Work life balance

My neurology, and that of my car, made a partial recovery since last I wrote with no more intervention than a good night's rest. Neither of us are a hundred percent, but we're both pretty high-mileage at this point. The goal isn't perfect health, only to muster the will to continue. 

Last night I tried to sleep in the car in the hospital parking lot under the sound of heavy rain after a concert during which I sweat through all of my clothes. An older guy dancing alone in a costumed crowd. 

Later I'm awakened at intervals to talk on the phone with a psychotic college freshman - just 17 and away from his parents for the first time, trying to open himself to the college experience; to see a homeless man with blackened fingers wrapped in soiled gauze who only cries and cannot tell me anything I need to know in order to help him; to sort through a platoon of inebriated students - sleeping, crying, looking at me expectantly or desperately on stretchers in the hall. None are frolicking. 

It's 4 AM on Halloween, and the Attending asks if I wouldn't mind taking a few drunk kids with me on my way out. "Only the weirdos are out at this time of night, he says. "And that's us, buddy."

The ocean and a teaspoon

That feeling in my head came down late this afternoon. A certain type of sudden exhaustion. Is this what they call brain fog? I don't know but it sucks. 

Work has been mostly running around trying to prevent something stupid from happening. 

My car started behaving strangely this morning. I made it to an Auto Zone and replaced the 99.9% dead battery. That didn't take care of it all. Into the shop again tomorrow.

Kind of drained. Nothing much to say. No desire to write.

Fall does this to me

I dreamed about you on some back channel of my mind this morning. I almost didn't remember, and when I did, in not much detail. I was talking to your sister. She was telling me how beautiful you were, as though I didn't know that. I offered to empty a large cart filled with recyclables for her. It would have taken several minutes at the dumpster. I remember hoping and dreading at once that you might arrive while I was working there. 

In another story, I had taken a bus from Lowell to San Diego and then a train a little further north to San Juan Capistrano where the swallows are said to be. I had vague directions from there, so I walked up into the hills, trying to thumb a ride, carrying an ALICE pack and a seabag on my back. You drove by me on your way home from work. It was awkward there for awhile. I don't know what I'd expected, only what I'd hoped. You told me heroin was like being in love. And you missed it now like a lover. 

I walked back down out of those hills with the heavy bags and boarded a bus to Seattle. Now I was ready to leave.

Good

My boy came over to spend the night. I made up his bed, cleaned the mirror and the sink, filled the dishwasher and ran them through, and bought some cereal and milk for breakfast. It's good to have him here.

Night shift

He wouldn't get out of the car. The police knew he had guns in there. He'd sent text messages to a former friend saying he was going to kill himself. Then he drove to a secluded undisclosed location. It took them awhile to find him. 

After some time, he came out of the car. By now there were a lot of police there and they had their guns trained on him. Then he went back inside the car where the guns were. He did this twice - coming out and going back in. Each time he did, it raised the level of tension and the perception of threat among the police. They remained patient. Disciplined. 

Once he'd surrendered, they didn't beat him. The officers found a loaded handgun on the passenger seat with a round chambered and ready to fire. There was a shotgun in the driver's compartment rigged with its butt braced against the floor and the muzzle aimed at about face level with a load of tactical buckshot in the chamber. 

He didn't kill himself. And they didn't kill him. 

Time

Today my youngest turns sixteen. In the yard, one of the wild flowers I seeded in the Spring stands nearly seven feet tall. Thursday, the people I worked with were trying to deal with an out of control teenager. They called me to come and assist, basically threatening the boy with the image of a large male. When I arrived the boy said, smirking, "They said you were tall".

Stranger

People come to this place because it's safe. I've got to remember that and keep it that way.

Gary Paulsen passed away and it made me remember this Norwegian in Alaska.

Back then, I'd take a lot of people to and from the bars - which closed only momentarily - at forty below zero in Fairbanks. There was one older Norwegian gentleman who'd sometimes make conversation on the return trip, after he'd been sufficiently lubricated. "Never get excited," he'd advise me. I wasn't so good at avoiding that particular pitfall back then. That's probably why he saw fit to tell me that every single time we met.

A rebuttal, a reminder...

 "Life will break you. Nobody can protect you from that, and living alone won't either, for solitude will also break you with its yearning. You have to love. You have to feel. It is the reason you are here on earth. You are here to risk your heart. You are here to be swallowed up. And when it happens that you are broken, or betrayed, or left, or hurt, or death brushes near, let your self sit by an apple tree and listen to the apples falling all around you in heaps, wasting their sweetness. Tell yourself you tasted as many as you could."

Louise Eldrich, The Painted Drum

Juice

A bright moon and a colder night tonight. The first frost hasn't nipped us here yet. I ran across two coyotes at different points along the road clearly visible in the moon's silver light. 

Gordon Lightfoot sang beautifully on my car radio about an old love. He said something like if time could heal this wound, he'd remove the threads so he could bleed a little more. I pretend I don't know what that means. There is a part in the song where he describes how it felt to walk with her. Soaring strings. They can sound silly or sappy to some people, I guess. But when you're in love, they come close to capturing the feeling of that thing your heart does. I can almost remember. 

I was in the city for a little while tonight and it made me feel old and out of synch with the places that were once familiar. They tested my battery at the oil change place today. It's pretty much depleted, the man said.

 

Yo vivo solo

A breeze has risen. This week the leaves began to come down in earnest. You can see bare branches and trunks in some places. There'll be a solemnity to things soon. 

She was bored so took a walk to Wal-Mart. You thought you recognized her. 

Her boyfriend, the man she lives with, is married. An immigration thing, she tells me. He's helping a Guatemalan. He calls pretty soon to check on her. "I'm fucking bored," she says. 

She calls the colored leaves flowers. Says her English isn't too good. She's a little restless. When we say goodbye, we shake hands. Mucho gusto. Hers is cool and a little wet. Heroin, I'm thinking. 

It's a grey town with few prospects.

Diminishing

I used to be able to sleep in my car for a couple of hours between night and day jobs and remain somewhat functional. It didn't always work. I bounced off a guard rail while momentarily dozing on a highway on ramp. I totaled my car, distracted by a woman walking by, crashing into the rear end of a Suburban. I often looked rather wrinkled and disheveled. But I did this for years in order to make ends almost meet. 

I work a few additional overnight hours now and seem to need 24 hours of continuous sleep to get right. It's discouraging, but I guess it helps to mark the passage of time. Like the women walking by are less distracting now too.

Sensitive

Left in the dark through river valley fog to talk with a woman about archangels and demons, magic in nature, solitude, ancient religions and a father's betrayal. She said she was sensitive to energy and thanked me for mine being calm. Green stars moving through the trees and winds whipping up around her. There are worlds inside of worlds and much beyond our understanding.

Decaf someone said

The anger thing is real and maybe too often misplaced. It's not very helpful at work most of the time. Maybe you should do something about that.

Plan of the day

The guy writes some very affecting songs, but apparently that particular aptitude doesn't automatically credential one as a good human being. 

Stay to yourself and let others be. It's better that way. Live quietly. 

Don't tease what's smoldering into flame. Flame consumes. That's just the nature of fire. You can't be mad about it. Sure it illuminates, heats, but only briefly. Its true purpose is consumption. To leave everything ash, burned black. 

Look out the window. Breathe. Don't get attached. Let go and fall away. Practice for death. The only moment - after birth - that really matters, or so I've read.

"You got a lot of heart," the man in the movie says to me. "Maybe too much." 

Or maybe you don't have enough. Who's that talking now?

Hey, maybe today you ought to throw what's left of that weeks old rotisserie chicken into the woods for the wild things. What do you think? 

Muster up.

They're going to close Maury's. The signboard in there is the same one, I believe, they had when my father took me there as a boy of four or five or six. 

He was tall and handsome and slim. He could sing and he was funny. But I don't remember ever hearing him sing. Those are things others told me about him. He called me tiger and carried me on his shoulders at least once because I saw a photograph depicting that scene. 

Grinders. I remember the white paper they were rolled in and the smell of cold cuts and raw onions. 

Fifty years ago. A pizza we made together also photographed. Cottage cheese sprinkled heavily with black pepper. Black Label beer bottles. You grew thinner, distant, yellow. Meaner, but I like to think that was not intentional and just once. You were the first man to hit me in the face, by the way. 

Funny, the things that stay. 

Never promised me

I was reminded of you while preparing food today. That is to say, I was dipping a piece of apple into a jar of peanut butter. I thought about enjoying simple pleasures like that with you. Fully enjoying them. Of course, in the background (sometimes it came to the fore) was always the fear of impending and inevitable loss. 

I remembered distinctly that feeling I'd get sometimes, when we were out in a public place, that you were looking over my shoulder at whoever was walking in. You told me that was just my insecurities. I knew it was more than that but I didn't want to. That awful feeling that you were always on the lookout for a better deal. 

And, of course, you were.

Rain Tree Crow

 

Doings

Work has been busy and hobbled by low staffing, weary and increasingly demoralized staff, and a lack of shared basic assumptions about the work. As a result, I'm often walking around with urgency feeling a particular kind of anger ignite internally. That fire propels me through the day. When I get home, I have something to eat, maybe I take a few minutes to straighten up a portion of my neglected and disordered  house, but then I'm in bed. I read a few pages in a book and then I'm off to sleep. I'm thankful that sleeping is something I usually do well. I wake up at 6 AM on work days, take a shower, dress and hit the road. There's about four hours of driving daily. 

Today, I'm off. Without the anger to propel me, I feel hollow and without a clear purpose even though I'm relieved to not have to go in. 

Today it's a flu shot for the boy, lunch, listening to the new song my daughter wrote and an overdue oil change. Maybe a trip to the laundromat for a little added spice.

How it is now

Ever present, but in a different way now. Like a portrait hanging on one of the walls of my home. I don't look at it intentionally every day, but I know it's there. I am always aware of it. I may not be consciously thinking about it but neither do ever I forget it. It's in the background of my self. Every day. An integral part of me. Sometimes I look at it deeply and I remember well.

I'll take it

A hello on the street turned my head and made me remember that I am alive. A haircut that went fairly well. A well-assembled tuna melt for lunch in a diner. Jaws clenched again because I'm back in management and responsible for the performance of others and unable to find enough of them to just show up and do the work. I have a beautiful, if relatively long, drive in and back. The foliage on the hillside is mingled with fog, black shiny crows, wet horses in profile silhouetted. It's neither good or bad. It's just what there is to suffer and to enjoy for the moment.

Golden October

The crowd at the fair put a damper on my good time. Sapped me. Luckily, we'd had a few good hours together - two of them and a friend and I. The third and his girlfriend had been up very late and they took the morning to sleep in together. Good on ye. 

She's singing again. I'm so glad for that. I'm hoping next Sunday to go and listen. It's been a long time since I sat in a church just to listen. I'd get hung up in trying to ignore the people I annoyed myself with making up stories about, but the music of the choir - hearing her voice distinctly within it - made it worthwhile. An expression of spirit. That's the thing worthy of praise and worship. Not the Alleged, imbued with all of our hopes and fears, who never bothers to pick up the phone. 

Seventeen is a hard place to be. I sit beside her gurney in the hallway and listen. She took the pills after doing her research and texted out to the world after swallowing a few. She's alive now, but doesn't know if she wants to be, and crying. All of her relationships have broken. She thinks it's because of the burden she's placed upon them. They all blame her for being sad. 

"Everyone leaves," she says. 

It's 5 AM and I've only slept for a few minutes in a chair. I am listening for much longer than I used to listen in similar situations. Yes, everyone leaves. 

For a moment, I want to be a boy her age who tells her that he never will and then never does. She becomes happy again. And she knows that the boy really loves her. Then her life goes on, making sense and being something she can actually live. 

She needs safety now. All I have to offer her is my ear and a hospital.

Barker

The man running the overpriced hydro-massage station asked me what my shirt said. 

Neurosis, I told him. It's a band.

That's a big problem these days, he said. People don't know how to get on with their lives. 

Big E

Tomorrow morning I'm going to the Eastern States Exhibition with all the kids along with one's friend and another's girlfriend. It's a Fall fair. Plenty of good things to eat and a day of just being able to be in their company.