I think it’s always been there, though rarely mentioned, this cold, black thing that kills all love and joy. Always! Though in my memory the first remembered taste of it came in Abilene, Texas when I was barely 13 years old.

This would be during the early years of rock & roll, 1958, when Buddy Holly was still alive. I single him out because we lived close to Lubbock, his home town, and to everyone in Abilene, Buddy was still a local hero. His music had a huge impact on me, because after Elvis, Jerry Lee Lewis, the Everly Brothers, and Fats Domino, listening to Buddy Holly was like listening to a slightly older version of myself. Rock & roll in general was the total antidote to every restrictive guilty pain I’d ever felt when growing up, the sheer joy a healing balm. I grasped the music with both hands and a willing heart, even though from inside my family (and elsewhere) came the darkly-hinted sense that something was “wrong” about letting go and feeling good.

For now this reference is a footnote, one I’ll expand later. In the context of the Helen Chronicles and my immersion into unholy hell in Tucson, it’s important, though: I remember where the ugly started… and it’s been going on for quite a while. Toward the end of my rolling nervous breakdown in Tucson, I happened to email my favorite cousin, almost exactly the same age as I am, with the observation that I thought Helen had probably been mentally ill for her whole life. Her reply was startling:

Absolutely true! I thought you already knew that she had this problem. I remember my parents speaking about an incident or two that happened when your family was visiting Granny. I guess she was never medicated/treated for it?

So everyone else knew except for her own children? If you don’t think this is monumental — and liberating — for a 63-year-old man to absorb, you haven’t been paying attention. Helen does have dementia, but I doubt it’s Alzheimer’s. Even if it is, there’s something else that’s in the mix, and it’s always been there: I remembered the first time my sister T_______ and I visited my folks in Tucson, back in ‘76. It was a Christmas visit, and while opening our presents there was such a horrible outpouring of hate from Helen that my sister and I immediately fled, driving up to the top of Mt. Lemmon outside of Tucson to sit on a rock, smoke dope, and watch the buzzards ride the thermals. Merry Xmas, y’all…

Oh my God

The truth is, I was completely possessed in Tucson. The pressure was unbearable. I couldn’t speak a single sentence without crying. My rage was all-encompassing, too. On the worst day of all, near the end, I cursed out both my brothers and a commenter on this site who’s very much like a brother. That was the day I initiated guardianship proceedings against Helen, so that I could force her into some kind of protective situation for her own good. A nursing home, assisted living, an asylum, who knows? The lawyers agreed that I had an emergency on my hands and had to act. Seven hundred fifty dollars later, phone calls had been made, appointments scheduled. I had a social worker visit Helen for a preliminary interview, and that’s where things began to look unsteady.

According to the social worker, Helen “presented well.” So much for social science, eh? I wonder what Helen was actually asked. Not about the voices, certainly, or the fact that she’d already forgotten that she’d asked me to come to Tucson to have her cremated and sell the properties! (She was dying, remember.) But this was a definite yellow flag as far as an emergency court hearing to obtain guardianship was concerned. Usually such proceedings aren’t undertaken unless there isn’t any doubt, and once again, the authorities were throwing up a roadblock. If I proceeded with the legal action, there would be a fight, and I would end up testifying in court against my mother. Naturally, I balked.

The next thing was that I finally included a younger brother in the deliberations, and he had reservations, too. I could see this wasn’t going to work, even though the alternative was the previously unthinkable one of just leaving Helen be. Leave her there in a rotten, sharp-edged, dirty, dingy trailer with no railing on the outside kitchen steps, no way to wash her soiled linens, no place to store her things. Leave her there in stinking, humid, white-hot Arizona with only one sibling and the cleaning lady to visit her. Leave her like she said she wanted to be left, losing checkbooks, missing $2500 cash, buying trailers she didn’t need with money set aside for taking care of her. Leave her with the voices talking about her in the night, needing dentures, glasses, and good food in the cupboard. Just leave her, like the laws of Arizona say she had a right to be, left alone to live like a crazy, sick, old lady who had no friends and no one to look after her. Just leave her there and go away… If that’s the way she wanted it, crazy or not, then…

Refusing all assistance

But all at once I felt a little loosening, a glimmer of hope for me. That morning I also had a long-distance talk with a Jungian analyst I’ve known for several years. She talked about the “dark, wild thing” that I had taken on myself by coming to Tucson and was clearly worried for my own safety. We both saw then that if I continued with the legal action, the dark, wild thing would still be on my shoulders. I knew I had to drop everything and leave.

Immediately thereafter, I called the lawyers and killed the process. (They agreed!) I told my siblings I was going home. I gathered up the checkbooks and credit cards I’d taken from Helen’s trailer and prepared to take them back to her. Already I felt like I was released from prison, even though I had the major hurdle of confronting Helen to apologize and comfort her.

Alas, my good intentions did not come to pass. What happened next requires another chapter, in fact, the most unbelievable of all. (Part V, coming up…)

Helen was always good at nest-building, as I recall.

This came in handy, because as I once figured out, we went through over 40 moves before I graduated from high school. Many of those were within the same community, of course. Arriving in Abilene, Texas for instance, we lived for a time in a motel with a kitchenette, then a rental house in the middle of town. I went to Lincoln Junior High School and had the requisite school jacket. After a while, we moved onto the air base for a while. When Helen decided the house was too small, my parents bought a brick rancher in a new subdivision on the edge of town. (I then attended Jefferson Jr. High and couldn’t wear my jacket.) That was where we stayed the longest — with me now at Cooper Jr./Sr. High School — until at last they sold it just before our move to Massapequa, New York (!). What with one delay after another, we then had to make another rented house our home for almost six months before finally leaving town. If you haven’t been keeping count, that adds up to five moves in less than four years!

Helen’s residence until a long month ago was the place I knew as the “family home” in Tucson. She’d lived there for over twenty years alone and outfitted it very nicely for a desert double-wide. It’s where I stayed this time and will likely stay again, when I come back to sign papers and dispose of everything. (IF I come back, I should say. More on that later.) The place has got to be one of the best-landscaped and situated properties in Tucson Estates, the so-called mobile home community for residents over 55 on the southwest edge of town. It’s adjacent to an arroyo where coyotes and javelinas go. There are mature trees and garden areas with a large paved patio. You can sit in a big screened porch and watch the doves and hummingbirds. Inside, it’s filled with Helen’s paintings and many beautiful keepsakes. The carpeting is plush and soft. Three bedrooms, two bathrooms. There’s also a big carport and a separate art studio.

A recurring theme in Helen’s last few years, however, was how she hated the responsibility of maintaining the place and yearned for a smaller, simpler home. On the face of it, this sounded sane to me. It was easy to imagine being 86 years old and not wanting to worry about the plumbing. The trouble was, practical concerns like that weren’t on her mind. She either couldn’t stand to simply let things be or couldn’t face the crisis of making choices and wanted somebody else to “take care of things.” This would invariably be one of us five siblings, and earlier this year she’d again floated the absurdist fantasy that my wife and I should take over the old place and be neighbors with her in Tucson Estates. In typical fashion, however, the thrust of this offer was that I would never be able to obtain a nicer home for us, being an artistic ne’er-do-well, and that my wife deserved far better than my forcing her to live in Taos. (Always the carrot and the baseball bat, together.)

In any case, I never figured she would do it. How can an 86-year-old woman take that kind of disruption in her life? But if she did, I knew or hoped that I could count on her to buy something decent. She’d actually pulled this stunt once before, a few years back, and eventually been convinced by sister M____ and others to move back to the double-wide. What I mean is, I just assumed she’d learned her lesson. Extremely naive on my part, for sure. I also think one sometimes manufactures hope to cover up the pain.

But she did it, and she did it badly. Very badly indeed. For one thing, she paid way too much and wasted precious cash for something she didn’t need. (My gently pointing this out resulted in my being attacked for never supporting her decisions.) For another, well, let’s start with a look at the old residence:

Old house: large screened porch

This is where you want to be except when it’s god-awful hot. From here you can watch the birds and look at your gardens. There’s tons of room and comfortable chaise lounges that are easy to nap on. I love it out there. The evening sun sets on the other side of the house, too, so it’s cooler here. Now contrast this with the screened porch on the “new” trailer Helen moved into a few weeks ago:

New house: narrow, hot, and ugly

Yes, that’s an apartment-sized washer & dryer in the background — Helen wets the bed every now and then, and that machine is too small to wash her blankets. (There are big, matched Maytag machines back at the old place.) This porch is much narrower and looks out on the side of the single-wide next door. What’s more, it’s on the sunny side of the house! In Arizona, that can be a death sentence. No one will ever want to sit out here.

Old house: just part of the landscaping

The shot above shows a little of the outdoor space beside the screened porch at the previous residence. Why give up what had always been a source of comfort and joy? The plantings and nearby wildlife almost made staying at Helen’s bearable, in fact.

Old house: carport, arroyo to the right

Helen’s studio is at the back. The steps to the house are specially-built, wide and shallow, easy for old legs to manage. The trees are full of birds all day. But take a look at this shot of where she lives now:

New house: rear of carport

That’s it, that’s all there is. The view isn’t a fair comparison, but you get the idea. This carport isn’t wide enough for the Chevy Cobalt I rented, and the steps to the kitchen door [not shown] are narrow and steep.

The sink in the tiny kitchen of the new place isn’t big enough to hold a frying pan, and there isn’t any dishwasher like Helen had before. The “bottom shelf” in the lower cabinets is the floor itself, and the counters all have very sharp edges. Dark brown fake wood paneling is everywhere. The previous owner’s dishes are still in the cupboards, and she uses them. I could go on and on and on: the bathroom in her old place was custom-designed with a soaking tub for old folks, special handholds and all. There’s even a walk-in closet. In the new place, the bathroom is so small that if someone were on the toilet when you opened the door, you’d hit them on the knee. The bathtub is horrible and slippery — Helen can only sit in a chair and take a sponge bath. There’s hardly any storage space at all.

This, however, is perhaps most telling of all:

New house: view across the road

Okay, ready now? The following is what it looks like across the street from the OLD house!

A little light in hell

My photos don’t necessarily convey the real differences, so you’ll have to take my word for it. The thing is, it’s just not like her, not like the woman who decorated the old place. No gardens to enjoy, no views, no birds or animals to watch, no porch to sit on. No beauty whatsoever, and someone else’s pictures are still on the walls. The new trailer is narrow, leaky, damp, and dark. My God, I realized: just like a grave!

It makes a kind of sense, this living death, but it’s very hard to take and very stupid. Helen needs live-in care, at least, and in the old home there were extra bedrooms where someone could easily have lived with her. Not so here! What’s more, the old woman paid cash for this, at least $50,000, money she could have used to pay for care. That would make it a tragedy, except that this is Helen’s chronicle. As we shall see, the last move of her life is actually her chosen way to die, as if she had no one to care for her and there were no other choice.

So be it, then, and on with the show.

Who did this, and how did this happen?

The dynamic is this: Helen is too sick to realize she can’t take care of herself and refuses to go to a nursing home — in this circumstance, however, every authority supports her instead of me. it’s as if you take your dearest loved one bleeding to a hospital and the security guards immediately start beating YOU with their nightsticks. I would say more, but a vital process is in motion. The fact is that no one can legally force another, not even a sick old woman, to accept care. As unbelievable as that sounds, it’s absolutely true. You can’t make them go to a nursing home or anywhere else, especially not her.

For the record, I was with her when she shit her pants in public, and she regularly pisses the bed. She moved into a dump, lost $2,500 in cash she had withdrawn, can’t really cook, can’t take a real bath, left most of her makeup and jewelry at the old house, needs new dentures and eyeglasses, and can’t walk farther than a few yards without resting. That didn’t stop her from cursing me and yelling for the police outside the doctor’s office this a.m. while trying to hit me with her cane.

You would think the above is evidence enough to get help for her, but you would be wrong. Not if she doesn’t want it. I broke down in the doctor’s office this morning because the doctor refused to do anything except recommend family counseling, and then she said: “I think YOU’RE a danger to your mother!”

Subsequently, I learned that the doctor had alerted Adult Protective Services about me! As I had an appointment with the lawyer I absolutely needed to keep, I packed all my clothes and things into the rental car and got the hell out of the house so no one could find and detain me. My attorney told me later that if APS did come around, they’d only ask questions first. But of course, I couldn’t have known that…

Her eyes turn black when she’s raving: small, shiny black eyes with a frightened fox-in-a-snare look. It’s like something is trying to escape, as if her soul is trying to leave her body but can’t get all the way out. I was able to talk to her about this, believe it or not, assuring her she wasn’t crazy but “different.” I told her that I wanted her to come to Taos with me (to a nursing home, of course), where I could visit her every day. She won’t come, though. She wants to stay in the grave of her dingy dead man’s trailer.

There are other solutions than nursing homes, but she would still have to agree, and there is no one to manage her care in Tucson unless I leave her in the hands of strangers — and she would have to agree, which she will not do. After this morning’s horror show in the doctor’s office, I’m not seeing her for a while. Who wants to talk to the police?

I will do what I can, EVERYTHING I can, and as completely as I can. I will follow through. I love her still, no matter what, even though she rejects me in her sickness, and I will not let her die alone if I can help it.

I hardly know how to begin, but I have to try, in order to save myself.

Those of you who have gone through something similar will understand at least a little, or maybe a lot. We’re all the same and yet so different. It’s one thing to say, “My mother has been diagnosed with advanced Alzheimer’s.” [Note: diagnosis not official after all. - JHF] It’s quite another thing to say that this has happened to Helen Farr. That makes this the Helen & Johnny Chronicles as well, of course, and only I can tell the story of what’s going on now with both of us.

The one who gave me birth

Sobbing in the carport of this stupid, stinking trailer, completely broken, swatting bugs and staggering, trapped here now in the hell-hole that is Tucson. Why does anybody live here? I can’t imagine. Unbearable, putrid heat all day and night, humid too, this time of year, with millions of mosquitoes in the goddamned desert. If ever a city deserved to die, this one does. It shouldn’t even exist, running on water that fell as rain back in the Pleistocene. But why am I talking about Tucson? What’s this place ever done to me??

I freely admit that my Tucson experience has always been colored by the hell of familial disfunction. I could tell you about the time my father was drunk, crying, and threatening violence as my wife and I were leaving, both parents wielding knives and screaming… so we took my mother with us to a McDonald’s on the outskirts of town. We all shared cardboard burgers we couldn’t taste and then my wife and I drove off, leaving my mother to wait long enough for the old man to pass out so she could call a taxi. But oh, there was so much more. There is so much more.

My father died back in the ’80s from lung cancer at age 67, not long after he told me, shaking with rage, that “No one knows what goddamned hell it’s been to live with that woman!” This isn’t a preface to an indictment of my mother, but rather to show the ground in which the current catastrophe has grown. Not from which, but in which — the larger tale is steeped in karmic mystery, of course. I can tell you what I know of what’s happened in my lifetime that relates, and perhaps I will, if I am able. Years of Jungian analysis has taught me how to shine a light into the catacombs where I’m always anchored, though my eyes are in the sky.

The present disaster has many layers, twists, and turns, which makes a linear narrative quite difficult. And always there’s the context, the heaving, painful, hideous tapestry of lies and idiocy, greed and nonsense, drenched in tears and blood. Yes, blood. You might not see it, but it’s there. So maybe some will understand when I say that when I heard that Helen was in the hospital with pneumonia and that my brother and sister needed me to come, I heard the banshees wail.

South of Socorro, on the way to Arizona

She’s sitting 15 feet away now as I write this, at least as lucid as she was when I was last here almost two years ago. Her dementia (or whatever it is) phases in and out, like the moon moving behind the clouds. Earlier today she all but needed physical restraint, but dementia is easier to deal with than the periods of so-called sanity. I live in dread of those right now, because I’ve already started taking over all the finances, and in this state she might remember. I’ve gathered up the credit cards and checkbooks, taken control of various accounts through power of attorney vested in me years ago if this should come to pass. I wonder if she knows she agreed to this just last Friday, at her bank. Please God, don’t let her ask about it now: I can’t take another fit of screaming.

She hears voices almost all the time. A common theme is sex and dope parties at the neighbors, late at night, people voting for her and against her, whisperings in the dark. An hour ago she came out from the bedroom and wanted to know who that woman was I’d been talking to. I told her I’d been sitting here at my computer the whole time, totally alone. We’ve actually “discussed” the idea of a nursing home, easier when she’s in a weakened state from which acquiescence almost flows. She doesn’t think it’s time, of course, but then she thinks I’m here just visiting. JUST VISITING??? I’ve cried for days, not knowing what to do or where to turn, and she has no idea. I’d say it’s more than I can bear, except I seem to still be here, where I would never want to be.

The pneumonia almost killed her and left her with a concrete-hard mass of congealed pus outside her lungs, restricting their expansion. My sister (a nurse) came out from California to oversee the situation, discussed this with my mother, and both agreed there’d be no major surgery to correct it. No extraordinary measures, no derring-do, let nature take its course, etc. At the same time, my sister, overcome with guilt, decided she would quit her job in LA to stay here and take care of mom — a position she’d only recently gotten after earning her nursing degree at the age of 50. With this decision in her mind, she allowed the hospital to release Helen for home care, thinking that she and my brother could manage the daily injections of antibiotics into the kick-line (IV) that Helen would need for several weeks more. That’s not the end of this installment, though.

While this was going on, I was on my way to Tucson in a rental car, straining against the loss of every mile that brought me closer to the vortex. It was like driving through giant thunderstorms of pain, and when I hit the Arizona line, I slowed down, knowing… Rolling into Tucson at midnight and 92 degrees, I headed for Helen’s other trailer, the luxurious double-wide she’d recently abandoned for the awful place she lives in now — this requires a separate episode — where I could camp out in the wreckage of my mother’s life and get some rest before heading over in the morning. While I was still asleep the next morning, my cell phone rang. It was my wife in Taos, who’d gotten up early and read the email from my sister:

“Sweetie, I know youre not up yet, but I wanted you to know: M____ has gone back to Los Angeles!”

Oh really? Oh God.

I didn’t have to know the reason, though. The context, remember. Always the context. Of course, she’d seen that everything was impossible, never mind her best intentions. Not only was Helen raving mad and vicious when she wasn’t, but my sister had realized she couldn’t quit her job and lose her health insurance, since she’d just had surgery for thyroid cancer and needed radiation treatments. No money would be forthcoming from Helen, either, since the dispensing of funds is always tied to coercion in the name of “doing what’s best.” No hope of getting compensation for giving up her life to stay here, then, assuming she could stand it.

I walked in the door and found Helen sitting in her chair, seemingly completely out of it. I bent down to give her a hug. She knew who I was, but not that I had come from Taos. The morning did not go swimmingly. She obviously couldn’t be left alone and yet there wasn’t anyone to take care of her. No one person can, certainly not my brother. Not me, not my sister, either. No one to take care of her, and what to do? Now everything was up to me, and here I sit, almost a full week later, Helen babbling constantly through the entire writing of this post.

Babble, babble, babble, each absurdity inviting an exasperated response I dare not utter.

I took her to a doctor on Friday (as soon as I could manage it), hoping to get some help, but he wasn’t her “primary care physician,” who wasn’t available anyway, so the idiot could do nothing except tell me to take Helen to the emergency room and leave her there. That’s right: ABANDON MY MOTHER at the hospital door and walk away! This advice came from a doctor,, and he’s not the only one who told me so.

This is America in 2008. This is what we have to answer for, all of us, and I’m white-hot with rage.

My 86-year-old mother is in the hospital with pneumonia in Tucson and not making sense. It’s impressive, what that does to you. I might as well call this post “John Watch.”

My brother is worried that I’m not there and hopes I’m coming soon. That’s not how we do it, though. Just the sight of me might generate enough “crazy energy” in her to momentarily fool them into letting her go, and then where would we be? Haha. But seriously: no, not yet. And the doctor will sedate her if she tries to leave again.

My wife: ”Your mother can’t possibly ‘escape’ from a modern hospital. She’d never make it to the front door.”

Me: “Even if she could get out, it would never work. She’d have to take a taxi, and she’d never pay for one!”

She’s already convinced she’s dying. For all I know, she is. And it may sound harsh to strangers’ ears, but it’s like I can’t do anything for her until she does. Even if she comes out of this, she’d have to surrender and cooperate for me to get her into a nursing home, and that’s not going to happen. She isn’t rational any more. She hasn’t been for a long time. I don’t see how she’s managed to live on her own for the last 10 years, anyway.

I felt some pretty strong emotions today. Not sorrow, but more a reaction to the archetype, the elemental thing that’s going on with Death nearby. This is monumental with a parent, even one you’re not that close to.

My relationship with my mother is deep and dangerous. I could say she gave me birth and love, but then she tried to kill me (and never gave up). And yet, the more I glue the missing pieces back, there’s less need to blame her for leaving them out. I can talk to her openly and with compassion, from a distance, anyway, and sense the spirit of a person, not my “mother,” and that person is all right. The last time I talked to her was like that. I just ignored the crazy parts and the arrows bounced right off. Then she seemed to shift gears, maybe out of boredom, and we connected for a little while, as equals.

That might have been the last time. it’s out of my hands, for sure.

Mine turns 87 this year, and we forgot to stage The Intervention. Too bad, not that it would have worked.

She lives in a so-called “mobile home community” in Tucson. What that really means is single-wides and double-wides close together, baking in the sun below a mountain, an aluminum hive of isolation and prep for final staging. She decided she wanted to move from the home she’d occupied for 30 years and go live in a smaller place to makes things easier, which sounded dubious to me, but sure: buy another trailer, let me and my siblings clean up the old one with all the junk and get it sold while she’s still alive. Much tidier that way. Only she didn’t tell me the place she’d bought was furnished and even had all the kitchen equipment, glasses, and utensils! None of which she threw away…

What’s more, she had most of her own furniture brought over too. There must be hardly any room to turn around inside, and now she can’t even unpack her own kitchen things because a dead man’s plates are in the cupboard. Just another sign, as if I needed one.

I have a nearby brother who’s going through hell with this. For three days she lays there in here bed, depressed, and won’t get up, says she has trouble breathing. My brother tries to take her to the hospital, but she refuses to go. Then she calls him in the night and says she’s dying (can’t breathe), call 911. He does, they come, and she gets up out of bed to talk to them. They see she’s ambulatory and refuse to take her. This afternoon she calls to tell me she’s dying and that I have to come “take care of things.” She isn’t dead yet, though, just moving through the world without her mind and wants attention. She wants me there to clean the cupboards out, unpack her stuff, get tangled up in other people’s goods now, see lawyers, sign papers, put her old place on the block. But what she wants is out of sequence, and I see she isn’t really here much anymore. For all that, rational argument is a waste of time.

So now it’s come to this. Her way out, if this is what it is, will be a messy one. She refuses guidance, has no friends, and shreds your psyche if you try to help. My job is detachment and compassion. There’s a pretty 18-year-old girl from Middle River deep inside, red hair blowing in the wind. I’ve talked to her, too, in moments when the walls were down.

For now, I’m doing nothing. That’s all I can do until “something happens” and we step in to protect her. I’m certainly not going to Tucson, at least not yet.

(That way yields madness, and I’ve paid my dues already.)

Here, try this:

[audio:John-John.mp3]

Well, that was a night, all right. That’s “John-John” by the original Zoo Pilots at our one and only paid gig — funded by a Kent County, MD Arts Council grant, if you can believe that — at Washington College in, uh… [ponder] 1984? ‘85?? It says right here at my audio page that this is from “the early Eighties,” but don’t take that for granted. It was two sets of originals by me. I even had a crazy lady recite her poetry in between! There were about a dozen of my friends in the audience and a few curious students. Not a big crowd, but we were in a big room in the basement with tables and a bar. At least I think it was a bar. Maybe it was a snack bar. But I had a good time, and I still have the recording.

Hang on.

As for John-John, he did it again on Sunday night, and I woke up at 4:00 a.m. this morning from a dream in which I beat him bloody. I mean that literally, and he deserved it. Then I had to get away so he and his hoodlum buddies wouldn’t kill us in revenge! Nightmare city, boys and girls, except this one is a gift, offering up about as clear a vision of the shadow as anyone is going to get. I’d been wearing him like a suit and couldn’t see, you see. That’s what dreams are for, especially when things are down to the bone when you drift off to sleep.

You may call this bi-polar. You can call me Ray. What blows my mind is that all those years ago, I instinctively pulled this out of my own psycho-drama and nailed it without having any inkling of what it meant. The song itself is a transmutation of something like a breakdown into a rock song, with just one verse and chorus, repeated over and over. I remember that the lyrics and the chords just fell out of my head, especially on the chorus. Over 20 years ago, and there it was, right in front of me. Who knew this stuff would take so goddamn long?

There’s something here I have to own up to. I even tried to, in the dream (as in the song). I went up to him while he still looked like hell, all sullen and battered, and said, “We gotta get straight with each other.” Trying to defuse the situation, you understand, effecting mutual acceptance and respect.

When I reluctantly got up at 4:00 a.m. to write down the dream while the pictures and emotions were still fresh — if I do this, I keep my eyes half-closed and don’t turn on anything bright — that’s when things got really weird. There was the light and the dark at the same time, and I was neither, nor anything else I’ve ever been. It didn’t feel exactly human, or maybe that’s the thing that needs expession in a whole new way. It also scared the shit out of me, but I think that’s all right. I mean, it just wasn’t anything familiar, and I felt a panic to return. Even feeling awful can be cozy.

(See, this is what I do instead of watching talking heads on Sunday morning or working in a hardware store.)

Tonight was different, though. I have no idea why, because all day long I was ready to snap. Instead, I washed the car before the sun set and stood outside swatting mosquitoes (which we don’t have here in New Mexico) in the dusk, admiring the gleam of clean white fenders. When I came in, I got out my instrument and played rockabilly bouzouki standing up beside the kiva fireplace to amplify the sound. And ohh, what a noise. Beats that mp3 up there all the hell, it does. Just you wait a little bit.

Tomorrow it’s off to Sandy Feet (Santa Fe) to take the stitches out of my gum. No, really. The dental implant thing. Have a greatl day, don’t worry about the election, and I’ll be right back.

I know, I know, but we have to call it something.

I was having the usual midweek ZoukFest freak-out. All that exposure to transcendental musicianship, wow! Or oy… On the one hand it was like swallowing holy razor blades, while on the other hand, the antidote for same. At first I started auguring in, like a fighter pilot in a spin — it wasn’t just the overwhelming musical talent, but all my friends were educated and erudite, too. I always thought I was, but somewhere along the line I gave up books for mapping my inner potholes — not that I ever had a choice in that, as I’d blown out all my tires and was riding on the rims. This exploration takes a lot of time, however, which is why my wife sometimes complains there isn’t any room for her. Books would sure be easier on the lady, I have to say.

Anyway, there I was, ready once again to send my parents’ wretched souls to everlasting burning hell for being so damned scared and useless and teaching me to fold. The way this thing isn’t supposed to turn out is that I think about my life at 62 and wonder if it’s all for shit: whom did I help, how did I make a difference, what did I have to show for it all? I could’ve been a Michelanglo, but everything is all fucked up, I’m getting old, and of course it’s someone else’s fault. It always is, except it’s NOT!

Jam session winding down (?) at 4:30 a.m.

And then the transcendental musicianship began to earn its name. The razor blades dissolved and went down easily. A giant relaxation seemed slowly to enfold me. I realized that maybe the purpose of this life for me wasn’t to paint or write a masterpiece but just to be okay. To HEAL myself, forgodssakes, to touch the flaming love of All There Is while the memories fall away. When this doesn’t get passed down with your DNA, when you don’t get zapped upside the heart with holy mojo goodness ’cause your mommy and your daddy love you more than life itself, then you have to find it on your own or take up ugly habits. What happened to me on Wednesday night was I felt like I was off the hook: if all I did from there on out was tell people how much I loved them (when I felt it), that was plenty. For me, I mean. The karmic debt was so enormous, paying it down was ring-the-bells HUGE. In other words, being happy was enough.

This was revolutionary. My God, what if everybody felt this way? The music moved me and I told the performers that it had. I walked up to others that I hardly knew and shared a friendly thought. Before I knew it, people were saying nice things about me as well. I emailed my wife to ask if this was how it was among the sane, and she said “YES!!!”

Yeah, yeah. I came home three days later, had a fit, and wrecked the car, so what.

I remember the last time I climbed a mountain, don’t I?

Well, I am a case.

After achieving temporary enlightenment at ZoukFest [see above post], I came home where I promptly made life difficult for my wife, had a dream in which my balls fell off, and spent most of today in a vise of horror. Later I got better, and after a refreshing, lovely time eating out with my sweetie, we took a little drive and I messed up her car.

We were visiting a house for rent. While backing out of a neighbor’s driveway, I grazed an old parked Subaru and bashed the right-hand side of the bumper. Ours, not the Subie’s! I think the damage is just cosmetic and can be painted over, but geez, this is not the way to end an evening — I’d say don’t try this at home, but that’s the only place it counts, haha. She didn’t want me to back up! She wanted me to drive ahead and turn around in the parking lot, but naturally I knew better. I wasn’t even depressed any more. I was happy. Who knew it wasn’t safe to operate heavy machinery AFTER?

The bumper and the Subie are just props in a play. What I really hit was her. Relationship. Trust. She’s already forgiven me, but I know why all this happened.

(Do you?)

I want to write about the heart. I can’t possibly finish this in a blog post, but I want to start.

Today I know that now, right now, is the beginning of the rest of my life, on which there are no limits. The “secret” is being true to myself, the fact of which I’m only beginning to feel. True to my true nature, I should say, in the context of a calm, slowly building joy and union with with all Creation. This isn’t an intellectual exercise. The locus is the natural world.

I grew up with a thousand reasons to be unhappy. In my case, it’s partly psycho-genetic. My granddad used to take the train from the Eastern Shore of Maryland to Philadelphia for a day to visit art museums. My grandmother, daughter of a “shoutin’ Methodist” circuit riding preacher in West Virginia, wouldn’t hear of it. “What’s the point of that,” she’d reprimand him, “there’s nothing there but pictures on a wall!” — but he’d go anyway. I never really got to know him — he died while we were overseas and I was 10 years old — and I wish I had. I’d like to ask him what he felt about those paintings and what they meant to him, since there was not a stick of anything you’d call art in Granny’s house when I came back to Chestertown as a grownup.

One day Granny gave me her father’s saddlebags, however. That’s right, my great-grandfather used to ride a mule to a different church every Sunday, before he landed a regular parish gig in his later years. I kept those saddlebags for a long time, until my aunt in Maine asked for them back, a typical Farr family manuever. That was only a few years ago, mind you, and though I deeply resented her asking, I realized the only way to avoid more injury to myself was to send them back immediately, along with every other family artifact in my possession. I had quite a collection, too. I’d come to sense that these things were actually poisonous, although sometime in the late ’80s I’d exorcised the saddlebags by taking them to my great-grandfather’s grave in Parsons, West Virginia and smoking a pipeful of dope, exhaling over his tombstone. She doesn’t know that and probably never will — shortly after I sent the musty relics back to Vassalboro, she walked out of her house and tripped, hitting her head on a rock, and hasn’t been the same since.

They can’t hurt me any more, I can only hurt myself (as I was taught to do). Hurt follows hurt, and love follows love.

I give myself permission to be. The sound you hear is singing in the blood.