Negotiating the New Normal in the Fourth Quarter of Life

I realized recently that I was alienating my friends on facebook by my political ranting, forcing my witty barbs, most of which were plagiarized in one way or the other anyway, onto their social networking experience. Many of my friends are devoted disciples of Obama, but my disappointment in him has becomeg toxic. I am enraged by his weakness as a leader the spinelessness of most politicians overall, and the narcissistic self-interest of world leadership in general. Watching too much news TV inspires the late-breaking diatribes that erupt out of me with the predictability of a high school science project -- on command in a controlled environment where TVs light up living rooms like hearth fires used to. This is what a good audience does -- armchairs its rage from one program to the next, until it falls asleep in thechair at commercial break. I come out of my comas critical and slinging a lot of Obama bashing. And while I appreciate that my friends love me as they do and so put up with my goings on, I’ve ceased my senseless shadow boxing mostly for me. It leaves me sick with hangover. Lays over me like grease on a fry cook, that same hopelessness I felt growing up hostage in my own family, held captive by someone else’s craziness, the meanness of my father, the dehumanization of the silent suffering of my mother.

It is not important that the Republicans eat the young the weak the paralyzed and the Democrats are ball-less wonders. My rage disappointment fear about how the world has spun out is not going change the trajectory of the planet. Already we are lost on the wrong side of the tipping point where all this wiggling the wrong way has taken us over the edge. Bob Dylan said prepare yourself for elimination. This is what I believe. We have descended down that hole so unless you can fly backwards, hold tightly to that which is close to your heart, treat others with dignity and respect, find compassion, and be careful to whom you open the door. Find joy as only joy will lift your suffering. Understand that in the world of man, the truth no longer sets you free. Truth no longer stands on its own because it is no longer required in defining the political realities that unfortunately define the world as we are to know it. It is a different world where the importance of truth has been left behind. In the new normal, it has been dismissed.

But I’m old school born with joy. It’s what I had in my heart when I came into this world to help me solve the mystery of my family without dying inside the plot. I came up hoodwinked and dull, stifled by the limitations that were cultivated in me. I’ve spent most of my 61 years trying to turn my life around and so I carried the seed of joy dormant in cold storage for many years. I forgot I had it I guess until one day I inadvertly opened up the junk drawer and let light in.

Then all kinds of things sprouted out from under that dampness. Like this joy. Everyone has it and it’s there to be discovered. Joy of knowing realization otherness oneness awakening detachment forgiveness endless searching tenacious sniffing around flying to the defense of truth regardless of the irrelevance to which it has been reduced by modern society by the good old boys. Call it out like bullshit. Be an activist -- one should not perish without objection. But everything must emanate from that deep quiet pool within. It’s an inside job from here on out and it’s very personal for each of us. It is our redemption however we frame it.

This is not my path the nightly news show that suck me in hard have their way then spit me out a nervous nut job on the sofa because i am powerless over the stuck-on-stupid mentality of an outside world that has lost its way inside which I have lost mine. This is the point to which we have evolved in our high-minded pretentions, and if we were strong enough as a species to correct our way out of the high-speed wobble of global destruction in which we find ourselves, we would have already done so. So the question is how do you want to go out?

Something Is Happening and It Feels Like Hitting Bottom

9/17/08
Wednesday
In the house of my dead mother.

I have to make this trip a personal sabbatical...a sojourn. I'm here in Georgia to help my sister with the estate of my mother and her husand. They died within six months of each other, my mother being the first to go. I hang now in their house where I putz, clean, pack, move this there, then back again. I wash underneath, scrub above, spray down the inside, make the outside shine. All the while oppressed by the lingering remains of what killed them both: cigarette smoke so pervasive it makes my ears hurt.

As I pack up the personal effects of the mother, I understand that the love between us was complicated and difficult to touch, while all my life I have been consumed by my father. For years I have been trying to run him out of me like flies off stink. Most times he just fades in and out like bad radio, but he has always taken up too much space. If I am to die whole, his ejection is imperative.

I feel really close sometimes. In a dream I shove him flailing and clawing out the backdoor as he digs his talons into the meat and bone of the threshold. But his resolve for the misery he creates has always been stronger than the rest of us. Even so, how long can I continue to make this true.

On this day my girl sits in Seattle, missing me but oddly glad that I am gone. I've planted landmines all over with a deep seething anger I just can't shake. I bruise her with my hair trigger even though she is the best and only person in the world for me. I am ungrateful and assuming -- unkind -- and I have become typical in my treatment of her. Typical like a knife in the heart.

On my way out of town I tell her in note that I am in despair. I'm having a health crisis as my doctors scratch their heads and tell me it must be allergies and I've just about had it with their useless conjecture. I go off the rails and crash around the house like a tsunami. I'm out of control, short tempered, and drowning in my own bile. I want her home with me to be a happy place, only I can't prove that right now. I'm not at my best. A thousand miles between us she tells me over the phone we can have a new start.

But wouldn't that be just like me to wear her out first?

The Shirt of A Dead Man

9/14/08
Cumming, GA
Lake Lanier Park, On the Water

"You are wearing the shirt of a dead man. His name was Al."

That's what I want to write on the inside of all Al's shirts as I prepare them for donaiton, folding after pulling them out of the dryer, warm and anonymous. Synthetic fabrics bring an element of easy care, though the fabric I have always found to be unfriendly.

Al was a fine fellow. He loved my mom for over 30 years. My sister tells me she found love letters full of longing and desire. I remember, though it was nothing we discussed much, that all of a sudden she was seeing this short, dark-haired fellow. They worked for the same company, different offices, different states at one time or another. They would stay in motels together. My mother...imagine...shacking up with some guy in a road side. She had broken loose from my father who he was a shallow caustic pool; seething and mercurial. When she just happened to mention this new romance and a slight detail of a love life, I remember being delightfully confused. "Go mom."

Only now, really, is my mother starting to become clear to me. Now that she is dead.

Of course, my parents did us no favors by staying together as long as they did in a loveless emotionally bankrupt marriage. That's where Jaye and Joe come from: a futile misstep in a long line of stinking thinking that forms the misconception that children can save a marriage. But there they were, the two little rug rats that I fell into my life just long enough to feel imposed upon to babysit, then I split. I never let myself know them at all until later in life. It is a circle that I'm glad has come back around, but at the time they only added to my suffering. They were too young and I was too indentured to appreciate them.

So, I made my get away. Long premeditated. Too late though to prevent the near-death of my soul, where it stagnated and hovered just above flat line for more years than I care to admit. It did survive though; somehow I called upon the resources necessary to resurrect it. It hiccuped and struggled back to life. It beat erratic for the long time it took me to determine if my life was worth living. I'm not trying to be dramatic, I'm just saying that's how it felt. I'm lucky though to have have been born with joy. That is one suitcase in all this baggage I'm happy to own. Now has come the time to open each of them up to see what it is I've been hauling around all these years. It cannot be that bad and clearly now fear is the worst part of mystery. But fear is like a shadow lurking and foreboding until you throw some light on it.

My Father Must Be Dying Even Though He is Already Dead

It is almost like the tearing away of the skin inside me. It is the birth skin, the skin inside my skin only turned inside out and wrapped around the nub of my core, as if to stop the bleeding. It’s old and nearly inaccessible from being shoved so deep into the hole of me.

I sit on the bus as it ambles through Beacon Hill. I stare out into early evening and reflect through the window as the neighborhoods spin past me. Something different has been raging inside me for months…something other than the usual shit. This one has more of a bite. It’s got a shorter fuse. It’s hotter and more highly flammable. I feel so toxic behnid it I’m surprised I don’t smell. Maybe I do. I don’t know why Kerry allows me. Sometimes she’s my own personal moving target and she’s starting to notice. I tell her over the phone after she has limped on to work one night after having fallen into one of my tripwires, "Listen, baby, bear with me. I'm either on the verge of a breakthrough or I'm about to have a break down. I'm trying hard not to land on you."

It makes me feel deeply damaged sick compulsive impulsive neurotic unpredictable unkind unsafe a threat to myself and others and I am struggling to keep my relationship with the world in tact. This is the year I’m having a hard time feeling the love.

What?


[to be continued]

High Speed Wobble

Can I be a Witness

The air is quiet tonight beneath all the noise, which rolls off car tires on the street below, where it jumps the curb and ricochets off the phone poles. It lobs itself over the back fence, bounces off the trees and bird feeders, dead into my window, half opened, because I like to listen and watch after all. A cultural voyeur.

What is that stillness beneath the buzz? I sense dismay, agog, and a deep sense of craziness. New Orleans. Biloxi. The Middle East. Bush cronyism discovers the Peter Principle. Man murders others, murders self. Children imitate what they see only to become adults who are one generation further disenfranchised and alienated from everything only to pump out another generation of puppies who might as well be born blind. What kind of shit is this? It is nothing short of odd to be watching the world as it is today disintegrate in slow motion before my eyes. I have always predicted that the world would succumb to itself, but I honestly never imagined it would be in my life time.

Actually, I don’t think it will be in my lifetime, but I am witness to the beginning of the end. I sound snivling, I know. Mabye I am, am I?

Anyway, it feels good to be right.

Up or out, off we go.

It is interesting and sad on so many levels. I have to force myself to remember that I’m not just an observer, but by necessity a participant as well. I can make a difference; we all can; one person, one step at a time. Life is happening right now, and to me the secret has been revealed -- one which makes me feel both ashamed and relieved: It’s an inside job, and it's as simple as that is simple.

Here Lies Vera; God Help Us

Once the dust has settle, sick water has been fed back into sick water, the body count has been calculated, and the cows have come home, remind me to write about Vera.

Signature

My dear friend Claire told me a sad story yesterday of mental illness and murder: matricide so close to her home and heart that it unsettles her to unspeakable depths -- the mother of her brother's wife killed by her bipolar son who had not slept for days and by then believed she was the devil.

At Thanksgiving dinner she was not the devil, sitting at the table with her children and their sweethearts. Her own sweetheart had died years before by suicide. Mental illness sprouts long mutant arms and settles firmly into shame with a strangle hold that can at best be restrained. Those in its clutches rasp out in wonder "how did this happen to us?" At Thanksgiving, the stories of each one around the table stewed inside, barely untold, and ever changing. Every minute, our stories are changing, or at least each coming moment offers an opportunity for reinvention. Or does it? How does Luis reinvent what is now his legacy...a bug in his brain, a hole in his head through which he fell, face planted and belly flopped into a gene pool in which he would eventually drown. When he reemergences, his will be the biggest broken heart of all. The shawdow of his father will, no doubt, threaten to suck him in.

There are no whole survivors, only the broken and fragmented who have the good luck float to the surface. Is it most or some mortally wounded? I'm trying not to count; I'm trying to believe we can all recover.

A Vicious Cycle: Victims Creating Victims

It's mind boggling really. The earth, so old; Collective culture, so compromised. Our heroes now are the clean up crew who crawl into daylight to mop up the carnage. We are little but reactive, stimulated by everything. Art is a reaction to life; life has become reality T.V. from which we cannot look away, we are hard wired and dumbed down. We need the noise, we call it information, we use it to prove our case or to disprove someone else's. We kill each other like heat seeking missles that search out signs of life then zero in on the vulnerable soft spots and the fish-white bellie.