Days: Fifteen Years Sober

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Days of Nothing

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Days of Something

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

‘Time’, by Pink Floyd

 

Days of Everything

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

In Flemington

When I moved to New Jersey to live with my mother on April 3rd, 2003 to begin my sobriety, immediately a lot began waking up in me–physically and emotionally I finally began to move forward and move past the stilted 17-year-old that was inhabiting my 25-year-old body.  But I also began awakening to the world of art, media and culture.  I devoured books, movies and magazines–anything that was within arms’ reach.  I had been writing poetry for many years before I got sober–most of it truly terrible.  Now that my mind was waking up to the actual artistry of poetry (I was also ravenously reading poetry written by others at this time) I quickly began to form my own unique poetic voice; if I can take a moment to toot my own horn here, crafting a unique poetic voice is not easy and most people don’t really do it, but for about four years I wrote in a style that (I believe) I owned all to myself.  Now, I wrote some pretty good poems after those four years and will still occasionally crank out a humdinger, but not in Early Sobriety Seth Dellinger voice–I couldn’t write in it if my life depended on it anymore.  It’s a conversational, almost flippant tone with an underlying promise of elemental discovery (and 75% free verse, but I did dabble in forms).  Here is one of my favorites from that era, called “In Flemington”, almost certainly written before I even had 90 days of sobriety.  My mother lived in a little town called Neshanic Station, but it was near the bigger town of Flemington.  I would occasionally drive my car into Flemington and walk around, astounded by being sober and alive and possessing free will.

 

In Flemington

On the corner at a small shop I buy a coffee
and take it outside with me.
In the air it steams to cool,
in communion with the breeze.
Strolling east, the cars and bicycles
are sparse today, even birds are few,
this close to downtown.  Passing the laundromat,
sweet, pungent softener assaults the nostrils
and the rumble of coin-op dryers is melancholy and promising.
Turning left onto Reaville Avenue a small boy
eight years old if a day
sits on the curb just sitting there
drying his hair in the sun like the sidewalk
and I almost say hi to him.
The coffee cools quickly in the chill afternoon,
I almost turn back to buy another,
but think better of the three dollars I have left.
I sidle into a quaint bookstore to gape at magazines,
the lives of others and kitchen equipment
glossy and flaxen, and the portly
latina by the register eyes me
and she is beautiful in that way
only latinas and llamas can be beautiful:
using solely the eyes.
Asking her if there is a restroom, she grudgingly gives me a key
knotted to a large wooden block
as if this were an interstate filling station,
and points me to the back corner,
but the door is open when I get there.
Safely locked inside, my pants stay buttoned
and I use only the mirror, studying my lines,
the old souvenir red blotches, reminding me
of lives and moments, other bookstores
or towns; some oversize pores poke peskily
into view begging for me to wash my face more often,
but not right now, not now, a time and place for everything.
Giving the key back to the girl, I emerge onto Main Street
and suck deep the stunningly new air,
amazed by the realization that you are somewhere far away
occupying real space
breathing just like me
and smiling right this instant,
your eyes gleaming like little coins.

Just ‘Cause You Feel It

I was driving my 1983 Ford Escort through the New Jersey countryside.  I remember the sun–the sun flying into the front seat so hard and fast I could almost see the light particles moving, could feel them beating my chest, my shaved bare scalp.  I had the front windows rolled down all the way and the air whipped around the little room–because really that’s what a car is, a tiny moveable room–like a wild wind whirlpool.

I had just moved to New Jersey a few weeks earlier, to live with my mother and her husband after my life had fallen apart back in Pennsylvania.  It was a time of rebirth for me unlike anything I had experienced before or would ever experience again.  I was melancholy, and joyful, and full of deep heaving sorrows and belly-laughs.  I was on “the pink cloud”, as some folks refer to this sort of time period.

My old ’83 Escort, who I called Earl Grey, did not come equipped with a CD player or even a tape deck, so I had a boombox sitting of the passenger seat floor on which I would play CDs.  It wasn’t as convenient as cars nowadays but sometimes working harder for your simple pleasures makes them more enjoyable.  The CDs would skip a lot and I have memories of being very annoyed by this but of course the passage of time now makes the skipping CDs seem endearing.

I remember specifically on this day (as on many days during this time period) I was listening to Radiohead’s album Hail to the Theif.  Over the next fifteen years I would come to see this album as a winter album but it was the soundtrack to my summer that year, its drowsy, hypnotic plea serving as a counterpoint to the frenetic buzzing of insects, far-off lightning storms, and revving motorcycles at the biker bar next door to my mom’s house.

On this particular day, I was exploring the back country roads in the area around my mom’s house, an area loosely known as Neshanic Station, New Jersey.  The country roads are pleasingly bendy and hilly out there, with lots of big ol’ green and yellow fields on all sides of you.  As I may have mentioned, the sun was beating into my chest like cannonball particles sent across the cosmos, the wind was a whirling dervish, and Radiohead, although skipping, assured me in bizarre time signatures that just ’cause you feel it, doesn’t mean it’s there.

I rounded a bend in a road I’d never been down before, and when a stand of trees suddenly dropped from view, I saw quite astonishingly there were two hot air balloons, fully inflated, just a few hundred feet off the ground over a field in front of me.  It was, you might imagine, an incredibly surprising sight.  I immediately looked for a place to pull over.  There was a pulloff just a few yards further, which also happened to nestle a tiny winding creek.  I hopped out of my car, turning my boombox up even more so I could hear my Radiohead as I got out of the car.

This was not only before smart phones, it was even before everyone had a cell phone, or even a digital camera.  It was before MySpace existed.  So my experience was still limited to just myself.  I had never sent a text message or posted a status, and having not done so yet, I did not feel the absence of such.

I walked out into the field, mesmerized by these red mammoths above me.  I could hear the pilots talking, could hear the occasional hiss of the burners igniting.  They cast twin bulbouse shadows across the expanse of the untilled field.  I took my shoes off and waded into the small creek.  The balloons were coming even lower, I could feel the air density change around me as they passed directly overhead and the cold, cold water swirled around my feel like a whirling dervish, and Radiohead continued to insist Just ’cause you feel it doesn’t mean it’s there.

I was still new to real life, but I knew it wouldn’t be like this forever, but I couldn’t imagine what else it could possibly be like.

Scenes From My Sojourn

After a straight shot drive down a highway whose number I now forget, I crested a hill around six in the morning, it still being completely dark outside, and saw for the first time the city skyline of Cleveland. I had the day off of work, and I was still exploring my immediate surroundings, since moving to what I call the chimney of Pennsylvania, so close to Buffalo and Cleveland and Pittsburgh. More than anything the prospect of Cleveland intrigued me, because I had never really considered that I might go there, or that it might be close enough, or what might even be there. So I set the early alarm, and drove straight in there with no plan. All I really wanted to do was park somewhere right in the city, find a newspaper from a newspaper

A self-timer self-portrait I did on a bench in Cleveland.

machine, and a local coffee shop, and read the Cleveland Plain Dealer, a newspaper whose name I already knew from years of attempting to be media savvy. Somehow I managed to find just the right exit off the highway, and, with my breath still showing in my car from the early-morning chill, found a parking lot that cost just a few dollars, right in the heart of the city. I hopped out of my car feeling extremely accomplished, walking across the early-morning parking lot, and I noticed many other people on foot, traveling the same way I was, heading into the city for that morning’s whatever. This was the first time I truly felt the call of the city, the desire to move in that hive, to be one of those lemmings. Wherever they were all going, it seemed like it must be interesting, different from what I knew and was accustomed to, and terribly important. Everyone made their way into their assigned nooks and crannies, disappearing down side streets and alleys and into revolving doors. In an almost astonishing short amount of time I found the newspaper machine I was looking for, and I even had the quarters ready, as I had anticipated this even before I left my apartment back Erie. I got myself a fresh-off-the presses copy of that mornings Cleveland Plain Dealer, and in an even shorter amount of time, I found myself in a local chain coffee shop called Phoenix Coffee, drinking a large caramel latte, reading about the Cleveland Browns that year, and the big high hopes everyone had for Colt McCoy.

 

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Shortly after moving in with my mother in South Jersey, a hurricane was on the way. I can’t remember what its name was anymore, because you know, they name these things, all of them. So it was on its way, and after the big news stories that the last few had been, this was supposed to be a big news story too. All the roads were going to be shut down, everything was going to flood, and we were all going to freak out. We all watched on the radar as the thing approached, and everyone from my work kept calling and texting around, wondering if we were going to have to go in the next day, and just how bad

Putzing around in the rain during our hurricane in South Jersey

everything was going to be. My mother and I were concerned about sleeping in our upstairs bedrooms, there being trees near the house, and that they might crash through the windows, like some goddamn nightmare. Eventually, it was decided no one had to go into work, and I was home with my mother as the danger approached. It started raining, and more than anything I was just intrigued. I’ve been through plenty of different storms in my life, and of course I’ve got the obligatory Pennsylvania drenchings from hurricanes that are almost out of steam by the time they get to us. But this looked like it might be an actual hurricane. Every hour or so I would put on all my rain gear and walk out to the development’s drainage ditch, to check the flooding progress. It’s one of those perfectly manicured little drainage ditches, it doesn’t look natural at all, obviously something that a few men with small bulldozer patted down on a Sunday afternoon twenty years ago. As the afternoon progressed the drainage ditch kept not filling up and not filling up, and the rain, although incessant and quite wet, kept being just that: rain. As Mom got bored from being cooped up inside and watching TV, and I got disappointed by the weather nonevent, the afternoon meandered into just another afternoon, one of those days wiled away looking at images on screens, or reading words in a book, the type of afternoon that you think of as a fine relaxing afternoon, but ultimately one with nothing very memorable. After it had been raining for about four hours I took my final walk out to the drainage ditch, saw that it was in fact actually less full than the previous time, and I took a short walk out to the small woods behind the development, and stood listening to the rain hit the leaves, and the small creek at the bottom of a low-grade hill behind my mother’s house. It was nice to be there, I thought. It was a nice place, and a nice time to be alive, and a very unique, circuitous path to be on. But it was also one of those moments when you think yourself, how in the world did I get here?

 

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I had been working out and dieting for about two months at this point, and had lost about three-quarters of the weight I wanted to lose. I had been living on my own in the city of Philadelphia for about six or seven months, and summer was in full swing. My new healthy lifestyle coupled with the season had invigorated me like I had never felt before. My typically high energy level was now bordering on manic, with me needing only a few hours of sleep a night, and typically reading thousands and thousands of words a day, in magazines, newspapers, books, and that was just the start of what I was able to accomplish. I would often be caught telling people that the world was actually bending to my very will. On this particular night, I had been out riding my bike all over the city, all day long. Starting out in the sweltering heat of noon, riding all the way from my Pennsport

Taken around the time I thought I could control the universe.

apartment to the Art Museum, then back again, then out again and down to the Schuylkill River Trail, making the entire loop, miles and miles and miles of riding. Every time I would come home I would just play Pandora radio, no television on this day, the universe and all its sounds and music coursing through me. At night I threw open the windows in my apartment and let the natural air flow through, stripping down naked and playing air guitar to serious and depressing Post-Rock music and laughing and crying, the music louder than my neighbors probably liked. I put my clothes back on and hopped on my bike, and went to a late night showing of a movie at the nearby multiplex. Afterwards I still couldn’t stop, hopped on my bike and rode down the side streets as fast as I could, the good paved streets, the ones you can really get going on. At that time of night, in that part of the city, you can really blow through the stop signs, when you’re really tuned into the world and the universe like that, you can pick out the headlights if a car is coming the opposite direction, at the intersection, and you can really get up a good head of steam blowing through all the streets, not stopping anywhere, feeling the ions and electrons buzzing, I felt like I couldn’t be stopped, like I could fly if I wanted to, like my tires could just lift off the ground and I could soar, maybe just a few inches off the ground but I could soar, like I could just tell the universe anything what I wanted to do. I still remember the exact smell of that night, of that bike ride down the side streets, the exact feel of that exact quality of air, the way that I knew I could not be that happy forever, the way that I knew in my heart that life is that good, but you just don’t always feel it. I rode faster and faster,  my bike going thirty miles an hour through the streets of South Philadelphia, the warmth, the music back at my apartment, the echo of the movie from the movie theater, the lights all everywhere around, everything still swirling around in me, like some great puppetmaster. Just like every stop on the sojourn, the question must’ve popped into my mind, how did I get here? But it wasn’t very important at that moment, I was almost flying.

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Here’s a poem I wrote while living in Erie:

 

A Slowing of Pace

 

 

For at least ten years you have been preparing

to feel comfortable here in your life,

not a shutdown but a slowing of pace,

a grace of peace, of stopping on your way

through rooms of your dailiness to touch

the woven basket, the plastic vase, walking

through the evening park without voices

intoning from the trees, you must, you must—

these same dreams of solitude since you were very young,

 

and you feel, have felt for years,

that this is how you most would live,

deliberate, considered, easeful, slow,

if your life will only let you,

which it won’t, and this last decade

you have been yearning toward it, plotting,

longing for the book resting on your lap,

pages spread wide, this cup, the open door,

letting in late September air.

 

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It was a rainy, cold day in early March in Erie, and I found my wandering car pointed in the direction of the Erie Zoo.  Although I hadn’t set out to go to the zoo, this new turn of events didn’t surprise me.  I found himself there five or six times a year.  Most people contented themselves with a few zoo visits in a lifetime, but the Erie Zoo was extremely affordable, and the even cheaper off-season price (seven dollars for a grown-up) seemed more than reasonable to spend some time communing with creatures that had no business being on this part of the globe.  It was cheaper than a bad movie, and these animals were real.

 

As I pulled within sight of the zoo, I became a little worried that, for whatever reason, it might not be open.  There wasn’t a single car in the lot.  It was around 11am on a dreary, cold Thursday;  I hadn’t expected it to be hopping, but I wasn’t expecting emptiness.

 

Optimistically cautious, I parked and got out into the barking wind, driving pellets of frigid rain onto my shaved scalp, and nearly trotted the 20 yards to the zoo entrance.  Sure enough, there was a woman at the ticket window, grinning from ear to ear, presumably thrilled to see a customer.  As I neared, I summoned my best “public smile”—my I’ll-

Having a moment with a giraffe at the Erie Zoo

pretend-I’m-one-of-you smile—and returned the woman’s “Hi!” with unrivaled enthusiasm.  Then I said simply, “One, please.”  She paused, then asked “Are you a member?”  I kept his public smile on.  “Nope,” I said.  And then she got the look on her face.  It was a look I had grown accustomed to in this version of my life.  It was a look a clerk or ticket-taker or usher got on their face when they were fighting the desire to say “What, exactly, are you doing here?”

 

I was sure I wasn’t imagining this look.  Aside from being by myself at functions and attractions that normally attracted folks in twos or more, the willy-nilly nature of my work and sleep schedule allowed me to quite often be at attractions and functions on days that were marooned in the desolate middle of the week, when the sad rest of the world were eating sandwiches from vending machines on their half-hour breaks in cubicles and smoking cigarettes under concrete gazebos on the edges of company property.  I had found myself alone or nearly alone in places ranging from early-season minor league baseball games to the Flight 93 National Memorial to the Cleveland Museum of Art.  And almost always, the middle aged woman working the door was quite visibly wondering what me, in my yellow flannel shirt and black

The house I lived in in Erie–the very first day I saw it. The For Rent sign is still in the door. I had the top floor.

knit cap and imitation Converse , was doing there at 8am or 10pm or whatever the case may be.  But they never quite did ask.  They liked to leave a big pregnant pause where they thought I might offer some form of explanation for my daring to visit their job.  “Just one?” they’d say, wanting me to reply Well, my father used to work here before he got struck by lightning or some other perfectly ridiculous but totally feasible explanation.  But I stubbornly never gave any of them any kind of explanation.  “Are you a member?” the woman at the zoo window asked.  “Nope,” I replied, and still smiling I stared at her.  She waiting a second or two, then said, somewhat stubbornly herself now, “Seven dollars.”  I handed the woman a ten dollar bill, and while she made change, she said “Looks like you’ll have the place pretty much to yourself today”, confirming my suspicion that, in fact, I was the only customer here.  Smiling as large as I could muster, I said “Yeah, I kinda figured that.”  I took my three dollars in change and walked into the zoo.

 

No matter how many times I found himself alone in public spaces, it never ceased exhilarating me.  It seemed to me like I’d won some kind of covert contest that nobody else knew they were playing, as though all of life were a silent jockeying for position in which, on this day, I’d triumphed.  Everyone else was being funneled through the cattle chutes of their typical lives to the choke points of the weekend afternoons and I was outside the chutes, watching from the meadow.  I knew this wasn’t true, I was being funneled by other forces, but my superiority seemed unquestionable in moments such as walking into a zoo I had to myself.

 

Of course, during the off-season, admittance was cheaper for a reason.  Almost half of the animals weren’t on display.  Too cold for them.  Lord knows where the zoo keeps animals hiding during this time.  Some sort of safe house or bunker, on imagines.  A smelly bunker.

 

But I knew where I was going.  I had been here enough times that I had “regular” stops.  Ten minutes communing with the Red Panda (so cute!), five minutes making cooing sounds at the baby (teenager, really) giraffe, and on and on, until eventually I ended up in the orangutan building.  The orangutans at the Erie Zoo were unique in that they were a bona fide family.  A mother, a father, a daughter, and a son.  In fact, the daughter was the older child, making the orangutans a mirror image of my own nuclear family.  The son, Ollie, was still a baby.  A toddler, let’s say.  He had been an infant when I first arrived in Erie, and I’d been able to watch Ollie grow up in little spurts, every few months when I’d visit.  It was when I visited the orangutans that I always got the weird and ecstatic feeling of really, this is right here in Erie.

 

Today was a little different, however.  As soon as I walked into the orangutan building (which was completely empty of humans), Ollie and his mother were right against the glass, in the corner nearest the entryway, Ollie sitting atop his mother’s shoulders.  They looked at me from inside deeply human eyes, and both smiled, as if to welcome me.  “Oh my,” I heard myself say.  I walked slowly to the glass, so as not to scare them away.  But they showed no signed of going.  As I reached the glass, Ollie (who, on his mother’s shoulders, was eye level with me) placed his hand flat on the glass.  I, sensing a moment was occurring, put my hand where Ollie’s was—like we were visiting in a state prison in some sappy movie.  But it wasn’t sappy.  Ollie and I made eye contact and kept our hands overtop one another’s for what must have been a full minute, an odd communion between a man and a baby orangutan in northwestern Pennsylvania on a rainy March morning.  When Ollie finally pulled his hand away, I turned to look behind me to see if any people had come in and maybe witnessed the sweet, unexpected moment.  But there was only an empty walkway and the silly tape recorded sounds of an African forest.  I thought the lack of a witness was both incredibly sad and completely amazing, to equal degrees.

And it was not sappy.

 

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A poem I wrote shortly after moving out of  South Jersey and into Philadelphia:

 

Cage

headphones in, I walk Old City

as if in the presence of an intelligence,

concentrating.  I imagine myself

scrutinized and measured closely

by the passers-by, the foreign tourists,

the horses with their carriages,

the sky and the earth.

my multiple reflections from shop fronts,

high windows, and bus glass stare back at me,

show my belly, my too-long hair, my crooked nose.

wind sweeps off the Delaware, bringing with it

Camden, Governor Christie, and further south,

my mother’s cooking.  home swirls around

this new city, this birthplace city,

where I am so far from everything.

but I keep walking and walking

and it gets darker and darker

and there is a flicker of light or two

far above and beyond my cage.

 

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My mother and I did so many things together when I was staying with her in New Jersey, it would be difficult to boil those myriad lovely experiences down to a moment indicative of them all.  We would typically do one thing together a week—from something as small as going to a movie together to an all-out road trip.  We unabashedly (ok, maybe a little abashedly) called these Momma Days.  I think we both knew these were numbered days of a grown form of childhood for both

Mom and I at a Camden (NJ) Riversharks game (minor league baseball)

of us, but they were golden days unlike the first childhood (when nobody knows how great things really are).  I remember every moment of the Momma Days, but the best memory is my ritual: every time we were going to spend a day together, I’d wake up, roll out of bed, and promptly run down the stairs, clapping my hands like a happy toddler, chanting rhythmically Momma-Day-Momma-Day-Momma-Day in a little kid voice.  It seemed, at the time, like something just between the two of us, that we could never tell anybody, because I was 36 and she was older than that even, but here it is, in my blog, because you just don’t get a whole lot of golden days.

 

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Just a few short months after moving into Philadelphia, I was riding my bike home from work on the night of New Year’s Day. About halfway between where I work and my home, one encounters Washington Avenue, one of the last large arterial streets that cuts through Philadelphia, before you get into what I called the Deep South. When I got there, about 10 o’clock at night, there was a police barricade, preventing me from going further down 2nd St., past Washington, which would’ve taken me directly home in about a mile. But it wasn’t an accident or a crime scene, and I quickly remembered what was going on. There wasn’t a whole lot that was notable about the neighborhood I lived in in Philadelphia, except the fact that it is the Mummer capital of the world. And the Mummers are basically men who dress up in very opulent costumes and dance around and ride interesting floats on a New Year’s Parade, as well as play in old world-style string and brass bands.  It is a tradition that only occurs in Philadelphia, and at that, only South Philadelphia, and at that, almost only my neighborhood. But it also turns out, that the whole city loves this tradition one day a year, that being New Year’s Day. And then on the night of New Year’s Day – not New Year’s Eve, mind you but New Year’s Day night – my neighborhood and just my neighborhood

Mummers in the 2014 Philadelphia 4th of July parade

becomes the largest party in the city all year. I hopped off my  bicycle, very interested in what this would look like. I was a bit unprepared. I’ve never been to Mardi Gras, but I am told it is much like this, and people who have been to both say that the Mummers party in Pennsport almost outdoes Mardi Gras in some ways. The crowd down Second Street was so thick, I had to quickly chain my bike to a mailbox, as there was no getting through the crowd. Huge, almost one-story high speakers dotted every-other block, where sometimes electronic, dance or house music played, and other times old world Mummer bands played corny but danceable string music. Enormous floats, gaudy and opulent, set in the middle some blocks, some of them decorated in modern ways, with heads of what looked like aliens or monsters, while other floats simply looked like a gilded golden things, big Faberge eggs on wheels, and all about everywhere strode Mummers, men and the occasional women wearing  long flowing robes of  shiny satin fabrics, embroidered gold and silver tassels, enormous red buttons, masks that looked sometimes scary, like out of a dream masquerade, or sometimes comical, or sometimes indecipherable. It was loud everywhere, chants got taken up out of nowhere that I couldn’t understand, songs were being sung like pirates about to board a weaker vessel. Everyone was drinking, the whole world was there, not just Mummers but teenagers and people in their twenties, kids with funnels of beer going to their stomachs, people on drugs screaming about things, people wearing beads as though it were Mardi Gras but it wasn’t, and nobody was taking their shirts off, weed smoke was an ever-present cloud.  There were food stands on corners, big sliced-open mangoes on sticks that you could buy, heads of pigs roasting over spits. I kept taking pictures and videos with my smartphone and sending them to people who weren’t there, people I wished were with me, people I hadn’t seen in years.  Somewhere around Dickinson Street I hung a left, popped out onto the relative calm of Front Street, walked six more blocks down to my street, stuffed the key in the lock, went inside in time for Anderson Cooper.

 

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In the winter, Erie is a cold, desolate, sometimes dangerous place. It’s not the ideal place to live alone with no friends or relatives within a five-mile 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. Wether the lake is frozen or open, it is 7 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 I was a manager at. Our day start 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

Snow tubing at a work function in Erie–essentially the ONLY perk of the brutal winters.

blinds, and started my car with my remote start, one of the best features that car had. 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 time with extra to get to work, and I was in quite a bind here. 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

Lake Erie and the Presque Isle beaches are actually an incredible hidden gem (during the summers!) in Pennsylvania.

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, 100% 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.”

 

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A poem I wrote in Philly:

 

Just Past St. Augustine’s

 

where the elevated train slows

just past St. Augustine’s church

off the Delaware river

a row of busted windows

only a single one still whole

open and darkly curtained

 

that’s where I once saw this arm

slip out between the frames,

the hand open to feel for drops of rain,

another time there were two arms

raising a small naked baby

for a breath of evening air

 

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I took a trip to Niagara Falls by myself once, while I was living in Erie. It was only a little over an hour away from there, and I figured I might as well take a look at it. It was a beautiful day, and I was much more moved by the wonder there than I expected to be. I did the whole shebang, the whole big tourist thing, the boats, the ponchos, everything. But the thing that I remember most, the thing that resonated most with me, was Goat Island. It’s a small island in the middle of the Niagara River. You can take a little pedestrian bridge over to it, and walk around. When I was there, I was mostly alone, and the bulk of the island is very unassuming. It’s got a big green lawn, some pasture. You can walk around and not really know that you are

Selfie from my solo trip to Niagara Falls

so close to those enormous rushing waters, and the touristy sites, and the boats and helicopters. I walked over to the shore of the river, all alone in the little clearing, looking out at the rushing Niagara just a hundred yards or so from where drops into oblivion. I couldn’t believe it. There I was, so close to the river, so close to those falls, and nobody around me. I was happy as a clam but I thought to myself, I can jump right in there. I could just end it. Death has always felt like a very close spectre to me, I’ve always sensed the razors edge that I am on, that we are all on. In that moment, I don’t think I’ve ever sensed that more, I saw it like an actual looming knife: just a few feet away, just one slip or one jump, and there it is.  I went to Goat Island by myself and for a split second I saw through the door.

 

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A few months ago I met the most wonderful woman I’ve ever known.  Her name is Karla and I’ve been gifted with the good fortune of her loving me as much as I love her.  She’s from “back home”, so now, that is where I will go. Not only to spend time with my love and her marvelous son, but to now spend more time with my father and other relatives and long lost friends.  My sojourn ends—and an incredible new one will begin.  I don’t believe “everything happens for a reason”—in fact, I believe quite the opposite.  But I do believe that my lengthy field trip away from home has fulfilled its purpose in the finding of the love of my life.  I think my mom will be happy that, in fact, I am going to get even more golden days now.

 

The love of my life, Karla, our golden days stretching out ahead of us.

 

 

 

 

The Lock Just Keeps Spinning

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

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

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

To a Box Turtle
by John Updike

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Get rid of your open mind.

 

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

 

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

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

Actually Interesting Photo Challenge

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

4th St., across from St. Peters Church

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

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

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

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

 

 

 

 

Philly Journal, 3/9/14

In this itinerant sort of life I live, moving from place to place every few years, it becomes easy to put the specificity of places out of mind quickly.  What I mean is this: I spend a few years getting to know an area, its history, landmarks, my favorite restaurants and stores and the quickest routes from point A to point B, and generally becoming a familiar citizen of these places.  And then, some would say quite suddenly, poof!, I’m gone, off to a whole new existence (I’m aware I’m not the only person to have ever moved to a new area).  It’s odd: once I’m in the new place, while some of the specifics of the former place may swirl on my periphery for a few days, they are largely completely tossed aside.  Now, please mind this next sentence: I am not suggesting I forget the lovely people or experiences from these places.  I’m thinking more about my favorite Chinese buffet in Erie, PA, a real shithole that I fell in love with when I visited it at first on a balmy summer day just a month or so after I moved there.  I’d just visited the Erie Art Museum for the first time (my first trip to an art museum by myself) and I was laden with pamphlets I had picked up there.  I sat at this shithole buffet for an hour, gorging on fried rice and realizing I loved art.  I went to this buffet roughly one million times over the next year.  It saw me get the fattest I’d ever been, and then slowly became an occasional guilty pleasure in the months before I moved away from Erie, as I was becoming slender and trying to avoid buffets.  That Chinese buffet was one of just about 100 unique places I evolved for myself in the 2 years I lived in Erie; the places we choose to frequent and spend time in outside the house become an extension of our personalities and identities.  I had places I liked to ride my bike, and stop my bike.  Places I rented movies, and bought books, and places I read books.  And then, in a decision made over the course of just a few weeks—I was gone, living with my mother in South Jersey.  Now I haven’t thought of those places–places that made up bits of my identity–for months or a year.

When I landed in South Jersey, for a week or two, I felt like I inhabited many worlds.  My new home was New Jersey, and I was excited to explore it.  But my identity in Erie was a good one, and it was fading like a seen ghost.  At the same time, I was working in Philadelphia—another aspect of identity.  In all three places at once, I was developing, forgetting, or remembering the places I loved that were special to me.

Eventually, I made quite a few special places in South Jersey.  A few antique shops that I liked to stop by all alone, browsing the musty wares, thumbing through the hundred-year-old postcards and selecting a few to buy each time.  The record store, Tunes, out on the absolutely horrid Black Horse Pike, where I secreted away to about every two weeks, where I once found and bought a vinyl copy of Bruce Willis’ blues album, and where I rebuilt my collection of Radiohead CDs.  I can still remember the taste of the incredibly overpriced cheesesteaks at King of Steaks on the main drag in Woodbury—with their three booths and cans of soda.

And then, in a decision again seemingly out of nowhere, I suddenly found myself living in Philadelphia.  I was immediately in love with my new situation, and often still find myself chuckling as I walk along the street to my house in the afternoon, all alone listening to Death Cab for Cutie on my iPhone, and I look over my shoulder and see the skyline.  What an adventure is my life, I think to myself.  And although South Jersey and my identity there hung over my life like a disappearing ring of smoke for a few days, it didn’t take long for me to forget the Barnes and Noble out on Almonesson, despite having gone there 50 times in the last year and a half.  I had new places replacing that one, and a new kind of identity forming with them, and down the road, these new ones will soon enough be replaced and forgotten, too.

This evening, as I was showering, I tasted one of those Woodbury cheesesteaks—I’m not sure why, but there it was—and I suddenly missed everything all at once.

What are your current places? What are some you’ve almost forgotten?

Philly Journal, 11/19/14

I had a truly enormously long day today, but I’m still wide awake, so I thought I’d open up the old blog here and just start typing and see what came out.

As mentioned before, this move from Jersey to Philly was always going to require two moves, with half of my belongings being at my mother’s house in Jersey, and the other half at my father’s house in Central PA.  So we moved the stuff from my mom’s on Friday, and today was the day to go get the stuff at Dad’s.

So I woke up at 6am to leave, with my mother in her car, by 7am.  We drove the 2+ hours to Newville.  Travelling with my mother is always quite a joy, even that early in the morning, so the morning had that going for it.  Sadly, we had some rest stop bad luck and I got zero coffee until well over an hour on the road.  That was not swell.  Long story short, it was a pleasant surprise to find the U-Haul pickup spot was seriously about 300 yards from my dad’s house, so…that was a bonus.  Promptly after arriving, my parents and I set upon loading my belongings into the truck.  It was a little strange, as some of these items have been with me for quite a few years now, all over the state of Pennsylvania, and they’ve been sitting in my dad’s garage waiting for me for about 18 months, but it felt like we had just put them there.  Oh hi, couch.  Oh hi, chair.

 

Mom having lunch at a PA Turnpike rest stop

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Then, the long drive back to Philly.  I drove the U-Haul, following my mom.  There were actually quite a few misadventures on this trip, but I am, as I write this, becoming as tired as I really ought to be, so I must cut to the chase.  This is what happens when you begin writing a blog entry just to “see what comes out”.

 

Mom getting me back by surprising me emerging from a rest stop bathroom

Anyway, after unloading everything into my house in Philly and mom and I emotionally parting ways, I had to go to work!  It was only for a few hours to count inventory, but I was already bone tired!  Add to that the fact that “going to work” now also means a 15 minute bike ride, and I was NOT looking forward to it!  THEN, add to that some unforeseen complications during said inventory count, and what you have is me just arriving home at midnight.  I am so tired, I feel as though I could poop out an entire, intact feather pillow right now.

 

But the good news is, all my stuff is now here in my apartment.  Thanks again to everyone involved, but most especially my parents…a more supportive, badass, cool-to-the-max and unconditionally loving set of parents, I could not ask for.  And I now have a couch, a dining room table,

My living room with all my crap in in

chairs, and all kinds of stuff one imagines when one thinks of…sitting down, and stuff.

 

Tomorrow will be my first real day off of work, with no “moving” to do since moving in, so I look very much forward to the free time to actually start getting this place in order and maybe stepping outside and exploring the neighborhood a bit.  My work schedule during this move, coupled with the move itself and it necessarily happening on my days off, has been just brutal (especially with my legs adjusting to the bike ride at the same time that I was moving boxes up and down stairs and onto and off of trucks in pretty much all my free time).  So I am in a pretty degraded physical state at the moment.  But it’s nothing one good night’s sleep and refreshing day off can’t undo.

This has been a fairly pedestrian blog entry.  My apologies.  I was more tired than I thought when I started.

Philly Journal, 11/14/13

This afternoon, after a morning of meetings in the city, I picked up the keys to my apartment.  My move-in day isn’t until tomorrow, but I stopped in just to have a look around at my new place for the first time in over two weeks.  Then I came back to Jersey and loaded all my stuff from Mom’s house into a U-Haul, with the help of the bro-in-law, the nephews, Uncle Dale, and, of course, Mom (and sister in spirit, no doubt).  I parked the U-Haul in a neighboring parking lot; we’ll be moving the stuff into the place early tomorrow morning.  Mind you (and I’m somewhat embarrassed by how much stuff I have) this is only half my stuff; the other stuff is at Dad’s house in Newville, which we’ll be moving on Tuesday, so while I’ll be living in the city tomorrow, I will be missing some key stuff, such as most of my furniture.  Anyway, I took some pics of the place today, here they are:

The living room, looking in from the kitchen, toward the front door.

 

 

The kitchen, looking in from the living room

 

The stairs, right inside the front door

 

 

The small bedroom

 

 

The larger bedroom

 

 

 

 

Philly Journal, 11/6/13

While I am super-pumped to finally be living in the city, it should be noted that my year and a half in South Jersey has been an extraordinary time in my life, and I shall miss it greatly.  I’m sure I’ll elaborate very much on this soon, but at the moment, I’m tired as all get out, and just want to show you all the sweet-ass video I just made, commemorating my year in Jersey:

Philly Journal, 11/2/13

It’s been quite awhile since I posted a Philly Journal.  Click here if you’d like a refresher course in the older ones.

So, today I finally got word that the row house I’d applied for in the city will be mine for the taking.  I haven’t said much publicly about my quest to move from South Jersey into the city, and that, as you may know, is pretty typical of me.  I don’t really tell people what I’m up to until things are kind of a done deal.  So, here’s what’s going on:

About a year and a half ago I moved from Erie, PA to the development in Jersey where my mother and sister live.  I got a new job, in the city of Philadelphia.  The goal was to stay with my mother for awhile until I figured out where I wanted to live in the city, and then be a big boy alone in the city.

It took a little longer than expected.

Mostly, because it took me almost a year to know for sure where I’d end up working in the city.  I work for the largest chain of coffee shops in the world.  I got hired as a manager but had to undergo some training before I got my own store, and that training does not have a specified length.  Not wanting to move onto the opposite side of the city from where I’d be working, I waited.  Then, once I got promoted, it still proved a daunting task to move into the city.  It’s just so big!  Try as I might, I just could not find a proper way to begin the task.

Also, there was the matter of my car.  I really, really wanted to not have it.  I didn’t like the idea of worrying about parking in the city (it’s a very legit hassle), and ridding myself of the expense would also be a major plus.  But, see, I had bought the car new, and still owed more on it than I would get by selling it, so I was in a precarious situation.  Eventually, over the past year, I paid it down enough to make selling it a viable option, and about three weeks ago, I did sell it.  I currently have no car!  It is a very, very strange feeling, one I have not felt since I was 16.  For those doing the math, that is 19 years ago.  So for the past few weeks, I’ve been driving my mom’s car while I took the final few strides toward finding a place in the city.

Luckily, even though I could certainly be classified as a bit of a loner, I have made a few connections in the city over the past year, one of whom happens to be a real estate agent who specializes in showing people apartments that meet their criteria.  So, I told her what I was looking for and where I was looking for it, and this past Tuesday we walked our rear ends off checking out apartments.  I liked quite a few, and it turns out I can totally afford to live in the hippest and coolest sections of the city, but alas, though affordable, they were all super small.  I fell in love with the last place we went: a townhouse well outside the cool parts of the city, and even a pretty good distance from my work (but really, just a ten minute bike ride, which is how I’ll almost always be getting around).  It’s not incredible, and certainly not much to look at from the outside, but I was just head over heels with the interior, and the idea of having so much space for myself.  Those of you who’ve been reading for a long time may remember how thrilled I was by the space I had in Erie…well, this is considerably more than that.

The house is in the neighborhood of the city known as Pennsport, by all appearances a neighborhood that is not an incredibly good one, and not an incredibly bad one.  I will here copy-and-paste the contents of the very brief Wikipedia entry about Pennsport:

Pennsport is a neighborhood in the South Philadelphia section of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, United States. Pennsport is home to a large working Irish American population and many Mummer clubs. It was also the site of a controversial push for casinos along the Philadelphia waterfront.^[ Foxwoods Casino was proposed for Christopher Columbus Boulevard at Reed Street.

According to the Genealogy of Philadelphia County Subdivisions, Pennsport was originally part of Moyamensing Township. Most of the area north of present-day Mifflin Street was included in the Southwark District from 1794 until the consolidation of Philadelphia in 1854. At that point, it was mostly contained in the First Ward. The First and Second Wards ran east of Passyunk Avenue and were divided by Wharton St. (First to the south, Second to the north). The southern boundary of the First Ward initially spanned south to the river, but it was stopped at Mifflin St. in 1898.

That is the extent of the entry.

Here is a map of South Philly neighborhoods.  Now, if you don’t know the city, this will be rather meaningless, but you can see Pennsport there on the far East of the map; that is the city’s end, so my neighborhood borders the Delaware River, and in fact, my house is in the 100 block of my street, so I’m actually dang close to the edge of the city:

So that’s pretty much it.  I got word late tonight that my rental application had been accepted; however, my move-in date isn’t until the 15th, so I’ve got a little time to do some South Jersey victory laps.  I’ll be resurrecting the Philly Journal for this process of moving and the new journey I’m on.  There will be pictures soon!

Self-Portraits in Cities

To see these pictures in the full, grandiose artistic glory with which I intend, click on them to see a full-screen version. From the full-screen version, you’ll have to use your browser’s back option to return to the blog.

Trenton, NJ

 

Wilmington, DE

 

Atlantic City, NJ

 

Harrisburg, PA

 

Philadelphia, PA

 

Erie, PA

Pittsburgh, PA

 

Cleveland, OH

 

Buffalo, NY

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Even

More Camden video, with apologies to my dad!

Sorry, Dad.  This city just fires my engines.  You guys have to check this video out, it’s like another planet!

The Woods Behind My Mother’s House

 

 

Liar, Liar

This is a real article from yesterday’s South Jersey Times.  Every time I read it, I laugh out loud, at almost every paragraph.  The actual event was probably not that funny, but the way the writer chose to word things just kills me.

Woodbury, New Jersey

 

 

Camden

Some of you may have heard me mention the city of Camden, NJ, in previous blogs.  Camden (directly across the Delaware River from Philadelphia and about a 10 or 15 minute drive from where I live in Mantua, NJ) is regarded almost without question as one of the most dangerous, poorest, blighted, and decayed cities in the country.  Percentage-wise, Camden has the highest murder rate in the nation in 2012, with 67 murders in a city of only 77,000 people. (Read this article).

Of course, if you’ve read my blog for long, it shouldn’t surprise you that this place intrigues me.  Blight intrigues me.  In addition, Camden has a long and storied history and hasn’t always been so sad and gloomy (it’s still home to Campbell’s Soup’s corporate headquarters).

But seriously folks, listen…you don’t just go into Camden. I am typically pretty fearless, at least when it comes to cities and slums and things of that nature, but I hesitated until today to go into Camden.  Now, yes, there is a “safe”, tourist-friendly area of moderate size that I’ve been to quite a bit, but as far as the residential, murder-capital part of the city…not so much.  And the pictures and videos that I’ve embedded after this won’t really convey the seriousness of what I encountered when I finally braved it and checked it out today.

I’ve seen plenty of slums and ghettos in my day, but this is on another level.  It is like a war-torn ruin on another planet.  If your first reaction is to say something like, “Oh, this looks like such-and-such a neighborhood around here,” then I haven’t done my job.  It is not just a matter of my own experience, but a matter of on-the-record fact: there aren’t a lot of places in this country like Camden, NJ.  I unfortunately did not film or photograph the most striking, jarring aspects of the city, because yes, I admit, I was scared at points.

Check out the video.  Come summer time, I expect to explore the city a bit more thoroughly:

The First Snow

It snowed a little bit on my commute to work this afternoon; granted, it was already gone by the time I got off work, but it seemed significant enough to qualify as this area’s “first snow” of the year. So what could I do but cobble together this insufferably pretentious video of the snow event? Enjoy it, you heathens.

Overcast on Top of Overcast

In the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy, the sky has been a constant rippling gray, for days now.  It’s not simply the flat, featureless gray of most overcasts; it is as if somebody laid down one layer of pure, solid gray, and then came after it and blotted on bushy, billowing slate cottonballs.  The sky has never looked so huge, while simultaneously enclosing us, pushing down, making clear that us humans are smaller than we’d even suspected before.

 

 

 

 

 

 

Philly Journal, 10/30

Life chugs along here in Philly/ South Jersey.  There are quite literally more things to do than I have time for!  The list of ways I want to spend my time keeps growing and growing and I rarely fully check something off of it.  In addition to tourist areas/ landmarks (which my mother and I tick off a list at the rate of about one a week), there are larger projects I can’t seem to get my feet under me for:  familiarize myself with the local rock music scene, find when and where nationally-renowned poets are reading in the area, figure out the local New Jersey history, take pictures of as many Philadelphia historical markers as I can, become familiar with Philly record stores…and on and on.  Luckily, I like doing things.

There was a hurricane yesterday.  Despite all signs pointing to the fact that we should have been, like, directly in the worst part of the hurricane, close to nothing happened here.  Just a whole lot of rain, and a little bit of wind.  For a moment it looked like there might be a flood danger.  Watch this video I took, once an hour from between 1pm and 5pm:

A few nights ago I went and saw the band El Ten Eleven at Philly’s North Star Bar.  It was interesting to finally see a show at this venue, as about two years ago, when I was living in Erie, I had planned to see the band Hey Rosetta! at this location when I was home on a vacation, but those plans got changed, however, I had stayed on their mailing list and have recieved monthly e-mails from them for two years, detailing the bands playing there.  While there are dozens and dozens of venues in Philly, it just so happened that the North Star Bar would end up being the first place I actually saw a band in Philly after moving here.  It was, essentially, a dump.  But I loved it.

This concert was somewhat unique for me because I attended it WITH SOMEBODY.  I went with my friend Bill Hanna, who doesn’t have a Facebook, so it’s almost like he doesn’t exist. But he does have a Twitter account, and I’m sure he’ll hate the fact that I just linked to it.

El Ten Eleven is post-rock, which I reference all the time but you still don’t know what it is. Damn lazy readers.  Anyway, it’s really serious music for really pretentious bastards like me.  But seeing post-rock live is pretty much the most intense experience I ever go through.  It is life-affirming, gut-wrenching, and sorrowful.  And seeing it live with a friend is even more intense.  Kudos to Bill Hanna for making the trip, as I think he still has just one foot into the genre, not yet sure if he likes the temperature, although he is a certified fan of this post-rock band.

Anyway, the day of the show, I spent wandering around Philly before meeting up with Bill and going to the show.  I made this video of footage from that day, set to El Ten Eleven’s “Lorge”, followed by footage I shot of them opening their show that night with the same song:

Other intense things lately: my mom and I saw a show of some of Winslow Homer’s paintings, including this hum-dinger:

Went to the intriguing Franklin Science Center with the sis, nephews, and mom:

I’ve visited the building Thomas Jefferson was staying in when he wrote the Declaration of Independence, the house where Walt Whitman died, four Phillies games, toured a battelship, taken a million (really good) pictures, eaten way too many cheesesteaks, allowed my mother to teach me that, yes, plants are actually badass, recieved multiple cool owl things from my sister, played a seriously challenging game of hide-and-seek with my nephew Ethan, bought a really sweet new record player, went to the damned zoo,  attended a meeting of our development’s Homeowner’s Association with my mom and Brian (formerly known as Pumpkin Latte on this blog, but that would be too weird considering my recent career change, so to my blog readers: Brian is my sister’s husband and also a registered Shaman in Alaska), went to dinner at a fancy schmancy joint with a visiting Michael, became obsessed with the works of this poet and even found a book of his in, yes, an actual bookstore, visited Newville and had my dad take me on a tour of his childhood, oh and this and also this,  and really almost too much stuff to name.

I took a break from the blog for awhile, just basically finding where it fit into my new life, but things have settled into a nice rhythm now, so expect it to come roaring back, with a vengeance. Also, vote for Obama, you bastards.

Flemington, Again

As stated in this post, my mother and I visited Flemington today.  It was an incredibly surreal experience.  It was truly lovely, but proved to be a very interesting exercise in the nature of memory and how I perceive the passage of time.  Until visiting there, I still had myself convinced that living there had been a “recent” occurence.  But being there again proved to me that it is most definitely verging on “a long time ago”.

Here are some pictures of the house we lived in (taken today):

We only lived on the top floor. The large window in the middle was the living room. My bed was up against the window that is seen at the far left of the picture.

And here is the best poem I wrote in which this house makes an appearance:

Like It Always Has

The dog runs away when I come near,
like it always has.
Off to the garage somewhere,
or to nose around in the garden,
maybe.
The skinny gray cat, however,
allows me to stroke him.
I like the cat, with his rough,
sandpaper coat and vibrating
contentment.
The cat meets my gaze with honesty,
commiserating over the heat,
the long days,
and the loud cars
which are ceaseless.

The house towers above us,
is taller than even our cars.
It is lit up like a ballroom,
and tonight it promises
to keep all wild things out,
like it always has.

OK, it’s me again.  Here is a picture I took today of the Boston Market I worked at while living in Flemington:

One of my lesser-liked poems from this period(the few people who have mentioned it to me usually call it weird or something like that) is a poem that was inspired by my job at this Boston Market, called “Growing”.  It is not actually about something that happened to me here, but employs a literary technique called Magical Realism in order to say what I’m thinking by presenting an impossible scenario.  The poem is about my fear of growing up and, ultimately, my fear of growing old—not unlikely topics to tackle at my first job after getting out of rehab and moving in with my mother.

Growing

Yesterday, at the ordinary restaurant where I work
a quite elderly woman bossed her way to my drive-through
window wanting food.  Upon passing me her hard-lived-for
money, my fingers briefly scraped the tips of hers,
and they were terrible, dead things,
scabrous extensions depleted of vigor or tautness
hardened at the end like pencil eraser nubs.
Whether these hands were worn heavy with worry,
decades of turmoil and injustice and life’s folly,
or whether these lecherous ladyfingers had become laminate
as the hands that doled out beatings, ear-cuffings,
being the manacles that held down and slapped,
I won’t pretend to know.  But like dried candybars
they crumbled and dissolved as I put her change
in her despicable palm, her fingernails crunching
like bugs under her tires as she drove off.
I laughed, and so did everyone else who saw it.

OK, me again.  The time I spent living in Flemington was so early in my sobriety, I was counting the days I had been sober.  Today is day ten, today is day 27, and on and on.  It is a practice unlike any other, to count one’s life back into existence.

Within the recovery community, the first really big milestone is 90 Days.  Newly-sober people are often encouraged to do a “90 in 90”, meaning to go to an AA or NA meeting every day for your first 90 days.  I did not do a 90 in 90, but my 90 day anniversary was still a big deal.  As such, my mother took me out for ice cream to celebrate. She took me to a little village of shops in Flemington–the chic kind of place with cute little shack-like buidlings with outlets in them, and quaint little restaurants with only 6 tables in them.  We had ice cream (I had pistachio) at a free-standing ice cream shop in the middle of a brick-lined shopping plaza.  For whatever reason, it’s always been something I remembered very distinctly, and I hadn’t been back there until today.  It’s all mostly the same, but the ice cream shop is a bakery now:

When you’re writing so much poetry (and often with such grandiose ideas), you end up missing the mark a lot.  One of my biggest disappointments from this period are my “thick days” poems.  It was my big poetic ideal to, on certain anniversary days, to write a poem about what it felt like to be sober that many days.  I ended up with three poems,  “75 Thick Days”, “90 Thick Days” (written the day of my pistachio ice cream) and “Thick Days Forever” about being sober, y’know, from here on out.  It was a good idea, but it was pretty much all idea and no substance, and I’ve always cringed when reading them since (they appeared in my second collection of poetry from Flemington, The Mundorf Bench).  But, even though they suck, I’ve never presented them online before, and being back at the ice cream stand today convinced me to do so, warts and all.  I also find it interesting and a tad terrifying that I refer to myself in these as young man.  Here they are:

75 Thick Days

I have inserted
75 thick days
between it and myself
I have licked
and kicked
and battered
the beast
for 75 thick days
and it is rather amusing
spying it reeling
still possessing strength
to lob me doubts
are you strong enough
young man?
Will time really tell?
When does
one of us
win?

How vigilant are bottles?

90 Thick Days

Such optimism
such a varicose life
laid before
and neatly stacked
beautifully puckered
within each day
such soberism
makes a nice wife
but a bad whore
old days packed
away and suckered
for this new way
these thick days
each day a prism,
the sharpest knife,
the brightest shore,
the ceiling shellacked.
90 days puckered
as if to say
they are here to stay.
I now await the next one with ease.
They have taught me something new:  “Please…”

Thick Days Forever

There will always be the graduations of younger folks
and who doesn’t like to see those fast happy times,
and music never stops being made for us to listen to,
bless those musicians.  Maybe dancing.
Or maybe singing; one can always take lessons
and, presumably, become good at almost anything,
with time, with enough days,
and so much usable time, so many precious tickings,
the message of moments easily lost or confused
so that choices become blurred or marred.
Perhaps hangliding, or bungee jumping, or such things affirming.
Or just to wander curiously about, not limiting
yourself into opulent categories or expensive specializations
but just to peek and peer under this,
above that,
seeing what such-and-such is made of
and how it does it.
Oh, with enough time, enough days
the world could become a tiny place indeed.
Nary a thing undiscovered, unfetched.
The days taper off like a coastal shelf,
and with enough of them, one becomes immersed.
What a view from here!
From these thick days, forever.

In Flemington

My mom and I are visiting Flemington, NJ tomorrow.  This may seem like a very not-big deal to most of you, but to me, Flemington is a place of magic.

Flemington is the town my mother lived in when I went to live with her when I got sober.  Like, within the first 12 hours that I got sober.  I’ve written a lot about my alcoholism, both my active drinking time and my recovery period, but I’ve never written at length about the very end of the drinking and the very beginning of the sobriety—and I’m still not going to, although that post is percolating, probably for sometime closer to my ten year sobriety anniversary, in April.  But it should be noted that my life as I currently think of it began in Flemington, NJ, about 9 and a half years ago.

I only lived there for six months (with my mom and her husband, John), but it seemed like much longer, and it still seems like yesterday.  I find it nearly impossible to believe it was almost ten years ago.  I still seperate events into things that happened “post-sobriety” and things that happened “pre-sobriety”, even things that didn’t happen to me.  If a movie was made in 2004 (post-sobriety) I consider it relatively new, despite it being 8 years old.  My life in Flemington serves as my own personal Big Bang.

Not only did I experience my early recovery “pink cloud” in Flemington, but it was an idyllic time for me in many ways: I was a grown-up with a job, yet had no bills.  Literally, no bills.  It was my first time in my life living outside of Central PA and I was discovering my love for “exploring”.  I was developing my love for movies, music, and books at record pace.  It was a wholly unique time of rebirth in my life.  And, I was writing poetry like I would never write it again.

It’s possible that I’ve gotten technically better at writing poetry since my Flemington period, but never again will I be able to write such genuine, immediate, voluminous verse as I was then.  I was bold, experimental, and searching for my unique poetic voice (by the time I moved in with my friend Duane in Carlisle, PA, six months later, I had found my poetic voice completely, and would go on to write a second batch of great material from our shared apartment on North Street).

The whole point of this post is for me to have an excuse to post my Flemington poems (or “early recovery poems”) for the first time in a long time.  I suppose it’s possible I am more fond of them than they deserve, because of my warm association with their creation, but I really do think they’re great.  I don’t have the time or space to post them all, or even all my favorites (I started writing this later at night than I had planned), but I’ll get a few here.  First is the poem I have repeatedly said is my best ever, and I stand by that.  The poem, “In Flemington”, doesn’t seem outwardly amazing, but it drips with emotion, and very accurately captures my experience.  It is a unique narrative chronicle and ends by revelaing that the narrator (me) has actually been thinking about a nameless woman that he didn’t mention previously, and that the entire poem has actually been addressed to her.  An immediate re-reading of the poem should then change your comprehension of the narrator’s (my) emotions, and add yet another layer of emotional depth to the piece.  Here it is:

In Flemington

On the corner at a small shop I buy a coffee
and take it outside with me.
In the air it steams to cool,
in communion with the breeze.
Strolling east, the cars and bicycles
are sparse today, even birds are few,
this close to downtown.  Passing the laundromat,
sweet, pungent softener assaults the nostrils
and the rumble of coin-op dryers is melancholy and promising.
Turning left onto Reaville Avenue a small boy
eight years old if a day
sits on the curb just sitting there
drying his hair in the sun like the sidewalk
and I almost say hi to him.
The coffee cools quickly in the chill afternoon,
I almost turn back to buy another,
but think better of the three dollars I have left.
I sidle into a quaint bookstore to gape at magazines,
the lives of others and kitchen equipment
glossy and flaxen, and the portly
latina by the register eyes me
and she is beautiful in that way
only latinas and llamas can be beautiful:
using solely the eyes.
Asking her if there is a restroom, she grudgingly gives me a key
knotted to a large wooden block
as if this were an interstate filling station,
and points me to the back corner,
but the door is open when I get there.
Safely locked inside, my pants stay buttoned
and I use only the mirror, studying my lines,
the old souvenir red blotches, reminding me
of lives and moments, other bookstores
or towns; some oversize pores poke peskily
into view begging for me to wash my face more often,
but not right now, not now, a time and place for everything.
Giving the key back to the girl, I emerge onto Main Street
and suck deep the stunningly new air,
amazed by the realization that you are somewhere far away
occupying real space
breathing just like me
and smiling right this instant,
your eyes gleaming like little coins.

OK, it’s me again.  Here’s another one of my all-time favorite, “You Sould Be Good”, a poem I write after my mother and I saw a woman collapse at a flea market.  I still read it and, when I get to the last few lines, I get chills.  Undoubtedly, I think, one of my most publishable poems.

You Should Be Good

I saw a woman stricken today—
with a heart attack, most likely—
it was at the flea market that occurs
every Sunday in the baseball field
beside my mother’s house.

She lay there quite still,
her insides arguing most likely,
and no one came running
except one woman wearing khaki shorts,
a daughter probably—
somebody’s daughter—
who knelt to tend to her.
(she was already dead?  perhaps)

The other market-goers stood,
seemingly stricken themselves,
stranded in place and looking on,
listening as the ambulance
from not-so-far-away
took up its familiar and chilling cry,
not just a wailing, but a caution:
You should be good.

Hey, it’s me again.  I’ve got to go to bed now, but I really have more of these to post, even though surely nobody is reading this.  So anyway, I’m going to return to this subject tomorrow, after my mom and I get back from our visit.  Goodnight, cruel world!

Self-Portraits in Cities

Harrisburg, PA

 

Philadelphia, PA

 

Atlantic City, NJ

 

Pittsburgh, PA

 

Cleveland, OH

 

Buffalo, NY

 

 

 

 

 

Philly Journal, 8/21: Ben Franklin Bridge #3

In my first installment of pictures of the Benjamin Franklin Bridge, I included some pictures of a ballpark that I had taken while walking on the pedestrian walkway of the bridge.  That ballpark is Campbell’s Field in Camden, New Jersey, which is home to the minor league baseball team the Camden Riversharks, who play in the Atlantic League.  (for those of you who are baseball fans, this is the league that Roger Clemens just signed on to play in…so it’s an outside possibility he’ll be coming to Camden).

Well, my mother and I attended a Riversharks game tonight, and it occurred to me that it would be quite interesting now to see the view of the bridge from inside the park, after seeing the view of the park from the bridge. Oh, and I had a great time at the game.  Very different from Phillies games, of course, and not even as energetic as Erie Seawolves games, but it’s the kind of team and ballpark that’s so sad, you just kind of have to love it.

Philly Journal, 8/10

There are five cats here, but two of them are skittish, so I never see them.  Still.  Three cats.  Not bad.

It’s been so hot.  Hot all the time, everywhere.  I like the heat but nobody else does, so I just feel like a creep.

I haven’t been home to see anybody yet.  I swear I’m coming soon.

There are lots of airplanes in the sky all the time.  I know this comes from being so close to Philadelphia.  But still.  I’ve never quite grown up in this regard.  Airplanes are amazing.

My mom and I watch a lot of MSNBC, and Philadelphia Phillies games.

We also eat a lot of turkey burgers cooked outside on the grill.

And chicken burgers, too.

I’ve only gone to one movie since I moved here.  I don’t really miss the movie theater, despite having gone about once a week for the past 5 years.  There have been plenty of movies released that I have interest in, too.  And there have been times I could have gone.  I just…don’t feel like it.

I also haven’t been reading as much.  I’m not sure what I have been doing, but it seems a bit more fun or interesting than movies and books right now.  Who knows.  Things change.  Then they change back.  Then they change again.  Such is life.

What do I have an unquenchable desire to spend all my money on?  Philadelphia Phillies merchandise.  I didn’t see that one coming two years ago.

My nephews are becoming real people.  It’s cool, but also scary as hell.

New Jersey has 1% less sales tax than Pennsylvania.  I just found this out today.  Just sayin’.

Bryan Cranston’s performance as Walter White on the television show Breaking Bad is by far the most impressive, sustained creative effort I’ve ever borne witness to.  The universe in general has certainly taken notice of it.  The stars and planets probably know about it.

I sometimes eat lunch, on my breaks during work, at a Whole Foods.  I’d never been to a Whole Foods before.  That shit is good.

 

 

Philly Journal, 8/8

LOOK AT THIS PICTURE I TOOK TODAY!  IT COULD TOTALLY WIN AWARDS!

Philly Journal, 8/2

Philly Journal, 7/31

One of the unstated benefits I’d hoped I might get by moving to New Jersey, so close to some of my family, was that it might stop or slow what I perceived as my slow but inevitable slide into being a real asshole.

It could be said about me that I may engage in a bit too much self-analysis (this doesn’t make me a good person; it just makes me weird).  But being in a near-constant state of “spectatoring” (paying attention to one’s own actions as though from a third-person perspective) has afforded me, if nothing else, a decent running account of what kind of person I am.

I got sober after a struggle with alcoholism in 2003, at the age of 25.  It’s difficult for me to say what kind of person I was pre-sobriety, even stretching back to before I started drinking.  My memories of Seth as a young man range from shy and socially awkward to a leader-of-the-pack Alpha Male, from kind and gracious to mean and brutal.  Then the ages of 20-25 were entirely alcohol-soaked; constant abuse of any drug essentially rids oneself of personality; you become the effects of your drug.

However, in the nine years since I’ve been sober, I think I have a pretty clear recollection of what kind of man I’ve been, and it’s gone through a surprisingly wide swath of personality types.  In the first year of sobriety, I was the nicest, happiest, most optimistic version of myself I will ever be.  This is actually a well-documented phenomenon of early recovery that we call “the pink cloud”.  I really doubt it can be overstated how happy and lovely this time is; I imagine people who have recovered from near-lethal illnesses go through it too, although really it only happens when one has actually accepted that your life is over, and then you come back and are completely better, complete with this spiritual awakening and the physical awakening of bodily processes that had gone so far as to shut down on you.  At that point in my life, I can’t imagine having been any more accepting, loving, non-judgmental, helpful…all-around, a pretty swell dude.

Nobody can stay on the pink cloud.  You try to.  You try really hard to stay on it.  But the pink cloud is itself like a kind of euphoric drug.  It wears off.  It’s inevitable.

I stayed pretty nice and positive for awhile.  But I can look back and see where my internal slides started happening.  When I started allowing myself to slowly think I was better than other people.  To judge them.  To be impatient.  Sarcastic.  Caustic.  Mean.

I’ve stayed positive through most of these nine years, at least, as regards my own life.  I’ve never stopped thinking that I have an amazing life.  I love waking up every day.  I love mornings.  I love late nights.  I love afternoons.  I love women in white pants, zoos, airports, little yippy dogs, and the moment the lights go down in the movie theater.  But, generally speaking, I think that you are a dumb bastard who likes dumb things.  I hate that I think that.  But I definitely think it.

Then, two years ago, I moved five hours away from everyone I knew.  Everyone.  I loved it.  I had a GREAT time.  Turns out, when you’re the smartest, coolest, hippest person alive, being around other people is always kind of a drag.  I was the only person I needed.

Being all alone in the world only made my asshole-ishness become more pronounced more quickly.  Those of you who got copies of my last book-type-thing, The Rub and Tug Capital of the World, will recognize (hopefully) this as the central theme of the book.  On the surface, the book can be read as just some random ruminations on living alone—completely alone;  but more than that it was meant as an admission that it was causing me to devolve into complete meanness and judgementalism.  The section of my search for “authenticity” represented the way I really thought, but the way I wrote it was designed as a revelation that I also knew it was ridiculous.  The section “I’m an Asshole” (by far the section that caused the biggest stir) was all true, but wasn’t meant to be bragging or facetious; it was a cry for help.

(as an aside, I’m a little peeved nobody has ever said to me, “Seth, The Rub and Tug Capital of the World is a painfully honest and boldly soul-baring work of art.  This is brave art.”  So, y’know…feel free to go ahead and say that to me still.)

I knew that if I continued to live alone, things would only get worse.  With every passing month I became more and more convinced of my superiority within the human race.  The rest of you wear stupid shoes.  You like stupid movies.  You pay other people to cut your hair.  You’re all so concerned about weekends. 

You’re living obvious lives—you really are, but I used to not care; heck, I used to embrace it.  You live your life, I’ll live mine, everybody’s happy!  But at some point I started to get annoyed by it, and then angry about it, until during the final year of living alone, I couldn’t even look strangers in the eye.  I hated them.  I can remember, just a few short years ago, I had been the type of man who said hello to strangers, talked to dogs and babies, and helped push broken-down cars off the road.  Not only did this make me look nicer, but I was markedly happier that way.

There are some people who claim they don’t think I’ve become an asshole, which means either A) I’ve always been an asshole and I’m just now realizing it myself or B) I’m a terrible judge of my own character.  Either one is completely immaterial, since if I feel bad about who I am inside, any external reality is unimportant.

Staying with my mom in New Jersey—and living just a few doors down from my sister, nephews, and bro-in-law, forces me to interact with human beings on a very regular basis.  It forces me to talk about my day, about their day.  It was, and still is, very unnatural.  But little by little, I’m re-learning. (and once I’m able to get back to where I started, I’m going to have to keep learning, as talking about myself…and I mean about myself, not about the philosophies I harbor or the rants I have memorized, but about how well I slept, how traffic was, etc.  I have never in my life felt anything other than terror when talking about myself like that.)  Of course, it’s not too difficult to be interested in the lives of your family.  But I’m trying very hard to talk to strangers and neighbors.  I’ve had some success (the neighbor fellow Walt tickles my friendly bone) and some failure (the presence of the neighbor children completely enrages me).  I’m trying to remember what “pink cloud me” would have thought, would have done, how he would have reacted.  Remember how close I was to death.  Remember what it’s like to literally feel your liver hurting, to have blisters for no reason, to vomit blood onto the ladies’ slacks you’re wearing and you don’t remember why.  What would a Seth who had just recovered from that insanity think about those neighbor children?  I doubt he’d love them (they really are genuine shit heads) but I doubt he’d be enraged.  He probably wouldn’t even notice them.

A few days ago, my mother and I went to the Rodin museum in Philadelphia.  As we approached the entrance, two elderly out-of-towners cornered us and, perhaps because of my Philadelphia Phillies hat, began asking us all kinds of questions…how do you get from here to there?  Have you ever been to so-and-so?  Of course I was annoyed by this intrusion, but to my surprise, I was not enraged.  Being with my mother, I continued to play-act the part of a nice, helpful stranger (my mother is one of the nicest people alive, especially to strangers, so when I’m with her I at least attempt to pretend to be nice).

Over the next few hours, we continued to run into these elderly folks 3 or 4 more times.  To my surprise, each time we saw them, I became happier to see them, eventually asking them questions with genuine interest.  It felt good.  I started to remember what it was like to not hate people, to be interested in them, to want to talk to them.

Eventually, Mom and I were on the Phlash trolley heading back to our subway stop when I spotted the elderly couple at the other end of the bus.  “Look, mom!  There they are again!” I said with genuine excitement.  Even if the rest of the world couldn’t see my transformation taking place, I knew, inside, it had begun.

Today, I was walking through Franklin Square when I saw a man, about my own age, sitting on a bench, while a squirrel, about 3 feet in front of him, did a little dance for him, nimbly running to and fro and occasionally stopping to make eye contact with him.  As I neared the bench, the squirrel ran away.  I could see the man was disappointed.

“Sorry to break up your party!” I said enthusiastically to the stranger.

He looked away from me and said nothing.

Not-so-very under my breath, I muttered Prick.

Baby steps, folks, baby steps.

Philly Journal 7/25

Philly Journal, 7/18: The Benjamin Franklin Bridge

One of the things I’ve been most interested in since moving here is the Benjamin Franklin Bridge.  Now, don’t get me wrong: it doesn’t really seem any more interesting than any other suspension bridge (although they’re all pretty interesting.  I mean, they hold themselves up!), but my exposure to the Ben Franklin (as it is affectionately known) has caused me to consider it’s nature moreso than other bridges.

First, a bridge of this nature is, ostensibly, ONE thing, yet it exists a multitude of places in a multitude of ways.  This particular bridge exists physically in New Jersey and Pennsylvania.  On the Jersey side, its massive cement tower is anchored into the ground in the slum city of Camden, which is one of the worst cities in the country (from Wikipedia:  Although once a thriving center for manufacturing and industry, Camden is perhaps best known for its struggles with urban dysfunction. Three Camden mayors have been jailed for corruption, the most recent being Milton Milan in 2000.  Since 2005 the school system and police department have been operated by the State of New Jersey; the takeover will expire in 2012. In 2008, Camden had the highest crime rate in the U.S. with 2,333 violent crimes per 100,000 people while the national average was 455 per 100,000. Camden public schools spend $17,000 per student per year and two thirds of the students graduate. Two out of every five residents are below the national poverty line. ⁾  

The other side of the bridge rests in Philadelphia, one of the most succesful cities in the world.  So there is a pretty glaring disparity between the two sides of the bridge, an object that is, in at least some ways, ONE object.

When I started going to work, commuting from New Jersey into Philadelphia via a commuter train, I became aware that these trains cross the Ben Franklin Bridge, despite myself never personally having seen one when I drove across the bridge over the years.  This got me to pondering what other hidden (at least hidden to me) uses the Ben Franklin (and other bridges of its kind) might harbor.  I began to become aware that the bridge not only has a duality from one end to the other, but has many lives from top to bottom.  From the highest tower and suspension line, to the pedestrian walkway (above the trains and cars), the commuter trains (above the cars), then the vehicular level, and then the various ways the underside and bottom of the bridge manifest their presence over the wide swath of real estate they cast shadows on, I started to become aware that there were so many perspectives to view this bridge from it was actually difficult to wrap my mind around.  And I haven’t even started to think about the toll booth workers who spend all day working on the bridge.

So, I’ve started taking pictures from as many perspectives of the bridge as I can.  This is by no means a finished project; I’m sure you’ll see plenty more Ben Franklin pictures from me, but with less explanation, in the future.  The following pictures have been taken by me over the past three weeks.

On the pedestrian walkway, high above the Delaware River, in the center of the bridge

 

The underside of the bridge in South Philadelphia

 

The bridge descending into Camden

 

The bridge as seen FROM Camden going INTO Philly

 

The bridge seen going INTO Camden, FROM Philly

 

The entrance to the pedestrian bridge, Philly side

 

The entrance to the pedestrian walkway, Camden side

Workers doing construction on the vehicular lanes, as seen from the pedestrian level

 

Vehicular lane seen from a commuter train, during the brief moment the two are level with one another

 

Commuter rail tracks as seen from the pedestrian walkway

 

The bridge’s end, Camden side

 

Me on the Camden side, bridge going into Philly

 

The bridge passing over Campbell’s Field, where the minor league Camden River Sharks baseball team plays, in Camden

 

View of Campbell’s Field from the pedestrian walkway

 

The bridge running through the Rutgers University campus…by far the least threatening section of Camden

 

Bench/ gathering area about a quarter of the way across the pedestrian walkway, Philly side

 

Entrance to a pedestrian tunnel under the bridge, Camden side, so folks can walk from one side to the other (not related to the bridge’s pedestrian walkway)

 

Inside the pedestrian walkway under the bridge, Camden side

 

The Delaware River, as seen from the center of the bridge, pedestrian walkway

 

The main tower anchoring the bridge to the Camden side, seen from the ground

 

Me on the pedestrian walkway near the main Camden tower