Enough!

First of all, Happy Thanksgiving to all! This was a different holiday, as the last few have been as the family has dwindled. In spite of there being only four of us (Chris and my brother and sister) we had a terrific meal at one of New Jersey's deservedly famous diners. In the course of things, several times today I've stopped and thought of all I have to be thankful for, including my friends, and Chris and sobriety and, of course, my health. It was a beautiful fall day here in South Jersey and tomorrow and the rest of the weekend promise to be as lovely. I have a good job where I work with terrific people and I have a raise to look forward to come the new year. I have more than enough.

That said, enough with Black Friday. E-f'ing-nuff! For weeks now we've been bombarded with those idiotic TV commercials about apparently psychotic women training like athletes for Black Friday shopping. Screaming and crying as they plot and plan their strategy to attack the local Macy's or Penney's or Sears. Or WalMart -- you know, that mythical WalMart where all the shoppers are cute-as-pie suburban moms and dads, all height-and-weight proportional, scrubbed clean and dressed real nice in outfits they haven't been stuffed into like kielbasa and that completely cover up their derrieres. Yeah, that WalMart. Stores have been trying to outdo each other in how early they're opening to offer their Doorbusters. (There's another word I wouldn't care if I never saw or heard again, Doorbusters!)

 Of course, this all makes great fodder for the evening news: nitwit news reporters interviewing people who've been camped out since two in the morning, their sale circulars marked up like top-secret D-Day maps.

Nitwit Reporter: So, what brings you out here so early?

Psychotic Shopper: Oh, the sales. You know, it's Black Fry-dee. 

Nitwit Reporter: So you're hoping to get some good deals?

Psychotic Shopper: Yeah, you know, 'cause it's Black Fry-dee...

The world is going to hell, but this is news.

This all begs the question, why do I get so exercised about all this? After all, in another day or two it'll just be the usual Christmas season saturation, but the Black Friday nonsense will have ended. I mean, apart from the fact that it really is annoying.

It's simple, really, I guess. I just don't have that big family any more and I don't need to worry about how I'll afford all the gifts I need to buy and what will I get So-and-So, she's so picky...? I think I miss it. And as the family grows smaller I'm reminded that I'm not that little kid who used to get to stay up until midnight on Christmas eve with my grandparents and my siblings and cousins, eating party food and watching "The Night Before Christmas" and "The Nativity" with the Mabel Beaton marionettes...

And of course it all seems to come so much faster now, whereas all those years ago it seemed like an eternity between the day school let out and Christmas eve. Now it's more like, "Christmas?! Again? Didn't we just have Christmas?"

Like most people I complain about it, but still manage to get a little joy out of it. And now that my own family has become smaller, maybe I can do something this year to make another family's holidays a bit brighter.

In which case I'd better get to bed: it's Black Friday tomorrow and I need my rest!

Some Things to Think About

Not new to many, I suppose, but always worth a look now and then.

Lost: Turtle

I guess I'm a writer. No matter what I do, I'm thinking about writing: going back to work on something I've started, starting something over or starting something new.

Last weekend we went to a wedding in Westchester County, NY -- Chappaqua, to be exact, where the Clintons have a house. We arrived early on Saturday and Chris indulged me by joining me on a drive over to Ossining, to see if I could find John Cheever's house on Cedar Lane. I've been working on a one-man show about Cheever, using his own words from his stories and novels, letters and journals, but it's been difficult to find the story and the structure. Still I soldier on, and I thought if I saw the house where where he had lived it might give me a jolt. Of some sort. I've seen pictures of it and fully expected to be able to find it, to pull over for a few minutes, maybe even catch a glimpse of Cheever's widow (in her 90's now) who would come down the lawn to the road and, on learning why I was there, ask us in for coffee or a drink, show us around -- "Here's where John would do most of his writing... This was his favorite chair... Those were his slippers; would you like to have them?"

Suffice to say none of that happened. But it got my mind going again, unwinding, going back, restructuring in my head the material I've put together. I'll get it one day and the whole thing will come pouring out.

Likewise I saw a production of "August: Osage County" today at the Arden Theater in Philadelphia, a gorgeous production with an array of wonderful performances in a play that's brilliantly deceptive. As I left the theater I was awed by the mastery, the humor and insight of the writing. Yup, that sure did deserve a Pulitzer Prize! But ultimately, after a few hours to think it over, and to read a dissenting review of the original Broadway production, I found it left a kind of bad taste in my mouth -- I'll be glad to share with you why another time -- and I think, ultimately, it's a bit hollow at its apparently brilliant core. And my thoughts went back to another play I've started that I now think I have a better handle on. Thank you, Tracy Letts. So I won't write the big, gay farce -- it'll be funny, for sure, but a little dark, too and it will have heft and hopefully people will come away with something to think about. Of course, I have to write it first, but at least now I have a handle.

Meantime, I might turn back to a little poetry. I pulled out a manila folder full of old poems from my days in Los Angeles, when I was part of a group of writers that took part in regular readings at A Different Light Bookstore on Santa Monica Blvd. in Silverlake. Sundays at Seven, it was called. Some of us wound up being published in a little collection of work with the same title, and when I came back east I was invited to take part in a reading at A Different Light in Manhattan. My selection: a poem entitled "Lost: Turtle". I just read it again after a long time and it is, I think, rather fine. Let me know what you think.

Lost: Turtle


Out here where houses are solid and wide
and the trees, celadon and bottle-green,
scrub the sky, on a telephone pole a sign:
Lost: turtle.


Printed in a father's hand,
exasperated father
whose promise of replacements --
puppy, kitten, neon tetra --
meet son's small voice upraised
like a little fist: No! No!
Another will not do, and so:
Lost: turtle.


Forever, I'm afraid,
plodding and unnoticed as an old waiter,
in the shrubs, in the tall grasses
fizzing with insects.
Lost. Turtle.


Yet son sleeps soundly, fists unfurled
as father, empty glass in hand
sits on the dark edge of a bed,
feeling for an instant what the boy feels.
It grips his heart and makes him shiver.
It is hope. And it is in the house.

Circadian Rhythm Disruption, or The Sunday Blues

And here it comes again: the days are shorter, I'm getting up in the dark and leaving work in the dark, and Saturday has its share of activity, and Sunday starts with a big pot of coffee and Sunday news shows and that "I'm going to get back to that (fill in the name of your) project today!" 


Then it's checking e-mail and having something to eat and the end of "The Shining" on TV, a brief nap and then... it's after 3 p.m. and the light is changing outside (where you haven't been all day), but it may not be too late to get something done. 


But it is. Yessir, it's Sunday afternoon. Again. And right on time come The Sunday Blues.


It's something I've been experiencing for years -- okay, decades -- and for the longest time I thought I was alone. Then today I decided to Google "Sunday afternoon blues" and discovered page after page about this disorder and its possible causes. (In addition to other blog entries about the malady, some poetry, even music: The Jack Rabbit Slims and even Eine Blues-Interpredation nach einem Jam-Track im Double Trouble Style, which is pretty good.) But there was also an article from the NY Times called "It's Sunday Afternoon and Here Come the Blahs", which includes a number of scientific/medical/psychological theories about the causes of TSAB, including one from as far back as 1919 by a Hungarian psychiatrist, Sandor Ferenczi, who noticed a weekly resurfacing of repressed memories among his patients.


There's also information about circadian rhythm and how the electric light bulb disrupted centuries-old human sleep patterns, and theories of seven-day rhythms in humans, internal clocks resetting, and so on.


But there are also plenty of quotes from just folks (mostly women who are reportedly the most affected by TSAB), all of whom describe exactly what I'm feeling right now. E.g. Rory Stockel who works for HBO and says "I know part of it is anxiety about the coming week... But it is also a lonely, empty, sad kind of thing that grabs me every Sunday about 3 o'clock." 


There was once a female comic, whose name I've forgotten* but whom we'll call Mary, who used to tell stories about her everyday life and then ask the audience "Have you ever felt that way?" At which she'd pause and then say "No, Mary, just you." For years when I talked to people about my Sunday blues and asked if they had ever experienced the phenomenon, they would shake their heads "No" and I'd think, "No, Fred, just you."


But it turns out that once again I find I'm not alone. Still blue, but I have company.


*In my search for the name of this female comic, I came upon the website of a woman I'd forgotten about, Maria Bamford (her website is here) who I recall being hysterical -- and the memories are correct. In one of the clips on the site she says "I never really thought of myself as depressed as much as paralyzed by hope!"


Maybe that's it...

Home again, home again...

...jiggety-jigg!

It was a wonderful week. It's over. It's going to take a while to come back to earth or "real life", whatever that is.

Meanwhile, lest I share TMI (as the kids say) look here for an album of photos from the trip.

Have a wonderful week!

This Too Shall Pass

Last full day of vacation. In between plans for dinner (I have yet to have my lobster and steamed clams);what to do today (the weather is perfect, probably the last "summer-ish" day of the fall, so the beach is on the agenda); and which of the myriad souvenirs, tchotchkes and items of on-sale clothing to buy to take home (do I really need an antique Chinese jar, or the bronze sculpture of an acrobat balancing on one hand?) ... among all these considerations I am concentrating most on enjoying what's left of the vacation. As usual I looked forward to this week away for months, convinced -- like the kid I used to be -- that it would never arrive. And when it inevitably did it went much too fast.

But as my mother used to say, "This too shall pass". And it applies equally to the pleasant and the unpleasant events in life. Intellectually I know that vacation doesn't last forever, but there's always that glimmer of hope, irrational as it may be, that one week will somehow stretch into two or four or, better, just go on indefinitely -- perhaps in some alternate universe where I stay on the beach, eat lobster and shop for half-price treasures, while the "other" me goes to work, shops the supermarket and balances the checkbook.

Yeah.

But the truth is that the older I get the faster time seems to pass, and the quicker the things I look forward to come screeching up then whizzing by. As the years pass I find myself talking about Christmas or tax day or the next colonoscopy using expressions like "It'll be here before you know it" or "It'll be over before you know it".

So vacation will end in a couple of days. (We head for home tomorrow but will have all day Sunday to decompress.) I'll go back to work on Monday. And maybe it's another of those functions of being older, but I'm really not stressed about it. It will be what it will be. It isn't that I don't care or that how I perform at work doesn't matter, but I feel as though I'm heading back with a renewed sense of confidence, calm and self-possession. It's not that big a deal. This too, etc.

Of course inasmuch as I had been planning on early retirement when my job came along, out of the blue, I know that my tenure at work has a definite expiration date. And it's not that far off. I enjoy what I do, I love the people I work with but I do look forward... You know, it'll be here before I know it.

And let's face it, if you stay on vacation forever, you'll never know what happens in the rest of your life. Transient though it all may be, you'd probably miss some wonderful stuff. Which sooner or later will pass. So it's the moment we really have, the right-now. That's all.

It's a beautiful Cape Cod day outside. I've had my coffee and a big cinnamon roll. The beach awaits. I'm outta here.

This too shall pass. In fact, it's passed already.

The weather is here, wish you were beautiful...

About 9:45 p.m., now, on Wednesday night. Spent the day strolling Commercial Street, window shopping, browsing. Lunch of fried clams (whole, belly clams -- not the strips) overlooking the bay and the harbor. I had a small financial fire to extinguish... nothing serious, no one died -- just slightly embarrassing. I noticed a rather large discrepancy as I checked my bank balance online, and had one of those heart-stopping moments I used to have much more often in the days before computers and online banking and Excel spreadsheets made it more, you know, automatic. A call here, two calls there, brief discussions with a handful of customer service people and my financial advisor, and it was all straightened out.

But it's a testament to the atmosphere in P'town (among other things) that I was able to get through this petite crise without melting down and letting it ruin the day -- to say nothing of the rest of the week. I just told myself that it would all work out and, in the meantime, we had enough to get by till the end of the week, we'll manage, etc., etc., blah, blah... And we went strolling and had lunch and that, as they say, was that. No big damn deal.

I tell you, it's the air up here.

Not that life would be all skittles and beer if we moved here (which we've often talked of doing). Unlike in many other parts of the country, the real estate market here is still fairly robust -- it's Cape Cod, after all, and a very choice part of it. So anything livable would cost. Make that "co$$$t". For example, there are "condos" here that started life as motel cabins or a a few rooms in an old house (like the one we're renting this week) that, depending on their location in town, proximity to the water, the view, etc., go for anywhere from the high $250's to half a mil or more.

In addition, the weather here is fierce during the winter months and, though P'town has become a much more year-round destination it's easy to imagine going just a little stir crazy given how isolated it must feel come February and March. Good, strong friendships would be a necessity.

On the other hand, the Provincetown zip code boasts the largest concentration of same-sex households in the country.

10:21 p.m. The wind has picked up and rolls off the bay in great gusts that rattle the windows. There's a fog horn in the distance. The air is full of the sea.

Make of this what you will. But this place is unlike anywhere else.