Ice Cream for the World: Cheryl Crow and God Do What They Can

We all face demons.  Most of those demons are inside us.  Overtime, I'd learned one's happiness is directly proportional to one's ability to subdue or reconcile one's demons.  Furthermore, there were two very different types of demons, demons of fear, and demons of desire, and that to be really happy, one had to pacify both.

Type A people, for example, are not really plagued by apprehension.  They'll try anything and move any mountain, ethical or not, to get what they want.  Yet, they usually eventually self-destruct because they cannot tame their own desires.  They appear to be strong to the world, and often rise to high positions, but they eventually implode because they seem to have no filter between I want and I do.  Many such men were in the news lately for sexual assault and sexual harassment.

Type B people, on the other hand, are plagued by apprehension.  No valley is wide enough to walk through because there is always some distant hill that a small rock might roll down and hit their toe.  They are usually very kind, but they are so busy taking into account other people's feelings, analyzing ethical issues, and measuring outcomes, that they never really act on anything.  They usually do little harm to others, but they are miserable themselves because they die under a mountain of unaccomplished goals.  They begin a lot of sentences with "If only I had...".

Of course, those are extremes.  Most of us are somewhere in the middle and battle both demons of fear and of desire.

These were my thoughts, sitting up in bed, reflecting on my dream.  Clearly it was representation of both types of fear.  I am more of a Type B sort of person.  Fear runs deep, and often controls my decision-making without me knowing it.  I have a hard time fulfilling my own aspirations.  It took me 10 years to complete my undergraduate program, and I dropped out of my masters program with a 4.0 and not much more than my thesis to complete.  The rational reason was money.  We'd relocated to Sandstone without any employment prospects.  All we could find at first were minimum wage jobs, so our budget was very tight.  Yet, I could have made it work, and I should have made it work, but I didn't.  The real fear, I think, was obtaining that goal.  It would in a way, redefine me.  Instead of being a student of the fine arts, I'd be a master of the fine arts.  I'd be eligible to enter the world of the writers and professors I'd admired for so long on equal terms.  Something kept me from moving on.  The same thing occurred in my undergraduate program.  I'd been afraid of moving into the professional, adult world.  I claimed to not to believe in it; I said that world was only driven by ego and greed anyway.  It was a system of haves and have-nots.  But the truth was, what I didn't believe in was me.  I assumed I'd be one of those have-nots, and part of me wanted to ensure that because except for a short time period, that's all I'd ever known.  Perhaps that too is what kept me from completing large writing projects.  I'd started countless novels; I'd work fervently until I got 100 to 200 pages, and then I'd just stop, distracted by some new idea.  The truth was, I was too afraid to complete anything.

Among my favorite books was Instructions to the Cook: A Zen Master's Lessons in Living a Life That Matters by Bernie Glassman.  In it, he writes about building up several businesses for charity, one of which is a bakery, operated, if I remember right, by the homeless.  He also talks about walking away from those successes when the time was right to do something else meaningful.  Basically, the book is about having no fear in the face of the new, and also about not clinging to success once you find it.  It's about living purposefully in the present.  I so wanted to to be able to do that.  I wanted my life to have meaning.  I wanted success--not for prestige, I didn't really care about that--I just saw a lot wrong with the world and wanted to make some sort of meaningful difference.  It seemed a crime to come to this earth, move through hour after hour, week after week, year after year, and leave it in the same mess it was before I got here.  And it was a mess.  Anyone who didn't see the ugliness in the world wasn't looking.  Of course, the same can be said of beauty--it definitely is a beautiful world.  But you don't cure cancer by focusing only on the healthy cells.  I wanted success because I wanted to make a difference; I wanted to fight those cancer cells.  With the exception of the environment, I didn't feel guilty of feeding them; but I did feel guilty for not doing more to fight the ugliness.

I'd also fought demons of desire for a short time in my life, in the form of addictions, but I'd learned how control them.  I don't really have an addictive personality in the first place; the root of my addictions was not desire but fear.  I battled shyness for years, and it was something I still struggled with, but I had learned how to deal with that tiger.  You don't fight back; you don't run away.  You sit down next to it.  You look it in the eyes and acknowledge its right to exist.  You love it, and through that love, see its sense of purpose.

I first realized this in a bar.  I shoveled crap for a living--literally--at an indoor mushroom farm at the time.  I hated my job.  I'd dropped out of college and moved back home to Sandstone because I'd had no other choice.  Prior to returning home, I was drinking myself into oblivion, both spiritually and monetarily.  In a moment of divine intervention after a night of cursing God while staggering down Mesa Street in El Paso, Texas, I woke up with a clear impression: Go home and start over again.  I didn't hear a voice, but I might as well have.  It was so clear and filled with such kindness:  Go home and start over again.  

I did go home, but I failed to start over again.  I continued to drink, and I continued to hate my life.  One afternoon after work, I stopped by a little log cabin bar on the south end of town.  I'd just moved back.  I'd grown up in Sandstone, but I'd been away for over 10 years, and in small towns only a few people of each generation stay due to limited employment opportunities.  That's what keeps the town small.  So, at that point, I could have been in any small town in America.  I didn't know anyone my age.  I entered in a fowl mood, determined to drink myself as close to death as I could and still survive.  I put some money in the jukebox, found a song I loved by Cheryl Crow, We Do What We Can, and headed to the back corner to settle nicely into my sour mood.  The song came on slow and deep as black Southern water.  I'd found what I needed in that slow-trudging piano making its ways through the swamps:

Downstairs they're playing Kenton
The house set to swing
I lay in my bed
And listen to everything.

'Cause Leo's in rare form tonight
His trombone sings so sweet
This is the room
Where they all come to meet

Oh that low, scattered, muffled trombone, and the steady beat of the snares, while that piano shuffled on like a wino in the back alley of broken glass, the broken face of God, staring up from the pavement, hoping, yearning to give something back to humanity.

He said
I do what I can
I live for the moment
And that's who I am
Yeah that's who I am

I sat back there taking it all in, hour after hour, coming to terms, sort-of, for the moment anyhow, with my deep-seeded anger towards life.  How did I end up here?  I was going to be a poet; I would write the right words, do what I could, maybe do some sort of good.  Instead, here I was in this little bar in this little town at the end of the world, 500 miles of deserts and mountains stretching to west before any real sign of civilization was found, spending each day shoveling crap, literally, for a living.

My brother once had a black t-shirt that said, I must be a mushroom; they keep me in the dark and feed me nothing but bullshit.

Oh that's right.  Nothing but bullshit, I thought.  I was settled in deep, oh so deep, the righteous anger building up inside.  A couple of more beers and this would be a good night.

Just then, in midst of my miserable reverie, a man I'd eventually know as James Paul John said, "Mind if I sit down?"

I felt like telling him to go stab a pitchfork in his gut and stand outside this crap-hole bar in this crap-hole town all American-Gothic like and greet these sorry suckers going nowhere as quickly as me.

Normally, I would have said, "Sure," and then pretended that I was capable of being normal and carry on a normal conversation, but in a moment of drunken clarity, I was honest.

"You can, but I don't talk.  I drink, and I listen to music, that's who I am."

That's the first time I looked my tiger shyness in the eye.  I was simply too tired to battle him any longer.  I continued with no fear.  "I'm shy; it's not that I hate people; I just hate talking to people.  It makes my face itch, my eyes water.  But if you want to sit and listen to music that's fine."

Perhaps out in the back parking lot a shard of glass shown a little brighter, God's unseen eye gleaming because one of his sorry creatures had taken a small step forward.  Clearly something had clicked.  The hardest thing about shyness is that it makes others feel uncomfortable.  If you just translate it for them, then everything is alright.  The reason this conversation is going nowhere has nothing to do with you; it's not that I don't like you, that you are bad company, or that I think I'm too good to talk to you.  It's just that talking makes me uncomfortable, but I want to do it anyway.

Somehow admitting that to myself and to others opened a few doors that had always been closed before, the most important one being meeting Marci.

So, I carry around in my head a sacred picture.  A man is slumped in a red vinyl booth in the back corner of a small log cabin bar on the outskirts of humanity.  Cheryl Crow's "We Do What We Can" plays on the jukebox as a tiger lays casually on the table and purrs.  The man has the last of his warm beer, puts his glass down beside the great striped feline, looks it in the eye, grabs his stetson hat, stands up to walk out, and whistles.  He walks out of the dark interior and out into a blinding white wintry Great Basin landscape.  The enormous feline follows and jumps in the back of the truck.  The man gets in the cab and drives off.  The music fades back in right at the climax, the slow-steady piano unleashed in a moment of tangled, tormented glory, those angry lyrics flowing out, so bitter, hard-edged and real:

The procession on the TV screen
What could it possibly mean for a man
Who's come this far just to turn around
Could there still be life in Kenton's swing
with the Kennedys gone and everything
Those sad rows of houses with their optimistic colors
Democrat grandparents and draft-dodging brothers
Riots down the street and discontented mothers
We do what we can.

I knew the time had come. It was my time to take ice cream to the world.

Ice Cream for the World: Tyger, Tyger, Burning Bright...

I was in a great olive green room with high ceilings.  It was an old room with dusty stucco walls; it would have appeared dingy if the architecture wasn't so grand, but it was very grand indeed.  The entire wall at the front of the classroom was this ornate Byzantine-like mosaic screen, also stuccoed-over, painted green and covered with dust.  Through it, I could see a courtyard with solid stone tiles and high stone walls covered with grape vines.  In each corner of the courtyard was an Italian Cyprus.  Across the courtyard I could see my usual classroom at the residential treatment center where I teach.  The lights were on, and I could see the room through a large 1960s plate-glass window.  That room appeared to be an add-on to this much older structure and seemed quite out of place.

However, in my dream, I didn't analyze the architecture of my surroundings.  It was the norm.  The only thing that was different was that they had fumigated my regular classroom, and it was my evaluation day.  I had moved over to this much older classroom and was in the back corner trying to get a stack of papers to graded so that I would have the data to measure my goal for that year.  The kids were in the room, and I'd started them on an informal pretest over the lesson objective prior to the principal's arrival.  The lesson was over noun clauses, and when he showed up, I'd gather up the little slips of paper, go over a few of them with the class, and begin the lesson.  That is why I kept glancing out the screen.  I saw the custodian, a pretty Mexican woman, out there sweeping up vine leaves that had drifted down from the high stone walls on three sides of the courtyard.  I watched her gentle figure for a while, glanced over at my students, who were still working quietly, and then went back to grading.  After several minutes, I glanced back through the screen and saw the CEO of the treatment center walk by wearing an Italian suit.  That was unusual.  Usually he wore shorts and a t-shirt.  But he'd worn the suite to work a couple times before.  I surveyed my students again and then returned to my stack of papers.  After several minutes, I glanced out the screen again and saw a rhino walk by followed by some tall Maasai.  That too was unusual, but not unheard of.  What was extraordinary was that there was no sign of my principal.  At least twenty minutes had passed.  He was usually fairly prompt.  I was reflecting on how I could delay my presentation when I realized the class had suddenly grown quite noisy.

I looked up to see what the commotion was, and my principal was sitting at the back of the room, taking notes.  I asked how long he had been there.  He smiled.  "Oh a good while."

In my mind, I stood up to teach my lesson, but my body either didn't get the instructions or refused to follow the orders.  I tried again.  Nothing.  I smiled back at him.  "Just a minute."

"Take your time," he said.  "Pretend I'm not even here."

As soon as he said that, somehow I zoomed across the room and was so close I could see the hairs growing out of his nostrils.  Yet, I was still at my desk, immobile.  He just kept smiling and fidgeting with his pen.  I was feeling very claustrophobic, so I glanced back out into the courtyard.  The janitor was watering the plants that grew along the edges.  I studied her slender frame as she bent over, hoping to find some sort of center, some will to get up.  The light played softly around her neck.

It was at that point I noticed a figure beyond her, in my regular classroom, which was lit up.  I bolted up, horrified.  The figure was me.  I was standing before the blackboard, diagramming a sentence with several noun clauses.  The kids were in there, attentive.  So was another version of my principal. Because of the plate-glass window, I couldn't hear anything, but it was clear everything was normal.  What wasn't normal was this sickly green classroom with the sickly green mosaic see-through screen and my new immobile state almost in the lap of my principal.  I panicked.  Surely, I'll get fired if I sit here and do nothing.

It was then I noticed the great blue vase in the center of the courtyard filled to the brim with cool, refreshing water.  I didn't know how I didn't see it before as it was between the custodian and my old classroom, both of which, I'd given plenty of visual attention.  None-the-less, somehow I hadn't noticed.  The cool, deep water reflected the light pouring down into the courtyard from above.  It was so calming that after staring at it for a while, I found my desk had returned to its natural position and my principal was back at the far corner of the room, still smiling.  I also knew that I could now get up and teach my lesson.  The problem was, I no longer wanted to.  Teaching had been a good life.  I had no regrets.  I'd diagrammed a lot of sentences and had fun doing it.  I'd read a lot of amazing poems written by my students.  Together, we'd listened to a lot of great music--them, quietly working and me grading papers while some grand jazz-funk, like Kool and the Gang's "Summer Madness," played in the background.  But it was time to move on.

Without a word, I got up, and walked out.  In a moment of bravery, I thought about kissing the custodian gently on the cheek and saying "Thanks" prior to leaving.  Then I decided it was kind of creepy--Listening to NPR, I'd heard plenty of stories about the creepy things men do lately--so I just walked on by.  The only problem was that after I took a few more steps, I glanced around and noticed the courtyard had no exit and in each corner there was a tiger slowly approaching me.  Over some communist-styled propaganda loud speakers mounted on each of the four high stone walls an oriental Khmer Rouge voice kept reciting the first two lines of William Blake's "The Tyger" over and over:

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night; 

Tyger Tyger, burning bright, 

In the forests of the night...

Ice Cream for the World: Looking at Myself from Outside Myself, I Realized I Simply Wasn't Sane

I have been saying Monday didn't go as expected.  That is so true.  I pulled into our lane and our two big dogs, Oreo and Chewy greeted me, running in front of the car past the old farm sheds and around the bend, where Chewy saw four or five deer standing along the fence line, and took off after them, sending them bounding over the barbed wire barricade.  He could have easily followed them, but turned back to the car.  This was ritual, day after day.

So too was Oreo's head instantly appearing inside the car as I opened the door.  He could never wait for me to get outside to say "Hi."  It irritated me a bit, but his eyes showed so much joy as his chin rested on my knee, all I could do is pat him on the head, "Hello Oreo."  Then I'd say, "How are the chickens?"  He'd instantly be gone, having zipped over to the chicken cage to let me know he was doing his job.  He spent the majority of the day laying by the wooden breezeway that went from the coop to the run.  He was utterly fascinated with how the chickens could get through it.  Originally, I thought he was out to kill the chickens.  But one day I let them out, and he had no interest in hurting them.  He simply admired how they could go through that little suspended hallway from their dark, interior world, and pop out into daylight.  It was all very scientific to him; he'd sit for hours in amazed observation.  He also dug in the dirt for scientific purposes.  I had large spots of bare dusty earth all over the yard which Oreo created for the sole purpose of watching the dust float away.  They were his labs.  Scratch a little; watch it all be picked up and float away.  My brother joked that Oreo would start the next dust bowl.  Oreo was awed by movement.  Somehow or another, he observed, those chickens just moved through that tunnel.  He didn't want to hurt them.  He wanted to study them, and so over time, it became his self-appointed job to watch over the chickens.  Whenever he was annoying me all I had to say was "How are the chickens?" and off he'd run to see if they were coming through that worm hole again.  It was very cute.

Chewy followed me part way to the door, but torn between allegiances, bound off after Oreo.  I was dog free--at least until I opened the utility room door.

As I opened the bright yellow door, I was greeted by our two pugs, Buddha and Camilla, yapping, spinning in circles and scratching at my leg.  I walked through the utility room, kicking a mostly-empty dog-food bag to the side, the two dogs running before me, jumping up, yapping some more.  Before I reached the kitchen, Marci asked, “Dear, did you give your notice?  Also, don’t you know where the pot lids go?”

The second part was to be expected.  I am often greeted with a showering of bullet-questions—indictments followed by question marks, which are not launched seeking answers but repentance.  But, that first question seemed to require a response.  What response I was supposed to give, I wasn’t sure.  I had purposefully not brought up the ice cream truck on Sunday because trying to discuss it Saturday quickly turned sour.  So, maybe it wasn’t a question after all.  Maybe it was sarcasm.  Maybe what she was really saying was have you dropped that hair brain idea of the ice cream truck yet?  That would make sense.  She would not want a response to that.  For her, the answer would be obvious.  Drop it.

I decided the safest thing to do was answer the second.  “They go in the bottom cupboard between the stove and oven”.

“Very good. So why were they under the stove again?”

I didn’t know how to answer that.  What I’d learned over the years is that I only had to get through these first five minutes.  Marci is a wonderful person and everyone loves her.  She isn’t mean, she isn’t a nag.  It seemed to have something to do with crossing borders from the outside world and into the interior spaces of our home.  I’m not sure where it came from.  It occurred whenever someone was coming home, like I was now; she’d wait inside fully armed with a great arsenal of questions.  It also occurred if she was the one coming home.  She’d enter like a S.W.A.T. team and gun you down before you could get out How was your day?:   

“Why is that NyQuil cup on the bottle?  Don’t you know it gets the bottle sticky?  And why did you change the tablecloth?  Don’t you know I hate orange?”

Sometimes I was stupid enough to respond, which would unravel what would have been a great evening of cooking and watching TV together.  We always had a show we were watching together.  Recently, it had been Stranger Things.  Sometimes Marci made dinner; sometimes I did.  If I could just stay quiet during those first five minutes of transition, everything was grand.  Very seldom did we fight over anything big, especially since I’d found my way back to the Church.  I was simply easier to live with than I used to be.  She might be difficult to live with for 5 minutes each day, but for much of our marriage, I could be terrible for weeks on end.  In short, for most of our marriage, I got the better end of the stick.  Still, those five minutes each day were hard, very hard.

“How was your day?” I asked, hoping we'd moved beyond the questions.

“Okay.  Did you give your notice?”

“Was I supposed to?”

“Yes.  Isn’t that obvious?  We can’t very well pick up everything, buy an ice cream truck and become vagabonds while simultaneously staying here.”

“But Saturday, you—”

“You aren't wavering, are you?”

“I didn’t even know a decision was made.  Saturday, you—"

Like I was saying, Monday did not go as expected.  Somehow between Saturday night and Monday afternoon, Marci had switched sides on this battle front.  What's strange is that I instinctively stepped over the line in opposition to her; therefore, in effect, countering all my own original arguments as if I had become her and she had become me.  Seeing things from her point of view, I realized what an idiot I was.  No wonder she had to let off a little steam each day as our worlds collided by firing those damn questions.  The pressure was immense.  Who gives up two secure jobs and a beautiful home to drive around the country giving ice cream away--for free?  Looking at myself from outside myself, I realized I simply wasn't sane.  What's more, this wasn't the first time this had happened.  If we actually went through with it, it would be the second time, and that was her loaded cannon.

"What's the big deal?  We moved here without a plan."

"That's different."

"How?  This is something you really want to do, so let's do it."

I wanted to say yes, but I couldn't.  From where she formally stood--it all looked so incredibly foolish.  All I could see was our lives imploding and us becoming homeless.  I wondered what conversation she had had with herself to get herself to walk off that cliff--out there in the deep, black void of the unknown.  But there she stood, calm as Buddha himself, perfectly at ease with an uncertain future.  How could I back out now?

I had no idea, but I'd sure in the hell try.  Our future depended on it.

Ice Cream for the World: Reason Prevailed

As I turned on All Things Considered on NPR, Debbie Elliott was talking to Robert Siegel about the senate race between Judge Roy Moore and Doug Jones.  I was anxious and my stomach was somewhat queasy.  I desperately wanted Doug Jones to win, but that wasn't it.  I had no clue whether or not the allegations about Judge Roy Moore seeking out teenage girls sexually in the 1980s were true.  I wasn't even overly concerned about them.  People change, and that was a long time ago.  As a Christian, I believe in the atonement, of redemption, of turning around one's life, and moving on.  No, what bothered me was that although he was denying the allegations, the allegations could very well  be true, and yet all those self-proclaimed Christians appeared to be willing to vote for him, not because they knew he was innocent, but because they could not bring themselves to vote for a Democrat.  Their political identity seemed to be stronger than their moral identity.  They were more concerned about their party losing a seat in the senate than the trauma of a fourteen year old girl.  They had become more focused on the large picture than the fate of the individual players.  They had become more concerned about the machinery of the senate than the worthiness of the office holders.  Life had been reduced to a game of political strategy.

I feared a society where we lose sight of individuals.  Sure, Judge Roy Moore might be innocent.  He could be the victim of political mischief, but what about those girls?  A fourteen year old girl cannot consent to something so life-changing as sex.  At that age, you try on a new personality every day.  Statutory rape is rape for a reason.  Power dynamics.  Kids are not adults.  It seemed many voters in Alabama were willing to possibly place an unrepentant predator in office just so the other party didn't gain political leverage. To me that was an omen of worse times to come.  I felt the democrats were a little better on that front, but not much.  As a country, we were losing sight of the sacredness of the individual.  We were acting like wolves, our brains seemingly hard-wired to small allegiances, such as party affiliation, above overarching universal cultural values.  The phrase I'm avoiding is, we were acting tribally.  It's not that tribal societies aren't guilty of what we call tribalism, it's that tribal used that way is a pejorative term because nation states don't behave any differently.

Of course, it could be some Judge Roy Moore voters just felt he should be given due process.  I get that.  It's just that, from the various radio interviews I'd heard, that didn't seem to be the case.  He wouldn't have had a chance if there had been a Republican alternative.  Voters in Alabama considered themselves to be choosing the lesser of two evils.  How messed up is that?  The thought that It's better to put a child molester in office than a Democrat.   To me, it was a clear sign of a broken nation, a complete failing of democracy on so many levels, the two most important being:  first, the political parties had demonized the opposite ideology to the point where voters would rather support a possible pedophile over a candidate from the other team; second, the nation seemed to have forgotten that democracy and a one-party system are in fact incompatible.  Each party needs the opposing party if our representative system is going to stay intact.  It is having a choice between divergent views that makes our system work.  No divergent views, no choice; no choice, no liberty.

For the first time in my life, I felt the fabric of my country was coming unraveled.  Not because of this one election.  Not even because the election of Donald Trump.  It had been building for some time, going way back to Newt Gingrich's war on public television back in the 90s.   But it was so exaggerated now.  Perhaps that is why I had wanted to buy an ice cream truck and give ice cream to the world.  I just wanted some way to bring us all together again.

I realized then though how immature my thoughts were.  Besides, what impact did I ever have on the world?  None.  That would never change.  Nothing had always been my world.  Nothing would remain.  That was okay.  I'd grown to love insignificance.  Outside my job, I had little pressure.  I had my garden in the summer, and in all seasons I could take a walk up the canyon whenever I wanted to.  I had an amazing family.  What more could anyone want?

I felt an enormous sense of relief.  I would not have to bring up the ice cream truck issue with Marci again after all.  Reason had prevailed.  I was free, saved from momentary ambition.

Ice Cream for the World: On the Way Home Across the Smoggy Yellow Desert I Almost Found Nirvana

On the way home across the smoggy, yellow desert, I reflected a lot on the benefits of inaction.  Smog, for instance, is as much a product of action as it is of inaction.  Although technology can and does bring relief to the environment, it is the developed nations, not the undeveloped nations, that produce the most greenhouse gasses per capita.  It is true our energy is much cleaner, but we use so much more of it because of our excessive need to be productive and entertained.  We defy nature so that we can work and play throughout the night.  While much of the world is sleeping, we are up late, producing carbon monoxide--staying late at the office, eating out, seeing a movie, working graveyard, or sitting alone in Denny's writing a book.  You name it, the lights are on, and we are up consuming energy.  Action.

I also reflected back on my life and realized I had done plenty.  No, I hadn't gained any fame.  No, I hadn't accumulated any wealth.  No, I hadn't accomplished my dreams, but I had done plenty.  What I realized I hadn't done is enjoy the life I was living at the moment.  I was always acting on tomorrow.  I was always escaping the now by fantasizing about the future.  For much of my life, I was bored, restless.  Even now that I was seldom bored and generally very satisfied, I was still always dreaming of different tomorrows: getting the house clean this winter; finally finishing the garden and patio area this summer; going back to school and finishing up my MFA program; or most recently, giving it all up, to go on the road and give ice cream away to the world.  These were all things that removed me from my present moment.  Looking back, I realized that's really all I got wrong in my life.  I was never fully present in the moment.

In high school I lived with my brother, an artist.  I might come home from school and find him in the field across the railroad tracks from our apartment complex flinging paint on raw canvas with the intensity of a conductor leading a symphony.  One year, he built city out of foam-core and charcoal in our hallway.  I had to step over foam-core cars to get to the bedroom.  It was like living inside a David Hockney instillation or the prop room of a theater company.  My friends and I hung out at the museum, the zoo, the botanical gardens.  We took photographs, went for hikes, long drives, and went camping.  My brother and I stayed up late, listening to music, talking about arts and ideas.

So much of what I had done was good; I was just too stupid to realize it was good at the moment.  There was always some girl I needed in my life to make me happy, so I was miserable.  And the small part of my life where I really went astray only occurred because I was too stupid to accept who I was and where I was at that moment, and in the misery of the moment, sought escape through alcohol.

Had I learned to be still, I realized, life would have been grand no matter what I did or didn't accomplish.  It wasn't movement that mattered, but stillness.

I looked across the valley.  The mountains at the south end had vanished behind the sickly, brown smog.  There was that strange yellow smudgy glow of winter inversion.  I felt dissatisfied.  I wanted to do something.  Should I write my congressman?  Donate to Greenpeace?  No, that would just use more energy.  I would have to get on my computer, keep on the lights, write multiple drafts to get it just right.  Someone on the other end would have to read it.  They would put me on their mailing lists and send me emails.  People would be working all hours to bring me into their correspondence, sending me weekly reminders to vote or donate.  I would spend hours deleting those emails from my account.  I had the urge to just slam on the breaks, turn off the car, get out and stand in the middle of the road and listen to a single moment of silence broken only by the cry of a passing hawk.

I thought of the moon, and emptiness; of clear, white light.

For a moment, I thought I found Nirvana.

Then I turned on the radio.

Ice Cream for the World: In the Room the Woman Come and Go Talking of Michelangelo

If my life were a work of fiction, I would have glanced up from struggling to retrieve my i-phone from between my seat and the console only to find a large, dark green flat-bed farm truck loaded with caged chickens coming at me.  There would be the collision, the spinning of my little gray Toyota Camry around, and a bunch of flying chicken cages, that would implode upon impact, sending terrified birds scampering to and fro.  When all the dust settled, a single chicken would rise from the rubble, stand on the heap of carnage, let out a little under-spoken bock-bock, and then peck at my bloody, amputated arm.

This is how I pictured it all going down as I made my way through the drive-thru at McDonald's where I ordered a 20 piece Chicken McNuggets for Marci and Everest and Chicken tenders for myself.  It's not much of a meal, but the whole thing, including my large Sprite Zero, was only eleven bucks.  It would have been even cheaper if I could have settled for Chicken McNuggets myself, but I can't eat them; they're simply too processed.  One time when we were traveling up the Oregon Coast, we stopped and had breakfast at a little pastry shop across the street from the bay in Newport, and afterwards, we walked along the docks.  A fishing boat was unloading these little tiny silver fish, and I asked the men what all those fish were used in.  One of them replied "Chicken McNuggets".  I have no idea if there is any truth to that or not, but it was enough to steer me away from them forever.  When I split apart a Chicken Tender it at least appears to have the texture of chicken.  This is not necessarily so with a McNugget.  Sometimes, on the rare occasion I try to convince myself to eat one, I'll split one open, and it is so oyster-like inside that I expect to find a pearl.  No thanks.  I'll spend a little extra for the strips.  But as Marci and Everest don't seem to care, why not save some cash?

What really happened when I made that distracted left turn is nothing.  Lava has a lot more traffic than Sandstone, but generally the oncoming cars are still a half block apart.  Besides Utah small town streets are so wide that even if a car was coming, I would have countless escape routs.  It's kind of like avoiding cows in Brooklyn or reality while watching Fox News.  It just isn't that hard.  So nothing happened.

Nothing is a big part of my life.  One night I spent hours trying to slip a humorous jab at Trump into a novel I was writing and nothing came.  Really?  How is that possible?  That's like not being able to grow pineapple in Hawaii or mold in Miami.  Yet it was so.  I sat there, sucking snot back up my runny nose, my head slightly numbed from a thick cold coming on, and nothing came.

I am alright with nothing being a big part of life; truth be told, I prefer it that way.  Decisions are not my thing.  Neither is movement, nor direction.  I always thought J. Alfred Prufrock had the perfect life, and I wondered why he couldn't enjoy his stasis more:

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherised  upon a table...

One hot muggy afternoon in Arlington, Texas--are there any other type?--I was entranced when Professor Cohen read these lines.  He went on, line by line, to explain that although the poem appears to be about the stagnation of a middle-aged man stifled by an upper-middle class lifestyle, it is really about the insecurity and angst of a nineteen-year-old T.S. Eliot, the author.

I cared less about all that.  What I cared about is that he seemed to be describing the perfect life:

In the room the woman come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

Oh how I could picture that.  In eleventh grade I had taken an art and music history class.  Apparently, only the daughters of the upper-middle class take art and music history because I found myself in a room of seven beautifully dressed, sophisticated-talking, charming girls, one obviously gay guy who fit right in with them, a stunning, oh so slender, elegant teacher sitting on the edge of her desk, and myself, a shaggy-headed geek, who wore the same white, button up shirt everyday that was two sizes too big, tucked into Levi's that did not reach my ankles.

They'd spend the hour casually discussing the most beautiful nudes ever painted as the images were projected on the classroom wall and casually discussing their world travels.  Oh I remember that one from the Louvre or I had the greatest cup of coffee just across the street from that fountain in Rome.
  
Me too.  And there's that great little travel bookstore right next door.  Rome is so wonderful in the spring.  

Oh, and Paris too!

Yes, we should go.  I'll ask my daddy.

That's when Miss Jones, our elegant teacher would chime in.  Actually, I was planning a class trip in June for those interested.

That, I knew, would not happen--at least not for me.  These were the daughters of lawyers and bankers, world-travelers, cultured in all things fine, including the arts.  I, on the other hand, was the brother of a real, working artist, and the poverty that goes along with it.  I was Pipp without any great expectations.  My brother was Picasso in his blue years, long before he would rack up thousands by doodling on a napkin enjoying some wine and cheese at a cafe with some friends before rushing off to see another bull fight.

Yet unlike Pipp in Great Expectations--I'm really mixing my allusions here--I was a bit more satisfied, though not completely, with my lot in life.  Not only did I not expect to go to Europe, I didn't even expect to be noticed by these wonderful girls.  I was satisfied to sit there all but invisible and be entranced by their musical voices, their long slender legs, and perfectly manicured toes sticking out of leather sandals.  Their legs were always crossed under the desk, and they'd idly swing the leg resting on their knee casually back and forth, a leather sandal casually dangling off the end of a foot, ready to drop off at any moment--the sandal ready to drop, not the foot; that'd be gross.  I'd become mesmerized, like watching swaying palm fronds from a cabana in Hawaii--not that I ever experienced that--while their artistically styled sentences dropped rose petals on the dirty tiled floor of a typical public school classroom.  Why they didn't go to private school, I don't know.  I went to high school in a fairly wealthy district, with a diverse population.  There were apartment complexes to be sure.  I lived in one of them.  But we also had one student who was dropped off at school by a limo each day and the parking lot was full of BMWs.

The point is.  I was happy enough to just observe those girls' world from the outside.  Like J. Alfred Prufrock I yearned to be part of their world, but unlike him, orbiting around the fringes didn't make me miserable--at least not yet; that would come later.  Yearning was there, a slight scent, but not yet an agonizing pull.

Put simply, I was quite happy to observe that--

 In the room the woman come and go
Talking of Michelangelo

Ice Cream for the World: What if She Calls and I Can't Get to my Phone?

Kudos to the evil genius who designed the i-phone just the right width to slip down between the car seat and console--a space too narrow for even a slender, artistic hand, like my own, to follow.  This was my thought halfway through taking a left onto Main in Lava, Utah after dropping a colleague off after work.  It must have slipped out of the pocket of my joggers.  My son hates that I have a pair of joggers.  He lets me know it is uncool for old people to wear joggers, but I will wear joggers if I please.  I will wear pajamas in public if I please.  I once did.  Up north, to Provo, the big city.  My children were horrified, but oh how comfortable I was.  That is the great thing about getting old.  You know that no matter how you dress, you won't be turning any heads.  So you don't even try.  It is great.  The ultimate freedom.  Happily married with a steady job, I can finally live the only place I ever wanted to live anyway--my head.  To hell with what's on the outside.  All I have to do is be comfortable in my clothes and dream.

Or so I thought until I rounded that corner and felt my i-phone quickly slide out of my joggers' right pocket.  I reached to grab it, but it was too late.  Other than the fact that I'd planned on plugging it into the cigarette lighter after McDonald's and blasting Dire Strait's Alchemy album on the 45 minute commute home, leaving it there wound't be such a big deal.  Except it was.  Marci might call.  For some strange reason I feel obligated to answer whenever she calls.  I expect the same from her.  A small bubble of magma rises from deep within me every time I get her auto text-massage, "Sorry, I can't talk now."  What I hate most is that it sounds nothing like her--even in text form.  It should say something like, "Go away, I'm in the restroom," which would really mean, I'm hiding in here reading Facebook or doing a puzzle on my phone because I don't want to deal with you right now.  That I could live with because I do live with it, and I'm a happy man.  But, "Sorry, I can't talk now" infuriates me.  How do I know my wife is on the other end when I receive such an anonymous message?  What if she was abducted by aliens or ran off with some young college dropout to find peace and happiness in Portland?  I don't mind that she would rather deal with a puzzle than me.  I can be pretty difficult to live with.  I want to quit my job and give away free ice cream the rest of my life (and yet, I have no mojo left, if there ever was any, to drive her libido to the point where she is ready leave reason behind and follow my crazy ambitions).  No, what I mind is not knowing she is still there.  That is what I'm addicted to: knowing she is there.  I don't care if she is crocheting, playing Mahjong or on Facebook.  I just care that she is there.  "Sorry, I can't talk now" gives no hint her presence.  It's empty.  A vacuum.  When I hear it, I feel like an astronaut floating alone out in space while David Bowie's "Space Oddity" plays in my head forever and ever.

I always assume everyone shares my emotional insecurities, so I thought What if she calls and I can't get to my phone?   There I was midway through Main, panicking, trying to reach my hand down a crevice not big enough for my middle finger, which definitely wanted to show its angry juvenile head--no adult ego state here, and all I could think was, What if she calls and I can't get to my phone, What if she calls and I can't get to my phone, What if she calls and I can't get to my phone?