Jesus Christ, tumblr. You. I’m trying to wallow in self-pity here and you bombard me with posts that hit far too close to home. It doesn’t help that my project at work is about a man who’s tormented by dementia and memories of a dead girlfriend. It’s a blitz from all sides!
Can a man be left alone to brood over his dark thoughts, just for a little while, long enough to forget or numb the mind enough to get by?
“No,” (says the mind, but let’s pretend you said it).
I know.
I had an About Me page until a few days back. It had some info, little tidbits to satisfy basic curiosity. Stuff like a desire to get a motorcycle license or the fact that I work in video games. Small stuff, little things that might make the reader think, “Cool.” They were the things I wasn’t afraid to share. It’s part of a mask I’ve worn for a long, long time. Easy peezy. Impressing people is not that difficult, nor is charm. Charm can be learned, picked up through observation. It is the recourse of someone whose natural instinct is to observe and not interact: learn what sticks, imitate and own it, then pile it on, thick and syrup-like. It is most successful if all who are present are intoxicated, of course.
I employed that charm when I attempted to discuss heavy matters last night after many a bottle of Sierra and Anchor Steam, a car bomb, and I think there was a kamikaze. The folks around me heard, at least a little, and provided well-wishes and requests to “Relax, man. Relax,” because almost no one wants to hear these things. Most people just want to be happy, and I can’t blame them. Happiness is a very pleasant place. I like to be there myself.
Christopher McCandless, aka Alexander Supertramp, spent two years wandering alone, experiencing and living and momentarily enjoying the company of others. I greatly admire this adventurous spirit, this willingness to leave behind a life that is full of pain and confusion. However, when on the verge of death from starvation at the end of his journey, he wrote the following (as portrayed in Into the Wild):
(via Things I Love)
I think about reality a lot. The reality of things I’ve done, those whom I’ve helped and the ones I’ve hurt. They seem unreal, some of my actions. Many things in life don’t seem real. Take, for instance, the universe. Things sometimes seem too coincidental, too poignant. They seem like they’re meant to happen. Is this wishful thinking, someone tweaking the matrix, what? Reality is real, isn’t it? It can’t be anything else.
I think about death a lot, too. It sounds depressing so I don’t make it a topic of conversation.
Are we real?
(It can’t be polite to constantly ask people if they’re real).
The spark that led to this bit of self-reflection is an experience with someone who has suddenly and unexpectedly become very important. I’ve been through it before, I knew how I might react, and yet you are reading this which means history has repeated itself. Whether I find the gall to reach out again remains to be seen. I’d like to think so (though Lord knows I don’t deserve reciprocation). I have, however, learned enough to know when certain thoughts and memories will last, and these will not shake loose. The old mainstays, lots of food and booze, will only serve to sharpen the feelings of these memories instead of dulling them as they might have once done. It is perhaps a case of maturation. I am avoiding the mainstays (last night and the occasional celebration notwithstanding), which I will take as a good sign.
There’s another tumblr post, this one a screenshot from a film (a very excellent film, mind you), that reminded me of the memories that do not slink away.
(via johari-window)
The memories are there. They will not shake loose.
(The universe will probably send me a glut of posts about alcoholism after all that).
I’m going to share a little story with you. My first instinct, before I decided to share the little story, was to make something up. Write about a guy in a city I’ve never been to who deals with his issues and finds a way to cope and becomes a better human being and yadda yadda yadda. Living in stories, conversing with fictional people. It’s what I do.
No one has ever heard this story. Here’s me, trying something different… something complicated.
(via a place that was once called Home)
It was the rare kind of bleak day in Los Angeles when the threat of rain loomed and everyone held their breaths, unsure of how to react. It was in the morning that my father, uncle, and I parked in front of the house next to the house on the corner. It was a single story, tan, stucco-coated townhouse with an additional room added to the rear, making it distinct from the rows of similarly constructed, if perhaps differently styled, tract homes. I later found old fumigation notices posted in the garage and attic that dated the house’s construction to 1944. I wondered about all the people that lived in the house before me. I wondered if the kids had ever dug a hole beneath the bushes in the front, or if they had ever felt sad and cried for seemingly no reason. I wondered if the moms cooked good food because they loved their kids, or if they had ever yelled after a long day of cleaning and cooking and dropping the kids off at baseball practice. I wondered if the dads had been good at fixing things and liked to play basketball. I wondered if they had been stern, impatient, and angry.
We met the previous owner that very morning. He was a great fat man with a beard and glasses, and he was all alone.
The property was surrounded by a great pink cinder block wall that added to the grandeur of the house. It is just as tall as I am now and only slightly higher than my father, but as a child it seemed like a great barrier against the world. No one could attack us. We played castle and pretended that armies stupid enough to attack were coming. They would never penetrate the defenses, the fools. The problem was that none of us, neither me nor my two brothers who are closest to my age, could climb it, so we could never see if there was anyone out there.
That first morning, the three of us walked the grounds. My father and uncle talked to the fat man for a while and I looked around. In the front yard was an enormous, perfectly straight pine tree that extended high into the sky and loomed over the front yard, shielding everything below against the rain that would never come. Now it is a trimmed, branchless shadow across the block, but back then it was wild, with branches extending out beyond our property and dropping their pine needles all across the front lawn and walkway, providing a soft pillow on which to wrestle and play tag, with the great tree as home base. It smelled of pine and although it was dry and the needles were prickly it was still a very welcome sight.
The pine tree’s companion was a thick palm tree that sat alongside the driveway on the left side of the property, standing as a knight watching over the universally respected invisible gate between the sidewalk and front lawn of all the houses. No neighborhood in South-Central was complete without palm trees and we were the ones to keep the tradition on our street, at least for a while. It seemed very old but always grew large green fronds, some of which grew so long that they could nearly touch the top of my father’s truck. The removal of the palm tree to make room for a wider driveway was the first of many losses.
When the men completed their talk we moved into the backyard and I followed along. We made our way toward the back where a single car garage stood, blocking the view of the backyard. It is there that my father began his massive collection of tools, wood, metals, bicycles, and other items that that he could never part with. My mother stored a few things in there as well but it took a while to get permission. Beyond the garage was a large patio deck constructed from richly lacquered brown oak that provided a respite from the sun and a place to sit in the summer, when it was too hot to walk around during the day. It was once barren and open, a fort builder’s dream, but years of hording and disinterest in having guests stop by for picnics and dinners led to the porch becoming another storage unit, filled with old and forgotten memories.
It was beyond the garage and beyond the back porch that it stood. It was like entering another world, some jungle paradise from the movies. The greatest forests in the Amazon could not rival it in my young mind. It was the great avocado tree, the once king of the land. Unlike the pine tree whose branches reached up and out or the palm tree that only grew anything at the top, the avocado tree grew everywhere and it grew down toward the ground. Its branches drooped, weighed down by leaves and great, big, swinging avocados, as large as the head of a four year old. Some were black and shriveled and others were green and shiny. The young ones were barely visible in comparison to those great orbs. If I picked a perfect one I could polish it against my shirt and see myself in its bumpy rind. That particular avocado tree had never been trimmed and it formed a pyramid of leaves that we could explore and tunnel through. Standing in its shadow was like standing in the shadow of a mighty temple, or of the God itself. It was our worship of the avocado tree, and unknown to us it would be the only time we could do so. My father promptly trimmed away the mess upon moving in and has never allowed the branches to grow that long again.
My father used to love to laugh. At parties, at events, at the movies, with his friends, with my uncles and aunts… he laughed. He told excellent jokes. His face turned red and he bellowed loudly, from his chest, with a slight mischievous rasp. The relationship between he and my mother deteriorated but even she could not help but laugh and kiss him when they were out in public. He was personable, adoring, and despite the fact that everyone really knew him they still loved him because that is when the rays of his good nature shined brightest.
I never did inherit his genuine charm. In retrospect, I do not think I cared to.
We still enjoyed the avocado tree, of course. It was part of our backyard world and everything could be enjoyed. We climbed it and ran around its trunk, passing by its single knothole of an eye each time, tagging the spot when we played tag or races. Our father built a swing using one of the low, thick branches, and we pushed it to the extremes that all boys push things into. We leapt from it, played jungle commander and climbed it, twirled around until we were busy. Things children do, most of which I’ve forgotten.
Once, my brother and I misbehaved. We had just returned from working the gardening route that my father worked on Saturdays. We pushed lawnmowers and raked leaves while most kids stayed in to watch cartoons and eat colorful cereal. We envied such activities, and learned the taste of bitterness early in life. The taste was that of dirt and it smelled like grass. The equipment had been returned to the garage and we were using the last hours of the day to play, have some fun, and get dirty before we had to go in and take a shower. In the course of playing we did something we should not have been doing, whatever it was. It was bad enough, though, that my father got upset. The man preached a working life but sometimes it seemed like a hard day’s work affected him in the same way it affected us, leaving him bitter and temperamental.
He called us to him and made us stand together, side by side, as he pondered what to do. Punishment was a necessity. Children had to be taught how to behave, much like he had been taught, much like a pet. We most certainly feared the belt above all things and waited silently for him to swiftly deal his judgment and penalty, but he took longer than usual to decide. He seemed distant and deep in thought, which was uncharacteristic of a man who was always quick witted and made decisions faster than most people could speak a word. He finally walked away and returned with a bundle of brown nylon rope. He had settled on an old form of punishment that was common when he was a child. It was something we had been warned of many times when he regaled us with tales of the times his father had dealt cruel and brutal justice unto him. He was to walk us over to the avocado tree and tie us to its trunk, like pirates tied to a mast. My brother and I were unsure how to react at first, but as he guided us along by the shoulders the full weight of the punishment sunk in. We were to be bound, left immobile and at nature’s whim, until he decided we had learned a lesson.
We were raised to be loyal and do as we were told. It is a wonder that we did not end up in the military, particularly the oldest of us, who were brought up in the house of loyalty and order. We would have made perfect soldiers. At the time, however, as young children loyal to our father, we simply allowed ourselves to be led along and began to cry. Our cheeks and eyes turned red, our mouths contorted as we pleaded to be released. We would never cause trouble again!
“You should have thought of that before” we did whatever we did.
So we stood, each of us on one side of the avocado tree. A chubby dark-haired boy and his skinny little pale brother, covered in dust and grass stains, wept and pleaded. He loosened the rope and used one end of it to lash us to the trunk of the avocado tree, walking around between the two of us until we had rope around us from chest to ankle. He placed the rest of the rope on a side of the tree farthest from us and secured it, then walked away.
We wept and called for forgiveness. There was no attempt to move or free ourselves. He walked by later with a beer in his hand to see how we were doing, and watched us. He grinned and watched us squirm. We cried and we cried, and he laughed and he laughed. We eventually freed ourselves when we realized that he had only loosely lashed us to the trunk. We avoided him until that evening when he walked into the bedroom where we sat watching television.
“Did you learn your lesson?”
I suppose we did.
My father once asked me, many years later: “You were scared of me?” His face was contorted, as if in bewilderment. His question was sincere like his every word and action.
“Of course,” I told him.
“Why?”
“You know why,” and he let it be.
It still stands, unlike the palm tree or much of what used to be a garden and is now converted into a bare concrete foundation. Years of pruning and trimming, in addition to the simple passage of time, have reduced what it once was. It now leans awkwardly toward the pink wall in the direction of the neighbor’s roof, almost as if it is reaching toward something else, something away from the property. Sap and other mysterious goo leaks from the dreary eye in the center, and the base of the trunk is coated a bright white from years of insecticides and powders and other protective measures meant to stave off infection and disease. Its wild, unwieldy canopy has been reduced to a polite gathering of leaves and twigs. And despite it all, the shadow of the avocado tree still cast its claws across the yard and the back porch. The shadow reaches out on those late summer days when the sun rises directly in the east and my father wakes up early to rake the leaves from beneath the tree, alone.
And that’s my little story.
A grain of sand has purpose. It clings to its kind and provides support for walkers, nutrients for eaters. Being tied to a tree, that had purpose. A malicious purpose, a lesson, humor, who knows what, but it had to be something. Writing this, it has a purpose. My purpose is to feel something and confront it, whatever it may be. If I was to surmise a purpose statement it would be this:
Give me self-realization or give me death.
(Hey, look. He is coping with his problems, trying to learn how to be a sensible man, a better person. He asked a question and decided it feels like something real).