Cleaved, Part I

I came across the detail of the Klimt purely by accident and, had I seen it before, I would have remarked it, the way one remarks a pleasing if not familiar scent—something unbottled from a perfumery perhaps, or a satchel of potpourri from the bottom drawer of a chiffonier. It was a detail of a woman’s face done up in blues and yellows and greens in Klimt fashion, the unlikely mottling he employs to suggest an otherwise even tone; face ovoid; eyes closed. A male face is also featured in the detail, and despite the bolder use of color, the angularity of his nose and jaw, his stern expression, he is background to the woman whose face is sideways in the frame. It is just a detail—I don’t have the full painting to reference, and quite frankly it doesn’t matter—and the fact of the woman’s tilt suggests she is in repose. If so, the overlap of figures insinuates that she is lying on the man’s shoulder, but—most notably—that she is happy doing so. It’s the smile which catches my eye, the smile that tugs at memory with the incessancy of cicada wings in summer. Just as Mona Lisa’s upturned mouth is decidedly coy, so too is the woman’s—upturned at least. Coy is not the right word. Her eyes are closed so what could be demure is actually a contented smile, one that reaches just the corners of her mouth.

I’ve seen this face before, and it is a welcome one. Its familiarity stirs a deep nostalgia, an almost painful remembrance, for it is a return home to a halcyon time, when things were simpler, when happiness was distilled perfectly into this, the smile the woman wears. Jenny wore the same smile on our honeymoon, which is why it is so familiar and so resonant of memory. She wore it in the Berkeley Rose Garden , this barest of smiles, while laying on my lap in the Northern California sunshine, her hair spilled over my thigh and my hand stroking her from the forehead to mid-scalp, just running my fingers through her hair, in total bliss. Jenny has her eyes closed to the sky, which is flawlessly blue, a San Francisco rarity, and it seems we have brought the weather with us, sunshine for the whole trip. We are staying in a curio of a bed and breakfast, so decorous with hidden treasures—singing bowls and Oaxacan figurines and spindly mobiles—that it is a wonderland, our bed a depositing in some fantasy wherein we communicate both our foundling love and future togetherness. We are husband and wife, a fact which is now signified by the reassuring <clink> of a wedding band against the rim of a champagne flute; it is signified in the ease in which we are together, sometimes in silence for, as fate would have it, on this trip my voice is gone—Jenn has to order me green tea at a Chinese restaurant for fear that if I attempt to do so, I will collapse into a coughing fit—so we talk in telegraph, but in full sentences with our bodies.

And this day in the rose garden is no different from our wedding day, our persons cleaved like opposing charges—she the ebullient one, me voiceless and not without greater discontent with the world, a discontent that makes her all the more important to me as she is the princess saving the prince—we are natural in our repose, and her head on my lap is most reassuring and we are happy. We are happy, and this is why the Klimt piece evokes such strong nostalgia, its particular pain in returning home, for why are we not any longer, or at least why is our love different? Why has ‘cleaved’ become its other definition, in which we are breaking apart, our charges suddenly repellant? I look at the Klimt piece and long for that smile’s return, but I know now it will be lent elsewhere, and not afforded me–just not in the same way at least–with the Bay sun shining and the rest of our lives ahead of us as husband and wife, when our rings were intact on left-hand fingers and every toast was ‘to us.’ We will be separated, alone but still together, just by different bonds, and I will be the one to have disappeared that smile, and left with the unflagging question, ‘How did it come to this? Why is the Klimt piece reminiscent of a ‘then’ and not a ‘now’? Why did Jenny’s smile downturn and, dear God, what have I done?’

I need acknowledge Jenny’s dispiriting, which is not a sudden thing, though in the finality of her leaving, and considering my then state, Octber 13^th came as a seismic shock. Not exactly seismic, actually, but something post-. It was like most earthquakes in that I didn’t feel its magnitude, didn’t feel the ground quake at all actually—but was left with the eerie quiet after. The house was left standing and everything was in its right place, but the quietude was unsettling, like existing on the other side of a heart attack when the heart’s return makes you suddenly aware that a great machinery had stopped momentarily, and wow. That you were in effect dead for a minute, and what life is by contrast once brought into stark relief.

A great machinery stopped when that door closed on October 13th, but I can’t fool myself into thinking it was a grinding halt. I may have been suddenly left in the post-seismic quiet, but the quiet had to have been precipitated in a noisier time, when my actions spoke loudly, when I was unaware as to the import of their effect.

I was obliviously happy, then Jenny was suddenly at her father’s, then in Long Beach, then unexpectedly in a place of her own (a place I would be barred from for two months). Then her family, who I was disallowed from seeing and who I didn’t want to see anyway, descended and gathered furniture and clothing and accoutrements from our home like so much harvest, leaving me the orange leather chair, the chair in which Jenny nursed Cayden when we were a burgeoning family, three and not two. The orange leather chair where I would be suddenly one and not four. It was where I marinated for a good month, soaking up what I do not know, for it was not yet regret. I sat in that chair; I slept in Cayden’s bed. I couldn’t bring myself to sleep atop the marital mattress without Jenny next to me and I refused to open her closet for fear that, in its emptiness, a great something would be comprehended, the sudden realization that could have ended me right then and there, like a golden lightning bolt out of a Bernini sculpture. A realization so ego-destroying I would’ve writhed uncontrollably like St. Terese on the bedroom floor, just not in ecstasy but rather in some existential anguish.

The realization that I did this.  

In the Pink, Grayly

“ Her name is Dulcinea and her rank must be at least that of a princess, since she is my queen and lady, and her beauty superhuman, since all the impossible and fanciful attributes of beauty which the poets apply to their ladies are verified in her; for her hairs are gold, her forehead Elysian fields, her eyebrows rainbows, her eyes suns, her cheeks roses, her lips coral, her teeth pearls, her neck alabaster, her bosom marble, her hands ivory, her fairness snow, and what modesty conceals from sight such, I think and imagine, as rational reflection can only extol, not compare.”

                                                                                                –Don Quixote on Dulcinea

“You didn’t see me, I was falling apart/ I was a television version of a person with a broken heart.”

                                                                                                –Matt Berninger, ‘Pink Rabbits’

“Oh, Thom. I didn’t need your poetry.”

                                                                                                –Jenny

In the Pink, Grayly The room this time is more to my liking: informed by at least a tertiary knowledge of feng-shui, stone and fire elements in their proper corners, water taking the form of a perfumed vapor that dissipates as quickly as a cetacean plume over the slightly glowing diffuser. The last room did not cater to as calming an effect. I was forced to sit in a white leather sofa not of my choosing and the embroidered throws were garishly turquoise with gossamer threads that resembled ill-spun spider webs. It was an office in the Del Mar hinterlands, and so much of my recovery was spent there; horse stables, coastal aloe, Spanish tile roofs. We were not in Del Mar proper for we did not belong there. We were relegated to the exurban corners, this the white leather office, also La Casa Palmera with its near institutional bent. We did not belong in the city proper with its charming avenues and Gallic flourishes, streets named after Parisian rues; no, we did not belong there. We were untidy by virtue of our diagnoses, intergalactic trespassers if you consider the workings of the synapses something cosmic. We were ill. I am ill.

This office, I repeat, is more to my liking and how eerily prescient that it sits next door to Amethyst, which will be my future home when the core is breached and when my life comes to an end. I shouldn’t say ‘home’. I will have none. I will have no home when my diagnoses become me, or at least have me interpreted as such; in sickness and in health, it will all become a lie.

Erik sits across from me and he is appropriately sympathetic. We are on new pills—we have to be. We are ill. The last doctor miscalculated me—I am if nothing an exception to most rules—and she took away my manic tendencies in exchange for a soul-crushing flatness that threatened my continuation on this terrestrial plane. I have lost God’s address and am mortal again, mortal in both senses of the word, for I tarry with thoughts of terminus, of travelling to the next station, which isn’t the depot where I currently reside, the one where I wallow with my ever-present elixirs and erstwhile cigarettes, where I smoke every last Parliament down to its end as metaphor for the greater extinguishing. I am not only ill, I am dying, and I’m urging the death-wagons forward. Vraylar, Latuda, vodka when those don’t work. Vodka even if they were to work. I just want to live in some bovine comfort, in bucolic contemplation, but I’m disallowed pasture. Grass is become chaff; I chew a disarmingly irritative cud.

There is a church inside me though, an idyllic white church with steeple and clapboard windows. It is surrounded by pasture whereas I reside in briar. This church is where I keep Jenny.

“How are you and Jenn?” Erik asks, and I am drunk. Or at least I have softened the corners this morning. This is an increasing problem, I am aware. Erik knows to ask about Jenn. He is a meteorologist and this is the truest barometer of my wellbeing. I oddly think of feathered things, maybe because my Icarus wings are currently ruinted and I have—for now—my bird job.

“The thing about flamingos,” I say finally, “Is their color, right?”

Erik takes the non sequitur in stride; he has proven himself a patient man and I—I am practiced at using words to describe other words. The tireless if not tiresome poet. (Next door at Amethyst, I will end my transformation, finally, and just become words, feeding off of their honeys; I will be an alphabet eater).

“They’re pink—they get it from the food they eat.” I briefly describe the science: “Carotenoid pigments from algae and plankton. They store the pigments in their livers. Now a feather begins as a living structure, ok?” This, it should be said is different from hair, which Erik has smartly combed; I am most likely a two-day old mop.

“It’s fed by a blood vessel that delivers the nutrients needed for the feather to grow, to unfurl. Well, those pigments travel in the blood and color the feathers pink.”

This is rudimentary. Eric follows, though it’s not evident as to why I’m talking about feathers. They after all, are living structures whereas I am a fast dying one.

 “Flamingo parents—they give their kids milk, you see—flamingos and pigeons are the only birds that produce milk—and this milk contains a lot of pigment. Now the flamingo kids, they get the pigment from their parents so that when their adult feathers grow in, they’re pink.”

Science lesson concluded, I ask:” Do you know what happens to the parents?” Erik shakes his head, but remains attentive. My last therapist would, at this point, be reaching for her samples bag. She was a galaxy-destroyer, and liked to steal away my stars. With Erik, I can constellate.

“They become gray, Erik. Without their pigment, they’ve nothing to stain their own feathers. It’s a beautiful metaphor, really. The parents give all their color away to their kids, they give a piece of their beauty away, so that the kids are something gorgeous.” I pause.

“I’m gray, Erik.”

“I’ve given all my color away.”

“I’ve given it away, and you ask how Jenny and I are doing? She’s beautiful, Erik. More than that. She used to be such a..a self-deprecating girl. ‘Just a silly girl who drinks pink tea’ she called herself. Or: ‘Oh, beauty queen—that’s me,’ she’d say, downplaying herself. Well, she’s pink now. Of course, she was going to be. I know that. I just lent her my color in the meantime is all.”

“And I’m gray. I’m gray but I love that she’s pink.”

There is inequity here, I am suddenly aware. Jenny wants me pink, too, like I am capable—or was once capable–of being. I know this, but I’m the broken courtier right now, a male songbird with faded feathers. My constant irritation comes from an existential discontent and a keening cognizance of my own monochromatic decline. When I first acquiesced to pills, I was better. I had a flush to my cheeks, a serenity that had its particular ebullience. But then it was too much Escitalopram, and I went manic; it was the sudden absence of Escitalopram and my wings broke off. I either flew too high to have my color rightly seen, or else became the color of gruesome wreckage. I wrote a lot about plane crashes during this time. I wrote about being a fuselage without wings. I wrote in grays and reds. I wrote about flying and falling, the alcohol serving to maintain my bird-ness by contributing to both. (At Amethyst, I will be a spatchcocked something. I will have irreversibly landed, free of substance, but with my wingtips sheared off and tucked into my corpse. Appropriately, Amethyst is called a Landing).

Erik tries to circle the metaphor back to parenting. He should. The cetaceous vapor of the atomizer does its breathing thing, and it is a low and constant hiss, like a constant deflating. Erik mentions Cayden and Finn, and the color I have given them; it is indeed the parental sacrifice, how we become wizened while our sons ripen into smooth-fleshed fruit, how we first lend them our blood, then ferry its course throughout their beings, enriching it with the salts of our own harvest. It is a vegetal thing as much an animal thing, a seeding, a grafting of one’s parts. I love my children but in this moment I don’t want to talk about that. I don’t. I’ve written hundreds of pages on the subject, have written down the rules of my particular parenting which I developed when I was a young age, when I first felt the effects of a perhaps improper rearing. “Don’t ever tell your children they don’t know what love is,” I wrote when I was seven. See I loved Reagan White then, and her improbably straight, waist-length hair. I sat side by side with her on the elementary school rug, knees touching, she in her Strawberry Shortcake dress. I was devoted to her and allowed her to catch me during every playground chase so we could collapse in a fit of knowing giggles. This was love. This is love, just one that a seven-year-old is capable of mustering as a yet unripe achene, a fig still seasoning on the vine. To be told love is only for the fully wisened is to rob a child of love’s caprice. I think of Reagan White, I think of Jenny. I think of love, and its maturation. I think of giving your color away because it is a compulsion, the way in which rain is compelled to fall from a fully seeded cloud. That giving is not an option when you at last love someone more than you love yourself.

Perhaps it is easy for me to love Jenny in the way that I do, the fact that I love her more than I do myself. I have willingly given her my color because pink is off-putting on such an otherwise gray template. Thing is, I would drink poison for her; she would not for me, I know. Our ‘Romeo and Juliet’ would have a lesser body count, in which case the play would just be called ‘Romeo’, I playing the role of the tragic fool. Still, I have integrity in offering her all of me, though I must be unlucky to love. I must be a wretch for–though I don’t know it sitting in Erik’s placid office—I will ultimately have my greatest fear realized, and I will be abandoned by the love of my life. Illness: I am privy to it and proof my own septicity. I have hurt, in both manners of the word. I cannot fully love myself, therefore no one fully loves me. A wholly loved person is not suddenly left to their own devices, and I have always said, ‘Death before divorce’, the most superlative thing I can think to say.  (At the time of this writing, I have five months to prove myself integrous in that regard) In the meantime, Erik and I discuss pabulums and pills to combat the ideation, that death be the option waylaid. I tell him I have given all my color away, so hope that everyone wears Taxi-cab yellow to my funeral, a corpse needing proper lighting. (I am very funny). He gives me Wellbutrin; there is ‘well’ in the name, as in ‘well, why not?’ I have taken anonymous pills before without so much as a forethought—this one at least suggests tranquility. If it fails its promises, I still have the white steepled church with the clapboard windows, the green grass which I devotedly keep watered. Jenny, she is my forever.

(It is not to say, however, there doesn’t exist a ‘church of me’ harbored within. I am not without ego. The church is just subterranean. There is no raising high of the roofbeams, no proud campanile extoling any virtue. It is underground, belfry muted by soil, its doors blocked. No one sits in its pews and as corpus there is me and my crown of mirrors. The eucharist, it is always full, and on a disused altar. ‘Why has thou forsaken me?’–this has replaced the Lord’s Prayer).

“One more thing, Erik,” and I trail off. I want to express something, I’m not sure what. I have yet to become words. In sickness and in health has not yet become a lie.

“Never mind.” I take my scrips.

 Nights I would lie next to Jenny, she naked from the waist up were I to have my way after making love—I would feel her chemistries flow correct and aligned, me my own irregularities. I would cup her breast and press my chest to her back, never the twain of our heartbeats meeting. Inevitably, Jenny would turn me over, half asleep, and put her arm around me. We were a sideways Pieta, smother me Mother. My heartbeat was fast, hers a lulling thing. I could be happy. Sometimes and despite my gray, I could even be in the pink.

Day 150

I don’t know what it is. Perhaps it’s the fact that Brian showed up to class today with his new chef’s coat tucked into his checked pantaloons, or the fact that his dullard nature has him three paces behind everybody else. Maybe it’s because he calls the consommé raft a sofrito, or that he can’t figure out a three-sink system, moving sautiers from soap to sanitation without so much as a rinse. Maybe it’s because Junior is the only one laughing at his own insipid story about catching a homeless gentleman taking a shit behind the Walgreen’s dumpster; or maybe it’s because Junior acts the Philistine and quaffs his finished consommé from a mug instead of spooning it with the savor it deserves: “Fuck! I can taste it so much better this way!”

I lend him a napkin and sigh.

Me: “Just don’t keg-stand the stock pot, Junior.”

I don’t know what it is. I woke up this way, so lend my fellow students grace—they’re just add-on to my irritation–not the source of it–though their front-brain proclivities and tardiness to the kitchen unseat me at times. (On the contrary, I always beat Chef to the school, twenty minutes early being on-time, being on-time too late; and when it comes to using the old gray matter in the kitchen, I don’t use the pour spout when seasoning a velouté, nor grab the sherry bottle when a recipe calls for a dry white. I take myself way too seriously). These are just kids and I’m at present their current ages combined. Junior can’t even legally buy a drink; I’m in sober living with an advanced degree in transgressivism, my curriculum vitae espousing multiple stays in San Diego’s various detox facilities and one fated night atop the roof of my house (I digress).

No, it’s not Brian, nor Junior, or the particular manner in which they people a kitchen with youthful unconcern. I’m just wizened, not necessarily wiser–wizened. To wit: I used to think Bronte’s ‘Wuthering’ was actually a misspell, so were I a novel right now I’d be ‘Withering Heights’, a languishing tale certainly, and one featuring a Byronic hero gripped with ennui. Step aside Heathcliff; there’s a new broody dude to take your place. And appropriately he’s in funereal black beneath all the chef’s whites.

We are dicing onions. Junior is openly weeping—he’s in fact retreating to the kitchen sink every two minutes to rinse his hands and splash water on his face, lightweight—but I’m the one with the undefinable lump in my throat. It’s been stubbornly there since my 1 a.m. dorveiller, when taking a cigarette outside Amethyst I am hit with a kind of midnight melancholy. Usually I’m what I call a ‘Starry Nighter’, homage to Van Gogh who quoted “For my part, I know nothing with any certainty, but the sight of the stars makes me dream.” He also said “the night is more alive and richly colored than the day” and I’m inclined to agree. But at 1 a.m. I feel the first rising of an as yet unborn sob, stuck in the passages somewhere. It’s night and I’m far from starry.

Junior: “Goddamn! Aren’t you crying?” Junior is furiously scrubbing his hands of onion juice again.

Me: (drily, and while chopping planks into batonets): “Just on the inside, Junior. Just on the inside.”

” April is the cruelest month”—I say it all the time in deference to T.S. Eliot’s ‘Wasteland’—and historically speaking, the beginning of spring marks the end of my ‘Mad Season’, when I seasonally—and like Van Gogh—switch out moods in obeyance to my bipolarity. Winter, I fly high—I am something Icarus, something sky-bound—but by April I can crash a mess of spent feathers and melted wax. There is a price to pay for flying too close to the sun, or, in my and Vincent’s case, too close to the stars. I wonder if that’s what it is today, my body acting on a particular muscle memory of a now dormant manic-depression. It’s been three years since I felt the euphoric rush of my Mad Season, but maybe there are vapors still. My sleeping habits have been closely mirroring those of my old manic self: first sleep, dorveiller, second sleep—maybe five hours en todo. Still I am not somnolent during the day, a nap is not necessary. Go, go, go until I force myself into Nod. Let the fulgurations cease. Be still.

The surface of the stock pot is itself motionless, the barest of bubbles marking the beginnings of a simmer and Brian is champing at the bit. He is poised with nutmeg because Junior is too, Brian not having an original thought in his head, and their collective choice of spice is questionable if not downright Philistine. Even Chef gives them a weary look as if to say, “What fucking now?”  But not one to dampen their pioneering spirit, he just asks, “Nutmeg? In tortilla soup?” before leaving them to their own devices. I have Mexican oregano in lieu of epazote, which the recipe originally calls for, and am secretly hoping Brian and Junior over-season their creations (as they are wont to do) considering nutmeg is a kitchen poison in large amounts. Just a tablespoon straight up will give you a myristicin high, with norepinephrine flood gates wide open. I would like to see Brian on hallucinogens. It would make him at least interesting. Like a Dali clock or something. As is, he is the class dullard, a taupe paint chip of a person, done up matte. I try and give him the benefit of the doubt, but he gets lost in a room of only three workstations, often times grabbing my knife in error else my finished demi-glace, the latter of which is inexcusable and deserving of a fillet knife between the ribs. We are supposed to be a team, but lately I’ve been unapologetically spelling ‘team’ with an ‘I’. As in ‘I’ am saving myself. Junior’s already rifled through my knife set looking for his misplaced blade—and you never touch another man’s knife set, Bourdain famously saying, “Your knife is your cock”—and Brian is (he thinks) secretly weighing out my mise en place for reference when he can’t break down a simple recipe. ’32 divided by two is sixteen, Brian—it’s fucking sixteen. Now hands off my me-see.’

No, it’s not even Brian that’s having me awry. I’m just off-kilter, I seemingly have absorbed the askew nature of the Culinary Institute’s environs, both in and out. The Institute is located in Barrio Logan, once San Diego’s poorest and most crime-ridden neighborhood, now an epicenter of gentrification what with the explosion of microbreweries, restaurants, and art spaces. This used to be where Mexican cartels would send scouts to pick up nortenos for their bloody street gangs, now it’s a great place to buy a taco (Las Cuatras Milpas FTW) and check out the latest installation at the Soda and Salt. Thing is, the CCAI is on National Avenue, which—like a magician’s tablecloth—has been picked up by the corner on its south side, then whisked away for all to clatter into place, detritus to the north side. We’re on the north side. Outside the Institute walls is a tent city, a homeless enclave in between the Barrio and downtown’s southeast center. The vainglorious Petco Park is in view as is the Central Library and the Transportation building. What lies in the middle is everything that has otherwise been displaced. Ten dollars? It’ll buy you a pint at the Park else a hit of meth on the street. To pay for either generally involves psychosis and, indeed, the avenue outside CCAI is full of angry zombies in crystal heat. Loud voices and displaced aggression. Drunks can be amiable, hotheads on meth vapors not so much. I steer clear of the tent city, though it’s only a stone’s throw away. The closest I get is the café table next door to the Institute where I take my cortado on the daily in avoidance of Brian and Junior at breaktime. It’s across from the blue tent where I believe a homeless man of importance lives. His blue canopy is much trafficked. I just drink my espresso and watch the comings and goings of the randos, think of later when I will be going to Jenny’s.

I miss Jenny, and maybe that is what is setting me off. How to describe. I don’t know, but my room at Amethyst bares her imprint. It’s a practiced devotion, but not slavishly so: I know she’s gone and I’m not wallowing. Still, her picture is in no less than four places. Jenn by contrast has erased me from her apartment, reduced me to one photograph which is in her ill-used kitchen and on the side of the refrigerator (wouldn’t it be good, I think, for the kids to have pictures of their daddy?  I say nothing). We have established, me and Jenny, that there has been inequity—and I’m loathe to use such a pecuniary term but, sadly, most relationship words are—there has been inequity both in and outside of our togetherness. I sometimes lacked presence, erupted in fits of frustration; she sometimes lacked sentimentality, always needed to fix. I was the poet whose poetry was not needed and she was the begrudging muse who needed fewer words, more action. Still, we communicated so often and so well, that it is a wonder things were left unsaid, and unresolved. I used to love to sit on the rim of the bathtub with a cup of coffee while Jenny did her daily ablutions, staring at her adoringly while she practiced her mirror face and applied her foundations, did up her lustrous hair. I will never run out of words to describe her.  But somehow, I think all conversation ended a long time ago.

Him: “I think I love you more than you love me.”

Her: “I think you’re right.”

(Followed by the inevitable throwing of objects, which admittedly didn’t help his case any).

I recently got a tattoo for Jenny on my upper arm. It is a print by Egon Schiele who is renowned for his lascivious lithography—sometimes bordering on the pornographic—and it is inscribed with Jenny’s name. Brian says, “Someday we’ll know what Thom’s tattoos mean…” Luckily the Schiele is on the bicep above the rolled-up sleeves of my chef’s coat. Brian nor Junior will not see it and they, being of a diminutive age, wouldn’t understand it anyway. They do not know that the man who carries such confidence in the kitchen and who is punctual to a fault, is in fact a broken mess. I can cut a 1/16^th inch brunoise with ease, but there are hundreds of as-miniscule cuts which make up my heart. And speaking of cuts, I am also keenly aware of the Angle of Luis, which begins below my mandible, crosses the throat, and ends above the opposite collarbone. It is the imaginary line the executioner envisions to guide the guillotine for the cleanest severance possible (severance: another pecuniary word).  I was severed in two on October 13^th, left to my own devices, some say left to die. One applies alcohol to a wound, and I obligingly absorbed all things antiseptic. I could’ve died, and not just figuratively. The second and final death. I could’ve tattooed crossbones over the ‘;Amor fati’ stamp on my left wrist and just drowned in my thinking chair.

Listening to songs like: “You didn’t see me I was falling apart/ I was a television version of a person with a broken heart.”

No, Brian and Junior will not know this, my brokenness, nor see my Schiele. The tattoo depicts a male lover resting on crossed arms in a woman’s lap, she nude-save-for-stockings in genuflection over him. He is subordinate in his pose, kneeling before her, and the woman’s hair cascades over his crown. Her eyes are closed and her hands disappear beneath his crossed arms to rest in between her thighs. It is a highly sensuous drawing–not necessarily sexual–and I am subordinate to Jenny in the manner the tattoo depicts. Sometimes I’m even damn near placative so as not to upset any extant intimacy between us. I have worshipped Jenny far more than she ever will me. It is the truth. I have to accept that. She is her own person after all, but– goddammit–she was *my* Dulcinea. Dulcinea and ‘dulce’ share the same root—‘sweet’; I ink my flesh, I keep Jenny’s pictures, I relish this, the sweet honeyed pain. In my way, I practice the perverse devotion of the abandoned, the love in which some who have been abused love their abusers. “Batter my heart” and all that.

Divorce me, untie or break that knot again,

Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

Nor ever chaste, except you ravish me.

I am quoting John Donne here. And ‘Amor fati’ is Epictetus, Dulcinea is Cervantes. Brian will never know what my tattoos means let alone understand them, and the less he and Junior know of me, the better. They do not know that I’m soon to be an ex-, that my current state is ‘broken’ though Jenn forever tried to fix me. People have always tried to fix me. When I was a child, the doctor wanted to twist my scoliotic backbone into a brace and correct me. When I was a boy, the doctor wanted to break my jaw and rewire my mandible into something more presentable. People have always wanted to fix me.

But they always proposed breaking me further first. Every. Fucking. Time.

I still love. Does that make me fixed? Even as I am broken? Jenny says she doesn’t believe in ‘broken.’ But.

In ancient times, the Chinese used to mend broken pottery with gold so as to make the pottery more precious in its damage. In the kitchen, if you break a Hollandaise you can fix it by whisking in an extra egg yolk, enriching the sauce. The latter I tell Junior as we work in pottage and mother recipes. He doesn’t know I am working in metaphor, and not just in Escoffier.  

Me: “The added yolk helps the emulsification.”

Junior: “Wait—why not just add an extra yolk to begin with?”

Me: “The sauce has to break first, Junior. Only THEN can you fix it. Get it?”

‘To fix’ necessitates ‘to break’, and ‘to break’ engenders a fix. The snake eats its tail and so on: that old orobouros again, which, to think of it, my Schiele tattoo somewhat resembles. So Brian, if you must know: my Schiele tattoo represents me and Jenny, my Munch tattoo represents my ambivalence in its particular Madonna/whore fashion; my ‘Amor fati’ stamp represents my love of fate despite its inherent hardship. My Picasso penguin? Well, it’s just a fucking penguin. You know, sometimes things are just what they seem.

‘Sometimes things are just what they seem,’ this I tell myself as I drink my cortado in the shitty part of the Barrio in avoidance of my fellows, in my attempt to be solitary though the tent city is a bustle with meth-heads and the trafficking of wares, the air staccato with junkie complaint: I am just a broken man with a lump in his throat on a cruel April day, and it’s just like the three and reticent days prior. That’s it. THAT’s what it is. I needn’t think any further. I need only think that later I go to Jenny’s where I will be thankfully divorced of Junior and Brian and in the company of my loved ones. I will inevitably check the refrigerator to ensure my picture is still clipped there and, if buried behind other papers, I will move it to the front; I will inevitably watch Jenny apply her ablutions as I once did on the daily, but now as she prepares to go out for her every-Tuesday night with the girls; and I will watch her change from a backless number into a dress that better suits her, with a neckline that plunges to an empire waist, her decolletage on display and the sideways crescents of her breasts; and I will inevitably tear up at this, all this lost, things being as they are, and I will maybe feel a lift just being close to her despite her most likely being far away; and I will remember her in her best black outfit, the one with the particular rouching, and in seeing that how I used to know her beauty and know that it was in part mine and know that everything and everything would in the end no matter what be all and forever ok.

“April is the cruelest month”—Day 150 of sobriety  

Day 130: Papers

“And why are you holding on to those…carrying them around so long?” and Alex, she gestures to my satchel, which is discarded against the armrest across from me. A ‘First Class’ delivered envelope, 8 1X2” by 11” is, by now, dog-eared and protruding from the haversack. It is bordered with green triangles somehow signifying its importance. It remains unopened.

I pause. The room smells of some essential oil—surely a eucalyptus blend—and, unlike other therapist offices I have resided in, Alex’s is more cluttered, less…hygienic. There no bland inoffensive abstracts on the wall, no damask. Certainly, the walls are the typical Taupe no. 11—maybe ‘Cordova Cream’ or ‘Tomayo’. The couch is a dangerous white above which hangs a wood print: ‘It’s OK to Not Feel OK’.  I feel ok, at the moment at least. I’ve been able to sustain some joie de vivre, and to me that’s problematic. I shouldn’t be feeling ok; fuck happiness. It was supposed to have left October 13^th when the door closed on the Hygge home forever and Jenny left me cadaverous in the orange leather chair. An otherwise blithe spirit dispirited. No, joie is not what I should be feeling. I’m stuck on ‘should’ as in ‘I should be miserable’, ‘I should make use of these rocks in my pocket and just walk into the river.’ ‘I should exeunt.’ I should, I should, I should.   I instead feel ok, which is blasphemous right now, and I learn to shower every other day and God forbid bake cakes.

Light the candles, it’s my goddamn re-birthday.

“I don’t know Alex,” and forever the poet, I seek the right metaphor. To use words to describe other words. I’m in once-remove.

I go pedestrian. “Well, it’s not like I won the fucking Publisher’s Clearing House or something. I’m not endorsing a check. I mean, to just SIGN on the line—I can’t do it. This is an existential receipt, not a Point of Sale.” I pause. “Ever see Sideways, or read the book?”

Alex gives a pursed lip smile in apology and shakes her head. Her face is fairly unlined. I’m suddenly aware of her age without her usual COVID mask. My beard, it is white.

“Well, the protagonist—Miles—he’s a frustrated author. Lovelorn. Giamatti plays him. Typical suffering artist, but he’s also a wine aficionado. In his possession—” and I remember this—“Is a 1960-something Chateau Cheval Blanc. He aims to drink it only when the time and place is appropriate. When the time is right. Like when he finally lands a book deal or gets married to Maya—she’s played by Virginia Madsen—or something.” I trust Alex is understanding where I’m going with this, but I choose another example as a slight detour.

“Look, it’s like the meme I saw the other day with a miserable woman sunk in a heart-shaped bathtub. It goes: ‘I listen to the same sad song on repeat to ensure it does enough damage’.”

Alex doesn’t break eye contact but says, “You’re punishing yourself.” She says it blandly. I can’t tell if it’s a question. I look at the satchel. I scan the room. There’s a photograph of a toddling child on the wall and she’s maybe two. Alex is off next week; she’s probably going on vacation with su hija. The papers, there they are. And WE used to vacation.

I raise my eyebrows, then lower them just as quickly.

“Sure,” I acquiesce. “Like a ritual. Needs ceremony.” This is not uncommon. There are purification rites: walking on knives; piercing one’s corpus with skewers, being dragged by chariots. Having a bleeding heart ripped out of one’s chest like in ‘Temple of Doom’. The bleeding heart one–that sounds about right.

“Let’s call it that. Rite of purification. Or incorporation. Something. I dunno—ask Margaret Mead.”

We’re off topic. We were supposed to be stuck doing origin work, as in: “Tell me again about Hermann Kafka leaving Franz out on the balcony? You know, tell me about your father, your mother. Tell me where this fuckery all started.

“Tell me again how your Mom told the 5yo you that you would one day hurt your wife. Tell me. Here’s some bilateral stim.”

But I’m talking about Jenny, and now Alex has diverted me to the papers. I placate her to change the subject: “I’m probably gonna sign them today anyway. I have a plan”, which is genuine and I have my favorite Sakura Micropigment 01 pen in my pocket to prove it. Alex and I—we go back to origin stories.

(It is true: I hurt my wife. Fuck if my mom wasn’t right. Just 40 years too soon and because I was throwing a fit over a Lego design gone awry. But I digress).

I walk home. Amethyst is about two miles distant from where ‘It’s OK to Not Feel OK’, and I have a stop to make on the way. A place to feel decidedly un-OK, which I’m masochistically looking forward to. Kinduv like the other week when I read authors’ suicide notes to feel better. Anne Sexton’s “I am like a watercolor. I wash off’ was my platitude of the week and it lent me some gorgeous pain. (They say misery loves company but I do a fine enough job when left to my own devices. My Curriculum Vitae includes ‘advanced degree in Ruminative Studies’. I get the job every time).  I have my phone queued to Jens Lekman because the devil’s in the details; I feel rather than hear the near-soporific swell of strings, which begin the song:

There will be no kisses tonight

There will be no holding hands tonight

Cause what is now wasn’t there before

And should not be.

There’s the ‘should’ again, its requisite twin ‘should not’ and I should not be thinking as I do, with the bougainvillea blossoming purple about the Girl from the City of Twelve Bridges who decorated the cakes at our wedding with blue and purple sepals—I should not be thinking about that, it’ll ruin the delicious dour—and I remember instead my last kiss with Jenny outside the Park Blvd. farmer’s market, and how I even texted her a ‘thank you’, that I would cherish it like I cherished kissing her and loosing the freesia from her hair in our wedding night suite. She was in a drawn bath and I was kissing her, her and her sunburn, which was in the shape of the bridal dress; I remember our almost-first-kiss—more fondly even than the actual first—when we leaned against each other on the Grape St. Suspension Bridge, lovers swaying eighty feet up in the air then, this before the suspenders would snap, heads touching in fond affection.

<The tom-toms rise>

And I will never kiss anyone

Unless it burns me like the sun

But I remember every kiss

Like my first kiss

Like my first kiss

Every first kiss—and I’ve had less than ten—has been something of helios, much like Jenny’s wedding day blister, red and raw, hot and shiny. And every first kiss has a place emblazoned in memory, its own sensorial address. To wit: the patch of gravel in the pitch-black cul-de-sac, too much lipstick; chlorine blossoms and wide mouths in the sauna; back supine on the beach, pushed down with breath-taking force, oh Jesus fuck; tobacco and wine, a single crowded barstool, the husband watching; lips sweet and wet like broken fruit, sweet and wet, eyelids closed to it all and that sacral warmth, Svadhisthana omigod.

I know I’ve broken hearts I understand

Some firecrackers blow up in your hand

This is torturous thinking. I relish it. I’m a half-mile to home and the streets have crossed Avenues, all the tree-named streets in a row—Quince and Redwood and Spruce—traversing Fifth and Sixth. A building towers upward and this is the edge of Balboa Park, a nondescript senior living residence like some extinguished lighthouse above Uptown. Balboa Park sprawls southward for the most part, eucalyptus like the fragrance of Alex’s office, groves of it down the length of Sixth. Also, the mismatched conifers—firs mainly–and you would think the hydrangeas would bloom pink beneath them in this, the acid soil, but—no—the hydrangeas are purple like Jenn’s wedding bouquet and like the sepals that garnished the cakes the Girl from the City of Twelve Bridges had hand-decorated.  The sepals are vibrant. It is March, the blossoms haven’t yet faded or been overtaken with hoarfrost. Purple, too bright to be a bruise, the bruise is my heart.

I could’ve gone many places, really, but Alex is right: I’m punishing myself and why not the mother lode? I’m interested in the main vein, not the subsidiary offshoots, like the Cliffs: that was an option, the bluffs high above Black’s Beach where the sedge grows in the winter, sharp enough to cut your hand, and where softer things grow in the spring. Fireburst aloe and sea fig and shoulder-high grass. “There will be lots of memories here,” my friend Ryan said when I introduced him to this spot near thirty years ago and, indeed, along the fingerling ravines, the sandstone and basalt, the panoramic vistas of the Pacific, Jenny and I spent our moonlight days here, half-clothed above the ocean spray in deep embrace, making fervent love a hundred feet above the beach. Across the way a palladium of a house, torch lit, and it was Barbara Streisand’s, can you believe it. Talk about misty water-colored memories, the way we were, and how we would pile back into the car with sex-warmed cheeks, hair tousled with smiles white in the moonglow. We would drive past the UCSD campus, where I went to school; I had the art studio code and there were nighttime walks here, too, beneath the creaking eucalyptus trees threatening to drop their limbs, and we would sneak into the painting room and lay on the floor among the half-finished canvases, pretending cinema in a tangle of discarded coats. Something sfumato like the charcoal sketches and conte drawings, our bodies gradually shading into one another.

This, though—all of this—the Cliffs and art studio, the foot lit tree we named Margaret at Cliffs’ egress, these are capillary places and things our bodies visited in halcyon days, before Jenny’s mother died, before we were wed, before my family dissolved when my brother was arrested one August night. These are capillary places and things, not venal. No, not venal; I want to open my fucking wrist.

“There’s something deeper here,” Alex says, “We need to go back.” And Alex has disrupted me from talking about Jenny again—about a recent argument we had over these goddamn papers—and I sigh.

“These are recent things, which is why you feel more inclined to go there—the memory is fresh.”

Of course, Alex is right. I am momentarily frustrated, but one must visit the origins. Thing is, I’ve had twenty-six years with Jenny, and that to me seems origin enough—twenty-six years ago when I really began, when Jenny, prim hostess of her bedroom kingdom, introduced me into her life. Being codependent as fuck, I am stuck to that silly girl who drinks pink tea, the girl with the thrift store A-lines, and burgundy hair. Also, her blonde-headed ‘now’, my new Bohemian; everything else seems momentarily irrelevant. I’m immutably her, or she’s immutably me, or something; but, yes, let’s talk about my mother.

“Sorry. Just devouring the hurt.” I’m eating my pain and I’ve forgotten the aperitif. I’m suckling at the wrong breast. I’m milk-drunk on Jenny’s tit.

“Thing is, Alex,” I return to the subject of my childhood, “You ask me to rate my traumas—give them a numerical score.” This is classic EMDR method, and I’ll be palming a bilateral stimulant any session now, I’m sure. Using both sides of the brain, which I already thought I did. “You ask me to rate them, and nothing seems to register the 7-10 like you specified. I mean, I HATE getting in trouble—why as an adult child I’m repulsed by authority—” I emphasize ‘repulsed’ while meanwhile hating people who are not to blame. “Every time I’ve been in trouble, it rates the same as when—I dunno—like we talked about: that my mom predicted me hurting Jenny before I even fucking MET Jenny. All those times I was lectured in Sunday School—when I’d ostensibly black out mid-reprimand–those times I projected my wrongdoings on to some other fucking kid: they’re all, like, the same.”

 I’ve failed my homework. Apparently, I’m a malfunction. Shit, authority really screwed me to the wall, but I could be eating crow as easily as pheasant here. I don’t taste much of anything. Except that I’m not OK in the grand scheme of things besides feeling okay now, among the ‘Cordova Cream’ and white pillow cushions.  I think to later. I’m gonna make another re-birthday cake tonight. Olive-oil scented buttercream. Chiffon. Meyer lemon. Wait—what?

Alex: “You may not find the moment just yet, and let’s make it sooner than later—” no pressure—“Because that will help you diminish the Negative Belief you have of yourself.” Alex is textbook here and I again remark the evenness of her face. I think, cynically: “there’s nothing an old soul hates more than a new soul acting on borrowed wisdom.’ I wrote that once. About Jenny. How sneer. Maybe now about Alex, too; perhaps I’m a dick.

I nod while looking at Alex’s shoulder. I know we’re racing for the prize here because I’ve intimated enough about the rocks in my pocket, and that’s how Virginia Woolf went in her mortal swim. I nod twice. I feel the Sakura Micron stab my side momentarily as I readjust on the couch. I need to affix a signature. I need to find the mother lode.

It’s 12:30pm and I’ve stopped at the senior residence, that concrete observatory, at Balboa Park’s entrance. In the leeward side of the tower is Eighth Avenue and there are Irving Gill numbers here, Requas and Drydens: I know my San Diego architecture well. I light a cigarette before going further.

And I will never kiss anyone

Unless it burns me like the sun

But I remember every kiss

Jens sings while I meter my draws. You’re not allowed to smoke inside of Balboa Park. It’s ordinance and I’m not looking to break laws, just break my heart. Upas is the tributary into Eighth and I remember driving it that June day, partially cloudy, in Ryan’s parents’ Tiger roadster. It was a tony detail—that roadster—me in a wedding suit with hydrangea-purple tie, sprawled in the cockpit while Ryan confidently drove. “Lookit you, so fucking cool,” Ryan remarked, “Totally relaxed.” My hands dangled in my lap, the cockpit had my legs outstretched and riding low. I WAS relaxed. I had the assuredness of a man completed, or about to be, and I was in want of nothing, not at the moment. A man waits his life for this; I was a quarter-century old and the preterite tense would be benumbed in lieu of a forever present.  Jenny and I would exist instead in the ‘will’, the future perfect. As in: we will retire to a shared park bench at the age of 102. As in, ‘we will always be in love.’ We were already sfumato, having fucked on the studio floor among the unfinished paintings; we were already and also chiaroscuro, a complement of light and dark, she ebullient and me her shadowed other. Yin-yang. Ouroboros. I was relaxed, so certain, and I never doubted a thing driving the short segue of Upas. All we needed was a rite of incorporation; we needed to affix signatures. Like I need to affix one now. I extinguish a cigarette, the preterite unwelcomely present.

(“I think I love you more than you love me,” I iterated an argument for Alex. “And Jenny, she says, ‘I think you’re right.’”

“That’s a ‘ten’. Alex. That’s a fucking ‘ten’.”)

The Marston House sits at Balboa Park’s north-most extremity. It has an Eighth Avenue address. The House is a classic Craftsman, steep-roofed and gabled, just more of a celebrity than the other Craftsmans north of Marston Hills. It features a formal English garden, a serpent-mouthed fountain. There are trees lining the eastern border, some of which bear fruit, and in the modern day they serve to block the coursing traffic of the 163. There is a low thrum regardless, an insinuation of cars, but otherwise the acreage is quiet, idyllic even. This is where on June 9^th, 2002, Jenny and I wed. This is the mother lode.

 I am increasingly aware of the Sakura Micropigment ‘01’ in my inside breast pocket; it’s just above my heart.

“Alex, you know what?” I am talking about ‘Sideways’ again. “Thing about Miles: he winds up opening that bottle of Chateau Cheval Blanc, just in a fast-food restaurant. Some fucking McDonald’s or other with yellow plastic benches He’s got the wine bottle brown-bagged and he’s pouring into a red plastic cup beneath the table. I mean, his book deal fell through, Maya’s essentially told him to ‘piss off’, but *this* is the moment he chooses.  That’s why I carry the papers. Who knows: I may wind up in a Jack in the Box somewhere. I may break my sobriety, sign the scrip, drink a fifth or something! Hell, that’s what got me here, right? (That and my charming milieu of mental offences, plain fuckery I tell you). That—that–is why I carry the papers.”

Except Marston is not the Jack in the Box unless the residence has exchanged its historical status for a business permit. Cheeseburgers al fresco in the English garden, pommes frites for everyone.  No, Marston remains Marston, and I am not Miles today. I’m Thomas Daniel Hofman—that’ll be my Hancock—and I’m here to hurt.

Jens is replaced by David Byrne. Our song: ‘This Must Be the Place (Naïve Melody)’. On our first Christmas, Jenny gifted me with the ‘Stop Making Sense’ CD featuring this tune. We celebrated a humble holiday, our diminutive tree stretching to its tallest height by virtue of an available end table—it was maybe all of five feet this tree, makeshift stand and all—and we exchanged few presents. I remember Black Oaxacan figurines of birds from the Mingei. The CD. Maybe one or two other niceties. We kissed though bereft of mistletoe and listened to The Heads sing:

Home is where I want to be

But I guess I’m already there

I come home, she lifted up her wings

I guess that this must be the place.

It could have been our wedding song—that would later belong to ‘In My Life’, which now never ceases to underwhelm me. It just doesn’t hold the weight of Naïve Melody, the latter’s image of a winged woman singing into a man’s open and receiving mouth something of simple gorgeousness. Jenny, she wore wings; my lips, they were parted. I received it all.

These days, though welcoming and invitingly orange, Amethyst is not my home. I have no home. Jenny’s not there. We don’t share the same space. She’s not next to me, we’re not holding down the mattress with our paired weight, she’s not underneath me in the throes (how I miss making love—I haven’t so much as touched myself in five months); her wings are neatly folded in between her shoulder blades, at rest for now and I am loathe to think they will unfold again for someone new. It is my least favorite thought, though I know it an eventuality, and I hold a double standard: I’d fuck anything that moves to pretend being whole again. I need le petit mort to parry the bigger death. I need to take myself to the point of release and shiver spasmodically into someone. The Girl from the City of Twelve Bridges, I knew her halfway, and I’m halfway to contrition.

I’m just an animal looking for a home, you understand. I’m sorry.

The Marston House is in view and I remark firstly the giant firs which stand sentinel at the parcel’s entrance. I have a photograph, the large one you have blown up when purchasing wedding pictures, and it sits at the foot of my bed at Amethyst. In the photo, I am insouciantly leaning back against a tree, cradling Jenn’s forearms as we share a kiss. Her bouquet is in hand (the day’s welcome trespasser had been a lady beetle, which’d found home among the sepals) and—the camera caught this perfectly—there is a light from the morning sun, our heads enveloped in some Byzantine corona. We are a gold leaf fresco, something Justinian. We are a contrapposto. She leans into me and I accept. I accept, and in remembering, I touch the available fir, which is reddish and scaly; I turn my back to lean against it, just like in the photo. The space is empty in front of me—I see the expanse of Marston’s front lawn where we had also taken pictures: Jenny in the grass, then me pretending handsome with hair cut too short. I remember the photographer vaguely: we wound up on her gallery wall, and she cried during our ceremony alongside her husband, her assistant. Love was in the air, a contagion, a stubborn lady beetle descending and holding onto the day’s floral offerings. I remember this. Jenny’s dress had hand-embroidered butterflies; we released Monarchs like spent and gilded leaves. We had such a lovely day.

Something is wrong here. I take pictures of the empty fir with my phone, with my eyes, which are stubbornly dry. I feel okay. I feel okay: that’s what’s wrong. I want to feel ‘not okay’ and immediately. I want instant gratification, an instant DISsatisfaction. I want to be empty, I want to be a room without furniture; I want my heart to know its hollow. My Cheval Blanc needs to be opened and I want a fifth of New Amsterdam, rather I want to want one. I am in the cathedral after all. I’m paying my tithes and I have been penitent this whole time, these past six months, so why is it I feel nothing? Make my re-birthday cake mean something tonight. Olive oil buttercream will be nice. I’ll use the fancy Oleamea. I’ll light a votive. Fuck.

“Alex,” I am telling her something original, “My best friend died when I was young—I was thirteen, remember?—and you ask me what does my adolescent self feel.

“Jason—you know I talked to him the day he died. Well, actually, I talked to his mother Judy. And she said Jason was receiving morphine. That they were making him comfortable. He was on the living room sofa—I can picture this—with his one remaining leg, one stupid leg left. And I hear Jason in the background, right? I hear him. He says, “I love you, Thom,” and he can’t muster the exclamation point, but it’s there. I was fucking thirteen. I used to explore the sewers with him, play Dungeons&Dragons all night. We never said, ‘I love you.’ I mean, we were too young for that and we were too busy—I dunno—doing Boy stuff. Girls and spiders and RC cars. I certainly didn’t know how—it wasn’t said at our house. I hung up the phone and I didn’t say, ‘I love you’ back. I didn’t say it back.” I pause.

“Anyway I sat in the back of the car later that day—my parents were grocery shopping and I was in the Nissan Stanza with my brother. I was playing with some cassette tapes my mom and dad bought for me that day—this consolation prize—and my brother, he says, ‘Aren’t you supposed to be sad or something?’ I remember putting on a frowny face—I tried to look all sullen and shit. But it was fake. I mean, two cassettes! Score! Alex: I didn’t know,” and I gesture with an errant hand, “I didn’t know. This was all too big for me. Like staring at the night sky and feeling afraid because you know it goes on forever, and I didn’t want to think of Heaven or Jesus or eternity—all these things scared me. I just didn’t know.” I repeat: “I didn’t say ‘I love you’ back. You know?”

And you love me till my heart stops

Love me till I’m dead

“Jenny.” I whisper her name to the fir. This is affect. I’m trying to conjure something. The memories are intact, but the feelings attached are once-removed. I am staring from six inches within my skull. Perhaps deeper into the cathedral. That may work. In the meantime, it’s not okay to feel okay; I wish for the opposite, because the haversack is surprisingly light and my pockets are empty of stones. “Oh, Jenny,” I repeat her name as I’ve done the past six months, sometimes upon awakening. Where is the accompanying somber, that palpable feeling of loss? Is this my consolation prize, my two cassettes in the form of a comfortable numbness, a lightness even? I don’t want it. I want something venal; I want to leave a red handprint on the tree. I want more than anything to cry at least. ‘I’m not okay’, I try and convince myself. I can’t be, I say, walking deeper into the Marston lot. I haven’t been. Two weeks ago, I was searching for some miracle of magnanimity from anyone, from Jenny even, when the feelings were so low as to be mortal. And now I want them back. I need to affix a signature.

I’m beneath the gable, and this is where Jenny and I had our first dance. Again, it was ‘In My Life’ and it’s not worth even changing the song playing over the headphones. I remember not remembering the song as it played that June day. We had a cantankerous and diminutive guitarist, hair like a toupee, unnecessarily feathered with a classical guitar near half his size. At last minute, we had asked him to perform ‘Autumn Leaves’ instead, but he flatly refused claiming lack of advance notice. So Beatles it was. There IS the line ‘I loved you more.’ I think to that. I think to that godawful exchange:

“I think I love you more than you love me!”

“I think you’re right.”

 And I hurled a book across the room out of sheer impotence–‘The Language of Letting Go’ maybe, how appropriate would that have been—a kinetic act to direct something, if for a second. Something smashed and it was also my heart. I threw a book because an old soul hates nothing more than a new soul guided by borrowed wisdom.

 I’ve told Alex this story; I tell myself now. Jenny was Isolde to my Tristan, but then there was the proof of inequity and I feared abandonment in a way that pitted my core.

(“A ten, Alex. It was a fucking ten”).

Except I don’t feel a ten now. I’m benumbed. I pragmatically take pictures, for there are details I remember:

1. The old window awnings, red and white striped, sagging swaths of canvas above pebbled glass panes.
2. The supporting walls and their stone templates, the overhanging soffits,
3. The brick inlaid porch beneath our feet as we danced cheek to cheek, eyes closed.
4. The window formed by the supports, the place people stood as we shuffled our embrace—people I did not even notice until coming to after the last chord was played.

I may as well be inspecting the house for termites, photographing the slow decay; the act of photographing is just an exercise and I’m like a crime scene photographer, shooting door knobs and corpses and spent shells. I am documenting a static thing and there is no inner movement. I’m as dumb as the support beams, six feet of corpus, and hollow. I move on.

Lastly the garden, an Imperial affair beset with rows of rosebushes. In June they would have been deadheaded, I don’t remember. I just remember orange flowers, which the Monarchs took to upon release and the chevron of hedgerows which Jenny and I navigated together to reach the aisle. We marched arm in arm, we were inseparable and there was no pomp of groom walking first, bride walking last. We held hands as we stared straight ahead toward the mouth of the serpent fountain, the wall inlay that served as altar. We walked slow, and I retrace the steps now, just as purposefully. Surely this will loose something, my chest is tight and wanting of release. Spring forth flowers of romance, all your dying petals and incumbent thorns!  Explode my chest, turn me inside-out. I stop at a large urn planted mid-lawn. It overflows with tendriling flowers, yellow-orange, and Jenny and I had paused here, too. To separate hands would have been ill omen, but we had our protective spell at the disposal: “Bread and butter, bread and butter,” we whispered. Bread and butter never separate—there was the fact of us and, even with fingers trailing either side of the urn, momentarily unlinked, we were inseparable. Forever would be.

“Bread and butter,” I whisper now. “Bread and butter, bread and.” I don’t say the last ‘butter’. I pass the urn into the mouth of the serpent; I stand where I stood that June day, in view of the gardener’s house and its archway. I could pass through it, but I think—I think– I’m done. I feel nothing. My Sakura is capped, will remain so for now, and rests close to my unmoved heart. Fuckit, I’m okay.

Postscript: I write this on March 26, 2022. I am in Jenny’s apartment tending to the Boys while Jenny vacations in Idylewild. She will be gone for three days; meanwhile I sleep on our old couch, rather I do not sleep. I write. Jenny has sent me a photo of her atop Idlewyld Mountain this morning and I inexplicably cry. I have just written the words ‘bread and.’ No ‘butter.’ I cry, and text Jenny as much. There is no reply, but she doesn’t know I’m writing this. She doesn’t know this is in fact the mother lode, the Chateau Cheval Blanc. I miss her. I sob, but quietly, so as not to alert Cayde. I’ve baked a cake. Happy re-birthday. I uncap my pen.

Six months from today, Jenny and I will be divorced. She probably doesn’t remember this, but I first told Jenny I was going to marry her on March 30^th, 2000. We’ve been together for 26 years. Bread and butter, bread and butter.

Bread and.

Hummingbird Heart

Twice in the canyon today. Once at daybreak when it was 37 degrees and the birds were waking; second time in a more crepuscular hour when an explosion of parrots dominated the eucalyptus, conure hybrids from escaped cages happy to be alive.

Cayde was away in the desert with his cousins, watching the jet planes do their practice runs, and there was a particular ease to the day. I had Finn for the better part of the morning and—typical—he asked for ‘Wench Wies’ (French Fries) so I atypically took him to the fast food joint where we could get a cheeseburger to share, and where he could get his potatoes. We sat in the breakfast nook, and passed the burger back and forth, exchanging bites. Later, when I was writing, he snuck into my closet and—discovering some foot powder—gleefully antiqued the house with aplomb, dusting everything in white. Little imp. Too tired to clean things up, me having been awake since three, we just retired to bed leaving the house white as an Elizabethan mask, his stuffies and rugs resolutely covered in talcum snow.

Jenn and I cleaned things up later—together—a quiet team, and it was then that Jenn showed me the mail. We received some monies—substantial monies, monies with promised and residual return that will change our lives.

And I celebrated by taking a walk to the canyon where I would see the paraques and warblers, but first I passed the bar where Mac was working and I swung around the countertop to hug and kiss her because she is beautiful and teaches piano to children; still I said: “just passing through.” And Mac gripped my hand seeing that I was happy and because my life is an Altman film starring Richard Gere, and I sat in the canyon with the leaves all fire-shot and stared at the beauty of a telephone pole which peeks out over the canyon rim.

On the way home, I serendipitously ran into Jenn who was just leaving in her car to pick up Cayde and I climbed in so we could all be together. Once in the backseat Cayde said all these bodhisattva things, my little foul-mouthed empath, who also said: “Mommy—you have a shitty memory—sometimes you say things to me twice in a row.” My little bodhisattva boy whose head is matched by his heart and who remarks to me that he wants to help the homeless and cries at movies when families get separated.

We went to a chicken joint to celebrate where we sat beneath space heaters and were warmed inside and out, me enjoying a bed of chicken oysters and celebratory libation, and where I looked lovingly at my bride, my champion, my girl, my Isolde, the love of my life (and I’m the Story of hers); and felt the contentment of being in absolute control of my destiny, no longer feeling lost as the setting moon, wanting only the sunshine of better days.

Every day is a new day, some better than others, and today was a day writ in giant red letters, like the Beatitudes, and I was happy for everything in my life: napping with Finn in a talcum-dusted house; hearing Cayde, my backseat Buddha, speak his compassion; working together with my wife in loving our family; the explosions of birds, which not only populate the trees but which explode thrice in this, my hummingbird heart.

Yes and yes and yes; and yes

We were having coffee before a show, and sharing a horribly unseasoned soup. The vichyssoise required Cholula, but my eyes needed nothing more than gazing at my wife.

I not only love her—I’m in love with her. There’s a qualitative difference, and being in love is better than just loving someone. I’m in love with Jenn, and the press of her lips in the morning is all I need to get through the day.

When you’re in love, it’s like you’ve achieved something; like you ran through a tunnel and came out the opposite end bursting with sun-glow.

Being in love is every Neruda poem, every Shakespeare sonnet; it’s waking up every morning, saying ‘good morning’ and meaning it.

It’s about being in love and in lust and wanting and writing words back and forth, a bad Henry Miller impression, just wanting each other and entwined legs at bedtime.

It’s about a cup of coffee.

Or a bad cup of soup.

It’s about feeling shitty to the point you have to be in the hospital, but your wife takes your hand regardless.

It’s about looking into each other’s eyes not noticing what color they are.

“Here, Babe,” and I gift Jenny some flowers.

“They’re hydrangeas, just like on our wedding day.”

I love you, Jenny. With every ounce of my being. Like Joyce wrote: ‘yes and yes and yes.’

I will top Joyce, and add one more: ‘yes’

Plank Pose

“You will need these blocks. No, no. Beneath the shoulders. This one, your hip.”

She taps my waist without permission, and suddenly I’m suspended on blocks in a pose I used to be familiar with–one I could do by myself–but now I’m pilloried by Styrofoam bricks. It’s a bad day when your yoga instructor has seemingly forgotten that breath is the most important thing and instead positions your legs and arms A, B, & C; when she positions you like a wayward starfish in a recessed tide, and you’re left holding your air in a darkened studio.

My wife does a headstand against the mirror. She used to be a hundred pounds heavier, a weight which has somehow transferred its molecules to this part of me which doesn’t show its gain, but sits heavy regardless.

We change poses and the instructor is relentless. She slides a metal chair my direction because she thinks my Downward Dog is somehow inaccurate. All I want to do is breathe, so I can continue breathing, but she keeps making me stop. My diaphragm holds a hitch and I try not to cry. We’re not in Child’s pose after all. Can we just Shivasna already?

She positions my hands on the chair, and it’s embarrassing. She murmurs, half to herself, “You’re not having a good day,” which is superfluous because she’s having me plank on a folding chair, telling me to straighten out when one look at my spine would inform her that I’m completely and irreparably crooked.

“Better?” she asks.

How do I say, ‘no.’

“Sure. Better.”

At the front of the class, Ann demonstrates a perfect and unsupported headstand, a straight and poised line, and I want to be her for just a second, in order to feel some sort of alignment, which my body can’t seem to handle at present.

I draw up a plan to somehow survive this class; I draw up a plan, and it takes me a few days to find my breath, but part of the plan requires not quitting.

 

 

 

 

 

Movement Erases Meaning

Cayden notices my car has developed a bruise, an indentation in the hood, just above the VW insignia.

“Where did that come from, Daddy?”

I really don’t care, had forgotten about it, but have to explain while Cayde and I drive the ten minutes to the Natural History Museum.

“Oh—it’s nothing, Dude.”

(It’s just an unseemly dent, not the end of the world)

“I was parked outside the market, and a guy with a big truck said he didn’t see my car—you know how those trucks sometimes have tire racks on the back?” I attempt a quick explanation.

Cayde’s playing with the AC vent while also surfing a hand outside the open car window—we are measures of inefficiency—and he answers: “Yeah? Go on.”

Story is this: a guy with an SUV reared into my car while trying to navigate out of a parking spot, and it was a panicked lady in a flowered frock who rushed into the market to tell me. To tell everyone actually.

“Does anyone own a gray Beetle?” she implores the backed-up line of patrons, and I’m holding an avocado and a six-pack of Le Croix.

I’m buying the pamplemousse variety of sparkling water, which could be a fine title for the lipstick on the lady’s cracked lips. We could also venture into ‘aubergine’ territory, were we to keep calling fruits by their gallic monikers, and lipsticks by their fruit counterparts.

“Fuck.” I slump my wares down. This obviously isn’t gonna end well. <Clean up on Aisle Three>

“Me. The Bug. That’s me,” I hang my head, then raise a hand as if still in third grade.

“Well, this man hit your car and he’s looking for you and I’m sorry and he’s looking for you. He’s out there,” she says pointing, “And he’s looking for you and I said I’d help.”

“Alright, Ma’am.”

I almost want to grab her hands, because she’s pointing and having her point be a near Scarecrow gesture with this up and down shaking wrist, and a finger that could either be directing me north or south.

“He went thataway, or he could’ve gone thataway.”

“Thank you, Ma’am. I’ll be right back.”

“He’s out there!”

“I’m sure, Ma’am. I’ll be right back.”

There’s a Golden Retriever at the entryway and I give the dog an errant pat while I cross onto the sidewalk, doorway chime reliably signaling my exit. I look both left and right, then decide I just need to go check on my car. I’m expecting a sideswipe or something, a crumpled door.

It’s a good dent, certainly, just on the hood. I sigh. Not too bad.

The perp is one of those Toyota FJ6 numbers, a really obnoxious blue, that’s still parked in front of my car. I eye the tire rack, line it to the dent. It’s a casual case of 2008, me always driving something smaller than the next guy.

A man with a neat moustache and a neater khaki jacket bursts out of the next-door establishment, which happens to be an art-therapy studio.

I guess if you just hit a Bug, you’d imagine you’d be exchanging insurance information in oil pastel. I was at the corner grocer in my work clothes next to the cigarettes and Lotto tickets.

I point my beard at him—“I think you’re looking for me…? Lady in there said something.”

And the guy is so apologetic. He runs his hands in tight circles over fine-clippered temples. For the second time in five minutes, I have to say: “It’s alright.”

“I just didn’t see you,” he offers. He says some et cetera things. He has a pack of Marlboro reds in his jetted left breast pocket, but he doesn’t smell of tobacco.

“Your car—smaller, didn’t see it.”

We were parallel-parked. It would have been hard for him to return to his car, and not realize his boxed-in predicament, but I digress.

I thought instantly of the day when Jenn and I, six months shy of our wedding, drove back from a hospital after her mom’s surgery had failed. Some jackass backed into us though we’d all been queued up at a red light. We all had our blinkers on in this unspoken social agreement that—without any thought toward trickery—we were all going to be turning right. Said jackass broke the social contract, backed into us, decided to open his doors and travel on whatever brave vapors to greet my wife at the car window.

“Wow—we didn’t see you. Your car, ‘s just so small.”

Drunk Guy shrugged—his inebriation was obvious—he turned his head and scratched his nose while halfway inside Jenn’s driver-side door. He then rested his elbows on the windowframe.

He had an SUV, we were in a Nissan Sentra. But we were in all agreement, by manner of traffic light and blinkers in synch, just thirty seconds prior and before any bumpers needed meeting, that we were going forwards, then right. Rules of the road and all. Why was this incident necessary?

Reverse is not usually a direction you volunteer to go.

Drunk Guy sniffed, like some James Franco preview with a broken manner of speech and a purposefully unkempt mop of hair. He turned his head away, then back toward my wife as affect. James Franco is an awful actor; so was this guy.

“So sorry. Just such a bad day,” He then got brave, figuring an easy solution, “Hey—know what? I can pay you for your license frame. I think it’s the only damage.” He pretends to assess Jenn’s grille, his eyes not even making it past the left front tire.

“I can give you twenty bucks,” he sniffs, “Looks like you need to change out the license frame. I mean wow. Just didn’t see you there. SUCH a bad day.”

A twenty is pittance in comparison to a night in the tank, so it was easy arithmetic on Drunk Guy’s part. To his only credit, the only damage did wind up being just a dented license plate frame.

Then my wife did the proudest fiercest thing I’ve ever seen her do.

Cayden would call this ‘SAVAGE’ or whatever new slang it is when you burn someone, else kick karma aside like a bad habit.

My wife—she was wearing a butterfly dress and a cardigan—she stepped out of the car onto El Cajon Boulevard in front of the McDonald’s, just left of the Arco, my wife all of 5’4”.

She rose up, jutted her chin upward, slammed the door, and asked Drunk Guy, “Did your Mom just die today? Did you have to watch your Mom die today? TELL ME PLEASE about your bad day,” these last words said slow and with clenched teeth.

We had been up for hours in rooms with lilac air fresheners and a bountiful supply of Kleenex.

A surgeon had said, not an hour previous, “I’m sorry, but…” just like in a rerun of ‘Emergency’, or ‘St Elsewhere’, or ER’—any incarnation of those medical shows, where every fifteen minutes a white-coated actor with an aluminum clipboard and a failed mark in Method class, says, “We regret to inform you…”

Jenn tried to meet eyes with Drunk Guy. In this short period of time, the traffic light had already turned red again, my wife’s mother was stroking out in similar color, and the goddamn neon signs were buzzing by some magic of inert gas. Drunk Guy ran his fingers through his hair, looking sheepishly downward. He probably got laid a lot, with that hair, but my wife was meanwhile only interested in laying him into a grave-plot at this particular moment with the flashing of her eyes.

My wife gave him one last glare, moved to get back in the car, but then spun around one last time. She held out her palm.

“Hey–sure. You know what? Gimme those twenty fucking dollars.”

He stammered, “Wha…?”

“Give me those twenty fucking dollars. It was your idea.”

He obliged.

“Asshole.” And Jenn slammed the door.

Dave’s Flowers was open across the way, also with a neon sign buzzing, but who’s gonna remember the neon exclamation of flowers while people are meanwhile stopped speechless at the gas station near the intersection—having heard everything—people inching out of the Mickey D’s drive-thru, suddenly guilty of their nuggets and watching us pull away, with a dented license plate frame and a crumpled twenty thrown atop the console.

 “Tell me please about your bad day.”

“We regret to inform you.”

 Cayden and I try to find parking outside the Natural History Museum (the NAT), but there’s a carnival of catering trucks, guys offloading chairs and vases of fake flowers. There’s also a slog of Memorial Day tourists attempting to find parking spaces while simultaneously trying to navigate a different city. This cuts both their speed and ability in half.

There is a sudden slew of hazard lights and cars pulled to either side of the parking lot. I don’t think these people are actually waiting for parking spaces. They’re just suddenly automotive ostriches that need to put their Triple-A certified heads in the proverbial sand for a second. Which is to say, it’s busy.

“Goddammit. When I teach you how to drive, Cayden, don’t do that.” I’m gripping the wheel with one hand on twelve, referring to the Subaru Forester, which has suddenly stopped in the middle of the thoroughfare. I point and drink an iced coffee with the other hand, the one that’s supposed to be manning the two o’ clock position.

Twelve is the mean of ten and two, so mathematically I’m still in the right; these double-parked tourists, meanwhile, need both calculator and compass to negotiate a parking lot.

Cayden smiles—he’s a smart-ass—“’Course not Daddy. Instead I’ll just yell at people who break the driving laws, just like you do.”

I’m such a good example, sometimes, in being both right and wrong at once.

“Well, I don’t do that as much anymore,” I say contritely, nodding in a halfway contrite gesture, still with just one hand on the wheel.

He shrugs.

“I know, Daddy,” he says smilingly, nonplussed. I take a sip of my drink and look at him out of the corner of my eye.

I don’t think he’s fucking with me, but you never can tell.

(He said earlier in the week, also while driving, about something he saw on ‘YouTube’:

“You know I can hear better than you. It’s science.”

I remind him that he likes Marshmelo and Ariana Grande. High court judges would grant me pardon and probably consolatory monies to boot.

“Not to be mean, Daddy,” and he always says this before being invariably uncouth, “You’re almost forty and I’m only nine, so I can hear the high-pitch things you can’t. Your ears can’t hear what mine do. It’s science.”

I could make a really snarky comment because every morning, it’s like he can’t hear my voice, particularly with regard to putting on shoes. 17,400 htz is the usual divide and—he’s correct—it is science, but my voice falls way below the threshold.

“There! Like that!” he suddenly says, pointing upwards, a sticky-haired, nine-year old Archimedes enjoying a eureka moment. “That noise!”

I shake my head while I pull up to a four-way. I wave on an unsure bicyclist.

“You’re making shit up, Kid.”

“No, no!—I could hear that. I bet you didn’t.”

“Those. Are. The. Brakes, Dude. I heard them, too.”

And I pump the pedal a hard second time as emphasis. The shoulder harness catches slightly as he chugs forward a little bit. I smile to myself.

“Guess the brakes need some work, Kid.”)

I have to pull around the Forester and I look longingly at the empty handicap stall just feet away from the museum. I actually have a handicap placard, but it’s only for when Finn’s with me, so says the law, so says my general conscience.

“Wish I could park there, Dude,” I still remark, being pretend wistful.

These tourists with their hazard lights, the offloads of—what’s that?—a potted fern tree? A faux Roman column? Delivery guys push random dollies through the parking lot, their cargo wrapped in pink bubble wrap.

“Why not?” Cayde shrugs.

Cayde—he’s usually the policeman in all this, well-versed on the handicap laws. He’s not the flight-risk, or the kid with extra genetic material. He usually eschews even a feint at cheating. We only use the placard when Finn’s in the car. PERIOD. It’s California state law, and Cayden’s, too.

I raise an eyebrow while pulling around the Subaru. A trademark of the gifted child is an ultimate and nagging sense of fairness. Fatal flaw, really.

Cayde continues: “If a policeman stops us, you can just tell him I’m autistic.” And I choke back a laugh and a gasp at once, because this is an awfully obtuse thing to say, and I stammer: “Wait-what?”

“Yeah—just say I’m autistic. Like that one student Mommy had,” and I think about lecturing him, but moral relativism is the other trait of gifted children, the trait that manifests when it’s fast and frustratingly realized that–wow—life really isn’t fucking fair. When cheating, slyly, and in small portions, is compensation for the bigger letdown that Lady Justice hasn’t really been blind all this time. She peeks with one eye out of that blindfold of hers. Karma’s supposed to be the bitch, but Lady Justice has a backroom reputation, as well.

Since we’re already cheating and listening to Eminem because Mommy’s not in the car (and we’re at that point in the song where Eminem says, “You’re pointless as Rapunzel with fucking cornrows/ You’re like normal, fuck being normal”) I, shrug, hang up the placard on the rear-view, and pull into the slot.

The engine ticks for a second while I sit, keys in hand.

“Cayden—you can’t say things like that. We’ve had so many conversations…You know that Down Syndrome and…You know about autism…You know…”

He looks at me, and this is the same kid who last week came to me upset because some Bad News Bear on the Little League baseball field said, “Hey—you’re that kid with the retard brother.”

He looks over at me, then looks down. We’re parked in a prime parking space at the NAT, and I fathom, for a second, just how confusing this all is for him. His hair falls briefly in front of his eyes and neither of us makes an attempt to brush the offending forelock away. I exhale and we both exit the car, the leather creaking guiltily, which I’m sure that as a forty year old, I can hear and—because science—my kid can’t.

The doors shut heavily.

Cayde rounds the car and inspects the hood again. He rubs the dent and—if he could whistle—might actually do so, like a charlatan mechanic surveying his prey. Selling a carburetor to a guy with a broken cigarette lighter.

“OoO–that’s a good one, Daddy.”

He says the same things when he regards my cuts and bruises from work, from when beaks do their damage. As a zookeeper, I’m obligated to say, “Anything with a mouth can bite, Dude.” It’s both punchline and truth. Don’t touch—you’ll get hurt.”

Or, at least, maybe you will.

Cayde looks up at me, squinting.

“You gonna get that fixed?”

I cross my arms, and regard the hood, pretending to really deliberate the whole thing with a puckered expression.

The statute of limitations is probably up on this one already because you’re supposed to call within twenty-four hours to make a claim. My car got bruised on Monday; it’s now Saturday. The guy was so nice and apologetic, too.

(“I just wanna make this right,” he said, while I shook his hand).

I finally smile, and drop my arms exaggeratedly. “Probably not, Kid. C’mon, let’s go.”

Jenn said, when I showed the car to her and waved off the damage, “Well we’re not Car People,” as if that explained every and all nonchalance. Probably did. Jenn drove around with a dented license plate forever, and I think we drank Drunk Guy’s twenty.

I try to explain to Cayde as we walk away from our illegal parking job:

“If I get it fixed”—and I think of my Bug on blocks, with its hood removed, and with all the estimates and invoices I’d have to sign—“Then that guy who hit me would have to pay a lot of money, and we’d have to pay money, and the people in charge of us paying money would make sure we’d both have to continue paying money…”

I know I’m not making sense to him.

“Make sense, Dude?”

Occasionally, and only occasionally, Cayde knows when to rhetorically surrender.

“Sure, Daddy.” He quickly grips my arm and says, “I love you.” He’s excited we’re going to the museum, so we walk away from the car, and I trust he’s happy.

The Subaru still has hazard lights blinking as if a parking space is going to open up soon.

“But…” Cayde says.

Dammit—always the ‘but.’

“But if you had a Lamborghini and got a dent, you’d fix it, right?”

We’re descending the stairwell to the entrance of the museum, which is actually on the basement level. The first floor has a T. rex sculpture, and the whole first floor is currently being decorated with fake trees and crepe paper. Post museum close, there’ll be a prom.

“If I could afford a Lamborghini, Kid, I wouldn’t have a Lamborghini.”

This is my best off-the-cuff and Mobius philosophy. Either that or a platitude you’d read on a Good Earth teabag. Take your pick which. Keep in mind, I’m a coffee guy.

Cayde jumps down three steps before grabbing the handle of the door, and I throw out my spent Americano while catching up. He’s quick to measure me up suddenly.

“You’re right, Daddy.” He affixes a hat to his head. “If I had a million dollars, I’d spend it on traveling the world and eating good food.” Then he opens the door to where the ankylosaurus statue resides and darts in.

I pause, door cocked. ‘Did I just teach a lesson, or get completely schooled?’ I can’t figure out if he’s being placative, or sarcastic.

These are the things parents have to worry about. Do I call this one into the as yet fictive Dad Insurance Co.? Give my SSN and offer up my parenting license as evidence I’m capable of doing this?

“Excuse me, Operator, I think my kid’s smarter than me. He also mentioned unattainable sports cars, and we live in a 900 sq. ft. bungalow.”

“Hold please.”

No-fault insurance was a popular concept when I was Cayden’s age. Sounds the easy solution. I walk into the museum like a flat tire.

I find Cayden by the Foucault pendulum, where a brass globe—suspended by a cable and artificially swinging in perpetual motion—methodically knocks over wooden dominoes. Cayde is hanging over the railing with his flat-brimmed cap on point, and he’s making like he’s going to try and keep the pendulum from moving.

“Dude, don’t,” and I yank him backwards by the belt loop. I jab at the sign that reads, ‘Don’t touch.’

I redirect: “What is the pendulum about?” (We’ve been here before, and we know the pendulum, the hall of skulls; we’ve gone through the photo exhibits where I hide the placards and quiz him: ‘What animal is this?’ while we circle the gallery, sometimes running. I point upwards at the suspended reproductions and he’ll say, “Megaladon. Gray whale.” These are easy games. He doesn’t read worth shit, but he knows his science.

“The pendulum? It means there’s gravity, that the earth is moving.”

“Yeah, but how, Kid?”

I’m not going to let him off easy.

“This stays in place,” he points vaguely at the pendulum, which is staid in its arc, “But the earth moves, and so the blocks get knocked down.”

Two blocks have already been knocked down. His is not the best explanation, but I say, “That’s right, Dude. Good job.”

He runs off to learn about tectonic plates and I don’t want to explain earthquakes today, still I do. This while Foucault’s pendulum proves, superfluously, metronomically, while trapped in harnessed motion, that the earth is spinning like fucking mad.

“Daddy, you probably shouldn’t talk like that,” Cayden says on the way home.

“You told me you were going to yell at cars, too, when you grow up.” I glance over at him. He’s smiling.

“Oh,” I smile while looking in the opposite direction. “You were being ironic.”

Welcome to the Big Spin, Kid; I easily blow the needless stop sign at the top of the hill.

Welcome to movement erasing meaning. I think you’re ahead of me on this one, Son.

Women’s Day and Bright Shining Dots

It’s International Women’s Day. There is history and her-story.
There’s this misnomer: ‘Behind every successful man is a good woman.’ This is a misnomer because it suggests a rank and file. If I’m successful as a man, it’s not because women are peeping over my shoulder; it’s because they are standing right next to me.
What does ‘being a successful man’ even mean?
We are human; the genders are equal in their strengths. Sometimes different, but the yin and yang wouldn’t be what it is without a tight compartment of unity despite difference.
You don’t ‘grab crotches’, you don’t prescribe to the Genesis idea that men have headship in the family because Man is the closer iteration of some bearded God.
No—you work together.
Can I list the women who have elevated my life, who are not the ‘behind’ women that have led to my perhaps success?
My wife. I’m a bright shining dot because of her. She is my everything.
My mom. She loves my dad so much, and I learned how to love by watching them together.
My grandmother, and how I miss her: I would tend her garden, she would water my own garden by asking the simple question: ‘How are you?” We would talk for hours.
My Aunt Deb McMahon: She gave me the blueprint for adulthood.
Maggie Jaffe: prolific poet to the end. Sadly beautiful and a force of prose.
Janet: who is my Mamó and oils my Tin-Man joints.
Elaine: my landlady on paper, but better my friend.
Debbie: who takes my kid to plays and brightens his eyes.
The labbies and techs at work, also my sisters and my cousins, all my surrogate moms, the women who teach me things in my career, the women who inspire me to be a better technician and human being; my co-workers, my friends.
Happy International Women’s Day.

Trees, Horror, and a Smoky Eye

“Turn that off,” I suggest to Jenn, while she’s doing her daily ablutions and applying powders to her face.

It’s early. Jenn has already done the gym and has committed to wearing her workout clothes to work, just sneakily disguised beneath a form-fitting dress that suits her. It’s what she’ll wear to school where, as teacher, she’ll change the world by manner of clocking in for her shift.
“Turn that shit off. I’ll grab some coffee and join you.”
She’s listening to NPR while doing her face and the news of the world gets more harrowing as the weekend approaches. She obliges, clicks off the stream.
I’ve been cursing more lately, but I don’t care. (My grandma would be lecturing me, were she still here). But the thing about cursing is that it’s the same thing Freud said about laughter: it’s the subconscious crashing through and exploding decorum for the sake of expression.
I grab a cup of coffee, peel back the bathtub curtains, and sit on the edge of the tub while she adjusts her mirror.
We’ve been in constant conversation recently. Talk talk talk. I got her a staghorn fern for Christmas because she’s been wanting to re-design our kitchen nook so that it’s more comfortable. So that she can lounge in it while I do my cooking, and so we can spend more time together in the evening conversing before putting the kids to bed. Doing all the rituals we do in perpetually getting ready for tomorrow.
The staghorn: it just had a bud. I am happy to report it is thriving.
I sit on the edge of the tub, which I crawled out of seemingly hours before. I’m a night owl, and stay up late writing. I end the night always with a bath before I crawl into bed with Jenn, before I wrap my arms around her in sleep.
I received a cautionary query from a good friend recently—he has a sister with bipolarity—and he asked, “Are you manic right now?”
It does run in my family, but I say, “Oh–fuck, no.” I’ve got a battery of therapists and angels watching over me. I’m just happy, fully, right now and need to exploit that. A lifestyle change and meds punching my pineal have me different. And with yesterday, the Doomsday Clock having been advanced to near midnight, I figure I need to stay laser-sharp and perhaps PRETEND mania the closer to 12 o’ Apocalypse we get.
Isaac Asimov was asked: “What would you do if you knew tomorrow you’d die?”
He said: “I’d type faster.”
So I write and write into the dead of night, read all the news. I report all this to Jenn while she decides on a smoky eye to match her dress, as we sit in our little bathroom.
I narrate all my on-line adventures of the night prior. I gave up TV. Can’t even fucking work the remote—Cayde does it for me. (I only watch ‘Jeopardy’, and last night I impressed the hell outta Cayde by ringing up a score of 54,600. I knew Final Jeopardy: Arthur Miller, 1949,  ‘Death of a Salesman, and what it’s like to fail).

I write to people all over the world every night.

That’s the cool thing about the internet: so long as people aren’t busy blackening their souls and depositing evil shit anonymously on social media threads, you can talk to anyone, anywhere. I write to my friend who’s in Antarctica; I write to my writer friend across town; I say, “Hey” to my sandbox-buddy in Guatemala; I send letters to Chicago and St. Louis and Africa and Finland.
Jenn is beautiful—doesn’t need the make-up, but rituals are important, and what we do to feel beautiful needs no apology.
Bertolt Brecht said: ‘What times are these that to talk about trees is almost a crime, because it implies silence about so many horrors?’
He also said: ‘This then is all. It’s not enough, I know.’
I prefer to talk about trees and horror in the same sentence, talking fast, because both are important.
I help Jenn out the door by dressing Finn. Purposefully, I dress him in a Superman tee. Remember—Jenn’s got her workout clothes on beneath a dress like some modern-day Clark Kent.

Be super.