 
### Philosophy 101

Steve Kenny

Copyright 2014 Steve Kenny

Cover Art Copyright 2014 Steve Kenny

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Philosophy 101

Table of Contents:

Who, Or What, Determines the Worth Of Someone Or Something?

Morphine And Roaming Inside A Hospital

With Dysfunction, English Is A Second Language

Sleeping On The Train

Drifting Subconsciously Into the POV Lane

Of Great Ships And Self-Determination

A Remembrance

Tuning

Heroes

when no years are light years

Open Salon: An Amateur's Attempt At A Definition

Sunday Morning Coming Down

Message In A Bottle

Lifespan Of A Royalty Check

November

–

–

-Who, Or What, Determines The Worth Of Someone Or Something?-

He had recently increased his efforts to quit thinking, or to think less, yet he knew it was no use, for the problem was not in his head at all.

The problem, he now realized, was not that his mind had been too open, but rather, that his heart had been too open...

His body swayed involuntarily in his chair at the small table. His tired, keen eyes burned. The all night cafe was nearly empty: a couple of hopeful prostitutes, out late; a couple of drunks, asleep at their tables.

His heart was a raw nerve, he thought; the open window to his soul that now let everything in.

Did he regret learning that the secret to true perception was to see with the heart and not the mind?

No.

He had no regrets.

Yet still, sometimes, he wished he could close that window just a little...just a little...

He sat there, facing the nicotine darkened room. It was well past midnight. The wind outside blew. He tapped his pipe absentmindedly into the ashtray while the proprietor, dressed in white, tired but patient, stood in the doorway of the kitchen drying a plate. The colors of the small room, tobacco stained reds and greens and oranges, lit by gaslight, had been hurting his keen eyes for hours, yet he was thankful that through a long, steady night of drinking, he'd managed to slow the always flowing ingress and egress of life.Now numb, and barely aware of the proprietor, the whores, the sleeping drunks, the whole sordid scene, he slowly repacked his pipe with fresh tobacco, struck a match, and took a few deep drags to get it going, exhaling the smoke without inhaling and watching the little fire jump off the rim of his pipe, like miniature blasts of hot air balloon flame.

The pipe smoke hung heavily over his small table, like a little cloud. He squinted and studied the slowly drifting and changing shapes of the little clouds of smoke, and the little field of green below and beyond them, which was, the felt of the old pool table in the center of the room.

He tried to burn the memory of the scene into his mind before taking his grubby glass and draining the last of the absinthe...

He rose unsteadily, the guilt of spending his brother's money hanging heavily in his mind. His mind reeled, trying to register the bitter tang of the wormwood. He swayed once or twice before setting the glass down.

He took a few unsure steps, got his sea legs, and staggered out of that place.The cobblestone street outside was empty, yet dark and windy.

The shoe cobbler's nails in the soles of his cheap boots were wearing through, so that lately, he had to try to curl his toes and raise the soles of his feet as he walked, so as to try to keep the nails from piercing him. As you can imagine, staggering along, curling his toes and raising his soles, he made quite the sight.

Yet he was alone, and so, no one saw the moment, while the January mistral pushed against him.

He pulled his poor coat tightly to him with one hand, and held his hat with the other. Far from home, he had come from the cold north, yet he shivered.

The south of France was cold indeed...

He arrived at the little yellow house and let himself in through the unlocked front door. Barely inside, the mistral still gusting, he didn't bother to turn and face the wind, but instead, leaned backwards against the old oaken door, and as it slammed shut, the silence of the house was immediate and repressive, yet still, and noisily, the mistral outside howled.

He was aware of a strange gladness as he leaned against that door, there in the dark, and found it wonderful and ironic how gladness can come into one's heart even in the midst of lonliness and silence.

He was home.

It wasn't much, but it was his home...

He slowly leaned forward and made his way up the stairs in the dark, drunk, and barely able to see anything in the dim light, but he moved with the practiced steps of a blind man, and made his way, slowly and surely, to the top of the stairs and to the small table in his little bedroom. Swaying like a buoy, he poured himself another drink in the dark, using the same unwashed glass he'd used earlier. Carefully setting the bottle on the table, swaying like a man at sea, he took a drink, then sat down tiredly on the edge of his bed.

The room, the whole house, smelled strongly of linseed oil and turpentine. Paintings and drawings, brushes and tubes of paint; an old paintbox with tubes of paint, all beside his thoughts, were all that he had now;

The yellow house in the south of France...

He listened to the mistral rage outside.

Inside his head, the mistral was a whisper, compared to the memory of the small mob of townsfolk chanting, "Fou rou! Fou rou!" on the street in front of his house; a memory which clanged inside his mind like the woeful bells of Quasimodo.

It was then, and there, in that very moment, that he took stock of his life; his work; his efforts. He thought of the sacrifices made for him by people who loved him. He thought of his brother; his brother's wife; how they loved him, even though he had nothing...

nothing...

nothing but hope.

What is hope?

Is it different for each of us?

What is money? He had none, that was sure. But he thought he had worth.

What, who, determines the worth of someone? something?

Are standards of worth equal across all standards of measure?

He was a lonely man, yet an astute man; with sharp insights and something to say; but for all his awareness, all his insights and experiences, he had no one to share with, and that wounded him deeply, and he was affected by it; and he was affecting by it; his own particular approach to self-inflicted humility.

He rested his forearms on his knees heavily, and sat on the edge of that bed in silence, looking down, at first, at the floor, then, at the dried flecks of paint on his clothes; his hands. His poor, threadbare coatsleeves caught his eyes...The nails of his shoes dug into his toes. He was too far from home; so far from home; but he would press on; that much, he knew.

Yet still, sometimes he got sick of painting. Sometimes he missed his brother. Sometimes, more than anything, anything, all he desired was someone to talk to; a little company; something to break up the loneliness.

The January mistral of the south of France crept into him like icy fingers. He shivered and shrugged it off, then rose from his bed as a loose shutter slammed into a wooden wall out in the cold night in the distance. He struck a match and touched its flame to a small candle and sat down at his desk. He thought of all he had; all he knew. He thought of all he had learned by seeing with his heart instead of his mind. He thought of those he loved. Sometimes, he had something to say.

So much to say!

Sometimes he knew the only way to say it was to write it, because writing, unlike painting, was like music; it had to be read in order; heard in order; to write, to read, to hear music unfold, we must enter the time stream...

Write it,

before you forget it...

Write it...

He swayed. A few pleasant thoughts came to him...slowly, thoughtfully, deliberately, he placed a plain piece of paper before him on his tiny wooden desk, picked up his pen, and began to write.

"Dear Theo,

-

-Morphine and Roaming Inside A Hospital-

May 7th, 2010;

On the very first day, when I'd walked into this hospital, fresh from my little town, I found Dad prepped for surgery, lying on his belly, propped up on his elbows, alone in a corner of a big, busy, big city hospital staging room filled with the kind of kinetic energy one only finds in hospitals. Surgeons and nurses, some looking at charts, some standing, talking, some with coffees in hand, all busy gathering the latest information; concerned, knowledgeable people; studious, professional people trained in medicine, with stethoscopes draped over their shoulders and wearing those soft blue shoe-covers, blue scrubs, and white coats.

"Hello, Steve!" He said. "Why don't you go have a beer and get comfortable!" A few seconds later, as if on cue, a surgeon walked up, smiled, and I was ushered out...

Dad's first day at the hospital wasn't a good one. The operation, a lamenectomy to remove 'spurs' from his spinal column, was stopped just after the administration of the anesthesia. Dr. Michael Liu, one of the surgeons present, came out, and, still in his scrubs and wearing those soft blue shoecoverings, with a hair net on his head and a breathing mask pulled down from his mouth, took a minute to tell me the bad news: dad's heartbeat had skyrocketed to 170 beats per minute, while his blood pressure - which has always been low - dropped to half its normal rate. To continue with the surgery would have meant an almost assured flat line on the table. Maybe, Dr. Liu said, if they can stabilize dad's numbers, they will attempt the operation again in a few days. So they sent dad to the seventh floor. I arrived as he, now on his back, was being wheeled into his room on a gurney. The whole scene reminded me of Caravaggio's The Crucifixion Of Saint Peter. He was in terrible pain, and he was arguing with a petite young woman doctor, a stoic, mildly cool, well trained professional woman. He wanted his catheter taken out. She didn't want it taken out. She argued her point, he argued his. Calm, concerned, professional, she addressed him directly.

"You're not being rational."

Rolling into his room on a gurney, in his pajamas, a small crowd of medical personnel accompanying him, he lifted himself onto his elbows, and somehow managed no small amount of eloquence.

"You're not understanding my rationale. I can get up and out of bed, and use the bathroom whenever I want."

He issued this doubtless declaration with such strong conviction that I instantly became confident his will would prevail. Still, she did not believe him, that he could just get up, pain free, whenever he wanted. She looked at him doubtfully.

"If we take that catheter out now, and you end up peeing in bed, it is going to be very painful for you when we have to put it back in." She paused, for gravity's sake. "You will also bleed."

Dad pulled himself off his pillow and propped himself up, once again, on his elbows.

"That's the chance I'm willing to take. Take it out."

While this was going on, Tina, a small, nervous, stressed-out middle-aged Filipino woman, was trying to hook up his IV's. He had four tubes going into him, plus eight electrodes stuck all around his chest. As I watched quietly from my corner, she quickly tangled everything. While arguing with the doctor, dad had begun to notice this nervous, frustrated, seriously frowning, incompetent nurse. He turned to her, smiled, and attempted a pleasant introduction. Tina willfully ignored him. Dad tried a few more times to get her attention, to introduce himself, but to her, he might as well have not existed; she continued to coldly stonewall dad and his attempts at an introduction, which caused him added stress and anxiety. Exasperated, he finally turned to me and nodded, completely under the medical staff's radar, even though they were crowded all around him, and said, "I'm talking to complete fucking idiots."

I watched Tina make three mistakes in less than five minutes and become very frustrated, while in the background, from his hospital bed, dad was still insisting that they remove the catheter. Finally, the still frowning Tina stepped away from his bed, away from the whole tangled mess that she'd created, and, anxiety-ridden, made her escape, leaving the tangled jumble of IV tubes and electrodes for someone else to fix. I watched her moved through the room, and emerge into the hallway. Then I saw a remarkable transformation. Her shitty little frown turn into a happy smile. She laughed as soon as she hit the hall. Just like that, she shook off the whole goddamned mess she'd created and abandoned in the room behind her, and completely shook it from her collective soul, her conscience, her mind. I continued to watch her as she walked up the hall and over to the nurse's station. She sought out the cool young woman doctor that dad had been arguing with. Reaching her, with a big, joyous smile, Tina gave that startled doctor a great big hug.

So that was our bad start, and most of it was caught by dad. For the next two days, disillusioned, he would say stuff like, "I'm tempted to pack my stuff and go home."

It was an awful time.

Dad prevailed and they removed the catheter. A minor victory. But when he needed to go pee, which was quite frequently, it would take a monumental effort on his part just to get out of bed, and a coin flip whether he could make it to his feet without any pain. And making it to his feet was just the beginning; there was the short walk to the bathroom; just a few steps, yet miles and long minutes, peppered with wracking pain. Then the return to the bed, the getting back into that bed, it was terrible to watch; there were shouts of pain, and his face would contort in pure agony. But that wasn't all his problems. On the third day, there became apparent a real push to send him home. Samantha [Sam, for short] and Patty, my sisters, back at the house, worked hard to find a way to keep him in the hospital, for we three knew that for him to be sent home in the condition he was in was tantamount to killing him. He wouldn't survive the trip. Their search for a way to keep him in the hospital was conducted without dad's knowing, because, at this point, dad still tended to follow the hospital's rules and suggestions, and we feared that he would allow them to send him home.

Once his pain reached a certain level, though, even he began to realize that he had to fight to keep his bed at this hospital.

It began to look bad, and I warned Sam to watch for the moment when Dr. Bush would come into dad's room and try to persuade him to go home.

Sure enough, that moment came.

"Monday or Tuesday, when we can try to operate again." Dr. Bush said, sitting with an assistant, at dad's bedside. This was met with a flat refusal to leave, which, in turn, was met with an insistent, firm push to leave. I rose, and as I stood in his room listening, the phone rang. It was the ambulance service, trying to schedule dad's pickup and transportation home.

"He's not leaving. You can cancel your trip here," I said, and hung up.

Meanwhile, back at home, Patty and Samantha managed to get ahold of what was called a Patient Advocate. Sam explained to me what a Patient Advocate is. Apparently, a Patient Advocate fights for the Patient. We became hopeful. A while later, the situation still unresolved, I stepped out of dad's room and went to the cafeteria for a cup of coffee. As I returned, and was coming up the hall towards his room, I could hear him screaming in pain. I walked into the room. He was half in and half out of bed, tense, apprehensive; "Go outside," he said, then gave out a great cry. "Arghh!" He grimaced.

"What?"

"Go outside!", he boomed, "Shut the door! AARRGGGHHH!!!"

I went out, into the hall, and stood outside, in front of the closed door, folded my arms across my chest and stared resolutely, straight ahead, across the hall. A team of doctors, to my left, were making their morning rounds, and walked down the hall towards me. I didn't move, didn't look at them, and stared straight ahead, while behind me, behind that heavy wooden door, dad's screams were fucking horrible. That group of doctors walked slowly, quietly past. A minute or two later, after they'd passed, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed, poking his head into the room directly down the hall, again, to the left of where I was standing, a little Puerto Rican guy. He was well dressed, had on a pastel shirt, wore glasses and had a clean shaven face and head. He looked just like a miniature version of Malcolm X, and gave the impression of quiet strength, quiet dignity, and intelligence. He gently leaned into the room down the hall, his clipboard in hand.

"Mike Kenny?" He said, softly. "Mike Kenny?"

"Here," I said. "Over here."

He walked over.

"Are you Mike Kenny?"

"No,"

A pain-wracked scream issued forth from behind the heavy door.

"That's Mike Kenny." I said, with a grave waive of my head at the heavy wooden door behind me. "You must be the Patient Advocate," I said as I reached out and shook his hand.

"Yes I am," he said. He looked at the door somberly, then looked back at me. "That's all I needed. Thank you."

Then he walked away, without saying another word, and walked over to the nurse's station, and leaned his slight frame on their counter.

That was the last I saw of him. Never saw him again. Nor did dad, nor did anyone else in our family, ever even meet him, shake his hand, or get a chance to thank him. But, except for the social worker calling dad's room once more about ambulance pick up, which I canceled, the general attitude, as well as the quality of care, that dad received from that moment on, improved markedly. And there was no more talk about sending him home.

The ensuing days found dad suffering in more pain than I thought I could bear witness to. Between his tormented, tormenting outbursts of pure agony, he would say, more than once, for anyone that would listen, that he would rather have died on the operating table than to live with the pain.

After the pain, the torture, had sent him from his bed, denied him the comforts of his chair, and either concealing or dismissing the exhaustion he must have felt from months of sleep deprivation and wracking pain, he simply drew himself up and stood, in the middle of the room, in between the hospital room's two beds, and slowly set his large hands upon the edges of his telescoped hospital bed table. Effectively ennobling himself, he turned that simple hospital table into his personal podium, and, with the perfect posture that he has always maintained throughout his life, and now balancing upon the precarious point of clarity, he held court. Larger than life, with his buzz cut and white stubble and large blue expressive eyes, he carried himself in a manner that recalled to life, to my mind, in turns, the majestic, powerful figures of Auguste Rodin's Burghers of Calais, or Jacques Louis David's Socrates, or even, once or twice, the great and tragic Robert E. Lee. His expositions were at times both profound and extraordinary. He waxed philosophical. He articulated his position with a physician or nurse. He recited poetry, his verse too learned, too voluminous, too seamlessly aligned and addressed to the moment and his predicament, for my pen to recall in later, quieter hours. His arguments were undoubted declarations, punctuated by timely anecdote, his protests, expounding thunder. Humor, attitude, shouts of pain all seemed like the convergence of accumulated life forces, a conversion into some mystical, powerful symphony. This music is the man; here a gesture, here a viola. There a loud shout, there a thunderous bass drum. The flash of the eye, the violin; the smile, the chorus.

Hours later, perhaps twelve, he found himself able to return to his bed for rest. Fearless is the word that comes to mind, as I think of his conduct throughout his, this, ordeal.

At one point, after he'd returned to bed, on the phone and heavily sedated, he declared to his brother, with expressive power and firm authority; "But we haven't mastered the eloquence of goodbyes, Buddy! It's important!'

Dad and I talked of many things; suicide.

"I think it's an acceptable act," he said to me. "It's even funny, like a big joke."

He spoke of fear.

"Your mother was on 18th Street. I was over on Taylor and Paulina"

"I have had nightmares about this for years...still do. I would think, in my mind, maybe I would take Ashland around."

"Around what? A bad neighborhood?" I asked. I had always thought that mom and dad's generation was made tough, so very tough, because all the neighborhoods were bad when they were growing up, in the 1940's and 1950's.

"Yeah. It was a bad neighborhood." The morphine would throw shadows across his eyes, his face, his recollections. I could see this clearly; invisible clouds drifting across his mind.

"A terrible neighborhood. Nobody wanted to go through it. I would sometimes have to go through it, though...and there was always this guy, this walker. I could see that he was crazy. The first time I saw him, I was at an intersection, a light. He was walking across the street, and, right in front of my car, he stopped, turned and looked at me. He pulled out a gun. He fired a few rounds around my car."

He paused, maybe to further examine his memory.

"Your mother and her friend had to go through that neighborhood once. They got caught. Your mother's friend was raped at knife point."

"What?"

"Yeah. Trina, I think her name was. He jumped out with the knife and tried to attack your mother. She fought back. Finally, Trina volunteered, saved your mother. Your mother had to watch." Heavy silence descended into the gloomy light of that room.

"I was always afraid of that neighborhood. I always wanted to figure out a way around it."

He looked at me. His eyes were searching. He was somewhere in his head, wandering the fields of his mind, returning to neighborhoods long since razed and built over.

"That's what we do," he said. "We are looking for a way around it; we are all trying to figure out a way to cheat death. No one has yet figured out how, though."

In that darkening room, in the silence of that moment, he, in his hospital gown and PJ's, seemed to me to be some great jurist, or philosopher, a great force of some kind, the likes of which this world rarely sees. He seemed not at all to be wounded, or in pain. Contrary; he seemed right then to be the possessor of the cure, the source of the strength itself.

Then his mood, his thoughts turned, lightened, and he said, with a joyous energy, "C'mon! Let's go stretch our legs!"

We took a walk down the hospital's halls, all the way to the other end of the building. From the east wing to the west wing. I commented to dad that we must seem like Virgil and Dante, as we walked down those halls, as he greeted and smiled magnanimously at all who passed him and stared or returned the hail hello. He inquired about the hospital barbershop. The barber, to his mind, was the man to talk to, the keeper of all the neighborhood information. And he inquired as to where he could get a cup of coffee.

When we drew close to the other end of the building, and approached a lonely corridor, dad having completely forgotten his pain, we encountered one of dad's surgeons, coming through a double door. The surgeon was genuinely astonished and happy to see dad on his feet and so far from his room, and offered up a happy look of wonder. Dad smiled. The surgeon was clearly taken aback by dad's autonomy, and, I'm sure, entered the encounter into future conversations with his peers.

Last night, Sunday, I spent five hours with dad. He spent that whole time lying on his back, comfortable and almost pain free, casually flipping through the TV stations with his remote. He looked like he was healing. He looked twenty years younger. I thought about the long nine months of pain he'd suffered through.

"How long has it been since you've been able to lie on your back for any length of time?"

"Months," he said. "Months. I can put up with a lot."

Dad and I really liked Minna, his nurse for the past three days.

She was a black-haired, dark-skinned, dark-eyed Indian woman with a kind, intelligent face. I could see compassion in Minna's every action, and hear it in her voice. She seemed to exude it, and it seemed to be her sole motivation.

Dad was smitten by her instantly, and was bold enough to say so.

"If I had a million dollars, would you be my personal nurse?" He asked, his hopeful flirtation sending smiles around his bed.

Gracefully, she moved through the room, living beauty coming from within and manifestly cloaked in scrubs. She checked charts, read numbers, adjusted rates, refilled canisters, took vitals. Her eyes were focused on what she was doing, yet she was engaged and responsive. She was the epitome of The Good Nurse. She smiled at dad.

"Sure. Okay." she said, her rich voice flavored with a light accent. "But I would have to bring my husband and my kids!"

Another time, late in the evening, when the day had died down,and it was very, very quiet on the wing, Minna was taking dad's vitals when a woman's voice erupted in a loud, shattered wail; loud, guttural, distant, close. Minna jumped, startled.

"What was that?" She said, her voice full of concern. She turned and ran from the room, towards the wailing soul.

By and by she came back to us, the grief of the wailing soul upon her, surrounding her, trailing her, informing her, it's soft persistence met perfectly by her quiet resistance.

Who knows?

Van Gogh's words echo down to me, the words he wrote to his brother Theo, describing what the Postes meant to him, even as he painted Joseph Roulin, the Postman, one of his few friends.

Who knows? Who knows what today may bring? Or even tomorrow? Who knows how anything will go?

During a moment of pain-free lucidity, dad was engaged in conversation with a little short-haired, salt-and-peppered, slightly mannish looking woman, one of his doctors.

"I'm sure you're looking forward to having the surgery and the relief of the pain?" she said.

"Let me tell you about a time, when I was young, and a friend of mine said 'let me take you to get a sandwich'. We drove, and as we drove, this guy described this sandwich as the best goddamned sandwich that I will ever eat. And you know what? He was right! It was the best goddamned sandwich that I ever ate! You know why? Anticipation. Anticipation is everything. Am I looking forward to the surgery? No, I'm not, because I know it will be painful. But yes, I am looking forward to the relief".

Jack Kerouac says it as well as anyone ever will, up there on a YouTube cloud: feeling good and still in his prime, delivering his insights, his heart, while reading from his work with his soft and lovely and warmly considerate East-Coast cadence, the cadence of a true poet, the cadence of life itself, as Steve Allen sends Jazz riffs up from his piano, up into the air, up, like wispy rings of smoke;

"... Nobody, nobody knows what's gonna happen to anybody..."

May 10th, 2010;

Sitting in a hall, waiting in a chair next to the nurses' station, on the seventh floor of this hospital, watching my dad, who is lying on a hospital gurney in some minor pain, some fifty feet away, awaiting someone to take him to surgery, he looks just like an abandoned, forgotten patient. We don't talk, we just wait, he over there, me, over here. After a while, he is rolled away to the operating room, or the OR. I am directed to a waiting room.

8:30: on the monitor:

8:01: 10477: Pt in OR

Pt in OR - Means your family member has been taken from the surgicenter to the Operating Room for their procedure/surgery.

8:45; Pt in OR:

Up on the TV, Oprah and Will I Am just paid off a few very fortunate homeowner's mortgages.

This is a dreadful wait.

It is 8:30 AM now. Dad's number, 10477, has been taken off the surgery monitor. In a flash of concern, I inquire at the front desk as to why this happened. After all, the surgery, I was told, should go for three or four hours.

10:25: 8:01 : Pt in OR

Still in surgery.

Went for a soda and a toothpick.

10:33: Pt in RR

\--your family member is in The Recovery Room. You may visit the Recovery Room when invited by Clerical or Nursing Staff.

A 3-4 hour surgery, done in 2 hours, 30 minutes?

My mistake. Pt in RR 11:12

which makes his time 3 hours, 11 mins..

They now say that he is back in 733 East.

I'm waiting and shaking gently, perhaps from sympathetic nerves.

11:31;

The surgeon, Michael Liu, just spoke to me. The surgery was a success. Time to make some calls.

Everything in this house is dysfunctional, and yet, against all odds, and after nine months of dad, as well as Samantha's whole family, enduring this, Sam, almost single-handedly, has finally produced a miracle, and found dad the right doctors.

Who knew it would, it could be possible?

So here it is, the quiet time. I am outside, sitting on a concrete ledge. It's a nice day here in Chicago, here in dad's old neighborhood. Samantha will be walking up shortly, and I will give her Brianna's cel phone, which I've had for five days now. I will be going home today.

A wonderful strength can be found in the quiet contemplation that can come into you after a successfully negotiated sustained stressful period. I feel that now.

And there will be strength and understanding in the simple gesture, the giving back of this phone, to my sister. We will know it and see it in our eyes.

I'm going home.

-

The first language we learn and share is the is the wordless, sensory laguage of the newborn: lights, colors, shades, sounds, patterns. This is the fundemental non-verbal, elemental and solid foundation upon which we build the verbal.

But there is another language, which also includes all of the senses, and includes every broken way of seeing, hearing, speaking, thinking, and learning, and this language, dysfunction, is just as old and just as permanent as the other two languages, but unlike the other two languages, dysfunction does not always cooperate with the harmonious nature of the world, which is a problem for us, because, as my uncle Andy Kenny said, in his book, Chicago's Gods: The Mafia Meets The Bhagavad Gita: "We depend upon social agreement to make the language work." Well, for those whom are dysfunctional, the 'social agreement' was not something we started with. We came to the party late and sober, and see all sorts of drivers who need to have their keys taken away; the language we speak is more important to us than the social agreement.

Dysfunction is a funny language. Most of those that speak it don't know that they are speaking it. I am dysfunctional, so I know the language of the dysfunctional, and have known since a very young age that dysfunction, in its purest form, is a vaccuum, and that, if I was ever going to learn to'see' the world in a clear light, I would need to first look inward and learn to see the dysfunction inside myself as clearly as I could see it others.

-Although dysfunction gets a [sometimes justified] bad rap, it guides my boat [I have no choice]. Of the beautiful contradictions inherent in dysfunction, I know of only two that grab me: If I miss, I miss with ignorance. But if I hit, I hit with an insight that is deeper than all the memory cells in my body.

-

-And In God They Say We Should Trust?-

They read our e-mails, our texts, our Facebook Page. They listen in to our phone conversations. They sort us by age, weight, height, sex, ethnicity, religious affiliations or lack thereof. They judge us by whether we can dance, cook, sing, lose weight, be interesting, and whether or not we are photogenic. They rate our Blogs, our wives, our girlfriends, husbands, husbands' girlfriends, and they take away points if we don't swallow. They divide us: High risk, Low Risk; Democrat, Republican, Independent, Libertarian, Lunatic Fringe; Union and Non-Union. They scoff at our style of dress and how we carry ourselves; they find fault with smokers and drinkers and coke heads and crack heads and scrip junkies. They want to know whether we are gay or straight, bisexual or transexual; they want to know what Parades we march in, what meetings we attend, what bars we go to. They want to know what's in our blood, what's in our piss; what's in our genetic code. They want to know if we are working, and where we shop, and how long we've been unemployed, and how long we've had thoughts of hurting ourselves. They want to know if we buckle up, ride without a helmut, or practice safe sex.

They are the Watchers, the Measurers, the faceless faces behind every suspicion; the ringing in your ears. They are really not there, they say, or so far away...yet, in reality, they are closer to us than we will ever know; closer to us than we are to our own consciences.

They are the Watchers, and they measure all things, including your happiness, your sadness, your depression, anger, complacency and conformity.

They do not fear you as much as you fear them; they do not fear each other, yet do not hesitate to listen in, and/or watch the other Watchers when they're not Watching; after all; you've got to punch out and go home sometime.

And if they see something...even if it's not terrorist-related...well...the Nobodies don't need to know, but Somebody needs to know.

Some Higher Up.

So they turn over the evidence; doesn't matter that they were supposedly looking for "terrorists"; Somebody should see what these Watchers find so interesting, after all, when they see something interesting, there's a human need to share [otherwise it seems soo illegal].

Good Watchers, if they know what's good for them at all, justify their curiosity with a timely "heads up" to their superiors, and a "just following orders, Sir".

"Can you be blackmailed?" he asked all potential candidates looking for work.

I can't name the man that asked the question, because, when he left Office, he took all his papers with him, and so, his quotes can't be found on the Internet, nor by the Watchers.

Is this all true?

Am I right?

Just ask David Petraeus.

He had to step down, not because he was a "terrorist", but because he was having an affair.

Here in America, In God We Trust; Everyone Else, We Watch.

The truth is, we have been lied to, misled, and brought to our knees, all in the name of Homeland Security.

Then, in walks Mr. Snowden.

A Watcher with a Conscience...

.

When I was a Baby, I watched for Meaning, and saw Meaning.

When I was a Youngster, I watched for Context, and saw Context.

When I became a Man, I watched for Love, and saw Love.

And life went on, and all was good, until 9/11.

9/11 brought it all home for me: Meaning, Context and Love; I looked for all three and found them that day, and the days immediately following 9/11. And along with Meaning, Context, and Love, I also found, amongst the horror and grief and despair, Hope.

And I saw that we all found Hope, and that Hope was strong, uniting, and it was a beautiful, even in that terrible moment, and so, I let my tears roll down my cheek freely.

But now, more than a half score years later, where I once saw hope, I now see confusion.

And where I once saw hope, I now see surrender.

And where I once saw hope, I now see we were blind.

And where once I saw a future, I now see it was manipulation.

And where I once felt tears, I now feel hardened.

And where I once felt close, I now feel alienated.

And where I once felt at one with my country, I now feel isolated.

And where I once felt sure, I now feel lost.

In Edward Snowden, for the record, as in Bradley Manning, I don't see a threat.

I'd rather drink a beer with either of those two fellows than with Dick Cheney.

-

-Sleeping On The Train-

I've never rode on a train in my life and didn't know that I was on this one until I woke up.

Vague remembrances of long-ago satisfactions, purer than happiness, drifted pleasantly into my mind.

Listening to Procol Harum and blinking away sleep, I look around the train car. Seated, comfortable faces stared down and out; sightless faces, each staring into their own particular version of the truth/space/time warp [the big W.W.W.].

Freight clogs the aisle. Faded posters crowd the walls; peeling, torn, faded; washed out; old; meaningless. The conductor enters the car, smiling happily [to my mind] in a meaningless way; meaningless, because I have no context for him; no way of knowing what it is that makes him smile, makes him so happy. Fuck. He might have a bomb in his underwear. You never know what makes some people happy anymore.

Nobody talks, nobody sees the conductor making his way down the aisle. Nobody seems to be aware of him at all, nor do they seem to have noticed all the freight in the aisle. Outside my little window, I see the miles and miles of windowless warehouses rolling away. The rhythm of the train and Procol Harum provides the lull and counterpoint to the dissonance in my mind, caused by the texters, the conductor, the crates clogging the aisle and the silence _._ All the crates in the aisle are on wheels, and I have become aware that the one next to my seat keeps bouncing, gently but insistently, off my armrest.

_Get the fuck off me._

I mindlessly shrug it away. It rolls across the aisle... then rolls back. I look at it. A small clear plastic pocket, holding the crate's Shipping Papers, is stuck to its side, and is facing me. Curious, I reach over and remove the Shipping Papers from the pouch and unfold them. Hey, I used to work on a dock. I take a look:

Two seperate pages.

_Page One:_

Point of Origin:  _Unknown._

Point of Destination:  _West Virginia_

_Page Two:MSDS_ [Material Safety Data Sheet]:

Chemical:

MCHM [methylcyclohexylmethanol) .

Chemical Classification:  _Unknown._

Toxicity:  _Unknown._

I fold the papers and return them to their pouch. The conductor, still smiling with a roiling emptiness, makes his way down the aisle; squeezing through, past all the crates, to me. I look up. He looks down.

_"How about them Cubs?"_ he asks me, still smiling...

Instinctively, the vague remembrance of a long-ago satisfaction, purer than happiness, in stereo, drifts into my mind; a moment in 1982 when I was so fucking high that I could hardly stand it. But man, I was  _happy._

_What could I have been thinking?_

_\---_

_We skipped the light fandango  
turned cartwheels 'cross the floor  
I was feeling kinda seasick  
but the crowd called out for more  
The room was humming harder  
as the ceiling flew away  
When we called out for another drink  
the waiter brought a tray  
And so it was that later  
as the miller told his tale  
that her face, at first just ghostly,  
turned a whiter shade of pale  
She said, 'There is no reason  
and the truth is plain to see.'  
But I wandered through my playing cards  
and would not let her be  
one of sixteen vestal virgins  
who were leaving for the coast  
and although my eyes were open  
they might have just as well've been closed  
She said, 'I'm home on shore leave,'  
though in truth we were at sea  
so I took her by the looking glass  
and forced her to agree  
saying, 'You must be the mermaid  
who took Neptune for a ride.'  
But she smiled at me so sadly  
that my anger straightway died  
If music be the food of love  
then laughter is its queen  
and likewise if behind is in front  
then dirt in truth is clean  
My mouth by then like cardboard  
seemed to slip straight through my head  
So we crash-dived straightway quickly  
and attacked the ocean bed_

-Procol Harum

"A Whiter Shade Of Pale"

\----

-Drifting Subconsciously Into the POV Lane-

I am not a religious man, or so I like to believe. My first eleven or twelve years were completely without any references to any God nor Religion. I just lived the day-to-day, experienced everything in good old black and white. I have never prayed to God, either, although I can clearly remember shouting once, in the rain, with real anger, and with surprise, at a God I thought I'd decided didn't exist. I remember it well. It was five or six years ago... back in 2005 or 2006... I was southbound on I-55, tooling along on my Kawasaki Vulcan Drifter, bound for my little town, from Chicago. That Vulcan Drifter was a big machine, that looked, with its solo seat and stylish fender skirts of bent metal that covered almost half of each of those chromed, spoked, fat black rubber wheels, a lot like the old Indian motorcycles of the 1950's.

I saw a rain shower rolling in across the plains from out of the southwest, so I pulled off the road at the 127 mile marker and got a cup of coffee at the local McDonalds. Two or three cups of coffee later, I became restless, and decided to try to ride it out. So I wrapped my spare t-shirt, pirate-style, around my head for protection from the rain, fired up the motorcycle and pulled out from under the relative safety of the Golden Arches. Slowly wheeling that machine out onto the wet State highway, I rolled up the overpass, and turned left, and as I rode down the on ramp, turned the throttle up as the rain came down. I built up speed, and, as anyone who rides can tell you, rain, even a gentle rain, hurts when you're being pelted by it at sixty miles per hour, yet I pressed on. The rain hurt. My face hurt. The rain was cold and hot at the same time, yet I maintained a steady pace of sixty miles per hour. And while sixty is a respectable speed in the rain on a bike, it fell far short of the pace I liked to keep. But, in consideration of the wet road and personal safety, I let it be for a while.

The sky darkened. A few cars passed me. With t-shirt tail wafting in the wet wind, trailing behind, soaked, heavy as an elephant's trunk, I'd sometimes glance over and stare through my rain-streaked glasses at the folks who'd pass me. It ran through my mind that I must either look, A; pretty goddamned cool and determined and fearless, or, B; pretty goddamned stupid and soaked, out in the rain, an imbecile on two wheels, hurtling down the road at a mile a minute. And, I thought, those occupants of the vehicles that passed me, glad to be on the right side of the glass, either looked at me astonished, or stared with complete indifference, if they stared at all. And I imagined that some were with me, and were hoping I'd make it, and some, I was sure, were making bets and forming odds on whether or not I'd crash and slide down the highway.

Soon, perhaps because of the caffeine, perhaps because my confidence in myself began to grow, perhaps because I was trying to ride a commercial tiger while being driven by personal dragons, I found myself going faster; much faster. For nearly an hour, I'd driven against the wind, rain, and was pouring it on, and going a reckless eighty miles an hour, rocketing past everyfuckingthing that moved, a flash of wet and wild wonder. I had traveled seventy four miles, and streaked past the 53 mile marker almost before I knew it. I had one mile to go.

Suddenly the wind drove hard and low from out of the west, across the soft and muddy wet fields of green and brown and blue and gray and yellow, and drove up from the shoulder, slamming and pushing my wheels across the wet road, and instantly, I knew that to steer into a wind like that to attempt a correction, even with skillful balance and a firm grip, I would surely lose control and go down, so I had no choice but to move with the wind, and onto the center line, while still going eighty. On the center line micro-seconds later, now realizing the danger and making calculations, a little late, with my heart in my head and stupidly happy with myself for a split second because I'd just stabilized for a silly millisecond, another gust slammed into me, and sent a half ton of man and machine unwillingly and violently into the show off lane. Not daring to turn and look, hunched over and staring straight ahead, I was very, very glad that I was the only show off in the show off lane right then, as I tried to get the wiggle out of my handlebars. Then I remember distinctly realizing, for the first time, why Kawasaki had named that bike the 'Drifter'; it was because it drifts. It drifts. Its fenders weren't really fenders at all, but were, in fact, sails; sails that caught every fucking breeze, and every fucking gust, too, for that matter. Drifter. Ha ha. I get it now, assholes. A faint and bitter smile crossed my rain-needled face. I would have tried to fight for ground and make my way back into the right lane, if given another chance, but another hurricane-force gust blasted me and that bike, sliding my wheels off to the left. I went off the road.

I remember, even now, thinking very clearly, many things at that moment. First; that my new found insight into the hazardous nature of stylish motorcycle fender skirts might just be my last thought [which really sucked, as last thoughts go, to my mind], and, that, although I had managed to slow the bike down somewhat, I was still going faster than a speeding idiot in a Midwestern Illinois rain storm had any right to be going, out there, out on the edge of the prairie, on the edge of disaster, on the edge of the Great American Tornado Alley. I knew this wasn't good. I knew I was going to crash, and knew that maybe I would hit something. Forced off the left shoulder, I rode down the grassy hill, and I remember a feeling that my eyes became wide, and remember thinking that my hands were probably white-knuckled. My whole body was stiff in anticipation and my mind was wildly focused on staying upright. I remember thinking that I was going to hit a concrete drainage block. I remember a jumbled, confused mass of jumping, violently shaking, bouncing images. I remember riding it down...

Then, stillness...

stillness... and rain.

...and water...

I was wet...

My face, my entire body, was half in and half out of water. It happened so fast that I found myself in this position before I knew what hit me or how I got there. My mind did a quick inventory: no pain. I'm okay, I think. And still here. Slowly pulling myself up, soaked, mud-covered, madder than hell and yet glad to still be alive and uninjured, I looked around. Nobody had seen me crash. The rain was too thick, the distance from the road, too far. I looked up and over, across the southbound lanes of I-55 and could see, through the hard-driving rain, the reflective white exit arrow on the green government highway sign pointing toward the exit ramp. I surveyed the situation. I couldn't believe it. I'd come seventy four miles, through rain and wind, at eighty miles an hour, for this? Real anger moved me. I strode as best I could in that ditch, sloshed through the deep pool of drainage water over to my bike, which was lying on its side half submerged, lying like a horse that'd just been put down in a creek. I grabbed the handlebars firmly and pulled, but that heavy machine didn't budge. I pulled again. The suction of the mud on that eight hundred pound bike was real, and a force to be reckoned with, and reminded me that I was no longer in my comfort zone, as if I have a comfort zone. Now I had something real to be angry at, something right before me, something I could add to my long list of new complaints: Nature. I thought about how close I was to my exit. It seemed to me that Nature itself had risen up against me, at the last minute. I became determined to finish my ride, or, if not my ride, then, at least, my trip, victorious: I'd walk home if I had to.

Somehow, with a struggle, I managed to get that bike upright, and smiled to myself grimly at my achievement. I straddled it, tried to start it, but it wouldn't start. There were forces here that were conspiring against me, I thought. And that was the moment I became angry at God, which really surprised me, because, up until that moment, I didn't think I believed in God. Oh, how angry I was! and determined! I'm gonna start this fucking bike, I'm gonna finish this fucking trip. I'll push this bike home if I have to, even if it takes me all fucking day. I'll show You.

Then, along with the raging downpour and the wind, along with my anger, along with all the noise of the storm and the passing cars, along with all the raging ridiculousness of the situation and the sheer miracle of it all, the lightning began to rise up. The first streak across the sky wasn't so bad, and neither bothered nor alarmed me. Even when the thunder, which quickly followed, boomed and seemed to shake the ground below me, as well as my inner ear, close by and present, I still paid no attention. It was only, only after a steady shower of lightning began to rain down, all around me, with the accompanying explosions of thunder, that I noticed the electricity in the air and realized the danger. I was ankle deep in water, soaking wet and sitting on a hunk of metal in the rain, with lightning present.

I had no choice, then, but to abandon the bike there, in the middle of that ditch. Giving up, humiliated and defeated, I swung my right leg off that motorcycle, in that muddy gutter. With my dark sunglasses lost, my pirate-style t-shirt a soaked and muddy disgrace, my eyes and face pelted, my whole body staggered by the torrential downpour, I pulled myself upright and raised my arms skyward, just the way a man would do when told to 'throw down your weapon', and backed away, slowly, in the rain. The whole scene reminded me of Gary Senese, as Lieutenant Dan, madder than hell, without a leg to stand on [after all, haven't we always been told that we have no right to be madder than hell at anything?].

I then shouted, to anyone that would listen, "Is that all you've got? Is that it? Okay! You win! I'm backing away from the bike! Are you happy? I'm backing away from the bike."

Of course, not knowing what the outcome of that moment would be, I became quite subdued, quiet and thoughtful, as I climbed up that embankment, muddy, drenched, humbled, beaten and ragged, almost home, sans motorcycle, sans hubris.

-

-Of Great Ships And Self-Determination-

The first thing I became aware of when I became aware again, was that this was a second chance. The second thing I was aware of was that I had been given just enough time to lift my head -the way babies do when they are first learning to crawl - before the next wave struck me midthought and pressed me flat again.

A second chance! Flat on my face, cold and wet and shivering down to the bone - but glad to have it!

I held my breath to wait it out but quickly realized upon sober inspection that my reaction had come too late, and that my lungs had taken on water, but with the help of panic and that blessedly strong survival instinct given to all life - however mean - I pushed violently against the sea-sand and sprang to my feet, retching out the sea even as I rose. Bent, staggered, making my way, first by inches and then by feet - my own two feet this time - I moved up and off that gray beach.

Soon enough, I found myself at the foot of an old tree, and sooner still, for this I had planned, exhausted as I was, I found myself doing what every self-respecting person should do, if given a second chance:

I turned and faced that which I had been delivered from.

The disturbed sea moved and foamed as if it had been deeply jarred from its sleep by an argument, or a wrong. Above this great scene the gray skies,stretched out as far and as wide as the eye could see, blocked the warmth of the day and seem'd, as low and as precarious a cloud cover as and I'd ever seen, and seemed, then, so weighted down to my mind that, at any moment, I fully believed they must either release all the rains at once or crash head-on into that shore.

But that moment and that concern left me for another; a distress signal from a Great Ship far out at sea. The small flare lasted but a second or two and was gone. The gray ceilings of heavy clouds, in their efficiency, concealed more than the warmth of the sun.

It was then that I remembered from whence I had come from, and, so lately, filled with such despair.

Had I been pushed? or had I jumped? Perhaps I had been pushed into a jump? And then it was, beneath that tree, that I remembered the news, broke to us so unceremoniously.

"Hear ye, hear ye. It is by the power invested in me from the thine Owners, at whose will and pleasure I do serve, that its Guests be made aware that they are, in fact, Guests here, and not now, nor never were, volunteer crewmates upon this Great Ship. Furthermore, I have been instructed to convey to you this: You have, not now, in the future, nor ever have, from the moment that you stepped foot upon this vessel, a right to lay claim to the ownership of anything you have contributed here while enjoying your stay."

Of a greater irony and disservice I could not imagine.

Whether it be true or not couldn't be discerned precisely, yet, as I looked around, a feeling grew in me, like the the sickening thrill of a weightless stomach on a roller coaster ride.

I fell back, against that rough trunk and slowly lowered myself down onto the grass. Blinking back rain, I stared blankly out at that ship.

Of solace, I had but two options:

I could take comfort in knowing that that great ship was broken and adrift in an aimless sea, or;

I could take comfort in knowing that I still had me.

I chose the latter then, and that makes all the difference.

.

Then, as it was, then, again, it will be.

Though the course may change sometimes

Rivers always reach the sea

Flying skies of fortune

Each our sep'rate way

On the wings of maybe

Downy birds of prey

Kind of makes me feel sometimes

We didn't have to grow

For as the eagle leaves the nest

We got so far to go.

Changes fill my life

Baby that's alright with me

In the midst I think of you

And how it used to be.

Did you ever really need somebody

Really need 'em bad.

Did you ever really want somebody,

The best stuff you ever had.

Do you ever remember me baby

Did it feel so good,

'Cause it was just the first time

And you knew you would.

Dewey eyes now sparkle,

Senses grow so keen,

Tasting loves along the way,

See our feathers preened.

Kind of makes me feel sometimes,

Didn't have to know.

We are eagles of one nest,

The nest is in our soul.

Fixin' all mt dreams,

With great surprise to me,

I never thought I'd see your face

The way it used to be.

Oh darlin'

Oh darlin'.

Ten years gone,

Holding on,

Ten years gone.

Ten years gone, holding on,

Ten years gone.

-

Led Zeppelin

"Ten Years Gone"

–

-A Remembrance-

\-----

One of the things I am most grateful for, probably more grateful for than anything else now, at my age, are memories. The truly wonderful gift of a memory is the way a moment can be seen from a third perspective, and when I think back to that particular moment in time, which I have had cause to do these past few days, I can see the happy ridiculousness of that one moment, which was but one moment, a fleeting moment among many. But also, and more importantly to me now, I see the love.

It is a sunny and beautiful day, right in the middle of a long and beautiful summer that has since passed, and yet remains, like the memory of a gentle breeze, and the ol' lady and I are still living in the little house that I have since lost. Our house sat across the street from the county courthouse, and was one of only three on the block, which sports a small park in the middle, and sits on an old cobblestone street that had long been neglected and overgrown with weeds. Judges and lawyers, county cops, state troopers, local yokels, and some of my neighbors had all cruised past in that time, and must have thought I was crazy, for I had spent the better part of a week weed whacking in the street, dodging traffic [wasn't as bad as it sounds], and sweeping the cobblestones clean with a corn broom, for the length of the block, from curb to curb. Then I decided to rake up all the leaves in the small park next door. It was late afternoon, and I had had a few, and was out there, into my second day of raking, drinking my beer and wearing dark sunglasses, as if, by wearing dark sunglasses, no one would see me drinking my beer and raking leaves in a park that I didn't own. I was almost done when Ronnie pulled up and saw me out there. He was grinning and wearing dark sunglasses too, and looked at me like, what the hell are you doing? Are you crazy?

I really can't remember what he said exactly, but I remember it brought a smile to my face, and I remember I stopped raking those leaves, leaned on my rake and said, "I love you, Ronnie!" And I remember that I meant it.

He asked me to install a bathroom floor in one of his rentals over on Park Street, so I went over and took a look. The house was an old wooden thing; two bedroom, and had just been abandoned by tenants who were slobs. The power was still on, which was good, because I would have to cut into the floor down to the floor joists, which were soaked and rotting and caving in due to a long-standing, leaking stool. But the water had been turned off, which was bad, because the filthy stool was filled with pure piss, and would need to be removed, by me, and as anyone who has ever removed a stool can tell you, if you don't drain 'em first, there's a good chance that they will leak out the bottom. Ronnie's plan was to remove the stool, fix the floor, and reset the stool in a different location. If it wasn't one of Ronnie's houses, I probably wouldn't have done that floor; not at least, without the water turned on, in case of a piss spill. But I moved the stool, and did the floor, and it was a beautiful floor.

Another time, I was driving up Main Street and saw Ronnie in front of me, hauling something in the back of his old brown pickup truck. I laughed, because I knew Ronnie, and knew that he had a plan for whatever it was that he was hauling, which looked to me like road kill, hanging over the tailgate and bouncing along like a dead animal. Anyway, a while later, he stopped by the house.

"Hey," he said, "I've got a piece of carpet for the Big House [that's what he called his house out on the North Road, next to the old Trophy Shop, a couple of blocks away from my house, out on the very Edge of Town] that I want you to install. Whenever you can get to it, I'd appreciate it."

Well, needless to say, the road kill he had been hauling was the piece of carpet, an old, used, [at one time, long ago] fifty two dollar a yard chunk of rug he'd bought at an estate sale in Saint Louis, and had obviously kept in one of his pole barns.

But, hey; it was for Ronnie, so I installed it; and it cleaned up well.

Ronnie was a gentle guy. He was an old codger and a horse trader. Ronnie was one of those older guys that I could never pin an age on; to me, he could've been anywhere from fifty six to seventy three. My only clues to his age came from his stories, which were amazing; he'd been in the service, had a front row view of the Cuban Missile Crisis; he'd been all over the country; he dreamed big, and took great pleasure in winding yarns. Listening to him tell his stories, I never had a problem visualizing what he said. Even after his stroke, and had trouble with his words, I could understand him, and sometimes could finish the sentences that gave him trouble. A couple of years ago, on Christmas Eve, he stopped by the house, apparently knowing that we had no food, and gave us a ham. Another time, he brought us a case of frozen fish from Dots, out in Mount Sterling, a grocery store two hours drive from here. Knowing that I was a beer drinker, and trying to get me out of the house, he'd always throw this at me: "Hey, the coldest beer in town's out at the Bowling Alley. You need to come on down some time and try it." I wish I had, Ronnie; I wish I had...He and his wife had five kids together: a daughter and four sons; every time he spoke of his kids, I could see the love; his sons, he referred to as Numbers: "Number One Son; Number Two Son; Number Three Son, and Number Four Son"; this would always make me smile, because I understood the reference [to that old TV detective, Charlie Chan]. He was a Republican, yet I didn't know it, and almost didn't believe it, when he told me so; so close were we in agreement on the problems facing America these days. He was a very decent man. To my mind, it's people like Ronnie that make this world go 'round; people like Ronnie.

"Hey," he would tell me, smiling, his pirate smile and blues eyes, old hat and white stubble painting a personal picture of a Scots-Irish captain of the African Queen, "for an old man..." never finishing the sentence, but smiling...smiling.

Once, a few years back, I was out at the Big House on the North Road working in his basement, laying some bricks. The big house was an old Second Empire home, and the house that he raised his family in, and where he lost his wife. The house, long abandoned, yet clearly once beautiful, now needed a lot of work. Yet, as he described his vision of the finished house, I could almost see it finished, too; even more wonderful and poignant to me, however, was that I could see the memories he had; all saved up in his mind from days gone by, days when he was a younger man, when his wife was still there, and his kids were young, and he had a long life ahead of him.

When he showed up, of course, he had a story for me. We went out into the yard, and stood under an old, ancient oak tree, one of two or three on the property. Among the piles of bricks he'd spent the summer before cleaning the snot off of, and the stacks of wood and empty drywall buckets, sat an old '59 Ford Edsel, rusting. It wasn't in bad shape, yet it didn't run. Ronnie had big plans for that Edsel, and even then, even with all his other projects going, he had busy calling shops around the country, pricing parts and making plans to get it on the road again.

He told me that he'd gone to the wake of an old friend a night or two before, about thirty miles away, and had brought one or two of his kids along. He then went on to tell me about a date he went on in high school; the last date of his senior year. His story just seemed to flow as naturally as a clear, cool creak. His date was a girl that he really liked, he said, and proceeded to paint a picture of late 1950's America in my mind; sock hops and rock n' roll and romance. He said that he and his girl stayed out til five in the morning, and had a great time; he didn't tell me what they did or where they went or even what they talked about, but that, when he pulled up in front of her house to drop her off, that they both knew that they would never see each other again, for she was going to become a nun.

"So," he said, getting back to the story about the wake, "I was standing there, waiting in line to pay my respects, when the woman in front of me turned around and glanced back. She looked familiar. We looked at each other for a few moments. 'Ronnie?' she said."

He smiled. I smiled. It was a beautiful day.

"It was her?" I asked.

His broad grin was wonderful.

"It was her. And we hadn't seen each other in fifty years. I looked at her, and she looked at me. I asked her if she was still a nun. She was. She asked about me; how my life was. I told her how I'd married, and told her that we had five kids together, and that I'd lost my wife."

He looked down and then raised his head and looked at the old Edsel.

"I know that some people might think me just a crazy old man, working on this house, working on this car. But it's important to me."

I was listening so intently it almost hurt, taking in what he was saying, because it was important to me, too. He looked at the old car again.

"This isn't the exact one, but it's close enough. This was the car that I had in high school."

-Shared memories.

You will be missed, my friend. You will be missed.

-

-Tuning-

\-----

If life is like a sound, or a heartbeat in the mind, then habits, especially old ones, are like strings that run, from tuning key to bridge.

And so it is that this has become the way I now look back.

Once in tune and out of tune at the same time, I have since become aware that my precious time is now being spent, not so sharp, nor not so flat as I once was.

Unlike most, my now practiced fingers never learned to touch the body very much; only the strings.

...EEE...;BBB...;...GGG...[flat];...GGG... [these old strings on this old flat top box retain their eternal four-forty quite well, and so, as I check the tuning, like an old friend, pull an old familiar smile from me];

...DDD...AAA...

...E...E...E...

Tuned, once more.

Thank you.

Old strings on an old wooden guitar, yellowed with age, with an old body as worn as my body; as familiar to me as any old habit is to anybody.

My hearing ain't as good as it used to be. That's the bad thing. The good thing is that my memories are growing stronger.

The strummed chord sounds good; beautiful, in fact; as sweet as a sweet bird's song. An E. After the familiar pause [rest], the slow strum comes along, steadily.

I am aware of myself and this instrument; its rhythms, aware that this particular habit of his, carried away by us, his younger brothers, so innocently, so naively, so naturally, so gratefully, yet without, ever, a single gentle thanks, so many years before, was once a habit we shared together. Now, one dead and one long gone, whenever I sit and strum, here, or there, or anywhere, I am aware of their presence somehow, even this long thirty years later.

Of their presence, I take what I can and imagine them here, doing three-part harmony, and, beginning again, strum, and sing this song, which seems to age very well, and both with them and alone, we sing again.

-

-Heroes-

We get our heroes from the rooms we run through as little kids. We get our heroes before we even have a concept of 'heroes'. We get our heroes through osmosis, as we look up at them with loving eyes. Before we even know it. We look up to our heroes because that's the original way we saw them; by looking up at them from our highchair, our cribs, our strollers. Our heroes come to us naturally, through time. "Like father, like son". 'The apple never falls far from the tree". "A chip off the old block". "When I grow up, I want to be like my brother [my father, my other brother]". We have our heroes before we can even talk.

We gather all that information, all that stuff that helps form who we are, all that stuff that informs us as, even as we squirm in our cribs, helpless. We pick up on the visual: the electric light on the ceiling, the sunshine through the blinds, the colors, the walls, the patterns of the wallpaper, the layout of the rooms. We also pick up on the auditory: the quality, the richness, the rhythms, the tones of those we love and the sounds they make, all around us, or down the hall; in the kitchen; in the frontroom. Our senses are working overtime to form thoughts, organize our world. They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. They were right. Even before we have a clue as to what the fuck we're saying, we're imitating. Even before we have a clue as to what the fuck is being said, we are imitating. We babble, and it sounds pretty; we learn cadence, and it sounds pretty; we learn a word or two, and the love connection is made; we learn how to answer, and we follow.

We spend countless hours, on our backs, just wriggling and thinking the thoughtless thoughts that only babies know and can understand. Then we formulate a plan of action, roll over, get up on all fours, crawl over to the crib bars, climb up and fall over the rail to the floor. Then, some of us get up and begin to look for answers, while others just lay there and wait for someone to come over and pick 'em up, while just outside that sweet and pastel room of baby blues and pinks, a whole world of sounds and scents and sights and love...

-

-when no years are light years-

By the time she arrived, I'd had more experience with babies than most my age: my parents had four more kids after I was born, all girls, so I grew up holding babies, changing diapers, sterilizing glass bottles in hot water, warming milk on the stove, testing the warmth of milk on my wrist. At an early age, it became clear to me that I knew how to care for babies: I could make them laugh, hold their interest, burp them, feed them baby food, clean their little faces afterwards, and show them love; all this I knew how to do before the age of nine.

.

The day after the night I'd gotten drunk and decided to open a MySpace account and send her a message on her MySpace page was the first day after the last day, long ago, that I had spoken to her.

Why it came about that I had sent her a message at all was because she had posted a question on her MySpace page, and that question, which had everything to do with creativity, hit me well and truly, and, for the first time in years, almost two decades, reading drunk, I thight she was talking to me. So I replied to her.

But before I could reply to her, I had to create a MySpace account, which wasn't easy, being that I'm computer illiterate and being that I was so drunk that I was having a hard time staying upright upon the old wooden trestle table bench I was using for a stand in lieu of a computer chair.

But I somehow created an account, all the while looking at the astonishing picture of her, now grown, which looked back at me from her MySpace page.

The message I sent her had something to do with the fact that I had been in the habit of stopping by her MySpace page from time to time, just to check up on her, from a distance.

My daughter...

So, having dashed off a reply and satisfied in my drunken stupid way that my effort was somehow good enough, I turned off the computer and went to bed.

But in the morning, trying to remember what I had done the night before, and suffering with a raging hangover, I remembered creating a MySpace account and sending my daughter a message, the first one in twenty years, and the first time, in her young life, that she actuall "heard" [if you count reading as "hearing"] her father speak to her.

I sat down on the wooden bench, turned on the computer, and went to check for a reply from her.

That's when I found out that I didn't know my own MySpace password. I tried all sorts of configurations: everything that I thought could remotely be my password. Nothing worked.

So, as usually happens in a story like this, the drunk calls his sister and explains to her what he's done, and that he has sent his daughter a message on MySpace, but that, in order to do so, he had to create an account... and somehow managed to do so...and, blind drunk, sent the message...and blah, blah, blah.

I asked my sister Frankie if her son could hack into my brand-new MySpace account and reclaim it for me.

The story, to my mind, was pathetic, and even as my sad and pained voice related the tale, I heard great joy on the other end of the line. My sister was ecstatic.

Why?

Because it had been nineteen years since anyone on my side of her family had last seen my daughter.

My sister, with all sorts of hope and great expectations, said she'd pass the info on to her son, who would see what he could do. Then I hung up, put on my t-shirt, jeans and dark sunglasses and went outside to rake. I was in the middle of raking the neighbor's little park.

.

Well, first of all, I'm not gonna lie and say that I was the greatest daddy anyone could ever have.

I wasn't.

I still ain't.

I haven't thought of myself as a 'daddy' in years, since she was a baby, in fact.

I have even told her so. This is not self-pity; this is fact. Yes, there is a difference, you know.

A father. Yes. I once fathered a daughter.

Of the fault, the reasons why I wasn't there, I will claim half as mine; more than half, even, if it makes you feel any better.

I don't mind claiming responsibility for what I've done, which includes a handful of drunken and regretted arguments with her mother.

But, once upon a time, she was a baby, a beautiful little red-haired baby, with the beautiful soft skin and eyes of her mother.

Love, intelligence, curiosity, wonder, all this and more I found in her beautiful baby's eyes on those few occasions when I had her with me during that first year.

I can still remember that singular year. I was a natural. I'd lean gently over her crib and look at her with love in my own eyes, knowing that my love had been given to me by her, as if by magic.

One day, I went over to her mother's house to visit and pay child support. The house was empty.

I decided not to pursue the matter.

The years went by.

Then came a day, shortly after I'd finally gotten with the world and had gotten a computer, when I decided to look her up. Sure enough, there she was. From then on, I'd check in on her, from the safe and non-intrusive distance that is the Internet.

Then the moment came when I saw her MySpace question.

.

So there I was, out in the neighbor's yard, in their little park, hungover, with my dark sunglasses on, raking up the accumulated leaves of autumns past, cleaning up the place. I thought about her, I thought about me; I thought about a lot that day. I was at my lowest point at that time, and spent most of my time trying to come up with reasons to live. It was a bad, bad time for me.

From inside my window, I heard the phone ringing.

I set down the rake, went inside, and picked up the phone.

"Hello?"

"Hi."

"Frankie?"

"Yeah."

"Oh. Hi."

"Hey, have you been on MySpace lately?"

"No I haven't. You know that I don't have my password."

"Well, you might want to go look at it."

"Why?"

"Because there is a message on there from your daughter."

Oh...the joy, the great joy; the expectation; the love and happiness.

I typed in the password, and there it was; a message from my daughter:

"Steve Kenny. How ya been? You really should put a pic of yourself up."

Hey, it might not sound like much to you, but to me...it was the sound of joyous angels and trumpets.

It took me a minute to compose myself [drunks are like that; they are always expecting the worst the next day, and when it is good news, it throws 'em off balance].

I steadied myself and began to form thoughts; thoughts so filled with love that, unless you've gone through it, you just can't comprehend it.

I don't remember exactly what I wrote, but I do remember the gist. It went something like this:

Rachel,

I have checked in on you, from time to time, over the years, but I have always kept my distance. I have always felt that when you became old enough, you would maybe come see me. Recently, I have gotten a computer and have found you on MySpace, and have checked in on you from time to time, just to see how you are doing. Although checking on you on MySpace is good, it kinda feels like I'm looking at you from across space; like you are in another galaxy. It also feels like the message I sent to you, I sent when you were a baby, and the reply you have sent me has just arrived, like a message sent from another galaxy light years away, having taken twenty years for me to hear.

When I went to bed that night, I cried. I think I cried half the night.

We met at a park alongside the Kankakee River a few months later, for the first time in twenty years. I almost couldn't stand to stand before her, so moved was I with emotion. As we approached each other, hesitantly, I could see strength and innocence, frailty and knowledge.

And in her eyes, her beautiful eyes, I saw my daughter.

-

-Open Salon: An Amateur's Attempt At A Definition-

It has become evident to me that Open Salon means different things to different people. This is my idea of what Open Salon is and is not.

_Is Open Salon a bureaucracy? [government run by officials]._

I don't think so.

_Is Open Salon, as far as I can tell, a functioning wing, arm or foot of the United States' government?_

_I don't think so._

_Is Open Salon 'open', as in:_

_'open air'?_

_'open water, well out from the shore'?_

_'the public knowledge'?_

_'to come out from hiding or cover'?_

_[all definitions found under the word 'open' in the 1991 Edition of The Webster's Dictionary and Thesaurus of the English Language.]_

I think so.

_Is Open Salon now, or has Open Salon ever been considered 'closed', as in:_

_'closed-fisted'? [mean. miserly]_

Sometimes, but that shouldn't be the ideal.

_Is Open Salon now, or has Open Salon ever been considered 'closed', as in:'closed-mouthed'? [not communicative, esp. not inclined to give information away]_

No; not as long as I've been here [which hasn't been long]

_Are Open Salon members 'close'?_

Not too close, generally speaking, yet I am also aware that some members are, indeed, very, very close; which reminds me of an old joke:

Question: _What's the difference between a brown nose and a shithead?_

Answer:  _Depth perception. [ah haha ha; a joke; ;]]_

_Does Open Salon 'lean' in any particular direction?_

Although Big Salon 'leans' Left, Open Salon seems to have always 'leaned' the way I do after twenty beers, which is, Left, Right, Backwards, Forwards, and Stumbleupon.

_Is Open Salon a newspaper?_

Not as far as I can tell. Some of us might be reporters here, but it is strictly on a volunteer basis, and if some wish to write in the 'anonymous' style, that their right; Personally, I like to 'see' the person behind the words. As a matter of fact, it is my belief that it is in the best interest of everyone here to let the reader 'see' as much of the writer as possible; 'seeing' the writer is what sets Open Salon apart.

We will never 'see' James Patterson in any of his books, nor do we ever get to 'see' much of the reporter behind the report. But here at OS, when you can 'see' the writer, you have a chance to get to know the writer, flaws and all...

_If Open Salon is an organic, dynamic, thriving, living thing, how do we keep it healthy?_

Like any living thing, it must be fed, and given air and light. Some say Open Salon should be kept in a smoke-free environment, well away from loud noises and free thinkers, and that it should get plenty of rest and daily exercise, as well as be fed a strict diet of low-sodium, fat-free foods, and no sugar. I suppose that would be, that is, the ideal for some here. But that is not the reality here. The reality is that Open Salon is fed from all the foods groups: dairy, fish, poultry, meat, fruit and vegetables, nuts and grains and ferns.

But that's not all it's fed.

It also recieves healthy doses of junk food, whiskey, beer and wine, nails and rust, cigarette smoke and medical marijuana, salt and pepper, prescription meds and aspirin, coffee, tea and insomnia; sugar, spices and rubs... along with generous amounts of honesty and pain, tears and laughter, outrage and good ideas, bad ideas and ghosts, joys and sorrows, hopes and dreams; all, given with a little spirit...

[Dickens would've fit right in here, I think]...

_Should we write with reservations?_

As far as I can see, there are no reasons to be guarded here; no reasons to not speak your mind. The last time I checked, Open Salon is not a Failed Salon; We treat people with a certain amount of respect here, or at least, we try.

Open Salon is not a Third World Failed State: We try to maintain civility here; We don't hang people off Interstate overpasses here, no one has to ride on the tops of freight trains to get in here; no one gets carded at the door; no photo identification needed. No one gets deported here, No family gets separated. We do insist that English be spoken, although anyone can speak any language they like here. We might get angry sometimes, but we try not to stay angry; we try to arrive sober, but sometimes end up leaving drunk [like me]. Some of us [like me] don't like Republicans; some Rupublicans here don't like us. Some women here don't like men here; some women here don't like men  _there_ , either, for that matter. Some men here don't like some women, and I don't care much for a few of my exes [but I digress].

As far as I can see, Open Salon is America, and America can be found here at Open Salon. Here, we agree to agree, or agree to disagree, but either way, and in so doing so, we affirm that Open Salon is a True Democracy, where all voices can be and will be heard equally, and given some respect. Here, we have modified the famous words of Pericles from _"We regard him who holds aloof of public affairs useless"_ [the ancient Greek word for useless,  _'idiote',_ from which we get the modern 'idiot'], to read: _"We regard all those who contribute here as useful in some way, whether we agree with them or not",_ and leave it at that.

Finally, I leave you with the words of the far-seeing Edith Hamilton, whom, describing the ideals of the ancient Greeks, once wrote:

_"...no one was ashamed of being poor if he was useful. They were free because of their willing obedience to law, not only written, but still more, the unwritten, kindness and compassion and unselfishness, and the many qualities which cannot be enforced, which depends on a man's free choice, but without which men cannot live together._

_-_

-Sunday Morning Coming Down-

Sunday morning came down to us with no promises.

At signs of first daylight the sky dropped and the rain and thunder tumbled out, wrapped in gray, and with the wind, swept over the empty yards before us before coming to rest, exhausted, to seep, slow and alive, under the many rotting fences of this empty neighborhood.

We looked out the window in silence, and after a while, my eyes wandered from the scene outside to the old man, sitting in the old two-dollar thrift store armchair that was his favorite. He stared quietly out the window, as if he could see. The old man was, in fact, blind, and whenever I ventured a look at his eyes, I knew what would happen; I would become captured by his inner life, his inner thoughts, and in his imaginative wanderings I would find myself traveling, in wild wonder, and could feel my mind's orbit being pulled, ever closer to his thoughts, his way of seeing.

We knew that all the roads most traveled were filled with barely clinging people, but that those roads held no promises either, and that, although they could all see, plainly, many roads less traveled, the people mostly stayed away from them, because they looked difficult, dark and dangerous, intimidating, overgrown and cave-like.

_Why can't they see? I asked._

_Because they can't; they won't. It's too difficult. They would rather wish. I call it blind happiness._

_What are they wishing for? I asked._

_They are wishing for everything they ever want to turn out, and believe it will, exactly the way no one ever promised them it would ever turn out. They are wishing for happiness without effort._

And at the core of his perspective, I always find only love and humility, which informs me, and gives me the heartbreaking truth, which is sadder than the gray day we face.

We have lost our humility. I can see this especially clearly when I compare our time with that of Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy, Eisenhower, Roosevelt...

_The wish is to the dream what the fantasy is to the fact, and, convinced of this without ever considering what this actually means, they hold on, to nothing but a fantasy based on a suggestion, as if it were fact, while in reality, it is a suggestion given by no one, who made no promises._

_Wishing is easy and cheap, and yields happiness without effort. Wishing is good for a laugh, a smile, and a soundbite, and can be heard on all the mindless radios on the roads most traveled, but satisfaction, which requires some effort, can only be found by taking the road less traveled..._

_\--_

Sunday morning came down to us with no promises. At signs of first daylight, the sky dropped, and the rain and thunder tumbled out, wrapped in gray, with the wind, and swept over the empty yards before us, before coming to rest, exhausted, to seep, low and alive, under the many rotting fences of this empty neighborhood.

Well I woke up Sunday morning,  
With no way to hold my head that didn't hurt.  
And the beer I had for breakfast wasn't bad,  
So I had one more for dessert.  
Then I fumbled through my closet for my clothes,  
And found my cleanest dirty shirt.  
An' I shaved my face and combed my hair,  
An' stumbled down the stairs to meet the day.

I'd smoked my brain the night before,  
On cigarettes and songs I'd been pickin'.  
But I lit my first and watched a small kid,  
Cussin' at a can that he was kicking.  
Then I crossed the empty street,  
'n caught the Sunday smell of someone fryin' chicken.  
And it took me back to somethin',  
That I'd lost somehow, somewhere along the way.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,  
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.  
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,  
Makes a body feel alone.  
And there's nothin' short of dyin',  
Half as lonesome as the sound,  
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:  
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

In the park I saw a daddy,  
With a laughin' little girl who he was swingin'.  
And I stopped beside a Sunday school,  
And listened to the song they were singin'.  
Then I headed back for home,  
And somewhere far away a lonely bell was ringin'.  
And it echoed through the canyons,  
Like the disappearing dreams of yesterday.

On the Sunday morning sidewalk,  
Wishing, Lord, that I was stoned.  
'Cos there's something in a Sunday,  
Makes a body feel alone.  
And there's nothin' short of dyin',  
Half as lonesome as the sound,  
On the sleepin' city sidewalks:  
Sunday mornin' comin' down.

"Sunday Morning Coming Down"

_Kris Kristofferson_

_-_

_-_ Lifespan Of A Royalty Check-

_Okay. First, you need to know the facts. The first fact you need to know is that a kid, a real person, killed himself a few years ago by jumping off a tower. The second fact you need to know is that a writer, later on, decided to write an essay about this kid's suicide. These are the facts. You should also keep in mind that there were many undisputed facts surrounding this kid's last act of self-determination, such as, how old he was, what he hit when he landed, and how many seconds he fell through the air. These facts are known. These facts are undisputed._

_Okay. So later, an essayist gets ahold of the facts, sits down, and types up an essay. The only thing is, in his essay, he fucked with the facts, tweaked here, changed there, until his piece, ten, fifteen pages long [I'm not sure, but then again, who gives a fuck about accuracy, right?], is finished. Satisfied, he submitted it to a publisher. The publisher put a fact checker on it [employed by the publisher, the fact checker checks submissions for factual accuracy], and before long, the fact checker had compiled a list of factual inaccuracies that would have made a politician blush, a list that was longer than the original submission._

_So began, the authors of a new book claimed [at first], a ten year correspondence between the fact checker and the essayist. The essayist; arguing on behalf of the 'creative' types who would change the facts of a real suicide for the sake of their 'art'; and, the fact checker; arguing on behalf of those who value credibility and integrity and factual accuracy -especially in an essay about a real suicide- above 'artistic licence'. By the way, the author of the original essay shaved a second [or added a second; I can't remember, and who cares, anyway? Right? Let's just get rid of Fact Checkers! The essayist messed with the factual time the kid fell through the air, because the number, nine, I think it was, or eight, maybe, didn't strike the essayist as a meaningful enough number._

_This is my response such egregious and egotistical hubris._

As I sat back in my chair this morning, in the dark, disappointed with the world and with myself, sipping my coffee and contemplating the drudgery of another day without sunshine, calmly listening to NPR, and a story about a book that tries to move the ethical boundaries of 'art', a book whose authors, if memory serves me correctly, originally claimed was the result of correspondences over a ten year period between an essayist [who, in this particular case, wrote an essay about a real suicide; a kid jumped off a tower and died], and a fact checker [employed by the publisher, the fact checker makes sure everything in a written work submitted for publication is, in fact, true], a book now revealed to have been completely concocted recently, a book whose authors clearly desire to be heard by whatever means necessary. As a story about a suicide, this story has done damage to the public's trust in the media. As a story about a writer with no ethics, the story has succeeded completely.

_So what, you might say; the guy only took artistic license with a real suicide for the sake of dramatic effect and psychological impact. So what; the family is okay with it, because it brings the issue of suicide to the forefront. In the face of this fact, I am still compelled to ask myself, Did the story of a suicide, a real, tragic, brutal suicide seem so weak, so superficial, so humdrum, so pedestrian, so everyday, to the writer that he felt he had to take liberties with the facts? Cannot the facts surrounding a real-life suicide strike the mind of a people, of a so-called writer, anymore, as a singularly powerful event that neither begs nor needs one to look no further than the awful truths of the act itself ? Are we becoming a people that can no longer see the real-life dimensions of human dignity? of human tragedy? Is every one of us becoming nothing more than a two-dimensional paper cutout, a two-dimensional image on a screen, a completely Superficial Representation,media-created representations of our true selves, the true self being set aside for the sake of art, and the way your superficial represntation looks on the printed page or the gel screen? Is reality being subjugated by the minions of flat screen electronica? Is this new, Superficial Representation in words really what we need right now? Don't we already have enough Superficial Representation on Facebook? On television? On the big screen? In our government? Is there really no more room for truth anymore? Has it really fallen so low? I can hear the coming buzz, making its way through the overheated circuitry:_

**Superficial Representation takes over the world when an army of deliberately misleading authors decide to take over the big publishing houses of nonfiction and memoir, and create a world in which nobody knows nor recognizes the truth anymore, a world in which** _truth is art, and art is truth..._

As an endlessly fascinated observer of the human condition with a soul-crushing awareness of my own conscience, and although not a big believer in warning labels, I feel the time has come for a new warning label, a publishing-house warning label, one that should be applied to certain works of 'art' that come down the pike disguised as 'memoir' or 'lifespan'. _'Superficial Representation'_ is the term we should apply to such works. It is an adequate phrase that should work well to warn the public; a nice, blanket-type tag, a bloviated generalization that will have no problem seamlessly fusing at the genetic level with certain media-created, corporation-approved, sensationalized and promoted works of horseshit. Now, before anybody in the room gets offended or angry about this new regulation, let me soften the blow by reminding you that the ideas of Superficial Representation and Decorative Space already exist in the _visual_ arts, and has for over a hundred years; _think Matisse._ That said, this tag, this warning label, used to identify intentionally misleading writing and writers of the charlatan sort, writers of the sort that take liberties with the details of a real suicide, should be _big,_ and should be _bigger_ than the warning label on a cigarette pack, but _smaller_ , initially, than the ego of the writer; this warning label should be _brighter_ the flame of a depressed soul unable to defend itself, but less bright than the clever intentions of the snake oil salesman; this warning label should be _wider_ the reach of the national publicity campaign attached to the product, yet _thinner_ than the fattened wallets of the celebrating hucksters, and, finally, hotter than the warm, fuzzy feeling the writer of such a load of horseshit gets when hearing himself on a national public radio station, but definitely cooler, by degrees, than anything such a weak writer shall ever produce.

This, then, is the proposed warning label:

**Superficial Representation Warning:**

**Warning: This story may contain Superficial Representations of the known facts of this story as we know them. Although this story is considered true, much or most of it may contain elements of untruth and complete and/or partial fabrications of pure imagination pulled directly from the author's own ass, elements that may or may not be related to the story, fabrications that have been put there to enhance the dramatic aspects of the story. Furthermore, it is the expressed wish of the author that the reader be informed that quoted sources have been intentionally misquoted, for the sake of psychological impact and/or other aesthetic considerations. It is the author's** _belief and will_ __**that the following be known by the reader; that the author's story and the author's writing skill alone should take precedence over and above existing fact, for the sake of the author's art, for the sake of said author's sales, and for the sake of his overly pampered and nurtured ego. The author takes no responsibility herein, except to accept any and all credit offered, including monetary, but none of the blame for this purposeful and misleading construction of** _artful horseshit._

_So._

Does a writer have a right to take your real story, a real episode in your life, and make it the writer's story? Sure, as long as the writer doesn't identify you, a real person with a real story to tell, specifically for the purpose of establishing the writer's credibility in the mind of the reader, only to abandon the facts of your story after _your_ credibility established the credibility of _the writer with_ _the reader._ In other words, if I am the writer, and I'm writing a story about P.T. Barnum, and I am presenting a story to a reader as a _truthful_ story, I _can_ start the story by telling the reader that Barnum was a circus man [which establishes a truth and me as a credible writer in the mind of the reader, and helps establish _the trust_ ] _,_ I cannot be allowed to go on and tell the reader that Barnum captured all his circus animals bare handed in the African savanna while drunk on zebra piss. Why? Because, while this bold statement might make for a more dramatic story, a more entertaining story, and might even maintain the illusion of a truthful story in some minds, it has run off the road of credibility, and, if such a fabrication is found out by the reader, depending on the temperment of that reader, the writer may end up kicked to the curb.

What such an author does, when apprehending such a story and bending and changing it and making it _his_ story, only partially concerned with the truth of the individual's story, is to take _that story, that statement,_ away from _that individual._ No writer, however talented, should trample around the scene of a suicide like some bumbling idiot detective, destroying or tweeking the _facts_ of the case, the _honesty_ of the story.

If the writer covering a suicide cannot approach and write, without purposefully creating or bending facts, a thought-provoking piece that stirs and conveys to the reader somehow the all-consuming pain of a human being willing to take his own life, then that writer is no writer at all, at least not a good one, and should probably go into politics or pac ad descriptions instead. A good writer can make a steaming pile of horseshit seem interesting to the general reading public. A good writer views the world as having such depth and breadth and width as to be a limitless place of unending fuel for the mind. A good writer is an astute observer of the human condition and has a _social contract_ with the reading public, and will be aware that if and when a supposedly factual piece appears in print, it damned well better be accurate.

I once wrote a story, a memoir. In my memoir, I recount a motorcycle crash I had. I was going eighty miles an hour, but right before I crashed, I was aware that I'd managed to slow the bike down somewhat. I reported that slowdown in my writing. Although I wasn't sure exactly how fast I was going, I made my best guess and put it down. Sure, crashing a motorcycle at eighty would have sounded better, and sure, I'd like to look like superman in my own work, but I just couldn't do it. It wouldn't have been an honest description of the event. Sure, I could have fabricated details, fattened and added and borrowed sensationalist phrases and descriptions, but that wouldn't have sat right with me, would it, if discovered, I would hope, sit right with the reading public.

In my memoir, there is much dialogue, taken from journals I'd kept. Some of that dialogue was with family members no longer with us. I found myself wishing that I had taken down more dialogue at that time. For the sake of the argument here, I could have 'invented' dialogue for my story. I mean _, it's my memoir, right? Who could challenge my credibility?_ , I didn't create imagined dialogue; I couldn't do it because it wouldn't have been _true._ I kept some passages out, but only for the sake of decency, and out of respect for those depicted.

I didn't fuck with factual accuracy in my story because I want my work to stand the test of time, just like a Michelangelo statue, or a classical Greek work of _art._ To borrow the real name of a suicide victim and insert it into a purposefully inaccurate story like so much filling in a turnover is pretty goddamned bad. A writer surrounding such a real event as a suicide with flights of imagination, and then, years later, promoting a book about the _arguments surrounding_ the _facts of_ that suicide, to my mind, reveals a callous, impersonal, and uncomprehending mind at work.

There's a revelation in my memoir, a few, as a matter of fact, that reveal my immaturity, my dysfunctions; far from flattery. Did I change, did I bend, did I skirt, did I skip the passages? No, I didn't. Not for the sake of art, not for the sake of a pretty, written sentence, not for the sake of ego, not for the sake of career, not for the sake of sensationalism, not for the sake of appearance, not for the sake of formula, not for the sake of a sale, and especially, not for the sake of my own satisfaction at the expense of the integrity and honesty of the story. I left it alone, to let it speak for itself in all its ragged, imperfect honesty, exactly the same way Van Gogh left his brushstrokes alone, a hundred and twenty two years ago, before he put a bullet in his own chest. How do we know he put a bullet in his chest? Because we were told by _reliable sources, that'_ s why. If you want to be considered a reliable source, and desire the same respect and privileges an honest journalist has when covering stories that a respectable journalist would cover, then you need to have the ethical backbone of an honest journalist.

The lifespan of a fact is one thing. Usually _a fact is a fact is a fact_. The lifespan of a suicide can usually be determined to within hours or minutes, or sometimes, even, _seconds._ The lifespan of a royalty check, however, seems to trump all reason, in this, the age of Superficial Representation.

Yeah sure, Picasso had to defend his art throughout his long life, and in the process issued some very profound, pithy, toothy statements concerning art, the act of creating art, what constitutes art, what is legitimate art. Yeah sure, he famously said that Van Gogh's example freed us all to create art as we saw fit, from A to Z. Before we forget, though, someone had also once asked a famous painter how he could tell when a painting was done.

"I put down my brushes." He replied, in good conscience.

_Any writer that is more narcissist than realist, more enamored of how what they've written_ _looks,_ _rather than whether what they've written_ _rings true_ _, should probably set the pen down before someone gets hurt_

_-_

-Message In A Bottle-

I used to think of Open Salon as one big Classroom.

Over time, however, I have come to view OS as one big Neighborhood, where everybody owns a piece of land, with a house and a yard.

Everyone sits on their porch, writes their pieces, and sends them off in the mail to all the other Neighbors in the Neighborhood.

In due time, some of our pieces will actually get read by some of our Neighbors, and some won't.

And some may actually get a response, and a Neighbor may either Agree or Disagree.

Meanwhile, lately; today; this morning, as a matter of fact, I realized that all of us are supposed assume that we are all under "house arrest" [a Blogspot is real a fixed position in virtual space, is it not?], and so, have to remain on our own properties; our own porches.

And in our Neighborhood, most of us are surrounded, on at least three sides, by huge privet hedges, privacy fences, picket fences, chain-link fences, or brick fences, which means, as we sit on our own porches, that we can see some of the other Bloggers, and some, we cannot.

I call these tall fences our "Digital Curtain".

But some Bloggers, I have seen [through watching their style of communication], enjoy having complete freedom; that is, they have, in fact, no fences, at all, and can come and go at will; walk the Neighborhood; peer into windows, listen in on phone calls; read our stuff without us knowing and without our permission; swim in our pools; watch us at all hours.

Meanwhile, because of our obvious limitations, I see meaning being misunderstood here at an alarming level. I know that I don't mind saying that I have a very, very hard time interpreting meaning and context here at Open Salon on a regular basis, even with those I percieve as like-minded.

I, we, need to do better.

Here's how I see me here:

I am sitting on my porch, alone, surrounded by a nice yard. Running 'round the sides and back of my property [my Blog] is a privet hedge, beautiful, but so tall and thick that I can't see any other Blogger in this Neighborhood.

But, I write and send it out, hoping to reach someone. And sometimes, frustrated, and feeling particularly alone, I will stand up and shout in the direction of where I think my Neighbors are.

So far, eh, I've gotten a few replies, which has alleviated some of the anxities and sense of isolation, and for that, I am thankful.

Still, I strongly believe that we can all do a lot better at communicating with each other here.

Just a castaway  
An island lost at sea  
Another lonely day  
With no one here but me  
More loneliness  
Than any man could bear  
Rescue me before I fall into despair

I'll send an SOS to the world  
I'll send an SOS to the world  
I hope that someone gets my  
I hope that someone gets my  
I hope that someone gets my  
Message in a bottle  
(Message in a bottle)

A year has passed since I wrote my note  
But I should have known this right from the start  
Only hope can keep me together  
Love can mend your life  
But love can break your heart

I'll send an SOS to the world  
I'll send an SOS to the world  
I hope that someone gets my  
I hope that someone gets my  
I hope that someone gets my  
Message in a bottle  
(Message in a bottle  
Oh, message in a bottle  
Message in a bottle)

Walked out this morning  
Don't believe what I saw  
A hundred billion bottles  
Washed up on the shore  
Seems I'm not alone at being alone  
A hundred billion castaways  
Looking for a home

I'll send an SOS to the world  
I'll send an SOS to the world  
I hope that someone gets my  
I hope that someone gets my  
I hope that someone gets my  
Message in a bottle  
(Message in a bottle  
Message in a bottle  
Message in a bottle)

Sending out an SOS...

.

"Message In A Bottle"

_The Police_

_-_

## November

\---

There are small holes in my carpenter's jeans, and a few stains, as well as some paint spatters. Same with my t-shirts. Seems work clothes are my favorite clothes to wear. Yet, my clothes are clean. All our clothes are clean: twenty two dollars worth of clean at the laundromat. Seven washloads: blankets, towels, rags, sheets, pants, shirts, underwear, your little onesies and pajamas; your little socks and hats; your spit-up rags. It's all clean.

The freshly swept and mopped hard VCT waxed tile floor feels clean beneath my thermal sock covered feet, yet I can still feel the cold. Still, the cinder block walls give shelter, and this place feels more like a home than any we've had in this town.

Holding you, over on one side of the small frontroom with you snuggly covered with one of your little baby blankets, your mother is wondering, out loud.

"She's wondering who I am."

I am sitting in the old cushioned rocking chair, surrounded by small stacks of different sized spiral-bound notebook paper. I am working on organizing all the scraps of writing I've compiled over the past year. I look up and over my reading glasses at you two and smile.

"No she's not."

"She's staring at me, wondering who I am."

You are ten days old. We love you with all our heart.

"No, she knows who you are."

"She's looking at my glasses. I look different to her."

Your mother has astigmatism, but hasn't been wearing her glasses lately.

"No, you don't." I say, gently.

In this place, we have found our direction, in this home, where once were two, we have found we now have you.

Your mother holds you in her arms, and at forty eight, your mom is a natural. At fifty two, I am still numb. My glance turns into a long moment of wonder and deep joy. I watch as your little hands move. To my mind, they are the most graceful, beautiful hands I have ever seen. They are very tiny, yet just about everyone has noticed your long fingers. Maybe a little piano player? Who knows? Still, Mendelssohn plays softly in the background.

Surrounding us in this small, modest room, we have two couches, a few large plants -small trees' really- and a wall of books, from floor to ceiling -my little thrift store library- sitting on bookshelves I made years ago from long boards of 1 X 8 pine. The days and nights are slow and fine right now, honey, as we take turns feeding you, holding you, and wondering, when we cook, if you like the smell of corn muffins and chicken broth, turkey and dressing and mashed potatoes and gravy.

"No, she knows who you are. She knows you by the way you smile, by the way you look at her, by the way you hold her, by the way you kiss her and talk to her. She knows you by the sound of your voice, and your scent; she knows you by your lips, your smile, and can feel your love."

Outside, the winds blow, the temperature drops, the trees shed their leaves, the squirrels forage and the birds flock to the bird feeder. Novembers are like that, little cutie. Inside, here in this small home, with you, we make a family. Tonight, we will be inside, and warm, and as we settle in for the evening, I will read to you from 'A Light In The Attic' or 'Where The Sidewalk Ends'.

But right now, it is still daylight outside, and I am looking at you and your mama. Happiness has finally and once again washed over me, over us, my little sweetheart. Thank you.

-

-What We Did On New Year's Eve-

A ten-dollar, five-foot-tall Salvation Army Christmas tree stands in the corner of our frontroom, in front of the old ten-dollar Dollar General quilt nailed up to the door to keep the cold out. It stands between the futon, which sits in front of a wall-wide, floor-to-ceiling homemade bookcase loaded with books, and an old thirty-dollar Salvation Army couch we've had for five years now, which sits beneath the wide frontroom window. Neither the old steel door, nor the cinderblock walls keep the cold from seeping in inside the concrete slab that lies beneath the waxed asbestos tiles, but we don't care. We are wearing our thermal socks and having fun.

She runs over to the couch and slams into it, excitedly, and tries to climb up, while I come up behind and say, "I'm gonna get you!"

She screams and laughs, before I push her diapered little butt up and onto the couch. She scrambles up and stands, resting against the couch's back and tries to lift the blinds. I lift them for her. Her little eyebrows go up and her little mouth opens, forming a little "o," like a little Chrismas Caroler singing, and with a look of wondrous curiosity, shouts, "What's that?"

"What's what?" I ask.

"That."

What?"

"That."

In the glass, in front of the darkness, there is a magnificent reflection of Christmas lights that are beside and above us.

"What's that?" she asks again.

"Those are Christmas lights, honey. Look. There and there. Those are reflections."

"What's that?" she asks.

"What?"

"That." She is pointing now.

"That? It's dark outside. The sun's gone down. It's New Year's Eve, honey. Tomorrow it will be a new year, honey. New Year's Day," I say.

From the speakers that bracket the wall atop the bookcase Stevie Wonder's "I Just Called To Say I Love You" is playing. I lift her tiny body up and into my arms gently, and sing to her while brushing her her from her eyes.

"These barrettes need fixing, sweetheart."

When she's in my arms, we dance, and when she's not, she's never far from me. We call her our little shadow. The Little Boss. With doe's eyes reflecting love, joy, curiosity, astonishment, she's the wonder of our lives.

She is dancing; her little shoulders swaying in my arms. I kiss her little forehead. This is only her second New Year's Eve, but my fifty-third. Am I thankful? My joy and happiness is beyond expression.

I sing to her.

"I just called, to say, I love you. I just called to say how much I care..."

Today I found Open Salon's posts to be astonishingly good. L in the Southeast's "'A Report Card On Selma, The Movie' was quite a moving post, and Zumiliscious' 'Black success, entitlement narcissism and racism' was just brilliant.

I grabbed my first beer at about eight, and had to wait until my wife came home, and then watch an episode of the Walking Dead with her, before I posted. Probably not always a good idea when I've been drinking.

But in the meantime, we are whiling away the hours tonight waiting for her mama to come home at eleven thirty. She's been up for about two hours now, and will stay up until her mother gets home to tuck her in.

You Are The Sunshine Of My Life plays, and then, Sir Duke.

With a silken head of hair already down to her shoulders and incredible blue eyes which carry all the depth and understanding and hope and innocence of the best Rockwell or Raphael Sanzio, she invades my heart with just her smile, as I change her diaper, before deciding to let her wear the little red Minnie Mouse cotton nightgown she got for her birthday this past November.

This is so very far away from 1961, and Chicago, and yet so very close to everything that I have ever needed.

I have set her down, and am now sitting on the futon, next to the Christmas tree, beneath an old clamp-on, 13-watt lamp, trying to read the fourth, fifth and sixth chapters of Dickens' A Tale Of Two Cities, ahead of this afternoon's Open Salon posting of chapters five and six, but the paragraphs are breaking apart in my mind before I ever get going. Knowing none of this, she turns her attention to me. From across the room, and with her little gait, she walks over, as I watch her approach, looking up, over my 175-power dollar store reading glasses. I will gladly put down my reading for her.

"Uppies, little honey?" I ask. She raises her little arms up, and I lift her once again onto my lap, and, turning, climb up and onto the futon, to stand before the speaker. It's not loud at all; maybe on 3. We listen. Sir Duke starts. She stares into the speaker in wonder. We step back down onto the floor, and gently bouncing her in my arms, we waltz around the room singing and looking at the Christmas stuff.

She is my daughter. With a mere four hours left in this year, we will bounce from room to room to room all night and tickle away the hours. We will bounce on the bed and roughhouse, and laugh and play; push cars on the waxed tile floor, bounce Nerf balls around, slide around on the floor with our socks. She will run from me laughing and I will chase her up and down the hall, all night, til mama gets home, when, finally worn out, she will take her little baba of whole milk on mama's lap, on the old two-dollar Salvation Army chair that sits in front of the futon, while I read and post comments on OS. When she is finally put in her crib, we will then watch a little Netflix together, and ring in the New Year quietly, with a kiss, and a "Happy New Year." "Happy New Year to you."

So this is what we did on New Year's Eve, in 2014, when you were barely a year old. We had a wonderful time. By the way, you've been working really hard on your ABC's and that work is beginning to pay off. Soon, you'll be able to read this for yourself, Little Sweetheart.

Happy New Year, Little Honey.

Little Boss.

We love you.

-
