Okay there was this one guy, and I admit this is a digression from my usual metaphysical waxing, who told me a sex related story in the course of my job. Remember when he is talking to me I am trying to decide if this guy is ever going to drink again.
The story began after the pro forma start of the hearing stuff had been conducted. The pro forma stuff means asking if his conviction dates for drunk driving were valid and whether he had every injured any person while intoxicated. After these questions were answered I had asked the gent when he realized he had a problem with alcohol.
The facts were pretty clear the gentleman previously had a raging addiction to alcohol. He was in bars most every night. He drank Jack and Coke to the point where he lost track of how many he was drinking. Life was paycheck to paycheck and most of that check was going into his bar tab. The claim was made that since he quit drinking he was able to buy a house and a small fishing boat.
The guy was not unattractive. A construction worker had that wild but buff roughneck look. Well anyhow this stud had spotted what he described to be the hottest woman he had ever seen in a bar. This Venus (backlit with the alluring glow of a neon sign flashing Budweiser) despite his proffering of free drinks and a line of well polished talk didn’t want anything to do with him. According to his testimony the spurning of his advances made her ever more the prize.
Over the next several months the gentleman chased this woman from bar to bar. Each time he ran into her he tried all the techniques he could muster. Despite flattery, free drinks, the application of the cold calculated logical approach (your attractive, I’m attractive, it could be fun), hard to get, etc there was still no action. But still he persisted.
Eventually something clicked. Maybe the lass developed an interest as to what this wild man-child had to offer under the covers. Maybe for her it simple a lack of other suitable options on a given night, but something happened. Whatever that something was one night she gave in and took him home with her. As he told the story he related he was clear in stating he did not know what had worked the trick. He told me was very, very drunk that night and the hours before the bar closed were very, very foggy.
I was curious and so I bit. I asked how if he had “gotten lucky” after so much drinking did that become the epiphany for him about his alcoholism. The gentleman looked down and responded that it wasn’t really that night but rather the next morning that he realized he was a raging out of control drunk.
At this point the Petitioner’s voice got kind of hushed and his eyes began to tear up. He told me that when he awoke it was kind of cool and the light was very, very bright. The bed was not very comfortable either and no shifting around seemed to make a difference. He decided he had to get up.
Opening his eyes that morning the storyteller realized he was naked and lying on the front lawn of the woman’s house. Strewn about him were the sheets from the bed. At this point the storyteller was absolutely almost inaudible. Apparently according to his telling of the tale what had happened was that he, having had his way with the woman, fell into a deep sleep. The sleep was so deep that when Mother Nature called as she is wont to do after many, many drinks he did not arouse himself to seek relief in the bathroom. Nope he just let the flow go, right there, yep in her bed.
Apparently he was so out of it that the pissed off (pissed on?) lady of the house was able to drag his virtually comatose body out to the lawn without his having due cognition of what was going on. After depositing his spent unclothed carcass there she then stripped the sheets and threw them out on the lawn too. Apparently she did not feel a need to cover him in his raw altogether state.
I was stunned. I really didn’t know how to respond. There were some questions I would have liked to have answered like were his clothes out there. Where were his keys? How did he get home? Why hadn’t the police found him by the time he woke up? You simply don’t ask these questions of someone who is sobbing. What you do is accept as true that this moment was a fulcrum that moved him into sobriety.
The air inside my office is cool. The computer fan hums low so low as to be almost imperceptible. My ears are ringing a bit more than they usually do. When I left my space to go get lunch the air was hovering around the freezing mark. Such are the days of March.
It is in this period between and betwixt the real spring and the harshest of winter that I long most for warm sun. In Michigan we can have many false springs. On the days of promise bright little dewdrop like flowers will appear. On days of despair they will then be buried under six inches of snow. These blossoms will survive and reappear again. Song birds will be present suddenly one day and then gone the next. The trilling will reappear.
On days like this I want to scream and rant. On days like this I want to be a shaman and do a dance that will bring the season of birth into full force. I rage at this in-between. Cabin fever? You think so, eh? Me too.
I am the wisest being alive, for I know one thing, and that is that I know nothing. Socrates in Plato’s Apology.
I am as part of a team of two people attempting to raise two children. Both are gifted and both are flawed. My guess is that these qualities make them somewhat like their mother and myself. No I am not implying we are smarter than anyone else but we did have our moments in our youth.
Both of our lads have always scored highly on standardized testing. The youngest was among the top 200 scorers in his age bracket on the ACT one year in our state. The oldest is the kind of kid where teachers and administrators pull you aside and say in a sotto voce whisper “He is really smart”. His ACT scores were solid but he has issues with testing. For ASD kids it is one and done and they don’t want to go back or to play to a teacher’s view of how things should be done. But when you talk to him you get it, he knows shit. The younger one never stops talking and if you parse out the Kerouac like stream of consciousness ranting you will see he knows shit too. Each knows different stuff. But they have a wealth of stuff inside those very different heads of theirs.
The child for whom the whispers come is on the Autism Spectrum. The child for whom the top end of the test scores come so easily is Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder. A gaze into their respective eyes reveals chaos and quiet, one has an impenetrable, inscrutable soul and the other a histrionic and hyperbolic persona. Exemplary of the challenges with these two distinct persons is that in each case messages from the school that are to come home to us are lost. In one case they are buried in the deep locker of the mind and in the other case they fly away tied to the legs of birds of fire circling in the air until all elements of the message are consumed in the fire and the light.
What was there that ever prepared me for this? My parents were old and their style of parenting was tired and laissez faire. In rural 1960s America this was probably okay. The risks then were beer, pot, baby making and blowing shit up. Today the risks are neural, viral and environmental. Harder nastier drugs abound. TV shows images of sex constantly and they knew by 6th grade what a hummer was.
I think that maybe I am too old to be raising even a normal teenager in today’s world let alone two very high needs boys. At various times I have been told one child has abused his computer privileges on the scale that the head of the school’s IT department has noticed and the other has melted down in class lying on the floor refusing to move. Ah the joys of youth. Give me the “I caught him drinking beer out behind the barn with those other punks” any old day.
Robert Thurman has said, “Wisdom and compassion are ultimately inseparable, wisdom being the complete knowledge of ultimate selflessness and compassion being the selfless commitment to the happiness of others.” Cleary I am not a wise being, I am fallible, I am confused and I am selfish. But I have been presented with diverse charges and in some senses challenging adversaries. But I care so much for my children. I really get the second part the “selfless commitment to the happiness of others.” Don’t most parents? I promise to live this day with my eyes open watching them take on the world I failed to conquer. Oh how little I know about what to do next.
Once we abandon the belief that there is a more spiritually useful moment than the one we are in, we have embraced our life and infused it with the energy for awakening.
- Rodney Smith, "Undivided Mind"
It is very hard to view a single moment in life as spiritually useful. Walking to the break room to get a cup of coffee seems so completely unspiritual. Even harder to accept is that a series of mundane moments spent in a vanilla box building doing office work is spiritually useful.
How can the acts of opening the door to the break room, finding my cup, pouring the coffee replacing the carafe on the heating element, walking out of the room, closing the door and returning to my office mean anything? But any sense that these acts are just killing time with insignificant matters isn’t true.
The coffee I use is a decaffeinated blend. I buy that because my cardiologist has told me that caffeine can cause my coronary arteries to spasm. The brand of coffee is Biggby’s Best. I prefer Starbucks blend but I buy Biggby because it is a local company and the owner is a friend to me. More importantly his son is a very dear friend to my son.
Each time I get up I am getting exercise and I sorely need that. This winter more than any other in my life I have been a couch slug and the weight has just piled on. The motion moves my blood and the blood moving makes my mind clear. The coffee maker is not mine and so I owe thanks to the person who brought it in, our clerical person here. She doesn’t even drink coffee. Her brining the coffee maker in is an act of unwarranted kindness.
On the way to and from the coffee pot I may run into someone who is suffering or fretting or otherwise in need of help or affirmation. By either Christian or Buddhist tradition I have to acknowledge them and offer something. I should do it if can help or perhaps lighten their emotional burden in any manner even if it is just by listening. The Lutherans go with “Into pain and suffering you are born…” and the Buddhists go with suffering as being the most basic of the elements of human experience. We are charged in either faith with working toward the elimination of suffering.
Being aware of the meaning of each step I take this morning, each step we take this morning, really does infuse our life with a sense of awakening albeit very small and slight. Sometimes that is all you get. Appreciating the complexities of what it took to put me in this place with a cup of hot dirty brown water in hand talking about someone’s grandson who is struggling, well this is embracing life. It is enough.
There is a genre of television program that I like. These different serialized tales have a number of similar elements. while I will identify a number of the elements the core of the tale each tells really comes down to one factor which I will touch on at the end of this rant.
The elements usually involved a fallen hero or heroes. These people are damaged goods or simply imperfect people like John on Person of Interest, Sherlock on Elementary and Kate on Castle. Frequently the lead characters are involved with either technology or other fantastic elements that lie sometimes just outside of the things mere mortals like myself have or will ever have access to. On the tech side there are/have been programs like Continuum, Fringe and Person of Interest. On the fantasy side there are teleplays like Grimm and Once.
These shows are populated by usually buxom women (lots of them blond or ginger) most of whom have a propensity to show their cleavage. I can’t think of a single one of these where there has not been a contrivance to get the good looking star down to her skivvies at some point in the series run. These shows are also populated by handsome and usually buff men. Again virtually all have come to some plot point that has mandated some main male character to show off a solid buff physique wearing only his boxers. The women are usually subjected to this diminished state of attire as part of an escape in cold weather (and water be it sweat or the East River) but for the men it usually involves a gym stakeout or a meeting at a swimming pool or sauna (mob types like saunas I have been led to believe).
Most of the story lines have some degree of sexual tension. This usually involves someone to who the hero or heroine can best be said to be a frenemy. There is almost always a third wheel who behavior is erratic or unreliable, think Fusco on Person of Interest. And there are other elements like soft retro lighting in scenes where back story is told and harsh cold lighting in situations where the outcome is theoretically dubious.
The core of each of these stories is this. In every situation the lead character is threatened by a malevolence that is vaguely personified. In some series this evil is clearly identified but is an ongoing unseen and perhaps unnamed character. In Castle it is the shady group that killed Kate’s mother. In Grimm it is the royals. I almost forgot the Mentalist’s Red John. In others of thee programs the evil changes from week to week with the hero vanquishing the current foe while still knowing that something else dark and sinister will arise. In every story the hero is burdened by imperfect, inexact knowledge. It is the role of that imperfect knowledge to keep us tuned in for the full hour.
My thought is that I (we, perhaps) are drawn to these programs by a feeling that our lives are lived with imperfect knowledge and that we like to see someone win a battle or two against the malevolence that pervades our world. When we are subjected to arbitrary and capricious dictates about how we are to perform our jobs or how our kids’ education must be planned or how we have to deal with some part of government’s interaction in our lives we feel a dark presence over which we are powerless to respond to. Thus I (we) subconsciously empathize and root for these characters. We have too often lost often due to the missed e-mail, the notice not removed from the backpack or being out of the group that is in the loop. We want to kick somebody’s ass and when those folks on TV do it we feel glee vicariously.
Those bastards at the networks are smart and manipulative.
Oh yeah we might watch this stuff because we wished we had done or could do the kind of acrobatic, anarchic and authority defying stuff they do. Perhaps it is because we wish we could drink as much as they do (and never have a hangover) or have as much rough sex as they do (without any consequences). Maybe it is just because we like to see beautiful people living lives as scantily clad rich people. Right now my favorite is Justified.
It struck me as important that this milestone with music. I have opted for one of my all time favorites. It has all the themes I need, hope, despair, Michigan and the Soo.
Also I have refreshed the Blog format. Any thoughts? Is it easy to navigate, attractive?
Writing this blog has become a journey for me. This trip a twilight passage through the straits in an old tramp steamer was an unintentional one to say the least. It began with a stray comment in a coffee shop from my dear friend Chris. Over several years she had listened to the manager of the store and I engage in that great American tradition of narrative story telling. Mixed in to the twisted and confabulated bits of oral personal history were personal observations on daily life and rants about political issues then current. It was her impetus, almost insistence that I write something down that motivated me to take a shot at it. This is the 400th piece I have drafted.
Fear almost stopped me from creating the blog. I was unsure of my writing skills and I was unsure of what I might possibly have to say. Funny in looking up something else I came upon a quote from a writer that now serves as my ideal. He didn’t speak of inspiration when he talked about writing. Instead he spoke about just doing the work, for writing is a kind of work. He emphasized the need to be doing it regularly and getting into the routine. Perhaps it was Ray Bradbury that seems like something he would say. He was right.
My skills at some very basic things like using periods and commas are quite deficit. Books have been bought since I started to try and improve my posting. Things like Grammar Sucks and Eats Shoots and Leaves were paid for. Both volumes remain barely touched on my shelf. Truth be told I have good intentions but at self improvement I am not so good on the follow through. If you look back on my attempt to do a complete run of comments regarding Milton Mayeroff’s On Caring tied to beach stories you can see it petered out after what nine posts. I still intend to go back to that. Grammar should not stop a person from writing. Computers these days will help you quite a bit; I know they have done wonders for me.
On those days when I have something to talk about writing this blog is a joy. When one of the kids accomplishes something I know the pride just drips from the letters on the printed page. If I am reflecting on a moment in the past with clarity it feels like I have opened a little puzzle box and found a prize inside. When I talk about music I feel passion for while I do not play and even with my hearing degrading. When I get up on my soapbox about our need to work with people identified as ASD I feel so much about the plight of the different folks that occupy our world in non typical situations. On the days I start down these roads it is just a joy. Not every day is like that and I know some stuff that I have put up has been filler. I hope you will forgive me. What surprises me sometimes is how much something I did as a “one off” still resonates for me.
About half the pictures I put up I steal off the web. The rest of my images I capture on my iphone and then tweak on the iphone using an adobe photo app I purchased some months ago. One picture I took of the canyon created by buildings on the north and south side of Ottawa Street east of Capitol Avenue and the short bit below it strike me as some of the best of what I have tried to accomplish.
I would urge anyone who has any leaning toward writing or is considering a journal to do it. Just go out to www.blogger.com and create an account. It will take about an hour to familiarize yourself with how it works and then off you go. What I have created here may be gone in a second one day when Google fails and shuts down its servers. But the Buddhist part of me is okay with that. In the meantime I will keep writing.
Listening to the Grateful Dead I contemplate the tableau on
the table before me.There is a bottle
of red wine and a number of plants on this kitchen table’s marble top.It is winter so the plants are not
thriving.Guess their struggles are no
surprise.What in this God forsaken
place thrives in the doldrums of early March? Hockey is over and occasional only
slightly warmer days tease us.In most
of the stores the displays for lawn and garden season are already up.Damn it they are toying with us. I don’t
drink but once a month but I might crack open the bottle of Merlot and have a
sip before the night is out just to ride out this case of the mid-winter blahs.
Over the past couple of days I have been thinking about self
censorship and self- filtering.Whilst
having dinner last night we were listening to Pandora on the stereo and Dion’s
Runaround Sue came on.This tripped a
memory switch and I started to tell my sons a story about how I spent my
summers in Ocean City, NJ, it was as they say a dry town.The drinking age was 18 and everyone would
cross the scary causeway at 9th street to get to Sommers Point home
of the Anchorage, Tony Marts, Gregory’s and countless other bars.
In the summers of the early 1970s the music that would be
blasting out would be the songs of summer circa 1965.Under the Boardwalk, the Twist and Runaround
Sue were three of the pillars of this endless cycle of oldies.Before my time at the beach was over the
Hustle and various Earth, Wind and Fire compositions would be mixing in, but
Runaround Sue always stood out.
I didn’t dare tell my son
that the reason that song sticks out for me is that one night after closing up
the ice cream stand at midnight we all crammed into a car and rode over to the
Anchorage.The night was very warm and
nobody had anything on other than T-Shirts and cut off jeans.My T said:
One late night as we
approached the entrance to the bar there was some girl who was way too drunk
involved in a scene.She was laughing
this weird kind of painful laugh.She
was so drunk that even though she had stepped on a broken beer bottle and
lacerated her foot, she was laughing and asking her uber drunk boyfriend what
she should do.The bouncers were trying
to give her boyfriend directions to Shore Memorial hospital but he seemed to be
too drunk to understand.I had never before
seen anything like this.If you were
hurt you went to the hospital, you didn’t dither about giggling.All the time we were seeing this, the loudspeakers
were blaring Runaround Sue and the queue to get in was oblivious because all
you could smell was pot.
Nope I didn’t offer up
that part of the story.Somehow it
didn’t seem right at the time.
I tried to explain to him
some of the things I learned at the beach that were PG rated.I told him that split shifts suck.Saturdays for me at the ice cream store were
routinely split shifts.You worked 10-2
left and then came back at either 6 or 8 and worked to close. Closing time
could vary but was usually closer to 11:30 than not. Isn’t much you can do on a
day with split shift midday except go outside and work on your tan, eh?
I could have told him
about the bad behavior that occurred when the shift ended.It usually involved being intoxicated until
about 4 in the morning (always), playing strip poker (sometimes), talking
philosophy and cosmology (always) and skinny dipping (rare).There was one nude conga line. Ultimately it
involved crawling out to the beach at 9 a.m. to sleep (after a short nap at the
folks apartment) and when the brain cells really starting working again as God
is my witness I would read Shakespeare.No really I wanted to grow mentally. Pepsi Cola handled the dehydration
and beach fries cleaned up the lack of salt.The salt water would wash away the stench of the shots of Jack Daniels.
(Not a reasonable facsimile of the author)
(Closer to accurate
image)
Even here I am self
censoring.It wasn’t just beer, okay?
It is funny this self
censorship is based on not providing a template for disaster for my kids.I look at other kids Primus and Secundus know
and the trouble they are already in because of getting wasted.I look at the people I judge and think there
but for the grace….No I don’t want to
glorify this stuff for them. It is one thing to tell a tale when it is long in
the rear-view mirror and another to present it as well a statement of this is
how it is.
On Facebook today I told
a story about stealing a flatbed trailer that came very close to altering the
direction of my life due to the fact it had been seized by the IRS.Uh, destroying Federal property was a big
thing back then, they called it a felony they did.The cops came to my home and there with them
were as Arlo Guthrie described it charts and pictures with paragraphs on the
back.In the end it all came to naught
but it was a very anxious time in my life. I didn’t even lay out most of the
story in the short Facebook post. The one thing I said was that when I saw the
State Troopers going over the trailer that my nads (short for gonads) pulled up
into my chest.
One of my fellow posters
called me out for being offensive.Uh
well I guess.Would it have been better
if I had said gonads? On average I try to keep what I put on Facebook
relatively clean.I don’t talk about
smoking pot in the church basement while the service was going on.I didn’t talk about a nuclear sexual
peccadillo that I won’t even mention here.I didn’t mention the night that convinced me to leave Detroit.It involved a road trip down the Cass
corridor at 4 a.m. harassing hookers.Any story that begins “There I was in the Post Bar you know the place
where it was written in magic marker on the wall, “You can only give it away
for free so many times”, will never find its way onto my FB stream.
But I am beginning to
wonder why the fuck not?I am 56 years
old and the statute of limitations has run on pretty much anything I could talk
about.It isn’t that my life has been
all that interesting or special or different cause I was a nervous Nellie
through most of it. Quite probably save my bacon more than once.But I am who I am nothing more and nothing
less.If I let down the filter maybe I
can break through to something more essential, more elemental in my
nature.I don’t know.If a very few years I will be dead and nobody
will have these memories I hold.Like
who will tell my boys that I used to be a petty and bitter man?Surely not the attorney grievance attorney
(currently but then a law student) who held me upright because I was so drunk
that I couldn’t stand up so that I could pee on my ex-girlfriend’s basement
(garden) apartment window?
Nasty right?Still it is kind of absurdly funny that this
is what I was like and what he was like.Now he defends impaired attorneys and I judge impaired people. FYI I
didn’t do that again and within a few more years (read a decade) I had backed
off on the drinking.
In all my thoughts of
this I have kept coming back to a bit of Buddhist thought I read recently.It is this “When we can be secure in our
inner source for true happiness, we don’t expose ourselves to the devastation
that comes when outside hopes for happiness and security are dashed. We have
our shelter, our place of security, inside. And we needn’t be afraid that this
is an escapist shelter. When the basis of our well-being is firm within, we can
act with true courage and compassion for others, for we’re coming from a solid
position of calmness and strength.”- Thanissaro Bhikkhu, “What We’ve Been
Practicing For”.
I am working to accept
that internal space. Really. Maybe I don’t need to clutter it up with secrets
and half truths about who I am.So again
maybe I can let the filter down a bit more or better yet let it start to
dissolve. Maybe I should let the filter and let the chips fall where they may
accepting what may come.
I walked out side the front of the Sec. of States office today. This is the place where you process your driver license fees and obtain license plates. A wide swath of humanity passes in and out these doors in a constant and unending stream
I don't drive. I haven't driven in decades. I had a meeting to attend away from the office so I ordered up a cab. The cab ran a few minutes late in arriving for me. As time went by I had the opportunity to watch a large swath of people go in and out on their errands . As I stood unobserved I noticed a number of odd facts.
There are a set of steps that lead up to the door of the office. Invariably someone going up the steps would be doing so at the same time someone was coming down the steps. At about the midpoint of the steps a person tends to adjust their grip on the handrail or their stance and they look up. As often as not they have to make eye contact with someone traversing the route in the other direction.
It is at this point things grew odd. Watching these interactions revealed the number of different social behaviors. On this day African Americans tended to greet each other whether or not they knew each other. Older people tended to greet each other regardless of race whether they seemed to know each other or not. The younger Chinese that came in and out seemed to have a sense of personal space and behavioral rules that precluded contact and made them seem somewhat rude by our normative behaviors.
The groups of white people coming through seemed too agitated and did only made contact with the person coming the other way if it was someone they knew.
I know it was only one day in one location and for a very short period of time but the differences in contact behaviors intrigued me. Long ago as an undergraduate student I participated in number of studies relating to the initiation of social contact. We did not look at issues of race or age relative to the contact behavior. We only studied position. If you're facing someone directly you are most likely to start some kind of conversation with them. If you were at a 45 degree angle the odds were far lower that conversation would follow.
There are no great insights from this. The differences were just interesting to watch.
I am waiting for an x-ray. My foot has become a unicorn. In saying that I mean that's spur has begin to grow from the atop my left arch.
The foot doctor doesn't seem particularly concerned. Her attitude makes me feel better about this situation. situation. Whenever you see a doctor what you want to hear is that it's mundane , it's normal, it's the regular kind.
And what is up with all these soft pastel watercolors?
