Dance

In all these tiny useless shops, with all this
torn and tattered furniture and too-small coats and
half-working vacuum cleaners, I have never come across
a velvety orangeish curtain like the one we hung
in the living room on Big Spring Avenue; it was
wide and garish like a Lady Pope’s vestments
and it kept the heat from pouring down between the
hardwood floor slats into the musty dirt basement;
likewise, in none of these big city shops have I ever
danced around with a cocker spaniel like I did
with ours–Cocoa–one bright Saturday morning
when I was all alone with her.  I did the funny dance I
only ever did with Cocoa, one hand in my armpit,
jumping on one foot, the sound of my skin half-drum,
half-fart, the world at last and for a moment a perfect
sun-filled room, a dappled meadow, Cocoa just
staring with all-black eyes, shimmying just to
get out of my way, me whirling and singing a song
I can’t recall, then laughing and laughing in the
sun beaming through the windows, falling down
with her, as if we were dying, as if we could
never stop–in 1984, in Newville Pennsylvania–
beautiful strange small-town Newville,
home of Laughlin Mill and the Bulldogs–
a hundred miles and thirty years away from
this dingy city thrift store I stand in, remembering
the orangey curtain and the drafty floors and the
sweet temperamental dog so confused with her
round voids of eyes, she’s gone now, so gone even
her dust is gone, oh giant universe, oh wild universe!

It’s Going to Be OK

I sat, waiting, in the Big Room.

Around me were gathered about forty others, in the hardbacked plastic seats, under the blare of florescents.  Most were having side or group conversations, hushed, but I sat quietly to myself, waiting.  The Big Room was, naturally, the largest room in the rehab facility.  It was the only room that everyone gathered in at once.  We started our days there with roll call and would cycle back in a few more times each day for various large meetings and activities, and ended most nights there with, typically, something profound or at least an attempt at profundity.  This is such a night.

The hushed conversations come to a halt as the head counselor, Bob, enters the room.  He takes his time situating some papers on a small desk near the front of the room.  We all give him our full attention.  Bob is that rarest kind of person: a truly warm-hearted, immensely kind person who nonetheless is not to be trifled with.  Finally he clears his throat and begins.  “Tonight, folks, we are going to put you in touch with your younger self.”

Bob went on to explain that in a few minutes, another of the counselors was going to join us; I forget this counselor’s name, but she was one of the counselors who mainly stayed in her office and had individual therapy sessions, so her joining us at night in the Big Room was unusual.  Bob explained that she was going to walk us through an experience that was like hypnosis, but was not hypnosis, and this was going to be a special night for us.  Then the other counselor came in, and Bob turned the lights almost all the way off.

“Hello,” she said.  “I want you all to get as comfortable as you can.  If you want to stretch out and lay on the floor, please do, or stay seated if you prefer.”  I stayed in my seat.  “I want you to imagine a house you lived in when you were younger.  It doesn’t matter how much younger, just that it be a time before you started using drugs or alcohol.  Picture the outside of the house.  Now I want you to breathe as steadily, as deeply, as slowly as you can.  Picture the outside of the house and all its details until I speak again.”  Here there was a long pause.  “Now keep breathing just as you are. Slowly but steadily.  Please envision yourself gliding in toward the front door of this house.  Imagine you are a–”

 

I am in the kitchen.  It’s the kitchen of my childhood home, the one on Big Spring Avenue.  I smell the old smell, and the quality of the air.  I blink my eyes to make sure I am seeing this correctly.  I am seated with my back to the den, the open doorway that opens onto the den, and I am looking into the kitchen.  The trusty, dense and solid dining room table sits in the center of the room, just a few feet in front of me.  To my right is the open door into the playroom (later, the office) and to my left, the trash can and the corner of the kitchen.  In front of me and beyond the dining room table, there is the old boxy Frigidaire, the squat electric range, the closed door to the “back room”, and the cabinets, sink, the intense orange formica countertops, the paint on the cabinets so thick from multiple coats that I can see the bubbles from way over here.  But most of all, the wallpaper, the paisley-esque floral pattern that never seemed to repeat itself, the busiest walls in town,  all the swirling greens, yellows and oranges you could ever ask for.  I sit staring, agog, at a room from the dustbin of my mind, all the details intact, the sensory flash a blinding experience, like surfacing from beneath water which you did not know you were beneath. It seems that full minutes pass as I sit there–seemingly immobile–in silence except for the ticking hands on the Seth Thomas that’s above the trash can.  Then suddenly, I see him enter from the playroom.  He is quite young, perhaps eight years old.  He is a tiny little guy, and his bright blonde hair is almost blinding.  I do not take notice to what he is wearing, I am so focused on his face as he strides toward me: quite serious, bordering on dour, his skin so new and flawless, like aloe straight from the plant.  He walks toward the kitchen table with a purpose, without looking at me, then as he is directly in front of me, he turns to look at me.  The gravity of this moment is not lost on me.  He looks me in the eyes, the seriousness of him slowly morphing into steadfastness, then further into assurance, and finally, the corners of his lips turn up, and he is smiling.  Not grinning, and not smiling as though at a joke, but as if he was happy in some secure knowledge.  Then he opens his mouth to speak and his tiny voice comes forth. “It’s going to be OK,” he says.  I am unable to move or talk, but I know this statement makes me cry.  He smiles even bigger now and takes one step toward me.  “It’s going to be OK”, he repeats.  Now he steps even closer, and somehow climbs up onto my lap, even though I can’t actually see my lap.  He turns his head toward me and I can see he is now smiling the smile of the joyous, the thrilled, the exalted.  His little smile seems to go all the way up to the highest tuft of sun-touched blonde hair on his eight-year-old head.   He leans in close to me and through that gaping smile he whispers, “It’s going to be OK.”

Nowadays I share a lovely apartment with my partner, the best person I have ever known.  I have everything I could ever want, both material and ethereal.  I move through every day like it was a dream, even when they are hard days.  We listen to some good music, or read some good books, or lay and talk.  And some days, while she is in another room or out on an errand, I may be sitting on the couch when a boy runs down the hallway and jumps into my lap.  This boy is really here, in the here-and-now, and he’s glorious.  His blonde hair isn’t quite as shocking, but it is bright and fine and bounces on his head when he runs, and his skin is like aloe, straight from the leaf, and his eyes are that kind of blue that are only blue in pictures; when you look right at them it’s like you see right through them.  Many days he jumps on my lap on the couch and shows me some spot he has injured in his play; a brush burn on a knee, a scrape on a wrist.  The tears in his eyes are real, teetering there in the corners, wobbly, almost-falling down the cheeks.  “Dis gonna go down to the bone?” he will ask, or “Me am gonna die?”  I kiss his boo-boos as well as I can and gather him up into my arms as tight as he’ll allow, and I whisper to him, “No, honey, it’s going to be OK.”

where the light gets in

  1.

 

I awoke slowly, groggily, dry-mouthed.  Beneath my body I could feel a bed, a nice bed, cushioney and soft, but also the obtuse crinkle of a plastic sheet.  Then came the sensation of the plastic pillowcase; and then, finally, I remembered.

I was in rehab, and this was my first moment waking up there.  I didn’t dare yet open my eyes.  Who knew what kind of world this was?  

My body felt sick, tired, disgusting.  I was shaking, but not externally.  My insides shook, as if my muscle and blood were a loosely-congealed jelly.  I was hot–I could feel my body heat transferring from my head to the plastic pillow case.  I had to cough, and vomit.  Every bad thing a body can tell you, I was being told, but only slightly, moderately, on the periphery of emergency.  I was in this facility for the treatment of alcohol dependency.  I had arrived in an incredibly drunk state, and so only remembered small pieces of the event.  I did not remember entering the room I was in, or laying on the bed.  I had memory flashes of receptionists, bathrooms, swallowing pills.  Bright fluorescent lights in drop ceilings.  A hallway.  Very little to go on.  I had, in fact, no idea how long I’d been asleep.

I became aware of what had woken me: the sounds of people talking outside my room.  Still without opening my eyes, I could tell these were people standing outdoors, by a window.  As the crow flies, they must have only been seven or eight feet away from me, but of course, they were standing outside talking, while I was laying on a bed in a room with, presumably, the shades drawn.  I felt badly the need to vomit.

With great trepidation I decided to open my eyes.  I did so very slowly, not knowing if there might be someone else in this room with me, and if there was, I might want to continue feigning sleep.  Gradually I let the light in–it hurt tremendously, giving me reason to think I’d slept for over a day.  The room came into focus. Brown wood-grain particle board closets were directly in front of me, at the foot of my single bed.  To my right, another single bed–blissfully unoccupied, the sheets and blanket meticulously made.  A brown balsa wood desk in the corner to my left, and to the far right, a small door that looked like it lead to a bathroom, and beside that door, a larger door–this one presumably the door out. Probably to the hallway that existed in a flash somewhere in my memory.

The room looked frighteningly like any of the countless dorm rooms I’d lived and partied in only a year or two before, and only half a mile away.  I’d lived in rooms just like this where the closet was full of empty beer cans and liquor bottles waiting for an opportunity to go out to the trash without getting caught.  It did not seem that long ago that I’d looked at closet doors just like this one and contemplated hiding inside it, or peeing on it, or whatever.  Now here I was in a similar but very different room.  I was the same person I’d always been, nothing had changed inside me, but suddenly here I was waking up in rehab.

The sudden knowledge of the bathroom woke up a long-dormant pain in my bladder.  With great achiness and slow care, I swung my feet out of the bed and limped my way to the small door I assumed to be the bathroom.  I became aware that the entire place smelled of medicine, like an overly-air conditioned pharmacy.  It was a sterile smell but reassuring; whatever was wrong with me, I was in a place to be fixed.  Someday the shaking might stop.

The first thing I noticed was the sink.  Not because there was anything very special about the sink itself, but because of the large red sticker attached to it, imploring residents to “wash thoroughly” in order to minimize the risk of transmitting Hepatitis.   I peed into the pearly white, larger-than-expected toilet for what seemed like ten minutes.  Relieved, I limped back out of the bathroom thinking I might sleep for another entire day.

But I became sidetracked on the way to the bed by the voices outside my window.  Who were they?  What was going on?  I waddled to the window and ever-so-slightly pried open two slats of the industrial white venetian blinds.

Outside was a large courtyard, completely enclosed on all sides by the one-story brick building which I was inhabiting.  The courtyard was large enough to house two or three full-sized trees, a gazebo, benches, and some concrete walkways.  A dozen or so people were scattered throughout the courtyard, speaking in groups, smoking cigarettes, nursing tiny Styrofoam cups with steam rolling off the tops.  They looked happy—almost like this was grade school recess or a break in a business meeting.  They were of many different ages and seemed to run the gamut on the socio-economic spectrum.  It looked like an inviting place to be, but also terrifying.  I wanted to stay alone in this room forever.  I wanted to get under the blanket where it was dark and plasticy and shake until the world ended, or my parents came and got me.  Somewhere outside these walls my friends were going to work, stopping at gas stations, watching movies in living rooms.  I could hear the chatter outside my window die down as the group was being called back inside.  This was who I had become.

 

2.

 

Today I live about forty miles from the rehab I woke up in that day, which was over ten years ago.  I live in an area roughly referred to as Central Pennsylvania, although some purists insist on calling it South Central Pennsylvania.  Neither moniker is quite accurate, but anyway. 

Most places in this world are the same, more or less, although cases for distinctions can certainly be made.  Here in Central Pennsylvania, the case for distinction starts with the city of Harrisburg.  Or, perhaps more aptly put, what the city used to be.  A city on the rise throughout the 1800s, a series of events (both controllable and uncontrollable) caused the city to begin a constant descent into mediocrity and blight much like other, larger Northern “rust belt” cities from the 1920s until present day.  Intense racial division, poor local leadership and the alluring habitability of rural areas outside the city caused an outward migration that has never fully stopped.

 

Harrisburg (and by extension, Central Pennsylvania) sits on the banks of the Susquehanna River.  Although the Susquehanna appears at first glance to be a mighty, majestic river, it is in fact the longest river in the United States that is not deep enough to allow commercial boating traffic—another contributing factor to Harrisburg’s stagnation.  The river at points nears a mile wide but is often shallow enough to walk the entire way across.  Although it factors greatly in much of America’s history—the Revolution and the founding of Mormonism, for starters—its shallow depth prevents it from achieving any great level of fame, or any truly major cities from growing near it.

 

As citizens migrated outward from Harrisburg in the early 1920s they formed a network of small towns and communities so close together and homogenous that the ones on the opposite bank of the Susquehanna are often referred to simply as the “West Shore”, as though they were one community.  These tiny towns, often quaint and artisan more than they were hardy and working-class, took their names equally from American history, Native Americans, and the local landscape.  Towns like Camp Hill, Penbrook, Paxtang, Enola, Wormleysburg—each with its own identity, history, and geography, but each in turn also related to the exodus of Harrisburg.  Camp Hill is named after a church whose congregation split into two groups—one of the “camps” held their worships on a nearby hill.  Lemoyne—which used to be named Bridgeport—is a town of four thousand people that for some reason has an intense concentration of guitar and instrument stores.  Paxtang is taken from “Peshtenk”, an English word which means “still waters”, although which still waters it was named for, we don’t know.  New Cumberland hosts a notable apple fest each year despite being relatively far from where the apples grow.  If one were to travel from each of these communities into the neighboring ones, you would notice small but not insignificant changes in elevation, a tangled network of water tributaries, bulbous outcroppings of sedimentary rock, and a collection of wildlife that includes the brown bear, the white tailed deer, the timber rattlesnake, and the turkey vulture.

All of these towns, and Harrisburg and the almost-mighty Susquehanna, are inside a valley.  The Cumberland Valley is bounded by mountains from both the Appalachian and Blue Ridge ranges.  All of the mountains are on the small side, as far as mountains go, although there are certain vistas that can be quite striking, especially in instances where the mountain ranges intersect with the river. 

Although the Valley as we know it extends for only about seventy miles (and, at its narrowest, is only twelve miles wide) the Valley is part of a much larger geographic formation in the state of Pennsylvania known as a Ridge and Valley section, a land formation over a hundred miles wide that consists of repeating north-to-south peaks and valleys, formed, again, by the Appalachians and Blue Ridges.  One can imagine (can one?) the difficulty these north-to-south peaks presented (and to a degree still present) to transportation efforts which in this state show a strong east-to-west desire.

In Pennsylvania, to the north of the Ridge and Valleys lies a vast expanse known as the Appalachian Plateau—basically a continually elevated area that looks like a mountain range but is really just high eroded sediment.  This feature extends all the way to the top of the state until it drops off into Lake Erie. 

To the south of our Cumberland Valley are the Triassic Lowlands—a small misnomer as there continue to be drastic changes in elevation throughout, but there is a distinct absence of mountains in this area, and most of the soil and structure is left over from the Triassic Period—some even from Pangea.  The lowlands continue until Pennsylvania’s small Coastal Plain on the bank of the Delaware River—which supports commercial boating into Philadelphia.

However, this is how the modern human being would experience this world: be in your house.  Travel a few feet out of your house into your car.  Turn on your car, your air conditioning (or your heat) and drive to your destination away from your house.  You will do this by navigating streets, interstates and intersections that you know by heart even though they have nothing to do with you or the land in which you live.  Arrive at your destination.  Walk a few feet from your car into your new destination.  And this is how it is everywhere now—not just in Central Pennsylvania, but everywhere.  You can move all over this country and most of the world and have a relatively changeless existence, never knowing where you are, what the place is like, what made it that way.

Sometimes our destination is in a whole separate town from where we started just a few minutes before, but the speed and ease with which we travel makes noticing these changes unnecessary.  Sometimes we drive our cars over rivers and don’t notice.  Sometimes we drive them through tunnels at the bottoms of mountains and bemoan the loss of cell phone service.  Usually we don’t know the name of the mountain we drove under.  We have no idea the struggle society went through to make such seamless east-to-west travel so unbearably easy.  We see large birds gliding in circles, distant in the sky but don’t know what they are—we don’t even know that we could know what they are, that there was a time we would have known, would have been expected to know, would have been shamed by not knowing what the enormous graceful flying meat eaters were called.  We’re unmoored, unhooked, disconnected, floating in a gel of inconsequence, we don’t know and we don’t know and we don’t know.

3.

 

My first year out of high school I went away to college–twenty minutes away. I went to a State School in the town next to us, and even though it was so close to home, my parents wanted me to live on campus so I would have the experience. I didn’t take well to the college experience at first (although later I would take to it much too well); I simply wasn’t making friends or doing the whole “college thing”. I was holing myself up in my room all week, ignoring everybody except the roommate I got stuck with, spending my nights on the phone with my girlfriend back home. On weekends, I went home and worked at McDonalds. And hung out with my real friends. And partied.

One weekend I was at a party at some kid’s parent’s house. I have no idea who the kid was, or any good recollection of who was there. I’m not even sure where it was, except that it was in a guest room above their garage. I spent much of the night at the far end of the rectangular room, beside the ping-pong table (it wasn’t in use; we were too lazy for Beer Pong) on old bench seats from the local Little League field after a dugout renovation some fifteen years prior. I was with three good friends who were still in high school, and we were ignoring most of the party.

Late into the evening, as most of the revelers had left and a dozen or so inebriated folks remained, an overweight, bearded man approached us from across the room. I had noticed him all night because he was so out of place. He was at least 28 years old, and a real Red State sort of guy. He wore a camouflage baseball cap and a red flannel shirt, and not the kind of flannel that was so popular in those days: this was the kind of flannel you wore so you could do physical labor in the cold, and it was really ugly. His voice was a thick drawl, thicker than a Pennsylvania redneck; this guy was from the South. This wasn’t a Redneck party, and it wasn’t a 28-year-old party either. In fact, it was a high school party. Even I was a little old for this party. This guy was a sore thumb.

He squeezed his way past the ping pong table and stood before us. I got ready to stand and shake his hand, introduce myself, ask him what the hell he was doing there. But before I could stand all the way he says this: “I know what you guys are.”

We all sort of chuckled, waiting for the punchline or explanation. One of us said, “What are we?”

“Fags. You’re fags, and I hate fags.”

This was shocking. It was shocking because, firstly, we were all raised rather liberal kids, by parents who thought just about everybody was OK and that everybody should be treated OK. Which is not to say that I never uttered the word fag, but we were all misguided youth who thought it was OK to slur if you didn’t mean it in your heart. And this guy obviously meant it in his heart, which was disturbing. Secondly, it shocked us because we were all rather straight, and anyone who had actually observed us throughout the party would have known that. Red Flannel’s statement clearly confused us.

We tried at first to convince him. The hostess of the party had slept with one of my friends, and an ex-girlfriend of mine was also present. We called them over to testify. But the more we tried to convince him, the angrier he got. He started to raise his voice, he started calling us more and varied names (it doesn’t take a genius, after the fact, to realize that this man was quite clearly struggling with his own hidden homosexuality, and his probable attraction to at least one of us. I wish I’d have realized it at the time; things may have ended differently). It didn’t take long for the remaining partiers to flock around us. The hostess and her friends stepped between the man and us. Of course, as soon as they took up that “we’re-stopping-a-fight” position, he took their cue and began to threaten all four of us with physical harm.

While it is true that this man could not have beaten up all four of us, he would have created one hell of a mess and more than a little pain by trying.

The ruckus lasted the better part of an hour, with Red Flannel screaming at us, everyone standing between us, the four of us on one side of the room bewildered. This variety of event didn’t happen to us. We didn’t get in fights, nor had we ever had to get out of a fight, and this made it difficult for us to remain the coolest cats in the room. It was too bizarre of a situation to know what to do. Everyone was now imploring the Red Flannel to leave. At one point, someone suggested that we leave, but Red Flannel made it clear that he would not let that happen.

Finally and somehow, the man left. Everyone breathed a sigh of relief. Some people laughed, some stalked around, pacing out their anger, muttering about how he had ruined an otherwise chill party. The hostess was afraid the neighbors had heard the noise and would tell the parents.

This idyll lasted only briefly, as perhaps ten minutes after he left, someone reported that he had pulled his truck up to the stairs leading down from the garage apartment–the only way out. His truck was idling. He had his parking lights on, and the glow of a cigarette could be seen behind the wheel. We let out a collective groan. We waited. Fifteen minutes later, he was still there. Our hostess was elected to go down and talk to him.

She returned moments later with the grim news: he wasn’t leaving until the fags left, and when the fags left, he was gonna kick the fag’s asses.

Suddenly and strangely the tone started to shift; although no one would say it, people were clearly beginning to resent us, and somehow blame us. With the Red Flannel no longer present to directly blame, the party was still ruined and there we were. We were quite clearly now blamed, having done absolutely nothing. Us “fags” sat ostracized in a corner while Hostess and Friends tried to figure out what to do. Do they call the cops? Do we wait it out? And somewhere in their subconscious–in that Lord of the Flies part of the brain–I know they had a third option: do we sacrifice them?

The uncertainty seemed to last forever, but in reality it was only about half an hour. The tension in the room was broken by a frightening smash, followed by even louder splintering and cracking noises. Everyone ran to the door, the gray dawn sky and birdsong of the morning shocking us all. And then even more shock, as we saw the Red Flannel’s taillights driving away, faster than a gunshot down the curvy country road, and directly below us the shattered remnants of the wooden steps leading down from the room we were in. He had smashed into them with his truck, rendering most of the lower half useless lumber, and severing the top half from its landing. The top half of the stairs now hung from the building by a few weakened planks, swinging slowly in decreasing circles.

Three days later, the property damage was listed officially as the work of a hit-and-run driver, who was never caught.

 

4.

 

 

A man turns a forty-year-old black plastic knob on his forty-year-old faded white kitchen stove in Pennsport, Philadelphia.  Some mechanism inside the machine clicks repeatedly, while nothing appears to happen.  Then suddenly a small, blue flame appears below the ancient burner plate.  A man has turned a knob and a flame has quietly and simply come out of the machine.  The man will put a metal pot overtop of the flame, add water to the pot as well as other human food products and create a meal suitable to his human palette, all made possible by that quiet little simple flame.  For this service the man will pay about $30 a month, made out on paper checks and dropped in blue mailboxes.  The man does all this, and eats his food, and pays the people for their services, but he has no idea what is happening, how any of it happens.  In fact, he has such an absence of knowledge about it all, he doesn’t realize he knows next to nothing.

Outside the man’s house, if one were to travel mostly south, but a little east, for just a few miles—really just about a mile and a half, you would encounter Passyunk Avenue, a street that cuts unexpectedly diagonally across the city’s otherwise quite simple and helpful grid pattern.  Turning left onto Passyunk Avenue, you would immediately be confronted by a large but not imposing bridge, what is known in bridge parlance as a double-leaf bascule bridge, which is fancy terminology for a drawbridge, but one that has two moveable sections instead of one.  The Passyunk Avenue Bridge, as it is called, was completed in 1983 and is made almost entirely of steel and concrete, although the pedestrian walkways on either side have sections made of cast iron.  The bridge crosses the Schuylkill River, the smaller of the two rivers that border Philadelphia, but alas, like even the smallest river, we still need a bridge to cross it.  The Passyunk Avenue Bridge had to be built as a double-leaf bascule bridge to accommodate the heavy amount of shipping traffic that passes through the area due to the proximity of the Philadelphia Gas Works.

The Gas Works covers a sprawling hundred acres just outside of the city.  This treeless, brown stretch of flatland right beside the Passyunk Avenue Bridge and sidling the muddy shores of the Schuylkill is a mostly ignored eyesore, one motorists tend to not notice that they don’t even notice it.  The long wide expanse is brown dotted with yellows and reds, criss-crossed by pipes of all sizes, with seemingly-random outcroppings of unidentifiable structures, metal winged Eiffels growing out of the mud.  The flat mechanical carnage stretches as far as the eye can see, until it hits the Philadelphia city skyline; a striking vista indeed.

Most of these multi-colored pipes contain natural gas, which in turn is a “fossil fuel”, which is exactly what it sounds like.  Energy we obtain from extraordinarily old things, which in turn got their energy, during their day, from our sun, which is still around.  We dig them up and squeeze our sun’s energy back out of them, thousands and thousands of years later.  The Philadelphia Gas Works doesn’t talk much about where it gets its gas, but for the most part, it isn’t drilled here, although it certainly has been.  Now it is mostly shipped here in those huge boats that go under the Passyunk Avenue Bridge.  But see, here’s where it gets interesting: this energy from the sun was being stored in all these old plants and animals for eons under the ground.  Then we found it (probably in what is known as the Marcellus Shale) and we went to great lengths to get it out of there.  We’ve got to bust open the rocks that it is in, then we’ve got to shore up the cavity we created in the ground so that the gas stays there until we can get it.  Then we have to remove all the impurities from it, so it can be used for things like cooking macaroni and cheese.  These impurities include water; gotta get all the water and other gunk outta there.  But see, if you’re trying to transport natural gas very far, it’s pretty inconvenient to do it in a gas form.  If you can’t get it there in a pipeline (those pipelines only go so far) and you have to send it in, say, a boat, you have to now liquefy the gas.  So we bust up the ground to get it out, then we turn it into liquid and put it in a boat.  We do that by making the gas very cold.  Now this boat chug-a-lugs down the Schuylkill to the Philadelphia Gas Works and huge pipes are hooked up to the belly of the boat and all the really cold liquid gas is pumped into huge tanks.  Then there are other pipes that go from those huge tanks to what the Philadelphia Gas Works really are: the regasification plant.  We warm it back up and make it a gas again.  Then we shoot that gas out into a series of progressively smaller pipes that stretch out in grids that sometimes cover hundreds of miles, until they are in really little pipes that, believe it or not, are actually connected to your house! Then somebody who drops $30 checks into the mail every month decides they want to cook a stew, or maybe do some laundry.  And miraculously, the little blue flame shoots out.

Now this man standing here in Pennsport, he doesn’t know any of this.  And if you were to start telling him about it, he may interrupt you and ask you why it should matter to him.  After all, he’s got his gas, he pays his bill, and everyone doesn’t have to know everything, right?  That’s why there are specialists.  But if you started asking him other questions, about other parts of the city and world around him, you and he might find he continues to know next to nothing about his environment.

Why are the sidewalks in his neighborhood a certain width?  And different widths in other neighborhoods?  Why are the blocks in his neighborhood so long?  Why are they shorter elsewhere? How might these seemingly small details affect his quality of living?  Ask this man what he knows about train traffic through the city, or the history of invasive plant species in Philadelphia.  He doesn’t know, he doesn’t know, and he doesn’t care.  He doesn’t see why he should.  He is content to go to work and come back home and play with his things but the larger scope of the world and environment he lives in are completely lost to him; furthermore there is no compelling reason for him to change this.

This is the exact same thing that’s been said about kids in the country for a generation now, that they’ve lost touch with their environment.  There isn’t that big of a difference between living in the country and living in the city.  In rural areas people have become disconnected from the literal environment, in the cities it is our environment we’ve lost, but it’s all part of the same big moving parts.

In the country, there’s a difference between wildness and wilderness.  Wilderness is what people settle for now when they think they are seeing nature.  They walk on well-worn paths, drive their cars through parks, take tours.  That’s wilderness, but there’s nothing wild about it.  Wildness is self-willed, autonomous, self-organized.  It is the opposite of controlled.  It exists on all sorts of scales.  You can see wildness in the movement of glaciers, or in the star-forming regions of the Orion Nebula.  Wildness is everywhere.  It starts with microscopic particles and it goes more than 13 billion light-years into the cosmos.  It’s in the soil and in the air, it’s on our hands, in our immune systems, in our lungs.  We breathe and wildness comes in—we can’t control it.  And yet, nowadays, almost nobody wants anything to do with that aspect of the world, the real, the wild aspect.  You can live in San Francisco, ride a Google bus to work, stare at a screen, come home, stare at a screen, repeat repeat repeat and never see an ounce of wildness at any scale, but do you know how close whales live to San Francisco?  And giant Redwoods?  There is wildness there to be seen, not just the microbes in your lungs, but at a scale that can impress a human, but still it is screen screen screen, nobody glancing around them.  We are hive creatures now, far more so than in generations past, fiercely attached to our social network, which has become part of our identity.  Nature is a movie that goes by outside the car window.  And along with nature, the real world, the knowledge of the functions of the real world.

In the city, bureaucracy and layers of time and history stand in for the wildness that (only seemingly) gets lost in a metropolis.  Instead of wondering about falcons and sediment layers we can instead pick apart the mystifying nature of zoning ordinances, inter-departmental transportation squabbles, and the righteousness of green space allocation.  But we don’t, almost nobody does.  So it is that no matter where we live, we’re just lost in a machine, or parts in a machine, not knowing what function we serve, not knowing where the machine is going, what we’re really doing.  Turning on switches and turning knobs, putting on clothes we know nothing about to walk to stores we don’t remotely understand, living lives blindly, blindly, trusting in some overarching system to make sure we all get to some kind of finish line on time.

The man in Pennsport stands in front of his stove and makes a delicious meal overtop of his blue flame, eats it and loves it and gets a full belly while watching television, the screen’s glow not all that different from that blue flame, wherever it comes from.

 

 5.

 

In the winter, Erie, Pennsylvania is a cold, desolate, sometimes dangerous place. It’s not the ideal place to live alone with no friends or relatives within a five-hour drive of you. It snows almost all the damn time, and it’s so cold, and the wind just races across the lake, whether it’s the summer or the winter. Whether the lake is frozen or open, it is seven miles wide, and there is nothing to stop the wind. On one particular winter morning, I rose to an early alarm clock, to work the morning shift at the restaurant where I was a manager. Our day started pretty early, and it’s always hard to get up, but especially when it’s dark outside, and the wind howls like a coyote, and you know there’s snow out there, and maybe more on the way, and maybe more falling even right then. I crawled out of bed, put on my work outfit, poked my head through the blinds, and started my car with my remote start, one of my most beloved modern amenities. Five minutes later I was down there to hop in, excited about the warm inside of my car. It had snowed the night before, but not a whole lot, maybe four or five inches, which isn’t very much when you’re living in Erie. But it was just one of those things, one of those moments where your car and the tires are sitting just right, or just wrong, and despite the fact that you see no perfect reason why, your car is stuck. I had not left myself a whole lot of extra time to get to work, and I was in quite a bind. Being late is sometimes easier than others in that line of work, and I can’t remember the circumstances now, but I do know that I absolutely had to be there on time that day, and my car being stuck put me in a moment of desperation. With nobody to call – not even any small friends or acquaintances, really nobody that I knew – I wasn’t sure how to proceed. I was out of my car, looking all around it, shoveling the snow out from the tires as best I could, trying to rock it a little bit. All the small things one can do by yourself to get your car unstuck, but there’s only so much of that. Then, in the predawn darkness I saw approaching a young man walking down the center of the street that I lived on. I recognized the speed with which he walked and the direction he was going as a man heading to catch a bus. Yes, there were buses, but I had never even looked into that. As he came to pass me I walked onto the street, and sent to him, “Hey man! Hi!  Hey man, excuse me!  I’m in a real bind here, my car is stuck and I really need to get to work.  I’m really screwed here.  Can you help me push it out?”

He stood still and wooden, looking at me through my pleading screed.  After a pause, he said, “But, see, I’m on the way to catch my bus to go to work myself.  What if this makes me late?”

This was one of those very touchy moments in life for me.  I absolutely needed this guy to help me.  But he had a point and I knew it.  Why should he be late to work simply so I could be on time?  I was sure if he helped me, the car could come out quickly and we’d both be on time, but time was crunched so badly, there wasn’t even the moment needed to explain this.  I analyzed my chances, as well as the look of the kid, and rolled the dice.  I said this:

“That’s a chance you’ll just have to take.”

 

6.

Sometimes when driving, or riding the train, or walking around in some park, I will try to get an image in my head of what the land around me would have looked like four hundred years ago.  The same hills, the same landscape, but in my mind I’ll cover it in nothing and wonder what it was like to be the first person to chance upon it.  This is always useless to me.  There is so much wonder in this world, but I always have trouble getting past our influence, our disasters and clumsy systems.  And even in those places where there is some real beauty, like over at Bartram’s Gardens, or up on Presque Isle, or down the road on the Appalachian Trail, all I have to do is take one look at the skyline in the distance, or the cement path I’m walking on, or hear the sound of the Honda hatchback blaring through the trees, and I am out of the tenuous illusion and coldly back in reality.

We are constantly tethered to some safety line.  There is always a lantern, or a map, or a screen, or a cell phone.  These things guarantee that whatever experience we’re having is just an attempt at connecting with something foreign and old, that it’s not real, no matter how real it looks.  We’ve sketched out a new world over the old, and they are in two separate universes; the old is lost despite the remnants we see of it every day.  If properly prepared, one could live entire decades indoors, in a world of their own creation.

Before I had a family I used to stay indoors for a day or two at a time, talking to no one and doing nothing of value.  Once I did go outside after a long stretch like that, it still felt fake, like some slide in front of my eyes.  At a certain point, I’d have to tell myself, This is actually real and I am actually here, that dog or building or mountain range in the distance is a real thing inhabiting the same space that I am.  I think that must be a very modern sensation, that of having to convince oneself of reality.

7.

 

 

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. A few nights ago I walked home through the city, listening to my music in my headphones, stopping to read the menu in a restaurant hoping there were vegetarian options. One moment I’m vehemently opposed to sports, the next I’m at an NFL game.

A month or so ago, I 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 five 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 overcome with a strange sensation. When I settled into the passenger seat I 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.

 

8.

 

Somewhere everywhere bakers are opening up their shops. The tall commercial ovens click on with whirrs of electricity and gas. The little rooms get stifling and smell of yeast and flour. Today will be a ten or twelve hour shift. They will sweat through their white aprons and go home to unread newspapers. In other cities police officers are rolling out of bed, pulling their crisp uniforms on, fastening the large utility belt in the darkness of their century-old foyer while their family sleeps. The sun peeks over the rooftops and flowers open their petals in their pots along the sides of buildings. Third graders are walking to school wearing raincoats and backpacks and talking about pop singers. They have cell phones and they look up videos as they walk. The sunlight touches their necks and their tiny hairs stand up but nobody notices. A woman who works in a city newsstand arrives to open for the day. She enters through a side door and is alone in the tiny building, darkened still except for a small crack in the still-unopened front window where the light gets in. After taking her coat off, she walks outside, fumbles with the frigid padlock until finally the metal window slides open. It’s the loudest noise on the street yet this morning. Dozens of people are stepping onto an escalator. They avoid eye contact, they look at their phones, they pretend to be in a hurry. They wait on platforms, in hangars, on benches, in bus shelters, lines for elevators, by curbs for cabs, people are waiting. A man alone in a movie theater remembers an ex-lover while watching the Coming Attractions. For a moment he can’t remember what movie he came to see. At a grocery store a woman tries to decide which peach is best for her to buy and in the process she ruins five peaches. Now she can’t even remember if she planned on buying peaches today, and for a moment she wonders how there are this many peaches in the grocery store in the middle of winter, and she tries to recall if she’s ever seen a peach tree, or picked a peach, but she can’t remember, can’t remember, and now she’s thinking of her son away in college but he doesn’t like peaches either. All everywhere people are stuck at traffic signals on streets they don’t know the names of. They pass the minutes listening to talk radio coming from signals they don’t understand, from places they’ve never been, spoken by people they’ll never know. Their internal combustion engines idle beneath them-the sparks and fuel commingling to create a low-key contained continuous explosion. The light turns green and they’re off again to someplace else. An elderly man on a scaffolding nestled against a house hammers nails into shingling, and he will do it all day, all day, and more tomorrow. Grown people are everywhere furiously scribbling notes and typing e-mails and hanging Post-Its and setting reminders—there are so many things to do and to say and remember. A family of four is selling fresh fish in tables filled with ice by the side of the street. The kids should be in school but nobody seems to notice or think to say anything. The fish’s eyes are glassy and fogged up but people still buy them anyway, will still cook and eat them anyway, these hundreds of miles from the ocean. Mail is dropped through slots in doors. Squirrels pause on telephone wires, turning nuts around rapidly in their tiny hands. Landline phones ring in empty rooms and the neighbors can hear it, they can hear it, but they just have to put up with it. Waterfalls just keep insistently sliding over the cliffs, pounding the complacent ground beneath them and digging deeper and deeper holes. Somewhere deep, magma moves, hisses, is still. The tectonic plates are pushing the ground under our feet up into new mountains right now, right now, as we get onto this escalator, it is happening, the earth is forming new things beneath us right now as we ride the escalator, looking at our phones, it always has been doing this and it won’t stop until the sun, dying, swallows the whole planet. But smile anyway, you damned fools, and feel the hairs on your neck stand up in the morning sun, because there is nothing else, nothing else at all.

 

 

 

 

Dance

In all these tiny useless shops, with all this
torn and tattered furniture and too-small coats and
half-working vacuum cleaners, I have never come across
a velvety orangeish curtain like the one we hung
in the living room on Big Spring Avenue; it was
wide and garish like a Lady Pope’s vestments
and it kept the heat from pouring down between the
hardwood floor slats into the musty dirt basement;
likewise, in none of these big city shops have I ever
danced around with a cocker spaniel like I did
with ours–Cocoa–one bright Saturday morning
when I was all alone with her.  I did the funny dance I
only ever did with Cocoa, one hand in my armpit,
jumping on one foot, the sound of my skin half-drum,
half-fart, the world at last and for a moment a perfect
sun-filled room, a dappled meadow, Cocoa just
staring with all-black eyes, shimmying just to
get out of my way, me whirling and singing a song
I can’t recall, then laughing and laughing in the
sun beaming through the windows, falling down
with her, as if we were dying, as if we could
never stop–in 1984, in Newville Pennsylvania–
beautiful strange small-town Newville,
home of Laughlin Mill and the Bulldogs–
a hundred miles and thirty years away from
this dingy city thrift store I stand in, remembering
the orangey curtain and the drafty floors and the
sweet temperamental dog so confused with her
round voids of eyes, she’s gone now, so gone even
her dust is gone, oh giant universe, oh wild universe!

Snow Angels in the High Grass

Once, many moons ago, I spent a week living on the couch of some people I barely knew in a small town I had never spent much time in, with too little money and nothing to slow a march of days that seemed to speed by while also being interminably long.  It was September, and each morning and late afternoon a wind would crawl down from the sloping Appalachians and swirl through the wide valley, sifting and reshaping the clouds.  By early afternoon, the sun would begin to set, the lights of distant truck stops making shadows of the nearby hills.

I spent much of the week walking through the unfamiliar neighboorhood, trying to imagine what it would be like to make a life there, behind that fence, in that shed, down that crumbling walkway.  This wasn’t an unusual pursuit, since at the time I was a stranger to adult life everywhere I went, no matter where I laid my head at night.

I had come to this temporary situation after failing to please the last people I had been staying with, and I had come to those folks after failing to please the people before them.  I was now occupying one corner of a dingy living room in a second story efficiency that smelled like dogs despite there being no dogs.  I followed the kind of schedule only the truly underemployed or severely addicted can devise.  Each morning, I would walk to the corner greasy diner that had become my office.  In the evenings I would wander to the pond on the outskirts of town and read. In the evenings I’d sit in the silent dark and write down individual titles to my sleeping dreams from the night before, scribbling details on the insides of book covers and the backs of ATM receipts.

The days came and went like half-remembered tremors.  It got uncharacteristically warm for a few days.  I laid down in the thigh-high grass in a farmer’s field one afternoon and pretended to make a snow angel, but nothing happened.  I remember the buzzing of the insects, and the precise smell, and the feel of the heat on my face which made my outside feel the opposite of my inside, which was dark, frigid, and dying.

It would be interesting, if someone were to make a movie about my life, if they just made it of this single, listless, seamlessly depressing week, leaving the viewer to wonder what could possibly have come before, and be anxious for what was to come after, and then the credits roll, and they never know.  Just leave them with the image of this drunk, solitary, silent 22-year-old, making snow angels in the high grass.

Where Did You Go, Where Have You Been?

Where did you go, the you that was there before?  The you that I tried so hard to be like?  You’ve settled in now, haven’t you?  Settled in for weekdays, Pampers, “the grind”.  You’ve all-but disappeared into it.  And that’s fine.  So have I, in my own way.  I look at the cubicle-dwellers, the 9-to-5ers, the mortgagers with judgment.  I judge them for a life spent in the cattle chute, but I’m the same, in my own way.  I wake up to an alarm five days a week, dash my utility bills off monthly in tidy little envelopes, take extra long showers and even bubble baths to de-stress from the rigors of a world I can’t even begin to understand.  I’m in the grind, too, in my own version of a cattle chute.  You were beautiful once, even more than you are now, supple like sand underfoot right after the wave withdraws, and I’ve never been a model but I had that nice little six-pack of abs and that 90s-era skater hair.  Who could forget the smell of your own hair in my face, your feet akimbo in the air.  We must have been dank and gorgeous like John Sloan’s Wet Night on the Bowery, everything akimbo in the air and musty and frivolous.  But who could look back and want that time again?  There was so much pain and we didn’t know a damn thing.  Who wants to not know a damn thing?  But then we wake up in this world, in this present-tense, and wonder where our beauty escaped to.  How did it siphon off?  We’re always so safe here, so comfortable.  When was the last time you felt real danger?  It is important to feel real danger.  What proof have you that you are alive?  What new horizon can you actually imagine, aside from the top of your stairs, or the local pizza parlor?  Dammit we were gorgeous but now it’s just about not forgetting umbrellas and digging out of debt.  Who ever heard of digging out of debt?  Does the field mouse understand what an interest rate is?  How about the barn owl, how much does it know about 401(k)’s?  What in the world is going on here?  What does any of this have to do with living?  Remember once, you and I were racing each other back and forth through my parents’ front yard–I guess it would have been my front yard, then, too.  And it kept bothering me when you would beat me because I was young and an idiot and full of the uncertainty of a scared animal.  I hated that you beat me again and again but I tried not to show it.  Then we laid in the grass and kissed deeply and for a long time, everything about our bodies sweet like warm milk just out of a cow’s insides.  Then we laid there and looked into the blazing-bright sky and, as young people are known to do, talked about the clouds, and what they looked like, and what held them there.  And then I asked you, Am I the funniest person you know?  I needed you to say yes to that, without any pause, but you didn’t say yes, you were honest, and it killed me inside.  Oh to be that young when such a small thing mattered so much.  Who wouldn’t love to hear, nowadays, near the midpoint of things, that you were the third funniest person you had ever met.  What a compliment that seems now!  These bits of personal fire are rare now, rare like two sweet bodies laying in the country grass, rare like paid-off debt.  Down the chute, down the chute, we all just keep going down the chute.  And what can we do?  Try and hop off?  What are the options?  Become a vagabond, wander the cities and towns, begging for whatever work there is and move on, like Richard Kimble searching for that one-armed man?  Or move to some commune–assuming they still exist–and paint or grow potatoes but also share your washcloth and help raise other peoples’ bratty kids?  No thanks.  The cattle chute’s the only way to go and still have your own place to poop every day, and there are so few comforts in this animal life as it is, you’ve got to keep the ones you’re able to find.  So slide, slide, slide we will.  But damn if one doesn’t miss the days before you knew you were on the cattle chute, the days with your hair in my face, where did you go, where have you been?

Speed Dial

Just a few minutes ago, I went into my basement searching for a specific book which I had not heretofore been keeping upstairs.  I had no idea where it was.  While searching for it, I opened a bunch of boxes that I probably hadn’t properly explored in years…stuff I just keep lugging with me from move to move.  In one, I came across an old cigar box that I had entirely forgotten about.  This is it:

 

This box is the earliest version of boxes I have today, in which I keep just about everything…tickets, programs, invitations, etc.  Well there were things in this cigar box that just blew me away!  Things I have ZERO memory of keeping, and I have no idea what made me think of keeping them at the time, but now they are incredible to see…old paychecks, school class schedules, appointment cards, etc. (And, paul, I found the ticket stubs to the two Seven Mary Three shows we saw together!)  Anyway, most of it will be only interesting to me, but I might post some of it here from time to time, as it suits me.  But this one thing seemed worth posting now.  Here is the little card that was on the phone in my bedroom in high school that showed what I had set as speed dials…I couldn’t help but post this and then tag the people who appear on it (those who I am in contact with on Facebook)…what an interesting snapshot of an era for me.  And how interesting that I had the movies on speed dial even then (it’s hard to read, but #8 says “Movies”) And my grandma? (number “zero” says “Gram A.”)

When Time Glides Up Next To You

The quality of the air in the house right now reminds me of something distinct, something almost-knowable, lost to years or almost lost, right there on the edge of words, and as I’m about to give up and turn from this, it comes to me.  It is waking up in the early morning hours to leave with my family for vacation.  This event I have not remembered for many years.  We used to wake up very early in the mornings for our yearly trips to the beach.  How early we woke up, I can no longer be sure.  It was dark out.  Waking up when it is still dark out becomes, of course, a matter of regularity in adult life, but as a child this seems like as early as is humanly possible.  It seemed we must have been the only people awake at all in the whole of the world.

I have no specific memories of these once-yearly times.  No dialogue or mental snapshots, just a feeling, a sensation, bursts of color and light and the smell of my sister’s bedroom which was next door to mine and the green of the bathroom walls and the still-new taste of toothpaste and the sound of stillness.  These are the only times—or at least some of the only times—our whole family is together at this time of day, and during which we are all freshly awoken and of unified purpose, and there is no television, or radio, just some groggy chatter, last minute suitcase-sitting-on, blowdryers and maybe the smell of a curling iron.  We are excited to leave for vacation but we are tired.

I do not know why the air and sound in my house just now should remind me so clearly of these seemingly fleeting moments, or why they should seem suddenly laden with importance, but, there it is.  Again and again I can sense those moments in that old yellow house as if they were right here with me, hiding around a corner, or tucked into one of these seconds, hiding in the air—as though time had been folded like a dog-eared page in a book and one of those early vacation mornings were pressed right up against me, just waiting for me to leap across the page right back into it.

Someday You Won’t Feel Anything At All About Anything

I had never had to break up with a girl before.  I had been slow in figuring them out–or they had been slow in figuring me out.  Either way, I had never imagined that once I actually had a girlfriend (and one who let me have sex with her, at that!) that I would ever do any breaking up with her.  I figured I’d always be so happy just to put my hand on a boob, or my tongue in a mouth, that the first one who agreed to it would be enough forever.

It was this kind of thinking that kept me with my first “real” girlfriend for 3 years, despite the fact that we were obviously as mismatched as possible.  Looking back on it now, I can’t even remember what we must have talked about.  We did spend a lot of time together, and I have many memories that are not unpleasant (and more than a few that are unpleasant).  Three years is a long time, even when you spend 8 hours a day in school.  So there was a lot of shared history by the time I realized I had to break up with her–but I still don’t know what we talked about.  (not to mention we were each other’s first everything, if you get my drift.)

But I did realize, eventually, that we were a bad fit.  I probably realized this because having been with her for three years, I had finally learned a bit about women and was at that point recieving some other very tempting offers from girls a bit more like me.  I spent weeks agonizing over how to break up with her.  Have you ever had teenage sex with a girl whispering I love you in your ear, knowing full well you are going to break up with her soon?  Well, it’s not as fun as it sounds.

I don’t remember much about the day I did it.  I remember it was in my bedroom, sitting on the bed, and I said it’s time for us to part ways.  It did not go well.  She cried and I was stoic.  I drove her home that night and it was a long drive.  When I got back home, my dad was in the living room watching TV.  I sat on the ottoman and made some small talk as though nothing had happened.  Then I tried to mention off-hand I broke up with her but my voice cracked and a tear jumped into my eye.  It was so hard, I said, as I started crying for real.

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

Two and a half years earlier….

The greatest thing about finally having a girlfriend was it finally gave me reasons and methods to be some sort of badass.

My friend Mike (I haven’t changed his name because everybody is named Mike) was dating her best friend, so we were a little group, the four of us, double dating, driving to and from school together, the whole bit.

The biggest problem in Mike and I’s lives, however, was that we were still virgins, all four of us.  I doubt it was such a problem for the girls, but it devastated Mike and I daily.  Then one day at school, the girls announced to us that tonight would be “the night”.  My girlfriend would be staying at Mike’s girlfriend’s house for the night.  This house was reachable by both my house and Mike’s house by bicycle (Mike and I were both driving by this time, but not our own cars, and we had curfews that missing cars would belie), and so it was agreed that Mike and I would both bike to the house in the middle of the night and somehow or other, all four of us would lose our virginities.

Mike and I made our own specific plans.  We chose a good spot about halfway between our own houses where we’d meet up on the bikes at precisely midnight and then go the rest of the way together.

Around 11pm, I opened my bedroom window, climbed out and walked around the house to where I’d laid my bike that evening, so I didn’t have to get it out of the garage.

Biking down country roads, alone, at night, in the silence that accompanies said action, is fucking scary.

It was a longer ride than it seemed in my mind to get to the meeting spot.  Since my family had moved out to the country a few years before, I hadn’t done an extensive amount of biking.  I grew up in the small town of Newville, where everything you could imagine was reachable by bicycle.  My brain was not equipped to deal in country miles.  After what seemed hours, I finally arrived at the spot.  No Mike.  I didn’t have a watch (and no, you bastards, this is way before cell phones) so I waited.  I checked the drainage ditches along the sides of the road in case he was laying there, hiding from passing cars (in the country when you’re a teenager, you somehow assume all passing cars are somehow going to tell your parents or the cops that you’re out late), but he wasn’t there.  I waited what I can only say was “a long time”, but I couldn’t tell how long.  It felt like at least an hour.  I couldn’t call out for him, because we had chosen a spot right in front of a few houses.

The thought of biking all the way to Mike’s girlfriend’s house–which I just now understood was really far away–all by myself just seemed like too big of a task.  I assumed he’d missed me, too, and gone on ahead, but if he hadn’t, I’d show up alone, and it would be awkward.  I got on my bike and rode home, climbed into bed sad that I was still a virgin, but somehow relieved that I hadn’t had to go through with the plan.

The next day, Mike told me he’d been hiding in some grass alongside the road and that he never saw or heard me.  It didn’t occur to me until years later that he’d been absolutely lying and he’d never even left his house that night.  Lord knows if the girls were even waiting up for us.

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

One year after the bicycle night…

Her and I had been driving for hours in what seemed like a circle.  Why I even ever thought the two of us could navigate Philadelphia was a mystery to me.  I didn’t even bring a map, I kept thinking.  If there’s one thing I learned about traveling from my parents, it was to always bring a map.  Did I somehow think we were adults who could do things like drive around cities?  What a fool.

I didn’t want to fight.  I had seen couples who got lost start fighting and it always seemed foolish.  It accomplished nothing.  And so the more tense we got, the more calm I forced my exterior to appear, and the more I love yous I said, and before I knew what hit me, there was the sign for the Turnpike–always a surefire way home.

Once safely on the Turnpike, after smoking a few relaxing cigarettes, she turned and said Seth, you’re a good man.  It was the first time anybody had ever said that to me, and I’ll never forget it.

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

One year after the Philadelphia trip…

It was a Friday night.  I remember that for certain because we were coming from a high school football game (she was a cheerleader, so I attended every single game, and carried all her gear to my car afterward.  This provides a serious high for any teenage boy, to be seen carrying his prominent cheerleader girlfriend’s things to his car after a game).  It was October and she wanted to go to the “haunted house” that is put on in Newville every October, and which is walking distance from the football field.

I did not want to go.

I’d be in my mid-twenties before I even started watching horror movies, and even now I don’t like things like “haunted houses”–though I do now love horror films.

Back then, I was scared of everything but trying my best to learn how to hide it.  This is Central Pennsylvania, home of tall corn, taller trucks, Joe Montana, and Three Mile Island.  Five-foot-tall men who scare easily are not the preferred type, and I knew that, and so was consistently doing things like this that every fiber of my being told me to turn from.

We got in line for the haunted house.  I remember she was still in her cheerleading uniform which I–surprise–found very sexy, even after 2 years of having sex with her while she wore the damn thing every Friday night during football season (and after home basketball games, too).  It’s amazing how long a 17 year old boy can stay transfixed on a detail.  So even then, that night, I tried to stay transfixed on the uniform instead of what I assumed would be the bone chilling terror inside the haunted house.

She noticed how I was looking at her and backed me against a wall, slid her hand down my pants.  She wanted to get me off right there, in line!

But I wasn’t aroused.  After a minute or two of attempting to get me going, she asked what was wrong.

“I’m just a little…scared,” I said.

“Of the haunted house?” she asked.

“Yep.  Just a little.”

She withdrew her hand from my pants and, looking me square in the eyes, said You pussy.

That’s another thing she said to me that I’ll never forget.

 

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

Eleven years after the haunted house…

i was out shopping about a week ago with a close close female friend of mine i didn’t need anything we weren’t shopping for me we were shopping for her so of course it stands to reason we were spending alot of if not most of our time in clothing stores i like shopping for clothes with women at least if it’s a woman i like i like to be just honest enough that they believe me about how things look on them and besides if i’m spending a day shopping with a woman chances are i find her deliriously attractive to begin with and have on immense blinders and truly think everything looks good on her anyway so i rarely get bored while clothes shopping with women except for when they are a woman who takes forever trying clothes on and this particular woman friend of mine happens to be the type who takes forever trying clothes on so about two hours into the shopping excursion while she is in a fitting room i wandered out into the mall and spent about five minutes looking at this kiosk that was all about some homeschooling-over-the-internet thing and they had a nice display and i picked up some of the books children’s books and educational books and felt the heft of them paged through smelling the smell of them remembering when i thought books were like shiny little stars with worlds in them like ameoba in a toad’s pee-puddle and i would feel the pages the coarse roughhewn pages like they were an heirloom quilt and when i had had my fill of standing at the kiosk reminiscing i wandered back into the store and halfway to the back i saw her.  Not the friend i was there shopping with but the first girlfriend the first one ever she still looked like she was 17 although a bit more like a woman now in fact she looked very good–not as good as the friend I was shoppign with but very good nonetheless– and although i immediately turned my head and pretended i hadn’t noticed her it was like i could smell her hair and the minty basement smell of sex with her and could see from a distance the way her lips aren’t lined up right and the sad swing of her braless breasts and i wanted to turn to her from across the store and say ‘i never knew you and you never knew me and that’s pretty much all there ever is to anything but we tried’ and then promptly turn and leave.  but i didn’t.  i meandered around the store at a safe distance so she could see me, so she could remember, too.

 

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

Fourteen years before the shopping trip…

We sat at the back of the bus, my friends and I.  We had finally graduated to that level of bad-assness.  We were the big kids on the back of the bus, though I was of course never “big”, but I had some major seniority on bus #10.

Lately, though, things had been all about our friend John, who had recently become the first of us to lose his virginity.  Each and every bus ride now, for the last week, had been filled with tales he’d tell us about what it was like.  We all wondered what this girl would be like.  John was an athlete and not unpopular, so she must really be something (I’d learn later that John had made up every sexual encounter with the girl; he ended up being a virgin longer than I was).

We were sitting in the school parking lot in the morning, waiting to be let off, when John said There she is, and he tapped on the window as a young girl passed by.  She stopped, grinned ear-to-ear, tapped back on the glass and blew a kiss to John.

That was the first time I ever laid eyes on her, and I remember thinking I was slightly unimpressed.  If only I knew how good she’d look fourteen years later while shopping in a backwater mall.

Soon, Again

Someday I know I’ll just start waking up
at six o’clock in the morning again
and drive to my old high school
bleary-eyed and pissy
and walk unflinchingly into the first classroom
I see, ready to go again.
Or, failing that,
it seems certain
that one day soon the old friends
will drop by and pick me up
and we’ll scurry off the the drive-in theater/pizza shop
to play pool and the juke box and smoke reefer
for a few blissful hours;
or, failing that,
it seems certain
any day now some pals from way back
will knock petitely upon my door
holding a red bouncy kickball
and invite me to the church down the street
which boasts a really large green lawn
upon which we will play a long sweaty muddy game
of kickball, the kind with baseball rules,
except you can throw the ball at the runner.
Or, failing that,
it seems certain
that any time now
I will crawl directly back inside my mother
up the wrong way
and settle down inside the scarred womb
among the sinew and bloody tissue
to once again hear the songs of angels
and the sleep of forever.

My 17th Favorite Song of All-Time

is:

“This is How We Do It” by Montell Jordan

I hear what you’re saying.  You are kind of confused by this one.  Well, so am I!  I have no idea why this song hits my sweet spot so much.  It’s definitely not a song I “identify” with or that means a lot to me personally.  First, it is just extremely catchy and pleasant to my ears.  But that is not usually enough to make me passionate about a song.  It is this song’s link to a very specific time period in my life (late teens) and the things that were happening, and the people I was hanging around with, and the general tenor and tone of my life at the time. These things are all wrapped up in sensory memory with this song.  I’m sure you have songs like this, too.  And although many other songs compete for the title, “This is How We Do It” reigns as the Song of My Youth.

Click here to go to the song’s Last.fm page to stream a clip of the song or watch the full-length official video.

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.

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.

Veil

Those folks who I’ve known only in the post-sobriety portion of my life (which, at this point, is actually the majority of people I interact with daily) often have difficulty imagining me as troubled.  This is not to suggest I live a perfect life or that I’m a paragon of emotional stability, but to all but a handful of my friends and relatives, it’s difficult to imagine me anything other than generally contented most of the time, in a way most people are not  (nevermind my temper, which can be practically elemental under the right circumstances). This leads the folks who have known me nine years or less to occasionally comment doubtfully upon my past as a pillar of depression, substance addiction and general misanthropy.  “I don’t believe it,” they say.  “You’re just so not like that.”

And they’re right.  I’m not.  Not anymore.  The lion’s share of my time, I spend marveling at how unoffensive  existence is.  Granted, I don’t exist on the improbably happy “pink cloud” of early recovery; my happiness is not super-human nor is it impervious to the ups-and-downs of the normal course of human life, but it is certainly a more even-keeled and consistent satisfaction than I witness in most of those around me.  I don’t often think much about it, or question it.  It’s just the way I’ve been since the moment I “put the plug in the jug”, as the old-timers in AA like to say.

Last night, for whatever reason, I had a moment.  Just…a moment.  That somehow clarified or confused my perceptions of happiness and sadness or whatever you want to call these dualities of human existence.  I was working the overnight shift, for just one night, which is always an eclectic combination of emotions and sensations for me.  Waking at dusk, just as the last of the day’s sun fades from view; dressing and primping myself as that evening’s prime-time television shows play in the background; driving to work as the other cars passing the other direction are heading home to their various comforts, and arriving to work as just about everyone else is leaving.  These aren’t all depressing facets; some of them leave me feeling a kind of ownership of the world, like I’m sailing alone on a ship on a vast, empty ocean.  A little bit sad, a little bit amazing, these moments before an overnight shift certainly make me feel different than usual, and perhaps a bit more receptive to epiphanies.

Last night, I left for work half an hour early.  And not on purpose.  By total accident.  I didn’t realize it until I was halfway to work, and by then it was too late to turn back.  But instead of going to work early, I opted to spend half an hour walking aimlessly through the Wal-Mart that is near where I work.

Perhaps it was the unique mood created by the preparations for the overnight shift, but I was not at all emotionally stable when I walked into that Wal-Mart.  Immediately inside the front door, there was a smell.  You know what I mean.  It doesn’t smell like anything you can put your finger on, like wet dog or cantaloupe, but instead, it just smells like your past, like a very specific day or time period or phase of your life that you can’t pinpoint or immediately recall but you know that it makes you feel a certain way and that you had never expected to smell it again and you’re amazed at the amount of feelings and sensations that it brings back.  Well, that is what I encountered immediately upon entering the Wal-Mart; a smell that brought back acutely the absolute immensity of what sadness used to feel like for me.  It was crippling.  I hadn’t even been that happy as I walked into the Wal-Mart, but the difference between what I felt like now and what I had felt like in the days of sadness was tremendous. I quickly was able to discern what the smell was:  stale cigarette smoke in a cheap motel room.  Just what the smell had been doing in the Wal-Mart entryway was certainly a mystery, and it was gone just as quickly as it appeared, but it’s job was done.  I was transported, and I would remain transported.  For years, I’d remembered as an undeniable fact that at some point in my life, I’d been terribly sad, for a long time.  But it had long since ceased to be a feeling I could remember.  Sort of like a war story an old man has told so many times, he no longer remembers the memory, but only remembers past tellings of it.  Now suddenly I felt it again, and not the memory of it, but it.  Not twenty feet into the Wal-Mart, I was looking at merchandise on shelves not as the self-sufficient thirtysomething who loved historical novels and art museums, but the twenty-three year old who couldn’t roll out of bed without a snort of gin, who couldn’t muster up the energy to shave even after he’d been threatened with lost wages if he didn’t just shave once a week, who stunk and was getting stinkier, who was convinced that he didn’t deserve anyone’s love, and he was dying—slowly, methodically, painfully.  The world felt shut off to him, and so now suddenly it felt shut off to me, too.  These Ritz crackers in front of me—such a simple, unimportant item—I couldn’t afford them, and even if I could, they weren’t for me.  They were for people who were fully of this world, fully in the world, full citizens.  I felt like I stunk, like I was unshaven, like I had 5-day-old bender breath and onion armpits, like I was staggering even before I drank, like I was being looked at, watched, judged at every turn, unworthy of even the simplest of life’s luxuries, like bubble bath or RC Cola.  I’d remembered plenty about this era of my life, many times over before, but this pure sensation of human uselessness and dismal despair had been shelved since the last time I truly felt it.  After a minute or two, I managed to push it back out, put it back in the past where it belonged, but it was an intense few minutes, to put it mildly.

For the next twenty minutes, I roamed the Wal-Mart trying to piece together what had happened after I smelled the smell.  Mostly, I was intrigued by the idea that purest happiness and utter despair seemed, for that moment, so close to one another.  Like a thin veil of this material world separated them like a silk curtain.  The curtain was pulled back, and while I remained in the same time and place, one extreme version of me became another, however briefly.  And, I thought, now that I’d witnessed it, I could almost will it into happening again, if I chose, for whatever strange reason a person would choose such a thing.  And to think that we must all be walking around, all the time, right beside that veil, able to peek around it or rip it down if we could just figure out how to.  If you’re sad, just throw back the curtain and be happy.  Or if you’ve been happy as a damn idiot for nine years and need a refresher course on what brought you here in the first place, move the veil aside, smell your bender breath, and be reminded.

Very soon (April 3rd) I’ll be celebrating my ninth sobriety anniversary.  I’d been waiting until the day itself to figure out what I would write (if anything) on the day, but I think now that this entry will stand as my anniversary entry, because those few minutes in Wal-Mart after the smell made me realize that, more than anything, what I celebrate on that day is having traded sadness for happiness.  Pure and simple.  My happiness may not resemble most people’s.  It doesn’t involve spouses or kids or houses (although Cheerio to you if yours does).  My happiness is selfish and aloof and not the type of thing that you make movies about starring Channing Tatum or Reese Witherspoon.  But, to the guy on the other side of that veil, looking at Ritz crackers like they were golden nuggets, it is everything he would have imagined, if he’d even dared.

Serious Boy

Find the dour, serious young me in these shots from my 4th grade school play.

 

Remember Me as a Time of Day

and when you are driving with the windows all all all the way up due to your constant state of coldness, think of me, and how hot I always became, never complaining except for when i did complain, finally.  and when you are looking for a designated outfielder in a game of baseball (played with a tennis ball), think of me and the time I made a stretching arching diving catch in my front yard that was absolute perfection in the glinting sun for a mere moment and only seen by five people.  and when you see those streaks in the sky made from airplanes we could never remember the word for—contrails, it turns out—think of me and the deep, inviting palette of kindest blue behind the lines as us, the kind of us that lasts forever, the kind of us people wave at as we walk past arm in arm, the kind of us that spoons on couches.  and when you hear a man snoring inside his house while you are on the sidewalk outside his house—as happened to us once on a street in Williamsport—think of me, and the kind way we had of making fun of people without judging too much, or resorting to name-calling, or tarnishing our perfection with hateful talk.  and when you see a child trying so hard to cross the street on a skateboard that is too big for him, in weather that is not for skateboarding, remember me, and how we helped him and he looked at us with his chocolate eyes and was so thankful.  think of me then.  and when you look back on your life and think of your friends, remember the way our laughs combined to form a new, third kind of laugh that only we could create—a kind of mega-laugh, and the way it echoed everywhere off everything, as we echo still on a college campus and inside terrible, downtrodden cars.   and when you remember me, please remember me as the bead of tiniest sweat on my brow, hovering, quivering, ready to fall onto your face below mine.  and when you remember me, please remember me as the smell of the charter bus we took to Virginia Beach—minty, medicinal, and somehow miraculous; the scent of organized group travel and somehow love, too.  and when you remember me, remember me as the crunch of leaves under our shoes as we walked together that first night, our autumn kiss soon to come, and alleverywhere the leaves swirling at our feet all goldbrownred.  remember me as the hint of sun above the cedars a few hours later, remember me as the sweltering summer noon we lost at frisbee golf,  remember me as the clicking change of a traffic light, remember me as a warm spot in the lake, remember me as the air so cold you could barely breathe,  remember me as something fast and wildly out of control, remember me as the clanging of a bell, remember me as a time of day.

 

All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone

There really is just too much being said about time flying by, and days ticking off, and how quick and fast and horribly brief it all is, he thinks to himself, sitting down at his computer to write.  So many poems and stories and cliches and greeting cards about it.  Nobody can stop anything.

Then, leaning back in his chair, wishing maybe he was smoking a cigarette, he unexpectedly tears up, his breath chokes a moment in his throat.  How he missed everyone so suddenly!

you try to keep people around, you try to stay in touch, you try to keep caring, but oh, life just has its way.  life just has its way.  and no matter how much people talk about it–-oh boy–-it just won’t stop being sad when people drift, drift like willful continents, into and out of your sphere so crassly, brazen, like it didn’t even matter, as if it were up to them, as if the same thing weren’t happening to every poor damned soul roaming around–

Of course he’d put on the most melancholy record he owns.  Some dirge-like rock without words, an album called All of a Sudden I Miss Everyone, as he sits to remember, drinks his diet cola like a good little boy and is mindful of the volume since this is a holiday,

–anything can remind me of everyone. friends, girlfriends, flings, all the same, that summer grass, that shiny egret, this itch on my scalp, just now, just there. the jingling and glinting of a set of keys, the way she always jingled her keys, how he always kept them on his end table, coughing in the middle of the night, illuminated by the night light, looking green like an evil lizard, we spent every day together back then.  it was spring and the air lifted us, smelled of comraderie, that gaggle of hot air balloons–-how many was it? five–-we pulled over and kissed in the gloaming underneath the hot air balloons, he held my arms behind my back so I couldn’t leave, but it was for my own good–-for years I accused him of “alpha-male”ing me–-but it was for my own good, the brown of the basement, the four of us inseperable, always laughing, the high pitched sound of uncontrolled laughter, unchecked joy, your tears coming for any reason.  the big round green eyes.  the purple shit in birdshit–-that’s shit, too.  the lazy rolling enormous clouds, the warmed arm left to hang out the driver’s side window, the long drive with the windows down, your flesh just tickling, the voice over the payphone, that feeling in the tips of your toes that someone out there could actually…well, you know…and the perfume she sealed her letters with, and the trees, and the swaying branches in the lazy perfect summer wind as we talked about what it all meant, and all of a sudden I miss everyone, and I am glad of it, and I am glad of it.

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.

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

Trying to remember your childhood is like reading a newspaper through cheesecloth.  Where have those moments gone?  Did they ever happen?  Or was elementary school like one long road trip by yourself, all moments straining into one, the mind collapsing all but the most essential rest stops into a generalized hodge-podge…….

…….it seems to me that for the first few years of my life, at least internally, I prided myself on being a “good boy”.  This seemed like the ideal to reach for, the ultimate thing worth being.  And so it seemed notable to my young mind to remember (forever) the first time I was told I was otherwise.  On the way out of my Kindergarten classroom to go to recess, I ducked under the easel instead of walking around it.  “Seth!” Mrs. Reed scolded.  “Don’t be a bad boy!”  How crestfallen was I!…..

……..I remember but don’t remember meeting my mother halfway along the route that we walked home to school on and telling her I had pooped my pants while at school.  The problem with this memory is that I have no idea if it is a real memory.  Was it a dream?  Was it a fear that I thought of often enough to make it seem a memory?  Or did it happen?  I have no memory surrounding it, just the meeting with my mother, where Big Spring Avenue meets Main Street, right by the fountain.  It is a significant memory, and yet……

……even in Kindergarten, there were supermodels.  Ours was Mary Hoover.  Lord knows how she got the job.  I can’t even picture her now.  But she was who we all desired.  One day at lunch, she must not have known I was sitting close to her as she detailed a list of all the boys she liked.  My name was on the list.  As soon as she said my name, I laughed out loud.  I remember a mortified look crossing her face.  I have no memory of interacting with Mary Hoover before or after this moment, ever.  She was not in school with me in later life.  I have never wondered about her until this moment that I am typing this…..

…..my sister and I are walking on the paved path that leads from the playground to the school, at the part when it is just starting to go uphill and turn slightly (right by the end of the right field fence of the Teener league baseball field).  It is terribly early in the morning; we are about to be at the school.  My sister is crying inconsolably.  I am very young.  I don’t know what to say to her, how to help her.  I remember touching her shoulder, saying something.  This memory is clear, crisp, and still, to a degree, painful.  I have no memory before or after.  I don’t know why she was crying.  I’m still sorry I couldn’t help…..

…….I don’t pine for a return to my childhood.  I had a good one; as good as anyone else’s.  I just want my memories.  I just want to know what the hell happened.  I had thought I knew, but when I try to confront the memories head-on, they run away, disappearing into a contrived mist.  Is this just a facet of childhood, or will I be wondering, 30 years from now, just what the hell happened when I was in my thirties?  How much do we lose, and where does it go?

Monday’s Song: Seven Mary Three, “Oceans of Envy”

Oceans of Envy
by Seven Mary Three

I’ve got a photo booth picture
reminding me of something you said to me:
“If everything you want is so far out of reach,
move a little closer to me.”

I held my breath as the water rushed in.
I was drowning in the man I’d never be,
a castaway…but you were there for me.

I did a perfect imitation of someone who’s alive
before I met you.
Now colors seem to have a taste and a temperature
and everything doesn’t seem so far away…
forever seems like it’s never gonna be enough

I held my breath as the water rushed in.
I was falling through a faded memory,
a castaway…but you were there for me.

Good Morning

When you said
good morning
on the gravel path
it was your morning
and your good

as you saw it
of its kind
the only in the world

morning for you
delicious entire
you giving me

your crazy-quilt
morning patches
of birdsong
singing grasses

I said good morning
back                   no,
not yours back again

I kept what
you gave me
you have mine

Friday’s Film Clip: “Citizen Kane”

This short but incredible clip from the film “Citizen Kane” is far from it’s most famous scene, but more than a decade after I first saw the movie, this little clip of minor character Mr. Bernstein (played by Everett Sloane) speculating on the possible meaning of “Rosebud” (Charles Foster Kane’s mysterious final word) still strikes a chord with me—and it gets more true every year I manage to stay alive.  I’ve transcribed the most precious part of the speech below the video.

“A fellow will remember a lot of things you wouldn’t think he’d remember. You take me. One day, back in 1896, I was crossing over to Jersey on the ferry, and as we pulled out, there was another ferry pulling in, and on it there was a girl waiting to get off. A white dress she had on. She was carrying a white parasol. I only saw her for one second. She didn’t see me at all, but I’ll bet a month hasn’t gone by since that I haven’t thought of that girl.”

Ten Mini-Memoirs: Early Childhood

1.  As far as I can tell, my earliest memory is when I was two-and-a-half years old, playing hide-and-seek with my mother.  I was hiding between the loveseat and the wall, in the tiny space created by the natural curvature of the loveseat.  It was dark in there, but I was very happy.  How do I know I was two-and-a-half?  Because at the time, I was thinking about how old I was, and repeating to myself in a little-boy whisper, “Two-and-a-half, two-and-a-half”.  At the time, I thought it sounded quite old.  That’s about all I remember of that.

2.  I used to go to Freemont’s with my father.  Freemont’s was a “drug store”, in the old fashioned sense.  What it really was, was a coffee shop where grown folks sat around drinking coffee (and, in those days, Tab soda) and smoking a ton of cigarettes.  I felt very grown up and happy at Freemont’s.  I was allowed to play around behind the counter, and even in the stock room (and sometimes even under the tables!) while Dad chatted up his grown friends.  Kenny–the guy behind the counter–often got roped into playing imaginary parts with me, and he’d show me oddities the store had for sale:  shoe polish, Swiss army knives, pipe cleaners.  But the best parts were the walks to and from Freemont’s.  We lived only a few blocks away, so Dad and I would walk there when we went.  Walking somewhere with your dad when you are very young is a special time.  Once, it started snowing as we walked there.  It felt like we were the sole, hardy souls on a blizzard planet.  I felt invincible.

3.  I have not hated anything in all my life as much as I hated starting school.  What a life one lives before Kindergarten!

4.  For a few years, I was insperable from my Cabbage Patch Doll, Troy Elias.  I loved (and still love) Troy quite dearly.  I would devise many fake but rather elaborate things for us to do.  I remember for a fact that Troy and I went on a vacation to Italy (in the living room), that the couch was often the cockpit of a space shuttle, with Troy as my co=pilot.  Then, one day…he disappeared.  I panicked, and soon the parents got involved and the house was turned upside down.  No Troy.  A week passed.  No Troy.  I was devastated.  Then one day my mom showed me the most recent copy of the tiny local newspaper, the Valley Times-Star.  My grandma Cohick–who lived two doors down from us for most of my childhood–had placed an ad in the classifieds, seeking Troy’s whereabouts.  At the time, I did not fully appreciate the gravity of her gesture.  Now, I see how marvlous she had been.  I found Troy a few months later, tucked way far back in my closet.

5.  One day, my dad brought home a dog.  She was a cocker spaniel, and her name was Cocoa, though over the years her name would somehow morph into Cocoa Rae Leena.  This is how I spell it in my head, but the rest of my family may have other ideas.  She was a lovely dog, despite taking a turn biting all of us in quite nasty fashion.  She’d die eventually, of course, but before she died, she mastered the art of walking through the large curtain in the living room and stopping at just the right moment to make it seem like she was wearing a very long cape that stretched up into the sky, herself the most beautiful dog queen of the universe.

6.  Nobody did birthdays like my parents did.  Sure, there were rarely lavish parties or hyper-expensive gifts (though I did once get one of those parties at McDonalds, and I still feel kinda cool from that experience), but what they did was make you feel entirely like that day was all about you.  We had birthday candles we lit every year, and let burn until they burnt down past that year’s number.  It was always so neat to see the candle again, once every year–an interesting marker of time.  We’d have the meals we wanted, and a cake, and our presents to unwrap at the kitchen table.  And then they would take our picture, with all of our presents (and sometimes the candle) prsented in an array on the table.  And then they’d mark our height on the wall in the living room.  And then (often) I’d go to Freemont’s with Dad.  I’d fall asleep on those nights feeling more special than perhaps anyone else on the planet.

Here’s the year I got Troy:

7.  One of the strangest things about childhood is the fleeting, foggy nature of many of the memories.  You sometimes try to piece things together, try to figure out what something was, or who something was, but it’s all for naught.  Almost as though, before a certain age, you were kinda somebody else.  For instance, I have a memory of a man being in our living room wearing a full Santa outfit.  Mom and Dad were happy to see him, and he gave me something.  I cannot even see Adrienne.  I do know that I hated the man’s presence, but I was not afraid of him.  This flash of a memory comes to me often.  I have no idea why.

8.  One of the major treats of my childhood was spending the night at Grandma Allie’s.  She ate different food, watched different TV, had different couches.  The sort of thing adults describe as a vacation, but kids just see as interesting change.  The very best thing about spending the night at Grandma Allie’s?  The baths.  Compared to ours, her bathtub seemed huge, and it was blue, and the whole bathroom was blue, and there were tub toys, like a wind-up SCUBA diver, and boats, and there was bubble bath, too.

9.  My sister and I used to create fake vending machines out of shoeboxes.  We’d dispense surprises to one another out of holes whenever the other sibling would insert coins in slots we had cut.  This entertained us for far longer than you might imagine.

10.  Once, Mom and Adrienne and I spent the night in the backyard in a “tent” we had made from sawhorses and blankets.  I don’t remember much.  I remember we had our “jambox” out there, and I remember listening to a tape of Club Nouveau’s cover of “Lean on Me”, which was very popular at the time.  I remember being extraordinarily happy to be outside in a tent made of blankets at night.  But then it started to get very cold, and it rained a bit,  and we had to go back inside and sleep in our beds, and I was sad at first, but then less sad once I was warm and under my blankets in my bed, but remembering how great it had been to be outside in the tent.

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: “Clean Heat”

“Clean Heat” is one of the rare poems that other folks seem to like more than I do.  Since it appeared in Ridiculous Things in 2004, at least 5 people have quoted a line from it to me, so there must be something about it (or at least those lines they quote) that sticks out to them.  Personally, if I had this poem to write all over again, I’d probably cut about half of it out (which I think would make it twice as good), but alas, I’d also like to cut the lines that people seem to like, and since it’s not very often people actually quote me to me, I’m not going to mess with what works.  As a caution, this poem is about sex and describes (tastefully, I’d say) some sex acts; I like to warn people of that in case my grandma or aunt Diane is reading.  It’s far, far from pornography but it might make you picture me naked.  So, here’s “Clean Heat”.  Click the gray arrow to hear it:

Clean Heat

Six years later and still I think of you,
you with so many faults and me with so few,
the two of us together for maybe eight months,
a wobbly pair.
I may never stop thinking of you,
and what a fact to behold!
And what memories I am forced to live with:
your pouty circular lips,
breasts perfectly shaped but too pale and veiny,
thighs tight to my ears so I couldn’t even hear the television.
I’m not even sure you moaned!
And that is the nature of what I selectively recall,
not the love,
no sentiment,
heartbreak forgotten and vanished.
Only how you smelled in the clean heat of the afternoon,
moving so well with my moving,
fumbling with my fumbling parts,
turning away death by proclaiming ourselves bodies.
I never fucked you, dear,
but I fucked my own terrible oblivion
right into forgetfulness,
and it is that which I shall never forget.

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.