Monday, December 29, 2008

I Wanted To Grow Up and Be a Cowboy, Just like Neal.

What is being posted I put up first about a year ago. This is a story originally told to me by a friend of dubious character. As such I neither endorse anything in it nor adopt the world view of the narrator. However the tale was a bit of a hoot and so I acted as the scrivener because the details had to be captured in print. The details are a tad bit off center and it seemed necessary to write in down in his first person voice. While resting around the house I decided I needed to get some new content up on the blog. Because of the period of inactivity my surgery has caused it seemed right to revisit this and several other pieces.

The reason the earlier draft did not stay up is the reason the current one will not stay up long. The tale has a number of components that are problematic when looking at the world I live in to leave lying around anywhere, especially in cyberspace.



Among those of my generation that chose to read both popular and classic, certain writers seemed to be touchstones. Vonnegut, Didion, Thompson, Pirsig and Wolfe stand out as key parts of the then modern cannon. Whether right or wrong, emulation of the realties reflected out of the pages penned by these new apostles of hip and cool was oft attempted by my peers. It didn’t matter that these writers were chroniclers of iconoclasts who would have had no use for their books. It seems that imitation is an easier choice than forging a strong personal style based on true individualism.

Tom Wolfe in his appreciation of the Merry Pranksters, The Electric Kool Aid Acid Test, went on at length about a number of parties staged at Ken Kesey’s La Honda ranch. One of the wildest of these modern bacchanalias involved Kesey’s Pranksters hanging a huge banner out on the edge of highway that said WELCOME HELLS ANGELS not knowing if the wild bunch would show. But they did fully clad in their leathers and just oozing the insanity. Make no mistake the Hell’s Angels were not nice people, not then and not now. However in Tom Wolfe’s recounting that night was serendipity to the maximum. Terrible and frightening monsters interacted with the generation of love, peace and astral projection and it ended all right.

I had read the Acid Test when I was enjoying the summer between 7th and 8th grades. It probably wasn’t the best choice of reading for such an impressionable mind as mine. The image of Neal Cassidy flipping his hammer again and again and trying to go further, to go beyond and break the barrier that exists between true now and perception was electrifying.

As I remember and it has been years since I have read the book Cassidy was always trying to live in the now. He believed that the time it took our neural networks to convey optical and aural information to our brain separated us from true now.

The implication that I drew from Wolfe was positive one, not a cautionary one. Seemed the right route to me when Cowboy Neal was eating every drug he could find to break the barrier down and move him as close to the now as was possible. Maybe he got there before the end. Four days short of his 42nd birthday, Cassidy was found dead next to a railroad track outside San Miguel D'Allende, Mexico. He wandered out there in an altered state and died of exposure in the cold high desert night.

With what I had read in the Acid test (and the mantra of the Grateful Dead’s The Other One playing nonstop in the background) it was about a year late as a freshman in high school the first time I took LSD.

There had been a plan to make the experience as positive as possible. I was supposed to spend the weekend with some friends who were all ready to dip their toes in that swirling cosmic water for the first time together. One of these friends had just returned from Berkley with a belt filled with about a thousand hits of orange sunshine. Sunshine was good clean shit and about the best that could be found anywhere at the time. I paid my money down and waited for the appointed weekend.

Ain’t it how it goes that the best laid plans of adventurers get way laid? Due to my parents’ intervention I was not going to get to experience tripping in the Leary way. Set and setting, friends, music and a controlled environment has been all planned out. Well, it turned out that I had been signed up to go instead on a Baptist youth retreat with a hip young minister. My friends we not willing to wait an additional week to share their getting “experienced” with me so they gave me my hit to take with me and to do with as I pleased. In retrospect my choices made at this juncture were probably more in line with Kesey’s tactics than what was opted for by my friends.

This particular church retreat ran Friday and Saturday night at the beach home of one of the scions of our church. A big old early 20th century cedar shake covered place it had a large porch and faced the Ocean which was about ½ block away. At night after the traffic died down and the rowdies went to sleep you could hear the ocean’ waves from the house’s open windows

My memory is not strong but I think there were about twenty people on the trip excluding the hip young minister and some chaperons. The agenda was to spend some time on the beach, have a snack, hear a sermon and then go to the boardwalk for good clean Christian fun. This was Ocean City NJ mind you and there were no bars and no open intoxicants visible from the street were permitted.

What to do, what to do? I had the power of the universe wrapped up in a small pill inside my pocket just waiting like an E ticket to be used at Disney. On the other hand fire and damnation wrapped up in a fringe leather jacket was awaiting me in the speech of the relevant young minister. This would be followed by a quasi altar call; acid or salvation, the lady or the tiger? About mid-evening on Friday night as our speaker was telling us about the evil of heroin, (he took it once and puked), I dropped the tab. Quality control in the manufacture of LSD has always been a spotty affair. What I was about to discover was that I had taken enough acid for four people.

As I listened to exhortations for a submission to God’s will, the walls of that old beach house began to breathe. The breathing was slow at first but quickly picked up in pace. Then the textures of everything in the room seemed to take on an odd blurry but patterned quality. My tactile sense began to become confused. The carpet was beginning to feel like a gritty and sand filled soft butter. Raising his hands high the forceful zealot began to shout “Are you ready to commit your life to the love and care of Jesus Christ our savior?” About this time my brain in its own special way began to scream MAJOR MALFUNCTION. I needed to get out of that room and into the night air RIGHT THEN. There wasn’t a straight line or a right angle in that room anymore. The air wasn’t really air any more it was more it was more of a velvety liquid. It didn’t frighten me but it was way beyond what I thought was possible.

Clenching my rubbery knuckles I made it through the rap. Despite the waves of existence that were beginning to crest over me I did not give in to the altar call and thus did not have to do one on one prayer and counseling with anybody. Being this was a beach town the reward for enduring the impassioned sermon was that trip to the rides up on the boardwalk. We all gathered outside to get assigned rides, at least I think it was outside. As if fate were truly just trying to fuck with me, I drew a ride up to the boardwalk with the impassioned twenty something one time heroin using seminarian in his Triumph Spitfire.

A Spitfire is a two seater and sits real low to the ground. As a result it seemed to travel like a rocket even at low speeds. With buildings melting around me we flew down the road and the minister and I rapped. Listening to his tale about the smack again I confessed I had taken acid at some unspecific time in the past. He told me that the thought of dropping acid scarred him to death. As I watched the road in front of us that road turned into a snake, writhing and twisting and curling back to look me directly in my eyes. I remember muttering that LSD was scary stuff and that I would never take it again. The snake at this point in our conversation was looking at me with a bemused attitude. As we approached the boardwalk the car slowed and the snake evaporated.

Walking, well most likely shuffling up to the elevated boardwalk I took one look at the rides and knew I could not get anywhere near them, let alone on them. There was this gyroscope thing that had nine carts all twisting in circles. Three groups of seats would spin in a small circle and the bigger machine would spin the three sets of these seats in an even bigger circle. As I stood watching this machine lurch into faster and faster motions traces and lightning bolts were firing out everywhere. Surely all aboard that hell forged contraption would die and most likely I would be going with them when it crashed to the ground if I remained where I then stood.. I staggered out onto the center section of the boardwalk. Sweating and cold at the same time I tried to put one foot in front of the other.

It was at this point reality came completely unhinged for me. Suddenly and without warning I was floating seven stories above my body. I could see for miles out over the ocean. I could look down and see my body making forward progress along the boardwalk. It suddenly became apparent to me that I had to control my body much a puppeteer manipulates a marionette and boy that sucked. I wanted to watch the seagulls circling so close that I could touch them. Suddenly I was everywhere and everything all at one and it made total sense.

On the other had as a puppeteer I was failure for I stubbed my toe and the moment of “all being” was over. Back in my body and barely avoiding a face plant on those creosote soaked planks I realized that if I were to have any chance of surviving the evening I had to get back to the house. “Hey chaperon I have a stomachache so can I go back to the house?” At least that is what I think I said. Given what was going on in and out of my brain it could have been anything.

The rest of the evening had its moments. I tried to take a bath back at the house thinking cool water might help me hold my mental focus. As I sat in the bathtub for the life of me I could not figure out how to use the stopper. Once out of the tub I decided to read but I kept falling into the cover of the book I had opted to read. What I mean by this is that my consciousness was merging with the patterns on the book’s cover. And somehow before the night ended I wound up biting somebody on the ass. We were fully clothed and there was no sexuality involved but it seemed like a good idea at the time.

The acid while of a high dose was clean. I think I fell asleep. Who knows I may have just gone into a restive semi-catatonic state.. All I remember of this period was that I was mentally watching the witches from Macbeth stir phosphorescent orange cauldrons. When I came to (or reengaged in linear thought) sometime in the morning I went to the beach and watched the sun move across the sky. Inanimate objects were no longer breathing but I was pretty sure the sun was what was left of a nuclear explosion. And I was still alive.

Fuck Tom Wolfe that was some pretty scary shit.

The bottom line was that I didn’t feel enlightened. Hell, I didn’t feel like I had become one with the universe, but I was different and probably always would be from that moment on. To this day I wonder if there is a remnant of what my conscious self from the night before I took that dose is left in my body. I am not sure but hey I am not unhappy with what I have become. But I may not have needed acid to get here. And you know what else; I don’t believe everything that I read anymore. And one last thing I am pretty sure if you are going to be a real individual it doesn’t come from trying to imitate someone else.

Sunday, December 28, 2008

Give me my Blanket Damn It!

Okay, here is the deal. I haven’t written anything in a couple of weeks. I am going under the knife on Monday for gallbladder surgery. If I don’t post now I won’t be posting for another long period. Thus I will post a rough draft of a story I started a couple of years ago. Enjoy.

The island community of Ocean City New Jersey has a sign that proclaims itself “America’s Family Resort” The sign is clearly visible as you roll across the 34th Street bridge, across what was once salt marsh and brackish water. The crisp white and blue sign harkens back to the time when the legacy of the Methodists ministers, who in 1879 laid out the city as a retreat for the rejuvenation of the Christian soul and body, remained strong. When I was a boy spending my summers catching rays and body surfing Ocean City was closed for business on Sundays. The rides, the shops, everything but restaurants and newspaper stands were locked up tight on the Sabbath. Then as now, no liquor was sold on the island.

In the summers of the early 1970s the concept of family in America was feeling stress. The behaviors manifested by the younger members of our nation’s nuclear families were clearly not those that would have been endorsed by those 19th century Methodists. The disintegration of the traditional multi-generation clan style of family, the social rebellion of the 1960s and the pervasive influence of television had created a group of 14 to 20 year olds that were out of control, that were traveling the fringe. We were pushing the boundaries and entering into the borderlands that lay beyond the social mores of the time. Summer and suntan lotion just made it worse.

My family’s home was about 60 miles away from Ocean City. It was a farm town that in the summer was hot and dusty. There was nothing for a kid to do there except to work at the packing houses, packing, unloading, sorting produce and to get into trouble with the cash earned at those tough backbreaking jobs. In 1970 beer was cheap and pot was available. My father decided that after the summer of 1970 we should flee our hometown and go to the beach. Two specific things led to this. First was the gun incident. Second was the fact that my Mom found my pipe (commonly referred to in the then current lexicon as my bowl) in the bottom of my dresser. She didn’t know what pot smelled like or she would have been sure I was going to hell. But she did know there was not a right reason on God’s green earth that a 14 year old should have a pipe with a wire screen in it stashed in the bottom of his dresser under his shirts. The gun story was a bit more complicated I will set that out in a different post.

As a result of the incursion of violence and drugs into our family life my father decided we should spend our entire summers at the beach. I didn’t know how I was going to handle that. I knew nobody at the beach. My relatives spent all their summer down there, but I had hung out with them for any time with them since that had moved away from our home town when I was six years old. Up to then we had been thick as thieves.

My mother was a teacher. In the lat 1950s she was in her forties. In what must have been a great surprise to her, she got pregnant for a fourth time in 1955. In April 1956 I came along. Her sisters were in tune with this and five cousins on my mother’s side were all born within six months of each other. Mom took a couple of years off to make sure my initial rearing went okay. She then went back to teaching and I was dropped off at my aunt’s house with my cousin, Billy. Well no sooner did I get there then Jimmy was born, and then Dottie Mae. We played together. We ran about. We did all the things kids did and we were almost an inseparable living organism. Then they moved away. My Uncle bought his own funeral home about 45 miles away. But in the crowded east coast megalopolis they might as well have moved to the moon, they were gone. Twelve years later we would reawaken that friendship.

[Okay so this is an old draft of a story that I never finished. I should be honest and fill in the three paragraphs that would explain how when I got to the beach I fell in with my cousins and we were tied on so many levels it was hard to believe we had seen each other every day of our lives. I would also have to explain how we all worked at the same card store/gift shop/newspaper stand together and it was sort of like the Taxi sitcom, all nuts, all the time. Also I would have to work in how I developed a somewhat as they say now complicated relationship with a woman named Nan. Just go with it. My cousins and I were tight and their names were Bill and Jim. My complicated kind of love interest was Nan and she was far too hot for the likes of me. The final thing I would have to add is that we spent every single freakin’ day on the beach working on our tans. The rest of the story picks up when my cousins, Nan and I went to the beach. Oh my cousins lived half a block away from me and none of us lived more than 1 1/2 blocks from the water.]

So there we were ready to head to the beach. I was happy that Nan had deigned acceptable to spend some time with me on the strand of sand. Billy had Aunt Sugar’s big orange blanket. Well, we used it as a blanket. What it had been in its earlier incarnation was the bedspread for a full sized bed. It was an orange of the kind that it could have been used as an emergency signal. The edges had a fringe that was a series of white strings that were about two and a half inches long. It was unmistakably Aunt Sugars because there would be anyone else who would have something like this. Jimmy was going to join us at the water.

Towels, check, jug of water, check, beach tags, check. Off we went. The day was perfect and the beach was crowded. Once you worked your way through the suntanned bodies down to where the water was retreating you had a space, even this late in the day to lay out your towel. As you lay on your stomach your torso separated from the beach itself by the coarse orange material reading the tome of the season, perhaps it was Looking for Mr. Goodbar that year, or Jaws, for each had a year where they were everywhere, you would develop a little bit of perspiration. This body generated moisture would arise after about half and hour and would glisten and be uncomfortable. It was like nature’s own timer telling you to go swim, body surf, frolic and then return to reapply the sensually scenting tanning lotion and to lie on the other side of your body.

And idle on a beach towel is something when you are 16. It is forever and is filled with the promise of nothing and everything. On a beach towel on a warm day you can nap. You can talk about the world, politics, pussy, dope, whatever. You can take a slug of ice water from a thermos. You can watch the sun tanned girls go walking by. You can see a two year old run to the water and run back again. Or you can try and figure out what to do about your doofus-assed cousin who seems intent on getting everyone sent to prison.

As Billy, Nan and I lay there experiencing warm eternity on a summer afternoon, Jimmy finally found his way to the beach. Jimmy was different now and it wasn’t clear what had happened. When we used to spend time together in the little ranch house as kids Jimmy was smart, and he was apt to follow the normative behaviors expected of us all. But in the years since I had spent time with him something in the boy’s personality had dramatically changed. It was subtle and hard to discern at first but as time went on it became very clear. Somewhere along the way, albeit the result of one tab of Orange Sunshine too many, or maybe because of enzymes that didn’t coalesce correctly in his cranium, Jimmy had lost the ability to see the lines of normal behavior and color within them.

Jimmy no sooner had sat down on the towel than it became apparent he was in his non-conformance mode. As my cousin sat on the towel cross legged he proceeded to pull an ounce of marijuana, you basic bulging bagging of green leafy vegetation, from his swimsuit. None of the three of us noticed at first as we were engaged in number of polyphasic activities, conversation, people watching and being generally lost in sunny day bliss. Jimmy however was on a mission. Joint by joint he winnowed down the pot he had in the bag. One joint, two joints, five joints, ten joints; slowly but surely the little outcropping of Mt. Cannabis was arising from orange island of my aunt’s blanket.

Glancing down the beach I noticed that the beach wardens, the tag patrol was doing its rounds. Ocean City like most of the other lily white towns had instituted beach tag fees in the year before this incident. The fees were ostensibly designed to provide funds for beach clean up and maintenance. The real purpose was a bit more sinister. In essence the real purpose of beach fees was to keep the riff raff out. And let’s be specific hear, riff raff meant people of color, whatever color it might be other than white. The tags were effective to this end. The tags also provided a basis to have deputized folks walking down the beach keeping an eye out for the evil John Barleycorn. As I noted this was “America’s Family Resort,” and allowing the use of alcohol on the beach just wouldn’t be right. If the demon rum was a problem, how would you think that take a bunch of stoner teenagers openly flaunting the drug laws of our country. Remember Spiro Agnew was still the Vice President. Remember also that it had only been a year earlier that Casey Jones and White Rabbit had been banned from the airwaves by the FCC.

Noticing the impending arrival of terry cloth short wearing justice, I in hurried consultation with Nan and Billy made the executive decision to wad up my aunt’s beach towel with the joints inside and go. In my mind the safer course seemed to be, given the number of eyes around that might mention my cousin’s behavior to the beach patrol, getting the dope off the beach. Nan and I decided/ended up being the blanket bearers. The plan hastily formulated was that we would take the blanket back to my parent’s beach apartment and hide the pot back behind the house, possibly in the outdoor shower.

For those of you that have never had a beach apartment, they invariably have an outdoor shower of some kind. These can range from a coldwater affair with a watering can type of nozzle or they can be quite elaborate. The one behind my parent’s apartment was in between. It was basically a small shed with a bench and some storage, with the hottest water and a shower head that gave off needle fine spray. I used to luxuriate after a day on the beach taking a 20 minute long shower until my skin was lobster like red. The simple pleasures they are what count most in life, aren’t they?

Walking quickly Nan and I covered the distance between the beach and the house, it was a relief to turn into the side path that led to the back of the house. Not having been busted by the police, the beach patrol or any other authority we simply needed to get to the shower shed, stash the joints for Jimmy to pick up later and we would be in the clear. Walking quickly Nan and I would simply need to avoid any prolonged contact with my mother as we passed the screen door to the kitchen/dining room. These apartments were stacked four in a building and were long and thin. The living room was in front, followed by a bedroom, then the bath, then the kitchen then a second bedroom. The living room had a pull out couch and the place could accommodate up to six or seven people if they were appropriately stacked. The outdoor shower was appended behind the second bedroom

As we passed the kitchen, our luck tanked. Trying not to stop I heard my aunt, my beloved aunt’s voice, call out. The aunt talking to me was Billy and Jimmy mom and I had her dayglo orange beach blanket/towel wadded up in my hands. “Jay bird, where are you going and what are you doing with my towel?” Trying to be nonchalant I said hi and tried to pass by without engaging in conversation. My aunt called again and I could hear her chair shifting as if she might get up and open the door blocking our passage. “Jaybird, give me my towel.” “Aunt Sugar” I managed to choke out, “Billy and Jimmy are going for a long walk on the beach and they asked me to bring this up to the house. It is full of sand, let me shake it out in the back by the shower.” Silence and it seemed luckily no discernable movement by my aunt followed. This was a false reading of the reality of the situation and the moment’s respite did not last long.

I don’t remember what she said next but it became clear she was going to come after the towel if it wasn’t in her possession in the next fifteen seconds. There was no time to take it into the shower shed. Lacking a better plan I just shook the towel vigorously toward the house. Nan was slacked jawed. The joints went flying. Tapping against the back of the house the reefer sticks bounced gently toward the ground. About 18 joints lay within a foot or two of the back wall of the shed and the apartment. My plan was that I would now walk the towel into my aunt and pick up the joints later.

This heart attack on a plate would just not end. As I took my first step toward the side door I noticed the landlord descending the steps that came down from the second floor apartment. These steps ran just above the shower. Mr. Dee, the landlord seemed to be in a talkative mood. As I remember the situation now it seemed he wanted to be introduced to the bikini clad Nan. No mystery there. Nan’s young tanned, firm and vibrant body was about as easy on the eyes as any nubile beauty could be. Dee, letch or not, would have had a hard time ignoring such pulchritude. In a stroke of good fortune for us the old man driven by the small brain never took his eyes off Nan’s chest. Luckily this meant that he did not notice the 18 joints (or two years of jail and probation if you looked at it another way) lying about the back of his building. Having feasted his eyes, and a period of time having passed that was moving into the awkward realm of socially unacceptable staring, Mr. Dee turned and headed out back to where his car was parked.

I sprinted to the side door to give my aunt, the Sherlock Holmes of teen bad behavior her towel. I say that because she had busted me by finding my gallon of wine hidden among the garbage cans behind her beach house one time. I say that because she routinely checked the nooks and crannies of her garage and found my Mary Gin, on loan to my cousins, stashed in the rafters. A Mary Gin removed seeds and stems from pot to allow crackle free smoking. Handing her the clumped up but shaken out towel seemed to defuse the situation. Nan in the meantime gathered up the joints. She hid them out of sight in her now lumpy bathing suit bra top. With nary another word we headed out. I don’t remember where we went but anywhere but there was the destination.

Another near disaster narrowly avoided. Once again it was not my fault, and once again I was simply trying to avoid things from spiraling out of control at the hands of someone else. Yup, there in the heart of “America’s Family Resort” I had dodged another bullet.

Saturday, December 27, 2008

Fallen Angel and the Fabric of Life

Are you out there?
Can you hear me?
Can you see me in the dark?

I don't believe it's all for nothing.
It's not just written in the sand.
Sometimes I thought you felt too much,
And you crossed into the shadowland.

And the river was overflowing,
And the sky was fiery red,
You gotta play the hand that's dealt ya,
That's what the old man always said.

Fallen Angel
Casts a shadow up against the sun
If my eyes could see
The spirit of the chosen one.

Fallen Angel by J.R.Robertson

I was 28 years old and living in a dive of a house. White clapboard, the quarters were something out of most American student’s college days and by that I mean the place was big, cold and cheap. I had become an attorney but not much was happening for me professionally. When I was 28 the last really big recession was on and there were no jobs anywhere. Seems I really didn’t have the work ethic thing down either my choice of housemates kind of gives that away. At that time I was actually living with a punk rock band named Free Cheese. This moniker was derived from how Regan was dealing with the surplus of dairy goods then prevalent in our great nation with gifts to charity of butter and Wisconsin cheddar. As a side note the band members were all bi-sexual and they routinely took group showers. It was awkward/interesting on those mornings I decided I had to shave so as to be presentable for legal endeavors.

At the same time I was living in this odd Bohemian milieu, I was trying to climb the ranks of the Michigan Young Republicans. I was quasi living with a woman named Nancy. Her dream it seems to me in retrospect was to groom me to be a good GOP soldier and to live the June and Ward Cleaver lifestyle. Ms. Nancy’s aim was to move me up the political rungs and then she could stay at home and manage my career. She actually got me as far as being named a counsel to the Young Republicans for this state.

I know it is hard to believe, me, a young Republican. The best way to describe it is probably in the terms my dear beloved wife Francie it. This particularly odd chapter in my life can be ascribed to the politics of pussy. I was a Republican because it was getting me laid on a regular basis. Also Republican hospitality suites and fundraisers are much, much more decadent that Democratic ones. In this very odd time I even ended up a delegate to the state Republican convention. It took a long time but the branding iron marks on my flanks have faded.

Surely you wonder what has this got to do with the above piece of lyric well, it is like this. At the time I was in this ardor (lust)-induced lapse of political reason I was spending a great deal of time at Nancy’s farm house. It was a horse farm a distance away from the commune/band practice zone/law office. Well, while I was out there at her home one afternoon the telephone rang and it was one of my housemates telling me that my brother had called me.

For no particular reason, except maybe because the call had come midday, and this was in the days before unlimited minutes, I assumed something drastic had happened. My sole and unquestioned assumption was that my father had died. It took me forever to try and track my brother down because the nimrod I lived with hadn’t got the number right. All this time my eyes were tearing up and I was choking up because I knew my Dad was dead. Finally, not ever getting my brother on the line I broke down and called home, something I didn’t want to do.

When my father answered the phone I tried to put my best face on the call. We talked for a while about this and that. The conversation was on mostly nonsense kind of things. He had just come back from a trip to visit his mother. Understand my Dad was seventy-two then and his mother still lived alone in rural South Carolina and she still carried a rifle when she went out walking. She was a tough old broad at her 96 year old age.

Finally my father asked me why I had called. Remember this is midday and talk wasn’t cheap at the time. I laughed and said that this is going to seem kind of silly but I thought you had died. He got a good chuckle out of that. Eventually he gave me my brother’s phone number. Before I got off the phone I told him that I loved him and he told me he loved me back. Really, that is about the only time I remember him saying that to me. I am sure he must have said it before, but I don’t have any real memory of it.

Called my brother and it was some nonsense that he wanted. I don’t even remember any of the gist of it but it was really trivial. We talked a little while and hung up.

The next day I got another call at about the same time at the same place telling me to call my brother. Got a hold of him real easy this time. This time the call was much, much different. He was in tears and was losing it. As I am sure you have guessed long ago he called to tell me my father had died that morning.

Do I believe there is something that occurs after we die or near the time we die that is different from the fabric of everyday life? Yes. The above incident does not stand alone for me in this regard as to my reaching a yes on that question, but it sure went a long way toward it. Yes I believe there is something more, something mystical going on when we pass and thereafter. Like in the old Mike and Mechanics song, In the Living Years, or a that Larkin poem about the coal mine disaster, there is some rent in the fabric of time and if we are at the right place or in the right mental space something happens. Maybe we sense something has changed. Maybe well feel compelled to make a phone call out of the ordinary. Maybe at that moment we see somebody now dead carrying the eggs they found on their way into the mine.

Do I have deeply held religious beliefs, absolutely. Do I proselytize, not really. Only by living do I communicate my belief structure. My mother has also died. Her death was different and not the sudden unexpected death of my father. Hers was a long, lingering decline. I am an orphan now but I am connected with a much broader universe than I ever thought possible.

Oh, why I am posting this, my father would have been 97 tomorrow.

Thursday, December 11, 2008

A Lecture and a True Moment

Tonight the person with whom I usually walk about half the way home from the bus stop with did not make her appearance on the bus. Without her my walk would be totally solitary. Having the totality of my walking time to myself I decided to click on the iPod portion of my iPhone. With no obligation of any kind to converse I could listen to the free Berkley lecture on modernist writers that I had down loaded earlier in the day. There are a series of lectures that apparently make up the bulk of the lecture portion of a survey course running late 1800s, Henry James and the like to the end of the 20th century, available for free at the iTunes store.

As I listened to the broadcast of this class it reminded me about how much I loved being in a college lecture hall. I was always there in my seat waiting to see what happened next. Almost all of my courses held this fascination for me. The speaker on this particular downloaded lecture was talking about the syllabus and saving money on books and the whole nine yards. Gosh what a blast of remembered moments.
It was when the professor talked about whether to buy an expensive anthology book that I hit that moment when I decided picking this particular course to listen in on made sense; it had had value if you would. The prof initially said something along the line of you can cheap out in certain ways instead of buying the text but if writing and literature turn out to be your muses than you will want to build a library. In such a library this book would be a good starting book for your collection. It was what he said next that made me smile that deep knowing smile. “Books are time capsules. You will remember where you bought them. You will remember what was going at the time you acquired them and what your life was like.” Wow, I am so there.

Ruminating here last night I talked about Kurt Vonnegut. I can tell you where I bought most of those Avon paperback editions of Vonnegut’s book, the Sun Rose Book Store in Ocean City on the north end of the island. This place was bright and cheery and run by some Deadheads. They burned incense and had books that were outside the mainstream. They carried Naked Lunch and Eyeless in Gaza.

The books I picked up here were my treasured summer reads. I spent my own money earned at Kurly Kustard on the Boardwalk (located between Ninth and Tenth Street) buying those books. My hair was longer and blonder and I was 50 pounds lighter. I hadn’t had cancer but I had a tan. Sitting on the beach in the midday sun my fingers would stain the edges of the pages because my digits had sun tan lotion residue permanently in the pores.

Ocean City summer breezes were warm and the sun was hot and a million people surrounded me as I lay on my blanket. Despite the cacophony of the Frisbee throwers, and the sand castle builders I was there in the cool slaughterhouse basement right next to Billy Pilgrim waiting for the firebombing of Dresden to end. Racing those novels I became unstuck in time and rode the wormlike trail of my life forward and backward. Funny thing I didn’t see this part of my life as I time travelled.

On the other end of the island that is Ocean City was the other bookstore. It was a place called the Bookateria Two. This was a used bookstore that had stacks and stacks of books from floor to ceiling. They had that musty smell that everything paper acquires at the beach. This was a place that was the anti Sun Rose. It was run by a crusty old guy who wanted his money. Bookateria Two was a place where I picked up books I felt I needed to read on the cheap. Shakespeare and Hardy were my favorites.

Again I would be sitting out on the beach working through those books leaving oily sandy grit on every page. What did I care these were used books. Over the course of the summer I worked my way through the old Folger editions of the comedies. As You Like It, Twelfth Night and a Midsummer Night’s Dream. If you don’t remember the old Folger editions of these books I can testify to you that they were a pain in the ass to read. On each page there would be expressions of Elizabethan English that would need a note. The notes were either in super fine text in a footer or in some of the books they were located on the backside of the page you would be reading. As a result you either you had to read the micro text (and remember I have never had better that 20/50 vision) or you were flipping back and forth. The saving grace was that after about one volume you knew the phrases and did not have to constantly be referring to the notes.

On the whole the Shakespeare has held up better in my memory. The themes were more universal, the motives more consistent with human nature taking it in a long view. I still love Vonnegut, I reread Cat’s Cradle within the past year and the plot was still a hoot. But the twists and turns in the Bard’s plays still stand out when I think back on what I learned on the beach.

I still have those books. I have hauled them from house to house. They have been boxed and unboxed any number of times. They have been shielded from yard sales on several occasions. Each time I look at a title I do remember where I got it and what was going on in my life. Hopefully there will be more in this lecture series for my brain to fix on, but this particular comment was a wonderful remark.

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

Blue Soup

I am sitting in my dining room deciding if I should start writing or do something else entirely. Life is so short. After a day at the office and the basics of doing laundry and washing the dishes I just kind of want to chill. TV beckons. However TV leaves me with one less hour in my life with nothing gained for it. Downtime is okay, but falling into the blue soup of one hour serialized dramas isn’t.

Blue soup is a reference to one of my favorite writers, Kurt Vonnegut. In one of the earlier books a character was kept hostage by an indigenous people who kept feeding him blue soup. The soup was some kind of narcotic that sapped the character of will power and the drive to do anything. Vonnegut always had characters that were fun.

My favorite of Vonnegut’s rotating cast was the secret agent in Mother Night who was so good at his cover job as a PR man for the Third Reich that the people who sent him weren’t sure if he wasn’t more of a detriment that an aid to the cause. Odd as they were there was truth in many of Vonnegut’s characters and truth in Vonnegut bon mots. I still think his comment that you should be careful of what you pretend to be because that is what you will become is about as true as it gets.

Having considered the options I think I will read. The Hunchback of Notre Dame calls. Finally after several weeks I figured out where I had laid the book down. TV versus a good book, well hell the book wins ever time.

If it is cold my gloves must be ugly

Wednesday, December 10, 2008

It must be my age. Walking home tonight in 20° weather just seemed colder than it should have. I mean I really felt like my teeth would begin to chatter at any moment.

Walking in the cold has some good points. There were more colorful Christmas lights out on the houses tonight and the moon came up with a ring around it. As I looked up at that full moon so luminous I was reminded about a song on an old James Taylor LP. The chorus was about a circle ‘round the moon. It was on the eponymous album he put out on Apple Records. I have a copy of it still and have only seen it on CD a couple of times. His circle round the moon song was just a reworking of I Know You Rider that pretty much everyone was covering in the late 1960s. Still his version was awful darn pretty with that lovely voice he had back then.

Right now I have as part of my cold winter gear a pair of old leather work gloves. Though not incredibly warm these tanned cow hides do keep some of my hands’ heat in. Stained with paint and dirt from several years use nobody else in my family will wear them. We started out this cold spell with 6 pairs of gloves and now we are down to three and a half pairs, not including my too ugly to grab leathers. I get the feeling that most of my clothes will be picked this way over the next several years. With Primus being 5 foot 9 inches tall at age thirteen he will be wearing large coats and sweaters and the like soon. Anything with an element of style will disappear as his need dictates. Note to me if buying for self buy warm but really ugly.

In the fall my walks were spent listening to KYW radio in Philly over AOL radio on the iphone. I have given up on this because the service is really spotty. The Pandora service works much better and sends me off in new musical flights of fancy. As I was listening to Tom Waits radio the other day they slipped in a song by Morphine. I liked it. Now I have Morphine radio programmed in. No matter how I try to make the walk more interesting, music, looking at Christmas lights, etc., it is still cold. No matter how I deny it I am getting older and less resilient. So it goes.

Tuesday, December 9, 2008

Cough


Leaving my office early today I took a cab to a small tastefully nondescript professional building. Nestled among other tastefully designed and well kempt buildings on a curving suburban drive with a small (statutorily defined to be so) sign that said Urology Associates is my destination. December again, eh, it must be time to go see the dick doc. This is pretty much two years to the month since I was diagnosed with prostate cancer. Time is speeding by and 21 months have passed since the surgery to remove the malignancy. Time and caution dictate that the appointed moment for a checkup is here.

No matter how you try and deny it, once you are branded with the big “C” diagnosis you life is changed. You may wrap the devil word cancer up in clinical terminology, things like stages and grading of cells but it doesn’t alter the diagnosis. You may shove your awareness into a mental box bearing the label, “Prostate Cancer Takes a Long Time to do its Damage”, but you still live with the fact that you have/have had/may still have cancer.

Cancer is pretty much in your face when you have it. Addressing it involves calm and persistence in seeking out information and making decisions. You need to be this way when every part of your being is screaming “I don’t want this to be happening”. Twisting insides your guts are saying “Run Away, Run Away” but there is no place to run. Then there is the mental check list like making that occurs like, I lived next to the world’s largest chemical plant. My aunts, uncles, sisters, brothers, father, friend’s father all worked in that cauldron of chemical suffixes and prefixes soaking those chemicals into their cellular goo for decades before I was I was even born. My aunts, uncles, etc., all came down with cancer and fought it, some living and some dying. Genetics and location, location, location that is why I got cancer that and maybe the two packs of cigarettes a day I smoked during my early twenties.

Upon admittance to the tastefully decorated but calmingly subdued office I hand over my insurance cards, accept my plastic cup and head into the bathroom to provide what I hope with be an acceptable but unremarkable sample. Completing that action I go out and note the sign that says my doctor is behind schedule by a half an hour and I match that up with the fact I am twenty minutes early. Then I sit down to read the informative literature left by the drug representatives and equipment manufacturers. Did you know there was a penile SST syndrome? I didn’t. It looks exactly like what it sounds like.

Waiting sucks. Waiting for the doctor on follow up day sucks even more. Waiting is just playing a game of dodge ball with the unknown hangman. You don’t do the blood work for these visits until you are there for the encounter. As a result you will not know what is going on in your blood for several days afterwards. In that my draw was at five p.m. on Tuesday and the local lab turnaround on PSA tests is three days I most likely will not know until Monday what my status is. While the doctor may smile and make nice talking about favorite ethnic foods, the constituent parts of my blood won’t pull or seal the trap door on the floor of the gallows until next Monday.

Quite possibly I am in this mood because of the weather. Dark gray and white clouds race across the sky. Now what is coming down is a cold rain. Last night it was sleet, snow and ice pellets. By midnight tonight it will be snow again with two more inches on the ground by morning. Gloomy skies and chilled bones make a trip to this tasteful doctors’ office suite just that much more ominous. It may be always sunny in other cities, but it is never sunny here.

Reading back on this it sounds as if I am depressed, I’m not. So far I have been cancer free and that makes me happy. My hope is that come Monday I will still be cancer free. It is just that the journey on this afternoon on this day reflects back with gray overtones. This is just a part of my life, it is not my life.

Thursday, December 4, 2008

One Hundred-with a thank you to Chris

One Hundred was meant to be written last week. Now One Hundred is actually One Hundred and Two. But last week I was travelling and so this didn’t end up being the centennial blog entry. Back in the USA I have time to write and so here it is.

Last year my dear friend Chris made an aside that changed how I looked at writing. Chris is probably one of the most insightful and learned people I know, and I really do know a good number of learned people most of whom are really much smarter than me. Well Chris noted during one of our long back and forth e-mail conversations that a blog seemed like it would be the perfect forum for my writing. She implied it might free up some of the time I had spent in writing long e-mails to numerous people so as to let me focus my ideas for my prose. Blogging versus writing individual e-mails would create time to write longer stuff; it would let me set out clearly the things I often felt I needed to say.

Clearly I had heard of blogs. Hell I even knew one person who actually wrote one. Still when she first proposed the blog idea I was hesitant. A blog would be a commitment. If you put something out there people will come back to it. You could end up being judged not just for what you are saying but things like the continuity of your commentary as well.

During the months before the Chris suggested the blog concept to me I had been trying to journal. I would buy these notebooks on clearance from the local hyper mart. Cheap was good. Small was good,. With an inexpensive 5 x 8 inch journal in my hand I could capture the wild ramblings bouncing around in my aging mind. When I first decided to journal I thought it would be wonderful because I could capture everything I was thinking of. With a small unobtrusive notebook that I could carry easily wherever I was going, I would capture that part of the world my eyes surveyed.

Each morning as I waited for the bus I would write down some thoughts. Initially it was mundane stuff. Things like “January 30, 3007-It is cold today as I wait for the blue cat (our bus company is CATA and the logo is well a blue panther).” Duh, it is always cold in January in Michigan. Clearly I was not covering any earth shattering territory there. Yeah bon mots like these weren’t going to really free my soul and expand my mind when I reflected on them. While I had some thoughts that maybe journaling wasn’t taking me where I wanted to go, it did show me not to be afraid to write or edit. It also showed me I could stay with something that required daily drafting. When I considered these facts against what a blog required I decided to give it a go.

One of the things that anyone who wants to “write” struggles with is finding an authentic voice. Well, authentic and comprehensible would probably be a better description. Okay, authentic, comprehensible, interesting, and not too inflammatory or caustic. When I sat and thought about what I wanted to talk about almost all of it was a recounting of anecdotal events. When I go back over them most of my memories as they are saved in my odd little brain are funny. The flip side to that is that a goodly number of them while funny are seriously profane and usually involve illegality or sexual impropriety in one way or another.

Still the more I thought about it the more I realized that what I wanted to say was somewhat of a hybrid of the National Lampoon (1970s edition) and Jean Shepherd’s old radio show. My story was Animal House told by the narrator of a Christmas Story. A strange mix admittedly, but then so is my personality. At work my language is ragingly profane. Still, since my children have been in this world I have not used anything stronger than damn in their presence. Okay I may have slipped a couple of times, but really not many at all. My mind is drawn to the absurd, but my career demands normal. The product of these kinds of battles are what flows out onto this pages.

Doing this blogging thing has raised my comfort level with writing and maybe expanded my ability. Trying to create frequent posts that aren’t just rehashes of what I have said before has made me work to be an editor and to think creatively about what I really want and have to say. Maybe I will take a chance and tell a couple of the more profane, inflammatory and downright bizarre stories that I have percolating. Maybe not, but something will always keep flowing out onto these pages.

I appreciate everyone who reads this. I also appreciate Chris, she sent me on this journey.

Wednesday, December 3, 2008

The World We Live In


12-03-08 Part III

So the annual trip to the great white north has come and gone. The trip was both uneventful and illustrative of the times we live in. As we were on our way to the border crossing between Port Huron Michigan and Sarnia, Ontario the news on Mumbai was breaking. As a result of that tragedy our crossing of the border into Canada was a challenge. Little details that in the past would never have mattered were questioned and double checked. The border guard was much more aggressive in directing the flow of the questioning than I have ever seen out of Canadian border agent. Me I got chewed out because I had not signed my passport.

Even with the 9th degree interrogation I really didn’t have a problem with it. Being a student of both the U.S. and the Canadian constitutions I am fully aware of the diminished expectation of privacy and the minimal level of rights at the border. Who knows what is in that crumpled up cigarette pack on the dashboard? Had I known about full scope of the dire situation of the Mumbai hostages I would even have been better prepared to face the challenge at the border.

Primus surprised me on this trip. There are times when I just don’t know what motivates his behavior. While he will eat fruit, he despises strongly concentrated scents. As a result he will eat an apple but not an apple flavored Jolly Rancher. Thus it came as a surprise to me when we were at a restaurant specializing in highly spiced foods when he opted for the goat curry. Despite the highly aromatic Indian spices he without hesitation tore into it with gusto. I tried some of it and it was better than jut okay. It was kind of like lamb in flavor. Still for such a picky eater to just decide to go for the goat, well like I said it left me wondering. ASD has levels and degrees of function and impact. Still, the willingness to try new food is a good thing.
The other brother, Secundus left me wondering too. While we were in an art gallery Primus was walking from picture to picture taking it all in. One of things about ASD is they are very visual learners. Graphic art really attracts the boy. As Primus was wandering about Secundus had found a stack of Toronto Life magazines. Apparently one of the creative staff there had done some artwork for this issue and thus the complimentary copies. As the rest of us perused the gallery’s offerings Secundus sat and read. When a number of minutes had passed I went over to check on what he was reading. Oh yeah, I really needed to see that he was 90% of his way through a story about the first honor killing in Toronto. He was irate and indicated that it was an outrage that this could have happened. Yeah left to his own devices Secundus is like a laser guided missile seeking out challenging materials. The thing is that he got it. He spent the rest of the day riffing on why we let antiquated ideas of religion limit our lives as opposed to love and understanding.

Yeah, nobody told me it would be like this. Nobody.

A Season of Light


Wednesday, December 03, 2008-Part II

Cold has come and the ground is icy. With no money in the public coffers the streets and sidewalks are not being cleared. Walking home last night took about 15 minutes, double the normal duration of my traverse of the route. Negotiating the route was a bit of a no win choice, walking in the streets was slippery and treacherous for large sheets of ice were everywhere, walking on the sidewalks meant finding the path under the hard pack snow. It does not seem like this will get better anytime soon. Listening to the Harvard guy who was declaring that we were in a recession left me feeling like it may be five years before anything actually gets better, if then. Thus get used to nature and make your peace with it. Drive slower, walk slower and maybe you will arrive intact. At the more leisurely pace maybe you will notice some of the details of life's fabric, not just the blurred patterns.

It is however the season of light. Advent is here. Each night as I walk home the houses along the way have more and more decorative lights. One block on my usual route is a group of homes that appear to have been built to resemble a street from a small 18th century English town. The lights on these brick sided lead paned windowed dwellings are tasteful and understated this year. The houses are just basically outlined in the white/grey LED lights that have grown popular in the last two or three years. The effect is ethereal in the early evening. Advent, the coming of light, even in tough times the little celebrations of hope can cheer one’s soul.

Whats Up Up North?

Wednesday, December 03, 2008 Part 1

Over the years I have been amazed at any number of governmental machinations. For me the real interest in this stuff kicked in during the Watergate era. I was in my mid-teens then and my mind was still open to new things. (Quit snickering I know what you are thinking and you are all perverts).

At that time I watched the hearings going on in D.C. with a passion. John Dean, Sam Ervin, G. Gordon Liddy et al. made for fascinating television. However the process really intrigued me. The impeachment process was arcane, ancient and rarely used and thus had the mystery and aura of some almost forgotten rite of the ancient church. Cool. The impeachment hearings probably had as much impact as anything else on my ending up a lawyer.

Nixon’s imbroglio led me to take probably five courses in total on constitution law. My law school paper (read thesis lite) was on the then and still hot button issue of how to interpret the Constitution. No matter what political stripe you all know the battle lines. The choices are between reading the Constitution with an eye only toward the original intent of the framers and the alternative of accepting the Constitution as living document with lots of penumbras and the like. I still go with a principled living document theory in case you must know where I stand on this issue.

After a time though, I found myself drawn to the constitutional battles of our neighbor to the north. Canada has been struggling to resolve issues that we settled long ago in cases like Marbury v Madison and in places like Gettysburg and Selma. Documents like the Charlottetown and Meech Lake accords fascinated me. (FYI-These were attempts to deal primarily with division of powers issues left unresolved as to the status of Quebec when the Canadian constitution was repatriated from Britain).

Right now the government of Canada is a minority government and it looks very likely to fall soon. There is all sort of political intrigue with opposition parties trying to form a coalition that will work and will allow them to form a new government. There are arcane political procedures being brought into play to try and avoid a new government or a new election. Has anyone here ever heard of a prorogue before? I hadn’t. If you want a diversion from the oppressive economic news we are facing just give this link a check and see what I am talking about.

http://www.thestar.com/default