[I have to go there to let the tiger out. Keelhauling through the unconscious follows:]
Perfect teeth: that’s always the giveaway, perfect teeth. In older people especially, shiny white teeth equal money and complacency, freedom from want. The ability to pay without reservations, second thoughts, or worrying about the bills. I watched the PBS American Masters show about Joan Baez at PBS.org last night, but all I could think of was her teeth. Her ex-husband, David Harris, had perfect teeth as well. Dylan I don’t know about, because he didn’t smile, but David Crosby did, and his teeth were just great, too.
I’ve been sick for about a week. Nothing major, but still enough to stop me in my tracks: sore and tender underarms, general aches and pains around my chest, feeling chilled, a scratchy throat, exhausted. Every day I’ve had at least a two-hour nap. I’ve done no work, no writing. I can’t kiss my wife — might infect her, if there’s anything infectious — can’t send either one of us to a doctor or the hospital, who could possibly pay?
The illness, if that’s what it is, is like depression turned into a physical condition. After watching two consecutive movies on the Internet one afternoon and muting the inner dialogue by focusing on something else, I suddenly felt fine. But by the evening, I was sick again. A vortex of self-flagellation that I have to kill. I really, really do, but that’s not easy. Last night I went to bed quite early because my whole body felt like ice, and everything I read online or saw in print just made me feel worse. There was simply nothing to do, nothing to warm my carcass or my soul. Those perfect teeth. Those perfect goddamn teeth.
The water heater died on Friday. Our landlady lives in Pennsylvania or in a ski resort condo somewhere in America and just got back to me today. (I’d already decided to have a new water heater installed next week, anyway.) Meanwhile, my brother called about his check, the one I send him on my mother’s bank account in Tucson. He lives on $500 a month, with VA health care, in a rent-free trailer owned by her in the most depressing environment I can imagine, a so-called retirement community south of town filled with bitter Anglo refugees from colder climes who think everything that’s wrong with Arizona equals “Mexicans.” When my mother dies, the money stops, and what in God’s name is he going to do?
My mother has become the crazy old lady no one likes. Every time I see someone’s older mom with twinkling eyes filled with love and gratitude, I feel like a member of another species. I have an aunt in Maine who must be 99 by now, wealthy once but drained now by circumstance and greedy people she adores. We haven’t talked in six or seven years. My family is a larger version of the same vortex of abuse that sucked me in all week and constitutes a major reason why I had to flee from Maryland. (Family tombstones lie unswept under layers of bird shit in a cemetery on the Eastern Shore…) There’s little in my heritage to look back on with love or pride or even sense of origin. There’s hardly any heritage at all, to tell the truth. Stolen by dysfunction.
I was born a little Michelangelo, da Vinci, Edison, Daniel Boone or Lindbergh, and all anyone tried to do was kill me. (That’s not hyperbole. I had a dream once about my father standing by the shore beside a pile of sand with a little boy buried underneath.) No one ever put an arm around my shoulder and told me, “You can do it!” No one ever made it plain that even if I failed at something, I would still be loved. Exactly the opposite, in fact: whatever happened to me was my fault, and if I didn’t measure up, too bad.
None of this makes sense, none of it.
My father died at 67 from lung cancer, though I’m surprised he lived that long. He hated everything, it seemed, especially himself, and had the darkest possible outlook on humanity and the world. It’s plain as day to me that he ordered up his own demise, much in the same way that I’ve ordered up whatever is bothering me now. These things don’t “just happen,” we imagine them deep down inside.
God knows what’s happening to America, then. The country seems so much like a reflection of my own family these days. No compassion, love, or sense of being able to make things better. It’s like a national terminal illness is the next thing coming down the pike.
But here’s the key, I think: my own attitudes reflect the injuries I received, so all of the preceding is suspect! I don’t trust the negativity at all, even as it sends me shivering to bed.
I saw the old home movies from Joan Baez’s childhood. Like my family, hers moved every four years or so. But for them, those were happy times, encouraging years, with a sense of adventure and abandon. The road trip scenes were very telling: instead of crying children in the back seat getting smacked, there were laughing sisters singing songs. One clip showed her father dancing for the camera at a rest stop somewhere in the desert. No wonder something precious bloomed. No wonder she had the strength and spirit to prevail. No wonder creativity and talent thrived. No wonder at all.
I want to strip out everything. Every last scrap of family corruption, every piece of painful lore and bloody memory. They tried to kill me, and they’re killing me still. I want to clean out every cubby, every shit-fouled stable stall, all the stinking vomit in old wastebaskets. IT’S JUST NOT TRUE, I KNOW IT’S NOT, IT DOESN’T APPLY TO ME! It may have made me what I am today, but that’s as far as it goes, and I’m not dead yet.
You think this is easy? You don’t know. You don’t know the half of it. I have to live like I’m a visitor from another planet, like I fell out of a UFO and look like everybody else but have no history. I have to build my own mother and father on the inside. I have to heal and be the one I truly am underneath the baggage. I have one more chance, and this is it. This is why I’m on the planet, this and this alone. Not to be rich and famous, necessarily, but free. To show that I can do it, that anyone can do it. To be whatever I am without blame or resentment, to be as close to spirit in a shaking human body as I can get, and I have to do it all right now, in this lifetime, before I fade away, or else there isn’t any point.
Not for only ME, you understand, but for the whole damn world.
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Pre-emptive strike: transmutation, art, siblings…
emotional orphans everywhere
We are all spirit, it seems to me the work is remaining connected to that. Just because we can’t see the point in any given moment doesn’t mean there isn’t one. Be gentle with yourself John.
No problem here! Just allowing MAXIMUM FORCE!
Has amazing effects. (Not sick now.)
Interesting thoughts!
Hey man, did you come here from another PA blog I found today? Come back again, I got a million of ‘em!
Through your words I felt your pain – almost stopped reading but forged on. You are a very strong spirit and I hope you find balance, raise above and move forward.
Good on you for forging on! (It got better, didn’t it?) This is as huge as huge can be for me, this FACING UP and reckoning. I wrote this for myself (it’s for a book), then read it to my wife. After she was reduced to tears, I thought I’d better post it!
And you’re right on the money about “balance.” The above is what allows for that, actually, and makes compassion as easy as taking a breath. I doubt my mother or all my siblings get it, but some of them will.
Hey thar old man, feeling a bit on the fragile side are we? i can relate, I can’t write it down without going places i left along time ago, I tried, but it looks like i’m whining in print, but like you, here recently, i’ve had a feeling, a malaise of some sort, sick but not sick? carrying a lump in my throat that won’t go away, Every bone and muscle aches, left foot is going numb, my eyes are getting worse, it’s not a good time, too sensitive?, to the everyday falling apart and dying going on with this old body and here recently we lost a good neighbor to a massive heart attack and the retarded understanding that the world is not what i was lead to believe. I have too much to do and feel like i’m running out of steam, realising that over half a century has come and gone and this is it.
, most if any spirit left on the shore was lumbered or turned into chicken feed and yanked out of the bay long before i arrived. The older i get the more introspective things become, it isn’t the money nor attention, leave that to the youngsters, i had a thought that it’s that time, to get close to something, and having never had a “belief system” I’m not really sure what i’m doing other than picking my way along the shoreline
The world will be no better when i’m gone, the poliitcs of stupidity will always be there, in the end , (coming soon to a planet near you!), screwing up most of the good things people try to accomplish, it’s the free spirit thing, it’s not easy living free, you left the shore, old frodo farr, off to new mexico, where there are plenty of wide open vistas and apparently real sources of spirit, you put yourself out to pasture
my jeans all wet past the knees, one day i’ll take that plunge into the surf. Now, I don’t think you should worry about the rest of the world, they have to reconcile there own demons, and personally my knees aren’t what they used to be and my back hurts most days, i’d let the world walk for awhile, otherwise it’ll never learn, like those poor kids in Turkey walking on all fours. (why someone didn’t get them a walker with little ribbons tied to the handles and
day- glo tennis balls on the bottom is beyond me)
Muddle on!
Hey Jeff, great to hear from you! The subjects you raise are all very much on my mind and deserve a whole blog post. However, for the short term:
1. “Fragile” is much too mild a term for how I was feeling. More like “in the jaws of the tryannosaurus with foot-long teeth piercing my vital organs.” And all the while very conscious that I have a hand in directing this!
2. Not put out to pasture, though. Far from it. These last 10 years away from Merryland have been like being keelhauled through a dip tank. (Some of us need the heavy-duty disinfecting.
In my case, what I needed to do was fail miserably, which I have achieved, in order to come eyeball to eyeball with the THING!
3. Yes, there are real sources of spirit here, because the land is so vast and the people so few that not everything is ruined yet. I couldn’t have done the eyeball-to-eyeball bit w/o having my fingers jammed into the cosmic electrical outlet, which was damned hard to do in Festerville. Impossible, actually. Your description of the Shore (I first accidently typed “Snore”) is fucking priceless and true. When I finish typing this comment, I’m having a drink in your honor!
4. I understand where you’re at in your “walking along the shoreline.” I can’t tell you how many times or for how long I felt like everything was fucking OVER and HOPELESS. At this moment, however, there appears to be an awesome CREATIVE dimensional void between now and The End. Whether this is just me or something universal, I don’t know, but I no longer feel trapped!
More later, and stay in touch. And thanks again for writing. No one writes like you do.
¡Dios mio! I think I know what this post is.