Today's Grateful Dead List

Don't scoff, lots of 12-step bloggers do this everyday.

Today I am thankful for:

• Criminal Background Checks (post 1993)
• My asthma. "I can't do that, I got asthma."
• The New Deal and The Great Society, I wasn't around to object to on conservative principles.
• That there is still paper money. (I can see the day coming where our debit and credit cards will also show outstanding debts. Grocery clerks will say, "No loaf of bread for you until you pay your dentist his $2000.)
• We can still smoke outside and in rented apartments.
• Insects and birds are smallish. There are no terodactyls to carry me off, nothing can swoop from the sky. Also there are no human predators underground.
• Electricty doesn't leak from sockets (hat-tip to J. Thurber).
• My sober sobriety.

Griefer

Since I'm unemployed now I naturally wait for the phone to ring, hoping it's my girl asking me over to spend the night.

Here at the Sober House I have an ornery house-mate, Chunk... He's got it in for me....He's noticed I don't work, He's leaving messages on our community board in the kitchen.

He's got me by the letter of the Oxford Code: get a job or do 20 hours of volunteer work each week. "You're not spending your days in your room collecting unemployment," he writes.

But sure I will. The house can vote and order me around if it wants, but we have no leaders, there isn't a boss here. If there was we wouldn't elect the stupid guy who huffed too much paint.

I just wrote, "Cool your jets, Frank" but he erased it. Now I want to write "drop dead, Fosdick" but he's filled up the board with his big block letters. The man is passive-aggresive, which is fortunate since he could easily break me in two. And he's right but the code means less to me now. I like to act on my own volition. A quirk.
________
She hasn't called, so I will take off to the club with Marginal Likley Hood, Back Child Support, and Semper Sci-Fi in tow. They like the college girls as much as the ex-strippers.

Various And Sunday

I'm writing a revenge novel. I've got two pages so far, and they're good, but we only broke up yesterday and will probably reconcile. I guess I'll keep at it though. The relationship isn't even stormy but I don't let go of resentments. Man, for a shallow guy I can be deeply ticked.
____
Yesterday morning I dropped James off at his poor Negro church in the factory area of town, and then impulsively took a right, up Dutch Elm to see Mr. And Mrs. Zigfield, my private detective friends.

All their kids were out playing, and the neighborhood kids who make the Zigfields' their headquarters. I used the cell phone to call indoors to say I'd be there to visit in ten seconds, if it was all right. But I got no answer. This being a Sunday morning, it was a rude time to drop in. So I was going to go

Suddenly the kids swarmed the car. I had ten toy guns trained on me, and they were barking orders at me to get out, get out get out! And yelling at me all sorts of things, like when their birthdays are, etc.

The whole damn neighborhood woke up and Zigfield got a call that there was a strange black car out front, and a man was out yelling at the little ones. So he sticks his head out the top little window of his American Gothic house and yells, "It is a strange man! What the heck are you doing, Porgy?"

I say, "I'm here playing tag, what does it look like? Let me in!"

He turned his head east and west. "What for? It's nice out."

"I got to talk!"

"Oh. Well, look. I can't point, but see over there. " He could only gesture with this head, the window was so small.

"There's all sorts of free counseling and social services in those offices across the street. They're open Monday through Friday. We're open Monday to Friday too."

"Then at least call off your troops!"

"Jesus. Hold on, I'm comin' down."
_______
They have a lovely little kitchen, red and yellow, Modern Tasteful Retrospective, don't you know what I mean, with a dial phone on the tile wall even. Like brand new.

There's a nice wooden table for three, but I pace, giving them the plot summary. These are my real friends. We do for one another. I babysit, they have me over for holidays and I make surprise visits when I'm mad and don't know what to do.

"Hold on. You're mad. That's energy, Johnny! Whatcha gonna do with it? Energy is a good thing, man!"

"I don't know what to do! That's why I'm here! I need instructions!"

Mrs. Zigfield thought a second and said "The leaves need raked."

"I promised Number 4 he could do that." (He didn't really say 'number 4' or '99', but it's almost like that there, with the Kettle Kids.)

"But he could wash the dishes," he told her. "Want to wash the dishes, Johnny? You can have a cup of hot coffee. A cold pancake...Oh. Wait. This is about a woman."

"Of course it is, " the missus laughed.

"You want to talk in private, then?" he asked.

I said , "Yeah, Pa. Could you go into another room?" I joked. Haha!.

"No, I want you both to hear this."
_____
I talked for 15 minutes, until they started looking at each other and, just with their eyes, came to some mutual agreement or assessment.

"You're wrong."

"Yeah. You were wrong. You shouldn't have done that. Why don't you call me when you're about to do something stupid?"

Mrs. Zigfield, she said, "He's right, John. Call first. Because you know when you're about to be rash."

He went on. "The worst thing you could do is be angry. Then you're owned. This is a dance. When she pulls away, you pull away. Give her space. How many times do I have to tell you that? You never could play it cool. You need to listen to more Jazz and not so much Blues."
______
I left half distraught. The kids shook me down again. I'm broke, so what did I care. Then they were distracted and I got away.

He was right, I had no self-control. No cool detatchment. I went home and put on Dylan's "Idiot Wind", an angry Dylan song.

You'll never know
the hurt I've suffered
Nor the pain I rise above
And I'll never know
the same about you--your holiness--or your kind of love
and it makes me feel so sorry


But then I put on "Long Black Coat"

Preacher was talking, there's a sermon he gave
He said every man's conscience
is vile and depraved
You cannot depend on it to be your guide
when it's you who must
keep it satisfied


So I don't know except to pray and have faith and live imperfectly and ---almost blindly---repent. The novel, very serious, will as usual be mistook for comedy. I suppose that's all right. It works for me, just to write.

The Determination Is Reversed

I appealled the unemployment decision.

The telephone hearing was on a Friday. That Monday I had the written decision. The very next day there was a neat pile of stubbed envelopes waiting for me on the dining room table and the junkies, drunks and ex-cons I live with---the Semper Sci-Fi, the steamer, the head-Ubangi, and Chunk--- were all scratching thier whiskey beards as I made my way through.

They kept a respectable distance as I approached and then thumb-flipped the checks to my ear. They pulled at their collars, they raked their chests and waited for me to speak.

Should be a check for each week. Each week I spent being joyful, contented, free and jobless.

"Men." I finally announced, "I've found my lost shirt."
___
"Chunk, I can replace that jar of marshmellow creme I mistook for bad mayo and threw out.

"Semper, I told you I'd give you ten dollars if you'd stop talking to me about the novel you wrote. I'll make that good.

"Steam, I've had a change of heart and decided to pay my rent after all.

"James, old top, I don't care how much money is here, you still owe me twenty bucks."
___________
I didn't count it all up. Didn't bother to make sure every week was covered. It was flow. Flow to last to the Spring thaw, by god.

I wrote to Anonydoc, "The point is the money. Then the principle of the thing, the vindication. That's sort of like the icing on the cake."
______
During the dicey days I was staying over with my good-night nurse. In exchange I de-Christmased her elaborately decorated apartment. I even got the huge tree out, with my backwards reasoning pushing it top first through the entry-ways and around the corners .

Got it outside, came back and what was this. It took me an hour to clean up that mess but I couldn't boast of my work without revealing to her how stupid I was.

But then she likes a good laugh so I did tell her.

She works long days, sometimes 13 hours, and since she is upper-class she doesn't have the internet. (That's for proles, like me.) Only books.

I enjoyed Roth's "I Married A Communist". I wrote her love poetry which went into the waste-basket. My infatuation is deep and sweetly sorrowful. I worry constantly that she'll return to the Mississippi coast. She misses the smell of the ocean, the sea breeze, her "bubbahs" and her grand-Aunts.

Meanwhile I'm running out of illness, and only have moods. She won't stay for moods.

I've got to find a way to take care of her instead, but this damnable self-sufficiency of hers. It makes me brood.
____
After the checks arrived I was driving back --- accustomed to the luxury over there--- when the sky suddenly went in nearly full eclipse and the tornado horns blew like a battle-cry.

Batten down the hatches, there's a hook echo somewhere. A surprise in January.

The radio said the storm was approaching from the south-west at 45 mph. Ten miles from town and I was about ten miles from her house. I was coming from the north-east at 55, 65, 70. Half way, one fat drop of rain on the wind-shield prompted me to hallucinate aqua-green.

The sky was closing over us too low, too close.

Into her hilly, forested neighborhood with the winding roads. It was raining hard and just as I reached her parking lot everything went white and it began to hail. I turned and six cars followed me into her lot. Anxious voices on the radio. I was only 20 yards from her back door bay but I thought if I got out and ran, all these strangers might mistake it as another signal and run with me. And then there we'd be.
_____
The next day my bookstore manager asked me into her office and closed the door. She said I was hired as a seasonal temp and they'd be glad to see me again next Christmas.

The well is still deep after a life-time of drinking. Drop a stone in there and it's a moment before the emotion. Then I notice that I brace against the echo, still. It's hard to swallow grief. And that's what it was, because the bookstore wasn't about books, it was about the people, especially my co-workers I barely knew. I stood up to go and it was like my legs might not work.

The manager had said "Of course, everyone loves the atmosphere here." So I was angry too.
I'd be happy to have me around. Idiot managers.

Earlier I'd told Katie and Christian about P.G. Wodehouse. They'd never heard of him or Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Freddie Widgeon, Aunt Agatha. Not even Psmith. So this was my good deed. Maybe in ten or twenty years they'd stumble upon "Psmith, Journalist", and remember me.
____
Anyway, the books are balanced, the cupboard is full, and I'm recovered already. It's marvelous how so many of my dreams come true, sober.

Katie and Lilly Keep Close

I know some women have their special, nice way of being mean to one another, but I'm rarely a witness. I always walk in late,

As Charlie Brown laments, with his forehead scribbled, "I never know what's going on".

That's a complaint dating back ---naturally---to childhood.

Katie and Christian and I were in Recieving, unpacking and sorting a new shipment of books. There were five or six booksellers hanging around, hiding out, and a few of the foppish supes, who actually put their feet up when they loiter.

Katie is 24, not quite shoulder-high, compact-healthy. Her light brown hair is short with a plain hair-cut and she's flat-footed. No nonsense, except for non-stop, musical, often hilarious self-narrative. She has light blue eyes which seem ever so slightly crossed at times, and wonderfully expressive. Her face is squarish, maybe heart shaped with her cheekbones.

She's cute as a button in other words. And she likes baking cookies and lasanga and bringing food to work for everyone.

She found a great web-site on crafts. She lives at Hobby Lobby, with my Good Night Nurse. Spends hours and hours there.

She's as wholesome as Marilyn Chambers on the Ivory Snow box.
____
Happy-going chatter-box. I sigh at my age and her youth. All we do is unpack and sort books while listening to and complaining about the FM radio playing songs 30 and 40 years old. (Same rotation as always. Hotel California. Stairway To Heaven. Repeat.)

She is a lapsed graduate student (of course! this is a bookstore!). She has only her thesis to finish. She's joked with Christian and me about how she can't rally herself since Novemeber and how her mother is always asking about her progress.

Both Katie and Christian laugh at just about everything. So you learn to also, it seems. It's like they're unveiling a world-view for me. It's an infectuous spirit.

Every off hand observation leads to a chuckle (No, a hee-hee-eeee, more like). I guess we don't make any observations if they're not in some way ironic, self-effacing, even punning. Memories flow, stories are told, all to be entertaining. Katie is the engine.

If you've got nothing funny to say, say nothing at all.
_____________
As I say, there were six or ten booksellers hanging around when one of them, Lilly, suddenly acted surprised to see Katie there.

"Katie, aren't you in school anymore?"

There was a sudden silence. Christian, I noticed, left immediately. I kept beeping the ISBN's with my hand-scanner and putting the single copy books on the appropriate carts, into their hundred sub-categories.

"I thought you were only here for Christmas," Lilly explained.

Katie said she just needed to finish her thesis. But that she hadn't touched it in a month.

"When do you graduate?"

"May. Ha,ha. I'm still telling my mother. May. Hopefully. Yes, May. I will."

"So but you're back here. Say, this is an elite group! How many people does Christian have working for him now??"

"I don't know. John and me. Sometimes James..."

I'm a stranger to the human race but now I could tell this was wrong. This wasn't a quiet, close, private inquiry. Lilly was talking from ten feet away. The silence of her audience made it like a whacky play, with Lilly seeming to be out of control, really bombing as an introvert playing an extrovert.

"How far along are you?"

"My survey is all done." Katie swept some non-existent hair from her eyes, an automatic gesture signaling busy-ness and perhaps fatigue. "Since last Fall, haha! I have about 30 pages. My professor has called me a few times, wondering, " she laughed, weakly. "I don't know what's wrong with me."

"Are you going to stay back here from now on? It is fun back here, isn't it? I wouldn't miss the sales floor, I know that."

Katie had no answer.

We were moving between the seven carts in our nearly perfect choreography, sub-consciously, invisiably signaling one another which way we were going and always knowing the right-of-way. (In four hours there are probably two or three beg-pardons. We're good, we're fast. Each cart has a hundred placards for sub-categories. We're efficient, we get it right and recieve no complaints from the shelvers.)

When I realized Katie might be letting this get to her, I was surprised and sorry. Did she think she was being made a fool of? Or that she should quit the store and go home and finish her thesis? Everyone in the room would agree that it was Lilly who was looking foolish.

Normally Katie will make remarks like, "When I had a real job...". Or, "I'm glad I don't have a real job," (echoing my sentiments exactly).

"Am I prying?" Lilly asked. "I'm just surprised to see you back here."

That prompted a bookseller to say to Lilly, "This is why we don't ask questions like that." I didn't turn around to see who that was, but if I had, I'd have saluted him.

"Huh?" Lilly held a book out in front of her and looked concerned. "Is this one of mine? Will you scan this for me, Katie?"

Katie walked across the long room and hand-scanned it.

"Oh. It is! Thanks, Katie."

She left finally and Christian came back as the door was swinging, almost like he'd been standing out there waiting. "Is the awkwardness over yet?" he asked.

Katie's head jerked up. "Was there awkwardness??" Perhaps this was the moment the pail of water poured on her head. She seemed genuinely surprised. Or she seemed to want us to believe she was surprised.

The next thirty minutes were unhappy. Or I was imagining things. Katie was mute now.

Days when Katie doesn't work are dull because we don't have any entertainment. She isn't there commenting on the books, or calling customers about their special orders and then describing to us, now and again, the surprise and confusion on the other end of the line. When Katie is vexed she is all the more humorous. Some complainers can be very entertaining.

I wanted to say something but I'm a stranger still, and maybe I didn't know what Katie was feeling.

Other booksellers offered up their own stories of procrastination at school. I kept quiet and realized that this group takes care of itself. I can listen and observe. I'm outside and that's good for now. It would have been impertinet to offer consolation, but I was very tempted.

The friendly seeming unfriendliness between some women... I've heard say! But now, maybe because I'm sober, the doors of perception, don't you know.

The ordinary can still be novel to the recovering drunkard.

A Rational New Year, For Victory

I enjoyed the recollection of this past year. Someone said if we remembered pain, women wouldn't ever give birth a second time. Worry and frustration are a part of my nature, it's day to day, oh I am a wounded animal, a 'man of constant sorrows', my knitted brow, my unconscious scowl. Then I look back and those were good times, even miraculous times, in my third year of sobriety.

What did you get for Christmas? What'd you get for living another year, then?

Love, shared laughter, even some material possessions I'll keep as mementos of the love and laughter.

So many good friends. I love 'em all. All my life I've been blessed---my mom will point this out to me frequently---with the best of friends. People who have stood by me for years, even twenty years, still around. It's a boast, but more to do with my finding the best people to hang on to.
____
2007 looked to be a frightening year in human history, and it was, almost through-out. But Israel was not attacked again and wasn't forced to go on the attack. With Rumsfeld's minimalist experimentation coincidental with this war, we'd sunk into disaster to the point where even conservatives had to re-argue the Iraq battle itself, but that has reversed itself with his resignation.

This was a year I turned on the "E" channel, out of emotional fatigue, out of anger at the press and the opposition. But fools were put in their place, or found their place. Larry David's wife suggesting we use two squares of toilet paper. Rosie O'Donnell comparing our troops to the jihadists and leaving The View, humiliated, unable to deny the record. 9/11 conspiracy theorists were hooted down. The New York Times had to fore go most of its corrections as week after week they were proved wrong about the war. ...Humorists like Colbert were hilarious but every joke was on some false premise. Only South Park can be funny and honest simultaneously.

Al Gore won his Nobel Prize even as the British schools were issuing an errata list to accompany his dishonest movie on global warming. On the right, we still wait for noxious fools like Bill O'Rielly and Sean Hannity to be disgraced and replaced by the likes of Dennis Prager and Hugh Hewitt. Or, Lileks himself, who has a long radio career already and in his 'Screeds' can be as polemical as the best of them, but with good cheer and a likable personality.

Some isolated disasters slip the mind now, such as mass, random shootings like at Virginia Tech and the Amish school. These were extra-ordinary crimes, true abominations, nothing we should be accustomed to but alas since Columbine--- that hated word! ---those two demons with human parents!---maybe we have become accustomed. The question is whether these crimes were a sign of our age, and I think they were not. Madmen, like dogs with rabies, appear from the low mists. We know there are monsters, despite what we tell our children.

2008: another year for America to come close to making a terrible mistake. We can only hope for a low voter turn-out. We gamble that the ignorant rabble will be apathetic, not stirred with promises of free food and drugs and a war on the successful or privileged. Let the Clinton gang come out again so we can have a fresh look at their P.T. Barnum politics, their cringingly phony sympathies, their corrupt alliances. I feel sure that sober America will win through once again.