Adventures with Humans–A Night Out

I am in the city  for an evening of symphonic and choral music. Earlier in the day, I had committed to a hearty regimen of Olympic-level wallowing. I had been sulking in a hot bath, thinking about how I would fully embody the genre of miserableness over the day’s later hours when a little voice suggested that I,

 “get my then-boiled ass out of the tub, throw on a dress, and get to the place!”  

My younger son is stepping in to play in this orchestra and any chance to see either of my guys play is a delight, so I go. Traffic is kind. There is only one car fire that slows flow for a few minutes; I arrive in perfect time. Delighted.


The event is in an industrial-looking, unappealing church. I take a seat in a pew a few rows back from the front. An older couple joins me and the fun begins: 

The man makes no effort to whisper. He talks about how ugly the building is, mentions something about “terrible people,” paces for a while, and then returns, hollering about how old the people in the audience are. His annoyed wife sits, trying to lure him to his seat.  I wonder how I will refrain from throttling him if he should speak while my son plays notes. I kicked a man once for texting during one of my son’s performances. It felt amazing. I recommend it.


The room fills. There is good space between me and the difficult couple until a woman squeezes through and fills it. She is short and solid, with a head of hair that reminds me of a serving of crispy noodles. She has had a drink or two before arriving–I can spot this a mile away. She is by no means drunk, but she is relaxed. The top of her head comes just to my shoulder as we sit, so she looks up at me like some kind of aged toddler. She wears large glasses, and seems to consider me as an oddity from behind them: she looks, and blinks, and stares. I wonder if I have a starfish stuck to the side of my face, or some kind of creature waving to her from my left ear that only elfin folk such as she can see. I greet her and we talk. She is upbeat and kind; an orchestra subscription member who attends all of the performances. 


The drama at the far end of the pew continues. Loud Man, now seated, yells to his wife, that he “…HAS BROUGHT BINOCULARS!” My new pal does not acknowledge the commotion. Instead she removes her shoes and gets comfortable with her bare feet pushing up against the back of the pew in front of us, doing her best to avoid the bibles of course. I buckle-in for the ride.


The orchestra plays. Thankfully, Loud Man quiets down. My pew pal looks up at me and smiles each time we clap for the musicians. I am tempted to go get her some milk and cookies, or promise her a puppy. During the last, longer symphony before the intermission, she falls asleep. Peripherally, I see her slump, then deflate towards the wife on her left. At a certain point of collapse, she resets only to tip again. She startles up and awake during the applause at the end of the piece, acknowledging its greatness as if she had not missed a note. 


Intermission comes and Loud Man’s wife, a member of the choir slated to sing during the second half, heads to the green room. When it is time, the many members of the choir walk onto the stage. I guess that there are upwards of 80 people in the choir and I love each one; they are all of the shapes, and heights, and ages. I imagine some as the matronly stalwarts of their sections, throwing disapproving stares at anyone missing a cue, or singing in an improvised key. There is a knot of men in the bass section that I immediately imagine as the selectmen of any village in any bucolic novel written by some easterner. I love that they are here, despite whatever their lives are like at home–love, health, wins, losses, births, deaths–but all here to sing. 

At one point during the choir’s entrance,  I hear Loud Man say,

 “Oh, there she is. She’s there. She’s always there, and after fifty-five years, it’s getting boring.” 

I set my jaw so as to not laugh out loud. 


The last choir member to enter is a woman navigating her way with a long white cane and the help of her choir mates. I notice this, but in case there is any doubt, my pal alerts me:

 “Oh, look. That woman there with the cane? She’s blind. She can’t see. She’s being helped in right now.”  

I smile, delighted with how entertaining the evening, then let out an audible “HARF,” when I notice Loud Man glaring through a stubby pair of binoculars. His wife can’t be more than thirty feet straight ahead of him but he is staring with a kind of fierceness, as if charged with guarding the coast from enemy submarines. I fully expect to discover him later, glaring from horseback with a pith helmet on his head, threatening to blow his cavalry whistle.

The music begins. A hired-gun–a trained soprano soloist takes her place and belts out sounds remarkable to be human-made. I look for similar sounds coming from the choir. There are none that I can hear, but the performance is still lovely. For a brief moment, I want to strangle the percussionist for lagging while playing tambourine, but this is my only impulse I have towards real violence during the evening.


The performance ends. My pal puts her shoes back on. “I hope to see you here again,” she says, rises and in the process of putting on her coat misses belting me in the head while stretching her hand through her sleeve, only because I dodge at the last second. 


The lesson here? –Always get out of the bath.

Mud

I recently changed desks. The process required that I move a few piles of papers that were rooted, it seemed, on my old desk. Rather than simply move them to my new-to-me antique mahogany battlement, I sorted through the piles and in this effort, a single sheet, like a falling leaf, swung through the shifts to rest directly beside my computer on the top of the desk. On the sheet is written a paragraph from the last page of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, that I had copied by hand years ago:


Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and hummed of mystery.


I love this. I love McCarthy’s writing. It was this line from All the Pretty Horses, that drew me to his work:


He thought that the world’s heart beat at a terrible cost and that the world’s pain and its beauty moved in a relationship of diverging equity and that in this headlong deficit the blood of the multitudes might be exacted for the vision of a single flower. 


To be clear, I am not a fan of violence, and as a curiosity have no dogged interest in New Mexico, but I have read everything that McCarthy has written because of the beauty of his sentences. To me, he writes as if composing a musical score, echoing it up off of the desert floor, or the squeak of leather horse tack. His words slow me down, and like most wonderful music, I listen with my heart. It is as if it strains to get to the words before my brain does, to punch out of my chest and meander in and around them as if the sentences were split-rail fences reaching deep into the world. Difficulty arises if I allow my heart to hang out on the fences for any length of time–the vulnerability of this; I am a sitting duck for self-doubt, and mean judgement–some, of my own rutted imaginings, but not all.


It is synchronous that I should find the paper with the paragraph on it right now. I was feeling flung into spring without any grounding–a flailing idiot, scrabbling along the tired path toward happiness which I am beginning to realize is nothing but a chimera. It is a relief to grok this, and in this discovery it occurs to me that it is peace that I’m searching for instead. My definition of happiness involves unhitching and leaving the deep mud of reality, the smell of it, far away and medicating into the oblivion of the world’s games. I’ve tried this and it does not work. It is the mud that I need; all the rest is tiresome and laid with brutal traps that require, over and over again, devotions of worthiness and an insane willingness to maintain a persona of lesser-than in order to win entry. Peace is better for me. A personal peace has no traps, and asks only for sincerity, authenticity. Peace comes from a direct link with nature and an ability to walk in, heart-first. The problem is that, unless I am careful as hell,  this vulnerability leaves the heart open to all of this meanness percolating through the ether lately. That is a real problem that I do not know the answer to, and I can’t be the only one. 


 I have no idea what is coming. 



Would you mind sending me a little sign that you have read this piece to the end? Thank you.

Reset

I went to the gym today. I go a lot. If I didn’t go to the gym, I would be a raging alcoholic, and if you’ve read or listened to any current events since the pre-Trumpian era, you could not blame me. All around the world, small-dicked Napoleons are popping up as if it was a climate deal that caused a hatch of them. Don’t get me wrong, Trudeau is not the leader we need–I am not defending him, but the conservative party(purposely lower case) is not the answer. That’s like getting rid of your gardener because he lost another fucking rake, and then hiring a company that specializes in BURNING EVERYTHING. Theresa May is my pick. She’s smarter than you. She’s smarter than most people–Agh, I wasn’t intending on writing about politics. My intention was to tell you about a thing I saw and a thought I had. I will begin that now:



I’m at the gym, giddy that I might make it through another day as a human. I’m in the middle of a weight workout. Oh it’s not a big deal. It’s maintenance stuff so I can continue to open jars of pickles, carry my groceries up the stairs, and should I ever again be offered the possibility of sex, feel good about the prospects of that one, medieval role-play that I have always…but I digress. I’m standing, resting between reps, and I find myself staring at the south wall. It’s fewer than ten feet away from me, decorously painted in the gym’s thematic blue and black. There are electrical boxes on the wall. Lots of them. And I am intrigued. There are at least three, tall, thin black boxes of different sizes, mounted one beside the other. There are black pipes–larger than Rob Ford’s meth pipe, but smaller than the exhaust pipe on Doug Ford’s stupid asshole van–that run from one to the next, but also straight up the wall. There is a larger metal box, higher up. It is beige, and has the pipes running in from below, and then a couple running out the top. Some pipes run up into the ceiling and into oblivion, heaven, I imagine. Others run off to the side. One connects with, or possibly runs behind an enormous logo sign. At least I assume it’s a sign. It could be some kind of portal. Probably.



What caught my eye, was the western-most box the size of a good slab-cake, that had a blinking red light on it. The light was so small that I hardly noticed it at first, but once found, I could not look away.  This light, this cute little beacon–what was it for? And were all of these other boxes and conduits arranged just for this light? Was this THE LIGHT? The reason I thought that, was because the eastern-most box, all in black, had a pie-shaped switch that pointed to ‘ON.’ But below ‘ON,’ was–  

                                                                OFF.

“My God,” I thought. “I’ve found it. I’ve found the great switch of things, which was mentioned in the Bible and in the Lee Valley Catalogue. Or, wait, it was NEVER mentioned in the Bible. I haven’t seen the latest Lee Valley so you’re on your own there.”  Can you imagine? 


“Jesus, what’s going on down there?”
“Well, Dad, the world is fucked, and the idiots have the keys.”
“Son. Language.”
“Sorry DAD, but things are so bad that it’s just a cluster-fuck. Oh damn. Oh…GOODNESSS. Sorry DAD. ‘Fuck,’ is, I’m sorry to say, the best word to describe the scene.”
“Well, DID YOU TRY TURNING IT OFF AND ON?” said God.


You see? I wasn’t paying attention that day in religion class (Sorry master David W.) but I think it seeped into my subconscious. Could it be? Is this the very switch before me? Here, in the middle of my two sets of 15 reps? 


Wouldn’t’ it be nice? Can you feel it? Imagine being able to reset the world. Just walk in to my gym, pull the switch and start again. 

Fuck.




Would you be so kind to throw me a note if you have read this piece to the end? Thank you.