I wake at 6:46 am. Willi has moved to the top of the bed and his head is tucked in beside mine on the pillow. I feel the hardness of our two skulls touching. I think about what these hard encasements of bone protect and contain. I think about how the brain is to a very large degree an involuntary organ. From the moment I become half conscious I am aware of an endless series of thoughts and half sentences that have been forming quite merrily on their own. Each phrase is about something else. My brain, when it is left to its own devices, quite gingerly vomits up thoughts and half finished ideas at me.
I finally get up at 7:03 am. I groggily walk down the hall to the kitchen and nearly step into a small circular patch of cold dog vomit on the kitchen floor. Willi threw up again in the middle of the night. Wonderful…delightful! How much vomiting will my poor little dog have to do before we finally get to the heart of this problem? And so a new day is beginning…but I am not finished.
I sponge up the dog vomit. I make decaf. I brush away all the thoughts coming at me about how I don’t have time to write my morning pages. I pour a cup of coffee and sit down at the dining room table and write three pages of longhand brain drain right at the bastards. My hand vomits my thoughts onto the page, my handwriting nearly incomprehensible. By the end of the pages, which are filled with nothing more than a stream of fresh random thoughts similar to the ones I had woken up with, I am ready to start.
The inner saboteur has shut up, and I am past the gate keeper. There are no inner voices making excuses or scaring me to death about the future. There is only now. Everything can wait. I am here, in the moment, in full concert with my involuntary noisy, chatty human brain. Holy cow!
My mind is ready and open; my hands are willing and eager to make something shimmer. As I write this, my last entry of January 2003, what comes to mind are vivid shades of sunset. The drive home last night, the digital clock on the dashboard of my car reading 6:00 pm and a translucent gradient of blue and yellow tint at the horizon; a deep, warm inner stirring in the depths of my being, that winter is finally, ever so slightly yielding its grip on us. Time is certainly moving us towards the lighter, warmer, more hopeful youth of spring.
And so a new day begins…
I wake at 7:19 am. Apparently all rhyme or reason has vanished from sleep. Stephen and I get up at exactly the same time. Willi remains cozy at the foot of the bed. Not only is it frozen outside, but my mind is saying that the freeze is deep and extends to the rut I am in.
Perhaps I need to do the hokey-pokey and turn it all around. Wish I had more to say, but sometimes less is more. Anyone else is in a rut? Tell me about it! It's all yours.
And so the day begins…
I wake up at 4:55 am. I stay in bed for a while. Then I throw in the towel and call it a morning. Decaf. Morning pages…three of them. Ah, so that’s what’s floating around in my cesspool of a mind. All these bits and pieces, it’s no wonder I can’t stay sleep.
As I write this it is still dark outside my window. Willi is tucked in bed and Stephen is up, checking email and getting ready for work. I watched the state of the union address last night. Scary times we live in. How’s a person supposed to get a good nights’ sleep?
Of course I could go into what I thought about it and what I felt about it…but I don’t want my journal to become a political statement and so it’s enough to say that I watched it with interest.
The winter cold has entombed me or dare I say embalmed me. We are currently checking for a pulse but it is unlikely we shall find one. There seems to be some movement here and there but we are uncertain if these are actual signs of life. I have one neurotransmitter firing and I can hardly find evidence that it is anything more than a knee jerk reaction. Somehow calling a corpse a corpse makes me feel refreshed; enlivened.
I have not recorded anything new that excites me. I have not painted anything or drawn anything that would get me through the fog layer. I have not felt deeply connected in days. On the weekend I crashed in bed for part of Saturday and watched three episodes of the Sopranos on DVD. On Sunday I went to see “The Hours” which seemed to take days. Don't get me wrong, I was entirely enthralled by the movie, just hated the fact that it cuts so close to the bone. Life is what you make of it. Life is not poetry, it’s meaningless; kill yourself at once. Or see the meaning in it, give it meaning damn it! Remember your story and be authentic! Yes! If nothing else, be authentic about what you saw and what it means to you! Remember who you really are and then be that all over the goddamned place!
Hmmm.
Perhaps I need a new creative challenge. What would get me excited? What would be meaningful? What am I passionate about? So many things. Perhaps when we feel depleted we haven’t taken the time to dream what we want from life. What do I want from life? Have I stopped asking that question? Have you? If there is one thing I have learned…if I am thinking it then so are countless others. I am not alone. You are not alone. We are all in this freaking mess, now go make it mean something.
And so a new day begins…
I wake up at 6:30 am. I go to the kitchen and open a new can of decaf and make coffee. I skip my morning writing…not good. Why? Because I feel hurried? Not a good sign.
The feeling of being hurried is perhaps the most toxic of all stresses. Half the time I inflict it upon myself because I have an overly active imagination. When I feel hurried, everything takes twice as long to accomplish because I don’t work well under the gun. I screw things up more when I’m rushing and then I have to start all over again, or clean up some mess that I’ve created while I was speeding around like a white tornado.
Haste makes waste.
“Slow down!” my father used to say when he saw that I looked stressed. He must have figured this one out years early. I don’t recall listening to him at the time. Perhaps I can listen to him now from my memories of him. “Ok…Dad….I get it. Or at least I am trying to get it.”
Slow down.
“Take a deep breath and slow down.” If only he would have finished the sentence with something like, “Things will go much better.” I probably wouldn’t have heard them because I would have been out the door in the middle of his sentence. "Ya ya ya...gotta go!" With all my rushing, the only place I ever got to, was right here, right now.
I have something to add to this. When we rush around in a hurry we lose our ability to listen to wisdom and we squander time doing things that don’t even need to be done right now. So I think I’d like to add something to my father’s wisdom.
Slow down and listen.
Listen to the voice that says…you do have time; everything in your stride. The only thing that is making us hurry is us. Besides, you know it’s only going to take twice as long if you rush…so stop it. Knock it off.
And so a new day begins…nice and easy does it.
I wake up at 4:02 am. Willi’s stomach is gurgling again and he is staring me down. After a week of homemade dog food which I thought had cured his illness, we are at the beginning of his cycle again. This tells me his stomach problems are not coming from the food he is eating. It’s a pattern. His vet has ruled out other more serious conditions which leaves only a few other possibilities. I had hoped the homemade food had cured what ailed him but it has not. One more visit to the vet.
I take him for a walk at 4:15 am because he seems to be telling me it's urgent. The temperature outside has plummeted and the night air is so cold that it stings my face and goes through my jeans and long underwear stinging my legs. The snow is squeaking and snapping underfoot. We hardly make it to the park before Willi starts pulling me back home. It’s even too cold for him.
Back again five minutes later but now wide awake because of the fresh air, I decide to read for awhile in the hope that I will doze off. I make myself comfortable on the couch and continue to read the Dorothy Parker Biography that I’ve been plodding through for over a month now. I can’t help but feel a kinship with her; her love of dogs, her life as a writer, and her tendency to be on the depressive side. All these things, for better or worse, resonate with me.
Despite all my efforts to find a sleepy state again, I am unable to fall back asleep. I wind up going back to bed around 5:30 but poor Willi’s gurgling stomach keeps me wide awake. I finally throw in the towel at 6:45 and make my morning decaf and start to write.
How would I live my life without reading and writing? They are actually the things I love to do the most. Without them I would be lost. Writing is how I get through all my toughest times and reading has become my greatest comfort. Without these two things to center my mind, in the dead of night, I would surely be adrift.
As I finish this I am sipping on my second cup of coffee, and the sun is beginning to come through the frozen windows of my writing room. This winter has been hard and long and I am growing weak from the cold and still there is February to go through. I hope it will speed by or warm up.
And so a new day begins…far too early.
I wake up at 6:45 am, a bit early for a Saturday morning. Stephen and Willi are sound asleep as I make my way down the hall to the kitchen. I make decaf and sit down to write in my morning pages book. A stream of names of people I need to write or phone come through my hand onto the page.
Johanna, my dearest cousin, gave birth on Thursday to a healthy baby girl. Mother and daughter are happy and healthy I am told. My uncle and aunt are happy to be grandparents at last. Everyone is rejoicing at the birth of our new family member.
My life, as I figure it sometimes, is just about half over. Here is a new family member just starting out in the world. I can’t help but be reminded of my own mortality at times like this…when this girl is my age, if I’m lucky…I will be an old man.
Why did I just have images of Kindergarten and the smell of Elmer’s glue on orange construction paper flash through my mind? Cut out paper snowflakes and the taste of apple juice in Dixie cups seem to be coming up; my favourite blanket, which my mother lovingly gave me to take to Kindergarten to take naps on. A tiny piece of home...my safety blanket for the big wide world. What is life but a dance of wanting to go out into the world and at the same time just wanting to go home to someone who will wipe our misunderstood tears away from our faces.
Inside each one of us, is our original self. Kindergarten reminds me of that essential self. The things I loved then are still the things I love now. It’s important to remember who we really are underneath all the things we’ve become. That is where home is…and some days…like today, I just want to go home.
And so a new day begins…
Happy Birthday Alana! Oh my goodness you are as old as me. Well God help us both. Remember...you are not getting older, and in your case I actually tend to believe this. I haven't forgotten, I've just been swamped at work all day. I will call you from home when I get there.
I wake at 6:45 am. Stephen is well underway…almost out the door when I hear him shuffling the cars around in the driveway. The room is almost completely dark, except for the slightest hint of early morning. I am warm under the blanket and would prefer to fall back asleep but of course that is not on the agenda today. Willi has found a cozy spot on the foot of the bed and is sleeping peacefully. Could this be the same dog that was so irritated just a few days ago? What a little home cookin’ can do.
I finally get up as Stephen is heading out the door. A subzero breeze comes down the hall as he leaves for work. The cold is getting to me. It’s been fine until now, but this morning it hit me; it is as cold as bloody Jerry Falwell out there.
I go to the kitchen and make a pot of decaf. I am bored. I am bordering on lackluster but living in dreary. I am as flat and chalky as a pancake at Denny’s minus the syrup and butter. I am not a whirlpool, nor an impending thunderstorm. I am the bathwater someone forgot to empty out the night before. I am an unfocused idea that may or may not hit the drawing board. I am a hand sketch I started but will get around to finishing when I find the time. I am a Will & Grace rerun, or as Rob would call it…Will & Disgrace. I have lost my will and what a disgrace. I am not exactly depressed, I am just recessed. I have swallowed up too many negative disgusting images of late and they are watering me down; I am a self-portrait in shades of decaf.
And so a new day begins…
I wake at 5:30 am. A nightmare wakes me. In the dream I am fighting for my life. Which life is that? The one I've had these past two years or the one before that? In reality, I have forgotten to turn the heat down and am overheating under the covers. It’s one of those dreams that seem real and even probable. I get up and turn down the heat in the house. When I return to the bed Willi has taken my spot.
After lying in bed for another twenty minutes I realize that it is a hopeless case to try to fall back asleep again. I missed my early morning writing practice yesterday and perhaps this is why the chaos is showing up in my dreams. I head for the kitchen and write three pages of stream of consciousness anything. Better out there than in here I tell myself. And it helps a bit. I work through the dream and what it is trying to tell me. One of the messages in the dream is simple…to keep my cool. Turn the heat down so that I won’t unconsciously lose my head. That sounds like good advice.
Willi is doing better it seems. Perhaps he really was just sick of the smell of his food. Anyway, I am determined to have my dog around for as long as possible and if that means cooking his food for him than so be it. He seems visibly energized and happier on his new diet.
I watched a bit of American Idol last night. Paula Abdul is absolutely hysterically funny to watch. I think she has finally found her true calling…judging other people’s voices. God knows she didn’t have much of a voice herself. But you have to give her credit for having become as famous as she did with the little tiny voice that she has. Notice she’s not using it anymore and is anyone upset or missing it?
What really fascinates me about this show are the people who are absolutely howlingly hideous singers…I mean they are sooooo bad. And the judges are merciless.
”Don’t sing anymore…hideous!” Simon says, while Paul Abdul buries her face in her hands shaking her head in disbelief, not knowing if she should laugh or cry.
Their condemnation of the terrible singers is a calculated attempt at generating buzz and word of mouth. In the end it’s all about ratings not reality. Notice that there are only two kinds of contestants in the American Idol version of talent: The ones who can really sing and the ones who are just unbelievably dreadful and deluded. What about the singers who are not half bad but not particularly compelling? We never get to see them because they are too bland and cause no emotional reaction whatsoever, and as a result no word of mouth. In the real world of singing there are many more people in this in-between category.
So, once again Hollywood perpetuating a myth about artists and talent that is only two dimensional: Singers either have a rip roaring talent, or they are dreadful and utterly self-deluded. What about the ones that have real potential and are developing…they are conspicuously absent from Hollywood’s version of talent and only become visible again once they have attained the status of the undeniably talented. Hmmm, once again the culture is generating bad and inaccurate ideas about what it means to be an artist.
And so a new day begins...
I wake up at 7:12 am. Stephen is all dressed up in suit and tie this morning with a full day ahead of him. A meeting with the client. My agenda for the day: Staying warm. Staying interested.
I took Willi to the vet yesterday because of the irritation in his digestive system. His vet listed a bunch of things it could be, none of which sounded particularly calming or reassuring to me.
Earlier in the day I had tried to feed him his dog food, a mix of dry and canned hypoallergenic dog food that the vet had recommended. I had mixed it together for his morning meal and he had snubbed his nose at it, so I put some plastic wrap on it and stuck it in the fridge for later. In the afternoon I took it out of the fridge and heated it up in the microwave. I accidentally left it in the microwave a bit too long and it came out steaming hot. As I pulled it from the microwave I got a steaming whiff of it in my face. Yuck! It smelled horrid. No wonder he didn’t want to eat this shit. I would rather starve to death than to have to endure such a stink in my face.
A simple dim little light went on.
Perhaps Willi just can’t stand the smell of his dog food anymore. Who could blame him? It was then and there that I decided I would make my own dog food from now on. My mother just happened to have a book on this very subject and so last night, from a basic recipe I found in this book, I prepared Willi his first homemade meal, consisting of lean ground chicken and rice with a teaspoon of olive oil and shaved carrot and zucchini. He lapped up every last bit of it and then asked for a second helping which I gave him. After that Willi went around smiling, happier than I had seen him in weeks. Let’s hope it is good for his stomach as well. I think it will be.
Usually if something stinks…ummm, it stinks for a reason. We need to follow our instincts more and listen to experts a little less. Fresh is better than canned. Fresh is better than dried. I can now eat my dog’s food without the slightest hesitation because it smells good and I know what’s in it. Can you say that about what you are feeding your dog this morning? Hmmm, maybe sometimes we need to rethink things.
Get and give fresh. Daaaah
And so a new day begins…
I wake up at 6:50 am. I make a mental list of all the things I need to do today, none of which I find particularly wonderful. I do not feel like rising but I do anyway.
Willi has stopped eating again. Two days now he has just refused to eat anything. Time to go to the vet again. His stomach has not been normal for months and he goes through a cycle of eating then getting ill, then refusing to eat then getting better again, eating for a few days until the whole thing starts all over again. Poor little guy. I have been to the vet at least five times with this problem over the past few months but nothing we have tried in terms of diet has made much of a difference. Every time I think we have finally licked the problem, it starts again. Of course the fear I have is that something evil and horrible is lurking.
Stress!
My health has not been great since August of last year, and the rounds of antibiotics I had been on during the past few months have done nothing to restore me to health. Once again I have a skin infection on my face which probably calls for further antibiotic treatment. Perhaps I should just let my immune system deal with it and not intervene with antibiotics.
On a brighter note, I would like to wish my longtime friend Shad a very Happy Birthday. Here's a picture from 1983 when we were all so much younger...Time is passing. I hope you have a great day and wish you all the best. Take some time for yourself for goodness sakes!
And so a new day begins...
The course of human relationships seems to consist of a constant dynamic flow of push and pull. To some people we are drawn like a magnet, to others we feel pushed away or repelled. These forces are in play at all times. People will come and go, live and die, push and pull, and out of all this commotion, if we are lucky, with some people we will form deep, eternal attachments.
Attachments are never light or fluffy because they involve the very real potential of loss; the greater the attachment the greater the loss. And this is where the push and pull of relationships comes from, in an implicit awareness that if I love you I could lose you and that would leave me with a hole in my heart. But if I do not take the risk to love, then my heart may be intact but it will be empty. The blood of attachment will not pump through it and my heart will choke and contract onto its own emptiness.
Even the heart muscle itself is constantly pushing and pulling the blood through our bodies. When that pushing and pulling stops...it’s over.
I have known the feeling of deep attachment in my life and I have the holes in my heart to prove it. Still I can’t imagine it any other way. I would rather have holes and chunks taken out of me from the devastating loss that always comes with deep attachments, than to have remained pristinely unscathed by life. Life is a messy business, love and attachments are as messy as it gets.
I walk up to the coffin, and place my hand on his cold dead thirty-one year old hand. Could this be the hand that I held onto for support and love? Could this be the hand that knew every curve of my being? Could this be the hand that once wiped away the tears from my face? Could this be the hand that I wanted so desperately to hold for all my life? This cold still hand I thought I could never live without... this room temperature hand that will be incinerated and gone from this universe within the hour? What are attachments good for if they end like this?
Everything.
So that you will know that you were alive, that you will know in your heart you didn’t just stand there pretending, fooling away the days. Attachments are not for the weak of heart, they take guts and courage. They will leave holes in your heart and initiate your soul, but the other option, to run from making connections and attachments is even more devastating; you will have scarcely lived.
So, a new day begins…Three down, three to go.
Had a horrible night’s sleep. After Gangs of New York, I couldn’t unwind, and then when I finally did fall asleep Willi was staring me down again and woke me up. It was 2:30 am when I put my clothes back on and went for an emergency walk with the dog.
When I got back I had lost interest in sleeping. Willi promptly went back to bed and I went to the living room and put on the DVD of Order And Disorder, Episode two: 1825-1865 New York, A Documentary Film by Ric Burns. What a wonderful piece of work about New York. I have always had a “thing” for New York; this might be due to the fact that I was born there, January 5, 1961.
After watching “Gangs” I was drawn more deeply into the historic period of New York, leading up to the Civil War. Many people seem to be unaware of the violence and tragedies that have always been an ongoing part of the city's history. The Trade Center Attacks were yet just another tragedy in a city that has had more than its ample share of such horrors.
How about the great depression in the early thirties? Fully one third of the labor force in Manhattan found itself unemployed and on the verge of starvation with practically no social programs in place to divert such a massive disaster. Corrupt city government diverted and siphoned off much of the money that was supposed to go to relief efforts. We can only begin to imagine the human suffering that millions had to endure during those years. Anyone interested in the History of New York owes it to themselves to watch the complete Ric Burns’ New York, A documentary Film. It’s entirely spellbinding and comprehensive.
I finally got to bed some time after 5 am. Yikes.
And so a new day begins…
I’d like to look out my window, I really would, but it’s so damn darn cold out there that the windows in this 1961 house we live in are frozen over. All I see are intricate patterns of chaos. Finally the outside matches the inside, not exactly the synchronicity I’ve been hoping for. By the time I finish writing this the sun will have melted away most of the chaos on the surfaces but what is deeper down is not so simple.
I have been tied up at the office these past few days trying to put out a software glitch in our accounting department. Not exactly my idea of fun and frolic. Do you know what this does to a creative person like me? Never mind. I have been socially negligent, not writing emails to people who are on my mind, not making phone calls to my friends, in short, a bad, bad boy. I am hoping for a swift and blatant return to good health.
Victor and Raff, it was so nice to spend time with you last Saturday evening…dinner and the symphony. Rob, I’ve been meaning to call you for two days, what about “The Hours?" Have you seen it yet? Steve, I’ve been listening to your CD in the car and haven’t had a chance to tell you all the things I like about it. Shad, I’ve got a few questions for you. Susi, how are you doing? Mother, I love the flowers you bought me for my birthday. Yvette, just keep going! John thanks for the poetic comments. Carol, I will call you soon and was so happy to hear back from you and about your lessons with Cornelius Reid; Craig, we will get together soon…I will call you. Jer, I hope you are feeling better and will return to publishing soon.
Please forgive me; it’s been a week like that. Now my windows are chaos covered and the cold from outside is radiating in through the windows and walls.
I feel stilted, like someone is holding a gun to my head saying...”Write! Write something funny!”
What is to you funny?
I didn’t start with morning pages…so what do I expect…my inner critic is making me nuts this morning. “So you think you can write? You’re boring, you're old, and did you know that it’s still possible to get the plague and die from it? No shit! You have a boring life. Why don’t you quit writing? Why don't you take up smoking again? You’re not even funny anymore.”
What is to you funny?
Thanks for sharing. And who the fcuk said I had to be funny? Take a hike! I need to drop my inner critic into a vat of stupidity where he/she/it will feel well taken care of. When Walt Whitman said we contain multitudes, I wish he would have been more specific. He could have warned us about the one with the nasty high pitched voice whose main purpose in life is to tell you exactly how unfunny, how untalented, how much of a failure you really are despite all the evidence to the contrary.
What is to you funny?
And so a new day begins…
I get back in from our surprise early morning walk at around 1:00 am. I am wide awake again. I try to go back to bed but after about twenty minutes I realize that this isn’t going to work. I head out to the living room, blanket and pillow in hand and make myself comfortable on the couch.
I watch a DVD of the old Lucy Show…the episode where Lucy Carmichael tries to get Jack Benny to move his money into the bank where she works for Mr. Mooney. This calms me a bit. The benign, mischievous universe of Lucy always calms me.
I realize that this redheaded genius has kept me company so often throughout my life. From my earliest memories of watching I Love Lucy in the mornings while my mother cleaned the house, right up until right now, Lucy has always been there for me. She is a true and cherished friend; she has never let me down. If things get frazzled around the edges, all I need to do is watch any episode of I Love Lucy, and the world becomes a kinder, more hopeful place. In Lucy’s world, things like cancer, heart disease, AIDS, war and terrorism simply do not exist. No mention of any hard realities…pure escapism. When I was a kid, I imagined that life would turn out like an I Love Lucy episode. Lucy helps me to regain some much needed innocence.
Thank you Lucy, thanks for keeping me such good company all these years, for making me laugh with all my heart, for calming me down and letting me live for a brief moment in a universe that is utterly devoid of evil, a universe in which I can fall asleep with a smile on my face.
And so a new day begins…
In bed by 10:35 pm. Read a few pages of the Dorothy Parker biography I am plodding my way through. Lights out at 11:05 pm. 12:45 am there is a white dog staring at me so loudly that it wakes me from my sound sleep. Guess who needs to go out for yet another walk? This happens when Willi gets irregular.
His stomach has been bothering him again. I think he’s allergic to the office and each time I take him to work with me he gets his stomach all upset. Well, here I am wide awake when I should be a sleep.
I wanted dogs, so now I have the consequences of my choices. That’s just the way it is folks. We choose, then we live our choices in the form of consequences. I love my puppy dog, never had a better friend, but at times like this I feel like a mother with a permanent new born infant, up for one of those fun 2:00am feedings. Yikes! Only this is a 1:00am pooping. Consequences…not circumstances.
I wake at 7:05 am. I feel rested. I head for the kitchen and make six cups of decaf which will turn into three mugs. I open my morning pages book and write three pages of stream of consciousness anything. I listen to the yammering in my head and do my best to transcribe it onto the page where it will be out there and not in here.
Writing is how I save myself. Writing is how I navigate my way through my life. Writing is how I gain access to my other forms of creativity. When I stop writing, I also stop singing, and drawing, and composing. The more I write the more creativity comes through me. That’s just how it works for me. Writing is the opening to my creative well. What is yours? What is your trigger?
I want to touch upon a disease we all suffer from to some degree in our western culture. Let’s call it the Notime disease. Our culture loves new diseases and if you can turn a habit or condition into a disease you have a whole new brand you can sell to people. So let’s call it Notime disorder. Notime disorder can be diagnosed using the following five questions.
1. You find yourself saying the following phrase in a slightly agitated tone at least once a day…”I have no time!.”
2. You find yourself trying to remember what it was you were trying to remember but you forget.
3. You often hear yourself saying things like, “I really would love to do that but____”
4. The phrase, “It must be nice” has become a theme song of your life.
5. You find yourself rattled with guilt because you have taken one minute to go to the bathroom.
If you answered yes to anyone of these questions…you are a notimeaholic and therefore are justified in seeking treatment. One of the other epidemics in our culture is that we cannot address issues without guilt and shame unless we can find or invent a pathology that is treatable, but that’s a whole other kettle of fish now isn’t it.
The only known treatment for this disease is rather simple to understand and largely consists of the cultivation of what is known as time thievery. Go out and steal your time back from whatever is eating you. I don’t want to hear any excuses…just do it, and then tell me how it can’t be done.
And so a new day begins…
I wake at 7:10 am. It’s dark out. I make decaf and head straight to my computer because there are some things that I need to say you; remind you of.
You must know that you are important in this life, in the world, that you are unique and precious. There will never be another you, and if you don’t say it and you don’t tell it, sing it, dance it, paint it, build it, write it, then who will? WHO WILL? It will go into your grave with you. Don’t let that happen. Make something that will stay behind in the hearts and minds of those who love you.
I know some of you are not bathed in relief by me telling you this. You have enough on your plates already; you are busy making a living, feeding yourself and others, reaching for goals or just trying to make it another day. I know. And now I am asking you to be yourself on top of all that other crap. Please, don’t be the one tossing yourself away.
Done that? Been there? Tell me about it. NO! I mean it literally: Tell me about it! Tell us about it! NOW! How are you tossing yourself away? Tell us!
Yesterday, I performed an experiment. I had my first open mic day, but very few of you took the opportunity to say anything at all. Craig wrote about his frustrations with love as a gay man, and Alexandre reminded me to go see “My Big Fat Greek Wedding”. But what about the rest of you? Scared? Bored? Couldn’t be bothered? You didn’t have the time? Afraid to make a fool of yourself? Well, I make a fool out of myself every day…and you read it.
You people need to come out! I’ve been busting my ass here for months, writing my fingers to the elbow. Take five minutes, and write me something…tell me what happened to you this morning, in the first five minutes of your day. What did you feel, what did you think, what where your hopes and dreams? What are you fed up with? Who do you feel like strangling? Who would you miss? Who do you miss right now with all your heart? Tell me…I need to know; we need to know.
And If you need some lessons on how to do this SoBlo can instruct you by example. Here’s a man who puts all of us to shame; each day he puts his heart and soul on the line, telling us his story. This takes real guts. Have some guts. Tell him that it matters! Tell us that you matter by telling us what matters to you!
BECAUSE WE NEED TO HEAR IT! DAMNIT!
This is your big chance, your window of opportunity…seize the day, don’t just say to yourself, someone else will comment, someone else will write. I am urging you to write…right now!
And so a new day begins…with me in your face!
I am not going to write anything today. Woops, I just did. What I mean to say is that I’ve been writing a lot lately, and I’m a bit tired. I need a chance to restock my creative pond. This is where you can help me out. What’s on your mind today? How about speaking out about that, just the way I’ve been doing for months. I pass you the mic, and invite you to say what’s on your mind.
For those who leave questions I’ll be checking in periodically to answer them. For those of you who just want to bring up your own stories, by all means...it’s your day today. Feel free. Don’t be shy, this is 2003 and we need all the help we can get.
Any Questions? Fire away.
And so a new day begins…
I wake up at 7:15 am. I feel groggy this morning. Not cozy…groggy. I bypass my morning writing by hand and move directly to the computer. Not a good sign. Did you know the word sign is the dyslexic version of the word sing?
I spent yesterday in the studio working with a young singing talent. A good friend of mine has a daughter with an incredible ear and a nice voice in need of cultivation. What to do at 13 years of age? Show business is tough. Having talent is one thing, and being driven is another and it seems that perhaps a person needs both. “I must sing.” is just as, if not more important than “I can sing.”
I am not the kind of person who thinks kids in show business are cute. But I do believe that if you want to pursue a career in music, it helps to know it when you are young. Judy Garland started singing when she was 2 years old. It was in her bones and she had a stage mother that fostered her incredible talent. Talents like Judy or Celine are not accidents…they are incubated; they are cultivated from early on. Talent in of itself only offers up a possibility or opportunity; drive plus direction turn talent into something useful and marketable and sometimes an unstoppable inevitability.
What do I say to a mother with a gifted child? Allow your child to be obsessed about something. Allow your child to dig deeper into her talents. Encourage depth and involvement. Uncover the true passion that is being revealed by the talent. In the end the child has to be utterly certain of his or her direction.
When I was five I thought I really wanted to learn to play the piano. Until I took six months of piano lessons and realized, hey this may not be for me. I can’t read the damn darn notes and I have this photographic ear that interferes with reading. I hear melodies and no longer need to read them. This is good up until they get too complicated to remember. Then, BOOM! I hit a wall. Never mind, I hit a mountain and I am afraid of heights. Talent is not enough. You cannot be afraid of the heights. And if you are, you need to have a great deal of courage and drive. There’s that ugly word again. In my humble opinion…talent is common…real unconditional longing and striving are much rarer. “I will sing, I will be heard! I must!” Now that has legs.
Myth: Talent is discovered.
Truth: Talent is painstakingly cultivated, driven, focused, ramped up, supported, with a thousand little baby steps and successes before it's brought to the market place. And that is the lucky break.
Now go get focused. On your tombstone it should read…Joe Doe… just had to sing. (Substitute the word “sing” with your own unstoppable passion)
And so a new day begins…now go take some unstoppable baby steps.
I wake at 8:07 am. Willi is still in bed next to me curled up in what looks like a pretty cozy position. It is my deepest wish in life to be able to find a cozy position, and be able to effortlessly curl myself up into it at will, at any given moment.
The last time I felt cozy was in 1979. I was eighteen years old. Since then, what has characterized my days is the type of energy that is usually associated with
impending electrical storms, drought, and the wild enthusiasm usually associated with brief but exhilarating rollercoaster rides. It’s been exciting, sometimes depressing, and it has definitely been challenging, but believe me, never a cozy moment since 1979.
That summer Victor and I were in the midst of building out a recording studio in my parent’s basement in which we envisioned recording an album of original songs. Susi, Kurt with their three year old son Mark were visiting from Austria. I slept in the studio for three weeks while our guests stayed in my bedroom for the duration of their visit. I remember waking up, in the silence of the newly insulated studio; cozy under the duvet, and completely at rest and at ease with the world. The future stretched out ahead of me, a white sand beach of opportunity met by a sea of turquoise blue.
Oceans are seductive and evoke all sorts of potentialities, and after all wasn’t I the person who loved to be by the water. Unaware of sharks and hurricanes I flung myself into it, completely unprepared for what lay at the bottom. Remember, I had not survived a world war; nor had I survived any life altering tragedy, these sorts of things still lay underneath.
I had been blessed by a stable family life, two loving parents and an older brother who firmly believed that it was entirely possible that he might one day become the president of the United States. Where did he get these ideas from…the same place I got my ideas: “You can do anything you want Mark! The world is your oyster.” My father would enthuse, painting me my very own sea of unlimited potentials. “Oysters…aren’t they those grey ugly slurpy things that come from the bottom of the ocean, that you couldn’t get me to look at much less slush down my throat?” Ya, well… then I’m in trouble. But in my cozy state, the words “Anything you want” sounded so comforting to me.
Life was good; we were spoiled. The fact that I was gay…Well I had successfully denied it up until this warm and fuzzy moment in time. It’s not that I didn’t know something was up, I did, but because I didn’t like what was up, I denied it quite successfully. This undoubtedly contributed to my false sense of serenity.
I am a person who is easily nauseated by things that other more sophisticated, more refined types find to be delicacies. To me, smoking a cigarette while driving a very large dry, straight up, gin martini with five olives around a marble surface was more my speed. I was later to discover that gin could stop adrenaline dead in its tracks. And once I got going and all that coziness came undone, there was one thing I had in spades; adrenaline.
Could my queasiness have been the early telltale signs of an overly sensitive person? Why do I even bother asking that question?
All this to say that…some people are prone to sea sickness and oysters are only aphrodisiacs if one can stand the sight of their grey, shiny vileness. Also, wide open seas of potential, no matter how deeply turquoise blue or picturesque they may appear from the shoreline of cozy, contain sharks and hurricanes.
There wasn’t anything innately wrong with the first part of what my father said. “You can do anything you want!” It was the second part that I should have been paid closer attention to. “The world is your oyster!” Yuck.
“Just close your eyes, open your mouth, and swallow. It’s nothing like what it looks… believe me!” my mother would say with a slight trill in her voice as she squirted the juice of a freshly cut lemon on top.
It would have been so much easier, so much cozier if my father had just said…”Mark… it’s a dog's life…curl up at the foot of the bed and call it a day.”
And so a new day begins…
Sentimental Reasons
I sleep until 8:30 am. Insomnia will do that. Never mind. The wonderfully supportive and kind words that came in via email about yesterday's post had me feeling pretty up, and I just didn’t want to go to sleep.
Thanks to SoBlo for driving traffic to my site yesterday, and to Jockohomo for the kind email about my singing and offering to add a link to his site…deeply appreciated! Last but certainly not least, thank you Dailyrob for being my friend for thousands of days and for being one of my key collaborators. Also to those of you who wrote emails and left comments yesterday, my singer's heart thanks you from the very bottom.
In keeping with yesterday’s theme of love, I offer up Sentimental Reasons for those of you who didn't get a chance to hear it the last time.
And so a new day begins…
I wake up. It’s entirely too dark outside my window. Stephen has already gotten up; I hear him coughing down the hall. Willi is tucked up next to me on the bed, lying on his back, little black paws in the air…snoring. It’s 7:30 am.
I head for the kitchen, make some decaf, sit and write three pages of absolutely anything. This is supposed to clear the brain of noise; the ramblings and musings of a complete and utter lunatic. The theory goes that if you get it out on paper it won’t infest the rest of your day. It’s a great theory but it doesn’t always work.
Yesterday’s reminiscence of young love is still swilling around in my consciousness, so it comes to me that I recorded a song during the last week of December which I would like to share with you today. Wilson had loved to sing Stardust and he had actually recorded it in my studio back in 1985. It was one of the few recordings he ever made.
After his death, I would periodically play the tape of him singing it, his gentle soul forever immortalized in the magnetic particles on the tape. As I would hear him sing…
The melody haunts my reverie
And I am once again with you
When our love was new
And each kiss an inspiration…
I sometimes would feel as if he had recorded this particular song to haunt me…to make it impossible for me to forget what we had meant to each other. Indeed, the melody and hearing him singing it as if he were still alive remains a haunting experience. Thank God there was this piece of him still alive and well, while the rest of him had turned to dust.
In recent years I hadn’t played it, but as I began choosing songs to record for a new voice demo, I felt the time had come for me to make a recording of it. It also was entirely in synch with the retro mood I find myself in lately.
Was I trying to haunt someone in the future, or was I just in love with this song? Was I singing it back to Wilson across the unknown into eternity or was I just inspired by his original performance and perhaps channel some of his feelings into the present moment? The answer is yes…for all those reasons and probably a few I don’t even fully comprehend.
So here it is…I hope you enjoy it and that it might haunt your reveries. I dedicate it to Jer and Emm and all the young lovers in the world who get too close for comfort sometimes and find themselves haunted by stardust melodies and dreaming in vain.
And so a new day begins…
“Soblo broke up with his boyfriend Emm.” Stephen tells me a few days ago. How unfortunate I think…”Weren’t they in love?” Then I think, why do I care, I don’t know him personally, or do I? Then Steve also mentions Soblo in one of our recent conversations about online journals, so now I am curious. But what I am not bargaining for is the power of his ability to communicate and the story that just happens to be unfolding. I print out his words and take them to bed to read.
My entire relationship with Wilson flashes before my eyes. I was young once too. Step for step, thought for thought I find myself retracing the pieces of my own twenty-four year old broken heart. The writing on the wall, the tell tale signs…the waiting for the phone to ring, the call not coming. Making the phone call, to find him at home watching television. What is wrong? The slipping away. The uneasy feeling in the pit of your stomach. The awkward moments and strange silences in what used to be an easy exchange. The “Talk”; the break up. The alarming pain. The bone numbing exhaustion mixing with all his explanations that repeat and repeat in your head until you think you just can’t anymore. The feeling of falling a very long distance. The fear that you will never be the same. The world keeps turning painfully and outrageously in your face to let you know how your little broken heart is only in your mind.
And what is he feeling? Nothing, right? He's happy, he's free, right? And the stupid questions just keep on coming for weeks and weeks.
This too will pass.
Yes and no. It will pass but you will be different. You will no longer love the way you just did. Something gets removed from the heart; innocence. And although you mourn for the loss of your loved one now, you will one day find yourself praying for the return of your innocence. If you are alive, I mean passionately alive, there is not a force in the world that can keep you from losing your innocence or bringing it back once it is gone. That's just the way it goes.
Remember…you said hello to him. You looked into his eyes. You went on the date, you said yes...again and again…and now you are here and not there. You were young but now you are not.
The Night is bitter
The Stars have lost their glitter
The winds grow colder
Suddenly you're older
And all because of
The Man That Got Away
No more his eager call
The writing's on the wall...
(Ira Gershwin)
End of act one. Stay tuned for the "return". There is always a return in every good love story. I give it six to eight weeks.
And so a new day begins…
I wake at 4:48am. The room is pitch black. There is only the green light from the cable box clock which I attempt to focus my forty-two year old eyes on in the dark. Focusing in the dark is harder now. 4:48am it says. Hmmm. What fun.
I try to fall back asleep. My mind is racing with a million chaotic thoughts, none of which I find particularly soothing or rest inducing. If only there was a switch on my own brain I could throw when my mind becomes a sea of noise in the middle of the night. I listen to the noise in my head and glance occasionally at the cable box clock for what must be about forty minutes. Finally I decide that there is no point in fighting it…for better or worse, I am awake.
I head for my morning writing spot, I make decaf. I drain my brain onto the page in an effort to untangle and subdue the noise.
“What really stopped you?”, Steve’s words cutting their way out of the noise. Steve is a person I met through the website. He left a comment here the other day, and he is right, we have many similar interests and concerns in common. We had a couple of really interesting conversations about our parallel worlds, but it’s this question that sticks in my mind, and after attempting to catalogue all the things that went wrong, I came to the same conclusion…I put myself here. I decided to stand in front of the speeding train. I walked out on the thin ice to find out exactly how thin it was. We put ourselves into the situations that “stop” us. We make the decisions. We are where we are because we chose it, one tiny decision at a time.
So, the only meaningful answer to Steve’s question is…I did it. I stopped myself…and started myself, and did whatever I did to myself.
If my studio was broken into and I felt victimized by it, felt beaten down because of it…I chose this studio…this location, this building. I could have chosen something else. I could have had an alarm system. It’s not my fault that there are thieves, but it was my choices that put me in their path.
The good news is…since we put ourselves where we are, we can also put ourselves somewhere else. We can make new decisions. We can learn to experiment more consciously. We can remember that we are accountable for the messes or successes we find ourselves in. We make our own insomnia…we can wake up and unmake it just as well.
And so, a new day begins…
I love this time of year. After the big snowfalls and the world is blanketed in white a person cannot help but be refreshed by all this crystal energy. Memories of childhood joy came flooding back as I walked Willi in the snow.
Today is a day for sorting. Usually the day after my birthday I sort things out. I open unopened mail, I pay bills, and I find the surfaces of my life. Today I realized that I had not filed away any of my bills or statements from 2002.
A whole year has gone by since I last did my own personal filing. I had just been sticking everything into a box to be filed away later. That gives us some indication of what 2002 was like around here. Later finally arrived.
I spent the rest of my birthday yesterday just as I said I would. Yvette dropped by with some birthday gifts, and then Yvette, Stephen and I each had a glass of champagne, after which I felt slightly ill as I don’t drink anymore as a rule. What an interesting sensation alcohol is for a person who no longer drinks. It feels poisonous. Once as pure as the driven snow…was is a thatmark to do?
Once again I feel a strange optimism blowing in from the north. Some internal slates have been wiped clear, and suddenly there is a trickle of creative glee, something that I have been lacking for more than half a year now.
And so, a new day begins…
The phone rang early and it was Alexandre, calling me to wish me a happy birthday. We had a nice talk about things that artists talk about. We must have been on the phone for over an hour.
During my conversation with Alexandre, Dimitri called to wish me a happy birthday. He was in Toronto on a layover but was on his way back to Vancouver. Would have been nice to see him but there was not enough time.
Shortly after my conversation with Alexandre, Shad called to wish me a happy birthday. We talked for quite a while. Her 13 year old daughter is showing strong artistic talents, in singing, comedy and imitations. Her quandary: should she encourage her daughter’s artistic talents or should she encourage a more traditional path.
Beate sent me an Happy Birthday e-card which I had already received before I went to bed.
Then Susi sent me a Happy Birthday email wish.
The phone rang and it was my Mother to wish me a Happy Birthday. We talked for quite some time until my mother realized she had a headache.
Hans sent me a Happy Birthday e-card from his entire family.
The phone rang and it was Trude, a good friend of the family’s who always calls me every year come hell or high water. There are few people like her on this planet, she is a treasure.
And that’s my day so far. As I said yesterday, I have made no plans to do anything today…just stay at home and read a book or watch a movie. I’ve wanted to see “Gangs of New York” since it came out but have not been able to get there. Also, “The Hours” which just came out.
And so the day is half over…which is more than I can say for myself.
Tomorrow is my birthday. I’ve been here 15330 days not taking into account leap years. I’ve never been able to figure out leap years…or leap frogs or Midsummer Night Dreams for that matter. It’s Ok.
This morning, as the sun came through my window for the first time in days, I just couldn’t imagine growing old. I tried to imagine myself at seventy or eighty but none of the pictures I imagined in my head had me in them. I never had a problem seeing myself at forty, but trying to imagine what it will be like in old age is like trying to imagine breathing water. I can’t conceive of it. What on earth will keep my body and soul together for another ten thousand days? I feel so much like a loose tooth from life already; just dangling on some gum tissue…one good yank and BOOM, there I am, meeting the tooth fairy in person. There isn’t anything physically wrong with me but an immense soul weariness.
So, I have decided to keep a low profile. No party or gathering is required. I just want to stay in and read a book or dream of living in New York, or what it would be like to have blue eyes for a day. I want the peace in which to contemplate my prospects. Perhaps if I can focus the strands that keep me attached might grow sturdier.
And so, a new day begins…
Well, I’m getting my refracted light requirements; it snowed, or rather is still snowing. Why is it that I don’t seem to have a snow blower? I live centimeters from the North Pole but fail to realize this simple fact: Winter…Snow. Winter…Snow. Na, it’s not resonating. It’s as if I have a slight “snowism”, you know, as in "autism" only fluffier and decidedly less problematic…but here you go, and who wouldn’t want to.
Never mind; it all makes sense on the Planet Debbie.
Interviewer: “So thatmark, tell us once again what ten years of psychotherapy and teams of psychologists around the clock did for you?”
Thatmark: “Ummm…well it wasn’t exactly ten years. (thatmark is counting fingers and switching to toes). The good news is that I have incredibly accurate premonitions which come to me in dreams; the bad news is that I suffer from insomnia, and wake up thinking about business, and how I should really be minding my own, if only I could figure out what that was.
Interviewer: “hmmm.”
Thatmark: “Yes, exactly…hmmm.”
Remind me to tell you all about the time I was dreading the whole idea of taking my clothes off in public. Not an issue anymore…I like my clothes now.
Interviewer: “Back to therapy…”
Thatmark: “Always heavenly. As a matter of fact, I’m one of those strange people who actually enjoys therapy and who wishes he could do it for a living."
Interviewer: “You like therapy.”
Thatmark: “Yes…love it. (Somehow insert breathless enthusiasm).Who in their right mind wouldn’t? In all honesty, I’d love nothing more than to be a professional patient, and be paid twice as much as the psychiatrist. I would prefer to have a session once a day, always in the afternoon, and with lit cigarette in hand and blue smoke billowing, I would tell my “therapist” all about the things I swear to God I remember...especially about my memories and dreams of the future. Also, what I love about one-on-one sessions is that I’m usually not the most peculiar person in the room. Sometimes it becomes difficult to pinpoint precisely which one is the patient, and which one is the therapist. We love that when that happens!"
Interviewer: “So…what about the future?"
Thatmark: “My sentiments exactly.”
Interviewer: “Riveting!”
Thatmark: “You bet your sweet ass it is! You’ll always get your money’s worth around here!”
And so, a new day begins with a blanket of the white stuff, some fairly outrageous make- believe and the occasional stray telemarketer calling me and asking me whether I would enjoy reading their shit-ass newspaper for a couple of weeks, which I of course would most certainly not! I’ve been telling them for years…but they just won’t listen to reason.
Thatmark: “I do not want the “Sun”, or Jupiter or Mars for that matter, on my front door step no matter how incredibly robotic, inconsiderately persistent and idiotically well rehearsed you may drone on about it! And don’t tell me it’s your job honey, ‘cause then I’ll just have to tell you it’s my phone line. Hello! If I could only just get a word in edgewise…thank you; I would tell you that I would just be compelled to fling the “Sun” with great velocity into the recycle bin. I prefer the “Sun” up in the sky where it belongs and fewer unnecessarily murdered trees in the forest where they belong. Now please, I’m begging you, do not call me anymore or I shall be forced to say nasty unpleasant and horribly authentic things to you at this moment!"
So, once again, with shovel in hand, a new day begins…
There is some snow coming; supposed snow. Not a moment too soon. I need some refracted light…my brain does. January without snow is like Simon without Garfunkel, Edith without Head, and Elizabeth without Taylor. The whole thing just doesn’t make a catspoop worth of sense. Ok, so now I am inventing things, making things up, giving haphazard nonsense makeovers to my boredom zones.
Bloody snow enough already!
I can hear Yvette cursing me right now. ‘How the hell do I translate that into German.’ she is thinking.
The spell check thinks I misspelled GARFUNKEL. I’ll give you a garfunkel in a minute! Ah, but if I use capitals I can fool it into thinking I know what I am doing, which is more than I can say for a lot of people in higher places.
I just want to take a moment and thank everyone who reads the doohickeys I write. I am so impressed by you. Thanks for making the time, for taking the time…because after all, time is our greatest gift of all. If you have some more (time), check out Stephen’s New Year’s Resolutions…they made me laugh.
There are so many things that need to be on my list of New Year’s Resolutions that I’ve decided that it would take a couple of years just to jot them all down much less actually do them, and by that point the year would be over…so in an effort to maintain a certain kind of simplicity and brevity, I will take up the peculiar yet necessary art of basket weaving.
Don’t shake your head like that. Not everyone on earth can possess a shining genius.
And so a new day begins…
Today must be the greyest day of the year…well that wouldn’t be hard to do since it is the only day of the year up until now.
We stayed in, watched some of the festivities on television and then called it a night shortly after 1am. I did not toast the New Year as I scarcely wanted anything to do with the last one…so I was more than content to slip through into the New Year without debacle and a modicum of radar visibility.
Despite my obvious pessimism I do feel strangely optimistic. If I scrape down past all the static that has been in my life for the past two years…I remember that I trust color, and that I can still be wildly seduced by the shapes of things; that I hear music…mighty fine music in my head, if not anywhere else, and that there will be spring, and buds, and tulips…and the smell of melting grass and earth in the air. And there will be birds chirping and making nests, and laying eggs…and I will curse myself up and down because these blackbirds that make these nests come back every single year, thinking we own them something, which we probably do.
They rudely show up uninvited and take up residence in the Austrian pine tree at the deep end of the swimming pool.Then, from late April into early June they fly over head and relentlessly poop all over the patio furniture and pool area. Big gobbing white globs of bird poop. Stephen will say, “We can’t have nice things.” And this will be a fairly accurate assessment of the way the world works. I will be power washing the poop from everything or avoiding the pool area altogether.
I don’t want to hear any one say…”Well, you have a pool, I don’t feel sorry for you.” Pools are ideal playgrounds for hyperactive children who possess no real goals in life, migrating ducks, and nest-making, egg-laying, poop-bombing blackbirds. I have generally found that mature adults have nurtured and honed finely developed aversions to swimming pools. Massive flying bird poop does not generally endear anyone to anything; of course, unless there is the smell of charring meat on the BBQ and a smart cocktail or three in hand, in which case a swimming pool can provide a sense of “being on the water”, even when one is in fact hopelessly landlocked.
So all this to say…
And so a new year begins…God help us all.