Memento M(ug)ori

I woke up this morning, but unlike Jim Morrison at the roadhouse, I did not get myself a beer. Instead, I had coffee. Smarter choice, that. Pandemics may change the rules. It is reasonable to assume that does not mean open containers on a morning drive are suddenly okay. I will admit that the thought of surveillance video showing me swigging on a forty while getting my cash made me laugh. Safe bet that would end up on the internet in no time. Andy Warhol whispered “fifteen minutes” in my ear. Tempting? Yes. Smart? No. The drive to the bank would be dry like Moore County.

Dry from alcohol, that is. Coffee was a different matter. My usual morning beverage of choice is black tea. Today the gray and drizzle made a persuasive case for a cup of strong black comfort, so I poured it. I like the sound of demerara sugar sliding off a spoon. Sweetness like gentle rain. A few slow sips are the ballast to the chop of the morning. I set a spell, savoring, then poured the remainder into a travel mug for the short drive. Stepping onto the porch I felt breeze on my skin, cool air filling my lungs. A round little wren perched on the worn wood fence. It cocked its head to peer at me with consternation. I tried to show I was no cause for alarm. The bird, like me, understood caution as a motivator. It flitted off to join some cousins in the shrubs across the street. 

Leaving the neighborhood for only the second time in a month felt like an overdue vacation. The weather was less than sprightly, a mottled silver-gray sky letting go a soft drizzle. Hands on the steering wheel shone like Wedgwood china. Nitrile has a way of catching the eye and troubling the skin. At least it would save me some time in the teller machine line. Funny how a touchscreen could be the stuff of bad dreams these days. Literally could be a case of your money or your life. Or is it your money now, your life later?

That thought troubled me only a little as I drove, mask dangling from the rearview and swaying gently. The blue and white cotton seemed muted compared to the nitrile. Putting it now felt like wrapping my face in fear. Anxiety and prudence slugged it out behind my eyes. Anxiety was putting up a good fight, but I sensed prudence planning a knockout once I had to open the window. Mama hadn’t raised no fool. The mask would be worn.

I was in a mood, as the kids say these days. When in a mood music is a frequent accompaniment to the noise in my head. Today was no different. I had plugged my phone into the tuner, set to play on an album that had recently caught my attention. The music was from 1995. Memory of it had bobbed up from the dark water of mind a short time ago. It played in my head incessantly until I gave in and bought it. The album unspooled through the speakers to land on my favorite song¹. Alone in the car, the volume upped to borderline discomfort, I sang along loudly and badly. The steering wheel morphed into an impromptu drum kit. Bass thrummed through the seat. I could feel the crunch of power chords in my mouth. It was good.

I was alone at the drive thru teller, too. A good thing in the face of the pandemic. I looped the mask strings over my ears. The touchscreen presented itself with corporate anonymity overlaid with distrust. There was no accounting for how many hands may have touched it before my arrival, nor for any cleaning that may have been done. I rolled down the window. The card slid silently into the slot. My blue left hand typed its way through all the screens. I wondered all that time over probabilities, disease vectors, and low-level fears. The sound of the bills extruding from the machine was surprisingly cheerful. I took the money and ran.

Driving home I had the song on repeat. The volume a little louder, the singing a little more amped up. That coffee graced my gullet, sips taken with gusto between stanzas. The drive back home seemed a little less fraught. The landscape was a little less threatening. I did something I had not done in ages once I pulled up to the curb in front of my house. I put the car in park to finish listening to the song. Volume down some, of course. I had no desire to annoy the neighbors. The song faded out. I finished the last of the coffee. My eyes teared up at the sight. This mug was a gift from my daughter years ago, adorned with artwork of her creation. What it lacked in technical brilliance it more than made up for in exuberance, in wonder. It shone in the pearly light. The mood stirred again. I absorbed the colors of the mug. It came to me that if I am blessed to be treated like a pharaoh when I depart this mortal coil, this mug is coming with me into the afterlife. It has to, holding as it does a piece of my troubled heart.

¹For the curious, the song was “Stars” by Hum. It is in heavy rotation.

The Emperors' New Sandwich

The crowd goes wild over a pop queen movie star getting her costume jacket back from some dude who bought it an auction. Isn’t he a sweet man? Yeah, it was for a good cause, raising money for a cancer charity. That’s nice. No offense to her but why the need for headlines? Can’t do something nice without a shot of celebrity attention? Something is messed up, willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on vanity. Let’s hope they won’t scream too loud when asked to put something fair towards the common good. Ah, who are we kidding, they will howl like someone stole their SUV.

Turn up the volume on whatever is crammed into our ears. Irrigate the nostrils with mist reeking of donut glaze or cotton candy. Anything to drown out the noise and reek that are the side effects of wrecking the planet. Distraction for the senses as parts of the world literally go up in smoke, while the so-called leaders take vacations or go golfing on the backs of working people who are killing themselves to survive. Breathe in, all you mad kings, you soulless bastards, and stop using precious oxygen attacking youngsters who want a planet on which we can live. But what’s that you say? Bitches already gave you yo money? So they can step off, to die in wildfires or hurricanes while you get fat in your bunkers? Yeah, no surprise there.

Breathe in the smoke. Shelter in place under the radiant parasol of the night sky. Marvel at days brighter and hotter than they have ever been. Sirens? What sirens? The rulers of 330 million separate empires plug their ears against the din. Pupils dilated by legal speed, twitching eyes struggling to focus on the latest commercials. Corporate shills hawking the promise of fast-food nirvana. Press lever, receive drug. Repeat, while the goddamn palaces burn down around their ears. The emperors chew loudly to drown out the voices of the abused, the oppressed, the melanin-rich but power-poor. Chicken sandwiches, man. Fuck you if you get in the way of their chicken sandwiches. Courtiers shrug when someone dies fighting over goddamned sandwiches. The emperors continue to gorge on Death, golden brown and delicious.

Waking Up Under the Wire

Still Life

For most of us, we don’t know much about art, beyond being able to say we like what we like. As a consequence it is puzzling to feel we know too much about still life. Not the painting type, unless it be that life imitates art. No, the still life I refer to is ours. Ours in all its inelegant, awkward, and erratically composed non-glory. That is the nutshell version. Luscious fruits in a golden bowl will not be confused with the thin broth of our daily existence.

Whose fault is it that the broth is thin? It can only be ours. It is a poor cook that blames only his pots and pans. Quality of ingredients bears some of the burden, but a thoughtful and careful cook makes the most of what they get. Arrangement is paramount. Whether we cook or paint or compose with our lives it is up to us to maximize the good in our circumstances. By such endeavors the stillness of a life can be made as a snapshot, a slice of time, and not the rule. Stillness can thereby be a temporary rest and not permanent stasis.

This is what we tell ourselves when stillness becomes stasis. Yes, yes, it is not necessarily stillness that should worry us, it is stasis. Stasis can be defined as “the state of equilibrium or inactivity caused by opposing equal forces” and “stagnation in the flow of any of the fluids of the body”. Certainly there are times in all of our lives where either description fits the measure of our days. Consider the pressures generated by the singular matrix of life in which each of us is embedded. The quest for love. Looking for the cure for pain. Freedom from debt , financial or otherwise. How we exhaust ourselves seeking to escape the “sheer hellishness of life”, a phrase so eloquently coined by Jim Harrison in his essay Meals of Peace and Restoration.

Yes, yes, pressures. The external world generates far more of them than any of us want to confront in our lives. Let us not be so hard on ourselves in the rush to keep up. By some lights, we only get one life. By others, we get other chances. Either path could use more kindness to ourselves and others, so that those lives may not fade in stillness.

Lost Threads

Making a career out of writing about the inability to write seems impossible. Of course, making a career out of merely writing also seems impossible to me, at least. Yet again ideas flit like hummingbirds into the garden of my mind, only to be chased off by the distractions of bad news, social media, and the attendant anxieties. In a world of flashing lights, my mind is a crow: observant, apparently intelligent, and overly fascinated with shiny objects. I am a compliant victim of self-inflicted diffusion.

This diffusion is irritating. The mind unfocused and swirling like a cloud of starlings over a meadow. There is no cure for it, aside from putting everything out of my head and latching on to one thing or thought. In my case, I find that near impossible, too. Most days when I can persuade myself to put down the phone or tablet, the one thing I grab hold of is food. Food and cooking. And thinking about food and cooking. The thing becomes the thought and vice versa.

To give you perspective, one day last week at work I just could not keep my brain on task. Not that the tasks were onerous, mind you, but they were not grabbing my imagination. Consequently, between queuing up music to stream (a bizarre intersection of electronic dance music and stoner rock, mostly) and desperate attempts to get things done, all I could think of was dinner. Specifically, a good sandwich from this local Italian deli I’ve come to favor. They call it a Roman. It is prosciutto, cappicola, and provolone layered on an Italian roll slathered with hot peppers. Yes, it is delicious, and yes, it had the strength to prop me up so I could power through the workday.

This deli has a television mounted up above the main dining space. I don’t typically cotton to such things when I dine out (hello, distraction, my old friend) but the management mercifully keeps the volume down to a background murmur. Easily drowned out when the place is busy. What is interesting is the set is usually tuned to an Italian station. News channel, it looks like. Even when I can hear the station I cannot understand the announcers, an unfortunate side effect of an inability to comprehend the Italian language. Between the ticker at the screen bottom and the video I can usually get a good idea of what is happening. Most of the Italian words and phrases I know are food related, but a few words I can suss out and the context of the video fills in the big gaps. What I do know from watching is that human misbehavior and mayhem are universal constants no matter where one is in the world. It just sounds better in a different language.

Dinner. Tucking into my goal for the day and watching the world burn in Italian triggered something, shunted my lollygagging mind onto a track hidden in the shadows. I had in my hands the luxury of a hefty meal. In my eyes I had a shipload of migrants encountering a navy vessel somewhere in the Mediterranean Sea. No stretch to say chances were good those folks had gone without decent food for days or weeks. My reaction surprised me in its strength and duality, of good fortune and humility. For the first time in weeks, strangely, there was a gap in the cloud of depression which plagued me. The breath caught in my throat, brought on by illumination and disquiet. I chewed and chewed watching the humans on the screen. That the world chews us up, and that we cannot survive except by the destruction of something else. These thoughts would not leave my head, disturbing me and comforting me. Can something be melancholic and uplifting simultaneously? The evidence suggest this is possible.

The story changed. The scene changes from desperation on the water to something involving a beautiful woman and some unfortunate escapades in personal turpitude. Or so I gathered from the tableau on the television. My meager ability for translation of Italian had exhausted itself seeing as it was definitely outside the realm of food. The basic gist I was gleaning from the video. Downing the last bits of the sandwich, it came to me that this meal had hit the trifecta of human fascinations of existence. The great rivers of food, death, and sex intertwined into a roiling confluence that swept me away. I leaned back in my chair, belching quietly.

The news was over. The plate pushed aside, crumbs brushed off the shirt, and a few steps back out into the warm summer evening. I could not divine where this big river would flow whilst I search for the lost threads in my life. The important thing is that it carry you into and through experience. Oh, and enjoy every sandwich along the way.

In the Quiet Box

Silence expands to fill the available volume regardless of the total. This is knowledge gained as a collateral effect of living. It could take decades before one notices what is happening. Different cities, different containers, different boxes all experiencing the same result. The silence is loudest in the night, in those moments before another bedtime. Silence haunts.

Amusingly enough the silence is not without a soundtrack. The noises heard tend to be generated in places other than the throat or head. The click of a kitchen light switch morphs into a rifle shot. An air conditioner fan takes on a near corporeal presence, a machine-age analogue of a waterfall coursing over a brim of rocks. Low hum punctuated by the pouring of rain outside the windows that surges in when the conditioner unit cuts off. The abrupt absence of a sound like that tricks the mind into thinking it is losing its balance. Living in a quiet box it is an easily acquired habit of leaning into sound because it offers support.

Support in the form of distractions from the vacuum of a life unrealized. Absences. Connections not formed, or frayed to the point of unviability. Projects uncompleted, or worse, never started because the attention was absorbed by some other thing in life and the mind failed to grasp the threads it should have followed. Funny how the hollow clattering of a butter knife into a sink (which was cleaned earlier in a fit of anxiety-induced housekeeping) can knock the mind from one track into another. A metallic thud serving as an accidental rin chime signaling the beginning of involuntary meditation in the temple of the head.

The knife lies still in the sink. Stillness broken by the hum and whirr of domestic machineries within, wind and rain without. The body reacts by pacing around the quiet box of its apartment. It cannot be helped that the mind is flooded with memories and regrets and the helplessness wrought by the realization that not enough has been done to find security in an unstable universe. In the stream of silences the head and the heart cannot escape the notion that so much potential appears to have been wasted or unrealized. Picture the tap on the barrel of water that was supposed to have enabled the successful crossing of a desert. Unbeknownst to all this tap was not secured before embarking. Miles of trudging through the heat and sand engendering thirst beyond measure, not to be slaked because the water dripped away.

Desperate discoveries occur in the silences of the quiet box. The stomach knows because it drops. No amount of pacing truly eradicates the gnawing sensation, but the motion can ease some of the discomfort. Discomfort? Do we really mean fear? Fear of having missed out on a cosmic scale and now not understanding how to get something back? Ah, this is it. Of course it is fear. A nipping at the heels brought about by a late-night revelation that you may not know what you are doing. Ever.

But you should know this by now. If you do not, surely that would be irrefutable evidence of the ineffectuality that you believe to be your shackles. It is this ineffectuality that howls the loudest in the midnight of the quiet box. Ineffectuality is the diamond-eyed beast that prowls the undergrowth just outside the dying circle of light. Growl and moan, rustle and snort, the impression is one of power that does not care how bright the fire you build. It will get what it wants. It will feed.

Living a life of balance is draining, in the face of knowing the universe does not need an excuse to eat you alive. The prime directive of that life is to find something, or better yet, someone with whom to share the quiet box of life. By such good fortune the beast will be kept at bay.

Stonemason Blues

On the shore of a personal ocean, black stones of the past clutched in hands scraped raw. The palms ache. The back, the legs, tremble to support all the weight. Gravity fills the bones, pouring from a heart overflowing from the rains of memory. Saltwater washes over bare feet sinking into the sand from the current. The stones are heavy. Heavier than physics would seem to allow. Dark matter denser than blood and iron carried so far, so far.

A journey of decades led to stumbling down this path ending on the strand. Years of confused struggle against things rarely understood crystallizing in a vitreous, drawn out slice of infinity. Time gels and breathing slows. Tears may well but do not fall. Life thickens. Ghosts whisper in the back of the head. They win, sometimes, in their efforts to coerce the mind into believing it will never be whole. They speak occasionally of hearts forever sundered. Deep in a cold night of the soul, victory against such slanderous propaganda seems unattainable. Why would it not? Belief and stamina once led a verdant existence in the valley of the soul. Now there is desert.

Drought happens in life. Rivers shift in their channels, rain ceases to fall, clouds become precious memory. To be human is to know a sere existence upon enduring loneliness as a rule rather than an exception. In the mirror maze of the heart there is no mystery to this loneliness. It is in the world, like gravity.

What is the seeker to do? The soul cannot sustain this constant cycle of wandering and returning with nothing but stones of experience. To build a shelter from them would be to take up residence in longing and bitterness. Terrible feng shui to be sure. The advantage to such housebuilding is that at least the shelter would be a known quantity. No guesswork, no fevered wondering at where one would lay one's head to get out of the weather.

The waves continue their liquid caress of the shore. Listening closely to their sibilance arising from sheets of water gliding over sand the heart may hear voices, offering encouragement or warning is difficult to ascertain. On the beach for miles in each direction no one is visible. No one to turn to, except perhaps figures in the mist whose advice may be as ephemeral as their presence. The questions to be answered, of course, are of what to do with these stones. Throw them in the ocean to let the tides carry them away and out of memory? Or find a green, quiet place to lay them down as a foundation of experience upon which to build a new life?

The head and the heart debate these questions at the edge the world, watching the tide recede.  They will have their answer soon, turning over and over the stones in the hands.

Divine (or Something Akin To It) Intervention

The rain poured down as a fitting tenor for the day. I pulled my car into the parking garage just like I do most days of the week. The distinctive voice of Matthew Sweet pealed from the radio, with lyrics I already knew but could not help but feel as needles under my skin.

I cannot understand my God I don't know why it gets to meOne day my life is filled with joyAnd then we find we disagreeAll depending on hisDivine intervention*

In the space. I hesitated before killing the engine. I had no real desire to hear the next verse, yet could not bring myself to turn off the radio. It was going to start with that line, you know the one, where Sweet sings “Does he love us? Does he love us?” Gets me every time. The question haunts me often, as it has starting in particular about fifteen years ago. That was the time when I lost my first two children. It seems cool, rainy days have a penchant for resurrecting memories.

I toughed it out through the end of the song. For what it’s worth I actually do like it. Matthew Sweet has pulled off the rare trick of writing a song about God that is neither cloyingly adoring nor furiously critical, and thereby appealing to me. The approach and the style I find interesting. I can listen to it with no eye rolling or agitation.

Certain days, however, with their combination of mood and weather in conjunction with a certain song can really land a punch on me. Rainwater slid with languid grace down the windshield as I waited. The parking garage had the feel of an aging mausoleum. Grimy surfaces, dim light, cold echoes of traffic and machines. The song ended, the engine sputters out, my head sags to the wheel under the peculiar weight of my five-plus decades on earth. I was having trouble breathing.

The steering wheel was cool on my forehead. I held it there for a few moments, listening to my breath while I meditated on the necessity of exiting the car and walking to the office. Rain continued to fall. The world continued to turn. Memories swirled together with weariness over a life gone akimbo, a little dizziness took hold and I wondered if maybe I should just turn around and go home, go back to bed.

But I didn’t. Work to be done and the need to eat got me out of the car and headed for the street. The song echoed in my head, lyrics messing with my heart. I did look around, and what I saw was far from destruction, yet I could not help but wonder how much longer any one of us can keep counting on divine intervention.

---

Lyrics from "Divine Intervention", from Matthew Sweet's album Girlfriend, released in 1991. 1991, damnit!

Sunday Meditation #44: Interstitial Crisis

I have spent my life making much of the in between. The places no one thinks about, the leftover, the marginal, the edges of the edges. 

I am the interstitial. I am the space between. I am the floor between floors holding things rarely in mind unless they break. The floors that matter only if the power fails or the air conditioning gives up. This is my life, my head space to carry the pipes and the ducts that allow others to do the talking. It is my bed and I must lie in it.

Floor 13-1/2. Duck your head when stepping off the elevator. A condition of existence when one chooses to live in the margins of the book. Is this a cry for pity? No. No pity needed. This path is voluntary, if somewhat regrettable.

The battle cry these days seems to be "No regrets!", but in my mind I think that is just rationalization of emotional laziness, an unwillingness to acknowledge that what we have done may have hurt others. To swallow the pill of No Regrets is to announce to the world that we have not been paying attention to our lives, to living. To live honestly is to experience regret.

A digression, if I may be indulged. To my ears most of those people whom I have heard say "No regrets!", or have it tattooed somewhere on their person, seem to be overbearing types who have made a lot of willful mistakes. Their hoisting of the banner of No Regret is an attempt to disown responsibility, to avoid a reckoning of the emotional damage they may have wrought.

If I were to campaign my life on the platforms of no regrets, it would be from the perspective of not having done or said something regretful in the first place. My life would be lived in such a way as to do the things I want to do the way I want to do them, without hurting others in the process. An ideal, I know. One that is impossible to attain.

Ah, I see this has gone off the rails a bit, has it not? Somehow I drifted from a meditation on living in the in-between to a screed about pretending to live without regrets. How does this happen? A side effect, perhaps, of living life in the interstices, where one thinks too much and maybe really lives not enough. This is what I get for insisting on living at the edges, for making my home in the spaces in between.

Burning In the Name Of

The air is thick with the stench, the smoke resulting from the explosive clash between love and hate these recent days in the United States of America. There has also been a light, and strong rainbow light streaming out the gaps in the smoke. It's love versus hate, and even a hard-core pessimist such as myself can see that love is winning. But there is a shadow on my heart. Impatience upon the soul to hear some of us talk as they do.

On June 11th, 1963, the Vietnamese Buddhist monk Thich Quang Duc sat down in the middle of a busy Saigon intersection, was doused with gasoline, then his hand struck a match thereby setting himself on fire. The photograph of his burning body, taken by Malcom Browne of the Associated Press, has become one of the most famous mass media images in the history of the modern world. He did it to protest the oppression of Buddhists under the regime of Ngo Dinh Diem. He felt it was a necessary act to bring effective attention to persecution.

On June 23rd, 2014, the retired Methodist minister Charles Moore knelt down in the parking lot of a strip mall in Grand Saline TX, doused himself with gasoline then set himself on fire. Bystanders put the flames out but the pastor did not survive, dying later that night in a hospital. There are no photographs of the event of which I know. The Reverend Moore had a lifetime history of advocating for social justice, particularly to rid society of racism and the hatred of gays, lesbians and transgender folks. He felt it was necessary to inspire action for social justice.

On June 16th, 2015, the irrationally anti-gay pastor Rick Scarborough, indicated that he and his followers would 'burn' if the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in favor of same-sex marriage equality. He also made remarks indicating that leaders in the anti-gay marriage movement need to get out front and proclaim "Shoot me first!" to protest what they see as godlessness and the destruction of our nation.

Early in 2015, the would-be GOP presidential nominee and delusional charlatan Mike Huckabee stated in a video that he will "Call down fire from heaven" in defense of traditional Christian morals, to stand up against gay rights supporters and those who advocate for marriage equality.

On June 26th, 2015, the Supreme Court ruled it unconstitutional to deny the right of marriage to LGBT persons, thereby rendering it possible for those folks to get married just like straight Christians get to do.

On June 27th, Rick Scarborough backtracked on his statements, saying he didn't really mean it. Mike Huckabee apparently cannot get through to God, because the skies have been remarkably free of flames or even a little bit of smoke.

For many years it seems, there has been an abundance of fire on the minds of those who proclaim strong moral, ethical or religious convictions. The main difference that has emerged is that those with love in their hearts were so moved by that power that they translated it into action. Those with hatred in their hearts, people like Rick Scarborough and Mike Huckabee, will never translate the power of that hate in such a way because for all their proclamations of being people of true conviction, they are really just mean-spirited cowards with big mouths.

Hate has nothing over love, not in the long run and the big picture. Love inspires truth, hate runs from it. They run. They are cowards. They will never set themselves on fire because they do not hold love in their hearts. Outside observers such as you and I may look at the actions of Quang Duc and Charles Moore and think them to be insane, but I believe that ultimately they set themselves on fire because they had more love than they knew what to do with in the material world.

The Rick Scarboroughs and Mike Huckabees of the world know deep down they will never set themselves on fire. They are so mean, so spiritually myopic, they do not see how the decent human beings they could have been have been corrupted by hate. Hate has its own rotten heart on which it gnaws, all the while pretending to feast as the soul crumbles. Love exponentially magnifies itself when unleashed. Love has courage and conviction of which hate can only dream.

Love burns.

Sunday Meditation #42: Sketchy

Christ, I don't reckon I know what has gotten in to me. Springtime on the headland is usually a time of joy, even for a a child of the fall such as I am. The sea looks different, feels different, even smells different. Maybe it is life blooming a bit in the shallows and the depths, stirred up by the rolling of the waves. This spring, I am different.

More restless than usual. Head full of ideas that never make it past the daydream stage. The slush of thoughts not making it to the ice of clarity. The proof is in the scratch papers, notepads and detritus piled up on my desk. They form a dune banking up to the windowsill. The paper rolls and bleeds into the dunes. It is a curious thing to have a sandbank comprised of the ideas illuminated in ink that ultimately is wasted. The scribe in me feels shame at the thought.

There is no avoiding it. Truth in front of me. The very notepad under my right hand bears little in the way of words and much in the way of idle sketches. Sketches of what, some may ask. I cannot say other than describe them as architectonic, formal follies. Mostly they depict variations on cubic volumes, shaded with crosshatches. Towers? Obelisks? Cenotaphs?

That last idea makes me chuckle. Cenotaph is fitting. Little monuments erected in honor of ideas buried elsewhere in my mind, or somewhere in the cottage around me. The sea, even! The sea. It waits there beyond my windows. Jade swells reflecting an unquiet mind. My hands stop shaking long enough for my attention to be drawn to the sky. A mottling of pewter clouds rolls in. Beneath them I can see the gauzy stain of rainfall. Spring has been wet here so far. Much has been washed away under its maulings and caresses. This I know.

The cottage fills with that special light of overcast as raindrops spatter and hiss on the glass panes. It comforts me in a way that sunlight and blue sky do not. My hand continues to sketch. I am building something. No, I am searching for something that I have lost the words for but my heart seems to know from someone I once was decades ago now. I recognize some of the drawings from my adolescent years, the younger me sketching out abstracts in blue and red and black. Somewhat confused by what they could mean, not knowing how to quit drawing.

The paper fills with fragments of someone I used to know. I can see him there. The rain falls harder, and weariness floods my gut and head. I watch the drops fall into the sea where perhaps they trouble it just a moment. But the ripples vanish as the sea rolls on. I take that as a lesson for my heart, rippled and anxious, but rolling on.

Head on the Writer's Block (Sunday Meditation #40)

This is no joke, people, this writer's block. Sitting, staring at the screen and the page while hoping something will turn up. The logjam will not break. With winter approaching, the pewter sky outside the window here does little to comfort me. The problem, you see, is that it should offer solace to me. Yet it feels far off.

This should not be. Fall and winter are the spring and summer to my creative intellect. Seasons of vigor and energy, of growth. Some of my best work and best efforts on life have come forth in the cooler months. Stretching all the way back to college when the best grade-point averages of my education were chalked up. Best ideas. Best efforts. Now, today, in this brown study or blue funk, uneasiness rolls in on a tide of unproductivity.

It is no lack of inspiration. Rather, no lack of source material. Current events and personal life offer no shortage of material to discuss, meditate upon, react to or use to generate a thousand and one stories. The problem appears to be one of application. All of those things to be considered cram themselves up against the forefront of my mind, a mob of unruly ideas trapping me in a riot of information. The riot is exhausting.

Something holds me in place. Fear or apathy, either could be a reasonable explanation. I do not know yet, because I am either too scared or too tired to investigate. Quite a paradox, to be frightened of that which I desire, and enervated by the mountain range between me and my creative selves.

Dead Presidents Make My Teeth Hurt

It was somewhere east of Topeka and west of Kansas City that dead presidents made my jaw clench so hard I thought my teeth might shatter. Billboard big as day showing the latest lottery numbers somewhere in the neighborhood of 70 million. Jesus key-rist, the stab of angst and disappointment that went through my chest nearly made me drive off the road. Nothing like an unavoidable reminder of what you do not have to put a smudge on an otherwise good day. Fuck that. I don't need the hassle.

I was driving back from a work assignment. The sky, it was blue like the heart of the best day ever. I was feeling good, then this billboard shows up in my field of vision. 70 million in the pot, ladies and gentlemen. All I had to do was play.

The problem, as I see it, is that I need to win.

But I probably won't. That is the odds, especially if I don't play. Here's the thing: I don't need or want four vacation homes, a couple of yachts or a private jet. All I want is to make sure I can take care of my parents now the way they took care of me when I was young. All I want is to make sure that I can provide for my daughter, give her some help to send her on her way when she decides what she wants out of her future. All I want is to make sure I close the gap between more and enough.

All that, and some left over to help Syrian refugees, Ebola victims, and those who have no idea if they even get a next meal. What that billboard did was to make me realize that I am not a rich man. Not even close. I do not live in dire poverty, but seeing those numbers up there in broad daylight brought it all home that I am in a constant race between 'just enough' and 'more needed'. Nothing like a stark reminder of the money economy to smack your head, and your ego, up against the wall as if to remind you who is in charge here.

In broad daylight, the hot sting of tears and gritted teeth, and I am painfully aware of how inadequate I feel due to lack of money. The hot wire wrapped around my heart telling me there is so much more I could do, so many people I could help, if only I was was rich. If only I had money.

They say it is the root of all evil, this shared hallucination of what is valuable, of what we supposedly deem important. I say, it is really the root of all anxiety, and worthlessness, because without it we feel like we cannot accomplish anything. One of my favorite writers, John Thorne, once wrote of the paradox of living in the wetlands and marshes of Cajun country, "Survival is almost always possible; prosperity, almost never."* His succinct phrasing sums up the anxiety of living in the land of not-quite-enough.

Never enough. Never smart enough, fast enough, cunning enough. It is a feeling I wish I could shake, because I know better. I do. Still, the ghosts of dead presidents haunt my waking hours.

---

*From "Bayou Odyssey", a poignant, scintillating essay in John Thorne's excellent 1996 book, Serious Pig.

Comfort Food for Plague Years

The universe has a reputation as a cruel and heartless place. Well deserved by most reasonable measures, measures highlighted by the cascade of disturbing news that washes over our daily lives. There is no escaping it, it seems. Horrifying words, images, and sounds burst forth from the screens of whatever electronic device is the weapon of choice in front of our scratched and bleeding senses.

Plague. War. Civil unrest. Even the perhaps lesser evil of data theft, private lives smeared across the ether in a toxic blur of titillation. Everything becomes pornography now, because the trend is think that having an impulse to consume grants the right to consume whatever it is the appetite wants. All because the access is supposedly granted because the victims deserved it and should not have put it "out there" in public.

The fundamental flaw with that line of consumption is that the victims (that is the correct word) do not choose to become violently ill, get murdered by rockets, or be shot for the sake of public display. No one expects their private stuff to get stolen (and data classifies as 'stuff') when they have taken reasonable precautions to keep the stuff from those who do not have permission to possess it.

No one blames the depositors for a bank heist that cleans out the safe deposit boxes. No one blames a kid who gets shredded by shrapnel because he was in the wrong place. No one with any common decency, that is.

All of this has weighed heavily on my mind in recent weeks. From the shooting of Michael Brown to the Russian tanks in Ukraine to the nasty virus eating up West Africa, the plague of bad news has been inescapable. Partly my fault, I know, because I listen to a lot of news while driving in my car.

But partly, it is due to the sheer volume of nastiness going on in the world. The funk thickened today, gelling around my psyche like smothering epoxy. Escape was necessary. The path was an unlikely one, paved as it was with two cans of tuna fish and a bag of egg noodles. Somewhere out on the road today, I did not see a Deadhead sticker on a Cadillac, but my back brain conspired with my belly to convince me I wanted tuna noodle casserole for dinner. It was a stroke of culinary genius.

I had not eaten homemade tuna noodle casserole in decades. The genesis of the idea burbled up in that little kitchen I fancy takes up some space in my brain. In there a slightly frazzled chef hunched over a butcher block table, scribbling ideas in a tattered ledger about what appeasements will be made to the maw that growls under his stained jacket. Today it was the memory of some oddments in the pantry that inspired this jaunt back to food from my youth, food that I had given no consideration except mild scorn and bemusement on the rare occasion when its name would arise in conversation.

Yet today it made perfect sense. I had the tuna and the noodles. A quick trip to the grocery store for milk, celery, peas, and mushrooms took care of the rest. Done with my work for the day, I stood and the kitchen and commenced meditation. Make no mistake, that is what this dish was all about. Cooking, centering, breathing. So simple, so clear, and so far away from the misery outside the walls that I ceased thinking about bad news.

It is important to note that this was mostly from scratch. I had no desire to shortcut the process by getting a box of pre-made "helper", or a tub of something from the local grocery. I wanted to build this thing, tweaking it to meet my needs and wants. Any grace to be gained would have been lost if all I did was rip open the box, pour it in a pan and set it in the oven. There would have been nothing learned. My mind would not have settled. My breathing would not have slowed. I made it the way it asked of me, and it was completely satisfying. This is all I ask of comfort food in the plague years.

A Game of Pooh Sticks on the Bridge of Sorrows

"Daddy, will the Sun ever burn out?"

Her voice quavering, my daughter questioned the very life of stars. The Sun is not the certainty to her that it is to me. It was there by creek side, under a luminous smear of galactic dust, she spoke to me of Death. 

I inhaled crisp air lashed with the tang of woodsmoke from the fire at our feet. A little creek, crossed by a tiny footbridge, bisected the yard in front of our cabin. It burbled and whispered as I craned my head back to contemplate the stars overhead in the clear South Dakota sky. Her questions were unexpected. The truth seized hold of my tongue before I could shush it.

"Yes, it will, sweet pea."

Her eyes as those of a wounded doe, she asked "When?"

"A long time from now, so far away we won't know about it when it does," I said.
She paused. Her face a sphinx before the flicker of the flames. 

"Could it happen tomorrow?"
"No, dear."
"But when will it happen?"
"Billions of years from now."

That stopped her cold. I swallowed the tightness in my throat, a metallic tinge of regret burning my gullet. The truth as I knew it was maybe not the best of revelations for a thoughtful kid who wants to see around corners. Just like her Da. I could tell. It was there in the shining eyes beyond the firelight. We held our breath, teetering on the fulcrum of a hard question, she wanting to know the truth and me wrestling with shielding her from it.

The dam broke. Questions spilled from her lips. Tell me about stars, she said. How long does it take for them to burn out? What happens if I get sick and die? she asked. What happens if you get sick? Is that what happened to my brother and sister? I don't want that to happen to us, she said. Will it? Will it, Daddy?

My mind reeled. The sediment of memory was stirred up, and thick. I did my best to describe and explain, without going to deep into details. Assurances were made, platitudes delivered, at best it was a redacted version of wisdom and history. There was no hiding from the direct questions. She is too smart for me to pull the wool over her emotional eyes for too long, so there was no trying.

The sutures on my heart throbbed and ached when tears welled up in her eyes. How to explain these things without breaking someone's heart? Compassion and regret were duking it out in my head.

But she asked. I wanted her to know. We drifted off into a conversation about the stars, again, their colors and what they mean. She impressed me with what she already seems to know about those things. I asked her if she knew of an easy way to remember the colors and the sequence. She did not. From some memory vault last accessed long ago, I dredged up the mnemonic I had learned as a kid.

"O-B-A-F-G-K-M, sweet pea. 'Oh be a fine girl kiss me." I laughed. She blushed, I think, hiding her grin behind her hand. 
"That's funny, daddy."
"I know, but you remember it, right?"

She asked me for the third time if I was certain the Sun wasn't going to burn out when we would know about it. I responded again that I was certain.

"Are you sure?" she asked, her arching upward in that 'I-do-not-quite-believe-you-yet' sort of way.
"Yes, I'm sure."

We lapsed into silence. A slight breeze stirred the trees. For some ticks of the clock, I watched the stars wheeling over the ridge line to the north. It was beautiful in the night. My eyelids drifted downward, the murmurs of the creek and the dying of the light exerting the gravity of sleepiness. She surprised me with another question.

"Daddy, do you remember the bridge? The one back in Maryland close to the apartment?"
I snapped my eyes open. "Yes, I do."
"I liked the bridge. Remember when we used to play pooh-sticks from it?"

The tightness in my throat returned. Boy, did I ever remember. "Yes," I squeezed out.

"That was a fun game. I liked watching the sticks in the water. We could play it here!" she said while pointing to the footbridge. The shine in her eyes was pure joy. Much better than the existential sadness I had glimpsed earlier. I chuckled.

"I reckon we could, sweet pea, but it is a bit dark for it."
"I know," she sighed, "but we could when it is light." 

With that, she announced that she wanted to go inside the cabin, because she was tired and it was getting cool. She fetched water and I doused the embers of the fire. Watching them fade away, I felt untethered from the earth, but comfortable with floating. My daughter hugged me, briefly, in that skittish animal way that kids have sometimes. The realness of the affection convinced me that sometimes, the best way to handle the infinite is to play games on the bridge of sorrows.

That Awkward Moment of Collapse

….when you realize that you are not living up to your promise and potential. Those terrible moments waking from a dream at godawful o'clock in the morning. A dream of collapse and loss, panting in panic muddled with fear. The seizure when you feel in your heart that you are so far from what you said you wanted to be that you will never catch up.

Pardon me. A moment, please. (Sighing)

I keep writing "you" as if I am describing the arc of your lives, you the reader. I should stop that now. What I should have written was "I". That awkward moment when I realized those awful things about my life. Not you. I cannot speak of these things in your life because I do not know the arcs of your lives in such particulars.

Waking up from such unsettling dreams as often as I have in recent weeks, it is my hope that no one of whom I know is experiencing the same. It makes for poor sleep, which in turn makes for sluggish days on which it takes far too much effort and time to get back to being in the moment.

These dreams have a recurring theme, that of losing all of my means of support. Cold sweat awakens me, wondering where my jobs went, how could I possibly lose them and the money that goes with them. I twitch awake, breathing hard. It is unpleasant, to say the least. I know these dreams have their roots in the unfortunate round of layoffs I endured starting in 2008, and the subsequent scrambling to find gainful employment. The question I cannot answer is, Why now?

What add a particular new shade of funk is that this unleashing of the succubi in my subconscious has manifested in the form of shame. Shamed by a sense of personal failure as a writer. In the cold grey sump of sunless mornings, imps have been whispering in my ears: "You will never be a professional. You squander any gift you might have possessed, you have not achieved meaningfulness as a way of life."

This is so disturbing that words are not sufficient to illuminate the heaviness in my heart. It is damning to hear those awful voices, to look back on what I have done, and think that perhaps the imps are right. Catchy titles, very short stories that exist in a near vacuum, the occasional flash of brilliance: these are things in which I perhaps have some facility.

Perhaps. Yet a solid body of work they are not. I have had a million ideas go nowhere. I have failed to produce anything I would be happy to call a book. A collection of short stories, maybe, if one cares to be generous of spirit. Yet disjointed fever dreams and notes scrawled on virtual Post-its do not an oeuvre make. Because of this, the small hours of the morning become tainted with anxiety swirled with disappointment bordering on self-loathing.

My mind overflows. My hand is stilled by a lack of ambition or surfeit of sloth, I am not sure which. The disappointment I feel fuels the crematorium of my dreams. I do not write this to depress or disturb any who may read it, forgive me if this has happened. This scrawling of mine is not a plea for pity, I wouldn't be so pathetic.

I write because of the dreams. I recently read truth from a favorite author of mine, who said "...honesty means nothing if there's no real risk to it, no self-examination". The dreams are forcing me to self-examine. I write this out of honesty, and I am enervated by what I have not done.

Swamp (Sunday Meditation #33)

Nothing like the sensation of waking up in the swamp, even if it is your own bed, with the cottony glow of sun-up seeping through the blinds. The small tremor, the raspy breath that pulls a wire through the gut. Dreams muddled with memories condensing like rotgut moonshine in the still of your mind. This is the moment when getting out of bed induces a shiver. The feel of cold mud on the feet, well, that is no way to start the day.

Arise! Get up! This is what the racing heart screams at the quivering mind. The alternative is to lay still, wallowing in low-grade anxiety. The bed shifts and squirms under the back. It is only a matter of time before you sink down. Is this what you want? No, no, of course not. Also, reason and senses tell you it isn't mud, it's mattress.

The floor is only carpet, not muck. You know this. Still, it is hard not to flinch when the feet it the floor. After all, what was that last dream? It was a search. Slogging through unknown, difficult terrain. The jolt when a taloned hand darted out of the bog and grab your ankle. A small miracle there was no scream but the sensation was vivid enough to wake you up enough the draw a deep breath.

Lying there listening to ragged breathing is when the other memories sweep over, rising out of the back brain like a dirty gray tide. There is no choice but to get up and move, to carpe Diem and all that jazz. Brace yourself while swinging your legs over the side of the bed. Remember, its only carpet.

Up. Stretch. Move. Run the shower. Brush the teeth. Don't think, just do.

The day, the day, dive into the day. Remember that saying about it being impossible to be depressed when in engaged in meaningful work? Substitute 'anxious' for 'depressed' and there you have it. The goal for the day. Plenty of chores are there for the doing. It may seem absurd but putting laundry away can be meaningful work, if one wills it to be.

So this is it: up and at 'em alongside someone you love. That is good fortune. The stomach may be full of jitters, soured by the dregs of unsettling dream and bad memories, but love is an anchor. Simple tasks shared like a community of monks. "Do all things with love" even if that means sharing lunch in between hither and yon.

The day will go on, just like you. Daylight and motion gently sand away the rough edges of your aura. Gradually the steps get lighter, the mental ground seems to get drier. The knobbly trees and hanging moss begin to thin out. This is good, no?

Then the moment where the wire breaks and your breath comes back to you. It is a slow passage that snaps into clarity. It is the moment when your hands wrap around a plain white bowl which holds dinner. It is a dinner made with one's own hands, and what the first bite does is bring you out of the swamp. The taste, the aroma, is the relief felt when the feet pull from the mire and you see both boots are still in place. Inhale. Chew. Swallow. This is the universe writ small, and you are back in it.

The secret is this: chop wood, carry water. By these simple acts you will know peace.

Mañana Blues

The problem it seems may be one of self-priming. Without priming, the well will not flow free. Without free flow, the energy goes to waste or is never expended at all. Energy without expenditure is simply potential. Potential and a few dollars will buy a large cup of coffee.

All of the above explains the paucity of posts on this blog. It explains the dearth of worthwhile photography over the recent months. It is a condition of my creative existence that I have momentum, that I actualize the latent forces within my brain. Momentum breeds momentum. Once I get going, I find it very hard to stop. Witness the time not so long ago where on this very blog I posted and entry a day for over one year.

That is a lot of posting. While some of it was fluff and fill, much of it was inspired and heartening to me. I wonder if I ever again can achieve a similar feat.

The reason this matters is because as of late the tasks of writing and photography have acquired a difficulty I struggle mightily to overcome. The energy to get started rarely manifests for long, and I wrestle with bouts of angst triggered by comparison to my past efforts. It is the feeling of "I should be writing!" that gets me all wound up.

It is a mystery to me why creatively speaking things should be so difficult. I know the conventional wisdom is that one should write/draw/photograph/paint etc every day even when you do not feel like it, to keep the discipline up and the energy flowing. I do recall that feeling of engagement and satisfaction I get when I do get going, when the ball is rolling, when the mojo is workin'.

That feeling is wonderful. Now to overcome the lassitude between me and it.

It is no good thing to think of yourself as lazy, unambitious or lacking in imagination, but that is precisely what troubles me during these short fall days. The notion that I am waiting for something to come along and knock me out of my complacency seems all too real. "Carpe diem!" shouts my conscience, and I would, if only I could get myself off the couch.

Rain on the Glacier

Troubled sleep fractured by thunderstorms and restless mind, it is no good thing to roll around on the sheets under the grey smear of a streetlight sky. The clocks may be digital, but that does not prevent them ticking too loud as to keep one awake. It was enough to make one run into the street, clothed in nothing more than swirling leaves and a coat made of anxiety.

It was rain on the glacier. Dark, cold, wet. Things to be avoided, yet here they were wrapped around my throat. I laid still, hoping it would go away.

A few hours later, and it was time to get up and make some sense of the day. Sense making is no easy task without defined goals, a sense of purpose and a job. I had none of those. The rain saw fit to make sure of it. Looking out the window, I saw the door to the shed flapping in the breeze, another incomplete task dropped from the colander of my mind.

It was the third day in a row I had forgotten to go shut and lock the door.

Not to be too pessimistic, but that seemed the story of my life, staring as I was out the window at the grey oppression of the sky. One long unfinished task, another episode of wasted potential. Chronic, it is. The contemplation of it left me in a sour mood, a brown study as the old-timers might say.

I thought once again of Bouvet Island, the most remote place in the world. Claimed by Norway, inhabited by no one, home to seals and birds, and I wondered if there might be a place for me in that stark ecosystem. Perhaps I, like the seals and penguins, could learn to live on krill and ice water. Brutal and harsh, maybe, but simple and and beautiful in own way.

The sun came out late in the day, the white gold light of which inspired me to grab my pinhole film camera and leave the house in search of inspiration in what ultimately proved to be an abortive attempt to capture the fading glory of the day. I forgot a crucial piece of equipment and the light went before I would have been able to go get the piece. I shivered in the cold breeze, and returned home empty handed.

I daydreamed about Bouvet on the drive home, then reckoned it was too grim a prospect for me to dwell upon. The sun faded back behind the clouds as I pulled into the drive. Late fall and anxious thoughts had there claws in me, I knew. I cast about the house for some relief, and found it in the form of cooking dinner.

The rain continued to fall upon the glacier, but I chopped, stirred and tasted until the umbrella unfurled, and I found myself warm in the heart of home.

Two Years Before the Mast or Something Like It

8:06 PM. Night is falling earlier on this slow slide into fall. A mirror of my days, methinks.

Monday, October 7th is an anniversary of sorts. The day will mark two years since I last plied the profession of architect full-time. Well, with one very small exception, plied it any time, to be precise. The demon of this particularity caught up to me in broad daylight. A mental mugging, minding my own business at a stoplight.

Hardly seems fair, I know. Enormous effort has been expended in the past two years, first on searching for a position suited to my training. Then when that became increasingly fruitless, Sisyphean even, my efforts were slowly diverted to searching for a position suited to my skills and interests.

You see what I did there? With the "training" segueing into "skills and interests"? I knew you could.

It was an inevitable transition, in hindsight. Anyone who has been laid off more than once knows that looking for a job is a full-time job. Old habits die hard, and I was up early and working the job lists and directories and cold-calling and frankly it ground down my resolve and self-esteem to the point where I had no energy to even be desparate anymore.

I was, though. The sheer effort in looking for an architecture job, with no results to show for it, haunts me even now. It is draining to think about it. The knowledge that no one seemed to be interested in a talented, skilled and licensed architect with 20+ years of experience (i.e. Yours Truly) is a puzzling and disheartening burden to carry. At the time, it was all I had and all I knew how to do.

Not that I have forgotten how to do it, mind you, but I have had almost no arena in which to practice it. So in essence I gave it up. I had to, so I could focus on other ways to preserve my sanity and hopefully make money. Thus, writing and photography began to eclipse what I was trained to do. Possibilities formed in my mind, of an intersection between the Want To and the Must Do sides of the coin of life.

I can say I have had some minor successes in that regard. I have exhibited in a local gallery, made some contacts in the art world, garnered some part-time work in photography, sold a few prints. So there are signs of encouragement. The writing has not had the same level of interest, it continues to be a slow go, but there have been some nibbles.

Still, the hard work continues. My figurative heels are sore and bleeding from all the nipping they endure, courtesy of the imps and demons that seem to shadow me, messing with my dreams. I fight them off as best I can, but every so often the shield slips and they get through.

Today at a stop light, a chunk of the sky fell on me and I flinched. Breathing hard through a squall of panic, my mind reeled over and over, thinking I must be nuts for trying to make so much out of nothing. The voice (you know the voice) whispered from the backbrain cave that maybe it would be best to give up carving a new path in this old jungle, when there is a perfectly good path somewhere behind me.

All I need to do is turn around, retrace my steps, and I can put down the machete. The path back there is dusty, rutted and beaten down. The rocks in it, the thorns flanking it, well they can't be as bad as the unknown overgrown thickets I am thrashing through, can they? It would so much easier to go back, would it not? Simply trade the promise of uncharted territory for the drab security (which is not so secure) I used to know?

The light changed. The breath wooshes out of my lungs. The car rolls forward, I make the turn, and try to put the past behind me. Two years before my own personal mast have taken me over strange new seas and into uncharted lands fraught with promise. It would be a shame to give up the ship when there is something wonderful on the horizon.