Nothing Personal

I'm walking to the bustop and I'm forced to pause a moment when a blue Toyota noses out of the parking garage to my left. The driver, a beautiful dark-skinned woman, waves at me and smiles.
I smile politely back and continue walking, but she keeps waving.
Her window comes down and she calls me by name, beckons me over to her window.

Me? You know me? You want me to talk to you? Can do!

This is exactly the kind of thing that should happen to me every day but in reality never does. Except maybe now.

" Hi! Hi! Remember me?"

Wow. She is remarkably beautiful. My IQ plunges as a dormant part of my mind rouses itself and starts searching for something cleverly stupid to say, draining resources from my already faltering memory.

I don't recognize her.
Or.
Maybe I do. Ah...it's like a mnemonic sneeze waiting to happen.

"Uh..."

" I'm Kris! From Bank of Generica! How are you?"

Oh yeah. Now I remember. Kris with a 'K'... I liked her, but we didn't work on the same "team", so we didn't get much time to chat. She looks different now, but I can't say how.
I was mortally drunk during that period, so my recall of those days is just a little blurry.
She was nice to me. I remember that much . It's a start.

"Doin' good! Nice car."

Jay-sus. That's not quite the dumbest thing to say, but it is close. There's a second car pulling up behind her, forcing her to move out of the lane and I've blown my one chance at being witty and charming. Her face is round, beautiful, her expression expectant; I look at her and I go into instant mourning for our never-to-be children. They would have been wonderful, talented kids. Our life together would have been a blissful celebration of unending love- but I have already fucked it up. Our future dies a painfully existential imaginary death.

Years into the future, I feel the leaves falling on my solitary, unvisited gravestone.
No one clears them away.

"Need a ride? I'm going towards Suchandsuch street."

"Sure! Thanks!"

Hah! So much for falling leaves and unmourned graves!

This is cool. It's twenty years in the future and we are walking hand-in-hand along a moonlit beach and laughing about the old days which have suddenly ceased to not happen yet.

But first we have some small talk. We live in the same neighborhood, just a few blocks apart.
Good.
She refers to our ex-boss as a "fucking asshole", breaking the profanity barrier and establishing some common ground.
I am so digging this.
Ha ha, yeah you are right, I agree, that dude was a major asshole. Fuckin' checklist this, ya know?

Haha!

Do I need to be somewhere? No, not really.
Why?
Sure, that sounds great. They have a patio bar, maybe we can sit outside.
Park and walk? No, I don't mind waiting on your porch while you change.
Trust me, I understand what you mean when you say it's a mess inside!
It's a gorgeous day, take your time.

She's a quick changer and she looks great in jeans, two admirable traits. We head to the corner bar.

Dude. You are rolling. Don't fuck up.

Kris orders something with Crown Royal in it. I order coffee. Kris doesn't say anything specific, but I sense that my failure to order an alcoholic drink is a minor breach of an unwritten social contract. Not a fatal error, but a sign. Of what?

Nevermind to all that. This is going really well. Kris just got a promotion, she's branch manager at a competing bank; she's pumped up about it, thinking about buying a house...I can feel her imagination from across the table and it is warm and inviting. Kris is very articulate and funny, haha- I think everyone hated the "ice cream socials" at the Bank, but no one said so- Kris tells me she despised them, I tell her that I was actually ejected from one.
That was you? Haha! Awesome!
She gives me a hi-five. Well done!

The ice cream the bank served was barely edible cheap, mushy, terrible stuff made from tainted Chinese yak milk; yet we were supposed to act grateful and obedient for having it foisted on us in lieu of raises. Ten cents an hour more would have been better for morale than bad ice cream.

Kris points this out:
"The only thing worse than having a shit job is being forced to enjoy it".
Ha! Damn, that's true.. I like women who say stuff like that. It shows realism. I bet she's a good manager.
Hello, comfort zone.

Sure, why not have dinner while we are here?

Tonight's special: filet of carpe diem served with a garden salad of earthly delights. Just don't fuck up.

Kris is very animated, I'm entranced by her delicate hands as they tell the story of how she went from temp worker to management in less than a year. She is looking at houses, thinking of moving to the country even though the commute will be long. She would like to have a greenhouse and an outdoor dog. She has a cat now and it's stir-crazy in her apartment; her fingers make scampering motions on the tabletop as she talks. Manic cat, they say.
Her talking hands are not wearing a diamond. They gesture at me.

"How did you do that?"

Do what? My exploits are legendary. She could be referring to any number of my award-winning accomplishments but I haven't even had a chance to tell her how totally fucking awesome I am yet.

"What's that?"

"The weight. How'd you lose it? I hope that's not being too personal...but you look great."

That's right! I was fifty pounds heavier back then. At this moment I feel 75 ft. tall, but in reality I am short. Fifty pounds was 25% of me. I was in terrible shape back then.
I'm proud that I look good to Kris.
Don't fuck up.

"Well, I...uh...well let's just say there's a lot of calories in beer."

Her gaze shifts to my coffee and then to her cocktail and back to the mug. Behind her bottomless brown eyes, her banker's brain is busily calculating, doing the math. She adds it up. Smart woman.

"So...you don't drink at all?"

"No."

"Oh."

She needs to tell me something. She has dated two alcoholics and they are both dead. She was engaged to the second one when he killed himself. It is nothing personal, but if I have a drinking problem, she'd appreciate it if I told her now.

Don't fuck up. Now is not the time to mention my family history of self-annihilation, yet here it is again- the past is destroying my present.

I pause, fumble around... a refill buys me a few seconds to gather my thoughts.
This is tricky stuff.
I am convinced that I will never drink again, but I can't deny that I have a drunk in my past or that a single drink might kill me. I won't let that happen but I don't know how to explain this to her. There is no guarantee. I can't promise anything to anyone.

"I used to drink. I don't anymore."

"Used to... a lot?"

"Yes."

"Oh."

Again, it's nothing personal, but she can't take a chance with a drug-using heavy drinker again. It's been too hard on her and she can't go through it another time.

I can tell that she has been having an imaginary future too, and in her vision a life that never was has just ended.
It's a familiar feeling and I recognize it for what it is.
And she is right.
It's nothing personal. I've had a number of variations on this conversation over the last two years and I know the only reasonable outcome is unfavorable to me- in an impersonal way.
I can't offer up any proof that I won't drink again. There isn't any.
I can't expect her to take a chance - not after what she's been through.
If you are betting on horses, it's not wise to put money on the one with a record of falls.
Given her luck, maybe it's best to avoid the track altogether, but we are all gamblers at heart, so some chances will always be taken.
Some will not.

Like people, the better the chance, the more likely it is to be taken.

I am an untaken chance.

This is an awkward moment. The chemistry is intense but Kris isn't looking for a one-nighter and frankly, neither am I.
It wouldn't work like that. We can both tell, no use pretending otherwise.
We are both looking for a nearly identical imaginary future and that search is what separates us.
Her dream requires an absence of alcoholics , mine merely requires my own sobriety.
It's a subtle but irreconcilable difference and it brings our imaginary tomorrow to a real end tonight.

Maybe my feelings should be hurt. Maybe they will be, but I doubt it.
I didn't do anything wrong- I didn't fuck up!- but I can't ask for trust that can't be given. Watching someone you love kill themself will fuck you up, no doubt about it. I know.
Two drunks in her life was two drunks too many and there is no third chance to be taken or given.
Who wants to volunteer for a suicide mission?
I understand this. It bothers me but it doesn't destroy me.

It's nothing personal.

A Holiday of Now

I promised myself that I would never talk to my father again.

Then why is the phone in my hand? I said I was going to erase his number, yet it's ringing and I'm holding it.

It doesn't matter. My father is always drunk, so he never answers his phone. I'll leave a message and he won't reply. That is the way it is with us.

Or it was. Before I stopped talking to him.

Why am I doing this?

And why does Dad answer the phone? He never does that.
Is it because he is sober?
He is, I can tell.

So there's this fake holiday to break the ice and maybe for one second I stop hating Hallmark for inflicting these landmine holidays on us.
One second.

Happy Father's Day.

He sounds genuinely surprised to hear from me, but we do need to talk. It's a bit urgent.

My father tells me that I need to be prepared, that his mother probably won't ever leave the convalescent facility she is in...she is gravely ill.
He wants me to know that it is serious.
Really serious.

I have been anticipating this conversation for months. Dreading it.

See, I know his mother is sick. I know all the details. I have been visiting and calling her for the last two months.
My dad, on the other hand, was missing on a multi-week bender, so he didn't find out how bad it was until he came home and slept it off...which took him days. My twin brother flew in from Chicago to help sort him out. It's a miracle that booze hasn't killed our dad.
Anyway, if Dad hadn't been lost in a drunken stupor, he wouldn't be so surprised to learn that his mother can't take care of herself anymore.
Taking care of her was his job, but he won't even take care of himself.
I use him as a model on how not to live my life.

These are things I thought I was going to say to him if we ever spoke again.

But I don't say any of those things. For a moment they slip my mind.

I ask him how he is. I already know, but it's important that he knows I'm asking because I care.
Now.
Yesterday, I didn't care. Tomorrow I may not.
So it is very important that I ask him now.
It's for my sake as much as his.
I care now.

He is OK, he says. It is a lie, but a forgivable one.

My father is very close to breaking as he tells me what I already know.
Yes, I agree, we need to be ready for the worst.

Any day.
Oh, yes, there's always the false alarms...keep hope alive.
Remember last fall? Haha. Boy, were we scared!

We laugh at some of the close calls and false alerts of the past. None of it was funny then, but some of it is now.

And now is where my father is.

So we talk about now.

I know where he was , I know where he is, but I know better than to ask about where he will be. I don't ask for or make any more promises.
His promise to stay sober mean less to him than my promise to disown him means to me and I've already broken mine.
It's only a matter of time before he breaks his.
I know that.
He knows it too.

But he is here now, and for now, we are speaking again.

Call Me It

I wanna thank Enemy for taggin' me. It's an easy meme- basically it just says: "blog."
But there are some rules:

Rules Are:* each blogger starts with eight - ten random facts/habits about
themselves…* people who are tagged need to write posts in their own blog about
the tag and post these rules…* at the end of your post, you need to choose
people to get tagged and list their names… *

Sounds simple, eh? It's not. How does one "randomly" choose facts/habits about oneself? The Exquisite Corpse method comes to mind- surrealist Max Ernst called it a "mental contagion", which is, to me, a decent and workable definition for "meme"...so. I shall mentally shred my personal trivia and toss the bits into an imaginary hopper. Spin the barrel. Reach inside:

1. I have embraced my baldness. I started losing my hair before I was 21. When my mom was doing chemotherapy, I shaved my head as a gesture of solidarity. I still 'bald' myself on a daily basis, using a disposable razor and the cheapest shaving cream available.

2. My most secret fantasy doesn't involve sex.

3. My not-so-secret fantasies do.

4. In the spring of 2000, I predicted that John McCain would lose to Al Gore in November and that Mr. Gore would literally be my new boss. Instead, Bush stole the election and my Commerce Dept. career vanished faster than Bush's National Guard records.

5. In the absence of literature, I become constipated. My bathroom has it's own library.

6. Coffee is the cornerstone of my nutritional pyramid.

7. I recently obtained my Passport. There are places I want to see and people I want to visit. (See #2 and #3 above)

8. I am quite shy in person but I never experienced stage fright during my long and failed musical 'career'. When I was on-stage, I always knew what I was doing and why I was doing it.
This is not always the case off-stage.

9. I haven't performed in front of a live audience since New Years' Eve, 2001-2

10. I didn't own my first automobile until I was nearly 30 years old.

11. I am not very adept at following rules.

Hmmm...who to tag? Howzabout:

-Angel. She lives in an amusement park and raises dragons.

-Hawkwind_555. Too cool for words. Just number your paper from 1-10 and mail it to me. I'll treasure it forever.

-Invisible. More than meets the eye.

-JP. Queer, bitter and Nebraskan. Makes Omaha interesting.

- Sling. Whenever I hear Dylan's 'Days of '49', I think of Sling. Sling would've been a cool hitch-hiking buddy, back when hitching was possible...1849, I think.

Patterns

To the right is an illustration of a microphone's
pickup pattern. This particular microphone has what is known as a directional cardioid pattern -
(the term 'cardioid', aptly enough, derives from the heart-shaped response curve illustrated by the blue bands)
-in the simplest of terms, what it means is that the mic "hears" sounds that are directly in front of it
much better , i.e., louder and with more accuracy,
than it does sounds from peripheral sources...and it almost entirely rejects whatever noise is behind it.

But I'm not here to teach you about microphones. Not today, anyway.

Today, we are students and the microphone is the teacher- not the actual mic, really, but a visual representation of it's function- the graph to the right speaks to us:

Imagine, if you will, that the Front (0 degrees), is the 'Now'- that always happening moment where past, present and future meet- the Now is as close to the future as one can ever get.

Now is where the music is.
That is where you point your microphone.
That is where you aim your heart.

To the side and to the rear ( 'off-axis' in geekspeek) are sounds that you may or may not want- these might be noise or they might be musical- but what they really are, in the Now- is distraction and clutter.
Think of them as the Past and the Future. They are both friend and foe, so be careful when dealing with them.

If too many of these off-axis distractions leak into your Now, the Now becomes lost in a brownsound mudpool and you can't really hear what you are trying to listen to.
Important information vanishes into a discordant roar- think of the Beatle's Live at the Hollywood Bowl album:

What is the loudest sound on that record? Screaming.
You can barely decipher what song the Moptops are playing, but you sure as hell can hear the screaming.

That is the sound of the Past. Like any life ( life, not live- no typo) recording , it is going to include some screaming. It's part of the package. But that particular recording is all screaming and if you listen to the screaming Past too long you will be driven into madness. Ignoring it entirely presents the same risks.
We need those screams to remind us that the Past is still there, but care must be taken that it does not drown out the Now.

That's the simple part and it took me forty years to learn it.

Here's where it gets complicated and just a bit anti-intuitive:

The Future is the sound that is behind the microphone- a good directional mic will barely hear the Future- most of the sounds of the future are just the echoes of the Past and the Now reverberating off the walls of perception - and yes, Mr. Huxley, if perception has Doors, it most certainly has walls- it can be interesting to listen to, but it's never very clear what exactly it is that we are hearing.

That is because we cannot be entirely certain what the Future sounds like. We can look behind us, around us and even look forward, but the best we can do is make a guess based on what we know about the Now and the Past.

For example, let us say that we have learned from the Past that if a freight train is passing through our backyard, the sound of that train is going to bleed into and probably ruin everything we try to record while the locomotive is roaring by.

Pause. Turn off the tape deck and take a break until the train passes. It may take longer than we'd like, but it will pass. It always does.

So now we know not to attempt to record during times of heavy local railways traffic; even if the sound of a passing train does fit nicely with certain Blues, we are not looking for the Blues.
We are not looking for anything definable, really- that's part of the mysterious Future- we just don't want any more Blues Trains ruining our otherwise sparkling recording. That is one reason why we must remember the past- it helps us avoid inbound trains and their potential sonic wrecks.

That doesn't mean that we need to ignore the tracks, or worse, sit immobilized on the rails, paralyzed with fright from merely thinking about all the trains that have rolled through here. That would be surrendering to the Past and that is not a good idea, because it means we forfeit the Future.

Do you ever have thoughts like this?:

"Oh my God, I can't sing right now- what if a train comes by? My song will be ruined!"

I have. These sort of thoughts are the enemy of Art. Godzilla only knows how many masterpieces have never been recorded because of this fearful thinking- but that's the Past.

There is no train Now.

But if one does come rolling through the middle of a song in the Future, we should sing louder and in harmony with its steel-wheeled thunder, because that train might just sound really good in the mix, even if we are not singing the Blues.

It's not somethingthat can be planned- you just have to do it, take a listen and see what you have.
Either it is good or it is not, but you gotta sing first and ask questions later, because we can't know where that train is heading, but we do know it is not going to be here forever.