first saw her.

My heart sank.  She was ugly.  Truly ugly.  I cannot sugar-coat it for you.  She had not really lied at all in her description of herself, she had simply manipulated things a bit, used the creative vagaries of language to her benefit.  Now, I do realize that I am not Tom Cruise, but back in those days, I was almost Breckin Meyer, which isn’t nothing.  She looked kinda like a turtle. I knew immediately that I was still going to sleep with her.  It would just have to wait until I was all the way drunk.

What followed was three days of severest debauchery.  A lot, a lot of drinking.  Oh, and driving, too.  We spent all night in a bar watching bands play and then I tried to drive us to my dad’s house in Newville, but I was so drunk I got on a highway going the wrong direction.  When I realized it, I backed up–on the highway–for a couple hundred yards and back down the on-ramp.  While blindly drunk.  I think about that often, at least once a month, anytime I am feeling sorry for myself.  After getting off that highway we somehow ended up back at my mom’s.  I don’t know how I was too drunk to remember how to get to the house I grew up in.

And sex.  Yes, lots of sex, when I was blind enough to bring myself to it.  But once there, it was fantastic.  Despite being obliterated I still remember moments of it, as it was so transcendant it created moments of clarity.

And during these three days of debauchery, I did not like this girl at all.  Not a single little bit.  But what was I to do?  She was there for three days no matter what.  I couldn’t very well tell her I didn’t like her!  After all, she paid for the plane ticket!  I thought I was just giving her what she wanted.

Eventually I got her on a plane back to Chicago, breathed a sigh of relief, and figured I’d go back to my life.

Which is what I did, for the most part.  I gradually eased off the e-mails, IMs, and chatting. Phone calls became virtually non-existent.  I had succesfully gotten rid of her.

Except I was still a drunken lonely misanthrope at night, and sometimes the temptation to reach out became too strong.  And so, sometime about a year after our initial visit, I began communication with her again.  And around this time, a friend of mine was also in online talks with a girl who lived in Chicago.  I have no idea how in the world we actually set this whole thing up, but suddenly this friend and me found ourselves in his car driving halfway across the country to Chicago.  We had booked a hotel for two nights.  The road trip itself was marvelous because this friend let me smoke AND drink in his car.  I got drunk the whole way to Chicago.  Pretty much heaven, to me then.

I don’t know what I expected to happen.  I don’t know if I expected her to be pretty now.  But she wasn’t.  We met her at a friend of hers’ apartment and had a few beers.  I thought she was obnoxious and unbearable and uglier than before.  I could not believe we had just driven to Chicago for this! (although a part of me still remembered the amazing sex, but the draw of that was simply not enough)

I pulled my friend aside and told him we had to escape.  He understood.  We made up a story about an emergency with the girl he had came to Chicago to see, and I told her I’d call her to set up a time to meet the next day.  We got the hell out of there and went to see my friends’ girl.  She was adorable and awesome and her fiance was there to keep my friend away.  Both dejected, we went to our hotel room, dumped a bag of ice and a 12-pack of beer in the sink, and got wasted.  The next morning I called her and told her some lie I can’t even remember.  We drove back to Pennsylvania that very day.  I’d never see her again.

Many years passed.  My alcoholism got worse and my life got even more depressing.  I rarely thought about her.  There were new women to worry about, right in front of me.  Then things got better.  I got sober and happy and started living a good life.  I started to think about her sometimes.  Not because I wanted to see her or because I missed her, but because I knew I had, in some way, perpetrated a wrong against her.  I wondered how she was doing.

MySpace became a big deal, and I caved and signed up.  She was one of the first people I looked for, but to no avail.  Every few months I’d look again, and nothing.  Then Facebook became a big deal, and I caved and signed up.  She was one of the first people I looked for, but to no avail.  Every few months I’d look again, and nothing.

Then, one day about a year ago, I had a friend request waiting for me when I got home, and it was from her.  I was so happy!  I think I just wanted to see that she’d turned out OK, had a family and a dog and all that good stuff.

Turned out, she’d turned out just like me–if I hadn’t quit drinking.  She was single, living on friend’s couches, drunk and high every night, working at a string of low-rent bars and clubs who’d take just about anyone, depressed and talking crazy.  She was, however, still living quite an exciting life–she was still in a band, though they seemd to change monthly, and the pictures she posted to Facebook looked like she was living a celebrity lifestyle.

Oddly, she seemed to have no concept that I had harmed her in any way.  She immediately sent me many Facebook messages that were so complimentary I almost laughed at them.  If I were to print them here, you’d think I made them up.  It is not exagerrating to say that no human being has ever admired me more than this woman did after we reconnected on Facebook.  And despite the self-destructive lifestyle she was living, I started to see that this woman had a soul that shone so brightly it was nearly blinding.  What was annoying 13 years ago was now endearing, what was unbearble back then seemed bold now.  Not that I fell in love with her, oh no.  But I did see her greatness.  And she knew just what to say to me about our romps in the sack all those years ago to get my engine in the red in no time.  Yes, she was good at that.

We started talking on the phone every couple weeks.  She was amazed to hear my story from the previous decade, as she had never even known me as an alcoholic (she somehow did not recognize it in me during our three day meeting years earlier), and I think my story sounded more like I was reading a novel to her than it being my own actual life.  Regardless, it clearly hit home for her.  I could tell she felt herself slipping away into madness.  Her illness was not just one of addiction; she seemed to be going truly crazy.  She would call in the middle of the night and ask me how I’d turned things around.  I never know what to say to people when they ask me something like that.  There are no easy answers, and I only know about being a drunk.  I know shit about being crazy.  But I’d do the best I could, trying to listen more than speak.  Sometimes she was desperate, other times quiet and close to happy.  Always at the end, she talked dirty to me.

Once, she went a few weeks with no calls, texts, or Facebook posts.  Finally she called me.  “I’ve been away in the mental hospital for awhile,” she said.  She’d tried to kill herself.  I wasn’t sure whether to believe her or not; she was crazy but also a drama queen.  But I treated it as if it were real.  She seemed more ashamed of having been in the mental hospital than anything else.  We were on the phone for hours that night.  She kept talking about coming to visit me, but I kept brushing it off.  I knew that I had changed a lot over the years, but not enough for that.  In the end analysis, I’d simply use her again.  Best to keep it to phone calls and texts.

About 4 nights ago, I was laying on my couch here in Erie, going through my cell phone deleting numbers I don’t use anymore.  I came across hers and realized I hadn’t heard from her in months.  I texted her asking what was up.  When, by the next night, no reply had come, I got on Facebook and went to her page.  I was aghast.  Here is a sampling—copy and pasted—of some of the posts on her wall:

“There’s no one in town I know You gave us some place to go.I never said thank you for that.I thought I might get one more chance.What would you think of me now,so lucky, so strong, so proud?”

 

“I am so sorry that you never got to meet Gabrielle. Who would have thought that Dave (the man you carded) would end up my husband and I would have a family with. I think about you lots.”

 

“Just logged on to Facebook and it “suggested” I re-connect with you. Oh how I wish I could. Love you — missing you more than you’ll ever know.”

 

So.  She’s dead.  It happened in May.  I messaged a few of her friends and it seems details are sparse.  All we know is that it “happened at her family’s home”.  It had to have been suicide.  If I know her–and I think I do, now–it was suicide.

I’m not extremely broken up about it.  I feel weird.  I only met her twice, in person, many years ago.  I don’t feel a void in my life where she once resided.  But, again—I feel weird.  There is no happy ending here, and I have no great wisdom to impart.  She’s dead, and I feel like I still owe her something.  And this blog entry is definitely not it.

If You Keep Playing the Same Sad Song Someday Bright Shining Light Will Suddenly Leap from Your Violin

Not too many years ago my mother moved into a rather small apartment in a rather small town that I had not previously had much experience in.  It was not far from where I lived (although I would have difficulty telling you where I lived at the time) and I took to spending a large chunk of my time at that apartment.  It seems to me I lived there for a time, although I’m not quite sure if I did, or if I simply slept there a lot.

My mother lived there with her new husband, who is a fine man who thankfully did not raise a fuss over my presence in the somewhat cramped apartment.  One of the defining features of this man is a penchant for collecting or simply buying bizarre or useless things that can make life seem a bit more interesting, or at the very least, less mundane.  Like big purple hats, rubber chickens or refrigerator magnets that make inane noises when you pass in front of them.  Also singing Christmas trees and lamps that go boing when you turn them on.

So, here I was, staying in this apartment, and friends would occasionally want to see me, or they’d have to come pick me up because I was too drunk to go to them.  Except I didn’t know this small town very well and would have trouble giving directions to the apartment.  So I would give them good enough directions to get them in my vicinity and then I’d go stand in the swath of grass beside the road in front of the apartment complex so they would see me as they drove past.

One night in the beautiful heat of autumn a friend wanted to do something with me.  I can’t remember what.  This friend had yet to come to this particular apartment, so I gave them the usual directions, with the instruction to watch for me by the side of the road.

I was rather in the cups by this point–it was already nighttime, perhaps past 10 o’clock–and I knew it would take this friend at least 20 minutes to arrive.  But the night was so beautiful, I wanted to go and stand by the road right away.  Even as a drunkard, I loved being outdoors in the summer.  So, I poured my gin and coke into a McDonalds cup and prepared to go outside and wait–when inspiration struck me.  My mother’s new husband happened to have a huge Halloween mask of some ghastly creature.  The mask was sitting atop one of the bookcases and I had occasionally taken it down and worn it to make my mother laugh.  This was one of those huge plastic masks that is not cheap by any standards–it would look right at home in some gothic Mardi Gras parade–and it was unwieldy to wear.  It was not easy to see out of or to breathe inside of, but it was a terribly effective mask.

I was going to wait by the roadside wearing the mask, in order to get a chuckle out of my friend when they drove past.

I settled in for a wait by the side of the road.  Every minute or so, I’d raise the mask in order to take a drink of my gin and coke, and every 5 minutes or so, I’d take the mask off and smoke a cigarette.  Sometimes when a car drove by I’d flail my arms and run in circles, hoping to either freak out my friend or give lonesome strangers an interesting story to tell once they got to their destination.

The mask became suffocating, and to this day I can remember the exact smell of the fumes.  My breath inside the mask became like gasoline, the piny gin-smell and the tarry cigarette smoke made me nauseous, but in a way that I was almost proud of.  That I could make my own body so disgusting was–not just then but for years–a source of pride, as though I had triumphed over God and nature and created something new. I was my own Frankenstein’s Monster.

Twenty minutes became half an hour, and eventually that became an hour.  I had no watch, but I was vaguely aware that I had been by the road a long time.  Eventually I forgot why I had come out there at all.  Sitting in the grass, with the mask beside me, it seemed to me I had simply gotten antsy and had wanted to drink outside, on the grass, by the road.  I was, I imagine, unaware of the mask sitting beside me, after a time.  It was probably around midnight that I curled up and slept in the grass.

I awoke in the wee morning hours and went back inside, not anymore confused than I normally was in such situations.  My mother had left a note for me. The friend had called.  I immediately called him to see why he hadn’t shown up.  He said he had drove and drove down the appointed road but had never seen me.  I asked if he had seen a person wearing a mask.  He had.  He had assumed it was some kid out playing.  He called the apartment from his cell phone, but I had never told my mother where I was going or what I was doing.  She had no idea that I was right outside the apartment.

I stayed awake well into the morning of the next day.  I was watching The Early Show with Bryant Gumbel when a plane mysteriously crashed into one of the World Trade Center Towers.  It was riveting television for someone who was so blindly drunk.

Vine Street, Newville, Pennsylvania

Act I

 

The stage is sparsely decorated: we see only an old, tattered couch and a matching loveseat, a used, varnished coffee table (which is very low to the ground) and an entertainment center which seems to have been bought in the early Nineties.  The entertainment center houses a 19-inch television, a VCR, a stereo, and some books.  It is not important what type of stereo it is, except that it is big.  The rest of the stage is black.  Lights should be concentrated mainly on the set dressing.  Director and Lighting Designer use discretion when lighting the wings of the stage.  A feeling of barrenness should be achieved.  Also, we should be made to feel that the entertainment center is, in fact, the “center” of this tableaux.  An armchair can be added to the set, but it will not be used.

 

Enter Cassie and Willie, a young married couple.  Willie is in his early thirties, thin, Bohemian.  Cassie is in her mid-twenties, short, artsy.  The couple stand and look at the couch for three beats, in silence.

 

Willie:  I really don’t know.  He could have peed on it.

 

Cassie:  I really don’t know.  I didn’t think he was that absurd.

 

Willie:  Absurd?  He’s just a drunk.  That’s not absurd, it’s terrifyingly standard.

 

Cassie:  Smell it.

 

Willie:  Why should I smell it?  I took care of that teenager he got drunk last week.  She wouldn’t stop crying.  I had to hold her down to keep her from running into the street!  You smell it.

 

Cassie:  Oh, what a way to begin our New Year’s Eve!  Why don’t we just pretend it’s not there?  Everything goes away eventually.

 

Willie:  What a way to see the world.

 

Cassie:  It’s no different than the way you see it.  I just word it more simply.

 

Willie (sitting on the loveseat): Neither of us sees the world that way at all, and you know it.  Nothing goes away.

 

Cassie:  Not even farts?

 

Willie: Not even farts.  Every fart that’s ever been farted is still hanging in a major pocket of collective fart consciousness, above Greenland somewhere.  Where’s my tea?

 

Cassie:  You’re going to turn into tea.

 

Willie:  Yes, Mother.

 

Cassie:  Maybe that’s tea on the couch.  It leaked out of you because your body was fully saturated.

 

Willie:  You become more ridiculous with each passing sentence.

 

Cassie (sitting on Willie’s lap):  Isn’t that why you love me?

 

Willie:  No.

 

Cassie:  Then why do you?

 

Willie:  Because you’ve always been willing to smell the couch when we suspect our roommate has peed on it.  Oh, and those canned hams you keep in the back of your pants.

 

Cassie:  I can never decide if that’s cute or annoying.

 

Willie:  Things are usually both.

 

Enter Seth.  He is short—about the same height as Cassie–, squat, and slovenly, yet possessing of a tremendously handsome face.  He is unshaven, with a two or three day growth of hair on his face. (Under no circumstances should Seth be portrayed with an actual beard.)  He enters and sits immediately on the couch, precisely in the spot Cassie and Willy had been looking at.

 

Seth:  So we ready for this New Year’s Eve or what, folks?!  I am ready to rock this house!

 

Willie:  I’ve never cared much about New Year’s Eve.

 

Seth:  Nobody does!  That’s why it’s such a popular holiday.

 

Cassie:  I have no idea what to do tonight.  It always seems like everyone in the whole world has something amazing planned and I—we—end up having an essentially normal evening.  Just once I would like to feel as though I—we—brought the New Year in with some kind of grand style, some form of eloquence or transcendence, something larger than life, or—hell, something smaller than life, so long as it was different from life.

 

Seth:  Now you’re talking, Cassie!  Bring on the world, I say!  Just make sure the world has gin, menthol cigarettes and a Paul Thomas Anderson movie.

 

Willie:  I really don’t know.  Our friend Jen is coming over.  I just hope she’s not as crazy as she used to be.

 

Seth: What?  Who is this vixen?

 

Cassie:  A friend of Willie’s from college.  We hadn’t seen her in a few years, then we ran into her at the guitar store last week and invited her over.  You’ll probably really like her, Seth.

 

Seth:  Oh yeah?

 

Cassie:  Yeah.  She’s—

 

Enter Jen.  She is chubby and short, yet wholesomely attractive.  She is dressed ridiculously—a tall, multi-colored, plush hat, bright green pants, a Confederate Army uniform shirt, and a pink, feathery scarf which she never removes, and shin-length brown Doc Martin boots.  Costume Designer should add little or nothing to this outfit.  Jen is loud and animated.  Her body movements are fluid yet exaggerated.  Jen acts as though she knows she is in a play.

 

Jen:  I am so totally here!  Bring on 2002!  Who wants to get drunk?  Who wants to get high?  Who wants to run screaming outside just to show the world we’re here, just to show them they can’t stop us, just to take that proverbial road not taken, to shake up the Misters and Ma’ams and goody-two-shoes and the Elvis lovers and the floor boards of that great stoic brainiac in the sky?  Who wants to fuck my boots and shit in my hair?

 

Willy:  I really don’t know.

 

Curtain

 

 

 

Act II

 

 

Two hours later.

 

The stage is now set to resemble a front porch.  We see a white front door (with screen door), a white overhanging awning, two white plastic chairs and an ashtray on a milk crate.  Lighting should be even lower now, as we are out-of-doors at night.  We should feel intimate with a small set centered on the stage.  All four characters are present.  Willie and Cassie occupy the chairs, Seth and Jen are standing, although they are both frequently moving; their movements are short of pacing but more than fidgeting.  Everyone has a drink in their hands.  All four are smokers and occasionally light up. (Good luck finding a playhouse that allows this nowadays.  However, it is necessary.  ‘Miming’ the smoking will not do.)

 

Cassie:  But then where can feminism go from there?  I mean, is that it’s logical conclusion?

 

Jen:  Who knows?  Dworkin wouldn’t have it any other way, but of course, she’s dead now.

 

Cassie:  All the best ones die.

 

Seth:  Yes, and the worst ones, too.

 

Jen:  I just can’t get over the fact that your walls are white.  Off-white, no less!  I mean, c’mon, everyone’s walls are off-white!  I really pegged you two (addressing Cassie and Willie) as less conformist than that.  I thought I’d come over and find pink and camouflage and Sistine Chapel type stuff painted on your walls.

 

Willie:  They’re just walls.

 

Jen:  Nothing is just a wall!  A wall is a barrier or an enclosure, a comfort or a menace, a home or a prison.  You can’t just go through your life looking at what the last person who lived here thought was acceptable, was easy-on-the-eyes, was relaxing or comforting or homogenous or sane!  That’s like living someone else’s life—or someone else’s version of life, or what passed for life for some forty-year-old single mother with two kids who liked to watch Regis and Kathy Lee after she got the little squirts onto the school bus.  Did you keep her couch, too?  How about her shower curtain?  Willy, do you picture her face when you’re balls-deep in Cassie?  Of course not!  You’re not living her life, you’re living yours, so why do you want her walls?

 

Seth (to Jen): I’m in love with you.  (Nobody seems to hear him say this.)

 

Willie (to Jen): So what should we do about our carpet?  Rip that out, spend thousands of dollars just on principle?  Besides, we rent this place, we can’t do whatever we like.

 

Cassie:  And I quite like our carpet, anyway.

 

Jen:  Oh of course there are practical concerns here.  You have to live out loud, as far as you’re able.  I understand that.  But you’ve got to do what you can.  You’ve got to try to be heard.

 

Willie (to Jen):  Did you just use the phrase ‘live out loud’?  Because you can’t be Thoreau one minute, and Oprah the next.  If you’re going to be so on-message, you’ve got to choose your words carefully or you’ll dilute yourself.

 

Jen:  Thoreau?  I’ve never been Thoreau.  Seth, was I being Thoreau?

 

Seth:  I’m in love with you.

 

Jen:  See?  Seth thinks it’s more of a Kafka thing.

 

The lights all go down except for a spotlight on Seth.  The other three characters are now ‘miming’ having a conversation.  We see them, in the dark, talking and gesturing, but we cannot hear them.  Seth watches them for a full ten seconds, with visible beaming affection.  Then he turns from them and walks to the lip of the stage.  He now addresses the audience.

 

Seth:  Well, hello there.  I suppose this wasn’t much of a play, was it?  There’s not much of a plot.  It’s just some people talking for a few minutes.  We didn’t really follow those pesky “guidelines” (here Seth does ‘air quotes’) that people have set up for plays to follow.  Well—Act One is a rather nice, tidy Act One, but then it’s just like we got sick of pretense and just talked about our theme, like the playwright just wanted to get it over with so he or she could go take a long shower.  And I hope that they did.  But, what was our theme?  Was it about walls, or houses?  Or was it love?  Or roommates?  Or the change that comes with a new year, a new house, or a new love interest?  Well, I know, for me, I’ve gotta ask how much difference there is between Love, and a House, and Change, because maybe we’re dealing with just one theme, no?  I’m not suggesting there is no difference between a house and love—I’m just saying maybe it’s something we could think about.  Maybe it’s something we could put in our meat grinder and see if sausage comes out the other end.  Ah, I have no idea what I’m talking about anymore.  And I haven’t the energy to summon up a compelling and dramatic end to all this.  Thanks for being here and watching a caricature of a memory.  Now go home and paint your walls.  Or don’t.  That’s a choice that should always be up to you.

 

CURTAIN