insecurity

When they buried Pullman, the railroad car baron who micromanaged his workers’ housing, after-hours activities and churchgoing, they had to protect his casket from being torn back out of the ground by irate labor activists. Under the shadow of an opulent monument lies railroad ties, concrete slabs, and anything else that could be found to slow down the desecrators.

I have an insult to my soul buried in me, entombed in the misunderstandings of a child. Over the years I’ve thrown all manner of obstructions on top in hopes of preventing being desecrated any further. And now I find all these years later I need to have a talk with that buried wound. The woman can heal with her experience and understanding what the child could not comprehend.

Frans Lanting has observed young male chimpanzees using their fingers to squeeze shut their lips, struggling to hide their nervous grins. The grin is a dead giveaway of feeling insecure. If they tip their hands that they’re feeling less than confident, all outcomes are far less likely to go their way.

I am struggling to understand insecurity. The underlying vulnerability and fallibility opens our hearts to each other; it’s widely held that these falterings make us human. The sympathetic character is central to fiction, history, theater, cinema and it is vulnerability that triggers our sympathy. Our shortcomings and weaknesses are the impetus for soul-searching, making amends, and the yearning for greater understanding of ourselves and others.

But take that vulnerability out in the world and up springs insecurity, a destructive force if ever there were one. Insecurity breeds cruelty, self-absorption and the tendency to abort creative and generous impulses at the get-go.

I can be confused by insecurity and power - opposites at first blush - since so many insecure people gravitate toward situations where they wield definable power. I myself learned as much as I could, broadly and deeply, as fast as I could as a viable defense. Where I’m from, if you didn’t know something or if you misspelled a word you were a target for ridicule.

I have the good fortune to have a metaphoric mind that thrives on fertile new associations so the greater the storehouse of knowledge I possess, the greater the likelihood new revelations will come my way regularly. I also have a native curiosity – I would much rather know about something, what makes it tick, than save face by not asking the question that reveals my ignorance. I honestly can’t remember the last time I was bored.

Yet woven into a mind humming along with metaphor and curiosity is electric fear: I understood from an early age there was a threat of humiliation and of being disowned if I failed to be smart enough. Upon recognizing the fear, I want to yank it out of me like it is an invading alien species in a tract of pristine wilderness. But how can that be right? Fear is hardly an alien species in the human psyche.

Perhaps there are two things I want, and they need to be sorted. Reflexively, I want to be shut of the pain and discomfort I feel along with the fear; there is nothing likable about these feelings. That said, I’m not sure it's wise or even possible to eradicate them.

Fine, if I have to live with the flat-out yuckiness fear brings along with it, then I aim for the other goal: I want to throw off the limitations of my age-old fears. I stop myself innumerable ways, innumerable times every day in deference to these fears. I limit my ideas, my aspirations, my very ability to conceive.

I was raised to excoriate myself; I no longer see the usefulness of this exercise. If instead I work from the premise that I’m human, no better or worse than anyone else, I begin to see that what I took for shortcomings are the ramshackle defenses of a child, cobbled together as resourcefully as circumstances would allow. Of particular use were injunctions to keep my head down, to strive to fit in. They were worked up for the five year old and the eleven year old. Is it any wonder they chafe and choke me now?

The task at hand is not to pull native parts of me out by the roots, but to bring kindness and shelter to the parts of me most hard-pressed in the past. I find the resources to do that by taking action based on my vitality, not my fear. I picture setting my fear up in a nice easy chair by the window with a good book, a cup of tea and a comfy throw to keep its feet warm while the rest of me goes about my business. Surely it could use a bit of rest by now.

This sluicing through what’s left of the old, searching out the bits that remain current, is a tricky thing. The water of here and now pounds through, and it’s difficult to track these small nuggets for long without being distracted, or seeing only the muck of the past, or simply giving over to how much more attractive the fresh water is compared to the lifeless sediment of what now and always will be gone forever.

I release my past. I let it sink away from me. I am not my wounds. What is real, what matters will stand. All else falls away.

good morning, sunshine

Good morning, sunshine. The whistley squeak of an unoiled vent fan next door sounds the alarm – something’s coming, something’s coming. The heat on my brightly lit skin on this cool fall day is the work of only one fire. Nothing but the sun could pull off such a feat. A gurgle of thoughts lies in the throat of my brain - will they choke off in a hack or spew forth, throwing back out whatever slipped under the radar down the gullet of my mind in the last few hours?

I tire of the mediocrity of work half-inspired and then finished up with one eye on the till and the other on the reviewers. Yet how do I avoid the same damn pitfalls? It takes courage and vigilance to keep to the source and damn the consequences.

I don’t even know. I’ve done a lot, but I think I have more to learn in follow-through, in bringing finished works up to the level of devastating strength.

This October sun is about to give me a tan. Maybe the function of worry is to tell us we’re not in exactly the right place. That if we’re unsure it’s because our center of gravity’s keewhacky because our footing’s not so good. I can find myself in a state of grace, implementing easily, and in that state there are no worries.

Does anything not manmade whip and crack in the wind? Waves crash. Trees creak and saw on each other. But it seems nothing grows long enough to be whipped so. I’m on the third floor backporch of Grimey’s and the two story building to my right has long sheets of heavy black plastic weighted down on its roof, I suppose, to prevent leaks. It sounds like a two-bit imitation of the shore in this wind, and I wonder if its thundering, and the squeaking of the fan on the building to my left don’t drive the occupants to distraction. Things made by man and left to interact with nature – including all our ears – in unforeseen ways.

Why isn’t it enough to be an active intelligence riding shotgun with a true heart, a keen-eyed gut and a thriving soul? Shouldn’t that be enough?

What is it I’m trying to be enough for? Fulfillment must come in the act, to look for it elsewhere is to topple over from the tug and pull of external authority.

the traitorous helpful instinct

I have set myself up to betray the thing that matters most. There is a way of being alive, tapped in, deep in the moment and in metaphor that holds more truth than any conscious act I can muster. The courage to create from this state is the single human trait that inspires me.

Yet, like a trick knee, I’m ready to fold, to come clattering down from the truth for the first knucklehead who says, “I don’t get it” or “Those are some ten dollar words you’ve got there.” I don’t walk into an art museum or an avant-garde jazz concert and expect to be spoonfed concepts. It irritates the crap out of me to see a play so didactic that I feel I’m back in sixth grade, prisoner of a condescending institution. It is precisely the stretch on the part of the artist and the audience that makes art glorious: a mutual application of self to attain a new state.

Yet I carry the curse of the “good little helper”. If someone responds to my work by, rather than stretching, saying instead, “Oh, that’s just too far. If you want me to get it you’ll have to bring here to me. Couldn’t you do that?,” my impulse to apologize and to accommodate kicks on like a lawn mower motor, champing at the bit to bring everything down to a nice, workable level.

Trouble is, my source material is weeds and boulders and broken bottles and weathered tree trunks cleaved in two and fully human souls, neither good nor bad… all manner of things that can’t be reduced down to tidy lawns, tidy stories, tidy songs, tidy outcomes. I’d go so far as to say I’m pretty sure the world doesn’t need tidy.

It needs more of us turning within to find that which resonates most, and bringing that resonance out into the light.

And not a one of us will find truth by having someone else hold our hand and walk us helpfully, remedially step-by-step through the process. That's not how it works. It can't: there's no dignity in it for the seeker or the guide.

specificity and self-consciousness

I have assumed since I was little that we have an obligation when we tell stories to make a real effort to summon up the flavor of the thing. It's imperative to strive for the words whose specificity and lithe grace give over fully what it is we’re trying to say. To settle for “Well, you should have been there, it was great,” is a small but total failure. We need to offer someone attending our words the same chance to be captivated by the thing that got us so cranked up in the first place.

There’s a way of learning as you go, of punting, of reaching into the unlit larder with one hand, feeling around for that stockpiled sensation or memory, even while you’re standing there talking to a crowd in your kitchen. With effort comes mastery: right as you’re about to fess up to your empty handedness, your fingers deftly nab that can of Mushy Peas, a delicacy you were so taken with in Ireland you had to lug home proof positive to show your friends.

I’ve always thought that tuning into specificity – not just “I don’t feel so good” but “I feel the unease that comes from having bitten off too big a bite, and now I dread trying to fulfill my commitments because just the act of starting will trigger blaring reminders of how under-qualified I actually am to do this” - that specificity is of real value. It carries you deeper into every aspect of awareness and aliveness.

I suppose this could be construed as tedious – I don’t really want someone trying their utmost to tell me in what ways their nose feels differently itchy than it did yesterday. There are miracles of discernment to be had here, but by no means do they all need to be shared.

As a lover of writing and of putting to words specific qualities, I find I have a new goal: to discern exactly the place or places in me where there are voices who truly have something to say. Right now I feel I have little control over where my tapping spout strikes when I sit down with paper and pen. Sometimes a sinewy intelligence flies out, pulsing, immediate. Other times that godawful stultifying primary school teacher in me commandeers my efforts, running ripshod on the nuances, and taking pains that every line is clear, every claim substantiated, and plenty of explanatory notes are peppered throughout for the imaginary reader. I have entirely too much of that voice.

And then there is a voice that flows with combinations of words that strike sparks off one another, and with ideas that get to the heart of my questions about living. I wish I could write from that voice always. I don’t know whether I can’t because I’m still inept at finding that voice, or whether that voice just doesn’t always feel like talking. It could be both. It could be something else altogether.

Writer Neal Stephenson says he needs a “slab” of four uninterrupted hours to write productively. Two sessions of two hours each will not be as productive. A four hour period where he’s worried he may be interrupted is completely unproductive. Pianist Helene Grimaud has a simple rule of thumb for what material she will play: “It has to be something I can’t live without.”

They have already found a steady enough supply of that vital voice within; just give Neal some protected time and show Helene a piano and they have their compasses pointing the way.

I still lack the strength to write most of the time without self-consciousness. I notice it when I subtly shift keys in my writing, vaguely aware that someone will be reading it down the line. I don’t yet know how to let myself have the notion that no one will read what I write unless I act to share it with them. Julia Sweeney talks of a stunning epiphany where she realizes for the first time that if she doesn’t believe in God, then the Catholic god of her upbringing wasn’t around her, in her, watching her, privy to all her thoughts. Her thoughts were her own and absolutely no one else would know them without her volunteering them.

I wonder if this sense of God’s omniscience we carry with us stems from the apparent all-reaching power we encounter in our parents when we’re young and artless. They could divine things about us with miraculous accuracy. We grow up with the seed of that experience buried deep inside, the lasting sensation of being watched, seen through, and eavesdropped upon.

An obverse of this is how little anyone actually cares about the minutiae in our lives that our mythical god is supposedly so wrapped up in. Hard to fathom. Even paparazzi have nothing personal against the stars whose garbage they riffle through and weddings they badger. They are caught up in the illusion of fame, and that’s what draws them in. It takes getting older to realize that we are not the center of drama, that drama is not the best reason that we are here. Turns out that much of what we experience as slights and insults isn’t personal.

And so I seek to write with my ability to zero in on the alive voice inside of me being of utmost value, even while who I am - the personal me - is not particularly important.

I don't understand writing

I don’t understand writing. I don’t understand where it comes from. I am on the beach on an incline, with the dense, wet sand packed beneath my feet. I draw a line into the sand an inch or so deep, moving down to the tide. Where I have drawn into the sand it fills instantly with water, and as I draw down to the waves, that newfound water flows down through the groove I’ve drawn and into the ocean.

That is close to how writing feels. I draw a groove and thoughts come from all sides and from below to flow into a line, a long string out to the ocean to be overwhelmed with and completely a part of the greater whole.

And so I don’t see writing as expression. At least not in the sense of
1.) I think this,
2.) I write this,
3.) you read this,
4.) I have expressed myself.

Instead, my thoughts lay all about like the water in the sand; they help make up the body of who I am. And when I begin to draw that line, thoughts that leap to mind waiting to be written are often utterly unfamiliar. In fact, I’m fairly sure I’ve never met these thoughts before. The expression part – the part that speaks for me – seems more likely to be how I get things said than any thing I actually say. It feels like the ideas and notions are the flood of water coming forth from beyond me, while the walls of the groove it flows through, which govern the shape and size of the flow – that’s the part that’s me. I bring to the table a jumble of intentional and unconscious restraints. What makes the work mine? My limitations. By contrast, the source I draw on seems infinite.

What if the solution to all problems was sawing?

What if the solution to all problems was sawing? Sawing away, chewing through, down to the core and past. Waiting on that satisfying moment when the two halves give way, savoring the muscle, the sweat, the concentration it takes to keep the path of the saw true. Just chew away at all life’s problems till they are reduced to half the size (and possibly rendered moot in the process.)

Or perhaps a hammer would do the trick. To drive stabilizers through – nails, tenons, dowels. Or to mash into bits or to resurface into a dimpled, broken glow. The whack of it, the thud or the ring, the strengthening or the shattering. It is such an immediate connection to pound away at the problems before us.

Or perhaps the tool approach is limited, and removal is the ticket. Pick it up and heave it overhand as far as you can into the tall weeds. Or just toe it a little till it rolls out of the way. Get hold of it with both hands like a child with a bowling ball, swing it back between your legs and bring it forth, giving birth to a mighty roll that sends that persistent problem rolling down the hill, bounding over a hillock and landing satisfyingly PLOP! in the lake.

Ah, the problem is too big to lift barehanded. Forklifts can do nicely in a pinch. You might try lassoing it to the trailer hitch on the Volvo, although you don’t want to overtax those noble four cylinders.

Once you’ve got the thing hooked up to motorized transport, a new problem dawns. You have to take it somewhere and now that can be almost anywhere. The neighbors’ yard down the street that put the Republican signs on your lawn last spring while you were on vacation? Your old high school? Your ex – the one that dumped you? Where do you leave problems you’re sick of, and how do you make sure you don’t leave them for the wrong person? There’s nothing about this in the owner’s manual; I suspect they never thought we’d have the initiative to get this far.

The truth is I have this antiquated notion you don’t remove problems, you work through them. I feel all the force of cultural approbation behind this notion but I honestly don’t know if it’s any damned good. The sensation is like you getting revved up, absolutely popping to go fly a kite. The weather is fantastic, huge puffy clouds rolling through a sky so blue it appears solid. You run around the house: sneakers, shorts, kite, tail…..string. You are so very ready to be in the middle of the act of flying a kite, the breeze riffling your clothes, your legs pumping to get the thing launched, but you are pulled up short by a hopeless tangle of yards and yards of kite string. You fiddle with it, a tug here and there, still hoping there might be a quick remedy, just the right pass-through and the string falls into an unknotted heap ready to be coiled.

The quick remedy eludes you. Slowly you fall into the problem-solving state, sliding to the floor as your legs and back tire of standing on the kitchen tile. Soon you are curled over the string mess in your lap, laboriously pulling through each next misguided loop, while that immortal boundless enthusiasm that had such a thorough hold on you only a moment ago recedes from reach the way the dock and shore seem to bow out of your life when you leave them by ferry.

You are now given over from living spontaneously, joyously, open, unguarded to solving. a. problem. Human magically folds self into one-eighth former size, the headline reads.

buttheads of history

TRIGGER


This post came while reading Karen Armstrong's "Holy War", a book that looks at the history of interaction among Jews, Christians, and Muslims and finds the source of the current war between the West and Islamic militants in the deeds of the bloodsoaked Christian crusaders of the Middle Ages who slaughtered tens of thousands of innocents in the name of their God:



Betelgeuse had no idea what was to come after him: the legacy of the posses hounding after the Crapmaster of the bible. Who are the buttheads of history? (Buttheads being far too kind a word for the marked human penchant for destruction – must kill must cut down must dominate and destroy must devastate what is present and flourishing and replace it with my seed and issue. Christ, we’re no better than the dinosaurs.)

And you get somebody like Christ, like Mohammed who say peace and love peace and love YO LISTEN UP PEACE AND LOVE and then they die and it’s the clock ticking down till their very own followers, the devotees the ones of the greatest faith twist the message into peace and love for us and all you other vermin must die at our swords so that we can have the holy world we’ve been promised. And how much can those who survive the point of the sword having lost everything they love to these murderous barbarous assholes, how much can these survivors take before they sign on to absolute hatred of the attackers? What a revolting cycle, played out over and over again and then promptly forgotten by following generations till some reptile sees the utility of reviving old, warped folklore, mythology, religion to suit their own ends and drive multitudes to horrible acts of desecration believing all the while they are holy holy holy?

I have grown up seeing the awful costs, the awful toll on people when an insistence on lies holds sway, mass hypnosis that supposedly protects the whole. He’s not a wife-beater/child molester! He’s an upstanding citizen! We’re not corrupt despicable imperialists, we’re the good guys! Those who are not the benefactors of the lie and who see the truth pay every day with their souls – it sounds like something abstract and rhetorical when I write of it but the experience is that up being caught between the millstones and ground up in the oncoming flood – if you have no power, no way to get your footing, make your stand, throw off the liars and manipulators you are simply ground up.

thinking about Now

Now is the time to write of Now, this moment I can’t catch any more than I can see the edge of darkness chased down by the glare when I flip on a light switch at night. The light is on or it’s off, it is light or it’s dark. The moment is Now or it’s not, and no fleeting hand scrawling madly, no profligate tongue could beg to keep up. It is all my thought can do to entertain the notion, and if I make the actual leap to begin to consider all the components that make up Now – why, I’m unceremoniously dumped in the drink, watching the backside of the moment Now I had just been a part of making a beeline for the horizon.

That’s the beauty of Now, we’re too slatternly slow to even think about it in real time. Probably hummingbirds feel like they have oodles of time to consider Now – they begin to have the speed to comprehend it, while we’re almost doomed to live in the past or the future.

Most likely I’ve got it all wrong and hummingbirds probably find it just as devilishly difficult to ponder Now. It’s just that their sense of it is infinitely quicker and finer than ours. Life seems to be like that: bring more tools and strengths to the table, find just as many challenges that are a match for your resources. We walk about in blinders, suddenly turning to discover a magnolia in full bloom: oh my! Of course, it’s been blooming its head off for days - it just took you till now to notice - and our physiology noodges us to believe that means it just happened. Oh yes, and we are each of us the center of the universe.

What all I will never see could almost lead my heart to the breaking point if it weren’t that I’m already completely overwhelmed, bushwhacked, undone by the great gobs of life I can see. Too much. Too much for one soul peering out of one pair of mortal eyes. We never get the hang of it, our grey matter hammering away like enzymes on all we take in, even in our sleep, in a vain attempt to break it all down into something sensible, keeping abreast of developments, beginning to see all the fine meshes of networks like dendrites connecting this to that and that to these many other things.

I love us for this. Thank god that, if the brain makes noises processing this vast unwieldy input, we can’t hear it or we’d never get item #1 done. What a clatter it must make somewhere, however microscopically. Kaffir lime leaves, Hamas, suds in a bucket, the new black, Richard the Lionhearted, Mothers Day, 2-5-1, don’t forget fabric softener, tweak in the left knee, co-sines, 9600 bps modem, Sam Mocksby, white breasted nuthatch, pentatonic scale of the wind chime, interest rate up .25%, prime’s at 8 now, Grandma had four sisters and their names all start with F, Tenbrooks was a big fine horse…Just a fraction of inventory of what’s current in my brain. Where do we conjure up the illusion of consistency, of interconnectedness that stitches this hornet’s nest together and lets us walk through the world confident in our individual-as-a-snowflake identities?

I already died

I already died. I’m already dead. I have nothing to lose. What I ran from so long, I can quit running from. It’s off me. I can’t be killed in the way I’ve been so terrified of my whole life. Hatred can’t touch me. I am life itself, life flows in me, and when I’m gone life will flow on unabated. It is unstoppable. If you define it as one thing, it will flow over you as something different from that. You can’t name it, peg it, define it, sanction it, control it, dictate it. If you try to dam it up it will run through your fingers. It is unstoppable. When I am living, I am unstoppable in every way that matters. I want to create while I’m here, whatever I make being vessels of the stuff of life, energy, gifts. When I’m done, I’m done and that will be all I make. I have drawn light and hope from so many other makers and that is my road as well. I will make what I can as full of life as I can. This is what I do.

half a world away

TRIGGER

This post was written after finishing John Crawford's fine account of being a young National Guardsman in the first wave of the Iraq War, "The Last True Story I'll Ever Tell". My writing became the basis for a new song, Half A World Away, where I set myself the task of the near impossible: write a song that remains true to Crawford's account of the high costs fighting in Iraq exacted on his marriage and on all the relationships of his fellow soldiers. Oh, yeah, and write it so it might get played on country radio:

Rat’s nest hell-hole. No comfort, nobody trying to get you any. Damn little protection, nobody’s life seems to matter all that much. Hit the ground running when you get the call, your buddies are in trouble. Laugh at the rest. Rise to anger at anybody who expects you to act differently. Go in for a year. Learn to watch where your enemy may be hiding among these people who look so different from anyone you grew up around. Struggle not to hate their countrymen you meet back home in America. It’s so far beyond sucking, it’s amazing what we endure, what we will adapt to. Other people’s innards splattered in the streets: that’s their tough luck. One of your own dealt the same way – well, that’s a lot tougher ‘cause it could have been you.

All the anger and resentment from the danger, tedium, lack of liberty, ill use, utter disregard for what you feel, demand that you deliver when asked like a regurgitating tern whose young have pecked that feed spot on its bill. Your humanity nearly shot, it’s been hammered so thoroughly, so persistently.

Call home and say the wrong thing, wait in vain to hear the one thing you want to hear – how can anyone stay in touch with where you are? How can you help but resent them for not loving you enough?

The clearest message of all while you’re living in hell? It doesn’t matter. It doesn’t matter. Nothing matters.

It’s funny what breaks down. You leap to help your buddies in the line of fire, give them nothing but shit when you’re safe. You ache at the distance from your young wife, convince yourself that she’s not trying hard enough, she’s drifting away, she’s seeing someone else. You ogle and flirt with every woman under 40 and over 14 in a knee-jerk, empty-headed fashion. You commiserate with your buddies – every one you know is having relationship problems now, but you all work not to scratch too deep. Acknowledge the wound but for Christ’s sake don’t start it bleeding again. What you won’t say will cost you everything at home, but you feel certain that keeping it in is what’s keeping you alive. Why not just lose it? Sometimes it sounds so good.

130 degrees. Nobody’s supposed to live in that. Stench: diesel fuel, dead bodies, sewage. It always stinks. You make yourself eat twice a day not because you want it but to keep yourself alive. Look for ways out even though there aren’t any. Get fucked up on drugs, drink the Turkish rotgut on the street, and then wish you were dead the next day, hung over with the thermometer on triple digits.

You don’t even remember what it was like when you used to care. You don’t care about kids, about old ladies, you want them all to stay the fuck away from you. You don’t care about politics, you don’t care about history, about why you’re here in this godforsaken pit, you just want to get done, go home and never come back.

But you can’t go home. This is the Iraq war. You are the National Guard. You are company non grata, and your stay gets extended and extended, courtesy Mr. Rumsfeld, like you were battle worn machines they were wringing a few more miles out, not living, bleeding, feeling, thinking young human beings at the threshold of your adult lives. All that goes to shit. Do you need it to matter why you’re here? Do you need a higher cause, a cover story, the drapings of glory to justify the lost years, lost marriages, lost dreams, irrevocable damage? There are plenty of cover stories as long a s you don’t need a really good one.

Somewhere down the line, if you ever come to terms with the shit sandwich your feelings had to eat, you will need to marvel at how hateful you became, how easily that happened, how you never stopped being you, you just started being you who could also gladly torment the locals just because they were dumbfucks enough to be there when you were while you had the guns and the backup. A couple times you ran out of luck and you were the dumbfuck and they were the ones with the advantage. There’s no good reason why you survived those times.

And here’s what you can’t get over: when you push soldiers that hard, they stop seeing people as people and suddenly there are any number of inhuman acts you are capable of, if inflicting them on others will keep your protective veneer intact. Depending on how things escalate, there are huge amounts of yourself you’ll throw overboard, and you’ll become an animal, a killer, a sadistic madman just to push the fuck back, to keep this shit off you enough that you don’t break. Anybody who gets it deserves it for pushing on you, whether they meant to or not.

So many things we can do that we can’t take back. You can’t unsay the cruelest thing you can think of; you can’t make your wife unhear it. You can’t unfire the shots that killed innocents, you can’t retrieve the lashing-out when a child impulsively got too close. We prevaricate, we rationalize, we ruminate, we figure everything out umpteen million ways with 20/20 hindsight but we can’t undo those shots from the hip that were latent, just waiting to leap out in your defense and lay low anyone who might push you just a little too far.

subways and Ogden Avenue

In the peace of the morning the storms have blown through. Fog on the windows. The thunder flooded down the river; we were rattled in the bowl of the valley. Deeper notes I never hear, I know they’re there but my poor ear can’t go that low. Steady rain, surrounding my womb of an apartment, birds starting to say Fuck it, the day is on, wet schmett, I’m going out and singing.

This is the hour when the hum of the fridge and fan’s whir wind up front and center, when any attempt to sneak into the closet for a fresh shirt without waking your baby fails every time. How thrilled were the first engineers when they heard the manmade thunder of a subway train’s maiden voyage pounding up the glazed-brick tunnels, the sound itself a tremendous force demanding to be let out of its confinement?

The first time I was in the subway I was ten and my dad took us three kids to see Hair. The massive sound of the approaching train, starting loud and getting impossibly louder terrified me - and I was no scaredy-cat kid. I retreated to the dead center of the platform, exactly halfway in between and as humanly far as I could get from the northbound AND southbound trains. That would be a maximum difference of about eight feet. There was no way out.

Years later I would often take the train to high school. As you built speed leaving the subway stations, as the last lights of the platform fell behind, you’d begin to notice recesses, locked doors, nooks in the half-light. I began to develop the notion of a whole people who lived, hoboing, down in the subway tunnels. They’d forage the garbage bins for cast-off food, learn the timing of the trains from infancy so it was instinctive to step into shadow and out of view of six cars of bored passengers’ eyes every ten minutes. I began a low grade campaign of vigilance, looking for signs of life beyond the platforms.

Taking the bus to high school was a whole other story. My route went through several unglamorous districts in town. Starting at the fire station a half block from home, the bus rolled due south straight through the most violent housing project on the north side, jogging across the river to catch Ogden, the only road north of downtown to cut kitty-corner northeast to southwest. Early on in our stay in Chicago, the clout-heavy real-estate types succeeded in getting Ogden chopped back block by block so that they could develop Lincoln Park as one of the city’s most affluent neighborhoods without its fatal flaw of having the artery of Ogden Avenue pumping in invaders from all the least desirable parts of town for a mere fifty cents a pop. The neighborhood transformed rapidly like it drew strength from the death throes of dying Ogden.

So over time it took longer to finally reach Ogden Avenue by bus, but once there we’d rumble past light industry and the Lyon Healy harp factory, the golden bear astride the tire joint, old filling stations and churches of every stripe and size, the rundown glory of Washington Park and the western boundaries of Skid Row. Hovering above the river, Montgomery Wards had a gleaming bronze figure atop its tower, surely to rival the grandeur of Demeter at the helm of the Board of Trade. By contrast, Montgomery Wards’ goddess had the posture of a spastic flapper. She offered a poor welcome to those travelers approaching downtown from the northwest.

Fruit markets and storefront gospel meetings gave way to medical complexes. We trundled past Cook County Hospital – grey, looming, Victorian, with an impressive cross-section of people milling around ptomaine trucks. Down past Rush St. Luke’s and over to U of I Medical Center and the VA, a bewildering mesh of blocks I never fully got the hang of.

This was the near southwest side, a jumble of old blues joints, housing project low-rises, and vestiges of the old Little Italy. Set down in the middle of this delicate biosphere were these huge medical complexes and the Lighthouse for the Blind, placed with the trademark brusqueness of Urban Renewal. Hard not to see the cynicism of the planners: here are huge well-funded projects, no we can’t be bothered with the busywork of stitching together the blood vessels that will bind these institutions to this neighborhood. Fosco’s, you’re new neighbors with U of Med - deal with it. Eddie Taylor’s – this is the VA. Now deal.

old man

The old man bent down ever so slowly to pick up the folded newspaper on the coffee table. He ratcheted back up vertebra by vertebra and cast a locking glance at me, daring me not to pay attention.

“This is it,” he says, “the charade is over. All bets are off.” He gave the faintest of horse snorts and shook his head. “A whole galley of fools, hell-bent for destruction, can’t run fast enough to get their own way. This is not human dignity. They’re worse than pigs. Worse than sheep. More like rats, I reckon.”

I knew the story that had him so vexed but I was waiting to hear him out.

“There’s just one way to live your life, child, and that’s by your lights. Dignity comes from choosing the nobler idea over fear every time, day in and day out. It’s not enough to do it once or twice, or to do it in such a way as to get your name in the paper. Chances are good if your name’s in the paper you’re not going by your own lights anyway but chasing some fool dab of glory that will somehow prop you up, make you think you are somebody.

“Well, hell, we already are somebody, every last one of us. It comes free with the package when you get that spark of life that kickstarts you living and breathing and it doesn’t fade till your last breath.

“Question is, are you gonna be like these ninnies who wouldn’t know an authentic moment if it reached up and bit ‘em in the biscuit or are you going to seek out paths where you test your mettle, see what you’re made of, stand up and tell the world that you stand for what matters in life? And I ain’t talking about showing off or anything like that. I reckon it takes the most courage just to tuck your head down and pour your life’s sands of time into whatever task you choose. Just summon up the faith to devote years to tilling your soul and creativity, till your life yields up the fruits of your labors and you go to your grave with an ease in your heart that can only come from good work well done.

“Oh, I know you’ve got questions, you’ve got doubts. You worry so. It’s good to ask questions, to wonder why things are the way they are and how a body could make them different.

“So ask those questions, and then you answer them, not with thoughts or words but with action. The courage to act in the face of fear and doubt is always rewarded with a sense of capability and often-times a big heap of revelation to boot.

“That’s the kicker, see. There are some questions that will drive you to distraction. Some doubts that will make you want to hide under the bed. And you’ll wonder if you shouldn’t redouble your effort to figure ‘em out, or maybe you shouldn’t be gallivanting around the world so riffled with doubt and it’s a better idea to set a spell longer and figure it out.

“Well you can try that for a little while but if you find yourself sinking lower and lower into a prison cell of despair, QUICK! GET UP! GET OUT! MOVE! The good Lord gave you a miracle of a body with full senses to take in the world, a fine brain and heart and gut to sort it all out, and a soul to let you know you’re absolutely part of it all. Get cracking and force that oxygen to travel down through your bronchia, out to your capillaries, up to your brain. Enjoy the phenomenal feat of effortlessly balancing dozens of pounds of flesh, bones and blood on two moving feet. Go find the people who blast a hole in your latest dark theory of the world. Go find the slant of light through the right stand of trees late in the afternoon that pierces right through you and nourishes some tender spot somewhere under your breastbone. Go live the miracle of making something wholly new, midwifing creativity into existence. Jump into the cycle of rebirth with every molecule of yourself you can bring to it. You'll find the answers to your questions waiting for you there.

sometimes the air is too thin

Sometimes the air is too thin, too loaded with exhaust and chemicals. Sometimes the light is too hazy, too glare-y and grey, cutting through the dullard atmosphere. This is when it gets hard to walk, to lift heavy things, to scramble up the stairs two at a time, to come up with a quick rejoinder that will make you chuckle every time you recall it in the next couple weeks. On these days, you can only do less because the third dimension has shrunk and there’s less room to maneuver. You have to duck your head a little just to manage an ordinary thought. When we think of how we’ve spent our time, what we’ve accomplished, we never remember these thin-air days – they’re too unlikable to hang on to, and too nondescript to file away with the bad times.

Fish swimming in their tanks overdue for a good cleaning, peering through the murk and anaerobic stink are in a similar predicament. You can’t leapfrog ahead in time to a blue sky day. You can only remove yourself from the haze, and then only if you’re free to give up your attachments, your commitments long enough to get away. Most of us don’t find ourselves in that situation. You have to sacrifice to get to the sunshine.

And where does that smell go, that slightly sweet, slightly wrong smell that tells you you’re inhaling chemicals that don’t form independently in nature? The molecules slide in the airstream traveling up your nose, slip past your unsuspecting cilia like they’re beefy, dozy security guards talking about their new TV sets and paying no attention to those lowlife molecules slipping in the front door with the pizza delivery man. Quickly the chemical molecules flow to your bronchia where they leap with both feet into the membrane that will carry them into your bloodstream. Everywhere they go, your organs say I don’t know how to deal with this crap. They bully the oxygen out of your bloodstream so your brain starts going a little hungry for its mainline supply of fuel. Your liver says this is some heavy shit – I don’t know what to do with it. If you’re lucky your lungs take most of it and flick it back out but, if you haven’t moved, haven’t changed locations, your next lungful of air brings another basket of crap for you to contend with.

quality of line

Quality of line. A line flows from thick to thin, lightens till it starts to feather, bears down suddenly steamrolling vast thick stripes across the page. Or a musician suggests a phrase, just enough to catch your ear and draw you in and you follow. She lightens her touch, the line becomes a puff pastry ready to blow away when suddenly a hint of determination enters the line. Now you feel when the next accent will fall in the moment before it comes. Now you hear the return of the opening phrase played with fingers of lead, an inevitability weighing down each coming note till you feel dread mix in with your anticipation of where the line will go.

We have the most amazing array of pleasure-dishing apparatuses at our fingertips. Our senses, so underutilized in our day, are infinite rheostats capable of such continually finer, subtler distinctions that to fall into your senses when you follow the quality of line flowing out of the painter and the musician you are now newly Horton hearing Who-ville. There are universes all around us available to our senses that we routinely ignore – or short of that, we mind-bogglingly fail utterly to discover.

I remember stepping off a diesel-fumed, body-odored, junk-fooded Greyhound after a thirteen hour ride from Chicago. The door swung open and I stepped into an updraft of fresh-cut Kentucky bluegrass. The smell was huge – green, clean, sweet, oniony; as sure a sign of warmth, open skies and the freedom of summer as anything under the sun. The contrast was more extreme than I almost can conceive of.

When I am in the woods for half an hour I feel a profound shift. My senses recalibrate, my tempo changes. All the sound palette that falls between, say, 15 and 75 decibels emerges and begins to distinguish its various components. The incredibly soft whisper of the wind through the grass – no, not just the grass, but the heads at the tops of the blades –is nothing less than a caress to these over-stimulated ears.

A squirrel might sound like a giant animal, perhaps a stag, stomping through the dried leaves till you hear the precise, specific hoofsteps of a deer coming down the hillside toward you. The mouse who never emerges from under the leaf cover keeps up a steady rustle; while cardinals, towhees, and robins fling leaves with a percussive flourish you’d mistake for no other movement in their hunt for tasty morsels. They're clearly the cymbal players in the dried leaf orchestra.

And what about the new young leaves? They hang on their branch tips, folded, translucent – an ethereal soft green that would seem otherworldly if it weren’t so essentially a part of the rebirth of this world. Reach up to touch a leaf – furled, not yet strong enough nor coursing with enough life-giving fluids to umbrella out into the sun and rain – and you feel a softness like the skin on a baby’s arms. Was there ever so fresh a thing in this world? Why yes! Stunningly there was and there is, over and over, back beyond time and there will be forward to some unforeseen end of time.

Listen to the calls of birds, whose heartbeats come in multiples of our own. Sweet call comes down through the trees ending with a rasping burr. Find that call later, recorded and slowed down, and the rasp at the end is instead a flourish of notes, a trumpet call as melodious as the rest but far too fast for our lumbering ears and brains to comprehend. Ah, these animals are living at levels our senses can only get a whiff of, what with their different tempos, their ultraviolet vision, their subsonic songs.

Ants, like many insects, negotiate the world and communicate through chemical signals using something like our sense of taste and smell as their central sense. One likeably perverse entomologist took a worker ant from its colony, daubed it with the scent of a dead ant, and put it back in the colony. The ant tried to head back to work, but every time it encountered another ant it would be sniffed at, determined to be an ant carcass, and picked up and hauled off to the colony refuse pile. This happened repeatedly till the scent seemed to wear off that unlucky worker ant.

arugula

Arugula! Delicious armpit of a flavor. Huge mouthfuls of funky French dirt. Pow. Is it green? Is it brown? Is it purple? What is that taste? A little horseradish, a little mushroom, a little peatbog, a little bleu cheese...

Makes my mouth smile. My mouth when it smiles inside lifts off and hovers twenty feet above the ground basking in all that is glorious about this world. My mouth prowls the back alleys of Bangkok at night looking for the finest, most complex stunning flavor combinations the brilliant wizards of the wok can conceive of. My tongue travels through time savoring the particular flavor sets of culture all over the planet, all over the calendar.

Ah, what an austere acrid people live here! My, how sturdy and funky these people are. Oh dear, here we have a whole culture anaesthetizing itself with dairy fat – glad I don’t live there.

My tongue is not that judgmental. Sure there are things it just won’t have – some things were not meant to be – but beyond that my tongue just wants to know the breadth, depth, parameters, textures, tastes that group the food of one people together. Ach, exclaimed the middle-eastern mother-in-law over a plate of black bean hummus – why do you Americans always have to mix everything up?

Well… we have to mix everything up because we’re looking for the pony in this stall full of manure. We haven’t learned the fixity and fatalism of the rest of the world. All the unrealistic people around the world do their damnedest to get here. Not all the best people, mind you, there are many ways to be a good person. Just all the people unwilling to embrace the reality they grew up with, even while they were surrounded by (and outnumbered by) people who stayed right where they were.