Getting by with a little help…

There’s some psychology thangs going on in my head, y’all, and I’m trying to work it out.

Part of this adulting thing is how we deal with the generations; ours, the preceding one, and the ones that will come after us. The decisions we make for each color our world and leave a mark on theirs as well.

As someone who doesn’t have kids, but has a number of nieces and nephews, I know of the responsibility I have to them; being a great uncle is more than just sliding over $20 every few months. I know of the responsibility I have to my generation, the ones I talk in reverent tones about our wild natures, parents who left us to our own devices, and the last vestiges of “good music”. But I was not aware of the breadth and depth of what I owe to my parents, and, by extension, what I may owe to my parents’ generation.

If one is lucky and blessed, you live to get old. I’m not so sure about that now. Doctor visits. pills, the divestment of the American social safety net to reduce life expectancy. It’s all very strange; as much as we say we as a country revere our veterans, our elders, or “essential workers”, the more we seem to actually ignore their needs.

Anyway, I have four elders who I am directly involved with, all with differing needs and states of mental and physical presence. In the attempt to make sure all of them are cared for and live out their days in dignity, we are smacked in the face of how many loopholes and circus hoops one must go through. Forms and applications and decisions made by faceless entities like insurance companies. You just want to make sure the people you love are content and safe, and everything that could possibly infringe on that causes stress, and I’ve been…having some stress lately.

Hell, even writing this was kind of stressful.

But, onwards.

Writing class postscript.

So, my eight week writing class is over, and I have a few thoughts. In whole, I really enjoyed it; the teacher was great, the discussions were good, and I learned a few things.

Allow me to crow a bit: the ten page short story I wrote for the in-class workshop went over very well. I felt that my story was solid, but was really curious how some people would understand and connect with it, and it got RAVE reviews, and I’m beyond happy. Part of creation, to me, is that someone besides me can lookout something I made and say “I like that”. It’s not the end-all be-all, but it certainly helps the psyche and mood that positive reinforcement form people who have no obligation to give it is given.

We were asked to give ourselves goals moving forward, and establish habits and practices, and this really made me think about what I wanted out of writing and what I could do in the short and long term. I was able to figure out where writing is in terms of time and energy. I thought all of these thoughts that I simply wouldn’t have in a vacuum.

I was reminded of the importance of drafts, and resolved to do more of those. To revisit work and tweak and refine; something I do with drawings all the time. To realize that I am miles away from the greats, but I am using the same words they use. I have the same palette and same brushes and same colors; I just have to put them together.

And I’ll probably be doing so here, for a lot of it. Because we’re all kinda exhibitionists, am I right? Showing off? Doing things in public? No? Yeah, me neither.

Prompt gone wrong.

So, in my writing class, we were given a sentence, and asked to write something in ten minutes that was our impression of something in the romance or noir genre. It was about playing with style, and word choice, and how you deal with cliches because both genres have their cliches, right?

So, the phrase was “She was blond.”

After ten minutes of frantic typing, we stopped, and after a few people shared, she asked “Is it possible to take this sentence fragments and NOT, in some way, focus on the woman’s looks?” One guy had written a romance novel, complete with flowing locks of blond hair. A woman had written a cliched opening of a hardboiled detective drinking bad whiskey at his desk and a dame with gams and blond hair walked in. You get the idea.

I chose, um, a diferent tack. I blame Walter Mosley.

Slow motion car crash…

You see the train coming. You feel the tremor as tons of steel, or years of loneliness, bear down on you, down tracks traveled before, repeating a history you’re familiar with. Because you are secretly Wile E. Coyote, doomed to be failed by your own brain chemistry and that damned Acme Corporation.

But you stick it out, because you weren’t supposed to be here anyway. You’re a good person, you’ve told yourself. You learned from that history, vowed not to be the same, or stand in the same place.

But, here you are, on those tracks again, waiting to get hit, plastered to the spot, hoping that this time will be different.

Short – Girlfriend Night

The giggles and gales of laughter from downstairs make me smile as I move from my man cave tp the bathroom. She’s entertaining her girlfriends tonight, and they’ve been at it for hours already.

I dare not go downstairs, not because I’ve been told not to, but because I don’t want to be a focus for any length of time. Let them talk freely, of love and family and work, and dreams. Hell, if there’s anything I need to know, my wife will tell me at some point anyway.

But as I listen to her laugh, I’m happy. Because with all of the things she’s think of, being happy is a temporary respite from her usual worry. Adulting has been worrisome recently, and taking one night to forget it all and enjoy the company of people she shares years of friendship with sounds like a great deal to me.

Most of my needs are upstairs with me; I thought to bring some chips up with me, but as my thirst mounts, I have an issue I hadn’t thought of; where am I getting water, if not downstairs? Easy answer: the bathroom sink. I cup my hand under the faucet, remembering the Bible story of how a kind and gentle God killed everyone who “drank like dogs”, and laugh to myself. The large part of my childhood spent outside and having to resort to the metallic tang of water sipped from garden hoses, fearing going inside to refrigerators and the accompanying parental attention.

I return to my space, catching whiffs of conversation and idly wondering how late they’ll be up. I smile any way and close my door.

Notes of preferred modes of creativity.

I registered for a writing class today. It’ll start next month, but as I did it, I had to laugh.

I’ve spent the better part of the last few years trying to become a better writer and subjecting most of you to those trials through attempted longform here and in my newsletter. I had no compunction about putting my clumsy wordplay into your eyeballs. (If you’re actually reading, that is.)

But I look at my IG and I haven’t posted a single drawing-thing in months, because my identity (in my head) is SO tied into what I draw and a) I’ve been writing more and b) my drawings haven’t been worth posting, IMO.

Austin Kleon said that people care about the creative process, and want to see “the making of”, which makes sense, because in this AI world, there’s a vast gulf between what you can watch someone make versus what a computer can output with some keywords. The magic’s in the making!

But while you watch me stumble through the construction of cogent thought, and I happily drop 300-400 word essays onto your TL, I can’t bear to let you see what I’m drawing. Just funny why that is.

Adulting suuuuucks.

Well, getting older, bills, things like that; they suck. But it’s really sucktastic to watch people get older and infirm.

Currently, my bio-dad is experiencing dementia. On top of that, he has advanced cataracts and high blood pressure. He lives alone in the woods, in a house he built himself 40+ years ago. He is the oldest sibling.

While growing up, he had the gravitas of a royal, a head of state. Now, he doesn’t remember where he is, in a town he’s lived most of his life. To watch that mental deterioration has been hard, made even harder by family members who insist that what they’re seeing is not true. “He’s fine.” “He’s just kidding when he says he doesn’t know where he is.”

To deny the reality in front of you, to say that all is well in the face of al the evidence it is not, is a frustrating thing to watch. If you won’t name the problem, identify it, then you cannot and will not address it fully and with the grace that requires. Can’t take the medicine if you won’t acknowledge you’re sick. Won’t eat unless you can say you’re hungry.

Yeah, this sucks.

When stereotypes are..true?

Before visiting NYC, I was warned by years of popular media that NYC people don’t give a shit. About you or your feelings or your problems or you as a person. They will step over you, on you, around you if you get in the way. And they’re proud of it, too.

I’ve been to many big cities, all of whom pride themselves on a bit of hospitality and/or indifference. The Southern cities usually portray themselves as old-time, folksy watering holes on top of square miles of concrete and asphalt, and the international ones as peculiarities of their countries. But New York? Fuck you, and you’re welcome.

So, I went out to NYC with some trepidation. Who would I piss off? Whose life would I be thrust into because of some random event? Who would be the characters I was assured existed that would show up in my visit?

It didn’t kind of happen like that.

On day one, I got in and walked the Brooklyn Bridge, starting on the Manhattan side. The day was overcast and not too hot, and the plan was to start getting used to walking everywhere. I was going to cross, find some place to eat, then visit the Brooklyn Library.

So, after crossing, I put in the wrong Brooklyn Library, because yeah. I was directed not to the main branch, but to the Brooklyn Heights branch, which is in the opposite direction. I realized my mistake too far along, but then I happened upon a small park where I decided to sit and recalibrate.

Unbeknownst to me, that small park was dedicated to those who served in the Korean War. My stepdad served in the Korean War.

And this pang hit me, and I sat down, and in Brooklyn Heights, I had a sloppy, snot-nosed ugly cry.I miss my dad, and I know he would have loved for me to tell him about my adventures and everything else going on. I thought of what was, and what is, and just lost it for about twenty minutes.

And, what I was told would happen, did. Hundreds of New Yorkers walked past my blubbering, sobbing mess, and not a fuck, not a care, not a concerned glance was given.

Thanks, New York. You do you.

In praise of sitting down somewhere.

The block is quiet this evening.

Well, not still quiet. Still the sounds of air conditioner units, the occasional peel-out on 43rd Street, the chirps and squawks of small birds and the occasional wayward seagull.

I sit under a large umbrella whose angle keeps the sun off my face, but onto my legs, stretched out on our back deck. My toes wiggle in the warmth, unaccustomed to not being inside socks.

My phone lays In the shade, and I have resolved not to touch it except to change the song playing on the Bluetooth speaker. I’ve selected a playlist of old school R&B and somehow can’t help but to remark how on-point my music selection is.

In my cup is bourbon, or is it vodka lemonade? A bottle of water’s condesation forms a ring on the small metal end table out here for the purpose of holding drinks and the ashtray which, while barren now, would have a cigar’s smoke wafting lazily had the urge struck me.

The wind makes the foliage growing between the porch and the fence rustle; I should really cut that stuff, but that entails getting under the porch and I have neither time nor inclination. You win this one, random weeds.

The calm I feel, outside, blessed to not be stressing about loved ones, or my next meal, and I am thankful. The voices in my head whose suicidal urges and negative talk were really loud when I was younger barely make a peep now. I am looking forward, figuratively.

I can’t really look forward literally because there sits a house, newly built, between me and these sun rays. Sunset over that house yields an artificial sunset, one where the porch is drenched in shade and the temperature dips. So I look off to the sides, at our lawn, slightly brown due to the recent lack of rain, or to the other side, a large vacant lot who, if city records are to be believed, were once home to three other buildings like ours; two flats with a basement, enough space for two or three families to live. This space is now stalked by a number of feral cats amidst the wild grasses, mown twice a summer by the city.

But I sit in this quiet, and my mind can wander, and I am at peace.

Parental visits.

My mother, 80 years old, spry and full of vigor, was on the courtesy cart driven by the red-shirted Amtrak employee. Before he could speed by me, I loudly exclaimed “you can let this one off right here.” My mother turned around and smiled big.

My mom hadn’t been up to see me here since my wedding five years ago. After Dad died, I pushed to make sure that she didn’t withdraw and still maintained her social network, and she flourished in many ways, reaching out to people and connecting. The pandemic brought connections through Skype and phone calls. But she didn’t travel, and I kept bugging her to come up and visit.

After much prayer and deliberation, she finally agreed to come up. Since the train goes right through town, I was able to avoid the hassle of the airport and get her a train ticket in sleeping car arrangements. Sure, it wasn’t as quick as the plane, but it was a lot more relaxing.

So, preparing for her visit was nerve wracking. Where do I hide the liquor? Do I bother hiding the cigars? What about my laundry, piled on one of the guest beds? Will she say something, or no? Is my house clean enough?

My mother, in her own special way, alleviated those fears. She told me that she was proud of me, that I had went off to college and never moved back in. That I got a degree and got a job without them worrying much about my work ethic or questionable choices. That I was able to navigate a personal life with people who are happy to be with me and around me.

Was I able to relax completely? No. There were still snide comments about the amount of liquor I have in my house, the humidor with cigars in it, and why frozen pizzas are in the freezer, but those were outweighed by how much fun we had just sitting around and talking. Her seeing me as an adult and not just her kid has rally improved our relationship.

All is well in parental relations. And it started with just buying a train ticket.