In Memoriam, Ann Conley, Jan. 14, 1942 - Jun. 18, 2012

My mother died yesterday morning, June 18, 2012 at 8:10 a.m. The world was unworthy of her. Please read this tribute I wrote yesterday evening, and please feel free to share or re-post this elsewhere if you are so moved. I want everyone to know what kind of a woman my mother was. I want everyone to know she existed. I want everyone to know what she was up against.

In Memoriam, Ann Conley, Jan. 14, 1942 - Jun. 18, 2012

My mother was raised at knifepoint — or might as well have been. My mother's mother once chased my mother through the house with a butcher knife. My mother hid under a neighbor's porch until her mother's psychotic episode passed.

My mother also saw her father "bloody the walls with" her mother.

The rest of my mother's 70 years as a physically manifested human were an epic war against the demons that forever and ever laughed in her beautiful child face.

She wasted little time. At age 18 my mother escaped from Upstate New York to New York City and held secreterial jobs throughout the 1960s, back when they were still called secreteries. My mother's favorite companies to work for were advertising agencies.

She drank a lot. Married a lot. Four husbands, all told. Had a son and a daughter in Connecticut with her first husband. She didn't believe herself fit to raise them, so she abandoned that family when her son was 12 and her daughter was 8. That ate at her forever.

Later my mother married an engineer — brilliant by all accounts — and they drank and rode motorcycles together.

In 1976 my mother had a vision. She saw the ghosts of her dead relatives, including her mother and grandmother, as well as Jesus and maybe the Virgin Mary. I'm not sure about the details. The ghosts asked my mother whether she wanted to live or die. My mother chose life, and never had the desire to touch alcohol again.

She moved to Michigan and joined A.A., which became her religion and her family. There she found her purpose: helping drunks get sober and stay sober, or, barring that, giving them her time and support and physically sheltering them from harm. A.A. gave her a sense of belonging, the feeling that she was needed, and a made-in-America theology that she could accept. It also gave her her third husband, and that man became my father in 1980.

My mother and father moved to Upstate New York. The two of them loved madly and argued terribly. In 1981 my mother kidnapped me to Minnesota and disappeared under an assumed name. Her stated reason was always that she was afraid of my father, although even she admitted he had never harmed her in any way. As far as the little girl inside her knew, everyone my mother ever met had a butcher knife for her, and wanted to bloody the walls with her.

Starting with a junker of a car, one hundred dollars, and an ornamental feeding spoon, my mother cobbled together a vast Minnesotan support system for the two of us over the years. She navigated the social services for single mothers, established A.A. connections, and eventually cultivated friend circles throughout the Twin Cities metro area.

That A.A. club was my family and my church. Angels helping angels rise up from rock bottom. I attended A.A. meetings with my mother until I was 11, old enough to stay home by myself. My mother's various boyfriends — half of whom were of the hippie persuasion, the other half military and law enforcement — all served as male role models for me. I believe she chose each one based on what she thought I needed at the time, rather than what she wanted.

Realizing she needed to expand her social horizons, and wanting to help the world as much as she could, my mother ran for local office on an environmental platform of saving some trees from being cut down. She was active in the parent organizations in the schools. She designed the t-shirt mascot (Tigers) for one of my two middle schools. Her drawing style was graceful. Delicate. Angelic. I never saw a more darkly expressive roll of toilet paper than when she drew one in black chalk for an art class she took in 1992.

The arts were not optional in our household. They were a mandatory part of daily life, just like breathing. We freely sang and whistled along to classical music, classic rock, and classic country. Legend has it her opera singing was the best in the state back when she was in high school. She could also play piano, which I saw her do on a number of occasions, whenever we would together happen upon a piano.

She took me to choir practice and band practice. She once spent all her savings on a euphonium (a kind of smallish tuba) for me so I could pursue my own musical path.

We laughed ourselves to the floor over Bill Cosby tapes, which we would play over and over on a vintage stereo system.

When I was 6, she woke me up before dawn and led me down the hallway to stand on the balcony and watch aurora borealis, the northern lights. They flashed all the colors of the rainbow. "Isn't it beautiful?" she whispered. The awe in her voice made me realize I was witnessing a special kind of magic: the kind that anyone can watch but not everyone deems important.

For my mother, love was about helping each other to see such wondrous things. But love was also guardianship and blind, reckless self-sacrifice. Once, a couple of older boys were ganging up on me on the basketball blacktop across the street from one of the apartment buildings she raised me in. Mom saw this from our kitchen window on the third floor and strolled out to the scene, lazily swinging my aluminum baseball bat in one hand and grinning maniacally. She took one boy by the ear, placed the bat gently but firmly against his skull, and intoned into his ear softly and clearly through clenched teeth, "I'm not afraid to go to jail for my son."

Sometimes the battle and the beauty fused into one thing. In 1996, my mother and I went to see a performance of Man of La Mancha with Robert Goulet as the title role at the Ordway in St. Paul. The final scene featured Don Quixote on his death bed, accosted mercilessly by knights in blinding platinum armor, all bearing giant gilded mirrors instead of shields, advancing on the old man, white lights screaming off the surfaces everywhere and showing Don Quixote his weaknesses and the futility of his valiance.
I broke down crying ten minutes after my mother and I left the theater. I didn't know why I was crying. I would find out later.

I saw my mother spontaneously relive and act out her childhood violence on at least two occasions, once in 1988 and once in 1997. She threw her body against walls and cried out in pain and begged whoever was doing it to stop it. I was powerless to help; I could only watch. She referred to these episodes as flashbacks or "remembrances".

We always loved each other very much — she was all I really had, and I was all she really had — but we often argued just as fiercely as she and my father had argued so many years earlier. I had yet to meet that father.

When I turned 18, my mother moved back to Upstate New York to try to reconnect with her family. On Father's Day in the year 2000, I received a letter from my mother, included in which was my father's current phone number, which unbeknownst to me she had kept track of for the entirety of the previous two decades. She suggested that I might like to give my father a call. And so I did. He and I really hit it off. When I first visited him that summer in 2000, my mother drove to join me at the house where he and my step-mother lived. My father and mother made ammends.

My mother had some success in her effort to reconnect with her own family, but her mind and body were already deteriorating. Don't ask what was wrong, exactly; I gave up trying to keep track of it all a long time ago. Administrative records in my possession show a woman desperately seeking solutions to the monsters that wanted to claw her to pieces from the inside out. She waged full-scale conflagration on them, trying every drug known to psychiatry, and every physical therapy that might have helped her failing body to recover or at least plateau.

My mother stayed active in A.A., continuing to find some solace in helping others, at least as far as they wanted to be helped, which was, more often than not, very little. And yet she continued as long as she was physically and mentally able to do so. And she kept up her belief in a higher power.

She spent her final months in a nursing home here in New Hampshire. This morning, the torture device that was her mind and body could no longer hold her. The beautiful, innocent, precious, perfect little girl that had held onto life by her fingernails for seventy years finally slipped free.

The tenacious woman that saved the lives of countless people through her A.A. work has completed her mission impossible. The mother who infused my heart with an aurora borealis has finally risen up and flown away.

Fly, Mom. This world was never worthy of you. Fly.

(Written by Will Conley and originally posted publicly on Facebook.)

On Passing Carefully Folded Notes

Every one of those little folded rectangles was a light about to be flicked on. You never knew what could be in there. Some new escalation of infatuation? Some drama about lunch? A funny joke? An unfunny joke?

You opened it and there it was - whatever it was. You'd have this moment with the note all alone, just you and the paper, even if you were sitting in science class surrounded by other kids.

You could smell the paper. If it smelled like her perfume, your heart sang. If the note was folded neatly, corners meeting corners, you knew some extra time and effort had been put into it. Maybe the sender was afraid of rejection, or maybe she just wanted it to be right. She cared.

If the note was roughly constructed, the contents were probably dashed off frantically. An urgent matter. "I need to know if you're a Pisces or an Aquarius?!"

You read the contents again. Stared at it. Folded it back up the way it was, handling it by the corners to avoid staining it with palm sweat and smearing the ink. Keep it safe. The little tab was such a thing of engineering ingenuity; you marveled at it.

You learned how tightly to crease the folds so the note would spring into itself; crease it too sharply and it would lose structural integrity.

A really choice note - one that made you dizzy - you kept in your pocket for days before storing it in a shoebox. Months or years later you'd look at it again and wax nostalgic, or you'd wince with regret. That new note scent faded as age and dust took over.

Dead trees, man. Dead trees and ink.

Image via some Facebook post I saw.


-----
All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.

How I Saved a Real Princess—A Nintendo Story

When I was a kid, I made some mad money by selling personalized stationery door-to-door in my various neighborhoods. At age 8, I used some of the sales proceeds to buy a Nintendo Entertainment System. I played Super Mario Bros. until I could save the princess every time, almost with my eyes closed.

I bought a few other games, too—Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, a couple of others. But Mario was where it was at.

At first, my mom barely tolerated having the Nintendo in the house. She said it was rotting my brain. But I wanted her to understand why I liked it so much, so I coaxed her and coaxed her to try playing Mario until she gave in and tried it.

To my delight, my mom actually enjoyed playing Mario. I was amused and pleased that she had finally come around to seeing things my way. We even played it together sometimes. It was fun at first.

A few weeks into her newfound interest, I noticed my mom would sometimes play Mario for hours. Sometimes I would try to get her attention, and she would get angry at the interruption. Other times, she could barely even hear me. There was Mario on the screen, doing his little back-and-forth dance, jumping on a Goomba, hitting a flag pole—and there was my mom staring at it.

My mom was disappearing. The princess needed saving. By observing her, I realized how pathetic I must have looked to her before she herself got sucked into the game. How vacant. It became clear what I had to do.

So at age 10 or so, I took it upon myself to sell that whole piece of shit—Nintendo, games and all—to a video game shop, and I never looked back. I got my mom back, I got myself back, and I had an actual childhood.

Today, I'm grateful for actual memories. Memories that smell like a rotten knothole holding up part of my fort in the woods, that grease my skin like baseball sweat at dusk, that take my breath away like the time I landed on my back while doing a double flip off a swing set.

I'm writing this in front of a computer screen. Hmm.

-----

All post content on Man of Many Words is created by Will Conley. Please feel free to share this post or any of my other posts with the whole world. Just make sure they know where it came from.

The Space Shuttle: Our Tower of Babel

I find myself genuinely mournful of the space shuttle program. I was born in 1980; the program launched in 1981. It was always there for me.

Space travel will continue, but the space shuttle program was more than that. It was a symbol of something strident and hopeful.

The space shuttle program, in my mind's eye, was the white spaceplane, the NASA logo, the American flag emblazoned on spacesuits filled with heroes. My heroes.

The space shuttle program was the televised launches. The countdown, the ignition, the launch, the blinding blaze of rockets, the disappearing of a handful of astronauts into the heavens.

The space shuttle program was our Tower of Babel. We built it for science, yes, but really we built it to reach God.

I was in first grade when the space shuttle Challenger exploded before it could even reach low orbit. It blew up right there before the eyes of hundreds of thousands of people. A teacher had been on-board. A television was wheeled into the classroom so we could watch the coverage. I remember my teacher, Mrs. Lindsay, crying a little and holding a tissue to her face.

Now, as I read the New York Times coverage of the last launch taking place this very moment, I am surprised to find myself crying a little. I will never go up in a space shuttle. I never knew it mattered to me until now.

I Loaned My Brain to Science

Many times, in fact. One of the experiences sticks with me.

I remember it in patches.

They stuck me inside a magnetic resonance imaging scanner--MRI for short. It's like a big sarcophagus made out of metal and plastic. You lay on your back in the dark while a loud hammering noise does semi-circles over your head from left to right and back again, over and over like one of those rotary lawn sprinklers: slow in one direction, fast in the other direction. It's so loud they have to give you over-ear headphones to protect your eardrums; the headphones double as a communication device. They talk to you through that, and a microphone over your mouth allows you to talk back. Essentially, an MRI scanner takes pictures of your brain by surrounding it with a magnetic field and registering the electromagnetic response. If the technicians are nice, they let you look at your brain pictures when it's all over.

While I was being scanned, they sedated me with ketamine--yes, the mild hallucinogen ketamine--"Special K" when called by its street name--until I was about, oh, I don't know, 1% conscious. They allegedly told me a story through the headphones. They brought me out of consciousness until I was about 75% cognizant of my surroundings. While I lay there in the dark, they asked if I remembered anything. I couldn't recall much of anything, and told them so.

Boom, they sedated me again, a bit less this time. I was about 15% conscious, or so it seemed. Allegedly they told me the same story as before. When they brought me back to about 75% consciousness they asked me if I remembered anything about the story this time. I vaguely recalled some girl by a river with a bridge. And there was a troll. And there was a room, and a boy--some boy--and someone was looking for something, and people were standing in a certain geometrical relationship. And I vaguely recalled the girl having red hair. Or did I make that up? It was a distinct impression, at the very least. The red hair felt real, either by their telling or by my imagining.

They brought me fully out of sedation and told me the story for the third and final time. When they asked me if I remembered anything about the story, I told it to them from beginning to end with total accuracy. I won't bore you with the details.

They extracted me from the MRI scanner and wheel-chaired me into another room to dry out. A researcher asked about my overall impression of the experience. She seemed really excited about the whole thing. Her face lit up every time I opened my mouth. She made me feel as though my words were important, which encouraged me to speak at length about every last detail. Kudos to her for that.

One interesting side effect during this experience was that at one point I distinctly recall scientists in white lab coats walking around behind me while I was in the MRI scanner. My brain totally made that up. The MRI is sealed on all sides except where your feet are, for one. Secondly, no one was wearing a white lab coat before or after I entered the scanner.

No, there are no lasting effects. Except aliens. I am always surrounded by aliens in pink tutus and they all want to sell me a vegan hamburger. It's cool though. I just play my ukelele louder until the aliens retreat to a far corner to shoot craps for a while.

A blues note.

The future is a terrible place, in my view.

I was born in 1980.

The 1990s was a wonderful place to come of age. Opportunity seemed endless. I was doing anything and everything I wanted. School was warm, nurturing, splendid. I was involved in numerous extra-curricular activities, mainly arts-oriented.

Outside of school, the winter ice crackled spectacular underfoot and the summer breeze cooled the leaves. Bicycles turned to car wheels. Riding was the stuff life is made of.

On the periphery of consciousness, in the media, the economy was booming harder than ever before. The human condition was getting better all the time, as far as we knew.

Friendship was solid, dependable. Love was rich, sincere, committed.

I was 21 when the planes hit the towers. I took it pretty hard.

Since then everything has seemed bleak. The first decade of the 21st century have been rough on me. I have not aged gracefully. Numerous false career starts have left me doubting I will ever find a solid niche and wondering whether I should even try. Numerous of my personal friendships and romantic relationships have shattered.

The false promise of the 1990s have left me with the 2010 blues. Thirty years old and I'm stuck in the mud with little desire to even spin my tires, let alone get out and push.

An Unusual Cabby: A Story in 25 Tweets

An Unusual Cabby: A Story in 25 Tweets

I improvised this story today on Twitter, one tweet at a time. It comes from a place of need. All tweets appear here in chronological order from top to bottom and have been proofread for respectful capitalization only.

Lord, I need a lift. I need to get from here to there. You're the expert, but if I may suggest a route, hang a left and aim for the glowing.

"Hang on to your shit," spake the Lord, and floored it.

In reverse. Pinned by velocity to the back of the passenger seat like a sixth-grade science project, I could just make out my past flying by.

As Fall Branch receded into the future, I saw the places I've been. At this divine speed they appeared as wet Polaroids not fully developed.

Azusa. Pasadena. North Hollywood. St. Paul. Mounds View. St. Paul again. Yonkers. Roswell. New Haven. Geneva. Minneapolis. London. Paris.

We passed green foothills in white caps, threaded through S-curves wiggling between sheer cliffs, blasted out into great expanses of desert.

And then we were riding on water. His taxi skipped across the Atlantic like a checkered yellow stone.
The Lord never asked me whether I was comfortable.

"Thirsty?" the Lord did ask unto me. "Yes," I replied, upon which He handed me an Evian bottle full of brilliant ruby wine. I downed it.

Yea, the Lord got me completely wasted. He pulled over. I fell out of the cab onto a cobbled street. The cab had turned black. "Nice trick.”

London. West End. The Hammersmith Apollo loomed high above my head. The marquee read "BLAST!" Blast, I'm late for my entrance, I mumbled.

"Don't worry," spake the Lord, "You're fired. Get in." I looked at Him, looked at the marquee, looked at the black cab and climbed in. Sigh.

The Lord buried His sandaled foot in the floorboards and off we flew, still in reverse. "Paris, right?" I asked, fumbling with the seatbelt.

I stood on the beach of Brittany at sunset. The blue swingset. The oyster bar. My friend Sanaphay, stoned and puking up oysters. Bliss.

The Lord shoveled me into the cab again, took the wheel, and punched it back to Minneapolis. University of Minnesota. "I'm tired, Lord.”

High school: Marching band, theater, English class, cross-country skiing, crushes, Live, Dave Matthews, lockers, cars and bicycles.

Middle school: Shame, darting eyes, righteous indignation, the stench of skepticism wafting from Mead notebooks. Picking fights with giants.

Elementary school: Mr. Galinsky, a class music video, the Bookworm program, a rosy girl of long black hair named Chastity. And Katie.

Baseball cards. G.I. Joe. Transformers. Mr. Rogers. Barbara Mandrell on PBS.

A wooden fence and a little blond boy named William in red shorts. Me.

An Easter Basket of green plastic grass and chocolate eggs. The reassuring smell of cigarette smoke on Mom's pea coat.

Everything goes black. "Lord, I can't follow You here.”

"Then you aren't ready to go all the way, " spake the Lord. "I'll pick you up in 87 years. You owe Me six hundred large." Put it on my tab.

The Lord sighed. "Thanks for riding with Us." I helped Him with His robes, slammed the door and gave the roof a pat. He threw it in reverse.

The End.

Product vs. Brand: An Anecdotal Résumé for a Brand Revolutionary

For a rote employment history please view my résumé on LinkedIn. For an anecdotal résumé, please enjoy this post.

Youth was not wasted on the young.

Not in this case, at least. Here are some of my happiest branding memories from the days of yore. (Or my, as it were.)

---

The Product: Homemade Cookies



The Work: Sold a big plate of homemade cookies for 50 cents apiece door-to-door at age 6. Made six dollars, paid my sweat shop worker (mom) a dime.

The Brand: Big Brown Eyes

---

The Product: Greeting Cards and Stationery



The Work: Sold greeting cards, gifts and stationery for Olympia Sales Club (R.I.P.) during my pre-teens. Again with the door-to-door.

The Brand: Gumption. Strangers were impressed by a young person selling things to them.

---

The Product: Money



The Work: Put in my hard time as a telephone fundraiser for powerfully peppy librul organizations. Learned how to sell an idea to a stranger for $270 in under 60 seconds.

The Brand: Peace and Solidarity

---

The Product: Art



The Work: Post-college years: Assembled a collective of like-minded (and un-like-minded) artists, musicians, writers and misfits to throw shows and sells zines. (What's a zine?) Afunctionul, as the group was called, was more than just about the art. It was about the movement. It was about the method. It was about the activity itself - especially the marketing.

The Brand: Activity

---

The Product: Ad Space

The Work: While at tiny alternative weekly newspaper Pulse of the Twin Cities (now gone the way of Belushi and Cobain, R.I.P.), co-opted behemoth rival City Pages' Minnesota Music Directory and used it to market ad space to musicians. City Pages sales director threatened "legal action" for having "filched" their public list but ended up offering me a job instead.

The Brand: Big brass balls of steel and impudence.

---

The Product: Ad Space



The Work: I built a classified advertising section for Pulse from the ground up. Kept it humorous but classy.

The Brand:

---

The Product: Street Promotion

The Work: Passed out promotional flyers on the streets of Manhattan. The challenge: Holding a piece of paper in front of a New Yorker is like saying "Here, you throw this away." Solution: target one person and start talking to them a half a block before they reach your position, then lunge with the flyer as if jousting. Score.

The Brand: Pure golden sunshine energy charged in the palm of my hand and released.

---

All Grown Up Now...

But I will never forget those formative years. I never knew I was learning the difference between products and brands.

The Bible Kids Part 1

So I'm sitting on the steps of Center Church waiting for my free bag lunch to pull up in a van. That van comes around every Saturday and Sunday afternoon. Suddenly, three guys appear and start milling about, walking up to my fellow beggars, offering flyers.

"Can I give one of these to you?" says one.

"Sure, I'll take one," I say, taking the flyer. I skim the backside of it.

Missionaries. Christian ones.

"Any particular denomination?" I ask.

The man hesitates for a moment, shrugs, says, "Born again."

"OK," I say.

We both pause and stare at each other for another moment.

"Do," he stammers, "you know who Jesus Christ is?"

"Yeah, he died for my sins."

"That's right."

I nod.

"Have you ever considered what he has to offer you?" he asks. By now the other two guys have sauntered up and surrounded me with gentle eyes. I don't mind. I take a quick visual survey of all three of these guys, take a breath, sit up straight, smile, and say:

"Well, what's your pitch?"

They chuckled and gave me the usual pitch. You know the one: Have you accepted Jesus into your heart, he died on the cross for your sins, salvation is yours if you follow God's commandments, here, have another flyer, a different one this time, can we talk to you about Jesus, Jesus changed my life, he's going to change yours too, awe shucks I'm so happy about Jesus and I really mean it.

Cool part about these guys is they knew their stuff. If I said something about being a seeker and answering any door that knocks, they rattled off a Bible quote, with citations, something about seeking and Jesus saying, Behold, I stand at the door and knock.

I am impressed enough at that quick citation. A few more of these quick scholarly responses and I am convinced I could have an interesting conversation with these missionaries. Two of the three are well versed and aged enough in their studies to be able to take me on in conversation maturely and without triteness.

Only one of them is your stereotypical starry-eyed ruby-cheeked spewer of stale sayings who, I'm sure, Jesus would have left to his fishing: Uh, thanks kid, I would love for you to put away your nets once and for all and help Me to convince men to follow Me and thus become yourself a fisher of men like Simon called Peter and his brother Andrew here, but, uh, you're just so good at fishing for fish. God needs you there, just plain old fishin'. That's a good boy. Bye bye, now!
I don't mean to poke fun at the poor chap, but he's just so cheesy I don't really believe him. As a non-Christian, I pray for the guy's faith.

The three of them took me to a Subway, bought me a sandwich (that's right, a sandwich, after I had gotten my free hors d'oeuvre-size PB&J sandwich, five or six potato chips, and a couple of swigs of a juice that is blue, all in a deceptively large brown paper bag from the previously mentioned van), and conversed with me for an hour. The cheesy kid slid me a very pretty Bible with silver-edged pages. As he slid it across the table, I looked up at him to confirm that it was a gift, and he gave me a cheesy look of kindness. I thanked him from the cheesiest part of my heart. I ate the Italian combo with Swiss cheese and downloaded my Coke.

(Part II will relate the Bible study session I had with these same guys about three weeks later.)

Bellissa and Faith

The following originally appeared on another blog on April 7th of this year.

*****

I walked out of the shelter and hefted my suitcase into the back seat of Bellissa's truck. Together we rode towards Rudy's.

"I have to ask you this," Bellissa was saying. "Are you on any drugs?"

"Nicotine," I replied.

"OK. So, nothing? Because if you need any kind of counseling, any kind of treatment, I've got hookups in that department too. I just want to make sure you're taken care of in that regard too, if that's the case."

"No drugs, no nothing. Just me and my karma."

"OK."

We ordered our burgers and fish sandwiches (me the former, vegetarian-esque she the latter) and one Schaffer beer each. Bellissa paid. I was grateful. The Wednesday night Rudy's crowd was a decent size. We talked about moving me into her spare room for awhile, and about what I can do for her in exchange and for how long it should go on. I would move a gigantic pile of sticks and branches from one part of her backyard to another. I would crush and destroy the bamboo-like weeds that had taken over one corner of the yard. I would put together her new entertainment center, install "grippy tape" on the front steps to reduce the chance of someone slipping, and help to unpack a room full of boxes and distribute their contents around the house where they belong. The latter is the only one I never got around to, because it turned out I was out of there and into my own place in a week.

Meanwhile, Bellissa drove me around, bought me lunches and dinners, introduced me to her friends and brothers and her basement roommate, talked with and counseled me about my options for the immediate and near future, and took my thousand thanks gracefully, eventually asking me to stop thanking her. I couldn't help it. Although I was helping her out around the house, I still felt that yanking me out of the shelter and putting me up for a week was a true gift. She was, and continues to be, a true friend. We laughed, we hung out, we even drank and made merry one night around a bonfire in her backyard. The fire burned an invisible igloo of warmth in the still, cool air of the opening days of April as we sipped on Bud and nipped at a small bottle of Southern Comfort. I felt completely at ease in her presence, yet also oddly responsible and productive.

I continued the blog from her place and considered my plans. Ultimately the blog drew forth a number of Good Samaritans (much like paramedics to a crash site) who offered all measure of things helpful: money, jobs, housing, food and coffee outings for discussing life and its vicissitudes, kind sentiments and powerful words of encouragement. The blog also drew forth a some chastisement from old friends who I had wronged at one point and with whom I had not yet made amends. Even that was OK, as it just felt good to be reaching out and talking to everybody.

Two people expressed doubt that I had ever been homeless. I felt immensely complimented and encouraged to hear that I was just "a professional writer riding a trend" of homelessness and poverty in the literary and pop culture arenas.

Perhaps I never made myself sound desperate enough. Maybe my positive attitude in the face of hardship wasn't typical. Certainly I was not living in the shelter for very long, but now wait just one minute, fellas. I have known poverty all my life. I grew up on Section 8 housing and welfare checks and grossly early Social Security benefits. When I was little, my mother and I usually had enough money left over for a Friday night donut date at the kitchen table. Silently, gratefully, and full of mischievous giggling, we slurped our half a donut each by candlelight. Dunked into milk sopping wet dripping. This was our treat for the week. I'm grateful for the donut memories.

Welcome to the story of my life: not having much, being resourceful, trying not to think like a poor person, being a chronic spendthrift when you get a few extra bucks in your pocket, only to find yourself broke in a few days and having to pawn something or ration the milk. Fine. Not so bad. Have you ever heard me complain?

Bellissa related the story of how she once asked a poor old man, Rawls, a jazz saxophone player, why he would spend $200 out of his $300 monthly government cheese on a handheld DVD player.

"When you've been poor your entire life," explained Rawls, "you really are not interested in counting your pennies. If you get a little extra cash, you want to get something nice for yourself. You just want to feel normal, like other people." And then you're broke for days or weeks and you have to beg people for food. That's thinking like a poor person. Again: welcome to my world.

One of the Good Samaritans who responded to my blog, Faith is her name, offered to put me up in an efficiency apartment in her house in exchange for 20-30 hours a week of work around the house. I could choose the jobs as I find things that need doing - raking, picking up trash, doing dishes, general cleaning, painting the unfinished woodwork around the window sills - what-have-you. It would also include feeding the stray cat, Squeak is his name, "because I want you to learn how to take care of something other than yourself," Faith intoned in all seriousness. That sounded great, so I took the efficiency.

And that's where I am now. I have a cozy little room - not too little, but little - enough room for walking loose figure eights, a writerly pace of pondering - with my own bathroom and kitchen. This is more than I could have ever hoped for, especially on a work exchange basis. The house is situated right off the New Haven Harbor, which is an inlet off the Long Island Sound, which is an inlet off the Atlantic Ocean. I can open my side door and see saltwater. It comes in violently in big tumultuous waves when it rains all day, like it did three days ago, but when the weather is stiller sits patiently in the cold early April breeze, lapping the shore like a stray tabby cat to its stairway water dish.

Is this the place where I can write my Great American novel about how I am not Great at all, hardly even consider myself an American in the popular sense of the word? There is seclusion and solitude here; Faith, ever faithful, assures me the place is well protected by His divine love. I can write my life and my memories and my nows and forevers, and I can take a bus or walk an hour into town for a little social healing, a healing I need so badly.

But it's the solitude I love. No sirens can be heard. No nighttime ambulances in a steady procession towards the Yale New Haven Medical Center, almost on top of which I lived when I was over at George and Howe, before I was evicted on sincere threat of violence.

No. This place is peace, here in my “kingdom by the sea”. So I'm grateful, I'm not homeless, and I'm ready to move forward in life. Tell me, please: Is that so boring?

Note: Some names were changed to avoid drama.

The Urban Pedestrian

If I had a blog called The Urban Pedestrian, it would be a daily account of my walks through downtown New Haven and surrounding areas. I would talk about the buildings, the streets, the people in the streets, construction projects that are underway, and so on. I would report on what it's like to be a pedestrian in the attempt to "raise awareness" about the "issue" of being a pedestrian. I would complain a lot about the traffic signals and how they are awkwardly timed so that it is actually safer to jaywalk than to cross at the intersection. I would bitch and moan about motorists who never use their turn signals, and relate tales of how I yelled, "Nice turn signal!" as the car swerved blithely on by. Uplifting stories of Good Samaritanism would be included, as would sardonic tales of the street people asking for money.

Today, for example, I ran into a street lady with whom I am quite familiar. I don't know her name. It was a beautiful day out, in the 70s I believe, and she said, "Do you know me?" I said I did, and asked how she was doing. "I'm depressed. I've been walking around all day, crying like an asshole." I could see the tears in her eyes. I don't know nor do I care whether she was just running for Best Actress or what. I just said, "I'm sorry, sweetheart, I would give you some money, but I am fresh out." I gave her a hug instead. She kept on walking and panhandling in the gorgeous weather.

Now that's kind of sardonic, yes? Sad, but nice weather. Good combination. Then I would move onto how I ran into my buddy Gary from the old soup kitchens I used to attend, and how I spotted him today wearing a suit at a bus stop. He was coming back from a job interview at a temp agency to (hopefully) replace his job as a stock "boy" in a grocery store. His explosion of sandy white hair and handlebar goatee, juxtaposed with the old pinstriped suit, made him look a lot like Samuel Clemens, or Mark Twain depending on who you ask. Gary was reading a fantasy novel. He's always reading a fantasy novel. He opened the one he was holding and read me a passage from the introduction, which was basically a how-to guide to writing fantasy. Moral of the passage: you have to have a theology (pagan or Christian, pagans are better because "they have more fun"), a Hero, a Quest, and a "Magic Thingamajiggy" (Holy Grail, the One Ring, the Special Jewel). That's as far as we got. Gary's bus arrived.

That's The Urban Pedestrian. Lowbrow and blue collar and street. Then there's The Upscale Pedestrian.

The Upscale Pedestrian would be a blog about how to live the good life without having to buy a car or even a bicycle. It would include information about how to use the transit system in an efficient manner, reviews of nice restaurants and museums you can walk to, a guide to planning your days around a pedestrian-oriented way of life, and other material. It would break down the cost of being a pedestrian and weigh it against the cost of owning a car, and then compare the intrinsic benefits of each way of life. I would attempt to prove that you can muster any type of non-motorist lifestyle you want, whether you are young or old, rich or humble, single or married, with kids or without.

So why don't I start those blogs? Because I have too many ideas. That's why I have this multi-purpose blog, this trash compactor. I realize there is little to connect this blog to itself. There seems to be no pattern, other than the fact that it is written by myself. So I'll just stick to this one for now. My goal is to tell self-contained stories that do not require you to follow a thread or series. On the other hand, a lot of my life does connect; a lot of the stories do find relationships with each other. So if you are a reader of this blog, please just read as much or as little as you like. If you start to see a pattern, then you have your larger narrative. Reading and writing are therefore a symbiotic relationship. As a reader, you have just as many choices to make as does the writer. So we're kind of exactly alike. You're confused, I'm confused, let's all share our lives with each other.

The Shakespeare Lady

The Shakespeare Lady is performing a passage from a play I do not recognize. I am the only patron in attendance. The admission price for the show is two dollars. The venue is a sidewalk.

"What feeble night bird overcome by misfortunes beats at my door?”

It’s a passage from the Robinson Jeffers version of Medea by Euripides – one of the Shakespeare Lady’s signature acts. We are standing outside an overpriced health food store. Customers are going in and out. Nobody stops to listen tonight.

“Can this be that great adventurer, the famous lord of the seas and delight of women, the heir of rich Corinth, this crying drunkard on the dark doorstep?”

The training she received at Bennington College in Vermont and the Yale School of Drama shines through. Her voice is strong and singsong, her physical gestures measured and effective yet sweeping. The lines from the passage seem to be directed at both herself and at the invisible character she is supposed to be addressing. At times, it feels as though she is addressing me. I feel included, somehow.

“Yet you've not had enough.”

No, I have not had enough. I am the feeble night bird. I am the boastful adventurer, the privileged middle class citizen, cut down to size. I hang on her every word. I know where this woman has been. I learned about her from first hand experience, word on the street, talking to the locals, and reading the news. She has a rare form of schizophrenia, an ailment she and someone at UCLA have described as “tactile demons”. She hears voices. They have been tormenting her since her days as a Yale student. Her Master’s Thesis was entitled “A Theatre of Hunger”.

In the early 1980s, she got into a physical argument with the voices and destroyed her apartment. She has been living on the streets and in mental hospitals, women’s shelters, and rooming houses ever since. The business owners around this neighborhood, which just so ironically happens to be the designated “arts district”, don’t like her much. She can get overly assertive. Sometimes she performs so close to the storefronts that the customers have to walk right by her, both coming and going. Apparently, people have complained, because the neighborhood business community is trying to put the kibosh on her performances. She has been arrested, thrown in jail, and tried for trespassing and disturbing the peace numerous times each.

Luckily, she is not all alone in the system. She has won allies through her performances. Many have advocated in the press for leniency for her minor “offenses”. Filmmakers and musicians have created documentaries and music videos in tribute to her. She even has a lawyer friend who defends her pro bono every time she goes to court. Even the mayor of New Haven likes her, and has been quoted as saying he admires the dignity she maintains despite her difficult lifestyle. Still, she continues living her own Theatre of Hunger.

“You have come to drink the last bitter drops. I'll pour them for you."

The rats took over her rooming house last June. The city condemned the place and kicked out all the tenants. I once saw what the place looked like when I myself was looking for a cheap place to live. It was frighteningly filthy. In an abandoned room I saw an open refrigerator, unplugged, with food still inside. The refrigerator was tilting, sadly, on broken feet. I didn’t dare look at the shared shower rooms.

The Shakespeare Lady still performs on the streets. Some say she smokes crack. I don’t judge it. Does your boss ask you what you’re going to spend your money on when he cuts your paychecks? The Shakespeare Lady’s performances are the best deal in town. Her eyes bulge from their sockets when performing, but rest easy and hooded when just walking. Her voice is natural and conversational as she again trots up the street towards me again:

“Hey baby, my name is the Shakespeare Lady,” goes the usual introductory line. “Mind if I read you a poem for a couple of dollars so I can get into a shelter?” By “poem” she means “theatrical performance”. She probably says “poem” because it’s quicker to say when you’re trying to hustle up a rush hour audience.

“Sure, Margaret, I remember you,” I reply, reaching into my pocket.

She readies herself by closing her eyes for a moment. She seems to be crouching internally, as if a cat before the pounce. She launches into the “To be or not to be” monolog from Hamlet. The cat has pounced, and she is clawing. A few lines go by before she is suddenly doing the “I Have a Dream” speech by Martin Luther King, Jr. Suddenly the speech has morphed to become the Emancipation Proclamation by Abraham Lincoln. I can’t tell where she made the switches. Is she twisting her lines on purpose, or is this some manifestation of the schizophrenia? Is she confused? And does it even matter? The “mash-up”, if you will, is seamless. A DJ or collage artist should be so proficient at blending the arts of completely many different epochs of human history into one cohesive narrative. The result is a timeless wailing of the soul. A longing, a yearning, a sadness and a strength. For my two bucks, the Shakespeare Lady ain’t holding back.

I, for one, appreciate her performances.

“Thank you, Shakespeare Lady, for throwing a wrench into my day,” I should say. “For making me stop and look somewhere besides straight forward. For making me look up at the sky, where you are looking, Shakespeare Lady. Thank you for speaking loudly, for not being ashamed of yourself, and for being a human being and an actor and alive. Thank you for reminding ‘sane’ people of the raw underbelly of their own psyche. Thank you for all the debts you’ve paid so that I can have this moment with you.”

I never say all that. Instead, it’s just, “Thank you, Margaret.” I look her in the eye, clasp her hand in my two hands when I give her the money, and figure she understands.

“Thanks, baby, you have a good night now.”

On Anger and Rage

My mother smoked a pack of cigarettes and washed down the tar with a pot of coffee every single day of her pregnancy with me.

My eighth birthday party ended when I ran around screaming into all of my guests' faces freaking everybody out and crying for absolutely no apparent reason.

Are these two facts connected?

According to my dad, William Fleeman, the founder and CEO of Pathways to Peace, Inc., a not-for-profit education and training corporation on anger management:

People with anger problems use anger like a drug, to change feelings of powerlessness into feelings of power.

That belief of his comes from experience. From the Pathways to Peace Founder's Story (available in its entirety here) :

I got in my first fistfight when I was eight. It happened at school. Another kid made fun of me because he knew I didn’t have a father. From early childhood I felt worthless and alone, powerless and afraid. That’s how kids feel when their fathers abandon them. The kid’s remarks hooked my feelings of abandonment and pushed my self-esteem even lower. I felt a sinking feeling in my stomach; then I shoved the kid down the school steps.

Watching the kid tumble down the steps, I felt my first “anger high.” The other kids who cheered me on added to the high. The high lasted only an instant, but for that instant I felt a sense of power I had never felt before. I felt confident instead of afraid, accepted instead of rejected, strong instead of weak. What I felt, felt good. The kid was not hurt. Neither of us suffered bad results. The teacher who broke up the fight merely talked to us.

Later that day the high went away, and all of the negative feelings I felt about myself came back. But that fight on the school steps changed me. The change lasted most of the rest of my life. A new part was added to my character: a part I could not seem to control, a part I was not even aware of, a part that would continue to seek the rush of power I felt when I shoved that kid down the stairs. Over time that part would grow big and strong. Finally it would run my life. Later I would find out what it was. It was anger and rage.

That fight on the school steps caused me to form another new belief: anger is power. That belief influenced my behavior for the next 35 years.

I can relate, of course. He's had more time to calm down, also of course. I'm 27. I still get these rushes of adrenaline once in awhile for no apparent reason. I generally don't freak out anymore. Instead, my voice takes on a new tone, though I don't scream and yell. My eyes start smoking, and I have to look away from the person I'm with, or else I'll give them a look they won't quickly forget. I've been told I have an expressive face, which doesn't make it any easier to conceal my anger.

It's rare. I'm glad I've calmed down. I look forward to calming down more every day. Whether the problem is genetic or learned, I still think the only way to deal with it is to get to know it, and then to sincerely try to solve it. The following workbook might help you if you have anger problems of your own:

Must Have Been the Pier Talking

Part 1, as written to a lover:

So I took a walk to the pier just before sunrise. It was absolutely incredible. I don't think I've seen anything like it. As I approached the rock-surrounded pier, the half-ish moon against the deep blue darkness was on my right, leaving its glowing fractured trail in the wavelets on the black Harbor. On my left, the horizon glowed warmly reddish purple. I bounced up and down on the end of the pier to get the blood flowing so I could warm up, then started rotating in circles so I could see the pageant of westward darkness and eastward flabbergasted light. Birds were flying towards the sun before it rose! The terns or gulls wheeled overhead, one of them playing shepherd to the other gulls wheeling and gathering directly over my head. The call of the gull is German. A pack of ravens or crows passed right through the gathering of gulls; the ravens were more purposeful in their eastward trek, and disappeared, calling in Italian. Two ducks, mute, paddled about in the water below me. Rush hour traffic was beginning to flow westward, which I could see from where I stood. Their headlights pierced the purple air. In another direction, in the darkness, the masts of the moored sailboats by the Sound School for aquatic studies stood still, some of them leaning, some of them straight up in the air, like a snapshot of the moment when the child's hand lets go of the upended pick-up sticks; the two spires of the massive boat lift towered above the surrounding masts. All down the edge of the shore, lights were still turned on in the death throes of night - street lamps, kitchen windows, what-have-you. And the birds just kept flying east towards the light as it brightened and brightened. I called to some of the birds, smiling, saying out loud for the benefit of my credulity, "This is impossible. This is beautiful," and such. After about a half hour I was getting a bit chilly so I went inside before the top edge of the sun disc would slice the horizon. Maybe I'll see that tomorrow.

Part 2, in a later letter:

On my daily walk past the Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center (a high school known locally as the Sound School), which is situated on right on the water and located across the street from my house on South Water Street (I finally learned the name of my street!) I saw a high school kid in a knit cap shaking a pair of sticks that went clackety-clackety-clack! clacky-clack! sound. I approached him, we said our what-ups, and I asked him what those things were.

"They're called bones, although these are made of teak. They come from Ireland." He held them in one hand, one finger between the sticks, showing me. Imagine something akin to your standard flat incense burner, with the curved end, but now imagine two of them held together with their curved parts facing outward. That's what the bones looked like.

"You're good at those," I said.

"Thanks. Most people find them annoying."

"I think it's cool."

"Thanks."

I continued my walk to the pier, passing a couple of high school kids leaning against a low brick wall, leaning into each other, a boy and a girl. All decked out in whatever the kids are wearing these days, with their funky coifs and and sunglasses on heads and silver necklaces. I walked to the end of the pier and stood looking at the four swans that were sailing slowly about bobbing for apples or whatever they were bobbing for. I sipped the last of my coffee and pondered how cool it would be if you could just swim around and have that be your home and everywhere you looked there was food right beneath your webbed feet. And then if you got too far from wherever you wanted to be you could just jump out of the water and fly there and then keep sailing slowly.

I didn't tell you what I thought about yesterday morning as I experienced the whole sunrise spectacle of dark blue sky and half moon and flocks of different types of birds and boats moored a couple hundred yards from shore and the big rocks and the rippling water gently lapping at the side of New Haven's shores and the lights of rush hour along the far edge of the harbor on the ground like a string of Christmas tree lights dragged by a cat and the masts and boat lifts perked up in darkness and the whole phantasmagoria of chalky cloud spread like rent gauze above the masts. It was the birds that got me to thinking ontologically about the nature of time and space.

As the birds were flying toward the dawning light, it occurred too me that there was a possibility that the birds - the ravens especially, who flew together with a great sense of purpose all in one direction in orderly fashion - always go where the light is. If the sun is rising, they fly towards it. If the sun is setting, they fly towards it. If the sun is high in the sky, they generally stick where they are. This maximizes the length of their day, if only by a few seconds. Some genetic thing. So if this is true, then that means they spend the morning flying east, the evening flying west, and the middle part of the day comparatively chilling out. This got me thinking about their range, their territory. It got me wondering if that's how they do life. And then as the seasons change, they fly north or south accordingly. Just seeing them make these almost worshipful mad dashes towards the sun got me wondering about all this. And then there's the nature of time. It is based on the sun for the birds. And if they make a really strong habit of sticking to the sun, flying this way and that, then that means time and space are, in practice, the exact same thing to these birds. Each point on the sky represents a certain time of day. I was looking at the sky and the birds and the ocean and thinking about all this, and it just felt really extra true to me then. The sky felt so close and personal, like it was hugging me, and that all was quite so very small. The world was my oyster. Very cozy.

That is all about that.

During and After the Storm

The Nor’easter is over. The flood had almost made waterfront property of the house where I'm living. We're talking a 10- to 15-foot difference in the usual sea level. A huge log of abandoned dock mooring had floated out onto Water Street and cruised on down like some bargain basement gondolier ride. It’s a good thing all the cars had been parked a block away on Sea Street due to the general alert issued by the city.

It's too bad I didn't have the stomach to walk out to the pier during the Nor’easter. It would have been deliciously tempestuous. The wind and the clouds were incessant, without the relief of lightning and thunder. Just that 60 mph wind ramming through the neighborhood and the entire coast. The trees made a wooshing sound that didn't quit. Longest avante garde wind symphony in history. The Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center got flooded. Their boat masts, docked opposite my house, are a whistling mechanism for the wind. The damn things screamed like banshees for 24 hours. The clanging of the lanyards on the masts added to the annoyance factor. And me without a car or frequent-enough buses to escape into downtown, away from shore by a couple miles. I holed up in my room and wrote and wrote and read some, and talked with my girlfriend on the phone.

Now: puddles and leaves and garbage everywhere. It is still heavily overcast but the wind has finally died down to about 15 mph, and the maddening drizzle is only intermittent. A few lone birds are back out flying around and sitting on their power lines. The whole world seems exhausted from the rain and the incessant wind. The sidewalk outside my door looks positively spent.

If I could remember everything about my life at every moment, it would be too much to bear. Please, one thing at a time. I have to step back from time to time and just walk out to the pier and get surrounded by water.

The sea level was all the way up to the boards. I could feel the waves thumping the bottom of the deck upon which I was standing and splashing up through the spaces between the planks. Water was lapping over the edges.

On my return walk from the pier, I spied my landlady's cat rolling around on the sidewalk outside my door. She is in heat (the cat, not my landlady) and had been missing for two days. Out getting some tail from the grey cat that I've seen around, no doubt. I took the opportunity to lure the skittish kitty towards the door with a bowl of the cat food I had bought for Squeak, the stray. I had to rattle the food around in one hand, tapping the plastic bowl on the steps, calling the kitty, holding the door open with the other hand.

Once inside, she had to actually be coaxed to approach her food and water dishes. As soon as she remembered she was starving she cleaned the bowl. Now she is meowing outside my bedroom door, begging to be let back out into the cold so she can find the gray cat. Poor dumb thing. Rolling around on the floor, rubbing its muzzle on everything.

Cats are insane. Sophisticated, yes, but also daft. Then you get a cat that's in heat, and they'll risk life and limb to get some sex. They'll lose their appetite and not eat for days. I remember when my childhood cat Mary would go into heat. The yowling and the sex starvation. Mary never got laid in her entire life. It's sad, really.

Now that high tide has come and gone, and low tide has reach its lowest point and started its climb, I can see all kinds of garbage washed up on the mud flats with their marshy weeds of bamboo proportions. Who knows what relics lie in wait for someone to discover them, or not discover them, in which case they might get washed back out to sea someday. Maybe I'll go hunting for archaeological finds tomorrow in the daylight. Tonight, I'm walking into town. The weather is still cold, overcast, drizzly, miserable and depressing, but it's at least navigable. I won't freeze.

After the Nor'easter

I walked down to the mud flats this evening not long before nightfall. Description: big, huge, wet, black rocks. These surrounded the pier, mostly, but also strayed from the herd, out along the mud flats. Smaller rocks, no doubt hemmed by tides from the bigger ones and chunked piecemeal, all edged and blunt-pointed. A sheer blanket of clamshells, acres of them in total, often whole but more often minced! So that the ground was covered in little tiny bits of clamshell, all up along the edges of the marshy bamboo things that line Water Street. You walk on them thinking, "Graveyard, holocaust of clams, ground of calcium." Crunch, crunch, crunch. Hundreds of thousands of clams' worth of little tiny bits.

Also: big huge rotted-out logs, all jutting on the ground parallel towards the sea, as if an old dock of gigantic proportions, disassembled and its foundations abandoned. One big log that had broken away and swung back to lay along the shore, much of it embedded deep into the sand-mud. Grassy bits where it is slippery and still waterlogged. Everything waterlogged, really. And garbage! Wrappers, plastic bottles.

I found three glass bottles - one green, one clear with the cognac label still on, and one clear with interesting little floral textures. I decided to keep them as decorations. I also found two fishing bobbers of the red-and-white variety, plastic, the line pinching mechanisms too rusted for use. I kept one of the bobbers as part of my hypothetical Harbor Shrine that I will erect somewhere in my room. How 'bout that. Interesting stuff. What else.

The mud flats smell like fish and clam and dirt and mud and brown grass and rotting wood everywhere, lovely, permeating everything. I discovered that underneath the pier, if you walk next to it, you can see a wide space, about three feet tall, between the layer of concrete underneath and the wooden planks up top. A great place to hide something, if you ever need to hide something. Do you need to hide anything? I've got the spot. Of course, it will get washed away at high tide. So it's a really good place to hide something. Or lose it. However you choose to see it.

Birthday

February 29th, 1980, and my dad is pacing. Leap Year. Year of the Monkey. Out of the jungle and into the shopping mall. Pisces. Still wet. Both unnatural and natural, nature and nurture. A bionic organism born to human parents. My dad draws a tense breath, exhales.

You could smoke in waiting rooms back then. But the dad was discouraged from entering the birthing room. Germs and things, probably. Or dads make for bad midwives. Female nurses and male doctors only. It wasn't an official rule any longer, it was a deep-seated prejudice, I suppose, and perhaps not without value. My dad, for one, was all nerves and tendons. With 100 pounds of muscle that could move 350 straight upwards. Leave the delicate work to the female nurses and male doctor.

Yet here he is, holding me up to his cheek, me sound asleep, no idea just how secure these arms are, just sleeping like the days-old baby I am. Drooling and dreaming of the womb. It was warm in there, the womb.

That's why I started hollering before the rest of my body was born. "No deal," I skillfully argued. "This contract is null and void. Put my head back in that womb or you'll hear from my lawyer." I paused for effect, drooling my first drool, ordered my abductors to "cease and desist," and ultimately lost the case. The verdict was unanimous. I was guilty of being born, the minimum sentence for which was 27 years of Life, with an upward limit of 120 years for good behavior.

Yes, it all seems backwards, even today. I tried protesting and all I got was ignored and beat up. Me and reality don't get along too well. It's just so illogical.

Culture Sketch: New Haven

Almost three years ago I left Minneapolis and ultimately landed in New Haven, Connecticut. This is what I've learned.

On the surface and in its depths, New Haven is a typical lost-and-found American city. She is always in search of both past and future. Many roads lead here. Some proceed no further. People "get stuck" here.

One local myth is that New Haven is the sixth borough of New York City. This notion may or may not hold sway with the map carvers, but it is nonetheless a distinct oral tradition, sleepily yearning for a truncated dream of the past. We wear the Yankees insignia on our hats. We mention The City in our hip-hop songs. We came from New York. Historically, this may be true.

We also caravanned from Virginia, the Carolinas, and Georgia. Our food is soul. Our spareribs fall off the bone. Our homes are clean.

We came from the Midwest. I myself came from Minnesota almost three years ago. I moved into a bedroom on Pleasant Street in the Grad Ghetto, a large, quiet enclave comprised mostly of studious Yalies. My roommate and subletter was a humble and responsible carpenter from Ohio named Mike. He built sets for the Long Wharf Theater, the only successful New Haven theater not affiliated with Yale. I took a job at a locally owned coffee shop called Koffee?. Such a simple name bespeaks the city’s smallness, its one-of-everything brand of cosmopolitanism.

I later lived in the Hill. I was the only white person in the neighborhood. Although most white New Havenites speak of the Hill in hushed tones of foreboding, I only ran into one problem in my three months there. One midnight walk home, a man followed me, shouting that he knows me, which I know he did not, because I looked. Should I have flashed my knife in the light of the street lamp, as I did, so that he could see it from ten feet away? Perhaps there was never anything to fear but annoyance, and it was my fear that was out of place, not my color. In fact, I once got the crud beat out of me by a bunch of cracked-out white boys on Ellsworth Avenue.

I moved in with my then-girlfriend, who had traveled from Portland, Maine in search of a husband according to the literalist directives of her lucid dreams. We shared that small City Point apartment on Sea Street with a born-again Christian man from rural Connecticut (I was a pantheist, she was pagan, but we all got along well enough). From our living room window, we witnessed the sun and the storms over New Haven Harbor. Down the street was the Sound School Regional Vocational Aquaculture Center. Docked boats, a long pier, and Sage, a classy burger-and-jazz joint overhanging the water, were some of the neighborhood's other hallmarks.

My girlfriend and I re-located to George and Howe, near the YMCA and almost adjacent to a pawnshop. On that corner, you can buy the New Haven Register from Steve in his orange blazer any day of the week. Steve rode into town on a Greyhound bus from Providence, Rhode Island many years ago. His uncles and aunts and cousins still live there.

When juxtaposed with my Midwestern memories, the “black” and “white” cultures blend together with comparatively little effort here in New Haven. This speaks highly of the community’s ability to transcend institutional racism. Not that racism is dead here. Puerto Rican people, who usually arrive in New Haven via Miami, are the community’s most stigmatized and isolated minority - more so even than the Mexican and South American Diaspora. North African, Arabic, and Indian peoples tend to man the hospitals and gas stations. Many other Asian peoples, such as Japanese and Chinese, can be found in the Universities. 

Obviously, these tendencies are bendable, but you see patterns.

The Yale campus, peopled by students and faculty from all over the world, is one of two pillars of the New Haven economy. Its presence has created many jobs for young non-students such as myself. Long-time locals tell me that the last fifteen years have been a time of growth and gentrification.

New Haven's other economic pillar is the social services. In the Downtown Evening Soup kitchen, I met a young middle-aged woman - hunched shoulders, sweet smile - filling plastic containers with second and third servings to keep herself alive. She told me she came from Iowa. I paused mid-bite and said, "Fellow Midwesterner." I learned her son is a philosophy student at the University of Minnesota, Twin Cities campus. “My alma mater,” I smiled. Auld lang syne.

New Haven is a community both rotting and growing, staying put and just passing through. Our identity is not so much a melting pot, but a sand painting in progress, ebbing and flowing under the gentle breath of time.

Northern Lights

My mother woke me up before dawn.

“Come quick,” she intoned as I rubbed my bewildered eyes. There was excitement and urgency in her voice. “This is very important.”

We stood on the balcony of our third-story apartment and looked out beyond the playgrounds of my elementary school, over the trees huddled on the horizon, and witnessed the Northern Lights.

Aurora borealis! There in the sky it flashed! Green and blue and purple and others, a whole mess of colors flashing madly, off there in the distance, just above the trees and reflected in the lumpy blanket of clouds that kept us all warm that night. It looked like what concert bells sound like.

Grace

I believe in the simple magic of saying the words Nam Myoho Renge Kyo.

I was homeless for a while. I spent the first week of my homelessness with my girlfriend, who had flown in from New Mexico to Connecticut to see me. I took a bus up from New Haven and met her in Hartford. We stayed in an international youth hostel called America House, which was run by an old Taiwanese couple, Grace and David.

Grace enthusiastically regaled us with her descriptions of a Buddhist group she belongs to called Soka Gakai, the mission of which is to get people together and chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo. “When you chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo,” Grace would intone, smiling at us through that cute accent of hers, “you get good things coming to you.” My girlfriend and I smiled back at the anthropological curiosity of a real live Buddhist.

At the end of the week, as I was kissing my girlfriend goodbye, I realized my wallet was missing. I patted myself down and ransacked my suitcase. The bus came, my girlfriend went. I was utterly alone and penniless and homeless and adrift in a town I knew nothing about. I returned to the hostel to scan the room in which we had stayed. No wallet. No ID card, no Social Security card, no nothing. No money to get back to New Haven. I screwed up my courage to leave, and said goodbye to Grace for the second time.

“You wait,” Grace said, disappearing into the hostel. She emerged with three dollars and a baggy full of change. Suddenly a cloud lifted from the woman’s face, which took on an otherworldly gravity and locked eyes with me. This serious side of Grace was new to me. I froze. She spoke.

“I am old woman. I have seen a lot. You are young. You are strong and you are smart. You get yourself good job. You have to be good man for your girlfriend. You get yourself good job and live good life. Chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo every day. When you chant Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, you get good things coming to you. You are going to be okay.”

Her sternness melted to a sad smile. I looked at her and bit back tears, cupping the money she had given me between my hands, involuntarily holding them chest high and bowing my head as if in prayer. “Thank you. Thank you.” I walked away chanting Nam Myoho Renge Kyo, not because I believed, but because I was too afraid to think.

I found the wallet ten minutes later. It was sitting undisturbed in a restaurant booth where my girlfriend and I had sat the night before. I made a mental note to phone Grace with the good news. She would be sweet and kind and terse and prescriptive and brief and busy and beautiful like an old woman who has seen a lot in her long life.