First big rainstorm of the season, and Northern California lost it’s collective, freaking mind. Off the hook crazy hype. Not just stockpiling toilet paper and bullets for the upcoming deluge, but sandbagging regular homes.
On the local news, a man who had been in some reportedly hour-long line for his share of government-issued heavy plastic bags of clean sand explained his need. Last year, the rain came and some water created pools, puddles I think are the technical term, on the floor of his garage. This year, he wasn’t going to relive the devastation, he was preparing for the worst. Bags would be dropped in a line along the crack of his garage door.
Foolishly, M. and I took our chances with no protection. My only plan, if puddles were to form in our garage, was to hope for drying and evaporation once the storm had passed.
Work was somewhat subdued and empty, as the word had gone out to take caution. Truth be told, it is dangerous here when the winds blow and the water falls from the sky. Dangerous, because Californians are collectively fucking morons and pussies in the rain.
Highway driving involves a lot of high speed braking in low visibility. The news and safety officials are smart to discuss the dangers of hydroplaning, because stupid shits jamming two-footed on their brakes, as opposed to say, reducing speed gradually, do have a tendency to glide over the skies’ fallen water. Sharply turning your wheel while braking also helps, along with switching lanes for no, ungodly reason.
After I braved the highway and made it to work, I couldn’t avoid the hysteria. A native Californian was scheduled to board a commercial flight, in the rain. By god the rain, people, the rain. The mere thought of being hurtled through space while there was precipitation in the atmosphere. Unimaginable.
i was a lone voice of sanity in the wilderness. Actually, I wasn’t a lone voice. Everyone around who has ever lived in another geographical area with actual weather was mocking the hype. The Californians, well the susceptible, gullible ones, succumbed to fear. Unfortunately for me, I was directly in the path of a quaking, quivering native.
Last week I had some serious ups and downs all about the toil that pays me.
For one, I applied for another job entirely that had my pulse veritably racing, or at least as much as anything I do for a living would ever get me pumped. Pretty much a direct arc of 20 years of non-profit, but with a whole kind of start up vibe, it hit me as something I’d like to do. It read like one of those jobs that, rare as the diamond when de Beers was full-on withholding, perfectly matched not just what I can do but what I like to do.
Despite feeling good after the initial phone screen, they finally let me know that I wasn’t in the running. Fuckers. I blame the economy and the likelihood of people on a dicier path than me and higher levels of education and experience jamming me out of my dream. Or, maybe not my dream, like sex, ice cream and the chance for a life of leisure are my dream, but at least a pleasant life plan.
On the other side of the workaday reality, we had a solid week of meeting after meeting. But, somewhere sprinkled among the meetings, was a morning spent in a corporate training on coaching. Humbling the experience was, as I realized that not all of my happy inspiring leadership thoughts in my head come out of my mouth just right. Actually, despite the humility, it was a pretty good session.
One side effect of one of the coaching exercises got me re-thinking my schedule. We were paired up with another eager co-worker to improv a coaching discussion that jumped from whatever thing you decided you needed to the coaching. For the woman with whom I was paired, she was looking to develop into a “leader.” There’s a thought I’ve never had. Mine was starting an open mike and, of course, actually writing and preparing for one.
The exercise continued and I got my partner to confirm that she would have a dinner discussion with her husband and plan a future iPhone App or other lucrative Silicon-Valley-esque project. For my project, though, we completely stalled out on the coaching conversation. So, the pro, the facilitator, she walked by and tried a little life support to our convo. What came of it was her nailing me to add writing during my lunch hour to my daily schedule. Coached I felt. Warm and tingly too and ready to update my daily calendar.
I needed that kind of focus lest I got myself all itching for a fight at work just out of sheer boredom.
One of the exercises we did in the coaching class I wish you could walk around and force people to do. I could actually, in a kind of Improv Everywhere, guerrilla action. Unfortunately, without the context of a professional coach, I’d just seem like a completely anti-social asshole.
Here was the exercise in its entirety. Person 1 tells Person 2 about they best vacation of her life. Person 2 does everything and anything not to listen. As anyone who’s done standup comedy at a shithole open mike can attest, there ain’t no low feeling quite like talking away to a disinterested audience. One on one, it’s brutal.
I work with someone who’s convinced he’s an effective multi-tasker. He’s not. It is for him that I wish this exercise was a universal tool in corporate living. Perhaps, with a little theater, he could comprehend just how frustrating a conversation that runs roughly like this one is.
“Hey, can I ask you a quick question?”
“Sure.”
Insert brief question here.
“Huh, what, sorry. I wasn’t listening what did you say?”
Repeat brief question.
TAP, TAP, TAP, Keyboard keys. No eye contact.
“Should I come back?”
“Oh, what? Yeah, I’m really distracted. But, wait, hold on a sec.”
SILENCE, more keyboard tapping. SILENCE
“So, should I ask my question?”
“Sure, sure, yeah, sorry. Did you have a question?”
Repeat brief question.
“Oh, yeah, that’s fine. OK.”
Oooph.
After a week with about 20 of those exchanges, I was overly ready to call it a day by week’s end.
With a week like the one I had (and by the sounds M. shared in overall suckitude in his workplace), there wasn’t anything that could be done but head to the beach. I’m not convince I’m cut out for winter waves and frolicking with them, but we picked up a couple of not badly used wetsuits from a surfer’s swap meet up in San Francisco. Wetsuits do work. Psychologically, though, when the air is hovering around 60 degrees and the water is around 53 degrees, it takes some will to dive into the waves.
Nothing clears your head quite like an October day at that beach, though. I survived, and my teeth didn’t even chatter.
Apart from attending a street fair and sleeping and junk, we were at the beach. And, then we were at the beach some more.
Here’s why the street fair out here in our new community is the bomb.
It rivals Cambridge’s many street fairs for variety, people watching and street food. But, it kicks it’s ass with the availability of not just wine and beer but actual booze in the form of a fog cutter. Cocktail on the rocks in a commemorative glass and tzachkes, including the new toe rings I had put on my right foot to replace those lost in a tragic foot rubbing incident. (OK, foot rubs are necessarily good not tragic.)
Also of interest is that the Hells Angels of Daly City maintain a booth. I never suspected motor cycle clubs for street fair esprit.
This year included the new and exciting sand castle contest. Silly me I expected it to be on the beach, where the sand is.
This time of year is the sweetest for our town, reputed to be enshrouded in fog pretty much all the damn time.
Actually, when we were shopping and thinking about this place and this town, we listened skeptically as the locals told us that what would become our neighborhood was immune from low-hanging cloud formations. They alleged that the curve of the mountains behind our house and the beach cove down the street oceanward created a doughnut where the sun glinted pretty much 25 hours a day. Local pride and hyperbole we thought.
Sho’ nuff, though, many a morning as I head to my work-a-day toil, I don sunglasses in our bright and sparkling driveway only to drive into dank gray two, three blocks down the street. And, this fog is John Carpenter fog. Scary, dense, pea soup stuff that has you tapping your brakes and fearing the bogeyman jumping out in front of you.
Perhaps the best part of the doughnut effect and the surrounding fog is its defensive powers. Driving into town from cutting over the San Bruno Mountains and headed to Highway 1, with the sun blotted out of the sky and clouds all around you, it’s impossible to believe there could be sun down below. So, at sea level in my backyard, the crowds stay away.
M. likens his commute to the Mists of Avalon. (Not clear if he fancies himself King Arthur.) I call it Brigadoon.
This weekend, they (or we) celebrate the mists with the Fog Fest. It’s the only street fest I’ve encountered on this god-forsaken coasts that puts me in mind of my days back wandering Mass. Ave. in Cambridge. Most of the street festivals here are precious and cloying in a particular California style. Lots of chardonnay and the kind of art for sale that includes evocative, colored door ways from distant lands snapped on someone’s world tour arranged to maximize the opportunities to see ‘exotic” brown faces and evocative doors. At the Fog Fest, the art is more driftwood and beads and sea glass; homey junk I would make myself.
As we gear up for this adventure that shall be followed by a frolic in the sea with our boogie boards, I checked out photos I forgot I had taken of a surf contest last month, the Kahuna Kapuna. When I paddle around with my meager, and they are seriously meager, sponging skills, which make me unworthy to share the ocean with the likes of Kelly Slater, it’s inspiring to watch people who know what they are doing. What you can’t tell from the photos is how unrushed and stock still some of old timers looked. Apart from the fact they were floating on a board at the top of a crashing wave, they stood as though they could have been waiting for a bus.
Now, in a free society, this post would be heaping full of links to the interwebs. But, for the sake of lessons learned and any kind of fall out for anyone that is not me, you’ll just have to trust in the story without the link love.
Tuesday of this week, as I am wiling away time clicking through budget spreadsheets and maintaining the meager daily existence that is my employment, M., an occasional diversion through electronic data transmissions, shoots me an email. The email was a forward from a dude who is a consultant at his company or, as you will read, was a consultant at his company. The contractor man had a nose that was full on disjointed, because, I gather from the corporate-wide email to which he appended his message, that consultants aren’t invited to some parties.
Now, here’s a side note. I actually have to work with contractors where I work, and actually have to work with the lawyers and the consultants themselves to get the terms of the contracts just so. One way my employer manages that whole blurry line of corporate communications among the folks that aren’t on the payroll is to refuse to recognize them. Consultants ain’t got no email. Period. No questions. One answer, and no question then that they just don’t get the corporate-wide messages. It’s up to us folks on the ground that work with them directly to point out the passing free lunch.
But, back to M.’s company. It’s much larger and much more corporate, business-like. They have consultants woven into the landscape doing all those kind of things that independent contractors might do at a corporation. In this case, the guy’s a graphic, web design dude. Like any number of graphic, web design dudes, although judging by a photo on one of several of his websites, perhaps a tad douchier than your average dude.
So, this guy, this avenger of the right and just, stands up for contractors everywhere and takes it upon himself to “Reply All” to the corporate-wide announcement for the shindig to gripe that it specifies “Contractors Excluded.”
Full disclosure. I’ve been that administrator who has to send out emails to a wide group and maybe make some negatives like “Contractors Excluded” known. I pride myself on two things in this life, not writing all sucky and shit and not being a total dick. Lucky for me, then, I’ve mostly been able to finesse the language away from full-on offending anyone. But, I can tell you from the real-life experience I’ve lived, people have an infinite capacity to find something to bitch about in any mass mailing. It’s the law that at least one person will complain, with a geometric progression growing to n+1 as the size of the recipient list grows.
People suck, and in my work lifetime, I’ve seen that suck grow alongside the popularity of email. You used to have to get up out of your seat and walk over and talk to someone or maybe pick up a telephone to get your complaint on.
So, you can probably guess as to where my allegiances were when I read the dude’s email. Mistake Numero Uno, the first, he called out the woman who sent the invitation email by name. He also called her out by deed, indicating to the entire corporation that he had tried last year (presumably for the same end-of-the-year party) to address the “Contractors Excluded” language. Of course, though, like all self-righteous pricks, he didn’t actually say how he tried last year.
Why is that mistake the first, the premier, error? Because, never, ever, ever fuck with the administrator who’s so close to the top of the food chain that she is the one sending out corporate-wide emails inviting folks to a party. The one who arranges events for the whole company probably sits within rock-throwing distance to people with Cs in their titles, those Cs stand for “Chief.” The email sender wouldn’t have chief in her title, but she’s bound to be on a first name basis, and know the names of the husbands, wives, children, dogs and hamsters, of the people who do. She talks with them; you, angry consultant, probably don’t.
The Number 2 mistake, but perhaps the mistake that truly removes you from naive crusader for a good cause to King Douche in a land of douchebags, hit my lizard brain before I fully understood the weight of the words of the email. Apparently, to you, angry contractor, not getting invited to a company party by a company that doesn’t actually employ you is the same as Jim Crow. Yup, the dude actually wrote to the entire company that his lack of an invite was just like separate bathrooms and water fountains and being sent to the back of the bus.
Let’s review that one. You work as an independent, self-employed graphic artist/web designer. You, per your grinning douche picture on your website, which it is fucking killing me not to post here or at least link, you are very likely of the Caucasian color scheme and be-goateed to boot. You work at a large, diverse company in one of the most racially diverse counties in the area. And, YOU, fucking compare yourself to people who ACTUALLY SUFFERED in our recent history?
Godwin’s Law talks about the frequency by which internet arguments devolve into Hitler comparisons. There needs to be a corollary law of wrongness for martyrs who compare their tiny inconveniences to Rosa Parks. Personally, I think it’s OK to turn a fire hose on anyone who makes a false comparison to the Civil Rights Movement. Being a contractor not invited to a party is not anything at all like having a separate bathroom, you fucking asshole.
It was from that metaphor alone I predicted that M.’s company would soon have one less contractor.
The much lesser mistake, mistake # 3, which for me was the big comedic pay off was the email sig. If one is to send an email to some where in the range of 1,000 to 2,000 people, based on the company’s size, one might want to pause and really think about what your email sig says about you. In this case, it says all of your several fucktarded online personae with links and names of multiple Facebook, AIM, Twitter and ‘blog identities.
Of the many, my fave was the Twitter feed for the account that seems to be your official company site for your business under which you contract. Early in the Twitter feed, around the same time M. forwarded your email to me, and we laughed at you, you predicted it would be a fun day. Thank you, it was. Then there are cracks about contractors “Included,” because, yup, hardy har, they excluded you. The denouement, of course, your bitterness about the company eliminating the complainer instead of fixing the problem.
Oh, so hard, to be so right, in such a cruel world.
As a companion piece, was your personal, casual Twitter feed. I don’t know what I’m digging more. Your conviction that you were martyred for “doing the right thing,” or that them turning off your remote computer access. That VPN note might win the funny by a hair, because the rumor was already out in M.’s company that they had indeed cut your computer.
It is so wrong of me to laugh. I have been fired. I have made mistakes on the world wide webs. I’ll probably continue to make such mistakes. But, at least, all of the company-wide emails I have ever sent have been mildly amusing and professionally worded. Although, i might have made an exception and something around excluding you my name.
Work. That’s all I feel like I do. Work. Toil. Plod. Struggle. Grind up hill and watch the boulder bear back down upon me.
For a few nights I brought spreadsheets home only to save some creeping insanity. Sometimes you just have to bring the tools of your destruction home and face them. Full on immersion, kind of like bathing in your enemies blood and coming out stronger on the other side encrusted with dried corpuscles, only with Excel. Encrusted with dried cells and formulae.
The truth is I’m just burned out. I can feel the funk of endlessly facing the same shit different day blues. I know it’s called a job for a reason, but I’m getting tired of feeling worked over. Maybe, when a whole lot of shit linked to the approaching year end, and I’ll feel my chipper self again. Or maybe, it won’t. Right now, I can’t tell.
So, for now, I’m writing very little, I’m performing not at all and I’m sleeping on the couch, weary when the sun sets.
Tomorrow, I’m going to hope for a little more energy.
I was just now dozing on the couch, when I was shaken out of my torpor by scanning Facebook. That is some sad shit, torpor-shakingly speaking, given the banality that presumes, but what are you going to do?
Regardless of the intellectual worth of my pursuit, here’s what I found:
An original work by an undiscovered filmmaker, my aunt, chronicling one of the places that is a touchstone, I think, for most everyone in my extended family. In fact, I think because of Scituate, I will always prefer the ocean as the go-to place for getting gone. Vacations should either involve being in an ocean, being near an ocean or flying over one. Or, it’s not really a trip, is it? Some day in my life, I may make an exception to that rule to visit Chicago, but they tell me, the theys that say things, they say that Lake Michigan is like staring at the ocean with no end in sight.
We didn’t go anywhere for this long weekend. I labored a little on spreadsheets, but that was more of a sanity measure, because shit at work just keeps piling up to shit levels I cannot stand. It was fucking therapeutic to almost feel like I’m not drowning in paperwork.
But, the important part is we didn’t go anywhere, because we don’t fucking need to go anywhere. We live at the beach. Yeah, my touchstone from childhood on for happy is less than a mile down the road. Granted, it’s the other ocean on the other coast of this continent, but saline and rolling waves and I’m a proverbial pig in shit. Cold, wet shit. Oh, fuck, that’s not the metaphor that really sells that one.
In the ’60s and ’70s, though, the beach for me was south of Boston, north of Plymouth, where the rock isn’t actually on a beach, at the end of what felt like a long ride, including a pass on “Old Oaken Bucket Road,” in the Sand Hills section of Scituate. Scituate, AKA the Irish Riviera, where the riffraff from the big city, like my people, bought summer cottages to escape the heat and wile away the summer hours on beach chairs dug into off-white sands.
Google Maps (which wasn’t invented back in the olden days of my youth) says it’s about 21 miles door to door and under 40 minutes. But, in July, packed up in the station wagon for a month’s stay, Pat at the wheel and five kids sitting in the pecking order that used to be when it was legal to cram as many children as you could in a regular car, it was remote. The youngest, poor me, was either on the hump in the middle, or the way, way back with luggage and food. (I was thrilled when the oldest began getting their licenses and their own cars or traveled in teenage packs with friends. It meant breathing room.)
The thing about Scituate was it represented an oasis from all the other suck in a typical hard-working suck life. Pat, the mater, as a school teacher, was completely free in July. She had no responsibilities other than to ensure we, her children, didn’t succeed in killing ourselves or each other. If I ever remember her happy, and maybe I do a little, the memories would mostly be in Scituate.
In Scituate, she could read books for hours endlessly. In Scituate, she could dig her chair in among the circle of moms on the beach in bathing suits with zippers and terry cloth “beach coats” and talk to adults who weren’t co-workers or the dreaded “Superintendent.” Of course, Pat, being who she was, that also meant she could have the joy of deconstructing the generally banal chatter of the beach-based coffee klatch and moaning about it. The Algonquin Round Table it was not, the great wits of the day must have been assembled on another beach, and I think Pat enjoyed complaining, Dorothy Parker-style.
I think everything was just a little bit different in Scituate. Take, for example, our cousins. My mother’s older sister lived, still lives, and raised her family in the same town where we lived, but we didn’t see them much around town. But, the time-honored tradition, which had to do with geography and who in Pat’s family stayed in Massachusetts and ages and families, was laid down at some point by my grandfather, his oldest daughter got August at the cottage, and Pat got July. The other folks in the clan visited around our two families, including my grandfather himself.
I really don’t know the history or how that fateful decision was made, but it was immutable law that we would be there in July, and in the planning and execution no minute in July could be missed. Then, in the transition on July 31/August 1 the keys were tossed to the eldest daughter of Pat’s clan, and we headed back to town. Because of this time share, the two sisters and their families actually talked some of the time, in Scituate.
In fact, one fateful summer, I was even allowed to stay on into August with my cousins. That’s when I learned the mysteries of hip huggers and halter tops and smoking in the dark of the beach. I hadn’t actually outgrown my childish ways, as yet, but I tagged along after my worldly cousin and her beach crew.
That was kind of the best part of Scituate. A little bit of lawlessness. All rules were relaxed. A chunk of the time you were sharing beds with some combination of sisters, cousins and friends, children packed into a few rooms without any school or work schedule to dictate terms. Late nights of giggling, followed by long summer days at the beach. Waking up was just as stop gap before grabbing a towel off the clothesline and walking to the waves. Even meals, while planned and cooked just like in town, seemed more casual and on the fly. Hotdogs and maybe back to the beach for one last dip.
There were rituals you couldn’t ever do in town. Like the next door neighbors, the Towers, that was their name, the Towers had an outdoor shower. That shower was occasionally a perfectly allowable alternative to a Saturday-night bath in the claw-footed tub. And, that shower was more fun than bathing could ever be.
There was no heat. None of the cottages had heat. So on the right, cool nights, that meant fire. Nothing rivals marshmallows or grilled cheese sandwiches cooked up in a fireplace, not to mention the chance to play with fire.
Here I am, now, thousands of years later with my own home near the beach, a fireplace AND a wood stove. Of course, inflation and real estate costs being what they are, I have to walk almost three times further to get to the beach. But, we were spoiled way back when, where the beach was 0.3 miles by road to our address, which was the “long” way without the path by the Beach Association. With the beach chairs and towels and food for snacks and lunch and stopping at Thorton’s Market and traveling in a pack, it felt longer.
It still relaxes me to spend a day at the beach. Or maybe just an hour or two. Today, it’s crushing Pacific waves in water that today the surf report tells me topped out at 59 degrees. It ain’t surprising that surfing caught on in this neighborhood in a big way.
Likely, I will never surf. The control of centrifugal force and wax sticking an upright homo sapiens’ feet to a long chunk of fiberglass or wood is beyond my philosophical imaging. I can’t stand still on solid ground, so fuck standing on a log. But I can grab a board none the less and manage some fun “sponging.” I’m too old to worry about cool, but just like a the owner of our favorite surf shop pointed out (in a hushed mystic, you had to be there Californian tone) there isn’t any other feeling like the energy of a wave pushing you onward.
I think last weekend we actually may have converted some friends from Boston to our new, weekend, wave-based religion.
It’s not exactly along the lines of John Edwards’ two Americas, but I feel like there are folks living in a different country than the one I am. For example, there’s the Glenn Beck effect. Now, I listen to old Glenn, and I think he’s either off the rocker or completely digging his dance with fame. I kind of think he’s the Jim Morrison of the FOXNews set, digging his own hype machine and taking his Lizard King news commentary on the edge further and further. One day, maybe he’ll whip his dick out of tight leather pants and claim he did it because of Obama’s hatred of his ivory soft, lilly white skin.
But, other people, like the folks on Twitter using hastags like #tcot or whatever the right is rocking these days, they think Glenn is a truth teller. They are retweeting the madness as important questions of the day.
He claims some kind of journalistic standard of research and facts. But, then, he goes on with absolute bullshit blathering of no fact, all opinion. In the irony of ironies, he wipes a broad brush over Washington, DC and all pols on the left accusing them of essentially rushing in quickly for no reason whilst waving his own brand of alarm, exactly the tenor he is accusing them of falsely raising. More weird is the high dungeon over things like 1,000-page bills or our trillion dollar debt. Where was the outrage under Bush and Cheney, for reals, were all of the bills back in those golden days an easy to read two, three pages at the same time that mounting debt made sense?
And, then there’s the health care debate. I’ve worked at hospitals and at the forefront of biomedical research. I know people who helped create and test life-saving drugs like Herceptin. I understand the good that is the U.S.-drive in novel therapies and new ways to combat diseases. You know what funds a whole lot of that there high-level research? Remember phrases like the “War on Cancer,” “new weapons in the war on HIV-AIDS,” and who’s brewing up badges of flu vaccines? Government fucking programs. Government grants.
You know, socialism. By the way, when did any and all government action automatically get disregarded as terrible and wasteful and/or the activities of apparatchiks in communist blocs? DMV aside, there are a whole lot of things going on by a layer of civil servants that are invisible by virtue of working out OK.
What I, and I’m sure a whole lot of liberals of my bent, with or without the experience working with doctors or in health care, find confusing is who is against health care reform. Blog after blog, CNN, MSNBC, FOX News, all have parades of outspoken citizenry shouting about the hell that change will bring. Taking aside the astroturf issue (and for me anyway, I would have to think twice about any protest I joined if I knew somewhere in the mix were lobbyists in suits with smug slogans feeding my anger), the fear seems palpable, yet completely misguided.
Misguided, because the folks interviewed, they all seem like regular folks. Jamokes with regular jobs and bills to pay just like me. People who live on a margin where catastrophic illness can break their situation pretty quickly. This interview ends with an outspoken dude, who had his 15 minutes of fame shouting in the face of Representative John Dingell, admitting he has “crappy” health insurance.
Why are so many people happy to pay out buttloads of cash to uncaring insurers, live with a status quo where literally millions are shit out of luck? I simply do not understand the logic.
I understand the fear, uncertainty and doubt. But, the venom and the slogans being screamed allude me. As does the intrinsic logic of government equals bad, business equals good and variations on the theme, at the same time the system is riddled with loopholes that favor no one but the soulless profiteers.
In the end, in today’s arguments, I heard a factoid on “Fresh Air,” as Terry Gross interviewed author T.R. Reid that surprised me, but shouldn’t have. The term “socialized medicine” was created by PR flacks working for the American Medical Association in 1947 to (successfully) torpedo President Truman’s proposed national health care system in good old-fashioned Cold War fear-mongering.
I’m thinking I might have to read that man’s book.
In one of those kind of modern day life imitates art or vice versa kind of dealios, I was just reading Gail Collins’ take in the New York Times on Woodstock. Toward the end the column compares the connectivity of today to the complete immersion of being stuck in traffic in the middle of mud in the middle of bumfuck upstate New York. The irony for me was the column was recommended to me by one of Gail’s contemporaries, and I mean contemporaries, someone who knew her back in the day, who was trying out Skype video chat over a distance of about 3K miles.
In 1969, in those months before Janis died and then Jimi, my dad had already died. Lawn-mowing induced coronary thrombosis rather than overdose or aspiration of vomit. Pure mainstream American, not the counter culture.
If that was the year that everything changed, with Woodstock the last bout of peace and love before the dominoes of Altamont and Kent State, at five years old, I may have been feeling the new ethos. Of course, in reality I was lost in my own brown-acid-less trip of not understanding death or why everything about my life was now changing. Somewhere between 1968 and 1969, I was sent away for a couple of weeks to live with cousins, moved from Massachusetts to Maryland and back, from a small house to a bigger one and back to an even smaller one near the first. Dazed and confused without the drugs.
At five years old, I can’t say how much I remember or how much I understood or how much I figured out. It’s all glimpses and shadows, like sitting cross-legged on the floor of an elementary school watching the moon landing on a big, black and white television rolled into the hallway on a tall stand, so more of us could see. It’s a vivid memory for me, but with Neil Armstrong strolling about lunar surfaces in July, when school wasn’t in session, and my academic career not as yet started, what with kindergarten cranking up in September, it couldn’t have been the moon landing.
Similarly, logic tells me through the glimpses and shadows of happiness with my mother, that it couldn’t have all been Altamont and Kent State. For her to have gotten married to a man many have told me was fun and funny and gregarious in ways she wasn’t, and then to have had a family of five kids, she must have had some fun in her. Like where did she ever learn to paddle-ball with such vigor and elan?
Yet, my long term memory is of a profound sadness, a life where I think she believed fate had conspired against her ever feeling truly happy. Her “Summer of Love” was probably 1967 too, just like the flower children along Haight Street, because one year later her husband would be gone, leaving an aloneness and perhaps a certain capacity to love would go with him.
It’s funny when I think of Woodstock and peace and love, and let’s try to love one another right now, because I’m pretty sure I have a warped sense of what love means. It’s not a bad sense, just off kilter.
I was talking to a friend the other day, moved to cynicism about what sounded like a pretty grim wedding with two young people embarking on a new adventure with a few cards already dealt not so much against them but maybe too low to make a winning hand. A baby on the way, and a minister dad with some strong words about unity, providing a subtext to the groom that the minister’s daughter was not to be messed with in any sense.
To that friend, I’m pretty sure all relationships, any relationship, any bond of love comes with a huge heaping helping of work. It’s work to keep families together. It’s the kind of work that has brought me to now really embrace the notion of making nothing more taxing than reservations on any of your major holidays. (In truth, I’m so far down on the lazy scale for that work, it’s not even me who makes the reservations. M. likes a good meal and will arrange one.)
Love is not a free banquet on the streets and a daisy in a rifle barrel turning away harsh deeds. Nope, I gather in our conversations that to her love is a bit like my mother’s was for us kids — a 50-mile hike with a 50-pound pack on a sweltering day surrounded by mud and mosquitoes. But, you do it, and you get through and that’s what it is.
I’m no romantic, but I like to think there’s maybe a free iced latte in there or something to lighten the drudgery and load every now and again.
Our major disagreement on love and relationships is over white lies. In my version, the beauty of family and relationships is they have to take your truth warts and all, and the little shit gets worked out. It’s to my family I can point out exactly how I feel and that includes M., and with him sometimes I think he knows too much about me. In my friend’s world, the social contract allows for a little greasing of the story, Lucille Ball telling Desi Arnez the new dress only cost a fraction of what it did and working a secret job on the side to make up the dent in the family budget.
Unfortunately for M., I’m no Lucille Ball, and I’m not making up any stories.
Meanwhile, back in our playing house 1950s California Ranch, M. and I argue (but not in the bad plate-throwing sense, but in the fun dialog way) about whether unconditional love exists. He gives it a possibility for parents to their children but certainly not couples. Because in coupledom, you can always walk away. The life is chosen and can be unchosen if the circumstances allow.
But, for me, and as i argue, walking away from his hypothetical heroin addict, moving out and moving on, doesn’t necessarily mean the love ends. Sure, any Al-Anon session will teach you that you gotta stop getting sucked into the addict’s life, but at the same time the bit of your heart remains behind. Personally, I’m happy I never have or it’s never gotten so bad that I ever completely wrote off some of the folks I have loved the most whose past behavior I have hated passionately the most.
I guess the love I still feel for people who have died also makes me question what unconditional love might be. Obviously, as a not completely insane person, I get that it’s not an active, I guess the word would be vital, love, and it’s a bit one-sided, but it doesn’t stop even as my live moves along and grows. Pat and Tommy and the dad I never really knew will always get a portion of my heart, for lack of a better cliched image to flog, and have a place set at my metaphorical table.
In the end, I’m now living geographically closer to Altamont than Woodstock, but I can spend time standing at the corner of Haight and Ashbury, looking at the T-shirts in the window of independent shops that popped up when the baby boomers still thought they could and would change the world by acting locally, and bemoan the big GAP on the corner, even though that was started in the same year but without the nickel and dime business plan. The boomers have, of course, changed the world both for good and for bad.
I may never know love. Or I may never believe in delirious and heady emotions blocking reason and imbuing me with a vision of chocolate-covered, rainbow-colored unicorns and puppies scampering in clover and daisies.
It’s a lock certain guarantee that I don’t aspire to and won’t be sashaying in volumes of white fabric down a satin walkway beribboned and flower bedecked, because I know not only that it doesn’t appeal to me but my self-conciousness at that little parade/ritual would just make it as joyless and awkward as I could neurotically muster. And, without a crystal ball or magic hippie divining rod, who knows, maybe in a minute or a month or a year or a lifetime either M. or I will want to walk away.
I’m not bothered, though. Because at least one thing Woodstock may have taught people, it was not only about being in the now and doing something and taking the chance like Gail Collins wrote about, it’s also about the story you get to tell later. I’m happy with the here and now and the story I might get to tell. (Not to mention, no mud, body odor or open latrines when M.’s copy of Woodstock on vinyl arrives in the mail.)
We get free food at work. We have airy and open little warrens and space enough to live complacent lives. But there’s the shining wire outside that may be the farmer’s snare of death. I haven’t quite figured out what my corollary wire slipping through my fur and cutting into my throat will be in the real world, but I feel like there are farmers keeping me well fed.
I’m worried about complacency setting into my soul. I’m worried that I’m just counting down to eventual death. More than anything, I’m worried that I’m starting to feel that tension around my heart that clutch that says there’s no where else to go, nothing else to do, bills must get paid, any job is a good job, unemployment is up, salaries are down.
I don’t want to scrabble through dust and despair all Tom Joad and depression. I’ve already packed up my possessions and driven long and hard into a promised new future in the golden west.
But, I don’t want the kind of tamped down emotional sub-life. Simmering at my desk. Worrying about office supplies. Hating the mere voices of those around me and their mewling needy ways. I ain’t saying I’m there. I’m not even clear on how much I’m hating work as compared to simply hating that I wasn’t born silver-spooned and silk-slippered and fat, dumb, fabulously rich and happy.
My two primary fantasies for most of my life would be comfortable wealth and intellectual shallowness. By intellectual shallowness, I actually mean flat out stupid. How fucking awesome would it be to be so stupid that no one expects nothing from you and you don’t care ‘cuz you don’t know? I had a dream that one day I never even figured out more than enough reading to be sure I could get the instructions for my instant oatmeal.
If I were rich, filthy fucking rich, but slow, folks might even help me. No one would expect advice or help from me. Nosiree, Bob, nope. How could I help without insight and understanding and book learning? And, the money would ensure I still got feigned respect.
Simple.
But, I’m smart enough and poor enough that I have so many fewer options. I can do something to earn me some cake or I can go hungry. That’s about it. Work or die. Or work til I die.
Four years in, though, four years into this gig, I’m still at a sweet enough spot where no one is avoiding me in the hallways. I’m in a sweet enough spot that the free Diet Coke still keeps my afternoons moving. I’m in a sweet enough spot that I even got a long-awaited title change (even if half of everyone in the building got one at the same time, too).
I think it’s not so much Watership Down and dying outside my cushy warren, but George Costanza. Maybe all I need to do is figure out how to leave on a high note.
