Days: Fifteen Years Sober

Prologue

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Days of Nothing

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Days of Something

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

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

‘Time’, by Pink Floyd

 

Days of Everything

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

I Loved Smoking Cigarettes

I love smoking cigarettes.  Or at least, I did.  I smoked my first cigarette at age sixteen and my last one at age thirty-one, and in between was never anything short of a constant, unabated love affair between myself and cigarette smoking.  And it was very consensual.

 

As a little kid, both my parents smoked and I hated it.  I bugged them to quit, heaped guilt upon them.  The evidence that smoking killed you was just heating up and becoming a major story.  The idea that my parents were doing something to hasten their own death was more than I could bear. I was a righteous little dude.  But even in the midst of that phase, I remember being at the supermarket with my parents, looking at the multitude of brands of cigarettes with exotic or evocative names and packaging and thinking to myself, If I was a smoker, which of these would I choose?  I was fond of Alpine and Kent.

 

The righteous little kid phase passed, as they tend to do.  My friends began to experiment with the kinds of things young teenagers experiment with.  I was hesitant.  I gave halfhearted lectures on the dangers of smoking, but it never would have made a difference.  We were barreling toward rebellion and all-out substance use whether we knew it or not.

 

I “smoked” my first cigarette in my friend Mike’s Ford Mustang in the enormous church parking lot beside my house, when I was sixteen years old, at about eleven o’clock at night.  It was a Marlboro Red.  Mike had been smoking for quite some time and was very experienced; in fact Mike had begun doing everything before us and was being very polite about helping us catch up.  I put “smoked” in quotation marks because I did not actually inhale the smoke from that cigarette; like many novices I actually had no idea I was not inhaling.  Now that seems somehow impossible—to not know the smoke is not entering your lungs.  But it was very much the case.  I wanted to smoke and was pleasantly surprised when I didn’t cough like I expected to, but disappointed when I didn’t “catch a buzz” like I had heard so much about.

 

I “smoked” in this fashion for a surprising amount of time—perhaps a month.  My girlfriend at the time had started smoking a little before me, as our group of friends all slowly picked up the habit, and it felt good to be part of the crowd.  Plus, the eternal truth: I thought it looked cool.  I thought it made me cool, and in many real ways at that time, it did make me cool.  At that time and in that place, there could be no question that to be a smoker was preferential to not being a smoker.

 

One afternoon, a bunch of us were hanging out at the drive-in theater.  That sounds weird, but it was an actual thing we did.  The drive-in near our house had a concession building that was open during the day and actually doubled as a pizza shop (with pretty darn good pizza) and a pool table, jukebox, some video games, and a cigarette machine.  For a few years, it was the go-to place for my group of friends.  Anyway, I was there with my girlfriend and a group of people, and I was walking around the pool table, shooting a game, smoking, and being cool as hell, when I noticed my girlfriend and her bestie looking at me and laughing.  I went over to see what the deal was and she said to me, You’re not inhaling!  I was floored by this information.  How could I be sucking the smoke into my mouth and not inhaling?  Needless to say, I was mortified.  I didn’t smoke any more cigarettes that day.

I can’t remember how long it was until I tried it again–but probably less than 24 hours.  I still had some cigarettes.  I waited until my entire family was asleep and I went outside our house.  It was probably around 9 or 10pm.  I sat in the mulch along the side of our house and lit a cigarette.  I sucked the smoke into my mouth like I always had been, and then consciously tried to suck it in even further.  BOY HOWDY.  It happened easily but the reaction was large.  My lungs kicked back and coughed it out, but there was also an instantaneous physical elation. A soothing, a numbing.  I took another drag and the buzz started to settle in.  The buzz is called that for a reason; my body everywhere began to buzz, to hum, to tingle.  I decided that if this was going to be my first ever buzz, I was going to make it a big one, so I began to “hot box” the cigarette–smoke it in quick, successive hits, allowing the nicotine to hit my system as fast as possible.  About a minute into it, I essentially blacked out–my vision began to creep away from me at my periphery, my head began to spin, my whole body went numb.  I slumped over in the mulch.  I have no idea how long I remained that way.  When I finally began to return to my senses, I had only one overarching thought: I must do more of this.

And that’s it, that’s what does it (at least, for me): the buzz.  I doubt I’d have smoked enough to get addicted if it weren’t for the buzz.  The buzz disappears quickly with repeated use, so we tend to forget it.  We get addicted and then we think THAT’S why we smoke, or many other reasons we make up for ourselves.  We forget how massive those early buzzes are.  They are like freakin’ narcotics.  The blast of my first dozen or so nicotine buzzes were unlike any sensation I’ve experienced before or since–and I’ve been down a few roads in this life.  It is an intense, euphoric high–but one that lasts only a minute or two.  By the time you’ve chased that high for one or two packs of cigarettes, it vanishes, replaced by the crippling addiction.  You still think you like smoking, but all it is is scratching an itch.  We find scratching pleasurable, too, but only when there’s an itch.

After Mike, I was the second of our friends to really start smoking, and a few of them gave me some pushback, refusing to lend me money for a pack of smokes.  But eventually they all came along for the ride–eventually almost everyone I knew from my hometown came along for the ride.  We were Red State Pennsylvanians.  It was just something you did.

I’ve written extensively about my alcoholism, and how drinking formed who I was for so very long, but in almost all addiction literature, nicotine gets short shrift.  It shapes your life in so many ways, but since it doesn’t actually inebriate you or ruin your life in any blatantly visible ways, it’s always the also-ran to the more dominant addiction.  And so it would be with me.

I smoked cigarettes while leading a “normal” life from the age of 16 until 20.  We partied.  We did crazy things.  I had a lovely teeneagerhood filled with cars and girls and cigarettes and, yes, booze that didn’t control me.  We exerted our rebellion by smoking–in malls, in parks, in basements.  My girlfriend and I would take drags of smoke and blow them into each others’ mouths–it’s actually quite sensual.  We learned to blow smoke rings, and bought cigars.  We thought we were grown ups.  We thought the whole world was nothing.  We thought we’d never die.

Around age 20 I became physically addicted to alcohol, which naturally altered my relationship with cigarettes.  It actually made me need them more.  While my body’s need for alcohol was the dominant itch by far, the prospect of having alcohol but no cigarettes was damn-near terrifying.  I now needed to jump through hoops to ensure I had a steady supply of TWO drugs at all times.

Against all odds, I was able to quit drinking very early, at the age of 25.  It was a no-brainer that I would continue to smoke cigarettes, though.  Alcohol had been ruining my life and killing me–the general theory seemed to be that I needed to keep smoking to not risk relapsing on alcohol.  And who knows?  That may have been true.  I managed to stay successfully sober, after one relapse, but I continued smoking cigarettes for another seven years, until age thirty-one.  Many people told me, around the time I quit, that they had really associated me closely with smoking; that I had been the person who got them started, or who made it look fun and enticing, and that some people even thought of me as a smoker before they even thought of me as a drinker.  Smoking was a big part of me.  Alcohol or drugs take you over because of how they alter your personality, but cigarettes defined me more than most people give them credit for.

When I quit drinking, I mourned alcohol like a loved one who had died.  When I quit smoking, I didn’t mourn it–I missed it like an amputated limb.  Seven years later, some days, I still do.  If I walk through a cloud of smoke someone just blew out of their lungs, often I am disgusted, but sometimes, if you catch me on just the right day, I stand in the cloud of smoke and breathe it deep.  Who knows why these things are true, why or how they happen to some and not to others.  To me, it’s a mystery–but maybe only because I don’t want to know.

(I quit smoking on September 20th, 2009, with the aid of Chantix.  If you’d like to read my blogging of it, all the entries associated with my quitting smoking can be found here: https://notesfromthefire.wordpress.com/category/chantix-diary/ )

Audio Poem: “Value”

Year written:  2006
Collection:  The Salt Flats

Value

When I was a younger man and foolhardy
I would pick sometimes old cigarette butts
out of public ashtrays and smoke the crumpled tobacco,
inhaling the stale breath of strangers and lipstick
because I was out of money or time
or too boozed-up to notice or care.
They had been like any other cigarette
except forgotten, nameless.

I don’t do that anymore.
I now have just enough money and scruples
to separate what is trash from what has merit,
or what is mine from what is no one’s.
And on days when the sun is out
and folks are walking, pushing kids in strollers,
I’ll walk the streets grinning, smoking one cigarette
with an extra one behind my ear, in case a stranger needs one.

Chantix Diary: Day 372

That’s right.  Today marks exactly one year since I have smoked a cigarette (it is day 372 of the diary because you start taking the Chantix 7 days before you quit smoking; to read all of my Chantix Diary, click on the “categories” drop-down by my picture and select Chantix Diary).  I’ve been pondering what to say on this occasion for about a week, and honestly, there’s just not a whole lot to add to the existing entires in the Chantix Diary.

Despite being a pretty heavy smoker (just over a pack a day for the majority of my 16 years of smoking) and self-identifying as a “guy who really loves smoking”–up to and including having strong feelings about smoker’s rights and continuing to think to this day that smoking really does make you look cool, it was somehow easier for me to quit, even with Chantix, than it is for most people.

To recap my Chantix experience:  the drug gave me some horrific side-effects, including the grand-daddy of them all, the one that Pfizer still doesn’t want to admit exists: suicidal thoughts.  But it was the cumulative effect of all the side effects that really really sucked:  insomnia, diahrrea (with subsequent terrible constipation), blurry vision, headaches, nausea.  I could go on and on.  Just read the old posts if you want the rundown.

It was hard not smoking for the first little bit, but not even a fraction of the difficulty I’d had when I tried without the drug.  Most of the difficulty came more from the “habit” part than from the “addiction” part; times, situations, places I’d normally smoke made me feel like some sort of amputee.  It was impossible to tell what the problem was; something was missing and I was having phantom desires, but not necessarily cravings.  When I quit Chantix after 3 weeks (long before they recommend) it’s fair to say I experienced very few cravings.  In a turn of events that seems almost unfair to the millions of smokers who consistently struggle with quitting, quitting smoking with the aid of Chantix was, for me, essentially easy.

I haven’t had so much as a puff from a cigarette in the 12 months since I quit.  I have, with relish, inhaled some second hand smoke, but that is totally allowed.  Still, even now, there are moments here and there, now and then, when the urge strikes me and I think a smoke would be great right now.  I can even feel the actual addiction for a second; I can feel the NEED in my lungs, coursing through my blood.  I breathe the air deep and imagine the smoke going in.  It would feel good, yes, it would feel very good.

But then it passes, usually in just a few seconds.  The overwhelming majority of my time since smoking has been easy, craving-free, and frankly, magnificent.  I do think that much of this has to do with my history with drinking.  You might ask…how so?  At first I didn’t see the connection, but now I do.  See, you must understand that I was quite radically physically addicted to alcohol.  This happens.  They’re not really sure how, but it happens.  They managed–by using other drugs and partially imprisoning me (rehab)–to seperate me from the alcohol for a few months.  Then, after a few months, I drank again, and was IMMEDIATELY just as addicted as I was when I quit.  And I mean immediate.  That first sip of relapse, I could literally feel the tug and pull of addiction, stronger than ever.  I would shortly repeat this entire process a second time (complete with second stint in rehab) before I could be sure of it’s factual nature: there was no starting at zero.  All roads led to the heavy addiction, and certain death.

This extreme set of experiences colored every smoking-related decision I made in the past year.  I knew, every step of the way, that one cigarette (at least for me; your experience may differ) would mean full-on addiction again, which would mean full-on quitting again.  I actually had quite a few stressful experiences this year that required keen use of this knowledge to prevent a return to smoking.  (I may never seem stressed, but since work is essentially a non-existent part of my online persona, you are spared the stressful part of my life; plus, I moved across the state all by myself.  Plus, some very interesting female issues that are about as stressful as female issues can get.)And through it all I was pretty easily able to not smoke, because I knew, above all and from previous experience, I simply did not want to have to quit a second time.

Listen, smokers: take it from a guy who so identified with being a smoker that he still defends you and basically considers himself one of you–everything they say is true.  Your sense of taste and smell, your breathing, your general feeling of well-beings, heck even your sleeping gets better.  A year out, and I’m still improving.  I feel like Superman.  No shit.

I ride a bike now, and not just a little bit.  I routinely ride the 13 miles around Presque Isle, for leisure.  A short year ago, ascending a flight of stairs winded me.  (and guys, don’t get me started on what will improve in the, um…wood department.)  I do a bit of jogging when I want.  When I sleep, I don’t feel my heart beating in my scalp.

I know it feels like losing the best buddy that is smoking will be more painful than the pleasure you stand to gain by being smoke-free.  I assure you, that is not true.  The major thing I learned by quitting smoking is that smoking is actually not pleasurable at all; not in the sense that a chocolate cake, or a perfect shower, or a first I love you is pleasurable.  What seems like pleasure when you smoke is the same kind of pleasure you get from scratching an itch.  It is the quelling of a nag, the silencing of a need.  Smoking is no different from peeing, if you had to pee once an hour, every day, forever.  To quit smoking is to stop the itch, and trust me, you don’t really miss the itch.  Sometimes, you miss the scratching, but eventually you can’t even remember what the itch felt like.

A picture of me smoking on the street in Carlisle, about 5 years ago. I just had the film developed today and saw this picture for the first time.

Cold Clothes interview, Part One

The following is intended as a fun writing exercise for myself.  If you’ve been reading my blogs from the very beginning, you’ll remember I did something quite like this about 7 years ago on my very first OpenDiary blog.  This is going to be a “fake interview” with a somewhat fictionalized version of myself, which is being conducted by an entirely fictional small arts magazine called Cold Clothes. If you read the old OpenDiary one, rest assured, this is a completely new edition of this.  You’ll see I have tagged the entry as both “memoir” and “fiction”–and that’s why it is so fun for me!  I am playing in a semi-real world (specifically a semi-real Carlisle) and with a version of me that both is and isn’t me, and there will be no cues for what is fiction and what is memoir. And put up with the early conversation about “art”–it’s just to make the reason for the interview believable.

Cold Clothes brings you Part One of it’s planned 12-part interview with Pennsylvania bohemian Seth Dellinger.  As our magazine has only a circulation of about 231, we are “simul-publishing” the interviews on our website–www.coldclothes.com–as well as Dellinger’s blog, Notes from the Fire.  And since we are a very irresponsible and erratic publication, we make no projections as to the frequency of the installments.  Now, Cold Clothes managing editor Rufus Paisleyface’s Part One of the interview:

I first meet Seth Dellinger at an outside table at his favorite Carlisle coffee house, the Courthouse Commons.  It’s an early autumn day, but Dellinger doesn’t seem to know it yet: it’s jacket weather, but he’s still sporting just

Dellinger outside the Courthouse Commons coffee shop in Carlisle, Pennsylvania

a t-shirt and shorts.  A few times throughout our conversation, he appears to regret this wardrobe decision.  He orders a tall caramel latte.

Cold Clothes: So, here we are, on a sunny afternoon at an outdoor coffee shop, and you appear to have quit smoking?

Seth Dellinger: Yep.  And yeah, if this isn’t the perfect time and place for a smoke, what is, eh?  But I had to quit, you know?

CC: Why?  Lots of your peers haven’t seemed to give it up yet.

SD: I think smoking always seemed to effect me physically a little more than most people.  I had a diminished lung capacity almost immediately after picking up the habit.  I’d be laying in bed and I could feel my heart beating in my head.  I mean, here I am, a 31-year-old guy who’s been away from drugs and alcohol for years now, who likes to be physically active and moving around and doing things, and I’m feeling my heartbeat in my head.  I didn’t like that.

CC: Does any part of you feel that as a drug and alcohol free non-smoker, your validity as an artist has been breached?  A lot of creative types hang their hats on the guttural experience of “use”.

SD: (laughs) So true. Certainly one doesn’t need to have ever used any drugs or mind-altering substances of any kind to make quality art, but I do think you need a sizeable well of life experience to be any good as a creator, and the folks who have always shied away from substances tend to be the same people who shirk a lot of life experiences, although this is certainly not always the case.  Let me say that again: this is certainly not always the case.  And yeah, sure, at first I worried I’d be called a “sellout” or, worse, a “straightedge”, but then I just thought, you know, I’m totally clean because I used things so much I had to stop or die, which is more badass than most of these smokers and drinkers can say.  I’m still badass.

CC: Has if affected your creativity?

SD: Not really.  Now, as before, I’ve not completed any major work that was at all worthwhile (laughs).  But I actually find myself writing a lot more, but the quality downgrades at the same rate as the volume of output, so in the end, I have the same amount of usable material.  I did have to postpone getting together with Duane (Miller) to work on an album we’ve been kicking around for a year now.  I found I wasn’t ready for collaborative work without a smoke yet.  I’m very comfortable writing at home in my own apartment in front of my computer, but the thought of kicking ideas around in Duane’s studio without a cigarette kind of terrified me.

CC: I was under the impression you’d been doing collaborative work with Rothman Hogar very recently?

SD: Well, yeah, but that’s all correspondence work.  Rothman (ed. note: Hogar is Dellinger’s frequent “best friend” and occasionally his “nemesis” artistically.  The two have a long, storied friendship which both are hesitant to talk about.) is currently a writer-in-residence at a university in Norway, and we’re collaborating on a screenplay via e-mail, so it’s still basically solo work because I’m alone while I’m doing it.

CC: Has Rothman’s absence changed the nature of the artistic life here in Carlisle?

SD: Only in the sense that a friend’s absence changes the dynamic of that group of friends.  Since Carlisle’s rise to prominence in the East Coast art scene, there’ve been plenty of personnel changes around here, but the core group remains the same and the general aesthetic remains the same.

CC: OK, now that we’re talking about it, take us back and tell us about the “rise of Carlisle”.  How did it happen?

SD: I’m sure you know that’s not the softball question it appears to be.  There are a few differing versions of how it happened.  Personally, my memory of the first national art media coverage was when Mary (Simpson) and I wrote and produced a play at the Cubiculo Theater here in town that built a slow media following: first the local papers, then the regionals, then the niche national publications, until finally it got a blurb mention in The Atlantic.

CC: That play was Conceited Eagle.

SD: Yep.  Eagle still largely pays my rent, too.  After it’s blurb in The Atlantic, a few regional theaters asked if they could put on a production of it.  Every year it circles a little further out.  This year they’re doing it in Fargo, Kennebunkport, and Denver.  It’ll never make me rich.  It doesn’t even pay the utilities.  Coneited Eagle exactly pays the rent, more or less.

CC: Do you harbor any hopes it will ever go “big time”?

SD: What, Broadway?  Yeah, it’ll probably make Broadway some day, and it’ll play for 18 shows and star someone unusual, like DMX.  I probably won’t like it.

CC: So what made Carlisle become a hotbed of artistic work, rather than this just being the unlikely story of an independently produced play?

SD: It’s almost impossible to say how these things happen.  There were just a lot of us in the right place at the right time.  Some folks interviewed Mary and I about the play a few times, and we mentioned a couple of friends we had–visual artists, musicians, writers, etc–and occasionally they went and interviewed those friends of ours, and people started getting into their stuff and interviewing them, and it was one big cycle.

CC: How famous do you think you can all get?  Could this become a cultural phenomenon?

SD: No way.  The Carlisle scene is bound to stay culty, for a couple reasons.  First, none of us are really pop artists.  I’m mainly poetry.  Rothman writes everything but it’s all very avante garde.  Mary’s a painter.  Jarly (Marlston) is a sculptor.  Duane plays space funk.  Tony (Magni) draws wads of meat.  I mean, c’mon.  The kids are never gonna flock here!

CC: Ryan (Straub) plays some fairly accessible singer-songwritery music.

SD: haha, true, but we’ve been trying to talk him out of it.

CC: How important is it for art to be accessible?

SD: That all depends how accessible you want it to be.  If you’re going for something you want everyone to understand and enjoy, and you end up making something daft, dense, or confusing, then I’d say you’ve certainly failed.  But it doesn’t have to be simple to be accessible.  Charlie Kaufman makes movies lots of people love, including myself.  They’re never going to make a hundred million dollars, but there are lots of fans.  I think it’s just about making what you set out to make, making it play on the level you wanted it to.

CC: Can you give me an example of a time you think that translation has failed?

SD: Sure.  I think Jonathan Franzen’s much beloved novel The Corrections is a failure in that vein.  He seems to want to be writing a really complex, codified novel like Pynchon, but he ends up writing it like a Grisham book.  It was an Oprah book back before Oprah started picking surprisingly good books.  It reads really strange because you can literally see Franzen trying to be dense but it comes off as populist.  It’s like beating off with a limp dick.

CC: So, back to the Carlisle movement: how important is the “group” aspect here?  Would any of you be successful without the group?

SD: We’re not the Beats, if that’s what you mean.  For the most part we participate in different mediums, we have different outlooks, are at very different spots in life.  Mostly, what we create does share a certain tone, a base idea of grit, or the grime of life, but we’re also not afraid to uplift.  You’d be hard pressed to find a photograph with more than three of us in it at any given moment.  I’d love to play up the idea of a group, or movement, because people love that story, but really it’s more like a loose group of friends who are all creative types.

CC: How many of you have been able to quit your jobs?

SD: Most.  But we quit our jobs with the trade-off of living uncomfortably.  We’re not rich.  We’re barely living off of what we do.  Remember, you’re interviewing me for Cold Clothes, not Rolling Stone! (chuckles)  A few of them still labor for their money.  Jarly still works (for the Pennsylvania Department of Transportation).  There’s not a big market for original sculpture right now, but I always say, a decade from now, that guy’s gonna be so rich he won’t even remember where Carlisle is!

CC: OK, maybe we’ve got ahead of ourselves.  Let’s go back before Carlisle.  Tell me about growing up in Newville, a small town about 20 miles from here.

SD: Newville is a very idyllic, perfect little shithole of a town.  It was an ideal town for a boy to grow up in.

CC: haha…um, explain?

SD: It had that quintessential “small town” feeling, that sort of close-knit Thornton Wilder thing that makes you feel comfy and safe and free to ride your bike alone all over town at a very young age, but at the same time, it’s a shithole.  It had seen it’s best days.  It had abandoned factories, forgotten corners of the town where the streets quite literally had no name, drainage ditches full of standing water, back alleys with weeds growing through the pavement.  But despite all this, I never found anything sad about it.  My childhood eyes saw all this blight as a great story.  I loved thinking about Newville’s past, what it had been like as a boom town, what those men in tall hats from the black-and-white photographs would think if they could see it now.  It filled me with a deep sense of time very early in life.

CC: How did your family end up in Newville?

SD: Well my grandma and grandpa Cohick–that’s my mom’s side–lived in the area.  My mom grew up on their farm in Oakville, an even smaller town a little further out.  I suppose at some point in time they sold the farm and moved to Newville.  I know Gram worked for the dress factory in town that was shuttered right around the time I was born.  After my parents were married they must have moved to Newville to be closer to them, although I don’t know those details for sure.  Isn’t it strange the questions you never even think of asking your parents?  Dad’s family was from closer to the river (the Susquehanna), the Mechanicsburg, Wormleysburg-type area.  It’s odd to think about, because my parents are divorced now, and Mom left the area, but Dad still lives in Newville, a place he’s not actually from.  It’s weird how life moves you around.

CC: And here you are, living in Carlisle.

SD: Well yes, but there’s not really a difference between living in Carlisle and living in Newville, geographically.  It’s like the difference between living in Chelsea and living in Greenwich Village.  And I suppose there’s barely a difference between where my dad’s parents raised him and where he ended up.  It’s all south-central Pennsylvania.  But I think it’s just neat how life picks you up, moves you around, and sets you down.  Sometimes it’s a lot more dramatic than Mechanicsburg to Newville.

CC: Did you enjoy your childhood?

SD: Listen friend, if you didn’t enjoy your childhood, you weren’t trying.  I fucking loved it!  I mean, sure, there’s plenty of sadness in childhood.  In fact, about half the poems I wrote in 2004 were trying to figure out why childhood seems so sad.  My childhood certainly wasn’t more sad than anyone else’s–in fact, it was probably happier–but I think as children we just haven’t learned how to deal with the truths of the world yet, and we’re very tuned in to the way things feel.  The passage of time feels quite acute to a child.  Boredom feels very acute.  Unfairness, not getting what you want, not feeling loved at every moment–these things take a lot of years to get used to.  And thank goodness we do get used to them, thank goodness childhood doesn’t last forver, because until you get your emotions and reactions under control in the early teens, you’re essentially useless.  But anyway, despite and maybe because of this deep sense of feeling, childhood is an amazing, magical time.  It’s this same “blank slate” idea that makes us so emotionally sensitive which also makes the world an extraordinary place to a child.  “Puddle-wonderful”, as Cummings called it.  Try as I might in my adult life, I’ve never been able to acheive the kind of free-form imaginitive play I had as a kid.  And that’s the thing:  I do try. I mean, I live by myself, I don’t have a job, I’m single and no kids.  Some nights, when I’m home, there’s nothing to watch, I’m sick of the book I’m reading, and I don’t feel like writing.  I look around my apartment and think, I should play.  And why shouldn’t I?  There shouldn’t be anything wrong with a grown-up playing.  So I turn everything off, make my hands into guns, or my golf bag into a dragon, or any number of things, and I give it a go.  But it never works.  My hands become hands again way too quickly, and the golf bag always looks much too much like a golf bag, and I just end up putting on a Radiohead album and pretending I’m a rock star, which is play to an extent, but it’s totally useless grown-up play.  It’s more about commerce and culture and self-glorification than childhood play.  I always remember this essay I wrote in 12th Grade english class about childhood play, and how my teenage life was really missing my childhood play.  That essay is still one of my favorite things I’ve ever written, because in it, I described childhood play in such a luscious, compelling, chunky way.  I could never write about childhood play like that nowadays.  It’s like my 18-year-old self was still tenuously connected to my childhood self.  I still had a visceral notion of what it had been like.  Not so anymore.  Nope, nowadays remembering childhood is like watching a movie through a bedsheet.  I can’t imagine what it’s like when you get older still; it must be like that childhood happened to somebody else entirely.

CC: Were you a social child?

SD: Reluctantly.  Which is another way of saying “no”, I guess.  I was pretty much terrified of people I didn’t know.  In fact, I was more scared of kids I didn’t know than I was of strange adults.  Now, don’t get me wrong, I had friends, but it was a long process for me to feel comfortable with them.   I had much more fun playing by myself, controlling all the plot points and characters.  But most of it comes down to fear.  I was one of the most scared kids around.

CC: You were scared of other children?

SD: Absolutely.  In both the theoretical and the very concrete sense.  Theoretically, I was afraid no one was going to like me, that I wouldn’t be understood, that I’d be ridiculed.  Concretely, I was literally afraid other kids would end up beating the shit out of me.  I’m not sure if this just came from being a short kid or not, if maybe it came from somewhere deeper, but it wasn’t until perhaps the age of 14 that I stopped worrying everyone wanted to hurt me.  It had nothing to do with my home life: my parents were not violent or physical.  I got spanked a handful of times, very civilly, very by-the-book.  Sometimes I think I just got born with a “scared” gene, and it’s been the major story of my life, overcoming it.

CC: Did you get in many fights as a kid?

Dellinger, age approx. 2 years, admiring one of his grandfather's sweet potatoes.

SD: No.  One or two, really, though the one was very, very terrifying.  It was this kid Shawn Wilson.  He was one of the baddest ass kids in Newville.  Like, you did not fuck with Shawn Wilson, even at the age of seven.  And I was in this church yard one day, this church yard that was a few blocks from our house on Big Spring Avenue.  I used to go there to play all the time.  They had some swings, a really big lush lawn, and even a small topiary maze.  Of course now, as an adult, it looks like a shrub-lined walkway, but at six, seven, eight years old, it was a topiary maze.  I was there playing by myself, and Shawn Wilson shows up.  At first, he played with me, but then for some reason he pushed me to the ground, got on top of me, wouldn’t let me up.  Of course, I cried immediately, did a kid version of pleading with him, but my fear just fed his aggression.  So he got a bit sadistic on me.  He let me up, but he wouldn’t let me leave.  I’d try to walk toward my house, and he’d run in front of me, knock me down again.  It turned quite epic.  I remember, what seemed like hours into this ordeal, I managed to escape, finally getting onto the sidewalk, y’know, that sign of civilization, and having this immense feeling of relief wash over me.  I felt like I had barely survived with my life.  That’s a moment from my childhood I remember with precision clarity, that feeling.  It’s poignancy is not diminished because I was so young at the time.  I felt like my life had been spared.  That’s a heavy feeling for a kid.  I ran the two blocks home and breathlessly told my mother the story.  She was a substitute teacher at the time, so was often home during the day.  I breathlessly recounted my ordeal.  She was concerned, of course, and very motherly to me, but must have been unconvinced of the epic severity.  I remember wondering why she wasn’t calling the police and giving me some secret grown-up medicine and calling the local news.  And the few times I’ve recounted this story to people over the years, I’ve gotten the same reaction. You see, you can’t ever actually make someone feel how you felt.  It is important to remember this when making art, too.  You can only get them really, really close, and then only if they’ve felt something similar before as well.  I will always be disappointed by anyone’s reception of this story, because I still get worked up thinking about it, over twenty years later.  I probably shouldn’t tell it anymore.  Oh, and Shawn Wilson?  He’s dead now.  A few years back, car accident.

CC: So now you’re the only one who remembers.

SD: Yep.  I’m the only person with the memory of that childhood fight.  And I like it that way.  Shawn Wilson may have grown up to be a different sort of man than the evil bastard who held me hostage in that church parking lot, but I’m still happy to not share anything with him, not even a memory.

CC: What else were you scared of as a kid?

SD: Just about everything.  I was scared of moving things, very much.  Motorcycles, horses, trains, amusements park rides.  I still won’t ride amusement park rides or horses.  I still haven’t conquered everything!  But yeah, fast things.  Bugs, snakes, the sky, night time.  Death was a big one.  I thought about death a lot.  My grandparents.  Rain.  You name it.  I mean, don’t get me wrong, I wasn’t unable to leave the house, or quivering like an idiot any time I was in public.  I’m sure there are plenty of people who had as fearful childhoods as I did.  I learned how to act through most of it.  Sure, I was still scared shitless when our parents would take my sister and I to, say, the Newville Fair, but I gradually learned how to hide it.  Well, hide it the best I could.  It was still no secret to those around me that I was mostly terrified.  But the acting is a skill I’ve really refined in my adult life.  While the fear is mostly gone from me, I now use it to disguise foul moods, sadness, worry.  I could be afraid I’m dying and hide it from everybody for a long period.

CC: Were you creative as a child?

SD: Sure.  But I never had one of those big moments you hear a lot of people talk about.  You know, I knew the moment I opened “Where the Sidewalk Ends” that I was going to be a writer or My parents rented “E.T.” and I knew in the first ten minutes I was going to be a film director. No, I never saw art that compartmentalized, and I still don’t, or at least, I try not to.  As a kid, I just knew I liked things that used that creative part of the brain, that idea that you can laugh or cry or sweat because of things that aren’t really there, or aren’t actually happening.  I was always drawn to that, and to the depth of emotion you can allow yourself to feel at these things.  I was always amazed by those depths.  Also, I remember losing my breath a little bit the first time I saw those little lights along the aisle floors in a movie theater.  That looked like real-world magic to me.

The Seth Dellinger interview from Cold Clothes will be continued!

Chantix Diary: Day One

Sure, at one point in time, I was physically addicted to alcohol.  It was ruining my life.  I drank day and night for years.  I drank in the shower.  I drank during sex.  I probably drank in my sleep.  Quitting entailed going through delirium tremens–the name for alcohol withdrawal–and from the name, you can imagine how much that sucked.  I went to rehab twice, for a grand total of 41 days.  I emotionally injured just about everyone I knew, probably should have gone to jail, and am lucky I didn’t kill anyone.

Quitting smoking is going to be harder.

Just because you quit one thing doesn’t mean you can just miraculously quit anything.  I could probably quit smoking just as easily as I quit drinking (which, of course, wasn’t easy) if I could go to some facility where they essentially lock you up for a month and don’t let you smoke at all and make you sit in an endless string of group therapies every day where everyone talks about their history with smoking.  Smoker’s Rehab.

But there is no smoker’s rehab.  And I need to quit.  And not because of my recent scare with the mole on my foot; I actually had the doctor’s appointment before I noticed the mole–it was going to be an appointment just about quitting smoking.  No, it’s time for Seth to get in shape, and that can’t happen until I quit smoking.  The smoking was a crutch I used during my early alcohol recovery period, and that period ended long ago.

I took my first Chantix about 16 hours ago.  I have six more to take until I actually try to stop smoking.  I’m going to document this process, mainly to keep myself accountable to my plan to quit, but also because I imagine it might be interesting (there are notoriously interesting side-effects, such as bizarre and vivid dreams).  And although I have no plans of failing, I’d like everyone to keep in mind that failing is certainly possible.  It can be part of the process.  Remember, I went to rehab twice.

Nothing out of the ordinary is happening yet, of course.  It takes a few days for Chantix to build up in your system.  In the next few days, however, I’ll probably blog a bit about my thoughts and experiences with smoking in general.  It’s an addiction that’s so widespread and common, the drama and seriousness of it is mostly written off.   (OK, so there’s not a lot of drama when it comes to smoking, but I’m sure I’ll dig up something interesting until the Chantix kicks in).