Kick Ass At All Times

I haven't written anything in quite some time. Not a single meaningful word has passed from these fingertips to the keys, or from cocked hand to pen. It's been all inbound traffic, a nearly endless stream of "content" funneled in from the void to my interior. Like so much newspaper lining the birdcage of my skull, meaningless, serving only to catch the waste as it drools forth from the blocked stem of my protesting consciousness.

The reason? I don't know. I can make some estimates. I can suppose that it is due to a lack of vital experience, a missing spark that no longer impels me into action. But is it ad hoc, or propter hoc? Pot or kettle? Chicken or egg? We can't be sure of why, only certain that it is, and therefore it is unwelcome.

The trick, I believe, is to begin again. To start. To empty the spout, tap the rim of the fuel additive against the rim of the tank opening to shake the last drops out, down the hole, to mingle with the wet fuel and begin the clumsy work of evaporating the water. Turn the key, listen to the old engine grunt, cough, grunt, and shudder into silence.

And to try again.

And again.

Airport,

trapped,  

a black storm

shuttling

across

the

open heat

of this desert

night.

All I can think,

all I want in this world,

is to get on this plane,

to leap

into the air

across the miles

back

to Los Angeles.

And when I

get there I

want to tear myself

apart.

To send you all

the jagged, complex,

gentle pieces

of my heart

in envelope after

envelope

like a ransom note.

To quit

my job

and sell everything

that owns me

and climb

back into the sky

to run across the world.

To burst

through your door

take you by the

hand, pull you

out into the night

run to the sea, where

we topple to

the ground and lay heaving,

gasping;

staring into each other

until the ink of night

goes down into the deep,

knowing that it will

not

I often write to process feelings that I can't express in other ways. But when there are feelings that I can't capture on the page, I am at a loss. This is one of those times. Nothing is adequate; nothing means enough.

We live, and it is strange. We are mundane and profound and somehow more yet less than the sum of our mechanical parts. We stain each other with the tint of our muchness, and the marks we leave behind are artifacts we no longer own, whose meaning we can but guess. Meaning itself is an illusion. The weight of a moment, the heft of a life, the gravity of human existence - these are dreams. They move in us, and we through them; colliding, dancing, fighting, soaring. Soaring. 

And then we go. And we leave only questions, the answers to which are dreams again. These dreams are our magnificent burden. They make us whole, and they take us apart. And when at last we lay them down, our others take them up again; adopting them, giving them new haircuts, new clothes, new names, new hope.

Once upon a time, staggering drunk at last call on the outskirts of Philadelphia, a friend and I came to the conclusion that we needed to drive into the city to locate some drugs to keep our evening going. We hopped in his faded red Toyota pickup and started off into the night. A couple miles later, my friend misjudged the road and we found ourselves wedged up on top of the concrete median, one tire blown and the vehicle firmly stuck between the two double lanes of late night traffic. We realized that our circumstances were not optimal, both being thoroughly intoxicated and me toting about half a pound of low quality marijuana in my backpack. We decided our best bet was to abandon the vehicle, so we fled the scene and walked into the Wawa convenience store about a block away. My friend knew he'd have to call a tow truck and go back to the car at some point, so he quickly devised a plan. He ordered a turkey hoagie from the deli counter, and when it came he took a couple bites before smearing the sandwich all over his face like a stick of deli-meat-and-mayonnaise sunblock. "This way I won't smell like boooooze," he said, smiling. When we walked back, the truck had already been towed. Figuring we'd wait until morning to sort it out, we caught a cab home for the night. 

The next day it took half a dozen phone calls to locate our disabled carriage. We finally called the right garage and made our way over to assess the damage. It turned out that two tires were blown and one wheel was cracked, and the portly mechanic quoted us his fair price of $1200 to get the truck roadworthy and release it back into our custody. He was sure to let us know that the sheriff was his cousin, and that he noticed a strong smell of alcohol when they had picked the truck up the night before. We didn't have the money, and we weren't about to let this grimy junkyard mechanic get the better of us. So, we made the only other move at our disposal. We traded him an ounce of my shitty weed for two used tires, a wheel, and an agreement that none of this had ever happened.

That was Media, Pennsylvania in 1996. My friend died of a heroin overdose a few years later. I got sober a few years after that. I don't know whatever became of the mechanic or his sheriff cousin. I've never seen anyone use a turkey sandwich as a facial treatment since, but this morning I found myself in a cafe in Media after a redeye from Los Angeles. I had a delightful goat cheese and asparagus omelet with a fresh-baked biscuit and a side of honey butter. I ate it alone and quietly enjoyed the morning sun painting the edges of the storefront across the street while clearing my head before the professional retreat I'm attending for the next 3 days.

We met at midnight by the water

half a lifetime ago.

Walked to my apartment

She marched in

and directly to the bedroom

where we cast our clothes to the floor.

Wild and raw

we took each other down

into the deep darkness.

After she left I was paranoid,

wondered if there was a

boyfriend or a

husband or a

father

waiting in the dark to do me in.

I checked the blinds and

locked the doors

and

lived until morning.

For years afterward,

I would call

late

and she would come.

Depeche Mode,

Bowie,

Sisters Of Mercy,

Joy Division,

Godspeed You! Black Emperor,

and sometimes (rarely) silence.

We would hunt each other,

like savage vandals

until we ran out of moonlight

and restraint gave way to

release.

Later, she said once,

"I was hoping you might kill me,

that first night that we met

by the water

in the dark."

It was the most romantic thing

I had ever heard.

--

The day Bowie died

she sent me photos

of her body.

She used to do that:

send me things,

pictures of her incredible ass,

hand between her legs in the mirror,

skinny as a rail with

tits and eyes and lips in a sneer

behind a euphoric swirling tide of yellow hair.

She looked the same now.

The way I saw her was always the same.

Even time and child and distance,

the slow fade of age as we moved

swiftly

through our thirties,

had not dimmed the clever light of

knowing madness

that flicked alight in the eyes

above her primal snarling grin.

"The heart's filthy lesson

falls upon deaf ears."

"Oh Ramona, if there was

only

something between us."

"...if there was only some kind of future."

“I’m already five years

older

I’m already

in my grave”

And into the night

like always,

When I was in my early 20's, strung out and living in Las Vegas for the second time, I met a girl named Carol. A homeless prostitute from New Jersey, she was sweet and funny in a gruff, streetwise tomboy sort of way. We met through the circle of transient addicts that I was spending my days with at that point, and formed the fast bond of street-siblings that often occurs among the desperate and the damned. 

I liked her. She was rough and crude, but with a dream still left inside her. She would get excited about simple things; a few extra bucks from a generous client or a nice outfit scored from the discard container out behind the Savers thrift store, and her face would light up with a smile and a contented laugh. Sometimes we’d talk about our lives before the streets and she would seem happy, recalling projections of her past the way she wanted to remember it. Skirting the conversation around most of the treacherous dark water and clinging giddily to the highlights, the times of carefree independence and joy. There was a kind of knowing sustenance in it; we would breathe life into the present by repurposing our transgressive past. 

Most of the people I knew in the streets were like that, actually: frayed and weary, but vital and possessed of a particular kind of survivor’s optimism. Many of us had put ourselves in the position to be there — we didn’t want to work, didn’t want to try, didn’t want to grow up and participate, but preferred instead to scuttle around the edges of society, pilfering what we could to survive and protecting our drug-lust like a sacred idol no matter what the cost. But there were so many others, too, who were out in the cold through no fault of their own. The sick, the crazy, the shadow dwellers — all those who had slipped through the cracks while no one was looking, who had gone untended or unseen while the neglectful mechanics of the civilized world were playing themselves out in homes and schools and institutions all across the many cities and states and towns that reared them. Yet even these poor souls would flash a cragged smile and their eyes would light up with life if you took the time to talk to them, to share something as simple as a conversation and a hand rolled cigarette or a 39 cent taco from the stand up the street. 

At the time I was staying in a shabby apartment house a few blocks off the strip, which I was paying for by way of a succession of manipulative, guilt-laden phone calls to my mother who had not as yet figured out how to ignore my narcotic insanity. Carol and I struck an arrangement in which I would let her sleep and take shelter at the apartment in exchange for contributing money for food, drink and drugs. We quickly found an easy rhythm — I’d spend my days out hustling and scavenging with the homeless junkies and Carol would spend her time turning tricks for the various Johns on her roster, then we’d meet at my place where she’d shower and get cleaned up while I made some sort of beggar’s meal. We’d get high, eat, and talk a while before nodding off next to each other on the cheap full-size mattress that was included in my weekly rent. 

We were never physically involved. It was a relationship of emotional proximity and guarded vulnerability that allowed us to share in a measure of solace, each clinging to the ballast of momentary companionship as we struggled to survive the madness our disparate afflictions. She was a child of abuse and violence, and I one of willful self-loathing and faithless defiance. We were, truly, a gift to one another. In that time and space, each was the only one who really “saw” the other, and in that we were afforded a reminder of our humanity in contrast to the monochromatic pallor that hung heavy as a shroud all around us. 

Often in the night I would wake to hear her grappling with the carnivorous demons of her dreams. She would jolt and thrash, protesting in a low moan and muttering echoes out of her past. 

“No, no, Momma, stop it!” 

“I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be bad, I won’t do it anymore!” 

I would lay there, horrified and helpless to assist, holding the fragility of these unseen traumas in my mind and heart. I dared not put an arm around her for fear of sending the wrong message or triggering a physical outburst, but my every instinct was crying out to take action, to help, to console; to fix. And there was my own fear and emptiness to contend with. I was also weak, longing for relief and understanding. In the absence of a means by which to truly alleviate this turmoil, my divergent sadness seemed to suggest that physical comfort was the only token at my disposal, that if I could open my arms and absorb her pain in some way I could somehow show her that it was ok, as if I could protect her and we could both be safe and free from the tyranny of our fermenting grief. 

These thoughts came and went quickly, and they troubled me. I pushed them away, recoiling from the impulse and knowing that it wasn’t the right answer, that you can’t fight a chemical fire with an electrical fire, but still feeling that I should do something. 

As I lay there in my paralytic state of sympathetic existential uncertainty, I somehow found the space to contemplate the greater scope of the moment. She was caught in the psychic damage of her experience and I was drowning in a deluge of emptiness and there we were: lost, human, together. Who was I to say that she needed to be saved? Or that my instinct to exchange comfort was to be rejected as necessarily wrong? What value judgments was I placing on things that were beyond my control or understanding, and why did I feel compelled to rush to action? Here were two fragile, wounded people trapped in the shadows of our transgressions and living outside the frame of normal society in a fugue of fear, pain and isolation, and we knew each other. Did that knowing require an attendant solution? I was her witness and her safety, and she mine. Perhaps silent recognition was all we had been called there to provide. 

For a brief time we found something between us that was greater than the sum of our fears. In our own peculiar way we became family, lending to one another’s survival. 

There are any number of meanings I could extract from my experience knowing Carol. I will most likely never know what became of her or where she is now. In the years following I would think of her from time to time, wonder if she made it out and found a life she could live with as so many I knew during those years did not. I have also thought of my own shift in that experience, traversing the spaces between the purgatory of fearful isolation, the conflict of polluted empathy, and the acceptance of powerless solidarity. 

When I began to transpose these experiences onto my current life, and onto the realm of coaching and leadership work in which I now find myself, they at first seemed an ill fit. In fact, I’ve spent a great deal of time and effort coaching myself to overcome the idea that I don’t belong in this new world, that a person with my background could hardly be one to make a meaningful contribution to a field populated with such experts as I have encountered in the realm of business and leadership, people who really know how to create, manage, and sustain success.

But given a space of objective curiosity, I began to see that the core values and operating principles I assimilated during those long dark years were frequently absent in the professional world I grew into after my emergence. There was often little in the way of shared purpose or mutual support beyond the essential task at hand. All too often I would encounter results being sought to the exclusion of a drive for sustainable principles, or a lack of attention directed to deepening the connection between the passions and attitudes of the individuals and their ability to lead, thrive and contribute to the greater picture. 

The dichotomy of art is that it allows the viewer to participate without accountability, while the artist has no such luxury. The power of the master artist to compel the world to feel as though they are as one, as if they have sat side by side on the many fevered nights as the daemon struggled to be free, or shared in the pride and relief of the magnificent moments when the true nature of the genius could not be denied in the work, is a testament to the connectedness of the human experience.

And yet the thought that, "I understand this feeling, it speaks to me," or even, "hey, that's ME up there! Your art, it's telling MY story," is at once a statement of beautiful identification and gross misappropriation.

That we mourn the passing of a man we had not met, that we should take to heart the weight of this loss and speak it aloud in symbol of our collective grief is indeed a thing to be admired. But in our haste to lay claim to our share of public sorrow, let us not also forget that there are those too whose paths we cross daily, leaving struggles yet untended. Legions of our fellows toiling under the weight of unseen fear, or visibly scarred at the hand of their own snarling burdens. And we judge and we wonder, or we pretend to ignore, avoiding the inconvenience of eye contact, of conversation, of engagement, while the other is suspended in a state of solitary duress.

I've seen both better men and lesser men laid down and stretched out, and I am baffled and humbled at the unwarranted grace that I was granted in not meeting the same end. And while I pay my most heartfelt respects to a man whose art has certainly moved me, I find myself with another kind of question altogether.

I dove in blind, broken, lost and seeking. Savage with the pain and the terror of rejection, abandoned to my desperate sense of certain madness, I set upon this place and you, its people, in a fugue.

I've not always been kind or gracious or wise. I have been careless and unkind. I have made mistakes, placed my needs ahead of yours and shrugged it off. I have handled you roughly, failed to appreciate the subtleties, taken you for granted. I have held you hostage at the mercy of my unmanaged emotions and fantastic nature. I have cast you in roles that you were not fit to play, and left you scriptless in the footlights.

I have admired you, imposing my eager and indelicate reverence, learning from your wavering shadows and the strong stroke of your elegant hand. I have worshipped you in clandestine solitude. I have spent idle hours staring blankly at the phone hoping for your voice to break my vigil. I have savored your patient wisdom. I have been shy and nervous, felt apart from your greatness. I have let you teach me about being, and I have not known how to let you go when the lesson was over.

I have ignored you. I have crossed the street to avoid casual conversation. I have done the wrong thing. I have tried too hard. I have waited too long and not known how to turn back. I have left things to chance when they required intention. I have seen your need and abdicated responsibility. I have let you let me use you.

I have told you the whole of my truth. I have not held back. I have said too much, too soon, and been glad of the telling. You have made me better. You have made me strong where I did not know there was weakness to be found. You have shown me who I am, what it is possible to become. You have been my greatest lessons, my most valued advisors. I have stood at your side and offered my shoulder, and you have held me up when it was then my turn to fall.

We all get afraid sometimes, I think.  Whether we grow up feeling like we're supposed to rise to an occasion, fit in a box, apply to a standard, or shrink into the distance and not offend or intrude, our mechanism for fear develops in parallel with our self-assured persona and our inflatable ego; our outward personality emerges suspended along the continuum of tension between these points.  Trapped in a paradoxical state of resistance, we rail against these conventions as we learn to flirt with independence.  We push at the boundaries and color outside the lines, we defy and disrupt in an attempt to prove our sovereignty and exert our claim on the universe.  

But in so many ways and in so many words we slowly grow dull, we relent and we conform to the constructs of our assumed environments.  We wane into a version of ourselves that's been tempered by the light of the day and the dark of the night, time having worn its slow valley into our igneous fate. 

Then the real fight begins.  

How do we wake ourselves up from this dream without destroying everything that has formed around us?  How do we redefine the things that are holding us down without losing our tenuous grasp on the veil of identity that shrouds our fragile hearts and holds us in place on the surface of this spinning stone?  

How do we live under the weight of all this gravity?

Black-lipped, we kissed these painless days goodbye.

  Through the ardent night to the first broken wisps, an urgent pressure.  A defiant, ceaseless knot.

A fist; driven to the surface, beaten to the ground.

  A breath;

suppression, 

it's knotted brow cresting the surface of a long sleep's film.

An irrational feeling, as are all the rest. Resentful, used, discarded. No longer convenient. This is the construct I have fabricated for myself in these circumstances, and so here I shall remain. As though a Lucite box has been lowered over me, sealing itself against the floor and pinning me there as a visible manifestation of my own foolish denial.

I find myself falling victim to this self-imposed catastrophe time and again. Hopeful ignorance of the uncomfortable truth behind every misplaced sentiment.  A blind man’s folly.

These sleights wholly my own, I bear the heft and sting of such errant shafts in ignoble aquiesence. Unwilling to suspend the delusion of fate, the “fantasies, ideas, and anxieties” that drive my waking hours, I am thus a willing subject of this particular madness.

And though while driven beneath this lash I find my most fearful self, I accept that it is necessary to the ovulation of purpose and truth. Absence of this tired and cruel companion foments a shallow dimension, a distractable affectation contraindicative of the gravity due such calling.

shuddering, still

with this taste

and this dream

caught hard in my

throat.

And return

with another face

a different scent

bigger tits, a new car

2 dogs and a bad haircut

instead of that ratty old houseplant you 

used to leave to die

in the weak haze of your too-hot apartment.

You take the stairs this time,

and I will take the elevator.

To the right floor in the wrong building,

and there will be a different sort of

problem

There is just so much beautiful madness boiling over inside of me.  Seething and writhing and pounding at the walls.  

A plague of angels, skittering across the cold hard tiles of this ward,

as they sing my reprieve to the debasing stars. 

It is a weight; a crushing and indifferent stone. 

This prison

is my freedom.