A Gift to Myself, for All

It is sometime in the late afternoon as I write this. I don’t normally do this sort of thing.

It’s my birthday today—sometime after eight p.m. on this day twenty-four years ago I made my grand entrance, DRUG FREE I’m told, which is how I remain to this very day.

For the most part.

It’s my birthday, and I’m blogging. No real plans to speak of for later. That surprise anyone? Well it shouldn’t.

I am a writer. Is it a bit presumptuous to call myself that at this point? You have to be published first, don’t you? Or at the very least have won an award or two for what you’ve written. Or am I only really a writer once I receive my first paystub? I’m still wrestling for a foothold in the publishing industry. Still crafting a platform. Still filling my hard drive with half-finished stories and prompts, poems, and late night idle thoughts and essays. If I’m paid for anything I write, I’m not sure where they’re mailing the checks. Is something relegated to a mere hobby until you are paid for it? Or is it not still what defines you? Isn’t it still therapeutic? Isn’t there still some kind of problem existing either in me or in the world that I illuminate or solve through my words?

At any rate, I will continue to make up and imagine things, and write them down, and hopefully someday many will read, and enjoy them. (Possibly even BUY them...) In addition, writing helps me to impose some small measure of order and organization to the chaotic tempest that is my inner mind.

(Picture a huge tornado whirring around, maybe an F4 or something. Got that? Right, now imagine all the crap, the myriad randomness spinning around in it amidst the dust and lightening: trailers, farmhouses, cows, street signs, wrinkled grandmas in their rockers exhilarated for the first time in years, octopi, Carl Jung, the rings of Saturn, a samurai and a cyborg locked in mortal combat, a stylishly clean shaven Knight’s Templar behind the wheel of an orange two-seater hot rod, a magical talking carp who grants wishes—don’t worry about his breathing, the mystical lake he swims in is also present—and the occasional half to mostly nude woman…)

In the chocolaty center of this funnel cloud of ideas, places and things is the storm’s eye, the nerve center that works to fashion a context for all these machinations.

Need a visual? Imagine that scene in the final Matrix film where stoic hero Neo walks into the bleach-white room full of security screens depicting all facets of human life. Here he is greeted by a neat and dignified looking older gentleman resembling Sigmund Freud—the ‘Overseer.’ What you would find is basically that, except the walls of my room are a speckled Crayola mishmash, and replacing Sigmund monitoring the outer shell is an ADD afflicted twelve year old with a mop of tousled hair, darting around from screen to screen in spaceship sequined pajamas.

Organization isn’t something I do particularly well…

My college diploma came yesterday in the mail. I haven’t actually opened it yet, though I am expecting a cover letter on the inside that reads like some variation of the following:

“Happy birthday Adam, and a thousand salutations and congratulations from us to you! Enclosed here in this big square of Federal Express cardboard is a sheet of the highest quality parchment, adorned with Latin calligraphy and signatures from “highly distinguished educators” signifying you are a Bachelor of the Arts [great, a bachelor in some other venue…], and have attained, through the culmination of four years of dedicated study, a base understanding of the English Language’s literary traditions, from it’s Anglo-Saxon roots right on up to the American Contemporaries and every stop in between!

Feel special? Well, you should—this piece of paper cost more than a big screen plasma television, Playstation3, platinum engagement ring, new hybrid car, and season Yankees tickets…COMBINED! That’s right! Think of it as currency for your livelihood and future; a voucher entitling you to recognition in any professional setting that values a creative and expressive mind, the advancement this fine culture through the arts and letters, as well as the propensity to be a bit loquacious.”

…

……

For the record, I feel a great sense of pride and satisfaction when I think of that diploma. It is proof of something that I am the first in my family to achieve. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I am more educated, or smarter than most. What it proves is that four years ago, I made the decision to undertake a responsibility. I decided on a path of knowledge and personal growth and was lucky enough to come to the understanding early that I had to be my own guide. I took what I needed. Learned about what I needed to learn about, and even amidst the undergrowth of gen-ed requirements and other superfluousness, rounded myself according to my vision.

At the path’s end, you were all waiting.

I walked out and greeted you. You cheered, mostly…I had made it.

It was a path that several had doubted my ability, for whatever reason, to walk in the beginning. They then doubted my motivation for being there, and the practicality of just what it was I was taking away from it. Of those several, some still wonder what I am going to “do” with it. Is it enough to get me through? Will it open doors? Were my efforts all in vain, fruitless?

Yes.

No.

I don’t know.

And frankly, I don’t care.

The course I am on currently is one I set myself. I stand at the helm. I steer the rudder. I am headed for new, exotic worlds, each one vastly different from the other, beset on all sides by uncharted, stormy waters.

I’ll show them to you. With whatever evidence I return with, I will tell you all about them.

I am ever exploring. Discovering. I write. It’s what I do, and it’s what I will continue to devote my life to until I can no longer navigate those waters.

Or until I lose half my vocabulary to age and dementia, and my mind as a result. Though I may be more fun then, wont I?

Maybe someday I'll take everyone's advice and aspire towards "a real job." One of those more "respectable and focused careers."

I am going to close this with what I could have begun it with, and I do hope everyone listens to it. It is the voice of my favorite author reciting his “Writer’s Prayer.” It is short, and simple and covers every real blessing a writer need take with him/her. Hang around for a minute through the bongos and tambourine rattling, and he gets to it, don’t worry.

(And I am aware of the irony of his first statement…)

http://neilgaiman.net/sound/01-a-writers-prayer.mp3

Directions

Drop the canteen you are hefting around in the desert you are walking through. Let the wind bury it in the sand; let the dunes overtake it. The weight of it is immense, and you are tired as it is. It reminds you always that you are thirsty. It reminds you of how profoundly sweet and cool the water that flowed from it once was, how it quenched that deep thirst so perfectly; nourished your heart, your body, your mind—saturated the root of you and made them new each day.

Drop it, for it is gone. What you hold is empty. Hollow. A shell of memories. A still-life reflection of what was, instead of a moving representation of what is. Don’t stop to think about it. Don’t make a production out of it; don’t grant it undue pomp and importance. It doesn’t deserve to be seen off; you aren’t saying goodbye to anything you need, or will miss.

Just let it go. Let it fall unceremoniously along your way, and don’t look back. No matter how cracked your lips become, or how much your chest starts to ache, don’t look back; build the distance; keep moving...concentrate on each drift of sand you kick, listen to the wind blow. It will whip, and blow through you from time to time. Love is a blanket, and for now you must keep yourself warm. Strength is a fortifier, for now build your own shelter. The world may seem impossibly dark; the fire inside you burns bright always-let it light your way

Move in a straight line, and never stray from your path. Trust yourself, your instincts, and what you do. Take pride in them all; Take them with you, let them be your guide. Give faith to your process. Continue to plant seeds, even in this barren place, continue to grow and create as you labor through.

But don’t exclude all else.

Go and be where there is life. It has a pulse. You will recognize its rhythm. Never deny its vibrancy.

See it.

Walk with it.

Touch it.

Drink it in—let it wash over you, and you will walk out of this wasteland, whole, renewed, intact. Above all, never stop moving. You will live again. You will find it again. You may realize, under the moon and among the countless stars that you already have.

When you have arrived, You will find me there. I will be waiting.

Now go.

Strands of Memory

In the past year or so I started noticing a small, almost indistinguishable spot of thinned out hair at the northern most pole of my head. At the front, a peninsular hunk of hair juts forward, while at the sides it seems to be retreating ever so slightly. When styled, my hairline comes to a point at the center of my forehead. I was told by friends that the term for this is a “Widow’s Peak.” Naturally, I googled it, horrified to learn I share the same ill-fated hairstyle as Eddie Munster. I had held out hope that this development was simply the result of a bad haircut, and in four weeks time I’d be back to my old head.

…

Only in a memory.

That head is long gone. I had always had full, healthy hair that grew like wild grass and at only twenty-three, the change was…unexpected.

I’m not actually losing my hair, I tell people, but rather it’s just retired from the stress and grind of my head, and relocated to my neck and upper back. Thankfully I don’t boast any of those reclusive strands that seek the privacy of my ears.

I’ve also thought often about the reaction I’d get if I told people that my hairline receding is actually news to me, that in all likelihood, it’s merely retreating back in disgust at the sight of their face.

…

To experience hair loss is to go through the five stages of grief. I think the above illustrates anger fairly accurately, especially since most people have the good social tact and decency not to mention anything to you, and you say it anyway. Depression entails thumbing through all the bogus hair restoration creams, shampoos and realizing you’re too poor for the surgeries, whereupon you bargain with every mirror in your house good enough to listen, saying, “If I could just keep most of it in this area….”

Denial is a comb-over. That stands pretty well on its own I think. Possibly even bolder on a t-shirt.

It all rounds out with biting the bullet, shedding a tear and then shaving your head.

*Sigh…* Acceptance.

The thought of shaving my head horrifies me. On the one hand I’m lazy, and I’d find the amount of effort it would take to run a razor over every nuance of my scalp every few weeks or so tedious and exhausting. Farther along that hand, I think it may hurt too much to watch what’s left of it go every time. I see it like pulling a plug over and over, or maybe putting a pet to sleep. Did I mention there isn’t a stylish enough hat in the world that could cover the shame of my big, hairless gourd?

Actor Ed Harris in decline, very, very few people can pull off the “balding look.” Where having gray hair can sometimes add an aura of experience, or seasoned maturity to a man, turning a blind eye to balding after a while is like walking around with a giant red-wine stain on your shirt, a widening tear in your pants, or a square of toilet paper stuck to the bottom of your shoe that doubles every few steps.

“You’ve got, you have…a little something, there…RIGHT THERE, yeah. You gonna…? (Is he ever going to DO something about that?)”

One of the chain-links in my family’s DNA, both sides, must clearly be labeled “Monk Balding Gene”. It is that series of nucleic formulae that ensures a nice visible patch of cranium in the middle of our heads by the age of thirty. The affected area spreads into a kind of crater, until stepping out from the shower in a brown colored bathrobe you may be mistaken for a lost Benedictine friar.

A hairpiece is both desperate, and out of the question. They are very easy to spot, and call just as much attention to hair-loss as, well, hair loss. While some of them are actually twined together out of real hair, they have to be replaced after so long, which would leave me a kind of second string cousin of the Vampire, preying on humans for their hair. I see it now:

In my struggle to function and fit in the human world, I would try and turn elsewhere for my epidermal lust. Neighbors will undoubtedly become suspicious when their dogs and cats return home in the wee hours of the morning completely shaved, while I walk out my door every few days with a new hair color and style.

Monday: Shaggy, shoulder-length retriever blond

Thursday: Short, business-like Labrador black

Saturday: Dalmatian salt and pepper. (There’s that seasoned look…)

A shy, emotionally repressed girl whose beauty is kept in check by thick reading glasses and a purple cardigan will take a strange liking to the provocative “chameleon man.” The image of her long, strawberry blond locks will pervade my dreams. I breathe deeply of her hair when we embrace, though I promise myself I will not make her my next human victim. Out of love and shear force of will, I struggle, conflicted…

I smell a series somewhere in all of this.

The Japanese top-knot was elegant and quite dignified but, much like the Jerry curl or the Flock of Seagulls haircut, relegated to a novelty of another generation, and unlike bell-bottom jeans or strawberry shortcake shows no sign of resurgence. And even if I did go with the neo-Samurai look, it sadly requires a certain amount of hair on the top and back, a weak spot for me, reducing it at best to a top-nub.

Looks like I will be recycling my kimono and hakama to the back of the closet rotation once again this season.

Damn…

Perhaps I should just let go now to save myself future aggravation and anxiety. After I shave my head, maybe I’ll take to rubbing beef brine on my face for that rawhide feel, file my teeth down by biting caps off beer bottles, and resign myself to spitting wads of Skoal into the empties, with a pack of unfiltered Lucky Strikes rolled up in my sleeve.

Or, with little time left, I suppose it’s as good an incentive as any to get out there and project my current youthful appeal. I’ve had friends who dreaded losing their hair until it was finally gone, from the first strands lost to their shower drains to the final clumps shaved off with their razors. They spent their last full days with it lamenting its loss, grieving with their heads down and covered for something that hadn’t gone yet, rather than enjoying what they had left.

How much different am I really with a little less hair? Will women really view me in a diminished light? Will I stop being me? Will people stop reading my blogs and stories? Will it stop me from writing and dreaming things up—from imagining? If the answer to that one is no, then the rest will fall in line accordingly.

Elegy for Dad, & Other Stuff

Some months ago in a creative writing course, my classmates and I were instructed to do an exercise wherein we took the traits of a parent and matched them up metaphorically with an object of some kind. We were to then briefly explain the connection.

Dads were old golf clubs, while moms were garden equipment or the musical instruments they barely played anymore. There were tools and car parts, even a steering wheel in one case. All were true representations in their own right, in fact it’s impossible to be wrong in this sense, but I felt that nothing about the things my classmates equated to their parents truly personified them. Each one, the golf club, the baseball, the wrench—they were things that stood objectively outside them, representations of hobbies and trades.

“My father is a golf club. Because…he likes to…play golf?”

“My mother is fond of gardening, and can become quite dirty out there, so this HOE…”

…

I suppose I could have associated my own father with a paint brush, that being the chief tool of his trade. Maybe a roller or paint stained steel ladder, or a speckled, used tarp. Or maybe a pair of bleached overalls and a beat up flat brimmed ball cap. They would all have made sense. I could write of the little empty lemon and lime juice bottles that he mixed all of his specialty colors in. He had an eye for color, my old man did. He could breathe new life into the drabbest room of the mustiest, most dated Victorian you can imagine.

With both Father's day and his birthday looming at the time, any of those would have worked as the perfect homage.

However, the truth is if I mentioned all of those things first it would have been a blatant lie. Nothing quite captures the essence of my father as accurately as a bottle of Jack Daniel's old Tennessee sour mash whiskey.

Something about the shape of that bottle, and that black label. Something about the way it stands out among the fancier liquors, the way it belongs up there among them and yet doesn't, like some little rugged, rough hewn gentleman. It's amazing, the contradictions this simple drink embodies; it can be a gentleman's specialty one day and a tramp's vice the next. A headliner at cocktail parties showing up in classy snifters or drams, while the night before it graced a dirty, wet bar top in a foggy mason jar. It's known as American Bourbon by a "worldly" few. To those well acquainted, it's just Jack. It's been there to toast successes, and drown failures. It stares down the pipes of screaming thralls, while other times it sits on a small kitchen table next to a lonely shot glass with despondence staring back at it. It is at once social and solitary.

Personally, I abhor this awful drink; just the smell of it buckles my knees. But the old man loved it. Some go toe to toe with it. Most fail, miserably. It’s by nature a hard thing to take. And so was he.

My father was a man of towering contradictions. On one hand he had a tremendous talent for what he did. He stood out in his family with a sizable capacity for abstract thought. He held firm beliefs, was a spiritual man, and for much of his life a devout Catholic. He had certain creative gifts, some athletic potential, and a high IQ.

He had potential.

…Then there’s that other hand.

He alienated his family and retreated to the bottle. A manic depressive, his proclivities soon led to destructive and volatile behavior, growing paranoia, and to the development of a massive superiority complex. He burned bridges to friends and most anyone who loved him. In his arrogance, he blamed everyone but himself.

My father died a few years back, succumbing to what a sheet of paper listed as congestive heart failure, hastened no doubt by nearly a lifetime of alcohol abuse. He died in a modest tenement, after sundown the report says, in the middle of a dusty old reclining chair alone.

They say in order to understand something fully one must go back to the beginning.

Here goes…

I believe that from an early age, my old man fell victim to what Steven King coined in his novel IT, as The Derry Disease.

For all those horror fans like me out there this reference should be self explanatory. For the rest of the world, The Derry Disease is a term the main characters of King’s novel use to personify the undercurrent of complacency, melancholia, apathy and tunnel vision that grip the citizens of their town. People cling to their faults and fears, hold on to their old prejudices, and continue to feed their vices until their goals become ever more shortsighted, their lives more trite and meaningless. They resign themselves to life in the town; the life of their parents, and their grandparents.

So absorbed in their own mediocrity and depression, they turn a blind eye to one another. One scene in the book, as told through a flashback by a female character, details her physical and sexual assault by a group of punky young men. Terrified, and with tears streaming down her cheek, she looks around for somebody, anybody, who can help her. Her silent, frightened gaze settles on a grown man in the doorway of his home. He peers out, a dumbfounded mixture of fear and shame on his face, and then slowly shuts the door, leaving the girl to the mercy of the gang.

In King’s novel, this backwards undertow of negativism and destructiveness provides the life force for an ancient, demonic being that had insidiously plagued the town of Derry for generations. On the surface it terrorized as Pennywise the Dancing Clown. In its true form, a sinister, spider-like entity, it literally and figuratively had its limbs stretched out through every artery of the town. It fed on its negative energy and bad karma, and in growing larger and larger it thereby perpetuated it year after year, draining the vitality of Derry's citizens.

Of course there is no murdering clown traipsing around Hamden or its nearby towns, let alone a grotesque, monstrous spider living underneath its streets.

That I know of…

*Sigh* Only in Maine...

King’s narrative was at least in part to me, a metaphor for what an inescapable deathtrap for personal growth and fulfillment a small town mentality can be.

People are born there. They dream. They live out their lives. They defer their dreams. And they die there.

It’s true, there is not, and never has been a life-sucking arachnid existing in the bowels of my town that influences its citizens to stray from the righteous path, but there is this inherited, renewed ethos that places great emphasis on bogus ideals of practicality and success, measured among other things by forty grand to start, a cell phone and maybe a company car. It is a choral mantra sung that endorses materialism, greed, and artifice, while condemning uniqueness and originality.

It starts with an empty home life and diminished expectations. It's followed by a desire for escape with no clear destination. Eventually there is the fear of failure:

“You can’t shoot for that, what if you miss?”

Complacency soon takes over. What began as a reason people couldn’t start something becomes an excuse why they won’t. Tomorrow becomes next week, and then next month until they drown themselves in eventually, and one of these days. At the first sign of a big paycheck they get caught up in an unfulfilling job. Then settle into a mundane, two-dimensional lifestyle. Suddenly, the idea of leaving seems impossible, just a foolish, fading memory. These people let others slap an expiration date on what they can achieve, and a time frame for things like marriage, and children.

The divorce rate in this country isn’t decreasing any in recent times…

The reins of their life no longer in their hands, they may regret year after year how all they wanted to do was leave this town and travel, be a painter, or go back to school. They lie to their wives, and husbands. Neglect their children. Forget their parents, and throw friends under the bus. Slaves to commodity, even education was never more than a business proposition to them. Some become self aware, donning the role of that guy on every bar stool in America who laments his position in life, perpetually unaware that tomorrow, in a few hours or even in the next ten minutes they could turn things around completely. Many remain ignorant to any of this, and sit happily in that bar(s) each weekend drinking with the same people at twenty-seven they sneaked in there with at eighteen.

A person like my father would have fallen just outside of this demographic. This would have been the yard stick presented to aspire himself to, and hopelessly at that, due to his family’s social and economical status. Not only was he told what he “should” achieve, he was reminded of what he never could.

As a lower middle-class, Italian Catholic, college was not a novelty he could afford, much less would it have been pushed in a household like his. From both ends of the perspective my father would have heard, “You’ll never be able to do that.”

He seemed frustrated all the time, angry at everything, and nothing in particular. He too never realized he could change any time he wanted to. As his son, I believe he could have. I believe that he was made for greater things, but was derailed early.

This post isn’t an attempt to exonerate the things my father had done; rather I am just putting into perspective a problem that threatens a lot of young, talented people.

For those of us who nurture dreams atypical of our locale and that require growth and life experience its stifling limits could never provide, this prepackaged lifestyle becomes a kind of sickness that pervades the psyche. We become subject to conditioning that dulls colors, nullifies emotions and expression. It stifles rhythm and quiets music. It kills the soul. If left in it too long, it assimilates us, holds us prisoner. We need to do all we can to liberate ourselves from being the latest batch of casualties to this monster, sacrificing our futures to feed it, keeping it alive to infect future generations.