Hidden Beneath the Leaves

The Year One

2010-05-24T01:16:00.004-04:00

If I still followed a collegiate calendar and schedule, I will have just about wrapped up my freshman year of real-life. If in fact real life constitutes any length of time post undergrad, or that way-station layover before graduate-school.

Like all first efforts it began with anxiety, a brief period of weightlessness and wondering in a new context before rooting my feet to the earth and realizing I hadn’t beamed to any new or distant planet and yes, this WAS still oxygen my ‘pitiful’ neophyte lungs were filtering.

In college they try and set you on the productive and narrow by hammering home certain, “realities”, outlining your prospectus as follows:

--Nearly twenty-something hours of homework and reading a week
--A seminar on STD’s and the morning after pill and the pitfalls of irresponsible sex.
--A lecture about how all too easy it is to fall victim to excess partying, and how, oh it WILL result in academic probation and failure.

Et.al…

Eventually you are able to see through their vision of academia, brick and steel citadel spires soon become just buildings with desks and projector screens, classrooms you will sit in semester in and out, with the same noisy heater that drowns out a different professor’s voice. You soon calculate that it takes more effort to get yourself kicked out of school than it does to stand on your tip-toes and really “reach” for that bare minimum standard of 2.0 academic excellence.

The Year One, A.G., (commonly “After Graduation”. Can also be referred to as Pre-Graduate Era) began with a simple online writing class, (credits required to actually finish my bachelor’s) which helped me to regain the confidence a negative senior year took a flame thrower to. I realized that, while I had yet to fully establish a voice or a definitive style to call my own, I could as my uncle coined, rub two words together and through resulting linguistic friction produce a fire. I began to trust my imagination again, and that out of that strange expanding universe were stories worth telling. I remembered how much I liked to make things up.

Next on my syllabus was the Graduate Record Examination, or, G.R.E. I put it off during my senior year, each month setting a new date for it. When circumstances finally drove home the fact that I would not be going to grad-school the Fall following graduation, I let it simmer on the back burner like something overdone and neglected.

On a June morning, I paid the $120 fee, set the countdown to a month, bought a G.R.E. prep book, and cracked it twice the week before the exam, walked into the testing center and, in a lack-luster performance, drudged through the most gratuitous, irritating performance test I had ever sat in on. More accurately called SAT 2.5, it drills you on your ability to answer some randomly generated moral quandary by sticking to uniform argumentative methods and rigidly standardized academic paper-writing rules, followed by a section of incredibly loose analogies and reading comprehension, overflowing with obscure, often times DEAD vocabulary even the best authors out there make it a POINT to shy away from. Still, you never know when you may have to stand and snobbishly argue your case in front of Parliament.

CROMWELLIAN Parliament…

Though I keep one handy at my desk, I do not sleep with a thesaurus under my pillow…

There was a math section. I think. The 350 I scored on THAT particular section I owe mostly to playing the odds (a., b., c., or d. means a 25% chance each time) and loosely on which examples I chose to SKIP.

I met someone. We dated a bit. It didn’t work out. I was really bummed for a while. We have remained friends. I am grateful for that.

I started this blog, originally as a tuner for my writing more than a personal outlet or virtual diary. It was to be the drawing board for all my writing ideas, non-fiction and creative alike, and provide writing samples, believe it or not, for possible employers.

I neglect it a bit. It’s been more of a sounding board for my angst of late than anything. Kudos to any consistent readership I may have.

I went on a few fruitless job interviews. One for a newspaper I have since freelanced for a few times. During the interview I managed to, through signature Adam with and snark, insult the alma mater of the managing editor. She tried comparing the student body of Wesleyan University, just down the street from the paper, and their impact on the town of Middletown to that of Quinnipiac University in my town of Hamden, where she had gone.

Um. Ah…

Couldn’t let it slide. I let her know that perhaps it was different in her time, but Quinnipiac is currently a haven for WASPY, upper-middle class douche-bags and its presence buying up all the property in Hamden does little to enrich it culturally, or artistically like Yale in New Haven, or like Wesleyan would if only the old-fart townies in Middlesex would EMBRACE the liberal presence of the college.

Perhaps a bit subjective… At least it showed I was trying to get a job.

I began writing for an online-zine dedicated to arts and culture in CT. Whereas it had gained early momentum and made a move toward an actual tangible PAPER, it has since folded.

Did some online news blogging. That lasted about 15 minutes.

Got a job at a bookstore, where I currently still work. Told myself by six months I would be out of there. This was in December. Working in customer service I have, if nothing else, surprised myself with my capacity in dealing with an unreasonable, often times idiotic public. We are a College Barnes & Noble responsible for selling text books to Yale students. While they remain fashionably sensitive, very liberal, and boast knowledge and opinions forged in classrooms with academic resources backed by an endowment tens of billions of dollars deep, indicative of a university on the highest plateau of the world's educational echelon...The common Yalie tends to lack a certain degree of broader social commonsense and worldly tact.

Street smarts...

God bless them, what with the world they are inheriting. Sometimes I feel great sympathy and anxiety for them, before I realize that we are all actually in the same life-boat, rowing frantically while trying our hardest to plug the leak in the bottom, schlepping pails of water out that threaten to sink us.

Did a little more freelance stuff, and realized it’s not the direction I really want to focus my strongest efforts, though will continue to slowly amass a portfolio of clips.
…

I researched grad schools. Well, more accurately, I vacillated, as unfortunately I continue to do as application deadlines have passed by, over a pantheon of MFA programs I worry won’t have me once I ever get a portfolio together. I think I’ve narrowed it down to six or so, maybe eight… Now all I need is about twenty-five pages of original work to show them.

…

Like in school, I think the self-applied pressure of having to impress with my writing is what holds me back, prevents me from the joy of the creative process and making things up. I’m hoping investment in another writing course remedies this funk.

Met someone else. At work. Didn’t think that would happen for a long time. Nothing happened. My timing, what a surprise, was off. She is leaving in the fall for grad-school. We are friends…I think. It’s hard to tell sometimes.

As an adult I think I need to enroll myself in a relationship refresher course.

Like in college, doors have been open and simultaneously closed; I was allowed to wet my feet with a few different pursuits before ultimately finding myself back where my real talents and passions lie. But unlike my foray into college, I refuse to settle in and grow too comfortable, and I do what I can to remain that way. The worst thing for me would be to find myself in the same place a year from now, as others move to the next tier in their lives.

As I approach year two of reality, the future seams so simple and yet so complex. It’s in my hands, almost completely. It hinges on my willingness to sit in front of a keyboard and type. They say sophomore year is the toughest. The training wheels go and the hill becomes steeper. It becomes easy here to float and fall off; to add miles of winding, brushy road between you and that goal.

Sophomoritis. That’s what they call it, anyway.

I turn twenty-five this year.

YIKES.

Wish me luck.

Maybe I won’t need any.

Maybe just a push. A positive, collective well-wishing jolt.

Take from this what you will

2010-04-29T01:06:00.002-04:00

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

2010-04-25T00:40:00.024-04:00

“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...

2010-04-21T16:45:00.006-04:00

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

2010-04-13T11:45:00.017-04:00

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.

Love's Austere, and Lonely Offices

2010-03-17T02:12:00.008-04:00

My grandfather’s sudden death left a 61 year old woman alone in a big house in a once safe neighborhood. My parent’s divorce a year later left a 9-5 mother with a two young children to care for. As if she’d ever really “shared” that responsibility. I was maybe two at this juncture.

In many ways my grandmother predated everything. She was always there.

My earliest cognitive memory, the oldest image I can conjure (without the aid of hypnotic suggestion) is of her.

It's blurred and choppy, like a dusty old film aging in storage:

Early morning and dark outside. Tangled in the sheets of my crib, I am wet, and crying. She lifts me out, and we walk hand in hand down our dimly lit hallway to the bathroom. I think I’m naked. The upstairs bathroom light is intense in the early morning darkness.

There is nothing before this.

One in a series of faded, photo album snapshots, I know some day it will be gone entirely.

.........

You couldn’t take me anywhere. My rages became hallowed things of legend, experienced by family and friends alike. Terrible didn’t just describe age 2 for me, but just about every stop thereafter. In my early childhood I’d gotten us “politely” evicted from restaurants, grocery and department stores, concerts and school recitals. Babysitting me for a day came only after lengthy negotiations and a lofty sum were agreed upon.

While my sister tries on shoes, and my mother looks for something I won’t outgrow in a month, I am made to wait with my grandmother. I am bored. I want to leave. Right now!

“Behave,” she warns.

I stamp my feet and curl my bottom lip to show I am not to be trifled with.

“You better behave…”

“Shut up!” I yell, and make a break for it. What began as steady whining has given way to a category three temper tantrum.

Down isles and behind display mannequins, I attack the men’s section by ripping off tags and tipping over racks of jeans. Before I can bring my assault to intimates and turn Bob’s Stores into a tinker tape parade of streaming pantyhose, my grandmother takes decisive action.

She takes hold of me, and before I can struggle free again, pins me to the floor.

From under her foot, I lay there, thrashing and wailing. Many would have stooped to bribery: Candy. A stop at Toys R Us. A video rental. More candy. But, appeasement be damned, she just stands with her hands on her hips as other shoppers walk past and stare.

The time for negotiating a behavioral truce had come to an end.

..........

At five years old I’m standing in the middle of the kitchen with a pack of the original Lifesavers. In an ill-advised move, I clamp down on the tube and with my front teeth slide half the role past my lips. I swish them around in my mouth, hoping for a fruit-punch effect of cherry, lime, orange and whatever the clear one was supposed to be.

Time slows down as I begin to choke. I can’t hear very well, but other senses become very acute. The pattern in the kitchen tile. The smell of old coffee lingering in the pot.

I know she is downstairs in her recliner watching her shows. I Panic. Falling to one knee I call out, hoping my guttural cries carry downstairs and over her television.

Harnessing the last bit of youth left in her body, she takes off in a sprint from her recliner and up those stairs, one long stride after the other.

Once behind me, she wraps one arm around my waist and pulls me to her, while driving the opposite palm down the center of my back.

In one powerful lurch, the bright candies accosting my air ways come up—with just about everything else I’d eaten that morning. Wet with spit and brown bile, they glisten in a wide, curdled puddle like Christmas lights strewn across muddy snow—one of countless messes of mine she’d had to clean up over the years.

I blame the clear mystery flavor.

Far back as I can remember I have never seen her bend her arthritic knees more than a few degrees, much less did I ever think her capable of movement that lithe. I would never see it again.

...........

What she may lack in kitchen prowess, my grandmother at least makes up for with a consistent menu of items: dried out chicken breast, a pasta sauce that tasted like tomato soup, shoe-leather pork cutlets, and a roast that came out of the oven so woefully overcooked it resembled a football helmet from 1926, to name a few.

Pair it up with a list of delectable sides that include soggy spinach, mostly-mashed potatoes, or an over-boiled rice and vermicelli combo all the salad dressing in the world can not save.

We liked to blame it on our electric oven, after all she had learned on gas. And maybe that her homemaking heyday came in the times before culinary globalization, and the discovery of such exotic spices as pepper and Old Bay. It was a time, my mother reminds me, when a type of potted meat scraped across toast could constitute dinner, or perhaps some kind of lower middle-class appetizer. Lucky for them, the first McDonald's in New England opened not far from their house sometime in the late 50’s.

She couldn’t boast to have served billions of people daily, but I am quite sure that I alone had happily consumed several hundred of my grandmother’s pan-fried ‘briquette burgers’ over the years.

..........

Christmas time. Her gift sits unmistakably atop a tower of brightly wrapped presents in that same bag with the same Rockwell print on it depicting a boy in pajamas SHOCKED to find Santa’s beard and red jacket in his parent’s dresser.

Like any kid wide-awake since 4:30 I attack my gift pile like a hungry piranha. After the frenzy she sifts through the war-zone of plastic, paper and bent cardboard and rescues the bag before the cats have their way with it. With a cup of coffee in her other hand, she seamlessly folds and tucks it away for Next Christmas.

Over the years that bag held a myriad of things: action figures; Nintendo and Sega Genesis games; Some CD’s; a gold chain for a cross; a bottle of expensive, tersely named cologne. When I started asking for simple cash, she’d tuck it inside a thick, ornate card and bury it in the bag under several layers of green tissue paper, I think, to grant it the illusion of substance.

That bag is now a decorative mainstay at the holidays, retired next to the stockings and wreaths, and above the porcelain Santa Clauses, angels, and scented candles. The same tag still hangs from the red-rope handle.

To: Adam

From:
Love, Grandma Marge
...........

Whatever provokes an eleven year old to call his grandmother a “candy-ass” I am not quite sure. Probably something terribly unreasonable on her part, like “no, it’s too late for you to go to his house now’, or ‘you can’t eat that, dinner is almost ready.’ Whatever the reason, in hindsight it was the wrong thing to do, not so much because it was rude or disrespectful, but because it couldn’t have been FARTHER from the truth.

Standing toe to toe on my back porch, I look her in the eye and utter those ill-begotten words. What transpires then shakes the air like a clap of thunder, louder than the gunshots that claimed Bambi’s mom and Old Yeller combined with twice the ballistic force. Writhing on my back, I clutch a section of my chest where there is now a giant red hand print.

Nearly three houses down, my friends are scratching their heads about now wondering where I am, but mostly what that loud crack was, and the girly yelp that followed it.

............

Mid summer on a Friday evening. Mother is at work, while sister is out doing what older sisters do. Whatever a sixteen year old male’s equivalent is, I have no clue.

I sit, legs resting limply like prostheses on the coffee table while the rest of me piled onto the couch like a scoop of something instant slapped onto a cafeteria tray. I stare, listless and unblinking at the television.

Strike-two.
Ball-one.
Foul tip.

If I have nothing else, I can at least bank on my favorite baseball team winning every six nights out of ten. It’s like a (for now) $175 million insurance policy. This then, must be that seventh or eighth night.

Pitch out.
Advertisement.

She slowly makes her way up the stairs. These days her body knows no other speed. She sits in the uncomfortable pink Victorian chair next to the couch and fixes her eyes on the TV with a weird smile.

This is absurd. I know she cares little for baseball. HER television works just fine, doesn’t it? Wouldn’t she rather sit in HER chair?

She turns to me between pitches with that smile still on her face.

“That colored ballplayer you like sure is doing good, isn’t he?”

The colored ball-player. Like the colored friend that would come by looking for me as a kid. I could explain Bernie Williams’s Puerto Rican heritage to her, but lack the drive.

“Yeah.”

The infuriating part is that she is right. He has been leading the league in batting average for the past month.

“Ya hungry, Ad?”

“Hmm?”

“Want me to make you something?”

By now fixing us our meals has become, like cleaning, one in a long line of thankless tasks she is very vocal about reminding us of, and as such has tapered back considerably.

“No. I’m good.”

“You sure?”

“Yeah, I’m not hungry.”

I am starving. She knows. It’s impossible to hide anything from her.

The game plays on and she continues her pointed observations. O’Neil’s temper, the rise in Jeter’s errors this year, Torre’s ever-present scowl and the often reprised “They sure are playing like crap tonight, aren’t they?”

“Mhmm.”

She continues to glance over at me with that feigned smile. Maybe it’s some dumbass, skewed adolescent concept of impeded privacy that stirs my Ire.

“What?” I snap

“What?” She retorts.

“You keep doing…that.”

“Doing what?”

“Nothing…Nothing.”

I slouch lower in my seat.

“Ok…” She says, and turns back to the television.

“Sure you don’t want anything to”—

“No,” I say, my voice tired and disdainful, “I’m fine.”

“All-right”, she says, gets up and slowly makes her way back downstairs, and closes the door.

Alone in the living room with nothing but the light of the television and the ground crew spreading the tarp over Yankee Stadium, my stomach begins to quake, and not from hunger.

I stare at the line of light from under her door, and yet all I can do is sit.

A few minutes later, it goes dark.

...........

Winters in Connecticut made things hard enough. Waking daily to the reminder I am a severely depressed and anguishing teenager wont graduate high school and will probably end up in a mental institution lest he dresses and soldiers through another day at the place that consistently beats him does little to lift my spirits.

Typically after my mother has given up trying, I wrap myself in the oblivion of sleep until about eleven or twelve.

Arthritic knees and hips made one flight of stairs a daily burden for my grandmother, but two some kind of corporeal penance. Nevertheless, she climbs the second tier.

As my mother curses at herself down the hall, my grandmother quietly stands just inside my doorway. She looks at me.

“Adam. Get up…”, she whispers.

I lay in my bed, staring at the ceiling.

She moves to my bedside.

“Adam. Get up”, she repeats.

“Grandma, I don’t…feel good.”

“But, you have to get up”

“But… I hate every day…”

“I know, I know. But…you—you just have to get up.”

There is something strange there in her face and her voice, some fear I have never witnessed before.

She is no longer the same disciplinarian, but then again I am not the same defiant, energetic child.

She came to this house for my sister and me, for US. That was the unspoken trade-off: Keep yet another home, help raise two MORE children, and be spared isolation in a big empty house, the indignity of assisted living complexes, and the loneliness of aging.

At least for this one morning my shame outweighs my depression.

I crawl out of bed and throw on a pair of jeans.

She rubs my shoulder, as if trying to conduct some kind of heat through me.

“Alright. I’ll go get your lunch money. Ok?”

............

Eighteen years old. Home from school, I am greeted with shouting. From the doorway I can see my mother and sister standing over my grandmother, trying desperately to get her attention. She is slouched in her recliner, her face expressionless, eyes wide and sometimes blinking.

Their calls to her become louder and slower. The tension builds in my mother’s voice and it begins to crack. My sister calls an ambulance.

I can only stand there.

What they describe in the hospital is an incident stemming from a loss of oxygen and slow wear and tear of clusters of blood vessels in the brain.

I.E., A massive stroke.

After a priest reads her last rights my grandmother holds out for an additional week, I suspect out of spite for trying to usher her along so quickly. Like everything else, she would go on her own time.

On the afternoon of December 16th, 2003 the machines show faint signs of life in her, but she had, we know, long since given up the ghost.

In accordance with her will, my mother and uncle instruct emergency room doctors to stop the respirators and pull the feeding tubes.

Like everything else, she would go on her own terms.

The service is held just a few days before Christmas. She is laid next to my grandfather.

............

My grandmother used to sit at our kitchen table staring out the sliding glass door sometimes for an hour or more, transfixed on the backyard as if waiting for something to move. To come to life.

An occasional Squirrel would dart across the lawn and up a tree trunk, while birds glided between the high, bare branches from time to time, but that was the extent of it.

It was usually mid-afternoon, after lunch and Regis, after household stuff was done, cats fed, dishes put away counter tops wiped down, and before the news on TV or the school-buses rumbled down the street.

There was this certain shade of light that would pour in that time of day. Bright, not the yellowy gold of sunlight, but more the white of a lightening bolt screened through a cloud. It would cast everything in the room its iridescent bleach and freeze it into a Vesuvius-like diorama. It always felt cold, a repressed world without sound.

In certain countries across the Atlantic many people choose to sleep this time away. Housewives opt for that second glass of wine, or cut a lime for another gin and tonic.

My grandmother wasn’t a drinker.

To see her sitting there was a profoundly lonely sight. She’d sit, hands folded, an expression not quite sad, or angry, but “pious” in a way, a look and a posture that, to me results after sadness calcifies, and you are given the choice to either tear into the scar tissue, bleeding the bruised blood of whatever life handed or took away, or take an occasional standing (or sitting) eight-count, remember what there is, and soldier on.

I wonder if she knew I was watching all those times.

I Am Superman--And I...Can't do ANYTHING...

2010-03-10T23:44:00.009-05:00

I’ve discussed before the importance of finding our cue to enter the “production” going on around us. But what if you found yourself in the same role every time?

George Reeves, the first actor to portray Superman, was doomed to wear the tights and cape for the entirety of his career.

He saw the role of the fictitious superhero as a jumping point into bigger and better things, hoping to endear himself one day to the hearts of movie goers worldwide as an A-Lister with great range and talent. Superman was a way to get their attention- a gimmick, sure, but a positive one- you’d welcome the Cryptonian into your home, Wouldn’t you?

Audiences appreciated Reeves’s Superman portrayal the way a crowd appreciates a court jester, mime or juggling clown- entertained, but not illuminated- acknowledged but not taken seriously.

Irrevocably type-cast, he couldn’t escape the identity, and what was just an icebreaker became his sole dimension. He tried to act in a few serious roles but…people just…REFUSED to see him in any other light.

His story ends quite tragically. I’ll spare revisiting that bit of Hollywood history. (For a sub-par film that kind-of explains it, watch Hollywood Land. I'm not going to force it. Understand however that you wont get those two hours back.)

I have a certain quirky way about me. Not eccentric, just a few miles both north and south of the beaten. My sense of humor shines through brighter than most traits; it’s my way of breaking the ice. I joke a lot.

I have this odd memory. I can’t remember where I put down my drink, or where I take my glasses off most days, yet I can rattle off some obscure actor’s name from a twenty-year old cult favorite, or other piece of popular culture.

(Kevin Costner’s Indian name in Dances With Wolves was Shumani Tutanka Opachi. Look it up. I didn’t have to. But I’m sure you will…)

I can impersonate. Pretty well too; there’s not a Family Guy character (outside of Meg, and honestly, who gives a rat’s ass?) whose voice I can’t nail. People love it.

I like making people laugh. I can do it fairly well.

I smile, or try to, and keep a light heart.

I show people respect; I never laud my own knowledge or opinions over theirs, no matter how much more valid and informed mine may be. I don't very much care for competing with people, and other pissing ground nonsense.

Somewhere in there, they become USED to this person, I think. Used to this patronizing comic relief.

In this way, I feel I fall into being ‘typecast’ by many people. No matter how I try and show them the other dimensions of my character, they don’t want to believe it exists.

Am I a one-liner? A novelty? A clown juggling on a unicycle? You laugh at a clown. You enjoy its presence. But you don’t take it seriously. You don’t place stock in his opinions or his own experiences. You don’t go out for drinks with him, or to parties. The myth about big feet in decline, you certainly don’t sleep with, or date him either. Instead of seeing the leading man, I fear people see only a stock character

This is an irritating, if not interesting phenomenon to me, because I’ve seen it work both ways, for the good and the bad.

Reeves was a good looking man with decent range as an actor, yet despite repeated attempts to show this, he was only allowed to be what the audience would let him be. What they PERCEIVED him to be.

There are those in Hollywood nowadays pulling the wool over our eyes with a good performance or two before disappointing in several others. Soon, they resort to any role offered to them. But they seem to set themselves in stone as talented actors and actresses because of those first few performances. People STILL put credence in them and their careers, studios STILL offer them roles, and the public flocks to theaters.

I’ve known people whom, despite their penchant for making complete asses of themselves, are secured atop a tier of coolness from which they can never fall. Why? Because all it took was a Fonze-like performance in some early social context and every stumbling drunk, word slurring, cock-blocking, disrespectful and tactless machismo exit thereafter is proceeded by a curtain call.

What if, despite the red cape, blue tights and giant red S emblazoned on his chest, the city of Metropolis perpetually referred to the Man of Steel as The Green Lantern?:

“But, look at my S…”-

“GREEN LANTERN.”

“But, I just stopped an asteroid from hitting the…”-

“Nah. Green Lantern.”

“Watch me leap over this TALL BUILDING”-

“Nope. Green Lantern. You’re not fooling me.”

“I have a deathly severe allergy to this green, glowing crystalline substance. Watch…”-

*Goes comatose from Kryptonite poisoning*

“Hm. I sure will miss that Green Arrow guy.”

Imagine the Man of Steel interrupted by some novice bodybuilder as he gives advice to someone about heavy lifting:

“Whenever I pull runaway BULLET TRAINS from the edges of cliffs, I push off with my legs. Yessir, it’s all in the”—

“YEAH, WHATEVER E.T.! Listen to ME kid—you just need to get HUGE AS FUCK, that’s all!”

I feel we all get the point by now. It’s maddening. I deal with this or some variant of it all the time. People get not me, but this projected IDEA of me custom fit to their mind’s eye, and from there, it’s almost impossible to alter.

I write. A lot. That goes without saying (or reading…). I fancy mine a creative mind--abstract, yet rooted in reality.

My tastes are eclectic.

Neil Gaiman is one of the best writers in ANY genre—Cormac McCarthy writes dialogue better than anyone I’ve ever read, and for an English Grad, that list is admittedly small—Michael Mann is fantastic, but missed the mark with Public Enemies—I can sway to indie, rock out to alternative, bang my head to metal, and get me on the right night, dance (albeit poorly) to anything else.

I’m a Zen Buddhist at heart with a bad habit of wandering from now to then to way back when—I believe in many paths to the truth, whatever candle lights the darkness for you, but no matter how far you’ve gone down the wrong path, TURN AROUND—I believe in being a newer, better, slightly different, more evolved version of you today than you were yesterday—I don’t believe in time frames; WE are in the frame and it’s reshaped and moved every day.

I’m a regular gym goer, and a martial arts enthusiast. I recently took up Yoga, and, if I can figure out how to restring my guitars without breaking them, will start teaching myself to play again.

I walk. Everywhere, especially at night. I’m perpetually on the lookout for something. Anything. That stuff we commonly shuffle right past; something opaque that clears up only when the moon is right.

I’ve been known to cook from time to time, menu not limited to tuna sandwiches, though with a bit of dill, black pepper, chopped celery and shredded cheese I don’t think you’d turn one of mine away. When we talk food, I will eat anything, and most likely love it.

No matter what you believe yourself to be, and that should always be something great, it becomes a bit moot when your audience and co-stars alike refuse to acknowledge it because of their own misconceptions and biases.

Have I sold ya yet?

NO?

...

I do my best to fill my life with different and meaningful things, and want very much to show them to certain people, to take them on the walk with me. I can only hope the ones that matter will take the time to make it past my opening soliloquy and acknowledge my stage presence and range.

The 'Icari'

2010-03-08T23:24:00.003-05:00

If I’m to fall,
Would you be there to applaud?
Or would you hide behind them all…

There's a painting hanging somewhere by an artist whose name I don't remember, but of which W.C. Williams wrote a poem.

"Landscape, With the Fall of Icarus."

Spring time. A perfect blue sky with friendly white clouds, and boats moored in the gulf of a placid, inviting sea. A farmer tends to his greening field, a shepherd to his livestock.

And off in the periphery of that perfect day, barely noticeable on first or second glance breaking the tepid surface of that inviting water is half the body of the mythical Icarus, his legs flailing wildly, desperately.

"insignificantly
off the coast
there was

a splash quite unnoticed
this was
Icarus drowning,"

…are the poem's final lines.

I think Williams saw it the same way I do: The death plunge of this hopeful, innovative young man went largely unnoticed, taking a backseat to everything else.

In seeking to break a family curse and escape from the labyrinth on the island of Crete that imprisons both he and his father before him, Icarus, an articulate and wistful young man, constructs large wings from feathers and wax with the intention of soaring through the ceiling.

He is free, or very close to it. High in the sky he tastes the crisp sea air, and soars through the updrafts, hair on end, through clouds. Tasting the exhilaration of those heights for the first time, who wouldn’t yearn to fly higher? His father warns him not to, but Icarus ascends higher and higher, his destination, a place only gods and monsters have clearance: the golden sun…

…and he gets too close. The sun's rays melt the wax holding the feathers together. He endeavors to fly too high and the earth's limitations impose themselves, sending Icarus spiraling down to a watery grave.

I speak in metaphors. A lot. Sometimes I worry what I'm trying to say gets lost in these lofty metaphors, and my audience along with it.

Robert Frost once said of his craft that poets should begin in obscurity and end in some form of wisdom; all winding paths converging on one clear endpoint. I believe this applies to many things. It’s how I express myself. It’s how I like to read and in turn how I myself like to write.

So, with that in mind, if you're still with me, maybe you'll be willing to read a bit further. (If you haven't given up on my entropic blog of late, for that matter...)

One of Buddhism's primary, if not its ONE primary concept is mindfulness, which manifests itself in many forms. Mindfulness of the suffering of others, of their struggles, failures and tragedies is one sublet that is lost on a lot of people. MOST people.

Icarus probably struggled there in the water for twenty minutes while his shoulders and legs cramped up; while his voice grew hoarse from crying out for help, and lungs burned filling slowly with saltwater.

Fishermen probably passed him on occasion. Swimmers waded by until it was no longer possible to ignore the limp, face down body. He was an imposition floating there, undetectable until caught in the gaze of some other artist surveying the hills.

Was Icarus punished for being arrogant--For not understanding his limitations? Who is to say what his limitations really are anyway? Was he wrong for defying everyone, for not adhering to their rules, or BELIEVING in their view of what he was and wasn't?

I guess right now, at this very moment, I'm worried about becoming Icarus, wanting so much to break through this barrier in which I'm interred, arms stretched out towards this light that I'd been chasing only to fall short. To fall hard. To be burned.

I’ve said it before in another post, it’s as though our generational predecessors failed to ensure more than just social security and oil stores, but our dreams, and a proper landscape with which to weave them in.

I think there are many like Icarus out there…A generation of…Icaruses? Or would it be Icari?—trying to blaze a bright trail for themselves- they do it alone, on makeshift wings, and on borrowed time shooting for heights once only imagined, while struggling to keep their heads above difficult things.

Anxiety, depression and other party favors in that grab bag of genetic predispositions, made worse by an increasingly alienating world are weights that overbear our buoyancy. Exhausted, we paddle furiously rather than float--rather than glide just above the earth, we trudge through it.

Some days they're more weighty than others. Some days my wingspan stretches from my upper back, to my shoulder blades, down my arms and across the updrafts. Other days I look and see only feathers hewn together with wax.

There's more I want to say, though I'm not entirely comfortable yet. Maybe I've been repeating myself. I'll explore these things in greater detail in future posts, which should come more frequently, now that I'm not working on anything for a while.

Some days, It's just very hard to fly.

Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger

2010-02-02T23:00:00.003-05:00

"Go on-Take my hand,
Not my picture…"

I suppose he would have wanted us to just look away, go about our business like any other day and pretend he wasn't there in the first place.

For the title of this piece I suppose he would have called me a clichéd little dumb-shit, and told me to fuck off.

But the past few days have proven that, despite his enduring wishes for privacy(the ones he fought for armed with verbal venom and threat of legal action) it has been just as impossible for us to leave well enough alone in death as it was during J.D. Salinger's life.

His wasn't a unique request, but one we have all made from time to time to our friends, husbands, wives and receptionists alike:

"Remember now, if THEY come calling, I'M NOT HERE."

What could sour a man's taste for success and curtail his grand ambition for literary gravitas so much as to take him from that cocky nineteen-year-old for whom an NYU curriculum was a waste of time; that young writer who then stood brazenly at the doors of the New Yorker demanding entry like Achilles at the walls of Troy; a mind and a talent too great to waste on the family business that fed, clothed and awarded him an upper-class living in New York; from prophesying his own status as a great novelist, the catalyst for the next phase of American literature; a handsome man with dark features and forlorn eyes, a literary Humphrey Bogart who had no trouble drawing the stares of beautiful women and blending in with New York's upper crust; An overnight ascension up the publishing world's A-list; to an introverted societal expat in rural Cornish, New Hampshire, where beyond occasional niceties towards neighbors, he refused to share anything more of himself with the world.

…

Salinger was, to my mind and probably many others, the founder of the postmodern "New York" novel. Literary critic James Wood once said of that proposed genre:

"...And besides, the "New York novel" - as opposed to the novel set in New York - is a genre of no importance at all."

But New York was clearly more than just a backdrop for Salinger's novels and stories. He was the voice of upper class disillusionment, a torch he unanimously inherited from F. Scott Fitzgerald, who abdicated his seat, joining other east coast writers as they drank themselves into debt and made their ill-fated exodus out west to a land of sunshine, orange groves and statutes on drinking water--the land of that pubescent and promising new media goddess, Hollywood.

Ernest Hemingway once described Fitzgerald as a 'whore' for career moves like this. A term Holden Caulfield uses to describe his brother D.B. in The Catcher in the Rye, who also writes for film...

(F. Scott = D.B.?)

In "The Great Gatsby", Nick Carraway graduates from the insular familiarity of his Ivy League world into the corrupt world of bootlegging and 1920's opulence-the world of Jay Gatsby.

Fitzgerald's New York reflected the 1920's, the prosperity following the Great War just before the jugulating grip of the Great Depression; Olympus before the fall, the last fleeting snapshot of America's socialite aristocracy. At the time events in The Great Gatsby play out, there was a slow but steady socio-economic restructuring that gave birth to the American middle class. Salinger's work traced those changes-the canvas, New York City.

If men like Thaw, Rockefeller, Carnegie, and Vanderbilt had previously been royalty, with the Roosevelts, Kennedys and Arnold Rothsteins the nobility, then burgeoning families like the Caulfields and the Glass' represented the new 'gentry', the earls and viscounts of New York: affluent though not rich, people of note but not newspaper-worthy, all set against one another, vying for advancement at the king's court.

Holden Caulfield is a progeny of those gentry: talented, directionless and bored out of his mind.

So what was it about one spoiled and, lets face it, often whiny prep-school kid and his inability to count his blessings like the rest of the trust-fund brigade? Why have so many with each passing generation, myself included, felt so much resonance with the narrative of Holden Caulfield?

After Salinger’s death, a blog on the New York Times website posted collected thoughts and reflections about the man and his work. One Leslie from England had THIS to say:

“Catcher in the Rye” was about a self-absorbed, privileged, ungrateful little snot and the two-dimensional female stand-in of a character. The only thing more depressing than that book is the fact that it apparently resonates with most of America. This is telling."

If Salinger's Holden Caulfield is a self-absorbed, ungrateful little snot, and if those tenets are so telling, what words would Leslie use to describe Joyce's Steven Dedalus...

The synthesis of 'Catcher', its spiritual parentage, predates even Fitzgerald. Holden Caulfield's misadventure through New York on his way home from Pencey Prep parallels the odyssey of Stephen Dedalus as he walks the jaded, idealistic artist through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses.

Stephen, much like Holden also finds himself estranged from his parents, especially his father, a well to do gentleman. He has trouble keeping a "real" job, much the same way Holden has trouble staying in school.

Stephen converses, or is coerced into social interaction with schoolmasters and newspaper editors, authoritative figures with whom he is deeply resentful and whose shallow worldview disgusts him. Like Holden, he has no practical use for religion, expressing distaste for the repressing, censoring effect of Catholicism on his native Ireland. He shares, at least at the start of his journey, a living space with a boisterous ignorant slob. Over the course of a day Stephen too finds himself stumbling drunk into the street, in an embarrassing failed attempt at soliciting a prostitute, and in literal tears later on.

Stephen has Leopold Bloom, (technically the titular 'Ulysses' of Joyce's epic) an older, more experienced and perhaps more practical man who has also dealt with the low ways of the world to catch him when he is at his lowest emotional ebb.

Though their encounter ends a bit abruptly, Holden in turn has Mr. Antolini, a teacher, whom he turns to for a much needed ear, and sound wisdom.

When the 16 year old Holden states that he'd like to use all of his 'dough' and move someplace far away to get away from the ignorance of people and their inane conversations, that he may for once be given the chance to be true to himself and see himself in that strange context he finds so personally fitting, it echoes, though maybe less eloquently, Stephen Dedalus's famous proclamation at the end of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':

"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."

Dedalus is a paragon of artistic integrity then? Lauded as the young man who refuses to accept his birthright, and instead makes his own way according to his own set of values.

And Holden is just a whiny, spoiled brat

...

Flashing forward this time, about sixty years...

Jay McInerney's 1984 novel "Bright Lights, Big City" follows an unnamed character (a WRITER, go figure, who yearns to see his work grace the pages of the NEW YORKER, for whom he is employed as a stressed out fact-checker) seeking escape in the vapid excess of New York's 1980's party scene. He, like Holden Caulfield, possesses a cynical worldview and partial detachment from reality, all the right ingredients for an unreliable narrative. The young man's wife has left him, a reality he is unable to cope with. His nocturnal exodus leads him around Manhattan to all the places she would go, believing she will return to him. As he suffers severe burn-out, the young man then struggles to liberate himself from this hedonistic undercurrent before he suffocates.

Tack on about 5-10 years, subtract his youthful naivety and squeamishness, and lose him in gaudy nightclubs, the cocaine mist of upper west-side bathrooms, larger quantities of booze, sex and other such inherent yuppie vices, and McInerney's novel very well could be a continuation for Holden.

What these characters, and in the end Salinger himself have in common is that they are all "new money", each one marking the birth and evolution of the middle and upper-middle class (of which is slowly disappearing from the American landscape), and no place better is it played than the avenues and neighborhoods of America's foremost metropolitan epicenter. They are each distrustful of something; institutions that set dogmatic artistic standards, and paper-thin societal norms. Though part of an (ever-changing) infrastructure and lifestyle that kept them financially safe and secure, they shun their birthrights. They are sickened by artifice, and have felt the effects of materialism and egotism on their life and work. They all possess a chronic allergy to bullshit, and to have stayed where they were risked a fatal case of anaphylactic shock.

An affliction JD Salinger knew was just part of life in the big city.

Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger (Part Two)

2010-02-02T09:26:00.003-05:00

The synthesis of 'Catcher', its spiritual parentage, predates even Fitzgerald. Holden Caulfield's misadventure through New York on his way home from Pencey Prep parallels the odyssey of Stephen Dedalus as he walks the jaded, idealistic artist through the streets of Dublin in James Joyce's Ulysses.

Stephen, much like Holden also finds himself estranged from his parents, especially his father, a well to do gentleman. He has trouble keeping a "real" job, much the same way Holden has trouble staying in school.

Stephen converses, or is coerced into social interaction with schoolmasters and newspaper editors, authoritative figures with whom he is deeply resentful and whose shallow worldview disgusts him. He shares, at least at the start of his journey, a living space with a boisterous ignorant slob. Over the course of a day Stephen too finds himself stumbling drunk into the street, in an embarrassing failed attempt at soliciting a prostitute, and in literal tears later on.

Stephen has Leopold Bloom, (technically the titular 'Ulysses' of Joyce's epic) an older, more experienced and perhaps more practical man who has also dealt with the low ways of the world to catch him when he is at his lowest emotional ebb.

Though their encounter ends a bit abruptly, Holden in turn has Mr. Antolini, a teacher, whom he turns to for a much needed ear, and sound wisdom.

When the 16 year old Holden states that he'd like to use all of his 'dough' and move someplace far away to get away from the ignorance of people and their inane conversations, that he may for once be given the chance to be true to himself and see himself in that strange context he finds so personally fitting, it echoes, though maybe less eloquently, Stephen Dedalus's famous proclamation at the end of Joyce's 'Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man':

"I will tell you what I will do and what I will not do. I will not serve that in which I no longer believe whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church: and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defense the only arms I allow myself to use, silence, exile, and cunning."

Dedalus is a paragon of artistic integrity then? Lauded as the young man who refuses to accept his birthright, and instead makes his own way according to his own set of values.

And Holden is just a whiny, spoiled brat

...

Flashing forward this time, about sixty years...

Jay McInerney's 1984 novel "Bright Lights, Big City" follows an unnamed character (a WRITER, go figure, who yearns to see his work grace the pages of the NEW YORKER, for whom he is employed as a stressed out fact-checker) seeking escape in the vapid excess of New York's 1980's party scene. He, like Holden Caulfield, possesses a cynical worldview and partial detachment from reality, all the right ingredients for an unreliable narrative. The young man's wife has left him, a reality he is unable to cope with. His nocturnal exodus leads him around Manhattan to all the places she would go, believing she will return to him. As he suffers severe burn-out, the young man then struggles to liberate himself from this hedonistic undercurrent before he suffocates.

Tack on about 5-10 years, subtract his youthful naivety and squeamishness, and lose him in gaudy nightclubs, the cocaine mist of upper west-side bathrooms, larger quantities of booze, sex and other such inherent yuppie vices, and McInerney's novel very well could be a continuation for Holden.

What these characters, and in the end Salinger himself have in common is that they are all "new money", each one marking the stages of the birth and evolution of the middle and upper-middle class (of which is slowly disappearing), and no place better is it played than the avenues and neighborhoods of America's foremost metropolitan epicenter. They are each distrustful of something; institutions that set dogmatic artistic standards, and paper-thin societal norms. Though part of an (ever-changing) infrastructure and lifestyle that kept them financially safe, secure They are sickened by artifice, and have felt the effects of materialism and egotism on their life and work. They all possess a chronic allergy to bullshit, and to have stayed where they were risked a fatal case of anaphylactic shock.

An effect JD Salinger knew was just life in the big city.

Here's to YOU, Mr. Salinger (Part One)

2010-02-01T18:59:00.006-05:00

Sleep, Sleep, you're better off dreaming...

2010-01-16T03:47:00.025-05:00

My father used to say that one of the worst things in the world, gaining ground on famine and genocide, was wasted potential.

Robert DeNiro admonishes his son in much the same way in the film A Bronx Tale. I like to think, or hope, that my father was saying it long before that movie was released; a pearl of wisdom imparted to him by his father or even better, an adage he carved out for himself when on the cusp of adulthood.

At any rate, DeNiro’s character uses the word talent, instead of my father’s choice of potential, which though less grammatically viable as a noun, clearly delivers more clout when you say it.

Considering the source, my father wasn’t exactly the man to line up in front of for sagely advice.

He was certainly not one to lead by example, either.

Then again, he also used to say that you could learn something from anyone, regardless of their standing in the world, from a teacher all the way down to a bum on the street.

Someone, essentially, knows something you don’t. Ok. Given.

I often wonder about my potential.

There are days when I don’t believe I’m wasting anything, rather, I feel like I am being wasted.

There are days, all too few, when I can believe that all things stitched into reality’s fabric are possible. All avenues seem open, streets run in both directions, the lights are green, all the hidden avenues are revealed, and I become that guy who can navigate every back-road in existence.

There are stretches when I wonder if I’ve actually grown up at all, hopelessly stunted by some cataclysmic event playing a desperate game of catch-up, months, even years behind everyone else.

I’m a giant child making his way around a big city: engulfed in blinding bright lights, dog-paddling in a sea of noise, keeping pace in a herd of other people as we dart across the brick, mortar and metal sage-brush of a concrete jungle teaming with unforgiving, unyielding traffic. Most already know to look both ways, but I constantly learn the hard way, soaked to the bone as large rubber tires kick up rain water and slushy gray snow.

One thing I’ve come to understand is that this world isn’t in the business of giving you what you want. So recoil your hands, un-cup them, and forget about asking. Move away from the cosmic breadline, because there’s not enough charitable karma to go around in this life.

This just isn’t a time for dreaming, nor has it provided an adequate ground to cultivate them. Lately we’ve all been locked in survival mode, trying desperately to get by on what’s around in a landscape that values uniqueness and creative expression less and less.

In the process we’ve have become estranged from one another; set in competition for whatever is left that can propel us out of this shallow, two-dimensional entropy that threatens to assimilate us and into self-actualized autonomy, and the lives we desire…

... ...

The Steven King novella Langoliers deals with a small group of people on a cross-country flight waking on their airplane to the realization that they are the only ones present. After an emergency landing, they wander a deserted airport. Machinery doesn’t function. There is no electric power. Food tastes spoiled or has no taste to begin with. If I remember correctly, it’s impossible to make a flame; fuel wont burn in this time and space, in fact, a gun won’t even fire. Time it seems has literally frozen.

The passengers come to find out they have somehow become stuck several hours behind the rest of the world in a temporal drain that time has forgotten, living constantly, so to speak, in the past. To top it off, there are these menacing little monsters that look like sinewy flying bear-traps devouring everything in sight, which will include these people if they don’t find some way to get the hell out of there.

Panic ensues, and a few of them go a bit batty. Paranoid, they turn on others in the group. Some have dark secrets they aren’t very proud of—life choices the present situation forces them to confront that they’d sooner alter if only they could, and would like nothing more than to forget. Romantic feelings for others in the group crop up for some, love’s bliss something they had been denied for a long time. A few, or at least one discovers a latent gift in these dire circumstances, but it may be too late…

These people have come to where they are by no real fault of their own. Circumstances just, well, placed them there, sent their plane spiraling through some void while they dreamily slept, their minds occupied with visions of where they are headed, whom they will see and what they will do.

(Or maybe Superman was just in the middle of turning back his latest fuck-up…)

The survivors eventually make it back to the plane, (the fuel currently IN it somehow DOES burn--Can we say Deus ex Machina?) and must take it back through the rift to catch up with the rest of the living world. And they must all FALL back to sleep in order to do it.

One among them has to fly the plane however…

In the cockpit, he lowers the cabin pressure, helping his peers to fall asleep, to put their anxieties and fears aside and just let go, while sacrificing himself…

I, like the passengers in the novel, find myself stuck in a kind of existential layover. It’s difficult to spark anything here, an idea, or a worthwhile thought. Making an attempt is like striking a match on the moon. Nothing. Only faintly aware of what landed me here, all I know is that I have to make it out, but like them too, I don’t readily possess the knowledge or the resources to do so.

Am I wasting my potential?
Is the world wasting me?
Or am I just wasting time?
Will I end up a martyr, left behind?

A Plausible Scenerio [this could happen]

2010-01-13T23:51:00.008-05:00

I'm going fucking bald. More hair escaped today, I know it. So I stand in front of this mirror, doing neck-yoga to find a penny-sized crater at the top of my head expecting to catch the next few in the act. And maybe for my waist to expand another inch or so.

Headboard abuse, that's what just what I'll say. Shifty, my crooked bottom tooth CHORTLES at me.

A knock at the door.

Adam? You in there?

Um. Yeah...

Everything ok?

Fine, yeah. Just. Give me a minute-

Hey, yeah, your fifteen's up, and you have to cover Aubrey's break-

Yeah, I KNOW-

You've been in there for over twenty minutes-

Yeah, I just. I'm Almost done..

A sequence of cleverly timed flushes. The white rush of the running faucet.

I open the door. My coworker Rich stands there, a Starbucks cup in his hand.

Wow. Must have been one epic shit.

Huh? Oh, yeah. Stomach's acting up. Probably the chili con carne from the cafe upstairs. All those beans-

'Its chicken NOODLE today..'

'Oh. Well..What..the FUCK was I eating then, HUH?'

My face contorts into a puzzled, energetic grin.

(JesusBalls, I'm a loser..)

We walk.

'Why not just use the bathroom upstairs?' He finally asks. 'It's quicker-'

'Yeah, well, faculty bathrooms cleaner..-' I say.

'It reeks of piss from the backed up urinal, and I’m PRETTY sure there's an actual turd hanging from the ceiling..-'

'..That's pretty much odorless now...'

'Huh?'

'Nothing, nothing. I just like my privacy, you know?'

'Yeah, I guess.'

We step on the elevator. Upper Level: General Reading. Magazines/periodicals. Cafe.

'You definitely don't want to risk the children's section smelling like a backed up septic tank either', he continues.

'Heh. Yeah..'

'Me, I'd just blame it on some kid. Throw one under the bus and the others jump all over him like spider-monkeys. Parents all rush to get the little pricks under control-BOOM, attentions off you.'

'I'll have to remember that', I say.

The elevator door opens. We hop off, and Aubrey is waiting there, holding papers of some kind in her hand.

'Oh, you found him! Awesome', she says, swerving past us.

'Well guys I'm going on break. Adam, could you handle this pull-list? Thanks!'

She pushes two hand carts and a stapled list loaded with selections from this year's best at me: Best gay erotica; Best gay sports erotica; Best gay military erotica; Some modern urban classics mixed in: Desperate Hoodwives; Thug Lovin; Flexin and Sexin.

She smiles at me and I barely notice the elevator door close. She is headed down while up here I'll be spending the next hour or more stacking twin towers of pulpy smut.

'Have fun man', Rich says walking off.

I see Gay-Porn Man is sitting in his designated spot, thoroughly enjoying a stack of titles on my list.

(Fuckme hate today...)

Can't Beer The Reaper (..New Years, Part Two)

2010-01-08T21:38:00.013-05:00

Further down Elm Street the wind picks up, and I'm cold. Really cold. I nearly slip a few times on ice. My car is of course several blocks in the opposite direction, but what makes me less eager to turn back now is the thought that this night is in many ways not just a real downer, but a bust all in all. I have come away with nothing, and feel more perplexed than when I started my walk.

Faintly then, I hear her.

"The moon's awake now/With eyes wide open..."

A beacon in any storm, Shakira's tantalizingly absurd vocals pulsate from inside Rudy's, a favorite bar of mine.

Normally I don't drink alone. No real moral objections, I just always saw drinking as a social thing and feel a bit self-conscious and generally uncomfortable with no one there to join me.

"Sitting across a bar/staring right at her prey..."

I pace for a few seconds with my phone out pretending to send text messages. My fingers start to lose their dexterity in the cold.

"It's going well so far/She's gonna get her way..."

A couple of burly door guys with lots of facial hair and piercings are chatting it up, and they vaguely notice me.

(Hey fellas!-A douche-bag? No, no I just might be meeting someone here. But they may not show. That's why I'm CONTACTING them. Ya know, with THIS phone? FRIENDS. YOU know how it is. What a hassle. Need the light over here because the screen on my cell phone is the kind that. doesn't. light up.)

...

"Nocturnal creatures/are not so prudent…"

Damn you Shakira. Damn you and the float you belly-danced in on.

I grab an Advocate from one of the free vendors and practically dive through the front door.

Once in, I can smell the frites sizzling in the back, behind the bar.

Rudy's is a Belgian owned establishment, an off the beaten' kind of joint where neighborhood regulars and Yale students go to chill out, mingle, catch live bands, sing karaoke on the right (or wrong) night, and write/carve something poignantly random or perverse in the bathroom or on the walls in the back.

Despite it's hip, alterno-simplistic vibe, the bar serves, among a few domestics, expensive dark reddish, or "blonde" beers with complex Flemish names, brought to you each in their own intricate glass. Adorned with calligraphy and images of things like leaping fish and medieval angels on the sides, these are far more than just glasses. They possess all the regalia of a mini chalice or goblet.

Eat a basket of thrice dipped fries covered in MAYONNAISE to wash down your grail-beer!

It's a Belgian thing. If you don't know anything about the Belgians, well, that’s just how those 'Wa-loonies' roll, and I certainly wouldn't change it

I grab a small table, order an $8 beer the name of which sounds like "Grimreaper", and take to my newspaper, my back to the door.

Occasionally I bring my head up for sip of beer, and I scan the room. It's generally quiet, like the glow of a fireplace at midday. Pockets of people are seated throughout at the old, oaken booths while few patrons lean at the bar.

In the middle of an article about a man's successful bionic sphincter implant (THE FIRST REAL medical breakthrough of the new decade, mind you) Cold grips my back and neck and I shudder. A group of about six or so walks in. All friends. All cheerful. All holding the door open for one another in an irritatingly slow, chilly cadence.

I pop the collar of my jacket, and when I turn back around, on a wall otherwise littered with rusty staples and thumbtacks a single flier with two words on it glares at me.

"Fuck Resolutions."

Yes, strange paper, I agree. Resolutions are destined to fall by the wayside. It's a Lifestyle that truly endures. Points for Rudy's.

Again, and for about the fifth time by now, the cold lashes my back and I shiver. I turn again, and this time rather scornfully. These people clearly don't realize they have no right to leave, nor do others to enter: Not while I am seated in the wake of the front door.

I notice the place has really picked up since my last sip. The dull peat-fire from before has become a kind of bonfire now, with a steady roar of lively conversation.

On the final swig o' the 'Reaper', the feeling from outside on the street returns.

Everything seems to mesh together and, alone at my small table I am becoming increasingly self-conscious and all the more annoyed at myself for it.

I'm hit with a feeling difficult to describe except for incorporeal-I have somehow popped my head through "behind the scenes", the curtains unguarded because no one on the outside had been watching.

It all sort of weirdly comes into focus then.

I wasn't actually a person in the room, but felt more like a presence haunting it--an undercurrent barely acknowledged, like a draft creeping in from somewhere, considered with a mild disdain, or apprehensive indecision.

A GHOST…

On the street I had been the live one, chilling out with the specters condemned to the boundaries of Temple and Wall; Chapel and Crown. In here it is the opposite dynamic: that, though within an arm's reach they all feel impossibly far; younger, older, male, female, each separated from me by some other existential plane.

This upsets me. It's one of my worst fears.

It was time I disappeared from there. I know I'll return. But not tonight, not for a while. I put the fancy glass back on the counter and make my way out. The man in front of me obviously doesn't hear my footsteps in back of him and lets the door nearly slam in my face.

....
.......

New Years is a bizarre time...

If You Ever Go To New Haven Town... (New Years, Part One)

2010-01-07T22:37:00.012-05:00

New Years Day is bizarre: Advertised universally on the menu as a Friday, only containing all the taste of Sunday, with Wednesday preparation and brought to your table with a garnish of Monday.

Perhaps it's because it marks the transition away from Christmas and into that cold, grayish gulag that precedes Spring here in the Northeast. No longer the brightly lit, multi-colored gulag that inspires giving and peace on Earth, it is rather characterized by another set of grim sense experiences: blistering cold, a deadened landscape (at least in southern CT), eight hours of maximum sunlight, the abrasive screech of a rusted timing belt quiet enough to ignore in the warmer weather, and subsequent daydreams of the west coast.

It's the period our intrepid leaders in government tried to render a bit warmer by forming the uneasy pact with greeting card companies that resulted in the flop we know as Valentines Day. With little else to do, they took the only remaining logical measure, and turned seasonal authority over to more capable hands; thus scapegoating a little earth-dwelling rodent.

This past Friday night I spent my January 1st, like I often spend many nights, walking around downtown New Haven, Connecticut.

It's nothing new, as I said, I do this often: ditching the car on any one of the city's many streets, following eyes, nose and ears returning again having found whatever it was I was looking for that day.

I weave through block after block, down one-way streets and around corners, tracing the squares in the city's grid like a wayward pencil across graph paper.

There's Chapel Street, the Yale Rep to my left, York Street to the right. Edging past the Yale dormitories I'm occasionally warmed by the steamy, sweet-smelling run-off from the laundry rooms.

Out onto Broadway where students, and other pedestrians, homeless and non-homeless alike congregate in front of the lit thoroughfare where I spend my workday. Here one can, among other things, shop American, urban, organic or eat a smart hamburger. Farther down York I listen in on the drum-beats, baselines and solos echoing from Toad's Place, and beyond...

Friday, New Years, was of course dead; a blanket of black silence speckled with the iodized glow of street lights was all that greeted me on my circuit. Cafes and restaurants were naturally closed, the storefronts dark, and the Yale students and faculty that typically litter the streets were now gone, many having left in a dusty trail of completed exams, coffee cups, and old textbooks; the wake of an old semester.

I turn down High Street and make my way towards Chapel. A lone Starbucks on the corner provides the only light in a row of darkened buildings. It's moderately full inside and as I peer in, I catch a few vacant stares.

Ah. Forgive me. Monkey had to use the john, and the Organ grinder's in the shop, ya see...

I shuffle past a quiet Payne-Whitney Gym, deserted and dark save for a single orange light by the big, old wooden doors.

(Not the actual way in, which is like a long cave entrance off to the side, currently sheathed in blue construction tarp and scaffolding-an industrial alternative to Lewis Carroll)

Vertically plastered along the building's old bricks are pictures of various Yale athletes, male and female frozen forever in mid lay-up; slapshot; forehand; volley. Each has its own torch-like spotlight underneath it, and for a minute, as corny as it sounds I'm reminded of Greek ruins. A pantheon empty, save for the echoes of rubber sole's screech on parquet, the violent crash of torsos on hardened mats and the thud of racket balls, overpowered then by a ravenous Yale crowd, blood-drunk for Harvard red.

The windows of Audubon Street, the arts district of New Haven and daily a defiant fist-pump in the direction of anything under the Yale fine arts umbrella, are a dark void.

Standing at the end of Grove Street I listen to the steady thrush of traffic, peering out onto State at the broken line of bright headlights. I guess in some weird way it reminds me a river. A river slowly but surely murdering the ozone, but still, a river.

Wall Street is especially lonely. A kind of Sleepy Hollow that cuts under a stone archway and into part of the Yale campus at one end that is accessible only on foot, and with a student ID. The President of Yale parks his vehicle in a private garage down here. It's awfully small to accommodate anything I imagine him driving though, like a hover car powered by Dark-Matter, or at the very least an M1 Tank with a rabid bull-dog stamped on the side.

It's here that a strange feeling overtakes me. It's as though wind, the sand it blows down the cracked concrete, the dull honk of cars in the distance, and the dim electrical buzzing of the streetlights mingles with the steady beat of my own footsteps to produce some weird night time score.

I stop.

Old words written by Patrick Kavanaugh ebb and flow through my mind:

"On Pembroke Road,
Look out for my ghost-
Disheveled, with shoes untied..
Playing
Through the railings
With little children-
Whose children have long since
Died..."

Everything becomes so acute and internal then, the way it gets, I think, while under water. Time becomes fluid and for whatever space of that moment, I actually wonder if I'm still capable of speaking.

I take to walking more briskly now on Elm Street, around the perimeter of the New Haven Green, the blue fiber optics of the city's Christmas tree softly glowing toward its center.

I come eventually to the Quad-section out in front of Broadway that's divided by a commuter lot and am given the option to continue my current course, or take one of three new ones:

DIXWELL? WHALLEY? GOFFE?

The first three were Puritan judges. Elm, last I checked, was of course, a type of tree...

Choose your destiny...

Tabula Rasa

2010-01-01T00:29:00.021-05:00

This is a strange time for me. Historically I never did much on New Year’s Eve, and the night just could not pass quick enough. I like to tell myself that maybe, perhaps it’s because holidays present a kind of paradox for certain people.

I suppose it’s difficult for those who possess more abstract modes of thinking we’ll call them, to immerse themselves in the strange, insular artifice of the holidays.

“No, no, not to worry things are GREAT!!! Happy New year, WHOO!!!”

…

But they aren’t.

Peddling this contrived mantra pushes the expectancy to be HAPPY on the rest of us, and for me it’s always been one I could never meet. It’s another way I'm reminded of being impossibly behind the curve.

I'm not a miser, really, far from it. It’s not as though I can’t have fun. It’s not as though I can’t enjoy simpler things, like a good old fashioned night of debauchery…

…Or of just forgetting myself for a while. Turning the volume in my head to low and the volume outside on high, and having a good time, connecting for a night with those around me, because apart from the corporate and economic-driven components that’s the most functional thing the holidays present us with, and God knows we live much of the year’s remainder, in my opinion, estranged from one another

Maybe it’s ME putting the pressure on myself.

There are things…There are always things, tangible or otherwise. Each December 31st we stand on the precipice of a new stage, an idyllic tabula-rasa, (that means “clear slate”, in the scholar’s tongue dontcha know…) whereby all of our shortcomings, failures, misgivings or mistakes the previous year are forgiven and forgotten in place of a new blueprint of productiveness. But last year’s incongruous tablate is still ever present cognition, and I puzzle over it: speckled with foggy sketches and caricatures; with good intentions, strong attempts and attempted "do-overs"; otherwise, quite incomplete.

I’ve never had much of a problem keeping promises to others, though in recent times I’ve squelched on showing myself the same courtesy.

2009 had its interpersonal ups and downs, and one thing I’ve noticed about each trend for me: when it rains, it pours.

I surprised myself on several occasions. I surprised myself with my ability to shine the way I’ve wanted to, and in front of certain people. Then as soon as it seems like it can’t get any better, the bottom falls out, and I find myself wading through the same quicksand I thought I left behind. There were propositions I made to myself, and ultimatums I therefore presented afterward: Research grad schools. Get a job. Take GRE’s. Write. Read. Write some more. Get something published. Get into a grad school. Meet someone…

…Ok. Cut your losses, Make money, write as much as you can, and at all costs, get the hell out of here…

Christmas and New Years respectively, also comprise the time when abstract thinkers are known to have…flare-ups. But with the level of alcohol, other depressants and stimulants alike flowing as they typically are, this is one of the most chemically imbalanced nights of the year anyway.

So, pulled between the options of going toe to toe with a slightly older and no less boozy crowd tipping champagne back until either the ball drops or they do, getting behind the wheel tonight and wandering the roads in search of life (and thus effectively taking mine into my own hands), or hunkering down somewhere with the network of friends and colleagues I’ve sadly never had in this glass-shop I acknowledge as where I grew up, I’m left to wait it out at home like some twenty-four hour bug with a book for company.

(hmm…what is a 95-word proclamation of pathetic?)

...

I imagine Dave Sedaris must have several stories to tell of New Years Eves spent alone: one near penniless, commonly drunk young man floating solo through life-limbo, between big cities and less than lucrative jobs during that pre-success, pre-Hugh Hamrick stint.

I’ll try and look for one…

At any rate, I hope everyone has a happy new year. My scope isn’t limited to the next few hours, rather I speak of the next 365 days and my hope for you all, like the hopes I have for myself, is that you accomplish at least a few of those things you need to; to do something NEW, and artistic or expressive in some way this upcoming year. To try at least one thing new you wouldn’t normally have. Expand your stages, and therefore your parts in the world. Add a few new dimensions to your life. Apply to a school. Or to a job, both of which you may have previous lauded as higher than yourself and hopelessly out of your reach. None of it is. I hope you find love. If you already haven't. I hope your year is full of it; for others and yourself.

(My blog was saturated with this philosophy in 09...)

Start tomorrow. No one will hold it against you for sleeping in.

Adventures in the Book-Trade, Part I

2009-12-23T00:36:00.016-05:00

I. A man, smelling as though he’d spent the past several days in the cargo hold of a Dutch East India Company trade ship inquires as to a book on “immediate response psychiatry.” I tell him the publication date of the book he wants is the tenth of February, as the computer screen indicates, and should you want to reserve a copy now we will hold it for you on the day it comes out. He doesn’t see why if he reserves it now, he doesn’t get it earlier than that—than the date it is released on the market PERIOD. As though the screen were some kind of Free Mason’s riddle, he leans in to have a better look. Really close. The pungent smell of nutmeg and curry…

II. A man and a woman, late thirties, early forties perhaps, literally prance into the children’s section dressed faintly like members of some kind of trendy, traveling bard-cabaret. Brother and sister I guess, though difficult to distinguish at times. Brother has on tight black jeans, woolly boots and a violet skull-cap and reminds me of an effeminate Cat-in-the-Hat. They are looking for a series of kids’ books called the Traveling Benedicts something-or other and as if on cue have a smug comment for everything co-worker Liz and I tell them. She wonders out loud to me if we are part of some candid camera experiment going on. They are entirely too giddy, and any form of happiness typically only stirs up resentment and paranoia in us book folk at that time of night. Sister reminds me of a witch. Not a bad one, necessarily, but not Glenda-like either; more like the flighty, bleach-blond, boozy pill-popper witch of the south (who wears too much make-up). It occurs to me that Dorothy in fact becomes the Witch of the South in Frank Baum’s world, and would pass the mantle to her daughter, and so on. Considering the lineage it all starts to make perfect sense…

III. A group of choral geriatrics decides to grace the bookstore with their broken renditions of a very, VERY Berle Ives Christmas, with an assortment of show tunes mixed in. My co-worker Sean and I have to set up the chairs at the forefront of the store’s upper level. Despite our insistence that we will take care of it, the “maestro”, an outspoken woman in her seventies or worse shows us how to set them up properly, dragging two interlocked chairs behind her, knocking over an additional two. The set has the feel and sound of a difficult childbirth, persisting for well over an hour. Customers in the store leave, while those at the door refuse to commit and turn around. Maestro is very lively and animated, dancing around and swinging her little composer’s wand, which I suspect she lifted from a Harry Potter activity book. Resentment overtakes me each time I see her head pop up over the shelves I’m stacking, not because of her ridiculous movements, but more for her ill prepared chorus of singers, a clear sign of her poor leadership, (or perhaps the huge collective lie she is responsible for concerning the old farts’ ability to sing. One of those.)

IV. A woman, incensed that, NO we do not offer gift wrapping services informs me that our other locations, as well as our competitors do at little table stations and would it really be going out of YOUR way to do the same? I tell her I can quadruple bag her purchase, spinning it in a special labyrinth of recycled holiday plastic if she is so inclined. She is not.

V. An older man asks me what I know about the NOOK, our new e-book reader. “Why it’s one of the two most vital components of a Thomas’s English Muffin, of course,” I tell him. His stare is like that of a shop front mannequin—artificially inviting, though mostly neutral and aloof. He goes on to speculate for a while about how the manufacturers will work out what he thinks are the glitches for a proposed NOOK-2 model. “Perhaps they will call that one the CRANNY,” I enthusiastically say.

VI. A couple inquire as to a book for their grandson; five years old and of course very “smart”. I point wife to Shell Silverstein’s classic “The Giving Tree”, metaphorically rich, touching, and simple from which there is a clear message. The memory of it warms her. Husband is not impressed and ignoring me tries to sell her on a book about a talking tractor and his friendship with a young deer. Rather than a children’s literary classic from a master he suggests a story about anthropomorphic FARM EQUIPMENT. “He’s a BOY-boy,” he tells me, “and into ‘BOY things’.” Don’t be disappointed sir, I quell the urge to tell him, but the deer, or half of him at least probably doesn’t end up over a fireplace at story’s end.

VII. A kid, about eleven or so excitedly enters the children’s section. His parents are very eager to leave, but he insists: “I know exactly what I want now, can’t I just run and go get it?” He walks through the archway entrance slowly and in awe as though it were the Stargate, points to book one of The Last Olympians on display, and asks me where the rest of Rick Riordan may be. I scan through TEEN, and then JUVENILE FICTION. No dice. “If your parents get on ya about taking too long, just blame it on me ok?” He nods. More rummaging. He points to Eoin Colfer’s extensive Artemis Fowl series: “Those were good too. I’ve read all of those.” He then spots what we are looking for overhead in JUVENILE FICTION SERIES (I mean, what the hell was I thinking?) Parents arrive. He pleads with his father for a set of all three sequels. “Remember how fast I read the first one?” What a surprise, the wishes of a child at Christmas time win out again. They leave.

A kid defies his parents’ demands that he hurry up. NOT in a Toys R Us. NOT in a Gamestop, or a Best Buy, but a bookstore. Through his best efforts he coaxes them into buying not a video game, remote control whatever, or DVD, but another book, the author of which he knows by both name and reputation. The smile lasts through the remainder of my shift.

Productive

2009-12-15T22:24:00.019-05:00

In a conversation recently about what was most important to us and how we want our lives to play out, a friend mentioned how eventually she wanted to live someplace outside the country. This was nothing new for me to hear; we had both studied abroad in the same Irish city and not surprisingly we both wished we’d never left. So we’d discussed decisions like this before and what led us to them, but it was how she said it this time that got the gears moving:

"I would rather live in a foreign country. Where everything isn’t about money and productivity, but about living, and beautiful things...."

I equate productivity, being productive, with things like self growth, doing what things you have to do, following up on all the things you wanted to.

Waking up reasonably early. Cleaning up, maybe tending to the yard. Some exercise, probably. Maybe further a relationship you may have only just kindled with someone, or spark an entirely new one. Make a call to a family member or friend you haven’t talked to in months, maybe even over a year. Finish a book, or start one, the one you’ve been meaning to read. Gain some ground on a personal/professional endeavor; a sketch of a building if you’re an architect, a series of snap-shots if you’re a photographer. If you’re an aspiring writer like me, maybe peck away at a short story, poem, or the "manuscript."

(That’s an intimidating word, manuscript...)

Give something away you don’t need. Hack away the things that no longer serve you in any way, and continuously add something that does. Leave a footprint in the sand, a positive impression on the world, or in someone’s life. (Earning a living probably fits into this model somewhere.)

The brand of productivity my friend seeks, as many of us do, to liberate herself from is of the "assembly line" variety, concerned with figures, statistics, money and status.

Lately a lot of us have been in survival mode just trying to keep our heads above the water, seeking independence without drowning in debt and the cost of living.

In this country, you are what you own. For many, self-worth is Codependent on net-worth.

*Sigh* If you’re gonna be broke, ya better be cute… (I look at my receding hairline and shudder lately...)

...

I think what it comes down to is filling the hours and minutes with as much learning, growing, and of course, sharing as possible.

Time is NOT money. I want to personally desecrate the grave-site of whoever coined that insipid phrase, because those who truly subscribe to that ethos do NOT actually utilize their own time—they monopolize the time of others.

I began working in a Barnes & Noble recently, and sadly my time, like the time of my coworkers, supervisors and managers is just a currency generating tool for a bunch of corporate fat-cats who sit in a board room somewhere in New York City and who definitely don’t give a shit about literature or spreading the "word" around.

It’s not just us either, but every consumer who walks through the big glass doors and consigns the minutes or hours of their day to that store. The customers always suspect they are being screwed somehow (though it doesn’t actually stop them from pissing their money away.) They are probably right, but they should channel their angsty frustration and collectively broadcast it to that Manhattan office building instead of slinging individual dirty looks, snide comments and other venom-tipped arrows in our general direction.

...

I’m not suggesting we boycott bookstores or anything in general. I in fact...love bookstores. If Glade made a "new book," or "wafting café aroma" scented plug-in, I’d have one in every outlet of my house.

Consider the suit-clad people in that conference room: even if their suede pockets are lined deeper than ours, in the end, their time isn’t theirs, and all time on this earth is small time isn’t it? With so much energy focused on financial and material gain, holes start to form.

Creative; spiritual; interpersonal; romantic.

Throwing money at a gaping void in life never was the best way to fill it. Besides, it runs out. Well, for most of us, anyway. Still there are a lucky few with inexhaustible trust funds, bankers whose alternate clientele include exiled royalty and arms dealers, and credit cards with platinum status that put Michael Jackson’s Thriller to shame.

Before you get envious, remember that they will continue to shovel that money through that black hole of little to no return like coal into an insatiable fire.

No, time is not money. What is done with it in the end, frugal or frivolous is inconsequential. Time is LIFE. How do you SPEND yours?

She is Love, (More Musings on Love, Part Two)

2009-12-08T23:03:00.014-05:00

...and I do believe her when she speaks..

What is a soul mate? It’s a term that gets tossed around a lot, relegated now mostly to Nicholas Sparks novels and their subsequent film adaptations.

However, its origins aren’t found in some lake house in North Carolina, but somewhere near HERE:

Everyone possesses a soul. Our souls are like pieces to something greater: an origin point. Across time and history, when we die, our souls divide. Each half, or shard, or whatever you choose to call it enters into a new human vessel for rebirth. The process repeats. So, one then becomes two, which later on becomes four and in turn eight and so on. It’s easy to imagine this in terms of cell division, the blueprint by which the universe expands and grows.

It accounts for why the world’s population was by leaps and bounds smaller a hundred, five hundred, a thousand years ago.

Anyhow, moving forward: There are others, separated from us sometimes by oceans and time zones that carry in them a corresponding piece. There is a part of them inside which was once a part of us, a long, long time ago. We begin our search for this person from the very moment we are born.

"You complete me." That term never gets old. That’s because it’s as timeless as this migration of souls, this process of reincarnation.

That’s the story, take it or leave it. But whether conscious of it or not, we are always looking for something, for someone. It is a mechanism, awareness from deep inside that I believe is separate from, and supersedes conscious judgment and thought. It is that unexplained apprehension we feel; a void or emptiness we can’t fill; a primal call on some strange frequency beckoning us to migrate, like something out of a Jack London story. It is what responds to that special light behind the eyes of another.

These beliefs precede many of the world’s existing religions, and are prevalent metaphors in several of them. (Think Adam’s rib, and that certain lady whom possesses it after it’s removed from him...That corresponding part both he and Eve share that was a piece of the original human design.)

"True love" is just that: our soul’s recognition of it’s counterpart inside of another. It is also the energy, the beacon, the waves we send out and the means by which we locate it.

For many, or honestly, for most, it never happens. Some dilute the importance of such a thing; a mere selling point for greeting card companies and romantic comedies. They con themselves into thinking it doesn’t exist, or they don’t need it. Still many others hold fast to this utilitarian viewpoint for all things. They weigh the value of their relationships with one another as though they were commodities, a process akin to buying a car:

"Well, we’ve been together this long, and we already live together; Well, she’s hot—I mean, she’s pretty hot, don’t you think?; Well, he can put up with me; She lets me do whatever I want; He has a great job and takes care of me; Well, at this point in my life...I probably can’t do any better...I’m almost 30, for heaven sakes! It makes sense, doesn’t it?"

NO. No it does NOT make sense.

"I just need a companion; a presence that fills the room..."— Then get a DOG, for Christ sakes. Or a parrot—those possess (albeit in a limited capacity) the power of speech.

Still some do believe. They believe so deeply and want it so much that they rush the process. Eventually, in their desperate quest to find it they project things onto people that never existed. Others know full well they aren’t there at all, but the idea is that it’s better than being alone. Right?

When actively looking for something it seems hopelessly out of sight. It’s a search for a gold cache in the black hills while the wind bites especially hard.

The Zen masters advise us not to seek, for all shall come to us; to enter every situation without expectations; to substitute thinking for doing, and reacting; to get back to us, to simply BE. This is sound advice, and it starts somewhere near here.

Part the first, I think...

By living without the censorship of self-conscious thought, we project a clear, complete version of ourselves. We are confident, motivated, inspired. We learn, live and grow. We are beautiful in this way.

Part the second is to infuse love into everything we do. If everything we do is done out of love, from cleaning to cooking, to writing to painting, to sculpting our bodies to clearing our driveways of old, wet leaves (that mostly aren’t ours in the first place, but anyway--) we send this power out as a signal, a beacon whereby our match can correspond, wherever they are.

I guess for those languishing alone, it’s about nurturing not just the hope but the faith that if our eyes and ears and hearts are always open, if we trust in the goodness of the world and dance to its music, we will find that person. If we lose them, we’ll find them again...

I Hope...

For those who have settled into loveless, empty, plateaued relationships, remember you are entitled to something much better. We really DO have everything we need to be happy on our own, I think, though some days, maybe even a good stretch of days, the solitude can become torturous.

There is a small upside to it all: there is more than one perfect match. In fact by this logic, we may have a few soul mates. In one lifetime, though rare, we may discover more than one other incarnation of our souls. If we let our own receptors operate, they'll sense it when it comes near. It’s important we don’t dull them with the banter of our minds, our anxieties, our bitterness, our crises, etc..

Never lose patience. Don’t be afraid to be alone for a while. Listen for the thunder. Remember, they are looking for us as well.

All The Love Gone Bad, (More Musings on Love, Part One)

2009-12-06T23:50:00.015-05:00

"..Turned my world to black..."

(It’s been almost a month since my last post. I have no excuse; other than my center of abstract thought took a vacation and the more languid part of my brain covered his hours. My muse is fickle, and I’ve just generally been in a bit of a rut. For those that read, I’m grateful, and I will try and keep up in the future.)

In my life I’ve been treated to a Whitman’s Sampler of how the bonds of love and relationships are cheapened and perverted.

In my own family I’ve seen people settle time and again for second, third, or even places where medals aren’t usually handed out.

It’s been one divorce after another. Bickering, slandering; no evidence that anything higher, or stronger than enmity and hostility ever existed. Everyone literally hates everyone else. What they think they have is transparent and empty, and they jump from one person to the other, using them up and moving on. It’s as though their relationship with each other is no different than their relationship with a pair of shoes, or a rental car.

All around me, peers, friends, neighbors and still more family have been continuously unfaithful and abusive towards one another. Both ends lack any real sense of appreciation for, or understanding of the other. They are impatient with one another and selfish. They stare at every other passerby muttering "I wish..." They become estranged.

So, I know what love isn’t. But I know what it is too; the three magic words and the weight they carry. Sometimes you recognize a person by their scent, their taste, their voice; the tactile memory of their skin. In darkness, in complete and utter blackness you can find your way back to them. No measure of depth or breadth space or time could keep you from seeking that person's light.

When bathed in that light, each one of our faculties is set ablaze. With them we are constantly learning, and discovering new places geographic or otherwise. Everything we are, everything we offer shines and washes over one another.

Around them we are inspired, motivated. Their presence pushes us to try harder. Behind their eyes are this life and energy, as well as warmth and support and kindness.

With them we share the similarities, of course, but just as many differences. Maybe "differences" is the wrong word. I hate the term "opposites attract." There are no "opposite" forces, only complimentary ones. Two people compliment one another.

It’s a waltz: each one takes a lead, while the other feels out the steps and follows unselfconsciously, discovering and exploring and learning anew. Each one offers the other a new perspective, a new way of looking at the world, at something they may have missed, or a glimpse into something totally different. Over time, it evolves and matures, becoming as Bruce Lee observed "like coals, deep burning and unquenchable."

Then there’s the physical component.

Yeah. Sex.

Often called lovemaking by representatives of the R&B and Soul communities. I know. I was never too fond of the term either. Isn’t it just another PC, Billboard Top 40 term for sex, the overly Christianized canonization of fucking?

No. At least lately I don’t think so. Its sex in the context of love: Unselfish, often spontaneous, and untiring. It is to be so close, intertwined so complexly and deeply that neither person can tell where they begin and the other ends. Their breaths are synchronized; they know each others' rhythms, compliment their movements. They’ve memorized every curve. One pushes and the other pulls. One pulls, and the other pulls harder.

Think it can’t ever be this good? That I’m over-hyping it? Think sex is overrated? Then you aren’t doing it right.

If it all sounds rare, bordering on impossible to some, that’s because, well, it is. To find another who evokes all this inside is to catch a bolt of lightening in a glass bottle. Timing it just right; listening for it, reading it and being in the right spot because it never reveals itself there more than once. Then there’s having to courage not to flinch. It’s a lot isn’t it? It doesn’t always happen. But it can. And once in a while, it does...

Over The Cap

2009-11-14T17:52:00.012-05:00

It’s very chilly out today, and gray, and has been raining on and off, adding to the dampness. Trees look like gaunt figures with pointy, rigor-mortised limbs. The last of the "pretty" foliage has fallen from all the branches, and most of it is now that yellowy jaundice color, or burnt flaky brown. And getting soggy.

(Refer back to my first blog post about the migratory patterns of these leaves at this time of year...)

Yes, November is definitely in the chair. I know it should be no surprise. The weather the past several days was warm even for October’s good taste, but if ever there was any doubt, just look outside. He has taken the spot; October has long abdicated and November is in the middle of his grim, sometimes misunderstood tale.

(And I want no ‘rubbing in’ from those San Diegans out there. We KNOW. It’s ALWAYS sunny in a whale’s vagina.)

At any rate, if I’m looking to scapegoat anyone for the gravity and tone of this post, it may as well be the month, the wet gray mare he rode in on, and his chilly tale... And the tomb-like dampness of his breath.

I read something yesterday in a local newspaper. I can’t adequately call it a column, but a Q&A section devoted to the seedier, more taboo issues in love and relationships. People write in anonymously under special acronyms and ask "The Expert" for advice on things. Some concerns have been:

A girl weighing the evidence and ruling that her boyfriend may be fooling around with his best (male) friend and what that ‘might mean’.

Another had to do with a young, straight man wondering if it’s normal that he can only ejaculate with the aid of rectal stimulation.

...

I swear to you all, up and down, that was NOT me.

I read these mostly for entertainment, though the columnist does offer pearls of real wisdom from time to time. Browsing through the latest issue, I stopped at a man whom, enduring almost 20 years of little to no sexual contact with his wife, asked if he, if everyone, was entitled to an active sex-life.

The reply he got was that no one is actually entitled to that, that we all have the "freedom of consensual sexual expression" and that we need to "find, marry or rent a willing sex partner."

He then stated that unfortunately many would not find it, that some people are just unlucky or, in his own words, unfuckable.

You take these things for what they are, but those words stopped me dead, and made the room a bit colder. A recurring anxiety cropped up then that’s become difficult to shake.

Is it possible that some people are just destined to live unsatisfied, and unfulfilled, despite their best efforts? Are there just some people that are cosmically earmarked to live in some kind of social caste system; a serfdom that life oppresses onto them wherein upward mobility is impossible?

The context spans far beyond sex. (For the record, I in fact deem myself quite "fuckable.") There seems to be restrictions on everything; a predisposed salary cap.

They lose so others can win; they live poor, so others can have everything; they have their hearts broken repeatedly, so others can find their soul-mates; they are told no, and are continuously made an example of so others know just how good they have it.

It’s not something I want to believe. I want to be wrong. For the first time I actually savor the thought of being proved wrong.

Pounding my fists with desperate fury like a man under a frozen lake, I am constantly trying to break through this barrier. I don’t walk around with a sense of entitlement, but I believe I’m worth the complete extent of my happiness.

Like a white-knight on a spiritual quest or pilgrimage, I use every opportunity I can to prove myself. I fight hard to make my life all I imagined. I arm myself with ideals like chasing dreams, and trusting what my heart tells me. I am, as Paulo Coelho calls it in The Alchemist, "Writing my own personal legend."

But maybe I’m delusional. Out of time, and out of place, like a modern Don Quixote in rusty, antique armor and a bent lance about to lose what little he has left of something, making a pathetic fool of himself in the process.

Or, maybe it was just Friday, The 13th and this is just a lingering tale of horror November is weaving from his seat. One so frightening I can’t tell the difference between what’s real and what isn’t. Such suspension of disbelief is paramount for any potent scary story.

Maybe it's just Early winter doldrums. That must be it..

Serialized NOW

2009-11-07T15:02:00.012-05:00

Bill Shakespeare once said that the whole world was a stage…

Walking out of the Yale Art Gallery several weeks ago, my uncle commented on how he was beginning to see the world around him more and more as a play.

The actions of everyone contributing somehow as choreographed parts in some grand, ongoing pageant. I guess your mind may take things to that level after an hour and a half of a modern art exhibit called "Continuous Present," a series of modern pieces emphasizing among other concepts the passage of time, and cause and effect.

On our way around the corner of York and Chapel St., we passed through the gravitational center of a conversation, or what was more like an informal interview between a pair of Yalies and a street-hewn local. In passing, and from over our shoulders, we saw another student directly across the street, trying not to be obvious, with a camera recording the whole thing. My uncle and I, still very much internalizing the art we had just viewed walked right through this exchange without realizing it (or, at least I didn’t realize it), and hence right through the filming. It was about here he made his observation.

He then, the spontaneous photographer that he is, snapped a unique photograph of a young black woman, probably also a student, waiting at the corner passively negotiating one of her iPod’s many play-lists, seemingly unaware that she was juxtaposed to the white, twenty-something male, very professional looking and very animated, pantomiming the subtle nuances of his cell-phone conversation. From that distance we couldn’t hear the particulars of this conversation—he was like a silent film actor.

People came and went, holding bags of things and coffees. Construction rumbled on across the street. And in the background of my uncle’s photograph well across the street, if you look close is the head of a man, his features blurred partly by a screen door, his eyes fixed directly on the lens of my uncle’s camera, and no doubt studying him as he shot the picture.

There is a distinct rhythm in the bustle of New Haven since Yale's been back in session. I've never been around at this time to really experience it.

I think the world around us is a production put on daily; it’s a play with ever changing scenes, spanning countless acts, an endlessly cycling cast of characters and taking place on a proscenium stage that’s as large as the context you choose to live in; your world, your own social circle. Where you:

exercise, go to cash your check, attend class, work, eat, get coffee, fish, bike, roller blade, surf, feed the pigeons, swim, grocery shop, cow tip etc...

There is a cue for everyone to enter, I think. Multiple ones maybe even, at many different times. Listen close enough with your eyes, ears and yes, even your nose, and you’ll realize your cue. They come around a few times, so, don’t worry if you miss the first call. But it’s important to be poised near the stage, listening and ready.

Tunnel vision can really hinder that. With regards to myself, my attention was always turned inward at these times, to a spot where something was missing; a vacant spot I couldn’t fill; someplace empty, where I wondered why there was nothing instead of outward to where there was everything, or at least a great deal of things. Walking around like I had been, I was a lone audience member apart from it all, rather than a player in it.

But perhaps we voluntarily balk at the opportunity to enter at certain times, and who could blame us. Duels are usually a bit over pronounced and gratuitous. Attention seekers pollute the air with their trite, self-aggrandizing soliloquies and I refuse to grant them any. And what serious actor wants to perform in some gaudy Masque, dancing under intrusive iodized lights amid a decadent array of brightly colored clothes, Our view of one another filtered through the false masks they don?

It’s true that in order for artists to internalize what they see, and project a representation of it through their work, they must take a scrutinizing stance just outside of it. Being so immersed in something we don’t truly see and understand its many parts, and can’t adequately address a problem therein. Being so saturated in it, we may become a part of this problem. Most work, a painting, sculpture, novel, etc...functions to identify a problem, societal or interpersonal, and maybe proposes a way to solve it.

But this can become a trap I think, if we allow it. Over time, a mechanism is sprung that takes over as habit, and it confines us to, as Paulo Coelho eloquently states in his novel, Brida, "The worst torture humankind ever invented for itself: Loneliness."

We can learn so much more by being a part of the production than ever we could as just a discerning audience member. Being a part of something unique going on also beats the pants off the role of that griping critic who sits alone up in the balcony somewhere, constantly searching for flaws in the performance through the lens of his stuffy theater binoculars.

I find that the more verbs I fill my daily existence with I expand and diversify my contexts, hence the grander the scale of the stage, and the greater my role in the production.

If you have to stand outside of it for a while and wait, then wait patiently, and never forget the beauty of it that draws you back in.

A Gift to Myself, for All

2009-10-28T17:51:00.014-04:00

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

2009-10-23T22:54:00.015-04:00

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

2009-10-05T01:34:00.013-04:00

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

2009-10-04T00:08:00.016-04:00

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.

A Writer's Rant.

2009-09-29T12:49:00.012-04:00

"The artist, like the God of the creation, remains within or behind or beyond or above his handiwork, invisible, refined out of existence, indifferent, paring his fingernails."
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Stephen Dedalus

Forgive me, but, it had to happen.

Sitting here, I find myself at a terrible impasse. As a writer, one who makes use of the written word as his primary means for expressing himself and his art, I realize I am at the mercy of a time and a place where visuals mean everything, leaving words hollow and meaningless.

Through language I strive to paint pictures, and beyond that arrive at various personal and perhaps universal truths. Through a range of tools like metaphor, simile, and punctuation like ellipses or a question mark, I rub two words and then three and then more together to make fire burn on a page.

With my own audible voice, I try my best to communicate the trueness of a feeling, garnishing it with various tones, and pantomimed actions.

I dig deep inside myself for the quintessence of that feeling. I dig it up, and sift it through all the choppiness of inner dialogue and confusion of cascading emotions. I cannot demand quiet because this is a place that is perpetually saturated with sound, that never truly sleeps.

With my eyes closed, I methodically and deliberately string syntax together. It becomes a monologue spoken semi-aloud; no, more so a dialogue I actually have with myself over and over again until it is refined, until the beauty of the feeling shines bright, and I am hopefully liberated by the truth discovered within it. Sometimes the beauty is measured in exquisite pain, and the truth is difficult, irrefutable and permanent.

By that point the voice announces: "I need to write this down."

I sit to process an understanding of the pain I am feeling in order to derive some form of hope if possible from a hopeless situation

I have organized something. Untangled a frustrating knot.

I have given something a name.

I have uncovered reasons for something, and dear God, I think I can change something for the better of myself or maybe others.

It’s my gift. My proclivities lie HERE. It’s what I’m good at.

It’s also a bit of a curse, in a world when everyone asks "What have you DONE for me lately?"

I review every image in my mind; revisit every memory, over and over. It is as though I am traveling back to the past with an aim on changing the present with what I find there. Each time however, I am hopelessly observing from the sideline, like watching a time reel.

The words fall short. Words are forgettable. Words can’t change a mind, no matter how true or poignant. Promises and odes don’t move hearts, no matter how much vindication they are spoken with. Rarely can one argue for another chance at anything.

Strike three is usually always, in most contexts, strike three, and words can’t change it.

Dylan Thomas wrote and recited poems to the woman, or women he loved. His work spoke not just for itself, but for him as well. Perhaps he was the exception to the rule in a world where symbols stand taller and louder than words. Men have painted ceiling masterpieces, and grown hanging gardens. They’ve waged ten year wars, commissioned the building of palaces and pyramids and the world’s first and only automatic Lamborghini in the name of love, devotion and adoration for someone or something. It seems a losing battle however to pit the medium of the written word up against stone, steel, stain-glass, gardens, near human sacrifice and Italian auto mechanics.

Shakespeare’s characters could move nations and fickle hearts alike with their soliloquies and poetic proclamations. What they say is emotionally powerful, unselfconscious, and honest. They bare their hearts and minds to lovers, comrades, ghosts, faeries and the audience, and that’s more than enough. Their words read off a playbook like magic.

Only in fiction...

Everything we do is steeped in some kind of magic. Our minds are like a terra-forming universe, explosions and chaotic bright flashes of light against a sheet of blackness. Out from that we pull something magical, something that is steeped in love.

We draft new worlds or opaque representations of this one, and populate them with characters and animals and other things, giving them a history. The drive to create something and then interpret it is probably the last divine cord connecting us to paradise. We actively steer the destiny of these worlds and peoples. Though they are guided by our hands, we discover just what that destiny is at the same time they do.

When asked why he came to the decision to kill off the little boy in his novel Cujo, Steven King said that he did not actually decide to have the boy killed in the end, but rather, he found him there dead.

Life as a writer can be one of constant anxiety and self-doubt because it is almost entirely dependent on the free flow of a process that is so often interrupted and distorted by, as Robert Lowell once described, the balance of ‘salt’ in the brain. Due to certain physical and emotional dams, certain receptors may become dulled, and desensitized almost to the point of shutting down.

The lifeblood of the process lies in discovering the numerous shades of color in the world, recognizing a melody in the even the simplest tone, and moving fluidly to that special rhythm of cause and effect. We take all these pieces singularly, and put them together into one fluid kaleidoscopic color sequence, lyrical progression, or rhythmic waltz.

We have to find the pieces behind the scenes. Hidden, beneath the leaves.

However, it’s from behind the scenes that we conduct it. With one leg there, and another back here, we plug away at a typewriter, and make something that then seems to exist free of us, as though it spontaneously willed itself into existence. In comparison with what we writers create, we ourselves don’t seem nearly as bright or colorful. So we remain in its shadow

"Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain..."

No problems there. No one usually does.

How often is an actor or actress worshiped in the end based on the myriad of personae they step in and out of? How often is it that backstage, or once the music stops playing, the person with the guitar or microphone is still the impetuous rock star-poet? For that matter was he ever? Crowds seem to think so...

Our work doesn’t speak for us in the same way.

We want to take people to these places, but they choose to go by themselves. They forget that we conjured the magic they get lost in; took elements of life and made a story out of them, deciphered the most difficult emotions and brought them to the surface. They forget walking with us is to walk through the process with us.

If the process hits a muddy snag, they can help bring us back to neutral and offer a push. This may be a difficult time, but there’s a dedication in it for them.

Maybe even a character...

We can reveal nuances about the world they couldn’t previously see.
The pictures are up to them. We just help them to see. Help them use their mind’s eye, and open their heart.

How else can you yell without making a sound? Speak in different languages without moving your lips? Tell a secret without the need to whisper, or confess something utterly stutter free, without self-doubt?

Musings On Love: Attraction

2009-09-26T17:08:00.014-04:00

There is something cathartic and ceaselessly amusing in simply sitting back, and watching a plump house pet. Whether impossibly cute or entirely repugnant, observing their hastened waddle across a newly mopped kitchen floor, the way they labor to keep up with the nimbler, more lithe animals of the neighborhood, chase around their zigzagging food bowl, slosh through their drinking water, or suffer through the heat of the day just makes my life seem suddenly less of a struggle.

With a wide grin I cannot fully explain, I pat its fur-coated back fat, and while ruffling its jowls with both hands I chuckle with affectionate empathy, and say in my baby voice, "Oh, you poor little bastard!"

And yet, when they rest their heavy, wet faces on your lap, or spin their awkward fuzzy bodies into a pile on top of you, you can’t help but be taken with the genuine enthusiasm for where they are and surprisingly warm, well meaning nature. There is nowhere in the world they would rather be, and it shows. Despite the drool and the sloppy kisses, you feel the same way.

I have witnessed relationships that seem to function in MUCH the same manner.

I have known guys far less than perfect who defied all shallow peer expectations by charming the hearts and minds of class-A beauties. From a distance it seems as though these women, intelligent, attractive, and talented have either based their choice solely on commodity, or that strange, love-pity hybrid. But up close, astonishingly, they are very much in love, or are well on their way. They connect on every level; enjoying each others company, and a mutual physical and emotional spark.

Over time I came to view the good fortune of these peers with a mixture of satisfaction and frustration. On one hand it was great to see people of real substance and goodness come away with something great, desirable, and meaningful. On the other hand, it has truly sucked to see other people hook things that were great, desirable and meaningful.

I suppose it’s because I came to view myself in the same light. While not fat, or hairy, I believe I too possess a certain ragamuffin dog appeal, like the male lead from Lady and the Tramp, or a canine Oliver Twist. A bit shy, ever loyal and well meaning, I’m the thin, possibly underfed, under loved pup with a heart of gold and a patch of dingy brown fur over his eye that you can’t fathom, because the rest of me is off-white in color. I’ve got the big eyes that howl "Take me home!" My nubs of ears suggest I made a little extra scratch wrestling raccoons in back alleys. If I had a resume attached to my makeshift, fishbone collar, it may read:

*Affectionate
*Works well with other pets (and children)
*Can herd sheep (and children)
*LOVES peanut-butter (...)
*Does not bite (too hard...)
*Guard Dog: will watch the house, the tv, the stove (and children)
*Toilet trained
*Proficient in sit, lie down, play dead, fetch, reverse-lie down, etc...

...Among other things.

There may be this desire for you to throw money at me. Perhaps that’s the reason I might be seen with a hobo at first.

So I lack the superficial purebred features of a Great Dane, or the intimidation factor of a Rottweiler. I can’t compete with a Golden Retriever in ruggedness either, but so what? Those are just images, is any of that honestly important? I’m the dog you really want. I can jump through all the hoops, and more.

Take me home, Dammit!

Repeatedly Reproached, or kicked to the roadside, I couldn’t understand what I was doing wrong. Were people really that critical, and elitist? Well, Some are for sure.

Then my mind got moving...

There is another familiar side to the image I’m channeling. It’s one of a dog that always seems to be cold, and shivering. It sometimes cloisters itself away rather than approach people. Upon being reached out to, it may quiver nervously, a clear sign it’s been hurt before. Disaffected, it projects itself as though there is something wrong with it, as though it were somehow aware that that brown patch doesn’t match the rest of it. Hopeful, it may follow you around after this.

The revelation that hit me was a bit painful.

If such an animal were to amble over to me seeking affection I would find myself thinking, "Hell, this thing needs SHOTS, not hugs and kisses." I would approach it from a strict distance with an obligatory kindness, and respect mixed with sprinklings of pity and discomfort.

I suppose if I couldn’t imagine letting my canine alter ego bury its head in my lap, I couldn’t much less imagine a woman allowing my less shaggy true self to do the same in hers.

...

Oh I get it; it’s a post about how his love life sucks!

Well, no, not entirely. This isn’t designed to be a bitter, self-loathing rant. I am not weeping with my hands in the air, beckoning the love deities yelling WHY?! If that were the case, I would have learned nothing at all. Instead, more so than being an outlet, I hope this shines a spotlight on an understanding I’ve come to that maybe will help other nice guys like me.

At almost twenty-four, I learned these lessons late. I’ve had my heart bruised many times to finally grasp them.

There is this loud and clear projection of something defined and unique, this confident embodiment of what people believe, BY those people. It is what attracts. Intrigues. Captivates. It is sexy.

In Neil Gaiman’s novel, American Gods, Loki, the trickster from the Norse pantheon illustrates this point perfectly when he describes the essence of god-hood to the novel’s protagonist Shadow:

"It’s not magic. It’s about being you, but the you that people believe in. It’s about being the concentrated, magnified essence of you. It’s about becoming thunder, or the power of a moving horse, or wisdom. You take all the belief and become bigger, cooler, more than human. You crystallize."

But what proof is there when you don’t believe it yourself? Or if the projector is broken or damaged, or the essence fractured somehow? People can’t believe in, or grow with something that isn’t whole.

Sure those awkward looking pets may seem pathetic at first, but on the other hand, a stately fat English bulldog seems to thoroughly enjoy the simpler things in its life, and in doing so, reminds and encourages you to do the same. They run about unselfconsciously with such vigor, unaware of any of the shortcomings or imperfections I or anyone else may perceive about them. Wherever they are headed, they’re well on their way.

It’s in those very subtle displays that they let what is best in themselves shine, and because of that, bring out the best in whomever they are around.

In the end, that’s one of the most meaningful, heartfelt compliments anyone can hear:

"I am at my best, when I am with you."

So, if the pieces are all in place, if you believe that you can breathe fire, then breathe it: brightly, fiercely, whatever shade or color it is. Maybe next time out proves greater than just another lesson to be learned. (Try not to burn anyone of course...)

Carrying the Fire, Part One

2009-09-15T15:32:00.018-04:00

Years ago in the town of Hamden, CT where I live, there was a man named Gil Nagle. A veteran of the Second World War, Gil was a short, grizzled man with a solid, coiled physique. He was a Hanshi (master instructor) in the Shotokan Karate style, and I’m told, one of the hardest men around.

Mr. Nagle began his martial arts training like so many in the first crop of American martial artists had, as a member of the United States Military while stationed in Japan. The training must have been rigorous, often times bordering on brutal. While Squatting for great periods of time in deep, solid stances, Nagle's Sensei would no doubt have taken great pleasure testing the gai-jin soldier’s foundation with sharp kicks to his thighs, and heavy, downward palm strikes to each of his shoulder blades. After countless knuckle push-ups off the hard dojo floor, Nagle would have been made to execute techniques until perfection, signified by the snap of a karate gi made stiff by dried sweat following every punch and kick, resonating through the tempered pine of the dojo where he trained. But as a warrior by nature Gil embraced it, and over time earned tactical proficiency in the art, and an honorific title few outside of Japan possessed at the time.

The title granted him the permission to spread the teachings of Shotokan to his home in America. Upon returning home, Gil’s interests branched out to the art of Judo. He corresponded to the masters in Japan through several instructors he trained weekly with in New York. He set up a small dojo in Connecticut where he trained adults and teenagers alike in his own synthesis of Karate and Judo. Though far removed from the shores of Japan, Nagle’s training was no less fierce. His students, some no older than fifteen or sixteen, endured the many bumps, bruises, cuts and physical exhaustion synonymous with physical training on a nightly basis. They practiced until their muscles failed, until their voices ran hoarse from successive kiai, until the skin of their knuckles cracked and split, the balls of their feet blackened and calloused, their necks and throats tender from shime-waza (choking techniques) until that same gi snap that echoed with authority for Master Nagle in that training hall in Japan echoed for them as well.

I have never met Gil Nagle, though I would have relished the opportunity. He passed away many years ago, leaving behind a legacy only truly carried on the wind, through the shared collective of stories spoken by his former students and neighbors. Master Nagle carried the flame of a tradition (perhaps two) that at its very core was deadly serious. He engaged his students regularly, pushing them to their very physical and mental limits:

He would dart flawlessly across the dojo floor, cutting seamless angles with his feet, frustrating the attacks of his pupils. Their strikes and kicks were rendered impotent against the forearms and shins of their instructor’s blocks. Aggravated, they would lunge at him, clasping his gi in an attempt at a leg sweep or throw. As if he could render himself momentarily intangible, Gil slipped through the grasp of his students and, in a few deft movements would break their center of balance and send them hurling to the hard pine below. A “soft” technique.

He put the fear of reality in them, readying them for the inherent violence of the world:

“If I was a seasoned New York street fighter, you’d have ended up in the emergency room, or worse,” he would admonish, as he helped them up, and dusted them off, resetting their dislodged toe or finger.

He would then turn to the class and tell them to consider ripping off a car antennae and using it to get through a truly difficult violent confrontation. It was quite obvious that this man knew more than most people did about unarmed combat. A bit more subtle though was Master Nagle’s underlying message that under no circumstances were any of his students to become a part of that undertow of violence. Times have certainly changed.

Seventeen to twenty-five year olds everywhere glut themselves on images of a new generation of testosterone overloaded martial artists, puffed out, and muscle bound, their skin scrawled with war paint. They squat triumphantly over a defeated opponent, raining their bowling ball sized fists down on their exposed heads with a look of mania in their eyes. They flock to MMA gyms that peddle a strictly physical program usually lacking a character building component, highlighting power and strength over knowledge and perfection of technique and execution. After a few months they ride high on their newly inflated egos, sporting brand name logos on shirts practically painted on their chest and torso. It’s an excuse for many young people to fight; the most fun they will have feeding this drive without being arrested afterward.

Though I would personally like to see a certain level of technical growth in the training of combat sport as well as the attitudes and conduct of its participants, this post is in no way a crusade to condemn mixed martial arts or any other sport like it. I have been an avid watcher of venues like the Ultimate Fighting Championship and K1 Kickboxing for years. A good number of its participants are superbly talented athletes and fighters in peak physical condition, and actively contribute in a positive, inquisitive light to the evolution of the fighting arts. This is merely a microcosm of an issue of greater importance. So much emphasis now is placed on competition. We are constantly in contention with one another, laboring under the false pretense that “might makes right.” Our identities seem in large partly defined by who our enemies are.

A month or so ago, a neighbor and friend of my sister’s was over the house for a visit. Soon enough the subject turned to a friend of hers she used to work with at a local gym. He is a relatively young man, perhaps no older than thirty. He had served two tours of duty already in either Afghanistan or Iraq, which one specifically I cannot remember. Not surprisingly the man is very large, and quite strong. Apparently, he also boasts a severe temper, which at times interferes with the cordiality of everyday civilian life. He plans on re-enlisting soon, and returning to the war.

“I’m really good at killing people. It’s what I’m best at,” he confided in her. “I like hurting people.”

Not to worry though, “he’s really a nice guy.”

It seemed to make just as much sense to my sister’s friend as it did to this man. It’s what soldiers do after all. The root of the American soldier runs deep in the traditions of aggression and blood lust.

...

I took my leave of the conversation.

I had always understood the effectiveness of a soldier to be measured in, among other things, his or her ability to accurately assess threats, keep emotionally distanced from that threat and eliminate it with as much economy as possible, draw on their resourcefulness and untapped courage to meet any situation, all the while keeping emotions at a realistic medium. The conditions of war are incredibly harsh and take their toll on even the best people and I’m in no position to condemn this man I do not know, but I am weary of those who would perpetuate their own form of blind justice from the barrel of an assault rifle on a battlefield. They nurture some collective unconscious drive to subvert human beings. They are the ones who rape and pillage. They see it as an excuse to act on this.

I can’t say for certain, but in the center of a conflict that saw the most catastrophic loss of human life in recorded history, and in a theater known toward the end of that struggle as the most violent, I harbor no doubt that Master Nagle was forced to take life. He devoted his livelihood to knowledge and the perfection of his martial skill, and the passing of that knowledge. The man could fight, and fight well. He probably found certain exhilaration in the physical challenge of it. But he did not subscribe to a mantra that bred conflict. He was not a murderer, nor did he ever actively take some perverse pleasure in exacting his dominance over others. His skill in taking a life never equated to an enjoyment of it. He venerated strength, discipline and perseverance, but valued love and compassion above all things.

Martial traditions, at least those found in the east, all contain philosophical, ethical, and spiritual tenets weaved seamlessly in with the fabric of the physical ones. If the physical application and execution of techniques is the body, these invaluable precepts are the soul. To deny one is to deny the other; the removal of each from the other sacrifices the integrity of martial arts and martial traditions as a whole, upsetting an important balance and sending them spiraling into perversity. Shintoism, Zen Buddhism, Bushido, and even aspects of Christianity in some cases imbue martial doctrine with codes of conduct, temperament, altruism and restraint. But these are just ideas, intangible and so easily ignored. What it all comes down to, what these facets of control, respect, proper conduct, and discipline are all extensions of, is the overlaying concept of HUMANITY. To negate our humanity is to lose touch with the human race. One can’t foster a respect for life in this way, and once that is gone, what is there to fight for? One then isn’t a martial artist, or a fighter, or a policeman, a soldier, or a warrior at all. Without this respect for life, the fires of grand traditions are snuffed out, and the conquering hero is reduced simply to conqueror, a thug, and a predator.

Riding the Wave

2009-08-30T18:55:00.008-04:00

Whether you are tuned in to your surroundings or spend most of the day hovering in the stratosphere like me, the evidence all around my town and I’m sure yours of College Move-In Day has cropped up unmistakably in the past week.

Ah yes, College Move-In Day: That magical day in the year when out of state vans and station wagons piloted by frugal, watch-tapping fathers and their overemotional first mate mothers tote boxes of clothing, blankets and towels, enough imperishable food to fill a modest bomb shelter, hand me down appliances, Wal-Mart specials and other last minute impulse buys. It’s easy to separate the first-timers from the two, or three year vets here. By sophomore year, that load of crap in the trunk and backseats is significantly diminished. By junior year, even that once emotional co-pilot can’t wait to book out of there as soon as possible. Senior year we are left with not but a seasoned undergrad unloading a few totes and bags from his or her own car, grabbing a red SOLO cup and finding whatever dorm the booze is flowing most freely from.

I experienced all four, starting with a Fall convocation signaling a new journey right up to the Spring graduation signaling the end and all the move-ins in between. This year I watch the end of summer tradition from the sidelines. What a precarious position it is.

I think at the end of things, after one part of our lives is book ended we find ourselves waiting on the cusp of something new, expecting it to sound its arrival with some form of pomp and ceremony.

What happens next is something akin to surfing, I think. I’ve never been surfing per se, but I suspect that if I did, I’d find myself floating aimlessly on my board for a while. I envision myself tossed around by this unrelenting force far greater than my own, expecting it to lift me upright.

It’s unconscionably awkward: You find yourself trying to balance on a shaky and unpredictable surface. You think you can’t do this, it’s written all over your face. You make a halfhearted attempt to stand, your knees wobbling and your arms outstretched and flailing like the crooked, derelict wings of a WWI fighter plane. They showed you how to do this on land and you envisioned yourself in this role many times. The designs on the board you rented most befit you and your personality. You know where you want to be, how you wish to look, Hell you even bought the skin-tight wet suit that the real surfers wear. But still you wade timidly on your stomach, letting the water take you or worse yet, you’re still standing on the beach.

Up until now you familiarized yourself with something, a self-actualized version of yourself with a lifestyle you want, in a world you wish to inhabit. You know its logistics, who else lives there, and where you want to fit into it. But up until now you’ve only theorized, you haven’t really, well, done much. Bruce Lee once likened practicing martial arts in this sheltered, reserved manner to be like learning to swim (or...surf?) by wading through dry land. He frequently echoed the maxim that knowing was not enough without applying, and willing not enough without actually doing.

Our own will is the pretext here; the earth doesn’t tremble, stars don’t fall from the sky into our hands, and koalas don’t crap rainbows of golden inspiration in our brains. It’s a process that we must start, and a process that we must trust.

You have to sort of feel the ocean out, FIND the wave, and hitch a ride onto it. At the risk of falling, you hop seamlessly from one wave to the next actively looking for the biggest one, the one that will take you the farthest, challenge you the greatest. The link from wave to wave, this chain of events is the process also known as the rest of our lives. Some waves were only meant to carry us so far, as a means to the end of something else. What you envisioned as the perfect wave may yield to an even greater one on which you may surf higher and happier.

This sense of wave hopping, as with going into the water, and paddling towards the waves before actively rising to your feet and riding them out only happens with a self-directed mindset and the constantly renewed sense of what you want to do and who you want to be.

Alright I’m sure most of you are getting the picture here, and I’ll spare anymore philosophizing. I bring it all up not for the sake of producing the 8th Habit of Highly Effective People, but because it’s a situation a lot of people, including admittedly, myself find themselves in after College. I guess I could have simplified this whole post into that one, time-honored, battle tested Nike mantra: JUST DO IT. Let us writers write, let the musicians rock out, and the artists paint according to our voices and visions.

Well, back to the now. My first article for Connecticut Creative Magazine is up and can be viewed either at the link to the right, or at one via my Facebook. On second look it could be a bit better, but I’m a bit attached to it, as It’s the first sort of professional thing I’ve done so, go easy on it. More will come. Got some creative stuff flowing well in the works, and a job interview soon I’m terrified about, so things have been going well by my watch. Let’s hope I can ride this one out without falling.

It starts with a small wave, and an attempt to stand on your own.

Much More Than Escapism

2009-08-24T13:18:00.008-04:00

So, I took a creative writing course this summer. It was one of two courses I needed to take in order to satisfy the six remaining credits I needed for my degree. I found the course to be helpful and very flexible and being that it was conducted online, yielded little room for egos to run rampant, something that typically plagues writer's workshops. However, I happened to be skimming the professor's syllabus one day and came upon a disclaimer:

"Make sure to avoid sensationalism: murder/mysteries, car accidents, sci-fi, alien abductions, or mistaken identities. Save this kind of writing for the producers of television programs and movies. You are learning to write literature."

I wasn't necessarily surprised, just disheartened. Academics and artsy hyper-neo-post modernist writers seem to suffer this long standing superiority complex aimed at anything they consider to be "GENRE FICTION"; i.e., Fantasy, Science Fiction, Horror, Suspense, Romance and so on. I've heard stories from people enrolled in in BFA and MFA programs for creative writing wherein their professors, "highly accredited, published writers", actively steer their young hopefuls away from any such projects, condemning the very idea. As an avid reader and writer of fantasy, science fiction and horror who is actively searching for an MFA program to improve my writing ability i find this disconcerting to say the least.

I had a conversation with my best friend a few months back in which I was basically selling the idea that enrolling into an MFA program was the next logical step for me. "It's functional", I said, "I'll be FORCED to get all my ideas out and organized; I'll be gaining a deeper understanding of the craft, and discover my own style and voice; I'll be surrounded by open minded writers who will make me better..." I think this was the last straw for him. He'd been sitting across from me in the diner booth sipping an empty coffee for my whole spiel.

"Don't be surprised", was all he said.

He went on to liken any process of becoming, of realizing one's purpose, one's art and one's creative drivers to be like fashioning themselves out of clay. "Don't be surprised when they all try to knock your hands away, reach in, and mold you the way they want you to be", was what he said, and I tried to defend a few programs in a few cool cities but in the end I knew he was right. As a musician and song writer who had been enrolled in a few different music programs the past couple of years, he had already experienced this, the voices telling him that he needed to change, that he could never sing properly, the classical musicians condemning the indie, blues infused rock music he had been synthesizing, the self proclaimed "poets" who continuously criticized his lyrics for being, well, lyrics and not imagist poetry. I'd had a poetry professor who essentially echoed my friend's warning when he spoke of the pitfalls of work shopping a peer's material: "Try as we might not to, in the end we all naturally want to make someone else's work just like ours."

What good would it serve for me to pay untold amounts of money for a program that forbade me from writing the way I want to? From discovering my own voice? From indulging my imagination, and piecing together the characters and settings that whirl around in my head all day long like fiery meteors through the night sky? Aren't writers supposed to write about what they know and what they love?

I think academics who cling to the "canon" fail to see the merit in science fiction and dismiss it as escapist literature. But authors such as Robert Heinlein, Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clark, Ray Bradbury, Philip K. Dick, William Gibson and Kurt Vonnegut remind us that behind a work of enthralling, page-turning imagination there are concepts rooted firmly in reality, metaphors that connect allegorically to and endure beyond the present day. Doomed reliance upon technology, ethical use of military might and scientific exploration, political upheaval, drug use, societal growth and over population, information exchange and privacy are only a few concepts that drove the work of the previously mentioned writers. Very often science fiction, and even it's more flighty and whimsical, however still as enjoyable younger sibling, Science Fantasy, ask the question of where we are headed, and if it's a particularly good place.

One can't deny the historical and philosophical subtexts found in most prominent works of the Fantasy genre. Using science fantasy as an example, George Lucas' timeless Star Wars saga deals with philosophies and warrior cultures from the far east, through the order of the Jedi. Replace a light saber with a katana, and The Force with chi, or possibly the concept of the Tao, and you have a philosophy closely mirroring that of Zen-Buddhism.

Beyond the philosophical and historical, the level of scholarship that men like J.R.R Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Robert Jordan, George R.R. Martin, and many others employ in their work is astounding to say the least. They all possess a very deep knowledge of mythology, folklore, religion, language, and literary traditions that they draw upon to create their heroes and villains, their landscapes and worlds, and their customs and ways.

Writers like Edgar Allan Poe, H.P. Lovecraft, Stephen King, and Clive Barker show through their works of horror that the monsters they write about are in reality, us. Mary Shelly's Dr. Frankenstein shuns morality and ethics in his research, and creates a perversion of science. The Wolfman and The Curious Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and The Invisible Man all deal with the duality of man and our tendencies toward the violent and the perverse.

I can go on forever with these. Lucky for you all, I'll stop right there.

As far as the mechanics of a good novel, novella or short story, these authors deliver on almost every level. The quality of narrative, complexity of style, experimental forms, depth of character, detail in setting, and smoothness and whit of dialogue are all, dare I say, fantastic. Neil Gaiman blows me away with his ability to play with form, and development of silly, hypnotic, dark, amoral, or mysterious characters and the distinct voices attached to them.

It would be a service to academia if the work of these authors were included in the so called canon, or were at the very least included in a syllabus and lesson plan by some young open minded professor. As far as stuffy fine arts programs go, works of "Genre Fiction" are more than just technically sound, they are perfect examples of "literature", just more enjoyable to actually read. It is short sighted and ignorant to suggest that these authors are sub-par, escapist, pulp writers because their imaginations brought them to the alluring worlds of fantasy, science fiction and horror.

, You will find...

2009-08-20T20:43:00.006-04:00

I'm new to the blogging experience and the simple act of setting this one up (in all its minimal glory) took several days to pine over and a few hours for me to construct. I've decided to post a range of topics here, including, though not limited to: literature, writing, film, excerpts of my own creative work, daily thoughts and reflections of the above and any other miscellaneous things that I can make fit the paradigm in some way.

I suppose my inaugural blog should cover the name I chose for it. Hidden Beneath the Leaves is one loose English language translation for Hagakure, a book of anecdotal musings on the Japanese philosophy of Bushido collected over a period of several years by a young Samurai who frequently visited a much older of his contemporaries whom was by then living out the remainder of his life as a Buddhist priest in the quietude of a hermitage, enveloped by the sights and sounds of nature: rushing streams, the wind in the trees, the occasional prayers of a wandering monk, and the movement of his own mind. During these visits the young man was treated to stories and reflections from the life of the former Samurai, each person, place, opinion and event recounted a valuable and enlightening lesson. Knowing he was privy to something quite special, the young Samurai transcribed each meeting down on paper, and the resulting collection garnered a reputation as a modern (at the time at least) treatise on the way a warrior should think and behave, bordering a bit on the fanatical.

Sparing readers delving any farther into this origin story, I'd first like to point out that I'm not a warrior monk, and in no way wish to give rise to the "new warrior caste" in America or anywhere else in the world. That said, I'd secondly like to emphasize that the title implies that amid the rank and file of ordinary everyday things lies something very profound, hidden for us in plain sight and visible if we just stop, listen and take it all in. Decipherable In any idea, or work of art there is an answer, or ultimately some part of our own truth. Perhaps it suggests that in something as simple and commonplace as Autumn's falling leaves there is an innate and everlasting beauty. Perhaps in this seemingly humdrum bit of blog space, just one leaf amidst thousands there is something profound, thought provoking, witty, humorous and engaging to be read. Perhaps I continue to use this falling leaf metaphor because I live in New England and the cascading, multicolored foliage seems to be our trademark. Even now, in Summer you can glimpse them. Of course it's mostly in the form of old, soggy, brownish-gray rotting piles gumming up the storm drain, or sitting in the corner of your driveway because back in November, in addition to your own leaf fall, the leaves from EVERYONE of your neighbor's yards just seemed to magically hitch a ride on the brisk Fall winds and find their way to YOUR house. You are never done picking them up.

....

Though really I think this metaphor serves as the window into something extraordinary; a place where our world intersects with a liminal one running parallel to our own, containing all elements fantastic, fascinating, and sometimes frightening. Most importantly though I feel it's where ideas come from. I became really attracted to this idea of liminality while learning about Irish folklore, and that attraction only grows with each work by Neil Gaiman I read. All topics I'll discuss in other posts, for this one has gone on long enough. As i become more adept at upkeep and maintenance I'll have more to post, and will eventually organize them into various headings. The page is a bit skeletal right now, and I'll have to do something to remedy that and give it a little more personality. That about wraps this one up. I look forward to posting, and to everyone's comments. Over and out.