by j-a
Aug, 2002
8-7-02The heat wave broke. It feels like fall's approaching. This always provokes a bit of doubt and pangs of regret and even inklings of dread in me. It's a turning inward, which isn't necessarily so bad a thing, except for the transition. I hate changing my mind, my operational orientation. But this year it may not be so bad, since I've not been so happy with the "vacation attitude," since it's been keeping me from working. In past years I've welcomed the distraction of the heat. But this is the first year that I've really found my way re writing, and I've been a bit regretful that I've slacked off of it quite a bit. I guess I must be growing up. How sad.
My brother called at 9:30 pm. He said he wondered if I was still alive since he hasn't heard from me in so long. I said, well, I haven't heard from him either. He said, yeah, he guess he doesn't call unless he needs something. That was his way of telling me he needs my help. I didn't respond. I never need anyone's help. (That's not really true. It's a stance I adopt.) Anyway, I guess he recognizes the truth of our relationship. He asked me if I wanted to work tomorrow. I said yeah, sure. It's a painting job.
I have an agenda: if you've read what I've written, you know what it is: I wait. I like to see how long I can go without anyone contacting me. In this way I think I can determine who cares for me. (It's a theory with a lot of holes, not the least of which is that I condition people not to contact me.) I don't mean caring in that superficial way that those who say they care for you usually mean it, thinking they are so profoundly feeling when they are just acting in their usual self-serving manner and pretending to themselves that they appreciate a world that they've projected their ego onto. Rather, I mean it in that dedicated way that demonstrates true caring, the way I used to treat (a few) others back when I was a (limited) caring person--in a dedicated and yet no-nonsense way. People who truly care for you know when to contact you, for your benefit, not for their own, and they know when to leave you alone. I can measure my level of need when people who are truly caring contact me. I'm hardly ever contacted any more by truly caring people, so I guess my level of need has dropped way off. (Like I said, the theory has a lot of holes.)
I seldom contact people any more, mostly because I don't care. Maybe I'll come to care again some day, if someone comes along who proves to me that they're worth caring for, by showing me that they really care for me.Jim called this morning at nine and cancelled on the painting job. Typical. It didn't come as a total surprise. It usually takes one or two cancellations before I go to work with him. He said he's got other jobs that "came up." I'm wondering what jobs could have come up between 9:30 last night and nine this morning. But it doesn't matter. I really didn't want to go anyway. Half a day's notice isn't enough time to reset my sleeping pattern. I've been sleeping late into the afternoon recently. The job is rescheduled for tomorrow.Jim called and cancelled again. No big deal. I still didn't want to go. My sleep pattern is still not readjusted. And besides, it's my birthday. He did wish me a happy birthday. I wonder how he remembered.I was outside in the rain today trying to see where the water was coming in through the roof just after the heaviest downpour of the year. The roof only leaks when it rains real hard (Duh.) What I mean to say is that there are times when it rains and the roof doesn't leak, and this has had me puzzled. It's hard to fix an intermittent problem.
So, thinking about it, I have been in the process of developing a roof-leaking theory: During heavy downpours, the gutters overflow and water seeps through the joint between the fascia and the house. To test this theory, I have to go outside in the rain when the roof is leaking and observe the gutter condition. The only problem is that I have two roofs, a new one (twenty years old) that's built over top of the old one. The water leaks in and onto the old roof, which delays it leakage into the house.
So, if I wait until the water begins to drip into the kitchen and then go outside to observe, it's too late. The rain has slowed and the gutters are drained. I'm going to have predict a leakage event from the severity of a storm and then go outside during the worst of it to see if the gutter is overflowing, and then go back inside and wait for the water to leak in, if it will.
Anyway, I'm outside, too late, because the rain has slowed and the gutter is already drained. And as I'm walking back across the porch, Steve and Marcia are exiting their house. Steve sees me and comes across the street. He asks me if I want the wood stacked in his front yard and I tell him yes. We walk down to the driveway, hover under the porch overhang, and discuss the virtues of the wood he has previously stacked there, and I tell him I got to get with it and split the stuff before winter comes, but it's been too hot to work for too long outside. (I probably sound like a whiner to him, because he's a landscaper and works outside in the heat all the time.) He says he knows what I mean and complains that his work's been slow because of the heat. I tell him I know what he means. I've been avoiding cutting my grass so that it won't burn (which isn't the real reason at all, but it sounds good; the real reason is that I've been a lazy turd.) He says, yeah, he knows what I mean. He's been telling people who want their grass cut that it'd be better not to cut it just yet because there are only a few long blades growing and if he cuts it, it could burn from lack of water, and he adds he's really glad we finally got some rain. (I think about telling him I'm not so glad. My roof is leaking, but that would violate the conversation pattern we're developing.) He says he's down $9,000.00 for the year so far because of the lack of rain. I tell him I know what he means. My investment income is way down too (because of the lack of sound fiscal policy in the Bush administration, which I don't mention). This goes on for a few more exchanges as I try to wind the conversation down, because although I feel that I could keep it going for a while longer, I notice that Marcia is patiently waiting in the car for him. He leaves and I go back inside, having made my human contact for the day (I'd say for the month, except I know that my brother is coming to pick me up tomorrow to go and paint an apartment--or so he says.)Worked today painting. We started out in the heat, in the direct sunlight, painting the front doors of a row of garden apartments. I pushed myself too hard in the heat. I kept thinking, just one more door, until I almost lost it. I waited too long to decide that I was closing in on heat stroke. I went up to the apartment we were going to paint. It was cool. I drank as much water as I could get down without passing out or puking, and lay down on the carpeted floor of the empty apartment. I felt feverish. After about five minutes, the fevered feeling went away, and although I didn't really want to get back up, I was supposed to be working, I forced myself up, got two glasses of water, one for my brother, and headed back down to the lower apartments. I painted half a screen door before the symptoms started to return, so I told my brother I was too hot and going to start painting the apartment, which he didn't mind at all, because he'd been telling me since we arrived that I could choose where I wanted to work.
Back at the apartment, I drank some more water and lay down again. I was feeling very feverish and starting to get stomach cramps. I started to worry that I might cause myself some damage if I started to work again right away, so I lay there for fifteen minutes. I still didn't want to get back up, but I forced myself to start painting. As I began to work, I got the chills, which, although I knew this was symptomatic of illness, still, they felt good and I welcomed them. After a while, I began to feel better, and I started getting into the work. We worked a total of five and a half hours. We'll return tomorrow to finish the jobs.
On the way home, Jim and I talked politics. Despite our many personal differences, politically we totally agree. We like Bush as a person, but hate his political position. And we like Gore's political position, but think he's a loser and a nerd. Bush in a leather jacket and Levis on his Texas ranch is a cool dude, man. Gore playing football on a lawn in his other brand of jeans is a dork. We are both ardent Bill and Hillary supporters and would like nothing better than to see Clinton as the first First Gentleman. Or better yet, as Hillary's Veep. We are convinced that Bush is responsible for the bad economy and, whether he actually is or not, he's going to need a fiscal miracle to get re-elected if people's pension funds do not turn around.
When Jim drops me off at home, Steve and Terry are loading up a tarp of firewood to be dragged over to my driveway, so I help them. We have a conversation about chain saws, and I ask Steve, if he ever sees Jim Dunn, to ask him where my chain saw is that he's been fixing for almost three years now. Steve tells me the last time he saw Jim, Jim reminded him that Steve owed him sixty dollars, and Steve reminded Jim that Jim still had six of his tools he was fixing for him. This does not bode well for my chain saw. Steve says that Jim is a good repairman, when he does the work. He makes an excuse for him, saying that he lost his father a year ago and has had a hard time adjusting. Steve says that he knows how he feels, because he himself had a hard time for about a year after his mother died. I empathize. I understand. I just want my chain saw back, fixed or not. It's not my saw, it's my brother's, and I don't want him asking me for it some day and me having to tell him that I don't have it.
I'm inside now, relaxing at my computer, gloating at my victory over the heat and a workday out in the world. But getting old's a bitch. The heat never used to bother me at all. I'm out of shape, not used to working in the heat, literally or metaphorically.I've got to get back to (my real) work. But I still don't want to. I painted all day today [i.e., the apartment, not fine art]. I felt pretty good. We painted the last of the doors for about an hour in the heat, and then we went up to finish the apartment. I'm getting back into the swing of physical work. I enjoy it, once I get back into a reasonable shape. But by two-thirty, painting the last ceiling, my neck was beginning to cramp up. Buy the time I got home, I was exhausted from having gotten less than six hours sleep a day for the last three days. I'd been on a nighttime schedule and this daytime work has thrown me off. I can hardly walk. My muscles are beginning to tighten up. I'm going to bed now to take a long, long nap.Still don't want to do any work. I fall behind when it gets hot because I'd rather sit around than work. Then, during the fall and winter, I try to catch up. This must happen every summer, but I never really focused so much on it before, because I've never been so productive as I've been over the last nine months, which is the only time I've ever caught up with the past summer and begun to work on previous summers' materials. I have volumes of past journals, mostly summer stuff, that I've never processed into art. [But maybe all of this isn't really true. See this.]If I had my life to live over, I'd do a lot of things differently, I guess. But as it is, I can't see how I could have done anything any differently now, having been given just one chance. I mean, what I've done, I've done, and it's what should have been done, inevitably, because this is who I am, and have been. If I had had done anything differently, I'd have become someone else. Therefore, logically, I can have no regrets, if I want to be exactly who I am. And I do.
After almost two weeks of summer attitude, again I awaken in the middle of the night to feel the presage of the coming autumn. I was walking, fast, almost as if I were running, through a neighborhood similar to Shannon Heights, but as if it were somewhere west of the city. I've been on these dream streets before, not this one in particular, but in this neighborhood. I run past a girl far off to the side of the road, in a flat field, a huge lot spanning at least fifteen or twenty standard sized vacant lots on the right side of the road. She yells out, as if I have been yelling out all along, or as if someone else had been yelling "This is the last chance to [get on the bus?]" She or I yell this several times. It seems that, at the end of the block, a school bus will be coming and I am running to catch it. As I pass this girl, who looks a lot like Clarisse except that she's more endearing and adorable, I look over at her and catch her eye, as if I am saying to her, without words, that she should come along too. But she doesn't. I want her to come with me, to get on the bus with me, but she doesn't and I'm sorry that she won't. I run to end of the block and, as if I'm on a small scooter, I turn the corner and head down a descending street toward a country road. The road becomes less well-surfaced and, as I begin the suddenly steep final descent, I change my mind and stop and go back a little ways. But then, finally accepting the inevitability of it, I start back down again, a different way, on a dirt road, not much more than a path, in exactly the same direction as the way I had started to go except that it veers off at a slightly different angle, one of those near-roads that has evolved from paths worn by kids playing in the woods. Both roads, deeply rutted, start out at the same place, traverse a short distance with a widening gap of overgrown brush between them, and end next to each other on the main road, which in this case is a dirt (county) road. [Two roads diverge, and end up almost in the same place.] I travel at high speeds along this dirt road. Or at least I'm moving fast for being on a scooter. [This is an area very similar to the dream where I was speeding in a car, being in both the front and back seat at the same time. Front/back = two small rutted roads leading to nearly the same place. One is the way I've lived my life, and one is the way I could have lived it, exactly the same way, but with a lot more awareness of what I was doing, and a lot more appreciation of others.] Eventually, I get onto a paved road, and then onto a two-lane. [I am on a road all by myself, but eventually, I figure out that life is a two-way street.] After a while, still speeding along, I come to an intersection. Since I'm southwest of the city, I don't know the area. [This must be what dreams of this area mean, a realm I'm not familiar with.] I come to an intersection [similar to the one in Center, where this dream will end up], look around, and try to decide which of many options I will choose. Finally, I go in one direction and end up in a shopping center, where I fall into line behind people waiting outside a bank, as if it's at a bank machine and everyone is waiting to get money from it. When I realize that this is what it is, having previously automatically assumed that we were stopped in traffic, I get out of line, because the line is not moving and I want to be traveling, fast. [Working at a job you hate, for money, is like standing in a line that isn't moving.] I leave the parking lot and get on a superhighway. The speed I am now traveling at, with traffic traveling even faster, passing me as I try to stay on the brim of the highway, is even more precarious.
The highway transitions into Rt. 380 up the hill out of Center heading toward Penn Hills, and the scooter transitions into an old school bus. I'm sitting with db, and there are several other passengers on board. db begins singing a country-western song, almost as if she's merely reciting the lyrics. I ask her who's song that is, and she says Loretta Lynn, but I don't believe her. [These are very interesting and unusual lyrics, not at all characteristic of Loretta Lynn. But I can't remember them. I wish I could.] I sing along with her. We're having a good time. The few others on the bus seem reluctant to join in. Suddenly, I have a banjo and begin playing "Foggy Mountain Breakdown," with prefect precision. This wins over the other passengers, who had been ignoring us, but who now listen intently to my performance. The bus turns around and heads back the way we came. At the bottom of the hill in Center, it pulls off to the side of the road. I get the idea that this is the end of the line, but I doubt it, since the bus has very little room to pull off the road here, and the driver couldn't possibly leave it parked here. A passenger, a guy who was sitting near the front, gets off. The driver, a young guy very similar to the passenger, obviously a friend of is, follows him to the door as they talk. They each gather up possessions, like lunches in paper bags and such. At different times, I think they are both getting off or just the passenger is getting off and the driver will take us somewhere else. There is somewhere else we (I?) have to go, some place "up in the hills" (of Plum Township--New Texas Road area.) The atmosphere is very hillbilly. As the two guys talk, everyone else exits the bus except db and I. And then, the driver leaves too, and the bus would be empty except for db and I and a woman who gets on, a young woman, good-looking in that plain and countrified sort of way, whose face is slightly dirty. db says "Hi, mom." And the woman says, "Is that all you have to say to your mother." I get the idea that they haven't seen each other in a long time. Her mother says something about their house, asking db if she's been wondering about it. I understand that this is db's mother when she was young, looking similar to the woman I knew, but still very different. I realize that the others too were younger versions of their older selves, perhaps each one, like db's mother, being now dead.
When I awaken, I am 'in touch' with 'life' in a way I often try to be, but seldom achieve, in meditation. I understand that life, like riding on a scooter on a speeding, busy freeway, is precarious, and precious, and the only time most of us realize this, if we do at all, is upon awakening to it in the middle of the night and lying in bed listening through the open window of the darkened bedroom to the crickets chirping.