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April 2002 An article in Salon.com describes how the war on drugs is making doctors afraid to prescribe adequate pain relieving medication. You think politics doesn’t affect you and you can just ignore it? Politicians are writing the rules that can leave you suffering excruciating pain. In the novel A Shortage of Engineers by Robert Grossbach, a French engineer working in America talks about the difference between French and American culture. The French, he says, “are a nasty race…. Narrow-minded. Bigoted. Argumentative. Xenophobic. The worst traits of the bourgeoisie.” [Webster’s: “1. a member of the middle class. 2. a shopkeeper, merchant, or businessman. 3. one whose political, economic, and social opinions are believed to be determined mainly by concern for property values. 5. conventional; lacking in refinement or elegance; philistine. 6. dominated by materialistic pursuits or concerns.”] “But … stop an average Frenchman on the street and ask him to name five of his country’s contemporary poets, and he can do it.” And the average American cannot. I can’t name one living American poet. I can name a few dead ones: Robert Frost, Emily Dickinson, Allen Ginsburg, Edna St. Vincent Millay, Walt Whitman. And no, I haven’t actually read most of them. Probably one or two poems each that were printed in some magazine article, anthology or textbook. I read Ginsburg’s Howl, my favorite poem. The French, says the engineer, are intensely political but cannot agree on anything, so France is in constant turmoil, often paralyzed. Americans, on the other hand, are ignorant about politics, not interested, so America is “stable, powerful, and productive.” We owe it all to our stupidity and apathy. Of course this is the kind of stability that favors those with money and power. By not being political we are doomed to be governed by people who don’t care what most of us want, or what is in our best interests. I would think that in old age men and women would have the most in common and the least to fight about, but I don’t know if that’s true. In your 50s you’re “older.” In your 60s you’re “old.” According to The Oregonian, 85 percent of smokers want to quit. One reason it’s hard to do politics is that people are protecting themselves against an intrusive society. In order to do politics we have to intrude. Probably a lot of people wish we would just go away. I picture Americans hiding in their bombed out basements from the corporate colonization of their minds, from TV, telemarketers, spam email, billboards, junk mail…. It’s hard at this point to decide what makes sense and what doesn’t. How would you know? No reference point. I’m tired. Coffee to wake me up and alcohol for zombification. I know it’s time to drop out but I just keep getting in deeper. I’ve been overwhelmed. I’ve been struck dumb by the stupidity of it all. Got to find some music, some poetry. Oh I always have a plan, that’s no problem. I depend on incoming email for motivation. Something to respond to. “People who travel a great deal lose their souls at some point.” – Don DeLillo, Great Jones Street. I haven’t so much traveled as moved, but I think the principle is the same. Maybe more so. After years of that you don’t belong any place, you have no home. Great Jones Street was published in 1973. A rock star leaves his band to hole up in a crummy apartment in New York. “Literary” writers like DeLillo have been criticized for their lack of story. There isn’t much plot in Great Jones Street. People mostly sit around and have absurd conversations. But it’s funny and the language is wonderfully bent. At the center of Great Jones Street is a tired, hibernating man who just wants to be left alone. Me too. But I keep doing things. Because I’m not willing to give up. I got on my knees and looked in the cabinet space under the sink for some sign of a coffee can. But what sign? Either the coffee can would be there or it wouldn’t. There was no sign involved. – DeLillo Coffee as a substitute for enlightenment. I’m trying to wake up. I don’t know why. I probably won’t like it. The situation is, oh, extremely fluid. Lots of email. Email as a substitute for writing. Everything is a substitute for something else. Infinite regression. I plan to write so much that no one will have time to read it. I must stop. I plan to be publicly private. Or privately public. I’ll do a complete core dump (computer, mainframe), but under a pen name. Perhaps encrypted, so no one can read it. Avoidance, denial, excommunication, hiding, obscurity, death. “To be or not to be”; not being is the purer concept. I’m not sure what the question is. I have no idea what I’m talking about. Not being is more advanced. No more sex. No appetite. But I digress. Spring. The sun is shining outside. Only outside. I thought it best to go someplace completely different. Everything was over. Nobody even knew what to wear anymore. – DeLillo There’s nothing left to do with America but laugh at it. America I make bad jokes at your expense. Ha, ha, ha. Walking around our back yard with a housemate, talking about what we’ll plant where. We’re both hungry, after a nasty gray winter, to see things grow. Peace, she says, in our back yard. I wonder what is the best preparation for not being? Should I sit a lot? Fuck death. My sister died on morphine because her collapsing spinal column caused severe pain. Eat your calcium. Walk. Your leg bones need weight-bearing exercise. Remember: Things are only important if you write them down. This is my last will and testament. I remember when we were all trying to get out of our skins. “Tractors you won’t forget … at a rate you’ll always remember.” – ad in The Oregonian I’m conflicted. I hate the war on drugs and I hate smoking. A political joke I heard: Two men were arguing about what the biggest problem is in America. One said ignorance and one said apathy. Unable to agree, they decided to ask a third man, “What do you think is the largest problem in America, ignorance or apathy?” He replied, “I don’t know and I don’t care.” I live in a world where it’s very difficult to make a difference. Everything has to be chipped out of solid rock – tables, chairs, love. Politics requires emotional balance. You have to have some anger in you to do it, but too much anger will burn you up. Spend some time looking at flowers. Put time limits on politics. Don’t let it take over your life. Try to connect with people. You can only understand politics in retrospect, in books. While it’s happening it’s just a mess of stupid detail. Can’t see the patterns. Fiction – you speak as someone else. Like applying for a job – you speak as someone they might want to hire, a bland go-getter just like them. Dating – you speak as someone she might eventually want to sleep with. It’s not so much that we’re all liars, as that we’re all actors. When I see spring green I’ve got to have hope. “America is out there … and it’s full of people who are waiting to be told what to do.” – DeLillo. Yeah, by shitheads like George Bush. I have conversations with books. Books are my consolation. They slow everything down. I need to live at book speed. Outside the frantic babble. People should not die so quickly. It just doesn’t seem necessary. There was an op-ed column in The Oregonian, written in that cheery everyman style with smiling photo of the author, which advocated torture. That told me that I don’t need to read The Oregonian. Change is only good if you choose it. Forced change is exhausting. Why don’t the newspapers just run the same headline every day – “We killed more people today.” So monotonous. The band didn’t arouse the violent appetites of the young so much as it killed all appetite, causing a dazed indifference to just about anything. – DeLillo Yeah, that’s Western Civ for you. When greed reaches a certain level, nothing makes sense. People withdraw because they don’t want to be part of the craziness. Thus becoming part of the problem. A long time ago a therapist I knew said that attracting women was mostly a little bag of tricks. Yeah, I guess so. You try to fit into their fantasies. Women do the same with men. But that won’t keep you married. I’m afraid I’m going to die grumbling. My last words will be, “And another thing that really pisses me off….” I’m going on the theory that if you don’t work it doesn’t matter how old you are. Heard on KBOO that hobos now use email, through libraries. The motto on the Internet is, “Information wants to be free.” Words want to be free, flying overhead in undisciplined flocks, shitting on everyone. I don’t know, maybe if politics could be expressed as poetry…. The most interesting stuff is always off the record, beside the point. My signal is breaking up. “I’m down on my knees and I’m laughing….” – Paul Simon The last presidential election was so close because if you give people a choice between Republican and Democrat they’ll flip a mental coin, and then vote. The idea of ageing is hypnotic. It tends to move in and take over, especially when I’m tired. When you get old, friends and family are the only true wealth. High levels of stress over a long period have been linked to physical damage of the immune system. – Edgar Jones, medical historian, quoted in Discover Jones is talking about war, but stress is also damaging to civilians. Working-class people are forced to live with more stress than middle or upper-class people. Bumper sticker: I think, therefore I’m dangerous. Some time over the winter the American flags came down in my neighborhood. It’s a relief to be free of all that reflex patriotism. Politics: It’s hard to be a leader when you can’t find any followers. Drives me crazy. Americans avoid things by working their asses off. Just too busy to think about that right now. Busywork. They want the federal government controlling Social Security like it’s some kind of federal program. – George W. Bush Sometimes I think all my past is good for is reminding me not to do that again. Life is supposed to be like a marching band, with tubas thumping in the background. But sometimes the parade suddenly dissolves, leaving you standing in the middle of the street thinking, now what? All my life I’ve been trying to step outside of things. Cities: I seem to need the irritation. I’ve lived in so many places that now I don’t live anywhere. In my dreams all the geography is imaginary. My sister, I believe, needed trouble. When you’ve lived with it for so many years, your (aptly named) nervous system develops a razor’s edge that requires constant sharpening. In the introduction to one of Stephen King’s books he writes something like, “I hope you’ll forgive me if, being who and what I am, I don’t bid you pleasant dreams.” I’ve read that alcoholism guarantees a miserable old age, if you live that long, because it destroys your social network. But so does smoking, because it destroys your body. I’m going to relax if it kills me. Being stoned must be a natural state. I’ve been high in dreams. Without smoking anything before I went to bed. Of course, I smoked something in the dream. Marijuana is a natural high. Is politics real? Depends on who you are. To the upper class yes, because the government increases their power and wealth, by making rules in their favor. For the middle class possibly not, since life goes on much the same regardless. For working-class people yes, because we are dependant on the government safety net, and government writes the rules that allow the upper class to screw us. It’s really hard to be free. We tend to remain in protective custody. My experience, though, is that sooner or later life pushes us out of the nest. If not, we’ll do it ourselves. We want change. We can’t stand to forever be the same. I’m still weighed down with fatigue, not sure why. Everything seems like a lot of trouble. My dreams are a surrealistic accompaniment to my life, like someone playing an instrument offstage. I don’t know what to do with smokers. On the one hand I don’t want to nag them, because everyone hates that. And it probably won’t do any good: they’re addicted. On the other hand, it’s hard to ignore the fact that people I care about are slowly killing themselves. It’s like having an elephant in your living room, but you can’t talk about it. Actually it’s more like I can’t stop talking about it. I feel like breaking something. There is a point where everything becomes so bizarre that it’s hard to say anything true about it. There’s a point where I want to hit the pause button and just make everything stop. Exhaustion. I’m wondering if tiredness is nature’s way of forcing me to sit and think. The good thing about a teddy bear is that, being inanimate, it can survive for very long periods of time. Outside of library books, our culture is written in disappearing ink. In the late 60s I met the guy who coined the expression, “Never trust anyone over 30.” The modern version is, “Never trust anyone who makes over $30,000 a year.” There still isn’t time. The Guardian is a TV program for adults. I think most men would identify with Nick: What he doesn’t say communicates a lot. He’s always holding something back, and you can see what it is, what he isn’t saying. They say if you see a gun in the first act of a play you know it will go off in the third act. When I was coming up, it was a dangerous world, and you knew exactly who they were. It was us versus them, and it was clear who them was. Today, we are not so sure who the they are, but we know they’re there. – George W. Bush, quoted in The Bush Dyslexicon by Mark Crispin Miller Yeah, we can hear them breathing. Whoever they are. A year here, a year there, pretty soon it adds up to real time. Business people drive us crazy, and then they sell us pills for it. I just noticed this on a Budweiser can: “Budweiser salutes America’s police, fire, rescue and public safety workers whose courage in action exemplifies the human spirit, and the spirit of America.” Patriotism on my beer can. Is nothing sacred? Leave me alone. Whenever you see people with power working hard to sell you an idea, suspect bullshit. Politics attracts nice liberals with good intentions who don’t get much done. What we need are angry people. People need to understand that there is a price to be paid for being apolitical. The bill is most likely to come due in our 50s or older, when we need “shelter from the storm” (Bob Dylan). I seem to have become rabid on two subjects, smoking and politics. Stress can overwhelm even a healthy brain and make it hard to think. Having a serious medical problem is very stressful. Have someone go with you to the doctor or hospital, listen, ask questions, take notes, advocate for you. Especially if you are old. A federal tax tip for low income people: You may be eligible for the earned income tax credit, even if you don’t have children. I was. Today I’m retired. The first Social Security payment is in my bank account, $551. From now on I only want to do things I don’t have to. Tonight I worked the last shift of the last job of my life. As I walked fast afterwards to catch the 12:10 bus I thought, it’s all downhill from here. Which is good, because downhill is easier. The genius of political repression in the U.S. is that mostly they don’t bother. They just drown you out. Plus most Americans have a deep distrust of anything different. If you can’t win, the only point of politics is revenge. Register and vote Green. Make them know you’re there. Have some fun. A friend said her retired boyfriend seemed lost. I don’t think I’ll have that problem. I’ve always been lost. Retirement is about telling the rest of the world to fuck off. I have a smart mouth and a bad attitude. And I’m still here. At 62, part of an endangered species, entitled to special protection. The only advantages of ageing: 1. I don’t have to work. 2. I don’t do as many crazy things. Do you think I’m too old to run away and join the circus? Women who want more communication from their men should be careful what they wish for. We have dark minds. I spent most of my first day of retirement sleeping, trying to recover from exhaustion. Off coffee. Stress seems related to time scale: more stressful, daily news; less stressful, books on politics. Television, with its chopped up, extremely short time scale, is an anxiety producer. Most of our minds are saturated with it. Electronic caffeine. Each medium has its own speed. When I slow down to the speed of print I seem to feel better. We’re as much addicted to anxiety, the constantly jangling brain, as we are suffering from it. Where most Americans really need pastoral counseling is in foreign affairs. How is it moral for us to provide billions of dollars a year to Israel so it can wage war on the Palestinians? I don’t think our need for oil justifies that. I wonder how long ministers or priests would last if they told their congregations things they don’t want to hear. Does this happen? All my past is haunted. It’s very tiring living on the surface. I like dreams because they’re underground. Meetings: Someone always has to oppose any proposal, and someone always has to make it personal. Women are funnier than men. It’s their exuberance. One thing I can already see about retirement, after two days: I don’t have to stay up very late reading a book. There will be time for it tomorrow. I’ll probably do it anyway. I’m looking for simple things. The scale of troubles is subjective. On the other hand, if you’re freaking out over every little thing, perhaps you should give it some thought. I’m used to living among the uncomfortable. I follow the path of least resistance. When I follow the path of most resistance, I always feel tired. After about a week of retirement what is dawning on me is, I don’t have a thing to worry about. Saw Bill Clinton on public TV, interviewed about free trade, NAFTA. He looked weird, like maybe he’s drinking too much. We share our dramas in conversation. Before retirement the main drama is “busy.” I’m trying to live without drama. After retirement the main drama is medical. We look over our shoulders to see what medical monster is going to suddenly end our existence. I seem to be living in different times. For a moment I’m 16, living in a rented house in rural Missouri, summer, packing to go visit my father in Florida, singing: The path to our cabin they say has grown dim And the stones are quite mossy around And I know that the faces and forms I once loved Now lie in the cold mossy ground I never went back. The faces and forms have been turned into ashes. It’s not fair. In my 16th summer I was reading The Books of Charles Fort, a collection of strange but supposedly true newspaper stories, picking up cow bones in pastures because I wanted to construct a skeleton. Later that summer I worked as a pinboy in a bowling alley in Florida, read Moby Dick and heard Elvis Presley for the first time. 1956. Memory means the past doesn’t die, but only small parts are preserved, like a photo album. Someday people will carry an auxiliary memory with them that will record everything, so when you “replay” a memory it will be like being there. We will have a much better idea of who we really are. The penal system is backwards: you take people who need more freedom than most and give them less. So far the squirrels have not appeared in my backyard, even though they’re supposed to be the focal point of my retirement. I’ve been telling everyone that I’m going to spend my time watching the squirrels. Do the squirrels not understand this? I will have to get a squirrel feeder. Donny Darko: a strange movie. I’ll have to read a review to figure out what I’m supposed to think about it. Funny in spots, but what was the rest about? I’m not supposed to be the one who doesn’t get it. I don’t think anyone in our culture, certainly not female writers, knows who men are and what we want. We’ve been defined by our roles. Like a movie star who made a bad career move. Someone should go back to the source and ask young men what they want. What I wanted was adventure and art. Adventure was traveling, exploring, new ideas, drugs, sex, politics, music, bohemianism. Art was mostly writing, but I didn’t know how to begin. Now I know: you just write. It requires a willingness to piss people off. Truth is not popular in a dominant culture like ours. Prosperity is bought with greed and a foot on someone else’s neck. Hearts In Atlantis: The movie left out the weirdness of Stephen King’s book. In the book the “low men,” and their cars, were aliens. Hearts is a smoking film, two of the main characters. We have the type of culture that empires have always spawned: aggressive, militaristic, expansionist, high consumption. To see a culture clearly you have to step outside it. I’ve been doing that all my life. Don’t be loyal to your country, it doesn’t deserve it. America is just a place, run by rich sociopaths. I read that LBJ said on his deathbed, “The kids were right, I blew it.” Presidents have been blowing it ever since. The voters let them.
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