Gone Is Always Coming

“Gone is always coming?” She read it off a post-it note stuck to my wall.

“Yeah,” I replied. “That line came to me in 2004 when I was a methadone counselor. A client missed her appointment because she was dead. So yeah. Gone. It’s coming. Always. In all kinds of ways.”

“That’s so cheerful,” she said and tilted her head. Smiled. Gwen is my kind of sarcastic. 

“It is, in its own way.” I explained. “It creates a kind of pressure to be present. Being aware of gone coming infuses the here with a heightened sense of urgency as it goes.”

So we kissed like crazy because gone was coming; her plane would soon leave.

*

“So of course he’s just devastated,” my dad explained. My mind came unspooled, trying to fathom.

*

The trick is to genuinely know that gone is indeed coming while still throwing down and going all in. A year ago tonight I was planning a wedding: Kate and I were picking out rings and white dresses and discussing who would perform the ceremony. By mid-August she was gone; it was always coming because that’s what gone does: comes.

But we are human casualties to the extent that we permit the awareness of the way gone comes to prevent us from showing up to the here before the gone with the mad tenacious intention of staying.

And so I clutch Gwen tightly with hands that know she might always maybe turn to smoke while holding her as if I’ll never let her go. Because I believe in love. I believe in a love that breaks all the rules in a world whose only promise is the (sometimes slow, sometimes fast) dismantling of all that dares to stand fast against the gone that so ceaselessly and relentlessly comes.

* 

“I’m calling to tell you your grandma died. She was 98.”

I bit my lip. “And grandpa? How’s he holding up?”

“Well. He’s a 97-year-old man who lost his wife of 65 years. So of course he’s just devastated.”

Devastated.

And who could possibly sense the coming of gone more than he? Yet he’s devastated and the reason he’s devastated is because he loved with absolute and complete abandon. He pushed all his chips to the center of the table and he went all in.

Risk it all. Hurl yourselves off cliffs. Jump! Devastation is the price of admission for a triumphant here that rages in love against the coming of gone.

Rest, Grandma Conover. Peace be with you, Grandpa. I love you, Gwen—the more impossible the better.

9

Elle Bee. You are 9 today and everything is smiling. The fear that trembles at the heart of all things has turned to faith and confetti and a gentle song that everyone is humming. No one is lonely. Sadness is ruined. It’s your birthday!

*

Piaget and Erickson have a bunch of sophisticated ideas about where 9-year-old girls are supposed to be on the spectrum of childhood development, but I’ve forgotten all that college stuff. And who cares? You’re so much more than a child in a predictable stage. You’re infinitely more mystery than can ever be known. You’re a vast expanse of yellow flowers howling in the rain. You’re the wind blasting through the trees and the weeds. You’re a pearl.

But I want to share with you what 9 was for me in my personal mythology with the hope that you too will be so blessed. When I was 9, my 3^rd grade teacher told me I was creative and that I would one day be a writer and these messages took root in the core of my selfiest self to form the seeds of my identity and the way I understood my place in the world. These ideas were the rock thrown in the center of my pond; the rest is just ripples. Everything I am rings out from being 9.

Who will you be?

I’ve wondered it since the day you were born: Who are you? Who will you be, little girl? But don’t worry. You don’t have to know. You will always be more than what you are.

*

As you turn 9, my favorite memories of you are seeing you come off the school bus—when you grab my hand and we walk home. You burst with stories. The sun bounces through your hair and all the trees lean toward you. I tell myself to listen to you. I tell myself to remember you. I love you so much that I imagine the whole world was designed just for you to move through, live in, and tell stories about. You are a guitar. You’re the very best song.

*

9 years ago, your mother and I started a little fire and you have burned my forest down. I don’t remember being a man who wasn’t your daddy. Alone, by myself, left to my own devices, I am not a very good man but you make me better. I want to teach you things. I want to tell you about the things I have read in books and show you the paintings that change what seeing means. I want to be an umbrella. I want to be glue. I want to crack your head open and let the sky flood in.

*

An artist. An accountant. A drug addict. A nurse like your mom. A used bookstore owner. A ward of the state with a rap sheet of felonies and mental health disorders. A journalist. A cashier. A mother. I will love whoever you become, however you unfold. There is no possible way you will ever appear in the world and not breathe in the atmosphere of me loving you. That will sometimes mean a lot and sometimes not at all, but it will nonetheless be constant and sure like the ground beneath our feet. There’s a sky filled with clouds and birds. There are mountains and rivers and ageless stones. Water assumes the shape of its container. Two plus two is four. You will laugh and cry. Your dad loves you.

*

It’s your birthday. Cake. Candles. Presents. Presence. Yes, I love all the past and future yous but none like the you right now, today, the one turning 9. The whole world and all its processes rush and converge into the explosion of you, a fountain, a thunderstorm, a fire, awe, wonder, a precious little girl. Yes. It all adds up to you. So laugh. Dance and spin. Swirl your dress and rip the doors off the house. Because you’re 9! Throw your stone in the middle of the pond; let the water ripple where it will.

*

Happy birthday, little girl. And many more, and more, long after I’m gone and I’m only a memory. Smile. And that will be me, a ghost, haunting your face.

I Have Seen A Star

The moon tonight is a thorn in my side. Things are never what they are. That’s the best thing about everything. It’s always everything else. So the moon tonight is a teacher with a bunch of lesson plans about luminescence, receptivity, irrationality, and the wisdom of insanity. But you already knew all that. You did. I swear to God it’s already in there, swimming around inside you like a fish that loves to hide.

We could break all the rules, you know? Tell them all to get fucked and start a bunch of fires. Tip over cars. Take the city by storm. Do you ever feel like a storm? Sometimes I feel like I’m made of thunder and lightning. Never mind all those rumors about blood and muscles and bones. Those are metaphors. We could just as easily be made of thunder and lightning. Rain too. And fireflies that flicker in the dark like ideas.

We say things like I have an idea. But what’s that? A flurry of neurotransmission flashing through your brain, configured in a unique way that creates a new phenomenon that you call an idea. That you have? By what right do YOU claim ownership of involuntary neurotransmission? Aren’t you yourself, the idea of you, a product of this very same neurotransmission that creates the idea you supposedly have? Fireflies, man, flickering in the dark like stars.

See there? Ideas are stars. Thought is finally in the sky where it belongs. It’s not in your head. Never was. When we say things like I have an idea, what we really mean is I have seen a star. There’s so many stars, millions and millions, and none of them care about being right or wrong. A star’s only desire is to burn and shine with the hope of being seen. Did you know that fireflies ignite their flashes of light with the hope of attracting a mate?

Love, like everything, is always everything else. Sure, it might be an illusion created by an excess of dopamine flooding the pleasure pathway, the same thing that happens when you bowl a strike or boot heroin. But it’s also a fish that loves to hide in storms of thunder and lightning. Love can come and go in an instant when a firefly burns a hole in the dark. It shines, it’s seen, and it’s gone. But I think the best kind of love is looking at the stars all night with someone made of rain. So keep looking up. This is what the moon teaches like a thorn in your side. Thorns are found on the stems of roses and a rose is a rose is a kiss.

Irrational Happiness

Have you ever been so inexplicably happy that you want to write or yell or stop people on the street and tell them it’s going to be okay? For no reason you can discern? And I don’t mean I don’t have a helluva lot of things to be happy about. I do. It’s just that there’s not one particular stimulus to which I can currently point and say I am happy because… [happy stimulus].

As opposed to something making me happy, I feel rather that I am somehow happy on a subterranean psychic level that bestows happiness on everything it encounters. It’s hard to explain. Especially when being depressed seems to be the default for a whole lot of us. But I’m happy, I am, on some weird fundamental level and I want to smile at you.

The sky is a gob of blue cotton candy haunted by marshmallow ghosts. We could go to the graveyard, you and I, and I’d listen to you talk about your problems. What would they mean, all your problems, in that city of bones?

God, if we could—just for a bit—forget everything we think we know about all the things we think we know, we might maybe could then pluck fresh poems from the trees like outrageous ripe fruit and dance in the streets like philosopher clowns. Aren’t we about due, Dionysus, to at last free the convicts, lock up the police, and swap out the sound minds for the zaniness of craziness? I want to fuck like some starving to death thing that forgot the meaning of words. 

What’s a tomorrow without language? What’s a problem without opinions? What if we burned all the research and forgot all the theories? I’ll tell you what. Magic. Gods. Wonder. Awe. We might even learn to shut the fuck up, listen maybe, be stunned by the weird fact of our breath and the strangeness of having hands.

Pick something up. Eat a peach. Wash your hair. What the fuck?

I’m happy tonight, so completely, and I don’t know why. I mean. I took my kids out to dinner. I saw a picture of a very old friend. I’m sober. I listened to a wise old man tell stories. A woman loves me: purely, wide open, wholly. I could point at these things as causes but it feels a little off. Rather, happiness feels more like an atmosphere, an emotional climate, weather, perhaps a steady rain of candy and sapphires and neatly folded love letters that pour and splash into puddles of dollar bills around which crowds of joyous bums dance and rejoice.

Open Heart Surgery

for GK

Castles maybe. And thunder. Lemons and yellow dresses. Common sense isn’t. So books of poetry with folded pages. Lines underlined. Chicago. Crying in movie theaters. Acoustic guitars. The things you found in your pockets. Empty bottles. More lemons. Keep it yellow. Credit cards. Airports. Arguing with Rothko. She was in her closet, picking a dress. Figure eights. Rachael Yamagata. Nostalgia for complete sentences. Bones. Breath mints. Spider webs. The junk drawer. Fragments. A “J” over here. An “n” across the room. Oh, and don’t forget the stuff buried in the dirt. Things we can’t know. Calculus. Archetypal psychology. Infinity. Don’t ask what it means. Build bridges. Because mothers. Deserts. Rings. Not a stream of consciousness. Pieces. Cake. Cappuccino on the deck. A vase, sans flowers, shattered on the tile. Ask a bum. Mountains. Ruins. And her sorting through pieces. Jigsaw puzzles. I’d like to buy a vowel. An “o”. Putting me back together. Gaps in your memory. Trains. Trains. Trains. She swept up the mess. Swiss chocolate. Blackouts. A used copy of Murakami. This goes here. And that goes there. Glue. Duct tape. Open heart surgery. He’s going to make it. A collision. A collage. And her eye for asymmetrical harmony until I am messy and whole. Her long neck. The bone behind her face. My big hands. Her hungry waist.

The End Of My January Myth: Art Opening

Stare at endings. And I don’t mean look at them real hard because that’s too conscious and willful. Staring is a different kind of thing where you sort of disappear so the thing you’re staring at can relax and be what it is. So endings. All kinds. Stare at them. Stare at them long enough and something happens. They don’t stay put. They—I don’t know—jostle or something. It’s like they wiggle. You know? They do a little dance. And when endings start dancing, that’s when you begin to move into the quirky little understanding that the end is ending. Yes. Endings end. Everything ends and then? Well there’s only one thing left to do, silly. Begin again.

I’m not going to write about mourning and grief this January. This is the year when I let my dead friends die. No time for the past. No time to dream of spring. The January thaw is fertile.

Dan Parker was with Chris Delaney the night he was struck by a car and killed, January 16, 1986. Dan Parker is an artist.

Amends

My first resolution for 2013 is to have done with procrastination and all the ill effects that spring therefrom.

*

Yeah. January 9th^th. Okay, yes, fine.

*

In addition, 2013, for me, will be about making amends with an emphasis on mending. I’ve recently stumbled into some revelations regarding resentment and fear that essentially understands these experiences as the very events, the sneaky culprits, that construct and perpetuate the self as a self over and against the world (from which of course selfishness quickly follows). What? I know I know. It sounds so high flying and fucked up, and yet? There it is.

When things get too abstract, I begin to starve for images. So, remember that gash on your finger? Such a nasty cut. Here, when I talk about making amends, when I think about mending, I imagine the slow and subtle way a wound heals. When’s the last time you slowed down long enough to think about how crazy and fucked up it is that your body—it just—it… the thing HEALS itself. You swear and drop the knife. Stop the blood. Swear some more. And a few weeks later, the wound—it’s gone. There’s nothing.

And it had nothing to do with you or your will. Your body, slowly, quietly, left to its own devices, mends. And what is mending but restoration? Indeed. What is mending but the slow and wondrous dissolution of mistaken separation? The broken skin isn’t sorry. It doesn’t apologize. It merely returns to its original condition of being unslit.

2013. I resolve to dissolve into being unslit.

To make amends is to lose one’s self in the indiscriminate place between the waves and the shore, where no clear separation is defined—the shore, waves, the shore, waves, this ever mending place of rich exchange between give and take. To be unslit is to ride the wind through trees and leaves and the flowing brown hair of wise women with multi-colored eyes. Go with the blow. Forget what you know. Everything! Forget it all. Until your thoughts are clouds and your dreams are fish and you’re not that, the other thing, and you’re definitely not this.

What will emerge—can you imagine?—when the wound heals, when all is mended, after the slow and wondrous dissolution of all mistaken separation? Who are you and what’s a world in the healed predicament of original unslittedness?

I sure as fuck don’t know. But forgive me or not, here I come.

Out In The Open & Into The World

Shaved my beard and it came off like a mask. Sick of hiding and being hid. The dead German philosopher said our greatest task is that of clearing a place to stand in the open. It takes time in the mirror to shave your whole face in the morning. I pause with the razor to gaze at the problem.

*

I’ve not been this committed to recovery from alcoholism since my early 20s. The problem of alcoholism is frequently misconstrued as merely an extreme abuse of alcohol. But the overwhelming thirst for alcohol is, in actuality, just a symptom, a wily craving for relief from the crux of the problem: a deeply rooted dissatisfaction with life resulting from a fundamental flaw in the relationship between one’s self and the world.

I’ve been conceiving it like this. There’s the world and what happens. And then there’s the ego (which here means the self or a complex system of expectation and desire). These things (ego and world) for all of us are always at odds in one way or another. Big deal, right? Just go with the flow. But where the alcoholic seems to distinguish himself from others is that he is utterly locked inside the ego and its perspective. The self as a jail or a maze with no exits. He can only see the world (and the people and things that inhabit it) through the perspective of his own desire, which of course the world often (always?) contradicts, creating an immense divide that results in an intense experience of loneliness. (The divide doesn’t really exist but only enlightened people understand this is in a lived way and they just taunt us with enigmas.)

If you want to forget the previous paragraph and insert Alcoholics are extremely selfish motherfuckers, that would be fine.

So the provisional (day to day) cure of alcoholism (extreme, extreme selfishness) is a miraculous shift in the alcoholic’s perspective from its root in ego to that of the world. Rather than dwelling in a jail that only sees how the world doesn’t meet the ego’s expectations, the new perspective is from that of the world and what IT needs, forgetting the ego altogether (with the hope of one day realizing its non-existence; three pounds of flax, etc.).

This is a monumental shift in perspective, a Copernican revolution in terms of relationship and vision, and, to put it mildly, it’s really really hard. So the other cure, in terms of temporarily mending the alcoholic’s sense of extreme divide between the ego and the world (not in terms of becoming genuinely selfless) is to drink 15 beers. OMG I love to get drunk! I love it so much it can only be described with surreal metaphors. Being drunk is the umbrella in a candy store. Being drunk is the mouse on the throne in the kingdom of dreams. And so on. The craziest thing is the experience of intoxication for the alcoholic is probably as simple as the way you (and here I mean you) feel when you do something kind.

How may I help you?

Who knew? Who, after reading libraries of books and undergoing hour after hour of therapeutic self investigation, could’ve possibly guessed that the key out of the jail of ego was a mere turning toward the world? When you give someone a ride, pick up some litter, smile at cashiers, waste less water, or buy someone a cup of coffee and listen to their problems, you (you, and all your rigid designs) begin to fade, diminish, vanish. The divide—it’s mended! And there’s no one in the mirror.

To mend that divide is the end of loneliness and the beginning of a looking out, seeing, and a genuine being in and with the world.

*

I’ve had a long-standing playful argument with Gwen about travel. While she has insisted that seeing the world is a vital necessity, I’ve countered (boasted) that all I need is a basement filled with books. Next summer, we’re going to Spain.

For Christmas she sent me a big rectangular package that I suspected was an art print. Guessing it was a giant reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica, what I found instead was a map of the world.