A Quick Word

Hey folks!  It’s been a long time since I posted an entry, and this coming right after I had a bit of a blog revival going on.  I just wanted to pop on real quick and let you know the blog revival is most assuredly still happening!  I currently have about a dozen entries percolating in me ol’ cranium–from the highbrow to the simple life-update variety–but, as many of you may know, it’s been a hectic time the past month, with lots of changes and whatnot (all good) in many facets of my life.  While I am adjusting (to new house, new commute, new town, new job) writing/ artistic time has taken a back seat to simply existing and figuring things out.  Again, these changes are all good (or at the very least, neutral), but I wanted to explain my silence.  I’ll be back very soon!

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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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 Something

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 mornings 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

A photo I took from Goat Island that day.

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

If My Feet Were Spears

The urge is strong to be a tiny bird
upon a tiny limb, maybe
a LeConte’s Sparrow
standing on its spidery feet,
instead of a rotund guy who falls
with a resounding thump,
who bruises, who scrapes on sidewalks
and car doors,
who sinks in river mud
to the waist.
If my feet were spears
I’d sink all the way through the mud
into one of the tumultuous underground rivers
that are everywhere,
earthborn by the black current.
When a child I thought I’d die in my twenties
like some of the greatest poets
but now at thirty-eight I see this hasn’t happened.
Still, I am gentle with my poems and birds.
Birds are poems I haven’t caught yet.

The One About the Cup, and the Runnething Over

As an adult, I spent much more time single than most people.  It can be easy to forget that, now that I have met my darling and been with her so long, but I was single (with just a few brief  flings) for well over a decade in my 20s and 30s.  Over that long stretch of time, obviously I developed a method of living by myself that I found quite comfortable and rewarding.  I had a lot of fun and tons of experiences.  I did things people in committed relationships simply can’t do—like relocate and/or start new careers with very little forethought.  It was an incredibly interesting and fascinating way to live.  Some blocks of time, I spent living not just single but far away from all my family and friends.  It allowed me time to breathe, “find myself”, and do some major work on fixing my deep flaws I had developed over years of alcoholism.  It was a great setup, but it did pose one great drawback: it was super lonely.

 

I never would have admitted at the time that I was lonely—mostly because I don’t think I even knew I was lonely.  But of course I was.  There was a lot of upside but being lonely was inevitable.  Luckily, I refused to settle or even actively date when I knew that I wasn’t ready.  This allowed me to be available when my Karla came into my life and also to get as much inner work done as I could before she got there.  So when she found me, I was the best version of me I could have been at that point (although you can ALWAYS keep being a better version of yourself, always always always).

 

Going from single for a decade to in a deeply committed relationship naturally had some shock value for me, and required a period of adjustment.  Fortunately my partner is full of kindness and innate understanding and guided me through the change.  Certainly there were elements of living with another person (or in our case, two other people and a dog!) that were challenging for me at first, but also of course, there were a great many positives and bonuses that come with having an all-the-time partner.  Most of these positives I at least anticipated or could have anticipated.  One thing I never saw coming:  her parents and grandparents.

 

I knew, of course, that when you gain a life partner, their parents become a part of your life.  That was not a surprise.  What I was not prepared for was the level of connection I would have with these people, and the amount of affection and caring they would have for me, and me for them.  From almost my first meeting with Karla’s mother, father, step-mother (although that term doesn’t do adequate justice to the maternal force that is Amy) and grandparents (I’ve only met her maternal grandparents as her other set lives a good distance away) I have felt a true and abiding acceptance.  Karla and I are not married but all these people truly are my family and I love seeing them any chance we get.  They are all different, unique, loving people who I am genuinely excited to get to know more as the years pass.  What a boon!

 

What staggers me the most, when I stop to think about it, is that I spent so much time completely alone, and then finally found a partner—and then a kid and a dog!  They all fill my heart up so much.  On top of that, both of my parents have been terrific parents throughout my life and continue to nurture me emotionally, in addition to being stellar grandparents.  And now to come to the realization that I’ve gained even more family, have even more love and help and caring…well, as I have said before, my cup certainly overflows.  It’s like the world felt it had to make up for all that time I spent by myself.  And sometimes you just have to write a blog about how great things are.

Gravity Works

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

The Moon is Down

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

Our Own Cause and Effect

Somebody recently shared a picture of me from back in my days as a cook for a family restaurant—a job I had for eight years (and a company I worked for for over fifteen).  I was astounded by how long it had been since I had spent any amount of time remembering  that job, that kitchen.  Eight years is a long time, but it’s interesting how easily even eight years of your life can be compartmentalized, filed away under PAST and visited only briefly and periodically henceforth.

 

My eight year tenure as a line cook saw sea changes within myself that dwarf even the largest of the recent growth I’ve undergone.  I literally evolved into the basic version of the man I am now over the course of that job.  Thinking back to who I was the day I started there—that guy is unrecognizable now.  I wonder how I would have ended up if I had gotten a different job?

 

I knew every inch of that kitchen.  Every contour of stainless steel, every equipment wheel, every floor tile—I had a history with it.  I knew where the problem areas were, where grease pooled and mops didn’t reach.  I knew which reach-in doors closed too slowly and which hood baffles would cut you.  I had a physical and emotional relationship with the kitchen.  Of course I had an even larger and more complex relationship with the restaurant and company itself, but it is this relationship of minutiae with the kitchen that my memory is most apt to gloss over.

 

My personal evolution in the kitchen itself seems more significant the more I ponder it.  My first day in cook training (I had spent my first few months with the company as a dishwasher) I was timid, clueless and constantly intimidated.  Although I had worked (in the kitchen) of a fast food restaurant for three years prior, I know now this could hardly be said to be experience with food—it is basically putting Legos together.  And while foodies would say this job cooking for a family restaurant is much of the same—that may be true, but the Legos are much more complicated.  My first few hours in the kitchen, I was hard-pressed to remember how to make the toast.  Literally.  Eight years later I was the unabashed, brash, dare-I-say courageous acknowledged leader of the kitchen staff, making decisions with store management about things that would affect the operations of the restaurant.  My evolution within the kitchen lead me to a career in management, first with the company I had cooked for, then leaving the nest and essentially never looking back.

 

Over the past five years, since leaving the original company I cooked for, I have worked for two organizations, both times as a store manager.  Granted, I’m not a Five-Star General leading troops into battle, but I do lead people, every day.  I’m responsible for entire buildings, and everything that happens in them.  This is what I do for a living, and it is a reflection of who I am.  While I am the last person alive to define themselves by their profession, I can’t deny that part of who I am inside as a person is why I’ve ended up in this career.

 

What I can’t seem to figure out is how I became that person.  Was that kitchen the exact right place for me to evolve the way I was meant to?  Or did I evolve the way I did because I was in that kitchen?  It’s kind of a nature vs. nurture question.

 

Time and experience have conspired to make me lose sight of that kitchen, and who I was then and how I changed (I think you’ll find time and experience have done similar things to you).  Now, I come into work every day, take it for granted I am in charge of everybody and everything, start making decisions with a well-used decision muscle, delicately maneuvering my operation to where I want it to go.  This from a guy who was once intimidated by toast.

 

Once we start pondering our own cause-and-effect (how we got where, what motivated us, what propelled us) the only natural thing to dwell on then is the now.  What forces are acting on me now?  Where is my current situation leading me?  Our human minds naturally think, at every moment, we are currently and finally the finished version of ourselves, but ask: how am I changing, now?

My Estuary

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

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:

 

Jeremy, Where Have You Gone?

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

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

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

I’m Annoyed By How Uninteresting You’ve Turned Out

I don’t think everyone needs to stay single and childless their whole lives, working jobs with unusual hours, reading all the hippest books and taking solo road trips and making artsy YouTube videos.  If everyone did that, the places I go would be crowded and useless.  And I’m glad most people live “the American dream” and are happy that way: and most people that get married and have kids and buy houses are not boring.  Many of them are incredibly interesting.  But, on the whole, I’m annoyed by how uninteresting you’ve turned out.

You were, at one point, full of promise and, I thought, onto something that I assumed I was not aware of.  I’ve since spent my whole life chasing the something, and in the meantime, you have slowly and insidiously become totally uninteresting.  Your new bob haircut with highlights or lowlights or chunking is not news.  Your new breakfast nook is not only boring, it’s useless, it will fall down someday and be rotted wood and the world will forget you, your breakfast nook, and your painfully uninteresting ambition to be comfortably exactly like everyone else.

But remember?  Remember when we were younger, and we huddled on leafy ridges in the Appalachian mountains on summer days with notebooks and big ideas and words all day, words words words?  You were so interesting, and I modeled myself after you.  I wanted to be onto what you were onto.  And I bought into it, whole cloth: life shouldn’t get hum-drum and routine and all about your rustic interior design or your nightly cavalcade of television shows just because you’ve aged past a certain number.  Cliche or not, we only live once, and I’m just so annoyed that you’ve chosen to abandon the promise of our youth for a homogenized adulthood that makes me look like I’m frozen in time, as opposed to living interestingly.

Oh, and you.  Remember those dark days during college, huddled in pitch-black rooms in anonymous houses on streets we can’t remember, just one candle burning, shuffling Tarot cards or reading aloud the Necronomicon or deconstructing “A Clockwork Orange”; what you now most assuredly look back on as a silly phase I recall as the beginning of my understanding of the invisible world—the spiritual or metaphysical truths and artistic penumbras which exist beyond our immediate material existence.  I continue to seek this ideal and probe my surroundings, but you gave up the search long ago in favor of sitting still for Sears Portrait Studio henchmen, reading “young adult” novels, and wearing fifty-dollar scarves when it’s 65 degrees outside.  Your abandonment of our quest—even though it was nearly 20 years ago— continues to hurt me personally.  You never really meant any of it.  It was just a lark to you.  Well, I took it seriously.

Or how about you?  Remember how we’d invent games to force life to be more unpredictable?  One of us would be blindfolded, and choose which direction we’d turn, and after a pre-determined amount of turns, we had to get out of the car, right then and there, and do something?  Countless tricks like this, we had, to keep the stench of routine from creeping in.  I believed you when we conspired to live our lives like this, to beat back the dreaded boredom, the hated ignominious hand of time that drags us all down the road of monotony that leads the way of dusty death.  But you gave up.  Either you quit or it beat you, but either way, I soldier on, alone, bereft of any blindfolded passengers.

I was reading an article the other day that gently poked fun at “adults with backpacks” as though, at some point, stuffing a bunch of books and papers and pens and binoculars and flashlights and other interesting things into a backpack and setting out in the world in order to have legitimate, authentic experiences was somehow childish, and people over a certain age should refrain from such activities. I’ll never understand the world’s insistence that at some point we start acting like grown ups.  What’s the use?  To what end?  To impress whom? Our culture is full of such arbitrary definitions of how we’re supposed to make ourselves uninteresting in order to become grown-ups.  And you’ve bought into it.  And that’s annoying.

In the blink of an eye, we’re all going to be dead.  I have no interest in spending my living interval having an uninteresting time trying to impress you with how well I’ve been able to mimic some really boring ideal.  I just wish you were still in on it with me.

Monday Doesn’t Always Have to Suck

(this entry was written by my sister, Adrienne McGuire)

 

Like most people plodding along in the corporate world, I used to dread Monday mornings with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. Now that I work from home with the freedom to create my own schedule, I could potentially take Mondays off if wanted to, but in the interest of maintaining an acceptable productivity level, I still find myself working pretty much every weekday. Since I’m a writer, a few months ago, I decided to make a list of my potential book titles, and I recently stumbled across the list again. One that jumped out at me was “Monday Doesn’t Always Have to Suck”.

Our weekends are filled with leisure time and having fun with friends and family, so it’s not surprising that most people have some trouble readjusting to the concept of work when the weekend is over. However, Monday isn’t going to be erased from the calendar (as far as I can see), and because most of us need to work on weekdays, I decided to create a list of ways to make Monday enjoyable. I actually started this a long time ago, when I was still working in an office setting, and I found that, of all of my coworkers, including those in offices adjacent to mine, I enjoyed Mondays more than the average person. Here are some of the things that I do to make easing back into the week a little less painful.

• Lay out your work clothing on Sunday night so that you have one less thing to think about when you wake up in the morning.

• Wake up 30 minutes earlier to enjoy an activity that makes you happy (yoga, meditation, reading the newspaper, enjoying a cup of coffee by yourself, watching the morning news).

• Take a morning shower. It will wake you up and get you moving.

• Listen to some of your favorite music on the way to work. Music always improves mood.

• Have a positive attitude. Think about what you can accomplish during the week rather than how long it is until the next weekend.

• Change your routine. Sometimes a slight change in our habits can change our outlook for the entire day. Take a different route to work or visit a new coffee shop. Sometimes we just get into a rut and small changes can make a big difference.

• Every Friday, make a list of all of the things you need to accomplish at work next week and take a few minutes to organize your desk. You will walk into Monday already prepared to take on your responsibilities.

• Treat yourself to your favorite latte or breakfast muffin as a welcome to the new week. Also, be sure to pack yourself a delicious and interesting lunch to give yourself something to look forward to halfway through the day.

• Take a walk during the day to step away from your desk and your duties. This clears your head and increases blood flow. When you return to your desk you will feel invigorated and ready to work again.

• Plan something fun or exciting for Monday evening so that you have something to look forward to at the end of the workday.

• Try to generate a list of all the things you hate about Mondays. You might find this task quite difficult and realize that Mondays really aren’t that terrible.

• Imagine what life would be like if you suddenly lost your job. Sure, you wouldn’t have to work Mondays anymore, but you also wouldn’t be able to pay your bills or afford groceries. Suddenly, Monday is looking pretty darn sweet!

If you find that people at your place of work usually have a really bad case of the Miserable Mondays, try printing out this list and posting it around your workspace. You might be surprised at how many people will take notice and may even put several items on the list into action! Sometimes, all we need is a nudge in the right direction to make small changes in our lives that can make a big difference in our overall well-being.

Adrienne McGuire is a writer, educator, and wellness enthusiast. You can enjoy more of her writing and more helpful tips at http://www.dailypath.com/.

Find Your Own Thing

If I were told today that I had a month to live (I haven’t been told that), I’d have to write something profound to leave you all with.  Some final, provocative thoughts about what life was like for me, what I thought of the whole damned thing.  It’s what one does when they’re told they’re dying.

I think I’d start by telling you how silly it is to spend so much time and effort paying off interest.  But I understand it’s fairly unavoidable.  And I’d tell you to avoid people that tell you you’ve got to “do something you love for a living”.  Those people don’t understand a thing.  Imagine such a world!  There’d be exactly two garbage men and seven million rock stars.  If you want my advice I’d tell you to just make sure you do something for a living that doesn’t kill starving children, and then make the most of your days off.

So my sister is getting married on Sunday!  How exciting is that?  Not every day your only sibling gets married.  Her and her beau are terribly in love.  Like, the kind of in love that annoys some people.  You know what I say? Fuck those people.  Hey Adrienne and Brian:  you be crazy in love as long as you damn well please.  And hey, if some day you’re not as crazy in love as you once were and all those naysayers try to say “I told you so” you say to them Look fuckers, we were just as happy as pure electricity for a good long time, probably happier than you’ve ever been, and that’s pretty much the whole idea of life, isn’t it, to be happy for as long of a stretch as possible?  That’s what I’d tell them, anyway.  Assuming that you’re not as happy as pure electricity for ever and ever, which I think is totally possible.

If I were writing this from my death bed (which I’m not) I think I’d probably say something about dogs.  I mean, holy crap, aren’t they just great?

I could tell you where I knew I’d gone wrong.  I worried too much about movies and music and books.  I worried too much about how people percieved me.  I didn’t ask my parents enough about themselves.  I did too much of whatever I wanted to do, without ever doing exactly what I wanted.  I hurt people all the time, even after I said I stopped.  I almost never read the comics section in the newspaper.

But it’s easy to pinpoint the places where you’ve gone wrong, and you can spend a lifetime trying to correct them.  Just be as good as you can and don’t worry yourself crazy about it.  Try to be nice without being fake.  That usually gets it right.

I just got back from riding my bike right before I wrote this.  Boy-howdy, let me tell you, I have discovered that almost nothing brings me the joy that I get just from riding that thing around.  It is a perfect meshing of everything I enjoy; crisp, clean summer air, sunlight, memories of my childhood and thoughts of the future, the sights and sounds of the world unfiltered by car windows and talk radio stations.  Plus I usually sweat.  I’ve always loved sweating.  Sweating makes me feel alive.

Three cheers for things that make you feel alive!

If I was writing this on my death bed (I’m not), I still wouldn’t be able to tell you any damn thing about how you should live your life.  I’ve barely scratched the surface of how I’ve lived mine; I understand almost none of it.  And I sure as hell don’t want to have all of you out on your bikes tomorrow, ruining my solitary streets.  Find your own thing.

 

Audio Poem, “On Turning Thirty”

Year written: 2008
Collection: White Sugar Man

Click the gray arrow to hear the audio version.

On Turning Thirty

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

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

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

Audio Poem: “Upon My Birthday”

Year Written:  2006
Collection:  The Salt Flats

Click the gray arrow to hear me read this poem.

Upon My Birthday

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

Barely Contained

Sometimes before
falling asleep a person
senses the give
behind the last given,

almost physically,
like the push
of plush against
skin.

The person imagines
a fig or peach,
perhaps a woman or
a deep constellation:
some fathomless fruit.

And that fathomless
sleep fruit is what we,
while we live, are:
almost without surface,
barely contained,
as crazy as clouds
compounding each
other,
refusing to rain.

Monday’s Song: “Passenger” by Emily Wells

Passenger
by Emily Wells

I’m the passenger, I’m the passenger,
give me the keys, I wanna drive.

I’m the passenger, I’m the passenger,
if you gimme the keys, you know I won’t survive.

Pour it down my throat,
I need it just to cope.
Hey kitty kitty…
say it aint so.
I’m drowning on tomorrow,
losing all my hope.
Bottom of the barrel
and I just lost the rope.
I had a feeling
this might not end so hot,
but tell me, tell me doctor,
you know how to make it stop?
Give me all your medicine,
give me all your pills;
your bedside manner
just to cure my ills.

I’m the passenger, I’m the passenger,
give me the keys, I wanna drive.

I’m the passenger, I’m the passenger,
if you gimme the keys, you know I won’t survive.

I’m the buffalo.
I’m the Lone Ranger.
I’m a squad car.
I’m an honest stranger.
I’m teenage boys, sure to take a tumble.
I’m the maze, the rains, and my lover.

I’m the passenger, I’m the passenger,
give me the keys, I wanna drive.

I’m the passenger, I’m the passenger,
if you gimme the keys, you know I won’t survive.

I will be waiting for you.

Audio Poem: “Gyre”

Year written: 2005
Collection: The Loosing of Clocks

 

I consider “Gyre” to be one of my best poetic accomplishments, even though, going back and reading it now I can see it’s got some pretty big flaws. It’s clunky, it tries too hard, its agenda is showing, there are way too many words in it, etc etc. But at the same time, I can still see it’s attributes. It summed up a complicated theme I’d been writing about for a few years, throughout The Loosing of Clocks and the two previous collections, and the theme was place, specifically, what does it mean to exist in a certain spatial place? What connection do I, in reality, have to this house, this room, this city park? I was damn near obsessed with it, and in “Gyre”, I feel as though I finally expressed it, even though I had to maybe get a little clunky to get there. I still really like the curve balls I throw at the end: the juxtapositions which beg more questions still; if I am the thief of past tenant’s bedrooms, is my sister the thief of my mother’s nose? Finally, by asking insistently, in this poem and others, what time means to places, I’m really asking from an angled perspective what time means to me.

  

 Click the gray arrow to hear the audio version.

 

 

 

Gyre

The laundromat which I frequent—
which I drive my car two blocks to get to,
but in the summer, who knows,
maybe I’ll pick up my laundry baskets
and detergents and walk there—
is the same laundromat which my sister,
years ago, when she lived around here,
washed her clothes at.
As I lean against the soda machine,
at the back of the place,
I can picture her very clearly
walking through the front door—
an armload of thisandthats almost sliding
out of her grip, she walks to a machine
and relievedly sits everything down.
She is so perfectly pictured in my mind
I blink my eyes to make sure she isn’t there;
she isn’t.
Her long, straight blond hair isn’t here,
nor are her precisely chosen clothes
or the nose of our mother which sits on her face.
She had been here, though, in this very building,
on occasions previous;
it is this realization which strikes me so viciously hard
that causes me to stumble into the plastic chair
snuggling the soda machine. I cannot stand up.
Did she ever use this soda machine?
It’s impossible;
maybe she even (oh god could it be?)
sat in this chair waiting for a cycle to be finished
or paged through the same years-old magazines
on the brown shelves by the big glass windows.
The floodgates are open: who else has been here?
What other folks from my life invaded this drab cornerless
business to dispatch of their dirty things?
My uncles? But I barely know them;
surely they couldn’t have been here
doing what I’m doing—solely I am doing it.
My old schoolteachers
who had neither private lives nor private parts,
what would happen if they used this laundromat?
Surely the world would collapse;
certainly I would not be permitted to be here;
I would instantly be laden with quarters.
Immediately I grasp what has plagued me
for the decades I have been alive:
too many things are able to exist
within finite space;
exponential lives have been squeezed
into the places which make up my own life,
which I had previously considered boundless.
Scared out of my mind,
I spring from the chair and walk hurriedly
out the door which my sister entered
five minutes ago,
five years ago,
and I lumber into the stinging cold.
The wind now brings not only faint hints of death,
but also a series of haunting images:
depression-era men in tall hats
strolling down the sidewalk;
stoned teenagers in tie-dyed shirts
doing Chinese Fire Drills by the stop sign;
a married couple, some year distant and future,
sleeping soundly in my bedroom;
my mother’s nose
on my sister’s face.

 

 

 

 

 

Audio Poem from “This is What is Invisible”, #12 of 12

As a reminder, I am posting an audio version of each poem from my new collection, “This is What is Invisible”.  This is the twelfth and final posting, and it’s called “Air”,

Air

When I try to think of all the things I’ve done,
try to review things perfectly like some wireless Victrola
and all that comes through are voices, the laughs,
the smell of the air, the weight of the air,
always the air and people talking
and in my sleep beside me I feel your weight on the bed
although I never loved you—not properly—
and other folks’ dogs padding through houses
waiting to be fed and slurp from the big red bowl
by the fridge—
when I try to remember all the places I’ve gone
and the marvels I’ve seen
I get the taste of the crisp soda in a tiny, tinny mouth,
the sun, the clouds, big things everywhere,
friends who are strangers who speak slowly
and with care,
things I said wrong, things I did wrong,
people I knew,
the breath of people and their spit flying in minuscule orbs
as they rant, my righteous anger,
the rain like tin pellets on the roof as you worried,
worried about everything—
when I attempt to measure as a distance
the places, the clearings, the rustling firs
the concrete porticoes with that tickling wind
or the paint-peeling balconies
and people’s eyes always looking, expecting,
expecting a certain thing from me or them
or the air in between us
as if sprites might emerge from a silence,
as if suddenly neither of us had been wrong,
as if I were not pretentious and they not insipid
but we always were, we always were,
and I always liked drinking cold cold water very fast
and driving, driving everywhere
passing other cars, slamming on the brakes,
all everywhere passing and stopping
and I never should have accused you—
the moments pass suddenly into shadows,
they always have and they aren’t going to stop,
you’d do best to listen to your breathing,
listen to her breathing, the dog’s,
and do.
I see children, too, waddling like huge lobsters
they’re your children—not mine—
oh those children are always hungry
even their hands are hungry,
under the blankets like dolls
looking at you in the half-lit doorway with hungry hands,
listening as their breath escapes into shadows.
What was that, just then? Ah, what it always
was, a moment, a breath, a just-barely.

Audio Poem from “This is What is Invisible”, #4 of 12

As a reminder, I’m posting an audio version of each of the 12 poems in my new collection This is What is Invisible.  This is the fourth posting, and it’s called “Nest”:

Nest

Two days until the weekend
and only 42 days more
until vacation
and 2,292 days to retirement
the janitor on outdoor duty
in one idle moment
lifts a rake effortlessly
and transforms
the meticulously built nest
of a starling into mulch

 

 

 

Upon Looking at My Own Baby Pictures

One can’t help but wonder who that is,
or wonder who that was,
there in that tiny striped shirt
grinning out at me
from a sepia-turning world.
I prod the skin of my brow,
the fleshy knob of my nose,
trace my jawline with my pointer finger—
these were somehow his, as well?
How did that tiny head expand,
contort, misshape itself?
And yet he does look at me with eyes
clearly mine, and a grin which suggests
he knew what was in store for me
(both good and bad);

I click the image away, banishing it
to some unseen region of the computer,
and just sit there, feeling my face,
remembering his, marveling again
at time’s creativity and just how
damn cute I was.

Doesn’t my life rule?

While living in Erie for three months, I’ve known the entire time that I lived very, very close to the lake–probably just a few hundred yards away.  However, it has been more difficult than you might imagine for me to find access to the lake or even get it into view from the neighborhood around where I live.  This is mainly due to the land along the lake being zoned industrial, and said industrial plants being the secretive types that hide behind fences and well-placed tree-lines.  A few weeks ago I did manage to find a nice lake-side park in a residential area about half a mile away.  However, today I was riding my bike around my neighborhood, very very close to my apartment, and turned down a side street I’d never thought of turning down before because it looked just like a dead end trashy alley, but alas!  It opened up almost immediately into a tiny, unnamed park with a fantastic view of the lake.  This excites me, as I just love being around the lake—reading, writing, exploring the coastline, etc, and to have the access so close is very convenient!  I took some video of the view–doesn’t my life rule?

Potato

In haste one evening while making dinner
I threw away a potato that was spoiled
on one end.  The rest would have been

redeemable.  In the beige garbage can
it became the consort of coffee grounds,
banana skins, plastic bowls.
I sat it, in its bag, on the curb
to be taken to the dump
where steaming scraps and leaves
return, like bodies over time, to earth.

When the bag fell over and dumped
its contents onto the weedy sidewalk,
the potato turned up
unfailingly, as if to revile me–

looking plumper, firmer, resurrected
instead of disassembling.  It seemed to grow
until I could have made shepherd’s pie
for a whole hamlet–hungry people
who pass the day building fences,
pumping gas, pinning hand-me-down
clothes on the line.

What should I do tomorrow?

I know it’s awful late on the East Coast to present this poll, but whadday want?  I was busy all day!  Anyway, this poll is quite real; I’ll abide by the result.  Poll closes at 8am Eastern Time.

Conneaut, Ohio

Erie Bluffs State Park

Living Like Living Was Good

I can rise in the morning and electricity like bugs will crawl from the top of myself down through my extremities and out my toes to meet the world.  This can be in excitement or dread but it is never in boredom.  Boredom would be to not feel the sunshine, or the echoing confines of an empty room, or the dawning smiles of the friends who love your own dawning smiles.

I can drive along colorless interstates and imagine each unique spot in the countryside as we pass. That tiny grove back in the field that no one can be bothered to safely look at: I bet it gets nice shade, and is full of happy and fattened bugs and rabbits.  I’d like to read a nice comfy book there.  I’d like to nap like a praire animal.  Smell it’s smell.

I can light incense in the living room and dance poorly naked.  I can wear new socks without shoes when I take the garbage out.  I can make instant coffee and smell the vapors coming off it, my nose a visceral clitoris. I can wear any hat I want, but I don’t.

I can sit on my couch and turn off everything that uses electricity.  I can be in the silent dark.  I can live like living was good.

LML

I just had a really awesome day.

While I’d love nothing more than to write a lengthy, detailed narrative of said awesome day, I don’t really have time, so I’m just gonna tell you about one moment that was a really knockout moment for me.

I was in Buffalo, NY to see an Ed Kowalczyk show (he’s the former lead singer of LIVE).  The show was a free show in a small park in a square in downtown.  I arrived around noon (first openng act was to go on at 5) and parked about 20 feet from the park.  I spent awhile scoping out the venue (the stage was up and there was ‘staff’ milling about, but the park was otherwise empty) and then I commenced wandering around the city for a bit.

(quick side note:  I love Buffalo.  Why?  It’s the most pedestrian-centric city I’ve ever been in.  Wider sidewalks than Manhattan, soft music piped EVERYWHERE.  You can’t even see the speakers, they must be hidden in planters, etc…just a great city to walk around in.  I’ll post a full entry about this sometime)

Anyway, after about two hours of wandering I ended up just a block from the stage a Lafayette Square, sitting at an outdoor table at a coffee shop, drinking a really delicious, piping hot caramel latte.  The sun was shining, it was about 80 degrees with a gentle lake breeze, I had nowhere to go, the quiet light jazz was being piped onto the street from somewhere, and life was just really freaking nice.  (this was when I Facebook-statused “LML”).   It was an incredibly simple, beautiful moment, and it’s magnificence was not lost on me. 

After sitting and enjoying the moment for a few minutes, I was jarred to reality by the thought that an Ed Kowalczyk song was playing down at the square (this was still only about 3pm).  I thought, It’s quite odd they’d play an Ed song on the day of an Ed show, as I thought they had simply started playing music through the massive speakers set up for the concert.  but after a few minutes I realized the sound was too “live”.  Ed was soundchecking!  I got up and walked (did not run) down the block to the park.  Ed and his band were playing one of the new songs off Ed’s solo album (which I did not hear any of until I bought it at the merch table after the show, so I fear I’ll never know what song I hear them soundcheck).  There were about 6 people in the park watching Ed’s soundcheck, and I suspect all of them just happened to be in the park.  I’m pretty sure I was the only Ed fan there.  I stood in the center of the park and watched Ed Kowalczyk play a song just for me, while still sipping my latte and enjoying the sunshine and breeze.  This was an incredible moment. 

After they were done playing, I took this video of Ed talking into the mic to prove how alone I was in the park:

Erie Journal, 5/19

Having all this space for the first time in my life has already provided some interesting results.  For instance, the room I am using as my bedroom is functioning only as my bedroom, whereas anywhere I’ve lived since I left the nest, my sleeping room has always doubled at least slightly as a living room or entertainment hub.  This fact may or may not account for the fact that for the first week I’ve been here, I’ve slept better than I can remember in my adult life.  I am waking up feeling so rested and refreshed, it is reminiscent of those sleeps you might have had when you were a child.  Sometimes it feels as though I’ve been asleep for a week when I wake up!  And oddly, I’m not even sleeping that long at a stretch—6, 7 hours at the most.  This may also be due to, perhaps, simply the move itself, and whatever emotional things (good or bad) are going on associated with it, and/or the fact that I’ve been incredibly active since I’ve been here, but I think almost certainly the “seperate” bedroom must have something to do with it.

Also, having my computer in a room seperate from my television (yes, there is definitely a TV in the computer room, but my flat screen and blue ray player and surround sound and all that is on the OTHER living room, hence any serious movie watching will usually but not always take place in the room without the computer) has resulted in, quite simply, more silence.  When my computer is in my entertainment hub, I almost never experience silence, whether it’s the TV, stereo, or record player making the noise.  Now, sometimes I just want to check my e-mail and I’m not going to bother turning on the TV in “living room Jr.” (as I just decided to call the computer living room), so I’m spending more time in silence and so far it’s going rather well.  I’m feeling really, really emotionally healthy.

Another side-effect of all the space is that I now have room to adequately store some items, like boxes of mementos from my childhood and teenage years.  Previously, I had to shove these items into closets or under beds, etc, causing them to always be very much out of reach or out of mind, and I just continued moving them with me every time I moved (always shedding a bit more of them as I moved, throwing a bit more out every time).  But now that I have an attic, a basement, and a few closets all for me, some of these mementos are actually closer to the surface of my daily life.  As I’ve found I have some spare time in the evenings I am not accustomed to having, I’ve been going through these boxes for the first time in many years and it has been really amazing, because—and maybe this is just me, but maybe this has happened to you, too—I seem to have already forgotten a whole lot about that time of my life.  I’m 32 and I’ve forgotten a fair amount from when I was 17 and 18.  And I don’t just mean minor events, because that’s natural, but like, whole freindships.  I’ve uncovred some stuff and I’m like, I was friends with him?  And then I DO remember it.  And I’m amazed by a piece of my life being re-revealed to me.

But no memento has been as eye-opening and fun to find as the stack of movie ticket stubs I found in a box.  For a few years, I kept the stub from every movie I went to and wrote on the back who I went to that movie with.  I had actually completely forgotten that I ever did this!  And looking through them is just nuts!  Alot of them I remember clearly—some of them were parts of landmark events in my life—while others are truly baffling.  (I seem to have gone on some dates that I don’t remember.  I also seem to have been “movie pals” with some dudes that I do not recall being more than mere acquantances with.  I also had forgotten that my mom and I used to go to every adaptation of a Michael Crichton book together.  Mom, are there any coming up????  I haven’t been paying attention to Crichton for a few years.  I do know he died.)  Anyway, I scanned some of the stubs, front and back.  Here they are (this is just a minor fraction of them):

Erie Journal, 5/15

I know, I know, I can hear what you’re saying, fearless, intrepid readers:  how dare I give you such exhaustive detail of all the activity leading up to the move and then abandon you for DAYS as the event unfolds?  It must have been like the cruelest of television season-ending cliffhangers!  Well, eff you.  Life got in the way of blogging.

(I don’t know why the Erie Journals have a tone of distaste for you, the loyal reader.  I swear, I love you.  It’s just the tone these entries seem to want to take!)

Anyway, as usual, I’m gonna have to skim over some details because just too much has happened since I posted last.  You saw the picture entries of the move itself, and I would like to once again thank Burke, Paul, Liz and Michael for helping me move. Also, thanks go to Mom and Mary for helping me clean, Dad for letting me crash at his house at a very crucial and odd moment for me, Duane for his last minute computer help, and probably somebody else who helped and I’m forgetting and I’m sorry I’m forgetting you.  I truly do have some amazing friends and family!

Long story short, the move was difficult.  It essentially went off as I had planned—and believe it or not, I consider myself something of a good planner—but what I never considered during my planning was that there was very little time for me to sleep, recover, and be sane.  And despite that, I would have made it work if it hadn’t for some godawful reason taken Michael and I eight hours to drive back from Erie after unloading all my stuff into my new apartment.  It was like we drove into some sort of black hole/time warp/weird thing.  I just kept driving that U-Haul, pointing forward and pressing the gas, and it was like nothing was happening…

So anyway, that drive forced me to change my plans a tad, and instead of ending up here in Erie Thursday morning, I rolled in here around 10:30 Thursday night.  So yeah, the plan had to be altered.  Still.  I claim this as a triumph in my life, as I single-handedly planned all of it.  This is not an attempt to be egotistical here folks.  Those that have known me since my teen years will know this is just a monumental achievement!

I’ll tell you what was friggen strange was walking into this apartment in Erie Thursday night.  It was dark.  A thunderstorm had just passed through.  The world was chilly but not cold, and becalmed, and silent with a hint of breeze.  I’d just been here, in this apartment the day before, but that had been in blazing sunlight, with one of my best friends, doing heavy, sweaty work and grunting and counting to three and lifting.  So now I approach the front door for the first time ever in darkness, and I am all alone, and I am not going “home” that night, and it is quiet everywhere as my brand new key jingles in the lock and I open the unfamiliar door and the room is pitch black and all I can smell is fresh paint and the afterscent of rain and I get lucky guessing where the light switch is and the overhead light pops on and there in the midst of all this unfamiliarity is, quite all of a sudden, the entirety of my belongings, sitting in a massive disarray, exactly how Michael and I had left them just a little over 24 hours before.

I know that may sound like a NOT great experience, but that is only because I’ve failed as a narrator.  Yes, it was surreal, and perhaps somber and disquieitng, but also rather thrilling, not like a roller coaster but my own personal fun house—my life as a hall of mirrors.  If, in 24 hours, one’s life can become so utterly different (and yet, so entirely the same), it makes you question just what it is that defines your life.  Oddly, during those first few moments inside the apartment door, it became clear to me that stuff does, in fact, play a role in my identity, but thankfully, just not a very large one. It was a relief to feel the sensation flush through me from head to toe that the truly important element in this equation was me, no matter which TV was sitting in the corner (though I loved the fact that it was my TV).

The first few minutes after entering the apartment were a flurry of activity, marked by one observation and two activities.  The observation was complete silence.  No television, no radio, not even any incoming text messages, and no neighbors making noise of any kind.  In such an unfamliar setting, I really did need something.  And so my first two activities were:  getting the TV hooked up to the DVD player (cable and internet wouldn’t come till the next day) and—actually the very first order of business—getting some blinds up on the two street-facing living room windows.  As I said, it was night time and the windows are facing the residential street and the only light I had to work with at this point was the bright overhead light, so I felt very, very exposed.  I had actually anticipated this and had even brought two cheapy Wal-Mart vinyl mini-blinds up with me right away.  I had never in my life put up a blind of any kind, so less than two minutes after entering the apartment, I was opening and attempting to figure out these blinds.  It is perhaps of note that the apartment is FULL of stuff, so I have very little room to work.  As a reminder, here was how Michael and I left the living room:

The day before, right before Michael and I left, I measured the windows in anticipation of the blinds, and stopped by Wal-Mart immediately before leaving for Erie that afternoon, to buy the blinds.  Well folks, turns out I’m not a champ at measuring.  Luckily, I over-measured, so the blinds I bought were too long by about two inches.  I did not see this as a problem.  Believe it or not, I have a toolbox, and in that toolbox is a saw.  So less than ten minutes after getting there, I’ve got these vinyl mini-blinds sitting on those white Gonella bread boxes you see in the picture above and I am sawing one inch off both sides.  (mind you, I am just sawing the bar across the top, not the actual blinds.  I’m  not a maniac!).  Amazingly, this worked like a charm and I very quickly had privacy, at least from the street side of the apartment (and only when in the living room).

After that it was the TV, and the couch, as my chair were all entirely buried underneath God-knows-what and I was definitely craving a sit-down.  As you can guess by looking at the pic of the living room above, getting the couch to in any reasonable way face a television would require some finagling.  But I managed it very quickly.  I had procured a few movies from the Redbox in Carlisle before leaving for Erie, and I quickly had the new DeNiro flick “Everybody’s Fine” playing, and I was laying on the couch, and I was just gonna watch a few minutes and then get up and start the long, arduous process of getting the apartment in order because after all, I didn’t really have to sleep at any reasonable time and obviously I had no plans in the near future and then…I was sound asleep.  I woke up at 10am the next morning feeling like a million very, very confused bucks.  And then the work began.

As this is a fairly long entry already, I’m going to end here for now so as to not tire you out, Fearless Reader.  Since everything I’m saying is in the past, it’s not really of the essence to tell it all now, so I’ll bring us up to the present day in an entry tomorrow.  Thanks for reading, shitbirds!

Erie Journal, 5/2

I go to Erie tomorrow for two days to find an apartment.  This is my first time actually being there!  I’d have loved to post more leading up to this event, but as you may know, my freaking computer died essentially the same exact day I was about to start searching for apartments online.  Now, when you are moving as far away as I am, the searching must be done almost entirely online.  It’s not like I can just go out and buy an Erie newspaper.  Anyway, I am really really crunched for time, and I can’t wait to blog more to tell you just how difficult my last week was (if by difficult, I mean how I had very little free time while living an amazing life).  Anyway, I’m off to Erie tomorrow through Tuesday and should have a significant amount to report come Wednesday evening.