Sitting on the Curb Together

Late last week I was at Daybreak on my regular Thursday walkaround. The place closes down at 11 to allow staff an hour lunch, so a number of people collect out back, smoking, napping in the sun, sitting and relaxing. This happens every weekday but I go there on Thursdays.

The volunteer coordinator calls it my "social day" because what I do is wander around in back and ask people how they are. Most times they answer in the affirmative and I might sit with them to catch up on stuff. But when they say "Not so good," I make a point of sitting or squatting with them to hear their story. 

That's all I do, listen to their stories. I'm not a social worker or RN or therapist, I don't have access to any resources and my knowledge of what's available, even a year after moving here, is woefully inadequate. But I can listen and I'm aware from my own time on the road that this is often something not available to lonely people; someone who will uncritically and calmly sit with them and listen to what's going on. I can't solve any of their issues and they're aware of that, but I can make them a little less lonely.

In seminary, this ministry was emphasized to me by the story of Job and his friends. While it's true they try to explain away his mistreatment by God by placing the blame on him, what they do before that is

set out from their homes and met together by agreement to go and sympathize with him and comfort him. When they saw him from a distance, they could hardly recognize him; they began to weep aloud, and they tore their robes and sprinkled dust on their heads. Then they sat on the ground with him for seven days and seven nights. No one said a word to him, because they saw how great his suffering was.

This is the critical part of ministry for me, that rather than immediately setting out to interpret his suffering, his friends sit with him and share his misery. For a week and silently. That is truly sharing in someone's grief.

I don't try to put myself in the shoes of Job's friends because they are convinced of their own righteousness and eventually give in to judgement. But I do accept the wisdom of their first actions, to sit on the ground and be with the one who is suffering.

So this past Thursday I noticed one of my regulars sitting on the curb away from the property and drinking a beer. She looked unhappy, so when I could I wandered over and sat down, said I was glad to see her and asked how she was. 

Her issue was nothing new to her, it's a problem she's been trying to solve since January, and I'd heard it before at length. But I didn't say anything about that, I just listened. After she finished her beer she stood up to go inside and we walked over together. She said, "Thanks for sitting there with me." I said, "That's what I do, it's about all I'm good at." 

That's when she said something that floored me. At first I was unsure I'd understood her and asked "What?" She turned around and looked me full in the face and said, enunciating every word, "You keep people from ending their lives."

I don't know if she meant overall people who do that or just me, although I'm certain in that moment she meant just me. It pierced me. That is, I believe, the closest I'll ever come to a personal divine message.

 

Too Young to Lose My Best Friend

 I'm listening to my Cocteau Twins Pandora station. It was one of the groups she'd introduced me to, along with the Bush Tetras, Hazel O'Connor, the Sugarcubes and Bjork, Echo and the Bunnymen, the Violent Femmes, and dozens of others I've forgotten in the ensuing decades. 

I don't remember our meeting but I have an approximate year: 1982 or 83. I was a tutor and she was one of my students in for writing help. I don't remember what her issues were beyond misspellings and the occasional missing punctuation, but somehow we bonded beyond the needs of Composition 1 and our friendship took on greater importance as the years passed. She was the first to get me drunk. It was my 25th birthday and we celebrated with several of her housemates with Melon Balls, Kamikazes, and, in a final booze-filled marathon chess session played among a half dozen sleeping bodies, Malibu Rum. 

We attended a half dozen Rainbow Gatherings together, and at the Nantahala Forest Gathering, the 1st for both of us, she managed to dodge the dysentery that laid most of us low. After, she told me how she accidentally avoided getting arrested 60 miles inside Babylon, by absently reaching down to pet the head of the drug-sniffing dog that was about to find the stash in her pocket. The grateful animal, as she said it, "just looked up into my eyes with her tongue out and such a look of, 'Oh, hi, do you want to play?', that her handler yanked her back hard and that was the end of that. They had to let us go." 

I'm unsure which of us graduated first, or if she graduated. Those years, graduation wasn't really very important to any of us back then, although we all expected to. What was important then were adventures, the sorts of events that happened and you talked about them later. We attended a couple weekend workshops but didn't have the money to stay in a motel. So we slept in my car. At one, after we'd finished for the day and had some dinner, we found an out-of-the-way road, mostly dirt track, and figured it was remote enough to safely sleep there. Along 1 or 2 o'clock I was woken by her insistent, "Someone's at the door" next to my ear, not so much whispered as said in amazement. It was a cop. 

Windows rolled down in cars then so I rolled the one closest to me and said, very quizzically, "Hi?" He said, "Do you know the owner of this property? Has he said you could stay here?" I said, "We didn't even know it was property, we thought we were out in the woods." He said, "Well, you're in someone's driveway and he's not around apparently, but if he comes by you'll have to move." That seemed reasonable to me, the having to move part, so I agreed and he got back in his car and we went back to sleep. In the early morning as the fog lifted, we could dimly see a house at the other end of the drive. The owner had either never come home or he'd never left. 

Another story, this one not involving me, one she told me. She'd been walking through the Student Union on her way somewhere when she'd got a whiff of someone's patchouli as he walked by. The tribe we hung with loved patchouli but found it hard to locate. She walked swiftly beside him and asked, "Is that patchouli? Did you get it around here? I love patchouli and..." He stopped suddenly, looked down at her--in her story he was over 6 feet--and announced, "It's obvious you want to engage me in  conversation but I don't want to." And he strode off, leaving her open-mouthed in his wake, incredulous when she told me, as if it was impossible someone wouldn't want to talk with her. I could not imagine why not. I was honored by her friendship. 

We attended more Gatherings, went more places, did more things. Most everyone wanted to talk with one of us everywhere we went. Somewhere in there we became lovers, although never exclusive, in defiance of everything we'd thought we were to each other. What she became to me, I'm sorry to say, was the human equivalent of home, someone that when you go there she has to take you in. I told myself that's all I was to her as well. Of course, that was wrong, both factually and morally. When she stopped talking to me after I married, my wife encouraged me to contact her. "You're too young to lose your best friend," she told me. 

That's a lousy story to end on, so here's a better one. Another Gathering, we had dropped acid together (when we talked about this last week while she was in hospice and I'd driven 1500 miles to spend time with her she insisted it was her first time, a possibility her sister later doubted, so we'll let it go) and then found ourselves at night at a jam session where, for some reason, she'd needed to take medicine. She dropped it and the two of us bent in the shadows, heads down, rummaging around among the leaves and twigs and loam for the pill. Suddenly, something dropped on her head, bounced, and landed in her open hand. It was the pill. We laughed because the universe opened a rift in time below our hands and another above our heads. It had decided to fuck with us and that was all right with us. That is how I will remember her, laughing. 

Uncomfortable Places Where I've Slept

 

There are no chickens in this story

MY LIVING ROOM FLOOR, NORTH CHESTNUT STREET, 

NEW PALTZ

 

I’d met this guy Jonathon while working semester opens at the college bookstore. He was really introverted but we got along. He invited me to a party in The City, although who he knew there I never figured out. The two of us rode out on the Trailways bus and took a subway to wherever the apartment was. I’m necessarily a little hazy on the details.

Most of the night for me was in bursts and flashes. I remember drinking tequila and then fashioning some concoction from other alcohols. I remember making out with a woman in a room away from the party but other than long reddish hair I don’t remember anything about her. This is a big part of the reason Jonathon later stopped being friends with me because I found out she was someone he liked and had hoped to get to know at this party. I wasn’t much of one for niceties like that in those years.

When the party broke up at 1 or 2 we took the subway back to Penn Station but there were no busses leaving until 7. So we joined the ranks of the homeless who squatted in the one room inside the station the cops kept open for them. Once an hour they rousted us to another end of the room, saying “No one sleeps!” But I did as I was riotously drunk and between bouts of laughing at the cops (not a practice I’d suggest) and trudging from spot to spot, I huddled on the floor and slept the fitful half-doze known to both the inebriated and those trying to have conversations with them. Jonathon spent the whole time standing and trying both to stay near me, like I was protection, and being as far from other people as he could.

Eventually the sun came up and at 630 we could buy tickets, with which we could stay the half hour to 7 while the others were bounced into the street. The bus ride was two hours but to me it seemed both like hours longer and just a few moments. We reached town, I walked with Jonathon as far as the corner of Main and North Chestnut where we parted, him to his room and me  to my apartment.

Now this is where it becomes uncomfortable.

I’m one of those lucky few born with some immunity to the bad effects of drugs and alcohol. I’ve never had a bad trip from LSD, never gotten paranoid while smoking weed or hash, never experienced anything but stupendous and unremembered epiphanies on shrooms or peyote. Never had a hangover no matter how much I drank. Except that time.

My headache began on the bus but I put it down to the sun in my eyes and lack of solid sleep. As I walked, I could feel each step travel from my foot through my body to the tiny hammer banging my brain. I had never felt so happy getting to my apartment, so much so I opened the door and did a faceplant on the floor. I didn’t feel like I could make it to bed, I just laid there and slept.

Or I tried to. It seemed that day everyone in the world I knew chose to visit me, either in groups or singly. Again, only fleeting memories but I do remember a stream of drool from my mouth to a small pool next to me when the first person, whoever it was, knocked at the door. Stupid me, it never occurred to me not to say, “Come in,” although that wouldn’t have accomplished much as I had a habit of not locking my door and encouraging people to walk in.

I alternately curled into the fetal position or spread full out like DaVinci’s Vitruvian Man. I may have even resembled that drawing a little as my hair was curly and long and sweat-plastered to the floor. I vaguely recall Jonathon coming by with another friend of ours, I don’t remember who, and looking smugly down on my pain. I probably cried once or twice. No one, fortunately, stayed long, or I don’t think they did, because I kept drifting back off to sleep after a few sentences describing my head variously as a deflated basketball, a cracked egg, a fishbowl full of fecal water, a balloon blown up by a congested drunken bum. There may have been more.

Eventually the night came, and far from being refreshed, I was so worn by the exhaustion of breathing through a mouth equal parts dry and swampy I fell finally into bed wearing the same clothes I’d worn to the party now 24 hours before and drifted in and out of consciousness until 5 or 6 the next morning, when I got up, stretched my 45 minute routine, and then put on running shorts and took a ginger mile and a half jog. Outside the day-long, incessant hammering, that was my usual start to the morning, which may have been why I didn’t usually suffer otherwise

Giving Praise in a Quiet Way

I've been thinking about how to welcome--and I do mean it, the welcome--in the new year with some positive spark lighting up the void surrounding it, and this song does it for me. I've written a sermon about it before, but here I'm just going to post the video and lyrics. Let it wash over you and see if you can stop from smiling.

The Sing by Bill Callahan

Drinking while sleeping strangers
Unknowingly keep me company
In the hotel bar
Looking out a window that isn't there
Looking at the carpet and the chairs
Well, the only words I said today are "beer" and "thank you"
Beer, thank you
Beer, thank you
Beer
Giving praise in a quiet way
Like a church
Like a church
Like a church that's far away
I've got limitations like Marvin Gaye
Mortal joy is that way
Outside a train sings its wail song
To a long, long train long, long fone
Then silence comes back alone
High as scaffolding
'Til the wind finds something to ping
When the pinging thing finds the wind
We're all looking for a body
Or a means to make one sing

 

258 candles-days 157-158

The days when I had many friends who rode this horse are long behind me. But I remain glad of any help in keeping other people like them alive. To argue, as Maine's governor Paul LaPage does, that providing access to Naloxone provides abusers an out that simply leaves them free to shoot up again is not only, like Alexander Walley says, like arguing "that seatbelts encourage riskier driving," but suggests that some lives are more worth saving than others. Arguing that is not a moral choice but a moral failing. After all, no one would say that alcoholics shouldn't have AA available to them because it only gives them the chance to make their next binge sweeter. No one abuses a drug in order to make her life more exciting, only to make it seem that way. The reality is very, very boring. While a lot of people shooting up want to continue, a lot more don't, and they should be given every chance to eventually make that decision. Every chance. As Jesus said, forgiving another type of abuse, "seventy times seven."

258 candles-day 110

I've been wracking my brain trying to think of what I can say that will mean anything to anyone about the current dismal, distressing state of politics in this country. And I've come to realize this: There isn't anything I can say. But there is something I can do.

My solution, based on the Chinese proverb that it's better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, is to provide daily candles in the form of links to other people's solutions, simple or complex responses to problems that they see. But as a single candle will hardly provide enough illumination to blot out the darkness that is the pettiness and meanness that characterizes this election cycle, I will light 258 candles, one each day between now and election day. In this way, I will do my part to remind each of us we are better than the baseness of the bases.

Today: When I was younger, I wanted to experience ayahuasca, but I never did. I expected that, if I were to make it to Arcosanti, I would have it available to me, and it might have been. But I never made it there either. But it's good to know such places as this exist, where shamans presumably give the drug the respect it demands.

Johnny Thunders died for your sins!

Like my wife, I was astonished at how much I enjoyed giving out candy last night for Halloween. We have only this year moved into a hub, and while we're no mistake on the far edge of it-the city limits sign is roughly six blocks to our south-we are also no mistake part of a neighborhood. There are a couple bars, an auto repair shop, many single story homes with immaculate, manicured lawns, and the wide great inland sea just a few yards to our east. And last night we partook, for a couple hours, in one of the last surviving community regular events. Giving out candy to children who come to the door and ask for it.

In trying to explain my glee to her last night, I made reference to the change of perspective I got when I interned with a kindergarten class. But that's not what I want to write about.

 A friend wrote a Facebook post about watching some 17 year olds walking through her neighborhood and going up to doors to trick or treat. They carried a pillowcase for their loot. None wore anything she recognized as a costume. Her response, she reported, was to switch off her lights and ignore their ringing her doorbell.

"At least make a pretence," she told them via her friends on Facebook.

I noted that I was giving candy out to similar groups at my door; but as I thought about it, I started articulating a more complicated idea. In my childhood in the 60s and early 70s, trick or treating was something you did in an area you were already familiar with, with groups of kids you spent your days with (although some, like me, did it with siblings and a parent in tow). But the point was it was in an area and among people you already knew and were comfortable among. This accounted for the frisson of excitement that even in the familiar there could be deliciously spooky surprises.

No mistake, we were acting out a then-comfortably stereotypical American childhood event in which we were safe, no matter how we might enjoy feeling otherwise. For our parents, children themselves of the Depression or the War Years, it was a chance to see their kids enact something that they might have only seen in magazines or heard about from other kids or imagined staring at costumes available in stores.

All this changed because of fears real and imagined, as well as the shrinking and then eradication of neighborhoods and what people thought of as safe. Now younger kids are driven to approved Halloween events at malls. The younger we are the more time we spend online and less among people we might otherwise come to know from playing and exploring together.

Enter a feeling of having missed out on something. Maybe the delightful scare at being at someone's door and your parent absent or more than a short scamper away. Maybe the same parent's reminiscences about when he was young. Maybe even the uncertainty of what candy you might get from stores not sponsoring the mall event: unfamiliar wrapped sweetstuff or homemade candy apples (with or without razor blades) or anything other than that nasty candy corn filler. You're old enough now that your parents feel or you've told them you're too mature for costuming up.

But you're hanging out with friends and in between times or slugs of cheap beer one of them mentions the brother or sister going out in costume that night. And it wakens some urge in you, mixing with the crisp air and early darkness and driving you and the friend out to the street. Maybe you run home to slap some makeup on and rip some old clothes and become a couple zombies, but maybe you don't, you grab a pillowcase or a plastic bag and you say, "Let's get treats"-because you still think of them as treats-and you and the friends go out to explore the neighborhoods that are usually just background to wherever else you're going.

Maybe you're tipsy or a little buzzed because it's the only way you've got to make facing people you don't know, or will be surprised you do know, and asking them to reenact with you a ritual neither one is sure the other understands. Some of us leave the lights on and give them an extra handful because we remember what it is to be 17.

And ultimately, is this really any difference in force and effect from the spiritual impulse that leads people to approach other doors where unfamiliar neighbors might turn them away? And are they treated any differently, especially if they stink of booze or the street? Give them the damn candy.

no regrets

I had an interesting conversation the other day that has stayed in the back of my mind since then, sometimes intruding on other thoughts. I had seen a psychiatrist--my first time, suprisingly I think, given how many times I've sought counseling--and during the course of our interview she asked, "Do you have any regrets about your past? Your drinking, drugs, your homelessness?"

I said, confidently, "No. No, I don't."

A  while later, in relation to another matter, she brought the subject up again. "You're certain, nothing you would change? Not your drinking or being homeless?"

"No," I repeated. "I don't want to romanticize it but there were things about those times of my life that I really liked and I'm glad I did."

And later, again, she said, "I've seen hundreds of people and no one, ever, has said he has no regrets about any of his past, so you're a first for me."

That's what is stuck in my brainclot. This notion that everyone else regrets his or her past misdeeds or perceived misadventures, and the suggestion that maybe I ought to regret them. I'll admit there are some instances I wish had turned out differently--some people I wish I'd been kinder to, some I wish I hadn't been so forgiving with, and those situations might have led to changes in my life--but with the major issues of my life, my decision to drink, to take as many drugs (outside anything to speed me up, tho coffee is as much a drug as any other) as I was offered, to pack up my belongings and go on the road instead of finding a new home after a few months on the street, I don't regret a thing.

No mistake, those were often difficult things to go through, but I'm happier I went through them than if I'd avoided them. I like the sense of disconnect and lack of control I get when I drink; I never had a bad trip on acid or peyote and weed was a very good friend; my homelessness helps me to remember to keep slow and not to take things as seriously as I might otherwise.

But I can't be the only one. I've known many homeless people and there have been some who choose to continue the life because they're comfortable with it or because they like who they meet or they feel safer. I've known a lot of drinkers and druggies who partake because they genuinely like it. It may be that such people never go to see psychiatrists and so are underrespresented. But I don't believe for a second I'm the only one who has who will admit to it.

at the mall

I know my wife doesn't understand, but I like malls. I'm not much of a shopper--with the exception of books I tend to walk into a store knowing what I want and leave as soon as I locate it--but I enjoy being in a place where I can be comfortable and see people moving around aimlessly. I like it in short doses I should explain. I don't care for the recycled air or the omnipresent mutter of music over the PA systems or the lights from stores. But give me a comfy chair and an atrium or just a skylight and locals wandering and chattering and I can spend the day there. There is, of course, the added attraction on a day like today of a warm, indoor walk. I know I can live without malls. Most of my life they were too far away or didn't exist. But like comic books and movies and drinking they add something to my life that I can celebrate.

johnny thunders died for your sins!

I'll be upfront and say that I'm jealous of this essay from the Orange County Weekly, both in its writing and its subject. I would prefer to be known as the punk pastor.

Having said that, I will admit the writing, by Nate Jackson, is done well. He allows enough of Joe Furey's (great name, that, for a punk) conflicted nature and the conflicts of interest between who he preaches to and the theology he preaches from to speak for itself. Furey is another in that line of preachers who have found a personal savior and want to make others aware that this same salvation can be theirs too. I can't fault anyone for wanting to spread the good news, as it were.

The story I would like to hear, however, is that of his wife, Therese. She has stayed with him nearly full-time from his early days as a catastrophically bad drug runner to his new days in the collar, raising three kids, often without help from him, and losing the eldest, her son, to an overdose. Her trust in life giving her what she needed and her ability to rise each morning is worth listening to and it's unfortunate that this isn't her story.

Which isn't to say Furey's story isn't interesting or worth telling. But it's another in a long spate, reaching back to Augustine, of libertines tamed by the Word and who make their life's work the spreading of that Word to the people they used to be. I can't complain about that, either, in that it's exactly what I want and hope to accomplish. As he comes across in the essay and in the single video I could find, he sounds like an amiable, avuncular, kind presence, and there's a lot to commend about that.

But what I'm uncomfortable with is the theology behind Furey's sermons. It's one that accepts what the Bible says as the end to all things, that there is a good and a bad and that if you would be one of God's People, you must change from one to the other. I don't credit that. It strikes me the Jesus of the Bible didn't seek out the homeless and addicts of his time because he wanted them to change in order to hear his teaching but because they were the ones most willing to hear and credit it. You were encouraged to change--"Go and sin no more"--but actual change didn't come from no longer drinking or hooking. Actual change was harder to accomplish (Matthew 19:22-4). Some people, of course, want to stop drinking or come off the road and they should be encouraged. But others don't. And they shouldn't be discouraged.

If there is a Good News to the messages of Jesus and Buddha and other teachers, it's that people  already have dignity, are of "God's People," through the virtue of being alive. They should be accepted as they are, unconditionally. End of message.

Here's to bright colors!

The night didn't bring any real coolness, but at least it took the edge off the heat. From about six or seven the company split up into little groups...Semyon and I occupied the large balcony on the second floor. It was cozy in there; with its comfortable wicker furniture, the breeze blows through--the perfect place for hot weather.

"Number one," said Semyon, taking a bottle of Smirnovskaya vodka our of a plastic bag with an advertisement for "Dannon kids'" yogurt.

"Do you recommend that?" I asked doubtfully. I didn't regard myself as a great specialist on vodka.

"I've been drinking it for more than a hundred years. And it used to be far worse than it is now, believe me."

He took two plain glasses out of the bag, a two-liter jar with little pickles floating in brine under its flat tin lid, and a large container of sauerkraut...Semyon deftly twisted the cap off the bottle and poured us half a glass each. His bag had been standing on the veranda all day, but the vodka was still cold.

"To good health?" I suggested.

"Too soon for that. To us."

I drank the half-glass without even shuddering and was amazed to discover that vodka could taste good after the heat of a summer day, not only after a winter frost.

Semyon chuckled.

"There was one time this foreigner I knew invited me to go around to his place," he began.

"A long time ago?" I asked, playing along.

"Not really, last year. He invited me around so I could teach him how to drink Russian-style. He was staying in the Penta hotel. So I picked up a casual girlfriend of mine and her brother--he was just back from prison camp, with nowhere to go--and off we went."

I imagined what the group must have looked like and shook my head.

"And they let you in?"

"Yes."

"You used magic?"

"No, my foreign friend used money. He'd laid in plenty of vodka and snacks; we started drinking on April thirtieth and finished on May second. We didn't let the maids in and we never turned the television off."

Looking at Semyon in his crumpled, Russian-made check shirt, scruffy Turkish jeans, and battered Czech sandals, I could easily imagine him drinking beer poured out of a three-liter metal keg. But it was hard to imagine him in the Penta.

"You monsters," I said in horror.

"Why? My friend was very pleased. He said now he understood what real Russian drunkeness was all about."

"What is it about?"

"It's about waking up in the morning with everything around you looking gray. Gray sky, gray sun, gray city, gray people, gray thoughts. And the only way out is to have another drink. Then you feel better. Then the colors come back."

Semyon poured the vodka again--this time filling the glasses a bit less full. Then he thought about it and filled them right up to the top.

"Let's drink, my man. Here's to not having to drink in order to see the blue sky, the yellow sun, and all the colors of the city. Let's drink to that. We go in and out of the Twilight, and we see that the other side of the world isn't what everyone else thinks it is. But then, there's probably more than one other side. Here's to bright colors!"

I am a great fan of Russian writing. I almost always read it in the winter, primarily because their stoic, controlled fury way of looking at life corresponds with how I look at it in the depths of snow and ice and cold. I especially like Russian genre writing. I've read my Tolstoy and Pasternak and Doestoyevsky and Turgenev and Soltzinitsin and Bulgakov and Nabokov, my Akmahtova and  Brodsky, my Mandelstam and Mayakovsky, my Yevtushenko and Pushkin and Ratushinskaya and Tsvaeteva. (I have a collection of Babel stories I haven't cracked open yet.)

But I think what I appreciate even more is Russian genre writing. I read Gary Shtyngart's farce The Russian Debutante's Handbook this last year and the science fictions Mir: A Novel of Virtual Reality by Alexander Besher a few years ago and much Stanislaw Lem in the 70s (I remember Solaris best), and I am finishing Nightwatch by Sergei Lukyanenko today. I often have issues with translation with most of them, as genre seems to require the least capable translators, so that their phrases often fall flat ("A hero! Oh, what great heroes we all are! Clean hands, hearts of gold, feet that have never stepped in shit. Have you forgotten the woman who was taken out of here? And the crying children, have you forgotten them? They're not Dark Ones. They're ordinary people, the ones we promised to protect. How long do we spend on getting the balance right for every operation we plan? I may curse our ananlysts every moment of the day, but why are they all gray-haired by the age of fifty?"), odd combinations of formal and informal inflection, wordiness and pithiness, strained analogies and quick cultural asides. Nightwatch is no different. Andrew Bromfield, who does not fit the role of writing hack, nonetheless does not seem very comfortable moving between the relaxed writing that I presume Lukyanenko can do well (and Bromfield displays in better moments: "The only movement was the trembling of the blue and red spots in the windows--the TVs were switched on everywhere. It had become a habit already, when you were afraid, when you were suffering--switch on the TV and watch absolutely anything, from the shopping network to the news.").


But decades ago I told myself I would find something worthwhile in everything I would ever spend reading to the point that for years I typed those passages out on index cards and taped them to my kitchen door. I have discovered the same in Nightwatch.

"There's one thing you've got to understand, Anton," said the magician, crunching on a pickle. "You should have realized it ages ago, but you've been tucked away with those machines of yours. Our Light may be big and bright, but it's made up of lots and lots of little truths...Anton, I'll tell you what the problem is. You're a young guy, you join the Watch, and you're delighted with yourself. At last the whole world is divided up into black and white! Your dream for humanity has come true; now you can tell who's good and who's bad. So get this. That's not the way it is. Not at all. Once we all used to be together. The Dark Ones and the Light Ones. We used to sit around our campfire in the cave and look through the Twilight to see where the nearest pasture was with a woolly mammoth grazing on it, sing and dance, shoot sparks out of our fingers, zap the other tribes with fireballs. And let's say there were two brothers, both Others. Maybe when the first one when into the Twilight he was feeling well-fed; maybe he'd just made love for the first time. But for the other one it was different. Some green bamboo had given him a bellyache; his woman had turned him down because she claimed she had a headache and was tired from scraping animal skins. And that's how it started. One leads everyone to the mammoth and he's satisfied. The other demands a piece of the trunk and the chief's daughter into the bargain. That's how we got divided up into Dark Ones and Light Ones, into good and evil. Pretty basic stuff, isn't it? It's what we teach all the little Other children. But who ever told you it had all stopped?"

Semyon leaned toward me so abruptly that his chair cracked.

"That's the way it was, it still is, and it always will be. Forever, Antoshka. There isn't any end to it...Do you have a truth of your own, Anton? Tell me, do you? Are you certain of it? Then believe in it...Believe in it and fight for it. If you have enough courage. If the idea doesn't make you shudder. What's bad about Dark freedom is not just that it's freedom from others. That's another explanation for little children. Dark freedom is first and foremost freedom from yourself, from your own conscience and your own soul. The moment you can't feel any pain in your chest--call for help. Only by then it'll be too late."

He paused the reach into the plastic bag and took out another bottle of vodka. He sighed:

"Number two. I have a feeling we're not going to get drunk after all. We won't make it."

my 1980s

[Although many dissed it, I enjoyed this Wayne Koesten-baum essay reprint on Salon, so much so that I've decided to write a similar one in the same style.  Mine will be, of necessity, shorter for the simple reason I'll try to say something in fewer words and images.]

"Plus ca change, plus c'est la meme chose."
Jean-Baptiste Alphonse Karr

I wanted to be the Next Great American Writer in the 1980s. I published one very bad novel and an interesting monograph on Jerzy Grotovski and a few short stories and poems. But I wrote many, many other things.  In my teens a professor told me I was a Renaissance Man and I took that to heart, wanting to whip off novels and poems with the same alacrity as Victor Hugo or Thomas Hardy; tellingly, I didn't enjoy reading either of them at the time. I envisioned myself forever sitting up late at night writing hard, amber-clear prose that never quite satisfied me. There is a wordless comic strip from Love and Rockets by Los Bros Hernandez from that time that shows one of the characters typing and smoking late into the night in a high garret room, suddenly crushing a sheet of paper with dismay, and that's how I saw myself. I often accomplished the sitting up late, drinking instead of smoking, but rarely found anything near solid, precise wording.

***

I was married when the 80s started and divorced about midway through. It was by mutual consent and there were no kids or property to dispose of so it was relatively amicable. We had sex nearly every day because we were young and horny and it was one of the few times we didn't fight. After we divorced and I lost nearly a hundred pounds I found to my surprise she wasn't the only person attracted to me and eventually I would gain a reputation, not undeserved, for fucking nearly everyone who approached me. For a while I enjoyed sex with men as a sort of vacation from the emotional messiness of sex with women, a kind of palate-cleanser between courses.

***

I read a tremendous amount, usually on walks and under trees, from silly novels to dense philosophies. I tried to find at least one important line from every book or poem or short story or essay and then typed it on a slip of paper and taped it to the swinging door of my kitchen. I'd been given a portable manual typewriter as a graduation present and it was on this I wrote nearly everything during that time. I had had a larger manual office model someone gave me during my marriage and it was on this I wrote my novel and the monograph, but one evening after reading On the Road I stood up suddenly and began to move methodically around my little apartment collecting furniture, clothes, books, kitchen utensils, everything I decided I no longer needed, and piled them in the center of my living room floor to give away. The office typewriter was among the last items to make the pile.

***

Today I have a lot of friends who hop trains and call themselves train kids. I did that only a couple times and only for short distances, always returning to my starting point. I was alone each time and spent the whole ride hunkered close to whatever I was holding onto: my first time I clutched a pole tightly, scared shitless I would be blown off and my body found by kids a la Stephen King's "The Body," and the next times I went I belted myself to something secure. I was a road kid, spending most of my time hitchhiking or in my own car. I always had luck hitching; it was always a matter of patience and not looking angry as the cars and trucks whizzed past me. One of the few times I hitched with someone else was one of the least productive hitch times of my career; we walked hours on the side of the New York State Interstate--we were headed to Buffalo--but we made it within twelve hours of our starting by dint of catching a train outside Rochester because it was dark and no one could see out thumbs. Whenever I hear the Pet Shop Boys' "West End Girls" I go back to that time and think specifically of riding around in the back seat of a car driven by a lesbian who would come out as straight within a year and who was showing us the city.

***

I acted in porn movies for a short time, a single summer, but it was enough to fund my life for a year. $500-1000 for a weekend's worth of work was great money. It was easier and less anxiety-producing than I'd feared and I loved the sex. I never thought about AIDS, not because this was before it or I knew no one who had it--I lost several friends to its depredations and I carry a healthy hatred for Ronald Reagan and his ambivalence to this day--but because I was stupid enough to think I was immortal. I actually came through those years of mostly unprotected sex without a single STD, leading my friends to joke my mother, like Achilles', had dipped me in the River Teflon. 

***



Authors I read for the first time that decade who played an important role in how I write: Susan Sontag, Jean Genet, Bruce Chatwin, John Gardner, Joan Didion, Thomas Merton, Gary Snyder, Jack Kerouac, William Burroughs, Dominick Dunne, Tom Robbins, Louise Erdrich, Tim O'Brien, H.P. Lovecraft, Raymond Carver, John Le Carre, Henry David Thoreau, Rita Dove, Vladimir Nabokov, Charles Simic, Gore Vidal, Georges Simenon, Anne Tyler, Sylvia Plath, Audre Lord, D.H. Lawrence, Toni Morrison, Rita Adler, Carlos Castenada, Ursula K. LeGuin, Peter Straub, Stephen King, Clive Barker, John Irving, Thomas Pynchon, etc.

***

For years after my divorce I lived in New Paltz, the town where my college was located. The town is snuggled at the base of the Shawangunk Mountain range between the Hudson and Wallkill Rivers and is home to many freaks. I found myself fitting there like fingers that curl into a fist. Three years after my divorce, through some stunningly bad decisions, I was out of work and had to give up my apartment to a friend. I was in Manhattan for a job interview and, having waited too long because I was at a bar to catch the last bus out of the City, I found a quiet berth under a construction trailer on the overpass above the Grand Central Station. I was warm, safe, and it was astonishingly easy to get in and out without being seen. I ended up sleeping under that trailer for several months, until approaching winter made me decide it was time to visit my parents. They were against my returning to the trailer, or to New Paltz, where I might have slept on friends' couches, so I said, "Buy me a cheap car and I'll live in that." They found a 77 Dodge Aspen wagon for $500 and I spent a weekend making it habitable and then lit out for the road. I lived in it for three years, seeing almost all of the country and parts of Canada, before my mother's entreaties to come back out of it and go to graduate school prevailed. I disembarked in southern Minnesota and sold the Aspen and lived in a park seven miles from town, sleeping under a gazebo and riding my bike to classes. This was September, 1989, and in another nine months I would meet my second, or as she says, my last wife. 

the most heartfelt prayer I've ever heard

I'm not big on prayer and neither is my denomination.  But on reading this morning about the relation between prayer and the sense one is part of a community, I was reminded of the greatest prayer I've heard.

It was in my last years serving the Menomonie UU.  The adopted daughter of some friends had been killed accidentally in Florida--she'd been struck by a car while walking on the side of the road, a stupid, meaningless accident that leaves a giant hole in the gut because no one, outside maybe God, could be blamed in such an event--and I'd been asked by them to co-officiate her memorial.  My friends and most of their family are UU while the girl herself had been pagan, so the other officiators were representatives of one of the local pagan communities.

It was a good, solid memorial during which many people said many good, solid things.  The melange of faiths, pagan and UU, mixed well (as one would expect since there are many UU pagan groups like CUUPS to help that along) and one by one her friends stepped up to the mic to speak about her.

The mix of congregants was good.  My friends' are deeply involved with the local homeless and punk communities and they were out in force.  Much of the memorial, in fact, was punk-flavored, from the music and the dancing to the clothes many celebrants wore, torn and shredded, reminiscent of the ancient Jewish ritual of rending garments in grief.

One kid, who had dated her years earlier and who had stayed friends and close with her, stepped up to the mic.  He was disheveled and had arrived late, and had been drinking for days.  He was, maybe, 17 at the time.  I'd been warned by my friends that he might be inappropriate because of his drinking, but I agreed that he should be given his chance to have his say.  There had been others, also drunk or stoned, who'd had something to say and their words were no less powerful for being slurred or rambling.

He came up to the alter and sort of gathered into himself.  For a moment I feared he would cry and cry so hard he couldn't get anything out and I would have to lead him away after a moment.  But then he threw up his head and screamed one articulate word:  "Fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck!"

It went on almost 20 seconds and many of the others joined in.  I'd like to say I did too but I was too surprised at the word, the vehemence, and the appropriateness of it that I simply stood there, and looked at them all.  It was like ululation, a wave of "fucks" drawn out and shrieked, and in that moment it was a desperate question put to the universe and a cry against injustice.  It sounded perfectly right.

His rage spent, the kid went back to slouching against the wall in the back.  Another kid walked up to the mic and said more things but I don't remember who it was or what that kid said.  The kid's prayer was still ringing in my ears.

I've kept up with that kid.  He's got an apartment now, a job, got his GED and given up drinking mostly.  I check in with him and he says he's doing okay.  we don't talk about the memorial because we don't have to. he said everything he ever needed to say.

"that's not punk rock"

I have more to write about the last couple days when I was once again relocated within my tribe, but for now I want to write about an anecdote the 2 girls who stayed with us the past few days told me that pisses me off. 

the new term for kids living on the road now is "traveler kids," apparently, and they've got a batch of new terms I wasn't familiar with.  one of them is "oogle," which is someone who tries to be the hardestcore of all.  (I explained in my day we called them "assholes.")  these 2 sisters knew 1 guy that they say no one liked so everyone called him "oogeleven" (I guess cuz he went to 11?) and who had stolen from people he stayed with, claiming that to do so was an understood part of sofa surfing (and I would suspect would make constantly moving from place to place mandatory).  at 1 point when they were around oogeleven was drinking at the punk house 1 of the sisters lived in in kalamazoo and swilled until he got sick.  he leaned forward on the floor on which he was sitting and puked and then leaned back and drank some more.

he made no move to clean up after himself.  eventually someone asked him if he was going to clean his puke up.  "no," he said.  "that's not punk rock."

let me make this clear.  he's right but only if he was admitting he was not behaving in a punkfriendly manner; not cleaning up after onself is not punk rock.  it's fuckedup.  one of the primary definitions of the punk movement is d.i.y.--do it yerself.  that involves cleaning up after yourself as well as, say, having an experience yourself.  we don't disengage from community when we join this tribe, we just locate ourselves in a different community, and a part of that is following the basic commandment jesus and prophets in other traditions recognized--treat others the way you'd like to be treated.  in words of single syllables:  don't puke on floors (either metaphorically or literally) and not clean it up.

we don't want to live as isolated individuals because that seriously hurts us, not only when we are with others but on our own.  if you have occasion to be in a room with oogeleven, remind him of this, perhaps with a gentle slap to the back of his head.  if you are hosting oogeleven, begin the cleanup process with him by taking him firmly by the scruff of the neck and using him to wipe the floor.

vagabondage

this is a mashup I've created as part of the worship service during my site visit tomorrow at my CPE facility. my didactic is about homelessness, a condition several of the people on my floor and my site have faced or are afraid they'll face once the move from the current building to a smaller one is begun, and while I've tried and failed to secure a guest speaker on the topic, my supervisor (and my group) argued that, as I had been homeless, I could be a persuasive expert on the subject. I'll emphasize to them, of course, that even within the broad definition of homelessness I was a particularly advantaged individual and that my experiences can't be taken as either the norm or anything like universals. however, as they have pointed out to me, I can speak to the emotional, psychological, and spiritual elements of what it's like to be homeless, and that's a step beyond what they know. I'm looking forward to this with a mixture of excitement and trepidation, as I guess I look forward to everything I suspect I'll enjoy.

tuesday afternoon reading

"I’ve been in jail more than once
on account of my drinking, but my
favorite time was a weekend I did in
Olathe, Kansas, as part of a DUI deferment.
The second day of the
jailed retreat, the counselor asked us:
“How many people here believe you
got here because you are an alcoholic?”
Of the twenty-five or so of us, I
was the only one who raised his
hand. I was honestly astonished. The
other members of the group looked
at me with surprise, dismay, or pity.
It turned out, as we told our stories,
that for most of the people there “it
was my first time driving drunk. I
just had bad luck.” I think they were
worried that we were being videotaped
and that somehow an admission
of guilt might be used against us
later, in court. But one of the younger
women approached me after the
session and said, “So you really think
you’re an alcoholic? I’m so sorry,
Clancy. That really sucks.”

"I don’t mean to suggest that these
people were all deceiving themselves,
only that I believe—though I may be
self-deceived; it’s so hard to know
these things—that I have become a
much more honest person since I
quit drinking, and that the cleanliness
of honesty is a big reason I don’t
go back to drinking when it seems
tempting. “But then I’d have to tell
my wife I had a glass of wine, and
then . . .” No. It’s easier to skip the
Burgundy and have an
iced tea."

--from "the drunk's club: a.a., the cult that cures" by clancy martin in the january 2011 edition of harper's magazine

the story about scott and kevin

"you remember scott? classic textbook example of alcolism, that guy. his dad killed himself. went into the woods behind their place and put a pistol in his mouth. his mom won't sell the place. scott's still there. his dad prolly didn't want to live to see his son become him. anyway, I don't think you knew kevin. he coldcocked him, man. right in my place. this kevin, he's a motherfucker from the old school, one of the original new paltz lowlifes. they were here in town drinking and somehow scott left kevin at the bar and came back to my place and kevin walks all the way from bacchus to my place. 8 fuckin miles, man. he shows up to my place and they get into it. I dunno, they had something with each other all along, didn't get along, maybe saw too much of each other in the other one, I don't know. so they're gettin into it and scott's wantin to whale on kevin, he's all pissed at him. he's goin after him, sayin, 'lemme at im, lemme at im,' and he's so drunk he could shit himself. kevin's just sittin on the couch, watchin im. he's got his arms folded like this across his chest. I'm holdin scott back, sayin, 'ey, be cool, man, not in my place, man.' you know, cuz I'm wantin my place peaceful, you know, like an oasis of calm. I don't need that shit in my house. respect my house. but scott's after im, he's tuggin and sayin, 'I'm gonna git im, I'm gonna git im,' and I'm holding him back and then he, like, breaks free from me and he's all over kevin, man. kevin stands up and scott's, like, 'du du du du du,' y'know, like tryin to pull off one of those boxing moves like on the punching bag. 'du du du du du.' and kevin, he's got like these big carpenter's hands, his fist's like a hammer, he just unfolds his arms and POOM. one shot and fuckin scott's down, he's down on the floor. he's not movin, man. and I'm thinkin, 'oh no, not again. not another murder, right under my nose.' so he's not gettin up and I push kevin and I say, 'git outta my house, git out and don't never come back.' so he leaves and I'm thinkin scott's dead. he's bleedin like a motherfucker from his mouth, there's this pool of blood on the floor comin from his mouth, takes me days to get that outta the carpet. he's not movin and I'm thinkin he's dead, and then he goes into, like, convulsions, still bleeding out of his mouth but shakin so I know he's alive. eyes back up in his head, tongue out, the whole works. he was out, no lie, 20 minutes, man, and he gets up and he's all like, 'ubadah ubadah ubadah,' like in a cartoon. kevin split the outside of his lip from his right nostril to his mouth and then inside his mouth and up to his gumline. I git im cleaned up and I tell him, 'that's it, yer outta here,' and I drive im home. but he's never change, man, I hear he's still fuckin textbook alcoholic. I ain't seen neither one of em since."