Listics

The Worm is the Apple and the Serpent is the Worm

Let me into your worm world
The place of dark imaginings
Where we touch ourselves
And hold the finger of God.

… the insanity of alcoholism is a particularly horrific affliction, usually leading to death [much like life]. I can’t begin to do the disease or the never ending but amazingly rewarding process of recovery any justice here. But, what the hell, let me reminisce some, tossing in some drink-driven drivel I wrote as a practising substance abuser.

Alcohol as an agent for exacerbating an already bad situation, and alcoholism as a disease leading to an insular, self-centered view of the world, fascinates me. Fifteen years ago, I would not have considered blogging. Now, safe in the anonymity of the face I use to meet the faces I meet, i.e. my humanity, I can write freely, knowing that, while the fact that nobody understood me as a kid caused me much pain, today I thank God none of us will never understand ourselves or each other.

Secondly, I think you’re right; the currency is debased, globally and in AA itself. However, I think that has more to do with the people practising the program than the 12 Steps themselves. It’s not just the spread of the 12-Step program to other areas of life - it’s the spread of a diluted program*. Within AA locally, we see the development of smoking and non-smoking groups, women’s groups, gay groups [”Cock Tails”], old-timer’s groups, etc. In my day, the only requirement for membership and access to any group was “a desire to stop drinking”.

I’m speaking from the experience of a couple of meetings in the past few years and an aborted attempt to ‘fit in’ with a local Alanon group. Also, I’m basing my criticism on my wife’s experience of several meetings with my experience of the countless meetings I attended from about 1984 to 1988. My jaundiced view is also enhanced by my recollections of a bunch of people who saved my life. That period of my life certainly colors my views of today.

Mind you, in my day, all alcoholics were male, heterosexual, over 40, and smoked like chimneys. I was a kid, a fast-tracker. Also, at open meetings, when the Lord’s Prayer was said [about the only overtly religious aspect of an AA meeting], very few people would continue after “…and deliver us from evil.” There seemed to be an inordinately disproportionate number of Catholics at those meetings.

From your phrasing, Frank, I’m assuming you mean the program’s been trivialized, commercialized, or disingenuously repackaged to suit our fast-food lifestyles - detracting from its intrinsic value. AA’s 12-step program is one of recovery, more specifically, spiritual recovery and the book, ‘Alcoholics Anonymous’, makes no bones about it nor brooks any ‘watering down’ [heh]. The physical, mental and emotional recovery kinda come with the package which, it usually turns out, is the person working the program. It’s a lifelong trip and, although I no longer attend AA meetings, I’m quite comfortable popping into one and calling myself a member.

I’m not shy of saying I think alcoholism tends to generate more misery for more people than does obesity [especially in an obese society] or ‘love’ or sex or spending too many hours at the office. I guess the life-threatening nature of the rock bottom informs my view. That said, I’m also not shy of saying I believe there are countless ways, other than by attending AA, to come to terms with one’s alcoholism. I can only speak of what worked for me.

My experience was that, once I’d taken to the program, only a conscious and determined counter to it would displace what I regard as a simple yet incredibly effective way of keeping my head in the virtual vicinity of my shoulders. My old man was an alcoholic who sobered up in AA when I was about three. He died close on two years ago, not having had a drink for close n 40 years. But we are picking nits and hair-splitting here - perhaps I should cut to the chase and share some thoughts of yesteryear from hazy recollection and ancient scribblings [mostly in pencil, for some strange reason].

We sometimes share and that’s about as close as we can get to being together - otherwise we are all alone, set apart from each other as surely as fence posts set in concrete. Our touching, sharing, communicating, provide the strands of wire that go towards completing the fences of our lives - fences separating what from what I don’t know. Even the Great Wall of China and the Berlin Wall don’t have to be faced. As soon as we’re born we set out on our separate paths and the road that brought me here can only be different to yours and the future will take me to go banging off in a totally different direction.

I still hold to that, but positively so. We’re networked, wired, connected, all of us. But some of us are like wandering axons, essential pieces of the global nervous system seeking to get a picture of the whole, dissatisfied with a role as a link in a chain of universal command and control. There are huge benefits to having people like us. We form random bridges connecting different worlds at different times. It makes a lot of sense to me that I identify with that drifting astronaut in Kubrick’s ‘2001′. I want the big picture and I want to know and experience it all.

Why, especially when I’m a conservative person of sedentary habits? I don’t know, but I suspect it’s because I believe we all have it within us be anything we choose to be.

I was an incredibly sensitive kid. Dark too. I’ve worked hard at dulling the sensitivity and, to a degree and with the help of socially acceptable drug, have managed to become something of a selfish boor. As a kid, though, I had no way of knowing that anybody was any different. School, a Catholic upbringing that stressed children being seen and not heard, and my parents’ reticence at showing physical emotion taught me they were. In my second year of school [I was seven], I contracted a virus manifesting a sore throat and fever. It lasted six months. As the old man was a doctor, I had the best of pediatricians and was confined to bed. I was put on penicillin [why, I don’t know, but ruling out rheumatic fever had something to do with it].

My confinement was great because I discovered books. I soon ploughed through the stuff the library stocked for kids and the local librarian used to stop by on a regular basis to pick up or offload books she selected from the adult library. I read novels feverishly until my early twenties. In high school, we were supposed to read a certain number of books each year; five or something. One year, I tossed onto my teacher’s desk a list of 365 titles ‘culled to impress’ from the batch I’d read that year. I did no schoolwork, but I read like a demon - two or three a day.

I remember having read one of Ian Fleming’s James Bond stories in primary school. My father had given it to me. I gave it back to him in the evening. So, he questioned me on it. I answered his questions. He seemed quite chuffed and somewhat amused by what I later came to realize was a penchant for something most people didn’t do, i.e. read.

Interestingly, it was during my high-school years that I read every book I could on Israel, identifying strongly with the one-sided view put across by the likes of Uris, Wouk, Malamud, and Singer. A nose for the news and South Africa’s situation taught me shortly afterwards that there was a flipside. Nonetheless, I’ve always harbored a fondness for that crazy little state and that’s why, today, it pains me to see it destroying itself and the Palestinian people.

Back to the books. I don’t know when he wrote it, but my parents locked up Mario Puzo’s ‘The Godfather’ in their sideboard for fear I’d get my hands on it. Being good Catholics, they could read it but I could not. They went out one evening. I picked the lock and was busy finishing the book by the time they came home. “Have you read the wedding scene?” my mother asked, trying to get the book from me. “Mom, I’m just about finished. It’s a good book.” That seemed to satisfy them. I’ve yet to see what they saw in Henry Miller though. His books and several others shared the cabinet with Mario Puzo but I enjoyed ‘The Godfather’ more than I did ‘Tropic of Capricorn’. Chrissakes, I was in my teens. I was no longer a kid and I was open to anything and everything.

My mother was a commercial artist and I’d spend time in her studio, drawing. I was a natural at about seven or eight and, to this day, my mother bemoans my having gone to school at all. There was something in me that sought conformity and this was most apparent in my art. Years later, in my twenties and when drunk, I’d wake up to stunning murals that appeared on walls only Wendy and I had had access to during the previous evening’s drinking. Wendy wasn’t into biblical imagery, ravens, crucifixions, winged beasts and daemonic creatures drawn surely and with a clarity that knocked my socks off. I’d think, “Shit, I still haven’t lost it” and scrub the walls down before the landlord, a neighbor, or the bottle store called. I should’ve taken some photographs of those murals. They were good.

Six years into school, I was writing books rather than essays. Some things never change. It made my teachers most happy and I excelled academically. When I got it wrong, though, either through me fucking up or a lack of insight on their part, their criticism hurt.

I had in me a deep-seated idea that I was somehow different to others and it didn’t sit too easily. Although shy, I was gregarious. Although introspective, I was always loudly in the thick of things. Although painfully self-aware, I didn’t give a shit. This sense of heightened inner tension came to a head in my first year of high school. I wrote the tests and got the answers right. I should have been happy with this state of affairs but one incident rocked me. We had written a science exam and I’d top-scored. The teacher made something of it and I was asked to stand while the class applauded me. It was non-threatening, popular applause. It scared me shitless.

During the second half of the year, I awoke one morning to a horrible knowledge. The world was out there. Whereas the night before I had been in the world, a part of whatever was going on, on waking, everything was on its head. I think it was an abrupt introduction to reality. My reaction was to drop social convention to the greatest degree possible without disrupting others’ lives too much. Call it alienation, depression, whatever. I was 12.

The lifestyle deemed acceptable by the society in which I lived was anathema to me. It was a world of ‘oughts’ and ’shoulds’, a series of tests, an unending string of possible failures. It was a behemoth over which I had no control. It was a giant microscope under which every action performed by me under its terms, conditions and rules was subject to the closest scrutiny. Right down to the way I looked, spoke, dressed, drank tea or wrote my name. It terrified me. So I avoided it.

I avoided examinations by not studying for them. I avoided study by keeping no notebooks. I avoided school altogether by adopting “Fuck you” as a silent, credo. The importance of the piece of paper I’d spent twelve years of my life at school for was not at issue. I knew as well as my parents, my school teachers and the university authorities just what that piece of paper meant. But its acquisition required obeisance to a system of living capable of destroying me. I could not, or would not, accept adhering to a code of conduct designed, as far as I could see, to reduce me to a nebulous reflection of a world devoid of meaning, one in which I saw only shadows instead of substance, specters instead of things.

I took to Camus and Sartre like a duck to water shortly after I left school five years later and Kafka was my standard fare. Dostoevsky’s ‘Notes from Underground’ became my personal creed [I don’t recall the piece’s content now but it meant a lot to me then]. Not understanding what these guys were getting at [I reread them later], I got sucked into an existential mess of individual angst.

None of us can ever understand each other. We are all fucked, doomed to die. Firing squads and bodies on the beach. It’s all so fucking senseless it just can’t be true. I’m fucking tired - fucking scared - and I feel like crying my heart out.

I was ostensibly a normal kid with an attitude. But since that day when I awoke to a different reality, i.e. the world being ‘out there’, I was painfully uncomfortable. I was aware of everything and that included a sense of being out of synch with the world and other people. Inwardly I knew I was a fuck up and potentially dangerous. My dual nature led me easily to socializing but, in social situations, I became decidedly uncomfortable. I found other people to be superficial and fake, playing a game for which I hadn’t been given a set of rules. Because of this, I discovered the benefits of booze early on. I’d always been fond of the stuff at the dinner table but one evening, after wandering off with the boys to Sea Point on the Atlantic coast to watch a surfing movie, ‘Pacific Vibrations’ or something like that, we came out into a hall that had just seen the end of a political party’s convention.

There was booze all over the place. Alcohol was no problem to me. It was to become my solution to most things; it loosened me up. A couple of hours later, I caught a lift home with parents of a friend. Traveling in a miniscule Mini Cooper is not a good thing for a teenager who’s poured enough ‘hooligan soup’ down his throat to start a riot. I felt queasy. Somewhere around central Cape Town, I projectile vomited onto the head of my friend’s mother. Bad move. I found myself crawling on the highway, spewing sweet red wine all over the place. I’ll say this for the Browns. They put me back into the car and bravely continued the journey. I vomited again, really making a mess of Mrs. Brown’s head. She swapped places with my friend. The third time, I figured the floor was the best place to offload the alcoholic excess.

I was also a polite kid. I slept about four hours before waking up, getting dressed, and telephoning the Browns to apologize and volunteer to clean out their car. They were grateful for the apology but declined my offer of a visit. The thing is, I wasn’t phased by this incident. I was sure I’d screwed up and would manage better next time around. Whenever possible, I’d practice and usually ended up puking out of the windows of moving vehicles. Shortly after turning 17, my old man had a word with me. “If you ever need help, get along to AA.”

Once again words, empty words. My self is concentrated, squashed within, and perhaps it’s better for those everyday walking-in-the-street cigarette and ashtray people. For an anarchist lurks, a brooding monster is caged, my faces swim uncontrollably in front of me. I am to others what I want them to see. And yet, still I long to be free. I like the edge, but fear it. God made me and I made him. No me, no God; for me. I watch people and I don’t know what I see. I’m disgusted with life; the last Roman on his purple couch. But, still I love, along with the coldness. There are two me’s and the one’s going to come out on top. God and His Child, and I will attain a lasting happiness and everything will just be. “The river is at its source and at its mouth.” At the moment I’m at my mouth and there’s a cigarette stuck in it.

He and I had already entered the phase in our relationship where the unconditional love of a child becomes the unconditional hatred of an adolescent. Yet, I admired my parents. My father was a great teacher, had interesting friends, despised his dead-end career as a pathologist, was studying philosophy, and wrote prolifically. He and my mother had chucked the Church when I was about fifteen. They were into yoga, meditation, and every other kind of eastern crap washing up on our shores, having been tossed into the Atlantic by Americans unable to ‘commodify’ such things for mass consumption. I was proud of them but hated them because, naturally, they did not “understand” me.

But, years later, my father’s advice to look to AA stood me in good stead. Fortunately, or unfortunately, my friends and I discovered dope and alcohol took a back seat for three years while we smoked dagga through every conceivable device known to man. I found the brandy bong the most effective way to induce a form of psychosis whereby I’d lose all spatial orientation and sense of reality. I recall, while walking down a street with my friends, being unable to bear the weight of my greatcoat [forerunner of the trench coat] and, as the thing became heavier, I slowed. Eventually, my buddies had to return to collect me. When they understood that my overcoat was crushing me to death, they took the thing off me and we continued on our way.

At the time, I was fast losing interest in a life most people considered normal.

We are alone, pushed around by fate and other people. We live in flats, houses, shacks or blocks of cities, see the vagrants in the long grass outside sunk into oblivion with discarded bottles of empty time scattered around them, or they stand their lives away on Main Road, sleeping nowhere, in doorways, unlit subways that give them a roof over which the intermittent train rumbles telling them that somebody is going somewhere for a while. And when they die, these vagrants, the state burns their bodies and somebody else takes up their post in the long grass or on Main Road and so, whether physically here or there, the soul of the vagrant lives on and the people that occupy those positions are the skin and bone and methylated brains wrapped around the soul of God’s Only Vagrant who is forever there.

The short story is that I copped out of life altogether. I remember reading, as a kid sometime in the late sixties, of people who were “allergic” to life. Life’s vagrants, unplugged. I understood them. If only those unfortunates knew what I did. Drugs made it bearable. I lived many lives between 18 and 21. Doing my stint in the navy, I was working on plans to make a wife of the love of my life. I was usually straight when I went to her place but loused up a couple of times and, now that I’ve seen some of the young crack heads coming to visit my daughter, I can imagine what her parents must have thought. Yet, they liked me. Perhaps that was a part of the problem. I got away with it time after time.

By the time I was 21, I had left the military, had made a feeble attempt at studying for a degree by correspondence [I’d set up quarters below the University of Cape Town so that friends attending that august institution could pop down anytime they liked to drink and smoke dope and I had developed a taste for reading around subjects rather than studying the subjects themselves] and was busy sabotaging a promising three-year course in speech and drama.

I’d met and fallen in love with Wendy and, within a couple of months, we were living in a rent-controlled commune with friends overlooking the sea. Pressured for a technical writing assignment about four years ago, I sent the following e-mail to my writing manager:

Hi Ren

When you’re young and run out of money for drugs and drink, you’ll resort to anything. I did. The motley crew littering the floor of our Three Anchor Bay flat (rent-controlled, R46,00 a month) were in no condition to face the ugly reality of the outside world. They were fit only to greet the day with the greedy sucking of a smoking bottleneck, the gurgling of a bottle of sparks and the resumption of a game of cards.

I went to Old Mutual to become a computer programmer. My friends were counting on me. One silly woman, the only other person in the place capable of work (Wendy was studying, sort of …) had left a month’s pay on top of a Main Road public payphone. She later married a Norwegian who couldn’t speak English, became a Christian fundamentalist and now watches the fiords freezing over from her home in Trondheim. Serves her right.

We were left with only fond memories of chip rolls, occasionally supplemented with a slab of hake from the Fish ‘n Chips shop on the main drag. Things were desperate. We had many blotters of Chinese dragons in the fridge but, for food, were reduced to picking shellfish off the rocks and boiling them in a huge pot on top of which floated a scum that would’ve inspired Shakespeare to write Macbeth II.

At Old Mutual they gave me an aptitude test. It’s the only one I’ve ever failed. Apparently my motivation and latent ability to operate machines that depended on holes being punched into cards was not that high.

It was a dark day for the little community on the side of Signal Hill. We lay on top of the garage roof, made a couple of pipes, and watched the hang gliders circle like vultures above us. But things always work out for the best and I decided that my future lay in becoming a clerk [grade 3] with the South African Airways. But that’s another story. A sad and tragic one, too. SAA have not yet recovered.

But time heals most things and within ten years they were pushing out APIs that even I could handle with ease and, dare I say it, dexterity. DB2 is no different. It’s just taken a while to get the hang of it but I have no reason to believe that the rest of the week will be anything but productive.

The nub of the matter is that it’ll probably take me most of this week to get this unit out. Forewarned is forearmed.

Also, I no longer feel a yen for Chinese dragons. Strange how things work out …

Mike

That place was chaos. And remember, we were kids with social consciences. We made a mockery of the university-centered left and carried the battle to the Nats. After bruising political meetings [literally in one instance] we’d retire to a hotel on the beachfront, rock to live music, smash and grind glass bottles into the floor, and have a good time until somebody, usually Wendy, went psychotic. She was a runner. Literally. She had some terrible memories from her past and they’d come back to haunt her after enough booze. So she’d run. One night, after she’d disappeared into a fog-laden night, my urging the police to get of their fucking asses and do something landed me in the slammer. Boy, was I hacked off the next day when I returned to our flat to find her waking from a deep sleep to ask, “Where’ve you been?”

Alcohol was not an issue for me in those days. I could handle it. But the dope was getting to me. I was becoming paranoid. And forgetful.

Wendy’s parents would pop into Cape Town from Malawi for an occasional visit. On one such occasion, her father wandered into the lounge. We didn’t have much but we did have a plastic laundry bag full of dope on the main table. My friend Max had a habit of stealing his mother’s car, driving seven hundred miles up to the Transkei, buying sacks full of dope and bringing them down in the trunk. He’d sell most to the local merchants and keep a substantial amount for us.

On one trip, he collided with another motorist and rolled the car with two sacks of dope in the back. The other guy was all for calling it quits but Max had the police travel miles into the hills to record the accident. “It wasn’t my fault,” he explained. “I had to have the details for my mother.” “Yeah, Max, but what about the sacks in the back?” “Well, they didn’t look there.”

Max’s elder brother studied medicine and diagnosed Max a psychopath. Given Max’s later behavior, I concur. Anyway, Wendy’s father didn’t expect to find a laundry bag full of dope in the middle of the sitting room so he didn’t see it. We were drinking and drugging to such excess that, after about six months, Wendy and I decided to call it quits. She was admitted to Groote Schuur’s psychiatric unit for a three-month in-patient program and I attended a three-month out-patient program. We cut the drugs. They were doing us no good and I resolved not to return to the house on the hill.

However, when Tony died of an overdose of Welcanol [a pain reliever for terminal cancer patients], the little community collapsed and it was found that the lease was in my name. I returned to clean things up. This was the post-punk, new wave era and the place looked like it. I cried going through Tony’s stuff. He worked at pharmacies to get his drugs and among the syringes and needles and packets of God-knows-what, I found a letter to him from his younger sister. It was a letter written by a sister who had no clue as to what her older brother was up to, but she loved him dearly and was inordinately proud of him. Mark had told me of how he’d seen Tony through his last hours and it was too much for me. No more drugs.

I cleaned up my act in those three months, and found a tough job as a production manager at a cool drink manufacturing plant. The next year, the day after my twenty-third birthday, Wendy and I married.

It was then that I really started drinking.

Okay, you see where this is going. I haven’t given a talk at an AA meeting in fifteen years. You get twenty minutes to share your experience, strength, and hope with others that have been through exactly the same shit. I used to be able to do that, but speaking is somehow different. Writing takes too long to even begin to address the insanity of alcoholism. So let’s skip the details. Anyway, I’ve blogged many of them.

By 25, I was a prisoner to fear. We moved often but, at one stage, rented the ground floor of a house in Fish Hoek, a coastal town and the only suburb in Cape Town that did not allow the sale of alcohol. I had a glass of wine in one hand at all times. Our only regular visitor was the delivery guy who delivered wine to the door from neighboring Kalk Bay. His van would criss-cross the ‘dry’ suburb, dropping off consignments of liquid solace. Although I was isolated, trapped in a hell from which I saw no escape, struggling to keep a job so that my wife and son had food, I had reason to believe there were others like me caught in the four-walled confines of their irrational fears.

I know, almost imperceptibly, I’m going mad. The thought frightens me. I am becoming ‘un-attached’, the world is floating away from me and all I have left in my head for company are empty neuroses sticking sterile pins into the rawness of my psyche. Drink offers solace but its rewards are destructive.

I would not open the door. At every ring, I would move to the bedroom and Wendy would open the door. The telephone terrified me. I would not answer it. When the call was for me, I’d take it only if absolutely necessary, replace the receiver, my hand cramped from holding it in an uncontrollable, vice-like grip. When I was sober, Wendy would have to take me for walks, leading me along the quiet avenues like a dog, reassuring me there was little chance of bumping into anybody we knew, crossing the street in choked-breath, sweat-soaked anxiety whenever a stranger approached. Eventually I could no longer enter a shop for fear the assistant might speak to me. When I had to, I would, in panic-stricken, wax-faced horror, emit strangled instructions and grab my goods, fearing the moment I would be crucified on the cross of my terror, struck dumb and down.

I’m in a low stage of death. I’m away and, in a sense, free but as yet I’m not sure I can accept it. I can’t take the plunge. I cling desperately to sanity, hating it but knowing a tenuous security. I have not been a part of the world for as long as I can remember, but in its own very brutal way, it has forced itself upon me. My development of defense mechanisms has been misdirected for as long as that long ago day I realised my alienation. My mind has done everything in its power to reinforce that alienation and it now no longer needs to carry on its sordid work.

There appeared, in those days, to be no way out. The passion and sensitivity that had brought me love was, with alcohol, threatening to take my life. My job was going to hell. My outgoing, laid-back, and friendly personality combined with some smart ideas had landed me in marketing. [This remains, for me, one of the great mysteries of my default persona. Twenty years on, people still take me as casual, relaxed, comfortable, a great guy to listen to and a guy who will always listen. It’s a crock. I take every kind of medication under the sun just to stay sane. I’m so wired with ideas most of the time, I feel as though my head should explode or my heart give in. Weird. And still, I always end up in Marketing.] Anyway, marketing meant people and that’s not a good idea for a drunk. I was coming home at lunchtime to have a bottle of wine to steady my nerves. Couldn’t these fuckers see I was out of my tree?

I’m alone and don’t want to have anything to do. With anything. The only thing I’m certain of that in moments of lucidity I reject my loneliness for the sordid, self-pitying idiocy it certainly or most probably certainly is. I hate my insecurity, hate with a raging blindness that sees everything my state of transference. I’m a furious traveller, going nowhere at a desperate speed, not quite here, not all there. Objectively, I watch the image I present to the world, talking, thinking, expostulating, protesting, doing all in its power to resolve my detachment from my psyche. It has an unenviable job, but it certainly has its moments of happiness, usually when it leaves the solution of those periods of unhappiness to some abstraction. But we cannot cling to abstractions forever. Our gods are as vulnerable as we, destined to return to ashes tasting foul on the tongue.

In desperation, I looked around for another job and landed one in the field I should have stuck with, publishing. It was a good day for me and the appointment was early. I was a kid without qualifications and they could pay me poorly. I didn’t see it as such back then, but I have learnt a great deal over the past twenty years. I was shunted straight from the company secretary to the CEO, chatted to him for about an hour and started working there the following month, to the regret of the company I left.

Like the navy, publishing is no place for someone with a predilection for abusing the fruits of Bacchus. For some reason, perhaps the fervor one puts into a new job and a potential career, I successfully juggled full-blown alcoholism and my job. Besides, in those days [we’re talking electric typewriters, the first word processors, and eventually XTs], publishing was still locked in the old British tradition of “going out to lunch with the printers”. We were the largest legal and educational publishing house in the country and printers sought our business in the time-honored tradition of catering to our basest needs. Lunch would start at twelve and end around the same time in the evening.

I was a natural. Twelve hours of drinking, four hours of sleep, and then pasting a smile to the dial before settling down to the manual payment of authors’ royalties, attending to their complaints and requests for more money, departmental accounts, proofing, subbing, reading, taking manuscripts through repro, buying print, putting together marketing campaigns and materials, learning the intricacies of the printer’s art, etc. were great. There was always a free lunch attached.

The Angel of Death Flies a White Aeroplane

People clap soundlessly - they dance.
When the drummer is no longer there,
They walk down empty streets,
Eat lifeless dinners,
Beside cold fires.

Sad streets,
Soft lights,
Dark days.

The mushroom grows.

[1983]

I’m afraid I laughed when I read that. Did I know something? Things were deteriorating fast. I’d dropped desperation as a bad deal. I was looking for oblivion, my private ‘delicious, creeping numbness’. I had taken to waking up in the morning and, driven by fear and the awareness that I hadn’t a clue about the day before, I’d go to the garage to check if the car was there. It usually was. I’d then think about getting up. The medicine cabinet bore testimony to my condition. I’m still not used to having a bathroom free of bottles of eye drops, Rennies, and Alka Seltzer [or their South African equivalents].

I was aware of the pain I was causing others. I was aware of every goddamn thing. I was careening through the world like a person stripped of his skin, trailing my neurons behind me. Everything hurt, everything mortified me. I was looking for unconsciousness or death, whichever came first. The greatest pain was the fact that I loved my wife more than I was capable of loving myself. Psychologists will tell you it’s not possible but, believe me, with alcoholism, anything is.

I just don’t feel a part of me anymore. All the memories, the pretty memories I lived through have gone. Thoughts of suicide have become more frequent. God knows what Wendy’s done to deserve this. Inside my head, I’ve become twisted and there’s no way I can tell anybody. This weekend has been depressing. I am dead inside somewhere and I just want it all to end so that I can be happy again without disturbing anybody else. I love my Wendy. I just wish there was some way we could be together. We’re both fucked and I can’t see anybody being able to pull us right. Something has gone wrong with me - desperately wrong. It’s so fucking sad, I never wanted it to be this way.

Having her own demons to deal with, Wendy had to contend with me as well. I was in the habit of going psychotic after too much alcohol and, by then, I’d drink anything. I knew I was in for shit because I was banned from all the bars in my neighborhood. My mind had gone. I was writing meaningless crap. Don’t bother to read the following if you want to fast forward, it’s drivel. But it does give a pretty fair idea of where I was at. And I can’t afford to forget it.

Rats in the head, rot in the ball, treacle in the hall. “Hallo you slapdash mingy mutt Dutch runt cunt - slenting slunting down you grot.” “Grok you,” say I to strains of Bacchanalian tremulosity. Familiar faces in the movie house. flickering “Hallo” to horrid distortion: stretched, elastic, fibrous faces - stretch, prick, break. “Hallo, rot your slot, rope your slope. Who the fuck are you anyway?” “HALLO GREENSPLEEN!” Madmen in the streets, Saturday morning shopper hopped high on spleen beans, looking muted “hallos” at split side shards of shops - stagger-woozy in the smoke - spunk drunk in nine ‘o clock gunk. Hey, where’s I at? Sailing the Strand Street blat - I want to meet the nine ‘o clock papers in my mindy suit - clothed in coolth - filthy feelth - schoolboys in schoolgirls… Who’s the stronger? Cape Town rots under the mountain, the people stink. Taiwanese trawlers sink in the gormless harbour. Quiet oily flat shit plêk [place]. I seek the hole to the other side - gross grits in footloose tits - repetition’s the panacea to all. We accept war death blotch - all that is mindless shitless gretch. Slob throb on the hob you hurt worm grot - you slicky slothy froth lob I feel you in your grut grooth. But the atomic threat is a painted dread around an insular island - matchstick men in asbestos suits, luminous balls of fire, thundering guitars, flop the lot on our side. “Why the hell you smell grunt fucks? Where are you, eyes to heaven raised? Where you come from mothers?” All around me you slither sloth - you snail-shit - I hate your flipping flopping globs, folds and rolls - your roly poly ridiculously holy polony… Back to the censor. Oh, my God Mr Man in a black hat - hide rock don’t shock - hock your block. Cape Town stinks of snoek in every hoek [corner] - don’t look - sorry sorry sorry it’s so easy to hide behind the blind, the King and the Queen in the poke. Do I flipsy flopsy my mindsy windsy? Dive bombers on dark nights - babies cry - the radio speaks - life continues and my mind burns - blistered boil in a skull aflame. Lord, look kindly on my burnt twitchings and perfect offerings. Desperate longing to explode the myth of our being - desperate energy to explore the bottom of our beens - the beens of our bottoms. Are they really there? Things come and go. So does Plato, musing on Michelangelo. All those shits, what is it that keeps God here? Who invited Him to stay? I must see the losers, the soulless shits of everyday - nausea - existential nightmare - I want to explore it - not become the shit in the news who [shame] committed death on himself because he was weak. What weird writing. No, not for me the pauper’s funeral. We leave in a hole. “Let me light up your hole - it’s my mission - I will show you the bottomless pit of your existence - the hole in your hall. I’ll explore it with you - leave you feeling dirty and hopeless - cringing and hurt. You’ll want to wake up other people because you’ll be alive, shocked.” Wake up, wake up, you’re being ripped off, taken for a ride, life’s passing you by.

Yup, acres of that sort of crap. I was way over the hill and far beyond the pale, a stranger in my own strange land. When truly drunk, I’d pick fights with the biggest motherfucker I could find. The police were always a good bet and nightclub bouncers can be extremely rough. Looking back, I realize I wanted them to put out my lights for me. They didn’t. Nor did they throw me into jail. I usually ended up in some psychiatric ward with someone sticking needles into me. So I tried to do the job myself. I’ve blogged it. I believe I wanted to die because I could see no alternatives. The alternative was there though and it became apparent to me once I’d carved my arm up. I wanted to live at any cost.

So I had my arm stitched together [after smashing the hospital’s admissions area], and started crawling towards sanity. I joined the Rondebosch group of Alcoholics Anonymous and found, through people who knew exactly what I was talking about, that love, freedom, responsibility, happiness, acceptance of self, and all the good things are possible. It just took years of practice and a good dose of honesty.

I reckon I equal your record of 86 out of 90 meetings in 90 days, Frank. My sponsor was a prematurely gray and balding ex-surfer type of about 45. He had a hell of a sense of humor and, with about ten years’ sobriety behind him, qualified as an old-timer. I recall walking into him at a meeting after about six weeks. “So how’re you doing?” he asked cheerily, slapping my back. “Jeez, Buddy, I’m so fucking tired I reckon I won’t make it through the evening,” I answered. His response was immediate. “Hah! Lack of sleep never killed anybody.” He expected me to understand. I did and kept going.

As I’ve blogged it wasn’t quite that easy. I slipped and slid in the vomit of vacillation and it was only after I attacked my boss one day after a particularly heavy lunch during which I figured ‘just one wouldn’t hurt’, I found that my AA buddies truly accepted me for who I was. I saw a psychiatrist who diagnosed underlying conditions and treated them. Dysthymia, anxiety, and panic attacks. I’d become aware of these things developing around 17 or 18, but they were not popular ‘conditions’ in those days. I saw them as symptoms of my ‘raging against the machine’. Today, I’m a firm believer in chewing tablets having a positive and constructive effect.

I found a therapist and a group focused on alcoholism and, over two years, followed the group through its life cycle to an immensely satisfying and rewarding close. I spoke at AA meetings on a regular basis. There were two each night in Cape Town and I was a regular on the speaking trail. There is nothing like a bunch of fellow alcoholics [and in those days most comprised crusty curmudgeons over forty who stood for little bullshit] to keep one honest.

This is where I find the AA of today very different to that of yesteryear. Our meetings started in the coffee shop after the meeting. We’d speak for hours. It was at one of these coffee shop evenings that I sat alongside one of the few people who can claim to have been the second man on the moon. Much as I wanted to speak about the legend, Buzz and I spoke AA. That’s how basic and honest it was. It was a democracy similar to that prevailing on the Web. The group I attended drew over a hundred on a good night, yet it was a tight-knit circle of people who appreciated the miracle of their sobriety. Not everybody made it and many died through reverting to booze or suicide.

They speak of the fellowship of Alcoholics Anonymous and they do so for a reason. I cannot describe the spirit that bound me to this extraordinary program. I cannot begin to convey the sense of miracles unfolding, the wonder of finding my own mind. I met people who had done the most extraordinary things, both drunk and sober, and they reinforced my belief that all of us are capable of anything. The also taught me that once I put myself above another, I’m destined to crash. I learnt my strengths and limitations and to accept that I’m never going to be absolutely right or absolutely wrong. I learnt too, that alcoholics find it very, very difficult to deal with success. That’s why I’ve yet to take that one on. I also learned that those of us who are slightly ‘more different’ than others, are extremely fortunate.

Yeah, I certainly don’t regret having just about drunk myself to death.

Wendy has her own story and it’s up to her to tell it. From my side, dealing with codependency meant a conscious return to the program after an absence of some ten years. I found an online group and, it was through my experience of that group, which also, luckily, came into being, went through the full group dynamic, and came to a quiet close, that I really began to appreciate the potential of the Web. I wrote like a demon for two years.

These past seven months of blogging have taught me that it’s not absolutely necessary to restrict myself to groups dealing specifically with substance-related problems. The difficulties Wendy has faced in getting to where she is today caused me great pain. Yet, it was as a blogger that I found that most people care. The number of people who shared their ‘experience, strength and hope’ with me was staggering. Mostly, they were people who had to deal with alcoholic parents or spouses. Yet they came through as only true friends do.

“Nice coffee.”

a) Leisure? Whazzat?
b) I am kicking back, Frank.
c) Nah, I don’t do that shit anymore.
d) I fall over.
d) After what I’ve been through? You must be joking.
e) Can’t slack off. PorridgeBoy’s out there.

Heh… that about says it. I haven’t had too much time for relaxing or leisure pursuits over the past three, four, or five years, but I’m getting there. Writing <b>is</b> a form of leisurely contemplation. It does me good and I do a lot of it. After doing a lot of co-dependency work on myself a couple of years back, I realized I was a certifiable ‘panic mechanic’, didn’t want to pursue it as a career option, and so broke the shackles. Writing is something I do for some ungodly reason and I’m intent on sticking to it. I’ll see where it takes me.

Still, running a family on my salary, being the only driver, etc. doesn’t leave too much time for doing what I really enjoy doing, i.e. getting the hell out of the city into the great wide open. I appreciate solitude and the big spaces. Andrea’s recent spelunking expedition, Shelley’s nature posts, and Jeff’s recent venture to the interior made for great reading. But I believe there’s something qualitatively different about African spaces where you can hear and feel the presence of God beating six feet deep in the heart of the country, where everything is tens of millions of years ago, and time and space don’t matter. It’s, well, cool. Ask Gary, he’s been out to East Africa within the past couple of years. I did the whole colonial, expat-Brit thing about twenty years ago when getting to know my in-laws. [Those old colonials are beyond pink gins and the club. They’re a bunch of wild animals on heat.] Put me on a mountainside, on or beside the sea and I’ll switch from angst to ecstasy without breaking stride. The world, left to its devices, is music to me.

Otherwise, I don’t have much time to indulge my in-the-world, everyday pleasures, reading and listening to music. I’m catching up on Leonard Cohen at the moment. Music’s as expensive as books are here. You know the lyrics to an album before someone makes you a tape of it - only single people, working couples, or my kids have large CD collections. I took a two-week break from Bob and soaked in Cohen. Eventually I couldn’t bear any more of it [yesterday], slammed in Stevie Ray Vaughn and raised high the roofbeams. I’m an old rock addict and will never grow out of it. Classical music, played well, makes me weep. It’s too much. I don’t listen to it. For, I reckon, the right reasons. It’s too intense.

I enjoy jazz as much but prefer it live. I covered jazz for a national paper for around two years. Interacting with musicians who trusted me to reflect their music accurately was incredible. Especially as I play no instrument, cannot hold a tune, and cannot tell what-bar blues it is I’m listening to. Being present during those unexpected moments of magic when the music would, for a time, transcend itself and everybody feel it, was something else.

I don’t read novels as such. No time. People I enjoy, I regard more as painters of the word and will read whatever they have to say. Moving from ‘novelists’, I started into the likes of Kerouac at about seventeen and have read the usual library familiar to the middle-class bookworm. I do feel a void when it comes to classical literature. My tastes are as eclectic as they are catholic. What’s happened to Kundera? He dead? I still keep a copy of Hunter Thompson’s ‘Generation of Swine’ lying around for late-night [early morning] reading. No matter how often I read those columns, I still crack up each time I read them. The man is a thug, albeit an elderly one, and deserves to be dragged out into the streets and flogged like a rented mule. He has given the U.S. a disgusting name. He is depraved and all his books should be burnt. Especially the vicious collection of calumnies he heaped on poor Mr. Nixon. It was he, after all, who extricated America from Vietnam.

I’ve a few close friends of long standing, intelligent survivors of the good old days and people I’ve known since early high school. We watch Grand Prixs, drink tea, kick a ball around, and listen to their amazing jazz collections like little old men recalling an insane past. One of them might smoke some hash occasionally but the rest of us will just laugh at him. Come to think of it, while I’m the one who consciously doesn’t drink, they’re bloody abstemious for a bunch of former hopheads and, yes, enjoy live jazz as much as I do. We don’t share much personal stuff because, well, we’re men and we’ve known each other all our lives and you just don’t do that kind of thing. Besides, that’s what wives are for.

Yep, it’s an interesting phenomenon and I can’t say I’m completely immune to it. Old habits die hard [calm down, Elaine]. And, in some ways, it’s a good thing too. Wendy and I are bloody good friends and I have no secrets from her. We can sit and watch a day’s cricket in silence together, I can talk politics to her till the cow’s come home, or she can bat my ear for ages about anything she wants to. We enjoy the same movies [we don’t watch much TV at all]. I did the whole art nouveau thing when I was a kid, soaking up every foreign film ever made, and so have missed out on a lot recently. But hell, I was the one who thought ‘Pulp Fiction’, ‘The Boondock Saints’, ‘Natural Born Killers’, and ‘Reservoir Dogs’ were comedies. Mind you, I’ve a far darker sense of humor than Wendy. My kids have inherited it as well.

Come to think of it, there’s a lot of laughter around our home and I do a lot of it around my friends. I guess that says quite a bit for such a dysfunctional bunch of people. Eh, movies. Burt Lancaster? I remember him well. My grandmother used to take me to the movies when I was a kid. She was ancient, in her seventies at least, and she’d slip me a large silver coin and whisper, “Remember, my boy, the Boer War’s not yet over.” She was Anglo-Irish. Great old woman although I believe she was a lousy mother. If I had to be a movie, I’d be ‘Withnail and I’. Now that was funny, beautiful, and sad. I suppose we all have to make choices, grow up, and learn to chill. When I’m in serious, personal blogging mode, I’m more the guy who drifts off into deep space in Kubrick’s ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’. Mind you, I’m pretty much like him anyway. I certainly wouldn’t classify myself a joiner - I’m pretty anti-social - and enjoy my own company. I never was a ‘team player’. Karate, skateboarding, surfing. They appealed to me.

Yeah, I’m relaxing right now, Frank, writing to you. To me, relaxing or leisure is just a case of ‘doing something else’, speaking to a friend, or meeting someone new.

Ah, jeez, Frank, why you do this to me, huh? It ain’t easy going under the knife when you’re the surgeon. What’s love got to do with it, anyway? Should I speak of how I lost my virginity aboard a freighter in Cape Town harbor? How a girlfriend and I [unknowingly or obliviously] ended up making love in sight of our friends? Strange places? [I can never look at a picture of Cape Town without a chuckle and a women’s residence isn’t exactly the mile-high club but it’s as dangerous. A doorway counts for something too, I reckon. What’s my score so far?]

Hmm… this has been done before, hasn’t it?

Let’s stick with pop culture and the bubblegum stuck to my shoe. While I’ve had stray Dylan love lyrics popping into my head all day, I’ve consciously tried pushed them away. I’ve no books and ‘how tos’ and glib answers and degrees and intelligent quotations to give anybody on this one so I guess I’ll put my money on it being George Harrison who wrote “All You Need Is Love”.  Yeah, love is all you need.

Let’s start with love as a journey. I woke up late this morning and joined the early morning traffic heading for the city. I cut back through our suburb and realized that most people leave for work at around 08:00. Lemming-like, they were all pulling out the side streets and joining the swarm headed towards the mountain and the big, stinking, crashing, banging, clanging, traffic mad city. There was something comforting in joining that early morning stream of metal pouring itself into a cubicled day. The sky was lightening and the mountain stood large and hard against the royal-blue stillness of a sky smudged black by the giant shadows of darkling cloud. It was beautiful being late for work today. Love has something to do with other people and their lemming-like behavior.

I’m usually at the office at 07:00, preferring to work longer and avoid the traffic. Being alone on the road also gives me a chance to unwind, open up the engine, and sail the winding curves and bends of the highway skirting the mountain’s slopes, heading up over Devil’s Peak, taking in the long blue sweep of Table Bay, the warm blaze of white, yellow and orange lights below, the sheltered comfort of the harbor, and the endless mystery of that deep, dark sea. Love has a great deal to do with me.

The sea is a perpetual mystery to me. Wendy and I visit it every week now, watching its moods, pondering its unceasing flow. Sitting on the rocks at Bantry Bay this past weekend, we were at the edge of the shore, watching the incoming swells explode in great curtains of lace against the rocks to which they’re wedded by the washing of the ages. We waited until a wave came roiling in to smash in all its crazed splendor against our rock, the white diamonds of its brokenness shooting skywards before drenching us in its cooling salt-sea spray. I felt as though we’d just been baptized and we moved away. There’s that marriage of one to the other, one to more, the sea to shore. Love is big, and wide, and free.

What is it to me? Hmm… I’ll have to go Hallmark on you, Frank. Love is like the South African sun, cycling our ancient earth, giving us life, sustaining us through times good and bad and, at night, radiating [like the wave breaking skywards] to the unknown sky. Love is all we have and, contrary to my good parents’ advice, all we need. Like the sun’s light, love is all around us, twenty-four hours a day. The darkness, which we so often take as “something”, is always an absence of light and evil, to me, is always an absence of love.

“God is Love” the mad prophet of the streets with the long hair and the burning coalstone eyes shouts at me. “Yeah, I know, broer”, I nod and move on. No arguments there. Of course God is love. Like the sun, He is omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent. No sun, no life. No God, no me. Why does the street preacher and his paid cousins who stress the importance of tithing from the pulpits of their dollar-and-dime, one-size-fits-all churches built on the blood money of others’ labors have such a need to explain this to me?

I am Constantine, locked in negotiation with St. Paul. Paul’s come in from the east on a marketing trip and he’s a pain. He has an old religion locked in a new idea and he’s been trying to flog it to me for years. I’m a religious man, a card-carrying member of Sol Invictus, the sun god, and know how these things work. “God is love,” says Paul, staring at me intently. “Ah, Sol, here we go again,” I think and get down to putting the guy in his place. A marketing man to the core, Paul wants his religion punted to the masses and I’m in the business of dealing with the masses. He sends out these horrible, grimy little tracts he calls The Letters of St. Paul and is hammering markets all over the place - the Corinthians, Thessalonians, Ephesians [I’m taking a three week break there in summer], Colossians, Romans… you name it, he has them covered. He hopes to find a publisher for these things too.

We hammer out a deal. Paul can set up offices in Rome and I’ll tout his religion for him. We’ll have an expo or something at Nicaea. What do I get out of it? Not much, but what the hell, we’re dealing with the same thing here. Sun. God. Sun God. Son God, etc. Too much sun gives me a headache. So does too much God.

“Listen, Paul, I know your kind. I’ve been dealing with you people for years and, quite frankly, it’s starting to give me a headache. You can have your bloody offices in Rome and I’ll set up the holding company. But we have to phase this thing in. First, you change this Saturday crap. It’s Sunday or nothing. We owe it to Sol. Next, this Jesus guy. His birthday’s on December 25. That’s the day Sol starts staying up longer and it’ll give everybody a bit of a lift to have a holiday around then. He, Jesus not Sol, can die in autumn. We’ll make it fit in with those people on that rock in the North Sea. They have a fertility festival dedicated to Esther around then and I’m sure they’ll appreciate the gesture.”

You know what it’s like. Another day at the office. I made the bugger work for his living although I knew he’d had it quite rough of late. Some of my colleagues in the “whipping the masses into shape” business are rough on traveling salesmen. “And we’ll call the weekly celebration the Mass, by the way,” I added, chuckling. He went for it and gave me his mailing list.

As for Christ, I don’t know. I don’t know whether He has any basis in historical fact; whether He was a militant zealot [the Essenes falling into that category]; whether He was an identical twin born of the House of David at the time they needed a king; whether He had a brother named James who looked to people’s spiritual needs while He was out kicking Roman ass. I don’t know these things and I’m pretty sure Paul’s not all that clued up on it either. You know what it’s like. Production never talks to marketing. But hey, reconciling worldly and spiritual realities is a doddle for people like us. We are, after all, professionals.

So Paul got his church and succeeded in the west where many like him failed in the east. His religion came to be known as Christianity or Gonzo Marketing, whichever you prefer. And I made it happen. They tend to forget that, all those little shits that downed tools during the Reformation.

Hmm… but, yes, in a way, that’s how it all came about; the love industry. Born and confirmed a Catholic, I kicked over the traces for twenty-seven years. I retained my belief in a God reminiscent of that instilled in me, but only insofar as that belief did not mess with my appreciation of other philosophies. I looked at every conceivable alternative but, ultimately, it was my reading of a couple of volumes of Jung’s collected works about twenty years ago that would see me to where I am today. I rock up at Mass on a Saturday evening [it being the true Sabbath, of course, as well as being more convenient than a Sunday] and slip into its essence like a hand into a glove.

For non-Catholics, this involves an acceptance of the Sacraments and the notion of transubstantiation. In short, the Eucharist does not symbolize the body of Christ; it is the body of Christ. It’s a very special moment for me and one I find centers my being in a way nothing else can equal. I appreciate, more with a fond familiarity than a deep reverence, the trappings of my religion. I dig it. The Catholic Church has a history. It’s the history of Western civilization, warts and all [hehe].

God and love. The only reason I appreciate the dawning day and the drowning sea is because I have them in me. So it is with God and love.

It’s not what I believe that matters; it’s how I believe it. I cannot be loved unless, like the earth radiating its given warmth at night, I love others. And so it’s worked for as long as I’ve enjoyed a bit of sunshine in my life. If I appreciate the sun how can I not appreciate all that to which it gives life? How can I not love other people? Dunno. It can’t be done.

Heh… oh, dear, all those promises of revelations of nights with what’s her name and group sex with other bloggers? Nah, can’t be. That’s sleaze. We’ll have to leave that for another day. Boy, have I loved and lost before. I guess I’m a glutton for punishment. ‘Being in love’ started hitting me when I was about 7 and I met Jane Tyler [she was about 6] and it hasn’t let up yet. I wasn’t a bad-looking kid. I had it all going for me but I was reticent [a curious mixture of gregarious and shy] and failed to exploit what was a bull market in virginal fields of feminine delight. A girl had to hit me on the head with a mallet before I got the message that “she wanted me and she wanted me bad”.

Through most of high school I dealt slowly with the hormonal thing and had several obsessions and crushes on girls. Hormones are evil and vile and corrupt the mind most foully. Yet there were girls I really ‘liked’ and did so for a long time. I’m a great aesthete in the male-female love game. I’d watch them and drink in their beauty and movement and breath and soul and sound and smell and float on the scent of heaven. I went out with several girls but didn’t really enjoy the experience [my time with friends was curtailed] until, in my final high-school year, BAM! Love hit me like a high-velocity bullet. It blew me away, so far above and beyond myself I’ve never recovered. I’ve told the story on my blog.

Here’s a snatch:

I had a wonderful, almost dreamlike childhood. I could look after myself, was sensitive to others, wasn’t molested or bullied, and I was a star on the dojo floor. I grew up in a manner befitting a kitsch Hollywood movie. I lived in a quiet suburb clothed in green-leafed splendor. In my final high-school year, I debated, represented the school in general knowledge competitions, and played the romantic lead of Thornton Wilder’s “Our Town”. I played street cricket, soccer, and every game going, smoked and drank and hung about in the quiet streets with my friends, raced bicycles around the block, surfed like a brick but skateboarded like a star. And, of course, my first love, the epitome of the brilliant yet beautiful and wholesome blonde girl next door, filled my brimful galaxy to bursting.

[…]

Her name was Kathleen and I was seventeen. I’m still seventeen for that matter, even though the clock says forty-four. But then, aren’t we all?

Whether two, ten, twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, sixty, or older, we are still who we were whenever it was we woke up to whatever it is that makes us whoever we are. But we forget so much and slip in and out of time and space and meaning so frequently we lose our bearings.

There was the time I was two but that is not for now. At seventeen, I saw and knew a great deal. It was a time of great dreaming. And beyond the universe to which we’re bound, she remains an inescapable part of me. Her surname was O’Reilly and, no matter how far you travel, you cannot escape your roots. Layers upon layers upon layers. Cut through them all; live like a knife and go straight for the heart. She cut to the heart of me and set my life on fire.

She was a young, blonde, Methodist girl with an acute intellect and looks you don’t find too often [not even in South Africa, and we’ve cornered the market on beautiful blondes]. I didn’t do anything, I swear. She came at me. My friends and I skateboarded a hill running outside the local Methodist Church hall and, on Fridays, their youth groups would gather. We’d get bored, wander in, and take over games of volleyball or badminton. The church had a coffee shop and I enjoyed arguing with the counselors. It was argument of the “Prove it” kind, what the hell, I enjoyed it because I couldn’t lose.

One evening, we landed slap-bang in the middle of some lecture. Don’t ask what it was about but we slung our boards against the wall and slouched into some chairs, looking about as dumb and cool any kid does today. I was sitting there thinking of Kafka when I became aware that I was being watched. I looked at her looking at me.

We looked at each other a long time.

Frank, I tell you, it was a truly religious experience. I was knocked every which way and then some. I had this extremely beautiful young girl staring straight into the center of my being and it hit me like the fist of God. I fell in love and didn’t set foot in a Church for twenty-seven years [unless on official business, of course, like getting married, baptisms, etc.]. Loving this girl-woman turned me inside out. I was irrevocably, unequivocally changed, lost, crazed, and more myself than I’d ever been. She was what I’d been carrying about in me for seventeen years and all the millennia before that. Goddess, muse, harlot, lover, friend, equal, saint and, yes, everything else under the sun.

She lived in my every waking moment and in my dreams. I was demented, lovesick and zonked. I was higher than a trip on the very best acid and I did not want it to end. I don’t think she knows the effect she had on me but it was profound. For the first time in my life, I’d met somebody I’d quite happily die for. We were inseparable and I guess I was a mite insufferable. Too much of a good thing had not yet entered my mind [that came later] but, being a woman, she understood these things.

Yep, we had a volatile relationship. I was too passionate, too intense, and demanded too much. The light was being measured and matched by the dark. Her friends envied her. Can you fucking imagine that? In my eyes, my stocks have never again reached such highs. Pride, they say, goes before a fall. I was conscripted into the navy at 17. We wrote each other every day. I was selected to do a permanent force midshipman’s course, my basic training was cut short, and I was shipped off to the Naval Academy at Gordon’s Bay outside of Cape Town.

I was home every weekend, swimming in the magic of her eyes, dancing on the sparkle of her smile, gliding on the shine of her long, blonde hair. But I was in the military and Kathy knew what that meant. She found somebody else. It cut more deeply than any pain I’d known. I was bereft, devastated, lost. A friend and I went out running one night. I reckon we ran for about six or seven hours. That kind of straightened me out. I felt, “Fuck it, I’m too good to be dumped” so I hunted her down and got rid of the competition. Our relationship continued for three years and included as many ups as it did downs.

Kathy excelled in everything and, after winning all the school prizes, she was selected as an exchange student and went to the States for a year. I was still of the belief that life owed me more than being unfair. I wrote up a storm and so did she. But another separation was too much. While I loved that girl, I went out with others and did the normal in-the-world things one does when you’re a middle class kid growing up in apartheid South Africa and life owes you a living.

I remember that summer. Love is too much for some people to bear. Others can’t live without it. I’m both allergic and addicted to it. I opened myself completely and let her in. You know what it’s like. Exposing yourself to everything. You live and die in every second and, when it’s over, death is a sweet memory. Hell is infinitely worse. Yet, do you know? Do you remember? Are your experiences so close to heart and mind that you live in each and every time? Is it normal to see and feel and know and love so much; drink in and appreciate every moment of your life; grab knowledge and feeling and being and soul and every infinitesimal moment; dive in so deep that your senses explode?

I checked out. Got drunk. Got stoned. I learnt to play the game.

We had an on-off relationship for three to four years before I met my wife. There were girlfriends between but no-one compared. I lived at the bottom of the world most of the time and it was dark. There was too much dope and too many heavy books. I opted for winter days, greatcoats, walks on the beach, scrunched packets of smokes and a bottle in the pocket. What the hell is romantic about a bench facing the steel-gray sea? No longer gnawing, I could feel something grinding my soul. The weight was immense.

She had great parents. They divorced. I remember meeting her old man. He was a loser. In the best sense. Too bright and fucked up for his own good. I didn’t know it when I met him. He loved his daughter and gave me a hard time. Saw himself as some kind of intellectual but I was onto him fast. We got on well. He shot himself about ten years ago. In a way I understood something when I heard that.

“So what was it about that summer?” she asks.

“Everything. You, mostly. But also the feeling that everything was possible, open, and known. Seeing between the spaces, knowing life knowing me.”

“So why’d you leave?”

“I don’t know. Just me, I guess. At least we had it for a time. But forever wasn’t possible, was it? That’s been one of my great regrets. One of my unlived realities, lost destinies. But I reflect. And you come to me. Sometimes.

Why does she sometimes come to me? I dunno. Unfinished business, I guess. I never slept with that girl. She stuck to her principles even though it made me crawl across the ceiling and I spent far too much time trying to change her mind. Big mistake. But I equated sex with male-female love. I still do and express my self fully loving my wife.

A Catholic background fucks you up and I never really enjoyed sleeping around. In my estimation, I was a lousy lover at best, partly because I believed I had to feel something more than sexual for the person with whom I was enjoying the more intimate aspects of a human relationship.  Things have greatly improved over the years and I’m pleased to report I now consider myself something of an athlete. But, being married, the women out there will just have to take my word for it.

But it is true then, about the trapeze in your bedroom?

After picking up a degree and working as a journalist a while, Kathy married and moved to the States, where I believe she still lives. She came back to visit a couple of times and I met her on occasion. I would still know and feel that, if I let go, something would happen. The last time, she was going back to the States and we had coffee at a cafe in Claremont. We kissed goodbye and I knew I’d done it. It was during the instant of that kiss that I could have opened a new world, closed the old, and probably broken the lives of those I love most, my wife and family. I chose not to. I said goodbye and got on with my life. She taught me what it is to love somebody and, for that, I owe her more than she will ever know.

In April of the year she went over as an exchange student [’79], I met a girl who made me realize that everything that had come before was merely preparation for the real thing. I didn’t want it and I didn’t need it but, from the moment I met Wendy, I knew that this was the person with whom I was going to spend the rest of my life. I’d just turned twenty-one and she was eighteen. But Frank, when I look back on my adolescence I realize the truth of Dylan’s words, “I was so much older then | I’m younger than that now.” I lived at a hell of a speed and with such intensity I sometimes wonder why I didn’t explode in a pink mist of blood and bone shards. Wendy and I blew the sky wide open. We did not live in each others’ pockets - we lived as though one on a mad rush through all that life has to offer. C’mon, share another blog reminiscence with me.

My wife was eighteen and I was twenty-one when I met her. That was twenty-three years ago. We knew something was up within days of meeting each other. A gang of us had gone camping for a few days up a river running through a long ravine outside of Ceres, about eighty miles from Cape Town. Our camping gear consisted of several flagons of cheap wine, cartons of smokes, a lot of dope, and some books. We knew all there was to know about camping and, if you’ve yet to experience the pleasures of outdoor life, remember to take these things with you. We forgot matches but discovered the omission shortly after leaving so were able to rectify the situation. We spent the first night at the foot of the ravine, fortifying our spirits next to a huge blaze before setting out on the mile-long hike that would take us deep into the wilderness the following day. I remember little of that night. I do recall fighting with a friend after a failed attempt to make mulled wine by leaving a bottle in the fire.

My wife, new to Cape Town from Zimbabwe and Malawi, was also new to our ways and found our behavior somewhat perplexing. She was used to water-skiing on Lake Malawi and fishing on the Shire River, where one has to keep one eye open for crocodiles and the other open for hippos.

As different in upbringing as she was to the love of my life at the time, I couldn’t help but notice that there was a lot more to this new girl breaking into my heart than her blonde hair, deep tan, stunning good looks, and obvious intelligence. That she was as left-handed and blue-eyed as my soon-to-be former girlfriend, was not the point. She was an original, as natural and wild as the untamed land in which she had spent the first eighteen years of her life.

We were mere children. The following day, we rose early and had breakfast. It was about eleven o’clock and a few glasses of dry red at that time of day seemed appropriate. Once we had negotiated the difficult entrance to the ravine and slogged fully a mile into its yawning interior, we set up camp. That night, I shared my pillow with this dream girl from central Africa and taught her what I knew of the stars above us. I was in love. Being so afflicted, I spent the following two days hunkered around the fire, moping, smoking dope, and reading the last of the Kerouacs I’d brought with me. It was late on the second day that she came and spoke to me. I was getting to the end of ‘The Dharma Bums’ but I didn’t mind. We talked about this and that and, within a couple of hours, she knew that I knew that she knew, etc. Within a week, we were inseparable. And, yes, if I might say it, we were fucking crazy.

Nothing’s changed. She read Kahlil Gibran, drew the most amazing pictures, could play the guitar and remember the lyrics to every decent song written since rock got real. She also liked Dylan. I knew she was mad but, when you find a girl like that, you don’t let her get away. During our first year together, I bought her incense and cheese-cloth shirts and she broke my heart whenever she left to visit her parents in Malawi. It’s said that no matter how close you are when you are young, you never really get to know each other as well as you think you have. We were different.

Shortly before the first year of our meeting was over, she gave me a birthday present. It was a copy of ‘The Great Shark Hunt’ by Hunter S. Thompson.  I knew then that she understood me and would be my wife.

I turned twenty-three the day before we married and Sean was born the same year, Sarah in ‘85, and Cathryn in ‘91.

Love is a two-way street. I’m an alcoholic who stumbled into AA in 1984 aged 26 to learn the tough love of people who’ve seen it all. Wendy’s an alcoholic and has a Disulfiram implant embedded beneath her skin. The horror and terror and fear and loathing and lost-ness and gloaming that comes with a disease such as alcoholism cannot be described. On my blog, I’ve tried in my long-winded way to give you something of our immediate story as it unfolded over the past couple of months. Reality is always far worse and infinitely more painful that that which is recorded.

The flip-side of love is the long, dark night-time of the soul, a time when you crawl the sewers of hell looking for a way, any way, out. And, yet, love [like the heat from the sun escaping the earth at night] binds, sustains, and grows. One gets through to the other side. I continue to do it with the love of friends, strangers, professionals, and family backing me all the way. Yep, all things considered, I guess I love because I am loved. I’ve never been ‘out of love’ with my wife. We have been through some violently ugly and hatefully hurtful times together. But Wendy is it. As sexy as ever and as beautiful as the day I met her. We have a kind of Jeneane / George thing going, I think. Tough times do not phase me. I am, after all, a professional. And the past month or so has been a rebirth for me. There are different types of alcoholism but that is of little consequence to those enduring it, be they affected or afflicted. Where it does matter is on the other side of the bottle. Wendy does not crave the stuff and her dramatic personality changes meant that once she was dry, she reverted to the girl I knew and love with a passion that still bemuses me [what the hell is it?]. Yeah, okay, there’s a hell of a lot of work to be done - it’s always the case, but the first step was perhaps the most important. And she took it.

How can I not love her for that?

Ah, this is way too big a subject. How about ‘voice’ and ‘authenticity’ and ‘blogging’? Love encompasses everything and although I’m prone to writing screeds, it’s way to big and important - even for me. To cut to the chase, it’s sort of like my potted history of Christianity - time warps and all. Everybody’s reality is different yet it’s the same for all of us. And so it is with love. I come out a winner all the way.

There’s a reason I started out on a religious note. The Bible has been abused for centuries and it can certainly withstand me. What’s love to me?

“8 Love never fails. If there are prophecies, they will be brought to nothing; if tongues, they will cease; if knowledge, it will be brought to nothing. 9 For we know partially and we prophesy partially, 10 but when the perfect comes, the partial will pass away. 11 When I was a child, I used to talk as a child, think as a child, reason as a child; when I became a man, I put aside childish things. 12 At present we see indistinctly, as in a mirror, but then face to face. At present I know partially; then I shall know fully, as I am fully known.” [I Corinthians 13.]

Yeah, forget what I’ve said and stick with that. It about says it and much, much more. Like the sun and the sea to mere mortals with nine-to-five lives, love is infinite and everlasting. It brings everyone and everything together in an indefinable way. It’s hard work at times and it’s a lifelong trip, but it sure as hell makes the morning traffic bearable.

I must admit I do feel a bit underdressed for the party. You have artists and writers and dancers and I am a humble working woman. I have political opinions and I read as much as I can get my eyes across, but many of the authors and written works mentioned were unknown to me.

Yes, I have a first edition copy of Faludi’s Backlash in my library and of course I know the mother feminists and I am a card carrying member of NOW and the ACLU, but my main objective in life at this moment is getting my teenaged daughter through the Ophelia years. I am trying to imagine what you might ask that I would have an erudite opinion about that someone might feel enlightened by reading. The lady doth protest too much?? I’m thinking about it ;-). I suppose I should send you the essay I wrote for my tattoo egroup on how I first decided to become inked. It included some really good pictures. Oh, or the story I sent to Chris Locke about the all night spades game in the barracks QC room.

That one was really a gas. The editorial piece I did protesting the passing of an amendment that would give a piece of cloth the status of a human? You may have opened a Pandora’s box that you can’t easily close.

How do these interviews usually operate?

I didn’t get my first tattoo till I was 45. I missed the 60’s.  Literally. I knew they were there and I saw all the fun on the nightly news, but I led a terribly sheltered childhood. Then there was the summer of 1970, the beginning of my sophomore year in high school.  Watershed, what a beautiful word for having ones teeth kicked in with a baseball bat, I could’ve had a V-8. Believe it or not, it was Stranger in a Strange Land. Of all the clichéd phenomenon I could have stumbled upon to open my shuttered eyes to what could be, not Freidan, not Ms, not any of the woman warriors of the present, but an alien male of the future. I dig testosterone. But, I digress, what was it you wanted to know?

Gulf Coast, just a stone’s throw south of Houston, 11 miles from the big water, sand, man o’ wars, and sharks. Landlubber at heart, love walking the shore, but the water can stay where it is, I like something solid under my feet.

I work for a MAJOR chemical company, remember the people who brought you agent orange? There is a swath of land out of sight of the regular person driving down the freeway, but in full view of the contractor parking lot, studded with nude dead trees where they probably first tested the stuff. Such a soul chilling monument to still be standing some 30 years later. I doubt that most of the baby engineers working here now know what that petrified forest really is out there. I wonder why they never plowed it under.

Chemical plant operator, a token female in a coven of tough guys. I’ve been there 11 years and only in last few years have I been grudgingly allowed into the club, I might just last out after all. I have put up with more male chauvinist pig shit than a human should have to endure, but ah, that aroma of male sweat in the morning, reminds me of . . . A male paycheck at the end of the week. What can I say, this is equality at its bedrock, 8 hours work, 8 hours pay, no gender bias here.

Superficially, you could say that it goes back to the first tattoo I ever saw… It was on the forearm of this biker guy I was dating in 1974. It was just too beautiful for words. It was the Harley motorcycle wheel face-on with the wings out the sides. This part was outlined and colored in, but between the wings was a luscious sunrise beginning at the tire with bright yellow and shading out the rainbow dawn to an indigo fading out at the tips of the wings. This was unlined and looked for all the world like it had been airbrushed onto his skin. From that day on, I knew I wanted ink, I just didn’t know what image. And there were some real deep down reasons for the tattoo too. First was the character Patty in SIASL, I felt an alter ego kinship with her at the time. And there was my dad. He died just before Xmas 7 yrs ago and all his funeral flowers were poinsettias. It was a way to remember the man who taught me that all humans deserve consideration no matter what is on their outside, he always looked to a person’s inside first.

And the poinsettia symbolizes so many things for me, my birthday is December 25, my favorite colors, the part of the world I live in, and most of all, the gift given in time of need. The legend of the poinsettia is so deeply moving to me, the angel who turns weeds into flowers so a girl who has given so much of herself that she thinks she has nothing left to give, will not have to be empty handed on Christmas Eve. Somehow the angels have never left me empty handed, no matter how much I give away to others. So the poinsettia it was to be. I picked the picture that I liked best and we found just the right guy to do it, Harley from Tiger Claw Tattoo in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Bones went with me, held my hand, told jokes, told stories and he and Harley kept me laughing and distracted while the magnums danced on my shoulder blade. I suppose that is why I eventually married the guy, Bones (Doug) that is. You know someone is dedicated if they can stand the yelping, the blood, and the hand squeezing that nearly broke his knuckles. What a guy!

This is a bit like going to the shrink without having to write a $150 check at the end of 50 minutes, refreshing.

“The African Queen” is definitely my all time favorite chick flick.

First, I don’t really care much for what most people label as chick flicks. I suppose it is the artificial tension they tend to rely on instead of plot or story line. And I especially despise flicks that depend on the death of a woman as the ‘gotcha’ factor. Nicholas Cage goes through all that angst to loose his wings and then a truck hits Meg Ryan. Get real! He’s got how many angel buddies that should have been there and you are supposed to feel sorry for him? For his own selfish needs he took a brilliant surgeon away from people who needed her skills; it’s so much bullshit. Or “Stepmom,” which tells you that mothers and stepmothers can only get along if one of them is dying. Do people really believe that we are so shallow? I find these kinds of contrived situations demeaning and unworthy of women as humans. I much prefer depictions of women as people of intelligence, power, and humor, worthy of admiration. Take, for instance, the scene in” Gone With the Wind” where Melanie goes to the madam to thank her for rescuing her husband. Both of these women realize the severe breech of cultural expectations that they are committing, they both understand the role in life they have been given, but they both manage to convey humanity and dignity in the face of a nearly intolerable situation.

I know I haven’t gotten to TAQ yet, but my second choice would have been any of the Alien movies. Ripley, now THERE is a woman and those were some chick flicks! She is so damn tough and so damn good. She is my alter ego. You’ve seen the comic strip, ‘Rose is Rose?’ Rose is a regular woman, but when she needs to be tough her alter ego, a tattooed, leather clad, long legged biker mamma, comes out. That’s what happens to me. When I need her, Ripley in her tank top, cargo pants, and boots, pops out to save the day, like when my daughter decided she wanted a python for a pet. It was Ripley that went into the pet store and let the store clerk put a snake in her hands. And it was for sure Ripley that took live mice (damn I hate rodents!) out of a little paper bag and fed that python after we brought it home (ask me about that first feeding sometime, what a circus).

If it isn’t obvious yet, I dislike the image of women as victims, commodity, barter, or chattel. I admire women who make the best of their circumstances whatever and where ever they are. And that is why I admire Rose in The African Queen. She may be a product of her circumstances, but she is not a victim of them. Her lot in life, a Victorian spinster “uncomely among the maidens,” as her brother calls her, is to be a companion and support to her brother in his missionary work. Yet at her brother’s death she is ready to pack up and move to the next stage of her life with no regrets or self-pity, even when that next stage happens to be Charlie Alnaught. These two characters are brilliant. While Rose loses a bit of her British rigidity and begins to enjoy Charlie’s company, Charlie gains respect for Rose’s physical ability and mental strength and together they rise to the challenge of an impossible situation. All this may sound clichéd and in the need of inspiring background music, but to me The African Queen speaks to the best of what we are and what we can become as human beings. My kind of chick flick

So in high school, when the recruiters came around for career day, I thought those women in uniform were the drop dead toughest babes I’d ever seen in my life. They were so stand up, so much their own person, so real, I think I fell for the image. I wanted to look that righteous. Besides, I knew I wasn’t getting any more education after high school unless I could pay for it. The GI Bill was a big selling point. Oh, and the recruiting speech, man you would have thought boot camp and military service was a cross between girl scout camp and

Disneyland all rolled into one great theme park adventure. Those recruiters can sure lay it on thick and heavy. So in the summer of 1973 I signed on the dotted line, raised my right hand and swore and for the next three years kept swearing, a blue streak. A big news flash here folks, recruiters lie like a big dog. It’s their job description.

For the benefits I received, yes, I would do it all over again, my GI Bill, my guaranteed home owners loan, the VA Hospital, etc. For the good times I had I would do it again, but kiss my rosy pink ass if I would ever go BACK again. I have this real difficulty with unquestionable authority, something the military frowns on.

The worst times, every morning at 5:30 AM. I am not and never have been a morning person. Pusan, South Korea, middle of winter, 22 degrees F, and a wet wind blowing off the Pacific, standing formation at 6:00 AM, shaking so hard I really think my bones are going to crack, snot is freezing to my wool scarf and all I can think is, “I volunteered, I volunteered, I volunteered . . . ” The quonset hut we worked in at the port was heated with a steam radiator and some days I would still be wearing gloves to type. I’m from the Gulf Coast of Texas, if it gets down to 32 degrees for a day or two between December and March we really think we have had a bad winter. The mornings, the cold, and the war stories were the worst of all. Almost ever guy I worked with or dated was a Vietnam returnee. We’d go to the NCO club, buy a beer, dance a while, drink another beer and then he would begin to talk.

I must have had a sympathetic face. The stories were gruesome, bloody, terrifying and would get worse as the night wore on. There was a night when I got cornered by a helicopter pilot who couldn’t seem to stop the horror from pouring out of his soul. It was four in the morning before I could get myself away from his horror and his grief. I never got closer to Vietnam than South Korea, but for years afterwards I would have the most horrifying nightmares of bullets and snakes and blood. It’s hard to let all that go.

But let it go I did or I would have made myself totally crazy. I did what every one else did, drank, danced, smoked, and had some riotous good fun. The best times were the camaraderie, damn, I wish I still had that story that I sent to RB. It hinged around this all night game of spades and this guy asked me why I had joined the military. Women get that all the time. I looked at him with all the sincerity I could muster and told him, “It’s like this, man, I got this guy in trouble back home, so I had to get out of town.” There was this glorious nanosecond delay before his brain caught up with what I had said. Oh, it was rich, it was too good. For some reason I have always enjoyed the company of men. They are so earthy, so gritty, and so dumb! (Aw, shit, can I say that here??)

Ok, maybe not dumb, they just take themselves so seriously, like “we’re fighting for honor, justice, and country!” Tell the truth it is more like, “adrenalin, testosterone, and pussy!” But for all their territorialism, bravado, bad attitude, and crass behavior, the guys were the best times. The people I met, the places I went, the things I saw, and the perspective I grew are all irreplaceable. Would I do it over again, yes. Would I do it again, not only no, but hell no! When I got to the end of my three years, I gave back all my uniforms, kissed my friends good bye, told my reenlistment officer to kiss my ass and I gladly went home. They even offered me one of the first female openings in West Point. Not on your life. But I did my time and there is a part of me that is proud of my service.

Finishing school, I like that. That is what decided me against West Point. I would have to had to take a year of military prepatory school, similar to ROTC, I suppose, before I entered the Academy. Five more years of unquestioned authority and then I owe them two years service for every year of school? It would have been 1991 before I saw the light of civilian day. That would have been every Ronnie Ray-gun inspired warlette plus Desert Storm. I still get a slight whiff of that alternate reality and breath hurricane sighs of relief that I didn’t accidentally step down that path.

But, what did the military do for me? I can curse in five languages.  More than that I believe it inured me to the xenophobia most people I know seem to suffer from. I have been a ‘rich American,’ me, the woman from Smallville, daughter of an East Texas dirt farmer’s son. Start the background music, please. We grew up on a less than poverty level income. The military was a step up for me and here were people who considered me rich when I was making $320 a month before taxes. I remember sitting in a bar in downtown Pusan, double dating, with two GI’s and a local woman. The guys went up to the bar to get drinks and I tried chatting with the woman, her broken English and my piss poor Korean. Stupid me, I asked about her family and she began to cry.

Typical story, she was sold into prostitution for the money to send her elder brother to college. She can work off the ‘loan,’ but she is forever a non-person to her family. For a 19 yr old it was a baseball bat to the glass house of growing up American. But I also came away with the very real understanding that I cannot impose my culture just because I don’t like someone else’s. But that is politics, not finishing school.

Coming home was like one of those sitcoms on TV. Here are my Ozzie and Harriet family still at home in sweet Smallville and I honestly feel that they are in need of protection from me. A few weeks after I got back I found out that a recruiter was after my brother. After talking to the kid and finding out what bullshit he was being sold I was eating gravel and it just so happened that the next time the recruiter called I was the one who answered the phone. I feel sorry for that guy, after three years of bad blood I let him have it with both barrels. I chewed on his ear nonstop till he quit making any noise and told him I’d have his ass if he ever got near my brother again. It wasn’t till I hung up the phone that I realized mom and my brother were there in the kitchen with me. Ooops. Anyway, my brother didn’t go into the military.

Sometimes I think that civilian life wasn’t ready for me yet. It was really frustrating going to interviews for factory jobs and being told that I could apply as a secretary. So I took my GI Bill and went to school and worked more part time jobs than I can count or remember.

Business Management, the 80’s mass production degree, it’s still tucked away somewhere with all the rest of my pretty pieces of paper. It was my finishing school degree courtesy of Uncle Sugar.

The world’s policeman or the world’s (what do you call those men who come around to your little shop and promise you ‘protection’ if you pay them ‘insurance?’) bagmen? Is that it? Do a few outrageously wealthy white men need such a huge profit margin that they will set up such a plantation system that requires slavery? Isn’t that the major problem with the depletion of the S. American rain forests today. They are hacked, slashed, and burned away so a poor farmer can grow “market” crops, graze “market” cattle, or bloom “market” flowers so we can have a $6 bouquet at the supermarket, have fruit and veg out of season, and get cheaper beef prices? Have we improved their lives or ours by convincing them to destroy their natural resources? Were they any worse off before we showed them satellite TV and convinced them that their lives were empty before the 700 Club beamed itself into their ‘godless’ lives? Have we done them a favor by foisting McDonald’s avarice meals on to their unenlightened world view?

Somehow, I don’t think so.

This is a true story. Think about the last time you were in a sports shoe store and remember the price you saw on the newest Nike swoosh icon shoe. Years ago Nike had its factories here in the US where they paid a fairly decent living wage to workers ($7.50 to $10.50 an hour - apprx).

Later, management realized that they could make a much higher profit by moving the labor portion of shoe manufacturing to S. Korea where they paid their workers approximately $2.00 an hour. However, S. Korea does appreciate it’s workers and has a law about increasing worker wages after a certain amount of time. Nike wasn’t at all pleased with this policy so they once again moved their factories, this time to Indonesia, where they employ teenage girls working 10 hour days at an abysmal minimum wage under horrific conditions an hour. Now look at that multimillion dollars sports representative advertising contract and the price of that newest ‘gottahave’ shoe. Have we done those girls a favor, have we improved the quality of their life, have we policed them very well?

Here is just one news article, but I think it says what I want to convey of Nike abuses.

I cannot change the history of our species that feels compelled to claim inhabited land and indigenous peoples just because we can. Let’s talk ‘manifest destiny.’ No let’s don’t, I would have to write a tome and I don’t have the time. I have a three quilt tops I’m working on for winter solstice presents and I’d never get them finished. Yes, I eat, drink, consume, and exploit more cheaply made products from all over the world. Were they not cheap I could not afford them, probably couldn’t be playing with this wonderful PC, but there are many things that I would do without to curb our abuse of other cultures. Someone mentioned the other day that when we were in the midst of WWII, Roosevelt told people to conserve and make do to help the war effort. Now, while we are contributing to a 5000 year old war over religious and political, monetary, and power abuses, Shrubbery tells us to keep spending, spend more to keep the economy stimulated to help the war effort. I wonder if he means help the war effort or help a handful of obscenely wealthy white men to support their profit margin.

I do support a child through CCF (education and love are wonderful things). Also the Heifer Project whose aim is supplying farm animals and farming staples to individual families. The promise the family makes is that they will in turn give the first born or first harvest of their animal or crop to a neighbor who in turn promises the same. This improves a family’s life and supports a community without any more interference than the training to properly raise and care for the animal or crop. A phenomenal program.

Peacefully? I don’t recall any redistribution of wealth that ever took place peacefully. I’m really surprised that this last transfer of power in our country didn’t degenerate into violence. Maybe it is a good thing that we are so accustomed to this tradition that the farce of the last election didn’t cause a civil war. I would still like to see retribution for the voters in Florida who were illegally deleted from the voter registration roles because their names or birthdays were close to those of felons. I don’t want to see the perpetrators necessarily executed (maybe put in stocks or have their computer privileges revoked), but it would be satisfactory to see them admit to what they’d done and publicly apologize. Despite the intervention of the Supreme Beings, I hope someone is still pursuing this in the courts.

Back to the market place. Do I think there ought to be controls? How to restructure thousands of years of abuse of the monetary system? The structures in place now for global business concerns are so convoluted and interbred, it’s had to even begin to tell what the mutated offspring are or who they belong to. Shell on top of shell and these wonderful new accounting methods. I am just not mathematically inclined enough to understand it all.

But I would like to see more safeguards in place for the regular workers. What happened here at Entex is despicable and unconscionable. I believe that any funds allocated to the employee should be federally protected and not subject to the financial whims of the company. I believe these funds should be protected much as the FDIC protects the money we place in banks. I also believe that upper management bonus’ should never be tied to money savings made by firing employees and that any bonus’ given out for savings, increased sales, gains, etc. should be something shared equally with all the employees. I would truly like to see a company put its money where its mouth is when that frivolous statement is made about ‘our employees are our best assess.’ And while we are on the subject of companies, please, PLEASE stop with the stupid corporate speak. If you are firing someone, say so, leave off the bullshit about ‘outplacing’ and ‘downsizing’. And we all know what ‘outsourcing’ means so just say you are hiring contractors or moving to an overseas labor force. Can we please have a meeting instead of taking one and eat lunch instead of do lunch. I get so damned tired of major managers speaking for 15 minutes in corporate buzz words and saying absolutely nothing. SPREK ENGRISH!!!

I like the idea of forgiveness. It is a huge benefit to the forgiver. I’ve come to believe that if I am the only one hurting that forgiveness is essential for my peace of mine. But I believe that apologies with meaning are important if one knows one has done wrong. It’s never enough just to say ‘I’m sorry’ and go on as if nothing has changed. And it’s really hard to forgive a person or institution that makes no effort at change or improvement. However, I truly admire any effort being made to intervene in international conflict considering some of these conflicts are hundreds, even thousands of years in the making and involve such deep religious and cultural differences.

And here I was thinking you were still going to ask me what other SF writers influenced my thinking and beliefs ;-), just in case: M. L’engle, of course, Jane Langton, she wrote “Diamond In The Window,”

U.K. LeGuin, M. Zimmer Bradley, not a true SF writer, but in the ball park, Herman Hesse, his novel ‘Demian’ in particular, George Alec Effinger, and especially, Ray Bradbury - Something Wicked This Way Comes is a classic among classics and hugely influenced my self esteem, being able to understand something of what real love and courage are in the face of wickedness and incidentally leads into forgiveness.

I wish to forgive my mother for being a product of her generation and not being able to break out of the straightjacket that it placed around her. She is such an intelligent, talented, funny woman, but she cannot get over feeling that she is not worthy of any compliments and she is incapable of giving a compliment without a criticism hiding behind it.

She is so crusted in her shell that it is near impossible to see the person inside anymore. I love her dearly, but I really can’t stand to be around her much because she is so negative and painfully self deprecating. I forgive her for being what she is, that doesn’t mean that I have to like it.

I forgive my father for being a practicing alcoholic until the day he died. Dad was not the greatest guy in the world, but he did what he could. He was also a product of his family and times, but he made an effort to move beyond what he had come from. I will always admire and respect my dad for telling me that all people, no matter what they looked like, what color they were, what their religion was, where they came from, their gender or gender association are worthy of respect.

This was in the early 60’s when the town we lived in was still lily white and the schools were still segregated. And he walked his talk. His friends were from all walks of life and he would tell us kids that we would treat his friends with the same respect that we treated our parents. I never realized until years later just what a great man my father was. We never heard, nor were we allowed to use any unkind names (we couldn’t even call each other stupid) and I was in high school before I ever heard anyone use the ‘n’ word. I couldn’t believe people would say such a thing out loud. He was an intensely strong influence on how I perceived people and the world around me. I forgive him for never being able to keep a job more that four or five years in a row. I forgive him for being unfaithful to my mom. But most of all I forgive him for dying before my daughter could get to know him as anything besides the old man in the nursing home who didn’t recognize her. I love you, dad.

I forgive George for not loving me enough and I forgive myself for not having the courage to challenge him. I forgive him for dying before I could say goodbye.

I have yet to be able to forgive my sister for her obsessive drive to be some perfect example of the ultimate mother, wife, daughter-in-law, & christian, without bothering to be a human being. If she were any more holier-than-thou she’d probably be sporting stigmata and reveling in the experience. One of these days, maybe I will be able to step beyond my dislike for the heavy handed way she preaches her own perfection and be able to see what motivates her and maybe be able to forgive her. On the other hand, I would someday like to be able to apologize to my sister for not being able to love her the way she is and simply leave her be. For the time being I am content to love her children and to make the effort to keep in touch.

I apologize to my ex-husband for expecting him to fulfill all my fantasies of what a husband should be and I forgive him for remarrying the day the ink was dry on the divorce papers. He just couldn’t make it by himself. I have extended this apology. I met up again with him and his second wife several years after the divorce and the very first thought through my mind was, ‘thank goodness SHE has to take him home and not me!’ The thought was so funny to me and I had such a deep feeling of a weight shifting off of my chest that I was able to smile and be friends again with no feeling of animosity - even though he did sell my car and buy a sports car for himself in his father’s name and then want my driver’s license number so he could still get insurance as a married person - the bastard ;-).

I wish I could apologize to Su and Deb for changing into a different person than I was when the three of us were inseparable. Now I don’t know where they are. And I forgive them, too, the door is always open.

I cannot forgive the Republican Party for not being able to find any better candidate to run for office than the shrubbery. There had to be SOMEONE other than a wealthy, illiterate, uncaring, derelict from duty, party boy to put in the White House. I understand that they were hell-bent on getting a GOP candidate back in office, but the shrub?!?

This guy is going to shoot his own foot while he swallows it and we, the people, are going to end up being the ones hurt. I cannot apologize for the way I view this excuse for a human being.

And, after all, I forgive myself for not being as patient, understanding, loving, defending, caring, a mother as I want to be. I’m just so tired. I apologize to my daughter for the same. She just hugs me and says I am the best mother for her no matter what. That’s all I need.

Thank you, Frank, for a place to prattle. It is my favorite pastime and second best talent.

Annie