Month: December 2020

So here I am in the middle of a life with the dawning understanding that nearly everything I thought to be the cornerstones of acceptable and positive human behavior was bullshit.

Please note that this “enlightenment” did not come all at once. It probably started in my mid 30’s, after I’d been married for nearly 10 years and had three kids. My life was pretty much formed, yet I was forced to accept that I had very little understanding of what it actually meant to be a “good” man or a “good” person. I was still far too self-centered, self-absorbed, and just generally selfish. I had no good friends and honestly had no idea why.

I’ve considered documenting my lame efforts at adopting the Christian faith and living that life. Although my life continues to be shaped and informed by the seminal wisdom and irrefutable cultural truths found in the bible, it’s promised spiritual and actual life benefits evaporated under the brutal scrutiny of real-life trials and the crucible of honest scientific examination.

But I eventually did find a relevant and pragmatic mythology, one that fits perfectly with honest examination, introspection, and observation of my external reality.

In the endless outpouring of the admittedly unreal I found the real.
My mythology, the structure, and concepts on which to base a life, a world view, and a complete perspective I found in the words, sounds, and visual imagery of fiction.

My teachers are many and quite varied.

One of the first is the late Kenneth Millar, writing under the name of Ross McDonald. Through his writing I became acquainted with Mr. Lew Archer, a California private investigator. He allowed me to follow him in his long and eternal struggle with a landscape of shallow glitz tinged with human failings and an uncaring system. He taught me that no matter how many times life gangs up and beats you down, you always, failing death, have the strength to get up, brush yourself off, and continue. Mr. Archer was often beaten but never defeated. Not because of his boxing prowess but because he simply would not be defeated.

Another is Sue Grafton. She introduced me to Kinsey Millhone. Referring to her as another southern Californian private investigator simply does not do her justice. Hanging around her gave me some small insight into the subtle yet profound differences life forces on women, in particular women who attempt to invade the unspoken but rigidly protected universe of the male hero. In her I could see the inviolable steel will of a woman who does what she must for no other reason than it is what she knows to be right. She allowed me to recognize (or at least to begin to) the strength and determination I’d seen in my mother, some of my schoolteachers, and the various remarkable women I encountered.

I watched Jonathan E. explode with lethally focused violence in 1975’s “Rollerball”. Through his pain and determination, I learned that sometimes the significance of the single, unwavering unit, the person, nameless to the thoughtless, corrupted, and never-fulfilled maw of the human monster’s appetite for violence, sexuality, anger, and mindless desire to WIN, is and always be, important, for no other reason than one individual believed in it.

Through the incomparably beautiful prose of Walter Mosely I met Easy Rawlins. Mr. Rawlins’ adventures as a black man in late 40’s Los Angeles gave me a protected peek into the racial barriers thrown up by fearful whites. He gave me just a taste of raw bigotry and hatred for no more reason than a darker shade of skin. I do not and never will know completely what it’s like to be black, (or female, or any other identity that we call “minority”) but I have some small idea.

But by far my greatest teacher has been the late Robert B Parker. He introduced me to his friend Spenser (like the poet). First name unknown (perhaps even to Mr. Parker) he works as a private investigator in Boston. He’s taught me about love, being true to yourself, sometimes cruel and brutal honesty, friendship, and what it really means to be a man, in almost every context.
Not being married, he taught me that eternal and unchanging love is not a feeling but a decision, made every moment of every day to fulfill a promise made to oneself and to another.

Not being a father, he taught me that the greatest instruction one can offer a child is unwavering and unconditional love.

Not being some perfect icon, he taught me that failure is inevitable and certain. That to fail spectacularly in private or in public, is to take one significant step towards the best we can ever hope to attain: simply being able to honestly say: “I did my best.”

Mr. Spenser was none of those things but one thing he was in spades: a good friend. And that, perhaps, is the greatest lesson of all.

As he moves through his violent and ever changing landscape, struggling against a faceless, nameless foe as determined to corrupt and destroy as he is to support, aid, and perhaps to redeem, he meets other heroes. Some help him once and are forgotten. Others are drawn to him, recognizing in him the same burning desire to help, to make right those few wrongs that can be made right.
He makes and keeps friends. These are true friends, not momentary images or words with nothing more than a virtual existence. Although they are no more real than the words and phrases that manifest their entire reality, they are more real to me than almost everything I see.

They are real because they represent that which means everything to me. The truth, the truth about everything and everyone that is, so much today, cast aside for material stuff, meaningless and unfulfilling as empty space, the cynical illusions of friendship, promoted by a virtual market no more real and relevant than the virtual space it inhabits. The ridiculous concept of falling “in love”. As if a lifelong commitment to care for and be cared for by another could in some bizarre universe, be equated to some intoxicating but well-understood biochemical process doomed to evaporate in time.

These are my teachers and I will never ever learn all they have to share.
But I am listening, and I am, despite all my weaknesses and personal failures, learning.

I watched a lot of tv as a kid, mostly the meaningless pablum of daytime programming. Most of it was from the late 50’s and early 60’s. It had little or nothing in common with real life, certainly not my life.

My family was poor, my father farming cotton on someone else’s land, spending what money he had to raise a crop, selling it for what he could and having to pay a significant portion of those proceeds to the landowner. There was never much left for him or us.

Our house was on the edge of town, small and spare, heated by three gas stoves, one in the living room, one in the bedroom, and the smallest in the single bathroom. In the summer it was “cooled” (and I am using that term in its most generous sense) by a large evaporative cooler, blowing somewhat cooler air through a living room window. It had a bad bearing, causing it to screech loudly on long, hot summer nights.

This was my real world and it was made nearly unbearable by what I saw and understood as “normal” on the various TV shows I watched. The characters that lived inside that small simulated wooden box were sometimes so much more real to me than the real people in my life and nearly always preferable.

I am the youngest of five and by the time I was born my parents were both in their early 40’s. They’d both been born into large, depression-era families, sharing only the life crushing poverty common in those times. They spoke little of their childhood (to me) and as far as I was concerned the history of my family’s existence began (and perhaps ended) with me.

Life had not been kind to them. Whatever hopes and dreams they might have had, were almost completely dead and gone before I was born. They did the best they could. It has taken me long years of hurt, disappointment, sometimes hate, and longing to understand that. All of that was displaced, directed mostly towards my father. My mother tried, in her own way to make me happy. My father spent all his time simply trying to keep food on the table, a roof over our heads, and shoes on our feet. He had no time or energy for the kind, generous fatherly relationships that was common on the insipid and fanciful TV shows that informed me as to what a father should be like. I still don’t and probably can never understand the soul-wringing hardships he suffered.

Against this seemingly grim background of my childhood was projected the insubstantial and unreal black and white moving pictures of completely unrealistic fictions. “Father Knows Best”, “Leave It To Beaver”, “Make Room For Daddy”, “Ozzie & Harriet”, etc were my windows to a world that was so much more real and preferable to the crude outlines of my actual existence. I lived in those shows, spoke with the voices of the two-dimensional children therein, listened to the calm, measured, and loving voices of the fathers and mothers, and dreamed of someday living in a house where patience, love, material plenty, and an easy, totally fictional and perfect life was offered to all who would take the time to sit, watch, listen, and believe.

Sure, I watched the other shows, “Superman”, “The Wild, Wild West”, “The Twilight Zone”, “The Outer Limits”, etc. The difference being that I completely recognized those for what they were; fanciful and fantastic visions with little or no connection to the real world.

I didn’t understand then that the family shows were no more accurate or relevant than these fanciful tales. To me they were what real life was or perhaps what it should be. They shaped my dreams and expectations as much as any accurate history or memories shared by my siblings, friends, or parents.

They were my mythology, even though at the time, I did not recognize them as such.

But a life built on the foundations of ephemeral and never existing shadows can only eventually dissolve under the simple and unrelenting pressures of what happens during normal human existence. The dreams and visions collapsed with no more substance than the light from which they were constructed. Life, rich and full of the ugly, insistent, and intense barrage attacks of real consequences, was always so much less and so much more than the shadows of those false teachers. Their truths and lessons, based on nothing more that some overworked and hasty TV writer’s hurried scratches, evaporated as the steam from water, boiled too long and too hot.

My life was almost always a huge disappointment, delivering none of the expected perfection, richness, and promised material wealth.

I don’t know when, but eventually I came to understand that the things on which I had built my life were baseless and simply put, bullshit.

I needed a new and relevant belief system.

I needed a new mythology.

Here’s something you may or may not know and\or understand: For the most part, people serving in political office at any level (but particularly at the federal level) have one, and only one priority: keeping their job. This isn’t surprising as that’s essentially the desire of anyone who has a job. The primary difference being most people try to keep their job by actually performing the work for which they were hired.

Not politicians. The work they should be doing is hard, and fraught with difficulty. So long ago, they learned the easy way to keep their job; convince the voters that someone else is actively preventing them from doing their job. They are most excellent at this.

So now, we have a divided country where both sides are completely sure that all the problems they face in life is someone else’s fault and thank heaven for my tireless senator\congressman fighting the good fight to make sure we get everything we want, desire, and need.

What a load of bullshit.

Let’s face the ugly fact and those are that our country was founded by rich and powerful white men who were mostly interested in providing a legal and political structure that mostly looked after the interests of rich and powerful white men. Sure, they paid lip service to the rest of us, but that was NEVER anything but an afterthought. The rest of us were simply mindless drones, fit for nothing more than mindless drone labor and other meaningless activities.
But even they, in their relentless pursuit of a system designed to promote rich and powerful white men, saw political office as public service and NOT A FREAKING LIFETIME JOB!

But we, the people, have been lazy. (and frankly far too busy trying to overcome the endless barriers put up by rich and powerful white men to our very existence to do much about it) We believed them when they said they were doing this for the good of all. (Of course, to them that meant for the good of rich and powerful white men.)

So now the most prominent leaders of our nation are rich and powerful white men (and a few rich and powerful women) who are FAR too old and out of touch to really understand the majority of the people they are paid to represent.

This is not some radically outrageous proclamation, made by me in a pathetic attempt to get attention. (Unlike practically everything I post) I believe this will all my heart. If you can provide solid evidence to the contrary, I’d be happy to see it.