Exit Salad. : March 2020

Saturday, March 28, 2020

The Bridge

The Bridge

I have always been something of a wanderer, a cheapskate, and an asker of too many questions. This fit perfectly for me being born late into the hippie era, when the culture was still sort of ok with a young guy hitchhiking to get where he needed to go. By the time I was 20 I was hitchhiking between working in the oil fields out west, and going home to see my family in NYC during the holidays.

One time I was coming off of an oil crew in Wyoming and somewhere in the middle of Kansas and eighteen wheeler stops and the driver tells he is going all the way to NYC but has to stop in Toronto first, and I can get in if I can stay awake with him all the way. Hell. I'm 20 years old. I can stay awake forever.

Well, 18 hours of coffee and conversation later, we roll onto the Peace Bridge in Buffalo NY at midnight heading to Toronto, but we get stopped at the Canadian Border for incomplete customs paperwork. It turns out that it will take another 24 hours to sort out, so I do the math, and reckon I can get down to NYC quicker than that, so I thank the driver, hop out, and head back to America.

I start to hitchhike but get no luck and its then that I realize my predicament. Middle of the night 20 years old, a young hippie, long hair, unshaven, backpack. Havent showered in 3 days, so I'm ripe, and I had to get by some very bored American border guards looking like that. They would see me walking up to them the whole way and be laughing at the entertainment value of finding themselves someone like me. I had no interest in being picked apart

But then I look at the bridge and see its a girder bridge. Well hell. I'm young. Being young means you are made of 1 part bluster, 1 part dumb luck and 2 parts stupid. Being young and male just means you get a double dose.

I climb up and over the side of the bridge above the Niagara River, and begin to crawl amongst the girders underneath it. I manage to get from the first to the second girder, then the second to the third, and after bit I have a technique going, and I eventually get to the other side, and drop down on the river bank of the American side, climb up to the Scajaqueda freeway, find the NY state thruway and get back to NYC by noon the next day, all in one piece, still young, dumb and lucky.

Little did I know then that within 12 years I would be living in Buffalo with my wife, she in Graduate school, me in technology, a regular citizen, and we would ride our bicycles over that same peace bridge on weekend mornings to get a cup of Tim Horton's coffee and a donut, back in those storied days before Starbucks taught us all how good a cup of coffee could be, but only if you had the money for it.

A Single Line of Footsteps

A single line of footsteps

The Tea was hot and bit against his tongue. He still drank it with milk, an old habit from his british days, his six years working on and off as a bartender in London. First in the pubs, 7 pounds a shift, pulling pints the old way for the old guys with the skull caps coming in and standing at the bar ordering one after the other. At first he could hardly understand what they were asking for. “Gisa painta Bitter”. Wat? Ok, so after awhile he began to understand and fall into the accents. After seven years he fell into it so far that American tourists on the street that would ask him directions would not believe that he was not british himself. “I listen to a lot of music” he would reply. Acoustic memory.

His daughter accused him of always either humming or whistling a song at all times. It bothered her, but he wrote it off to her being 18. He did have music in his head all of the time, something that he didn’t see much in other people. There was a song in his head at all times. When he worked, when he slept, eating lunch. It never left. It was a constant companion. He was intrigued by the fact that the song he had in head as he went to sleep at night was the same song that was in his head when he woke up in the morning, no matter how wild the intervening dreams were during the night. How did that work? How did the song manage to stay there?

Evil revisited him in his dreams. Pure evil, stalking him. Tracking him down. Without recognizing it, he knew it for what it was. Standing inside a cabin in the woods, the doorknob shaking, and he knew it was trying to get in. “WHAT DO YOU WANT?” he would scream, then wake up with the risen goosebumps that he always did after these dreams. The evil that would imprison him, torture him. Drench him in his own or other’s blood. Like the music, it was just a part of his life that he had come to accept as a norm.

He had asked his wife one time if she was ever visited by evil in her dreams, and by her reply she knew she hadn’t. Either you know it or you don’t. Either it has stalked you, or it hasn’t.

He would be with others in an elevator or a restaurant, and he would see that he was the only one that could name every song that was played after they left. It was like he was the only one that was listening. Consciously listening.

He sipped his Tea. Cooler now, and drinkable. An attractive blonde woman talking and sitting between two men in suits once ran product development and thought it was crazy. They sit for 20 minutes and the men don’t speak at all. Then they leave.

Maybe like most people, he had lived a life of deception, mixed with failure, mixed with success. Any of these perspectives could be argued as being his defining characteristics with success. Pick one and argue it. Turn the prism around so that only these colors bleed through.

Deception. It was strewn everywhere behind him as he looked back on the path that was his life. He wanted to live in London as a young man, had no formal way of doing so, and so just one day up and moved there, and lived for seven years as an illegal alien. Downside. Never being able to tell anyone around him who he really was. Upside. It made him the man he became.

Deception. He comes back to America and can’t find a good enough paying job so he puts on his resume that he has a college degree, when in fact he barely got through high school. Downside. Never being able to share with any of his coworkers who he truly was. Upside. Paved a financial path for him to have a wife, kids, car, house, dogs and all the rest.

Deception. His house was an odd conglomeration of rooms that he built himself, never asking the town permission to do so, and never going through any formalized process. Downside. Like everything else in his life, the sense that the Piper will one day show up and ask for payment. Upside. The house grew with his family and as he needed it to grow. And how.

He knew and understood the common thread behind all of these deceptions. An inability to understand why formality should get in the way of him wanting to do things that he felt he needed to do to grow and in no way hurt others.

Success and Failure. He had become fairly successful financially working in the technology field, starting out as an engineer, and over the years billing out as a functional analyst. But it was all temporary contract work. None of it lasted. At first he would attribute the temporary nature of his contracts to the fact that he was by nature a fairly gruff and direct New Yorker in a world full of Californians, who approached technology in a much easier manner, whereas for him, was the bull in the tea shop, always driving to get things done. But on deeper introspection, he soon came to realize that it wasn’t California, or even New York, or even technology that spoke to the temporary nature of his work. It was him, and was a strain that went back to his earliest jobs growing up on Long Island. He had NEVER lasted long in any job, no matter the location and industry. And as he looked deeper into it, he recognized a recurrent pattern in his life. Talk his way in. Use his smarts and acumen to clean up whatever mess lay around him. Build out early confidence in his abilities. He was quick enough for these parts of the job. But then the boredom would hit him. He would lose confidence in the people around him, and when they wanted him to do things that he did not agree with, he would resist, and then things would fall apart around him.

Job after job. From working in restaurants, to bars, to the corporate world, the pattern didn’t change, and the root cause in all of this was the same as the root cause of his deceptions. He didn’t know how to listen. He didn’t know how to follow rules others lay before him. He only knew how to listen to himself. What was wrong with him? He didn’t hate this part of him. In fact, he kind of liked it, which was why it probably stuck around him as long as it had. But it did have its downside, and is why many people around him removed themselves from his life when they came to recognize it in him. He is not going to go along. He is not going to listen.

An old well in the forest.

He took another sip of coffee, and thought about his identity, this person whose reflection was fading before him. You put your hand in the water of the pond, and your face goes away. He was beginning to have the types of dreams again like he used to have as a kid. Lost, running, fearful and alone. He is working on a ship travelling along the shore of South America, and he finds himself walking along the lower levels and finds shelves of silver coins. He picks some up, even though they are not his to take. He puts some in a bag and walks off the ship with them. Then the ship is stopping in a foreign city and everyone gets off for some shore liberty. He gets off with everybody else, but pretty quickly, they are all gone, and gone back to the ship. Then the ship is gone, and he realizes that it left without him, and he wonders if he was intentionally left behind.

More and more these days he was feeling left behind. He remembers as a young man struggling so hard to make ends meet. Crappy job after crappy job, for years, and never getting anywhere. Every fiber of his being just wanting to one day have a normal life, the life that everyone else was having. A wife, kids, a place to live. It all seemed so unreachable because he could never get any kind of work where any of that was possible. He lived inside of invisible jobs, the types of invisible jobs that no else notices. The bartender, the cab driver. The type of people you don’t see.

Then he lies one day on his resume, he gets a decent job, works hard at it, gets a decent wife, and they begin to raise decent kids. They get a decent house and decent life to go along with it. It surprised the hell out of him. He got his twenty five years of having the normal life he had always dreamed of. Can’t ask for more than that. He was grateful for that.

But now it was all fading away, and the comedy of it all was that it was fading away all at the same time. His identity for so many years was built on fundamentals that were all now crumbling. For one, Work, Family, Gender.

His skill sets at work were becoming antiquated, and no longer as useful as they once were. Suddenly, everyone in the industry needed to be be degreed and credentialed. He had never thought much of credentials, he had never been a hoop jumper, and as far as he could see, there were a lot of credentialed idiots, but now it seemed to be a requirement. The industry wanted hoop jumpers. He had always relied on his cleverness to see him through life, but maybe being young and clever is more appealing than being old and clever. An old guy walks in with white hair, and everyone is wondering what the hell he is doing there.

And then there was his family. The Center of His Life. For so many years he was Daddy, then Dad, and he was needed. Now his kids were grown, and building lives of their own, and even though he knew that this was the way of things, he felt so alone. Even his wife was busy with her own life. He would have tea with her in the morning, and he wanted to tell her that he was drowning and gasping for air, but he didn’t want to worry her. Even if he told her, what could she say?

All this was happening at the same time, along with his physical deterioration. Suddenly, he would notice his arms tiring a lot more than they used to. He and his wife would try to have sex, and his body would often not respond. He was losing his ability to be a strong man. He looked in the mirror and could not recognize himself. An old guy. What’s he doing there?

The pillars of his identity were crumbling all at once, and he had nothing to show for it. No clue on how to rebuild himself into a new person. No idea how to start. His dad – the dad who left him for 30 years – if asked might tell him, the only and the surest way forward is by taking one step at a time. You don’t need to know where you are going, but you need to keep taking steps forward. Eventually you will get to where you need to be.

And so, he had been given twenty five years, and he raised his glass to that. Thank you.

He thought: I am told that the more I drink from this well, the stronger I will be.

There but for The Grace

He didn’t understand much.

On the surface of things, he was agnostic in his beliefs, in that there was no single religion that did it for him. They all mixed lies with their truth. All of them filtered a greater truth through the various foibles of human interpretation, of limited human capabilities of understanding. This meant to him that all spiritual teachings spoke through constrained emotion that stemmed from individual isolation, the essential shackle of all living things. Constrained to a life of solitude, by a life of solititude.

But they all spoke a common language, and spoke to a common striving external to the solitude, a place ineffable to grasp. They all spoke to a belief that that place existed. That it was there. He sort of believed that. In addition, he had always believed that within that place was a consciousness that he could talk to, that he could walk through life with. The fact that this belief in an “other” to which he walked through life with conflicted with his non religiousness didn’t upset him. He accepted it as a conflict arisen by his inability to fully understand things properly. Broken down to essentials, he was only an organism crawling on the planet’s face, much like all the others, except that – today – he wore an orange shirt. He seemed to prefer orange and green in the clothes that he wore. If someone had asked him what his favorite colors were, he would never claim those two. Yet it was what it was. An inability to connect deeper incongruities and make sense of them.

This other. This thing that walked with him, whatever it was, or wasn’t. He seemed to live his life in staccato, sharp ups and downs. During the many downs, too many of them, this thing would be there to listen to him. What do I do next? Where do I go? I can’t see forward in the dark. Please help see me forward. In his younger days, this thing always seemed to respond in time. Lady luck help me one more time.

His quickness had allowed him to be an imposter to others for most of his life. He could always talk his way into jobs, and into other people’s lives, and was never as qualified or as decent as other’s thought he was. He let other’s think those things, and then figured established norms out along the way. He always had unlimited confidence in his ability to figure things out along the way. It was his essense.

This formula worked well for him when he was younger, when his expectations were lower, and maybe also because people were willing to forgive him, because of his natural openness, and for his youth. But now that he was edging close to 60 years old, the old tricks in his bag did not seem to be working as well anymore. When you have nothing, you are willing to say anything to get where you need to be, and you maintain a clear conscience in whatever deceptions are required. Once you have a family, then things change. That veneer of integrity conflicts with playing the imposter clown, willing to say anything, to perform sleight of hand with the truth. The old bag of tricks lays by the side, unopened, with the inevitable disappointing results. He had difficulty playing the old parts. He had no idea how to move forward without them.

60 years old. Jeez, and Everything coming at him at once. The person that he always thought he was seemed to have died, and nothing new arisen in its place. He was a walking and shallowed out husk. He breathed, and he was sure that others could see him, but - in fact – he was no longer there.

This thing. This thing he still talked to, no longer seemed to be listening. He was living through the hardest moment so far in his life, and he never felt so alone. Everyone around him was busy moving on with their lives, and it was as if he existed in another dimension, separate from them all. He yelled, in his own way, but no one heard him. He was the imposter, and life had finally caught up with him.

One step at a time, his dad would say. Doesn't matter the direction. The direction will find you. It's what you need to do.

So with that, and knowing the pain involved in removing all the layers, he found himself back to who he had always been, put his hat on, shrugged his shoulders, and stepped out into the storm, knowing that there there is only one way to get out of the storm, and that is to walk strait through it.

Friday, March 27, 2020

The Path travelled

1. Where does this dirt road go?

Though I was unaware of it at the time, my divorce from Michelle began roughly 5 years ago next month, the two of us standing outside of a Big Bear Diner in the city of Vallejo, California. The two of us, with our two teenage daughters, our stomachs full of breakfast, and in the middle of a 5 day bicycle trip from Santa Clara to Sacramento. The two of us standing outside the restaurant, and then she says to me "If you ... like that, I will leave you".

Let me repeat the statement, because even now, five years later, it rings in my ears: If you grab her again like that, I will leave you.

To be understood properly, that statement needs to be unpacked in so many ways, and of course I can only perform the unpacking as best I can from my own perspective, not Michelle's. I can only say that - for her to be able to utter that statement declaring a potential end to our relationship, it had to already have been on her mind, which means she had been thinking about it for awhile. For me though, it was like being hit by an avalanche, an avalanche that I have still not yet recovered from, still trying to find my vertical, and claw my way to the sunlight.

Up until that moment, I could never imagine that Michelle and I could ever be physically or emotionally separate. We were like the first two fingers on my right hand, bound to each other, and committed for life. When we held our relationship up against other couples, I was always sure that we were the winners. The ones who knew how to make it work., to make each other laugh, and to be best friends. I didn't know and could not conceive of anything else, and when I thought about it at all, I felt myself amazing lucky to have come upon someone in life that I fit with so well.

I don't claim complete innocence in the matter. Raising teenagers is hard, and in moments of extreme stress, it takes two parents - if there are two parents - to be able to form some kind of union of agreement in raising them. As the saying goes, you either stand together, or you fail separately. As the natural teenage instincts of resistance arose in our daughters, I fell back in dealing with it to the way I myself was raised, with a sterner hand, and Michelle fell back to her own upbringing, one that was much less noisy and not as messy. To me it seemed like a withdrawal. Suddenly both of us different, both of us feeling in the right. Both of us seeing the other path potentially taken as dangerous in the long run.

And so our even keeled marriage, and the stability of our relationship the only possible ballast in being able to move forward, suddenly tilted on that sunny morning for me, leaving the smooth pavement we had been on together for 28 years, and turning off down a far rockier path that would eventually lead to dissolution 5 years later. Pain.

But there is a brighter side. Stoicism states that rather than be angry at those things that life has taken away from you, it is better to be thankful for the things that life has given you. I have been blessed in my life with many things, first and foremost being that I was able to raise Mara and Jana and to experience being a Dad to them for 20 years or so, and for that alone I will be forever grateful to life for giving that to me.