Origin Story, or: Where I Started

1.

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

2.

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

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

6.

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

7.

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

Big Spring

The Big Spring Creek (as it is technically named) rises from inside the Earth somewhere about two miles from my dad’s house, which is the house that I mainly grew up in, along with my sister and mother, until we all moved away except my dad.  He’s still there, tending the hyacinths.

The Big Spring (us locals never say the ‘Creek’ part) bubbles up out of nowhere under a hillside, about twenty feet from a bend in a very pretty road.  From there it meanders about six miles—never really more than a few feet deep—until it empties into a larger creek, the Conodoguinet Creek (us locals do say that creek, although more often than not, it’s just The Conodoguinet.  We’ve all heard the story that it was named when a cowboy asked a Native American, “Can I go in it?”, which is, of course, about the stupidest story ever told).  The Big Spring hops up out of the ground (it is what is called a Karst Spring, meaning the soft limestone ground has allowed water from surrounding runoff to create underground tunnels, from which it then shoots forth), makes a very scenic area even more scenic for a few miles, and then becomes something else entirely.  Its life, from an individual molecule’s point of view, is pretty brief.

Growing up, we moved from an old house into a new house when I was about eleven years old, but both houses were very close to the Big Spring.  It’s a small creek, but nonetheless, growing up near water has its perks.  I never learned (or wanted) to fish, but I spent lots of time on the Route 233 bridge—that one right there by John Graham Medical Center—peering down into the pristine flow, tracking the movement of the brook trout as they navigated their daily lives.  I also liked how swarms of anonymous insects gathered near the surface, buzzing about in a loose ball.  I imagined they drank the water, and maybe liked the sunshine.  I think maybe I wanted to be one of those anonymous insects.

My father now lives closer to the Big Spring than any of us from my family, but he didn’t grow up near it.  He grew up in a different small town about 25 miles away.  Nowadays, that doesn’t seem far, and I grant you it wasn’t a massive distance then, either, but it was farther.  The interstates weren’t as perfectly engineered as they are today, and cars weren’t so finely manufactured.  You drove 45 miles-per-hour on the network of roads that had sprung up organically over time, as people figured out where they wanted to go.  And each town still had their own Main Street, their economic centered downtown, so there was much less reason to go from Mechanicsburg (where Dad grew up) to Newville (where I grew up).  I’m sure the chances of Dad even hearing of the Big Spring Creek in those days was pretty slim; Mechanicsburg had plenty of its own attractions.  He once told me a sad tale about his days in Little League baseball all those 25 miles away.  In those days, they made you try out for the teams.  He wasn’t good enough to play with the kids his own age and they relegated him

Dad, very young, probably even before moving to Mechanicsburg

to “pony ball”, where he played with boys much younger than himself.  Regardless, one year, his pony league team was a very good team.  Their star player was a young pitcher by the name of Bill Shortridge who was just pitching lights-out ball.  Near the end of the season, one of the teams of older boys came and took Bill Shortridge off Dad’s team and promoted him to the older league.  Even so, Dad’s team finished undefeated, even without the star pitcher.  Later, at an awards ceremony, they were handing out a trophy for Most Valuable Player, and it was still given to Bill Shortridge!  He must have been very good.  But an adult pulled Dad aside and said to him, You know, if it wasn’t for Bill Shortridge, we were going to give that award to you.  Dad told me not long ago, “I wish they just hadn’t said anything to me at all.”

I had a very similar (although admittedly less heartbreaking) experience with little league baseball in Newville.  My dad and I are both short men, which means we were also “little” boys.  In most athletics, being a small boy is a one-way ticket to obscurity.  In addition, I was not very good at baseball.  Before I ever swung a bat it was decided I would play one age group below where I should be.  So when I arrived at the ballfield each Saturday, I would see my friends and classmates over at the bigger field, playing a version of the game that looked to me like it was on steroids.  Then I would go play a game of baseball with kids two or three years younger than me, and they were still better than I was.  I was (and always will be) afraid of the baseball.  They’re just so hard.  I’d usually get stuck in right field, and even then I’d often botch a play; when a fly ball was hit to me I would make sure I took the least-effective route to it so that it would land before I had to try and catch it.  Once, I didn’t get a single at-bat in a game and my parents stayed after to complain to the coach and he bawled them out for standing up for me.  Later on, on the car ride home, they just laughed about it because the guy had been such a maniac.  They’re good parents.  But I’m also not any good at baseball.

 

In my teen years, my family had moved out of the small town of Newville to a house in a more rural area.  Walking down to the Spring was no longer quite as easy; it was now a little over a mile away.  It was still easily reachable by bike and of course by car.  There was a large

Me in the gravel parking lot, age 35.

gravel parking lot along the Spring out here in the country.  That parking lot was the site of many “firsts” in my life—most of them illicit in some way.  This creek which had been a source of innocent musings to me as a child now bore witness to very much of my growing up.  I still visit that parking lot almost every time I visit Dad, but there’s nothing really there for me anymore.  Some places don’t ever own any real magic.

 

My mother grew up in yet another small town—not Newville and not Mechanicsburg, but Oakville.  Now this is a tiny town, but not too far from Newville and the Big Spring.  She was probably aware of it was a child.  She grew up on a real life, honest-to-goodness farm.  She often had to gather eggs as a child.  Her sister (my aunt) tells a story of moving freshly born piglets out from under their mothers so they wouldn’t be crushed.  They had many outbuildings, as farms tend to have, including a pump house, where you would heave and ho on a big metal pump and call water up from deep underground.

As her parents got older they sold the farm and moved into a house in Newville, on Big Spring Avenue.  My parents, after meeting in college and getting married, would later buy a house just two doors down from Mom’s parent’s house.  I would spend my first days as a human being (notwithstanding a few days in Carlisle Hospital) in the big

Mom on the farm in Oakville as a young teenager

yellow house at 66 Big Spring Avenue.  Both of my parents, despite being from “the next town over” came to adopt Newville as their homeland.  Mom would eventually be on the committee of the Newville Area Community Center, and Dad would be the announcer and finally the coach of the town’s ill-fated Twilight League baseball team, the Cardinals.

In those halcyon days, Newville had an annual carnival-type event down at the town playground (this was different from the current annual Fountain Festival).  As a child, the carnival seemed like the biggest event in the world.  It felt like the whole town was there.  There were dunk tanks and food stands and those things where you throw darts at balloons and face painting.  The whole shebang.  I also was made to feel special at these events, because my mom was something there, and the importance of this is not to be diminished: she was the long-standing champion of the Dual Sack Race.  This is a race where you and a partner each put just one leg in a large burlap sack, and then through teamwork you race other teams in a kind of start-and-stop hopping motion.  Mom’s partner each year was family friend Wayne Witmer, and boy-howdy, they were good.  They just simply won every year, but nobody knows for quite how many years.  One year they even made the local paper, the Valley Times-Star, with a picture and everything.  Mom recently said to me, “I can still see that picture in my mind, exactly.  I was so cute and little and lithe!”  Lithe.  There’s something time seems to take from all of us, no?  Know what Mom and Wayne won every year for their heroic efforts?  An ice cream cone.  Despite the meager winnings, when the event organizers stopped offering the event, it made Mom feel sick.  She looked forward to it so much.

When I was pretty young, but I don’t know how young, I was out at the Spring with a couple of my other pretty young friends. I’m not even sure which house we lived in at this time. I know that we were out in the country, although we might’ve lived in town. But my friends and I were out in the country, and we were taking big rocks, as big as we could actually carry, and moving them across the Spring, trying to make a dam. I don’t know why we were doing it, it’s just the sort of thing that you do when you’re a kid growing up near a body of water.  You want to manipulate it, plus, you’re also bored. We got about halfway across the spring, it was actually a pretty good dam we were building – and we can actually see the waterflow changing a little bit, when down out of one of the grand houses that stands up in the lush vegetation beside the pretty road (which is, for the record, called Spring Road) strode toward us our elementary school principal. I didn’t know it at the time, but Art MacArthur, the principal of Newville Elementary School, lived in that grand house, and he had been watching us.  But the thing was, he didn’t come to yell at us.  We were scared when we saw him, but he was very nice.  Most of us, he knew our names just by looking at us.  He talked to us for a few minutes, complimented how well we had made our dam.  Right before he left he told us that if a police officer or Game Commission official happened by, we could get in a lot of trouble, so we should put the stones back where they had been.  So that is what we did.

My sister Adrienne has always been about three years older than me, and presumably, she always will be. I say that she’s about three years older than me, because sometimes it’s only two years. It depends on what month it is. So of course, we had slightly different experiences

Adrienne in the backyard of the Newville house with grandma Dellinger

growing up. But we did spend an awful lot of time together by the spring. When we were very young, and still living in town, we would often walk down to the spring, where there is a large and a very old stone arch through which a bend in the stream  meanders. We could walk up a very steep embankment and get above the stone arch (which wasn’t a bridge so much as a tunnel through the embankment), and simply be there, being in our own little world. It really is a very secluded area, the town itself is almost devoid of activity during the day, even now when I visit. Back then, stifling hot summer days would send everybody who was actually home during the day inside, and we could be out and about. There was silence, and insects, and cars in the distance. We would be above this stone arch, which was probably over a hundred years old even then, and we would look for big thick branches that we could lay down on. We would pretend it was our own sort of hideout or fort. Our age difference was enough that we weren’t often playmates, we didn’t share fantasies or other worlds, but this little secret place, we could share. Later, without me, she would bring her first boyfriend Mike down to the same spot, find little coves in the trees, and make out with him. She was growing up, which I suppose is something everyone has to do. It was, I suppose, her version of the gravel parking lot that I would later find as a teenager, once we moved out to the country. Either way, that spring was just trickling past us, whether we noticed it or not.

Everything just keeps trickles right past.

 

 

The Scent of Bitter Almonds, and etc, etc.

1.  Nothing says “I’m a boring person” quite like posting pictures of your alcoholic beverage to Facebook.  Seriously.  You went out to a bar or club and you think the interesting thing that is supposed to happen is the drink itself?  Uninteresting, repetitive pictures of the person you’re with, or even another selfie, are more interesting than a beverage in a glass.  We’ve got the whole internet, and you want us to look at a beverage.

2.  I’ve brought this up before, but I just have to keep digging at this one.  Why are there two kinds of screws and screw drivers, ie flat head and Philips head?  I’m not over here like, meh, there should only be one kind! I am confident there are very good reasons for there being multiple kinds of screws, but I just for the life of me can’t figure out what those reasons are.  Anyone with any insight, please comment!

3.  War is terrible, but man, for a nation so young, we’ve had two very interesting wars!  I’ll be damned if the Revolution and the Civil War aren’t two of the most amazing stories ever told.

4.  With Philip Seymour Hoffman dead, the greatest actor of this generation (ie the generation currently the correct age to play the most interesting parts in the kind of films that get made the majority of the time) is James Franco.  Discuss.

5.  I get pretty tired of taking the trash out.  I mean, we really just have to keep doing this?

6.  Look at this picture of my dad and sister on vacation in Brigantine, NJ in 1980.  What’s not to love about this picture?  I want to sit on a porch listening to that radio, wearing those socks, next to a child dressed like that:

7.  I recently asked a few friends of mine which baseball team they would like, if they had only to consider the teams uniforms/ colors and logo.  Where you grew up and your previous loyalty should be not considered.  I got a few interesting answers—Billhanna said the Astros, which was a damned good answer.  My answer?  The Marlins or Blue Jays.

8.  Gabriel Garcia Marquez died this week.  He is one of my (and many others’) favorite novelists.  His most famous book is “One Hundred Years of Solitude”, which I love, but my favorite book of his is “Love in the Time of Cholera”, a book about a man who is obsessed/in love with one woman for his whole life, and dedicates his whole life to being with her.  It sounds creepy, and at times, it is, but what I love so much about it is that it is the only work of art in any medium that I have ever encountered that treats the obsessive side of love with the tender and insightful kind of care that most people reserve for “romantic” love.  It is a game-changer of a book.  Here is the first sentence from that book: “It was inevitable: the scent of bitter almonds always reminded him of the fate of unrequited love.”

9.  I understand you didn’t ask for my postcard or letter in the mail, and I understand, in this day and age, you’re not really sure how to respond to such antiquities.  I really don’t care too much.  Ideally you’d send a letter back, but I’m not expecting that.  You can ignore it.  That’s fine, you didn’t ask for it.  You can text me a response, which is the main thing people do, and that’s fine, if a bit gaudy.  But please, please…don’t post a picture of it on Facebook.

10.  What about this?

 

Let’s laugh at the clock on the wall.

I grew up in a small, small town in Central Pennsylvania, right on the border of what they call “Pennsyltucky”, the outward lands of the state marked by blighted Appalachia, wide rolling hills, and miles upon miles of pastures, corn fields, and truck stops.

The house I grew up in was on a shaded street with expansive sidewalks, the smell of pine, and painted rain spouts.  In most towns this would be a side street, a forgotten street.  But in my small town, it was one of the main thoroughfares, although almost no cars went down it.  I remember once peering out our glass front door and seeing the town’s sole police officer giving hasty chase—lights and siren blaring–to a speeding motorcycle and thinking maybe the world was ending.

Just a few blocks down the street from the house I grew up in was a corner store.  It was, I would estimate, about three blocks away.  This corner store was, even all those years ago, a throwback to older days.  It was not “intentionally nostalgic”, it was just a little store that hadn’t yet changed.  There was still a soda fountain there, where you could order Chocolate Cokes, or pineapple sundaes.  Things like that.  Folks gathered there in old wooden mint green highbacked booths, smoked cigarettes and spoke animatedly over outspread newspapers, hunting magazines, lottery tickets.  There was penny candy by the counter, a spinning rack of comic books by the door, and ammunition, shoe polish, and straight razors under a glass case near the back.

Frequently, but on no set schedule, my father and I would walk together down to this corner store.  It was something we did together.  Often, my sister came, too, but as a boy, of course, one singles out the times you are alone with your father.

It was three blocks away, but back then, of course, it seemed quite a distance.  Distances are always changing as we grow.  The walk to the store with my dad was half the fun.  I would try to walk on just the painted part of the curb, but I had the darndest time.  I couldn’t balance.  Then Dad would try, and I would try to push him off, but he was too good.  My father had impeccable balance.

We’d get to the store and, typically, the older neighbors who lived near our house were there.  Dad would settle into a booth with them, and so I would I, at first.  They’d start talking grown-up stuff after making obligatory kid talk with me.  They’d light their long cigarettes with colorful disposable plastic lighters, drink pungent coffee from thick-walled mugs, pop open cans of Tab.  I liked the smells, how they intermingled, how they wafted, how they meant Dad and I were together at the corner store.

Before long, I’d slip under the tables, make my way behind the counters, even disappear into the back stock room, which I remember as a long, dark hallway with one or two turns, and boxes up to a ceiling that looked fifty feet high.  I had the run of the place.  The owner and his sole young employee never tried to corral me.  I invented worlds within that store.  Alien lands, faraway cities, subterranean hideouts.  Every so often I’d pop back into a mint green booth and see that maybe Faye had won five dollars on a scratch-off, or Dad had a strong opinion about something that I didn’t understand, but I wanted to understand.  I wanted to.

One year, on the day of my birthday, Dad and I walked down to the store.  I had finished opening my presents and was already feeling very special, near ecstatic.  It was early evening and dusk was setting in.  My birthday is in mid-January, so it was decidedly winter.  Dad and I set out for what seemed to me the long, but pleasant, walk to the corner store.  What a night for me!  My birthday and now the store.

Halfway there, it started snowing.  Just a light, flurry-kind-of snow.  Still, I was sure Dad would suggest we turn back.  How could we keep walking to the store in the snow??? I thought.  But he had no designs to turn back.  We talked, we laughed, it snowed in our faces and stuck in my eyebrows.

Let us not try to make things perfect.  Let’s laugh at the clock on the wall.  Breathe deep the stunning air and wonder, wonder about everything.

Hoffman Film Fest, Day Six

There aren’t many movies out there about the adult relationship between a brother and a sister.  And while the relationship portrayed in “The Savages” between Philip Seymour Hoffman’s character and Laura Linney’s character is nothing like my relationship with my own sister, it still stands out as a unique film for this reason alone.  Plenty of movies dig around in the grown relationships of brothers, or sisters, but any movies I think of where the main siblings are a brother and a sister either glancingly explore the relationship, if at all, or the characters and their motivations are shallow. (if anyone can think of a movie that explores this that I’m missing, let me know in a comment!) I actually just watched “The Savages” less than a month ago when my eyes fell on it on my DVD shelf.  It was the Phil movie I’d seen most recently before he died.

Because “The Savages” is available to rent on YouTube, there are no clips really available anywhere on the internet, but here is a GREAT little tribute/ featurette about the movie that includes some nice little scenes and people talking about Phil:

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, 11/2/13

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!

Past and Present

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.

Philly Journal, 9/7

Philly Phacts

1.  Philadelphia is the fifth most populous city in the United States.  It’s kind of a big deal.

2.  The city of Philadelphia is its own county—the only instance of a city-county in Pennsylvania.

3.  The Greek translation of “Philadelphia” is literally “brotherly love”.

4.  It is one of the twelve “four sport cities”.

5.  As of December 31st, 2009, there were 829,873 registered Democrats living in the city, and 134,216 Republicans.

How I’m Doing!

I am really having a grand old time.  Living around people I know again, as well as working at a job whose main training tool is basically telling you to be really really nice to people, has started to make me come back around to caring about my fellow human again.  I love my new job.  I have really, really fallen in love with my mother’s cats, and I dare say they’ve started falling for me, too. Living with my mother is not only easy and tolerable, but downright great (and I don’t care how that sounds coming from a 34 year old; you can stuff your societal norms where the sun, it does not care to shine.  I am talking about your bunghole).  I have way too many fun and interesting things to do, all the time.  This new setup is redefining what I am interested in, and how I spend my time and money; where I’ll end up on that spectrum remains to be seen.  I will say that without a doubt, there will not be a year-end “Top Ten Movies” list of 2012.  I just cannot seem to muster the interest for movies right now (although there most definitely will still be a music list).  I finally got back to Central PA to visit friends and Dad.  It was a transcendant time.  Dad and I’s developing interests in local history are making for lovely, lively, emotional visits.  I only got to see a few friends on that visit but plenty more will be coming soon.  Paul is coming here to see the Phillies vs. Marlins with me next Wednesday, so that should rule.  I’m drinking a lot, a lot, a lot of coffee, and not just at work.  I got a new, finally very nice record player.  I’m kind of obsessed with it.  I’ve decided I like owls now and my sister keeps finding rad owl statues/ figures for me.  I cautioned her not to overdo it but with finds like these, I’m not sure overdoing it is possible.

Here’s a picture of my sister and I at the Franklin Institute

“It’s not the dream that makes you weak/ It’s not the night that makes you sleep.”

The concert last night was AMAZING.  Partly because it featured two bands that I’m pretty much at the apex of liking right now, and it’s been a long time since my concert-going career was so in tune with what I’m currently digging (which is why you may have noticed a significantly higher rate of commentary about this concert on social media than I normally indulge in), and partly because I really have slowed my concert going frequency in the past year, so now when I do go to a concert, the experience is starting to have some of that oomph that it had in the beginning, oh-so-many years ago.

The Band of Horses show destroyed me emotionally, while the My Morning Jacket show ripped my face off, in the good way.  I won’t bother you with specifics, but it was wholly satisfying.  Although, one specific: I finally got a “Steam Engine” from My Morning Jacket, after seeing them 7 times now.  “Steam Engine” is my white whale with this band.  I’ve just thought up that term for this purpose, but it’s perfect.  I seem to have a “white whale”” with just about every band I see frequently.  My sister and I shared one with LIVE (it was “White, Discussion”) and we finally got it on their farewell tour.  With Pearl Jam it was “Hard to Imagine”, which at one point seemed unthinkable I’d ever hear…and by the end of the 2008 tour, I was actually annoyed when they kept opening with it!  haha.  Anyway.  Aside from those two, I think I have yet to see any of my other “white whales”.  Oh, and of course, I got “Steam Engine” last night, and I definitely fucking cried.

Of my opener/ closer predictions, I got one out of four correct (“The Funeral” to close BoH’s set)…which was by far the easiest guess, but was no gimme!  I got one from each band’s wishlist that I had made.  Not too shabby.

The inside of the Mann Center for the Performing Arts, before the crowd arrived. I had a seat in the balcony.

Band of Horses during “Infinite Arms”.

Band of Horses setlist

1.  For Annabelle
2.  NW Apartment
3.  Knock Knock
4.  No One’s Gonna Love You More Than I Do
5.  Detlef Schrempf
6.  Infinite Arms
7.  The Great Salt Lake
8.  Cigarettes, Wedding Bands
9.  Older
10. Ode to LRC
11.  The First Song
12.  Laredo
13.  The General Specific
14.  Is There a Ghost?
15.  The Funeral

My Morning Jacket during “It Makes No Difference”

My Morning Jacket setlist
1. X-Mas Curtain   <—this is an incredibly abnormal opener
2. First Light
3. Outta My System
4. Holdin’ On To Black Metal
5. Tyrone (Erykah Badu cover)
6. Mahgeetah
7. Into The Woods
8. Evelyn Is Not Real
9. Gideon
10. Rocket Man  (Elton John cover)
11. The Bear
12. Strangulation
13. It Beats 4 U
14. Steam Engine
15. Victory Dance
16. Circuital
17. Touch Me I’m Going To Scream pt. 2
18. Touch Me I’m Going To Scream pt. 1
19. Highly Suspicious
20. Wordless Chorus
21. Run Thru
22. Smokin’ From Shootin’

Encore One:
1. Wonderful (The Way I Feel)  [with Ben Bridwell of Band of Horses]
2. I’m Amazed
3. It Makes No Difference  (The Band cover)

Encore 2:

1. Off The Record
2. One Big Holiday

In case you’re even mildly interested, I recorded MMJ coming onto stage and the first few minutes of “Xmas Curtain” (which has some incredibly interesting lyrics)…for me, one of the most interesting things to see from shows I wasn’t at is how the bands start the performance…the entrance music, the first few chords, the audience response…and MMJ never disappoint in this regard. (notice the red and green lights for “Xmas Curtain”, which, as far as I can tell, may or may not be about having sex with a prostitute on Christmas).   This also gives you a good idea of how far away I was :(

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, 6/25

Yesterday, Mom and I went into Philly to scope out my new place of employment (for those of you relatively new to my blog, we don’t use actual company names here).  I’d been quite anxious to see where it was situated.  I knew that is was very much in “Center City”, but I wasn’t sure to what extent.  The big question that was looming was the question of parking/ transportation.

It was not a great visit to the city for me.  The location is essentially as close to the center of the city as you could be—which is awesome and is going to be a lot of fun to work at, but my stomach sank as I came to realize that driving to work was going to be essentially impossible.  It would cost almost as much a day for me to park there as I would be making!  My mom and I drove home with me feeling more than a little dejected.

(a little more on the location:  it is smack dab on the middle of the Avenue of the Arts–for criminy’s sake, people, click the link—which is also within sight or very short walking distance of Philly landmarks such as LOVE Park, Rittenhouse Square, and the Wells Fargo Center.  I am not blowing smoke up anyone’s whatever when I say I am working as center as “Center City” gets in downtown Philadelphia.)

Shortly after arriving home, my sister chimed in with the clear and brilliant solution of PATCO, a light rail rapid transit system that runs from South Jersey right into Center City, Philly.  Basically, I’m taking the train to work.  Really, any solution other than this would have been silly.

So today I did a dry run.  I left the house at the approximate time I’ll be leaving for work this week.  It went like a dream.  It takes me about 20 minutes to get from home to the closest PATCO station, in nearby Woodcrest (this number, of course, is very reliant on traffic).  The train ride then takes another 20 minutes.  Then, my place of employment is literally within sight once you emerge from underground at the subway station.  So, within about 45 minutes after leaving home, I can be at work in the very center of Philadelphia.  Not too shabby, for $6 a round-trip.

Of course, I took some pictures, because that’s how I roll. (remember, if you want to see any pictures full-screen, click on it, then when it re-loads, click on it again).

The PATCO platform at Woodcrest, NJ.

You can see my place of employment here. This pic doesn’t do it justice; on the other side of the street are tons of recognizeable Philly landmarks.

Because I love pictures of myself.

Philly Journal, 6/21

Erie seems like a dream.  What was that?  Where was I?  Was that me, doing those things, being those places, thinking those things?

I moved there on what was, essentially, a lark.  I made a decision what seemed spontaeously to live my life without a plan, to roam, to live for experiences rather than goals.  As such, the suddenness of it, the supposed meaningless of it, now makes the experience seem, just two days removed from it, like some sort of fever dream, a shadow glanced in a forest.  I lived there for almost excactly two years, but it somehow manages to feel simultaneously like 2 days and 2 decades.

I’m incredibly glad I did it.  I loved my time there and, despite how cliche it sounds, I learned a lot about myself.  In my 30s, I found myself continuing to evolve and change (not in all positive ways, mind you) and, ultimately, “find myself”.  I used to think that saying was meaningless, but now I think it means something.

So, all that happened in Erie, but somehow it still feels like I dreamt it, or even just imagined it.  Here I sit in my mother’s living room in New Jersey, just outside of Philadelphia, where I have moved at this stage in my life to continue what I began with the move to Erie: living for experiences and not goals.  But I remember, like yesterday, when my friend Michael (that’s the female Michael, yo) and I moved all my stuff into my apartment in Erie.  There is, to my perception, zero difference between that day and literal yesterday.  Here’s a picture from that day:

And then a picture from yestrday morning:

It’s like the time in between was about the lessons learned and the self-discovery, but in the final analysis, like no time passed whatsoever.  The strangest thing is that I haven’t simply moved back into my apartment in Carlisle, PA.  The absence of my life before Erie is the most concrete evidence that time has moved.

Tonight will be my second night here in Mantua.  Most of my stuff is now put away, or at least the boxes are in the appropriate rooms.  I’ve spent some quality time with my mom and nephews (the sis and I are having a spa day next week.  Not really.  But I would, if somebody else paid for it.  Speaking of my sister, read her writing on this site, she’s amazing!).  This afternoon I ventured “out” for the first time by myself.  I pretty much just found my new Planet Fitness, but my excitement over the, frankly, ordinary stuff in the general area where I live confirms my suspicion that I am actually too easily entertained.  I drove around thinking to myself, look at all these supermarkets I can go into and That looks like a cute Radio Shack.  Even crappy, useless chain retail seem, to me, like terra incognita. 

And I haven’t even thought about actually going into Philly yet.  And have I mentioned New York City is only two hours away?  And I get to live with this fucking cat?

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Monday Doesn’t Always Have to Suck

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

My 90th Favorite Song of All-Time

Click here to learn about this list.  You can also click on the link in this entry that says “100 Favorite Songs” to see all the song’s entries.

First, a re-cap of the first ten:

100.  “Breakfast at Tiffany’s” by Deep Blue Something
99.   “Jack & Diane” by John Mellencamp
98.   “Hotel California” by The Eagles
97.   “American Pie” by Don McLean
96.   “Don’t Stop till You Get Enough” by Michael Jackson
95.   “Nuthin’ but a G Thang” by Dr. Dre
94.   “Bushwick Blues” by Delta Spirit
93.   “For the Workforce, Drowning” by Thursday
92.   “Fish Heads” by Barnes and Barnes
91.   “Shimmer” by Fuel

And the 90th…

“Rubber Biscuit” by the Blues Brothers

Sometime, at some unrecollected moment when I was very young, my mom and maybe my sister and I, sat around our old kitchen in Newville, listening to this song on a first-gen “boombox”, and I know that at the very least, I laughed my ass off for about a dozen consecutive plays of the song.  I remember it was a cassette tape that my mother had of the band playing live; in fact, it was undoubtedly the version in the YouTube video below.  Although it was something we only listened to on a few occasions, I still often recall it fondly.  Usually, odd, unfinished chunks of language remind me of the verses.  And biscuits always make me think of it.  I will say, it is much funnier without the video attached; although they are clearly a talented band, my child’s-mind’s-eye made it much more entertaining.

2011 Wasn’t Real

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

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

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

Bother With Hours

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Ebbing

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

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

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

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

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

Portrait

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Adrienne at her wedding

Click the image, then click on it again after it re-loads.  It’s the only way to fully appreciate it, you bastards.

 

Find Your Own Thing

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Three cheers for things that make you feel alive!

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

Minarets

I wasn’t allowed in the women’s wing, despite it being just a few feet from my room.  This was rehab, after all, and it had to be a completely neutered experience.  Sex and romance only clouded things.  But She was in rehab at the same time as me, and I could hear Her down there right now, just twenty feet down the hall, probably sitting on the floor with other women, chatting amiably in their PJs.  Fuck it, I thought, I’m going down there.

My ten-year-old mind was mainly amazed that a swan would walk that close up to me.  It was so beautiful, so…exotic.  What was there to do, I figured, except to pet it?

A grown man in his thirties doesn’t often find himself high up in a tree on a golf course, reaching dangerously far out over a gulf of blank air, desperately groping for a nine iron, but there I was.  A friend had lost his grip on a backswing and his club had decided to stay in the tree.  Despite being the opposite of a climber, I somehow found myself here, swinging out over nothingness.

We were almost too tiny to even carry baseball bats, but here my tiny friend and I were, by ourselves, in the churchyard throwing baseballs to one another and swinging and usually missing.  What a feeling, being alone like that in the world and trusted.  What a feeling, the thwap of the ball on the bat.

I breezed right past Allen, the on-duty intern.  I thought he had looked right at me.  I thought he just wasn’t going to care.  There She was now, right in front of me.  She didn’t see me yet, but I saw Her, all thighs and lips and perfect-voiced serenity washing over me.  I hurried my step to get closer.

My hand never got close enough to touch it, because as I approached it, it lunged at me, making some screeching noise that is still hanging over Newville somewhere.  It’s wings unfurled like a demon’s plumage, and it’s face morphed into a sinister sneer.  It began to chase me.

The branch cracked.  It moved.  I felt it becoming less branch-like.  Below, my friends weren’t even watching me.  They were chatting amiably, assuming I was doing just fine. There was no way I could reach that club.  The branch cracked again.

He threw the ball to me.  Eyes on the ball, I swung.  Thwap.  It launched off the bat, hung in the air like a tiny moon, and crashed through one of the church’s windows with an unbelievable sound.

She glanced up, saw me.  Omigod what are you doing here? You’re not allowed down here!  she blurted.  I grinned, pleased with my rebellion.  I thought I’d come see you, I said.  She actively frowned.  You have GOT to go back to your room or we’ll all be in trouble!  I could see She meant business.  Before I had even finished walking toward Her, I swivelled and went back the way I came.  I walked past Allen as calmly as I could.  Just as I had gotten past him, his eyes looked up from his book and recognition washed over him.

I thought the swan would kill me.  I ran as fast as I could, as if I would never run again.  Somewhere out of my sight, I heard my sister laugh or scream.  I knew she couldn’t help me now, either way.

The branch gave way, and I leapt toward the nine iron as I fell, somehow getting a grip on it and taking it with me toward the lush green turf below.

We looked at each other for one tiny moment.  Run home!  I yelled, and we sprinted off in opposite directions.  As I ran, I was filled with a terrible anxiety.  I was smart enough to know we were lucky it was a regular window and not one of those colored ones, but only becuase I thought God would be more mad about the colored glass.  I thought that all windows were equally expensive: roughly a thousand dollars.  I wondered if we’d been seen, if the cops had been called, if the baseball had hit anyone.  I felt like a murderer.

I was almost to my room.  Hey!  came the call from behind me.  I knew Allen’s voice without even turning around.  What were you doing down there?  Shit.  I was in serious trouble.

I finally got to the back porch.  I knew I didn’t have time to get inside with the swan hot on my heels.  I stopped dead in my tracks, put my hands over my head and crouched down, awaiting a pounding, a pecking, some sort of mauling.  Nothing happened.  Silence.  Slowly I turned to face my aggressor.  There it was, thirty yards away, calmly gliding back into the stream, my nightmare already forgotten, ignored.

I landed on both feet, with a grin on my face and the club in my hand, completely playing off what had moments before been death fear.  I entered their conversation, handing the club to it’s owner, silently vowing once again and for good this time that I would never climb a tree again.

I ran and ran and ran, out of breath and shaken to the core.  I had no idea what to do when I got home.  Mom would be there.  To tell her what had happened, and thereby face the consequences?  Or to ignore what had happened, and hope I didn’t get caught?  I entered the screeching screen door, the windows-open-everywhere summery house to the smell of corn being husked and sasparilla.  I tried to walk calmly around the downstairs until I found her.  She was on the patio, husking corn, putting the spent silk and leaves into plastic garbage bags, smoking a cigarette and smiling at me as wide as the sky.  Honey, she said, what happened?

You Would Not Survive a Vacation Like This

So.  That was a pretty insane trip home (and lots of other places).  I’m not even sure where to begin.  This may end up being a ridiculously long and disjointed blog entry.  I apologize in advance.  If it ends up not being extremely long and disjointed, I will come back and delete this intro, and you will never read it.

First, I should like to thank my family (Dad, Mom, Sister) for their various forms of hospitality and much-needed displays of unconditional love.  Yay human spirit and the familial bond!  I feel pretty damn good about my family.  You guys rule!  And thank you to all my friends who made me feel as if I never moved away.  I am blessed beyond belief with deep, intense, loyal friendships!  In addition, a big frowny face to those who I had to miss on this trip (most notably, loyal blog reader and renowned Muse, Cory.  Little does she know, my next trip home is going to be so all about her, she will have to call the cops on me. And the truly lovely Mercedes, whom I am unabashedly smitten with.   Also, on-again-off-again blog reader Tiff, who I had *promised* a certain something to…well, next time, ok???).  I was stretched a little thin to do and see everything and everyone I wanted, but it was fairly satisfying nonetheless.

My Zany Itinerary

Let me just show you the zaniness of where I’ve been the last week and a half.  I am going to include tomorrow, as I go to Pittsburgh tomorrow for a work seminar.  Here’s where I was, for the most part, the last ten days:

3/25: Erie, PA/ Carlisle, PA
3/26: Carlisle, PA/ Asbury Pary, NJ
3/27: Mantua, NJ
3/28: Brooklyn, NY/ Newark, NJ
3/29: Manhattan, NY/ Mantua, NJ
3/30: Mantua, NJ/ Carlisle, PA
3/31: Carlisle, PA
4/1: Carlisle, PA
4/2: Carlisle, PA/ Erie, PA
4/3: Erie, PA
4/4: Pittsburgh, PA
4/5: Pittsburgh, PA/ Erie, PA

And I aint even tired yet.  Bring. It. On.

My Newville Tour

Early on in my trip, I had a little extra time to kill early in the morning, and I drove into Newville (the small town I grew up in) and walked around the town for the first time in many years (I have been there plenty as of late, but not actually walked around).  I took some pictures of major landmarks in my life, also making sure to get a few pictures of some of the places that have played large parts in some of my blog entries.  Here is a bit of a pictorial tour of Newville:

My first house, 66 Big Spring Avenue. My bedroom was the top two windows on the right of the picture.

The big enchilada….the childhood home.  Most famously portrayed in this blog entry right here.

I have been trying to upload the famous picture of my mother and I admiring my grandmother’s garden, but I am having some trouble, so here is a link to that picture on Facebook. And here is a picture of that back yard area today:

One of my most popular blog entries ever was “The Fruit that Ate Itself“, about me being bullied in a local church yard.  I snapped some pics of that area in current day:

The church yard itself.

The line of trees is where the dreaded swingset and slide had been.

The Senior Center where the "fight" ended. Those are the bushes I flew through in the climactic moment.

If you’ve read my blog entry “Down the Rabbit Hole“, you may be interested to see this cellar door on one of my childhood neighbor’s homes:

OK, so just a few more pics here, but not related to any previous blog, just some Seth-historic stuff:

The very spot where I got on a school bus for the very first time.

This was my corner when I was a crossign guard.

Friendies

I had almost too much fun with friendies to try to sum things up here.  I’ll hit some highlights:

I surprised Kate with my presence not once but twice, and she lost.  her.  shit. each time.  First, Michael and I surprised her at her house:

It was also on this visit that this picture of Michael happened:

A few days later, I was strolling through Carlisle wasting a few minutes before picking up another friend, when I came across Kate and her family at the local eatery The Green Room.  As I was leaving them I took this pic of Kate, her husband Matt, and their son Dylan:

Let me just take this moment to say, as I was strolling around Carlisle that night, I was struck by just how freaking cool of a town it is.  Those of you who still live there, please do not take it for granted.  First, it is totally adorable.  And such a great pedestrian town!  And for a relatively small town in central Pennsylvania, it is arts-friendly.  Open mic nights, free music, poetry readings, public displays of photography, and on and on, are quite common.  The area known as the square and the surrounding blocks are humming with a vibrant intellectual life (not to mention some fantastic cuisine).  Please partake of what the gem of a town has to offer!

My brief time with Burke was spent in some fairly intense conversation that may, in fact, make me think about my life differently.  Oh, and Johnny Depp is a fucking sellout.

I spent some truly hilarious time with Jenny.  Jenny is quickly becoming a Major Friend.  (if her name is unfamiliar to you, this was the last woman to be an “official girlfriend”…and if my hunch is true– that I am a lifetime bachelor– she may go down in the history books as the last woman to be an official Seth girlfriend…what a distinction!).  Anyway, I sure do love this woman.  She has the special ability to make me laugh until I am worried about my health…without saying anything. She has a non-verbal humor akin to Kramer.  She can just look at me and I lose my shit.  Here we are, loving life:

Of course, you know I saw Michael, and it resulted in a moment of hilarity that I am pretty sure you “had to be there” for, but we decided that Merle Haggard had at one point recorded the “classic” song “You’re Gonna Make Daddy Fart (and Momma Aint Gonna Be Happy)”.  I still laugh when I type that.

Mary and I had one helluva time trying to find parking in downtown Harrisburg—notable because it’s usually not THAT hard.  Sure, those few blocks in the very center of town are tough, but we were unable to find ANY spots on the street ANYWHERE.  When we finally did park (in a garage) we ended up just hanging around Strawberry Square , when in fact we had intended to go to the Susquehanna Art Museum. I’m still not sure in the least how this distraction occurred, but we had a blast.  But the major news from this venture is that Mary has OK’d some photographs of herself!  You may or may not know that pictures of Mary are quite rare.  She just hates pictures of herself, and of course I love taking pictures of people, so this is a friction.  Plus, she really is one of the most exquisite women in existence, so I always feel as though the world in general is being deprived of some joy by the absence of Mary pictures.  When I take a Mary picture, I have to show her, wheneupon she then either insists on immediate deletion, OKs the picture for my own personal collection but not anyone else’s eyes, or (the most rare) OKs a picture for online distribution.  So here, lucky world, are 4 new Mary pictures:

That's the back of Mary's head in the lower right.

Staying at Dad’s

It is with much chagrin that I realize I did not take a single picture of my papa and me on this trip. *sad face*  Nonetheless, I must say, spending time with my dad just gets more and more pleasant as the two of us age.  It never stops surprising me how we continue to grow into friends (while he retains his essential papa-ness).  He is one cool dude and we somehow never run out of things to talk about.

This also marked the first time in recent memory that I have stayed at Dad’s for multiple days without my sister also being there.  In this sense it was entirely unique.  The last time I stayed at my dad’s by myself for more than one night was way back when I was still drinking and on-again, off-again living there.  So this was new, and really, really great.  In a lot of ways, it felt like a true homecoming, learning how that house and I interact when I’m a grown-up, and sober, and left all alone with it.  Turns out we get along just fine.  And I sleep magnificently in my old bedroom.  But it’s tough getting used to that shower again.

Hey Rosetta!

I’m gonna really have to shrink down the Hey Rosetta! story, or I’ll be here all day.  So, in summary:

Here are pictures from Paul and I’s show in Asbury Park, NJ.  It was a fantastic time, both Paul-wise (Paul, thanks for helping me see that not all my close friends have to be women!) and band-wise.  Really, one of the more satisfying concert-going experiences I’ve had.

Then, I made an audible call and went to see them by myself twice more over the next three days, in New York City (more on NYC later).  Long story short, I ended up basically knowing the band.  But they started talking to me. I suppose when you are a band that is really famous and successful in Canada, and then you come to the states and are playing bars where most of the people are ignoring you, and there is a short fat guy with gray hair jumping around and screaming your lyrics, when he shows up to your NEXT show in a different state, it is worth taking note.  So as I was taking this picture of the chalk board advertising their show in Brooklyn, a few of the band members were walking out of the bar and saw me and introduced themselves.

Because shows like this entail a lot of waiting around (if you insist, like I do, on front row) in small bars with no “backstage” area for bands, as well as lots of changing-out of gear between bands (not to mention trips to very small bathrooms), the two shows in New York would prove extremely fertile ground for me talking to the band.  This went way beyond my previous “thank you, your music has meant so much to me” that I’ve been able to give other bands.  This was basically a getting-to-know-you situation.  Specifically cellist Romesh Thavanathan, lead guitarist Adam Hogan, and violinist Kinley Dowling spoke quite a bit to me and I was definitely on a first-name basis with them by the end of my second New York show, and I’d had a chance to speak to every member of this six-piece band.  Certainly, this was fairly incredible, but also….in some ways, not as great as you’d think.  Parts of this experience were awkward.  I may blog more about this at some point, just because it was pretty intriguing (ever have your favorite band watch you as they are playing?)  But don’t get me wrong, I wouldn’t trade it for the world.  It was an amazing experience.  Here is a video I took of “Red Song” at Union Hall in Park Slope, Brooklyn, followed by a few select pictures of the New York shows:

I also managed to snag handwritten setlists off the stage two of the three nights.  Here are scans of the setlists:

So now, for the benefit of probably just myself and maybe Paul, here is some Hey Rosetta! setlist discussion:  on the first setlist shown, Bandages was skipped.  On the second shown (from my thrid concert, Manhattan) ‘Bandages’ and ‘Red Heart’ were swapped in position (as were the two songs where a swap is indicated, ‘Yer Spring’ and ‘Welcome’…and talk about a way to open a show!  “Lions For Scottie” into “Welcome”!)  Here are all three setlists for shows I went to this tour:

Asbury Park, NJ

1.  New Goodbye
2.  Yer Spring
3.  New Glass
4.  Bricks
5.  Another Pilot
6.  There’s an Arc
7.  Seeds
8.  Red Heart

Brooklyn, NY
(reconstructed via this photograph)

1.  New Goodbye
2.  Yer Spring
3.  New Glass
4.  Bricks
5.  Another Pilot
6.  There’s an Arc
7.  Welcome
8.  Red Song
9.  We Made a Pact
10.  Seeds
11.  Red Heart
12. A Thousand Suns*

*’Bandages’ is on the setlist in the 12 spot, but ‘A Thousand Suns’ was played.

Manhattan, NY

1.  Lions For Scottie
2.  Welcome
3.  Yer Spring
4.  New Glass
5.  Yer Fall
6.  There’s an Arc
7.  I’ve Been Asleep For a Long, Long Time
8.  Holy Shit
9.  New Sum
10.  Seeds
11.  New Goodbye

Encore:

1.  Bandages
2.  Red Heart

And now, for the record, the sum total of Hey Rosetta! songs I’ve seen, including the two acoustic shows I saw last year:

1.  Red Heart–5 times
2.  Bricks–4 times
3.  I’ve Been Asleep For a Long, Long Time–3 times
4.  Lions for Scottie–3 times
5.  Bandages–3 times
6.  New Goodbye–3 times
7.  Yer Spring–3 times
8.  New Glass–3 times
9.  There’s an Arc–3 times
10.  Seeds–3 times
11.  Seventeen–2 times
12.  Red Song–2 times
13.  We Made a Pact–2 times
14.  Another Pilot–2 times
15.  Welcome–2 times
16.  A Thousand Suns–1 time
17.  Yer Fall–1 time
18.  Holy Shit–1 time
19.  New Sum–1 time

Mom’s/ Sisters

So my mom now lives with my sister, which makes visiting everybody much easier!  It was quite nice to see everybody all at once!  In the same breath, however, I must admit it made me feel as though I did a poor job of paying ample attention to everyone.  When you are seeing a gaggle of loved ones all at once for the first time in a long time, it can be a strain to give equal time.  I think specifically of the nephews, who I love uncontrollably but whom I was not able to give the sort of attention they are accustomed to receiving from me.  When it came down to it, my mom and my sister were the center of my focus (not to mention the antics of Pumpkin Latte).  Don’t get me wrong, I had a lovely time!  I guess I’m just feeling some guilt, cause those boys worked up a good amount of anticipation for my arrival and I almost certainly dissapointed.  That being said, the time with Momma and Sis was marvelous. LOTS of laughs, and a new momma/ son tradition: I claim her and I are going to do the Jumble together, and then I end up freaking out over how amazing she is at it, while I add absolutely nothing to the process (she really is amazing at the Jumble).  Also, I “T”d my sister, which always rules.  A brief but incredibly heartwarming time.  Some select pics:

Sister and Pumpkin Latte, as she was taking their picture

Sis, Me, Mom

New York

The New York trip is another thing I shall have to gloss over, or I’ll be writing this blog entry until next week.  I did what I typically do: I drive right into the city, pay a thousand dollars to park, and just walk around.  I usually have very little plan other than one or two fairly simple goals.  This trip’s goals: see sunrise from inside Central Park, and buy a New York Times from a newsstand and read the whole thing from inside a midtown Manhattan Starbucks during the morning commute hours.  I’m not sure why I wanted to do these things, but once the goals were in my mind, I could not seem to let them go.  I accomplished both, and although being in Central Park during sunrise was magical, it was not easy to get any great pictures of the event, due to the vast amount of:

a) Tall trees, and
b) skyscrapers

These things blocked the view of the actual sunrise rather effectively, but feeling the world come alive from within the park was quite joyous.  Here is the best picture I got of the sunrise:

I spent almost two hours in the Starbucks, enjoying my latte and an incredible issue of the NYT.  I suppose for a moment I felt as hip as I’ve always suspected I am.  It was a quality time.

I spent the rest of the day wandering around, taking pictures, eating, even napping briefly in the tranquil section of Central Park known as the Woodlands.  I also visited, for the first time, the Central Park Zoo, which was a lovely treat.  Here is some video I took of the Sea Lions being fed (and putting on a little show) followed by some pictures:

Sunset, Brooklyn

Me in Central Park

Some Things I Learned

1.  8 months is not long enough to forget how to get around (but it IS long enough to cause some occasional navigation confusion)

2.  When you are a single man in your 30s who moves away from everyone he knows and doesn’t visit home for 8 months, a surprising amount of people from all demographics will just straight-up ask you about your sex life.  This is fodder for an entire blog entry at some point that will be in the form of a “rant”.  FYI, nobody need worry about my sex life, mkay?

3.  You may think where you live is boring, but leave it for a little while and then come back; you may just find it’s really cool.

4.  There are really hot ladies everywhere.

5.  Don’t tell people you got fat.  You may think it will make your fatness less awkward, but it makes it moreso.

6.  Things change.  Buildings get knocked down, businesses change their name, streets get re-directed.  Accept these things as a natural course of existence. (reminds me of a Hey Rosetta! song:  “The schools that we went to have all been closed./ And all of my teachers are dead, I suppose.”)

7.  You can walk further than you think you can.

8.  If you move and your sports allegiances change a little bit, you can just kinda keep that to yourself on your first few visits home.

9.  As you leave places you have stayed for just a day or two, remember to gather all your various “chargers”.  We have a lot of chargers in this day and age.

10.  Family and friends really are the best things in the world, even if saying so sounds cheesy and cliche.  Fuck it, it’s true!

I Almost Forgot…

Today is my 8 year sobriety anniversary!  The original purpose of this vacation was for me to have off and see my loved ones leading up to the big day.  (I just have to complete my anniversary tradition of watching “Dark Days” on the anniversary itself)  So…yay me!  But also…yay you!  Thanks everybody for putting up with my horribleness when I was horrible, and then helping me live such a satisfying and fantastic life in my sobriety!  What a treat, to be able to celebrate the week leading up to it in the way I did.  And how neat is it that I almost forgot today was the day???  That must mean life is pretty good.  I love you, everybody!

You can stop the train. Just pull the brake.

The Hey Rosetta! show in Asbury Park, NJ with Paul was a truly thrilling experience (so much so that I am locked in an intense internal debate over whether to go see them again in Manhattan sometime Monday or Tuesday…I guess you’ll find out via blog post eventually!)  I’d type a longer entry about Paul andI’s experience, but I’m on my sister’s laptop and this keyboard and mouse are confounding me.  This time, the band was fully electric (you may remember the first two times I saw them, they were acoustic) and it was MINDBLOWING.  Paul and I once again got to thank the band and shake their hands, and we both got handwritten copies of the setlist off the stage (I’ll be scanning mine in when I get home).  A ball-to-the-wall awesome time.  The setlist was:

1.  New Goodbye
2. Yer Spring
3. New Glass
4. Bricks
5. Another Pilot
6. There’s an Arc
7. Seeds
8. Red Heart

Pictures:

 

Paul at a rest stop on the way home.

Dispatch from Home

Hello folks!!! As you may or may not have heard, I am writing you from the ol’ homestead of central Pennsylvania (and New Jersey and maybe New York or Philadelphia, at some point).  I didn’t give any forewarning on this develppment, as I desperately wanted to avoid having an “appointment” vacation, where I make so many plans with people I no longer seem to posses free will.  I want to visit home but also have an actual vacation.  I mean…I work real hard.

Anyway, you won’t (probably) be hearing from me much in the interim, although before I left Erie I set up a few blogs to post automatically (mostly the recurring blogs with days in their names…Monday’s Song, etc) so we won’t feel my absence entirely.  I just wanted to put that out there in case you happen to know I’m in the middle of a 5 hour drive and an Audio Poem posts, you know I’m not doing that shit from my car!

I had a perfect day yesterday, seeing my dad in the morning, some terrific friends (Michael and Kate) in the afternoon, and then having a near-flawless road trip with Paul to see a mind-blowing Hey Rosetta!  (not to mention getting to meet Paul’s precious brand-new son, Parker).  Paul: we somehow seem to have more to talk about with each other than we did as younger men, plus we laugh even more.  What a rare quaility.  You’re a gem, sir.

I’m off to New Jersey now (I know…I was just there yesterday, but I promise, it’s not the same town) to see my mother, my sister, my nephews, and Pumpkin Latte. 

Also, it’s really sunny, and 42 degrees (right now that feels like 70!)

And just wait till you see the pictures I’ve been getting!

My Family is Cooler than Your Family

Someone pointed out to me a few days ago the very true fact that I have an incredible family.  This is a fact I am quite well aware of, but perhaps not often appreciative enough for.  Now, this is not going to be some lovey-dovey blog about how important family is, how well I feel my parents raised me (which, for the record, I think is very, very well)…I am more talking about the fact that all three members of my nuclear family are just plain cool.  They are freakin’ rad people, and I just don’t think a whole lot of people are blessed with such a situation.  I could take a lengthy road trip with any of them and have a freakin’ awesome time.  Here are a few words about why each of them are so incredible (in the alphabetical order of their familial title):

Dad:

My freakin’ Dad is totally hilarious.  Genuinely.  Not in that, “Oh hey man, you’ve got a funny Dad” kinda way, but in that “Holy shit, that dude was freaking funny!” kinda way.  He’s got a humor that is smart, but also cheesy, but he knows it’s cheesy so it’s always in a wink and smile sort of way.  Dad also contemplates life in ways that often challenge me to re-evaluate my own worldview.  He has an open dialogue about memory, death, religion, the past, the future.  This dilaogue is an invaluable asset to a son; couple such serious topics with a rockin’ sense of humor and you have one helluva cool man! And Dad stays very up-to-date on the state of the world, current affairs, politics, etc.  And he’s totally liberal! (yes, liberal is cool.  Sorry to my one conservative reader, if you”re still out there…but it makes you just a tiny bit less cool)  Way to be cool Daddio!

Mom:

My freakin’ Mom is totally amazing.  Here is a woman who was simply born with the ability to figure things out.  Literally anything can happen and within hours she will know which paperwork you need, or which office to go to, or whatever whatever.  She has an innate sense of how.  And this woman can be damn funny! (you’ll see a theme here; from my blog you may not think of me as funny, but I come from a hilarious family and in person I am quite a cut-up.  It comes from these parents!).  Mom often has me rolling on the floor with just a few choice words.  She’s also an avid reader, which I think is super-cool.  Also: very liberal.  See Dad’s section for my thoughts on the coolness of liberalism.  Momma: way to be cool!

Sister:

My freakin’ sister is totally cool.  Like the rest of my family, she is completely hilarious.  I suppose it’s no mystery that her humor is most like my own (with a strong bent toward actual nonsense).  She is extremely self-reflective (badass trait), likes super cool music and movies (our tastes don’t perfectly match but they intersect in interesting places), she likes to write, attend concerts, “Dexter”…ok listen, obviously, we’re a lot alike, but different enough to make us clear individuals (for instance, she likes “The Amazing Race”….gross).  Oh, and she’s an amazing mother, who is using the rockin’ childhood we were given to raise her children even more freakin’ cool than we are!  Plus, she’s liberal! Way to be cool, Sis!

My family is so freakin’ cool!  I challenge you to come up with a cooler family than the Dellaiellamstsfields!

Ten Mini-Memoirs: Early Childhood

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here’s the year I got Troy:

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

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

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

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

Audio Poem: “Gyre”

Year written: 2005
Collection: The Loosing of Clocks

 

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

  

 Click the gray arrow to hear the audio version.

 

 

 

Gyre

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

 

 

 

 

 

Ten Mini-Memoirs

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hello folks!  Hey, just before my move to Erie, I had begun producing copies of a small, new collection of poetry called This is What is Invisible.  I had managed to get a few copies mailed out, but then my computer took a crap and I am still to this date unable to retrieve anything off of it, including the text of Invisible.  I have recently procured one of the completed copies from my sister and am busy typing it back into my current computer.  Long story kinda short, I’m not sure who I have and have not sent a copy of this collection to; can you let me know if you have recieved a copy yet or, if you haven’t, if you want one?  Thanks!