Take from this what you will

Sometimes it’s difficult not to notice that, despite how many of us collectively the human condition applies to, we remain unsympathetic and unreasonable towards one another. We are guarded about ourselves to a point of paranoia, what we want, strive for, what we think; exactly who we are at our very core. We mark the four corners of our daily lives with an atmosphere of judgment and scrutiny, turning it into a walled arena of competition, factious cut-throat and dogmatic instead of some kind of community that is symbiotic and open-minded

We randomly weave in and out of each other’s lives, treating those around us like merchandise we willfully use for varying periods with no intention of buying only to reject and discard. Like a jacket or blouse that contours snugly to our bodies, worn until just before or well after a grace period, we are unceremoniously slid off and returned in a crumpled pile to the retailer.

The fervor of that day trying it on, its luster in the mirror, and then under the city lights, for all to see is abruptly gone, and what no one really saw was how they never removed the security tag, or that they would find something wrong with it…And it is shed the way a snake sheds a layer of skin.

I’m bored with this now; It’s served its temporary purpose; Oh, you didn’t know?—I never had any intention of actually keeping this…

So there we lie, wrinkled and dusty in the bottom of some bin or on the dusty linoleum store-front floor, still contoured to those shoulders, to that torso and that neck as others walk over, on top of or to the side of us without a second thought.

We are alienated from one another until someone perceives us as useful in some capacity, in as much as we’ve got something they want. We are a means to the end of someone’s satisfaction, a utility to fix or occupy a space, or the satiation of some kind of appetite. If a situation of co-dependence arises, emotional or psychological attachments, then we are kept in the mix:

I can’t find anyone better than this; No one else will have this level of patience; No one else performs this task like he/she does…

You are either player or spectator. You get only what you win or what you take. You are at all times balancing on a tightrope subject to fickle head-winds, at all times prone to failure, at all times replaceable. Your methods must be subtle and opportunistic.

I am twenty-four years old. It’s an age-range characterized by transition and discovery, by screwing up, and making fly-by-night decisions. Stages of life at this juncture are ephemeral and constantly shifting, each one more indicative of a layover than destination. But I have no intrinsic talent for this callous, elitist game, nor do I subscribe to its rules. I have no masks to wear in front of people. My words and actions are often misunderstood. Honesty and enthusiasm, randomness and spontaneity are translated as ineptitudes and weaknesses. There are always some who feign friendliness and civility as a kind of charity. It is not an in fact an act of charity, but one of some self-aggrandizement and put-on altruism, the way some people pity a tramp by tossing some change or a few patronizing words in their direction.

Well, I kinda feel bad for him; I mean I feel like I kinda HAVE to, you know?

Sympathy is not pity. It is empathy; it is mindfulness of the discomfort and/or suffering of another person you live, work or exist in close proximity to, and the acknowledgement that as characters in the same narrative the existential weights stifling them are in no way foreign to us. When someone forgets the words to their favorite song, or how to step to it, just tap out a slight beat to walk to, whistle a tune to help them remember, and go about your business.

There are times I wonder if people, even the ones I grow fond of and care about, see in my eyes reflected back at them the things they don’t like about themselves, scared at what the game’s top scorers may have to exploit. Sometimes I feel as though I am being forcibly tailored into this kind of lifestyle of seclusion, growing ever distant from it all.

It’s high tide; sunrise and sunset; death and taxes; steroids in baseball—it’s just an immutable fact of life and even the best of people seem to be caught up in it. However, choosing to exist on the fringe is a choice to dim the beacon we are supposed to shine—the magnetism of love, compassion and enthusiasm which in turn draws it back to us from others.

And so, every day is an effort to extricate myself from this dour mold, and weave myself in the collective inseam of the world around me, somehow finding those with whom I share an understanding while avoiding the knots, tangles and snarls inherent in it.

Is it like this everywhere?

This Round's on Me

“Good morning son.
Twenty years from now
Maybe we’ll both sit down
And have a few beers.”

For certain demographics, the 20th of April is synonymous with indulgence in a certain mind and mood altering vice. The day's festivities typically kick off with piling into a friend’s tight, rust bucket car or poster and tapestry-clad basement, covering every square inch in a thick haze of marijuana smoke. While one auditions crudely formed jokes, another feels compelled to share with his friends his new-found interpretation on life, beginning, of course, with his handWhile impossibly relaxed, they harbor the thrill of breaking an "oppressive, closed-minded" law at the same time, as well as the worldliness of knowing exactly which code it is. Productive and eye-opening as that sounds, With no bad habits to support, contacts to provide them, and the day off from work I spent the night uneventfully at home. No, I remind myself, this time of year holds other, more austere observances for me. On the evening of the 21st, I decided I needed a drink

I left the car along Tower Parkway downtown and hoofed it to Chapel Street and Richter’s, a bar I’d passed dozens of times before and had been meaning to try for months. Though the outer facade grants the place the appearance of an old man’s watering hole, it is always teaming with pods of Yaleans and other species of regular, all drinking and laughing and enjoying themselves—something I could just never do solo while others around me did it socially.

It was a Tuesday, by no means a ‘big’ night for hitting the town, but then, by no means do you really need an excuse when the weather was this inviting and if you’re a Yale student so close to finals time. It was early yet and the doors were open. I pushed forward.

Various of Yale's college insignias hung on the wall next to a mounted stag’s head. Scattered factions of diners and only a few bar patrons. A middle-aged man hitting on a moderately attractive bar-made. A Michael McDonald body-double hitting on a young, ‘full-figured’ black woman; two male students, sans the flirtation, looking on from behind their beers in amusement; a good selection of beer; someone having not a pint, half-liter, or liter, but a YARD poured for them…A solo excursion under these conditions was, I decided, not pathetic, but essential.

I bought a Bohemian style lager I hadn’t seen on tap anywhere since my time abroad and sat sipping it and watching a baseball game on one of the bar’s three televisions. I took a long draught from my pint glass. Through the hopsy golden fog of it Roy Halladay gets a sign he likes. He winds up, all six and a half lanky feet of him, lunges off the mound and the baseball leaves his hands…

--Why don’t they use metal bats, like my friends and I do?
--Because that would be too easy.
--My friend says metal bats are better.
--Not really.
--But wouldn’t they hit more home-runs?
--Don’t they hit enough already?
--I guess…
--How many did Babe Ruth hit?
--Ummm..(a brief pause) Seven-hundred-and-fourteen
--(a laugh) That’s right, and he swung a wooden bat, didn’t he, Jake?
--Yeah. (a coy smile at ‘Jake’)
--(leaning in close) So you tell your friend that wood bats work just fine, eh?

My nostrils flare and my upper lip curls…

…On the stools to my left, a young couple sit nursing a pair of whiskies. I shudder, but who walks into a bar with an aversion to whiskey and has the audacity to complain about it? I pretend that a stool a few seats down provides just the angle that has eluded me for watching this game. Doting on each others every word they fail to notice my switch. Turning my attention back to the game I can still smell it. I think of my father, dead five years as of the previous day

As a boy, when he would bring me close, be it for the greeting lift-off, the kiss goodbye, or some lesson of unfathomable importance to my ensuing manhood, his breath was an invisible right that could just about knock me out of my Velcro Nikes.

Eventually I’d drawn the correlation between the distillery fumes emanating from his mouth and the brown paper bag I saw in the cup-holder of his car on weekends when he came by to pick us up, or at any other point in the day.

I give him credit; he was good at trying to hide it, waiting until our attentions spanned elsewhere long enough to drain a few more milliliters of sadomasochism from his crude paper-bag dram. But it’s impossible to hide anything from a kid forever. They always find it, whatever it is. They always ask questions. What harm can questions really cause when you’re a kid? The thought orbited my six, then seven, then eight year old mind, but apart from one bad-breath accusation, I could just never bring it up.

I had to learn to take the good with the bad. With so little good to go around, I had to cherish it, really crystallize it all, the good, the bad and otherwise, all streamlined like movements in your very own waltz. I think it was Theodore Roethke who reminded that such dances are difficult to keep up.

The man loved baseball, and as I am told was a prolific little league coach, guiding his kids to several pee-wee championships. Of course, only those who truly contributed to that two-foot trophy were honored in the end. What does that mean exactly? Just imagine if coach Buttermaker didn’t include tragic Timmy Lupis when he doled the individual “good job” trophies out to the rest of the ‘Bad-News’ Bears. Due to his fervor and high on base percentage, I imagine the kid instructed to lean into just about every fastball got his, even if he made more contact with his bruised radial ulna than a baseball bat. It’s impossible to tout his little-league golden years without bringing him right back down and chaining him to the earth with that bit of local sports trivia.

I had always imagined that one day, when I deemed myself presentable and when everything from the past had settled (the way grass grows again slowly over the carnage of a battlefield), I would contact him, and maybe start the process of catching up. He wasn’t fit to drive so, I imagined myself with a driver’s license and enough geographical wherewithal to tackle the George Washington Bridge and navigate the Bronx for a Yankee game. Along the way I listen to his dogmatic baseball opinions, and allow him, one half out of empathy and the other sheer entertainment value, to continue believing he knew everything. When we arrive at the big ballpark in the Bronx, when we walk past anything enshrined to Yogi Berra, he reiterates to me and anyone else listening how much of damn stupid wop he thought the accidental sage really was.

Elston Howard! Now that’s who I grew up with; now THAT was a catcher…

Counter-intuitive as it is to offer a (hypothetically) recovering alcoholic a beer, in my vision we have enough time before the first pitch to duck into one of the bars that dot the stadium's interior, or share a few overpriced stadium Budweisers when we reach our seats.

It never happened, of course.

Parallel parking is in itself a special order for me, and I am not the navigator to see your way through any kind of jungle, concrete or otherwise. He called a few times intermittently over the years, mostly out of guilt I suspect; he desperately tried to leap-frog from casual small talk into something, anything meaningful while avoiding the past, nearly drowning at times in dead air as he cast out life-lines guessing at the person he thought his 17-year old son might be. Mercifully, I brought up baseball…

Each year around this time it floods my mind like heavy stout into a clear pint glass.

A few years back, my college roommates and I were on our way back to the dorms after an excursion to the liquor store. The only of us over twenty-one at the time, it was on me to actually walk into the place, handle the money and buy everything.

With a case of beer in each hand, my Sam’s Summer Ale in the left and someone’s cheap piss-water in my right, I make my way from the car to our door, ever vigilant for campus cops. It’s sunny and breezy; all the apartment windows are open, each one blaring at differing volumes the dull roar of a crowd; the pop of fast-ball meeting catcher’s mitt; lyrical triteness of Neil Diamond; Jerry Remy’s incoherent banter; all the magical numbers in the original soundtrack of Fenway Park. In Springfield, Mass, you couldn’t sell your first born to watch a damn Yankee game…

Without pretext, one of the usually sturdy handles suddenly breaks and it falls to the dirt in a heavy thud.

Shit...

I lift the case of Sam’s up off the ground. As if pulled from an invisible spigot by a phantom barman, a perfect amber-gold stream pours out the bottom. I watch it foam and fizz and quickly dissolve into the earth. Once inside I open the case and inspect it: Completely dry. ONE bottle of twenty-four directly in the center, a perfect crack around its base and not a drop of beer left inside. I pop the cap of my own beer on the edge of the counter and raise it to my lips. From our doorway I peer across the way through our neighbor’s window and the game playing on the television.

I Heard About a Man to Whom I May be Related...

In the late 19th century, an itinerant New England vagabond regularly traversed a 365-mile circuit that took him through most of western Connecticut and New York. Starting in south-west Connecticut he moved through New Haven County and along the Connecticut River, across northern CT, through Litchfield County, into New York and along the Hudson River Valley, and back to his starting point in CT.

He humped the entire journey on foot at a pace of about ten miles a day, took what he could from nature and relied on the goodwill of townsfolk for whatever else he needed.

His name is enshrined in a pantheon of New England folkloric figures. The residents who beheld him came to call this strange wanderer Leather Man.

Leather Man took his name from the strange garb he wore: a thick, baggy coat, trousers, boots, and hat, all a self made derelict patchwork of leather weighing over fifty pounds. He carried all of his worldly belongings in a large leather satchel, which included among many other things, a hand-made axe, crudely hewn pipe for tobacco, food and other provisions and a black Catholic bible translated to the French.

Rainfall, snow or sunshine, he knew every square mile of the woods and trails of Connecticut and Westchester County New York better than many people know their own property lines. I imagine he did a lot of thinking, meditating, reflecting along the trails he walked. I imagine that despite the smile he reportedly wore around his peers he suffered to himself silently, reciting litanies and his own personal gospels to walls of dark, empty caves.

There is always the possibility he was just another psychologically damaged transient, unable to function in the larger social context, but I just can’t agree with that. Evidence suggests that he was literate, quite possibly very intelligent, and given his French accent, worldly at least to some extent. The bible suggested he was a Christian and the worn cover that he referenced it often.

He was described by 19th century NY and CT residents as kind and polite, if not intensely private and reclusive. He would ask for nothing from people but food, or water: the most basic elements for survival. They would offer him the loft of their barns, or in some cases even a warm bed in their homes but he always declined, preferring instead to sleep under the star-lit roof of the many caves that dotted the route he traveled. He carried many tools, all handmade, was knowledgeable of woodcraft and survival in the outdoors. He was recorded to have purchased items in foundries and grocery stores, meaning he found some form of employment here and there. He was almost entirely self-sufficient.

He stopped often in towns for provisions, and while he crossed paths with many different people I can’t help but view him as a man apart, amidst but never among. He chose to communicate with a series of hand gestures and grunts usually;

Yes.

No.

Food?

Thank you…

When people approached him with personal questions or otherwise anything outside common pleasantries, he would ignore it or abruptly change the subject.

His unwillingness to speak about his past and where he came from suggests to me that there is something shameful, or otherwise too painful to relive from his life. His constant movement additionally suggests to me that he was either trying to get away from, or pursue something connected to it: things, concepts or people that only existed to him as intangible ideas that either haunted or just barely eluded him.

Several accounts stated that he often mumbled to himself, sometimes in French, while others in English—tinted of course with the brogue of a man from, it was determined, Southern France. So, he could speak.

It was often speculated that Leatherman’s hermetic and nomadic existence coupled with his “vow of silence” was self-imposed, a kind of personal penance. I can understand this to a certain degree as being a manifestation of some kind of guilt, or desire for privacy, but then…WHY was he so approachable? Why did he move through the lives of Connecticut residents the way he did, allowing himself to come so close…Only to shy away?

It always seemed to me that, rather than a conscious choice to separate himself from the larger human context, indicative of some kind of deep-seeded paranoia or distrust of people, it was a position he had no way to change, waiting in the cold at humanity’s window. Did he know how to knock? Did he forget how? Did he know he could? Did he know he had every claim to the warmth of human contact?

If not, what happens to a man to make him forget? What could frighten shame or traumatize him so much that the basic threads of commonality he shares with those around him are severed?

The few chromy photographs that have survived of him capture a kind of feral element in his eyes, like a raccoon in daylight—a man that had lost his nature somehow. But he maintained all of his humanity and was in no way volatile; children were hardly frightened of him, and instead relished the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the old Leatherman once a month or so, and adults were no different. Notices were posted urging him to come out, join functions, or answer questions. In the end it wasn’t fear of persecution that sent Leatherman on the low-roads, but popularity. It was as though he was afraid of being accepted. But why? Was he afraid he would disappoint or hurt them? Or maybe that he would be disappointed or hurt by them?

In 1888, a particularly harsh winter slowed the Leatherman’s movements. He was found in one of his caves, dead due to a combination of cancer and overexposure to the elements.

...

I often leave my house and hop in my car with no real destination in mind. I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I barely know when I’ve found it, but I like the freedom inherent in just going. It’s a way to organize my thoughts. I walk the same city blocks I have many times before, sometimes the silence of the streets is such where I can hear the nuances of each step, my breathing, heartbeat. It’s hard not to feel almost incorporeal. I stop off for a drink, or coffee. I usually have a book with me. Sometimes the book is just a ruse.

It’s funny…It indicates I am occupied, and want my privacy, and yet I take it to a public place. There are plenty of other more solitary spots to read but I choose ones soaked in the steady banter of people, and I in the middle, or just to the periphery of their comings and goings. In the midst of people sometimes, it’s as though we want to be sought out, yet we remain unseen.

I can’t always say the things I want to say to certain people. All the depth of my feeling comes out as just mumbling or stammering, cloaked in layers of metaphor and uncertainty, indecipherable as a fractured Rosetta stone. It can be a real problem.

I’m certainly no “man of the land”, ascetic or hermit. I have no dark past, nor am I damaged in any way. I have my quirks and eccentricities, “homeless cave-dweller” not counted among them. But I just think that, with the possible exception of a very blessed few, we all collectively share these kinds of experiences, at least at some point in our lives, and should understand this man's life in context to our own

If at any time you’ve ever found yourself somewhere on the fringe in life, walking the miles alone with your thumb in the air;

If you’ve ever felt yourself more a ghost haunting the world around you than a presence acknowledged in it;

If you’ve ever slowly stitched a coarse layer of armor over your skin out of self preservation and to hide your scars from people;

If you ever perceived a kind of impermeable layer between you and the ones you most care about, or the world around you;

If for days on end you’ve ever felt you must keep moving, that you couldn’t sit still for another moment for fear your mind will catch up with the rest of your body;

Then, be the trail paved with gravel or dirt, you, like me, have walked at least a day, a week, month or in some cases even years in the shoes of the Old Leather Man.

A Little Light in the Shoulders

A few days ago I went to the wedding of a life-long friend. Up until a few years ago his family lived in the house next door, and although they have moved and my friend and his new bride began their life together in North Carolina a while back, I still refer to them as neighbors.

I have apparently lost a good deal of weight in the past year. None of the four suits I auditioned from my closet even remotely fit. When I stepped into the one I last wore five years ago to my father’s funeral, I felt like the younger sibling of some All-American quarterback in an adorable attempt to fill big brother’s shoes.

The new gray suit I brought to the tailor garnered a confused look from the man, who I assumed would need only to hem the pants a bit. I walked out of the tiny dressing room and stood in front of a mirror as he looked on.

“You picked this size?” he asked.

I knew my thirty-four inch waist had become a thirty-two in recent times. He was kind enough to informed me that in reality meant thirty, and this only after a sizable meal.

“There’s no silhouette in the rear end, it just looks entirely too baggy.”

“And here. You see? In the crotch area, it’s just not filled in. Looks like there’s nothing there.”

…

I never did possess the gift of a shapely man-ass. It’s a fact of life that stares back at me from every reflective surface I walk by, so I certainly don’t require his reminder, or this new accusation that I may be a few utilities short of a belt. What almost fit about a half an hour prior appeared to me then as a gray, Michael Kors horse blanket draped over my shoulders.

He measured and made several white tics with his chalk, pinning the pants up and the seams of the jacket so that it may fit me a bit snugger. He took another suit off one of his racks and had me try it on.

“See, you’re more the European style,” he says to me, “That whole slender fit. You know, they’re always walking around and all that over there…” he says, both sardonic and quizzical.

“If I were to wear this my stomach and butt would just stick out, like a duck.” He laughs.

I simply file this away as further evidence that I belong somewhere else, and it affirms that the desired male aesthetic in this country is some perverse, bloated mixture of overweight and on steroids- something between an American athlete and the ape that watches the door of the Toon Town nightclub in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.

I hate dressing up, and always feel incredibly restricted in suits. During the wedding ceremony, the collar of my shirt felt like a dog’s leash yanked at by some phantom hand. The jacket prevented much arm movement above shoulder level and my feet soon started to hurt.

At our table afterward, I see that the groom’s seventeen year old cousin, also named Adam, is wearing the same make and designer suit that I almost did. He fills it out like an ad for Ralph Lauren formal-wear, and though he in no way deserves it for a moment I hate him immensely.

Then the talking begins.

The problem with gatherings like these is that you’re put in a position to tell everyone you haven’t seen in a while what you’ve been up to. This is done in large part by revealing what you haven’t been up to.

You have to try and invent yourself on the spot; inflate something that’s barely there, puff out your chest and stick out your ass while downplaying or obscuring the 800lb. omnipresent gorilla seated next to you: that, a year out of college you have yet to have anything creative published, struggle sometimes for air in an existential choke-hold of acute writer’s block, flayed concentration and doubt while wedged in a catch-22 trying to build a professional portfolio between upper-tier publications that refuse to work with inexperienced freelancers and that lower tier that refuses to use you and give you that experience.

You try not to feel unaccomplished and terribly dull to people. The things you like to talk about are for the most part projects half written or still planned and thus aren’t set down yet, much less published- they aren’t visual, and this is a world that lauds the visual over everything else. You can pull back a sheet from a canvas to show a nearly complete painting and there may be enough there to praise. Such an effect is lost when you refresh the word processor on your laptop, or withdraw the little black notepad from your coat pocket and show your scratched notes.

So you fall back to things that bore you half to death to even think about. You try and reap some kind of meaningful feeling from soil you never really planted the seed of your soul in to begin with. Turning your head then to that patch you did, you notice that nothing has grown because all of the tilling, work, worry and effort were placed elsewhere. I.E., you forgot about all the things you really do want and love to do. What a precarious position that is…

And while their overall positive, albeit generic endorsements of what you are hoping to achieve are somewhat uplifting, you feel additionally vain and narcissistic for worrying about yourself on a friend’s wedding day.

At any rate, the bride was beautiful and radiant and the groom more jovial than I’ve ever seen him, and when they were together you couldn’t help but find yourself tagged in their radius of genuine warmth and happiness. It dulled anxiety’s sharp bite.

I really should stop worrying so much.

...

Five years ago I went off broad shouldered to college, took my measurements, weighed my strengths and laid myself down into a certain mold. In the end I suppose it was like a promise I was making, or a pledge to something. Diploma in hand they pushed through a curtain onto a misty, rickety runway...

But things change. People change. Sometimes your own sense of self is so blurred you step into something that doesn’t fit you, and having walked around in it for so long you haven’t the faintest notion that you have grown out of it or never filled out at all. You very well may be drowning in it.

Sometimes you fall prey to what is, shall we say, fashionable and practical. You are at the whims of what everyone else deems the quintessential masculine look, or the color for all seasons, or what is acceptable for someone like you to step into for an interview, or wedding, or…anything. Life becomes a suit you may allow others to instruct you in how to stand and walk in, and you drive yourself crazy trying to contour to it.

Shoulders back—ok, now…I SAID SHOULDERS BACK DAMNIT!!

Maybe at some point, instead of altering my genetics to change for it, I will have the chance to tailor this life to me. Or find a suitable environment where I can slip into something a little less constricting; something that actually fits.

I can carry a metaphor for miles and miles, can’t I?

Bottom line is that I’m dusting off the sewing machine and readjusting my priorities. I want to have a portfolio strong enough to show an MFA program that their investment in me and my livelihood as a writer is a worthy one that will pay publication dividends for us both somewhere down the line. I need to devote my energy, my heart, mind and everything in between to it, and that is what I plan to do.

For people that don’t know, it can be very difficult. You are in every sense of the word making magic- conjuring something from nothing with mere words and concentration. Slip up, stall or lose that concentration due to some outside anxiety, and the spell fails. What you are left with is a messy chimera with the head of a toad and Oprah Winfrey’s fat ass. Or a room full of rebellious mops and pails.