Depending on whose fung you shui, facing north is good if you're a house with a blue door. Facing south is good if you are in the Northern Hemisphere and you want sun in your windows. I don't want sun in my eyes because it makes me squint. I don't want the sun at my back because, well I'm too pretty to be backlit. I've been thinking about my portrait reflections over the past few years and they all involve rocks. So at the moment I feel as though I have suddenly found myself free climbing. So the north face of something describes me. I have a face here that is definitely north of 40. This time I've put in a lot of filters. I'm wearing my skateboard injury. I'm in my new home office. I'm contemplative. Again. Out of a discipline, but not necessarily of necessity.
This is my 9th month of seasonal affective disorder, or mild clinical depression or whatever you call it when you're on a very mild upper and you pay $50 a month to see a psychiatrist. On the whole I have come to understand that the thing that concerns me most is money. Weird how a small pile of money can change my mood. I understand why. I have the kind of self-confidence people usually associate with arrogance and for this reason all I ever thought I needed was money. I was wrong either to believe this too much, or not believe it enough. So I didn't ditch every relationship to make some killing on Wall Street, blind as I am to the confidence I would have made one, nor did that fantasy ever lose currency with me. Today I watched George Carlin's routine about 'stuff'. I am still surrounded by my stuff, and my family's stuff. It feels like the kind of material comfort that preachers rail against. I don't love my stuff, but I always feel entitled to it. But when I can't make enough money to keep my castle manned, it makes me edgy and uncomfortable.
I did a calculation several weeks ago to determine exactly what it would cost me to draw level to my financial situation as of 12 months ago. That I had an answer gave me some comfort. It was really that simple. You see, I've been talking to people who have some vague idea of my intelligence and capability and I see in their eyes that I'm worth something north of what I'm getting. That too gives me some comfort. None of this comfort, however, changes the elevation of the perch where I find myself on this cold January morning. One step at a time. One fingerhold at a time. Facing the rock. I could fall to my death. This is not a moment to play.
I have faced down three crises in the last 8 weeks. Blood clots in my mother's legs. A mental hospital commission for my son. Kidney stones sending vomit level pain through my wife. I put on my ten-gallon hat and John Wayned it again. All the way through the crises, I took the reins. I think I drove the right people to the right places. I bent over finally to take a deep breath, hands on my thighs calming myself. I stood up wobbly to find bloody hands. Suffering in the wake of this and other fine piles of shit, I conclude 2019 as the crappiest year of my life. With great disappointments comes great what? Capacity to survive disappointment. I have lurked in the shadows of my capacities for what seems like 3 years. I have grown so accustomed to not feeling my self-confident self that I have given up trying to stay in the lane I thought was mine. In 2003 I was so broke that I considered driving a cement mixer truck. It was that strange. Call me Deacon Blues. This year hurt more but I have more cushion. I can take a more brutal beating, it seems. I watched a video of an armed robbery in which everyone cowered from the gunman holding up the bar except for one patron who continued smoking his cigarette and drinking his cup. I don't know if it's healthy to stare death in the face, but I think he knew the odds. He wasn't being a hero, he was just eating popcorn. I'm drinking lemonade and eating popcorn watching the movie of my own life.
I remember my 23rd birthday. I realized in the back of my mind that I would not be anyone's fair-haired boy. I would not be tapped by the secret society. I wouldn't have the money to survive the pranks filling my imagination. I determined that I could only experiment with myself; my personality from time to time was my only playground. And yet I never designed to make a spectacle of myself that I couldn't reverse. So I have been halfway to everywhere exciting, developing just enough skill so that I don't have to take anything so seriously that I anchor my life to it. I participate. In the wrack of these crises it all becomes apparent where I have been participating and where I am truly committed. The answer is frightening. I have been engaged in a finely honed diplomacy with everyone in my life. I am only fully open with myself and with my writing; my writing to an audience who is merely participating with me from time to time. It occurs to me in this very moment that only the completion of publishable materials may give me the satisfaction of a pure act of creation. Everything else has been a responsibility to others. Everything else is a disappointment. Offerings to inconsistent deities of our own choosing for the occasional intimacy that delivers necessary social oxygen.
Three months ago I ventured back to my old neighborhood in several trips. The first was to an intimate concert where an old college friend would be performing with his Erykah Badu style band. He mis-introduced me as a crazy black Republican to the most likely to succeed man I ever knew in college. I picked up a conversation we had 25 years ago when he informed me of the cultural dissonance of China. We spoke abstractedly for a few minutes. I found a table with another member of my friend's entourage but we were informed that it was reserved. We cruised the bar for drinks but it was too crowded. I left, frustrated. I had been promising myself to go to a local bar I had never been, next door to the old hardware store I fetched to and from whenever my baseballs broke a window. It was halfway full when I buzzed through the security gate, full of men and women 20 years older and 30 years younger than I. All looked forlorn with their tall drinks as two football games and a reggae song played. The bartender looked like the kind of large Arab who, in cartoons, stood at attention beside a door in curly toed shoes with arms folded attending a 3 foot scimitar. His smile was gentle behind his large black beard, and he poured me a tall drink. Here, in this place I've never been, I am welcome. One of our newly empowered fat young women in exquisite makeup over flawless dark skin in a flush of florid fushia returned from the bathroom to her pink drink. I don't belong here yet. I left to go to the other restaurant in West Adams where the music is more Marvin Gaye and the red beans and fired chicken bring back good memories. Yet at the very beginning of Friday night it was closed. My heart sank as I floored it through the dirt back alley on my way somewhere else. I arrived to Jefferson where a new brightly lit healthy food cafe announced the gentrification of 'East Culver City' just two train stops past the new gigantic residential skyscraper rising above La Cienega. It too was closed. I grabbed a desktop printed menu of forgettable dishes and settled into the mood of fête manqué. I returned to the original venue but I missed the entire set. My college friend's singer didn't show up, we had little more to say. He too was disappointed. I might have thanked him again for the time he spared me by letting me paint some of his house to the sound of Tupac. Instead, I promised to come by the next time. I didn't, but that was last year.
When I look at my face in the mirror, I see a man on the verge of looking that dismissible age. We assume in all our casual associations that anyone who looks like the old reporter Bernard Shaw, or Morgan Freeman is a man defeated, unless he's wearing an impeccable suit. Maybe he's somebody's strange uncle at a BBQ, or a retired football coach, or gardener or principal of a middle school. You never really know what to expect of old men unless they look powerful in that ridiculously manicured way. In my current affluent environs, they wear dark shades and drive expensive sports cars. It's the only casual that works. I have my breakfast club and I am as full a member as might participate. But all of the men my age that I've known tend to bunch up into a single decade or other. My relationships are abbreviated. I talk about the deep past or a shallow present. No one has more continuity than my family, and there my role is fixed. Second to that are my inveterate readers, of whom I've only met 3 or 4. Where is Kikka?
I have been thinking about the next decade. It will be a troublesome time for all of us. Nothing will be quite right. My children will live in the Millennial sphere. I will continue to work like some old Dickensian shuffling through sooty snow in a troubling winter cold I can barely survive mumbling past the poorhouse and street beggars in frozen street sewage. My mind is ever sharp. My experience is ever deep. I go everywhere in my mind and yet it transports me not. I have to decide once again how much I want whatever riches I can manage. For this season a lifetime of average luck has brought me to handle a fistful of tragedies that make me dizzy, lazy and half crazy. Yet I can see the hell of it clearly, the hell of all of this is in stark relief.
Mark Twain. I think I'd rather be Mark Twain than Frederick Douglass. I had better read that Twain biography. I don't want to need a war for my own satisfaction and liberation. Maybe I can turn more towards the wry aspect of my stoicism.
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