Black Summer Rain

 Even as it poured down all over me, it was my shame that could not be washed away. There were so many fragments I did not understand, yet I was making big decisions on the perceptions of light, cutting through the cracks of my devastation. 

My audience was mixed, some watching the collision unfold, some watching the back side of the screen that contained a younger me from seemingly a lifetime ago, and those who somehow were seeing a tornado of both trying to harmonize in demented union. You could say that all was lost, yet anything was possible.

The humidity surrounded me, and the fan growled because it knew it would die without ever winning. Maybe I knew how I got here, but I did not understand it. I knew it was while I was riding a wave in which my life was an adventure that could not possibly be happening to me, even though it was.

Photo by Bailey Alexander on Unsplash

Looking back I do not know why the few people around me were not screaming at me that the bridge was out on the road ahead. I say this, but I know that they were, but it was all so unintelligible I could never comprehend it. It must have been an incredible topic of conversation when I was not in the room.

The big bang happened in the north woods. My energy to make decisions every moment on high-speed chases seemed limitless. When I was a child, when on a car trip, we would drive passed a steep mountain and I would wish that I could get out of the car and climb to the top of it. Had I been let out of the car, there is no doubt that I would do it. That was how things were, the hills that I climbed daily I could never have the energy left in the rest of my life to climb today, that is just how it was.

One moment I was looking in the mirror, knowing when I stepped outside, I was living in an alternate reality. I pushed every limit I could see and owned every one of them even if they were not mine to own. It was there, next to the supernova that I made jump into a fiery pool that I could not even comprehend. Then it happened, entire lifelines passed by me like picket fences.

The hot asphalt of the central Pennsylvania highway burned into my shoulder. My hands scorched from the hot metal of a serene July morning in the mountains. What a contrast from yesterday's sensuous dream atop Bear Mountain. It feels like two years ago on a similar trip. In a strange way, all of my accomplishments during that time were largely geographical. Today, I was running straight off the cliff. The confidence of what I could actually do was more like a Coyote and Roadrunner scene from Looney Toons where the Coyote would keep running off the cliff and would go a distance before looking down to realize there was no earth beneath his feet. I was in that thin-air sprint. I was so magnificent at it too. You should have seen me.

The big sky of Tennesee bore down on us like we were mere ants at a convention of giants. I was the guardian and I was still invincible. The machine I piloted, I did with tools made of almost no substance. Running hard into battle with a cardboard sword, what could possibly go wrong?

Tennessee was years of a little voice in the back of my head asking if I was out of my mind. She was sitting next to me, my prize, my spoil, my victory. I still believed it. Believing that was an unending source of fuel for determination, which did not have any effect on the fuel needed for the actual journey even though I knew, that it was running low.

Now on the ten-year journey across Tennessee, we were coming apart at the seams. My serene July morning under the car in the mountains was failing, and here I had been so proud to just take care of it.  This is where my defiance comes to the rescue. Just after my exile into Arkansas, I made the decision to run without conventional means, accepting a new reality and staying alive instead of putting myself in grave danger. Had I not, this would have been a story other people had told that I would never have heard or been here to hear.

The Texas state line loomed as the sun was setting over the Lone Star State ahead of me. I had no idea about the disasters awaiting. As it got dark and exhausted, we slept in the grass under the giant Texarkana sky. I started to understand that I knew as much about the next hour of my life as I did about the next turn of a page in a book that someone else was writing. It was not really sleep, as I watched the live-action of this border all night, fascinated with its activities. I was thankful that we were in a moment of stasis. Vulnerable, but still.

The sun rose on what was about to be the longest day of my life to this point. I made some repairs. Such as it is when you are headed to the Coastal Bend, not far down the road, the route takes us off the highway. Last night I noticed a deep and old antagonist following me out of the corner of my eye. I was trying to pretend it was not there, but my predator kept pace with me.

The day's journey began normally. I think it was merely me trying to duplicate other journeys somehow and overlay it into the reality of today. But, the reality of today has begun to take over. It started out as something I thought I could control, but moment by moment, it rose up into view and started telling me that it was in control.

My footing and grip began to falter, at the crossroads, my grip failed and I slipped. I bruised my knees and cut my hands in the hot Texas sun. On the side of the road, I was regrouping, trying to use my cleverness to over come a new assailant that was firing at me from the south west hill. I met a man, who jumped into action, and although it just seemed that this was the way that he was, helping me to overcome my new attacker, it became dangerously evident, that he too was out to get me and used far more cunning ways to overtake us.

With gratitude and pleasantries, I fought hard to break us free. He had helped, but it almost cost us dearly. Dangers lurked everywhere and I was the lone centurion navigating through the deep gloom.

As the sun began to set, I used all of the rest of the resources I had. There was no more. This had to do it. The promised land was to our south and somehow we had to make it. As the sun disappeared on our western horizon, our morning pursuer found us, and it was then I knew, it was going to be a night like no other.

I gripped the wheel, grit my teeth and said, "I win tonight, somehow". Deeper into the south we travelled, and then turned south again. As the hot gulf coast night air blew in on us I knew, that I was not going to win after all. A thousand options and none of which were even possible. No resources, no one to help. Floating in the dark of space, aimless, vulnerable and in imminent danger.

Dead in a dark ocean, the object of my desire became my new antagonist, she called me out even though she had seen me fight one battle after the next over the last 10 days. I sat in the pitch black, "I tell you, we are not finished yet." She challenged me, and I walked away.

I heard a sound and then it was gone. A few minutes later there it was again moving north now. a hand reached out, I thought quickly and using reason, the laws of physics, and desperation, formulated a plan that was so unorthodox, but worked. When the rocket engine kicked in, I burned all of the fuel in an effort to push our momentum to our new home and just barely made it. 4 AM, we landed. Every moment from now on, I had to deal with what I just did for the last 100 days. I had no idea how hard that was about to be.

Coming home was so beautiful and I had no idea whatsoever why I ever left this paradise. I belonged here. Slowly the reality of what I had done started to seep in like water into a ship that was breached everywhere. I learned that I did not know the person I was with or the magnitude of the problems I had taken possession of. I brought that hell upon others too, since I just could not stand on my own.

I fell back into part of my life from three years ago, and every night at home, I had to deal with the worst decision of my life. That was nothing compared to my own demons though. They were still with me and more enraged than ever. I was walking and talking, but I was dancing at the zombie zoo.

Everything came to its end on that one September Friday night. I took a gamble and fell to the bottom of the cistern of understanding that anything I had achieved in the last three years was gone. I learned nothing, I was nothing. I failed. I even heard the words that burned into my skin that I not only failed, but I was a failure. 

Then it happened, a collision that was more like an attack, from an ally that I could not have believed could do it. It filled me with a rage like I have never known. I was done and I was gone, my pride not yet having died as it was about to. Laying in the dirt, far below the surface of the earth, I knew there was no way out. The only thing that I could do now was to work hard to safely get everyone clear of the devastation that was me. Acceptance had finally arrived. I could not live with anyone. I needed to make sure that the mess that I was, that I should live alone so it would not cause any more trouble. Finally, pride faded into nothing.

I sent everyone away to safety, and I looked around. I had nothing, I was going nowhere, I was nothing. In a strange way, it was the best place I had been in for a very long time. This is where humility sprouted. I stood in the black summer rain, only knowing that it was all gone. Everything. For some reason that was good. There was an honesty to it that I could not deny.

When the storm was over, I raised my eyes to the north, and I needed to know what my life looked like without coercion. Ironic, because I would charge back in the biggest deception of my existence, although I would not know of it for the next 40 years. I cannot regret this, because of it I gave a gift to people who would have had nothing. My only regret is that I was not stronger for them. 

The devastation of those days molded me into who I am. For better or worse, the hopelessness and demoralization of standing in the black summer rain is what gave me understanding too valuable to ever count. As long as I live, I will never fully understand it. 

Insufficient

Joe and I sat at the table many years ago on the island and talked about cars. I took the words from reality into absolute science fiction. He called it out as worthless. I knew then that this type of daydream was futility. Why dream of something that is not even possible?

I understand today the uselessness of using brain power on something that cannot grow. Sure, daydreaming is nice, but it can be a tool for creativity, and it can be a tool for frustration when dwelling on equations that do not make sense.

 The daily puzzles that rise into view cannot be solved by always adding something that does not make sense. All I see is hurt, and damage. It says that all we have worked for is insufficient and insults the struggles made to be where we are. It is a lonely road to walk.

Photo by Brands&People on Unsplash

Living on this side of what is real and what cannot be real can allow you to dream, see, and do. The other side is insanity. I have seen it in people; eventually, they are a shell of a person, empty and insufficient.

So if you say to me on the road we are traveling, "What if this" and "What if that," it only resonates as what we have is insufficient, and where we are going is not even that direction. It only feels low. It only feels down. Everything feels insufficient.

47 days

 In the season of insanity sanctioned by tradition and greed, the masters are allowed to talk grandiose things, and the subjects are allowed to shout, insult, and boast, pushing, gaslighting, and imposing ideas in what should have been a sprawling land of fertile soil.

It all seemed like a good plan in the beginning. But I have to wonder, with certain historical artifacts on the premises, is that only a romanticized version of the account that we tell ourselves? I already knew we turned around the stories of who did what to make ourselves look better. As the information age has grown to maturity, we browsed the books that we would never find over our morning coffee. Humanity suddenly looks different when you are a card-carrying member.

The burn of truth is persistent. That light that you can see even when you do not look at it can never go away unless you ignorantly deny it is there. Eventually, you find that you are actually living at 704 Hauser Street in Astoria.

Photo by Museums Victoria on Unsplash

You look back on the glory days for solace. Close your eyes. Court Street, the day after Thanksgiving 1988, cutting glass in an era when finding a place to live almost happened involuntarily. At one hundred, and fifteen dollars a week, it all reads like a stupid little fairy tale. All of it. 

What is truth then? How is it that the hours of today are constantly unraveling the hours of yesterday? Did that happen to the generations before me, I dare say not. Who is better off. Is it them, sitting in a chair looking through their picture window into the past with a good dose of psychological valium? Is it better to be numb?

This brings me to the final thought about all of this: Last night, as with many nights in my life, I went to sleep wrapped in the Moody Blues Days of Future Passed album. I always wonder in my final moments, if would I want that playing as it has accompanied me in a molecular way all of my life. But then I think about that early Sunday morning room in the ICU at Bay Area Medical Center on SPID in Corpus Christie on March 31st, 1996. How would Dad have felt if I had put the Doors Crystal Ship on or Dave Brubeck Take 5?  Something inside me says all he wanted to hear was his children's voices one more time.  I think I understand this completely now.

I found a recording the other day from December of 2009. I was reading Are You My Mother to Noah. He was a month shy of turning 3. It is the most incredible thing to go back to a time like that. It is more than any song I could ever hear could give. I guess I needed that. Watching society become so fragmented and thinking back on what once was believed to be solid and true, it is nice to look back and simply see something so beautiful. When I look at those things that really matter, my blessings are too great to count. I guess I can deal with 47 more days of what is happening in the news. I guess.

Unplugged

I can talk a big game about not needing modern conveniences. I have been practicing living in the 1880s since as far back as I can remember.

A kerosene lantern was always preferable to the light bulb unless that lightbulb was a 12-volt, 50-watt bulb, screwed into a house lamp that was clamped to a car battery, sitting on the floor of the living room, behind the table the lamp sat on.

A gas mantle light on the kitchen wall that threw as much light as a 75-watt bulb worked as well. Wood in a wood stove for heat, nothing did it better. 

I was raised by the noise the floor makes when you move something in the morning in a hunting camp. Whether that camp was an old bus from the late 1940s or a small cabin with plywood floors. I was grown out of this soil.

I first learned about crystal radios when I was gifted the Six Million Dollar action figure as a child. Steve Austin came with some accessories that were not part of his bionic body parts. One of these was a plastic engine block because I can not tell you what a fantasy of mine it is with all of these engine blocks I see just lying around in my path daily if I could just grab them with my superhuman strength and lift them in the air with one hand by the mysterious carrying handle at the top of said engine block.

The other accessory was the astronaut’s backpack that Steve came with. There was an antenna on the back you could raise in case he needed to radio back to NASA. It came with a 1970s, transistor radio-style earphone. If you plugged in the earphone to the pack and connected the supplied alligator clip to a ground source, such as a copper water pipe, then slowly moved the antenna, and everyone within a 3-mile radius just shut up for a minute, you could actually pick up AM radio stations. No power, no batteries, no cranks or solar. Just the power of the earth. We didn’t need no stink in’ batteries!

This prompted a wonderful conversation between my grandmother and I. She told how in the beginning of radio, crystal radios were the norm. Of course, they were much larger and more powerful than this modern 1970s micro novelty version that was a cheap way for Steve to hear fast-talking DJs and AM Rock music from Earth.

She said that at family get-togethers her father and uncle would huddle around the crystal radio to listen to a ball game. The way she talked about this radio, it was simply how it was done. Looking back at crystal radio technology, it fascinates me how technological advances stick a big old pacifier in the human psyche, and make us critically dependent on it. Who is behind this door anyway?

33 years ago, I gallivanted all over the place in 3 Middle East countries. My resourceful history of DXing AM stations across the nighttime stratosphere made it easy for me to pick up the BBC World Service out of Europe after 9pm or Voice of America out of Northern Africa so that I could really find out what was happening with the hurricane in which I lived in the eye of at the time. Armed Forces Radio spoon-fed us exactly what they only wanted us to know. By which I mean emergency reports on the brand new Pamela Smart sex-murder scandal in my then-home state of New Hampshire, every 15 minutes!

I digress. My friend Nick said it best when we looked back on this time in our lives, that it was a daily quest to live our immediate lives more comfortably. This is spot on. The innovation that we gained from this experience is priceless. I also learned during that period, that you never, ever, ever think for a moment that the authorities or the government are going help you, aid you, or take care of you. The fact is, they absolutely do not care. It is every person/family for yourself.

Decades upon decades I have looked at most of the things that we have daily and figured out contingencies. We lose power about once a month and sometimes more. Every few years for multiple days. I have made my house much less dependent on electricity over the last two decades, so as a family we hit it with one hand on the fence and never break stride. I do not own a generator and have no intention of owning one. We do not need it, but I can keep my freezers going and water stocked, with plenty of heat, light, and cooking. We used to use gravity showers now we use battery showers since they are so cheap.

As I sit here this morning in Plymouth Vermont, sipping coffee, in front of a fire looking out over the mountains and valley, I am content because I know I can do either. I’m not gonna lie, I like it that I can grab my phone and just look something up. I am okay with this. I can occupy this space like a person with power and tech, or I can enjoy it just the way it is and party like it’s 1889.

Drifting

 It is like "A Little Bit of Emotion" a 1979 song from the Kinks, Low Budget album. There are things we see on the surface that we show all the time. There are also pieces of us that we will not show. At 25 years old, we get stuck in the trivial life, just existing, always believing that tomorrow, next week, month, or year will be different. At 35, it is the same thing, as is 45 and 55. But of course, by now you realize that it is happening.

If I could have the 58-year-old perspective at 21, everything would be so much less messy. At 58, all of the days that I have just settled for mock any kind of wisdom I might think to turn over as cards to win the game. I lament how my generation and the one before it was solving everything, but we have only made things worse. I do not feel sorry for me but for my kids. 

As I look in the mirror, in my eyes I see the person who has looked back decade after decade. Secretly I wish to send messages back to him. Nothing too deep, just a practical slap to wake up.

If I think about it too much, I become agitated. The longer I dwell on it, my anger grows, and I want to just start screaming and not stop until it clears away all of the superficial cobwebs that I no longer have the patience for.

Anger has always been a tool for me, a matter of propulsion to get motivated. I do not know any other way. I somehow know in my heart that I would not even exist without it. Each according to our gifts I guess.

I have mentioned this many times in writing that I have an associative memory. Things that I see and hear that have nothing to do with things in my life actually hold pockets of memory of my life. It would also seem that there is no expiration date on said pockets of seemingly lost memories.

When we leave the house, we put the TV on for the dog, she is more calm if she cannot hear every noise outside while we are gone. We used to do YouTube but it will time out after a while. Roku Live will play indefinitely. So we have been putting on Little House on the Prairie for her. Something happened to the whole Little House-watching world sometime around the year 2000. We forgot about all of the fun, warm, and wholesome moments the nine seasons of this show gave us and only remembered the horrible personal disasters that were also laced into the show. Alice Garvey and Mary's baby dying in a fire, Laura's baby dying from illness, the plague that wiped out part of the town due to rat infestation of the food supply, and of course, Mary going blind.

Inevitably, with this show just playing in the background, it has pulled us in and we end up watching whole episodes from time to time. Some nights, instead of surfing through the disgusting lack of quality that exists in modern-day streaming, we just let Little House roll. I noticed something. I am finding that some of my personal memories are attached to scenes of that show that aired especially during the times that I was between the ages of 9 and 15. The show began in 74 and we lived in Torrington, Connecticut. Torrington was a unique small industrial city in a valley in the northwest hills of Connecticut.

Fragmented memories of my 5-year stay in the mid-1970s Torrington have drifted in and continue to do so. Sixth grade, standing in the woods behind Torringford School face to face with Michelle Deleo and her saying the line to me, "Knowing you." Instantly when I think of that point in space and time Abba suddenly shouts out at me: "Knowing me, knowing you, ah haaa, there is nothing we can do..." because my brain did that in the moment we were standing there. A couple of days ago, I did a Google Street Level drive around Torrington and looking at the backyard of the school into the woods, I can see the exact spot that happened 47 years ago.

About this virtual drive around Torrington. I see sadness and decay. Yeah, we had the Keep America Beautiful commercial with the crying Indian from 1970 telling us that we ruined everything, but let me tell you something. The houses were more beautiful, the roads and sidewalks were not crumbling, and the bridges were not falling apart. Today, despite great efforts at restoration and repurposing, there is still a sad post-apocalyptic feel to the drive.  I am sure this is not the case for someone from a later generation.

The vinyl siding revolution of the 80s and 90s took away the beautiful character of the homes built throughout the 1800s during the Industrial Revolution and placed upon them all of the architectural charm of a latex glove. I lived in 3 such homes in Torrington. We moved into the 2nd-floor apartment on James Street in 1974, Main Street in April 1976, and East Main Street in February of 1977. In April of 1979, we moved back to Bristol, never to live in Torrington again.

It is the world that was so different though. It was a world in which radio and newspapers were the pulse of everything that was happening. It is different for me than for many people in the world. As my life changed, so did my permanent geographical location. So, I do not and have not seen anyone I went to school with. It is like all of that is on a different planet for me. Even in my adult life, I have had 4 separate existences. Different places to live, different jobs, different family, different friends. 

It was on James Street that I made my first individual claim to music, to having a voice as a person. It was in the attic of Main Street on July 13, 1976, when I discovered WKBW in Buffalo, NY. It was at 541 East Main Street where I got my first job working for the landlord, sweeping hallways and sidewalks, mowing the lawn with one of the old manual push grass cutters, raking and shoveling snow, whitewashing walls, and building cement walls. The Hartford Civic Center roof collapsed while we lived there. We endured the blizzard of 78 there and also did not have a car for 2 years, and for a while, we had no refrigerator either. 

During that time, some nights the only option was from the Burger King down the road from us. I would walk down there and get our food to go. Two double cheeseburgers, two Whopper Juniors, 4 large fries, 3 medium cokes, and 1 medium rootbeer. With tax, $6.14. I knew it by heart.

There was a real coming of age period in the latter years for me hear. One night in the fall of 78 I discovered my attraction to alcohol, as well as my addiction to cigarettes. When I hear Paradise By the Dashboard Light it takes me back to a crazy night back in 78.

My last spring in Torrington was 1979. Heart of Glass by Blondie was riding high on the charts as was Rod Stewart’s DaYa Think I’m Sexy. Mork and Mindy, and Saturday Night Live were top of the top. Times were changing though. By March everything that had been the way it was began to unravel. This was not a bad thing either. There were old habits that just needed to stop.

We left Torrington in a very different way than we had arrived, although our arrival was also unorthodox.

The associative memory always intrigues me. It can be such a rabbit hole. Thanks to that I can remember so many days of my life 50 years ago as if they were yesterday. Liam and Noah have this exact thing too. I think it is a gift. It helps me to understand things better, and appreciate the people in my life more fully. 

I am not sure who gave me this. I have conversations with my mother and she has a remarkable memory, I wonder sometimes if both she and my father were the perfect storm that could cause this amazing phenomenon.

The Conscription of September

 I woke on a dark morning. It was September, the air was chilled, and reality sounded like air-raid sirens warning that I had been deceived. The summer which seemed eternal was only a dream. No wood in the shed yet and a summer's worth of dire projects yet to be started, what happened?

Panic season begins suddenly. It is the annual realization that there are only moments left. It was summer, and we were all rejoicing in it, and then the 99 red balloons drifted over the wall and I knew, this was it.

You would think that I would learn. September is always the same unless you are looking at the Laguna Madre, but even then, December comes. It is a gravity, and you do not get to escape it. You cannot opt-out.

Many months ago I filled this month's calendar with things to do, never thinking about the things that would be undone. Painting myself into a corner that if I do not follow through, I will have regrets.

I stopped at the top of the hill in the crisp cool morning, I thought about what we lost on this last journey around the sun.  Karen, Wayne, Henry, and Joan. We are taking this one without you, but we still remember.  It has been a long journey and in some ways I was only 7 years old moments ago.

Then it was 1975.  I can hear the airwaves as they once sounded, I can smell the air of those days. I can hear every creak in the floor, door closing, fluorescent light humming, and steam radiator banging.

Every moment is indeed precious. There is something that can be made in every one of them. To sit while the world spins and screams through the universe cannot be allowed to happen.

 

You may wonder why all the contrast. Honestly, it is because I AM NOT READY. I really am not. Every moment needs a name.  Every single one. This is just me, having my annual tantrum because I did not understand how short a summer can be once again. I never learn and I am sure that I never will.

 My heart cries out for you Summer. You were there a moment ago and now I am not even sure you ever existed other than in a story that was told to me long ago. Was it a dream? I swear it wasn't. <sigh>