Moody

The list of things I am unfit for is a long one. Ballerina, freestyle skateboarder, auto mechanic, seamstress. And, in yoga, meditator. Get me in that room, sitting on the mat eyes closed, and I can do everything but “observe thoughts as they arise, but let them go.” No, they fall over me like a feather comforter, and I breathe them in and out until I am transported four hundred miles away, walking into the Diamond Grille in Akron. Always, walking into the forties in the form of a restaurant I’ve been in only a few times, yellow light on blonde wood. I wonder why I always come here, when I am supposed to be at yoga class. I get hung up on this place. Among other things.

Then, the voice of the instructor this morning, suddenly opening my eyes to the blue overhead through the skylight and a contrail of white vapor expanding slowly. “This is the best moment of your life.”

It was, and then it too bisected the view in disappearing cotton. I came here wearing a gray heaviness that I thought I might never again have to bear. I had forgotten what this felt like, the mood that descends and pulls me down, down. I am caught in the anchor rope, and there is only so much breath left in me. The next time I inhale, it will be water, and then I will fall all the way to the bottom.

I have been living lately in a green world, shot through with light, one with a three-hundred-sixty-degree view of joy. I was not sure where it came from—after a year of building my own new mental house, sawing and hammering and watching the walls go up, finally the roof going on—but I was not going to question it. What is this strange feeling? Why, it’s happiness! I had grown so used to feeling this lately, I had begun to believe it was the steady state.

Ha.

Everything changes. Happiness, too.

I used to say, Panic attacks are something you would not wish on your worst enemy. (I have compassion even for criminals; they, too, suffer.) But this past week, it’s depression I have been making the reacquaintance of. It’s like meeting the dead. Alive again. And horrible.

It’s a hole in the bottom of your bucket. A minute pinhole you can’t find in order to patch; the water seeps slowly. I was going to write something, tomorrow. When tomorrow came, I decided I would write it tomorrow. I got into bed right after dinner, fell hard asleep, then woke at two, and and four, twisted up with the duvet. Woke tired. Aimless through the day. Hopeless through the night.

I tried to parse its meaning. It couldn’t have just come back for a visit, unbidden, because it missed me, from our long relationship of yore. It had to be here for a reason, sapping all desire.

The week before I had ridden long, and hard. I had felt the exhilaration of doing something I did not know I had it in me to do. The ecstasy of thinking , for all those miles, about the one thing that’s paramount in my mind right now, and had the magic of the road solve it—the answer to a problem I did not yet know I faced—out there just ahead of me in the Pennsylvania dark. I came home so tired I did not even know it until the next day. The day after that, I was even tireder. And then it became something else. A fatigue of the spirit. In the following week the sum total of my accomplishments was three loads of laundry.

I must remember that I have never stayed anything for long. Not panicked, not sad, not angry, not happy, not productive. Or unproductive. I wish I could say, for now, this was something in the air. But it seems to be in me. Maybe tomorrow I will finally get around to washing my bike, as I have been telling myself to do for six days. Maybe tomorrow it will go away, this feeling like chains that clank about my ankles as I try to walk. Tomorrow it could all turn out different. We could both be washed clean.

In Prison

The world subverted.

Everything that is known--the foundations of life, what we call "love," the myriad considerations that keep us together and in harmony (for the most part) so that we can function as a society--all of it is turned on its head in there. So that up is down. Love is hate. Understanding is torn top to bottom. "This hellhole," writes an inmate of Attica to me; "this shit storm they call justice and I call hell on earth." The notion of justice, even: all tied up and turned around until it is not possible to read what Webster's has to say about it and believe the dictionary tells the truth. What is true, inside the cellblock?

Your friends become your enemies, and the people who punish you are besotted with their power. Or perhaps it is their powerlessness after all. Who knows anymore.

When we lock up animals, for the crime of being voiceless, we call it a zoo. Depriving a creature of its freedom to follow its biological imperatives--to move, to fulfill basic needs for companionship, safety, food, space around the body, to know who is who--causes well-documented neuroses. Animals take to what are called stereotypies: pacing, cribbing, ceaseless licking, self-mortification. They slowly go out of their minds. They turn on one another in acts of aggression; unwarranted aggression, it is termed. And when the animals are humans called prisoners, these behavioral last resorts are then considered proof of their unfitness to be returned back to the outside. And so on the inside they stay, further ruined for the possibility of freedom.

Yet sometimes, prisoners are let go. Then they become frightened because it looks like the rules have changed once again--the subverted world is quickly turned right-side up once more, hence nothing that worked for them previously (the strange rules of exchange; the hard methods of self-protection; the awful plays of power that pass for the expression of love, as in the forcible taking of the weak, the new, the unguarded) will work out here. It is terrible, suddenly, this freedom. And so, another crime. At least they can go back to the familiar. Recidivism rates are currently around 67.5 percent. That is a number to think about. Think hard. It tells a strange tale, of inside and out.

The institutions are called "correctional." This in itself becomes part of what is subverted: the presumption that inside, things are taught, things are learned. That there is, in the end, hope.

There is not. Because we are not honest about what we are doing here. Is this not then, strangely enough, a crime we commit?

In his book Coercion and Its Fallout, Dr. Murray Sidman, a foremost behavior analyst, writes (in a chapter titled "Between a Rock and a Hard Place," an apt title for any exploration of our prison system),

Ordinary standards of justice are suspended in these citadels

of law enforcement, so even conformity to regulations does not

ensure the avoidance of punishment. The slightest suspicion of

any departure from the rules brings the authorities swooping down

on the whole inmate population. Because constant observation of

everyone is not feasible, accurate assignment of blame for

instigating disorder is impossible. Indisciminately and

capriciously, therefore, they administer the approved measures

of solitary confinement, lockup, ruthless questioning, revocation

of privileges, and surreptitious viciousness. The guards, their

uniforms, the very sound of their footsteps, and all aspects of

the prison environment become signals for unavoidable punishment.

Depression is common among prison inmates. Yet, because it keeps

them "well behaved," it is not considered a serious problem.

It is from (very unfortunate) animal experiments that we have learned precisely what happens when punishment--say, electric shock--is administered "indiscriminately and capriciously." Not knowing when it is to occur, and therefore not knowing how to avoid it, the rat ceases even to try. He dissociates from his fear, from his anxiety; those emotions were designed to assist in preparing for action, after all, and now no action will be of help. He gives up. "Learned helplessness." Or, in another word, depression.

The lie is given. "Correction"? What then is being taught? Perhaps it is merely a lesson in how terribly humans can act toward other humans.

From afar, they are imposing, and dismal. It is clear they are hiding something. They are hiding something big from our eyes. Something we do not wish to see. So that prisons are most of all hiding a truth about what is inside all of us.

Behind these locked gates, these stone and concrete and tempered steel walls, 2.3 million Americans now live. China, four times more populous than the United States, has but 1.6 million prisoners in its jails. (Another way to understand this--those big numbers are almost too big to picture, aren't they?--is to imagine the fact that this amounts to one in every one hundred adults, incarcerated.) And we are getting harsher and harsher, too, in imposing our will: from 1925 to 1975, our rates of incarceration were fairly steady. Then the numbers shot up, raced up, almost as if it were such a pleasure to us that we wished only to jail more and more and more. So that now the U.S. has one quarter of the world's imprisoned people, though we have only 5 percent of its population. One might almost say our best-producing cash crop is prisoners.

It is tempting to ask where this all might end. It is also necessary. Or else we might find more and more of us inside, and only a few beyond the gates, beckoning. If we are willing to keep what is hidden in plain sight a secret inside our hearts, they too will rot. Like the humans whose various pains we are all too happy to forget. It is necessary to look inside. So that we might see how it is that the world turns upside down, reversing all that we think we know about ourselves. It is necessary to look at the walls, the bars, the weapons that are made from objects once innocent, now fearsome in their new shape. Human ingenuity is the one thing that remains unchanged, inside.

Prison photos (c) Andrew Garn

Conscience Takes a Holiday

What a strange locale, the ski slopes. As close to the place we call "nature" as it is possible to get--the elemental mountains, stripped of animal comforts, even to the thinness of the air. And as detached from nature as anyplace save the Mall of America. A place devoted to doing something as unnecessary as sliding down snowy hills on two boards, then being hoisted back aloft to the top to do it all again. This unproductive (but irresistible) activity is bracketed by journeys to and from gigantic parking lots, often in gigantic cars that can negotiate winter terrain as well as hold lots of expensive, single-purpose equipment manufactured and purchased solely for these few lavish days in the winter. Many of the skiers I know are very "green" people, so obviously they're averting their eyes when they head to the ski resorts.

Yes, me, too. "Blind spot," I think it's called. I have so many of these they'd make me breathless to recount.

Now that I live twenty minutes from a state-owned ski area that would not win any prizes for luxury--the lodges are overcrowded, the food dismal but still shockingly overpriced--I cannot justify not going skiing, at least a few times each season, primarily because for kids it's such huge fun. For grownups my age, it's largely a day spent praying to avoid either frostbite or hard landings. (But it's also huge fun for us when we allow ourselves to go a little too fast, or pause mid-slope and look out over the panoramic view--blue sky over gray bowl of far-off mountains--that can be had no other way than at the top of a chairlift.)

Many lessons can be learned at the slopes. Some can make you a little bit sick.

The chairs stop operating at 4:00, so everyone can get down from even the highest run before sun gets clipped by the ridge of dense mountains. It was only 3:30, but although I wanted to make another run, having successfully evaded both blue fingers and hairline fractures, my internal dog alarm was now ringing. That's the one that got installed the day I first got a dog; the one that buzzes insistently when I've been away from home for five hours.

Why five hours? I don't know. It feels like the whisper of love. It feels like my dog wanted me to come home, attend to her needs.

To the friend who was gesturing, "Down to the bottom, we'll go back up this lift again," I gestured, "No, can't, gotta leave." She slid over to me, perplexed. "Why?"

"Nelly is alone, and I need to get back. I've been gone five hours."

She looked at me like I'd given her something spoiled to eat. "We used to leave our dog alone for ten hours, and he was fine."

I have heard this one so many times I have lost the patience for smiling tightly and shrugging my shoulders. Now I say, "Can you go for ten hours without having to pee?"

Her response: "Well, you can crate the dog. Then they won't pee in the house."

Please permit me to jump up and down and tear out my hair for a minute, will you. There.

These small sentences contain so many large implications. Like The problem is not whether another animal is suffering because he's trapped and has a natural taboo against soiling his own nest, and so will wait in an agony until it's no longer possible; no, the problem is whether or not you have to clean up a puddle when you get home. And also: The fact that I have a dog is not going to stop me from doing things I want; a dog is a convenience, like a tennis racquet, that can be put in a closet when not in use.

The biggest, though, is: I assume my dog feels what I want him to feel, because it's more comforting for me that way. Ergo, he's fine. But that is simply because he lacks the means to make his owner realize that he's not fine. And what lack of common language doesn't accomplish, lack of empathy will. Or, wait: a lack of even the desire to have empathy.

This exchange up on the mountain instantly reminded me of all the similar, shocking conversations I've had with people who purported to love their dogs, and they rained down on me until I was wet with unhappiness. "Yeah, one time he got locked into the gallery, and we didn't realize until the next day he was there; 28 hours and he didn't even go to the bathroom! He was fine." "One time my father couldn't make it home and the dog was there all weekend. Only peed a little, by the door." And do you think he felt terrible things when he did?

I remember the time I offered to pick up a friend's dog up from the vet's where he had been caged--er, I mean "boarded"--for the weekend. Three young vet techs were hanging out in the room, looking at something together and laughing. Dogs watched from behind their bars.

They gave me the leash, and the lovely brown dog jumped out of the cage. We walked down the hall, and he kept looking nervously up at me. I opened the door, and he managed to get his tail clear of it by one inch before he lifted his leg to pee. And pee. And pee. I think it took seven minutes for him to void his bladder. Then he took three more steps, to the first patch of lawn he could reach, and crouched. That took a long time, too.

I think maybe those vet techs had been looking and laughing at that thing for quite some time. Like, days.

Oh, why do I know anything? Maybe people are right. Maybe I make this stuff up. Maybe I project. Maybe dogs' bladders are indeed made different from ours, by an evolutionary process that foresaw ownership by people who liked to ski full days (once it foresaw the invention of the chairlift).

It certainly would make my life a whole lot easier if Nelly would only be fine when I left her home for entire days so I could go do fun human things. But I have a piece of her inside me, so she comes along whenever I go. I can hear her when she begins to whimper, and then I can't help feeling bad for her. It's the damn inconvenient piece that makes it seem that a responsibility comes along with having a dog. Love has a weight, and it sits on your shoulders.

Ode to Speed

Can one regain innocence past? Let us return to a lost time
and see.

It is 1909 and the world is coming alive with the hum of engines. Fearsome, alluring, raw potential pushing at the edges of its own constructions. F. T. Marinetti quivers with excitement in the words of "The Futurist Manifesto": "We are going to be present at the birth of the centaur and we shall soon see the first angels fly!" He was talking about mechanized speed, and the new, improved version of happiness it would deliver to the populace. "Time and space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed."

He rails against the "gouty naturalists" who he sees as counterposed to the forward-looking embrace of the engine. But a smarter head than his--and one that knew the engine profoundly well, not just as objet with good lines--Antoine de Saint-Exupery, the poet of flight, knew that this was a false opposition. The machine brings us to a place of elemental humanness: the moment when every sense is fully engaged with time and space, and when life and death stand starkly looking at each other, right over your head. This is living--pure, animal living.

His swoon-worthy book Wind, Sand and Stars, which situates the point where man, nature, and machine meet, was published in 1939. This was five years before he disappeared in an airplane over the Mediterranean. (Is there anything more unrelievedly eerie than the lone aviator who flies over the horizon and falls off the edge of the world?) In the chapter titled "The Tool," he takes on the naysayers who carp that mechanization causes a decline in spiritual values. He puts paid to that "fictitious dichotomy" (as beautiful language in the service of beautiful thought always will): ". . . the machine does not isolate man from the great problems of nature but plunges him more deeply into them."

It is not with metal that the pilot is in contact. Contrary
to the vulgar illusion, it is thanks to the metal, and by virtue
of it, that the pilot rediscovers nature.

The speeding engine compresses time, and our instincts race to keep up with it. We vibrate with the effort, but do not notice, because we are no place but fully inside the experience. There is no way to comment on it.

Therefore speed is life. It keeps us in this instant, which is the very--the only--definition of living. Here, now, fast. But do not fool yourself. About any of it; that which I only intimate.

California Dreaming

It is a place I've been exactly twice, in what felt like two distinctly separate lives that I have been given the memories of, so apparently the same person experienced them, and that person is me. Or why are these sensations and recollections in my head?

In 1980, in that between-college-and-real-life juncture--more like a pothole into which the wheel thunks suddenly, because you do not see it coming--I went west to California. A stay in a roommate's lovely old family house in San Francisco (not withstanding my ugly ban on her Laura Nyro records in the communal student housing) was offered, replete with sushi breakfast in the garden. A a week of doing little but skulking around the best bookstores I'd ever seen, drinking coffee and Anchor Steam beer, and having my conception of Chinese food rearranged in the most pleasing fashion, I got on a Greyhound bus. I was headed for Utah, and a breakup, though I did not know this detail until after I'd arrived. Now I see I survived. Then, I was less than sure; such is youth.

The second time I was another person, a new mother. This journey was by airliner, praying all the while the baby would not start screaming somewhere over Indiana and not stop til LAX. The flight and the hotel--the kind with cool marble lobby, artful bowl of green apples on the reception desk, and alluring fountain sending a wall of gold water into a basin--were paid for. I was just along for the ride. So ride I did: around and around an unfamiliar city in a car with an infant in the backseat, day after day, in order to explore, or rather push a stroller around, by myself. But there was more car than stroller. Way more. I did not like L.A. I'm sorry.

It is time, I've decided, for a new view on this variegated and gorgeous state. The baby is now big--we wear the same shoe size, at least for the moment. And I want to take him there.

The plan got byzantine, even for someone whose daily bread is twisting things into impossible shapes. It involved overnight camp with California cousins, visits to friends both known and as-yet unmet along the coast, traveling Highway 1, and a real sense of having gotten there: ergo, by motorcycle. Because there is just as much to see along the way. I have grown tired of hearing myself say, "I want to take you to the Grand Canyon, honey," and "We could go see those Indian cave dwellings in New Mexico," and repeat the variations the next year. When is "next year," anyway? Is next year when I'm leaning on a walker, or, worse, never? I want to be as good as my word. Or not utter words--or have hopes--at all.

The problems would pop up, and my brain would find a counter for them. Don't feel comfortable enough on the K75 to put my dear heart on the pillion seat? Well, how interesting that I happen to know one of the finest riders on the planet; I would trust my son to him, if to anyone. It all seemed possible, if not truly, overwhelmingly, excitingly difficult: a month total on the road, two bikes, three people, thousands of miles.

When an idea takes hold--and an idea I go public with, to boot--I am loath to let it go. Even when the other rider suddenly finds himself without a motorcycle to ride. So my brain starts churning again. I could ride someone on the back of a bike like a Lario: there was not a place I did not feel fine taking that nimble, well-balanced machine. Too bad it is recommended to bring a certified mechanic along on rides of more than forty miles. But a bike like the Lario but not a Lario: how interesting that a Breva 750 is up for sale nearby. Do I need three bikes? Is that a rhetorical question?

I am still California dreaming--August sounds fine, doesn't it, the word itself like gentle heat--but now it takes place in a fitful sleep. I wake suddenly on the what if . . . and suddenly feel as though all the balls are in midair but I am watching some of them fall to earth, uncaught, in slow motion.

I never know what I am going to do, really, until just before I do it. I somehow sense this is not normal behavior. But a trip like this is not normal, either, which is why you have to sleep on it, and wish hard upon waking that it is real. Not disappeared into day.

It Happened One Night

Tuesday belongs to me. It represents what summer does to the eight-year-old: an alluring expanse of time stretching all the way to the vanishing point and beyond, into which every single activity and longed-for pleasure can be packed. It will never end.

On Tuesdays, alone of the week, I do not need to be home at four for the arrival of the bus, nor do I need to think of what to make for dinner that would not shock my circle of organic-eating, protein-aware mothers (tell me, what really is wrong with a meal composed of corn chips, frozen french fries, and ice cream?). It is my day, and dinner will be what I want, when I want. Eight, or nine, it matters not. By Monday afternoon I am full of happy anticipation: I think I will . . . answer all those e-mails, and take my time doing it; I will go to the grocery, a period of time when I can let the brain go into sleep mode, cool off while I throw things into the cart; take Nelly for a long walk and not care--too much--if she goes AWOL in the briers at the cornfields; go home and put on some records extra-loud while preparing dinner, usually a can of vegetarian chili; build a fire; and, finally, have some time to write.

Awful as it is--sometimes twisting the gut, forcing me to get up and wander the house in search of anything that needs doing so as to delay the ugly confrontation with the blank page (sometimes I am sure I hear it go "nyah-nyah!")--I like writing. Only problem is, I can't do it anymore with anyone else in the house. If there is, I find myself steeled for the inevitable moment when at last a pour of words is about to come, thank god, and . . . "Mom? I need ______" [fill in the blank: pencil, toilet paper, a definition, math help--ha!--a book on Indians, a hug]. All of these are given gratefully. Nights alone us two, talking about cartoons or music or (now, sometimes) girls, are so amazing I wish I could share them with everyone. But when I finally grab on to some slippery words that have been eluding me for hours, and then they slide away again (such is the power of the word "mom"), it's best not to even begin.

So I treat myself to the full array of lonesome pleasures on Tuesdays, chief among them the glass of wine, the laptop on the floor in front of the fireplace, and time.

Last year--it seems just a dream, a whole year gone in that place--in my rental house without a fireplace, I made a vow to my child. It went like this. "As god is my witness, we'll never live without a fireplace again!"

So when I went down the spec sheets of houses for sale, first I looked to see if they were Nelly-friendly; next, if I could afford them; and third, if they had a fireplace. My amphibian's blood needs this warmth; a house needs a heart. Plus, where are you going to roast marshmallows when the urge takes you in mid-February?

So Nelly and I walked the cornfields next to the icy river on Tuesday; for a mile there and back, there was no one, only crows, their own cut-paper silhouette against the yellow-blue-brown land and sky, and the sound of Nelly diving into the brush, her tags jingling far away. We got back in the car; no one. We drove to the store for a bottle of pinot grigio, for no one else. At home, no one. Nelly ate, then got up on the couch to see what I would do next, but then she couldn't keep her eyes open after her rich day of careening about at top speed, and now the bony meal calling forth digestive effort from her body. I put a match to the paper, and yellow-orange leaped up so I could watch this small magic, wood consumed and turned into unmatchable warmth. The chili was heating on the stove. The computer screen turned blue, clicked.

I could stay up late, just as in the olden days when there was no seven-thirty alarm to hit me between the ears with its urgent message: Get up, get up, make breakfast, make lunch, make snack, get boy out the door at eight-fifteen so as not to miss the bus. I was free to do whatever the hell I wanted, and that alone made a little nest of satisfaction into which I could psychically curl.

Then the words came. The keys clicked and clacked. Hit save. It does not happen like this every time; it does not happen like this even a quarter of the time. But Tuesday it did. Tuesday, it did.

I threw on two more logs, then lay back on the floor to feel this passing triumph. That is when it came to me. It moved upward along my body, until it stroked my face. Joy. For I wanted nothing in my life to be different, not this night, in which I give myself anything I please, and not the next day, when I would rejoin the community of men, or at least indoor soccer and homework struggles. There would be my son's shy smile when he first comes in the door, looking to see if I am unchanged after a whole day in which we have not seen each other.

On Tuesdays, I can practically shout it to the mountains that rise in their unknowable mystery behind the new house, the one with the fireplace: I love my life, every striated bit of it. Being alone; being unalone. Each in their own proper time.

But let me know if you have something better I could trade you for.

Nostalgia Trip

Music is a component of the DNA that makes us who we are. It is uploaded into our cells during the most intensive period of growth, young adulthood. It comes and finds us, but we are pre-set to receive certain types. It tells us who we are, and we use it to tell others who we wish to be.

Oh, it's so neat.

Consider its importance as personal code: There is a point in a courtship when the CDs are exchanged. This is usually quite early, and it is the simplest, purest way of saying, This is who I am; can you love this as I do? It functions both as warning --"Speed metal speaks to me!"--and as hope--"Here is an aural nude portrait of me, to show you just how much I trust."

It is, really, a visit to the Mudd Club in the first year of the eighties, a dark and galvanizing (and filthy) night at CBGB when the Talking Heads took the stage. Most especially, it is the small back room of Maxwell's in Hoboken, when you did not yet know you were where history was being made (What? In this tiny adjunct of my tiny living room?). You also did not know it would be made by these kids you saw every day at the bodega or waiting (waiting, and waiting) for the PATH train--looking very much like you, in fact, in thrift-shop sweaters (which they would write a longing song about, "Autumn Sweater") and Danish book bags--but who would form a band called Yo La Tengo that, unlike the others who would have their moment and then break apart, would stay together and keep blooming, like the peony. Twenty years on they would still be making music that could break your heart, set your teeth on edge, express pure yearning, be depressing as all get-out, or exemplify ironic wittiness. Sometimes in the same song.

The music that I would offer as having made me did so in the two decades starting in 1978. That was the year my college station played a song called "Psycho Killer," and I can still remember where I was standing when I heard it. Actually, I was lying. On the floor of my bedroom. David Byrne's cool and controlled aggression reached out from the air and put its trembling hands around my neck. I had never heard anything like this, but I knew it was made for me. Six months later I spent a cold January alone in the communal house at school while everyone else was home, and every day I struggled with the outline of an aesthetics to explain how genius in art announces itself. The soundtrack to these intellectual gymnastics was my recently purchased Talking Heads: 77 record, played repetitively and at great volume (it was outlawed when the roommate from San Francisco was in residence, as was her Linda Ronstadt when I was home; we agreed only upon Joni Mitchell). The thesis got a barely passing grade, but Talking Heads got the zeitgeist.

The next time music got hold of the weird stuff that was floating around in my brain and gave it external form and voice so I finally knew what I was thinking was after graduation, and this is when I was created by what I heard. There are two tiers of it, the music that's fun to dance to and the music that freezes you where you stand when you hear it. What is it about being young, soft clay that wants to be hard as obsidian, and only music can make its indentations on you? It is perhaps the only form that can reach you then and in that way: from your mind, to your heart, via the pulse of your blood. It moves you. Then later, when you find it again after a remove of many years in which you thought you had changed, you put it on the stereo, just a little test, and there it is. There you are. The past, present. Pounding through the floorboards, and you--singing. Formed again.

{Connect the dots of the music. A picture will take shape: you. Below, my dots. And yours?}