EveDestiny's Vox

Barely Enough

Socrates supposedly said people fall into two kinds: those who are not worthwhile and live only to eat and drink, and those who are worthwhile, and eat and drink only to live.

I would have said I fell into the first group, loving little more than to eat and laugh over a good meal, especially one with a few dear friends. That would make me less worthy in Socrates' eyes ... well, so be it. I'm sure I fall short in a plethora of other ways as well. C'est la vie.

But I realize that lately I don't hold my liquor as well as I used to. Mostly because I have not been drinking as much as I used to.

There are plenty of people out there who, like Socrates, would say drinking falls into two camps as well -- the happy drinking and the not-so-happy drinking. And I would agree, and say that on various occasions I have landed in both (or either) of those buckets. But as historical trends go, I drink much more when I am discontented or woeful. Like any other useful, chemical crutch, I deploy it to numb my grey matter, to silence the chattering worry wart that resides in my skull and runs amok during times of stress and duress. To detach, unwind, forget. Many, many of my drinking memories root in unhappier times, and most (if not all) of my sick-drunk experiences have been firmly negative in genesis and execution -- I started out in a funk and ended up in a drunk, hungover and sick for the trouble. To quote Mark Twain: "Sometimes too much to drink is barely enough."It was a means to drown out, not drum up.

My natural mental programming (which is admittedly maudlin and often macabre) -- my tendency to use alcohol as a crutch -- has been reinforced by my habits to self-medicate stress, instead of celebrate a cessation of stress, even if only overnight, away from the work grind, or over weekend, away from the worries of deadlines and bills.

So I sat at my desk this sunny early-spring afternoon and took a few moments to try and dredge up memories of Happy Drinking. And I found a few, but not enough.

- Drinking what was surely five litres of red wine in Macedonia with two very dear friends, on a trip of a lifetime (a month in Europe).

- A karaoke birthday party with friends in Portland, loopily warbling our favourite tunes.

- Several bingey get-togethers with coworkers from The Swoosh Company.

- Dancing in more than one lesbian bar, also with friends.

- N'Awlins 2001 for Depeche Mode, with friends, where I learned to love jalapeno peppers and stayed up 48 hours straight, pre-5-Hour-Energy, high on Red Bull and good times.

I realize my habit has been to associate drinking with bad times, and that is a paradigm I can break and repair. It is time to do Happy Drinking, and plenty of it.

Who's ready for Happy Hour?

The Tax Man Went

Mucking about
In the traces of dollars and cents
That are all that remains
Of a life together.
Vestiges, memories
Of worse times and
Not so bad times,
But times that had to pass.

Grinding through
The records of meals and the shopping
And the vet visits.
A humble, lived-in summation
Of monies gone
To construct a house
That fell in anyway.

Entangled now
In miasma and ghosts,
Tripped up in what went missing:
Connection, understanding, conversation,
Receipts.
Evidence of something ...
But what?
And does it matter to anyone anymore
But the Tax Man? 

“Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep.”

That quote comes to us from Scott Adams. Creator of Dilbert, among other savoury things.

First, some context. You'll need to view the following Ted Talks video by Elizabeth Gilbert: Eat Pray Love Author on "Nurturing Creativity".

Watching this vignette left me rather argumentative and irritable.  While Gilbert is very likable, and a pleasing, engaging speaker, what she has to say is just a retread on the same old song and dance mankind has been seesawing with for eons -- passing the buck.  We (collectively) cannot cope with the dark and light of things; we can't accept that certain skills have steep prices, that certain choices lead to outcomes we never intended, so we talk about "fate/ Fate" and console ourselves with the stories we tell ourselves (and each other). We just seem allergic to responsibility, as a species.

Which, you should notice, Gilbert mentions herself about five minutes in, when she said she realized she might have written her best thing and it's all downhill from here. THIS talk, this mindset she espouses, appears to be the coping mechanism she uses now with some efficacy -- that her gift is not her own, but that of the divine ("Divine" with a capital D? It is not clear, really).  That all of it is somehow something separate from herself, and she can pass the buck on owning it. As long as she can hold something else accountible for the success/failure of her attempts, she can survive (I suppose). This is her "protective psychological construct." (Cue the Imaginary Friend banter, please.)

She suggests that art and its creation is full of anguish because it is too much pressure to own genius. Instead, I wonder if it is "too much pressure" to trade in the fickle and mercurial world of "what people like." Art has no subjective ruler; it's not financial accounting, with standards. It's not even management, with laws, or farming, with metrics and bushels. It's amorphous by its nature (the proverbial, unanswerable "what IS art?"). Trying to create in a world that demands currency for sustenance, and trying to create a consumable art in such a world (just as Gilbert did, before she hit pay dirt with Eat Pray Love) is surely maddening. To me her complaint is more castigation of the economics of the modern world, and less of the framing/perspective of the "gift" with which she plies her trade.

Why is not sufficient to say she was merely lucky? Lucky ... that she ever got a publication contract at all, pre-Eat Pray Love. That she was ever able to make any living at all as a writer. Why isn't it enough to just say that she had great timing, and she wrote the right self-help book for the right affluent market, pre-economy tank, when any frustrated middle-class wife could envision herself ditching the deadbeat husband and taking the alimony and finding herself in various countries around the world. Why does she conclude, instead, that somehow this book is somehow more blessed (my word, not hers, altho she manages to say "divine" five times during her talk) than those that came before? And in assigning her ability in writing Eat Pray Love as some event by which she merely channels something outside herself, how does she suppose she will EVER again master that "how the fuck did I do that?" How is that at ALL empowering to ascribe it to asupices outside herself? Weird. It's so contradictory.

Also -- I found the title Bait/Switch. Her talk (to me) seemed more "self-help," in the vein that Eat Pray Love was self-help, and less about truly "nurturing creativity." Yes, we lose great artists to suicide. I fail to see how believing in a higher power helped any of the suicidal artists who believed in something outside themselves (statistically, most humans are not nontheistic) managed to leverage that into a "Ok, I won't stick my head in the oven" outcome. Making it MORE overtly "not my bag, baby, it's a divine genuis thing" seems to place the artist even farther from control, and last time I checked, feeling out of control was one of the big Nasties of depression and stress. I fell for the hook, though; had the Ted Talk been entitled "Olé to God and His (His? Her? Its? Their?) Gift to Me," I would never have given her 19 minutes and 32 seconds of my precious, finite, only-this-one life.

Ultimately I found her commentary vaguely tragic, that her conclusion to so much nuance and surprising ability among what humans can do and how they experience the world and then translate that into massly-digestible "art" was to say "they saw it for what it was (talking about the dancers) -- god." Such credulous conclusions just scream "pathetic" to me. It's such a failure of curiosity and creative explanation. Such a failure of imagination. We've been saying for too long that something we couldn't see or prove makes the lightning and steals away the breath from our beloved companions. This coping mechanism is not appreciably different from Jeremy Lin's ascription of his talent to "not his" (Jeremy Lin and God's Game) or Tebow's endzone prayers (Tebow's Biblically Blessed) or the Muslim's Qu'ran admonishments about letting go (Let Go, Let Allah). I could crosshairs other "spiritual" belief systems as well, since they are all coping mechanisms of some degree, but I'll stop here. (In truth, I believe most every action I take as a human animal is about coping and comforting myself, so do not suppose I view religious and spirital beliefs only as the most heinous of human crutches.)

Gilbert is not advocating truth. Or even nurturing. She's advocating belief as a coping mechanism. And that's what I object most to -- the assignation of coping to something outside ourselves. The tendency is too deep to pass on everything to some omniscient sky daddy or collective invisible sense of "what's right," and in releasing it all to the unseen, we remove ourselves from the equation of solution, or correction, or improvement. Or responsibility.

I suppose I resent her misuse of her fame to further spread fatuous approaches. It's regressive. Maybe she's a Republican. (LOL, wink wink) I'm with Carl Sagan: "It is far better to grasp the universe as it really is than to persist in delusion, however satisfying and reassuring."

All-Temperture-Cheer?

I'm in the mood for a fable: a fairy tale, a twisted little story with a Moral ... something gothic and faintly disturbing, and probably not really all that fit for consumption by children. (Who would agree that a story of wolves eating little kids is a great Happy Kiddie Story anyway? Little Red Riding Hood)

~~~

Once upon a time there was father. Let's call him Pops. He had gotten married young and promptly fathered two kiddies: me, and then my brother. Pops was a young man once, but he's now in the midst of his Middle Ages. That means he's "getting old." Of note, Pops recently Got Jesus again.

Now, Pops had Jesus for a long, long time, a long time ago -- for all of his kids' upbringing, in fact. My brother and I were raised in the "Church of Christ" -- from birth until ... well, I'll get to that. Pops even served as a deacon (wiki/Deacon), which was a Very Big Deal, and the entire family regularly attended church three times a week: Sunday mornings and evenings, and on Wednesday nights. We did a lot of other church-related stuff as well, including VBS (Vacation Bible School) (wiki/VBS) and summer church camps. We were Good Little Christians.

But that was a Long Time Ago.

Because Pops philandered, once, twice, three dozen times a' ladies ... fucking the wife of his first cousin, among other women ... and the Dear Ole Church tossed out the whole family -- Pops, Moms, me, and my younger brother. I was 21 or 22 at the time, my brother only two years younger. The disfellowshipping (like excommuniation, but for Protestants) of Tricky Dicky (a/k/a Pops) lead to the falling away of the whole family: my mother the "wronged woman," my brother, me. It's never clear to me why these groups turn out their neediest members. God Works in Mysterious Ways. Amen.

After much drama and consternation, and the dissolution of his marriage to my mother and the Cousin-in-Law's divorce from her husband, he eventually married The-Wife-o-the-Cousin, making her progeny both my step-siblings *and* my cousins ... but whatever -- we were a Southern family, now "families" -- plural -- and this is Southern gothic at its finest. It's just not Southern if it's not fucked up.

However, this is just context for a larger fable at play in this bizarro sphere. After all that hair-pulling-and-jumping-about, after the "disfellowship" (defined) and the drama, both Pops and the Concubine (fomerly known as Cousin-in-Law-now-Wife) swore off "all things church." And with good reason, after all -- in a trying, difficult time, the church abandoned them for "sinning." {As if any sin named in the Good Book is more or less "sinful" than the other (oh, except that most inhumane of sins, blasphemy (wiki/Blasphemy), but that's a level of ridiculousness I'm not prepared to address in this post).} And years -- nay, decades -- passed without the need for GodJesusHolySpirit hullabaloo.

Pops built a huge house up in the country for him and the Concubine, and then he coaxed his increasingly decrepit mother to move into a very large house that he built (with her cash) across the street from him. (They live rurally, and she'd lived in an increasingly dangerous part of the inner city.) While her house was being built, my grandmother lived with  Pops and the Concubine in their 8,000 square foot chateau. For a couple of years.

Somewhere along the way, things got Difficult. Because my grandmother wasn't a big fan of the Concubine, who can be a little "simple" (I'm trying to be polite) and harpyish, and ultimately the Concubine returned the antipathy. Which became acrimony. And then the two women stopped talking to each other. They accused each other of "stealing momentos" from each other on the day my grandmother finally moved into her house across the street.

More years passed. The two women did not speak; they lived across the street but holidays came and went, and they never exchanged any time together, a spoken word, or even a look. As my grandmother's health deteriorated, Pops would go across the street once, twice, three times a day to deliver food and make sure my grandmother took her medicines. If my grandmother needed to go to the doctor and Pops could not take her, he asked a friend to do it, since the Concubine certainly wouldn't/couldn't. (Ah, the grown-up joys of maturity and mature behaviour.)

But time was Moving On, and Pops and the Concubine got older, too. Mysteriously, the Concubine decided she once again Needed Jesus. So she started going to church again. (After all, nothing provides the opportunity to gossip and Style-and-Profile quite like doing it for Jesus. She had retired by now, so she no longer had a place to wear her ridiculous high-heeled shoes and tease up her hair and wear flashy jewelry.) But somehow, Jesus didn't help her heal the rift with my grandmother. Or the rift the Concubine has with her own son. (Her son *also* Has Jesus, in case you were curious.) And church is Hard Work when you have a spouse but you can't drag him/her along, too -- that just Looks Bad -- so she managed to talk Pops into going back to it, too. (He had said he had no interest: "been there, done that" were his exact words.)

But age and a lack of education can do things to a man. Living with a shrew must surely be hellish as well, so I guess the man caved.

And then my grandmother died.

And now the death rites approach. Moms, the former daughter-in-law (her marriage to my dad lasted 21 years and spawned two grandkids) is explicity prohitbited from attending, even though my grandmother was still fond of her ... certainly enough to be on Speaking Terms. While the Concubine, whom my grandmother wouldn't have stopped to squat and piss upon, will be present for the event. (Ah, Jesus is no good for healing divorce rifts either, apparently.)

So the Moral of this story should be nicely evident now: Jesus is not a universl tool. Unless your universal tool needs to be a Cherry Picker. (Cherry Picking is when one notices and uses just the bits of a story or process one wants to pay attention to, and ignores the bits that one does not like.) Jesus Makes Cherry Picking Easy! For that, he's PERFECT. He's exactly what you need to beat your atheist daughter over the head about "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" (Warning: Religious Propaganda) {when he actually ISN'T if you know a single damned  thing about history (here and here and here and here)}, but he's NOT good at all at assisting in the forgiveness of past hurts with an ex-wife, with a mother-in-law, or a son.

Jesus is *not* All Temperature Cheer (1980 Cheer Commercial with Debra Winger). He's Lukewarm and Limp. Use only as directed. (Which maybe explains the unique misery that "Christmas holiday silliness" actually is. But that's for another post.)

A Little Dab

On my first full “just hanging out, not really traveling anymore” day in the South, post-cross-country-odyssey, I was greeted by a series of images and circumstances that reminded me, in ways both subtle and obtuse, that I am a kind of Dorothy in my own Oz, and I’m not in my Kansas anymore. In fact, I am in AR-Kansas.

First, as I puttered around town in the morning, I was greeted by this billboard:



I’m usually dismissive of this kind of heavy-handed tactic; it’s so overt and cloying (“YOU WILL MEET GOD. Unless you don’t. Whatever.”) that it just begs to be mocked and dismissed. (Did none of these billboard peeps take Marketing 101? Or ever heard “Catch more flies with honey than vinegar”? I digress.) And until recently, I never saw such silliness on billboards, because life in Portland did not give an agreeable audience to this kind of ridiculous religious bullying. But on this day, as a freshly-minted “Southerner” again, I was less than amused. I was offended, really, because it is a great example of the sacred-cow-in-your-face-red-carpet that religious pontification, especially of the Christian variety, is given. If this billboard were to display some equally stupid threat from the Qur’an and refer to Allah or Mohammad, it would never have been put up at all,  for one thing. For another,  such blatant displays of what in any other circumstance would be evidence of mental illness or “eccentric behaviour” (believing in an Invisible Friend, anyone?)  gets lauded merely because it’s “religious.” Nay, it is “CHRISTIAN.” Blurgh.

Sam Harris has a lot of good stuff to say about how we give inordinate latitude to religious belief. An example of his thoughts, from Letter to a Christian Nation: "The President of the United States has claimed, on more than one occasion, to be in dialogue with God. If he said he was talking to God through his hairdryer, this would precipitate to a national emergency. I fail to see how the addition of a hairdryer makes the claim more ludicrous or more offensive." I agree with him. It seems absurd to steer such a wide berth around concepts that increasingly only get traction because “these beliefs provide comfort.” So does Advil and morphine, marijuana and overeating. Except the last four things are regulated, illegal, or frowned-upon. Do I digress again? My point is merely this: only in this part of the United States (and, I should point out, places like Afghanistan and Iran) is this kind of religious extremism, which I find smacks a bit of terroristic threatening, allowed. Sadly, I even expect it. And it still pisses me off.

Next in line on what I’m now colloquaially calling “My First Day Back,” I encountered some cleverly irritating marketing of fruit.

THIS  is an Asian pear.

So is this:

Please notice that the box in the lower pictures does not say “Asian pear,” though. It says “Apple Pears.”

Hmm. Why the labeling drift? I wondered. Well, the “Apple Pears” were for sale in a Sam’s Club in North Little Rock, Arkansas. Where, I might guess, that “Asian-anything” is going to be viewed askance (at best) or hostilely (at worst). Ah, the great South and its magnanimous, tolerant ways. (Ahem. Meet my coping mechanism; it's called "sarcasm.") So they call an Asian pear something a bit less “furr-in.” (That’s a phonetic “foreign” for those unfamiliar with the Southern accent.)

Lastly, on that surprisingly-trying day a few weeks ago, I was confounded not once but twice over lunch in the same Sam’s Club that purveyed the doesn’t-exist-in-nature “apple pears.” First, every food option at the lunch counter featured either meat or sugar. By the metric fuckton. Second, when a woman asked me where I had gotten my napkins, she uttered the following word -- “Fudge!” -- and then *charmed me* (not really) with an unexpected and unwarranted explanation for why she could not find the napkins on her own. I could forgive the monologue about the tragic state of her affairs in being napkinless. But “fudge?” Really? As if that innocuous placeholder holds more or better sway in the English canon by being a clean version of the word she actually should have used, “fuck?” I am quite certain I rolled my eyes so hard as to cause vertigo in the people sitting within 10 feet of me, but she was unaware, so rapidly did she segue to her Lack o’Napkin story.

For what it's worth, the Mythbusters have proven that using actual foul language *does* increase the  body's tolerance for pain and stress-endurance. Should I have passed that little nugget on to the Fudge Lady? Mayhap. I pass it along to you now, dear reader:  Mythbusters No Pain No Gain.

I left the South more than once to live elsewhere, fully aware of my love/hate relationship with the land of my birth. I had thought the better part of a decade away would ameliorate that a bit, but I find thus far, that is not the case. Not only will a little dab do me. It might also do me in.

One-Seventh Above Water

I endeavor to reclaim my daily writing habit, but to do more of it in the consumable public and less tucked into the folds of my paper, combustible, shadowy journals. And tonight's stream-of-consciousness reveals only a fraction of what lurks beneath the surface of my mind, much like the above-referenced iceberg.

There is so much we do not know: about the world around us, about the circumstances and situations we find ourselves in every day, or about the people in our lives, or our own stories and desires, about how things will turn out as we grind down the path we call Life. If there is a tired and boring theme developing of late in my musing, it is this quality of gambling, of not much guarantee around payouts or wagers in the Game Of Life. I suppose it is reasonably true that predictable outcomes would make the act of living a bit more boring, but of late, I would happily plop a great big helping of Routine onto the roulette wheel from which I keep eating my moment-to-moment experience. I am really quite sick of the ever-changing cast of locations and dinner tables and cities and weather patterns and intimate routines and so on. A little pedantic rut sounds appealing right about now.

Someone will now caution me, sotto voce: "Be careful what you wish for; you just might get it."

And indeed, that is where my mind has gone, burrowing so deeply into topics others might leave unturned: the qualities and payout of a life that's maybe a bit too predictable, a bit too benighted. A bit too neglected. Because I can enumerate plenty of those of late, and the folks living those quieter, unremarked lives are restive and atrophied; they will not remain still much longer.

And therein lies the pickle of my evening: to rut or not to rut, that is the question. Seems as with most everything else, it is a matter of moderation, of balance between extremes. Of finding the sweet spot between boredom and chaos, between ideal and banal. I posed the following question to a friend recently -- if the most important part of a house is the foundation, how does one pay adequate attention to that foundation? Most of us walk on it every day, never giving it a second thought, until it breaks, busts, fails, and *then* it's a pain in the ass to deal with the needed repairs, assuming it can even be repaired at all. I view most of my own life in this way, from the fundamental of a largely unseen and un-thought-of foundation, upon which I have built everything else in my life -- friendships, family, career, long-term relationships. And I never maintain it. Almost none of us really do.

Isn't that sort of guaranteeing epic failure? But what of preventative maintenance on something so unseen, so unglamourous? I find it stymies me, and clearly it stymies most of us, because we do piss-poor jobs of caring for that most basic element of our lives -- knowing our selves and performing self-care on ourselves.

I asked a friend tonight over dinner what she wanted. And like me, she felt a little perplexed in the face of such a bald, rarely-asked question. What does she want? In the greater context of her life, is it the details that make her happy, or the construct upon which she hangs those details? Is it the people in her life? How she spends her time? Makes her living? Strives for the next goal? Any or all of these may or may not make her tick. And in asking her what winds her clock, I realize that what has wound mine has changed, and the only way I could realize this was to look at the damn thing and tinker with it.

In that metaphor of foundations, I have to walk around on the floor, testing for soft spots, listening for squeaks. Are there termites? Rats? Boogey men? It should be on my schedule of routine maintenance, and I suspect it should be on all of ours. Because one never really knows when the floor may fall in, and bring the roof down with it.

Which means -- there goes the rut. And maybe the neighborhood, too.

A Single Step

"A journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step." ~ Confucius

My cross-country odyssey, redux, began yesterday. I am en route, circumlocutiously, from Portland, OR, to Nashville, TN. A journey of a good bit more than a thousand miles, but at least I'm not walking it. I had kept far more than a mere car-full of belongings, so after shipping 22 boxes of what would *not* fit in the CRV, I jammed the rest in, leaving room for myself, natch. Barely.

The winter weather has predictably gotten things icky on the most easterly route, so I go south and then east. Once again, I ewchew the direct for the curvy. Conveniently this time I suppose I blame the weather.

The round-about approach or route is in itself incredibly ironic for me, because I move through this world in a pretty direct fashion. On any given day, I am cutting to the bottom line, saying what is on my mind, divesting myself of bullshit and bullshitters. It seems the one modicum of vacillation I permit myself is in the how I do Big Stuff: my big decisions sort of erupt and flow downhill like lava from a side vent, bounching off canyon walls and zig-zagging out into open spaces. No wonder vulcanology fascinates me.  Lava Butte

Circumlocution: it's a great umbrella descriptor for this trip, for the route that's gotten me here, and for maybe the entire course of my life. Back when I believed in fairy tales and nonsense, my zodiac symbol resonated: the Crab. A creature seemingly incapable of taking a direct route between one point an another, they lurch, backtrack, angle and amble.  They walk sideways to go forwards, for crying out loud.  Beach Crab Walk  But they mean well. And they only follow their natures.  Certainly I can't say that's any less than I have done. J.R.R. Tolkien said, "Not all who wander are lost."  I have to assume he was referring to himself and a host of other folks like myself, who have to jump in to know how they feel about the water. Even when it's maybe croc infested or too murky to know how it will turn out. We may look like we have no clue what we are doing, and maybe we don't. But at least we are trying to figure it out.

Embarking on a cultural shift like a long-distance move presents its own set of pecurliaries. After the agony of making the decision itself, the logistics are just the beginning of the headaches; beyond the vagaries of getting one's worldly possessions from point A to B, there's the ripping up (I do not embellish) of roots, relationships, and potential futures. There is pain and loss there. Will it be outweighed by future gains? A gamble.

It is a bit like taking up an intangible set of die and shaking them thoughtfully in your fist before letting them fly. What will come up? What will the outcome be? All of life maybe be a gamble,  but the Big Moves in life seem to be the most fraught with potential failures.

A friend of mine likes to say "you miss 100% of the shots you never take." It's a pithy sports perspective, and I usually am not terribly fond of those, but I like this one. I guess because it so boldly encourages unfettered attempt; it sounds so pervasively optimistic, even in the face of what might be overt failure. It makes the sentiment of "nothing ventured, nothing gained" so kinetic that I can feel myself drumming up the courage to take those shots -- chances -- just in uttering the words themselves ... "I miss 100% of the shots I don't take."

I managed to exit town yesterday without shedding a single tear in the car. But I find as I sit in the room of my hotel, a mere 20 miles from the state line, about to drive permanently away from Oregon as a resident, it is now crystal-clear to me what I have actually left, and how very vague and undefined what I head toward is. And it is in this quiet moment that I mourn what I have lost in leaving Portland. The decision to leave was one born out of frustration and a sense of what I could not have, could not achieve, there. And so presumably the grass is greener in the familiar, in what I have known before -- my Southern roots, proximity to family and old friends. But that stuff has moved on in the six years I have been gone, and it feels as much a mystery to return there as it did to move to Portland, sight-unseen, in 2004. Because I am not the same person I was six years ago. The place I have called home in the interim has altered me, and what I want, in ways I never expected.

So. This, like all Big Moves or decisions/choices, remains a gamble. I just have to make the leap, believe it will be what I hope for, what I need. And say goodbye to a chapter of my life now closed. When will the new chapter start? Perhaps it has already. And here I go.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Photos from the Road:

Tap Your Heels Three Times

Dorothy and Glinda in "The Wizard of Oz"

"There's no place like home .... "

Even repeating this phrase the requisite three times won't get me back "home." I'm between homes, you see.

And in the midst of not having a home, being literally homeless, I begin to question the meaning of the word. What *is* home? There is so much pithy good stuff out there to give me guidance: home is where the heart is. Home can be on the range. And Thomas Wolfe tells us "one can never go home again."

How do we know to go home at night? What calls us there? As often as not it's just habit. We don't conceptually think of why we go where we go, or why it feels like home. It's just ... where we go. And once we get there, what makes  it home, anyway?

I spent most of my life thinking it was My Things. I still think in large measure that's my key. Not everyone is wired like this, though. I have friends who have no desire to own a home, who love traveling more than anything, and they feel smothered if they live too long in one place. I, however, dreamed of owning my first home when I wasn't even old enough to do so. And when I come back from a trip, when I "come home," there is a real joy in my own bed, my things where I left them, knowing the number of steps from my bedside to the bathroom, the sounds the pipes make when they tick in the night. The smell of my soap. The routine of coffee, of the way the sun slants through a window or the rain sounds against a pane.

And there's the real root: the familiar. The safe. My home is where I feel safe. Either protected, overtly, by solid doors and a sturdy roof, or safe in the known, the strengths as well as the weaknesses.

Living perpetually out of boxes or luggage, for me, is not safe. There's a pervasive sense of vulnerability, in having no routine of my own, no room of my own, bed of my own, mug of my own. I wonder, rationally, if it's unhealthy to manifest so much of my own sense of stability in what are truly just things. But they are not just things to me. My ritual treatment of them, my need of them, invests them with the same kind of sustenance of any other ritual, be it habitual holiday trip or even the comfort of spiritual belief. These things create order, create the known. Create me.

There's also the school of thought that one can "feel at home" with other people, be they like-minded, or kindred spirits. Or friends known a lifetime. I live in a city that's been my residence for just six years, though. I know a few people, some of them are good friends, but not like that. There hasn't been enough time to create that sense of belonging, of simpatico. Over time, flickers of connection would grow. But not as deeply as that yet. So the city feels strange, and my friends feel far away, and there is no sense of "home" with the people in my life. We all feel like strangers here, and to each other. And of course none of them are neighbors or close by; every aspect of my life feels far flung. It's as if a microcosmic version of the Big Bang is playing out in the clustered galaxy that is my own life: everything spreads farther apart, and faster.

On my commute away from work, toward the house I've been camped out in while it waits to rent again, I realized I don't know why I go there. Little, if anything of mine, is there. The mattress on the floor: borrowed. My few books are in boxes. The walls are bare; all but one of the rooms are completely empty. The only way I know I "belong" there is the smallest of facts: I have a key that fits the lock in the front door. That is the only reason I know I'm supposed to be there.

If in fact I am supposed to be anywhere.

Dreaming of chilly autumn nights and love by firelight.

When Your Day is Night Alone

I realized last month that I was crying every single day, often multiple times a day. Perhaps if you know me, see me daily, you find this shocking. Yes, well. I am very good at hiding what I feel, managing my messy emotional landscape for your greater comfort. I can “leak” and recover well; I think I was born with this innate ability, as well as honing it to art form over the scores of losses I’ve taken in the aching years that have been my life. My pain is usually intensely private, and I can (and do) move mountains to make you believe my dog and pony show.

I had not really realized I was crying so often, though. I was taken aback, even appalled a little. That is not normal, is it? Do most people cry every day, especially as the day dawns and the sun sets? If so, I suggest that we all, collectively, do ourselves a disservice in the cloaking and dampening of emotion. Maybe we would all do a better job of caring for each other if we knew when each other was in pain.

So I will raise my hand and admit it -- I am in pain, a wrenching sort of emotional corkscrewing that chews at the fibers of my mind like a rabid rat, weakening everything in its hunger. And I have been under the onslaught for years now. It did not deluge me; it sort of snuck in slowly, accumulating like thick dust along the shelves of my life and my heart. And now I mostly just live with it; it has become the backdrop of every day, every interaction. Does *this* person help assuage the ache? Does *that* food fill my void and comfort me for a moment? Does this activity distract me from the abyss? It is rather like a sorting exercise: one prioritizes the activities that ameliorate and postpones those that aggravate.

At a Socrates Cafe a few weeks ago, we discussed why humans are so disinclined to be happy. Much was made of expectation, of making the “choice” to “be content.” None of these lay philosophers seemed to grasp the point I made, which is one based in science -- nature abhors a vacuum, and the rare equilibrium, *when* one truly exists, is obtained at a constant, grinding, often huge, cost. Ergo it is not reasonable to expect contentment and peace from systems or bodies that are not at rest, i.e., living and breathing humans. If one is living, and moving, one is hurting or at immediate risk for doing so. There may be a modicum of choice in how much one chooses to focus on that hurt, but the reality is easy enough to reduce to the basic theorem -- life fully lived requires the expenditure of energy, and expending energy requires an exchange, a cost. “You have to break some eggs if you’re gonna make a cake,” as it were.

A life fully lived ... it’s in my head tonight, and tearing open my heart, because I got another  missive/update from my mother and aunt, about the slow spiral of dementia that has finally caught up with and begun to eclipse my grandmother. My feisty, 10-feet-tall-and-bulletproof grandmother, who loaned me $5,000 when I lost my job in college, so I could squeeze out the last two semesters without working, and then forgave the loan. Who wrote me letters of love and concern every single time I made a bad engagement. Who chides me for “not being happy where I was planted.” Who raised four children single-handedly after her alcoholic husband died young. She lived most of her life alone, finding love and companionship only in the last decade of her life, only a few short years before he slipped away and died on her, too. Her life is slipping away from her now in less-than-graceful, less-than-loving stages. Oh, how I ache for her. And for my family, bogged down in the care of her, which is equal parts deflecting misbegotten hatred from my grandmother, who resents them for “ruining her life,” and constantly, constantly repeating things.

I wonder: was her life fully lived?

I suppose anyone’s greatest fear might be the loss of one’s mind in old age. Frailty slipping in, the unwanted intruder, stealing memories, robbing hope. It certainly is mine; often, I feel that all I have that’s of any merit is my mind. I have no children, no career. No great beauty, no great talent. I am merely what I think about and the relationships I create. Is that a life fully lived?

For a while I wasn’t sure I was going to find out. I slid a few ticks over from "beat up" and plopped right into despair. My old friend, depression, was in the house. It was harder to keep getting up in the mornings, to keep going through the motions. I began to plot again: which woods I would hike into and never return from. Which overpass would be a good impact point, and how fast I would need to be going. I could see the writing on the wall, my name written in red. The edge was slipping away from me again, and I could feel the fall into perpetual, pervasive shadow approaching. So I decided recently to go back on Lexapro. I have been fighting a losing battle for months now, and if that little pill and its placebo affect can save my life, well, I might as well let it ... to see if I can really keep living my life fully, chock full of heart and hurt and potential loss. As if there could be anything else for me. For any of us.