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.
Monday, May 24, 2010
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Take from this what you will
Sometimes it’s difficult not to notice that, despite how many of us collectively the human condition applies to, we remain unsympathetic and unreasonable towards one another. We are guarded about ourselves to a point of paranoia, what we want, strive for, what we think; exactly who we are at our very core. We mark the four corners of our daily lives with an atmosphere of judgment and scrutiny, turning it into a walled arena of competition, factious cut-throat and dogmatic instead of some kind of community that is symbiotic and open-minded
We randomly weave in and out of each other’s lives, treating those around us like merchandise we willfully use for varying periods with no intention of buying only to reject and discard. Like a jacket or blouse that contours snugly to our bodies, worn until just before or well after a grace period, we are unceremoniously slid off and returned in a crumpled pile to the retailer.
The fervor of that day trying it on, its luster in the mirror, and then under the city lights, for all to see is abruptly gone, and what no one really saw was how they never removed the security tag, or that they would find something wrong with it…And it is shed the way a snake sheds a layer of skin.
I’m bored with this now; It’s served its temporary purpose; Oh, you didn’t know?—I never had any intention of actually keeping this…
So there we lie, wrinkled and dusty in the bottom of some bin or on the dusty linoleum store-front floor, still contoured to those shoulders, to that torso and that neck as others walk over, on top of or to the side of us without a second thought.
We are alienated from one another until someone perceives us as useful in some capacity, in as much as we’ve got something they want. We are a means to the end of someone’s satisfaction, a utility to fix or occupy a space, or the satiation of some kind of appetite. If a situation of co-dependence arises, emotional or psychological attachments, then we are kept in the mix:
I can’t find anyone better than this; No one else will have this level of patience; No one else performs this task like he/she does…
You are either player or spectator. You get only what you win or what you take. You are at all times balancing on a tightrope subject to fickle head-winds, at all times prone to failure, at all times replaceable. Your methods must be subtle and opportunistic.
I am twenty-four years old. It’s an age-range characterized by transition and discovery, by screwing up, and making fly-by-night decisions. Stages of life at this juncture are ephemeral and constantly shifting, each one more indicative of a layover than destination. But I have no intrinsic talent for this callous, elitist game, nor do I subscribe to its rules. I have no masks to wear in front of people. My words and actions are often misunderstood. Honesty and enthusiasm, randomness and spontaneity are translated as ineptitudes and weaknesses. There are always some who feign friendliness and civility as a kind of charity. It is not an in fact an act of charity, but one of some self-aggrandizement and put-on altruism, the way some people pity a tramp by tossing some change or a few patronizing words in their direction.
Well, I kinda feel bad for him; I mean I feel like I kinda HAVE to, you know?
Sympathy is not pity. It is empathy; it is mindfulness of the discomfort and/or suffering of another person you live, work or exist in close proximity to, and the acknowledgement that as characters in the same narrative the existential weights stifling them are in no way foreign to us. When someone forgets the words to their favorite song, or how to step to it, just tap out a slight beat to walk to, whistle a tune to help them remember, and go about your business.
There are times I wonder if people, even the ones I grow fond of and care about, see in my eyes reflected back at them the things they don’t like about themselves, scared at what the game’s top scorers may have to exploit. Sometimes I feel as though I am being forcibly tailored into this kind of lifestyle of seclusion, growing ever distant from it all.
It’s high tide; sunrise and sunset; death and taxes; steroids in baseball—it’s just an immutable fact of life and even the best of people seem to be caught up in it. However, choosing to exist on the fringe is a choice to dim the beacon we are supposed to shine—the magnetism of love, compassion and enthusiasm which in turn draws it back to us from others.
And so, every day is an effort to extricate myself from this dour mold, and weave myself in the collective inseam of the world around me, somehow finding those with whom I share an understanding while avoiding the knots, tangles and snarls inherent in it.
Is it like this everywhere?
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?
Sunday, April 25, 2010
This Round's on Me
“Good morning son.
Twenty years from now
Maybe we’ll both sit down
And have a few beers.”
For certain demographics, the 20th of April is synonymous with indulgence in a certain mind and mood altering vice. The day's festivities typically kick off with piling into a friend’s tight, rust bucket car or poster and tapestry-clad basement, covering every square inch in a thick haze of marijuana smoke. While one auditions crudely formed jokes, another feels compelled to share with his friends his new-found interpretation on life, beginning, of course, with his handWhile impossibly relaxed, they harbor the thrill of breaking an "oppressive, closed-minded" law at the same time, as well as the worldliness of knowing exactly which code it is. Productive and eye-opening as that sounds, With no bad habits to support, contacts to provide them, and the day off from work I spent the night uneventfully at home. No, I remind myself, this time of year holds other, more austere observances for me. On the evening of the 21st, I decided I needed a drink
I left the car along Tower Parkway downtown and hoofed it to Chapel Street and Richter’s, a bar I’d passed dozens of times before and had been meaning to try for months. Though the outer facade grants the place the appearance of an old man’s watering hole, it is always teaming with pods of Yaleans and other species of regular, all drinking and laughing and enjoying themselves—something I could just never do solo while others around me did it socially.
It was a Tuesday, by no means a ‘big’ night for hitting the town, but then, by no means do you really need an excuse when the weather was this inviting and if you’re a Yale student so close to finals time. It was early yet and the doors were open. I pushed forward.
Various of Yale's college insignias hung on the wall next to a mounted stag’s head. Scattered factions of diners and only a few bar patrons. A middle-aged man hitting on a moderately attractive bar-made. A Michael McDonald body-double hitting on a young, ‘full-figured’ black woman; two male students, sans the flirtation, looking on from behind their beers in amusement; a good selection of beer; someone having not a pint, half-liter, or liter, but a YARD poured for them…A solo excursion under these conditions was, I decided, not pathetic, but essential.
I bought a Bohemian style lager I hadn’t seen on tap anywhere since my time abroad and sat sipping it and watching a baseball game on one of the bar’s three televisions. I took a long draught from my pint glass. Through the hopsy golden fog of it Roy Halladay gets a sign he likes. He winds up, all six and a half lanky feet of him, lunges off the mound and the baseball leaves his hands…
--Why don’t they use metal bats, like my friends and I do?
--Because that would be too easy.
--My friend says metal bats are better.
--Not really.
--But wouldn’t they hit more home-runs?
--Don’t they hit enough already?
--I guess…
--How many did Babe Ruth hit?
--Ummm..(a brief pause) Seven-hundred-and-fourteen
--(a laugh) That’s right, and he swung a wooden bat, didn’t he, Jake?
--Yeah. (a coy smile at ‘Jake’)
--(leaning in close) So you tell your friend that wood bats work just fine, eh?
My nostrils flare and my upper lip curls…
…On the stools to my left, a young couple sit nursing a pair of whiskies. I shudder, but who walks into a bar with an aversion to whiskey and has the audacity to complain about it? I pretend that a stool a few seats down provides just the angle that has eluded me for watching this game. Doting on each others every word they fail to notice my switch. Turning my attention back to the game I can still smell it. I think of my father, dead five years as of the previous day
As a boy, when he would bring me close, be it for the greeting lift-off, the kiss goodbye, or some lesson of unfathomable importance to my ensuing manhood, his breath was an invisible right that could just about knock me out of my Velcro Nikes.
Eventually I’d drawn the correlation between the distillery fumes emanating from his mouth and the brown paper bag I saw in the cup-holder of his car on weekends when he came by to pick us up, or at any other point in the day.
I give him credit; he was good at trying to hide it, waiting until our attentions spanned elsewhere long enough to drain a few more milliliters of sadomasochism from his crude paper-bag dram. But it’s impossible to hide anything from a kid forever. They always find it, whatever it is. They always ask questions. What harm can questions really cause when you’re a kid? The thought orbited my six, then seven, then eight year old mind, but apart from one bad-breath accusation, I could just never bring it up.
I had to learn to take the good with the bad. With so little good to go around, I had to cherish it, really crystallize it all, the good, the bad and otherwise, all streamlined like movements in your very own waltz. I think it was Theodore Roethke who reminded that such dances are difficult to keep up.
The man loved baseball, and as I am told was a prolific little league coach, guiding his kids to several pee-wee championships. Of course, only those who truly contributed to that two-foot trophy were honored in the end. What does that mean exactly? Just imagine if coach Buttermaker didn’t include tragic Timmy Lupis when he doled the individual “good job” trophies out to the rest of the ‘Bad-News’ Bears. Due to his fervor and high on base percentage, I imagine the kid instructed to lean into just about every fastball got his, even if he made more contact with his bruised radial ulna than a baseball bat. It’s impossible to tout his little-league golden years without bringing him right back down and chaining him to the earth with that bit of local sports trivia.
I had always imagined that one day, when I deemed myself presentable and when everything from the past had settled (the way grass grows again slowly over the carnage of a battlefield), I would contact him, and maybe start the process of catching up. He wasn’t fit to drive so, I imagined myself with a driver’s license and enough geographical wherewithal to tackle the George Washington Bridge and navigate the Bronx for a Yankee game. Along the way I listen to his dogmatic baseball opinions, and allow him, one half out of empathy and the other sheer entertainment value, to continue believing he knew everything. When we arrive at the big ballpark in the Bronx, when we walk past anything enshrined to Yogi Berra, he reiterates to me and anyone else listening how much of damn stupid wop he thought the accidental sage really was.
Elston Howard! Now that’s who I grew up with; now THAT was a catcher…
Counter-intuitive as it is to offer a (hypothetically) recovering alcoholic a beer, in my vision we have enough time before the first pitch to duck into one of the bars that dot the stadium's interior, or share a few overpriced stadium Budweisers when we reach our seats.
It never happened, of course.
Parallel parking is in itself a special order for me, and I am not the navigator to see your way through any kind of jungle, concrete or otherwise. He called a few times intermittently over the years, mostly out of guilt I suspect; he desperately tried to leap-frog from casual small talk into something, anything meaningful while avoiding the past, nearly drowning at times in dead air as he cast out life-lines guessing at the person he thought his 17-year old son might be. Mercifully, I brought up baseball…
Each year around this time it floods my mind like heavy stout into a clear pint glass.
A few years back, my college roommates and I were on our way back to the dorms after an excursion to the liquor store. The only of us over twenty-one at the time, it was on me to actually walk into the place, handle the money and buy everything.
With a case of beer in each hand, my Sam’s Summer Ale in the left and someone’s cheap piss-water in my right, I make my way from the car to our door, ever vigilant for campus cops. It’s sunny and breezy; all the apartment windows are open, each one blaring at differing volumes the dull roar of a crowd; the pop of fast-ball meeting catcher’s mitt; lyrical triteness of Neil Diamond; Jerry Remy’s incoherent banter; all the magical numbers in the original soundtrack of Fenway Park. In Springfield, Mass, you couldn’t sell your first born to watch a damn Yankee game…
Without pretext, one of the usually sturdy handles suddenly breaks and it falls to the dirt in a heavy thud.
Shit...
I lift the case of Sam’s up off the ground. As if pulled from an invisible spigot by a phantom barman, a perfect amber-gold stream pours out the bottom. I watch it foam and fizz and quickly dissolve into the earth. Once inside I open the case and inspect it: Completely dry. ONE bottle of twenty-four directly in the center, a perfect crack around its base and not a drop of beer left inside. I pop the cap of my own beer on the edge of the counter and raise it to my lips. From our doorway I peer across the way through our neighbor’s window and the game playing on the television.
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.
Wednesday, April 21, 2010
I Heard About a Man to Whom I May be Related...
In the late 19th century, an itinerant New England vagabond regularly traversed a 365-mile circuit that took him through most of western Connecticut and New York. Starting in south-west Connecticut he moved through New Haven County and along the Connecticut River, across northern CT, through Litchfield County, into New York and along the Hudson River Valley, and back to his starting point in CT.
He humped the entire journey on foot at a pace of about ten miles a day, took what he could from nature and relied on the goodwill of townsfolk for whatever else he needed.
His name is enshrined in a pantheon of New England folkloric figures. The residents who beheld him came to call this strange wanderer Leather Man.
Leather Man took his name from the strange garb he wore: a thick, baggy coat, trousers, boots, and hat, all a self made derelict patchwork of leather weighing over fifty pounds. He carried all of his worldly belongings in a large leather satchel, which included among many other things, a hand-made axe, crudely hewn pipe for tobacco, food and other provisions and a black Catholic bible translated to the French.
Rainfall, snow or sunshine, he knew every square mile of the woods and trails of Connecticut and Westchester County New York better than many people know their own property lines. I imagine he did a lot of thinking, meditating, reflecting along the trails he walked. I imagine that despite the smile he reportedly wore around his peers he suffered to himself silently, reciting litanies and his own personal gospels to walls of dark, empty caves.
There is always the possibility he was just another psychologically damaged transient, unable to function in the larger social context, but I just can’t agree with that. Evidence suggests that he was literate, quite possibly very intelligent, and given his French accent, worldly at least to some extent. The bible suggested he was a Christian and the worn cover that he referenced it often.
He was described by 19th century NY and CT residents as kind and polite, if not intensely private and reclusive. He would ask for nothing from people but food, or water: the most basic elements for survival. They would offer him the loft of their barns, or in some cases even a warm bed in their homes but he always declined, preferring instead to sleep under the star-lit roof of the many caves that dotted the route he traveled. He carried many tools, all handmade, was knowledgeable of woodcraft and survival in the outdoors. He was recorded to have purchased items in foundries and grocery stores, meaning he found some form of employment here and there. He was almost entirely self-sufficient.
He stopped often in towns for provisions, and while he crossed paths with many different people I can’t help but view him as a man apart, amidst but never among. He chose to communicate with a series of hand gestures and grunts usually;
Yes.
No.
Food?
Thank you…
When people approached him with personal questions or otherwise anything outside common pleasantries, he would ignore it or abruptly change the subject.
His unwillingness to speak about his past and where he came from suggests to me that there is something shameful, or otherwise too painful to relive from his life. His constant movement additionally suggests to me that he was either trying to get away from, or pursue something connected to it: things, concepts or people that only existed to him as intangible ideas that either haunted or just barely eluded him.
Several accounts stated that he often mumbled to himself, sometimes in French, while others in English—tinted of course with the brogue of a man from, it was determined, Southern France. So, he could speak.
It was often speculated that Leatherman’s hermetic and nomadic existence coupled with his “vow of silence” was self-imposed, a kind of personal penance. I can understand this to a certain degree as being a manifestation of some kind of guilt, or desire for privacy, but then…WHY was he so approachable? Why did he move through the lives of Connecticut residents the way he did, allowing himself to come so close…Only to shy away?
It always seemed to me that, rather than a conscious choice to separate himself from the larger human context, indicative of some kind of deep-seeded paranoia or distrust of people, it was a position he had no way to change, waiting in the cold at humanity’s window. Did he know how to knock? Did he forget how? Did he know he could? Did he know he had every claim to the warmth of human contact?
If not, what happens to a man to make him forget? What could frighten shame or traumatize him so much that the basic threads of commonality he shares with those around him are severed?
The few chromy photographs that have survived of him capture a kind of feral element in his eyes, like a raccoon in daylight—a man that had lost his nature somehow. But he maintained all of his humanity and was in no way volatile; children were hardly frightened of him, and instead relished the opportunity to catch a glimpse of the old Leatherman once a month or so, and adults were no different. Notices were posted urging him to come out, join functions, or answer questions. In the end it wasn’t fear of persecution that sent Leatherman on the low-roads, but popularity. It was as though he was afraid of being accepted. But why? Was he afraid he would disappoint or hurt them? Or maybe that he would be disappointed or hurt by them?
In 1888, a particularly harsh winter slowed the Leatherman’s movements. He was found in one of his caves, dead due to a combination of cancer and overexposure to the elements.
...
I often leave my house and hop in my car with no real destination in mind. I don’t know what I’m looking for, and I barely know when I’ve found it, but I like the freedom inherent in just going. It’s a way to organize my thoughts. I walk the same city blocks I have many times before, sometimes the silence of the streets is such where I can hear the nuances of each step, my breathing, heartbeat. It’s hard not to feel almost incorporeal. I stop off for a drink, or coffee. I usually have a book with me. Sometimes the book is just a ruse.
It’s funny…It indicates I am occupied, and want my privacy, and yet I take it to a public place. There are plenty of other more solitary spots to read but I choose ones soaked in the steady banter of people, and I in the middle, or just to the periphery of their comings and goings. In the midst of people sometimes, it’s as though we want to be sought out, yet we remain unseen.
I can’t always say the things I want to say to certain people. All the depth of my feeling comes out as just mumbling or stammering, cloaked in layers of metaphor and uncertainty, indecipherable as a fractured Rosetta stone. It can be a real problem.
I’m certainly no “man of the land”, ascetic or hermit. I have no dark past, nor am I damaged in any way. I have my quirks and eccentricities, “homeless cave-dweller” not counted among them. But I just think that, with the possible exception of a very blessed few, we all collectively share these kinds of experiences, at least at some point in our lives, and should understand this man's life in context to our own
If at any time you’ve ever found yourself somewhere on the fringe in life, walking the miles alone with your thumb in the air;
If you’ve ever felt yourself more a ghost haunting the world around you than a presence acknowledged in it;
If you’ve ever slowly stitched a coarse layer of armor over your skin out of self preservation and to hide your scars from people;
If you ever perceived a kind of impermeable layer between you and the ones you most care about, or the world around you;
If for days on end you’ve ever felt you must keep moving, that you couldn’t sit still for another moment for fear your mind will catch up with the rest of your body;
Then, be the trail paved with gravel or dirt, you, like me, have walked at least a day, a week, month or in some cases even years in the shoes of the Old Leather Man.
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.
Tuesday, April 13, 2010
A Little Light in the Shoulders
A few days ago I went to the wedding of a life-long friend. Up until a few years ago his family lived in the house next door, and although they have moved and my friend and his new bride began their life together in North Carolina a while back, I still refer to them as neighbors.
I have apparently lost a good deal of weight in the past year. None of the four suits I auditioned from my closet even remotely fit. When I stepped into the one I last wore five years ago to my father’s funeral, I felt like the younger sibling of some All-American quarterback in an adorable attempt to fill big brother’s shoes.
The new gray suit I brought to the tailor garnered a confused look from the man, who I assumed would need only to hem the pants a bit. I walked out of the tiny dressing room and stood in front of a mirror as he looked on.
“You picked this size?” he asked.
I knew my thirty-four inch waist had become a thirty-two in recent times. He was kind enough to informed me that in reality meant thirty, and this only after a sizable meal.
“There’s no silhouette in the rear end, it just looks entirely too baggy.”
“And here. You see? In the crotch area, it’s just not filled in. Looks like there’s nothing there.”
…
I never did possess the gift of a shapely man-ass. It’s a fact of life that stares back at me from every reflective surface I walk by, so I certainly don’t require his reminder, or this new accusation that I may be a few utilities short of a belt. What almost fit about a half an hour prior appeared to me then as a gray, Michael Kors horse blanket draped over my shoulders.
He measured and made several white tics with his chalk, pinning the pants up and the seams of the jacket so that it may fit me a bit snugger. He took another suit off one of his racks and had me try it on.
“See, you’re more the European style,” he says to me, “That whole slender fit. You know, they’re always walking around and all that over there…” he says, both sardonic and quizzical.
“If I were to wear this my stomach and butt would just stick out, like a duck.” He laughs.
I simply file this away as further evidence that I belong somewhere else, and it affirms that the desired male aesthetic in this country is some perverse, bloated mixture of overweight and on steroids- something between an American athlete and the ape that watches the door of the Toon Town nightclub in Who Framed Roger Rabbit.
I hate dressing up, and always feel incredibly restricted in suits. During the wedding ceremony, the collar of my shirt felt like a dog’s leash yanked at by some phantom hand. The jacket prevented much arm movement above shoulder level and my feet soon started to hurt.
At our table afterward, I see that the groom’s seventeen year old cousin, also named Adam, is wearing the same make and designer suit that I almost did. He fills it out like an ad for Ralph Lauren formal-wear, and though he in no way deserves it for a moment I hate him immensely.
Then the talking begins.
The problem with gatherings like these is that you’re put in a position to tell everyone you haven’t seen in a while what you’ve been up to. This is done in large part by revealing what you haven’t been up to.
You have to try and invent yourself on the spot; inflate something that’s barely there, puff out your chest and stick out your ass while downplaying or obscuring the 800lb. omnipresent gorilla seated next to you: that, a year out of college you have yet to have anything creative published, struggle sometimes for air in an existential choke-hold of acute writer’s block, flayed concentration and doubt while wedged in a catch-22 trying to build a professional portfolio between upper-tier publications that refuse to work with inexperienced freelancers and that lower tier that refuses to use you and give you that experience.
You try not to feel unaccomplished and terribly dull to people. The things you like to talk about are for the most part projects half written or still planned and thus aren’t set down yet, much less published- they aren’t visual, and this is a world that lauds the visual over everything else. You can pull back a sheet from a canvas to show a nearly complete painting and there may be enough there to praise. Such an effect is lost when you refresh the word processor on your laptop, or withdraw the little black notepad from your coat pocket and show your scratched notes.
So you fall back to things that bore you half to death to even think about. You try and reap some kind of meaningful feeling from soil you never really planted the seed of your soul in to begin with. Turning your head then to that patch you did, you notice that nothing has grown because all of the tilling, work, worry and effort were placed elsewhere. I.E., you forgot about all the things you really do want and love to do. What a precarious position that is…
And while their overall positive, albeit generic endorsements of what you are hoping to achieve are somewhat uplifting, you feel additionally vain and narcissistic for worrying about yourself on a friend’s wedding day.
At any rate, the bride was beautiful and radiant and the groom more jovial than I’ve ever seen him, and when they were together you couldn’t help but find yourself tagged in their radius of genuine warmth and happiness. It dulled anxiety’s sharp bite.
I really should stop worrying so much.
...
Five years ago I went off broad shouldered to college, took my measurements, weighed my strengths and laid myself down into a certain mold. In the end I suppose it was like a promise I was making, or a pledge to something. Diploma in hand they pushed through a curtain onto a misty, rickety runway...
But things change. People change. Sometimes your own sense of self is so blurred you step into something that doesn’t fit you, and having walked around in it for so long you haven’t the faintest notion that you have grown out of it or never filled out at all. You very well may be drowning in it.
Sometimes you fall prey to what is, shall we say, fashionable and practical. You are at the whims of what everyone else deems the quintessential masculine look, or the color for all seasons, or what is acceptable for someone like you to step into for an interview, or wedding, or…anything. Life becomes a suit you may allow others to instruct you in how to stand and walk in, and you drive yourself crazy trying to contour to it.
Shoulders back—ok, now…I SAID SHOULDERS BACK DAMNIT!!
Maybe at some point, instead of altering my genetics to change for it, I will have the chance to tailor this life to me. Or find a suitable environment where I can slip into something a little less constricting; something that actually fits.
I can carry a metaphor for miles and miles, can’t I?
Bottom line is that I’m dusting off the sewing machine and readjusting my priorities. I want to have a portfolio strong enough to show an MFA program that their investment in me and my livelihood as a writer is a worthy one that will pay publication dividends for us both somewhere down the line. I need to devote my energy, my heart, mind and everything in between to it, and that is what I plan to do.
For people that don’t know, it can be very difficult. You are in every sense of the word making magic- conjuring something from nothing with mere words and concentration. Slip up, stall or lose that concentration due to some outside anxiety, and the spell fails. What you are left with is a messy chimera with the head of a toad and Oprah Winfrey’s fat ass. Or a room full of rebellious mops and pails.
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.
Wednesday, March 17, 2010
Love's Austere, and Lonely Offices
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.
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.
Wednesday, March 10, 2010
I Am Superman--And I...Can't do ANYTHING...
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.
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.
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