Thinking and Smoking

Rain in the Summer. Far too many metaphores. Far too many descriptive passages about its melancholy beauty. Add the city into the imagery and forget it. You've got buckets of inspiration--the kind of stuff Woody Allen is overcome with in his rainy Manhatten. Like him, I feel overcome, but often fail to convey its deapths beyond the explicit anecdote.

I am in rainy Chicago. Chicago has a beauty, a sense of place all its own that I'm more in love with today than I was when I first moved here, even when I first visited. I can't say that it's a city that grows on you because I was taken right away. But I'm over my crush now. Now this is love.

I realized last night something that I have realized continually. Everytime it hits me, I rail. I vow to fix it. I forget again. And the cycle continues. That realization is this: I am more comfortable alone than I am with other people. There is a small group of people whom I don't consider "other people". But in general, I prefer to be alone.

I am in rainy Chicago. I am hungry. It is Thursday. I have not posted to my blog today. I tell myself I will post Friday. I've just learned that the Drinking & Writing benefit will begin at 9pm, not 8pm. I have hours to kill. This realization exhausts me. I walk to my bank. I deposit checks. I take out cash. I walk to Huey's in Andersonville. I enjoy a blue cheese burger and fries.

If you've never eaten at Huey's I highly recommend it. Take your out-of-town friends there and make them order hot dogs, or better yet brats. Lean back and grin over Chicago's history. You can still get damn good meat in this town. I hate seafood. Massachusetts was not my culinary home--but these streets still stained with the fantom blood of livestock, make the red-meat lover in me feel quite welcome. (I appologize to my vegetarian readers for that passage. It's lunch time.)

I am still in rainy Chicago. I love the warm rain, but my pants are beginning to get soaked around the cuffs. I decide to cross the street to a local market and buy a cigar. I've not smoked one for about a year. Yes. Red meat and cigars. The rain. My melancholy. It is Self Indulgence Day.

I buy my favorite inexpensive cigar--Punch, $6.95. I walk through the neighborhood I used to live in when I lived in Andersonville. Not much has changed. I walk the alleys. I love the alleys. You don't see alleys in in New York, not like these.

And the time is creeping, and my back is aching. The rain is falling harder and now my elbows and my shoes are wet. My bag is soaking through, and my back and butt are beginning to get wet. It's time for me to decide whether I should go to my friends' show or go home. I know that they need an audience. I've already bought tickets but I am aching.

And I'm aching in another way. I am in the rain in the summer puffing smoke rings onto Summerdale. I am dreaming of Chicago's Gilded Age, of men smoking cigars and conceiving skyscrapers--envisioning the future beauty of this city, fighting for the honor of the World's Fair, insisting that it can go toe to toe with New York. Chicago...a city with a big chip on its big shoulders.

Leaning against a tree, blowing smoke from my cheeks, it hits me. The warmth of my home office overcomes me like dreams of hot cocoa and a fireplace in the dead of winter.

And I walk, and I tell myself that this is in my control. I ask the question that I am most fond of asking myself: "in this moment, what kind of person do you want to be?" That question usually gets me to do the right thing. But tonight, I decide to do something about which I'll feel guilty. I decide to go home.

I wonder to myself, often, will a person go crazy if he doesn't spend enough time with other people? How can a person feel so much love for strangers from a distance, to connect with his past so passionately, to love a city--but keep his love for his friends hidden?

I ask this question but the city does not answer me. The city bares its lessons to me, but it never challenges me. I can't hurt the city. The city can't hurt me. It is a match ideal and beautiful, as well as stagnant and predictable. After all, if someone lets you blow cigar smoke in their face whenever you feel like it, you may never give up smoking.

Prognostication's Rewards: A Traveler's Tale

Seven years ago, I had a dream that my brother and my sister-in-law lay dead, side by side, in our family's laundry room. A year later, my sister-in-law died of an accidental drug overdose. A year after that, my brother died of an asthma attack.

When I was in seventh grade, I dreamt of a girl named Doreen, on whom I had a big crush. She and I were holding hands as we walked around a red house. We sat on a picnic bench. Some dark-skinned children ran into the backyard and played a game like ring-around-the rosy.

A year later, Doreen and I would briefly "date", and that exact scene would occur: Her neighbors, who occupied the same large, red house, were Indian and had a lot of kids who ran into the backyard while Doreen and I held hands on her picnic bench, as though on cue.

During the summer of 2001, I went on a Zen retreat. When I returned, I was having drinks with my friend Rachel (England Rachel for those of you who have read the previous post) when she told me that she, Chloe and my now fiance but at the time new friend Genevra were going to go on a road trip. And then a flash. I think it was because of all the meditating I had been doing. I saw Rachel in front of an alligator. More specifically, though Rachel doesn't remember this detail the same way, I saw Rachel standing in front of what could have been an alligator sign, and in front of her was some kind of small road.

Rachel thought that was odd because they were going to the Southwest and were not expecting to see any alligators. But I was pretty sure of what I saw so I made sure to tell Genevra and Chloe seperately to take a photo of Rachel in front of it if they saw an alligator sign.

While on their trip, they wound up getting turned around, and drove quite a ways in the wrong direction. And then they saw it--a huge alligator sign.

I still have the photo.

There have been many other instances of my having made predictions or having had dreams or instincts that seemed to come true, though these three strike me as most memorable.

I've taken to weirding people out now by warning them when I think I've had a prophetic dream. I dreamt that a friend of mine got his girlfriend pregnant. I warned him to be safe. I dreamt that my brother-in-law-to-be (hi Brent) got a job as a door man at a bar and was shot in the feet by a woman who was robbing the place. I warned him not to take a job like that. They both probably thought I was being a little odd, even though it happened that the couple hadn't yet settled on a method of birth control, and Brent had recently applied for a position similar to the one that I'd dreamt of and I didn't even know he was looking for work.

I don't see myself as psychic, though. But I also don't think it was coincidence.

I started paying more attention to my instincts one day when I was moving out of my apartment in Andersonville. My girlfriend at the time and I had just broken up and were going through probably the most amiable seperation one could imagine. We had always been good friends and worked together well. Somehow, dismantling the lives we had built with each other and literally dismantling the apartment went as smoothly as most of our relationship had.

At one point we decided that since we had so many books to cary out of the apartment to give or throw away, it would be a great idea to throw the books out the back of our third floor window and gather them into boxes below. I stayed below while Elyse tossed the books to me. We started giggling at one point because we noticed that if you threw a stack of books onto the paved walkway, they would hit the walkway in a stack and then burst upwards into an arc of books that launched away from the house. They became almost as fun to watch as fireworks.

I learned how much distance I needed to keep between me and the drop zone. But then there was this one stack of books that hit the ground and arced toward me--the top book somehow much more propelled than usual. The book came at me and began to lose momentum about 18 inches from my chest. In fact, it slowed so much that it was almost difficult not to reach out and grab it. I did so instinctively.

And when I grabbed it, it was facing me perfectly--front frontwards and upright, binding to the left. The title was something like: "Freeing Your Intuition. How to Unlock Your Own Psychic Powers." It had been a book that Elyse picked up at her job and brought home because she had thought I might be interested. I'd never looked at it.

I then decided to keep the book. I did learn a thing or two from it. Mostly I've learned how to tell the difference between my instinct and my imagination--a skill I very much value.

There was no way that I could have prevented my brother's and his wife's deaths. I may have predicted getting to hold Doreen's hand, but I didn't predict her dumping me in a matter of weeks, nor was I able to predict her untimely death when she was in her mid-twenties. And while I may have predicted the aligator sign, Rachel, Chloe and Genevra found that sign the day they left for their rode trip on September 11th, 2001. So I was able to predict the sign, but not the deaths of thousands on the east coast who died a few hours prior.

Feelings come and go constantly: which elevator will open to take me to lunch; where exactly is the best place to stand on the El platform so I can get into a car first. But they rarely predict anything important. As for predicting the events of my life, I didn't even know that I was going to end my relationship with Elyse until the words came out of my mouth--and then I knew like I had always known. And Genevra and I happened suddenly and unexpectedly at a time when I saw my destiny very differently. In September she will be my wife.

It would be nice to be able to save the world, to help others, but I think somehow to be able to predict events in your own life would not be so nice. I think, we are here for surprises. We're here to learn how to appreciate the good ones, and survive the bad ones.

It's a long, unpredictable journey. There's no way around that. One can ask only for a pair of shoes and a body, for now, to slip inside them.

Tales of Fitchburg, Part 1 (The Beginning)

My brother Ed had filled me with visions of college as an Eden. No one there was unkind. Everyone was more interested in learning than popularity, and athletics were not necessarily a prerequisite for sexual congress. This Eden theory was the opposite of my high school experience, which scarred me and left me an outcast virgin with no more than a social triangle to call my own.

I may disappoint the irony-hungry by saying that my brother was generally correct, although college was never an Eden.

Fitchburg State College, my alma mater, is a small state institution located in a hilly former mill-town in central Massachusetts. Mill towns were apparently huge during and after the industrial revolution, producing textiles and the like before dying somewhere around the great depression and never fully recovering. The City of Fitchburg was no exception. Main Street, running through a dead downtown, is lined with formerly beautiful buildings with marble foundations and proudly chiseled construction dates over elaborately tiled doorways. And all over the city there are abandoned mills, factories and warehouses, sometimes in large, interconnected lots which might span a half a mile.
A famous train-line which ran from Boston to Fitchburg was a favorite stomping ground of Henry David Thoreau’s. In his day, Fitchburg was a hilly paradise, barely settled and eminently rural. He would escape there from time to time by following the railroad that ran right past Walden Pond in Concord.

To this day it is still the last stop on one of the MBTA lines from Boston. Every now and then I’m sure a foreign traveler, accustomed perhaps to arriving at a major city and riding a train out to its last stop as a way of getting to know a new country, will pause with nauseous horror as he emerges from the train to see this city--its rotting bones stuck in the 1930’s and its draping flesh a modern American tide pool for the socially abhorrent. It had become a joke of a city, populated mostly by toothless white people with greasy ragged hair and oily fingers. We called it “the Burg”, and used the expression like it was a synonym for the joint or the slammer.

So I was eighteen. I was trolling for colleges. Speaking of Transcendentalists from Concord, I wanted to go to Emerson College. There were many people who applied to Emerson only to wind up at Fitchburg.

Emerson was an expensive communications college in Boston. I had decided I wanted to be a filmmaker because I had obsessively co-created a few raggedly assembled sketch videos and enjoyed myself tremendously. That was all I needed to uncover my life path.

After a college fair I found my first choice: Emerson. Beautiful, private, Boston-based Emerson. Being somewhat of a worrier I decided I better find a more affordable college as a second choice: FSC. Small, state-run, Fitchburg-based FSC. It held no interest. But it was affordable and one needed to have a no-frills back-up plan in suburban, middle-class, dreamless Billerica, Massachusetts--my home town.

Emerson cost about thirty thousand dollars per year. Fitchburg cost seven. I was accepted to both. I applied for financial aid.

My idealistic, genius, Boston University graduate brother Ed not only told me that college was Eden, but that I could find a way to afford any program. This mythic way did not readily present itself. And I had a friend, Randy, who had also applied to Emerson and Fitchburg, and he wound up in the same situation: accepted to both, but without enough financial aid to afford Emerson.

I remember our first open house. It was a program called, ingeniously, Fridays at Fitchburg. We took a Friday off from high school and drove my gold, 1986 standard shift Hyundai Excel fifty plus minutes to our first glimpse of rotting, hilly Fitchburg. It was raining.

The FSC campus is your traditional quadrangle--a few brick buildings surrounding an acre of neatly mowed grass and a few beds of yellow flowers. In the center of the campus, just outside the dining commons was an enormous, blue smokestack, affectionately nicknamed by my friends “the big blue dick.” I have no idea what this monstrosity was for, except to serve as a sickening beacon to prospective freshmen arriving freshly from their shattered expectations.

After we were shown all over the school, we walked back to a parking lot to retrieve my gold hatchback. We weren’t saying much to each other. I can’t say that I was impressed or disappointed. I felt the usual numbness I feel when I try to consider any choice that involves a potential for enriching experiences. I didn’t know this then, but I am a terrible judge of fun and rely solely on others’ lusts for adventure and newness. Like most people are with meeting friends, I generally need to be introduced to a good time in order to get to know it well.

Randy was my ambassador to fun. He would disagree with this as he probably considers he was generally miserable during this time of his life, but it was how his misery manifested itself that led me to so many places. Randy had a kind-of persistent longing. He was never satisfied, always looking to move on. My life, though like his not always a happy one, was at the very least persistently enriched.

The rain had stopped but it was still cloudy and wet. Randy was walking with his hands in his pockets, his well-hair-sprayed head hung downcast. The two of us, with near identically slight frames and short skeletons, shuffled into the McKay parking lot on that rainy Friday.

I broke the silence.

“That wasn’t so bad,” I said.

Randy nodded almost hypnotically. A moment later he began shaking his head and slowly erupted with “No man, that placed sucked.” A pause. I smiled. “It sucked!” he repeated, also smiling.

I nodded, certainly aware of Fitchburg State’s mediocrity, but again I relied on Randy to teach me the intricacies of any good or bad experience.

“I guess it does kind of suck,” I said.

“Totally,” he emphasized. “It totally sucked.” We laughed. There was an atmosphere of release and I found I did have a lot of things I could complain about if I tried hard enough, and we complained together over our drive home.

Again we would be stranded in an idiotic school and we would have each other. That was what we were used to. So it didn’t feel like the end of the world. It was, however, the beginning of a new one.

Bloom

There are so many mornings that we can't remember because they're identical. My alarm goes off at 6:30 AM Monday to Thursday. I snooze once. I wake and get ready for work.

This morning was different. It was different mostly because of what happens to my body when I'm performing in Too Much Light Makes The Baby Go Blind. It's a show that begins at 11:30pm on Friday and Saturday with a Sunday show at 7pm and a meeting afterward that can sometimes keep you up until midnight. Suffice it to say I'm wrecked on Monday mornings.

I was wrecked this morning so somehow I snoozed an alarming number of times and woke up forty minutes later than usual. I called work. I showered. I ate. I left. Whenever I'm running late, I like to give myself some leeway so I don't have to rush. I told my co-workers I'd be a half hour to an hour late. I was thinking to myself as I left that it would be nice to bump into the Limping Man because then I could follow him with my buffer time. That thought was followed of course by the recollection that Limping Man is as regular as Wilford Brimley, so my chances were slim.

It's a beautiful day today. On these days I love Chicago dearly. Finally the trees seem full and are everywhere. I think it's a good week for blossoms--some kind of blossoms. I don't know a damn thing about blossoms, but these blossoms are white and pretty and everywhere. I love them and I'm not afraid to admit it.

I rounded the corner heading toward the Western El stop, thinking of the blossoms when lo: Limping Man was there. He was running forty minutes late as well. A mental speedway second of disbelief, thoughts of karma and fate was followed by my steely commitment to learn more about this friendly hobbler. He carried a shopping bag with him today. He was wearing shorts today. He was on the wrong side of the flipping street today. Everyting was different.

I was walking south. He was walking north. "Hello" I said. "Hi ya doin'?" he replied. And then we went in opposite directions. Immediately I rounded a corner to the west that I never round. As I did I heard a much friendlier "hello" from Limping Man and a woman's voice greeting him back. I thought again about how low I was on his Friendliness Index but I tried not to let it bother me. I stopped. I couldn't keep walking west after all. I waited for the woman to pass, stuck my hand into the nearest free newspaper dispenser and then retraced my steps toward the north.

And there was Limping Man's back. It was difficult to follow him. After all, he moves slowly and I needed an excuse to leave some distance between us. At one point I had to stop. I held up my newspaper and peered over the top of it. I was about as subtle as Spy vs. Spy. People were litterally staring at me as they passed. The paper in my hand was an employment paper filled with want ads. I found that ironic since I was late for work--and later still because I was following a strange man for no good reason. The ads on the page I was looking at were for construction jobs.

Yes. I could have worked for the CIA.

He limped on and I watched. I decided to stay still because I could easily have put a block between us and still kept a good eye on him. Then the predictable--he turned toward McDonalds. My previous suspicions had been correct. He's one of the many retired men who spend a lot of time at McDonalds in the mornings. Just to confirm, I approached the front of the restaurant, contemplated throwing out my paper but chose to keep it in case I needed to stop suddenly and make an even bigger ass out myself by pretending to be looking for a drain management job by the ketchup dispenser.

As I walked into the vestibule, I saw him through the glass waiting in line. I decided that this was proof at least that he didn't come to use the restrooms. Again, with a brilliant idea, I decided to pretend to use the phonebook below the payphone. With artful intention (I am a performer after all) I flipped through the book, located a page of lawyers and then put my finger on my pretend find. I looked up from my lawyer, and saw Limping Man at the counter, leaning very casually and comfortably toward the employee. He had already placed his order and he was being his usual friendly self. He leaned with his right arm, and turning back...he looked at me.

Lawyers! Let's see. Yes. That's the one. I turned and left...satisfied that indeed, Limping Man is a retiree who lives nearbye and spends every morning at McDonalds with a community of other retirees.

Now, had anyone been following me, they would have determined that I was an out of work construction worker who was looking to sue his previous employee--probably because they fired me for being unable to lift anything heavy, or because of my penchant for expensive eyewear.

I rode to work happy. The sun feels brighter than usual today. I am reading a fabulous book. The people are wearing less. Somehow, it gives you the impression that you can see them more clearly. I'd like to think this is a day for fun--with the blossoms out and retirees lounging longer than usual in their shorts before they meet their friends.

I'd like to think this is a day for all things to be lay bare.