Living Dangerously

I sometimes see my life as romantic. But then I remember where I live.

The “house” that I have rented for many years—an interesting structure—one of those bland fronts of a South Philly house that often shield peculiar and sometimes rich lives from the glare of public knowledge. Long ago my little place probably housed sailors or dockyard workers or longshoremen. Just a few blocks away are the great piers that once serviced ocean-going freighters, the street that was once a seething waterfront thoroughfare.

Photographs from the mid-19^th century show this street a maelstrom of activity: the dusty avenue thick with horses and wagons, and thousands of carts bearing the freight of the tall ships whose masts tower above the piers in the background. It was a close, active street, the kind of street where the primary commerce of the international American trade once took place—among men and small-scale vehicles, not cranes and mechanics and diesel trucks. (I miss it, can you tell?)  Now, of course, Delaware Avenue is no such thing, but a six-lane boulevard of stoplights and road rage, connecting the Sprawl Mart with the Home Repo and the Super Stash. It’s a strip mall stuck in the only place the city could put it, the only stretch of open retail-ready land within 10 miles.

But the houses around here remain largely what they were. I’m pleased to live in a place where a house can reach 150 years of age, and more, and still serve as a house, without making any great fuss about it. I live amid scores and scores of these houses, and not even a block of suburban-style mini-houses—vinyl siding, garages—can destroy the ambience.

However, I’ve known I must leave this place--the lust has indeed wandered—and have wondered what circumstance would permit me a graceful exit from this residence of six years. Last week I found it: The first floor wall, long bowed outward into the alley, has in fact collapsed. I didn’t realize this at first. My landlord spent the night here last week and we couldn’t figure out why the furnace, which had run all night, had apparently failed to heat the house by morning. Then we looked in the alley. A big brick wall really does make quite a pile. We had only a piece of sheetrock between us and the great outdoors.

This new development with the house takes its place alongside other, older quirks of the structure. For example, the hole in the bathroom floor that looks down into the kitchen.

Following the walll discovery came frantic calls to contractors, several of whom came to give estimates. And they confirmed what I’ve always told the owner about this place: Fixed up, it’ll sell at a huge profit. I think he believes it now, and plans to sell. Which means I need to find a new place to live.

Which is all right. I’ve decided, at least for now, that my only safety is despair of safety. I seem to be happy only when in flight. So once again into the wild blue yonder. So far the remaining two floors have not tumbled. Just give me another two days.

Gone

Yesterday I got up at 7, loaded the car with all kindsa bicycles, dropped off keys, drank coffee, took medicine, and was outta the parking lot before the first person showed up for work. The Geo purred like a kitten. I covered 500 miles and got a subsantial part of the way there, listening to Bill Bryson the whole way.

Now two days away from the job, two solid days hoofin it east, more than 1000 miles from the breezy grit of Los Angeles. I’m in the big sweeping prairieland of New Mexico and the Texas panhandle, where the scene goes white with dust whipped in the westerly sirocco.

Glad to be gone, in fact. How can I say it sucked because they were unfun, those people. One colleague in particular, I desperately wanted to know as a friend. I tried repeatedly to open some friendly connection with him. And every time I felt I was feeding his not-so-secret belief that I was an imbecile. He looked at friendly gestures as weakness. I tried until I despaired, and felt I no longer needed to play the earnest suitor.

Random notes from the road

October 14, 2014

Got started from Tulsa this morning and drove a humane 300 miles East to St. Robert,  Mo, where now. Traveled the path of old 66, locally now a superhighway called the Will Rogers Memorial Highway. A center span of this highway is a toll road—possibly because it enters the Kickapoo nation territory—but near Tulsa in the west and Springfield in the east, passage is free.

Signboards, many of which lay mangled after the recent winds, advertise things like “Visit the Catholic Superstore!” and “When you die you will meet God,” appealing to some audience you also might meet when you are dead, and identify. For God only knows who it is now. There is great admonishment around here to repent and be ready, a nice accompanying message to the harangue of death I was listening to while driving. Bryson, of course. Whose base narrative line I am coming to believe is a random Google search. Put it like this: The thread upon which he hangs his prose looks more and more like a desultory sequence of diverted interests, of the sort you naturally fall into when you aimlessly look stuff up on the Internet.

Certainly it’s the sort of trap I fall into when on the Internet, where last night I started by looking up pictures of the clothing worn by Otzi the Iceman, and proceeded thence by incomprehensible steps to an account of Charlotte Bronte’s life, followed by pictures of Charlotte Bronte, followed by the writing of Charlotte Bronte, followed by exhaustion.

This search cascade did yield the interesting photographs I sought of Otzi the Iceman and his marvelous equippage. The tools and clothing found with him—indeed, the food in his stomach and the once-glowing ember in a birch bark cannister—spoke much about his life, his sustanance, his background, his mode of survival. And it occurred to me to wonder how much he and I, both sole practitioners of our own highly personal and self-invented technic, might have in common. Specifically I wondered if his impulse to fashion a coat out of animal skins or a backpack out of reeds or a carrying pouch out of birch bark, was somehow similar to my desire for the cash-independent resourcefulness of my do-it-yourself camp stove and my self-powered travel and my permanent auto-repairs with seine twine.

Otzi lived in a time before economy. Sometimes I wish I did too.  

Notes from the end of an era

When I think how little anyone worried about the death of books, the death of bookstores, the death of so much else of the commerce of culture—music, movies, newspapers, the live singing and playing of music—I am moved to nostalgia even for that very ignorance. How could we have known that in a short time, in so very short a time, the markers among which we arranged our adult lives, the markers we were just coming to grasp, would be gone. And not in any slow disintegration and seeping loss of market share, but in a fantastic great implosion of beloved institutions. How could have known we were the last of a great tradition that would die tomorrow?

It takes an effort now, as Bill Bryson would say, even to remember the relation we had with words, with writers, before the Internet made it possible for anyone with an internet connection to be seen by the world. One so much enjoyed curling up with a newspaper on the train, or a book on the airplane. One correlated one’s travel with the speed of reading, to see if a good paper could last the whole train ride, or vice versa. One enjoyed knowing the great author was out there, somewhere, at his rustic house in Vermont, and might be reached by  correspondance through his publisher, and might actually respond. One aspired to be that distant presence, in all its vagueness and mystery. It was a smaller world but a more enchanting one. Typing, reading by lamplight, by candlelight, writing in cursive, penmanship, the connoisseurship of inks and pens, all now gone the way of the dial telephone, and with them a way of understanding and interpreting the world, and more than that a way of expression.

And this from a man who would never have claimed to be happy in those years. In fact he has never been happier than now, in these later times, these post-internet times. He will not therefore credit this great magic of the age with his improvement. And yet he will also not claim it kept him down. He will only say—I will only say  (this third person gets tedious)--that to the extent I could be helped by the rapid retrieval of information, the Internet has helped me. It has made my mind commensurate with the greatest in the land, as far as plain information is concerned. It has given me instant answers to difficult questions, of which I have many. And if those answers fail to satisfy my curiousity, I am consoled at least in knowing they are the best available. It has made me less worried about the strange questions I wish to ask. For even before I finish typing the question in the search space, my exact question appears at my cursor in anticipation.

So I'm really not that grateful to be here

Pardon me if I don’t see God’s great charity in skipping my death in order to ordain a new destiny for me as a staggering neuralgic. This hunger for gratitude around me, this discomfort with any other response but humble endurance and thankfulness for the fulness of his benevolence because I lived–-what is it but a salve to the horror of death? People want to see this. It helps them believe that serious illness is really all for the best. Is it magnanimous to see mercy in this condition? Is it the dog’s still-wagging tail after a beating? Is it even sane to feel grateful?

No, I am not grateful. I lived a life of constant physical challenge, both to better my health as a child and to foster a vigorous old age. I was cheated of both. I am not grateful for being here and I am not happy. God’s real gift would have been to take me when I fell. I do not live each day as it comes and I do not live in the fullness of his bountiful plan. I live in rage. I will not be happy until the vigor I enjoyed as a 55-year-old returns to me, or He, in his divine justice, finds more amusement elsewhere and lets me go. 

I do thank him for taking an already vivid sense of tragedy, an instinct for sarcasm, and developing it, elongating it, elevating it to a level of truly cosmic pretensions. Laughter is laughter, however biting.

Simple Gifts

Tis a gift to be crippled, tis a gift to be still

Tis a gift to sit right through the fire drill.

I crept down this morning and I sat on the stoop,

And I waited all day for some help to poop.

Sit then, you’re weaker than it seems,

My little prank will engulf all your dreams,

And I’ll hold you still when you want to flee,
For I am the Lord of the Joke you see.