Reposting this video because there is actual research on this topic, with answers:
Here’s my take on this, and related thoughts.
This is an excellent look at this phenomenon. One of the things I’ve learned in life is to question everything I am told. I applied this lesson to dreams when I heard, in fact, was told, by well-educated people, that, “We don’t dream in color.” There are many times when I am partially awake while dreaming. Since this question was important to me, I found that I could analyze a dream while I was dreaming, usually in the microseconds before I woke up. I can verify that I have seen colors in dreams. In fact, I have smelled things and tasted things while dreaming.
I don’t remember dreams all that often. One that recurred often, and became part of my more permanent memories, was of flying. I noticed in my early teen years that I was only flying a few feet above the ground. Upon retrospection, I realized that it is probably because my brain is only roughly 5 feet above the ground, and that’s how it feels when I’m walking around, riding a bicycle, or riding in a car. That begs some questions: Do people who live in high rises fly higher in their dreams? Do airline pilots? Do People dream of flying higher who fly small planes, ultralights, or gliders? If, as I’ve read, dreams are our brains’ way of analyzing, categorizing, and storing information, they have to use what information was recorded by our senses. B&W TVs gave our brains the misinformation that moving images are in B&W.
Interestingly enough, my early dreams also seemed to fill my field of vision. Once, I was accidentally overdosed on paregoric, a cough medicine that contained opium, and/or heroin. I woke up in the darkness watching movies play out on my bedroom walls; fighting, full-sized, toy-colored knights in armor, moving up and down hills, that morphed into soldiers attired in either blue or grey uniforms, fighting in hills. This was long before color TV or movies. But I’d seen such colors on toy soldiers.
Nowadays, just before I fall asleep, I notice the little dream-like movies in my head are much smaller, internet-sized videos – social media in size. Looking at the size of videos and photos today, in the mega to giga-byte size, I have theorized, based on much longer upload and download times, that, perhaps our brains cannot hold that much information, so they are minimized thumbnail-like movies. That’s another area of research.
I dreamt on Monday. I don’t recall having any dreams in quite some time. Usually, if I dream in the morning, I forget it by the time I get out of bed, no matter how hard I try.
So, Monday I was waiting for a message to let me know my call time to be on a movie set.
[ I had driven to Santa Fe three days earlier to work as an extra, but we all call that “background” now. We say we are background actors, which is to say we are like moveable set decorations. However, that day, after getting stuck in highway maintenance that had Interstate 25 almost at a standstill – it took 20 minutes to go 4 miles – we were informed that production was behind schedule. They couldn’t use us yet, and couldn’t afford to pay us to stay. (It’s a low-budget pic). But, we were asked to come back the next day. They had only planned to use us for four hours, but if we would come back the next day, they would pay us for eight hours. Well, that took some of the frustration out of having to drive up and back for nothing. So, I went back, and got stuck in traffic again. We were on set, however, not for four or eight hours, but from 11:00 am to 11:30 pm (12.5 hours). I was excited about the overtime, but that didn’t happen. Just a flat $120. Still, money is money, and they needed us back the next day too. So Saturday, Oct. 15th, found me on set again. This time they only used some of us to complete a pivotal scene we’d been in the previous day. This time we were there from 6:00 pm to 1:30 am the next day. Pay: $90. Like I said, it’s a low-budget pic. On certain projects, we work at a rate of $100 for eight hours. ]
I got to sleep in on Sunday, and I had back-to-back acting classes to attend that afternoon. I was able to sleep for a reasonable time Sunday night. But, my system was still adjusting, so, while waiting for a new call time on Monday morning, I took a nap.
That’s when the dream hit me. In it, I had just picked up my mail and was walking up the stairs of a porch to my house. (It seemed like I lived there, but I don’t have a porch.) As I was standing on the porch, absorbed in opening my mail, I glanced left and saw my former stepdaughter there. She was wrapped in blankets, one of which was very colorful. She was in a bed or on a small sofa. There was a young woman sitting near her. Both of them were smiling. It was a shock to see her there. (Recently she moved away from here to California.) I sat down next to them and asked what was going on. She and the woman laughed, but she turned to me, and said, “I have to go.” The dream ended, but there was a red/yellow afterimage of her in my eyes and she seemed to wink before she disappeared, like Lewis Carroll’s disappearing Cheshire Cat. I messaged her, telling her about the dream, She replied: “Interesting dream and very vivid!” I was surprised to hear from her at all because sometimes she doesn’t reply.
The Cheshire Cat — with whom Alice had just had a conversation — fades away as it sits on a tree branch. Date first published: 1865
Anyway, I never got to set on Monday. There was a 3:00 pm call time, but then production cancelled shooting that day, and for Tuesday, because of the heavy rains we were having. I expected to be on set today, but production took another day off (“company day off”) so it’s Wednesday, and I’m waiting to hear about the call time for tomorrow,
Meanwhile, I had another dream about my former stepdaughter this morning when I woke up. In it, I was standing around with several people, like at a party, and she was there, speaking with her father. Someone came up and asked her about her brother, she reached into her cell phone/wallet case, pulled out a folded newspaper-like photo with her brother and others in it, and handed it to them. She went back to her conversation with her dad. The person she’d given the photo to tried to give it back to her, but she was still busy in her conversation so they handed it to me and walked away. I tried to give it to her, but she ignored me. I put it in her hand. She grabbed it and tore it up, without looking at it, tearing only about a third of it off. That was strange and rude, so after a few moments, I walked away.
I still miss my former stepdaughter. I say former, because, over a year ago, long before she left, in a Father’s Day message to me thanking me for all I had done for her, she referred to me as her ex-stepdad. I didn’t like the sound of that, so I use “former” instead. However, perhaps “ex” is appropriate after all. She posts updates and photos on Facebook, and I comment on them; sometimes she likes or comments on my FB posts, but that’s the extent of our relationship now – digital only – after she’s been gone for four and a half months. I wrote letters to her twice, hoping to revive that antique custom, but it hasn’t happened. In fact, it turned out that she took a trip back here, and went out to see the balloons during the Balloon Fiesta in Albuquerque, but never let me know she was in town. I didn’t find out until she posted a photo. I messaged her why she hadn’t at least called while she was in town, but she never replied. Her house had been on the market since she left. Perhaps it sold, so she had a reason to come back for that, or just to visit her dad and her friends, and was just too busy to want to deal with me too. My status with her is vague.
I have to think she appears in my dreams because I’m still trying to accept that she’s gone, and the old days of sharing our birthdays and holidays together, or of blind wine tastings, or lunches on the patio I built for her, are gone. We had kept our relationship after her mother and I divorced, seeing each other for birthdays and holidays. For a year and a half, after she could no longer drive, I picked her up to take her to her job and back to her house. Her brain surgery for a tumor had ruined her peripheral vision on the left side, and after totaling four cars, she gave up driving before she hurt someone. Then I began working for a winery for ten years, and six months after that, she joined me in that endeavor on weekends, and on holidays from her jobs. I enjoyed driving her to the winery in the mountains east of here and working with her, picking fruit, filtering, bottling, labeling, and selling wine together at festivals and at the winery. She has ended her life here. She had put her house up for sale, and then sold, donated, or threw away nearly everything she owned before she left. It is a new start for her, a new job, a new place, a new time. I accept, realistically, that she must live her life on her terms, and try new things.
But, to never see her again after 30 years? That’s hard. Family is still important to her, but I am not family to her anymore, I think. I asked her what I am to her now, but she never replied, I mentioned coming to visit her, but I received no response, no welcome to do so. I had told her how much I missed her, but for her to come back and not even say hi – that’s rough. She hasn’t severed her connection with me totally (It’s just digital now) but it seems tenuous, like a rubber band stretched beyond its elasticity until it breaks. And now, I’ve made myself sad again. Any more of this and I will cry. I guess there’s a reason why I prefer to just post photos now. As much as I love her, I suppose I will stop dreaming about her someday.
We’ve been having a lot of rain in New Mexico lately, after 70 days without any measurable rainfall. We’ve all been waiting for it. We love rain here because there’s so little of it. The state has been in drought conditions for years. the longest duration lasted 329 weeks beginning on May 1, 2001 and ending on August 14, 2007. The most intense period of drought occurred the week of January 19, 2021, affecting 54.27% of the state. After what seemed like an unending explosion of fires throughout the state, the rain is so very welcome. Of course, now the problem is monsoon rains that have brought flash floods and landslides. But that’s New Mexico. I love it here, although the fires have been getting worse with such extremely dry conditions, and now the fire areas (burn scars) don’t have the vegetation needed to prevent mudslides in such heavy rains.
But the rain, predicted to last through June 21, is still coming. It’s Sunday now, June 29. The rain has been falling for hours, off and on. I enjoy the light rain pattering on the roof, and I love the heavy pounding of rain during cloudbursts. It’s all good here. When I went for a short walk a while ago, after one of the little rainstorms, I found a large clump of snails on the sidewalk. There were all mostly out of their shells sliding all over each other. I saw a couple strays nearby, but it seemed that about six to eight snails were having an orgy. Imagine that – a snail orgy.
But I also noticed that the rain sounds so different while I paused under the huge Mulberry tree outside my front door. It had a strange resonance. Usually, people say, “The rained drummed on the roof,” but this sound was so unlike that. No drumming. Repetitive, yes. But also extremely pleasant, reminding me of an orchestra of wind instruments. Imagine that: strings played by the rain, for the pleasure of the snails.
Well, I put a movie on tonight while the rain played its tune. I had a copy of The Leisure Seeker on my shelf since last year, and finally popped it in the player tonight. I bought it because it stars Helen Mirren and Donald Sutherland, two consummate actors. And, you say? Yes, I liked it. Comedy and tragedy. So very well done. I say comedy, because, in the short interview with the actors after the movie ended, Sutherland called it a comedy with a tragic ending. But it’s not any kind of laugh-out-loud comedy. The comedy fell out more like British comedy, funny, as in strange, with unpredictable actions and words.
In actuality, Sutherland’s character has advanced Alzheimer’s, and Mirren’s character is gravely ill, but they spontaneously take a road trip in an old, oil-burning, well-used RV. The movie seemed more like a slice-of-life adventure, with it’s real-life ups and downs, just as life had been for this plucky couple. The denouement of their lives plays out throughout the movie until the movie itself reaches its climax.
Throughout, we experience the inexplicable devastation of someone’s mind as Alzheimer’s disease takes its slow toll on memory and quality of life. Yet, these two people have a chance to share their love and laughs, and even painful memories, as the unexpected surprises even them.
Through it all, I could see myself in the characters, as I often do when reading books or watching movies. I feel the deterioration of my body and brain all the time, and it is already far more than just being easily distracted, or having the body run down slowly. My heart is not well, and it was very noticeable in the aftermath of an extremely painful and traumatizing tooth extraction recently. As the pain continued, unabated for days and nights on end, my heart struggled. I felt it leaping and struggling to keep up. There was pain. And, the antibiotic I took caused severe stomach pain with constipation, and it added to the malaise generated by the pain in my entire jaw. My eyes are rapidly deteriorating now, as opposed to the barely perceptible changes over the last 40 years. My right hand and shoulder move randomly, sometimes spasmodically. My driving is becoming erratic. Working on a movie set for 13 hours is thoroughly exhausting, and much more difficult to recover from than it was just a few years ago. Driving home late, through the very dark section of interstate highway between Santa Fe and Albuquerque has become nerve-wracking and scary.
As I was writing this, I realized that today is Sunday, and I had purchased a ticket to Chatter Sunday, and forgotten to go again. I so enjoy the music and the poetry. Nothing kept me from going. I knew I was going as recently as last night, but it slipped my mind again. Well, c’est la vie, as the French say. Fuck it, I say. Except, it is simply late, in the wee hours of Sunday morning. I hadn’t noticed it was even past midnight. I will probably go to Chatter Sunday after all later on today. It’s still Sunday.
I will continue on, abandoned as I am in life. I have my motorcycle to ride, and buddies to ride with. I have my acting classes to memorize things for. I’m creating a storyboard for a class commercial project that I will add to my clips. I will also create both a sad and a funny monologue for the same reason. I will be part of a movie the whole class will create. It’s also for my clips and resume. I keep going. One day I will run down. I will be no more. But not yet.
Two movies I’ve watched between yesterday and today have had a strange effect on me. In one hour we turn our clocks ahead. But it’s two hours from now. It’s all a fiction, this way we keep track of time. But, I’m a romantic. I feel like I’m writing in between the magical time that doesn’t exist, when it’s 2:00 am March 13, 2022, and when the digital clocks say it is actually 3:00 am on March 13, 2022. There’s a strange feeling in me. Not of death, but my fantasy of release.
But, enough of that. According to Netflix, I’ve rented 876 movies since January of 2008. That doesn’t count the broadcast movies I’ve watched, the ones I watched in movie theaters, the ones I’ve bought, or the many shorts and features I watched in order to rate and review movies for the Santa Fe Film Fest or the independent short movies the people I know have made. It’s, all of it, a lot of movies. I don’t watch much TV. Perhaps that’s why I work so hard towards being an actor: for the movies – to be in a feature-length movie where I am one of those collections of pixels on a screen that move and talk and bare their emotions for all to see. All of my auditions collected together would equal a – pretty boring – movie series. Some really bad acting, and some heartfelt moments from days or weeks of work for each audition.
Some day, perhaps.
It’s strange to think that it’s all that my life is now. My decades of seeking love and romance led to twenty-one years of marriage, split between two women. A brief sexual dalliance since then that lasted almost two years, but I no longer seek anything. I remember, I dream, I satisfy myself with unrequited romances – my specialty.
One such lasted 12 years, long after such obsessions usually end. The two movies I watched brought that all together for me. One was Hector and the Search for Happiness. In it, a psychiatrist goes on a worldwide journey to find out what happiness is, and, really, to find out why he is unhappy. But, after interviewing people all over the world to sample what others think happiness is, and after some strange, some wonderful, some odd, and one really awful, near-death experience out of all those experiences, he does come to realize he does know what it is, and it’s up to him to go for it.
Such was my realization recently when I decided that I do really want to be happy, and what would make me happy goes beyond things, movies, acting, travel, food, drink, or sex. You all know what that is if you’ve watched one-tenth of the movies I’ve seen. Someone. Someone I enjoy spending time with. Someone I admire. Someone I desire. Someone whose very happiness brings me joy. I have indeed known someone like that for quite some time. However, that is a path I cannot travel, for reasons that are part me, part her, and part historical. Such is life. It became a long-lived and very unrequited love. I tell myself I will always love her, quite unselfishly, and we’ll always be friends, but even the friendship is all in my mind.
The other movie I watched was Pandora and the Flying Dutchman. A ghost ship centuries old with a brooding man who can’t die, who lives in a turmoil of regret, guilt, and unfulfilled longing, for a woman he lost, one he meets, and death. He can have none of those. But stranger things have happened and is it a movie. It ends in deaths and romance and love.
What was odd was how I felt. I was happy, in a bright and cheerful mood, the kind that makes me sing and hum old songs. It’s a rare mood for me. Just recently, I realized my unrequited longing for the woman I mentioned had to stop, no matter that I love her still. Our friendship was not deep and based on just a couple of things we had in common, but I’m certain she needs to move on from that. She sees me once in a while if I ask, but not always when I ask. She never asks. She never calls, texts, or leaves messages, except in response to mine, and not always then. She doesn’t have to say it, I’ve seen it many times – she needs to move on. And really, I realize I do too. I am comfortable with that. I am happy for her. I feel good about myself. I can plan again, go on dates, maybe romance someone. I’m ready. And there’s still time.
Pedaling a bicycle all day, every day creates a nice rhythm, like meditation. I often rode from the slightest glimmer of light to very late at night, sometimes midnight. I had a supply of soybeans, brown rice, and granola in my bicycle panniers. I found places to create a fire to cook my meals, sometimes a picnic area with a barbecue grill in it, or a patch of dirt not far off lonely roads. In the morning I looked for gas stations that had groceries, and I bought a carton of milk for my granola and a piece of fruit: apple, orange, pear, whatever each state might offer me. For lunch and dinner, it was rice and beans. Sometimes I wished I had oil, butter, or cheese, but it was what it was. Bicycles don’t have interdimensional refrigerators that I could use for food storage. I had little enough money for milk and fruit, let alone restaurant meals or motels. So that was my day: pedaling, cooking, pedaling, cooking, pedaling.
Being in a state of mind where I wandered through old nursery rhymes, music, and campfire songs as I pedaled along, sometimes I got lost. I always stopped for free maps at gas stations when I crossed state lines. Remember free maps? But, not knowing the roads I wasn’t always clear on which to take. I was, at the time, heading due west across Michigan, after coming from Ohio, through Detroit at night, with a few brief stopovers in Toronto, and other places in Canada, and around the great lakes through Sault Ste. Marie, Ontario. And yet, I was lost. Numbered backwoods roads on a map don’t come with road names. There had been few houses or service stations. So when I spotted a cute little house with a finely manicured lawn just off the road, I leaned my bicycle against their short white picket fence, opened the gate, walked to the door, and knocked.
And knocked, and knocked. I could hear a TV blaring, and I knocked louder. Nothing. A kitchen window was just to my right a few feet away, so I ambled over, saw an old woman in the kitchen with her back to me, and rapped on the window. It took me a little while to get her attention. The TV was really cranked full blast in the adjoining room. She turned around finally and saw me, and I pointed towards the front door. I stepped back to the door, expecting to see her as it opened, but instead, there was a shotgun pointed at my face. That was, of course, a little disconcerting, but I really needed directions. A wrong turn could take me anywhere at night. I opened my mouth to ask for directions, and all I could get out was “Hi. Could you…”, but the man holding the shotgun wasn’t having any of that. He ordered me off his property.
I turned slightly to go, but I kept trying to spit out, “I was just…”, “I’m looking for…”, but he thrust the shotgun at me and yelled for me to get off his property again and again. I hastened to do so, needless to say, but I stopped at the gate. I tried again to ask for directions, but he wasn’t even listening. He ordered me to close the gate. I did so. Then I yelled over that I just wanted directions – shotgun still pointed at me – and could he tell me if I was on such and such highway. After a tense minute or so, he lowered the shotgun away from his face, and told me, angrily, that it was. That was all I was going to ask, so I turned, threw my leg over my trusty Schwinn “Continental” and rode. I went slowly at first, but then I got back into my rhythm and rode for a long time till after it was pitch black, except for the tiny cone of light that my bicycle put out. I had attached a small friction generator that, when released against my tire, powered my light.
Eventually, I was really feeling exhausted after a pretty grueling day. I came across a small picnic area in the middle of nowhere.
I had lost my sleeping bag while I was in Canada. A couple of drunks I’d met in a park on the Canadian side of Sault Ste. Marie had plied me with sips of wine from a shared bottle while I waited to return to the youth hostel I could stay at only at night. They were nice guys, probably Anishinaabe, from that area. We had talked about Lake Superior. There was a lot of heavy industry on the U.S side. Factories and businesses and smoke covered the U.S. shoreline.
They told me that the U.S and Canada were always fighting over rights to the lake. The U.S. had been dumping waste into the lake for some time, but the Canadians did not do so and fought the U.S. to clean up its act. The guys had also had some beers and gave me one. I had not eaten that day as yet, so I had gotten drunk. We had gone for coffee. To make a long story short, I had gotten sick after a couple sips of coffee, made a mess of the toilet there, was too weak to clean it up, and the police had been called. They told me to clean it up or be arrested. I slurred out, “Go ahead.” I was nearly passing out by then. So, while I was in jail overnight waiting to see a judge in the morning, one of the guys had taken my sleeping bag to use as a pillow, as his friend told me the next day. I had tracked the other guy down to his apartment, but he wouldn’t give it back.
However, after the judge had ordered me to pay a fine for public drunkenness, I had gone back to the youth hostel to get my bicycle and money for the fine. He had allowed me to do that. Without my sleeping bag, however, I took a blanket with me from the hostel. And I rode across the border as fast as I could into Michigan. I really couldn’t afford to use my food money for a fine. So I had become a petty criminal, I supposed.
Meanwhile, on this middle-of-nowhere road, I pulled out that very blanket and spread it out on the ground under a picnic table. I wanted to be out of sight in case the homeowner with the shotgun had called the police. You never know. With my long hair and bushy beard, I resembled Charles Manson, who, with his followers, had been all over the news for a long time after killing five people including actress Sharon Tate a few years earlier. I figured out later that the homeowner had likely put me in the same category as Manson, and had been scared to death of me. He must have thought Manson was still the leader of a nationwide revolutionary group from the way the press had carried on back then, but Manson was in jail, his followers arrested or disbanded.
I slept for a short time, wrapped in the blanket, with an arm through a bicycle wheel. But I was indeed awoken by a car that pulled into the picnic area. I hoped they didn’t see me, so I stayed quiet. I heard the car door open, and footsteps on the gravel, then, the door slammed shut and the car zoomed out. I went back to sleep. I woke at first light as usual and saw a large cardboard box on the ground by the picnic table. “Did someone leave me food?” I idly wondered. It was instead a kindle of tiny kittens. The cats were too small to crawl out. When they saw me, they all started mewing and crawling over each other. Cute as they were, there was nothing I could do for them. I petted them but had nothing they could eat with me. I didn’t have much water left in my bike’s attached bottle, but I wetted my finger and put a few drops in each of their mouths. I picked the box up and put it on top of the table with a few large stones propped around it, hoping someone would stop to check it out. I couldn’t take them with me. When I pulled up my blanket I was shocked to find that I’d been sleeping on bits of broken glass, bottle tops, various sizes of stones, and god knows what else, but I hadn’t felt a thing – I had been that tired.
After some wonderful adventures and good, kind-hearted people in Canada, I was shocked to realize the differences between our two countries. I had met people who had welcomed me into their homes, to stay a night, or for fresh, hot blueberry pie, or for a home-cooked meal. A retired farmer had taken me out to his hand-built, wood-stove-heated sauna, probably because I smelled rank after weeks on the road, only taking sponge baths in gas station restrooms. And people had insisted I come visit again, anytime.
Back in the U.S. I had a shotgun in my face, things thrown out of cars at me, people honking, yelling at me to get off the road, and now I was worried about kittens that some asshole had just dumped next to me.
Well, I was alive, in good shape, with a working bicycle for transportation. It was better than hitchhiking. I hoped to reach the west coast before I ran out of food and money. I had started out with $100 from someone I’d loaned money to, but I’d lost $50 of it when I had taken one of those sponge baths in a restroom before I’d even entered Canada. I must have put it on the shelf by the mirror. I had been a short distance away when I realized it and went back. It hadn’t been there. I had also asked the guy working there if he’d seen it, but he said he hadn’t. Nevertheless, I had continued on my trip. I’d tucked half the money in my shoe. It wouldn’t get me far. but it had to do.
I continued on, across Michigan’s upper peninsula, across a bit of Wisconsin – damn cold there at night, across Minnesota, to North Dakota. By then I really didn’t have much money left at all, enough for a few more days of milk cartons and fruit. There was still some granola, rice, and beans left, out of the five pounds of each I’d started with. I stopped at yet another gas station. The Watergate hearings were on TV, but I didn’t much care about that anymore. I was certain Nixon would be impeached. I asked the guy behind the counter about work in the area. There was a carnival down the road a little bit, and it was their last night. The station attendant told me that the carnival always needed extra hands to take everything down on their last night, and I could make a few bucks there. I thanked him and rode away to spend a night working for a carnival, I hoped. It turned out, yes, they did need temporary workers.
I helped tear down a Ferris Wheel, then went to work for the electrician, disconnecting power cables from junction boxes that fed the rides, joints, and poppers, as they shut down. The other half of the terminals in each box were still live, connected to the biggest generator I’d ever seen. One cable I took off welded itself to the metal box as I was pulling it out a hole that had no insulation around it. There was a giant cascade of sparks, and as the breakers popped off, the entire carnival went dark. The electrician came over and yanked the terminal lug away from the box. I told him what had happened. He told me, straight-faced, “Don’t do that again.” After a very long tiring night – after everything was packed up and loaded on semis – he came back and asked me if I wanted to come work for them. But, that’s another story.
First off, before I talk about musical “excursions”, I’ll explain the photo above. When I got home from the Chatter Sunday weekly concert, I was hungry. It was about noon. I was about to make an omelet, but noticed the leftovers. I had some black beans, pinto beans, saffron rice, and a little bit of crabmeat. All that sounded good. I put them all in a bowl to heat up. Meanwhile, I fried an egg, over easy. I slipped the egg over the leftovers and punctured the slightly runny yolk to add some color and flavor. I also tore up a green chili pepper (much hotter than its green pepper cousin). The combo was delicious and certainly satisfied my hunger – hunger, in my case, not starvation, but simply wanting something flavorful. It could be said that I didn’t really NEED to eat. That was something like my friend Maya had said to me recently; she said, about my having spent eight years working for a winery without pay, that I didn’t really NEED the money. While it’s true that I could survive without pay for that work, I was really broke for three years after retirement, having only enough money to pay for rent, food, utilities, and some gasoline. I couldn’t afford long car trips (in fact, when by myself, I rode my motorcycle to and from the winery to save gas, even on the coldest winter days). I couldn’t afford to travel or go out to movies or nice restaurants. No excursions for me.
Maya doesn’t drive, due to a loss of peripheral vision after brain surgery, and subsequent car wrecks, so I drove her back and forth to the winery and winery tasting events, and for a short time also back and forth to her regular job, for which she insisted I take $100 a month. And really, the old car I had then drank gas like a wino drinks cheap wine. It was costing me over twice that monthly to drive that car for her benefit, and I otherwise only used it for grocery shopping. I didn’t mind chauffeuring Maya, she had been my step-daughter for 14 years and all through her cancer operation and subsequent treatments, and then later for eight years as a coworker. But, I was perpetually broke, until years later I began getting the Social Security money I’d accumulated over 45 years.
Maya and I had worked together at a winery in early 2010 until the end of 2017. She was paid to work selling wine on holidays and certain wine tasting events, occasionally having time to help pick fruit, bottle, or label on weekends, but I worked much more often, weeding, ditch cleaning, irrigating and pruning and picking our fruit trees and grapevines, and cleaning the fermentation tanks, pumping and filtering wines, and bottling, labeling, and inventorying and selling wine. It was hard physical labor for the most part. It wasn’t a full-time job, and the hours varied. The problem was that I wasn’t getting paid. I had agreed to work for shares in the winery. It was a small independent winery, and the (private) shares were counted as income by the I.R.S., for which I had to pay taxes. The idea was that when the winery was successful, and money had been made, that there would be a point at which the winery would be sold for a large amount of money, and I would get my wages based on my shares, and the other shareholder investors would get a return on their investment. It didn’t work out that way. The man who had created the winery, our vintner, died in mid-2017 while hiking around the Capulin Volcano Monument in Northern New Mexico.
2015 PARTIAL WINE LIST
We kept it open until the end of the year, only bottling some favorite wines, and selling off some of our stockpiled wines. The decision was made to close the winery after that. No one had the time for or wanted the vintner’s unpaid job. No one wanted to put any more money into the business. There was not enough money to order bottles, so all of the 6000 gallons of the bulk wine in tanks was destroyed, per state law. We had been selling bottled wine at half-price, but after we closed, all partners could take whatever bottled wine they wanted. Since many of them lived in Placitas, and I live 25 miles away, I didn’t get out there before most of the best wines – in short supply – like the Rojo Seco, Blanco Seco, Cranberry, La Luna, Wild Cherry, Chokecherry, and Synaesthesia were gone. I took what was left of a few of those, but mostly the less desirable wines, about six cases. I don’t have a cellar, so some of what didn’t fit in my refrigerator I put in my unused dishwasher – it’s well insulated and seals tightly. The rest went in a storage room (not temperature regulated), so I will likely end up throwing it out. I don’t drink by myself. I sold some cheaply and gave a lot away.
The point of this story is that I was losing money, not just from not getting paid, but having to pay taxes on the shares. It made me angry that Maya – to my mind – dismissed all my hard work and lost money as unimportant since I didn’t NEED the money I had been promised. I still find that hard to forgive. It wasn’t the only thing she said that I found disturbing, and I may have inadvertently insulted her, so I ended up feeling like she didn’t like me, had moved on, and we were no longer friends. That had never happened to us before. I love her very much, but suddenly I didn’t want her photos on my wall, didn’t want to see her posts or photos online or even think about her. I had been divorced twice in my life, including from her mom, and although it was bad, I never felt like I didn’t want to ever see them again. In fact, I missed them a lot, but I’ve gotten over that. I live alone. Despite having many interactions with fellow actors, with hikers, and with neighbors, I felt cut off. Hollow inside. Depressed and ready to leave the state forever.
Although I did end up missing Maya, we finally met for a wine tasting on neutral ground. It was a subdued get-together, and although we touched on a couple of sore points (for me), she didn’t understand why I took things the way I did, and I dropped it. Although I was happy to see her, I ended up rambling and boring her (I’m old). She was anxious to get back to her house. She didn’t want a ride home. In fact, she hadn’t wanted a ride to the wine tasting, hadn’t wanted me to come over for lunch as we had done fairly often last year, and she hadn’t wanted to have my signature black-bean chile con carne, paired with red wine at my house.
So, I haven’t moved away yet. In fact, I went to Sunday Chatter this morning. It was not the concert that had been planned – that was supposed to be Spektral Quartet, a string quartet based in Chicago. It is the ensemble-in-residence at the University of Chicago’s Department of Music. They had to cancel. But pianist Luke Gullickson played some amazing music to make up for it, like a six-part composition called Walk in Beauty by Peter Garland, the Night Psalm by Eva Beglarian, and the wonderful EXCURSIONS op.20 (1945) by Samual Barber. I do hope Spektral Quartet will be able to make some other time. They blend music from different centuries into eclectic concerts described as creative, collaborative, thrill rides, and magical.
There was poetry and spoken word by Nathan Brown, a favorite of mine and the Chatter crowds. He is an award-winning poet, an author, and a songwriter. He has 25 books to his credit.
Nathan Brown
We’re very lucky to have him from time to time. He taught at the University of Oklahoma for twenty years. He taught memoir, poetry, songwriting, and performance workshops from Tuscany and Ireland to the Sisters Folk Festival in Oregon, the Taos Poetry Festival, the Woody Guthrie Festival, Laity Lodge, the Everwood Farmstead Foundation in Wisconsin, as well as the Blue Rock Artist Ranch near Austin, Texas. He seriously made me laugh today numerous times.
And, there were free cookies and banana bread. And I have an acting class tonight.
On October 8, 2021 – this is what I did – I wrote. It is 99% unchanged from free-association writing, except for misspellings and gross errors.
no computerno TV
Last night I decided that today, on the anniversary of my birth, I would turn my phone, TV, news radio, and desktop computer off. I knew that my contacts on Facebook, family and friends, would be notified of my birthday, and I would receive many greetings and birthday wishes. As nice as that is, I’d rather see people in person, raise a glass together, laugh, or discuss. So, I’m incommunicado today. I’m writing this on a yellow pad of paper with a black-ink ballpoint pen, despite my unpracticed handwriting skill.
The first thing I noticed was that, since I’ve given up coffee, and I make black tea instead, I always have to wait for it to steep, so I kill time while I wait. However, what do I do today? Ordinarily, I would play Solitaire games on my computer. The computer is off. It’s so quiet, unnaturally quiet, so I switch on my receiver. It’s part of my old-school component music system: radio receiver/controller, six-CD rotating player, a vinyl record turntable, and even a cassette player. In the last fifty years I’ve managed to accumulate a collective total of 800 vinyl records, CDs, and cassette tapes. I used to have a reel-to-reel tape deck, but I sold it decades ago. For a time I had a combination vinyl, cassette, and 8-track player, but I traded that to my wife for one of her watercolors, years before we married, as a music system for the young girl who would become my stepdaughter.
In years of late, I have not played too many of all those music recordings. “PANDORA” has become my go-to source of music while I’m reading or writing. Both phone and desktop computer are off. So, no Pandora. Changing out various media all day would interrupt my writing flow, so I opt to listen to non-news radio, ED-FM (103.3) instead. It plays mostly pop music from the last few decades, and commercials, but no news, no sports, no talk, no traffic reports. I hate the commercials, but I can tune them out while reading or writing. ED often plays what they call “a bunch of music in a row,” without commercial interruptions, so I enjoy that. It does tend to be repetitive, and limited to mostly pop music, which is why I prefer using the Pandora app. I love the way I can select different “stations” or types of music there, and I always have it in “shuffle” mode so that I never know what I’ll hear next, classic rock, jazz, blues, salsa, merengue, electronic, folk, classical, reggae, R&B, soul, or select country music like Willie Nelson. Pandora remembers my favorites and plays new music that I can add or reject. It’s better than any radio station.
Moving on from music, I saw an odd image of a woman holding a weather balloon in the current issue of Smithsonian Magazine. The article was a fascinating account of the birth of the National Weather Service. The odd thing about the woman is that she is wearing a mask while she holds the balloon, and it was taken in 1890. I want to research that, but NO INTERNET today. I could walk down the street to the local public library, but already I miss being able to look something up instantly. It’s a small library and I don’t know if I could find something about the early weather balloons and why one needed to wear a mask (so as not to breathe the helium?).
For now, I’m listening while I read, something I really enjoy. I am nearly finished reading a book, Mayordomo, Chronicle of an Acequia in Northern New Mexico, by Stanley Crawford. Having spent one long day a year helping to clean the acequia or village ditch in Placitas, where the winery I worked at for eight years was located, I am fascinated by Crawford’s account of the politics of water, the meetings, the disputed water rights, and the gossip that goes into making sure that water flows through an acequia, and that everyone gets either the water they need or are entitled to as a parciante – one who has shares in the association based on the size of their irrigatable land, or traditional access. This is all water only for irrigation or livestock. Drinking water is drawn from wells or municipal water pipes.
I notice that my handwriting is deteriorating as I write – I should practice more. I hope I can read this later.
As I read Crawford’s book, I come across a word I don’t know: desagüe, referring to a permanent structure to help control the flow of water down the acequia. I understand the use of the word, but not the exact meaning, and I have no idea how it is properly pronounced. Quick! – to the internet! – usually Google, but NO, not today — I am not connected. So, my attempt to pronounce the word properly will have to wait, if I remember to check the pronunciation when I reconnect. Or I could ask the neighbor who lent me the book. I am so dependent on technology that it didn’t occur to me first that I could simply ask someone.
Despite the stiffness of this “Knee Pad” of paper with a cardboard back that rests on my knees, it is not easy to write this way. I could sit down at a table, or my desk, but I am writing in my overstuffed chair that my two step-children donated to me after my divorce from their mother. The chair is old now, as frazzled as I am, but still, it is comfy. I could pull a large book from my shelves to help balance the kneepad on, but I am using my laptop computer as a hard surface to write on. So many ways to connect, but not today. Tomorrow I will transcribe all of this using my word processor application on my desktop computer, with its big screen and large keyboard. Tomorrow. It will take some time to do that, especially translating my roughly scribbled words into formatted text, using whole sentences (mostly) in paragraphs, and spell-corrected.
Hmm – five and a half pages of Palmer-Method penmanship so far, and it’s only 8:49 in the morning, even after reading a bit. What the hell time did I get up? If I write all day I’m going to have a novelette to transcribe. Sigh.
Well, I’m going to make breakfast now. Black tea, since I’ve given up coffee as of a few months ago, is not enough to sustain me for long. Yea! – back to one of my favorites: a small stack of corn tortillas interspersed between the layers with sautéed onion slices, garlic, a large green chile, and a drizzle of uncooked red chile sauce and grated extra-sharp cheddar. And, of course, a fried egg – to top it off – and one more drizzle of red. Ahhh. After breakfast, I finished the book. “Muy suave”, as the ditch Mayordomo replies to a hard-working parciante on the ditch who asks that these other ditch cleaners admire his meticulous tarea, his work to dig and clean up a section of ditch.
It’s only 10:11 am; now what?
I now realize that I depend on the internet to entertain me, inform me, and waste time – a brief sit to check on casting calls, look up a word, or read the latest email turns into hours of browsing that don’t seem that long until I realize I’ve cut into my sleep time. But, the days go by quickly when I’m “connected”, unlike now when I’m not. So little time to count down the years to my departure from this world. I should waste less of that time.
When I finish a book, I always take a break from reading to consider what I’ve read. Right now I find myself looking at photos. There is a hidden photo album in my bookcase that I came across while I wandered aimlessly through the house, unable to decide what to do. It is a photo from circa 1998, twenty-three years ago. In the photo, she is nude sitting on the edge of a hot tub near Santa Fe. She is OK with me taking the photo, but only of her face and shoulders, as I recall.
But the lens is a good one and captured a bit more. Her dark hair is tied back, with thick tendrils falling alongside her face in front of her ears. Her olive shoulders are smoothly rounded. Her eyebrows are thick and dark like her eyes, which are even darker with applied makeup above and below. Her mouth is open, smiling, upper teeth resting on her lower lip. Her neck appears long, straight, and smooth to the point where it meets her hidden ribs. Her breasts are plump and hang low after suckling two children. Light blue arteries spider-web out from around her large areolas. Her nipples are erect and slightly pink in their centers. I take all that in, in an instant before the shutter clicks. Then I move towards her so that I can feel those smooth shoulders, press my lips to hers, feel her breasts against my chest, her warm back under my hands. But that moment is long, long ago now. I’ve not seen her or touched her in 14 years. I don’t miss her anymore. But I like that memory.
That memory aside, I am here now in this time. I open my door to see what the day is like. It is warm and sunny now, although the house is still cool from the desert night. I look at the work I did around the new door I installed, having just installed new weather stripping, and replacing the rubber in the metal threshold which is cemented in place below the door. I had thought I’d have to chip the old threshold out in order to close off that drafty space, but when I was picking out weather stripping at the hardware store, I saw the replacement rubber insert and happily thought it might just work. It did. My door closes softly and securely against its old frame and threshold. The heavy old frame is bolted firmly into the adobe wall. There are no gaps. It is ready for winter. Am I ready for winter? for my winter?
I notice small holes in the frame, holes from small nails that pepper the wood. Some are left from the hinges for the old screen door I removed, but others are spread all around the frame in between the door and the space where the screen door hung. I get out my caulking gun and fill all of the holes. Then I grab the HOA-approved brown paint to blend the holes into a smooth brown perimeter. I’m a good renter, my landlady says. That done, I’m hungry again. Sliced ham on oat bread. It’s a bit after 2:00 pm. I sit down with a book of poems by Irish poet Attracta Fahy, Dinner in the Fields, but I put it down after a few pages in order to resume writing.
After writing the preceding paragraphs, I finished the Attracta Fahy book by 3:30 pm. While I had been reading it, I snacked on a mixture of citrus-flavored Jelly Belly Jelly Beans. I shouldn’t. Seems like all I do is eat. I don’t need the extra calories, the extra fat on my stomach, but hell, it’s my birthday still, and at 71, I don’t know how many more of those I will have.
This leads me to reflect on the poems I just read. Most of them dealt with love and pain and overcoming adversity, all of which speak to the legacy of Ireland. She also writes of nature and beauty and birds and ancestors – also things which evoke Ireland’s legacy. One poem stood out for me: THE TUAM MOTHER-AND-BABY HOME. It was a place where she once stayed, tended to by the nuns for ten days while her mother was too ill to care for her. It is the same place where just recently a trove of infant bones was discovered in an old septic tank. I remember that from my Google News feed from not long ago. Her poem tells of the discovery and her connection to it with mixed feelings, and I understand that. 3:48 pm. What now? I have another book of poems ready to read in front of me, but I’m not ready. It’s The Blood Poems, 101 poetry pages by a local poet I love to read and listen to, Jessica Helen Lopez. I decide to wait. I am going out for a five-minute walk to the mail kiosk.
Aha! A book arrived in the mail; it is The Shadow of a Man, by Benoit Peters, illustrated by François Schuiten. It’s a beautifully written and exquisitely colored graphic novel, 104 pages. Sorry, Jessica, as much as I love your poetry and admire you, I’m going to read this part of their Obscure Cities series now. I finish it fairly quickly, pausing to admire the wonderful illustrations. The book was published in 1998 and revised in 2008, but it has only recently been translated into English. Yes! I loved it. It is the story of a man haunted by nightmares. They are ruining his sleep, his job, and his new marriage, but the cure for them changes everything. A man living in his dreams is like a man living in his memories, in my opinion. So, is he really living? really happy? Am I? What a birthday this is. Perhaps it will be a rebirth for me? Probably not. I seem set in my ways, but so was the protagonist of The Shadow of a Man.
Now I feel like reading JHL’s book. But first…. no, no, no – I will not go online. Damn it. Why does my life revolve around the world wide web? First, I will eat some leftover mac ‘n’ cheese from yesterday. My life appears to also revolve around food. 5:37 pm. I opened Jessica’s book – 45 poems. I don’t have to read them all tonight. But what else is there to do without internet or TV? I don’t want to know the news today. No more about debt ceilings, Biden, Trump, McConnell, etc. Not today. No more about shootings. No more. “Stop the world, I want to get off,” someone said – a song, a book, a play? I can’t remember – and I can’t look it up today. Agggh! I have so much restless energy that I can’t take a nap. Mosquitos have gotten into the house, hiding, until I feel the unrelenting itching, on the top of my feet mostly, no matter where I sit. So much I want to do. I’ve read three books now that I want to record in goodreads.com; I do that for two reasons: (1) it helps me know what I’ve read so I don’t buy another copy some day, and (2) it motivates me. I set a specific number of books to read each year and Goodreads keeps track. I’ve exceeded my goals most years but lost interest during 2020 when, paradoxically, I had much more time to read, but no time to kill waiting to be on set, or traveling. Being home so much was so frustrating I found it hard to focus.
Just listening to the radio station now. It’s been on all day. So many commercials. I want my Pandora channel, but they have commercials unless I send them money not to interrupt my music.
Now I’m finally started The Blood Poems by JHL, who is an Albuquerque Poet laureate. Blood oranges, boiling blood, blue-black blood, kicking it with Death, anger-no anger, “inbetweenthelegs” freedom, fickle fire, blue and lonely as a salty song calling for a shore. From somewhere in her book I copy down: “How the heart fractures beneath the weight of an endless nuclear winter.” I loved reading that thought. Jessica writes about life, life as poetry. She haunts “the house of” (my) “blood.”
8:56 pm. I want to turn the TV on. I don’t. I am listening to the radio still, my one vice today. My token electronic device. Now that it’s night, I also use light bulbs, but they are not electronic, not media. The radio only plays music for me, and commercials for themselves. Occasionally it gives me a snippet of weather, the same weather I can see outside my windows, the same weather I feel when I go outside, so it doesn’t really count as “news”. I have no idea what’s happening today, Friday, October 8, 2021. I don’t know who killed who. I don’t know what some lying hypocrite of a politician is saying about another politician. I don’t know anything about Covid-19 today. I don’t know who is doing what with missiles.
I am home in my casita, alone with a cat I didn’t want but take care of. I have my books, my musical recordings, and my writing. I could be writing in a remote shack in the Sahara or on an ice flow, or on top of a high mountain peak. With solar cells. Because of music. I don’t play any instruments, so I can be a hermit if I still have music.
I’ve settled into an acceptance of this day of disconnect. Some days I feel disconnected, all the while connected to the world only electronically. I think that if I learned anything today, it’s that I am not as disconnected as I had believed. Still, electronic connection is an illusion. Behind the illusion are friends that want to wish me a Happy Birthday, some of them good friends and family. But most days, except for my birthday, I don’t hear from people. Sometimes they like a photo I’ve posted, or comment on one. But the only people I talk with in person are other background actors (movie/TV extras) who are as bored as I am waiting in holding for someone to tell us we can go to set: to sit, or walk, or pretend gamble in a casino, or pretend talk noiselessly to each other. In holding we talk about the production we’re on, others we’ve been on, and above-the-line actors who we’ve met or would like to meet. Phones aren’t allowed on set, so phone and media addicts explode with talking every chance we get, until a production assistant tells us to ”Keep it down”, or “Put your masks on,” or ‘Sit six feet apart,” or “Sip your drink but keep the mask on between sips,” or ten feet apart if eating in the “green” zone.
9:30 pm. I still resist the automatic urge to push-button the TV on, or check my email to read the dozens of casting notices posted every day on Facebook. Tomorrow will be a busy day: mark as-read three books from today, or four if I finish The Blood Poems tonight, mark The Shadow of a Man as received on Amazon; write a review of it, catch up on my daily Microsoft Solitaire games, pick up eggs from the Saturday Farmer’s Market in the village of Los Ranchos de Albuquerque, and buy a few things at the grocery store. But I will also get to have beer with some friends I met while making a seven-minute movie for the 48-hour movie project, while we wait to see if we get any awards for our hard work. Most of the people I see often are actors, wanna-be actors, would-be directors, camera tech’s, sound tech’s, lighting tech’s, wardrobe people, editors, and writers. But they have lives away from set. I have little else to do.
10:03 pm. I read a few more poems by Jessica Helen Lopez, including POEM FOR MY BELOVED, an eight-page revelation about a new lover. And then there is another poem still, titled: THE LAST POEM I WILL WRITE FOR MY LOVER, a sad lament for a lover who has said goodbye, and the UN-LOVE POEM. Yeah, I know about un-love. I wonder idly who the guy was she was with when she read poems from her new book at Sunday Chatter not too long ago, who she said “I love you” to from the stage. Same guy or a completely new one? I wonder because the book was already in print before that Sunday morning when her poetry spoke of a new lust for living. Well, that’s her business, All I know is that I enjoy her poems – the wordplay and passion she puts into her writing. I’m a fan.
I’m also a fan of Poetry & Beer, a monthly meeting of poets to poetry-slam or just use the open mic. This past Wednesday, two days ago as I write this, it was instead called Poetry & Whiskey, because the brewery now serves their own whiskey, and I just had to go. I’m glad I went. Two of Albuquerque’s best slam poets had a boxing poetry match, where they went at each other and the audience, back and forth, with poem after poem, including improvisation. It was theater, o fuck no, it was better than theater. I enjoyed it so much. I had arrived too late to sign up for the open mic, or for the slam, so I became a judge. I always enjoy being a judge – forces me to listen to every word closely. I had a ball trying to be tough because the MC told me to be tough. There was a $50 prize.
And, to be honest, there was a bespectacled woman sitting at the bar listening intently to all of the poetry. I’m a fan of bespectacled women. The glasses pegged her as likely an intellectual or at least someone who reads a lot or writes. I went over to her and asked, and yes, she is a poet, and she is going to bring poems next time. I’ll be going for sure. Meanwhile, I’ve managed to write twenty pages, it’s late, and I’m off to bed.
In the hours, days, and years of our lives there is much death and destruction.
Somehow, we find a way to get through the worst of times and reemerge, somewhere, somewhen.
Sadness can’t be forgotten, but we go on, somehow better and stronger.
To live life is to suffer, but it is also to learn from it, to survive and live, to live more fully, boldly, and with the love inside us strengthened by the pain and loss that is really just a small part of us.
Someone asked a public question on Facebook: What is your favorite movie soundtrack? At first I ignored the question. I’m not usually big on soundtracks, unless I really loved the movie and the music moved me. But that started me to thinking about it. I couldn’t come up with a favorite. But I have favorites.
That said, in order as I recall them: the romantic Dr. Zhivago. I watched it because I had read the 1957 book. As with all of the other movies of which I purchased the soundtrack, even though I’ve had dozens of relationships in my early life, and two marriages spanning twenty-one years, I watched it by myself.
2001: A Space Odyssey. After realizing that the portion of Also Sprach Zarathustra on the soundtrack came from a much larger work, I bought the actual work by Richard Strauss — I would listen to it late at night.
Hair (an anti-war, counterculture musical redone as a movie). The Harder They Come introduced me to Raggae. The dark Irish soul-inspired movie The Commitments I watched just following my first divorce! The Sci-fi Babylon 5 (TV show & movie) is actually more interesting than Star Trek or Star Wars.
O Brother, Where Art Thou? tapped into Homer’s epic poem The Odyssey, as transpiring in the deep south. House of Flying Daggers has award-winning cinematography with a deeply romantic score, and we’re full circle back from Doctor Zhivago. I’m a romantic.
I’ve listened to them hundreds of times each. There is a soundtrack for At World’s End, one of the Pirates of the Caribbean movies that came out in movie theaters (remember those?) just after my second divorce; I saw it alone and couldn’t enjoy it. I remember riding my motorcycle at about 120+ miles an hour along Albuquerque’s Coors Blvd at night after I left the theater. But I remembered the music, and it was bittersweet to listen to later on. It’s not a favorite.
I also enjoy the music from Dead Man’s Chest. Also: Pulp Fiction, Soul (which was just released), Tim Burton’s movies, The Graduate, Mary and Max, Chico and Rita, The Point! and Braveheart, but I have never listened to them as much as the ones pictured above. I have 759 albums, but only 26 are soundtracks.
Here are a few of those other great soundtracks, worth listening to again and again.
Chico & Rita is fantastic animation, along with amazing jazz. Mary and Max is a movie about a penpal friendship between a sickly old autistic New Yorker and a lonely poor Australian girl. Although, technically, Myst and Riven are games not movies, the soundtracks are awesome! The Point! is a great story about non-conformity. Soul has a great soundtrack, and musician & composer Jon Batiste just released Music From And Inspired By Disney Pixar Soul – also great.
No photos today. Actually, I was up the night before until the wee hours of Friday morning getting those photos from day four edited and uploaded. The hotel’s Wi Fi is problematic at times, and I kept having to restart my laptop and sign in again and again. I went to bed around two in the morning and slept late. Still no change in the elections results. I know I went out to eat, but I can’t remember where. Most of the rest of the day was spent reading.
However, I had an acting class on Zoom to attend at 10:00am. We worked on some monologues and dialogues, getting feedback from the teacher, and getting suggestions from classmates on different ways for create those acting takes, as if we were in an auditon room. Who knows if that will ever happen again! All of our classes are online now, and we’ve all had to set up space in our homes to self-tape auditions. There’s a lot to get right: shutting out any kind of outside sounds, the lighting – especially eliminating shadows, and getting full light on our faces – and having a plain background behind us as we record our own auditions.
It’s a whole different way to do this, and, it is believed by many, including casting directors, that this is the wave of the future. Voice-over actors aleady had been working from home, and have had to set up soundproof areas in their homes. When doing dialogues, we have to either have someone living with us take the other role(s) that in-person readers used to do, or have someone outside the home on their phone or laptop read as we do our lines. It’s way different without having actual people to speak with and get reactions from.
Later that evening, I went back onto Zoom to listen to and perform poetry. It’s how that is done now too. So far, it doesn’t matter about lighting or background, and sometimes other people wander by the camera or a dog barks. Brave New World, indeed.
So, I’ll post the poems I read:
CDX
Death comes for us all even archbishops shopkeepers and presidents doctors and lawyers mail carriers and drivers writers and moviemakers actors and singers men women children the bright and the dull animals trees flowers planets stars galaxies.
The funny thing is once we accept that that we will die that it’s where it is where we’re going then nothing else matters.
It is freedom to enjoy life enjoy the journey. It is no matter no matter what it doesn’t matter. Life just is.
it rains- enjoy Sun shines – enjoy flowers grow – enjoy raving mad lunatics – enjoy tomorrow they’ll be gone marching in the streets – enjoy tomorrow there’ll be change. Life is chaos terrible depressing skulduggery stressful dangerous.
Life is joy children music colors smells tastes feelings
stretching running hiking biking playing living.
Life is change – enjoy revolt change things make things embrace all love all be all.
We’ll die so? isn’t it wonderful? isn’t it freedom? because now right now we can do anything we want to.
Life is random key presses meaningless meaningful life is life make it so.
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MADNESS IS A HOT-AIR BALLOON
Perhaps I need to let my madness free. I worry about madness People thought me dumb when I was young So I kept quiet though I burned.
I think terrible thoughts sometimes So I keep them to myself Even though the hot pressure builds Is it better to live crazy than not really live?
Madness restrained is not madness contained. It leaks out here and there Stray comments, a wild movement Depression agitation combustion.
Yes combustion For, madness restrained doesn’t only leak It can explode Violence rape grand-theft murder.
How to portion out my madness? Let enough out to be happy Not enough to harm or hurt or die Just enough to feel relief.
A hot-air balloon can fly even holed Hundreds of tiny holes in the envelope From a bad landing in a field of cacti Yet it still fills rises floats and soars.
For a time.
As long as the propane lasts it rises As long as wind blows it moves As long as air is colder outside than in It can soar through blue sky.
Would that my madness were a balloon Free to fly Not too far Not too high. Just enough just enough just enough.
Last night, I was watching a fascinating German movie (Never Look Away, 2018), based loosely on the life of visual artist Gerhard Rickter, who experienced growing up under the Nazis. I was just past 45 minutes into it (a small part of it, considering that it is 3 hours, 9 minutes long), when what struck me suddenly was that the movie had just advanced to 1951, as the artist Kurt Barnert is on his way to work, walking past still ruined buildings, through streets still lined with rubble from the saturation bombing of Dresden. Between February 13–15 of 1945, with the war nearly over, the British and U.S. forces dropped some 2,700 tons of explosives and incendiaries and decimated Dresden. Before WWII, Dresden was called “the Florence of the Elbe” and was regarded as one of the world’s most beautiful cities for its architecture and museums. It had no strategic importance. The purpose of the raids was to terrorize Germany into surrendering, and to fulfill a promise to Joseph Stalin to prepare Germany for invasion by Soviet troops. 2,800 more tons of bombs were dropped on Dresden in three other attacks before Germany’s surrender on May 7, 1945. Author Kurt Vonnegut was a prisoner of war in Dresden at the time of the bombing, which he describes in Slaughterhouse-Five.78,000 dwellings were completely destroyed; 27,700 were uninhabitable, and 64,500 damaged but repairable.
Six years after Germany’s surrender, in 1951, I was one year old, having been born in the busy seaport and immigrant town of Baltimore, Maryland. My parents lived near the famous Lexington Market then, where you could find all kinds of fresh seafood, meats and international foods. Baltimore was not all that different from Dresden in Old World charm, but we had fresh food, not food lines. The streets were clean and open, some with trolley tracks and cobblestones. A few farmers still hawked their wares from horse-drawn wagons. There were plenty of cars, but no freeways bypassing the city. There was poverty then, but the row houses – like my paternal grandparents’, next to a bar – had their marble front stairs. There were green parks, and jobs at Bethlehem Steel and the McCormick Spice Company. The inner city was old and beginning to decay, but there was no rubble then. The harbor was full of cargo ships and housed a submarine, the USS Torsk from WWII, and the 1854 USS Constellation, a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship designed and built by the United States Navy.
I did not know about Dresden, or Hiroshima, or Nagasaki, or the other places so devastated by weapons of mass destruction until I was much older. I did not know how lucky I was to have been born there and then. I have been back to Baltimore a few times, and much of the old inner city near where I was born is now ruined and decaying, with burnt-out buildings and people from a racist culture war, loss of manufacturing jobs, and urban flight. I found a few photos online of the ruined sections of Baltimore’s inner city. There are 46,800 vacant properties in Baltimore.
Watching this movie is indeed thought-provoking. I had to pause to write this because, over two hours later, I might have forgotten these feelings, even if I remembered the thoughts.
So, I finished the movie. It was an amazing thing to experience. The blurb on the DVD pocket missed everything. It was about life, and connections, and pain, and happiness, and guilt, and also how art is influenced by those things and influences those things. Yeah, there are some Nazis early on, but they are not the focus, nor really important, nor is socialist realism, which wasn’t ever a realistic way of life or art.
There is an underlying intellectual curiosity throughout this movie, probing for answers, for what is true. Art is a symbol. Symbols can be art, but there’s more to life and how we perceive it and live it than that. I know this thing is over three hours long, but I’m saying, really saying, it’s worth it. Well, it was for me anyway. Really well done: story, direction, acting, cinematography, everything. It really engages heart and mind. Tom Schilling and Paula Beer are wonderful as the hard-working couple Kurt Barnert and Ellie Seebard struggling through life. Their joy in life, despite their setbacks and struggles, is palpable. That’s life for so many, and Schilling and Beer pull it off, plunging into painful memories, dealing with so much crap, from war to life in East Germany, to the Seeband patriarch, who is a seething caldron of the very mental diseases he condemned people to death for.
Sebastian Koch plays that Seeband patriarch, a man able to excel under Nazi rule and transition seamlessly into the perfect socialist under a rigid, joyless soviet-style totalitarianism. You expect him to be caught, punished, and destroyed, but he survives, on the surface. Underneath his professional veneer and perfect obedience is a haunted man, and Koch is brilliant in this role.
New terror inspiring I keep wondering when this will be over. Like endless wars and terrorism. When do they end? When will we be safe? I want the world to stop hating to stop fighting to come out to rejoice in our common humanity. How novel.
I just finished a book, called THE ONE AND ONLY IVAN. It’s a children’s story, but I wanted to see what it was about. As I got near the end, my eyes began to feel funny, and as I finished the last line, and turned the page, a tear rolled down my cheek.
Sounds corny, and I know you might not believe me, but if you don’t I might just tear your head off. Ivan wouldn’t do that — he’s a silverback gorilla — but I might. My name’s Terry. I’m a human.
I have a cage too, like Ivan. I can leave it anytime I want, but often I don’t. There are other humans outside my cage. Sometimes, like Ivan, I long to be with others of my kind. Sometimes I do, mostly I don’t. Sometimes I think I’m not like the other humans, especially if I am in my cage too long, as Ivan was. Sometimes I really do enjoy being around other humans, and I act just like them. And I smile, even though I still feel lonely.
Sometimes, in my zoo-cage, I read a book like this one, or watch a movie that makes my eyes tear up, and sometimes tears drip off into my beard. It’s then that I remember what it’s like to be human.
And I remember what it was like to work every day, to live with someone every day, to wake up with them, to eat with them, to watch movies and plays with them, or drink with them, or dance, or travel, or sleep together.
Once in a great while, after two divorces, I found someone to have sex with, and I liked that a lot. And doing things to each other that made ourselves feel fantastic. And I liked the sleeping together the most, the warm body next to me, the feel of skin against skin. Me, making breakfast for us. Eating together. Watching TV, or going out to a movie, or eating in a restaurant together. Or sex in the big overstuffed chair, or in the kitchen, or in the car in a parking lot. But mostly I liked the touchings, the sittings next to each other, or the cuddlings in bed before the most restful sleeps I can have, luxuriating in the warmth and skin of another.
It seems all that is over now. Age creeps in. Habits overtake. The mind slips sometimes — it’s so much harder to write now. Misspelling things a lot, switching letters around, leaving letters out, forgetting words I used to know, having to use a machine to look up spellings and meanings, and not noticing my mistakes sometimes until the second or third read. But I majored in English, and I read every day. Sometimes, no matter how much I liked a book, I forget what it was about. I used to be able to remember whole paragraphs from a book, and where in the book to find a sentence or scene.
And the body is slipping away slowly too. The erratic peeing, sometimes strong and steady, sometimes painfully urgent, sometimes in fits and drips. The heart that almost failed me once. The pills I take. THE ANKLE. The ankle I turned sideways stepping off a curb in August! I hike in the mountains, climbing hills, and stepping on and over large rocks, and running downhill without falling on the loose scree. But for some reason I stretched out and twisted the fuck out of my ankle, months ago, stepping off a curb. It’s much better now, but not entirely healed, which makes me feel less whole. And weaker. And I don’t like that feeling. The pain of the fall was unlike anything I’d ever felt:
— worse then the time I rounded a curve too fast on my motorcycle, and fell in the gravel on the side of the road with my right arm out. That didn’t hurt till later, but it took a year to heal, and I was in my early thirties then.
— worse than the time a car ran into me while I was crossing a street at night, and it pushed me half a block down the street while I was still standing, until the driver noticed me and slammed on the brakes, which slammed me against the asphalt.
— worse than the time a car hit me on my bicycle, sending me flying and crumpling the bike frame under its wheels, or the time a car knocked me off my bicycle, tearing the left pedal completely off, and leaving me with a huge multicolored bruise on my hips and ass.
— worse than the two times I totaled my motorcycles running into vehicles, or the time a car rounded a corner directly into my car head on, and my brain bounced badly off my skull.
No, stepping off that curb did something to my ankle I’d never felt before, sent shooting pain up my leg directly to my brain, and my mouth opened as it went by, and I screamed out loud — something I’d never done before — and when I fell, I pulled on the same nerves, tendons, muscles and ligaments, and I screamed again. But that sharp pain went away immediately after each of those. But there was pain still. Five months ago. But even after wearing a stabilizing boot for two months, and then an ankle wrap, I still feel the changes in my ankle, the not rightness of it. X-rays show a tiny bone chip fracture, but can’t show soft tissue damage. Can’t have an MRI unless I see a physical therapist eight days from now. But I don’t know how much of that the insurance will cover.
See what I mean? Yeah, sure, I have all of my limbs and digits and both eyes and ears, but I don’t like this feeling of gradual decay. I really liked the bicycling, the running through streams over wet, slippery rocks, hiking up a mountain until my lungs felt empty, hiking twenty six miles along the crest of a mountain. I still hike, sure, but there’s a bit of insecurity creeping in. Can I jump off this rock? Can I leap across that sliver of a stream? Or step off that curb? Can I still bicycle a hundred miles?
NOW, DON’T GET ME WRONG – I’M NOT COMPLAINING. It’s good to feel pain, to know I’m alive. It’s good to be alive, to feel the sun, wind, rain and snow on my skin. It’s good to taste food, good coffee, or a glass of good wine. To listen to music, to hang out with people at a play or on a movie set. I still enjoy reading and writing.
It’s very, very good to feel real love for another person, and I do. Love is love.
There are friends I see. Pool games to play. Poetry to listen to or recite. People that I meet. People to talk with. But, sometimes, I still wish for sex, or for just that gentle touch of lips on mine, or the feeling of skin on my skin, or just a touch to my face or a hand in my hand.
But, it’s unlikely. I have a cage around me. Not just the house, but the one in my mind. I don’t trust people any more. I say odd things sometimes. I scare people. I’m leery of strangers I don’t love. But I know I have to spend lots of time with people to get to know them, or love them. And yet, I stay in my cages, and wish I wasn’t so alone in them.
Over six years ago I had a heart attack. Too much plaque in the heart artery that feeds the heart muscle itself. Problems for some time before that, something I attributed – as did my doctor – to a recurrence of my childhood asthma. Overtired on exertion, falling way behind on hikes up the mountain. Getting weaker instead of stronger. I’ve climbed up the Sandia-Manzano mountains. Sandia Crest is at 10,679 feet above sea level. Manzano Peak is at 10,098 feet. I’ve climbed in the San Mateo Mountains, specifically to the highest point, up Mt. Taylor, to 11,306 feet, and I’ve snowshoed Mt. Taylor several times. Also climbed to the nearby La Mosca lookout tower at 11,036 ft. I’ve climbed Mount Baldy, at 10,783 feet, in the Magdalena Mountains. I’ve hiked in the Jemez mountains, including snowshoeing in the Valles Caldera. At 11,253 feet in elevation, the volcanic caldera is 13-miles wide. I’ve hiked and snowshoed often in New Mexico’s mountains.
After the heart attack, not as much. I still hike, usually once a week, sometimes two times a week. Sometimes I hike a fair distance, sometimes I hike really fast for just 70 to 90 minutes, a cardio hike. I figure I’m in good enough shape for my age. My knees never bother me. Since I had the angioplasty and stent placement 6 years ago, I’ve been good. No sign of any heart problems, but you never know.
Of late, I’ve noticed myself falling behind the others I hike with, and being very winded at times, more than usual. I’m sleepy often throughout the day. I used to catnap for 15 or 20 minutes, and be completely refreshed. Often I try that now, and sleep for an hour or two. I have no trouble sleeping through the night.
But, but, but. Today, after I’d taken another short nap, I awoke to a small sharp pain in the chest, just right of center. I researched it, and it’s likely not a heart attack, but it could be leading up to one. Possibly it’s angina, a symptom of heart disease. or it could have been a spasm. Either of those can occur during sleep, and generally last 5 to 15 minutes. This one lasted two to three hours. Took some Advil and then some aspirin.
The more likely cause is a blood clot traveling to my lungs, as I had none of the heart attack symptoms I’d experienced before, nor any of the other classic symptoms. The reason for this could be that I badly sprained my right ankle a month ago. A lot of blood clotted around it, giving me bruises all around the ankle and even between my toes. I’ve been wearing a stabilizing boot since then. There is also a small (3mm) chip fracture on the talus bone of my ankle. I can walk fine with or without the boot, but the doc gave me two more weeks to keep wearing the boot. I hate it. But, it could be that the ankle injury is the source of a blood clot, if that’s what it was. Painful anyway. The pain is gone now, but it could come back. I don’t know what caused it.
I was supposed to have had a checkup with my cardiologist two weeks ago. Arrived 20 minutes early for a 3:45pm appointment. Checked in and waited. And waited. The few people there all got called in. I waited. More people showed up until there was quite a crowd. There are a lot of doctors there. At 3:45, a tall healthy-looking man checked in, saying he had a 4:00pm appointment with my doctor. He was called shortly. I waited. About 10 minutes later, I got called to the examining room, to have my vital signs read. I told the woman taking them about experiencing weakness, and sleepiness as before my heart attack six years ago. She left, said the doctor would be in shortly.
I sat there, unhappy. The reason I’d come early was hoping to get out by 4:15, as I had an important commitment at 5pm. As I sat, I could hear my doctor’s voice next door, with the man I’d seen come in 20 minutes after me. I waited. But, by 4:30, I had to leave, and I stopped at the reception desk to tell them I was leaving. Never heard back.
Now this sudden pain. I thought about making another appointment, but never got around to it. I could die any time, so I figured I’d get an online will started while I still could. Such a strange thing it is to contemplate a will!
I rent, so I have no property to leave behind. I have only the money in the bank that comes in and goes out every month. I save, but things always come up to spend it on, necessary things, like repairs to my aging car and much older motorcycle. Sometimes I have to travel to family events, and none of them live nearby. Anyway, I have little in the way of tangible assets. But, there are things I’d like to leave to family. I have way too many things, like music CDs and vinyl albums. Tons of books. Some paintings, but mostly prints. A few coins. Not really a whole lot, but I’ve been to enough estate sales to know what happens to all the stuff you think is worth something. It’s all junk, sold cheap. Some things can be worth a goodly amount, but no one knows, unless someone hires a professional appraiser. But few family ever do that, unless the deceased was extremely wealthy. As it happens, I am not. Wealthy. Or deceased, as yet.
But it sure got me thinking about who I could give my things away too. So much of it has little enough financial worth. I thought about who might enjoy this small sculpture, or that old painting, or the coins, or a keepsake from the winery I worked at for eight years before it closed. Some things I’d like to have go to family who would appreciate it. I have too much stuff, sure, and much of it can be sold off at an estate sale for whatever they can get; that’s fine. Sitting here for hours today while the pain subsided, deciding who should get what, and not wanting to slight anyone, but not having so much to give everyone something, even if they actually would want it. 1st world problems. And yet, I’d like family members I love to know I was thinking about them. I like to make people smile, especially those I love. My estate, what a joke. Cheap material goods.
What was my life? Flipping burgers. High school diploma. Working in a college physics lab, measuring x-ray wavelengths and spaces between atoms in silicon crystals, a useful thing to know later on for computer technology. But I left that lab before the computer chip revolution hit. Spent years traveling, working for a carnival, a bronze foundry. Settled down in another state 1,675 miles away as the crow flies, but I rode my bicycle there over countless miles. Poured concrete, laid concrete block, installed park benches and steel doors. Treasurer of my union local. Finally got a job back in the sciences, giving tumors to rats, and treating them with chemotherapy drugs and x-rays. I did continue in Cancer Research a bit, then worked Quality Control at a printed circuit board company for three years. Finally went back and got another job at a medical school working first with mice, and their immune system proteins, then with research machines.
I took night school classes for years until I finally got a Bachelors of Arts college degree, a dual major of English (Creative Writing) and Distributed Sciences. I had studied a lot of sciences over the years, but not enough in any one field to get a diploma in it, not even a Bachelors of Science. Never did much with the writing part of my education, but I ended up making synthetic proteins for medical research, and synthetic DNA and RNA as well later on. I could also sequence proteins, or DNA, or analyze the amino acid content of proteins, or purify proteins and DNA. I ran a lab, balanced my budget, kept database records, worked independently. Finally retired with a small pension. Then I made wine for eight years at a small winery until the vintner died, and we had to close the winery. Now I take acting lessons, hike in the mountains, work occasionally as a background actor on movies and TV shows. Still hoping to land a good speaking role, one that brings me recognition, something to show that my life had meaning.
Yeah, I had lovers as I traveled, and met someone I wanted to spend my life with, but all I got was a bit less than two years with her. Married sometime later to a great woman, but after seven years that was over too. Two stepkids I never got to spend time with again. Then I married again. Two more stepkids. That 14-year relationship was fun, but ran out of steam and died. However, I did realize that I loved my stepdaughter when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Fortunately we’ve been able to stay connected, even making wine together for those eight years at the winery. She survived after surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and more chemo. How strange to find those chemicals and x-rays I used on rats used successfully on a human being I loved.
So perhaps I did accomplish something significant after all, Perhaps my work on x-rays in silicon and germanium crystals helped create the computers to run those fancy treatment machines. Perhaps the work I did on rats helped establish correct dosages of chemotherapy drugs and x-rays. Perhaps my work helping calibrate x-ray wavelengths helped doctors calculate just how much energy was necessary to kill a tumor and not the person. All the people that work in science, even those that just run the machines, and conduct the experimental protocols, contribute, each in our own small way, to a much greater good.
And, goddamnit, my step daughter is alive and healthy. And I love her. I finally learned that love is when you truly care about someone, about their happiness, and not just your own. Love is not about having another person. It’s about loving, without expecting anything in return. That’s what I think. If I’m still alive tomorrow morning, I’m going to call the doctor’s office, get in there as soon as possible, and do what it takes to stay alive. Because I love someone, and I like that feeling.
Just realized I was writing my own obituary. Hmph. Got things to do yet.
UPDATE: Cardiologist says the pain in my chest is just a pulled muscle. (I thought the heart was a muscle?). Saw a gastroenterologist. Been coughing for 7 or 8 months. Having trouble swallowing, and things seem to get stuck easily. Sometimes a mouthful of water won’t go down, and when I swallow it’s mildly painful. So, I had an endoscopy – that’s where they shove a small HDTV camera down your throat, way down there. Nothing serious. Some inflammation, but mostly two constricted areas, caused by acid reflux. So they sent another device down to stretch those areas out wider. Caused a slight tear in the esophagus, but no big deal. Meanwhile my lower jaw had been sore that day, but I wasn’t allowed to take anything for pain. Went to a dentist afterwards. Pain was so bad by then I had a death grip on the dental chair. Lots of x-rays -18. Looked like a root canal infection, among other things. Regular dentists don’t do those anymore – you have to go to a root canal dentist. In the meantime, Yeah, you guessed it – bigger fees. Prescription for amoxicillin. Told me to alternate high does of Advil and Tylenol until that antibiotic kicked in, 24 to 48 hours. Took longer. But no pain now. Regular dental appointment in two days. Root canal appointment in two weeks. Expensive. This getting old is really pricey, even with insurance. But, I’m feeling better psychologically. Enjoying some reading. Digging on some good music.
It is old and had never been properly cleaned. The latch broke years ago. The handle is falling apart. But, it works. The heating coils are built into the waffle plates. The waffle plates are screwed into the covers. The two halves are connected to each other, so even after I was able to remove the covers, I had to disconnect many of the power wires in order to separate the two and remove them. The main power lines run from inside one of the plates to a space on the outside where the power cord comes in, but that has a cover plate held in place by five screws. All of that was last week. I don’t make waffles every day, and I had to leave my house shortly after the disassembly.
Today, after I had coffee, I noticed I was hungry, and running through several options, I decided on waffles. I measured out and mixed all the ingredients from scratch, because only one restaurant in town makes buckwheat waffles, and they just don’t measure up. I like *buckwheat waffles made only from buckwheat flour, without having to add any wheat flour. If I’m lucky I find buckwheat honey for the batter: oil, vanilla, milk, honey, an egg, baking powder, and a little salt.
I reached for the waffle maker from inside my stove and it wasn’t there. After a quick search, and questioning my intelligence, I remembered that I had placed it on the fireplace banco for reassembly “later”. So, what to do? The batter was ready. I was hungry. Could I reassemble it? How long would that take? I looked all the parts over, and decided yes, damn it, I want waffles now, and I’m putting this sucker back together. No wiring or parts diagram available.
I had to see if I could remember enough to reason my way through it. Got it done.
It has no on/off switch; it powers on by plugging it in. So the acid test: plug it in. No pussyfooting around, I grabbed the power cord and inserted it into the socket. Nothing exploded, no fires broke out, no breaker blew. The heating and cooking lights came on. Unplugged it and greased up the plates. After letting it heat through a cook cycle, I was ready for batter. Poured the dark, speckled batter on the waffle plate and closed it up. The cook light went on.
Kept my eyes on it. I still didn’t trust my intuitive reassembly. The cook light went out. Yes. Perfectly cooked, with a nice toastiness and beautiful color. Success!
Irish butter. Check. Pure maple syrup. Check.
And damn these are good. Eat your heart out pancake houses and chain restaurants with your refined wheat flour library paste: stripped of fiber, nutrients and taste. These rock.
But maybe I should get an old-fashioned stove-top waffle iron, just in case.
My waffle recipe:
1/2 cup milk
1 egg
1/2 tsp pure vanilla (more or less)
2 tbsp oil (or melted butter)
1 tbsp honey (or raw sugar or molasses)
1/2 tsp salt
1/2 tsp baking powder
3/4 cup *buckwheat flour
*Buckwheat (Fagopyrum esculentum) is a plant cultivated for its grain-like seeds and as a cover crop. It is not a cereal grain. Despite the name, buckwheat is not related to wheat, as it is not a grass. Grown in North America, it is used to make Japanese soba noodles. In Canada, it’s used for pancakes, or made into groats (also known as kasha). A related and bitterer species, Fagopyrum tataricum, is a domesticated food plant raised in Asia.
09/03/19
Well, six years ago I had a heart attack. Too much plaque in the heart artery that feeds the heart muscle itself. Problems for some time before that, something I attributed – as did my doctor – to a recurrence of my childhood asthma. Overtired on exertion, falling way behind on hikes up the mountain. Getting weaker instead of stronger. I’ve climbed up the Sandia-Manzano mountains. Sandia Crest is at 10,679 feet above sea level. Manzano Peak is at 10,098 feet. I’ve climbed in the San Mateo Mountains, specifically to the highest point, up Mt. Taylor, to 11,306 feet, and I’ve snowshoed Mt. Taylor several times. Also climbed to the nearby La Mosca lookout tower at 11,036 ft. I’ve climbed Mount Baldy, at 10,783 feet, in the Magdalena Mountains. I’ve hiked in the Jemez mountains, including snowshoeing in the Valles Caldera. At 11,253 feet in elevation, the volcanic caldera is 13-miles wide. I’ve hiked and snowshoed often in New Mexico’s mountains.
Valles Caldera mound
Valles Caldera
After the heart attack, not as much. I still hike, usually once a week, sometimes two times a week. Sometimes I hike a fair distance, sometimes I hike really fast for just 70 to 90 minutes, a cardio hike. I figure I’m in good enough shape for my age. My knees never bother me. Since I had the angioplasty and stent placement 6 years ago, I’ve been good. No sign of any heart problems, but you never know.
Of late, I’ve noticed myself falling behind the others I hike with, and being very winded at times, more than usual. I’m sleepy often throughout the day. I used to catnap for 15 or 20 minutes, and be completely refreshed. Often I try that now, and sleep for an hour or two. I have no trouble sleeping through the night.
But, but, but. Today, after I’d taken another short nap, I awoke to a small sharp pain in the chest, just right of center. I researched it, and it’s likely not a heart attack, but it could be leading up to one. Possibly it’s angina, a symptom of heart disease. or it could have been a spasm. Either of those can occur during sleep, and generally last 5 to 15 minutes. This one lasted two to three hours. Took some Advil and then some aspirin.
The more likely cause is a blood clot traveling to my lungs, as I had none of the heart attack symptoms I’d experienced before, nor any of the other classic symptoms. The reason for this could be that I badly sprained my right ankle a month ago. A lot of blood clotted around it, giving me bruises all around the ankle and even between my toes. I’ve been wearing a stabilizing boot since then. There is also a small (3mm) chip fracture on the talus bone of my ankle. I can walk fine with or without the boot, but the doc gave me two more weeks to keep wearing the boot. I hate it. But, it could be that the ankle injury is the source of a blood clot, if that’s what it was. Painful anyway. The pain is gone now, but it could come back. I don’t know what caused it.
I was supposed to have had a checkup with my cardiologist two weeks ago. Arrived 20 minutes early for a 3:45pm appointment. Checked in and waited. And waited. The few people there all got called in. I waited. More people showed up until there was quite a crowd. There are a lot of doctors there. At 3:45, a tall healthy-looking man checked in, saying he had a 4:00pm appointment with my doctor. He was called shortly. I waited. About 10 minutes later, I got called to the examining room, to have my vital signs read. I told the woman taking them about experiencing weakness, and sleepiness as before my heart attack six years ago. She left, said the doctor would be in shortly.
I sat there, unhappy. The reason I’d come early was hoping to get out by 4:15, as I had an important commitment at 5pm. As I sat, I could hear my doctor’s voice next door, with the man I’d seen come in 20 minutes after me. I waited. But, by 4:30, I had to leave, and I stopped at the reception desk to tell them I was leaving. Never heard back.
Now this sudden pain. I thought about making another appointment, but never got around to it. I could die any time, so I figured I’d get an online will started while I still could. Such a strange thing it is to contemplate a will!
I rent, so I have no property to leave behind. I have only the money in the bank that comes in and goes out every month. I save, but things always come up to spend it on, necessary things, like repairs to my aging car and much older motorcycle. Sometimes I have to travel to family events, and none of them live nearby. Anyway, I have little in the way of tangible assets. But, there are things I’d like to leave to family. I have way too many things, like music CDs and vinyl albums. Tons of books. Some paintings, but mostly prints. A few coins. Not really a whole lot, but I’ve been to enough estate sales to know what happens to all the stuff you think is worth something. It’s all junk, sold cheap. Some things can be worth a goodly amount, but no one knows, unless someone hires a professional appraiser. But few family ever do that, unless the deceased was extremely wealthy. As it happens, I am not. Wealthy. Or deceased, as yet.
But it sure got me thinking about who I could give my things away too. So much of it has little enough financial worth. I thought about who might enjoy this small sculpture, or that old painting, or the coins, or a keepsake from the winery I worked at for eight years before it closed. Some things I’d like to have go to family who would appreciate it. I have too much stuff, sure, and much of it can be sold off at an estate sale for whatever they can get; that’s fine. Sitting here for hours today while the pain subsided, deciding who should get what, and not wanting to slight anyone, but not having so much to give everyone something, even if they actually would want it. 1st world problems. And yet, I’d like family members I love to know I was thinking about them. I like to make people smile, especially those I love. My estate, what a joke. Cheap material goods.
What was my life? Flipping burgers. High school diploma. Working in a college physics lab, measuring x-ray wavelengths and spaces between atoms in silicon crystals, a useful thing to know later on for computer technology. But I left that lab before the computer chip revolution hit. Spent years traveling, working for a carnival, a bronze foundry. Settled down in another state 1,675 miles miles away as the crow flies, but I rode my bicycle there over countless miles. Poured concrete, laid concrete block, installed park benches and steel doors. Treasurer of my union local. Finally got a job back in the sciences, giving tumors to rats, and treating them with chemotherapy drugs and x-rays. I did continue in Cancer Research a bit, then worked Quality Control at a printed circuit board company for three years. Finally went back and got another job at a medical school working first with mice, and their immune system proteins, then with research machines.
I took night school classes for years until I finally got a Bachelors of Arts college degree, a dual major of English (Creative Writing) and Distributed Sciences. I had studied a lot of sciences over the years, but not enough in any one field to get a diploma in it, not even a Bachelors of Science. Never did much with the writing part of my education, but I ended up making synthetic proteins for medical research, and synthetic DNA and RNA as well later on. I could also sequence proteins, or DNA, or analyze the amino acid content of proteins, or purify proteins and DNA. I ran a lab, balanced my budget, kept database records, worked independently. Finally retired with a small pension. Then I made wine for eight years at a small winery until the vintner died, and we had to close the winery. Now I take acting lessons, hike in the mountains, work occasionally as a background actor on movies and TV shows. Still hoping to land a good speaking role, one that brings me recognition, something to show that my life had meaning.
Yeah, I had lovers as I traveled, and met someone I wanted to spend my life with, but all I got was a bit less than two years with her. Married sometime later to a great woman, but after seven years that was over too. Two stepkids I never got to spend time with again. Then I married again. Two more stepkids. That 14-year relationship was fun, but ran out of steam and died. However, I did realize that I loved my stepdaughter when she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. Fortunately we’ve been able to stay connected, even making wine together for those eight years at the winery. She survived after surgery, chemotherapy, radiation and more chemo. How strange to find those chemicals and x-rays I used on rats used successfully on a human being I loved.
So perhaps I did accomplish something significant after all, Perhaps my work on x-rays in silicon and germanium crystals helped create the computers to run those fancy treatment machines. Perhaps the work I did on rats helped establish correct dosages of chemotherapy drugs and x-rays. Perhaps my work helping calibrate x-ray wavelengths helped doctors calculate just how much energy was necessary to kill a tumor and not the person. All the people that work in science, even those that just run the machines, and conduct the experimental protocols contribute, each in our own small way, to a much greater good.
And, goddamnit, my step daughter is alive and healthy. And I love her. I finally learned that love is when you truly care about someone, about their happiness, and not just your own. Love is not about having another person. It’s about loving, without expecting anything in return. That’s what I think. If I’m still alive tomorrow morning, I’m going to call the doctor’s office, get in there as soon as possible, and do what it takes to stay alive. Because I love someone, and I like that feeling.
Just realized I was writing my own obituary. Hmph. Got things to do yet.
(09/05/19 UPDATE: The cardiologist says the pain in my chest is likely muscular, because of the lingering pain, and like a blood clot or angina. Blood pressure, however is high, so I need to monitor it twice a day for two weeks, report back).
Forget
icebergs melting
rising seas
or
more hurricanes
terrible tornadoes
flooding
drought
forest fires
crop failures
and economic disasters.
It gets worse
some like it hot –
bacteria: Vibrio vulnificus
the flesh eater
amoeba: Naegleria fowleri
the brain eater.
While food is scarce
or unaffordable
coastlines under water
storms apocalyptic
I sit in the rubble
of a water-logged house
surrounded by smoke
and funnel clouds.
Most of us would like to end our lives without regret. I think one way to do that is, of course, to accomplish something. To that end, I think I’d most want to have passed along some tidbit of knowledge, something that has made someone think. It’s not that I need to be remembered, because, as I’ve looked at that, I realize I’ll be gone, dead, without any way of knowing or caring about that.
Statues mean nothing to the dead. Moving tributes mean nothing to the dead. Our dead ancestors don’t hear us, except in our heads. We carry memories of people: how they lived, what they said to us, what we said to them, how we interacted, and all of who we think they were. We can interact with those memories; they can drive our behavior in the present. We may derive some satisfaction from following in someone’s footsteps, or following their advice, or perhaps doing something for ourselves that would have shocked that person, or disappointed them or even made them angry.
So, in a real sense, they are with us, not as a physical manifestation (a visible spirit), but as a memory, which is after all, the real ghost of that person. We all carry ghosts with us, and, perhaps not just of the dead, but the living we no longer see or interact with.
What I’m attempting to get at here, is that I thought of something, something I’d like to know someone I love would remember, something that changed them, or gave them something to pass on. But, in the time I spent preparing my breakfast until sitting down to write, I’ve forgotten what it was. I can come up with many things, but can’t recall what was on my mind an hour ago. Live a full, active life? Live for today? Love for today? All seem trite, but, then again, it may just be a very small thing, but small things can make a difference.
For instance, a carrot seed. (The Carrot Seed). I read and passed along Dihedral‘s interpretation of that short wonderful story. He noticed that other people interpreted it in wholly different ways than he thought possible. Is it a story about gardening? about carrots? about a young boy? or the pointlessness of planting one seed? It is none of those things. I agree with the author on this one. Read it (linked above) and see if you do too.
So, what is that little carrot seed I could plant in the head of someone I love? I wish I knew. I’d want them to know that love is real, and real love is not about sexual attraction. So many people confuse sex with love. Notwithstanding that one can love the object of one’s sexual couplings, sex is not love, love is not sex. Leaving aside the Freudians, we do not usually desire sex with one’s parents, siblings, coworkers and friends because we love them. We do not (generally) try to have sex with every person we love. Some people feel that we should love someone before we have sex with them, but that presupposes that love is the object of the relationship. Sometimes, and often when we’re young, it is not. Hormones, loneliness, and sexual objectification can overwhelm us and actually blind us to who a person actually is. Sex is great, but it is hardly the be-all, end-all goal of life, although procreation is certainly a driving force.
I once read that love is when you care about someone without ANY anticipation of reciprocation or reward; that is real love. Infatuation? – no, you want that person, or at least sex with that person. Unrequited love (limerence)? – no, same thing, but you hope that person will feel the same way about you, and sometimes you believe it to be true, and you are hoping for your dream of being together to come true. You want your own satisfaction, you need something, and without that, you are miserable.
No, love is given freely, as trite as that idea sounds. I believe, when you love someone, you want what is best for that person, you want them to be happy, to have a full and loving life. You want that person’s success and happiness, even if you can’t be with them. Their successes make you happy, their happiness makes you smile. Their joy alone satisfies you. That is love, even if you never see that person again for the rest of your life or theirs. Many parents feel that way. Yeah, they love us, but they aren’t really expecting anything in return, in general. Some can demand your time or shows of affection. Or use their love for you as a means of control. I don’t think that is really love. Sometimes it is loneliness, and you’re handy.
But, I don’t care. By which I mean, I have discovered that I can love someone with all I’ve got to love them. I desire their happiness, their success, their joy, their zest for life, and their resilience to setbacks and hardship. And while I certainly enjoy seeing them, I can see only a photo of them smiling at an event posted on Facebook, or hugging a friend, or being on vacation somewhere in the world, or sending out a broadside message to all and every, and that gladdens me. I need nothing from them. Even if I knew nothing of their life anymore, even if they wanted nothing more to do with me, unfriended me, ignored me, disappeared entirely – I would still love them. I know who they are, and why I love them, and well, that is not going to go away.
Friendships can be fleeting. Sexual attraction fades over time if you never see that person again, and know you never will. There’s a plenitude of people to know, and love, or have sex with, or all three. But when you discover that you love someone truly, you realize you will always love that person and that it simply cannot fade. It is not a wish or a hope, or a desire, but a reality. Something you know. You know. I cannot convince people of that, I’m sure, but, if I could convince that special person I know that: that is all they need, to love someone else, unconditionally, I will have done that one thing, passed along that one tidbit, that one carrot seed. That person they love does not need to be me, and I do not need to know it.
It certainly took me long enough in this rant to get around to it, but yeah, I’m pretty sure what went though my mind earlier was this desire to accomplish that: to leave this world having convinced someone that I love: to love, just love, and realize how wonderful that is, alone and of itself. Maybe I’m just full of myself, but I believe it.
My head rolls back
against the chair
it tilts to the left.
Usually when I stand
it tilts eerily right,
but I pushed it left.
For some reason
this restricts blood
to my brain.
I awake
suddenly
with a snort.
My brain is light
not full of it
but lightheaded
not enough oxygen
I feel close to death
and I realize
how easy death is.
I see a bare foot
in front of my face
it is my foot
as in a dream
because
in reality
my foot is clothed.
I remember a joke
drawn as a Larson cartoon
in which there are
two undertakers
in a morgue
one says:
This guy has the winning lottery ticket
in his pocket
and the other says:
Lucky stiff.
The humor is that
a ticket is a ticket
and it still has value
when one is dead
one cannot use it
but someone else can
We cannot take
anything with us
we no longer
own
anything.
But I wonder
because
there are bare feet
sticking out
from under the sheets
no pockets
all the corpses are naked
so where was the ticket?
I had that appellation applied to me in high school when one of my German teachers would ask me how to say most anything in German, because I’d just grin awkwardly if I didn’t know the answer. Truth is I’ve always had a hard time with languages, but that’s neither here nor there, because that’s not what I came here to talk about today.
I suppose what I’m here to talk about is death, not that I’m that emo, or into dark gothic role playing, or angst, but it’s something that rolled across my consciousness after hearing a song by Johnny Cash called, Smiling Bill McCall, with these lyrics:
“I don’t want to be layin’ in bed When they pronounce me dead.”
Well, that’s true enough for me. I’d rather die trying to do something, or just doing something I enjoy. Hiking up a mountain, or acting, or fucking – those are things I’d prefer to die, well, not doing, but immediately after. I do like to complete things.
Now, I probably came close to that dying-while-fucking part once. Met a woman about 35 years younger than me, and, somehow, it didn’t take us long to get into it. We were in the kitchen when she suddenly grabbed my belt and undid my pants and glommed right onto my penis, which leapt into action. I had never met a woman that aggressive about sex before, and it was amazing! So goddamned turned on! I wanted to fuck real bad, so we moved to the bedroom.
Well, she dropped herself backwards into my bed, and I helped her shuck her jeans, and I just dived into that gorgeous muff of hers, and she squealed in delight. I worked on that cunt of hers with lips and tongue, while she squirmed and wiggled. By the time I got around to putting on a condom and fucking, my penis had lost some of its stiffness, and it wasn’t doing its job. That, of course, is supremely frustrating, especially when you’re hot for a woman who’s hot for you to fuck her. Now, since I’d been divorced about five years, I also hadn’t had sex, with another person, for that long, so I wasn’t expecting that.
I went to the doctor and got some of the blue pills, and he said I’d probably only need half a dose, and he was right. I was afraid I couldn’t entice that young woman back into bed with me, but I called her and she was still eager. I’ll never know if I really needed ’em or not, but I had an erection that just kept keepin’ on, and not long after we’d stop for air, we’d go back at it again. Well, that was fine, and we kept at it for two years like that. I kept popping the blue pills because I was afraid to disappoint her or myself, and we could fuck and drink for days at a time.
Now one fine time, after we’d gotten started early on a Saturday night and spent most of Sunday morning fucking as well, I had to take her home, so I could go run the winery I worked at part time. The next day, Monday morning, I picked up my stepdaughter to get her to work, and then donated a pint of whole blood, and, since they tell you to follow that up with a big meal, I stopped at a buffet, for a breakfast of chorizo and bacon and eggs to replenish my iron-depleted blood, and a syrup-laden waffle, and half a plate of fruit. Went home, played around on my computer, dug through tons of spam to read my emails, and read part of a book. I began feeling strange, and there was a strange pressure in my chest, and to make a long story, that I’ve already talked about, short, I proceeded to get myself to a hospital and had my obligatory American-style old-man heart attack while surrounded by doctors and nurses and technicians in an operating room.
One of the questions they’d asked was if I’d had sex recently. I told them I had. Later on I found out that those oblong blue pills were implemented in some heart attacks, but that didn’t stop me from using ’em again as soon as I saw that lover of mine. We got right back into our routine, since I felt great, better than I had for years, and the blue pills weren’t necessary any more. However, the whole heart-attack thing had bothered her, and since she had never planned for us to be a regular item, it didn’t surprise me that one day she said goodbye, and then left town not long after that. Maybe she just didn’t want to kill me, but I’d have gladly died fucking her.
So, where the hell was I? Oh, yeah, death. Fucking is one way to go, or falling off a mountain – things like that. But I suppose I might have another heart attack some day, and I suppose I might be riding my iron horse, the one with two wheels, 750cc engine, four carburetors, and four tailpipes. I do like riding that thing, and I like getting it up to speed. It’s old too, but the engine purrs when it feels like starting up.
So, where I’d been going with the whole random line of thought was this: if I’m riding along on my motorcycle some day, and I feel a bad, painful, I’m-probably-not-going-to-survive-this heart attack coming on, I’m not going to pull over and die on the side of the road, or in an ambulance cruising to a hospital, or in a hospital bed. I say this because, just in case it happens that I die blowing on down the highway, and they say I was doing 250mph, it wasn’t suicide, or stupidity. I was just going out, and having fun while I was doing it. But I’m pretty sure I’d rather have been fucking.
OK, so the President of the United Sates posted this tweet: “Despite the constant negative press covfefe.” Shortly after this, he posted another tweet, AFTER deleting the first: “Who can figure out the true meaning of “covfefe” ??? Enjoy!”
In context, you see that the word would have been “coverage”, which, when refering to press coverage, is something Trump hates. He has often said the press makes issues out of nothing, and he really, really hates any kind of bad press resulting from something he has said or done, even when it is 100% true. That said, Trump did not correct the tweet; he instead told us to: “Figure it out.” Now, cov is basically a short form of coverage, shortened deliberately, because Trump wanted to add another word. Unfortunately, he didn’t spell it exactly right, but if you seperate cov from the word, you get fefe. Now, fee fee can be used to mean, “a party”.
However, an actual Fee Fee is a masturbation device, (a rolled towel with a rubber glove) that is used by prisoners. After being rolled, the end of the glove is then stretched over the top. Then it is finished by pulling a sock over the opposing end to hold the glove in place. Can then be run under warm water or placed in between mattresses to create a “real life” effect.
It is a fairly common word. Used with cov, in context with press coverage, it refers to the press basically playing with themselves – making up stories where there are none, basically: creating a story they can play with for their own enjoyment (masturbating).
Now, you may think I’m just making this shit up, but I am not. If Trump had merely mistyped coverage – although I think it is difficult to type “fefe” instead of “erage” – he wouldn’t have deleted it so fast. He may have simply retyped the correct word, or said something to the effect of: “You know what I meant.” He did not. Why? because a popular understanding of the slang word he attempted to use would have brought negative criticism of a President using foul language. Even just the idea of a Fee Fee would gross a lot of people out.
I will bet you, with 100% confidence, that press coverage-fee fee is what Trump meant, as an off-color jab at the Press.
I decided to respond to a Quora question:”What have you assumed was exaggerated until you experienced it?” since I’ve been working in a winery for seven years, cleaning ditches, weeding, picking fruit, fermenting fruit, pumping, filtering, bottling, labeling and selling wine. I wrote:
Well, lots of things, really, throughout my whole life, but I’m going to just focus on wine. Most of us, especially when young, make fun of all that wine tasting stuff, like swirling the glass, or sniffing the “bouquet”, and can’t figure out what wine goes with what food, often resorting to anyone else’s recommendation, but always feeling like it doesn’t really make any difference: wine is wine. I thought the whole thing was made up or grossly exaggerated. Which is not to say there really aren’t posers who do not know what they are talking about, or try to impress, regardless of how much or little they actually know.
Anyway, I found out many things when I began working at a winery, and actually making wine, and not just grape wine, but wine made from cherries, apricots, peaches, plums, apples, blackberries, raspberries, and even cranberries, among many others. Only wine grapes don’t need any additions of sugar to ferment, having a high enough sugar content to make a strong alcoholic beverage. But, by adding sugar, slowly, incrementally, to fruit, any fruit, you can make damn fine wines too.
I say this because I would not have learned as much from a few grape wines as I have from fruit wines. Yes, it does make a big – a huge difference – what wine you have with your meal. If you’re just drinking wine to get drunk, or impress people, it doesn’t matter much what you drink. Fruit juice with distilled alcohol will do.
However, one of the first things I learned is that wines to be paired with food need to be dry, that is, without sugar. If all the sugar is converted to alcohol, you get a very superior wine. It can take quite a while to do that, but it’s worth it. Drinking a sweet wine coats your tongue with sugar and makes tasting anything else difficult: the fine flavors of food can be masked by sugar. And, dry doesn’t mean bland or high in alcohol content; dry table wines can be very fruity and complex with layers of flavors.
But, even drinking dry wines with food takes a little bit of consideration. A very light-tasting food needs a light-tasting wine. White wine with chicken or fish, sure, but not if the chicken is heavily spiced, or the fish is something like salmon. But, a strong grape wine, like a cabernet sauvignon, will completely overpower the taste of some milder foods. Drink them with red meats like buffalo, for sure.
Very strong-flavored foods need a strong-flavored wine. A rich-tasting wine will complement the salmon you’re eating, neither taking away the flavor of the food, nor being overpowered by it. In our winery we have an apricot wine, served by itself or blended with a white grape wine, that we use for things like salmon, blackened tuna, or aged cheeses. For really strong, pungent cheese, we recommend that or a 100% peach wine.
When it comes to spicy food, we recommend a red grape wine blended with wild cherry wine, the pure wild cherry wine itself, or plum wines. The plum is particularly great with curried foods.
For meats that same red wine/ wild cherry wine mix works great, or other all-fruit wines we blend.
Now, none of this is to convert you to fruit wines other than grapes. There are some really great grape wines. It is just to illustrate the point that you have to experiment with wines to see what foods they complement. (I used to only drink whites like chardonnay, sauvignon blanc, sémillon or pinot grigio. Now I can finally appreciate red wines, even cabs.) I hated the intense pure apricot wine until I tried it with venison; suddenly the apricot flavor jumped out at me, and the heavy gaminess of the meat was toned down. I don’t like blue cheese, or any of the moldy-looking strong cheeses, but I tried them with this powerful peach wine, and suddenly I could appreciate the flavor of the cheeses, and the wine. This happens at some level with all wines. If you can’t taste the wine after a few bites of your food, or if you can’t taste your food after a few sips of wine, it’s not the best experience.
Another thing I learned is that the whole point of wine, from the very beginning of viticulture, was to accompany food. It can heighten the flavors in your food, making the meal a real joy, which makes you feel pretty good, compliment the chef, and smile. As long as you don’t overindulge in the dinner wine, you will be able to enjoy your wine and your food, and not actually feel drunk. Drink some water too along with your meal. The water and the wine help your digestion. Sweet wine? – after your meal. And maybe have it with a little dessert too, yeah?
Damn! I wish I could find my fucking reading glasses. But it’s a nice day, and I head out to buy a battery for this pinche little clock/timer I use. The little silver oxide battery is going for $5.99, which seems a little steep for just one, so I buy the three-pack for $10.99. What the hell. Save a few bucks when I need another one. And I buy a package of Walgreens’ faux-Oreos while I’m there. No high fructose corn syrup in these, they taste exactly like the real thing, and at $2.29, they’re a great deal. For some reason a pack of real Nabisco Oreos with the cheap-ass chemical hybrid syrup from taxpayer-subsidized corn cost twice as much.
But then things get real good, because there’s a piñón coffeeshop a few blocks away. Now, this section of 4th Street features nothing but shops and restaurants. There’s a KFC and a McDonald’s, of course, but also Bob’s Burgers, Powdrells BBQ, Tacos Mex Y Mariscos, Burritos Y Gorditias, a Church’s Chicken, and a Teriyaki Chicken Bowl, among others. There are money-lenders, the Laundromat, and a car wash, donuts and ice cream. It’s a busy street, so it’s not the greatest place to hang out, but I brought a book with me, and I love piñón coffee. Piñón coffee is always smooth. The cafe uses dark-roasted beans. My large café americano has four shots of espresso, which will make me hyperactive later on. I buy a bear claw too, and sit in a stuffed chair in a sunbeam. The bearclaw is gooey, and so messy that it’s hard to eat it and drink coffee one-handed, while trying to turns pages and hold a book one-handed, so I ignore the really hot coffee for a bit and finish off the bear claw first. Then I have to wash my hands. Finally, I get all settled with the book in one hand, and my coffee can be set on a little table next to me when I need my other hand to turn a page.
The book is excellent! Luis Alberto Urrea is not only one damn fine observer of people, but he can write about it with fine attention to detail, and also be funny. Well, some of it seems funny to me anyway, because it sounds like barrios in California, the South Side of Chicago, and here in Albuquerque have a lot in common, and I’ve heard a lot of it before in my forty years in the southwest. The book is a real treat, but I do wish I had my glasses, because reading without ’em is usually tiring, and it sometimes gives me a headache. Can’t get new ones until I see the optometrist in a week. But the book is so good that I don’t mind, and the sunlight makes it easier to read.
It’s not a real busy coffeeshop, having only opened recently. One old guy, like me, sits reading when I come in. A couple comes in after I sit down, while I’m still strugging with the bear claw. The woman is young, smiling and very attractive. When I try to ogle her, she looks back, but blankly, twice. Her companion, with his back to me, is a young man with extremely short buzz-cut hair. A young woman comes in with a guide dog, orders coffee and something to eat, and sits down six feet from me. She speaks low to the dog from time to time. She is dressed in very plain clothes in muted colors and without any kind of style. Her hair is cropped short and she looks more like a young man.
I read three stories in Urrea’s The Water Museum, and prepare to go. My coffee is not quite finished, so I sit quietly for a few minutes without reading. The man reading a book has left. Another single woman comes in and hits the restroom. The young woman with the guide dog prepares to leave, taking her trash to the receptacle across the room first, which seems to confuse the dog when she returns to her chair for her coat. She chides him, humorously, for sitting as she turns to leave, and I chuckle with her. Moments later, after the woman in the restroom leaves it and walks to the counter, I finish my coffee and head out.
I think about my glasses. I thought they were in the house somewhere, but I’ve turned the place over several times and I can’t find ’em. I was on a movie set near Santa Fe, on Zia Pueblo land, a few weeks ago, and may have had them with me. I vaguely remember that, since I intended to read, I could have taken them with me and stashed them in my green fleece jacket with Applied Biosystems embroided into it. They are a biotech firm I used to order supplies from before I retired. I’ve had it for many years. I remember hanging it on a tree limb at one point, as we rushed to set, and left it behind when we wrapped after dark. No one in the crew had found it when I went back later. The set had moved, and they clean up really carefully, but I suspect my reading glasses were in that jacket, and it’s still hanging in that tree somewhere in the hills south of Santa Fe among the stunted piñón trees.
(FOLLOW UP: I finally finished Urrea’s book in the evening, and it is mind-blowing. The stories bounce around from barrio to rez to border towns and midwestern towns, and the people come in all races and types, and the love and hatred and ennui and dialogue and descriptions and emotions and sharp shots of drama just knock the breath out of your chest. And then I read the title story, about the water museum, and yeah, it’s a museum, because large parts of the country have had drought so long that children don’t know what rain is or what it sounds like, and fear humidity. And, although it hasn’t happened yet, you know, you just know, it will happen just as he described it. And I’d recommend this book to everone.)
(MORE FOLLOW UP: I found my glasses in my house, sitting on top of a carved wooden statue of a wolf-like lounge singer that sits in a corner near my bathroom; until I saw them, I’d forgotten that I’d put them there, or why. The green fleece thing is long gone by now, battered by rain, snow, hail, and broiling sun, and probably fallen on the ground and used by packrats for nesting material).
So yesterday I helped filter 300 gallons of cranberry wine, but I fucked up, because, of the three square filters we use to pump wine through, I managed to turn the 3rd one 90° so the holes didn’t line up, so even though it seemed like everything was fine, only about 2/3 of the wine got really filtered, and we only discovered that when we tried to filter a small batch of wine with lots of sediment, and the higher pressure punched a hole in the filter and so today I had to refilter that whole 300 gallons of wine into one tank and then pump it out into the two tanks eight of us will use to bottle that wine and three other batches of wine on Saturday. And Sunday my step daughter and I will label some of that wine.
So when I got home there was a message from the background casting company. Because of a bad weather prediction for Friday, the shoot for the episode of the TV show I was to be in the background for was moved up to Thursday, and if that was OK, “…could I come in right away for a costume fitting?” And of course I said, “yes,” but before I went to the studio I stopped by Ramona’s house to pick up my hiking cap that I’d left there, because we usually watch movies together on Wednesday nights, but not tonight, so then I dropped off a book I had borrowed from a photographer who sponsers a teaching/learning photography group on Wednesdays called Guerrilla Photo Group, and then I went to the movie studio, and found out that the shoot was postponed until Friday anyway, but I had already told the vintner at the winery that I couldn’t work Friday, and then emailed him that I could work Friday because the shooting had changed to Thursday.
So I usually hike in the mountains on Thursdays, but I decided to go to Tractor Brewing Company’s tap room for Poetry and Beer night, and I had two strong beers: an oatmeal stout and a Farmer’s Tan Red, and an “asian style” chicken sandwich with sriracha mayo from the food truck outside. So now I don’t have acting work for tomorrow, and I could hike, but I really just want to sleep. I don’t want to set an alarm for early in the morning again. I don’t want to think about anything tomorrow. I don’t want to go anywhere or do anything.
But, of course, I have a part in a horror film and I have about nine pages of dialogue and rambling monologue to commit to memory by April 24, and I’m not quite there yet, and I probably shouldn’t be doing so many things, but I’m “retired” so what else should I be doing? I don’t want to just sit on my ass. Sometimes it seems like all I do is sit on my ass, but this week reminds me that I really don’t.
I am a very imperfect man, with many flaws. That said, I’m going to tell you some things about the concert I went to this morning. There is a classical concert 50 Sunday mornings of the year here. I do not go every Sunday. For one thing, it costs $15, and since there are espresso baristas who provide great free coffee, tipping is a nice thing to do. There are people who bring fresh home-baked sweets as well, and there is another tip jar there, so it’s easy to spend $17 or more, and I’m not going to do that every Sunday. Besides, sometimes the music is choral, or operatic, and I’m not going to those. I like my classical music, old or modern, to be instrumental only. Perhaps that’s a flaw, but I do not care to change it.
This was Bach, Johann Sebastian Bach, to be exact. Born 1685, died 1750. It was a sold out concert accommodating 150 ticket purchasers, and the volunteers who make it possible. The first part of the program was performed by a fantastic cellist who was solo cellist of the Bergen Philharmonic Orchestra in Norway, among other positions in the U.S. She played Suite No. 4 for solo cello in E-flat major. It is a complicated piece, and a very busy one, with seven parts. I remember thinking how thickly populated with notes it was. The notes seemed mostly brisk and sharp without long duration. Since I am not a musician, I cannot speak technically about the music, but it rocked! Read the rest of this entry »
Another Sunday morning, although, truth be told, it’s just another day. I wandered over to the cafe for some good coffee – 2 shots of espresso diluted with a bit of hot water – and some breakfast, because I get tired of the stuff I make.
It’s nice to get out of the house too, but I can’t say I like the crowds on a Sunday. Way too many people all at once, and many talk as if what they have to say is really important, loud and clear words cutting through all the other mindless chatter. And I brought a book with me that I use to shut ’em all out, but it’s hard to do. They come in at times, standing next to me, looking for a place to sit, and we all know how busy the place is on a Sunday, but they look anyway, thinking there’ll be room just for them. Important assholes.
I never understand why half of ’em don’t go up or down the road to where there are dozens of food or coffee joints. It’s probably too busy for ’em there, too many people, too many cars. But they come here, here where’s just a bookstore and a cafe, and they pack the parking lot full to bursting, and the latecomers drive around and around looking for that spot that must be waiting just for them somewhere. And the tables are mostly full, and although they know it, they come with groups of five or six and expect to find room. And they ask me if I’m using one of the extra chairs at my table, and I pull my eyes away from my book and say no. And I go back to reading, and sure enough, another group has come in, and another one of them asks me for another chair.
And I just want to tell them to go somewhere else. When they arrive before I do, and they stand lined up from the order counter, and the line snakes around past the door and heads north, I just turn around and go back home. It’s just not worth it to stand quietly in line while people talk loudly about nothing, and have no idea what they want to eat when they finally make it to the counter. And most of ’em come from the rich houses a little north of here, and they have big dining rooms and kitchens, and lots of chairs, but they want to squeeze in here where they pretend their words matter. And their big expensive houses are empty except when they come home at night and sleep in them.
And I grow more impatient with humanity. And I lean to eremiticism. Sometimes I am lonely, but more and more I’m just alone, because I just can’t stand to hear humanity babbling, especially when the babbling rises to a dull roar. I grew up with six siblings, and you’d think I’d be more accustomed to background noise. When I first left home, I missed the sound of other people in the house, low conversations, or toys being fought over, or crying or toilet flushing. I used to think I’d prefer that to living alone, because as much as I enjoy solitude, the loniliess creeps up on me and it aches. And the aching makes me aware of just how alone I really am, despite my reluctant acceptance of being a recluse, because, well, maybe I’m not a true hermit.
I could be a cenobite, but I’m not religious, and I no longer want to be part of any community, I think. And yet, something drives me across the street to eat at the cafe. I am a hermit in a crowd, but the crowd bugs me. At the same time, I have been trying out for parts in movies, and I must, of necessity, be around other people, interact with them, and act. I’m good at acting. I think most of us are, because we act differently around each group of people we get around. I feel as though that’s how I’ve gotten through life, acting here, acting there. I smile when I’m not happy. I talk because people expect it, but usually I’d rather not. Conversation, to me, is private, shared one at a time with someone I trust and like to be around, but there are so few of those.
Blogging is almost ideal. I get to talk without listening, something most of humanity seems to prefer. We talk at each other, and listen for the pause that allows us to speak again. It’s all a big pause here. I can type and type and type, and maybe someone will read it, and maybe no one will, and that’s OK. But something drives me to write and put these words out where someone might read them, and I don’t know why.
And, just like a semicolon in a sentence, like the one tattooed on my arm, I know there’s more to come. I haven’t finished what I have to say just yet.
And, I suppose that’s a good thing! After all, a few months ago, a man drove his car here and parked by the cafe and blew his brains out all over the inside of his car. I guess he had nothing more to say. Was he lonely, or just sad? Was he terribly troubled? Was he in pain from loss? Was he dying of some incurable or painful disease? I’ll never know. It saddened me, me, a recluse. Why should I care? if I don’t care about humanity? Perhaps I can only care in small doses. Humanity is just too big. There are too many. Too many.
Got knocked down by a car the other day. It made me think about all those times in my life when, but for one thing, I would have died. As an infant, and later as a two-year old, I had pneumonia. I was saved by penicillin, by science, technology and society, twice. Before penicillin, I would have been dead as an infant.
As a six-year old, I fell into a house under construction. The incomplete basement had no concrete yet, the floor was mud with pools of water. Me, my brother John and Eddie Knight were bringing the biggest stones we could find and carry, climbing the foundation wall, and dropping them into the pools of water. The object, of course, was to get a huge splash. We dropped in our stones, enjoyed the splash, and set out to find bigger stones. I dropped a nice one in, it hit the water nicely, and turned to see Eddie plop the biggest stone I’d seen all morning on the floor level of the foundation, so he could use both hands to climb up. Somehow, I couldn’t help myself. I ran over, grabbed the stone, and dropped it in. I think it made a big splash. I say think, because all I remember is perhaps a sense of movement. Eddie, pissed off as all hell, had come charging at me, I think. The details are vague. Because I was standing by the edge of the hole in the floor we were using (it was for the stairs to come), I must have gone right over. I woke up some time later. Two adults were carrying me through tall weeds in the huge field behind my house. I had cracked my head against one of the stones, maybe even Eddie’s big one. Lying face down in the muddy water, I would have drowned. My brother pulled me out. Eddie, meanwhile had gone for his parents, who were carrying me home. I never saw Eddie again. He never came by. I would guess that he felt guilty, or his parents simply forbade him to play with us again. Life saved by my younger brother, although medical science repaired my cracked skull.
I turned eight years old during my stay at Lutheran Hospital in Baltimore, Maryland (formerly the Hebrew Orphan Asylum). My appendix had ruptured, and I remember being told later that I had peritonitis (literally an inflammation of the stomach lining), although today the term mostly used is blood poisoning, or sepsis. In septic shock, weak, and barely able to shamble, with support from my mother, who drove me to the hospital in a borrowed car, the staff there knew I was in real trouble from my blood work. An x-ray did not show cause, so I was taken for exploratory surgery. The appendix was hidden behind an organ, and hadn’t been visible on x-ray. Again, medical science, through surgery and chemistry, had saved my life, although I was hospitalized for four weeks, and convalesced at home for another week. Happy Birthday!
Soon after that I developed bronchial asthma, and survived by using steam and a towel over my head, or a prescription inhaler. Sometimes I simply couldn’t catch my breath at all. I didn’t know where it went or why it was running away. The asthma attacks went away sometime after my 12th birthday.
Of course, not everything I did was life threatening. I slipped trying to repair a leaky roof in a tree house and fell to the ground, breaking my arm. Excruciating pain came with that one, and a cast on my arm, and notoriety at school. It was hard to brag about falling out of a tree. I was just embarrassed.
I must have developed an acute sense of caution, because I didn’t get hurt again until I was an adult. I got creamed by a huge beast of a car as I had been pedaling down a nice hill. It hit me broadside, and dragged the bicycle across the street, but I had been thrown forward by my own momentum. I bounced, and passed out. Passers-by thought I was dead. I heard them say so as I came to. They’d already given up on me and were comforting the driver! I was in shock, didn’t know who I was or what had happened at first. I was thoroughly amazed that I’d survived, because my last thought before the impact had been that I was going to die. Traffic had been thick and heavy, and I could have easily been run over by some other vehicle. As it was, my own momentum had carried me in a high arc straight forward, and the car was so big, a Lincoln Continental Mark III, that it had blocked enough of the lane to keep the other drivers away. Saved by the eighteen-foot car length. Nothing broken this time. I had a major sprain on the top of my left foot, which had been hit by the car. The heavy Schwinn bicycle pedal arm had been bent, back into the spokes.
Bicycles on highways or city streets are accidents waiting to happen, and I had a few more. Once my shoe was simply ripped off my foot when a car turned into me and I put my foot out to protect myself. Once I skidded on gravel on a mountain road and slid down a long section of blacktop, taking a lot of skin off my chest and stomach. Ouch. Another time, a car side-swiped me as I pedaled down a city street right on the edge of the road. It appeared as though the car had passed another car on the right, illegally, had not seen me up ahead, and clipped me. The impact left a huge bruise on my ass and thigh muscles. I was stunned at first, and lay on my back, staring unblinkingly into the light rain that was falling. I worried that I was paralyzed. The driver didn’t stop, but someone else did after a few minutes, and an ambulance took both me and bicycle to a hospital. Bruised and scraped flesh was all I received then, but it could have been worse. Somehow I had fallen without breaking my neck. Somehow the car hadn’t broken my hip or run over me. Little things.
Given my history, buying a motorcycle was not a very smart thing to do, but at least it put me out into the drive lane at speed, instead of paralleling the other vehicles, riding bicycles in the gutters full of storm-drain grates and broken glass. It didn’t take me long to lay the bike down: the first time taking a corner in the rain, slipping on icy roads, or hitting a crazy dog on a curve. I was never hurt, but I went through a few turns signals and mirrors which stick out to the sides. I learned to anticipate accidents, to always brake the front and rear wheels simultaneously, and even ride on icy or snow-packed streets. I got good. However, as I neared my house one fine day, I decided to pass in front of a stalled car blocking my lane, and he hit the gas microseconds before I got there. I t-boned him, and sailed over the car hood. The bike was totaled. I was sore and bruised but none the worse for wear after a few weeks. Everyone in the neighborhood said I must have said my prayers. I didn’t pray anymore, so that wasn’t it. Given my moral turpitude at the time, I could have thanked the devil instead, if I’d still believed in such things.
Years passed with my replacement motorcycle. As I was near home again, in a different house with a wife waiting for me this time, I misread a red traffic light. I thought it was still green, but the sun was directly behind it as I topped a hill. I sailed into the large Route 66 intersection at about 40 mph. There was a pickup directly in front of me; I looked up – the light was red. Never even applied the brakes. Totaled that bike too. I was again bruised and scraped up. My arm was a bit sprained, so I wore a sling for a short time. The driver of the pickup told my insurance company that I had bent his truck frame. Really? Well, no matter. I got another bike, number three in a series, and I never wrecked it. Since it was old and leaked oil, and always needed repairs, I finally traded it in. Success! I had ridden a motorcycle the entire time I had owned it without damaging it or myself. However, the newer bike was not so lucky. Within two weeks I had laid it down, negotiating a turn, I didn’t understand what had happened until it happened again. This time I took it in to a shop. They found a spacer missing from the front axle. Such spacers keep the wheel centered on the axle, but without one, the wheel was sliding to one side as I turned, causing the wheel to lock up.
Of note in all this mayhem is that I paused in June of 2013 to have a minor heart attack. The large descending artery on the right side was partly clogged when I first got to the heart hospital, but within minutes, the clog had moved to completely block the artery (sudden minor pain). Fortunately, I was already hooked up to an IV and heart monitors, and my wrist was prepped for sticking a balloon up to my heart to clean it out and leave a stent behind. They went ahead and did that, and I felt relief immediately. Recovery was rapid and complete. Four months later, I ran a half marathon in three hours exact. A year later I ran it in 2 hours, 46 minutes. Cheating death. Again.
So, I’ve dodged any motorcycle accident for many years now. I am very aware of my surroundings. I always know where other vehicles are, and I keep a constant eye out on side streets and pedestrians. I hit nothing, and nothing hits me. I have a car now also, and my motorcycle habits have transferred. I have no accidents, because I am always acutely aware of my surroundings. So, it came as a shock last Friday evening to find a moving car pushing against my body, again.
I was crossing a street at a slight angle to reach my car. It was a cold night, and I was worried about an approaching storm, so I had opted out of riding the bike. I was in the southbound part of the street as I saw a car approach the intersection from an eastbound lane. I sped up so I wouldn’t be in its path. It was about 50 feet away, so I had plenty of time to reach my car before it even reached me. Wrong. She had turned wide, and sped up as she straightened out, but not where she should have been. She was squarely in the northbound part of the road. Her right fender was pressing hard against me. I noticed the rest of the car was ahead of me, instead of behind me in the empty southbound lane. She never said what she was doing. Was she just turning wide? She later said she only saw me at the last moment before hitting me. Had she tried to avoid me? swerving around me? She never said much else. Liability issues, I’d guess.
Fortunately she did see me plastered against her grille, and stopped. I was thrown forward and hard onto the asphalt. It hurt. So, there I was again, lying in the street again, wondering how the hell I’d misjudged that situation. How the hell had she caught me? I hurt all over it seemed, but I thought I should get up. My right hip area had impacted the street, and it was in considerable pain, but after a few minutes, the pain went away. We exchanged information. She is an artist with the gallery whose open house I’d just left.
I went home, took two Advil Liquid capsules, applied some Blue Emu cream, ate a late dinner with some chokecherry wine, and got some sleep. The pain was back next day, but so far, so good. The hip only hurts to the touch. “So don’t touch it!” I know, I know, but sometimes ya gotta roll over in bed, or ya bump against the side of a chair. It’ll heal. There’s skin scraped off again, but no bruising. The pain seems to be deep, and just behind the hip bone that juts out there. Worked hard yesterday, did a lot of heavy lifting of demijohns of wine, and shoving larger tanks around at the winery, with no pain, so I think I’m OK.
Today was another day. It was a day like many others. I woke too early, in that it was very dark. That was to be expected, inasmuch as I had drunk a pint of beer the night before. What was unexpected is that, after I fell back asleep, I woke again, before dawn. I knew that I had to be up fairly early, as I had work to do, and 24 miles to travel before 9:00 am. However, because I had also run 3 miles the evening before, I wanted as much rest as I could, so I stayed in bed. Before long, after a period of daydreams, I noticed it was light, which, this time of year, meant it was later than I should have gotten up, so up I got. For the third time that morning, I peed.
I made a double Americano, and sipped it while browsing the land of the internet. I ate a banana, and showered, and brushed and flossed my teeth. I was running late, but I rarely care about that. I am retired, after all. The sky was dark with rain clouds, but it is never safe to bet on rain in Albuquerque, so I mounted my old motorcycle anywa and rode to Placitas. There was work to do at the winery. I am a partner in the winery. The work involved “buttoning up” a storage shed, to quote the vintner. The vintner showed myself and Michael what needed to be done, and began working with us, but was soon called away. We cut wood strips, and screwed and nailed pieces along the upper east side of the shed to close the openings there. First, we had to move all the old pipes, wood, metal, and other junk that accumulates in farms and ranches everywhere, and remove a small fence along the side of the shed, so the project took many hours. We took a lunch break because the vintner always makes lunch (venison stew today) for whomever is working. After lunch we worked for 30 to 40 minutes, but the rain came and chased us off, since we were using power saws to cut the lumber and pressed plywood.
We went inside. I was still hungry, and I wanted something sweet. Since there is never anything sweet to eat at the winery, I persuaded Michael to drive the four miles down to the closest shopping. He bought coffee for us and the vintner, and I bought a wonderful peach and apple cake baked right there in the local grocery store. It was heavy in its pan, full of peach and apples slices, spiced with cinnamon in a sugar syrup, and covered with a simple cake. It was incredibly delicious, and not only did the vintner partake, but our newest partner, who is upgrading our computer books and website, also had some cake.
Michael and I finished the work on the shed and stowed the tools inside it. It still doesn’t have a door, but, there is still a lot of work to do: sealing all the cracks inside, and then we will power wash the entire inside, because of the activity and shit of pack rats in there. Then it will become a functional place to store things safely.
But, as it was after 4:30 already, I headed home. I hoped to make it home without being caught in the rain, but I did not get far before it caught me. I’m used to that. On my way home on Wednesday night (my 64th birthday), I had also gotten caught by rain and soaked. If I had thought to have brought my chaps, and worn my boots, I’d have stayed mostly dry. Fortunately, today, I had at least worn my boots. I arrived home with only my pants wet, from the top of my boots to my knees. I threw them in the washer as soon as I got inside the house. They are clean and dry now.
There was an interesting book reading by the coauthors of More Than Two, and a discussion about polyamory across the street at the bookstore at seven, so I had time to walk over there, dressed in my leather hat and leather jacket, as it was still raining. The talk was interesting, and the questions even more so, as: “What is the effect on children in polyamorous groupings?” and “What about legal problems, mortgages? What was their experience with couples introducing a third person into the relationship? I thought the book, and the discussion rather dry and boring, or I was just very tired, so as soon as there was a break, I grabbed an unrelated book by Neil Gaiman that had been on the shelf in front of me, browsed it, bought it and left.
I went into the restaurant next door and had a vanilla bean milkshake. It was good. I was still a bit warm and red in the face from being outside most of the day, and I had a thirst I couldn’t quite quench with water.
I walked home, not a long distance, but perhaps a city block away in length near the back of the compound I live in.
Suddenly, I found myself humming loudly, and enjoying it. I was even voicing some da, da, da da, dadadadas, along with the hums. I was unaccountably happy. I couldn’t even stop doing it. It was just spontaneous, and I enjoyed it. It doesn’t happen very often, and it didn’t last long, but today had become a day unlike many others.
Tomorrow I will run 8 miles. The next day I will hike 12 miles in the mountains. I will do some more running and working next week. In one week I will run a half marathon.
I’ll likely take a week off everything after that. Read, watch some movies.
Woke up this morning early, dreaming. I had stayed up until 1:00 am, but I was wide awake at 5:30am. I ran a lot last evening, in the rain, with lightning just a few miles away. It was the first time I’d run in the rain. I liked it; I was able to keep my body temp down while running. Cool, in reality.
The doves are cooing and I have my coffee now. I decided to post because my dream fascinated me. In my dream, I had decided to live on the street. I know, I know, one does not just “decide” to do such a thing, but hey, it was a dream. I had some sort of small tent or structure over me, and I was under a large blanket, peering out at life on the street. Part of me wondered what I’d done with all my stuff. That part of my brain decided that I still had a car and had my stuff in that.
As I peered out, I saw a couple I knew. I knew the male better than his partner, but they came over and looked in at me. Suddenly the woman was getting into my tent, box or whatever it was I was in, and she was naked. So was I. She climbed under my blanket and lay on top of me. Her skin was warm and smooth. I was in heaven. Then, of course, this guy also came in. He seemed a bit hesitant at first, but he came in and lay down next to the woman. I had no idea what was going on.
In fact, I quickly realised that the two people didn’t know who I was, that I was out of context, and in the poor light available, they hadn’t recognised me, as I had thought. That raised interesting questions to me. Did they do this sort of thing all the time? Did they seek out homeless men to sleep with? Should I tell them I know them? As I pondered ways to shock them with my knowledge of their identity and introduce myself, I realized I’d forgotten their names, which killed my element of surprise, so I said nothing about myself.
Realizing that they were probably expecting sex, especially since the woman had her hand on my erection, but I wasn’t into either this ménage à trois stuff, or sex with men, I wasn’t sure what to say or do. The male asked me if it was alright. I said I wasn’t into men sexually. He asked me why. I told him that men just didn’t turn me on, and he, of course, wanted to know why I wasn’t curious. I told him, I had been curious, but I had gotten over that. I went into a reverie, and could no longer tell if I was just in my head or speaking out loud.
I remembered my roommate from when I’d first left home. He was into young boys, his words. I accepted that about him, but came to realize he was also interested in me. In fact, he was four years older than me. I’d thought of him as a friend, but he had other ideas. Nothing ever came of that, not for lack of trying on his part, but I’d had to punch him a bit to finally dissuade him.
Shortly after that experience, my best friend had been a lesbian. That doesn’t mean that I learned anything from the experience, but years later, on a trip to Canada, where my old roommate had become an expatriate, I had needed his help getting across the border, after a run in with the border cops, and I was staying in his apartment. He made it clear I couldn’t stay long, as he couldn’t afford to feed me. It was clear that he wanted me to feel grateful for his help, and he told me to go ahead and make myself breakfast while he went off to work. I had very little money at that point, having lost $50, half of all the money I’d had a few days earlier, and I was feeling a bit desperate.
When he came home later, it seemed clear from a number of things he said, that, if I were to be open to sex, he could possibly put me up longer. That was consistent with his previous attempts, and I figured I should consider that. However, the sight of him naked didn’t excite me, in fact, I was totally flaccid, and couldn’t get it up anyway. That seemed to settle the issue for him. Somehow, people always seem to assume one can get into something they have no interest in, if only they try. It often doesn’t work for heterosexual relationships; so there wasn’t any reason to expect it would work for a homosexual relationship either, except that young men seem to always be ready for sex at any time.
I really do think that there has to be some physical attraction, and some hormonal signaling, for this whole sexual attraction thing to work. I don’t think one should ever have sex with someone one is not attracted to. Random sex with strangers is just not a good idea, in my opinion.
So, that is what I told the couple. The woman still wanted to have sex with me, and, as had happened before, the man said he would just watch. I had turned down that offer as a young man, but I was very much interested in this woman, so I was considering it when I woke up.
Ah well, it would have been a much more interesting dream, I think.
Once, while I was young, tanned and muscular, I met a couple who invited me to their home for a party, and since I didn’t have a car, they drove me there. However, there was no party, except for the three of us, and the man had made that offer: I could have sex with his wife, if he could watch. It was the first I’d ever heard of such a thing. I considered it for a nanosecond, but at 25 years of age, I turned them down. I felt vulnerable, and a bit worried about what would happen. Rape came to mind. Being bound and tortured came to mind. But, most of all, I knew damn well I couldn’t have enjoyed myself with the woman with anyone else watching, much less her husband.
Once I told them I wasn’t interested, we had a few drinks, talked some, and slept, since it was very late at night. I slept on the couch and they didn’t bother me. In the morning they drove me back to where I lived. I never heard from them again, but it was fascinating to learn that there where people who did such things.
I don’t know why all this bubbled out of memory last night.
Perhaps I was curious about what my stepdaughter was up to. She had texted me to pick her up from work, but hadn’t said where she was going, Her evening class was over, and I thought she might want to have me take her food shopping, since she doesn’t drive. However, she had wanted me to take her to a certain bar, a favorite of hers, one not far from where I live. I was going to be running with my running group, and would have to turn around as soon as I dropped her off, and go right back to near where I’d picked her up. I remarked on that, since I thought it was kind of funny. She was apologetic, as she thought it would be easy for me, since I’d be so close to my home.
I asked her if she was meeting someone, and she said, “Yes.” I asked her if she was having dinner or just drinks. She said, “Dinner.” And she said, “Bye, See you next time.” I was curious who she was meeting, but she didn’t seem to want to say, or give me any information; I was curious why.
I love that woman a lot. She inspired me to run. She runs a lot, always has, except during her cancer treatment. It took a lot of work on her part to get back into running, but she runs marathons these days. I ran a half-marathon last year for the first time ever, four months after my heart attack, and will run one this year. She will run a full marathon at the same time, probably in little more time as it takes me to do a half.
When I got back from my run last night, I thought about stopping into the bar where she was, but I know she likes her privacy. I remember thinking that I’d have joined her if she’d asked, but three can be a crowd, and anyway, we don’t hang out much anymore.
When I say I love this woman, I mean it. I love her with all my heart, and always want her to have a great life. I’d love her even if I never saw her again, but I hope that doesn’t happen.
Some day, she’ll be married, with a kid perhaps. Maybe we’ll drift further apart. I used to drive her to and from work, but she doesn’t need me for that anymore, just an occasional lift here and there. I’m divorced from her mother these last seven years, and her mother avoids me like I have bubonic plague. No communication or rapprochement with that one. She’d kill me if she believed I had any designs on her daughter. Hell, my stepdaughter would quickly terminate all ties with me too, if she thought I’d ever thought of such things, even in a vague association with a dream.
I don’t know why I even brought it up. It is nice to have someone to love like her, even in a non-sexual, platonic way. In fact, I’d find life a whole lot less tolerable without her. It’s bad enough my cat got eaten by coyotes. “Situations tolerable” the Traveling Wilburys sang, and really, my life could be worse, but it could be better.
I feel like this is my last night on Earth. Almost one year ago I had a heart attack – on that day, I felt doom, oddly like the end of the world, or at least my world. I honestly felt like my life was finished, like I was going to die. If I hadn’t gotten myself to the heart hospital, I’d have been dead – so they say. At the hospital, I was shown an echocardiogram of my heart. The main right artery was nearly completely blocked. Only a trickle of blood was making it past the clot. The doctor convinced me that I needed balloon angioplasty, where they would break up the blockage with the balloon-tipped catheter and leave a stent in place. I asked about options. He said I could undergo drug therapy, but he didn’t recommend it. He seemed amused that I was unconvinced that angioplasty was my best option. I said to go ahead. They decided to insert the catheter via my arm, instead of my groin, after they shaved both areas. My groin may not have been the best choice since I hadn’t showered since the morning of the day before. They asked my if I’d taken Viagra. I had, on Saturday night – it had been a nice night of sex with a woman I knew at the time. It was then Monday. They probably thought I’d not showered since then. In actuality, I’d showered on Sunday morning, but masturbated Monday, that very morning, and washed up, but had not had time to take a full shower. I had had to rush off to pick my stepdaughter up and get her to work on time.
I felt fine that morning, and, in fact, donated a pint of blood after I’d dropped my stepdaughter off. My blood pressure was OK, and my pulse steady, and all seemed fine; my cholesterol levels have always been good. They told me to go eat a big breakfast. Taking them up on that, I stopped at a breakfast buffet. I had a pile of bacon, a little bit of scrambled eggs, some carne adovada, a small waffle, some fruit and coffee. I felt great. I went home and relaxed, played around on my computer: checking the status of things I had for sale on eBay, reading email, looking at my blogs on WordPress. I picked up a book and read for a while. It was then that I felt the weird pressure in my chest that wouldn’t go away and kept getting worse. Nothing I did helped. The feeling of doom crept in. Death. An ending. It’s over. All that went through my mind. No pain. No numbness. No nausea. Nothing but the most unusual sense of impending doom, and the pressure in my chest. I survived.
No heart attack now. I’m off most of the medications. I’m supposed to keep taking aspirin every day for the rest of my life. I’m still taking a statin drug to keep my cholesterol down. It’s lower than it’s ever been in my life. I also take a drug to fight off acid reflux. It helps. However, I don’t feel like taking any more drugs. I checked my blood pressure the other day, and it was higher than it’s ever been in my entire life! Way higher. I never had a problem with hypertension before. I started training for a half-marathon shortly after the heart attack, and ran it in October: 13.1 miles in three hours. Slow, but I made it. I had never run before. I’ve been running since, but not lately – I’ve had too many conflicts, what with work at a winery, and being on a movie set, and hiking sometimes in the mountain. Somehow I am busy, even five years after I retired from my day job. All is well.
Psychologically? I don’t know. I came back from visiting a friend who just had cancer surgery a few days ago. She had her thyroid removed, and her parathyroid relocated. We visited a bit, and she said she was tired, and wanted to nap. I left, but later saw that she was on Facebook, and at dinner with friends. She hadn’t mentioned that. I’d offered to take her out, or pick something up, but she’d said no. Well, that felt odd.
Watched a movie tonight: The Secret LIfe of Walter Mitty. Great movie. Easy to identify with the main character. Just before it ended I heard a muffled explosion from my kitchen. I was engrossed in the movie and didn’t want to get up. But then, I heard the sound of water running, and dripping, and I had no idea what it could be. I paused to see what the hell it was, and discovered my kitchen cabinet leaking. A bottle of Blackberry wine that came from the winery I work at, but had been opened by my stepdaughter, and recorked, had exploded and was pouring out over the countertop. She hadn’t liked it, and had given it to me. I grabbed some towels to mop it up, left them in place and watched the rest of the movie. Since then I’ve cleaned up a little, taken most everything out of two shelves and wiped up all the wine. I still need to wash it out. My whole house smells like wine now. It’s past time I should be in bed. I need to get up in 5 hours to drive to Santa Fé to work with the film crew. It’s the last day, day 13 of filming. It is a Sci Fi TV pilot. Whether or not it will ever be seen by anyone but ourselves, I can’t say. It’s an excellent concept, and everyone has worked hard. Very low-budget. Most of us worked for free. As extras and crew we’re not paid (except coffee, donuts, fruit, cheese, water and pizza). The actors are paid, although not much.
It feels like the end to me. Running through my head is the idea I can’t shake: that this is my last night ever, that tomorrow is my last day, ever. I don’t know why. I’m being melodramatic. I’m foolish. I know better, but not much inspires me to write anymore. This does. What if this is my last night?
It is so, because murder is a legal term for killing not sanctioned by society. If all killing were murder, then executions would be murder. If all killing was murder, then any death in wartime would be murder: killing the enemy? murder, friendly fire? murder. Because we sanction those things, we do not define them as murder. Recently I came across the comparison of the fines and penalties for harming the eggs of protected species, like Eagles, and human fetuses. The argument appears to be that if it’s wrong to destroy eagle eggs, then it is wrong to kill human fetuses as well. This does not follow logically. The Eagle, for one, although recovering, is an endangered species, and the fine is an attempt to allow that species to continue. Does anyone, really, anyone, believe that abortion is killing the human race? That we are in danger of dying out as a species because of abortion? No, of course not. Hell, we continue to proliferate, for now. What does threaten the survival of the human race is pollution of the air and water, and eradication of too many animal species. Life on Earth is a balancing act.
When we kill off entire species, we remove an element from the balance. For example, animals are usually either prey for some other animal, or prey on some other animal, or are both. If a species goes, its actions in the balance of things go too. The result can be overpopulation of that animals prey, or an absence of prey for others, whether it was mammalian or insect, or aquatic in nature. Sometimes, another animal can fill the void, sometimes not. Sometimes, the death of a species results in the death of many other species. Some argue we are in the middle of just such an effect now, where the death of so many thousands of species has reached a point of cascade, wherein it is impossible to stop, and we will be left with only humans, for a short time. For, regardless of whether one is vegetarian or not, humans are dependent on animal life for our survival.
There are so many interactions between animals and plants, between animals and insects (another animal, but I’m making a point here), between animals and the air we breathe and the water we drink. Humanity would cease to exist long before the last animal species was wiped out, because it is a codependency A good example of codependency is that between wolves and deer. Too many wolves, and the deer are removed. Not enough wolves, and the deer overpopulate, then overgraze the available resources and die out en masse from starvation. Hunting laws help keep that balance, but hunting laws are not going to keep us alive when all the predators are gone, or when all the prey is, or when all the bugs are gone. There are billions upon billions of interactions in the world that result in life for humans, and we can’t imitate them all. That’s the reason for endangered species laws.
Be all that as it may be, however, I’ve strayed too far from the point. The point is that killing is not murder, legally. Abortion is NOT murder, legally. There is a movement among Evangelical Christians to define life as beginning from the moment of conception, frivolous and stupid idea that it is. Does the world celebrate conception days, or birthdays? Most of us know that life begins at birth. No one wants to see a baby killed. However, killing living, breathing human beings is almost universally illegal, except for executions, and in war, or self-defense, or by accident. Killing is not and cannot ever be considered murder in all cases. Killing a fetus is just such a case.
Killing a human fetus, is not, for the time being, murder. There was a time when it was. Murder is a relative term, depending entirely on what the society making the laws believes.
For, if killing a fetus is murder, regardless of the law, then so is execution, war, and accidental death. We don’t seem to agree on this. Those who want life defined as beginning from the moment of conception, can then justify making all abortion illegal. However, almost all of them accept execution, and war, and do not want those things to be illegal. It is a very inconsistent, illogical and convenient. Is all killing murder? or not? Does a woman who slips and falls murder her fetus? or a woman who is involved in a car accident or other such incident that results in the fetus’s death murder that fetus? Are they murderers? How many exceptions will the true believers accept in order to make abortion illegal again?
But then, there is that other question. If one is opposed to all killing, and all killing is murder, then eating animals is certainly murder, for animals are often cruelly killed, tortured and abused in the process of becoming what we refer to as meat. MEAT is dead animal flesh. The animal had to be killed for that. If killing is murder, than eating meat condones murder. Hah! you say? animals are not human. Why is that? Very convenient. We can kill, that is, terminate any life we want, as long as it isn’t what society defines as human. Funny how most animal fetuses, including human fetuses, look exactly alike in the womb at some point. It is in the development that a fetus becomes an animal or a human. So somehow, people argue, animals and people are not the same, and it is OK to kill animals for food, even if they resemble us, because well, they are not human – by law. Again, it is a legal fiction that animals and people are not protected from killing in the same way. There are animal cruelty laws, but those usually apply only to pets, and ranch animals like horses, which often are a kind of pet. Slaughterhouses kill every day, and we don’t blink an eye at that.
So again, I have to ask, why is a human fetus, unborn, not yet even breathing, more important than a living, breathing animal? The historical answer has always been: the soul. Biblical teachings have it that human beings are special, are endowed with souls by their creator. Animals, according to organized religion, are said to have no soul, therefore, it is legal to kill them. And, kill them we do, in the millions every day, and yet it is not murder, because we do not define it as such. So it is with abortion: when it is legal, it is not murder.
So, the whole question of abortion as murder comes down to this soul, a religious belief that sets humans apart from animals, for the purpose of allowing us to kill animals without shame or repercussion.
Some people do not believe in the concept of souls.
Some people believe that all living things have souls.
Some people selectively believe that only humans have souls.
So, what life-begins-at-conception laws and anti-abortion laws really are, are an attempt to impose, legally, the belief on all people, that souls exist, that a human fetus, alone of all creatures, has a soul, and therefore cannot be killed. This attempt is only possible if one does not care what other people believe. Lately, I see all these complaints from the politically-motivated-religious right that they are being persecuted for their beliefs. Somehow, it is persecution to resist their attempts to force their beliefs on those of us who do not share those beliefs? This has happened throughout the history of organized religion. Those who believe have killed those who do not believe the same things, or believe in the same way. “That was in the past,” they say. Bull. It is happening again. This same group of self-righteous religious fanatics want to make providing access to abortion, or having an abortion a Capital Crime. Again, those motivated by their belief that they are right and the rest of us are wrong, want to kill everyone who does not accede to their beliefs, and they want it to be legal to do so.
That is the essence of organized religion: do what I say, or you will die, for I am right, and you are wrong. And you seriously think I shouldn’t be offended by that? You seriously think I shouldn’t fear your blatant attempts to legislate your particular brand of morality? to make everyone follow your beliefs by law or die?
THINK AGAIN.
And think about this: you have no soul, no Christian compassion, no love — if you have someone executed for having or assisting an abortion.
I have such an odd feeling, as though I have no future. I have cleaned up my house, put things away, and find myself thinking that it is ready for the estate sale after I die. It keeps running through my head that I haven’t much time left. Last night I even thought that my due date is coming up sooner than later. All bills are paid for the month. The rent check, the book I sold, and the Netflix movie are all in the mail.
I watched The Man Who Wasn’t There last night. Perhaps it influenced me too much. In identifying with the protagonist, I ended up being depressed. Of course, I never have to dig too deep to find such feelings. Been that way for some time now. I don’t feel sad as such. I just have this gut feeling that I will die soon. I kept getting the idea running through my head last night that once I leave my house today I will never return. That could mean different things, but it’s hard to imagine not returning to my house if I’m still alive.
I hope someone takes care of my cats.
UPDATE
Someone read this post today, so I pulled it up. I’d forgotten about it. Well, here I am 12 years later, still alive, on August 5, 2023. The cats, however, are gone. The orange one actually disappeared. I suspect he is one of the orange-striped cats that live a mile and a half from me. People on Next Door posted photos of the cats, which live outdoors, and are fed by people in the neighborhood. I’ve been through the neighborhood recently, and one of them is a dead ringer for my old cat. His markings are identical, but more to the point, he acts the same – looked at me, and appeared disinterested. I called him – no response. I whistled for him which he had always responded to, but it’s been many years since he disappeared one night at dinnertime. He was sitting on the porch of a house, so I didn’t want to just walk up to someone’s porch unannounced. If they were home, they hadn’t noticed me calling and whistling. A few years after he disappeared, I saw what looked exactly like him, behind a fence behind the Senior Center a little further away. He had immediately stood up when I called him, then lay back down and crossed his front legs – very typical behavior for him. I was blocking the street with my car, so I circled around to look for him and try again, but he was gone. I looked many times because it’s close to the Post Office I go to, but never saw him again, unless it’s the one living down the road from me.
I had already picked up a companion cat for the lonely black and white cat. She became listless after the orange one disappeared, always scanning for him, staring into the spaces he might appear from. The new cat, a white one, was male. The black and white was female. They ignored each other, at first, and didn’t seem to want to cuddle or play or screw as the missing cat liked to do. Eventually, I caught them chasing each other around the house sometimes, but that was the extent of it. She would go out, and he mostly stayed inside on the bed. The female developed a skin problem, losing some hair from biting the area on her back. The vet prescribed an ointment that cleared that up, and her hair returned. She seemed fine. But shortly after that went into a fast decline, not eating or drinking. She recovered a bit, and was drinking water, but suddenly died. I suspect it was the rabies shot the vet gave her while she was sick when I took her in, or she picked something up while she was there. She became stiff in her walk and was falling down one night, but moving around. When she plopped down in the bathroom entrance for a long time, I picked her up. I knew she was dying. She would never have let me pick her up otherwise. I put her on my lap and petted her, continuously. She looked at me from time to time. I wetted my finger to wet her tongue since it was hanging out, but it didn’t help. She died at some point and was already stiff with rigor mortis.
The white cat walked by and had no interest in her. Months later, he died in much the same way one night, getting stiff, and having trouble moving. I helped him stand to drink water. He drank often, with my help, but died that same night while I was out briefly. I should have stayed with him until he was gone.
So, no more cats, now or ever. I loved that orange-striped cat, and his mate, who had shown up at my house a year after he had. They were a loving couple. I loved them, and they stayed with me, never straying far even though they had a cat door to come and go. The white one was OK, and I treated him well. When he died I took him to the city shelter for disposal. They asked me if I wanted a cast of his pawprint as a memento, but I certainly did not.
I still miss that orange and white striped cat. I raised him from a kitten. He was the best. The black and white one never sat on my lap or let me pick her up, but she slept in the bed with me and him until she died. I gave away all their stuff: litter box, catnip, cat toys, food, food bowls, and water feeder. No more cats.
She said to me that I was lazy, that was why I was with her, that I was too lazy to look for love. She implied that was why I loved her. I think she felt she wasn’t good enough for anyone to fall in love with. She also said that I didn’t love her, I loved everyone. She was a hard person to love. She would not tell me she loved me, and, it’s likely she didn’t. She was never affectionate; she never touched me on her own. She was rarely passionate. I could touch her, but not too much, usually only after sex, and then we could cuddle together for a short while. If it was sex on the rare night, she would turn away quickly to her own spot on the far side of the bed. If it was a weekend morning, then she would get up shortly after sex, so the cuddling was short. She slept late on weekends, and told me never, ever, to wake her. I woke early on weekend mornings, and I waited for her to wake for hours sometimes. Over the years, she began to sleep late, wake up suddenly and jump out of bed before I could touch her.
Sometimes she would let me put my arms around her while she worked in the kitchen, but she wouldn’t stop what she was doing. Usually she’d move away or brush me off. She seemed to like it sometimes, but never for long. If I persisted, she said all I wanted was sex.
She never came to me for sex. Sometimes she allowed it; that was my impression. I liked sex, sure; never seemed to get enough. I liked sex with her, even though it was so one-sided. During the four years we dated before marriage and for a few years after that, we’d often had sex multiple times in an evening. One morning, I remarked to her in surprise that we’d had sex five times since the night before, and she was shocked; she didn’t remember the middle-of-the-night sex at all. That puzzled me for years. It was rare for her to orgasm, and she said she didn’t mind. She once told me that she had orgasms in her sleep. She thought that was the only time she had them. I knew better. She would orgasm during sex, sure enough, but only after a night of drinking. She had to be really drunk, and her body arched, and shuddered, and sounds came from deep within her chest. Afterward, she passed out. It was years before I found out that she just didn’t remember such things. I always thought it odd that she said she never had orgasms, no matter what I did, when I’d heard her moan softly and felt her breath quicken. And she breathed hard and fast and I kept going as long as I could, and her excitement excited me and I’d go crazy with lust for her. I never wanted to stop when she seemed to actually be enjoying it. I never knew if I pleased her, or if I disappointed, because she never said anything. After years of marriage, she would often just signal that that was enough, and I should stop.
I finally put it all together. It happened one time that we were out of town, staying at a motel in Santa Fe. We ate dinner and drank a lot. We drank way too much, and the increase in altitude made the drinks work faster, and we headed off to bed. It was not often, away from home, that she’d agree to sex, but this night was different, and we both got our clothes off quickly. She said that she had to use the bathroom. I don’t know when she came back. I woke up shortly afterward to find her nude, and asleep. It was a hard night for me in both meanings. I was aroused by her nude body always. She was out cold. I once heard a neighbor tell how he often had sex with his wife when she was passed out drunk. He loved for her to get drunk. That wasn’t me, however. I couldn’t see having sex without mutual desire, or at least acquiescence. I snuggled up to her, but I couldn’t fall asleep. I was aroused, probably because it had been awhile, and also she was nude in bed, which didn’t happen anymore. She always slept in a heavy nightshirt and socks. In the summer she’d wear something lighter, but always there were the socks. When I could snuggle with her, I’d get my hands inside her night clothes to feel her warm body, but often not until she was asleep. She always said she was too hot. She insisted on sleeping under a thick comforter all year long. She said it made her feel good, but she would throw it off several times a night.
Once, on a cold night, I awoke shivering and found neither of us covered. I pulled the comforter up over both of us, which woke her up. She asked me why I’d covered her. I told her it was cold; I thought she’d want to be covered. She yelled at me, angrily, to never cover her or uncover her. She thought I had been uncovering her at night.
On this particular night in Santa Fe I couldn’t sleep. It was a combination of the excessive alcohol and my desire for her. I tried falling asleep, but I couldn’t. I felt her soft belly and cupped my hands around her breasts. My rock-hard penis was nestled against her ass, and it wouldn’t settle down. I felt the curve of her hips and her soft thighs. I caressed her arms. I dared to rest my hand on her mound. She never woke. I was restless and excited. I wanted her so bad. Towards morning I was exhausted. It had been a long night. I dozed off only after light came in the crack between the heavy curtains, but not for long. I woke and dozed, woke and dozed, always with a hard on. Finally she was awake. I snuggled up against her, touched her, kissed her, and she pushed me off, gently this time. I persisted, however, and she said, “We already had sex.” I was incredulous. “What! We didn’t.” I told her she was wrong, that I would know. She insisted. She said that since she was naked, she knew we’d had sex. I struggled for words. It was impossible. There was no stickiness, no wet spot on the bed, no smells, and besides, sex is not something I have ever forgotten. She insisted we must have, but, after a quick trip to the bathroom, she came back to bed and agreed. It was too late for me. I was dead tired, and hung over. My penis was not very stiff, and I couldn’t keep it erect for more than a minute. I had to just give up. She said nothing. We got up and went to breakfast.
But, after that, I knew why she thought she never had orgasms, why she thought we didn’t have sex when we had, and why she thought we’d had sex when we hadn’t. She blacked out. She is one of those drunks who doesn’t remember what she did the night before. All those times we had sex after Thursday night dancing and drinking – she didn’t remember it. I think she remembered mostly the morning sex, the quick rushed sex because we both had to go to work. Years of long Thursday nights, and lots of sex that she would never remember. Orgasms she would never remember. My efforts to please her for nothing. I enjoyed the sex, but it was only a chore for her, something one does for someone else’s benefit. Did it mean she loved me? I guess I’ll never know. She never said. It’s been four years since I’ve seen her. I wrote her, without a reply. I sent her a book with a note in it, asking if we could get together to talk, see if we had misunderstood each other, if there was anything to say; she said no. I called her when her daughter had to travel to Texas for surgery, offered my help, offered to drive, share a motel room, or buy her a plane ticket. She said she’d think about it, that her sister might fly in from LA and go with her, but she never called me back. I called her and she said her son was taking her, and she didn’t want me there. My step-daughter said not to come, that it would just upset her mom more than she was already.
She lives alone now, as do I. She told her daughter once that she had never been alone before. She’d gone from home to marriage, and even after her first divorce, she’d had the kids with her. Now she is alone. She has her alcohol, and her phone and her sisters and friends to call long distance. Her son calls her nearly every day or she calls him. But, she doesn’t need anyone. She thinks she has always been this way, because she doesn’t remember when I held her hand, when I cuddled her, when I touched her and fucked her, and loved her, and only her, for all I was worth. She just doesn’t remember when someone really loved her, and when she thinks of me at all, she knows I didn’t love her, because I just love everyone.
Just what the fuck is depression anyway? I tried researching it, after experiencing it for a few years. Got medication simultaneously with counseling. I was definitely depressed.
Depression, which doctors call major depressive disorder, isn’t something you can just “snap out of.”
Dramatic change in appetite, often with weight gain or loss
Extreme difficulty concentrating
Fatigue and lack of energy
Feelings of hopelessness and helplessness
Feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, and inappropriate guilt
Inactivity and withdrawal from usual activities, a loss of interest or pleasure in activities that were once enjoyed (such as sex)
Thoughts of death or suicide
Trouble sleeping or excessive sleeping
Major depression disorder, according to the Mayo Clinic, is when a person has five or more symptoms of depression for at least 2 weeks. In addition, people with major depression often have behavior changes, such as new eating and sleeping patterns.
Depression can appear as anger and discouragement, rather than as feelings of hopelessness and helplessness. If depression is very severe, there may also be psychotic symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions. These symptoms may focus on themes of guilt, inadequacy, or disease. It is thought to be caused by an imbalance of brain chemicals and other factors.
However. Hmmph. However, none of this says what depression is, or where it comes from. Obviously, trauma can bring it on: the loss of a loved one, a pet, a friend, or the end of a marriage, love affair, or even a job. Many things can trigger depression. If it is caused solely by a chemical imbalance, then it would be entirely random, in my opinion. People in all walks of life would be depressed for absolutely no discernible reason, whereas most of us can attribute those feelings to something that happened. Everyone deals with these things in different ways, and, in fact, it is common for everyone to be depressed at some time. So, to follow the medical opinions, I should talk about major depressive disorder, that thing that just doesn’t go away for some people sometimes.
I think I know what it is, and where it comes from. I’m not a doctor, neither an M.D., a psychologist nor a psychiatrist.
Now, Wikipedia says: “The biopsychosocial model proposes that biological, psychological, and social factors all play a role in causing depression. The diathesis–stress model specifies that depression results when a preexisting vulnerability, or diathesis, is activated by stressful life events. The preexisting vulnerability can be either genetic, implying an interaction between nature and nurture, or schematic, resulting from views of the world learned in childhood.”
Blah, blah, blah.
I think it is nothing more than our reaction to pain. Pain, as many of us know, decreases in intensity after we suffer it for a time. Runners, torture victims, accident victims, and victims of disease know what I’m talking about. There may be a variety of things involved, but we all commonly think about endorphins kicking in, numbing us to pain after awhile.
Endorphins (“endogenous morphine”) are endogenous opioid peptides that function as neurotransmitters. They are produced by the pituitary gland and the hypothalamus in vertebrates during exercise, excitement, pain, consumption of spicy food, love and orgasm, and they resemble the opiates in their abilities to produce analgesia and a feeling of well-being.
Well-being after sex, yeah, I know that one pretty well. I also like chile, red or green, and sure enough, a blast of really hot spicy food brings about a lessening of the hotness after a short time. I can then eat hotter chile, but I pay for it later. So, one thing to notice is that this morphine-like substance we produce in our bodies doesn’t last very long. But, we can produce it over and over again, in response to various stimuli, including stress. Some of us experience stress daily, so we must also be producing endorphins daily.
Here’s what I think: depression is our bodies’ response to psychological pain. Depression is our psychological morphine, producing analgesia. We go numb in response to psychological pain. We cry, or grieve deeply, sometimes feeling an overwhelming crushing weight. We can’t function that way. We have to go to work, or continue our normal routines, so we have to push those feelings aside just enough to function. Depression is the result. If it was a relatively minor pain, we may work it out through continuing our normal routines. Sometimes, however, the pain was severe, or was perceived as severe, and continues to recur. We may keep brushing it aside. I think this is a normal mental defense, allowing us to continue our life until we can deal with the cause of the pain, similar to the production of adrenalin or endorphins, which give us temporary options for survival.
But, it has to be dealt with sooner or later. Just as an injury can be ignored while adrenalin or endorphin pumps through our bodies, eventually the injury must be treated. Depression is our temporary defense against psychological pain, but at some point, we have to deal with the “injury” that produced the depression in the first place. How we deal with the injury is what our mental health industry is all about. Alcohol and other central nervous system depressants slow normal brain function. In higher doses, some CNS depressants can become general anesthetics. Temporary. These measures are temporary, and can actually worsen depression.
An interesting tidbit I gleaned from the research literature is that endorphins attach themselves to areas of the brain associated with emotions (limbic and prefrontal areas). Perhaps endorphins are involved in the onset of depression? I do not know, nor care.
Do I know how to “cure” depression? No. Various treatments, combinations of certain drugs with counseling, are said to allow our minds and bodies to slip out of depression long enough to allow us to reprogram ourselves out of it. The length of treatment, types of drugs and types of counseling vary widely. The results vary widely.
Having just come out of a three-year long depression (at minimum), I have some observations:
1.) Depression is temporary.
2.) It does not occur 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
3.) In all likelihood, we prolong our depressive state ourselves.
4.) Whatever caused the initial depressive response must be overcome.
Yeah, I hear you: Overcome? How? Beats me. Drugs and counseling will help in some cases.
My best guess?
Here ’tis.
1.) Recognise that one is depressed.
2.) Trace the cause. This may take medical and psychological help.
3.) Eliminate the cause. This one is tricky.
I know that there are techniques often applied, common sense approaches, that may or not be accepted by all. For example, I have read that grief cannot be overcome unless one goes through various stages, like denial, and anger, leading to acceptance. I’ve found this to be true for depression. One cannot wish depression away – that is simply denial. Accept that one is depressed. And then get angry. Avoid violent solutions, because the depression will worsen, and be prolonged, but anger? Anger is good. Get really fucking angry. Maybe one thinks it was all their own fault. Let me tell you, getting angry with oneself doesn’t do a whole lot. What hurt you badly? What was the thing that drove you over the edge? Was it your boss, your spouse, your ex, your lover, your sibling, your parent? Hate them. Your injury? Hate it. Give it all you’ve got. Hate your boss, your spouse, your ex, the negligent driver, the government regulation, the politician? Hate them. Hate, hate, hate, hate, hate. Give into it. Feel the vindication, the release, the shifting of the pain from yourself somewhere else. When you’ve gotten the focus off of you and onto the cause, let it go. Forget? No. We can never forget. But we can let the anger go, and the pain goes with it. Then focus on change. Get away from the source of the pain if you can, or confront it. Attempt to change the situation that caused the pain in the first place. We all know what we have to do. If we don’t, the pain will hit us again, and we will be depressed again.
Do you know that odd feeling in your throat when you get emotional? It tightens up, you find it hard to breathe, and maybe your eyes water. Happens from time to time. Sometimes I watch a sentimental movie and feel that. There was a time when I felt deep regret over a lost love and I’d get that way. Doesn’t seem to happen much anymore. It’s an odd feeling, and only seems to occur with a sense of great loss, or empathy with someone’s loss or near loss. I remember when my step-daughter survived cancer. If it had been something I was watching in a movie, I’d have choked up like that, with my throat tensed and a feeling of being overcome by emotion, regardless of outcome. However, when Maya survived the surgery, and then again, when I found out the tumor was gone, after a whole lot of radiation and chemo treatments, I felt joy. It was the purest joy I’d ever felt. I was happy. My throat did not tighten, I did not cry, I did not feel overcome with emotion. I was, instead, blissfully happy. I stayed that way for a while. I am, of course glad that she is fine today, and in complete remission, and it is not the type of tumor, being so rare, that she is likely to experience ever again. The joy I felt back then was for her. I love her so much. I don’t need anything from her, don’t need to have love from her, or anything at all. I wish her a long and happy life.
Mine is not so happy. I experienced depression for a time in my life; got counseling, and medication. It may have made a difference. There was a change from that deep hopeless depression. I was sad a lot. It was sometimes overwhelming. There was an almost physical pain, tightness in my chest, sighing. That part is over now.
As always, I stay busy, even though I’ve retired from work. I hike, I snowshoe, I read, I watch movies. I buy things online and in junk/antique stores. I don’t feel sad. I eat a lot, which is not good, but it hardly seems to matter anymore. Nothing does really. It’s not the way I ever thought I’d be: just drifting along. No sadness, but no joy either. It is hard to enjoy a movie, a good book, a good sleep.
Sometimes I nap and I wake up nearly suffocating. It is dark and terrifying. My throat feels like it has been closed up. My brain feels oxygen starved. I feel like I’m dying. It happens more and more often. I don’t know what it means for sure. I’ve no known breathing problems. I had pneumonia as a child a couple times, so perhaps my lungs are not all that strong, and I had asthma until I was twelve years old. I don’t feel like there is anything wrong with my lungs now. My hikes take me up over 10,000 feet above sea level sometimes. It’s not all that easy, but I survive. I hiked near that altitude once for 20 miles.
I don’t know what to make of all this sometimes. I think I will drop off to sleep one day soon and I will just stop breathing. That doesn’t seem to scare me. It’s just the waking up unable to think straight and feeling like I’m dying that ever bothers me. When I couple that with my lack of joy in living, with a loss of interest in companionship or love, and with no enthusiasm for the sex that always made me happy, I wonder if this is it? Is my life over? Not in any figurative sense, but really. Is this what it feels like to die, or just to grow old?
I should do something, right? I try. I have a meeting tomorrow with people who want to change the world of politics. That used to excite me, but it’s more running on inertia now. I do the things I used to do, and new things too. I tried out to be a VJ ( a TV announcer/spokesperson), and it was good to try. Didn’t happen. I went to a local winery and I will be working there a couple days a week, with flexible days and hours. I might be serving/selling wine, or helping clear the ditches, or helping with new construction. I may be able to help with some of the tedious paperwork stuff, since I have some experience with maintaining inventory and budgets. It’s a new place for me. Something to do.
I don’t know if my life will change again. I tried the guitar, but I’m not doing much with that anymore. By now I thought I’d have a few dozens songs down. My photographs never sell, so I don’t know how much I will keep that up. My stories never sold, and I know they’re not that good. My poems pale next to most everything I hear or read. You’d think that would make me sad, but I don’t feel sad so much as tired. I don’t know what the point of it all is anymore. Going through the motions, eating, sleeping, doing things, watching things, reading, writing, working. I just don’t know. I know that people say, even when they’re dying, that life is a joy, and we can just enjoy every minute. Can’t say I feel like doing that.
In reality, I think my life is winding down. I think it may be ending soon. I can’t say why. It just seems like it. Sometimes the brain knows things we don’t consciously admit to, or recognize. Animals have been observed doing that: preparing themselves to die. They sometimes seem to know. Are people any different?
There are lots of things I can do: volunteer to help kids with their homework. Ask someone out. I have tried to get interested in other people, but the spark is just not there. It’s not here in the sense that perhaps there is no need anymore? If my life is going to end soon, then there really isn’t much point in anything. I look at that in the reverse direction, and I think, if there isn’t much point in anything anymore, then maybe that’s the sure sign that I am going to die soon. I have no regrets, no bucket list, no things I need to resolve. Death doesn’t scare me. Nothing scares me. Nothing excites me either, so that seems the same as death.
Well, tomorrow is another damn day. Who knows what will happen?
I had a dream last night:I was moving. I didn’t want to move. There were other people I was living with, and I didn’t want to go with them. I stayed in bed while people finished packing. I got up after awhile. There had been a very young kitten hanging around for awhile, feral, skittish. I didn’t know where it had come from. I saw it now, asleep by the bed. It looked so sweet and happy there. I went into the bathroom to pee and noticed little bits of cat shit around the toilet. Seems the kitten had decided to stick around. I thought about sticking around myself, just by myself. I heard a truck horn. There were to be two vehicles going. Four guys in one big truck and the two women in a car. I remember thinking it odd that the women and men were going separately, fearful that the women were going to disappear. That it was deliberate.
I went back to the cat, stared at it. I decided it was my cat. I could stay. Then I decided to go after all, but the cat was coming with me.
I happened to notice that today’s date, in the standard US nomenclature, is a palindrome: 01022010, if reading as January 2nd, 2010. That is the way most of us speak of the date in English in this country. Of course, it is sometimes written another way, as the 2nd of January, 2010. Under that convention, today’s date is 02012010, not a palindrome at all, and confusing. Of course, under that secondary convention, the palindrome for this year would be the 01 of February, 2010, or 01022010, but that dating convention leads to far more numerous palindromes. I prefer to use the first convention, by which the last such palindrome date was October 2nd, 2001, and, which is more interesting, the one before that was August 31, 1380!
Of note are these: October 10, 1010 (not a palindrome), although January 1st, 1010 was; December 12, 1212 is an interesting repeating two-digit number also, but, again, not a palindrome; and November 11, 1111 (now, that was quite a date!). Perhaps people don’t consider 11111111 as a palindrome?
So, assuming today is the palindrome for 2010, then one question that would arise is: when is the next such year? Obviously, it occurs on November 2nd, 2011; 11022011. However, no such date palindrome occurs again until 2020: 02022020. For those who put a lot of faith into numbers, it may mean something. It means nothing of importance to me, but, still, I find it interesting to note that our 12-month, approximately 30-day cycles yield such rare sequences of numbers.
This would all be so much simpler is there was only one conventional way to write a date. So, I’m looking forward to February 2nd of 2020, the first date in 1010 years that is unambiguously a palindrome by any convention, even one that puts the year first.
Is the next dual-use, unambiguous one after the year 2020 in March of 3030? There is, of course, Sept. 22, 2290, an ambiguous palindrome (It’s either 09222290 or 22092290), and October 3rd, 3001, (it’s either 10033001 or 03103001). Another 1010 years? I leave that to you, but I believe there is such a date. Tell me if you think you know what it is. There’s a hint in this post.
Another Valentine’s Day. People make fun of the day, and criticize it as meaningless commercial promotion for the greeting card and candy companies. I’ve often found, however, that when I’m in a serious relationship, it is satisfying to do something nice for your lover on a day that is dedicated to love. Once I didn’t, by mistake, actually. I was one of those who felt that gifts or flowers as sentiment should come spontaneously and randomly, and I acted on that. However, I knew, without a doubt, that my lover at the time would want to be treated special, so I had a plan. Since I rode a bicycle every day to and from work, it was difficult to range very far in getting flowers, which is what I thought most appropriate at that time. And, of course, arranging to have them delivered never occurred to me. Every day, I passed a flower shop on the way home. I had never had a real girlfriend or lover to buy flowers for before, and had no idea how early one has to buy these things. However, the shop would certainly have had some kind of flowers left, even if they weren’t roses. So, I left work, and headed home, climbing the slope of “nine-mile” hill steadily. I reached the flower shop, and THEY WERE CLOSED! As in shut down and moved away. Crap. I couldn’t believe it. I knew of none other within miles, and I was expected at home anyway. I went home, and promptly told my love what had happened, and she said it was OK, and no big deal. DON”T EVER BELIEVE THAT. It is just not true. Later, after she’d left me for someone else, and we’d become friends again, years later, she told me that’s when she changed her mind about me. She was actually pretty upset. She met this guy coincidentally the next day, and she became interested in him.
Be that all as it may be, however, I’ve been with many women since then, and I never screwed up like that again, always giving flowers and treats, and not because I had to, but because I wanted to. So, I like Valentine’s Day. However, since that last divorce and my subsequent unrequited love infatuation and rejection, I don’t think much of this approaching day of love. It sucks, really. I added a note to myself on my appointments calendar for the 14th: Kill myself. Now, it’s unlikely I will. For one thing, I’ve gotten really interested in learning guitar, and I practice every day. I understand a little bit of the nomenclature, and I’m training my fingers, and making slow progress. It may take a long time, but I think I can do it. So, since I want to see how well I can do, I should stick around a bit longer.
Before this, I joined the Mountain Club, however. I went on four hikes, up and down hilly terrain, for lengths of 8 to ten miles, and enjoyed it. Loved the slowly increasing strength and stamina, but I haven’t been hiking since January 1. I used to go hiking on level ground about 4 miles every Sunday before going mountaineering, but I haven’t even done that. Now I’m focused on guitar. I wonder if I can keep my interest in that? Or will I lose the excitement that grips me now? If I do, will I decide there’s no further reason to keep on living? or will I find another item on my bucket list to throw myself into? I can’t predict, just can’t tell.
I watch so many, many movies these days. The TV is useless for much of anything else. I don’t know what I see in the movies. I like to escape, of course, but that is less appealing than it used to be. There are so many stories to see, ideas to hear, intrigues, and mysteries, and wonder. Still, I find it hard to sit still for movies anymore. I wander off and read, or check my email or auctions or Word Press stats, or play solitaire, and watch some more. It’s not so much the movies themselves, but that I am restless again, as restless as I was in 1973 and 1975 when I rode away from jobs and family and stability. I rode away the first time, but came back and tried again. In 1975 I rode away for good.
Movies seem to have relevance sometimes, but I am tired of extrapolating them into the myriad ways that they reflect my own life, or comment on it, or condemn it. They’re not as much fun as they used to be for me. Neither is my job, and my life, which once had purpose. It’s time to return to the carnival. We, most of us, speak of running away to join the circus, and that’s what I did so many years ago, although it turned out to be a carnival: no animals, well, live ones anyway. There were always the two-headed goats and five-legged cows, but they were actually in jars of formaldehyde, which you would only find out after you paid your money to see ’em. The marks always lined up to see those kind of things, and the painted signs outside always made it seem like the animals were real, and just inside. But, a carnival doesn’t put on animal shows, just people shows. Mostly it’s all “punk” kiddie rides and ferris wheels, and all the other mechanized thrill rides, with music blaring from giant speakers. No big top, no tents really. Lots of trucks, motor homes, and trailers. And electrical generators, of course. Need power for all that stuff. All those lights. All those popcorn “poppers” and games-of-chance “joints”. Try your luck, but you’re really buying cheap fluff. Hotdogs and ice cream and sodas. Eat and spend. Eat and spend. The real American dream. Carnies epitomize our values – buy low, sell high. Maximize profits. The ideal is to get the most for the absolute least you must provide in return. Provide thrills and escapism; promote gluttony for empty calories. Cheap thrills.
When I left the carnival, I realized that much of the world around me was the same, even Universities. It’s all sleight of hand, and manipulation, and cheap thrills. Education, sure, it’s important, but secondary to research grants that pay the bills. Stationary carnivals. My brain is tired from trying to keep it straight.
I went back to work, and finished college. I pay my bills, I eat a lot. I watch movies. I marry and divorce and marry and divorce again, and buy and spend and work and buy and spend. Cheap thrills. I am viewed as more respectable than a carny, but the differences are slight. Some towns only sit in one place, some move around, but we stay the same either way.
I can’t imagine I’d really want to work a carnival again. But, traveling is always good. Hiking? Bicycling? The physical activity is liberating. As you put distance behind you, it feels like a new world, a new beginning, and you can’t go back. All that walking or biking would be a waste if you went back. But, one doesn’t have to travel in the opposite direction to go back. I’ve been back to visit, but I live 1675 miles away. Where would I go away to now?
Time to ramble again. I have a glass of wine in hand, a white wine from the New Mexican winery San Felipe, that they call Moscato. Sweet, but not as much as a muscat. I sound like such a wine snob. Ha! I just shared my life with a wino for 14 years. After a hundred wine tastings, visits to California wine country, and traveling to every winery in New Mexico, I absorbed some of the lore.
Tonight I’ve been watching the 1979 movie, Being There, with Peters Sellers and Shirley MacLaine, and really enjoying it. I paused the movie to write this. The readout is 1:11:11. As with most movies, I only enjoy them if I put myself into the movie, and, much like a medical or psychology student studying disease, I imagine what I watch to apply to myself. The child-like gardener that Peter Sellers plays is easy to empathize with. He only knows how to do one thing, but somehow people imagine that he knows much more. Because of the way he’s dressed, and misinterpretations of his description of his life, he is taken to be more educated and intelligent than he really is. That’s where my imagination comes in. I am him, and imagine that I’ve always been this way. As far as imitating what I’ve read and watched and people I’ve known, I am. I also question if I am who people think I am. I say I work with DNA, which seems to impress people, but I backed into the position, working my way from lab work on rats and mice, to a research position extracting immunoglobulins from the glands of mice and purifying them, to working with proteins. I learned how to operate simple machines that can uncover the amino acid sequence of proteins, or take amino acids and assemble then into a protein. The machines simply take known science, and using valves and solenoids, deliver reagents in standard formulas with standard protocols. From there I learned to do almost the exact same thing with DNA, using very similar machines. At first I was not paid very well, but these days I make about half of what some of the better-paid professors make. I always live in dread that people will find me out – realize that I don’t really understand much of what I’m doing.
I’ve always wanted to be a scientist, but never could get through all the classes. I understood basic chemistry, physics, and math in high school, but college was another story. Laboratories were always fun, but genetics lectures, calculus, and physical chemistry bewildered me. Oh, I understood the lectures well enough, but I could never remember all the formulas, equations and pathways, and did miserably on tests. I persevered for a long time, finally passing several classes in calculus, basic genetics, basic physics, organic chemistry, and basic biochemistry, but even though I understood the purpose and usefulness of integrals and derivatives, and stoichiometry, the biology of cells, and vector analyses well enough, I can’t remember how to use them anymore. I can balance simple chemical equations, and my high school algebra never leaves me, but my understanding of the science of DNA is so rudimentary.
Just like the gardener, I stumble through life, getting credit for knowing far more than I know. What’s worse, it’s all falling away from me now as I age. I can barely type anymore, as I invert so many letters and words, even adding extra words, or leaving some out. Without editing, I hardly make sense. Without computers, I’d have failed to get through many of my final classes, and it’s much worse now. I just make too many mistakes, and don’t control my fingers all that well. The brain feels tired now. I have been playing chess, and doing OK, but only against a novice player. I don’t know how much longer I can continue to pretend that I have a clue what’s going on, or can concentrate long enough to do a job. I’d like to retire from life now. It’s been fun, but, really, it’s all a bit too much for me. People, and money, and relationships and reading and writing. I want to withdraw. I don’t want to be here anymore. But I stay. I work every day. I talk to people. I go to political rallies. I play chess. I still exist. Existence is not a sufficient raison d’etre. But, then again, why should I care about the reason for my continued being? Why does it matter to me? I think we all need a plan, something to shoot for. What is left me at this stage of life? Yes, yes, whatever I want. But, I seem to want less and less. To be a child again. That would be nice. To play, to move from one thing to the next, to have no place to be, nothing I must do. Being here.
Surely, we all can’t be simply dragging ourselves along this way, simply to drag ourselves along?
I see where things are going, and I’m not real happy about it, but they’re going to go where they go. I’m right in the middle of negotiations with my union local and the University. We’re not a typical sort of trade union; hell, most jobs in the USA aren’t trades anymore. Most jobs are turning into service jobs of one kind or another. A lot of our people are administrative assistants, (which is the new title for secretaries everywhere), or advisers or other desk jockeys. We live and work in a college town with a military base and a weapons lab and a big University. Even Enron has a chip plant nearby. The Sandia (Watermelon) and Manzano (Apple) Mountains are full of nuclear missiles. The anti-war people keep trying to get the city council to force the government to admit that the missiles are there, and that they are a target and hazard that we should be prepared for. There is the hope that we can get rid of those someday.
Our local is at the University. Education is our mission, and every department has a mission statement, just like the corporations and their imitators all over the country. Useless things, mission statements. Hardly anyone reads ‘em, and they don’t reflect anything except the way the grossly overpaid administrators felt the day of the retreat when they wrote ‘em.
We do our jobs. We put up with asinine supervisors and managers who have or are working on their business degrees, and hope to make something more of themselves. They squeeze staff, push ‘em around, and then move on to their next position, a step up somewhere, with a fuller resume, and a recommendation or two. We remain here, and try to keep our jobs. Myself, I work in a DNA research lab, mostly running robot-like machines that manipulate DNA. It’s a living. I’m the President of the local, for the last four years, and I’m really tired of negotiations. We’ve done well for the staff here. We have to lobby the State every year for our raises, insurance and health benefits, because they control the purse strings. Negotiations are entirely dependent on what was appropriated before we even set negotiation ground rules, but we go through the motions anyway. We dick around with the contract every year, trying to improve on protections for staff, and make management more accountable. Sometimes we win a little, sometimes it’s a draw. But, every year the contract gets a little better, and we lose more members.
Everyone we represent by law isn’t a member, and they don’t have to be, to be protected by the contract or get the raise we negotiate. In fact, it’s rare that there’s much difference between the benefits of being a dues-paying member and a free rider. Usually, for staff we cover, it’s a clean shot at a certain raise percentage, while people outside of our representation get whatever their supervisors decide out of what funds are available, which can vary quite a bit.
So, one of our members has a problem with the way she was treated. She was getting pushed around and we fought back. She got the promotion she deserved, but a lousy performance review. These reviews don’t mean a whole lot, but it bothers people because they worry about the reviews being used against them. In this member’s case, she is being retaliated against for fighting for herself. She didn’t like her review, but we can respond to ratings and comments with our own comments before signing the damn things. I told her to go ahead and sign hers, and make all the comments she wanted. Her bosses sent the thing to the personnel department, excuse me, Human Resources department, and they sent it back because it was incomplete.
This is damn boring stuff, ain’t it?
Anywho, once it came back, the review was changed, comments were added, and then it was sent back to be put in her permanent record, and all of this after it had already been signed. Illegal, and even against University policy. Human Resources did nothing, and just assumed that the correct version is in this woman’s file, even though she told them it wasn’t. It seems a small matter. However, a contract is a contract, and just as our union contract has the force of law behind it, so does any other contract made in this country, or at least it used to. When you sign a document, it doesn’t get changed afterwards, or it’s no longer an accurate or legal document. Everything is on our side in this. Today, a group of three union officers went to HR to see the personnel files and were refused. HR has a 24-hour rule about access, and they didn’t know that, so they were pissed off. So far, they are no repercussions to the small-scale confrontation, but, like I said earlier, I have a bad sense about where this is going. We have already made it clear this could be a legal matter. The union officers, who are also the negotiating team, are pissed off, and HR is wanting to meet. Meanwhile we have to meet the same people in negotiations in a couple more days.
I’m so tired of all this. Important rights are at stake, but someone is going to lose a job here, maybe even me. I’m so tired of my job, and I seem to have few reasons to even stay around here. I wanted to retire in a few years, and try writing, or part-time work at least. Getting divorced took away my chance at retirement. It wasn’t my idea, but my ex got the house. I get to keep my retirement income if I ever retire, but it won’t be enough to buy a house, and I’m too old to take out a long-term mortgage anyway. My retirement income won’t even be enough to afford a nice place to live, so at the moment, I have no idea what kind of future to look for.
It’s so easy to push people around, even at what the right-wing nuts like to call a liberal university. There are good people here, and good ideas, but the place is being run as a business, and the management of the University see our union as an outside business muscling in on their territory. There is certainly a territorial fight over turf involved in negotiations every year. We feel like we win a little, but then we hear of managers pushing people around, telling them to quit if they don’t like it, and getting rid of people who actually understand how the ever-changing rules and regulations work. We have a new financial system that took years to put into place and tweak, and it forces people to conform to it, instead of being just a useful tool. The bureaucratic mind loves it, since they expect everything to fit under its umbrella, but there’s always something we can’t do, or must do because of the accounting software structure. Most of the admin assistants have been turned into part-time accountants, and are given purchasing cards that spell the end of their jobs if lost or not properly accounted for, even if no wrong doing occurs. It’s a funny place.
Our Governor gets to appoint the Regents, a medieval nomenclature for the political appointees who run this place. He ran for President of the United States. He knows a lot about international politics and is a skilled negotiator, but, really, he does not know what goes on at this university, except that tuition for students has to keep going up.
03/13/09 UPDATE: UNM’s faculty voted no confidence in UNM President Schmidly, Executive Vice President David Harris, and President of the Board of Regents Jamie Koch. We’re still waiting to see what happens, as a new audit was also requested, but Governor Richardson visited campus and met with faculty. Shortly afterwards, Jamie Koch stepped down as President of the Board. Our Legislature is still in session, so we have yet to see if they will confirm Koch’s seat on the Board. They still need to confirm the new President of the Board. Meanwhile, the Board of Regents can’t meet, and UNM seems no worse for that. Harris needs to go too.
I ride my bike to work every day, or, I should say, I used to ride it every day until it wouldn’t start anymore. I jumped it from a car battery – wouldn’t turn over. I checked fuses, charged the battery, checked the fuel line, and the spark plugs. Everything seems good, but it won’t start; it just grinds and wears the battery down, even the jumper battery. I replaced the starter solenoid – no luck. I jumped the solenoid across the terminals and the bike still just grinds, over and over, but real fast. Now it seems the starter button is dead too. I finally give up. I decide to take it to the best repairman in town. I have to schedule an appointment, and they squeeze me in as a favor, since I want to ride in the Ride-for-Kids that benefits pediatric brain tumor research and treatment and provides scholarships for the kids too. My step daughter went with me last year, and after all she went through with her brain tumor, I really look forward to her company.
I had to find a vehicle to get the bike to the cycle shop, as the shop doesn’t have a tow truck. My friend Mark always has his good old Dodge, and after helping him build his house, he always lets me borrow it anytime I need it. He’s like that anyway. He’d lend anyone anything, even money, although his newest wife ameliorates that a bit, I think. I called him from work, left a message on his cell phone, and I wasn’t expecting a quick reply, as he’s often busy or traveling. Amazingly, he called back in 20 minutes or so, from his plane. He had just turned his phone back on and got my message. Good timing. He was off to speak somewhere. I told him what I needed, and he apologized for being out of town, and that the truck was not available – it was at the airport. I was prepared to go get it, pay for it, and put it back before he returned until he said, “But! There is another option!” (He often speaks in exclamation points, and loudly, as he is hard of hearing these days.) He said he had just bought another old truck, a ’59 Ford. It was in the field behind his house. “It’s a little tricky,” he said. I might have to spray the carburetor in order to get it to start. He had a can of spray on the seat, and the key was in the ignition.
So, OK, I come home after work, eat dinner, and head over to his place. I unlock his gate with the hidden key, park my car and lock it inside his fenced yard. It had been raining heavily the day before. The field is muddy. I traipse though the sticky mud. I close the truck’s tailgate, noting that the bed is outlined in leftover manure, so I know what he uses it for. It doesn’t start right off. I spray the air intake, several short bursts, as it says on the can. I try again – it fires right up! It is a very old looking, beat-up truck. However, it has all its windows, and they aren’t even cracked, which is damn good, because I can’t get stopped for anything, as the truck isn’t registered yet. The seat is high. It is narrower than the original, and welded in place in the center of the floor, so I can’t move it up, and it’s a long reach to the pedels. It reminds me a lot of the ’51 Dodge-post-office-parcel-post truck I used to drive. In the darkness, I can’t tell how many speeds it has. The lights come on, but go off if I turn the knob too far. I don’t have instrument lights, which is why I can’t tell right off how many gears the truck has. I thought it had four gears, but I can’t find fourth by feel. I put it in the gear where 1st was in my ’51, and head out, shifting into what I think are second and third. At the first stop the engine revs really high. I hit the gas and it dies. I spray the intake again, and it restarts. Off I go down the road. Playing with the light switch, I notice that I can get the instrument lights on, but it’s a delicate balance between having all lights, having only headlights, or having only instrument lights.
At every stop the engine races like the timing must be way the hell up, or the carburetor wildly adjusted to keep it running. It takes a while to understand the damn thing. I finally get a rhythm going for stopping: push the clutch in- holding it with my left foot – then tapping the gas before braking. I make it home in one piece, without the engine dying again.
In the morning I move the truck around (after spraying the air intake). I notice that I have put the truck in second gear, where I thought first was. It is the simple H pattern, but my tired brain and bad memory forgot all about that. I think it starts alright in second because it revs so fast. I slide a board from a small grassy hillock onto the bed. The bike is heavy at 550 pounds, so pushing it up a ramp isn’t going to be easy. I push the bike up onto the grass and run it towards the truck, but a neighbor stops to help and we push it on fairly easily. I’m wired on coffee, because I thought it would be a major effort by myself. I tie the bike down, noticing, in the light of day, all the colors. One door is a turquoise green, a fender is pink. The roof of the cab is painted white with black, zebra-like stripes. The rest of the truck is a faded pale blue, where it isn’t rusted through. The moistened manure smells really fine. I’m surprised my neighbors didn’t torch it the minute they saw it in the parking lot.
The truck fires right up this time and runs much the same, except after a few miles there is a popping noise from the accelerator, and it is suddenly unstuck, and I don’t have to hit it anymore to get it unstuck. Linkage? Anyway, it runs fine, but I try not to stop with the bike in the back. When I see the sign for the motorcycle shop, it is beautiful. I have never been so happy to arrive there. It takes three of us to get the bike down, and I abandon it there. Carl, the best bike mechanic in the world, chats a bit. I tell him how I am hoping to take my step daughter on the Ride-For-Kids in ten days, and how happy I am that she is healthy again. Carl tells me about his wife Teresa, who had three surgeries on her ovaries, and how one operation left her bleeding internally, but she is much better now. His mother has also been operated on, and had her hips replaced. It is early in the shop. No one else has come in yet, and he is relaxed and calm. Later, people will be lined up, and the phone will not stop ringing all day. It rings now once, and he picks it up, but it is a fax coming in. I tell him how busy I am these days, with little time to work on the bike, and he tells me how busy his life is. He is in his church choir, and also plays drums for the church’s band, so he is often practicing. My step-daughter is in a similar sort of church herself. I am not religious, thank god.
A couple men show up outside the door, so I head out. I notice the CD on the truck seat. It is my Honda Magna 1993-1997 manual. I run it back inside to give to Carl, but he has already gone back into the shop. The men are explaining what they need to Carl’s substitute helper. I don’t know her, but with Teresa out, someone has to be up front to order parts and help customers. I hear her tell them that the earliest possible day she can fit them in is a month and ten days away! I am a very, very lucky man.
What kind of life would I have without motorcycles and old trucks? It would be like drinking black coffee all the time just for the caffeine, without enjoying the drink.
Actually, to be specific, Seborrheic Keratoses (seb-o-REE-ick Ker-ah-TOE-sees).
I found this thing on my ass, of all places. It was a mostly round, raised area, with a brown circle, almost like a cell nucleus off to one side, and the rest was red. I went to see a doctor over a month ago, and got referred to a dermatologist. The doc said it wasn’t cancer, so I guess that’s why there was no big rush. Of course, it’s also because the University is trying out this new managed care thing, and rather than have an employee stop by the employee health clinic and get seen right away, I guess it’s better to make appointments, and wait for those to come around, if I can remember to even go. But, I’m straying from the story here.
So the dermatologist, over a month later, takes a look at it, and she says right off what it is. I’ve got a nice pamphlet explaining it all. So, nobody really knows why these things occur, but they’re not cancerous, and they’re not from sun exposure. That is pretty obvious, especially if you saw how white my ass is. I’ve never had sun shining on that part of my anatomy for very long. Here’s the salient point from the brochure: “…almost everybody will eventually develop at least of few of these growths. They are sometimes referred to as barnacles of old age.” How nice.
Real barnacles
“They become more common and more numerous with advancing age,” which is what my doc kept trying to say, without ever mentioning age. She said, “as we get wiser” and things like that, trying to be funny, I guess. I said, “You mean, as we get older and fatter?” She didn’t want to agree with that.
Anyway, my barnacle is irritated, probably by having my jeans rubbing against it all the time. Even though it isn’t dangerous to have one, these barnacles can itch or bleed, so they are often removed (among those of us with health insurance). Liquid nitrogen to the rescue! So I ended up having my ass frozen by Dr. Kim, a pretty young doctor. Not so bad.
Meanwhile, there are also actinic keratoses. The first doctor I went to noticed them on my forehead. They are little tiny hard bumps; they feel like a piece of sand glued to my forehead, and I’m always scratching them off. These I hadn’t given much thought to. I had felt them on my scalp before, and asked another doctor about them, but he tried to tell me they were just sand, and only after bugging him about it did he finally admit they were probably keratoses, which can be pre-cancerous. He dismissed it as insignificant and harmless, so I never worried about it. Hey, I’m getting old anyway, so who cares? Long story short, these are also called solar keratoses, because they are found on fair-skinned people who have had significant sun exposure; they are considered the earliest stage in the development of skin cancer (10% do become actual cancers). How nice.
Again, treatment #1 is freeze ’em right off with liquid nitrogen. That was more fun. However, it’s likely I have more, and will continue to develop more around my forehead and slowly receding hairline, so rather than make regular trips to have my face and scalp spot-frozen the rest of my life (the doc gives me another 30 years), there are other methods. One is a topical chemotherapy lotion that really reddens the skin for awhile ( that’ll look really nice all over my forehead), and the other is another cream that promotes an immune-type of response (also possibly creating red blotches all over my forehead) for a much longer time. I have a prescription for that, so once these frozen ones fall off, I will start using that. After three months: fours weeks of treatment, four none, four treatment, I should be through with these little things. The odd thing: the cream, Aldara, is also used for genital warts and actual skin cancers (basal cell carcinomas). In my incarnation as a cancer lab worker, I used to give skin cancer to rats, then treat them with combinations of drugs and radiation, before those treatments were tried on terminal cancer patients. Then I had to dissect them – skin cancer will eventually invade the entire body, organs, lungs, brains – not a pretty sight.
And, the moral of this story? Use sunscreen, especially when you’re young. The doc, the young pretty one, said I probably got these started when I was 18 or so. Actually, it was riding a bicycle around the country a few times in my 20s, but close enough. Never wore a hat much, and certainly never used sunscreen. Of course, my parents took us to the beach every summer as kids, and we always got sunburned, every single time. It wasn’t ’till I lived in Arizona for awhile, after bicycling in from the East Coast, and working outdoors there, that I ever had a sustainable tan of any kind. I told Dr. Kim that it was great: I was tanned and muscled for the first time in my life. She thought that was pretty funny, or wanted to me to think I was funny.
“Who’s that knocking on my door?” said the fair Young Maiden….”
Just call me Barnacle Bill the Sailor.
You should listen to or read the bawdy lyrics for Barnacle Bill the Sailor sometime.
UPDATE: 4/30/08. I’ve started treatment for the actinic keratoses. Weird! The first morning after treatment I could see more of the little bumps under the skin, and they stay visible. No reddening of the skin yet. I did wake up with acid reflux. Felt like acid in my throat. Later on, I felt so tired I was like the walking dead. Drank an extra coffee to get me through the day. I was unusually talkative, and even more unrestrained in what I said to people than usual. Suddenly, about 9pm last night, I felt like I woke up. My mind was clear, and I felt happy. I even smiled, for no reason at all. Odd.
UPDATE: 08/14/08. Finished treatment last month, but one area still itches. Every place I saw raised bumps and scabs that itched like crazy during treatment, but only that one area still itches every day. Odd. I learned that 10% of all actininc keratoses become skin cancer, so I do wonder.
Why is it that wrapping a long cord around something is extremely satisfying? Like an electrical cord around a power tool or vacuum cleaner? You wrap it in neat circles around and around, so it’ll stay together and unwrap easily. But, it irritates you when you want to use it and you have to just as slowly unwrap it? Seems to take forever. Why is that?
Why is it that you’ll clean up your car or bike thoroughly once in while, vacuuming, wiping, washing, polishing, but, not other things you use just as much? Like the toilet, the bedroom, the garage, the den? Why is that?
Why is it that your house has no odor until company is coming? Then you smell something rotten, something fishy, sour milk and dirty socks? Why is that?
Why is it that you remember to watch the lunar eclipse, and when you go out the moon is covered by storm clouds and you can’t see squat? Why is that?
Why is it, that, needing a new VCR, and debating the relative merits and popularity of Blu-ray over High Def -DVD, you buy the cheaper Panasonic HD-DVD player that plays every CD & DVD format in the world, except Blu-ray, but Panasonic drops the entire technology a couple months later, leaving the foreseeable future solely to Sony’s Blu-ray? Why is that?
Why is it that, early in every political race, the one candidate, out of a huge field of candidates, that you really like, who makes the most sense, who seems the most trustworthy, intelligent and visionary, is never one of the the two left to duke it out? Why do we always have to choose the lesser of two evils? What’s that all about?
OK, I’ll admit that I like coffee. No, this isn’t the first line of my therapy. I just like coffee. I like it leaded or unleaded, with caffeine or without. I enjoy drinking it. I like the flavor and mix of roasted bean extract flavored with raw sugar crystals and cow juice. I have access to an espresso cart at work, and I have developed an appreciation for espresso, but a single or even a double shot doesn’t give me much to sip on. I like Americano coffees. Hot water and two shots of espresso at work jump starts my day. On Sunday mornings I amble across the street to the Flying Star. It serves great coffee – far better than Starbucks, or any fast food restaurant or gas station convenience store. I have a favorite now; I order an Americano with four shots of espresso. The funny thing about espresso is that it doesn’t have the jolt of caffeine you’d expect, nor the bitterness of brewed coffee. It actually tastes good. So, to paraphrase a song lyric: my mind begins to wonder. I walk through Flying Star’s little parking lot every Sunday morning, and what do I always see but empty take out coffee cups. Not strange, you say? People are pigs, you say? Well, amazed to discover: the discarded coffee cups are not from Flying Star! Most are from Starbucks, with their characteristic green logo, some are from 7-Eleven, and some from Circle- K. It boggles my mind. There are no other coffee shops of any kind within miles. People have to have brought these cups with them on their way to Flying Star. Now that raises a lot of questions in my trivia-obsessed brain.
Do people need a coffee with them in order to drive to Flying Star? If they like Flying Star coffee, why buy coffee elsewhere before they get there? Are people that addicted to the caffeine that they have to buy one on the road on their way to a cafe? Why drop the cups in the parking lot? If they are going in to the Flying Star Cafe, why not dispose of the empties there, or just outside the door in the highly visible trash can? Why drop these cups in the parking lot at all? It’s a mystery to me. Flying Star coffee is highly rated around town, so I can’t understand why people are drinking coffee elsewhere, and then coming to this Cafe? Why would people drop their cups in the parking lot anyway?
The only thing I can come up with is that these are smokers, or former smokers, or that they have tapped into that same mentality. Smokers used to drop matches and butts everywhere, higgedly-piggedly, although I rarely see a used match anymore. Occasionally I’ll see a discarded, far more ubiquitous disposable lighter. One of the problems associated with smokers is that they simply drop their spent butts wherever they happen to be, sometimes putting them out, sometimes not. If a building policy forbids smoking inside, then piles of tobacco droppings are certain to be found spread around the door like guano. Smokers seem to have adopted the crime mentality that permeates many people’s brains; it is the mentality of the law-abiding citizen who breaks a law or moral code, and comes to accept the label of criminal. Once you’re a criminal already, then why care about anything? How else to explain the careless way smokers throw matches, cigarette butts, and cigar butts out of car windows, over their shoulder, on simply down at their feet? It is the behaviour of brain-addled addicts, to be sure, but addicts who have no sense of social responsibility. Enter our new, more socially-acceptable addiction: coffee. Along with the habit comes the old habits: toss, drop, ignore.
Cigarette butts were bad enough. Now it’s styrofoam cups littering the sidewalks, and all the parking lots of our schools and workplaces. It is a shameful product of minds that cannot accept responsibility for their own actions; that cannot see their actions as bad. I imagine the attitude is, “It’s not my driveway, my house, my sidewalk, so why should it matter?”
Why have we become such trashy people? Is it simply another sign of civilization in decline? The attitude used to be: “Out of sight, out of mind.” It gave us leave to dispose of things we called trash, even people, because we didn’t see it anymore. Now, we have, “Out of mind, out of sight.” If we don’t mind, it don’t matter. How long before nothing matters anymore? Sad.
UPDATE!
So, although I never posted my discovery here, I’ll do so now. It’s the Wi-Fi. People buy coffee at convenience stores before they go to Flying Star Cafes to use the free Wi-Fi. They sit in their cars in the parking lot. Some of them smoke. They don’t buy anything from the Cafe but feel entitled to take up space in the small parking lot, drinking coffee from elsewhere, and/or smoking, and just tossing their trash out of their car windows. They have a car! All they need do is carry a small trash bag in their car and dispose of their trash at home. So, not only are they using up parking spaces and Wi-Fi meant for customers, but they are totally irresponsible: just selfish, freeloading pigs who care about no one but themselves.
Oh, you’re looking for another celebrity endorsement, are you? Well, you won’t get one here. I will tell you this: Santa is a man of peace, and not peace when it’s convenient or politically correct, but now. Those of you fighting in Iraq, and Santa knows exactly who you are after all, need to get out of there. Santa does not endorse any of your gods either. Get out. Get out now. You say you still want to know who should take over as President of the United States? I haven’t seen much good will coming from Republicans or Democrats, and not much effort has been made by any of these politicians to seriously end this war. Now they are even preparing for another war, even while occupying two countries. No, my friends, it is not for Santa to say who US citizens should vote for in their Presidential circus. That said, however, I think you should all search your hearts and vote for whoever you think will end this mess quickly and bring all of your loved ones home quickest. That’s all Santa has to say on this subject.
I feel good today. There is more bounce in my step, and my eyes seem clearer. It’s a warm fall day, of course, but it’s easy to overlook that when you’re busy obsessing over a failed marriage, an unrequited love, being short of money every month, having union meetings to call and preside over, and trying to figure out how to assist people who need help keeping their jobs, and being treated fairly at work, since they pay dues hoping the union can do that. I’ve a meeting today, but I went for my usual 4-shot espresso/Americano across the street. I could make my own, but Sunday mornings I want to get out of this casita and be around people. The cafe has wonderfully pleasant staff, and really good coffee. I realized on my way home that I didn’t feel compelled to see my ex anymore. Sometimes I’m tempted to call, to see about going over there, having sex again. I woke up thinking about sex with various people I know or knew, obviously feeling a bit horny this morning. I always have sexual dreams about my unrequited, but she is off limits.
My ex, the Dragon, is still by herself as far as I know. Her general hatred and mistrust of men should keep her that way for awhile. I keep thinking back to that time I went over to finish up the computer swap from my system to hers and having her standing next to me while I lay under the desk pushing and pulling cables and getting everything plugged in. She was wearing that light, almost transparent wrap she has and it was parted, exposing her bare legs next to my eyes. There was a small hole in it, and I mentioned it to her, talking from my position under the desk, not seeing her face. She answered, in a pleasant voice, that she knew about the hole, and regretted that the wrap was wearing out, as it was so comfortable. My hand ached to stroke her legs, and our conversation was not strained or angry, so, who knows? She is sexually attractive to me always. I also thought of others though.
I was married before this. Ran into her in the grocery store last weekend. Talked a bit, but we sometimes see each other at work, so it’s not like we haven’t kept up. I’ve asked her to come by and check out the new place before, or to come for coffee some on Sunday mornings when I’m across the street. I should have invited her right there and then to come by when she finished shopping, because she wasn’t all that far away from my little place, but I didn’t. I fantasized about being in bed with her again too. She still wears that small gold Tumi knife figurine that I gave her shortly after we met, but she’s been with the same guy now for about 13 years.
My mind connects a vision of Carla from about 27 years ago, to my current object of desire, unrequited, these last few years. She has facial acne, and Carla had facial acne. I remember Carla telling me just before she left that she was pregnant, and she needed money for an abortion, but when I pressed for more information, asked for some kind of evidence, she backed off. I thought she was just trying to squeeze me for money. She had been living in LA, but was here visiting, living with her sister. I met her at one of Mark’s construction parties. He had lots of gatherings of people to work on his house. Friends, students, friends of friends; they all came to help Mark make adobes for his walls, mix mud for the adobes and the floors, pour a slab for his kitchen/living area, etc. In the tradition of barn building, some people brought food and drink; others, like myself, came to labor. It was at one of these work parties that I met Carla, whose sister had brought her along. I don’t know how it started. I must have noticed her or even been introduced by her sister, who I knew from my brief stint as a math assistant at the technical vocational school that she and Mark both worked at. She was a very cute woman, long dark hair framing a pretty face, and it wasn’t long before we were hanging around each other. I took Carla for a ride on the motorcycle to cool off, and we stopped along the arroyo that runs along the nearby Pueblo. It was a damn hot day, and the water looked inviting, so we got in. Since it was next to a highway, we left our clothes on, but that didn’t stop us from playing around, and even dry humping a bit. Can you dry hump under water? Wet hump? Anyway, it was too public an area, and who knows what was in that ditch water? We decided to go to my house, and the sex was nice, very nice. We saw each other for awhile after that. I found it hard to imagine living with a smoker, however. She was sexy, so I can overlook a lot for that, like most men. The t-shirt she sometimes wore said ‘Good Stuff’, and she was. She was often at my house, so I bought a TV for entertainment. It had been years since I’d had someone to live with, and I just didn’t know what to do with her. I liked fucking her, but I wasn’t making any plans. If she had stayed around, who knows, maybe we’d have stayed together, and she’d have moved in permanently? As it was, she said she was going back to LA, and I found that was OK with me. She just announced that she was going. That was after she said she might be pregnant, but we seemed to have settled that, and she didn’t bring it up again. I bought her a carton of cigarettes as a parting gift.
Suddenly it occurred to me that my unrequited is exactly old enough to be Carla’s daughter. Wouldn’t that be a kick in the head? They both have the same acne problem and the same build. She may even be smaller than the petite Carla, but since Carla smoked, that could have resulted in a small baby, from the oxygen deprivation. I have visions of Luke and Darth Vader: “I am your father”. Cool. I’d love to be Her father. That would pretty much kill my sexual fantasies, but I would welcome the permanent link to her. I know She is adopted, and she knows her biological mother. She told me the last name once, but I can’t remember. What if? Man, I come up with doozies in this fevered imagination of mine. I had the same thought before, wondering if I could be Her biological father with another woman from my past.
Probably not, but there was this woman Chris, and she told me she was pregnant and that was somewhere in that same time period. She had been something. We mostly just had sex. Sex is one of my all-time favorite things to do. I was busy with a part-time job and lots of studying. I didn’t want a full-time relationship, or marriage. One time, Chris said she wouldn’t mind having another child. Her daughter had been taken to Florida by her ex. She said that, if she got pregnant, she knew someone who would marry her, even if I didn’t want to. I said OK, so I didn’t worry about it after that. One day, of course, she told me was pregnant, and wanted me to marry her. I reminded her we agreed not to do that, that I wasn’t interested in marriage. She threatened to abort the baby if I didn’t marry her, and I just wasn’t interested. I don’t know why. I certainly didn’t have a definite future at the time, and I felt no deep affection for her, and didn’t care if she had the baby or not. I never saw her again, so I don’t know if she decided to have the child or not. Another potential biological mother of Her. How did I go from wanting to live with Her, to marry her, and have children with her, to wondering if I could be her father? Well, I already know I’m insane. What sort of man believes he can hook up with a beautiful sexy young woman at my age? Why would she trust an asshole like me anyway?
“There is gold in them.” The woman in the antique store told me that the glasses were made with gold. They were old glasses. She didn’t know how it was done. They were red. I couldn’t understand why glasses made with gold in them could be red, but there they were. She said that was how you could tell, that only glasses made that way could be that color of red. Blood red. Nothing else is that exact color. She thought they had been made during the Depression. I was so intrigued that I came back a few days later and bought them. People have been coloring glass for centuries. The ancient Romans knew that adding gold to glass would convert it into a ruby-red material when heated in a controlled fashion. My favorite colors have always been blue and green and black. I think I liked the glasses more because I imagined the gold swirled around in their making. I’d done some glass blowing, so I could appreciate the red hot glowing balls of molten glass being formed into joints, into tubes and balls and shapes. The hot glass is so pretty that you want to touch its perfection, but you cannot. Years later I was to work in a printed-circuit board shop, and learn how gold is applied to the finger tabs along the edge on each board, the tabs that connect the board to other boards, and to power. Gold’s properties as a conductor make it almost perfect for connecting these thin circuits. One need only apply a current across an object in a tank of acidic dissolved gold, and you can coat that object with a layer of gold. Of course, on a circuit board, under the gold is a layer of nickel. I do not know exactly what the nickel is for, unless it is to create a thickness and strength for the very thin layer of gold, which could otherwise be worn off quickly. And the gold must have something to adhere to. I don’t remember exactly why nickel was used, for once you see the gold tank, you forget all else. It is a shining pool of red, the color of blood. For gold does not dissolve into any old solvent. To dissolve gold and maintain it in solution you need cyanide – actually hydrogen cyanide is its proper name. The structure that forms is similar to a structure found in hemoglobin. Cyanide is also necessary for the commercial preparation of amino acids. It is considered likely that hydrogen cyanide played a part in the origin of life. It is released from molecules in cherries, apricots, bitter almonds and apple seeds. At the right concentration hydrogen cyanide will kill a human within a few minutes. The toxicity is caused by the cyanide ion, which prevents cellular respiration.
It occurred to me to ask my grandmother if she had known about these glasses, and she said she remembered when Ruby Reds were popular, but had never owned any. I had only five of the small juice glasses. Five. She had five children left before my father died, but she had raised six healthy children. Six. One of my aunts had died, hit by a car, while still a young and beautiful mother. I brought the glasses with me to my father’s wake and gave them to her then. I don’t know why. I seldom saw her, and wanted to give her something. After a while at the wake I saw her, and she was a little on the tipsy side as my father might had said. She was carrying the glasses around the house with her. I dismissed it at the time as an old woman having had too much to drink. But she was hugging the glasses, and would not put them down. After that I looked for more. I finally found one, and bought it, for it had finally occurred to me that she might have found more significance in the number of glasses than I had intended. I sent it to her so that she could have six blood-red cyanide glasses of gold, one for each of her children.
through streets still lined with rubble from the saturation bombing of Dresden. Between February 13–15 of 1945, with the war nearly over, the British and U.S. forces 
My parents lived near the famous Lexington Market then, where you could find all kinds of fresh seafood, meats and international foods. Baltimore was not all that different from Dresden in Old World charm, but we had fresh food, not food lines. The streets were clean and open, some with trolley tracks and cobblestones. A few farmers still hawked their wares from horse-drawn wagons. There were plenty of cars, but no freeways bypassing the city. There was poverty then, but the row houses 
– like my paternal grandparents’, next to a bar – had their marble front stairs. There were green parks, and jobs at Bethlehem Steel 
and 
The inner city was old and beginning to decay, but there was no rubble then. The harbor was full of cargo ships and housed a submarine, the USS Torsk from WWII, and the 1854 USS Constellation, a sloop-of-war, the last sail-only warship designed and built by the United States Navy.
There are 
Over six years ago I had a heart attack. Too much plaque in the heart artery that feeds the heart muscle itself. Problems for some time before that, something I attributed – as did my doctor – to a recurrence of my childhood asthma. Overtired on exertion, falling way behind on hikes up the mountain. Getting weaker instead of stronger. I’ve climbed up the Sandia-Manzano mountains. Sandia Crest is at 10,679 feet above sea level. Manzano Peak is at 10,098 feet. I’ve climbed in the San Mateo Mountains, specifically to the highest point, up Mt. Taylor, to 11,306 feet, and I’ve snowshoed Mt. Taylor several times. Also climbed to the nearby La Mosca lookout tower at 11,036 ft. I’ve climbed Mount Baldy, at 10,783 feet, in the Magdalena Mountains. I’ve hiked in the Jemez mountains, including snowshoeing in the Valles Caldera. At 11,253 feet in elevation, the volcanic caldera is 13-miles wide. I’ve hiked and snowshoed often in New Mexico’s mountains. 
No high fructose corn syrup in these, they taste exactly like the real thing, and at $2.29, they’re a great deal. For some reason a pack of real Nabisco Oreos with the cheap-ass chemical hybrid syrup from taxpayer-subsidized corn cost twice as much.
The cafe uses dark-roasted beans. My large 
My coffee is not quite finished, so I sit quietly for a few minutes without reading. The man reading a book has left. Another single woman comes in and hits the restroom. The young woman with the guide dog prepares to leave, taking her trash to the receptacle across the room first, which seems to confuse the dog when she returns to her chair for her coat. She chides him, humorously, for sitting as she turns to leave, and I chuckle with her. Moments later, after the woman in the restroom leaves it and walks to the counter, I finish my coffee and head out.
cafe for some good coffee – 
Another Valentine’s Day. People make fun of the day, and criticize it as meaningless commercial promotion for the greeting card and candy companies. I’ve often found, however, that when I’m in a serious relationship, it is satisfying to do something nice for your lover on a day that is dedicated to love. Once I didn’t, by mistake, actually. I was one of those who felt that gifts or flowers as sentiment should come spontaneously and randomly, and I acted on that. However, I knew, without a doubt, that my lover at the time would want to be treated special, so I had a plan. Since I rode a bicycle every day to and from work, it was difficult to range very far in getting flowers, which is what I thought most appropriate at that time. And, of course, arranging to have them delivered never occurred to me. Every day, I passed a flower shop on the way home. I had never had a real girlfriend or lover to buy flowers for before, and had no idea how early one has to buy these things. However, the shop would certainly have had some kind of flowers left, even if they weren’t roses. So, I left work, and headed home, climbing the slope of “nine-mile” hill steadily. I reached the flower shop, and THEY WERE CLOSED! As in shut down and moved away. Crap. I couldn’t believe it. I knew of none other within miles, and I was expected at home anyway. I went home, and promptly told my love what had happened, and she said it was OK, and no big deal. DON”T EVER BELIEVE THAT. It is just not true. Later, after she’d left me for someone else, and we’d become friends again, years later, she told me that’s when she changed her mind about me. She was actually pretty upset. She met this guy coincidentally the next day, and she became interested in him. 
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