I’m gonna sow
A seed of deep devotion,
Fertilize it with emotion,
Water it with warm desire,
And then I’ll reap the harvest of love.
The Rockin’ Berries, “Harvest of Love”
I realize that my posting has been rather sporadic over the past few months. Hopefully, that’ll soon change. Life, however, is not a “spectator sport,” but rather, demands one’s full participation. As I’m not a fulltime “pundit” (chuckle), I find that living my life occasionally compromises my ability to comment upon life in general, via placing certain restrictions/demands upon my time.
Read on.
Of late, Maggie and I have been taking advantage of the lovely weather and putting some work into our much-neglected garden and yard.
For me, it’s been a truly welcome opportunity, as we really didn’t get as much out of it as we should have last season. Granted, we harvested more cucumbers than we could eat (or pickle), brought in a fair haul of Chinese Yard-Long Beans, and certainly didn’t want for cut flowers all summer (the zinnias I allowed to go to seed have grown as rampantly as mint). Moreover, we had a huge crop of various kinds of basil (Sweet, Genovese, Cinnamon, Lemon and Lime), and brought in a few luffas and winter squash, but the overall yield was far smaller than in past seasons.
The drought was a problem, to be sure. The infestation of hornworms, vine borers and cucumber beetles didn’t help either. Even so, I’ve faced the same threats in past seasons, and always come out on top. Even going it alone (as, owing to my father’s illness, I’ve had to do for the last two seasons) wasn’t an insurmountable obstacle.
No, the biggest problems, by far, were lethargy, indifference and inertia on my part. My aunt, father and dog (whom I’d rescued from the pound, fifteen years before) all died in rapid succession during 2007, and recovery was slow in coming. As 2006 hadn’t exactly been a banner year, either, the combined weight of all the shit (and there’s really no other way to describe it) I’d had to endure took rather a heavy toll on me.
Beyond these, there were other difficulties. Maggie and I began dating in March of 2007, my first “serious” relationship in nearly twenty years. It was also the first in over ten years, the duration of which was measurable in anything other than days or hours. I could be a smartass, and say that it was also the first time in several years I didn’t have to pick up a hooker or nymphomaniac barfly in order to take care of “an itch I couldn’t scratch.”
That, however, would be crude of me, so I won’t say it.
Our relationship hit a snag almost at once, when I misinterpreted something she’d written and went completely batshit. Like many MDI-cases, I have a horrible temper, so the less said of that sorry episode, the better. Once we’d put it behind us, there was the matter of living three hundred miles apart with which to contend. Long-distance romantic relationships are difficult to sustain in the first place, but when both parties find themselves under additional, external pressures, the strain of holding one together becomes nearly unendurable. Luckily, neither of us is a stranger to adversity, as a result of which neither of us is inclined to haul ass in the opposite direction when trouble rears its ugly head. From April until September, then, we toughed it out – and fought like cats and dogs via the telephone and email.
It’s much funnier in retrospect than at the time it was happening, but at one point, Mags became so infuriated with me; she had my photo enlarged, taped it to her heavy bag, beat the shit out of it, and then gave the scraps to the dog.
Finally, she “took the plunge” and moved in with me a week or so before her birthday.
The months from April to September were difficult for both of us. My father died on April 26, leaving my mother and me a number of headaches. He’d done a fine job of getting his affairs in order, but even so, settling an estate in the bureaucratic nightmare that is modern America is anything but enjoyable. My mother, having been insulated from “the system” for as long as she has, found herself entirely unable to cope with the postmortem bullshit. This left the weight of dealing with various agencies and institutions firmly on my shoulders – along with that of reassuring her that the end of the world as we know it was not, in fact, nigh; and that playing “hurry up and wait” is simply a part of life when dealing with financial institutions and the government.
Although we’d only been dating a little over a month at the time, Maggie left North Carolina the day my father died, and stayed with us for two weeks. She helped with the last-minute funeral arrangements and generally made herself indispensable, greatly easing both of our lives in the process. Putting it bluntly: Without her, we’d have been well and rightly fucked, eight ways to Sunday.
Unfortunately, I’ve made some piss-poor choices over the years, insofar as the objects of my affections have been concerned. Owing to my sad tendency to let both pecker and heart usurp functions better left to my brain (the Spin Doctors’ “You Let Your Heart Go Too Fast” could have been written with Yours Truly in mind…), I’ve gotten mixed up with more Lucretia Borgias and Elizabeth Bathorys than I care to count, over the years.
My first love – for whom I pined for over two decades – was a lovely, brilliant little girl who inexplicably “morphed” into a superficial, sociopathic drama queen, and has since – to all appearances, at any rate – become the very stereotype I mock in my fiction: An utterly unremarkable, middle class, middlebrow, middle aged broad.
A few of the others weren’t much better, so the less said of them, the better.
Maggie, to my shock and relief (I’ve harbored a slightly misogynistic streak for quite a while, and am man enough to admit it), was nothing like any of them. As our commitment to one another became ever stronger, I realized that whereas I’d been in love before, this was the first time any woman had ever really loved me.
Como se dice “What a mindfuck,” Gentle Reader?
A first-class mindfuck it was, to be sure, and much, much more. So much more that; on the first of May, I asked her to marry me. She agreed, and the rest is history.
History’s distinguishing characteristic, though (as anyone who’s read a bit of it can attest), is that it’s fraught with tension, strife, and a seemingly endless series of pains in the individual and collective ass. In keeping with this most time-honored of patterns, no sooner had we plighted our troth and set our sights on a life of connubial bliss (or at least a reasonable facsimile thereof), than it began raining shite.
Maggie attracted the (unwanted) attention of a stalker. A brief Q&A session concerning the guy’s attitudes and personal habits left me with a sick feeling in my gut. Unfortunately, she (being very naïve in some ways) hadn’t a clue as to how profoundly aberrant the behaviors she related to me actually were. Therefore, she couldn’t understand the depth and intensity of my concern. Getting her to see the light required the intervention of my Bros Marc “Animal” MacYoung and Wayne, but she finally came around.
This was a good thing, as (my nerves strained to the breaking point from everything else that was going on) I was on the verge of singing “Call Out the Goddamned Reserves,” i.e., rounding up a few of my drinking buddies, taking a road trip, and showing the gent the error of his ways. Nothing says, “Stay the fuck away from my woman!” like a good, old-fashioned beat-down, after all.
Luckily for both of us (the idea of doing time for battery --or worse-- doesn’t sit well with me, and I’m reasonably certain the other gent was no keener to spend several weeks in traction), cooler heads prevailed. Since stalkers rely upon the cooperation of their victims through their silence, I simply decided to expose the guy rather than ambush him on his way home from work and tell him to hit the road -- or be found lying beside it in the morning.
No sooner had we solved that problem, than another popped up, in the form of the worst case of writer’s block I’ve ever experienced. On some days, I couldn’t crank out a single, fucking word; while on others, I was good only for a paragraph or so at a time – and a lousy paragraph, at that. As writing is my “stress busting” activity of choice, this left me in a nasty “Catch 22.”
Then my dog died.
Yep. First my mother’s youngest sister, then my Da, and then my dog. As I’d raised her from a puppy (I adopted her from the pound in 1992), this was especially devastating. For fifteen years, she’d been my constant, devoted companion and friend. There were times at which -- practically speaking – she was the only friend I had. And suddenly, she was gone.
When I took her in, she was eight weeks old, and had been picked up as a stray. Being half Dobermann, she was a good-sized puppy, but still a puppy for all that. I gathered from her hostility to other dogs that her size had served her well as she competed with them for food. When first I brought her into the house, I discovered <em>how</em> she’d managed to survive as a stray, a mere eight weeks old: her first act, upon entering the kitchen, was turning over the garbage can and rooting through its contents. I’ll admit that I’m not a “nice,” touchy-feely guy, but seeing that just broke my heart.
Unfortunately, her dietary habits had taken a toll on her. I’d had her for a week or two, when I noticed that she simply wasn’t gaining weight. I also noticed that she had difficulty keeping food down, and experienced severe attacks of diarrhea. Moreover, her nose had begun to run cloudy, yellow mucus. I immediately made an appointment with my vet, who confirmed my worst suspicions.
In addition to eating from garbage cans, Sweetie had been drinking from puddles and, presumably, one or more of Atlanta’s heavily polluted streams. In the process, she’d ingested parasitic paramecia called “flagellates.” The vet then told me that Sweetie had also contracted Kennel Cough -- in the pound, as likely as not. She then told me that Sweetie had a 50-50 chance of surviving, and reminded me that dogs purchased from the pound had a “warranty” of sorts – that I could return her and pick another dog.
To make a long story short, I took her home and spent a miserable, sleepless night crying like a baby. By the next morning, I’d made my decision (or, more accurately, committed to said – I think I actually made it in the vet’s office).
When I adopted Sweetie in April of 1992, I was twenty-four years old. My first dog, whom I’d had since I was nine years old, had died a little less than a year before and my cat, whom I’d owned since I was twelve, had followed her a few months later. Six years earlier, my parents had effected a de facto separation, at which point, my father PCSed to Germany. Five years earlier, a friend of mine was murdered. Four years earlier, my brother committed suicide. Three years earlier, I’d had my guts –and heart – ripped out and served to me by my first love, during a foolish, fruitless effort to win her back.
To say that I was contending with “abandonment issues” at the time is to understate the matter to the point of absurdity. For that very reason, as I suppose, I swore to a God in whom I no longer believed – and to myself -- that I would not, under any circumstances, abandon that, poor, sick puppy.
And I didn’t.
Were she to die, I reasoned, she’d do so in a home, with someone who had, in the span of a few days, grown to love her -- not alone, in some dog pound gas chamber. In the few days I’d owned her, she’d become unbelievably attached to me – and I to her. Illness or no illness, she’d meet me at the door when I returned home from work, her tail wagging – even if rather feebly. And her eyes… The look in her eyes whenever she caught sight of me.
Hell, I may have been a twenty-four-year-old, dope-smoking, pill-popping, White trash drunk, with a shit job, a shit attitude, and a fairly severe affective disorder (I’ve long since stopped smoking dope and popping pills, for the record…heh heh heh…), but to that dog, I might as well have been the center of the universe. Whatever anyone – or everyone – else thought of me; whatever I may have thought of myself at the time, Sweetie thought I was the neatest thing since sliced bread.
And I, in turn, thought the same of her – even when she bit the living shit out of me; chewed a few of my favorite sci-fi paperbacks to shreds; peed on my carpet; pilfered half a pound of hamburger from the kitchen counter, before barfing it up in my car; and, in one particularly infuriating episode, came behind me and uprooted each of the dozen or so pepper seedlings I’d transplanted into larger pots, even as I planted the next one.
Send her back? “Fuck that noise!” as we used to say in those days.
I’ll neither spew any clichés to the effect of: “Love makes all the difference in the world,” nor regale the Gentle Reader with platitudes, bromides, shibboleths, and/or similar verbal detritus. (I might beat him up and take his lunch money, but I’ll spare his intellect their equivalent). The long and short of it is: She survived, and I had her for fifteen years.
And then she was dead.
That sucked – but life went on.
As did the long-distance relationship. Mags and I had a few telephone and email pissing contests over the summer, but the relationship survived them. In July, we had the chance to spend a few carefree days hanging out at MacYoung’s Colorado digs, catching up with friends old and new. Things improved markedly thereafter.
She moved in with me in September, and from then until January, we adjusted to living together as best we could. Having been a bachelor for forty years, I found this especially challenging at times. Owing to a few of my “quirks,” I don’t doubt that she found it equally challenging, but we made it.
The Holidays came and went. Social obligations and visits came and went. A bit of bullshit so petty and callow that I’ll neither relate it nor mention the perpetrators’ names came and went – but we remained together.
And we adjusted -- to each other; to living on less money in order to spend more time writing (and doing things worth writing about); to ever-increasing prices, changing markets, a changing culture, and a changing world.
For my part, I adjusted to certain internal changes as well.
By January of this year, it had become self-evident that the status quo, as it were, was unacceptable.
Lest anyone draw inferences concerning my politics, I’ll state for the record that I have little respect for Barack Obama, even less for his mindless “Change!” mantra, and none whatsoever for the kind of mentally stunted creature to whom “change” – a mere process, an alteration of condition – is treated as an object; especially an object of veneration.
Change is inevitable – but it isn’t inevitably good.
As I looked at the patch of ground my father left me, it occurred to me that since his death, things had changed for the worse. The changes (God! How I’ve grown to loathe that word!) that had befallen the land were in many ways analogous to those that occurred within his own body, as the cancer consumed him.
Seeing it die was like seeing him die again.
And I’d spent so much time grieving his passing; I’d let it happen.
The rest is an all-too-typical “long, strange trip,” as the Grateful Dead sang. Call it what you will, Gentle Reader; an odyssey, a “vision quest,” or – and I prefer this term, for the record – a pilgrimage of sorts.
Suffice to say that the pilgrim has made measurable progress – and that a few changes have been made.
Life is not a “spectator sport.”
Hammer oder Amboss sein.
Rambling and pics forthcoming.
