Pearls Of Wisdom (P.O.W.)

What follows represents a sampling of advice and general observations shared with me in my youth:

Italians love concrete. My mother, offering her take on a neighbor's driveway-replacement project.

"Down the alley the dago flew, stuck a knife in the bald-headed Jew." This little ditty came from Uncle Ed, who was actually my mother's uncle. I would recite it in the backyard, oblivious to the notion that it might offend our Italian neighbors.

Way down south, where the trains run fast, monkey stuck his finger up a baboon's ass. Baboon said, "Goddamn your soul, get your finger out of my asshole." Courtesy of Aunt Marge, Uncle Ed's sister. Also a sister to my grandmother.

Shit and molasses, sugar and snot, 24 assholes tied in a knot." This from Aunt Marge, also, in the nursing home, summoning me with her claw of a left hand to bend closer, the better to hear her faint voice. It was longer, but I could only make out this part of it.

Opinions are like assholes...everybody has one. From my father, via my mother. I might have mentioned it before, but it's a gem that bears repeating.

Don't ever grow up to be a nigger. This from a neighbor who also was a friend of my brother's and a regular presence in our house.

There are black people and there are niggers. Courtesy of my mother, making allowances for the possibility that good black people do exist.

There are three things you can't get back: The flown arrow, the lost opportunity and the spoken word. My mother wrote this on a scrap of paper, I think when she was trying to get me to reconsider my college choice and not forgo a particular school.

The Lord works in mysterious ways. My mother, time and again. In fact, the Lord works so mysteriously, you don't even know he's there.

The Lord always answers your prayers. Sometimes the answer is no. My mother, of course, and ain't it a beauty.

The Virgin Mary never refuses the prayers of children. Also my mother. And for the record, Mary refused my requests, which I didn't think were unreasonable. I didn't pray for material items or to get in someone's pants; I just wanted to not feel like jumping off a building all the time. And to be able to sleep, maybe.

You never know who that might be knocking at your door. My mother said this is what her mother used to say when she gave to beggars knocking on the door during the Depression. Her mother's apparent rationale was that the person looking for food might be God incognito. My mother later chastised me for offering one of my brother's friends orange juice to drink, saying it was too expensive and that we needed to keep it for ourselves. I guess that was okay, since we were pretty sure he wasn't God.

The sky clouds up in the afternoon. My mother's take on Good Friday. Her contention is that the skies darken around the time Christ died. I think this one came from her mother, too. It seemed eerily plausible for a while in my youth, but it hasn't since been borne out.

Don't ever buy sheets with less than a 200 thread count. About a week after offering me this sage advice, my mother gave me a 150-thread-count sheet set.

Make milk shakes out of it. My mother's advice for how we should use the shitty ice cream she routinely bought. I guess, if you want a shitty milk shake.

We've been in a recession for years. Mom, during the Clinton boom times.

What are you, a little faggot? My oldest brother, after he pulled up alongside me in the car as I was skipping home from second grade.

Every time they shoot a rocket into space, the weather changes. Grandma, allegedly, who my mother described as being ahead of her time.

You can write your own ticket. This via one of my mother's male companions, parroted by my mother, in an effort to persuade me to attend the elitist high school. Well, I went there, but I don't know about writing my own ticket, whatever the fuck that means.

Gotta have a funnel. Some drunk girl brandishing a plastic convenience-store funnel who jumped on the hood of my car in Montana. She was with another girl and a guy. Not sure where the funnel came in.

Truckers eat pussy. A friend spotted this on a bumper sticker. Said there was no rhyme or anything.

Don't tell my mom I'm a lawyer, she thinks I play piano in a whorehouse. From an acquaintance, also from a bumper sticker.

Next time, I'm just gonna find a woman I don't like and buy her a house. From the same acquaintance, who had been married three times.

Don't get married. Women are wired different. My Uncle Lee, at my cousin Timmy's wedding.

When you want to be with a girl, jerk off and throw a dollar in the trunk of your car. This appeared in former Yankee Sparky Lyle's book, "The Bronx Zoo." Some gentleman gave this advice to Sparky, ostensibly to keep his career on track. I would certainly have more money had I followed this guidance.

You have no sense of humor. My mother, to me, numerous times. Trust me, her fucking jokes weren't funny.

You don't need it. One of my brothers, in reference to antidepressant medication.

There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so. This comes from Hamlet, though my mother favored variations. I once heard George Carlin say there were certain things nobody would ever hear him say. One of those was: "I think I'll stick this red-hot poker up my ass." Now, do you suppose if someone were to find himself with a red-hot poker up his ass, he would be able to think good thoughts? Unlikely. Sometimes depression feels like I imagine a poker in the ass would feel, and it's just as impossible to think your way out. So this notion that someone can shake the blues with a little exercise or getting out and about or whatever has inherent flaws, and nobody should expect that a person so afflicted can snap out of it or retains control over the ability to do so.

Cascade

The footings begin to give way under the cold veneer of surface ice before collapsing completely and making way for the shattered pieces from above to cascade downhill like a wave gathering upon itself and crashing toward the beach. And you try to swim out from under as the avalanche overtakes you, but your own taut skin hems you in and and tingles from the piercing cold.
So began the approach toward electroconvulsive therapy, wires driven down through the layers under which I was buried, providing enough of a thaw to stave off suffocation. Recently an article about the late Townes Van Zandt said he had survived ECT. Alas, he couldn't outlive self-destruction, but the characterization of him as being an ECT survivor struck me, for I, too am that. But I pondered whether I considered myself in that light. Yes, I've thought of myself as a survivor, but of life in general, not specifically of a broken home or a questionable upbringing or meddling priests or 20 different medications or of electroshock therapy. They have made up my life. Just as I didn't consider the absence of a father as anything particularly abnormal, I thought ECT was the natural progression of a process I had begun in an effort to shake free of the depression.
At least that's what I think I thought. Witnesses exist who might provide a different account, but their views came from the outside. But to call it a natural progression is not to discount the emotional toll or the haze through which I subsequently have had to peer when recalling that time. I periodically felt ravaged by ECT and less than sanguine, and it had a greater emotional impact than protracted experimentation with medication, in part because of its temporal concentration.
My perspective has evolved, however, with additional exposure to a side of life that could be considered the polar opposite. Having had ECT makes me unique among my peers, and they weren't bothered by it; if we all had 12 beers, everything would be all right. But now I have kids, and they go to school and absorb information like sponges and sleep over friends' houses and fight with each other and laugh and play sports. And they're not exposed to violence and drug dealing and drug using and a general atmosphere of lunacy. Through them, I've received exposure to a side of life that at one time would have been as familiar to me as a Maori existence. I haven't become completely immersed in that life, and I can't fathom that I ever will, but it has demonstrated to me, like I'm watching a movie on a screen, that not everyone would consider a natural progression as I would. Okay, so being an ECT survivor makes me unique among a certain set. Apparently Ernest Hemingway and Judy Garland had it, too. That might not bode well. Speaking of Judy Garland, could anybody help but fall in love with her in "The Wizard of Oz"? But then things got a little messy.
So, what was I like in and around the time of my brush with destiny? As far as I can gather, if people who had never experienced depression suddenly became depressed, they would long for their worst day when they were "normal." The lack of an escape hatch proved troubling. I needed to get away from myself but couldn't. Drinking didn't give me that evacuation route. Antidepressants weren't working. You can't escape yourself. Unless you kill yourself, I guess, but with my luck, there actually would be an afterlife, and I would have fucked myself for all eternity by committing a mortal sin.
It becomes a cliche after a while. Depression haunts me, and I get tired of myself. And bored with it all. Tired of being in pain but not wanting to be a drama queen. And faring better than some people, anyway. Then I worry that I'm being a whiner. When virtually every day that you can recall consisted of a struggle, a fatigue element certainly exists. The weight of decades tests the limits of resilience. On the dash of my car rests a button labeled "ECT." When engaged, the button activates some kind of additional power reservoir for the engine, and the driver can accelerate more quickly. I used to think that if I could plug myself into the cigarette lighter and engage the ECT button for home electroconvulsive therapy, I could give myself a maintenance treatment every once in a while.
Maybe during those I'm-a-cliche-to-myself times, support from people familiar with my perspective mattered most. Getting over oneself, overcoming the notion that people shouldn't want to spend time with you, allowing them to make decisions for themselves in that regard and not supposing that you know what is best for them, presents a formidable challenge. Not wanting to be around myself, I questioned why others would. Nevertheless, support from those people mattered, though that wasn't always apparent to the support providers. I sometimes kept people at a distance, as much to turn away from my old, tired self as to keep them at bay. My fatigue and disgust led me to a sometimes insular existence, perhaps as part of a self-defense mechanism designed to preclude additional pain. Somewhere within the depression literature, I read that sometimes a depressed person should rely on others' judgment with respect to behavior. In other words, if you're too fucked up to recognize how fucked up you are, you should listen to someone else. That can be a slippery slope. If the person to whom you turn for guidance about your fuckedupedness has always been telling you how fucked up you are, then that particular avenue might not be the one down which to travel. On the other hand, if someone has judgment that you've deemed prudent in more lucid moments, then that might be the person or people on whom to rely.
I, somewhat necessarily consumed with myself, don't think I stopped to consider then the perspectives of other people involved in my life during the dark stretches of Amazonian depth and range. What must it have been like for them? Most commonly, the people in this situation have felt helpless. As I've gotten a little older, my perspective has undergone somewhat of a realignment, with children the primary force behind the adjustment, and I've attempted to assess the difficulties people in my life must have encountered in trying to penetrate an intensely personal experience. I look back through 16 years' worth of nebulae and the further accumulation of experience, and I'm appreciative of their forbearance. My mother at least kept track of the bills, which probably distracted her from considering too disturbingly that upon her son every other day were being visited sedation, restraint and electricity.
I can see myself now in a different light because the children can see me with relatively untainted perspectives. They've only known me as their father, a comparatively stable presence in their lives. An inevitable legacy from the past persists, but the bearing it has on now need not always be destructive.
As part of a management class group exercise in college, the professor told us to come up with a word to describe ourselves, how we would like to be remembered. "Tenacious," I said. That drew some oohs and aahs from my classmates. "Good word, good word." Those fuckers wished they thought of it first, but, not being as tenacious as me, they didn't. The instructor also told us to come up with a phrase, or a personal slogan, that we would want to use to communicate something about ourselves. I didn't know this was coming, but I thought about my mother, and I said to my fellow classmates: "It's not my fault." I kind of surprised even myself. Unfortunately, the recognition that I considered myself culpable when outcomes failed to please, particularly the women in my life, didn't provide a runway down which I would travel on my journey to self-awareness and healing. Not then, anyway. If it had, life as I know it would be much different.
Even when depression hurled me headlong toward ECT, I shouldered blame. I failed, and shame washed over me. No longer am I ashamed. And it really wasn't my fault. For some people, the stigma and shame associated with depression persist, and they can't bring voice to their frustration. "Don't worry 'bout a thing, every little thing gonna be all right." I guess, if you're smoking ganja all the time. "Don't worry, be happy." Fuck that guy and that stupid fucking song.
Warren Buffett says he hit the genetic lottery by being born in the United States. He contends that his U.S. citizenship conferred upon him advantages unavailable to people in less developed countries. That point of view has a certain validity when considering life from an economic perspective, as he has been inclined to do. But being born in the U.S. doesn't automatically bestow riches, material or spiritual, on everyone. Obviously. But the point is that there can be tremendous disadvantages inherent in being born into a particular family in a particular place. I guess I, at least, haven't been a depressed Chinese coal miner, but I think I would rather feel okay most of the time and have less access to what the West commonly provides, for it doesn't necessarily a happy man make. I once heard Paul McCartney say that if he had had to live through what John had to live through to write the songs that John wrote, he wouldn't have taken the deal. Touche.

Childhood

Childhood is a most queer flame-lit and shadow-chilled time. Think once more how the world wavers and intones above us then. Parents behave down toward us as if they are tribal gods, as old and unarguable and almighty as thunder. Other figures loom in from next door and the schoolyard and a thousand lanes of encounter, count coup on us with whatever lessons of life they brandish, then ghost off.
So says Ivan Doig in his memoir "This House of Sky."

One day, a father appeared in my life, and I was he. Not until I became that person did I recognize some of the effects of a father's absence. Robbi the cognitive-behavioral therapist asked me before I had a child if I was prepared. She later reminded me of that as I recited a litany of anxiety-inducing issues associated with having had a child. That question, though, defies an adequate response. How could I have known whether I was prepared? Had I known then what I know now, I would have said that I lacked sufficient preparation, as everyone does.
Had a father accompanied me throughout my tortuous, and torturous, journey, perhaps such a characterization would prove unjustified. The catch being that a bad father who sticks around might be worse than no father at all. Or perhaps a bad father could provide an example of what not to do. My mother helped in that regard, by serving as an example of the kind of parent to avoid. The converse being that a halfway-decent father might help prepare a son for becoming a father himself.
I take into account my own childhood confusion, and the general challenges associated with a child's attempt to process experiences, when I attempt to look at situations from my children's perspective. I like to think I don't act like a tribal god, in the words of Mr. Doig. But when you have your kids' best interests at heart and the conviction that you know better, behaving in a manner that accommodates their sensitivities can be difficult. The great weight of responsibility deriving from having sired children can stand in the way of gentility.
Rather, I would like to come across as someone who has more experience and cognitive capabilities, though I often feel unqualified to provide guidance. I can, however, provide reassurance that someone will be there who will listen and wants the best for them. They'll probably resent the intrusion eventually but would never be the same people had they not had that kind of guidance in the first place.
Exclusive of reading, writing, coaching, etc., I'm present. One of my priest friends once gave a sermon about being there, after he had called me earlier in the week and swung by when his father was dying of cancer. He didn't want to be alone. I'm at least a presence, and not a malevolent one, though surely not always perceived as benevolent.
Unwittingly to them and for a while to me, my kids have provided a mirror in which I not only see myself but in which I also search for a glimpse of my father. Sometimes I don't like what I see, but I don't turn away; I have to fill the the void that I never knew existed.

Our Lady of Sorrows

This subject http://againlucky.blogspot.com/2010/03/holy-trinity.html offers a window through which to view a certain stage of life, as adolescence began to bloom and usher in an age of downhill slopes strewn with sinkholes.
After completing 5th grade in public school, my mother decided Catholic school would offer a better alternative than the public institution I would have had to attend, about which she had heard horror stories from a teacher. So, off I went, book bag in hand, blue corduroys, lighter-shade-of-blue polo shirt, desert boots and a Dutch-boy haircut. My neighbors attended that school, as did some of the kids with whom I had played basketball in the parish, so I knew some people.
Sr. Mary of the Rosary embraced me in sixth grade as the model student, despite her censure for my failure to turn in a Science Fair project, while she pulled Donald Wagner around by the sideburns. I hauled the extra crates full of school-size milk cartons from the cafeteria over to the convent each day, though I don't know why. Didn't they have refrigeration in the cafeteria? She generally compensated me with Clark bars.
We recited prayers dutifully, said the Act of Contrition and stumbled through confession ("Forgive me father...I swore and I fought with my brother and I robbed the deli blind and I drank half the Scotch from the cabinet and I might have smoked weed since my last confession, but I can't be sure because it fucks up my memory) and attended the Stations of the Cross. During class, especially religion class, I adorned my book covers with band logos, with The Who and Yes and Kiss occupying particularly prominent spots, although I didn't consider myself above throwing Rush or ELO in there if I needed to fill space.
I played the good-boy role, for I couldn't let down my mother and then the nuns and then the priests. I needed permission to fail, or at least to adjust or to be allowed to express how I felt or to change my mind, though instead I encountered relentless pressure.
Another side existed. I had a thing for knives, and I brought them to school. I once repeatedly plunged a knife through a classmate's binder, in class, the kind of stuff for which a current-day student would face arrest. I destroyed another classmate's book bag more than once, though I don't know how his parents failed to notice or intervene. Another friend stalked this kid down on the playground one day, grabbed him and spat in his face. We had taken up a collection as an incentive for this expectoration escapade.
Our sixth-grade class trip to the Six Flags amusement park provided an opportunity for us to spread our wings a bit more. As we ascended in the cable cars, we smoked marijuana and glided above the pedestrians in the park below. Sixth-graders being who they are, Dennis the priest got wind of our antics--I actually told him that, yes, I had smoked weed when he asked me a few days later. He threatened to tell my mother but, as far as I know, never did. Gave me a few days of angst but didn't interrupt the long-term trend, for my roguish behavior proceeded unabated for the next one, two, three, four, five years. But my good grades and above-average athletic performance must have masked the self-destructive aspects. Never mind that I slept a disproportionate number of hours. What if Dennis had told my mother that I was high on the sixth-grade class trip? Would she have recognized that a constructive change might have been in order? He probably thought he was being cool by not ratting me out, but a better outcome might have resulted had he informed. Not likely, though, that it would have effected long-term change, for my mother wouldn't have surrendered the way of life to which she had become accustomed nor acknowledged that something dark plagued her great white hope.
I tended to beautiful Ria while I was in eighth grade, after her family's car accident left her a paraplegic. A classmate and I met the van that brought her to school at the side door and transported her in her wheelchair to the electric chair that would slide her down the stairs. She pushed with her arms and slid herself along a board to transfer from the wheelchair to the electric chair, and from our vantage point at the top of the stairs we watched her descend toward her fifth-grade classroom as the noise from the chair's motor echoed throughout the stairwell. We carried the wheelchair down the stairs and met her at the bottom so she could slip back in. Her family gave us silver Cross pens at the end of the year. I still have them.
I still know some of these people. Others have died. Little Billy Thorne, who used to run toward me screaming my name for protection from an enemy real or perceived, succumbed to a congenital kidney ailment. Sean died, too, and I still don't know how. I cross paths with others from time to time. With some, long-festering animosities create current tension, while with others the interactions are familiar. Back then some of these people perceived me as having the world by the balls, when in fact a maelstrom swirled in my mind. I wonder how they perceive me now, with the family and the two kids playing little league and the job and the dog. I suspect they think the same as they did. So do I.
A friend and I drove by that school, Our Lady of Sorrows, one day, and he said something about Catholics always dwelling on negativity and defeatism, with names like that. The name, though, suited the place and times.

The Holy Trinity

Recently I learned that a onetime priest with whom I was acquainted as a youth had been afflicted with either Alzheimer's or Parkinson's. The person telling me wasn't sure. After some digging, I discovered that he had died and that his last few years proved difficult because of the Alzheimer's.
As a 6th, 7th and 8th grader, and into high school, he alternated between being an antagonist and an ostensible friend. He once told me that if he had a son, he would want that son to be like me and that the greatest gift he could give me would be for me to recognize my own potential. He eventually had two daughters after leaving the priesthood, and a divorce, and I doubt the girls are much like me. As for recognizing my own potential, I think he went 0-for-2.
Had my father not created a vacuum by his departure, perhaps the opportunity would not have existed for this man to step into the void. He also had God in his corner. To people of a certain mind-set, God can open a lot of doors, therefore he had a level of access conferred upon him by virtue of his being a priest.
This priest took me to see the Knicks and drank a bunch of beer and yelled at their coach. "Hubie, you bum." Hubie Brown didn't appear rattled, but who knows? Alternatively, he excluded me from a 76ers game at which two of my friends got to meet Julius Erving. Why he excluded me I'm not sure, but I thought then that he did it to hurt me. It worked. Manipulation and passive aggression and retaliation. The extent to which that stung still resonates. Alas, he helped to cement the notion that adults lacked trustworthiness. But boys being who they are, or were, I retained the capacity to resurrect at least some of my faith in him.
Since he was an Army chaplain, he took us to the local base, where I had the opportunity to fire rifles at the range. Had I turned the rifle on him, or myself, life's course would have been altered for us both. I might have been able to spare us subsequent distress, especially him, apparently, in his waning years. He plied me with beer one night at the base and allowed me to articulate my perspective on the high school in which I was matriculated.
"I don't want to be there," I explained. "It's a pre-college. I want high school."
And so it followed that I pulled out of that high school after only a few weeks and enrolled in one of the local Catholic high schools. All was well on that front. Except my mother shunned me. So, I had no father at home and the priest pulled me in his preferred direction, while my mother sulked and withheld affection and wore on me with her own passive aggression. At that point, I think she perceived a tug of war between her and him, with my 13-year-old emotions as the rope.
During this stretch, thoughts of suicide intensified. I couldn't live with my mother under those circumstances, so I asked the other school if I could come back. Yes, as it turned out. I told the priest, who, clearly distracted, cut short his sermon at mass later that afternoon. My mother took note and seemed pleased. I had worked my way back into my mother's good graces but alienated the priest. Our interaction subsequently dwindled.
He shouldn't have become a priest. I suspect family pressure influenced his decision; his sister the nun was principal of our school. Before the fallout, he and I regularly took my dog swimming. He used to step on the clutch and have me shift the manual transmission in his burgundy Datsun B210. We once rode nearly the length of the Garden State Parkway in that car, and at each toll booth I would hook a shot from the passenger seat over the roof and into the basket.
At least he eventually rectified his decision to become a priest, but not before inflicting damage. While still a member of the clergy, he would intimate that someone from our crowd of hormone-driven lads should become a priest, probably because he wanted to spread the misery. Like all things Catholic, it would have been perfectly reasonable to have committed to the priesthood while in 7th grade, despite having to conceal erections several times daily with textbooks, or even Bibles, when we had to stand in class. The Adidas logo on our book bags stood for All Day I Dream About Sex, and we all wanted to end up in the bushes behind the church with a companion during the Friday-night basketball games.
This priest did recruit us as altar boys. We ate the host and drank the wine, and not just at mass. Levels existed within the altar boys and I eventually reached the pinnacle, the altar-boy captain, so to speak, only to quit in protest of his behavior.
My universe revolved around sports then, and he once summoned me to the rectory and seated me in front of the desk behind which he sat.
"Before I throw you off the team...." he began.
I don't recall my perceived offense. Probably just general attitude and obstinacy. But those traits had gotten me that far, so I saw no need to change. Panic and betrayal descended upon me rapidly, but I got recovered enough over the course of this meeting to basically tell him to go fuck himself. I left there thinking I no longer would be on the basketball team, the fallen captain, but it never came to pass. At the very least, I would end up in Hell for telling God's representative here on Earth to fuck off.
He comforted me when I arrived at a Sunday-afternoon basketball game, fresh with the knowledge that an assailant had attacked my mother in the Bahamas. I couldn't hold it together, and as we sat on steps in a part of the school separate from the gym, my tears poured forth and my back heaved with each sob. I always had feared that I would lose my mother, and the world seemed as if it might make it happen. Then the trauma transformed into anger, and I played the game with a certain vigor, and we beat our archrivals. What a triumph.
Part of his frustration with me derived from the strained relationship he had with a younger priest who had come to our parish. The younger priest and I became friends, and Priest No. 1 went to the school psychologist and complained that Priest No. 2 was stealing his friends. Or at least that's what Priest No. 2 told me. Once when I was particularly exasperated with Priest No. 1 (let's call him Bill, since that was his name), Priest No. 2 (Dennis) said to me: "The difference between him and me is that he jerks off and I go out and get fucked." We suspected he was doing Miss Williams, and we marveled at her breasts. While we considered becoming priests. Two priests and a boy, not to be confused with "Three Men and a Baby" or "Two Guys, a Girl and a Pizza Place." I think Dennis, who eventually became jaded and with whom I drank while I was in high school, had my interests at heart, as opposed to my mother and Priest No. 1.
So unfolded the saga of Bill and Tom. He left an impression.

Penis

In Evan S. Connell's book "Son of the Morning Star/Custer and the Little Bighorn," he makes reference to Indian calendars and the custom of some of those calendars to highlight an event from a particular year. Subsequently, that is how they remember the year.
Connell cites Bruce Nelson for this nugget: In the Miniconjou year of 1796, the great event involved a game of hoops-and-sticks in which a player named Penis was killed. The calendar doesn't indicate how he came by the name, but Penis apparently attacked two players during the game, and they killed him. The game continued, and they used his body as a backstop. The year 1796 henceforth became known to the Miniconjou as The-Year-When-the-Hoop-Rolled-against-Penis.
This particular Penis, apparently, led less than a charmed existence.

The Creek

A creek coursed through the woods of my youth, and my friends and I negotiated on our bikes the dirt paths that snaked their way to the water like tributaries.
We dug up worms and sat on the banks, our fishing poles either extensions of our hands or resting in the Y of a upright sticks, and caught catfish and sunfish and pike there. We waded through the tunnels over which the interstate eventually would pass and shot crayfish and birds and frogs with BB guns. We floated for what seemed like miles in flimsy inflatable boats acquired from the toy store and netted fish that we eventually allowed to fade and dry to a crisp in the summer sun. My friend Rick once hooked an eel that he swore he needed my help with, and perhaps it has grown through the prism of time, but we wrangled what I still consider to be a three-foot creature about six inches in circumference to the bank. We foraged there for snakes, too, that we sometimes vivisected with shovels. A state trooper on the highway once spotted me shooting my BB gun and stopped and yelled; I took off. He didn't stand a chance. Those were my woods.
The woods and the water offered us danger and refuge, from parental oppression if nothing else, especially the water, concealing its mysteries under opaque surfaces and vegetation and carrying us to points unknown. When we waded those waters, we sank to mid-shin in the soft bottom, the eventual extrication of our feet bringing rise to the fetid muck. A flood once buried the trails under three feet of water, and we forded our customary bike paths in hip boots and waders, acquiring a fresh perspective.
We hid pilfered cigarettes near drainage pipes and smoked after fourth grade let out. We pulled those cigarettes to our lips as smoke-induced tears formed in our eyes. Newports, Kools, Lucky Strikes, whatever we could get. I can still taste the Newports, enhanced by the allure of the forbidden, though sometimes the rains dampened our stash and rendered the matches unusable. Ditto the Playboys we discovered, the process of separating the soggy-then-dry, soggy-then-dry pages distorting the bodies of the partially clad women. Later we drank and smoked mind-altering substances in those woods.
A fence rose up at some point, blocking access to the paths down which we used to travel, long after I had left them behind. I could circumvent those barricades, but perhaps they're better left in place. I drive frequently down the long-since-opened interstate, and I point out the creek to my kids and tell them I grew up fishing there, and we look down at the creek as the water passes under the bridge.

Energizer

What keeps us going? For some people, such a question might seem ridiculous; they appear to keep going because they like it. Others probably never have considered an alternative; they just keep going because, well, what the hell else are they going to do?
Some people don't necessarily like life, per se, but they carve out enjoyable pockets, activities to which they can look forward, like drinking or smoking marijuana or jumping out of airplanes or driving race cars or having sex. Those people's normal lives appear to represent a holding pattern, occupying the gray areas between when their lives take on color. That holding-pattern time, however, for many people lasts much longer than the colorful slivers, which fade too quickly. Sex, for example, can vary in its intensity and duration but generally speaking doesn't last as long as, say, a normal workday. Jumping out of airplanes attracts adventurous spirits, as does bungee jumping, but they're fleeting adrenalin rushes. My dog has taken a piss that has taken longer than falling off a bridge connected to a springy cord.
I guess porn stars or NASCAR drivers make a living out of doing what thrills them, but I bet longevity dilutes those thrills and turns them into gray areas. Booze and pills help, but overindulgence induces an eventual reckoning; they often leave an unpleasant residual effect. Unless we could have pills that help us to perceive the gray areas differently from how we might normally. Oh, yeah, the drug makers are trying.
Other people appear to permanently occupy their own, more ordinary gray areas, and some contentedly so. We have vacations, but the knowledge that we must return to the gray for way longer than vacation lasts tempers the satisfaction. A week at the beach doesn't quite mitigate the months of work required to get there.
For others, the gray areas are more like black and making daily peace with the world presents more of a challenge. The people who populate, and tolerate, the gray areas, tend to have difficulty relating to those who take up residence in the black areas. So, too, do those who live in the rosy neighborhoods. I don't trust them. The rosy people obviously keep going because life is grand. The gray-area people compartmentalize or accept or figure there's nothing better or like their lots in life. I can't relate to them.
So, back to those of us who don't want to brush their teeth or shave, let alone clean the bathroom. Some part of me always has clung to the notion that I will find something satisfying enough to persuade me that everything has been worthwhile, that it really has been a wonderful life, that I'll be able to stop saying I still haven't found what I'm looking for. I'm competitive, too, so if life represents a game and poses a challenge, like continuing to live, I don't want to lose.
Does love keep us going? Certainly, for some, love for and from their children provides sustenance. Then again, some people with children kill themselves. Love of self seemingly sustains some, as does spousal affection. Longtime spouses sometimes follow the death of their significant others by dying themselves.
Some people endure life because of the promise held by the afterlife. Long-suffering Catholics bear their burdens secure in the belief that Heaven awaits. They proudly forsake earthly pleasures. Dogma promotes misery.
Maybe this holds some answers, but I think it's largely bullshit:
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/28/magazine/28depression-t.html?em
The article doesn't seem to account for those people for whom depression cripples, instead of clarifies and focuses effort.

Stoned

Eight years of my life barely had passed when I rode my bike down the road to the gas station so I could top off my tires with air. That always seemed to be a problem, a deficiency of air in our bicycle tires and no pump with which to breathe life back into them. Gas stations didn't have coin-operated air pumps then, so we didn't need to scrape up any change, but the pumps' unreliability introduced a measure of uncertainty.
Flats constituted disaster, like an appendage lost, and our amateurish surgical procedures risked further damage. We would remove the tires from the rims with flat-head screwdrivers and in so doing often introduced additional punctures into the tube. If we managed to extricate the tube without inflicting further damage, we then contended with a patch kit. The kit, packaged in a rectangular aluminum box, contained glue, which eventually would dry out and crack and resemble a used-up tube of toothpaste that had baked in the August sun; the patches themselves, which we cut to fit; and the top of the aluminum container, which resembled a cheese grater in miniature with its rough surface intended to scratch up the area around the puncture before applying the patch. After applying the patch, we sometimes, in an effort to further entomb the offending hole, would set afire the glue that seeped from under the edges. The chain, too, could prove equally problematic. A malfunction often left us streaked black with grease and frustrated by immobility.
My bike also facilitated self-injury. I once trailed blood 200 yards from around the corner to my house after a no-hands ride carried me face first into the door of a parked car and left my lips in threads. Wheelies the length of football fields often ended with the back of my head or my tailbone meeting asphalt. Someone stole my Sears Free Spirit with the American-flag motif that my grandfather bought for me, delivering an affront to me and patriotism in one blow. I lusted after the rims on the fancier BMX bikes, which made mine look pedestrian.
And so it was that my bike carried me on that fateful day to the gas station. Construction crews had partially completed the interstate near my house, and the pale green metal supports bore the weight of the highway as it crossed over the road on which I traveled. Once underneath those supports, my tires zipped on the asphalt and echoed in the chamber. I looked at the as-yet unspoiled white concrete embankments that angled up to the base of the bridge as I passed.
I emerged from the shelter of the bridge, exposed on the other side, and a group of teenagers standing on the as-yet-unopened highway spotted me, like birds of prey sighting their quarry. They unleashed a fusillade of rocks from their perch above me. Time slowed, and the recognition that a group of kids were stoning me sunk in deliberately. The rocks rained down and tore flesh, and I pedaled furiously as tears formed in my eyes and blood rivulets turned peach fuzz crimson. I looked back at them and saw someone I thought I recognized, the stringy hair and the cocked arm.
I pedaled until I reached the gas station, another half-mile, and I puzzled over how I would return home. The kids had left by the time I had summoned the courage to venture home. Safe passage. At home, I showed my brothers my wounds, and we all immediately piled into the car, hell-bent on vengeance. Solidarity. Once up on the highway, we encountered a man my oldest brother knew, and he, too, sought the rock throwers for hitting his car. To no avail.
Most mornings, I drive my car under that overpass, and sometimes the sting of unbridled cruelty resonates more than 30 years later and again leaves a hole somewhere deep inside of me.

Reality Show

I consider myself a realist. As such, am I destined to live a life of relative disquiet? Apparently. Do all people consider themselves realists? Everyone necessarily has an individual version of reality, so who is to say which reality equals the real reality? All realities ring true for someone.
But can we come up with objective measures of reality? Men and women, for example, often perceive situations differently. Witnesses offer different takes on what they have seen. Certainly some circumstances lend themselves to reasonably objective interpretations; if someone threw a baseball through a window, and the window broke, and someone else said it didn't, you could say, "Bullshit, I just saw that fucking ball break the glass," and anyone else around likely would share your interpretation.
On the other hand, not every situation presents in such a fashion. My mother and I have quite different interpretations of certain (most) events, and even when we agree on what transpired, we disagree on why. I could say the same about other women with whom I've interacted. So I either for some reason interact with women who are predisposed to disagree with me, or most women have that predisposition, or I'm the one predisposed to disagree. Here I will acknowledge some culpability.
I also will concede that my perceptions, based on life experience, appear to deviate from the perceptions of people who have had less turbulent lives. Or, as my wife says, my normal isn't normal. Drinking, drugs, violence, depression, suicidal tendencies, electroconvulsive therapy all have skewed my perceptions. I have taken a while to come to that recognition. I bet not everyone knows somebody who has undergone ECT. But that's my reality, and I can't change it.
I can change how I process some of my experiences, so I guess our past doesn't have to hold a completely inexorable grip on the present. But that involves work and energy and an emotional investment and a willingness to make oneself vulnerable and to keep at it for years and years in my case before something clicks. Is that a way to spend a life? Although, the alternative looked grim, and final. Most people I've encountered don't have the inclination to change. As a result, no reason exists to investigate the formative experiences that have shaped who they are and how they got there. The path of least resistance apparently holds the most appeal. That's their reality, and they're sticking to it.
People lie, too, and in so doing further muddy the reality waters. For some people, the lies eventually become truth to them. If you tell a lie long enough....No wonder, then, that reconciling these disparate realities can prove elusive.
I've read, and I don't know where, that depression affects realists disproportionately. I guess it would. Which comes first, the realism or the depression? The way people cope might make the difference. I'm genetically predisposed, I think (maybe nurture played a part here), to wake up in the morning and for the most part decry daily life's drudgery. Paying bills and cutting the grass or shoveling the snow and getting the car inspected pretty much suck. Then you have to deal with the selfish dickheads who appear to exist to make other people's lives more difficult. Work holds little appeal. People who go to church on top of all this amaze me. Why not add one more shit-ass thing to do in a day/month/year filled with shit-ass things? I'll stop, since I run the risk of depressing anyone reading this.
But this is my reality. And I'm right, after all. And you can't run from your own head.