Creativity

Another Crazy Day

Dream the night away and forget about everything, Yes, forget about everything.  Did you ever what to change your life, leave the rat race and go somewhere, anywhere.  Find some town where your soul meant something.  For me it was Mendicino, the town, the county, the ideal of living free.  I wanted out of he rat race, out of that crowded suburbia so many people call living.  I had a dream about buying some land, somewhere I could settle down in that simple way.  Chop wood, haul water, if I remember the book.  Sometimes I still dream about it, sometimes I listen in the night and create that sense of change I always wanted and never quite managed.  You know what I mean?  Sure you do.  We all had that dream, those of us who mattered in the late sixties.  But dreams take money and I had none.  What else is new?  The young never have the money for their dreams.  So we settle for what we can get.

 

I settled for working for the phone company as a lineman and cable splicer.  Craft work, union work, physical work.  I hired on at just above minimum wage, I could reach the exalted top wage of seven dollars in five years.  Think of it, seven dollars an hour.  My god, I remember when three dollars an hour was a decent wage.  But that was before I paid my dues to Uncle Sam, back when three dollars was a good wage and got you a decent apartment and a nice girlfriend and a good car, better than the 55 Buick Century I had at the time.  Hey, the thing was fast enough, could do Columbus to Cincinnati in an hour and ten minutes, about a hundred miles an hour.  Two years later I acquired a wife and nine months later we had a daughter.  We struggled financially before I got the job with the phone company.  Some part time work, then a real nasty minimum wage job.  difficult to make ends meet when you’re young and have so many wants.  We bought a house, really more than I could afford and the bills were starting to pile up.  Trying to be middle class is like a solid gold trap.  Your foot gets caught and you become afraid to chew it off to free yourself.  I picked up what overtime was given me, that helped out financially but she complained when I worked a few hours late or a Saturday.  Said I didn’t love her enough.  After four years of marriage we called it quits.  Broke even on the sale of the house and moved her into an apartment in another city.

 

So that solid gold trap got a little tarnish and bent up but the teeth bit into my ankle harder.  Child support, Montessori summer school for my daughter to help out on child care, some clothes shopping here and there.  Playing weekend father, man, that was the worst.  It gets to you after awhile.  Then she finds another man and he’s playing real daddy.  Bastard!  Later I find out he was a real bastard, would sometime become physically abusive.  Bastard!  No, man, got to keep my head down, got to work what overtime I can get.  She got the car, so I walk to work, just a couple of blocks from my apartment, a dive, bad neighborhood.  It’s a lonely time,  a very lonely time.  Take the bus to community college at night, got to advance in the company, need to make foreman if a position ever opens up.  At least it occupies my time, gets me out of the apartment.  A couple more raises where the Union COLA kicks in, inflation just eats that up.  You know, you’re making more and consuming less.  I feel like I’m running as fast as I can but I don’t get anywhere.  The VA college payments help, keeps me even for now.

 

Mother Earth News is like an escapist Disneyland.  Yeah, go back to living off the land but I still need a day job and I work in the city.  Besides, it takes money to buy raw land.  Oh, I know all about this new way of living.  got to pay cash for the land because the bank won’t lend money against raw land.  and if you want to build that log cabin you need some timberland with trees, big trees.  You know how many trees it takes to build a simple 500 square foot cabin?  so I put in for a transfer to the country areas.  ain’t no openings and the company has frozen everyone in place for the next two to five years.  So I’m still stuck in my trap, the rent keeps getting higher every year, and the ex has moved to Utah.  Lucky if I can see my daughter a couple times a year, fly her out at my expense.  Just as long as it’s not on holidays.  Big deal that, family comes first.  I’m just a single dad pretending he has a child and paying for the pretense.

 

My dream won’t go away.  I took a couple of trips to where I want to be, but every time I’m there and see the happy people living my dream I feel that knife plunge deeper in my heart.  I’ve got a little money saved, maybe a couple thousand but land prices keep rising.  My dream keeps slipping into the future.  Gone through a couple of girl friends but that’s about all.  None seem to stick and only one ever thought much about my dream.  They all talked about careers and family and I talk about dreams.  Yeah, I’m a rolling stone in a sea of romance.  Every year I get a little older and every year Mendicino gets a little further, must be close to a million miles by now.  These old dreams never die a natural death.  And Mother Earth News changed, I stopped reading it years ago as it became quite the commercial success, becoming the very thing it was against.  We’ve all changed, even the land has gotten yuppified.  Think of it, wineries, bed and breakfast places, commercial retreats for the novice artists and writers.  And me?  I’ve been priced out of my dream.  Oh, it’s still there, like all our old dreams, it lingers alike a long and slow death, haunting our memories.  At least I’m out of the city, sort of.  Found a small community that is rural like enough for my childhood memories and distant enough from city life.  Even got me a wife that likes much of what I like.  Anyway, this reality is nice, I like it.  We’re happy enough.  I might even settle down and forget about everything.

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Long Time Gone

It”s been a long time coming and it’s going to be a long time gone. Youth never knows where it’s headed until some outside action points to the direction one is suppose to take, required to take. At least that is what my invitation to join Uncle Sam’s merry band of pranksters said. It had taken the selective Service board to find, me, catch up to my lack or wherewithal.  I looked at Jeanne, those tears were over the loss of puppy more than the loss of a love affair.  I was being rescued and I knew that things would never be the same.  If not the draft, then the problem of a pregnancy and years of low wage unskilled labor would be our reward.  No, Uncle sam was doing us both a favor and we both knew it.  You know haw that goes, you gotta put on the show that somehow you cared because it is required and makes both your lives seem noble.  It’s the mid sixties, for god’s sake, we’re supposed to have these noble dreams.  Still, three years is a long time gone, a long time for a young man and a young woman.

 

So there I stood, suitcase at my feet, packed with what few portable luxuries I could afford to bring.  She was worried that I would be sent to Viet Man to die in some rice paddy.  I told her it would take six months before they would even consider sending me.  Well, at least I meant that much to her.  But I knew it wasn’t me, I wasn’t the one she saw herself settled down to for thirty or forty years of marriage.  I couldn’t conceive of twenty years of marriage, let alone ten.  Hell, I couldn’t conceive of marriage right now in the next six months.  No, I knew this breakup was a long time coming, it had no where else to go.  I mean, what was the point?  No, we both deserved better.  she with her mother’s influence, call it the reality of being dominated, manipulated.  I instinctively knew the pattern, my mother tried her best to manipulate me.  I was a hard sell, a tough customer to close.  So here I was at the Greyhound station waiting for the bus that would take me to the airport, would take me out of my adolescent years and put me on the road to manhood.  Yeah, I had some idea what was in store.  Shaved heads, marching all day, sergeants yelling at you all the time.  Yeah, that premonition of something worse than football summer camp and three or four practices a day.  Marriage wasn’t as easy to figure and I didn’t want to try.

 

The bus pulled in, the driver took my suitcase and placed it in the belly.  I gave her a quick kiss, nothing longer, nothing prolonged like the movies show you’re suppose to do.  I knew it would be a long time before I came back.  I didn’t want to come back.  I was breaking my ties for something unknown and I knew it.  I just didn’t know what.  Yes, I’ll write.  Everybody writes, it’s a fact of loneliness.  But what would I write?  Did I miss you?  You were handy, comfortable to have around.  Yeah, you can spend all your love making time and wasn’t that what we had done for the past year?  So she waves, sheds a tear or two, draws back from the platform, waiting for the final curtain.  The other passengers are now aboard and the driver has closed the door.  As we pull out, I see her turn around and head for her mother’s car, the canary yellow Buick coupe.  She always called it the Yellow Bird, as if it had some soul of it’s own.  I think it was a projection of her own wish, to be her own person.  Momma wouldn’t permit that.  Momma had control over the family fortune and that meant no matter what Jeanne wanted momma would decide what was best.  Yeah, I bet she could kick some friendly sargeant ass any day of the week.

 

An hour later the bus pulled into the airport unloading zone.  Inside I met the recruiting sergeant with his sharp pressed uniform.  He handed me a vanilla envelope with the paperwork for the six of us traveling on to the next city.  My name is low on the alphabet so I am appointed in charge of the other five.  So make me an officier.  It wouldn’t be the first time that the alphabet gave me a “command”, for what it’s worth.  Half an hour later we are on board the aircraft headed for basic training.  No brass band, just a welcome from the stewardess.  Yes, that is what they were called back then.  Bought myself a whiskey sour for the ride, it’d be a long time before I would ever have another.  Another two hours and we would land near the basic training base.  Another bus ride, late night assembly and official swearing in, barricks assignment.  In the morning we would find our assignments and be marched by one of the friendly sergeants to that company headquarters where a disinterested captain or lieutenant would tell us what a great adventure awaited us in his company and by the way, don’t fuck up.  Yes, we are ushered into the world of hurry up and wait.  Later I find it’s just like marriage, but that’s another story.  Right now we have to go through the various buildings to get our shots, our clothes, and some chow between the buildings.  then it’s to the barracks where we will spend twelve weeks learning how to spit shine boots and march in formation.  Time enough to learn how to fire a rifle, qualify as markman, and learn how to break it down and clean it.  Yeah, lots of busy work and maybe a sunday to write someone.

 

Mail call and you stand in formation at ease, smoke em if you got em.  God, I quit that habit just to take it back up again, what a waste.  She got the address from my mother, helpful woman.  Some get mail, most don’t.  In another week more mail will show up.  We got all kinds in our company, even one we have to give a shower party, a special invite, so to speak.  Yeah, this is democracy and we are all the same, except for the friendly sergeants who are god, just ask them.  A few more letters and a fem more exchanges of lies.  We graduate from boot camp, as if we had a choice in the matter.  Now it is off to whatever school, from AIT to electronics to Mp or cook school.  One has to be real low IQ to be assigned as a cook or MP.  the cooks are always the little guys while the MPs are always the big guys, go figure.  Then six months later and it’s off to Hell, her fears came true.  I don’t mind, I know she is ready to find Mr Right, or at least the approved individual her mother selects.  so I head for southeast asia and she heads for the approved man in her life.  Life has a way of being perverse in an almost unintelligible way.  He would be no where near Mr Right.  He would beat her, beat the children, go on alcoholic binges, and then when he saw the light, would be dead from a heart attack six months later.  I never got so much as a scratch in my year of hell.  Go figure.

If I Could Keep Time In A Bottle

If I could keep time in a bottle would I lock it up and hoard it away, keeping eternity at bay? Or would I measure very carefully each precious second and minute so as to not waste a drop? What should I do with all that time concentrated in my hands waiting to be let out, like a Genie in a bottle, waiting to do my bidding?  Jim Croce had his own idea about saving time in a bottle since it was a love song to his wife.  No, damn it!  Elton John never wrote it, he bought it from the estate.  Jim died in an airliner crash and left behind a wife and two children.  Elton John bought a couple of Jim’s big hits, and there were hits long before elton ever sang a note of any of them.  Croce sang in bars and joint, working his way up to clubs and finally got a break when a few of his recorded hits made the top 100 and even the top ten.  Man, ten, fifteen years of grueling work and the man is on his way.  Hardly anytime to enjoy his fame when the bottom drops out.  The young don’t know your name.  Back about 2002 I remember calling up a DJ on public radio who caller Time In A Bottle an Elton John song.  She thought he wrote it.  I read her the riot act.  If I could save time in a bottle, the first thing I’d like to do, is to bring back all the young musicians who died and see what they still could do.

 

George Gershwin, a name most Millennials and few Slackers know and yet his influence in the American music scene gave us a sense of place.  I am amazed that the world knows Gershwin and yet most Americans have forgotten him.  He wrote the music and his brother, Ira, wrote the lyrics of a great number of popular music.  But it was George’s foray into the world of classical composition that shook up the older generations and put the world on notice that here, at last, was a composer for the twentieth century.  Who in modern times can compete with such a master?  All over the world his American Opera is played to sold out audiences.  Porgy and Bess, the music and the lyrics are very haunting.  The opening number, “It’s Summer Time” and the living is easy.  Leontyne Price does perhaps the best rendition of that song.  Her performance still sticks in my mind so many decades after she recorded that tune.  George died at 38 from a brain tumor, a great loss of talent.  The pantheon of musicians and writers who died so early in life has become so crowded.  A tip of the hat to Robert Okaji for remembering the Russian poet Sergei Yesenin, another early death.  Yes, if we could save time in a bottle, just think what we could do.  We could spend an eternity keeping them working all for the likes of me and you.

 

With all our time saving devices one might think that saving time in a bottle a very practical application of the space time continuum.  I fear all we will ever do with the promise of time saving devices and waste instead of accumulate time.  Perhaps we might take a different look at time and learn to spend it wisely.  Of course there are times when no matter how wise we may think we are, life kicks us in the head.  Poor Glen Campbell, a popular singing star, a would be actor, the good life.  A hansom  man blessed with wealth and talent.  Now his time is laid to waste by alzheimer’s.  Linda Ronstadt has parkinson’s disease and will never sign another note, hasn’t for several years.  A famous choir director and composer has an aneurysm take out his ability to for any long term or even moderate term memory.  He forgets after less than five minutes what he has said, seen, and done.  Yet his long term memory has not been destroyed, he can still remember the choral works he knew decades ago.  He has time in a bottle but that time is always now.  Time comes in all manner of dimensions and sizes of bottles.

 

Most of all, time is what we make of it.  After all, we are part of that space time continuum, the fabric of the universe, energy and mass that occupies space and time.  That is what we do so well, occupy space and time regardless of moral purpose, for the universe doesn’t give a damn about our morals, such as they might be.  In the world of the physical universe, there are no morals, there is no purpose unto heaven, there is merely existence, the accumulation of mass and energy that occupy space and time.  For us, time matters because our existence matters to us and maybe to a few other individuals.  Beyond that, time has no meaning.  Distance is measured in time.  How much time will it take to go from point A to point B.  Even Zeno’s paradox is about time and distance.  True, it is a false assertion and much discredited.  But it highlights an element of truth.  Before we can go from point A to point Z we must travel halfway to point M.  And before we can reach point M we must travel to point G.  And so on,  constantly halving the distance.  So by that standard, if we try to save time in a bottle, first we must try to save half of it.  But in order to do that we must first save a third, and before that, a quarter, and before that an eight, and before that, a sixteenth, and before that a thirty second, and before that, well one gets the idea.  As babies we would never grow up and become adults.  And the old folk will never get old, babies will never be born, and I’ll never have another birthday celebration.  There is more to time than might meet the eye.

 

But time is distance, the rotations of the earth in regular and periodic turns.  It is space distance because the earth travels around the Sun.    Time is a measure of occurrence.  It is a matter of change.  Could I save distance or change in a bottle?  Maybe, never tried.  Time is not a commodity to be bought and sold for there is no clear ownership that a court of law would uphold.  Time is a way of living, of doing, of perception.