At 42 I miss 24, if only for the anticipation of surprises, the atmosphere of mystery. Lately I feel as if the plot has been spoiled, as if I read the last sentence first.

“And then you die.”

I’d like to forget I ever saw it, convince myself I may have been mistaken. Maybe there’s some context that will change the meaning. Maybe the whole thing turns out to be a dream. Maybe if I start again from the beginning I’ll get so lost in the drama, so absorbed in the unfolding of details that I’ll forget what I saw, or at least cast enough doubt to make things interesting again.

[It hurts to lose you - Emmett Tinley]
January was blinding
As we climbed from the basement
Said goodbye for the last time
In a bar by the grand canal
Thanks for confiding
The pain you were hiding
But don’t let the silence
Come back to your eyes
‘Cause I heard the music
Your soul was making
It hurts to lose you
Just before we made it
You took my hat with a sad smile
And paid me back with your photograph
Though I needed to know why
I tried only to make you laugh
After you left the sky
Rained for the first time
And I went to see what I
Could find to blow my mind
And I heard the music
Your soul was making
It hurts to lose you
Just before we made it
Now you write mad poetry
In your room with dead roses
Just one more life story
That cries from the ocean
And wait for the dark tide
That comes to you day and night
Is it too late to take your side
Too late to win the fight?
‘Cause I heard the music
Your soul was making
It hurts to lose you
Just before we made it

…and here’s the cover art for “Echoes“. The painting “Echo and Narcissus” is by John William Waterhouse, and it’s in the “public domain,” so it’s stealable, I think. And the songs? Did I get permission from all the artists/record labels to cover them? Er, uh… Hey look, you can see a boob in the painting!

And here’s some plain ol’ silliness…

I stumbled through the parking lot
Looking for my keys
The moon was hiding in the clouds
Got on my hands in knees and then
I asked myself some questions like
Did I believe in God
And if tonight was all the time I had
What would I spend it on
And then the thought suddenly came to me
That you might be awake
And so I dialed your number but
I guess it was too late

*["Don't let it crush you" outro is borrowed from My Dear Ella's "The Majesty"]*

523 Waller Street – My old place!

I lived in the Bay Area for five years before returning to the east coast. This period was the most intense and life-altering chapter of my life thus far, and the streets of San Francisco, specifically the Lower Haight neighborhood, have impressed themselves upon the core of my being. Curiously, I had not found my way back until this past weekend, when I had just a day and a half to run around town while my wife attended her annual anthropology conference. It rained hard almost the entire time we were in town, but during a brief break in the weather I did manage to hop that train to my old neighborhood, where I visited my old house on Waller Street, walked up Haight Street to Buena Vista Park, to Ashbury Street where I went to graduate school, then all the way up to Golden Gate Park.

Of course, much has changed since 1993. There is now a coffee shop (Bean There) directly across the street from my old house, as well as countless businesses up and down Haight Street that I swear I had never laid eyes on before. CIIS (my former grad school) has moved to another part of the city, but the old building still made my heart skip a beat when I stood in front of it. The streets still felt electric to me, the overall vibe of the town still filled me with a sense of hope and possibility. Eventually, the clouds gathered again and rain started to fall, so I hurried back down the hill to the train station. Before I left the old neighborhood though, I just had to pop into Aardvark Books. I went straight to the psychology section and, sure enough, a copy of No Boundary was sitting on the shelf, waiting for the next kid with his head in the clouds to pick it up.

It’s strange how years turn into decades, how the lines around our eyes creep in and eventually give us away, how a sense of hope and possibility that buoys us along for so long can turn into a sinking feeling in the pit of our guts. I’m not quite sure what to do with all that’s been stirred up by this walk down memory lane. Next week I turn 42, and it’s true, I miss that sense of hope and possibility, that feeling of anticipation that comes with believing that anything might be around the next corner, that something more might announce itself at any moment. For now I’ll just sit and watch the swirl of images rearrange themselves in my mind, let the rain soak me to the bone, and wait for the storm to pass.

[Show as slideshow]

It’s bad enough hearing one “code yellow” called over the loudspeakers, as you never know what type of “psychiatric emergency” you might be in for. You always hope it’s followed by the words “child unit,” not because you’re happy a person under the age of twelve has gotten out of control, but because you know it will be relative easy to restore order. But if a yellow is called on the adolescent unit, you don’t know until you burst through the doors whether you’ll be dealing with a 13-year-old throwing a temper tantrum or a pair of 6-feet tall, 200 pound gang members beating each other with table legs. Fortunately, on this night, the youth in crisis was a wiry lad of 15, whom I could manage fairly easily aided by a pair of sturdy nurses.

An adult unit yellow is the most unpredictable scenario of them all. The crisis might be a 19-year old opiate addict trying to bust out of the place, and he or she may quickly calm down when the “show of force” arrives on the unit. Or it could be a 75-year old grandmother trying to hang herself with a bed-sheet. You just never know. A double yellow — two simultaneous crises –, especially on the weekend when staffing is at a bare minimum, is potentially a disastrous situation. Like this one night, when there were only two males in the building, myself and Charles, a big lug who works over on the adolescent boys unit. He and I were on the floor struggling mightily with a homicidally angry (and rather large) 18 year-old young man on the adult unit when a second code yellow was called back on adolescent boys. There was no way either of us could respond to the second code without leaving the other to be pummeled. It took us twenty minutes or so to get the guy into a locked, safe place where we could let him loose. By the time we arrived on the boys unit, the plexi-glass protecting the nurse’s station had been broken down. One nurse had been struck in the face with a three-hole paper puncher, her cheekbone shattered. The other nurse on duty was bleeding from her nose, having taken several punches to the face. It was a horrible scene, and Charles and I spent another half-hour rolling around on the floor making human burritos, desperately attempting to manage the chaos. We found out later that a few of the boys had been planning the assault for days, monitoring the cafeteria at meal times to see which staff people were on duty and thus who would be available to respond to code yellows. When Charles left the unit to respond to the adult yellow, the time was ripe for the boys to strike. “With Charles gone,” they must have surmised, “there would only be that little shit from the druggie unit on duty, and no doubt he’ll be busy helping Charles.” They were right. There was no one left who was strong enough to stop the carnage.

Fortunately, double yellows are rare, and the hospital is not always full of dangerous psychopaths. In any event, physical intervention is always a last resort, but there are nights you simply can’t avoid coming home with rug burns on your elbows and bloodstains on your pants. But again, on this night, when I first met the Son of God, things could have been much worse. After the first yellow, the wiry adolescent eventually succumbed to the effects of his forced injection before he could break through the outer “tortilla” restraint, and the second yellow had also ended peacefully, with Jesus humming himself to sleep. I didn’t see how the second yellow began, but I heard all about it in the adult nurse’s station while they were filling out the incident report. Apparently this man, intent on proving his divinity to each and all, had jumped up and grabbed the basketball rim during a friendly game of HORSE (a miracle in itself for someone no taller than five-seven), then somehow clambered up to a standing position, ten feet off the ground and about to take wing when his foot slipped through basket, enough that a fellow patient was able to grab hold and pull him down. Not one to give up easily, Jesus ran to other end of the court for another go, and things got yellow from there.

I say this was the first time I met Jesus. He and I would come to know each other quite well. That first time he introduced himself to me in the form of a short white guy in his twenties, with unbelievable hops. A few months later, his skin had turned brown and he had aged a couple of decades at least. Black Jesus — a name he invented himself and insisted upon –, he and I became especially good friends. The best of friends, really. Finally, just a few weeks before I left the hospital for good, Jesus checked in again, this time as a former psychiatrist, ironically the same psychiatrist who had treated the previous two incarnations of… well… himself.

Mysterious ways — that’s how the man works. That’s how he rolls. Me, I like to know what to expect, to know what I’m getting myself into. Back in the day, they used to call me Dr. Armstrong, the guy who would always come running when the call went out. These days, when two people are beating each other with table legs, I’m running away from the madness, not toward it.