Tag: #reverb11

Prompt: A second cup of coffee

Throughout my years in Carrboro, NC, I could be found – at first quite frequently and then later from time to time – reading, writing and ruminating at the Open Eye Café. It’s where I had my first ever cup of coffee – believe it or not at the age of thirty! I remember well that first cup. Kara – a friend of mine to this day – expressed to me her curiosity that I spent so much time in a coffee shop and yet had never ordered anything but juice and cookies. She insisted I try some coffee, widely regarded as the finest in the area. It was impossible to refuse a free cup of coffee from a girl with dimples, and so I chugged it down as if it were chocolate milk on a summer day. Kara looked at me as if I had lost my mind, explaining to me that coffee was a beverage meant to be sipped and savored. Perhaps it was the unpleasant associations I had made between coffee and my parents’ heavy smoking throughout my childhood, but for whatever reason I had always regarded coffee drinking as a pointless, disgusting habit. I also had assumed (wrongly) that the caffeine buzz was approximately equivalent to a can of Coke or Pepsi, which to me was undetectable. Within a minute or two of downing that first cup I asked for a refill, which I also threw back in a few quick gulps. Then it happened. I began to talk, and talk, and talk, as if I had just been released from a decade in solitary confinement. Suddenly I found myself engaging with staff and patrons alike, people I had seen a hundred times before, yet with whom I had not – until now – exchanged more than the occasional furtive glance. I was beyond buzzed. I was downright high. For the next several months I used coffee like most people use recreational drugs, as a way to ring in the weekend or as a social lubricant. It took about a year for me to become an everyday drinker, then about another year to move from one cup to two a day. Although I no longer get quite the thrill I used to get from my two cups of Joe, I still enjoy my coffee thoroughly, even reverentially at times. And I can still be found from time to time in a local coffee shop. Presently I’m camped out at Milagro in Las Cruces, NM. It’s becoming my new Open Eye. More than ten years have passed since Kara got me hooked on the magic bean. She eventually married an affable chap named Andy, and they just had a baby. Robert Harman – a.k.a. The King of Carrboro, The Colonel, The Mayor of Open Eye – was hit by a car and killed this summer, right after I moved to NM. It’s weird how time does what it does. It’s strange how this place – Milagro – is so familiar, so much like the Open Eye. The cute baristas. The hipsters hiding behind books and laptops. I’m still here, reading the same books, thinking the same thoughts, drifting down the same stream. I’m wearing a beard these days, flecks of gray betraying the baby face underneath. My cup is empty. The first refill is free.

Prompt: The majesty of the Organ Mountains

The biggest deal of 2011 has been without a doubt the move from North Carolina to New Mexico. We’re talking HUGE. I circled in a holding pattern for a good two years longer than I expected as my wife made the transition from graduate student to employed academic. We could have landed anywhere. We were very close to moving to Portland (Oregon), but we also could have wound up in Kalamazoo (Michigan), Bar Harbor (Maine), Mexico City, or any number of other places. At first I pretended to be more excited about Las Cruces that I really was. I mean, it’s so deserty here. Daddy likes his green. And there’s no discernible music scene, and it’s ever so far from family, etc. But the place grew on me right away, and today Las Cruces and I fully consummated our relationship when at long last I set foot upon the mighty Organ Mountains, which I have been admiring from a distance for the past four months.

Dripping Springs is right up the road from our house, but for whatever reason my wife and I didn’t make the trip until this morning. It was unusually cloudy, and much to our delight it even began snowing as we ascended the main trail. The photos below don’t even begin to capture the majesty of this place, what with all the clouds and my cheap-ass camera. And it’s hard for me to capture in words the quality of happiness I felt as I breathed in the cool mountain air and gazed at the various peaks and stared at the three deer we came across and, most of all, as I considered how grateful I am to have landed in one piece, in this particular place, with this particular person by my side.

The wings of possibility are stretched wide over me once again, and this time I am ready. I am willing. To surrender to the breath of the wind.

[Show as slideshow]

Prompt: A vague notion that others are reflecting and writing about something having to do with parenting

When my father was my age (41) he had four children, the oldest of which was 17. I was 15 at the time, and it’s difficult for me to recall what the world looked like to me then. I loved sports, especially playing soccer. I was obsessed with one girl or another, continuously, in that worshipful, “she’s unobtainable” way of the pimply-faced adolescent. I used to babysit for spending money, usually on a Friday or Saturday night for one of my father’s cousins. It was easy money, and a chance check out HBO or Cinemax after the kids went to bed, in the hopes of catching a boob scene or two in Porky’s or Fast Times at Ridgemont High. I remember one night, at about 2am, I caught the first hour of Lady Chatterly’s Lover, which went way beyond the usual brief booby flash. But I digress…

I was always in demand as a babysitter, partly because my Dad’s cousins liked to get trashed every weekend, but also because I had a way with kids. I still do, I think. I’m a goofball who clowns around constantly no matter the setting, but kids find me especially amusing, and I can often be found at family gatherings surrounded by multiple little buggers, one or two of them maybe even climbing on my back or clinging to one of my limbs. And yet I have never seriously considered having children of my own. Partly this has to do with the particular way events in my life have shaken out. I didn’t get married until I was 35, and I’ve never been in any kind of secure place financially. Also, I married someone who isn’t at all interested in having kids. Yes, this is highly relevant piece of the puzzle!

With the holidays come visits with family, and my wife and I are the only couple in the entire extended family (both sides) who do not either have children or aspire to have them. While many folks don’t seem to care one bit about our childlessness, many seem troubled by it, I think because raising a family is at the center of many of their respective value systems. As an ardent non-follower/non-believer of religion, I’m often confronted by a similarly weird vibe around religious family members. Again, it’s a perceived conflict of values, and honestly it goes two ways in that I’m not particularly comfortable around those whom I perceive as devaluing that which I hold sacred. So what do I hold sacred? I suppose I value the pursuit of truth above all else, which for me is characterized by a commitment to intellectual honesty, critical thinking and self-awareness. While belief in God or following a particular religion doesn’t have to be mutually exclusive with these things, in my experience I have been all too often dismayed – and at times even frightened – by how unwilling and uninterested most people are when it comes to reflecting deeply upon their lives. But then again, perhaps I reflect too much. When it comes to religion, nearly everyone I know who identifies as Christian was simply born into it. Same with other religions. My parents encouraged me to question religion, to appreciate whatever aspects of this or that tradition I found to be interesting or appealing and to ditch the rest. And so my attitude is perhaps likewise mostly a product of my environment. But what of my stubborn refusal to procreate?

The fact that my wife doesn’t want kids is obviously THE limiting factor here. My two previous girlfriends are now mothers, and I have to wonder what might have been had either of those relationships lasted. Might I be a Daddy by now? Or perhaps these women kicked me to the curb precisely because they sensed I was not up to the task. Who knows… What I do know is that becoming a father is simply not a topic that shows up in my thoughts and emotions until someone asks me about it. And when someone does ask me to reflect on it, I usually just give a shrug of the shoulders. I’ve never ever, not once in my entire life, had a thought, feeling or tingling in my naughty parts that said: “I would rather be parenting right now than doing what I’m doing.” I’m equally interested in writing a symphony in G minor, or building a boat with popsicle sticks – which is to say not at all interested. I’m not against the idea of having kids, as if on philosophical grounds. I suppose I just like my life the way it is. And yet, if somehow my sperm were able to both penetrate rubber barriers and outwit my wife’s birth control medication (Yes, BOTH!), AND a baby started to grow in her belly, AND we decided to let nature take its course, then I honestly believe I would just take it in stride and embrace fatherhood fully. Hmmm…

I’m glad we had this chat. Now I can more fully appreciate the value of thinking about what I want to write about BEFORE I start writing!

Prompt: The place where the wall meets the ceiling

For a long time now I’ve been in love with Tomorrow. Crazy in love. I mean, nothing is sexier than Tomorrow. Tomorrow is hot, a downright F.I.L.F. (Future I’d Like to… Feel-up). I’ve always longed to be in her (yeah, I went there) because she holds all the things that get me off: Hope, promise, potential — she’s my ideal everything. A funny thing has happened though as I’ve crept into middle age. It seems that Tomorrow has lost some of her luster. Instead of rock stardom, best-seller authorship, and total self-mastery, the future is starting to look a little more rough around the edges, full of shit like aging, decline, loss. But another funny thing, one that makes reflecting, speculating and reverberating all the more strange, is how falling out of love with Tomorrow has given rise to… er uh, made it incredibly hard to miss… I mean, stiffened my resolve to… Well, let me put it this way: I’m getting a crush on the Here and Now like I haven’t had since like, I sat next to Michelle Dewey in seventh grade homeroom. Shwing!

Anyhoo… It feels like this is how it’s meant to be, this transition of focus from the potential to the actual, although it can be all too easy to fall into the arms of that foul temptress, Yesterday. Maybe it’s because my particular past just isn’t all that exciting, but for whatever reason I am simply not much interested in reliving the good ol’ days. The ol’ days were “okay”, but today is where it’s “all good.”

Of course, this is all a cliché, this be-here-now-live-in-the-moment shtick. What is new, to me at least, is the realization that my love affair with Tomorrow was never really about the future at all, but rather it was about enjoying the feeling—the raw sensations in my body—as hope and wonder and anticipation flowed through me right then and there. It’s like when you tell your first lover that you’ll love her or him forever. It’s not really a promise about how you’ll feel in the future, or at least it’s foolish to look at it that way. It’s much more so an expression of how intense your feelings are in the present, so intense that you use the biggest metaphor you can think of: Fo’evah!

So I’m still down with hoping and dreaming and planning and reminiscing and lamenting and celebrating and enjoying all the sights, sounds and sensations that time traveling has to offer. But I’m enjoying these things all the more because I’m finally recognizing it all for what it all is: My present state of mind, the way I’m feeling right here, right now, in this body, under these stars in this desert sky.

It’s cold outside, the wind whipping the trees in the backyard around hard enough to break branches. Cup of coffee numero dos is buzzing me toward the jitters. A shower, maybe a few songs sung toward that place where the wall meets the ceiling, then dinner with wife and friends.

They say it might snow tomorrow, even in the lowlands.

Prompt: The wind

The winds are gusting upwards of 45 miles per hour outside. My back yard is full of fallen leaves, swirling around like mini-tornadoes. My back yard. One of the many big changes that blew in with 2011. Growing up we always rented, so I never had a backyard of my own. Many times this year I could be seen playing soccer or mowing or just wandering around, taking in the new scenery. New Mexico. Who woulda thunk it? It’s all good. That’s my theme song these days. Not that there isn’t much to be done. Not that the internal struggles that have characterized my first 40 years on earth have evaporated in the desert sun. No. I’m still me. It’s just that, well, … it’s all good.

I’m unemployed for the first time in a long while. We moved out here for my wife’s career, and while I’ve been hitting the pavement hard in search of honest work, even for half the pay I was getting at my last job, so far it’s no go. When people ask what I do I tell them I’m a childless househusband, and I suppose that’s true enough. I run the errands, do the chores, and hold down the fort in a hundred other ways. My wife brings home the bacon and I keep it sizzling. So far it’s working out just fine. Yet I’m wary of getting soft. I’m constantly trying to light a fire under my own backside, knowing too well that this may be the last time for a long while that I have this much time to devote to stoking this inner flame.

Yesterday I sang my throat raw, hitting notes I had hitherto sung only in fantasy. It was a bittersweet experience, as it occurred to me with the thud of a drop kick to the guts that I could have accomplished this vocal feat at any time over the past fifteen years, had I merely approached the situation with the appropriate level of belief in my own powers. Why did I wait until now? Why haven’t I set my mind to accomplishing the many other things that have been and are well within my reach? Laziness? Fear? If I knew precisely how to overcome my perennial obstacles, would I even act on this knowledge? I’m not sure.

2012 might look like the end of the world to some, but for me it feels like a beginning, a grand opening of heart and mind the likes of which I haven’t permitted myself since my early twenties.

Then again, I always say shit like that.

Seems the wind had died down a bit. Better grab a rake and get to work.