Success

Soon I will reach a birthday with a zero in it.  I will be sixty.  It seems so fast that the years have sped by.  As I approach this milestone someone asked me if I had been a success.  The question left me scratching my head.  Was I a success at anything?  Did I feel like a success?

 

How do you define success?  A dictionary (Encarta) provides several options to wit, “Success is the achievement of something planned or attempted.  It is also defined as impressive achievement, especially the attainment of fame, wealth, or power.”  Quote sites are all over the place with things like the following from Vince Lombardi, “The price of success is hard work, dedication to the job at hand, and the determination that whether we win or lose, we have applied the best of ourselves to the task at hand.”  For me I think if you combined the impressive achievement part together with hard work and dedication component despite the world’s view of whether you are winning or losing that is pretty close to a good definition of success.

 

Me personally I don’t have any great achievements.  I have not done well with money.  I have not climbed the corporate ladder.  I have not done something that has gained me positive notice that will last for any period of time. I have simply lived. I have tried to live in a manner that reflected what I really was inside, a goofy, joyful person with a sense of wonder.  

 

Success is not breeding so please don’t go down the “but you have a wonderful family” line of discussion.  I helped create kids with my participation in a biological act.  They are growing in a world that is only defined by me in the most minimal of ways.  They will be who they are.  I hope they are good people and I hope their faults are minor but most of that resides in DNA and the conditioning the world has imposed on them.

 

A few years back I ran for public office.  I won by 1% of the vote.  You could call that a success.  But I did that out of duty, not for the sake of winning.  I would have felt the same way whether I won or lost.  If you don’t care about the outcome in a race or a game I don’t think prevailing qualifies as success.

 

16 years ago I applied for a job I didn’t really want. I went in for the interview with a smart ass attitude. Really my only desire was to get some interview experience under my belt and nothing more.  Here I am 16 years later in the job I didn’t care if I got.  Maybe that was a success.  Moving from private practice to government work was fine; it felt good to be out from under the pressures of a small private practice law office. Still it didn’t resolve any deep ache in my soul.  This is just another job.

 

What I actually view as my success sounds silly.  My success is writing. Until I was in my late thirties I was afraid of writing.  Grammar and spelling do not come easy to me.  Seems odd for a person of words to be afraid to put them onto paper does it not?

 

However about 10 or 12 years ago I started to journal. Constantly I scrawled notes about every stray thought that crossed my mind.  Every day before I got on the bus to my office I found that I had about 10 minutes of dead time.  My choice was to get a notebook and to write as I stood at the stop.  Over several years I poured out my heart and soul into a series of spiral bound notebooks.  I was honest.  I was brutal.  I waxed poetic.  I ruminated on God and existentialism.  I focused my thoughts and I carried on page after page with daily consistency.

 

One day a friend said to me she thought I had enough stories to write a blog.  While this blog has been dormant of late I took that idea and ran with it. On this silly electronic medium I have set out over 600 posts.  Some were just photographs.  Some were long meditations.  But this blog is me talking and shouting and cleansing my soul.  I am dedicated to writing.  I am determined to get some of what is in me out.  

 

Yeah success is writing for me.  It isn’t anything else really that I can point to.  Writers exist for the glorification of words and ideas and it is not vice versa. Singers exist to glorify the song and again not vice versa.  To the extent I have glorified the words Ifeel I have succeeded.

 

 

 

Music and Words

A piano playing soft allowed an aire of sweet melody to escape from the soul of the pianist. Lifts and lilts and warm tones so peaceful spread carried high by cascading currents of emotions. In a room filled with the faint scent of incense the heart shaped pattern of the music emerged. 

A young man clad in blue jeans and a Martin Strings t-shirt heard the music. Alone and simply walking by the performance space he was seduced by the purity of sound. From a room large enough for a small concert but currently empty of anything but the piano at one end and a few chairs close to the door at the other end the music poured out. The sound just grabbed the soul of this passerby. 

The lid to the piano was up and the one man audience was obscured from the view of the performer. He had entered the room as quietly as a cat.

Summoning years of emotions bottled up inside of her heart and head she let delicate fingers find their way to press those keys evoking a romanticism of the real. The sole member of the audience felt a connection to a soul exploding both with joy and longing. Each note carried laughter and loss. 

As each peak and ebb of the music passed he scribbled with the pencil that had been stuffed in his notebook’s pocket onto its lined paper.  Words flowed out.

Flowers

Rain

Eternity

A heart’s burden

Connection

Acceptance

Surrender

The pianist was lost in her own world.  Pure feeling was flowing out into all that the strings and dead trees and ivories could loose from her soul.  She played with her eyes closed not thinking thoughts constructed from the artifice of words.  She played with lightness of pure feeling.

Words first fell upon the paper and then words became lines and lines became verses and choruses, stanzas and refrains.  He scrawled and erased and struggled for synonyms and argued with himself over the couplets and the meter.  But it all flowed as easily as the music flowed from the pianists hands, mostly.

Eventually the music peaked and grew soft. It peaked again but now not quite as loud. Then it grew soft with strong but subtle chords. The writer placed his pencil back in the flap inside his notebook. Very quietly he stood up and headed for the door. As he headed out he heard the coda and then it was done.

She never knew he was there. 

He worked that poem for months to resolve the mostly.  Then he set it aside.  After a year he returned to the work and stared at it for hours.  He wasn’t happy, the words were not the perfection that the music had been.  He thought he would take a stab at a verb tense change or a different adjective but he eventually gave up.  If he changed any single thing more in the poem he might lose the memory of a perfect moment.

He became the writer he had planned to be when he had started carrying around those little ringed binders.  He worked in prose and published op-ed pieces.  He sold his work and he dreamed that eventually he would get a story in the New Yorker but that was a goal, not an end. As the years went by he would come back to that poem again and again and each time he was in that room anew. He never shared the poem. The poem was his and he rebuilt the room and the sound each time he ran his eyes across those lines.

As the years went by she never abandoned the piano.  She made money from her gift.  She played well and found her way onto a few CDs as a backing player.  She played in support of musical theatre productions and grand affaires. She loved her music and it showed.  But she would often return to thoughts of that day when in a sunlight filled empty hall she had sat down at a piano and let everything that was in her flow out.  She knew to herself that was the best she had even given and the best the piano had ever yielded for her.  She savored that she had a moment which belonged to her like that.  .Her only regret was that no one had been there to share in her accomplishment.

I love the Winter Woods

Summer Remembered

Seeds of this season have long been sown. Now the fragile plants of May are tall and fruitful and groaning for harvest. The season has been good, bright and warm mostly. Still the days have passed with enough rain to let the little green seedling mature to tall and dusky and ripe plants. Late September grasses blow in the mild winds. Apple trees are weighted down with their sweet fruits. Harvest is due.

Nature's palate takes a turn right here, right now. Where once a thousand nuanced shades of green spread out across the horizon, now flames of orange and red have begun to spread. Red, orange, yellow and dark almost purple colors are emerging from the canopy of leaves that line the roads I walk. It is a riot of rich, rich color. Both celebration of and elegiac of one good season they please the senses.

In walking cascading thoughts as to beauty, trust, truth, motivation, desire, hope, love; well they all rush through the brain. Me I keep returning to the idea of the meaning of beauty. What does it mean to call something beautiful?  What do I mean when I call someone beautiful?

Beauty is something true, at least that is what I think when I ruminate upon it.  Beauty means that the thing called beautiful is so true as to be pleasing to the mind, the eye, the ear, the heart and well to almost any of the senses.  True beauty is something not just surface, not just ephemeral.  Beauty is a construct of the thing’s essence.

When I call someone beautiful I am not talking about a physical form I am talking about their spirit.  Beauty is a heart seeking to become all that it has any right to be on God’s green earth.  Therein lays beauty, in a spirit’s search for the real.  With true beauty can come love.

Love arises slowly, grows into a blaze and then settles into a warming fire. Love’s embers can linger for a lifetime. The trick is learning to discern the difference between the start of love and the start of lust. I think you catch the difference in the glimmer of an eye, in the tone with which a word is spoken and in the way a phrase is laid out.

Lust can arise quite quickly. Normally it will pass like the summer rain. Heated passions arise in a moment but in the end they leave not a trace. Like a shooting star they can neither be contained nor caught. In the end having experienced lust a few times I have learned that you don't cling to passing moods.

Writers may speak only through the world of letters but their words can be infused with carefully turned and meaningful phrases.  The way in which particular writer speaks is a viewing point into a human heart.  With each word a writer puts down love may grow.  Seeds planted with words can envelop the heart like a canopy of bright fall leaves.  Beauty leads to love.  Love leads to awareness.

The Joy of CSN & Y

Somewhere in 1967 I started listening to FM radio.  1967 & 1968 were the heady days when FM was outlaw radio.  DJs played what they wanted, when they wanted.  This special moment on the airwaves allowed the Chambers Brothers to be matched up with Muddy Waters and the Nice.  It was the era of smoking a joint before heading off your first class at 8:30 in the a.m.  It was fringed leather jackets and long hair, back when long hair meant something. 

8 track tapes played in 1963 Chevy Impalas. As you were driving around back country farm roads everyone was listening to Led Zepplin or Yes cranked up to the highest volume possible.  Each month it seemed car radios improved.  Every time the radio got better somebody bought one and dropped in their cars.  Guys carved out holes in the space between the back seat and the trunk and dropped the biggest bad assed speakers they could find into those slots.  I remember one guy just mounted a set of full sized component stereo speakers into his back seat.

There in the midst of a time where music was political as it has not been in many years. Narrow was the window when who you listened to said so much about who you were. Right that in those few days when music was politics suddenly there dropped an LP like none other I had ever heard.  In March of 1970 Crosby, Still, Nash and Young released Déjà Vu. The sound of that record was seismic in its impact of the listener and on what would happen in the years that followed.

The album opened with Stephen Stills anthem “Carry On.” A sampling of the lyrics shows the urgency with which the album was bursting:

Carry on, love is coming, love is coming to us all.

Where are you going now my love? Where will you be tomorrow?

Will you bring me happiness? Will you bring me sorrow?

Oh, the questions of a thousand dreams, what you do and what you see,

Lover, can you talk to me?

Every lyric, every line was vivid and conveyed stories that were layered and to which you could craft a relationship with your own life.  But it wasn’t the lyrics, it was the sound.  Bill Halverson and Wally Heider Studio #3 provided the genesis for a wave of multi tracked harmonies as nuanced and beautiful as anything that had every come before.  It wasn’t just a quartet layered and layered atop itself into a perfect blend of harmonies.  Those voices lay atop the roughest meanest guitars slingers about, and yes I mean Stephen Stills and Neil Young. Neil’s and Stephen’s licks were transcendent.

Driving the back roads that summer we had the eight track blasting Woodstock at top volume.  Drinking little Rolling Rock ponies and smoking $40 an ounce Columbian weed we learned every single lyric to every single song.  Hey as the years went on Humble Pie, Alice Cooper and the Rolling Stones Sticky Fingers got played to death too.  But nothing sounded like that CSN & Y tape.  It was in a class all by itself.  Its tales took you to places, to Woodstock, to North Ontario and wherever else a vaguely country motif might lead.  Hell we all wanted to get back to the earth; we all wanted to get back to the country once we heard that record.

Memory of a Summer Girl

The death of David Bowie has taken me back to the time when I first heard his music.  It was in an ice cream store on the boardwalk.  What days those were.  Sad thing I did not realize how special they were.

What could I possibly remember from those hot summer days I lived so many seasons ago?  All human memory fades with time.   True memory even in the strictest mental disciplinarian's reckoning is elusive.   Memories become coated with a patina that imparts romanticism and mutes the past hours' reality with overtones of nostalgia and warmth.

Thinking on the passage of time it is nigh onto 33 years since my eyes first scanned her form, that coworker who would be my first love.  At our first meeting I did not realize she would be the first true love of my life.   How could I have known as my myopic eyes ran up and down her supple body that what I would eventually feel for her would be the measure against which all other romantic interludes of my life would be weighed? 

1974 was the year and the Imperial Presidency of Richard M. Nixon was about to end.  (Do you remember dear reader those funny euro-empire style uniforms Tricky Dick  made the White House guards wear for a time; the yellow ones with the epaulets and the feathered plumes?)   I digress.  It was 1974 and I was 18 years of age, legal to vote, legal to drink and ready to leave the nest.   Summer was upon me and once again I was at the beach.

My first real beach job had come to me through the intervention of my cousin.  Initially I was to take a job with him full time as a salesman at his card store.   However over the winter things as they say had changed.  During the winter my cousin had begun playing hide the salami with a young lass on a regular basis.    So as to insure his ready access to the preferred silo for his moisture missile he needed her to have a reason to be at the beach, and thus my job vanished.   She got the salesclerk's post and I was offloaded on a business friend of cousin a short Jewish gentleman named Phil.   Where was I to work, well at an ice cream stand named Kurly Kustard.

I don't remember our introduction, but I know it was in the small front space of that purveyor of soft serve extraordinaire Kurly Kustard.  The first real memory I have of her was during the distribution of the cups.  I think we were given a choice of four cups between the four of us employees.   Cocaine, Heroin, Morphine and Opium, these words were baked in black letters in script reminiscent of Edward Gorey's pen on ivory white coffee mugs.    I believe she picked first and took Heroin.  I took to the best of my recollection Opium.  Having your boss give she a cup with a scheduled drug emblazoned on it was not so strange in the 1970s.   Now if an employer were to do that, especially an employer of teens, he would probably be facing charges.

Uncle Philsy was no fool.  The cups were a clever ploy on his part to keep his costs down and his profits up.   The rule was that you could eat all she wanted of anything in the store, except for individually wrapped novelty items, but you had to use your assigned cup.   Paper cups were counted as inventory control and thus were not to be used.   To a teenager these initially seemed like heaven.  The promise of milkshakes and ice cream, nuts and syrup; what a deal this was.    Mr. B. as we called him knew what he was doing, cagey and crafty man that he was.  A mere two days of gorging on milk fat rich treats would devastate even the hardiest of youthful GI systems.    Explosive diarrhea, vicious cramps and gas pains so strong they would double you over were the inevitable, the near certain results of such gorging.   The nausea and the pain were memories that would seem to last a life time, but surely they would last a summer.  As a result the ice cream and treats were safe.  We ate sparingly.

Standing there petite and beautiful, she held her cup, Heroin.  She had the vibrancy and radiance of youthful beauty, but the word in her hand was the hardest of the hard.   Little didn't I realize that the cup she held was a metaphor for what she would become to me.

My memory now is that encounter with her was visceral, sensual, and electric.  Her long brown hair, curly from the humidity, was bouncing in the cooling breeze from off the Atlantic's waters.   Her skin tight jeans clung to her shapely ass.  And as always she wore those clingy rippled sort of tube tops, mostly in earth tones that barely concealed her breasts.   But it was the bandana and the glasses that I remember most despite what the first part of this paragraph might imply.

With her hair pulled back and with those aviator style glass frames, her face's beauty was clear, her smooth skin tanned and brown and those full lips captured my eye.   And the things that rolled off her tongue, the way she said them, just amazed me.  Her glasses and hair gave her a look of constant forward motion.   Her whole facial countenance seemed to imply a life being lived with a vibrant spark.   She may have been conveyed by a motorcycle, an open cockpit plane or a surfboard, but her trajectory was always forward and fast and wonder filled.

Why I Blog

It was about a decade maybe fifteen years ago that I decided I had to do something to capture what was within me.  I was feeling shackled by a variety of roles that seemed to be stealing away pieces of my soul. Watching little and big pieces of my life disappear scared me.

Ultimately I had to create a space where I could think out loud (but not where others could hear me) and where I could capture the memories of whom I was.  When I was still with working at a private practice law firm 16 years ago I wrote a couple of long pieces dealing with frustration and personal disquiet. Somewhere I still have them saved on floppy discs.  When I left private practice law was a period of grace when I felt okay and the turmoil seemed to abate. Nothing went down on paper during that time.

Eventually the questions started to crop up again.  Me I have always struggled with questions of meaning and ethics.  Nagging questions sent me down what a great number of people would think was an endless rabbit hole of reading philosophy.  Immersing my mind in Spinoza and others I mulled the meaning of life, love, marriage, trust and honor.  Little kernels that I would glean from their works would sit in the back of my mind. When I was struggling with things like my son’s diagnosis with Aspergers, my cancer and some other primal issues my feelings flowed out onto electronic paper.

One day as I was telling probably my rudest but humorous true sexual story to a couple of my barista friends at the coffee shop I used to call my second home a third party suggested I write a blog.  In March 2008 I started writing.  I have slowed my production at times but I have never stopped.  I also started using little notebooks to record some ideas to work into posts.  In doing this I was able to open up things I kept bottled up inside for a long, long time. Joni Mitchell kind of captured what was the disquiet that motivated me.

Joni Mitchell - Hejira Lyrics

 

I'm traveling in some vehicle

I'm sitting in some cafe

A defector from these petty wars

That shell shock love away

 

There's comfort in melancholy

When there's no need to explain

It's just as natural as the weather

In this moody sky today

 

In our possessive coupling

So much cannot be expressed

So now I'm returning to myself

These things that you and I suppressed

 

I see something of myself in everyone

Right at this moment of the world

As snow gathers like bolts of lace

Waltzing on a bridal girl

 

You know it never has been easy

Whether you do or you do not resign

Whether you travel the breadth of extremities

Or you stick to some straighter line

 

I would suggest to you (that is anyone who might be reading this) that you create some time to use your words to suss out different challenges and feelings that you are working through.  Me I have a Gmail account where I send only fragments of what is crossing my mind.  Maybe a sentence seems to work and I think I could use it later. Maybe I have a little thought that becomes a paragraph but there is not enough to create a piece of 250, 500 or 750 words.  So I capture it and fire it off and come back to it later.

Here is a plan of action for you dear reader. Create an electronic space for nothing other than collecting drafts or for writing out you gut’s most innermost feelings.  Then start using it.  Open it and write.

In the darkness and pain of solitude we have to work out our own salvation my friend.