Truth and Consequences?

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 9^th 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.