Visitation

I see the month of February is practically over, which is shocking to me since I feel like 2012 hasn’t really started yet. And yet it has. My self-improvement project continues, as I suspect it will for a long while.

I have not heard a peep out of my brother in Los Angeles. Even though I shortened it considerably, perhaps he is still reading the letter I mailed to him three days before his birthday. There is a lot in that letter to digest.

I did, on the other hand, have a really nice visit from my father. Our father, I suppose I should say in the spirit of brotherly unity, which is emerging as a theme, although that phrase – our father – does sound mighty Catholic. It was the end of January and my fever was evidently at full throttle because I woke up one night in the midst of the flu’s second assault to find my father, who has been dead for more than three years now, perched on my dresser wearing what appeared to be a wizard-ish outfit. I was shocked to see him, naturally, although he looked great. He reminded me, in a fatherly sort of way, that not only was his birthday coming up but so too was one of my nephew’s.

So the next afternoon I sent an e-mail to my brother (the father of my nephew). I haven’t spoken with this particular brother in nearly a year, so I felt a little intro was in order: Sorry I have not been in touch … And then I explained that I was quite ill but wanted to wish my nephew a happy fifth birthday. And my brother’s reply came back in less than 20 minutes and with such joviality that it occurred to me that perhaps lots of people just don’t communicate very much. I haven’t been in touch with this particular brother because I think he’s an asshole, and I assumed that his lack of communication meant the feeling was mutual. For so many years now I thought my brother was using his two children as an excuse to avoid conversations with me, but perhaps I have been wrong. Maybe he really is overwhelmed.

My sister – our sister – and her two daughters and her husband are coming out west this summer. This trip of hers is one of the things that got me amped up on the need to go see a therapist because earlier this year, when she mentioned that she was going to bring her family out this way, my immediate thought was that if we had a halfway normal family, my two brothers in California and I would all get together at some point with my sister and her family. We could maybe rent some rooms somewhere on the Oregon coast. Or maybe somewhere in Northern California. But, since we’re not really on speaking terms at the moment … you know. If that’s not a sure sign of a low-class family I don’t know what is.

Anyhow, on Valentine’s Day of all days I had a real estate agent come over to the house and have a look. Then we went down the road for coffee to “talk it over” and she told me, when I asked her point blank, that yes, she does believe that my house could be sold, and probably fairly easily and no, she does not believe I am trapped in this structure until the day I die or the day it burns to the ground, whichever comes first. When I asked her the question I used those scenarios, more or less, because, I’ve realized since, they’re exactly the scenarios I’ve been carrying around with me for a few years now. I slept so soundly that night I cannot quite describe it. So soundly, in fact, that the following morning I decided that I probably shouldn’t start the selling process without having a very clear idea of where I’m going next. Which of course I do not have. Not even remotely.

Finally (for now at least) I’ve been thinking a lot the past few weeks about God. I’m not really sure what I believe or don’t believe, and I’m not really sure that what I believe or not matters much. I do have a friend who I met through AA, and she and I do get to talking about God from time to time, and we’ve both run into the issue as if it were a wall, a very solid, concrete wall. The alcoholics talk a lot about God and the importance of God and getting right with God as part of the “recovery” process. And for now, for today and for at least a few more days, I think what I need to do and what many of us need to do is the exact opposite: Before we turn this that and the other over to God, we need to get on good, comfortable speaking terms with the demons.

And I thought I had problems

On Friday afternoon I went down to the neighborhood theater and watched a movie about Marilyn Monroe. I wasn’t blown away by the movie itself, which is one of many nominated for an Academy Award, but it did get me thinking about fame and fortune. I love money, unapologetically for the most part, but when it comes to fame, I think people who aspire to celebrity are well on their way to complete madness.

This includes presidential hopefuls, people who want to run large corporations, actresses, and little girls from semi-rough neighborhoods in New Jersey whose voices somehow serve as the cornerstone of dreams that are shared by millions.

What I heard on Saturday afternoon wasn’t initially clear to me. I thought the guy on radio was dedicating her most famous song to someone else. A couple of songs later a minister came on the radio program I was listening to and was asked to explain how this death would impact the black community as a whole. Oh, I thought. She died. Wow.

It would have been hard to live through the 1980s and early 1990s without knowing the songs. I never owned any of her music but I heard plenty of it. Some of it I really liked; most of it I did not. I never saw either of her big movies, both of which looked awful enough in previews. I don’t really follow celebrity gossip much, but I had heard the stories about the marriage to a guy whose name was apparently synonymous with thuggery but whom I’d never heard of otherwise. I heard about the drugs and I saw a picture of her on stage in which she looked not unlike an elderly chicken.

I saw, of course, the interview, and yesterday, on Monday (I’m sort of embarrassed to admit this) I spent many hours watching other interviews and reading articles and watching clips from the news programs. Like a student completely unprepared for the exam but dead set on getting an A, I absorbed at a fevered pace. I have many questions and comments, but I’ll close with the one that keeps raising its hand in a demand for attention: Why is everyone so anxious to blame the ex-husband?

Greetings from Issue City

In addition to going to Missouri and dealing with being sick not once but twice, there was something else that kept me busy-ish during the month of January.

I got caught up with some family correspondence. I’ve been neglecting it for a long while now. I’ve been avoiding it as well. Those are two very separate things, I’m learning – avoiding something and neglecting it.

This is the beginning of a long and probably tedious story, but it is one that has to start somewhere and that somewhere, I’m sorry to say, is right here and right now. It began a few days after Christmas with the arrival of a card with a Los Angeles postmark. It was some High Catholic foolishness and on it was scrawled an inane message from my brother down there – the one I haven’t spoken to since two days before Michael Jackson died, and that was in June 2009. I tore it to pieces, which I tossed directly into the trash. Normally I’d recycle something like that, but I’d rather contribute to a landfill than put that kind of toxicity into the earth we all have to share.

Everything this particular brother of mine does infuriates me, but here are a couple of specifics.

The lesser of the two is that this card he sent to me and to others in our family is from a collection that our father kept. They were designed by a friend of his from high school who went on to become a monk who specialized in calligraphy. The problem here is that had anyone else in the family taken these cards from the house and mailed them around as holiday greetings, it would have been turned into a federal case. By my brother in Los Angeles. But because he is special, because he is the chosen one among us, it’s perfectly fine.

Just like it was perfectly fine for him to sit in his apartment and tell me he’s not sure how he feels about another of our brothers taking family photos out of the house. It takes a certain sort of person to say something like that while seated in a living room adorned with family photos, a rug we all hooked together in the early 1970s, several Christmas ornaments my mother collected over the years, our parents’ wedding china. My brother is that sort of person. He is exactly that sort of person.

Worse, though, is that my brother’s casual little holiday greeting implies, I think, that if we haven’t spoken for two and a half years now, that must be because of something trivial and ridiculous that’s entirely on my side of the fence.

I fretted and fumed for a few days. I came down with a cold, one year ended and another began, and I quit smoking. And I started writing a letter. My first attempt was 22 pages long and included footnotes. Attempt number two was shorter – 14 pages or so – and did not include footnotes. The version that was mailed to my brother and that he hopefully received on his birthday – which this year was on Friday the 13^th – was eight pages. I haven’t heard a word back, of course, nor do I expect to. But writing and sending that letter did set a thing or two in motion and has transformed this place of mine here into what a therapy-addicted friend of mine used to refer to as Issue City, and it’s a town, if you will, where I plan to be for a while.

There went January

Apologies in advance for the negativity, but 2012 is certainly off to a shitty start.

A few days before the end of 2011, I caught some sort of cold thing, which was miserable but that did prompt me to throw out not only the cigarettes but the ashtray as well. The cold lingered a bit and then went away. Sort of, but not completely. Those five words are the theme of the year thus far: Sort of, but not completely. The sickness, the illness, was at just the right pitch that if I was experiencing nicotine withdrawal, they were covered up by cold symptoms.

Underlying the sickness, in the background of it, was the murky malaise brought about by being sort of working but sort of not working. I struggle to see myself and present myself as a flexible, go-with-the-flow type of person, but when it comes to work, I am simply not. Beginning around the middle of December and going straight through until last Friday, there has not been a single normal week. The last week of last year and the first week of this year were screwy because while the holidays took occurred on a Sunday, they were observed on a Monday. Most people in my work sphere disappeared the Thursday and Friday before Christmas, so that week was a weird one. Then on the last Thursday of the year the cold arrived, and I feel like I’ve been hacking and coughing and sneezing and complaining ever since.

The week before last I got on a plane and went to Saint Louis. Then last week I got on another plane and returned. So there went two more weeks. And, just to add to the general weirdness of it all, last Thursday afternoon I was sitting right here at my desk and at about 1 or so in the afternoon, I realized I felt awful. After arguing with myself for a while, I conceded and buried myself beneath the covers, fully dressed except for my shoes. A couple of hours later I got up and was shivering so violently that I could barely shut the computer down. I took the hottest bath I think I’ve ever had and while it was still light outside went back to bed, where I remained until a little past 9 on Friday morning. I don’t think I’ve had the flu for more than a decade. It was strange getting out of bed on Friday. First, I am usually up before daylight. And second, the little white lights in my living room window were on, which was odd. Why I would have turned those on during the afternoon is beyond me. Maybe I did a bit of sleep walking and plugged them in during the nearly 20 hours that I was in bed fighting the fever. Who knows? Anyhow, when I got up I was craving scrambled eggs, which I took as a good sign. But then it got worse over the weekend, then a little better, than worse again. And the sort of but not completely continued.

So, I have a couple of notions about how to better enjoy next January. The first thing I’m going to do is to tell any and all clients – provided I’m still in this business – that I am absolutely unavailable from Christmas Eve through the second day of January. And the days after the second day of January will be normal business days whether clients are working or not. The second thing is to reschedule or completely forego the trip to Missouri. Because January is one of my favorite times of the year, and even though I’m still in the sort of foggy vagueness that can only be brought about by combining little illnesses with fuzzy schedules, I just realized that it’s over this week.

Public seating

For a couple of years now I’ve been complaining and carrying on about people at the coffee shop in my neighborhood and how territorial they are about tables. Seriously, I often want to scream when I’m down there, just because you have a Twitter account and a Facebook page and a glowing image of a fruit on your laptop does not mean you own the space in which you sit. And sit. By the hour. Wearing earplugs, cords stretched across aisles, that horrible, horrible look of manufactured intensity I know so well shielding the faces from any human interaction.

So I have decided to do something about it. On many occasions over the last few months, when I’ve been seated at a table and people are standing around with mugs and plates in their hands, I’ve shared the table. There were two women who meet for coffee regularly. There was a guy and his sister, who was here for the holidays from somewhere back east. There was a guy and his daughter, who was about eight or nine years old. There was a woman who was expecting someone who never showed. It’s not that big of a deal. We didn’t have to have conversations. The little snippets about each of them that I just shared were all overheard by simply listening after saying hello and you’re welcome and please, by all means, have a seat. Then I’d return to my book. In all instances there was nothing painful or even awkward about sitting at the same table with complete strangers. We all came through it unscathed.

At the coffee shop in my neighborhood there is a large table in the front that I’ve always thought of as the group table, or the community table. Maybe that’s a wrong assumption on my part, but it’s larger than all the other tables and it’s rectangular rather than round. Once, one guy told me in a rather condescending tone that he was “sort of, um,” waiting for a couple of friends to join him and that the seating at that table is, “you know, first come, first served.” And I just kind of glared and said oh, okay, and sat down, and after a few minutes he packed his shit and left. I think that’s what got me started.

Recently, I was at Ikea and I stopped at the cafeteria for the meatballs, mashed potatoes and chocolate cake. In Portland, the cafeteria faces west, and there’s something quite nice about gazing out on a silvery winter afternoon at the fields and the hills off in the distance and the airport, watching the planes come and go. I sat at the end of one of the long, narrow tables that has eight chairs on each side. I want to say that one more time: It has eight chairs on each side. Although the cafeteria was pretty busy that afternoon, I had that table all to myself. I felt slightly guilty as people scurried about with the trays, their worried looks, their merchandise, but only slightly. Of the 16 chairs at the table where I sat, only one was taken. When I got up to leave two groups – one of three, the other four – raced, and I mean raced, toward the table I was leaving. One group got there first, as often happens, and so a woman from the group that reached the finish line second said “Oh, I’m sorry” and stepped back a bit and looked at the members of the victorious party with an awkward expression on her face. “My God,” I said as I walked away with my tray, “there are sixteen chairs.”

I have no idea what it is that infuriates me so much about all of this. People not being able to share space might strike me as a little bit too solid a metaphor for what is either an increasing inability to connect with new people or an increasingly alarmed reaction to my ongoing inability to connect with new people. Or maybe it just underscores what I think is the general self-centeredness of people, which seems to me to be on the rise. Or maybe it scares me deep down inside because it causes me to think: Shit, what are we going to do when we really need to help each other? By that, I mean, how will the seat savers and public space hoarders behave when the water and power get turned off, or shut down? You know as well as I do how they’ll behave: Badly.

Anyhow, the other day I met a friend for lunch over in an area of Portland called the Pearl. If you don’t live in Portland, the Pearl is what happens when a lot of mostly white people with a lot of money decide that it would be cool to acquire an urban lifestyle and, in the course of less than a decade, take over a neighborhood that was previously one sketchy block after another of warehouses, loading docks, broken windows and railroad tracks. I’m developing a bit of affection for the people who live over there, I must say, and here is why. They paid their million dollars or more for their view of the city and the mountains and then demanded that the post office alter its schedule and the trains reduce the pitch of their whistle. And their demands, of course, were met. They have enough money to build a new skyline so why shouldn’t the noises that were there long before they were be reduced? There’s a wonderful honesty about it, I think. We get what we want, the streets and boutiques and hybrid Toyotas over there whisper, because we pay for it.

The cathedral of the Pearl District, I think, is the Whole Foods store sitting there on West Burnside, a swirl of moneyed, mostly white folks coming and going, carrying the Whole Foods bags and wearing expressions of earnest urgency on their faces. It’s important business down there, getting the purest of the pure, the most organic of the organic. Because the grocery store in my neighborhood does not carry it, I go to Whole Foods to buy brown sugar in bulk, which I use for my oatmeal. This friend of mine who I had lunch with the other day – she’s my former boss, actually – has a thing for late lunches, and I do get hungry, so after I filled the plastic baggie (God forbid) with brown sugar I went over to the bakery section, which I had never visited before, and got myself a ham and cheese croissant. I figured I’d take it over to Powell’s with me and order a cup of coffee, but as I came through the checkout line I noticed the strangest thing: There are long, narrow tables with chairs that are more like bar stools on the Couch Street side of Whole Foods, and although it’s in one of the snottiest neighborhoods in Portland, the tables there are shared without questions, explanations or apologies. I couldn’t believe it.

Smoke

It was the last Thursday afternoon of 2011. I was sitting at my desk and in the course of one hour I experienced the transformation of what had begun as a weird little tickle on the rear roof of my mouth into a full-fledged cold, or flu, or some sort of malady that fits into that category. I woke up Friday morning and realized I was, in fact, good and sick, so I went ahead and met a friend for coffee, as we’d planned to do, and then I got on the train and went out to do a bit of shopping and have some lunch. It was gray, and cold, and rainy and windy, but I didn’t really feel ill. Not exactly.

I got home before dark, and that’s when my nose began to bleed. At first I was surprised. Then I was annoyed. Then I was terrified. I am going to bleed to death in this goddamn house, I thought. I leaned over the kitchen sink as what I thought was a massive amount of blood splattered into the sink and splashed, as I would discover soon enough, up onto the black and white tile. My neighbor did me up an ice pack, which worked for quite a while. I had a really nice bath and then, around 10:45, woke from a deep sleep and noticed that my face was wet. Once the lights were on, I discovered an ungodly mess. Later, toward 3 o’clock in the morning, I fell asleep briefly in the living room, where I’d laid down on the rug but made sure my head was resting on the wood floor, figuring that if the bleeding started again, wood – unlike pillows or sheets or blankets or couch cushions or the rug – could be easily washed.

I think New Year’s Eve, a Saturday, was probably the worst of it. My face would feel so hot I feared combustion. Then, moments later, it was like ice. I cancelled my lunch plans and laid down on the floor again. At noon I got up and read a little and then laid down again. And then a little before five I walked to a potluck gathering, which I stayed at for an hour or so. I walked back to my house and went out to the little enclosed back porch out back, where I lit a cigarette and heaved and hacked my way through two drags. I had a cold that entailed some kind of respiratory issue, so as my chest got heavier the act of breathing became more difficult. And so there I stood, smoking. After two drags I put the cigarette out. An hour later I broke all the cigarettes I had in the house into at least three pieces, drenched them in water and then drained them into an empty coffee can. The coffee can, and the one remaining ashtray, were in the garbage before the beginning of 2012.

For me, smoking fell out of the social realm many years ago. I do recall (fondly, I have to say) going out to bars and cafes and restaurants and smoking with other people. There was something very reassuring, I thought, about lighting a cigarette right after the after-dinner coffee was poured. There was a time when I could smoke my way through most of a pack in a single sitting – or standing – at a bar. I also thought that smoking was one of the very few pleasant aspects of driving. Cigarettes somehow added a fleck of civility to the depravity of sitting in traffic on the outskirts of a city famous for incorporating public transportation into its urban planning.

The act of smoking changed so much in a relatively brief period of time. For me, it became very private, and very confined to one particular space. And not long after I quit drinking, I started trying to figure out what it was exactly that would prompt me to light a cigarette. Almost every cigarette I smoked, I figured out, I smoked in order to avoid doing something else. They weren’t relaxing. They weren’t pleasant. They certainly weren’t a whimsical ending to a tasty sexual escapade, and from the vantage point of the fifth full day without one, I don’t exactly miss them, I don’t exactly want one, but I cannot honestly say that their absence has gone unnoticed.

С Новым годом

It seems to me that sooner or later every regular blog includes a post about the blog. For this blog, that sooner or later is today.

In September 2009 I decided to post a blog about the death of Ted Kennedy. And then I wrote another, and then I started trolling around here and there for photographs. Then I discovered, much to my surprise, that I had forgotten how much I truly enjoy writing, and by that I mean putting words to a thought or emotion or impulse with zero regard for the audience. That’s the exact opposite of my job, which requires me to write focused exclusively on the audience, with the goal of inspiring the purchase what’s being sold by whomever is paying me to write what they want written. In other words, it’s not writing at all – it’s typing. Writing this blog is another matter entirely. I write for the satisfaction of it, I write to express opinions without having to be polite about it, I write for a certain measure of therapy. It’s a self-centered enterprise, with very little thought given to who might be reading.

But a few months ago I happened across a tool I had no idea existed: In the back room of the blogging program there’s an accessory that spews forth very specific numbers and charts and bar graphs based on who drops in and when and from where. Even though I do not write with a specific audience in mind, I’d be lying if I said that I don’t find the statistics very interesting.

By a huge margin – and by that I mean several thousand – the most clicked upon or opened or read blog post is one I do not even recall writing. It’s about a city in Ohio whose basketball team had just lost a very, very celebrated player, a loss that had much of the sports world worked into a frenzy such that I thought the name of the basketball player had eclipsed the name of the city. After looking at the numbers I went back and read the post, which is one of my rambling odes to the glory of industrial cityscapes and the tragedy, I think, of elevating professional athletes to hero status. What’s truly strange is that the post doesn’t even mention the player by name, so how it caught on is a mystery to me. And it will remain so since I refuse to activate the comments function.

Another mystery pertains to the second most clicked upon or opened or read post. This mystery, for me, is more intriguing. The second most popular post in the history was about a very, very famous Russian author and a big, big book he wrote back in the 1850s. I posted it last fall, when my sisters and I were in the midst of reading that very long and very detailed book. A few months ago I discovered that not only had that post racked up some very impressive numbers but that it also altered the readership of this blog.

To this day, most of those who visit this blog do so on computers – or mobile phones perhaps – that are located in Russia. That baffles me, of course, but I do have three scenarios.

The first is that they’re Internet hackers. According to what I’ve heard and read, it’s something of a golden age of hacking over there in Russia and in countries that were once part of the big union. So perhaps every time their computers pick up a specific word – the author’s name, for example, especially when it’s in the headline – thousands of people either have a look themselves or use computers that are instructed to do so on their behalf. Of course, it’s odd that they’d continue reading, or monitoring. Anyhow, that’s my least favorite scenario.

The second is a bit more to my liking: The Russians remain deeply committed to and deeply in love with the author. Maybe people have their computers set to search for his name as a key word. Maybe people are conducting research for dissertations and on the lookout for something – anything – that testifies to the author’s power to transcend time itself. Or perhaps someone had a few hours to spare and was clicking around here and there on a cold and lonely afternoon on the eve of a Russian winter, when she (I do think of this person as she for some reason) came across a topic with which she was on intimate terms. And perhaps she forwarded it, and, to borrow the phrase of the author, so on and so forth.

Here’s my third scenario. The name of the author in the subject line prompted the blog to be picked up by various individuals and groups who are learning English. A simple forwarded e-mail that said, Look, here’s something about Tolstoy morphed into regular readership as a means of experiencing a regular dose of the language they’re learning in a more conversational rendition. That’s pure fantasy, of course, and it’s therefore not only my favorite of the three scenarios but the one I’m sticking with.