Category: Life

I found the old snapshot in a shoebox in the garage.

The girl is maybe 18 years old, adorable, still showing a little baby fat. Her skin is tanned, except for the pink in her cheeks. She is seated at a kitchen table in front of a window half-covered with dime-store curtains. Her luxurious dark brown hair is a couple of inches longer than shoulder length, parted a little to the right but not “done.” She is holding a spray can of Black Flag House & Garden. Not really holding it, but with her hand around it the way you might have your hand around a drink as it rests on the table, in between sips. She knows this is funny, and she is telling the camera this with a smile that lights her whole face, really the whole room, and still, after all this time, stops my heart.

She is wearing a little sleeveless thing, mostly green with a close white print on it, a little halter top and shorts all of one piece, that might have been called a sunsuit in earlier times. I know this garment. I know how short the shorts are. I know how it can come off with one zipper in the back.

I know this girl.

She dumped me decades ago. Shortly after we met she gave me this picture that had been taken a year or so earlier. I don’t know exactly how old it was or who snapped the shot, but this was before the days of digital cameras and cell phone photography, when you had to buy film and load it into the camera and then you could only take that many pictures and you couldn’t see any of them until you had shot the entire roll and had it developed, back in the days when you had to put some effort into it, when a photograph really meant something. We didn’t know each other very well at the time, and when she gave me this picture I didn’t know she was saying this is important, what I’m giving to you, and I have more to give, if you only ask. Eventually, I got the message.

We were together for — a year? Two? She lived 50 miles away from me and I thought nothing of making the drive in my rickety car, out to the far reaches of the San Fernando Valley. Once we drove together a thousand miles in that old sled, to another state, just to look at the trees and the mountains we found. I can’t think of any reason for that trip, except I wanted to be alone with her, away from everyone else, because I couldn’t get enough of her.

I didn’t do it right, of course. I broke our promise, the one we made to each other in her bedroom that first time in the Valley, and the other times that followed. We never spoke any words about it, but she knew, and I knew. At some point I began pretending that we were sophisticated grownups enjoying each other immensely, nothing more. Of course I didn’t tell her this, but she knew. Women always do, usually before they even have any evidence.

I thought I was getting away with my bad behavior until one night we left a party together, I thought to go outside and make out. I don’t know how long she’d planned it, or even if she’d planned it. But after we got in the car, and before any hanky panky got started, she told me calmly we were finished, that I wouldn’t be seeing her again. She’d come to the party in her own car, and she was going home without me. From then on, she would be going everywhere without me. She wasn’t angry or emotional, but there was nothing I could say to change her mind. I tried.

So it turned out right after all, I guess. I got what I deserved, tossed out with the trash. She got a fresh start, without me, when she still had all the time in the world. Vaguely, I knew there was a lesson to be learned from this episode. I didn’t learn it, but at least I got enrolled in the class.

I hope to graduate some day.

When I was a small boy, I cut my hand with a double-edged razor blade.

It didn’t hurt — at least I don’t remember any pain — but the bright red blood shocked me. It was flowing out of my hand, I couldn’t even see the cut, and it wouldn’t stop. When I touched it, it got all over my other hand, and then all over my T-shirt when I tried to wipe it off. I was paralyzed with fear, and the blood kept pouring out of the invisible cut. I had two thoughts more or less simultaneously: I want my mother, and there is no way I can explain this to her.

I can’t even explain it to myself, looking back at it through the fog of many decades. What was I doing, that breezy Spring day, walking across a baseball field playing with a Gillette Blue Blade? I can see this blade now in my mind, and it was clean and blue and shiny. Not a rusty old blade that you might find under the bleachers, although why would it be under the bleachers at a municipal ballpark? How did I get my hands on it?I don’t remember, but it seems now that there must have been only two ways: Either I took it from my father’s shaving stuff in the bathroom, or somebody out on the baseball field gave it to me.

That type of blade came in a cool dispenser — a flat blue plastic box with a thumb hole on one side and a slot on one end. You could see the center of the top blade through the hole, and you’d put your thumb on that part of the blade, sliding it out through the slot at the end, directly into the razor. The next blade would then be visible in the hole, ready for the next change, but the main thing is your razor would be loaded and ready to go without you ever touching those dangerous sharp edges.

Maybe after seeing my father perform this procedure I just had to try it myself. Only of course I ended up with the blade in my hands, not in a razor. A safety razor, as they were called.

I remember thinking, out on the field, with the green grass stretching hundreds of yards in all directions and the warm sun and the pleasant breeze, there is no danger here. This blade is not so sinister. See how it bends and flexes, not at all like a dangerous knife. Why is everybody so nervous about these things? Why have I been kept away from them all this time?

I remember walking while I thought these thoughts, and it was somewhere in the bending and flexing and scoffing that the blood started pouring out of my hand. I had almost convinced myself that this was not even a real blade, that it was just a benign plastic replica, a prop. It couldn’t possibly have just cut me. I had felt nothing, and now there was all this blood. I was afraid and confused. Afraid of the frailty of my skin, confused over the treachery of the blade, shiny and blue and smiling and innocent, like the devil. This blade had fooled me, lulled me into carelessness. I’d been laughing at it, and then it had turned on me.

Of course I ran home. I was a small child, and I didn’t know what else to do. I sensed that I would be in some trouble over playing with razor blades, but also I knew my mother would clean the wound and bandage it, and maybe if I played my cards right I wouldn’t get spanked or yelled at.

In any case, I felt it was worth the gamble. Much later I would develop the resources to take care of my own wounds, the better to deceive not just my mother, but everyone.

With the media frenzy surrounding the death of Steve Jobs, I have been contemplating life and death.

They are playing clips in heavy rotation on TV and radio from his commencement speech at Stanford a few years ago, after he’d been diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, and had already had a liver transplant. He must have known he didn’t have much more time, and he told the graduates something like this:

“Death is an important part of life, because it clears away the old to make way for the new. You are new today, but don’t forget that someday you’ll be old, and death will come to clear you away. Your time is limited. Don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Whatever you do, make sure you do what you love.”

I’ve heard this advice in various forms from various people my whole life, and I have come to the conclusion that it’s not the way the world works. It’s that “do what you love” thing that has caused an entire generation to believe they (we) are special, and that the world owes them (us) a living, that we are entitled to experiment all our lives, try this career, sample that lifestyle, and somehow everything will work out.

After many years of study, I can tell you that everything does not necessarily work out. Sometimes you lose your job, your wife, even your home. Sometimes there are powerful reasons why you have to stay in a dead-end job — for example, you need the paycheck, you have responsibilities, people who depend on you for food and health care. You “live someone else’s life” because that someone supplies the paycheck, and no matter how difficult or demeaning the work may be, you suck it up, because you have to. You don’t go chasing dreams, because you have to survive.

Here’s how I think life works: You roll the dice, and you see what happens. Whatever happens, you have to deal with it. You might become a billionaire, like Steve Jobs, or you might lose your shirt. The good news is you can roll the dice as many times as you want, chase various dreams, take many lovers, try different vocations. The bad news is, each roll takes something out of you: your money, your time, your heart. There’s no hard limit, but after a certain number of rolls, you will run out of resources to roll again. You may not have any more money, or enough time. In my case, I don’t have the heart any more.

I went through many years of confusion and denial about this, because I believed that if I followed my dreams, things would work out, and in that context it didn’t make sense that things weren’t working out, at least not the way I’d hoped. Now I know that life happens the way it happens, and you can bend the arc a little bit, but you can’t make it turn out exactly the way you envisioned it. Steve Jobs took a bunch of technology that had been invented by others, packaged it attractively and dropped it into a market that was ripe to take off. It was probably difficult for him, 25 years later, to think back and see it happening any other way, but of course it might have happened differently. How many millions were following their dreams at that same moment in time, and how many of them achieved phenomenal success?

Not very freakin’ many.

We don’t want to admit it, because we want to put Steve Jobs up on a pedestal and believe that he represents the inevitable result of perseverance, hard work, and doing what we love. If he can do it, so can we, because that’s the way it works, right? The more likely truth is that he was in the right place at the right time, and along with the love and the hard work and the perseverance, he was damned lucky.

The funny thing is, when I try to imagine what I would do with my life if I had it to do over, I think I would take pretty much the same path. I’d like to think I’d do it better, make better decisions at the important junctures, but maybe that’s just the experience talking, experience I wouldn’t have if I were really “starting over.” Maybe I’d be luckier the second time around, and maybe not. But if I had a second chance at my life, I guess that’s what I’d do: Do it over.

It’s kind of repulsive to watch all the maneuvering.

Since the gun attack this past weekend in Tucson, politicians and talking heads of all persuasions have been trying to show how far above the fray they are, dancing near the line of decency and occasionally sticking a toe over it, pulling back quickly.

Tonight the President spoke at the memorial rally service and said we should learn from this shocking event to be more civil to one another, and the crowd cheered mourners nodded agreement. Nice try, Mr. President.

Of course, after a few days we’ll stop being more civil. Most of the public figures who have spoken or written publicly about the incident are already spinning their remarks one way or the other: Democrats say the radical right has created an atmosphere in which people think it’s OK to shoot people with whom they don’t agree. Republicans are defensive about being unfairly attacked from the left. Embracing both sides, the gun lobby has restated its opinion that if everybody carried guns this could have been avoided.

The polite masks are already cracking and if history is a guide we will soon be at each others throats again. We will not be able to control our emotions, nor will our politicians be able to control the gun lovers. We will forget this latest bloody rampage, as we have forgotten all the ones that came before it.

And then, once we have settled back into our regular patterns of intolerance, it will happen again.

Feeling sad, edgy, melancholy tonight.

John Lennon died 30 years ago today. I don’t know why I care. I guess, for all of his superstardom, he was a regular guy, a musician, a dreamer. I can relate. All the documentaries end the same way. You hope they won’t, that it’s been a mistake, but in the end John dies a violent death every time, only 40 years old and right after coming back to his music. Our music.

So there’s that, and then there’s politics. It doesn’t matter what the current issue happens to be. For the record it’s about extending the Bush-era tax cuts, which by law would expire in a few weeks. But it doesn’t matter once you realize that the government is no longer in charge of anything. All the “debates” and arguments on both sides are simply so much posing by the elected officials. But they are owned by international corporations. I had great hope for Barack Obama to bring real change to Washington, and I’m sure he expected to do just that. But reality trumps hope.

I’ve been listening to Christmas music for a couple of weeks now. I love the season, but lately I feel as if I’m loving it from the outside. I long for peace and love, but I see war and hate. So when I hear a song like “Have Yourself a Merry Little Christmas,” it just breaks my heart. Maybe John had a deeper insight than he or any of us knew when he sang “War is over if you want it.”

We just don’t want it.

I don’t usually do this.

I’m a cranky old guy, I guess. I don’t feel cranky most of the time, but I tend to be a loner, happy within my own thoughts. I like people, but most of the time I’d rather they leave me alone. As a result, people think I’m cranky, and they avoid me. Which, don’t get me wrong, is fine with me. I just wish I had a … warmer public image.

So here I go.

I’ve got a crummy job that I hate, that doesn’t pay very well or engage my mind. My coworkers, with a few exceptions, are dolts I wouldn’t associate with under any other circumstances. But I’ve been there so long — and I work so cheap — that I’ve been able to hold onto the gig through three rounds of layoffs and a whole lot of insubordination. And those few exceptions mentioned above are such special people that I sometimes wonder how I would get through my day there without a chat with one of them.

I’ve never bought a house, or anything bigger than a car. There was a time, just a few years ago, when this made me look like a pathetic dumbass. Almost everybody I knew bought a fixer-upper when they were twenty, and traded up every few years until they were living in beautiful, expensive homes in good neighborhoods. But I didn’t think there was any good reason to “own” a piece of this planet, so I have always lived in apartments or rented houses. I mean, the earth was here for a long time before I was, and it will be around long after I’m gone, so how is it that I get to claim any part of it as “mine”? My friends told me I was throwing my money away, making the landlord rich, and building no equity for myself. I won’t belabor this, but I’ve still got most of my money and pretty cheap rent, despite the horrendous (and unfair) reversal in the real estate market.

When I was in high school I finally talked my mother into buying me a guitar. It shouldn’t have taken so long. My parents should have seen my interest in music and encouraged me from a young age to explore the field. But they were in over their heads with five kids and one big drinking problem (my dad’s), which made them preoccupied and broke, so it took me about five years to convince my mom to take a chance and spring for an instrument. It was from Sears, not the cheapest one, but close, and I played it every single day for at least two years. I started my first band during the first year. That guitar led to another — electric — guitar, then another, and so on into a world of songs and gear and gigs. I rode a crazy rock’n’rolller coaster for decades, and eventually gave up trying to make a living at it. But I taught myself the language of sounds and rhythm and rhyme and harmony, and I made music with some of the best people in the world, and — against all odds if I do say so myself — I’m still rockin’, and there is no better therapy for me.

I grew up in California when the first Governor Brown was in office. A lot of politicians claim they want to be “the education President” or “the education Governor,” but Edmund G. “Pat” Brown, once he was in office, seemed to be trying to build enough colleges in the state so that everyone would have one within walking distance. I was a bright kid, but my parents didn’t have a clue, and my home life was so chaotic that I didn’t get around to applying to college until it was too late to get into a four-year school. So I started at a community college, transferred to a state college (San Francisco State, if you must know) and finished with a bachelor’s degree in semantics. All together I probably spent less than $3,000 of my own money. I had a scholarship, a couple of grants and a small loan. It’s only a BA from a state college. It won’t get me a seat on the Supreme Court, but I learned how to think, how to tell truth from baloney, and how to set goals and make them happen. Kids today don’t have as much chance at this as I did, and the way things are looking, soon education will be an unattainable luxury for all but the wealthiest and the luckiest.

Marriage, according to a recent survey, is becoming obsolete. When I was just eighteen, full of worldly wisdom, I not only predicted this, I embraced it. Who needs marriage, I would say. It’s an unnatural state, a way for society and religion to control the people, a vestigial custom held over from the days of subsistence farming. Even when I was a teenager we knew that half of all marriages ended in divorce. Did we need more reason to skip the whole archaic thing? In my thirties, though, I had a friend, a smart, funny, beautiful girl, and one day I realized that I just didn’t want to live without her. Occasionally these days we debate how it happened, and whose idea it was, but after more than 30 years of marriage I guess we are allowed a little gentle disagreement.

So thanks. Thank you, HugeCorp (my evil employer). Thanks Pat Brown and San Francisco State. Thanks for the cool guitar, Mom, and the lifetime of music. And thank you, Sweetheart, for the love and magic you still bring me.

I’m a lucky guy, after all.

I just heard Peter Goodman of the New York Times on a local public radio show.

He said something about our current economic crisis that’s been in the back of my mind for a couple of years now, but it’s never come to the surface, and I’ve never read it or heard it anywhere. He said (paraphrasing) that yes, in the runup to the economic collapse in 2008, people did spend beyond their means, but they did so because they did not have the means to live. Their incomes had been stagnant or falling for decades, and they had to provide homes for their families, put their kids through school and pay for increasingly unaffordable health care.

Most of them didn’t stupidly and greedily buy more stuff than they could afford. The monied class simply took all the money and left the rest of us foundering with the leftovers, while fuel prices and everything else went spiraling upward. The masses turned to credit to cover the gap. The banks then jacked up interest rates and fees, making it ever more difficult to stay out of credit problems.

I’m not excusing the abuses that many people engaged in, or the foolishness of falling for the mortgage broker’s line that you could refinance forever and your house would always be worth more. And it’s certainly true that Americans have come to expect a higher standard of living than any other population in history. But our founding documents guarantee a fair chance for all, not to mention life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and as far as I’m concerned the ability to go to the doctor when you’re sick falls under the heading of “life.”

I’ll forgive those who racked up too much debt so they could go to the doctor, or college; those who thought it was their right to take the kids to Disney World or the Grand Canyon; or those whose faith in our system led them to believe that somehow things would work out in the end.

They didn’t know that the ruling class had changed the rules, that the game had been rigged, that the house didn’t just have an edge — it had the outcome totally locked. In effect, most of us have been playing a game in which we had no chance at all.

Maybe this was inevitable. Maybe human nature was bound to pervert the values of solidarity, fairness, freedom and compassion expressed in those original writings. Maybe we just didn’t notice what was happening because it took the ruling elites a couple of hundred years to pull it off. If that’s true, then religious fundamentalists of all stripes are right after all: humans are essentially bad, and must be watched constantly and threatened with the wrath of God or else they will sin.

Personally, I don’t believe it. I think that most of us — not all, but most of us — are in this sinking boat together. A tiny few have escaped to island paradises, and are safe and untouchable. Good riddance. Those of us left holding the bag must try to keep it together by helping each other, acting like grownups, and holding on tight to our dreams.

First, I got my memory stick back.

Then, Congress passed health insurance reform legislation. So, not a bad week.

I don’t like the law they passed, even with the “fixes.” It’s not really healthcare reform. It’s insurance reform, and even at that it doesn’t go far enough for me. They started with the premise that the insurance companies’ role in healthcare was critical and sacrosanct, when they should have begun by questioning the very roots of the system. Why, they might have asked, should we perpetuate a system in which the insurance companies skim off at least 30% of the money spent on healthcare and use it for everything but healthcare?

But whatever — I’m not going to get into it. It’s been predicted, and I agree, that people are going to like this legislation and that there will be improvements to it in the years ahead. I really believe it would have been vastly better to implement a government-run single payer system. Yes, it would have been socialistic, but I’m a socialistic kind of guy. I don’t see why anyone should have 50 billion dollars while others are hungry, homeless and sick. A single payer system would have done a lot to right this wrong, but we have allowed the insurance companies to get too big and rich and powerful, and what we have seen in the past year has been dramatic proof that they will have their way no matter what the people want, no matter how intelligent and compassionate the President and no matter what makes sense. I will deal with them, since it looks as if I must.

In other news, I have survived another round of firings at work. Living inside the beast, as it were, I didn’t see the pattern until the past couple of months: Ever since HugeCorp acquired our little company they have been firing people almost continuously. The Depression that began in 2008 was an excuse to accelerate the job cuts, but in reality the job cutting began only shortly after the takeover, and continues today, despite frequent media pronouncements that the depression has struck bottom and things are getting better.

Better for whom, I wonder?

Back in 2008, everyone in my office — except me — was fired or moved to a nearby city. where they were assigned roughly triple the workload. After doing that for a year and a half, they now find that HugeCorp is closing that office, too, only this time no one is getting moved. They’re just being fired, and a new, mostly automated office is being opened. In another state. In another time zone.

The rumors about this began flying six weeks ago, and I of course assumed that I’d be getting the axe for sure this time. Training sessions that should have involved me took place, but I wasn’t invited. As the administrator of a certain network system, I was asked to create a new user — a new user with my exact job title. A fellow worker bee told me on phone that she’d been told not to “get too attached to me.”

What other conclusion could I have drawn?

I was actually starting to look forward to it. I put a CD in my work computer that would, on a simple command from me, erase everything. I started to put my personal office supplies in one place, the better to gather them up with minimum fuss when the day came. I was extra nice to my friends around the workplace, extra nasty to the assholes. What was the point of being political if the decision was already made?

Then last Monday I was called into the executive office.

There was no drama. The guy I spoke to — nominally my boss, although I have seniority on him in every conceivable category — had no idea about the rumors. I already “knew” everything he told me, except the part about my new duties. New duties because the corporate changes were going to relieve me of many of my old duties, but I still had the privilege of continuing to work there. Just when I was making plans to clean out the garage once and for all, write and record more songs, start running again, spend more time making sweet, sweet love, and updating this blog.

It was a blessing and a bummer.

I’ve been circling around my new duties this week, trying to figure out efficient ways to make it appear as if I am getting them done, but they are essentially accounting functions, which means they will be checked and audited by various detail-oriented bean-counters at several different locations within HugeCorp, so I may have to actually do some work. At this stage in my career, and considering my bad attitude about HugeCorp, this will be a challenge for me.

So I took a break and went to Trader Joe’s a half-mile down the street to get a bag of Sutter’s Formula cookies. These are soft, slightly chewy peanut butter cookies with tons of chocolate chips. Why put chocolate chips in a cookie unless you are going to put tons of them in, right? These cookies are truly of the devil. The combination of sugar, peanuts, chocolate, gluten and white flour will kill a lesser being, and you will soon pay for your pleasure, because you will arrive at the gates of hell fat and with a serious headache, which can only be cured by more Sutter’s Formula cookies, but they don’t have them in hell, bwah-ha-ha-ha-ha. However, the moments of ecstasy as you bite into each cookie will make you forget your crummy job for a while, and your “new duties” will seem unimportant, if only briefly, so, totally worth it.

I was at the counter at T.J.’s paying for my guilty pleasure (in cash, so there would be no record of the transaction), and I pulled out all my change and spread it on the counter, the better to extract the precise amount required, and I looked down at the pile, and this is what I saw: Some change, of course, and also a tiny little pocket knife, a couple of guitar picks, a nail clipper, and my new memory stick, which I bought to replace my lost one. It turned out I didn’t have the correct change, so I scraped the whole pile off into my hand and dropped it back in my pocket, and it was at this point that the lightbulb over my head blinked on.

When I had completed my unholy bargain, I picked up my cookies and strolled over to the “office” to talk to the “manager.” At T.J.’s they don’t have a reagular office where the big shots hide. They just have another counter, a little higher than the ones at the checkstands, but otherwise unassuming. And as for managers, everybody wears the same casual T-shirts there, so it’s hard to tell who is a big shot anyway. Come to think of it, maybe I’ll apply for a job there once I get fired for real.

I asked the friendly-looking guy at the big counter if they had a lost and found, and as I was describing my lost memory stick to him and explaining that I may have left it on one of the checkstand counters a week or so earlier he pulled out a small cardboard box containing several keyrings, a couple of pairs of sunglasses, a small notebook, a bunch of bank cards, and my memory stick!!

“That’s it!” I almost shouted, and I could see in his eyes a split second of indecision: How could he be sure the thing was really mine? I was fully prepared to tell him exactly what he would find on the stick if he inserted it into the nearest USB port, but, in the great tradition of Trader Joe’s, he quickly sized me up and decided I was trustworthy. Besides, he was probably prohibited by corporate policy from sticking anything into company USB ports, because of viruses and possible pornography, so he just handed it over.

Memory stick recovered, landmark legislation passed, sweet bag of pleasure in hand. A good week indeed.