Jackie and I were talking

about writing; she started keeping journals in fifth grade, but just now looked back at them for the first time (at age sixteen) and was mortified by the shallowness and stupidity of the entries.

I told her what I've told myself - something I did not make up: until you've made your first thousand mistakes, you can't correct them.

And I also told her that most people can't withstand the realization that their ambitious efforts have failed, and fall back to something easier, some arena where they already know the terrain and the adversaries, and success is a likelihood.

And I told her that it took me thirty years or more to learn how to write decently; but I then realized I had to qualify that by saying that I was only a part-timer - that a real player that jumped in the deep end could shorten that span by quite a bit.

And hoping I was telling the truth.

The First Warm Evening of the Year

I like to think I'm snappy with the words and all, but, believe me, there are times when I enjoy being speechless. Especially in the face of casual beauty. Neighborhood beauty.

When the shock and numbness wear off,

then it gets serious. And misery - as we all know- is fantastically invasive and viral. It summons each and every blood relative to the march, down to the most distant cousin, and the horde howls with negative glee as they storm your highest walls.

Here's what can happen: the past fills you with agonized longing and relentless regret, you view the future with terror and paralysis, and the present is a path that dissolves into darkness at every step.

The good news? The good news is that, in our hearts, most of us know that there are others fighting much harsher battles, and we still feel a need to recognize and honor all those who struggle against genuine catastrophe and who somehow carry on.

And here's how you can do it - for starters:

Stop whining. If you can read this, you don't have it that bad. I'm not saying your pain isn't real, but if feeling sorry for yourself was an effective treatment, there would be no hospitals of any kind.

At the corner of College & Keith, in North Oakland,

a relatively busy intersection for cars and pedestrians that I navigate often, being near my house, I vividly remember seeing fleeting glimpses - as I turned left through a really short Turn light:

• a pretty young girl in a T-shirt and jeans weeping as she walked alone, unseeing, as if all was lost:
• an old man in a three-piece suit and a fedora smiling vaguely downward, as if the streets were lined with gold - again!
• a man shining with sweat as he juggled three - or four? - tennis balls while strolling in a small circle, and shooting every other ball about twenty feet in the air.

There is a world behind this world.

Who He Was to Me and Why I'll Miss Him.

To put it as simply as possible, I was extremely lucky to have had Mills in my life, though of course if it was up to me I'd have had much more time with him. Much, much more time. But that’s a different conversation.

So, I'll just pick a couple of stories, since I could go on and on otherwise:

When I was maybe six or seven, I was terrified of riding a bike without training wheels. Lloyd came up with a great solution - he took me up to the top of Eastway, which to me at that age seemed like a pretty long, steep hill; he held the bike as I got on, steadied me, then gave the bike a good hard push and yelled, “Just steer straight and don’t fall over!”

And I made it nearly all the way down to Northern Road before I wiped out and tumbled onto somebody’s lawn. After that, I wasn’t as afraid, and it got steadily easier.

Fast forward from bicycles to cars....Lloyd’s mom Flo had a Le Mans, I think a ‘68, maybe? Anyway, pretty close to new. He got to take it out one night right before they opened up the new Sprain Brook Parkway, and we thought it would be cool to push the barriers aside and take the Le Mans for a high-speed ride on as near to a perfectly smooth surface as we’d ever find. With no traffic. And no cops. We were too stupid to think about the possibility that the road may not have been completely finished, or may have still had construction materials or machines in the roadway. We just rode. Fast. Like 130 miles an hour fast. And it was so QUIET. I will admit I was a little freaked out, but I looked over at Mills and he looked like he was born to be behind that wheel. And I felt OK.

No wipeouts that time. We took that luck for granted.

Then there were all the times that Lloyd was just my guardian. A bunch of you will remember that the late ‘60’s was a time when if you were a guy with long hair, it was like an open invitation to get punched in the face. Mills was one of the people who stood by me and said, “I don’t think so.”

Years passed; I went upstate to college then moved out West. While I was gone, though, after Flo and Bernie moved to Florida, Mills took care of the Northern Road house, and he also helped take of my parents two houses down, who were not getting any younger - when they needed a new stereo or TV hooked up, or a chair repaired, he was there for them.

When he moved out of the Hartsdale house, he and I lost all touch for a long while. I was busy with my new family back in California, and I didn’t really know how to go about looking for him, even if I’d had time on my hands. 

Then, Facebook. BAM. Lloyd - and many of you - were suddenly back in my life. I was as happy as a kid in candy store, for real. 

The Sudden Reunion of 2009 came to be - through the hard work of a bunch of people. You know who you are, and I thank you. I got to spend an exhilarating two days with people I hadn’t seen for as much as forty years, but most importantly, I spent a lot of time with my lost brother, and I can remember nearly every moment, so clearly.

We talked for hours and it was like no time at all had passed since we last hung out. And of course, he still took care of me - my luggage had been lost on the flight in, but he drove me back to Westchester Airport right before the reunion supper and literally talked a guy into opening a locked office where - surprise! - my bag had been the whole time.

Since then, we kept in pretty good touch, by phone and email. I mainly wanted him to fly out here to Oakland, to meet my family, walk with me in the sun, and eat my wife’s great food. 

I wish we could have had that visit. What can I say. 

The sun broke through, in the west,

while the skies above the eastern hills stayed thick and dark, as I pulled in front of my house after a seemingly endless day.

Pretty accurate mirror to my mood. Again.

When my mom died about ten years ago, I found myself surprisingly able to forgive her for a lot of truly bad behavior - trust me, bad - and I often thought what I would give to have her back for just a day, even at her most difficult.

Multiply that, by any number of your choosing, and that's what I feel right now, when I try to get my head around the growing mass of losses in my life. In all our lives.

But that sun eased the burden for a moment. Is there such a thing as a bread-and-butter miracle?

My State of Mind

A little repetitive and incoherent, I know. Like I say, my state of mind....

I've always known that there are limits

to how clearly we can see each other and how deeply we can comprehend what another person is going through as they make their way, hour by hour, day by day.

But you can't spend all your time asking probing questions, analyzing behavior, and brooding over your findings. No one can live like that. Instead, you try to pay attention and weigh what you see and hear, then ultimately make some assumptions and guesses. And then largely take things at face value.

If that marriage seems happy, well, it's probably happy. If that child appears well cared for, then there you go. If a friend acts content and well-adjusted, great, all's right with the world.

And there's no denying that as we grow older, most of us become more adept at masking our pain and unhappiness. We don't want to whine, since we sure don't like to listen to others whine, or we don't want to burden friends or family, and whatever it is will pass anyway, or maybe we just don't want any more well-meaning but useless advice.

No one's doing anything wrong, really, but between our willingness to avoid looking too closely and our ability to stay poker-faced while the floorboards are starting to give, it's a wonder we know ANYTHING about each other.

As many of my friends have heard by now, a man I knew and loved as a brother since we were little kids took his life this week, with no obvious motive or triggering event. And as harsh as it sounds, I almost wish it had been a random accident, or even murder. In those instances, I would still have to live with the loss, and the cruelty of fate, but I wouldn't have to wonder what I'd missed, or what he'd buried inside.

If LSD is the answer,

- then what's the question?

Nah, just kidding. Never thought that acid was the key to the kingdom; just enjoyed the journey. Most of the time.

This is a big topic; can't do more than take a little swipe right now. First up, I'm reminded of what drummer Mickey Hart said when asked what he thought now about his years of psychedelic excess with the Grateful Dead; he said, "everything I did led me here, and I like where I am", or words to that effect.

I have a lot of stories about the improbable things I did while under the influence, but I realized after a number of years that some of my pride in these adventures - and they really were adventures - was just another brand of machismo. I voluntarily danced on the edge of lunacy and dared Fate to push me over.

And there are moments when I suspect that it may have. That there may have been a trip that never ended but just took on such a solid form that all that I think has taken place since that day are just vivid visions inside that chemical theater -

 - I may wake up in a rented room in Utica, New York in late September 1970, blinking under a yellowed light fixture at a nightstand where a paperback novel and half-glass of water sit waiting.

No, not really. But my point is that I played with my mind in a way that was fantastically foolish, and the fact that I lived to tell the tale may in fact support the old notion that God protects babies and fools.

And if I had it to do over, you know, I'd do it all the same.

Class Notes, 1973

These were notes I took in the late winter/early spring for a course at Utica College on Joyce's "Ulysses". They accurately portray my state of mind at that time. (Oddly enough, I did well in this class, and the professor was not a push-over.)

This Is Your Brain on Science Fiction

Between the ages of say twelve and twenty-one, I read a lot - probably the most I ever read in my life. Some was for school, but textbooks aside, I even enjoyed a good percentage of the stuff I "had" to read, and I went beyond what was required in many cases, especially in the realms of philosophy and literature.

Of course, much of this extra effort was motivated not by intellectual curiosity but vanity - I enjoyed showing off: "look at the twelve-year-old checking Herman Kahn's 'On Thermonuclear Warfare' out of the library!" (and no, I didn't finish it. I skimmed the first five chapters, tops).

But I'll tell you what genre I immersed myself in the most, during that time: science fiction. Novels, short stories, sci-fi magazines - the whole lot. Heinlein, Sturgeon, Asimov, Zelazny, Simak, Bradbury, Blish, Clarke, del Ray, Boucher, Miller, Harrison, Delany, Pohl, and on and and on.

I finally reached a saturation point, or maybe my standards for dialogue and character development (never the strongest aspects of the genre) just got too high. But by then the damage had been done. And of course there were still the movies: Star Wars, Blade Runner, Alien, Close Encounters, Terminator, RoboCop. And let's not forget Star Trek.

What did all this do to me? Beyond the common symptoms - persistent disappointment in the failure of technology to bring us flying cars, robot servants, or faster-than-light spacecraft - here are my thoughts and concerns:

• Why are there still nations? We are never going to be admitted into the United Federation of Planets at this rate.
• Time is an illusion, or at least much more fluid and malleable than we think it is at this point.
• Evolution is not only real, it is probably accelerating. And it's not limited to humans. Or even higher mammals.
• Off-world colonies. Hello? Yes, I know they'll be run by mega-corporations and populated by coerced labor, at least initially. But we have to start somewhere.

Feel free to add your own entries.....

Speaking of taking things for granted,

it occurred to me that you can also seriously screw things up by taking YOURSELF for granted. I'm sure there are exceptions, but it seems to me that most of us have paid some dues and have done some real good along the way, and that we may have lost sight of that.

Why does this matter? Because, goddam it, you paid for that ticket, and you ought to get to enjoy the ride.

This even applies to some people who come off like self-absorbed, arrogant bastards, I believe. My wife did childcare for a long time, and I got to know a lot of children; I know acting out when I see it.

Tennis, Anyone?

My pal Greg sent me a provocative excerpt from a writer/philosopher named Andrew Cohen, who I'd never read before:

"A Greater Purpose

I don't believe the purpose of life is to just be happy. Why would God take fourteen billion years to produce highly evolved sentient life-forms that would ultimately develop the extraordinary capacity for self-reflective awareness, simply in order for them to be able to experience happiness? It's my conviction that we are here for a reason, that there is a grand and great purpose to our presence in this universe, and that none of us are going to truly find what we are looking for unless we get over our misguided pursuit of personal happiness and connect with that greater sense of purpose—that ultimate reason for being."

It was before 8 this morning, but couple of thoughts sprang to mind after reading this: first, that two beings as different as Freud and Buddha both believed that the quest for "happiness" was deluded 

- in the first instance, because it's unrealistic, and in the second, because it's a distraction (no claim to great scholarship here; these are warmed -over reductionist statements at best, but you get my point).

However, if we play with the word and the concept a little, and instead define it as as being at peace and in balance with the world/universe, then I think both Beard-guy and Smiling Fat Man would say, that's more like it....

Some Soul

Another from the final Characters' session, as a trio; Canyon, CA, August of 1990.

First one in the house awake, as usual,

and I like it that way. To my left, my loudly ticking Beatles wall clock; outside the window to my right, birds' songs like tiny silver bullets of light streaking through space. The occasional passing car. More birds. My stomach growling.

Working a regular daily gig, with commute, is requiring some adjustment on my part, but one big plus is, I really enjoy my evenings and weekends at home. Easy to lose that appreciation when you work from home. At least for me.

So getting up early to do things as prosaic as polishing my shoes and paying a couple of bills online feels right.

I'm starting to understand that all of the body blows, foreboding, and losses the last couple of years brought me are still reverberating, even as conditions seem to be easing up some. Once you've fallen through a few floors, you just don't walk the same. At least not right away.

I do understand that whatever setbacks we've endured are mosquito bites compared to what others live through - or don't - every day. But again, this is the life I'm living, so I need to start here.

What Have I Learned?

A work in progress. In random order.

• Always rinse and dry your razor after shaving. The blade will last ten times as long.
• Don't use any more toilet paper than you absolutely need at any given time.
• When you owe anyone money, never dodge them, and pay what you can. Unless they're mobsters, this will keep things OK.
• When you walk, keep your head high, shoulders back, arms and hands relaxed, and spring slightly forward with each step. And breathe.
• Remember that you can never un-say anything. Ever. And apologies are never really effective. Ever. Work on not saying or doing stupid things in the first place. (This especially applies if you are over twenty-five; before that, you have a plausible excuse).
• We all live in glass houses, in terms of the whole throwing stones deal.

November, 1977