The release of spring

Thursday, March 12, 2015

The weather turns.

The way we turned ahead the clocks, a leap of faith, imposing ourselves into this new warm, moist season, our hands still frigid from being so long exposed.

I can barely move my fingers or feel the softness that this new season brings, my soul aching for the touch of leaf again after so many months of stark icicles, this stiff embrace painful with each bend of finger.

I learn to walk again, needing not to fear falling from some slip on ice, solid ground that my footsteps can follow with more certainty as I stride back into the wider world.

I am renewed on the inside and out, though I still stir with the need of release, the desperate struggle to unsheathe what winter had forced me to hide.

The breeze is not yet warm enough for me to run unclothed through woods or fields, though that ache rises up with the promise of release, of free air, and the kiss of something tender on my upturned lips.

Even the rain, as cold as it is, renews me, and I choose to walk without hood or hat to allow it to wash down over my face, this grace of changing, this rebirth out of which I find hope of release, this change of season that brings me back to life, and makes me ache in better way, in a way that promises some greater reward.

Ah, life.

A walk through the past

Monday, March 09, 2015

This is always the time of  year that hits me hardest – this time when the world melts and reemerges as something new, when warmth finally gets its grip and strips off the chill so that we might run naked again like children (or at least underdressed).

Everything drips from the just over freezing temperatures even at night.

Lately, I’ve gone back to doing my laundry on Sunday’s in Secaucus – not so much out of need but out of nostalgia for that more innocent time when my eyes remained closed to the worst abuses of the world, and I could still pretend to be unstained by the vulgar realities that make up our existence.

Perhaps in some ways, I still haven’t come to grips with all that, even through like a tour guide I wandered around the edges of the dark world, watching but largely untouched with its reality.

Drying the drying cycle I took the ten block walk from the Plaza section of Secaucus to Trolley Park and back, snow melting into oozing pools with each footstep. For the most part, the heart of Secaucus remained unchanged from the day I first stepped foot into it during the early 1980s when I came to work in the Fotomat  booth in the parking lot across from what was then the town library.

Along this route, you have to look hard for the changes – although the most obvious is the new library constructed slightly over a decade ago. The rest is like a stroll through memory lane – with even some of the same faces in cars familiar.

Thomas Wolfe was right when he said you can’t go home. Someone else pointed out that time shifts things so that even a river that looks exactly as it once did is not the same, and when you step onto it, you are sailing on different water. The only things that remain the same are those which you carry with you, and even that is an illusion.

I always think of people and places in time like photographs. If you keep in touch with them, you barely notice the changes. But if you are away for a while, the vision you have is only a mental photograph that doesn’t match up later when you get back.

So that even this stretch of landscape doesn’t quite fit with the place I have kept inside my head. Trolley Park is loaded with playground equipment. Huber Street School has a new face. Even in the heart of the town I remember, the library isn’t the library any more, the Acme is a CVS, the Plaza Diner is a bank, the New Jersey Bank and other banks that previously occupied this town square have different names if not different looks.
But as I walked I searched out for those elements that had not changed, things that cling to our reality, and beckon back to a past we remember, but cannot replicate.

Even the bar across the street from the laundry has changed, losing its rooftop icons such as the full sized fishing boat, for a more modern look – so that I know I will feel less comfortable inside if I chose to pull up to the bar for a beer.

And yet, coming back, walking this route, looking at these things feels right. For some reason, this part of the world will change less quickly than other places such as Jersey City – destined to become for some ungodly reason – the most populated city in the state, filled with phallic towers and smelling of too much testosterone.

This tiny bit of warmth

Wednesday, March 04, 2015

The ice drips off my front porch awning; but with no real relief

Spring hasn’t arrived and seems at times it never will.

This is less a complaint than an observation, and a need to renew, as if age makes healing from old wounds more difficult; this season projecting on the outside world, how I feel inside.

This dripping a lot like dripping tears as we embrace new storms that seem to stretch out ahead of us for the rest of our lives, this winter like few other winters clinging to our heals like a rabid dog, snarling and biting, but never so deeply as to inflict a fatal wound.

Forecasters looking back claim this has been one of the coldest winters in recorded history, and refer back to the winters of 1985 and 1979 as examples, those years when I still lived in a cold water flat in Passaic and watched the river there fill with chunks of ice – just as I watched the Hudson fill with ice this year, emotional-filled years of change that I still recall with the vivid sting that winter’s kiss brings.

This inside/outside weather forecast never predictable except in hindsight when we look back and see how these chunks of ice clogged our arteries and created havoc with the slow thaw of approaching spring.

Winters like this make us ache all the more for spring, even though such wishful thinking also eats up time we otherwise wish would tarry, as we rush ahead to the worst of all winters when there will be no thaw.

All this morbid thinking comes at a time when we get a temporary thaw ahead of yet another predicted snow storm, and we try to cling to that small vestige of warmth the thaw has given us until we can bask in the real thaw, if and when it arrives.

I used to stand on a bus stop in the early 1970s clinging to a cup of coffee as I waited for my ride to work, this small bit of heat allowing me to thaw inside while winter raged outside. Sometimes, this is all we have, this cup of coffee, this tiny bit of warmth that keeps our veins from turning to ice, this idea that we shall soon see spring, and renewed hope.

Spock’s gone home

Saturday, February 28, 2015

Leonard Nimoy is dead.

This comes on the same day that Russian opposition leader Boris Nemtsov was murdered, proving that we haven’t even time for a deep breath and a moment of mourning before we plunge back into the insanity we called human existence.

Nimoy – or more commonly known as Mr. Spock – became an icon of sanity in the mid-to-late 1960s when I struggled to find myself. If not quite a father figure, then an example of male sanity I could not find in my own family.

I could not model myself after him partly because I am too much like another character in the Star Trek universe, Captain Kirk – somewhat reckless, often irresponsible, known to leap off tall buildings with a single bound and no parachute.

Like Kirk, I needed someone that was grounded, even if that someone happened to be floating in the imaginary universe of a future outer space.

Spock-like characters did not exist among my friends – although one or two liked to think so, leaving me to rely on the same character as Kirk did for some of this.

I never became a Treky or Trekker (as Nimoy liked to call them), no more than I could become a Deadhead, unable to give myself up to any cult like following. I believe too much in Groucho Marx’s philosophy that I would not belong to any cult that would have someone like me as a member.

But there is a kind of collective sadness with his passing that even I can’t avoid, this huge sense of loss the universe will not make up for, like a black hole in wisdom that can’t be filled up again, and must be lived with, existed around, with those of us who temporarily survive, forced to rely on memory as a poor consolation.

This news came also when I learned that my step mother (who until a few years ago I didn’t even know I had) had suffered a set back in her recovery from cancer – and I once more ache for the relief that Bones McCoy once offered in bringing us advanced medicine that did not leave people worse off than when they started.

We are born to our own period of time, forced to live with the good and bad of what technology offers during that period when we live. (this a rip off idea from Lord of the Rings, of course) and so we must make the best of what we have, and hope that our children will have better to offer.

In some ways, the Trek world offers more hope than most of the other futuristic fantasies of our generation.

Lord of the Rings is about a past we can never get back, Harry Potter, a party we are not invited to attend, Star Wars, a universe beyond our ability to achieve. But Trek was always a world view we could share because it was never so alien to us that we could not connect with the characters – even someone so apparently alien at Spock. Even had his character not been half human, we would have connected to him because we needed that part of him to balance the insanely human part inside ourselves we cannot control or will not or must not. For ever Kirk, we need a Spock.

And now we don’t have him.

The cogs who would be wheels

January 3, 1984

Eighty four?

Lord, how the years have passed!

Twenty years ago, I was suffering in the seventh grade under the stern gaze of Sister Cecilia (for the second year in a row).

Steven was my best friend. David was the strange kid down the block who I always saw running to and from the coffee shop near Vernon and Crooks.

Back then, and even before, I always looked ahead to the 1970s as “the future,” and constantly pondered what it would be like. Would we be traveling around in air cars and space ships?

The reality of those years (now firmly behind me) proved a sad disappointment with gas shortages, meat shortages, the loss of the war in Vietnam.

Few of us ever believed a president would step down; but then, who in our generation thought one might get shot?

For most of us of my generation, the shooting started a transformation process that we still have not fully recovered from – and which led to a change in America that America hasn’t yet recovered from, leading inevitably from one iconic moment to the one which the president gets on a plane for the west coast only to step off on the other side no longer president.

Most of my friends felt vindicated although enraged a short time later when the vice president pardoned Nixon making it impossible to hold him accountable for what many believed were war crimes.

Hank and others think Nixon and his associates got away with murder.

They want his kind punished.

Few believe as I do that there is little worse we could have done to him than to strip him of the office he loved so much.

Forcing him to step down as president humiliated him in a way no jail could have.

This is not as true for his compatriots such as Kissinger – who should be in shackles or at least, an iron mask.

The best punishment is to deny a person the power he most craves.

This would not be adequate for someone like Reagan, who is merely a mask for a corrupt and greedy society – and it is impossible to strip them of their power without a revolution.

The problem is they have already brought about a revolution of their own, putting the final nails in the coffin of a free society, and we plunge ahead into an Orwellian future where spy guys and fascists protect us from enemies they deliberately create in order to keep us from seeing just who the real bad buys are.

This is the year of Orwell’s most famous book, and most people misinterpret its message, taking it too literarily. It is a book without hope, of a social order in which we have no place except as cogs in an ever consuming machine. It is a testimony to greed run amuck.

And not a new concept at all, just made more powerful by technology that tightens the chains around us.

The concept has been around since before Christ.

It is based on one very simple and nasty concept: if you do not feed the greed machine, you have no value – and have very little value even if you do.

Christ, Napoleon, Gandhi and others have tried to change this through various means and for their own purposes, but always the masses revert to the same dismal condition, partly because we are like sheep and need to be herded, fearing to step too far out from the flock at risk of becoming vulnerable.

The saddest of these are the sheep who believe they can become herders, or the cogs who believe they can become wheels.

This is the real sales pitch Reagan has brought to America; convince ordinary people that they can share in power when they can’t.

It was not a popular uprising that brought down Nixon, but his own actions – and not the ones we associate with Watergate.

Nixon betrayed the masters, the wheel-turners, the ghosts in the machine. He gave back land to Native American Indians; he supported and enforced affirmative action; he mistakenly believed he was a wheel, when like Reagan; he was merely one more elaborate cog.

This is not a mistake Reagan will make.

Reagan knows his place, and his duty to keep us in ours.

Reagan will never have to leave office in shame.

Shame requires a certain level of morality Reagan lacks, and must lack in order do perform his required function – that all real powerful people also must lack.

True independent power scares the shit out of the powers that be.

This is why the Kennedys had to die (they had their own network). And why Christ, Gandhi, Malcolm X, Martin Luther King, Napoleon and others died.

And why Nixon’s survival puzzles me.

Perhaps by letting him live in shame sends a message to other potential upstarts that there is a punishment worse than death.

Cave Dweller

Sunday, February 22, 2015

The snow came as a surprise, throwing me off my routine for the weekend, just as mother nature tends to do. So as human kind has always done at times like this, we flee back to our caves until the storms expire.

This is true for internal storms as well.

I have always been a cave-dweller, someone who relied on a private space to protect me when threatened by external and internal forces.

The last three or four years have been a lesson in life, and how easily, we get caught up in other people’s webs.

I am a powerful person that puzzles other people.

This is not a boast.

Most people get their power from position, and thus become vulnerable to a number of factors, not the least of which is people with more powerful a position.

People who use position for power cling to it desperately, and are easily seduced by any thing that will allow them to maintain it (often with the illusionary promise that they might get more.)

These are the most easily corrupted because they soon come to realize just how little power they actually have.

The truly powerful – whether from personal or position – use these petty power people to maintain their own power, often playing one against the other so as to eliminate any threat to their own position.

In organizations where the most powerful person on top is relatively weak or indecisive, petty people create fiefdoms and operate their own little hives.

What few people truly understand about me is that I always defy authority when I think authority is corrupt.

It is the nature of who I am.

Even at risk of losing my job or getting killed, I’ve done so.

Somewhere in the back of my head, I can’t live with the idea that evil goes unpunished – and will do everything in my power to stop its being rewarded for ill deeds.

Early on, I was openly defiant – and more than once was fired over it. More than once beat up or threatened with more serious violence.

In most cases, especially in jobs I’ve worked, I somehow managed to position myself in a way that I was more or less immune to the ebb and flow of ordinary power – such as when I was a baker and changing ownership would not risk losing me.

So I was in these cases, always able to speak my mind, when other people, who feared the loss of their jobs, could not.

Just as I remain a cave-dweller, our so called liberated society largely remains a serfdom, where bosses dictate not merely how jobs are accomplished, but also the pattern of people’s lives.

In these cases, it is hugely important for someone to keep them honest when in most cases, they are not.

Personal integrity and power rarely co-exist in the same person or even the same work place. Since our society is based on the pursuit of wealth, corruption is a natural byproduct – even in the smallest institution.

The most ambitious people leap frog from one institution to another, and slowly work their way up the power chain to higher and more significant positions. But as in all such societies, they must live by the ruthless rules of survival of the most vicious. The problem in that scenario is that there is always someone more ruthless that you are, and others just like you seeking to edge you out of.

Over the long years, I’ve learned patience is one of the best defenses against this aggression. Sooner or later, these types – especially the ones who have less to offer than they think they do – undo themselves.

While working hard does not protect anyone in this game, competence generally does. The secret to surviving backstabbing is to not give these petty power people anything they can use against you. In most cases, they are simply trying to use your own weaknesses against you.

Of course, I am as flawed in many ways, so I have many chinks in my armor. – and part of the life lesson over the last few decades is trying to keep from letting others use these against me.

My biggest weakness, however, is my biggest strength – my inability to let evil people thrive.

The powerful and the powerless

Saturday, February 21, 2015

The last few weeks became a lesson in street theater as traditional political forces garnered their strength in an attempt to push back again the black lash of radical protestors.
This was not a 1960s kind of radical protest, but had a lot to do with the spirit of underground press I was weaned on, the irreverent, even mean attacks on powerful people through satire, sarcasm and humor.

The East Village Other and the LA Free Press, even my much later Scrap Paper Review were always designed to strike at the heart of corrupt power in a way corrupt power was helpless to stop.

Back then, printing costs and paper were cheap and almost anyone with access to a mimeograph machine could issue political satirical diatribes.

For a time, mafia-owned newspaper and magazine distributors and corporate controlled media – along with FBI informants – nearly shut down the underground movement, making it too expensive or risky to continue.

Even my humble newspaper had its FBI informant who kept trying to get close to us to that they could keep an eye on us. He eventually went on to spy on WBAI, partly because the inner circle of our little revolution was too small to accommodate him, and we suspected his intentions from the start.

Controlling media was a huge part of halting the social revolution, and for a good part of the 1980s and early 1990s, the power brokers were able to shut us down, leaving people like me to print news letters and later magpie call up internet sites (my publication was on line in the late 1980s).

The revolution reemerged when the web exploded on us, and we had an early page in 1995-96.

Liz Smith, of course, criticized this recently, saying that this exposure had eroded the quality of celebrities. She has always been part of the mainstream and her power has always rested in being one of those allowed into places like Club 54 while the rest of the humbled masses remained out in the cold.

The biggest complaint I’ve heard this week about the trial of internet bloggers who attacked their enemies on their websites is that they were offensive and vulgar.

Indeed, they often are – just as we were back in the heyday of the 1960s when we could say nothing nearly vulgar enough to attack the outrages of political power killing millions in places like Vietnam.

People are upset by these bloggers partly because the bloggers have touched nerves and are able to mouth truths (even if by accident) that traditional power is unable to silence. Powerful people can control traditional media – as they did in destroying the old school underground movement and as they are trying to do in the fight against internet neutrality, but as long as there is an open free press that is not controlled by mobsters or corporations, they must resort to other means.

Corrupt people tend to hide their mean behavior behind the mast of civility, saying how outraged there are by the radical behavior. This is passive-aggressive. While they pretend to be holier than thou, they secret pull the levers of the old style political machine to maintain their power, manipulating traditional press, political institutions and sometimes even the legal system. And while shooting from the cover of anonymity, they complain about the Revolutionary War-like radicals that shoot back from similar positions, often more effectively showing just how corrupt the system is.

The legal victory over the last week is a temporary reprieve by radicals fighting the corrupt system, of course. Eventually, corruption wins, simply because like rust it never sleeps.

But sometimes – as one famous orator from the 1960s pointed out – we can stick something in the gears and stop the machine for a short time, at least long enough in this never ending conflict to readjust and find new ways to defy the corrupt forces that control traditional institutions such as media and government. Sometimes, the little guy actually wins,