“He says the news is all lies and the reason it’s so popular is that it sells itself as all truth and people believe it because they’d rather believe in a lie.” San Shepard, “Berlin Wall Piece”
I was thinking the other day that this blog is equivalent to a message in a bottle. Tossed from an iron bridge into a wide, slow moving river, one full of silt and dead trees and jagged rocks. These entries have about the same odds of ever reaching anyone, and that’s fine with me because if I was looking for anything else I would have quit years ago. If I’m honest I think I’ve been searching for some kind of connection and community with like-minded souls, though it hasn’t happened yet and most likely won’t.
It’s gray and overcast here, a heavy marine layer that will linger until well past noon. Garbage day. Beige-colored Marborg trash trucks pass on Milpas Street, and the sound is loud, but not as loud, or jarring, as the gas-powered hedge trimmer from across the street. I hate that particular sound, the way it winds out, whines and echoes. Hedge trimmer, leaf blower, chainsaw. Drowns out the sound of birds.
My mother turns 89 this month. A Depression-era baby. The women on her side of the family tend to live well into their 90’s. Stubborn genetics. French-Canadians. Catholics. My grandmother lived at 27 Charter Street in Salem, Massachusetts, in a high-rise building full of elderly people. I went to visit her in the early 1990’s, a surprise for her birthday. She was in her early 90’s then. There was a cemetery near her building with headstones dating back to the late 17th century. My grandmother loved to play bingo. “Beeno,” she called it. She’d win pocket money. I don’t have any notable ancestors, no dukes or cardinals or even Civil War veterans. No wild and crazy uncles. No eccentric aunts. No criminals. As far as I know, nobody wrote a poem or a symphony or a play or a novel or an essay. Ordinary people, forgettable people.
I’m aging. When I roll out of bed in the morning my body is stiff and my first few steps on the hardwood floors are painful due to neuropathy in my feet. I see floaters in my left eye and have tinnitus in my ears. My hair is wispy and silver and my sex drive is non-existent; only half joking, my wife says I should take Viagra or Cialis or one of the other drugs that inject new gusto in aging cocks and produce magic moments of romance for old married couples.
Parts of my life are a mystery to me, buried deep under layers of time. Almost all the years before I met my wife. Memories are there, but I can’t easily access them; they’re like black and white films with huge gaps. I wouldn’t call them lost years, more like misdirected and wandering. What was I looking for in Tokyo, Honolulu and Seattle, and then for a short time in Irvine? Myself, I guess, an answer to the question, who am I? What am I doing in this life? What am I meant to do?
Childhood memories are even more difficult to get at. Maybe my parents’ divorce when I was ten affected me more than I realize. Right around the time I began junior high. There’s some reason why I can recall so few memories of early family life, of my father. Was the experience that traumatic? Nothing changed all that much. Even high school is a blur. Mostly what I remember is being shy and feeling awkward, and doing a lot of dumb stuff with my friend David. Borderline juvenile delinquents, rebels without cause or clue or coherence. Driving around Santa Barbara in the late 1970’s in my light blue 1965 VW bug, my first car. At 16 a car is pure freedom. We smoked weed morning, noon and night. I spent many days and nights at David’s house, his parents had also divorced but his mother was cool, and his older brother -- who was the same age as my older brother -- managed a waterbed store, which was there was a king-size waterbed on the patio; David and I slept out there many times, under the stars, and we’d wake up in the morning wet with dew.
Time takes its toll. Not an original thought, just a fact. I ask myself if what I’m looking for isn’t meaning, but stories.
