A harried visit

November 3, 1985

She came and went, but is still not gone, nor has the storm of controversy disappeared from around her.

It sends shock waves ahead and behind.

I should have known she would be coming and that the reason for her coming would not be simple.

I’ve been writing about her again and that seems to draw her out of the woodwork.

She has numerous reasons for coming; the least important of all is seeing me.

No, that’s not true either.

Seeing me is a matter of convenience, and she manipulates me by withholding fact until it is too late for me to do anything about any of it – and possibly upset her plans, or would be so embarrassed to do so as to seem unreasonable.

She called yesterday at two in the afternoon saying, “I’ll be down for a visit.”

A short visit, she said, just in and out.

She claimed she would have to get back home to meet a friend the next morning.

“Going to New York City,” she said, and in my half conscious state this did not hit me as a calculated statement.

I offered to let her spend the night. It seemed silly to have her drive all the way back only to come back to this neck of the woods a few hours later.

She said “Maybe,” and hung up.

Some hours later she called. She had gotten off at the wrong exit – again – and was lost in the heart of Passaic.

I went out and led her back through the maze of streets to my little hovel.

It was then she informed me that she was to attend a Halloween party in Clifton.

“Something my boyfriend doesn’t know about,” she said.

How strangely her mind works, the push and pull of motives and plans. She comes all the way to Jersey to party and make peace with me – at least long enough to have a place to rest.

“I start a new job Tuesday,” she said.

In the meantime, she is making good use of her short vacation.

This morning I deliberately overslept – just to see what would happen.

Maybe that upset her plans enough to wrangle a real visit out of her.

She managed, however, to salvage her trip, and even managed a brief telephone confession to her boyfriend back home, telling him she would be going to a party without him.

Maybe she feared I might accidentally reveal her secret the next time I met with them together. And then, in yet another bit of last minute information, she informed me that she had driven her boyfriend’s car with her, but that her friends from the party would be picking her up and could I keep an eye on the car if she leaves it here.

“I’ll be back to collect it in the morning, I promise,” she said, wiggling her fingers as she left to the honk of horn of her party friends just then pulling up outside.

A harried visit 1985

I will always miss the mushrooms

June 17, 1987

I used to come here with her some times, autumn walks through the mills which gave us something to do between the time she came home from work at five and I went to work at eleven.

One might call it a nature walk, though it was more than that, it was an oasis in the midst of a growing and insane commercial world, a walk where dog owners and lovers came to share the shade, lovers often walking arms around each other along the two main trails.

There are other overgrown grassy trails that give the illusion of wilderness. She and I made love on a few of these – although we generally made love everywhere on anything, flat surface or not.

This is one of the places she said she could still find peace.

But she didn’t introduce this place to me; Pauly did, close enough to the town where he grew up for him to consider it his personal natural laboratory.

I was dating another woman then, who came with me and Pauly to explore it.

In many ways, it always reminded me of a race track with trees, one long looping gravel path that brought you back to the small gravel parking lot where you started – although on the far end, you could sit down on the edge of a cliff and stare out at the suburban sprawl these trees hid mostly from view.

Sometimes – when she was not in the mood to make love or after we did – we strolled along the path just to look at the mushrooms that sprouted up in droves to either side of the path – as pretty as flowers, we thought, which is why I got so angry when some right wing gun toting jerk in a pickup came here and picked them all. We caught them carrying out bags of them for some feast they had planned because they thought they had a right to pick them since their taxes (the ones they actually paid) make this park possible.

I secretly hoped the mushrooms he ate were poison.

I felt as if the bastard had robbed my wallet. But I got over it, and the mushrooms returned.

Our visits here came infrequently in winter since the trail closed at dusk and we had so few hours to spend between coming and going from work that we dared not waste any time making the drive here from Passaic, choosing to make love in my pathetic bed in my pathetic cold water flat instead.

But as I walk here today, two years after we split, I miss most holding her hand as we strolled, and treasure the memories, such as the raccoons who we caught in the middle of the path or the ducks who mistook a puddle for a pond, and the mushrooms. I will always miss the mushrooms.

I will always miss the mushrooms 1987

The morning before the morning when the clocks go back

Saturday, November 02, 2013

It is the morning before the morning when the clocks go back – that one day when it is possible to relive what was lost, only to lose it later in the spring when things spring ahead.

I go back in time reluctantly.

I am not one of those people who looks back and wishes I could do something over that I did wrong the first time (not an unusual event), learning to live with the consequences of what I do on the first go round.

Yet on this day, this moment when we become master of time for an hour, I relive things I wish I could relive exactly as they were, even when they seem painful when first lived, not to change them, but to examine them more closely, to take each moment apart tick by tick to see how it ticked in the first place, to understand more fully what I could not possibly have understood when I was in the midst of it.

This is the day for that, when I know that I will relive on hour out of this year, and will be able to treasure it and polish it like some precious jewel, a gift from the gods, who have bestowed upon me an hour of reflection, even if it is the hour before the dawn in which they come to collect Christ, or that moment before the world ends and I get to breathe the free air for one hour more before all falls in.

It is still dark out now. Tomorrow it will not be at this hour. And later after the dawn when the sun rises, the day will seem older because of the slanted light of the sun and the later hour I have used up already, worn out, sad light that casts everything into a deeper glow that will bring on twilight too soon.

There is always a price for receiving gods’ gifts, in this case months of this sadder sun, a penalty for man’s messing with time.

So that now, on this morning before the morning the clocks turn back, I must appreciate this gift, and accept it, knowing that the world will not return to its normal spin until this hour is recaptured, and instead of living in the past for an hour, I must leap ahead and lose another hour later – and always wonder what I might have done in that hour in spring, and if it is worth keeping this hour now at the expense of that hour.

But I never know.

All Souls Day

Friday, November 01, 2013

The rain came after I left for the office. So the wiper washed away the bird poop that had decorated my windshield for days

This was after I managed to clear the leaves that blocked my window washer, but poop always eluded the wiper blades and so remained like a tattoo on the glass.

This All Souls Day, one of those magical moments when the world changes for me. The rain fits the day and my mood – although Friday being Friday all the lunatics are loose on the roads. It will be worse going home after some people leave work early for a little pre-weekend nip.

This is such a routine that I sometimes see the same people driving home each Friday doing what they always do, and I learn to avoid them – the way I do potholes.

This is a day of sadness for me, the kind of bitter sweet sadness I get when I see leaves falling from the trees after a long summer.

Something is over and gone, and will never come back. What we will see in Spring – if we make it so far – will be utterly new, looking a little like what we saw before, but not the same.

Nearly all of those closest to me in my life had passed away in the months between All Souls Day and Easter, as if the symbolic dying winter signifies bears fruit during these barren months.

But something also dies inside me at this time of year, leaves from blooms I had seen rise from seedlings in spring, now perishing.

I am as predictable in this manner as the drivers I avoid on Fridays, knowing that I am always most inspired at the first buds of spring, and feel inspiration work up in me through the summer and come to this point in the year when I wearily concede to the change of season, and must find rest.

These are not dismal thoughts I think as I steer along these Jersey City streets. They are merely a random collection of feelings I have come to expect, knowing that something will happen within a few days or weeks that will send my life in a new direction, and that will show signs of growth when spring emerges.

The sadness is in the air with the sudden gushes of rain, wind shoving hard against the car as I plunge through the puddles.

What is shed at this season, must be shed, should be shed, in order for new things to grow. Yet it is still hard to let go of the old, knowing that even in their decay, they still show signs of their one-time value, and even when fallen, these things make up the soil for some new, perhaps more successful growth.

We all grow stronger after we have let go of that which no longer has value in our lives, and out of the past emerges the future, hardly predictable at all, no matter how many life times we have lived and no matter how much we have learned from past lives. We are always plunging through the dark of winter into the unknown with the hope we can survive until we see green again.

This odd time and place

December 12, 1981

We had our first snow last night.

A half inch of white covered the ground when I stepped out my door.

I thanked God or whoever was up there listening for how lucky I was to have put on snow tires.

I woke woozy from a mere three hours sleep and a pot hangover. And I couldn’t find the brush for my windshield. So I had to wipe away the snow with my gloved hand.

Passaic’s streets for some reason are vacant at night – even Fridays – and so this scene felt a little eerie, snow given a blue cast from the street lamps.

This was my two-day per week ritual of survival. But I can’t get used to working nights on the weekend after sleeping nights the other five days of the week.

Still it keeps me fed and a roof over my head.

Somehow, this year I’m in the mood for Christmas. Talking to Louise and my daughter after not having heard anything from them in years will do that.

Through the haze of thinning clouds, I saw the moon – an omen to go with the lingering voice of my ex-wife still lingering in my head.

Her voice has grown warmer more friendly than the remote voice I heard when we first talked again over the summer.

This strange phenomena coming as if the changing of seasons had soften her, while making the world colder and harder with the coming of winter.

The snow reminds me of Boulder and the piles of it I saw that December when I climbed off the bus and walked to her door, my hair still short from my stint in the army, and kept warm by the black leather motorcycle jacket I had purchased in LA.

It is almost as if I have gone back in time and have been given a second chance.

But this is Passaic and the winter is coming over me and my world, this crumbling ghetto in which I have taken up residence. My friends, who used to live here with me are all gone, seeking softer and warmer places in the suburbs while I cling to this way of life, knowing that I cannot survive the remoteness of that suburban world, and need to feel the cold snow stinging my fingers as I wipe it away from my windshield.

I envy Pauly as he sit with Jane, the love of his life, in front of a fire place on a mountain in Towaco, staring deeply into the flames as if looking at the future.

Or Garrick living not far from him at the edge of an ice-covered lake.

We used to get drunk on nights like this and stare out the window at the snow, bemoaning lost loves and remote futures, wondering if we will ever find the dreams we dreamt when we first started here, artist, musician writer.

I even miss the band and the crazy hours that I put in, not just lugging equipment, but picking up the pieces of the broken-hearted groupies the band left a trail over behind them, trying to keep them from going over an edge from which they might never return.

But by the time I climbed into the car and let it warm up and began to drive up the snow covered street, I’d forgotten all that, thinking only of the blue glow and the snow, and this sense of loneliness I still felt and probably would always feel, floating in this odd time and place forever.

Another cycle ends

Thursday, October 31, 2013

I want to think this is all about Halloween.

But it’s not.

This time of year is always that time of year when great changes happen, changes that seem bad at first, but over the test of time, show that they are positive.

Freud, of course, calls this an anniversary syndrome, and claims that people either cause events to happen at particular times to fit particular moments in their lives, or attribute events to these moments that do not otherwise apply.

I prefer the spiritual interpretation.

Tomorrow is All Souls Day, and so traditionally, today is the day when all hell breaks loose, and those wild spirits get to express themselves before they are forced back under wraps.

The last few years we have seen physical ramifications of this such as that freak snow storm in 2011 to last year’s Sandy.

But every year something dramatic happens inside or outside, and this year perhaps is a combination of both.

In some ways, the unstable forces of the world clash as part of some need to find a more stable existence, and so it is true now.

We come to the end of one cycle and the start of another, not an annual cycle that concludes something that might have started earlier in the year, but something that overlaps other cycles and takes time to resolve.

This year some of the dark forces of my world are coming to reckoning. Like all battles between good and evil, right and wrong, the conquest of the dark also removes something good from the world, the price the world pays for having bourn evil in the first place. So we watch innocence lured into darkness, who must become the sacrificial lambs for salvation.

It is only those who are not so innocent that survive, the ones who have already felt the stain of the darkness, yet have not completely succumbed.

The innocent and the guilty suffer the most – those foolish enough to believe totally in the spells cast over them, and those who do the casting.

The world is a purer place afterwards, yet at a significant cost, leaving a trail of innocent blood.

I feel sorry for those suckered into the depths even though they went there willingly, because they had become true believers or people willing to suspend their disbelief in order to obtain some sensual reward. Yet even when they are betrayed, even when it becomes clear that the spell-casters have merely used their innocence as shield for their own greed, they continue to believe. No shock can shake off the spell and so they are consumed.

In some ways, I even feel sorry for the spell-casters, who themselves are deceived, believing they will find some deserved reward as a result of their evil actions, when deep down they know they deceive themselves.

Levels of culpability vary, of course, some are more evil than others, some motivations are more vicious, or self-serving.

But in this cycle, I see only the most pathetic of players, insiders who all deceive themselves, living on the edge of something that cannot do anything other than crumble under their feet and cast them to doom.

They are blinded by their own ambitions, all of them seeking something they don’t honestly deserve – like those weaving, speeding cars on the Turnpike that rush ahead of everybody else, so talentless in their abilities that they can end no place else but in a car crash from which they will be lucky to survive.

Some of the players in this cycle will survive, and move on to new schemes, spinning new spells – leaving behind a landscape littered with victims or co-conspirators, who either fell for or hooked into a scheme that could not possibly work in the first place.

Paterson, the novel (part I -- Boys will be boys)

Paterson, the novel (link to main menu)

This is the first part of a novel -- a frame tale. Most of the characters are composite, although the early childhood stuff is pretty autobiographical -- this is the early childhood section. If someone wanted to know why life was like as a kid, this reflects a small chunk of it.

Like most of my writing, the rest of the novel is hand written, and needs to be transcribed, which I'll so over the next few weeks.