I was so angry when I started writing. At this late stage in life, after all I’ve done and gone through, to suddenly experience the impact of what they took from me on yet another level is instantly enraging. (Just ask my wife.) I wonder if this will ever stop.

In the course of examining the saved mementos, letters, and documents I brought home from my 90-year-old mother’s place in Tucson, I came across an item of extraordinary significance. It had nothing to do with me in particular but blew the whole place up, and there I was, looking at another goddamn hole.

You need to know a little more about my family first:

My parents were both from Maryland. My father grew up on the Eastern Shore, my mother on the east side of Baltimore. They met when my father went to the Glenn L. Martin plant to rivet wing panels on B-26s. Or something. He hardly told me anything about his early days, and I guess I always felt like he was keeping something from me. Holding back. I haven’t a clue as to what his personality was like when he was young. At any rate, my mother (Helen) worked in the typing pool, I think. They probably met at lunch. She was barely out of high school and he’d had three and a half years of college. I guess he needed to drop out to make money. It would be nice if he’d ever told me this, but there you go. We just have to imagine it:

It takes a while, like these things did once. They “date,” which means go out with groups of friends. Maybe they take the steamer across the Bay to Rock Hall and dance to an orchestra in the open air. A hot dog and a Coke would have been a big thing. Who knows what else goes on—he rivets, she types. World War II is about to start. Soon the Army Air Corps needs pilots in a hurry and takes men with less than four years of college into OCS (Officer Candidate School). Off he goes to flight school in Texas. On the day he gets his wings, they get married in San Antonio.

So far, so good. One could get interested in this, right? What happens to them, obviously, but also where they came from. What their parents were like. Who they were. And this is where it starts to crack…

* * *

John Sr.’s mother, the one we kids grew up calling Granny, never wanted him to marry Helen. There was much disparagement of my mother’s more humble background, in her eyes. I know my mother’s family was “poor,” but only in the way a lot of families were back then, in that they had to live on very little. All her brother’s and sisters had to take odd jobs to help their widowed mother keep them fed. My father’s parents were hardly any better off, but Granny had gone to a Methodist college—free tuition for a preacher’s daughter—and my father’s older brother and sister had degrees, both obtained by working their way through school. They had to. I even did the same myself, with almost nothing from my folks.

But Granny always felt her education, such as it was, made her superior to the hoi polloi. I’ll never know exactly why, because looking back, she had less appreciation for culture and the myriad pleasures of life than almost anyone I’ve ever known. What counted were the tenets of shoutin’ Methodism in the hills of darkest West Virginia, where the only thing worse than wasting time was having fun or spending money. Any money. She kept her children on a short leash of pending disapproval and was critical of my mother her entire life. In short, it appears the dark side of my dear Granny who always let me take things from the attic and gave me pie was a miserly, moralizing snob! Thank God I was a grandchild and not her own.

My mother’s family was fascinating, though.

There were tons of aunts and uncles. They did things my father’s family never did, like have big outdoor get-togethers where grownups would have crabs and beer and kids got undeserved cake (and “pop”). My cousins had a jukebox in the basement. A couple of them built hotrods and got in trouble with the law. One uncle owned a famous soft drink bottling plant—I have no idea what the others did. Would that my siblings and I had had more time to get to know these people better. As the oldest, I remember some things. But to this day, I probably can’t name all my cousins, and certainly not their children. I have to work to remember aunts and uncles, and I doubt my siblings can.

When I was growing up, I almost never heard about the Massons (on my mother’s side). It was always about the Farrs. Granny and her three “kids,” mostly—Grandad seems more a footnote. In the early days, there was more contact with my mother’s family, but that weakened slowly over time. We’d visit with my grandmother in Chestertown for a week and take an afternoon to go to Baltimore. The short leash again, you see.

And so our lives unfolded. We moved over 40 times before I graduated from high school. (I attended three of those, each in a different state.) I went to the University of Texas and did all kinds of things, good God. Taught in a junior college. Got married and divorced. Dropped out to become an Ozark woods hippie. Burned my draft card. Moved back to Austin, a day laborer with a master’s degree. Took off for Maine to be an itinerant sculptor of giant metal insects. I am not making this up. No one in the Pine Tree State would buy my two-foot welded steel mosquito, but after I gave up and migrated down the coast to Maryland (again), I sold it to an entomologist at Virginia Tech while doing a craft show there.

And where was I in Maryland? Chestertown, of course. My grandmother’s home. The seat of what’s acceptable, as well as being awfully nice. There I met the love of my life and lived for 25 years. Barely 30-odd miles as the crow files across the Chesapeake Bay from Baltimore, but only once in all those years did I go to see my mother’s family. For a funeral, of course. And we visited the city many times.

* * *

A couple of my cousins read this blog. I don’t know if they really understand what happened to me and my siblings, but something turned wrong with my mother when it came to us and her relations. Maybe it was guilt at living so far away and growing out of touch. Maybe my father and grandmother bullied her and made her insecure. Maybe she was sick. Maybe all of this is bullshit and it doesn’t matter. All I know is, I didn’t get the kind of schooling in my family history that my wife got with her own. By comparison, I know little about the Massons, other than what I absorbed before I was nine and stories Helen sometimes told when there were spaces in between the fighting and the strain.

I know that her paternal grandfather was born in France and came to Baltimore before the 1880s. I know she had several aunts who lived a long time somewhere near Middle River (Baltimore), right there where I could have known them. But she ever introduced me or took us there to see them. I don’t even know their names. She never really talked about them. A FAMILY FROM FRANCE! Neither did she have much to say about her mother’s people. Germans, they were (the Volzes), with deep roots in the community.

But this afternoon I had occasion to shuffle through some file folders from Tucson. In one of them was a tiny, tattered envelope from France bearing a U.S. stamp (?), postmarked in Le Havre on September 2, 1933:

Inside was a birthday card for my mother, who was turning 12 years old:

For those who can’t make out the writing, it reads:

Dear Helen: I’m very far away in France, but I have not forgotten you. Hope I am not too late wishing you a very Happy Birthday. Aunt Helen.

AUNT HELEN?!? My mother was named for an aunt of hers I never knew about?? Perhaps my siblings know, or maybe even I did once and just forgot.

Great-Aunt Helen might have visited Masson relatives in France.* The card was handmade but purchased here before the voyage or maybe on the ship, showing forethought and affection for her namesake. Little of my mother’s family remains in all her papers, but there is this. It must have meant a lot to her, a birthday card from France. And yet she never shared this with us, never pulled the card out from wherever she had stashed it or spoke proudly of the aunt I never knew existed. And consider that this was 1933: what kind of resources did this woman have to go to France? Was she a single professional? Did she have a husband? What was she like? WHY THE HELL DID NO ONE EVER TELL ME THIS?

Once again I felt abandoned and deprived. Despite all the amazing things I’ve done, my life was often wracked by insecurity and depression. I could have used this information, that I came from sophisticated people who led interesting lives and cared about each other. Instead of feeling like an orphan, I might have had more pride. God damn whatever illness made my mother rob us of our birthright, the self-inflicted beatings that still rattle every one of us!

But who knows why this is or was?

The karma is inscrutable, yet there’s a way to let the wounding be a gift: when you finally feel the outline of the missing piece, then way down deep, something new slides into place and one is different. It can happen in an instant.

Never doubt the Mystery. Never fear the pain.

* Better see the comments. I’m just sayin’.

Post from: FarrFeed

Time Bombs of the Dead

“Quiet!” she hushed, raising an index finger to her lips and cocking her head. She meant it, so I shut up.

Seconds passed. “What is it?” I asked softly.

“Like something outside, a wild animal, coyotes howling or something,” she replied, still searching for a match.

Personally, I didn’t wonder. It’s hard to hear through thick adobe walls, or masonry ones either, like in the small bathroom where we stood. Coyotes come by all the time, too, and their yelps are quite distinctive. I couldn’t make out anything, which wasn’t a surprise, but all at once, she nailed it:

“It was the toilet!”

Oh yeah. The ancient mechanism never quite shuts off sometimes, and then it “sings,” a quiet, humming, high-pitched whine that falls and rises. With a little luck, you can make it go away by slapping the side of the tank. I could see how the sound might be mistaken for a howling beast some miles away, rattled down arroyos and carried by the wind. But this was just a 40-year-old calcified convenience, our own coyote toilet of the numbered days.

I have permission from the landlady in Pennsylvania to replace it whenever Gilbert the Magic Plumber thinks we should, which is pretty much right now. But Gilbert’s ministrations are something to be savored. I can do nothing else when he’s on the scene, nor would I wish to. So the timing must be right: the job will take all afternoon.

I should be used to this by now. There’s a rightness to living this way that I appreciate most deeply. If only I weren’t so impatient to make up for lost time.

In Arizona recently, my sister sorted through hundreds of photographs she’d stashed at our mother’s old doublewide in the desert. Some of them were of my wife and me, taken on visits to Tucson I can’t even remember, back in the early days when we’d drive all the way from Maryland. I looked impossibly young. Utterly, impossibly, very handsomely young. As is usual with me, I spoke the first thought that came into my head:

“Oh, squandered youth!”

Which was revealing, I thought. Too much so, in fact, so I immediately dissembled and moved on. Can’t have any of that.

Besides, it was in fact not squandered but magnificent! Even if I wasn’t rich or famous, even though I ricocheted from adventure to crisis all the time, and despite my lack of focus, understanding, or respect, I did nearly everything I wanted. We’d go skinny-dipping on a pristine beach and had sex almost every day. I sailed up and down the river. She practiced on her baby grand on warm, humid nights with the windows open. Someone had a party every couple of weeks. There was lust like mildew over everything. We ate corn, crabs, strawberries, and tomatoes. I played loud guitar, built boats and sculptures, cast bronze cat skulls, painted, went exploring, and occasionally worked.

We took all kinds of trips. Early on, we drove her old VW to Mexico and back. While our friends picked out new furniture, we hocked everything to go to Europe on sabbatical. Sometimes we jumped in the car after her last class to drive 90 miles across the bay to go to D.C. for a movie or just to visit Bloomingdale’s for kicks. I’d have tequila from a flask, get high, and drive back listening to the stereo in the wee hours of the morning while she sat there with the map light on, finishing her lesson plans—over the Bay Bridge in the moonlight, hardly any traffic once we reached the Eastern Shore.

Squandered??? HELL, NO!

Just easy to forget in the rarefied imprisonment of approaching doom. I have focus now but look like hell. I feel all right but think I know the score, and so I hurry—rush about inside—leaving no damn room for glory or the magic plumber, much less the wilderness that beckons just outside the door, and all the ships lined up, waiting to come in…

The old porcelain howls of fur and footprints in the night. I will have to trust in magic and go home.

Post from: FarrFeed

Coyote Toilet

It’s a long, hard road for some of us to get to where we should be. I ought to know. Just now I said goodbye to my brother, William G., after handing him an “allowance” check from my mother’s bank account that’s way too little for most people to survive on. He was very grateful.

I added 50 bucks extra to pay him for the promised removal of two piles of tree clippings in the patio of the old double-wide, and then we walked through the place so he could name things he thought he might want. Some of you might be surprised to learn that Helen’s sewing machine and associated gear was all he really cared about, plus a couple of simple mirrors hanging on the wall. My brother has been sewing his own clothes (and shoes) for years, mostly in quite unconventional ways, using found or salvaged material of one kind or another to extend the life of garments in creative ways. It’s a side of him that most people have no idea of, an adaptation to years of bone-grinding poverty but also indicative of a native artistic soul that will not be repressed.

Yes, I threw him out of the house last Sunday because of prior draconian banishment, and I made multiple apologies today for this unconscionable behavior. He knew why, of course, but still. Yes, he’s done a lot of things he shouldn’t have, and I have cursed him publicly and privately for decades. (I probably never got over his peeing in my shoes when I was 10 years old.) Yes, I apparently have all kinds of issues with my siblings that are only now coming up for needed attention as we contemplate our mother’s imminent demise. Who knew? In any case, this has to be a good thing, provided I can stand it.

On my last visit to Tucson, I gave Bill our mother’s old computer, an eMac of indeterminate vintage, the first computer he’s ever had in his own residence. He told me today that he had recently googled his name and come across something I’d mentioned, perhaps on Twitter, about the kinetic artworks he’d created out of old electric motors and bits and pieces of old junk. “It makes me feel good when you say something nice about me,” he said. So for all his difficulty in communicating with the world at large, he still has the ability to zing right through to the heart of things occasionally.

Ouch. Oh dear. Or oh wow, depending.

When next my wife and I descend on the dystopian glamour that is Tucson, I will shoot some video of his creations for you all to see. This isn’t charity, he has real talent in this area and always has had. One of his skills is stacking rocks, for example. It is simply time he had his due, and I will help him get it. Maybe he’ll even pose for a picture.

Mere survival has to count for something, and both of us still walk upon the earth. I have credit cards, computers, a beautiful wife, and gobs of mostly useless intellect. He has our mother’s aging attack chihuahua, an old trailer, and lives alone on less than what most of you spend for gas and burgers in a given month. If I am so much better, why is he still here?

There’s so much to ponder in this life. Perhaps before I shed my mortal coil, as my Aunt Mary used to say, I’ll know a bit more of the answer to that last question. It may just be that he has stayed around for me.

God truly does move in mysterious ways. You can tell her that I said so.

Post from: FarrFeed

For Brother Bill

“Johnny,” my brother spoke up bravely from the back seat,”maybe if you came to Tucson more, you’d like it better.” I was much too quick and cutting in my reply, something along the lines of that being the funniest thing he’d said all day, but Tucson brings out the ugly in me.

We were all three—my sister, my brother, and me—on the way to visit our mother at the nursing home. My sister drove past endless blocks that were all the same: wretched strip malls, blown trash piled up in the cacti, palm trees that didn’t belong, nothing anywhere that made you want to stop and give thanks. Tucson is like a giant failed experiment in bulldozing and paving—at least the contractors must have gotten rich. Here and there more upscale franchises glittered for a frozen moment. Soon the sun and no-one-gives-a-damn would fade the paint and crack the plastic, but by then the customers would already be gone to the next nice place with fresher asphalt. The slash-and-burn economy still works here where the populace is mesmerized, viewing new piles of concrete and construction clutter as signs of hope.

I didn’t need to see my 90-year-old mother, not one bit—it had been three and one-half years—but three busted siblings on such an outing was like over the river and through the woods to grandmother’s house we go, and would not be denied. I didn’t need to see poor Helen because I did most of my grieving years ago, after she threw me out in a psychotic rage that was the ultimate breakup of my life.

We walked into the dining area, where I recognized her immediately. My first thought was, she looked masculine in profile, gaunt and short-haired with enormous ears and a drooping nose. She sat in a wheelchair, grasping the edge of the table, staring blankly into space. We greeted her. She knew my sister, possibly my brother, and appeared to know who I was after she’d been told, reaching out to touch me with a swollen hand that had no muscle in it. Her eyes were huge, wet, and dim. She looked like someone you wouldn’t expect to last a day.

We wheeled her slowly back to her room to visit. It’s a smaller room than we had her in at first, because she doesn’t notice anymore. Here and there were signs of recognition, even a touch of the old guilt-tripping: “Do I look like the same mother?” And then, “Ask me anything,” but no one did. My sister held her hand and talked gently to her. My brother had few words and taped a picture to the wall that promptly fell right down. I could tell that each of them was still probing, caring, hoping for a connection. As for me, though, I felt nothing.

Does that shock you? I think it shocked my wife when I told her later, but it’s the truth, so help me God. Seeing my mother was like looking at someone who wasn’t a relation. She could have been any of those other women sitting in that dining room, hunched over in their wheelchairs, staring at the window, waiting for release. I felt the same compassion I would feel for any human being, but no more. No grief, no sadness. That may come, perhaps, when she finally passes on, although she did symbolically four years ago. My siblings have had no such inoculation, no purifying flames, and may deal with this forever. We all have different fates, it seems.

Perhaps my flames were not so purifying after all, however. All week long I’ve been suffering a sustained emotional constriction, a general sense of awfulness and feeling really, really bad. Not guilty, mind you, just depressive, grinding, ugly, brutal. The stress has given my wife an awful case of hives for the first time in her life. We both know I’m responsible.

In the aftermath of the visit to my mother, I feel more determined than ever to say goodbye to the Tucson portion of my life. I’ve taken much too long to clear her house out, lingering over memory-provoking artifacts of family history, feeling responsible for the preservation of it for my siblings or some other entity that pushes me. But I’m the oldest and lived through it all. My younger sister is dead. The youngest three have their own experiences that must be huge to them, but only I lived through my parents’ entire evolution as adults. Things resonate with me that mean nothing to anyone else, though the one who died summer before last would know. (Dear Teresa, I miss you so…)

I will find the time to write about such things as may be important or engaging, then let the rest slip loose. This episode is almost over, and there is deeper dirt to plow.

Post from: FarrFeed

Tucson Plague Week Chronicles

“At this moment, your father would be very proud of you,” she said. It was NOT a compliment!

We were sitting in traffic waiting to turn left from Ajo onto La Cholla, following a short cut I’d learned from the realtor, and of course I knew just what she meant. (Numbers, money, nitpicking, and assigning the worst possible motives to someone I didn’t know.) Just like me to drive my wife insane while she’s already tensed up over oncoming traffic that’s going is crush her like a bug, as I argue on about a thing that doesn’t mean shit, except remembering the experience makes her feel bad. Being inculcated in the ways of vengeful gods, I paid for my transgression by promptly getting lost in southeast Tucson, although we still made it to the restaurant and got our food and all.

If I were lucky, I could blame it all on simply being here. Tucson just isn’t easy on me. The family history that unfolded in the shadow of Cat Mountain could squeeze vodka from a stone. By the time we finally arrive and step out of the rental car at the old parental double-wide, I’m already half used up. And then I have to work!

The “mobile home retirement community” [gag] where my mother’s two mobile homes are located—yes, I sold one!—is now filled with snowbirds from the North Country: Alberta, Saskatchewan, Ontario, Minnesota, Wisconsin, Michigan, and a few outliers from darkest Kansas. They ride around on golf carts, some in geriatric packs, from coffee shop to golf course, and then home for cocktail hour. Singles pace the streets pretending to exercise as they look out for a live one. No wonder my father liked it here. That, and he never had to mow the grass.

But this is Tucson. What you do here is, you drive. You get in the car and drive to where lots of other people are and buy stuff, and then you drive some more. Drive, drive, drive. The gas stations are always crowded, day or night: all those cars, all that gas… It’s so damned depressing. There are times, though, when the mountains and the sky, especially at sunset, is so ludicrously Arizonan, like a Looney Tunes cartoon, that you almost forgive it all, because poor Tucson just can’t help it. And then someone pulling onto the freeway thinks his turn signal means YOU’RE supposed to move and makes you want to drop the big one. You would, too, except you have to keep on driving. That’s the secret glue that holds the hologram together: gasoline and people separated from the things they need.

Naturally, I tend to bitch about this. My wife reminds me of her brother’s family in Atlanta and how they spend hours out of every day inside a car. I am somehow not comforted to be reminded of how many millions of us live like an exploited class which has no choice—the things that we accept because “that’s just the way it is,” and “people have to live somewhere,” and the cultural diversions playing constantly in the brain to make us all forget. Maybe that’s my problem: I don’t HAVE those distractions in the terrible high desert! A little Netflix and the Internet, God knows, but really just the mountains and the fight to stay alive and rise above my training. It helps so much to keep things local, focusing on what’s in front of me, living close to Nature.

In Tucson, though, that means dodging overweight shoppers waddling across vast parking lots with plastic bags of junk just to score some toilet paper and a jug of milk. Leaving places like “Food City,” we carry our own plastic bags. No wonder people don’t return the shopping carts. It’s all disposable, like the architecture built of tin and colored gravel. (They kill trailers here like graves in Mexican cemeteries. Yank ‘em out and stick in someone else.)

Sell the double-wide, John. Sell it fast and laugh about the rest. This story isn’t over yet.

Post from: FarrFeed

Tucson on the Brain

I hate logging in when I haven’t posted in a while and seeing how the visitor numbers drop off in my absence. Oh man, do I. On the other hand, experience shows that silence is far superior to making something up just to jog the stats. And I have been writing, oh yes.

Often in the past, when I wouldn’t post for quite a while, one could safely assume that I was terminally depressed. That’s not the case these days, and I feel strangely decent, anyway. The kicker is that I can’t exactly tell you why, but only hint from the periphery of all that’s going on.

I’ve been having some amazing dreams, for one thing. As part of an exercise suggested by my analyst, I sat down the other night to write about three hats that showed up in the latest one. Yes, hats! That might not spin your wheels, but I churned out 2,431 words in just two hours off the top of my head, only getting up once to load the wood stove. The sentences flew by, and I was gobsmacked by surprises all the way, remembering things I’d lost for decades: near the end, there was a flash of insight into a dream I had nine years ago. In the process, something came unstuck. I’m not even certain what it was, but damn if I’m not different somehow. It doesn’t get any cooler than that for this old man, to realize the Universe is still in play.

Dreams are like that: timeless and non-linear. Something you dreamed a really long time ago might suddenly make sense when you least expect it. This is a major thrill for me. I love the slap of recognition when invisible leviathans bump together in the deep.

On another front, I had Gilbert the Magic Plumber over yesterday. The 40-year-old toilet just wasn’t flushing like it used to, and I was tired of watching you-know-what go round and round for three flushes before it disappeared. Gilbert is “retired,” ha-ha, but showed up in his 30-year-old truck with the washers stacked on the gear shift lever and pulled an ancient sacrificial auger (“snake”) out from underneath an even older heavy tarp. I say “sacrificial,” because he broke it on our toilet.

He had to stand on top of the bowl to get leverage and turn the crank—hard going, because the thing kept getting stuck. He’d crank it back and forth, yank on the cable so hard I thought the porcelain would break or he’d fall in, then crank some more. Finally he pulled it out, and lo, the snake was dead, cold steel busted near the end. The verdict? Calcium deposits, decades of them! There was so much calcium inside the toilet itself, it had nearly been completely plugged. I’d never heard of such a thing, but then I doubt we’ve ever lived with a 40-year-old toilet before. Hell, it’s probably older than that. Be that as it may, it flushes now, thank God.

When it came time to write out the bill, he chose not to come back in the house but sat outside on a bench, where I joined him in the sun. It had to be 25 °F, but the wind was calm, and we were comfy. Out of the blue, he told me a story about the midwife who delivered him. In the old days, all anyone had here were midwives, and all of them wore black. Gilbert said that his was named “Mary Quick.” Oh, come on.

“Her last name was really ‘Quick’?”

“Yes,” he said.

“What a great name for a midwife!” I exclaimed, and we shared a laugh. There was more, lots more, but it involves mystery Spanish I can’t spell, arcane local folklore from the old days, and wouldn’t make sense to you, anyway.

I hardly get it myself, you know, but there must be habitat for whales.

Post from: FarrFeed

Update: Writing & Other Wonders

This is kind of ridiculous. I was just about to write a post about why I hadn’t updated FotoFeed, when my wife suggested we take a drive. I took us west of the Rio Grande Gorge and shot a bucketful of photos on the way back. FotoFeed, no problem!

But there was in fact a large gap. I hadn’t updated since January 2, so I back-filled from there through Sunday. That’s why you need to click the “Previous Entries” link repeatedly to see them all. You’ll be glad you did, though. That’s one of them below.

The opposite (east) side of the bridge is the scene of some controversy just now. There used to be a wide bare strip where sightseers parked and various vendors sold their wares. But the land actually belongs to Taos Pueblo, which granted the state an easement for the bridge way back when. Just recently, they decided to clear the vendors out and restore the parking area to its natural state. The ostensible reason has to do with bighorn sheep in the area, although some people think other motives are involved and say the action is unfair or ill-advised. I was inclined to agree until today, when we drove out there. Whoa! To my eyes, it looks a lot better now with the old bare gravel lot plowed up, and I can imagine the sagebrush growing close to the road. “Keep it as pristine as possible,” my wife said.

I don’t know how the various parties will resolve this , and the truth is, there isn’t any decent place to park now for anyone who wants to walk across the bridge. It’s kind of an outlaw situation, with a few cars on the shoulder where it isn’t safe. You can park in the rest area up the hill on the west side, but it’s a long meandering way down to the bridge from there—quite doable, but a good little walk. This is a prime tourist attraction and people are going to show up regardless, so I hope they work something out. On the other hand (and there always is an other hand), it does feel more natural and peaceful with the old parking area gone. And where is it written that one has the right to park right next to every beautiful place?

A lot of people are upset that the bridge is a favorite suicide venue, too. Surely making it more strenuous to walk to your death isn’t such a terrible idea, no?

Post from: FarrFeed

Of a Sunday Afternoon

My wife was in the kitchen making dinner. “Sweetie?” I called out. “I feel kinda woozy, like I’m gonna faint. If I do, don’t freak out. I’m just letting you know…”

Yeah, right!

As I plopped down in a comfy chair and reached for the blood pressure monitor under the coffee table, I felt lots worse than I was letting on. The cold I’d suffered with for a couple of days—me who “never” gets sick—had already weakened me considerably, but this was different. Oh, was it ever. I had the intuition everything was shutting down. It was remarkable how that concentrated my attention as I tightened the cuff.

The readings were extraordinarily low. I’ve always had what most people would call low blood pressure, but this was shocking. The next thing I did was grab my laptop and do the google. One chart I looked at showed me in the “coma” range. I searched madly for solutions, so I wouldn’t be so preoccupied (haha) or drop dead over dinner. From all indications, though, I was actually severely dehydrated. No symptoms of heart failure, in other words. All I ever drink is coffee, which just makes you pee, and I’m always craving salt. Since I finally grasped how people die of thirst, I made sure to have a big glass of ice water with my meal and after supper dosed myself with over-salted popcorn. It tasted wonderful, like God’s own medicine. I followed that with more water, LOTS of it. An hour later, my blood pressure was merely at the “watch out” level, not “call 911!” and the dizziness was gone.

Dry climate, wood stove heat, no water, too much coffee and tequila, hardly any fruits and vegetables, lots of long hot baths and lack of exercise in the winter—not good! Always looking for the “perfect” place to live, doubting my abilities, expecting to be criticized, procrastinating, rationalizing, projecting, dicking around on the Internet instead of following my heart—NOT GOOD! Poverty, dehydration, awful diet, deprivation of all kinds. Same thing, starve the body and the soul.

I’ve always been strong and healthy, never a serious problem. In a year and a half, I’ll have outlived my old man, who died from smoking. But someone’s trying to tell me something, no?

It’s not enough to be a jerk. You gotta get happy, too.

Post from: FarrFeed

Easy Way Out

You may have noticed that this website runs faster than it did before. I’m responsible for this. It also rakes in lots more Google hits, all part of finally taking my professional self more seriously at an age when most men are either resting on their laurels or figuring how to kill themselves.

At least I think that’s what they’re doing. That’s the worst thing about being different, the damn comparisons with others, whether they’re true or not. Every time I drive back into Taos—like today—I look at the treeless sagebrush plain that wouldn’t be ugly if there were no houses on it and beat myself up all over again for getting stuck. (When you walk off the cliff, you’re not supposed to look down! I did, of course.) There are however, two cool consolations:

The first is that I’m at least 10 years ahead of my time. You take a man who’s been “successful” in conventional terms, has a nice home and and a tidy retirement account stashed away—now blow up the economy, make his money worthless, kick him out in the street, and see how well he handles it. Friends and neighbors, I know exactly how this feels. By the time the ditches run with tears and the rest of the country is flailing about for Plan B, I’ll be on to Plan C or maybe D (the one where orcas eat my kayak).

The second is the one that erases being “stuck.” I have no doubt whatsoever that focusing on my gifts, as in marrying the damn things, will open enough invisible doors to get us closets and a curb—Taos joke—or maybe even let me feel at home in my own life. It’s taken me a very long time to feel that certainty in my bones, a consequence of being raised with Farr feet on my neck. “Just FUCK everything else,” as my elegant professor emerita Iowa wife with three degrees asserted earlier this evening. And so I shall… There really is no other choice, never mind your age, and I can’t believe how lucky I am to live with someone who will tell me so, after all the shit I’ve rained down on her.

(I wonder if her sister talks like that in private? If she’d married me, I’ll bet she would!)

So you see, this really is a Happy New Year message. It’s okay to make mistakes,* but keep on moving! My very own wife and God Almighty just want us to relax and spread more joy. As I’ve done precious little so far to fulfill my quota, there’s a lot to do.

I’m not afraid of dying, only running out of time.

* [There is no such thing, of course.]

Post from: FarrFeed

Happy New Year! (I Think)