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The morning has moved from a muted Art Pepper “Over The Rainbow” to Van Morrison’s “Tupelo Honey.” It’s always a good sign when I find my way back to Van Morrison; he has been with me for a very long time. “You can take all the tea in China and put it in a great big brown bag for me” seems a remarkable way to talk about feeling fine about who you are and who you are with. Even so, I realized that the hard thing for me about my getting up very early and finding my way into the old music is that memory can be complicated, dangerous, if only because it can be full of feelings of loss and regret that take on weight, pulling me back into the memory of what was, and is, both now compromised and not soon to return, if ever. Going back there is not an option; keeping it real and healthy means staying here, and being present with nonspecific fear and drift of another day with too much pain and not enough physical outlet and/or peace of mind. I canceled another shoot this morning.

It is time for breakfast and a trip to the gym, where I will do some aerobic exercise on a machine and listen to a Van Morrison playlist on Pandora. My back will hurt for a while and then I will get into the rhythm of it. Somewhere in there will be a recognition that I am doing this thing and not sitting at home in pain like I did for the past year. That unlike many folks who have gone through my sequence of physical ailments, I am alive and well and irrationally irritated with my perceived failings; to the degree that I am succeeding in rebuilding a life that works for me, the irritation is useful if somewhat indulgent. The “I Used-to-was” phrase has been mostly replaced with the more accurate and ultimately more useful “I am.” 

Image Credit

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

Remember when depressed was just another word for being sad or maybe blue? And, sometimes, after you got to be a teenager, if you were blue you could get into a conversation about having the Blues. Whatever they were. It made one seem more real and perhaps a bit worldly. And it was a useful way to seem both intense and possibly desirable to the opposite sex. It could lead to getting laid, so to speak.

As you got older, there was existential angst to be had, Schadenfreude to be aware of, not to mention Weltscmerz, in a diverse universe of Weltanschaung to contend with, and like that. All to be avoided or wallowed in as the case may be. The Blues were much simpler than all that heavy traffic. They could be about having lost your girlfriend, having gotten drunk, having gotten into a fight. Maybe about having gotten drunk, gotten into a fight and losing your girlfriend in one lost weekend. Or maybe last Thursday. And, maybe you were standing in the kitchen with a knife in your hand and a chicken staring back at you from the cutting board. Maybe then you realized there were at least four things you can do with a knife and a chicken and an empty pot and all of them are the Blues. A whole mess of that stuff could be a good country tune as well. That’s what being sad was.

These days, all of that stuff falls under the heading of mileage, at least it does for me. It’s easier that way. And more useful as shorthand, hence Tarmac Meditations. My place for relaxing and paying attention, all the while being in touch with the slip-slide of my days. And the whimsy of the passing parade. Not sad by any means but certainly filled with feelings and the sense that there is still shit to do and my time is both at hand and slipping away at one and the same time. All of this mileage may be just another reminder for me to be getting back to work, lacing up and lighting out by doing what there is to do with what I’ve got. I’m betting my life on it. And I’m all in. As if had any choice in the matter.

There, I feel a whole lot better. 

Image Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.

So I wrote this a few years ago and then let it be. I haven’t been able to get back into the longer work I began in the fall, so I have been doing a lot of whining, housecleaning, erranding, complaining out loud to strangers, cleaning the window grouting with a used toothbrush, creating new recipes for old vegetables and anything else that was not writing.

The other day I mistakenly wondered about a document in my writing folder whose title caught my eye. Mistakenly because I opened it, read it and started into rewriting it. And then I did it again with another piece; so much time went by that I decided to pick yet another piece and do the same thing. I spent the entire working day just like that – rewriting old stuff. OMG it was kind of thrilling. Sadly, the piece that needs finishing and several others that need starting are in no immediate danger of meeting their appointed fates.

But if “hope is a thing with feathers” as the poet said (although I am sure she was not referring to the new duster I bought the other day and placed prominently on a corner of my desk), I am closing in on the work that needs doing. Trust me.

Honolulu Café

I was going to meet a poet for drinks at 5:00, so i ran some errands on the other side of town. I was early, she was late. I wrote this while I was waiting. Later we drank cheap red and made out, leaning backwards across the hood of a ’55 Chevy.

It’s been raining hard all day.

I’m driving south on Main Street towards Marine Drive. I’ve got some bills I have to pay. Roy Rogers and Norton Buffalo are playing on the radio. It sounds like the lost nights and the window skies from so long ago; sweet, endless like youth itself and now, it seems, over. Rest in peace, Norton.

I stop for a red light. I catch sight of the Honolulu Café on the eastern side of the street right there between the New Antique Market with a “new” container from Belgium and the Come-In Enterprises Emporium, featuring stamp collections and “super healthy” food from Hong Kong.

Honolulu: hotels, beaches, Pearl Harbor, beautiful Hawaiian girls, the Pipeline. The palm tree sign out front has fallen over. The place looks wet from the inside out, shrouded in the rain like Noah’s final port of call, a last chance hole in the wall, a wait-it-out-‘til-paradise kinda joint.

I get to thinkin’ how maybe Miles or ‘Trane played here some long-ago lost night on the road but that’s romantic tripe. My guess is that nobody ever played anything at all at the Honolulu Café.

I don’t know anyone in there and they don’t know me. At the Honolulu Café you got to figure that since they don’t say anything, they got to know something.

On a rainy day here, north of the original Skid Row, we are all innocent bystanders. According to a local ordinance, every act of kindness will be revenged.

Behind the fallen palm tree sign and the worn out yellow light the shadows drift behind the fading yellow window.

Outside the Honolulu Café an old man staggers against the blowing rain. I imagine for a moment that he is remembering how the decks were awash in the South Pacific swell.
The darkness inside the midnight watch was blacker than the night sky in Hell. The Southern Cross was all but gone. As he ran for the wheelhouse he prayed that it wasn’t another one of those rogue waves rolling up from the South China Sea.

From behind my wheel it looks to me like that storm is right here, right now. Watch caps and John Deere hats don’t keep you dry up here. The streets are wet; his pockets are empty. I’m thinkin’ that he knows that there ain’t nobody home waiting up. The old guy turns into the oncoming rain. It slashes across his battered face. From here I can see a hint of a smile; could be he is remembering his last good day, somewhere east of the Solomons, running for home in front of the storms coming up out of the Sou’west.

I’m waiting for the light to change. I keep drifting back to the back of the place I grew up in. I hear the sounds of chairs scraping on the wet floor and dishes hitting the bus box. Comes a voice in a long-ago hotel kitchen singing, “You’ve lost that lovin’ feelin’…,”  a dishwashing angel, backlit in clouds of steam and endless stacks of dirty dishes. He wasn’t young like me or old like hard times; he was just worn out with the distance between here and used to be. I went back to look for him one night, maybe ask him where he’d been, ask him what he knew. He wasn’t there.

I can hear the wipers on the windshield, the rain on the roof, the road wet tires, the sounds of passing by. I’m heading south, paying some bills. I’m waiting for the fog to lift, waiting for sunrise over the islands. I’m waiting for the phone to ring. I’m waiting for the waiting to be over.

and the other piece,

Hard Candy

She turned her back to me
I threw my arm around her,
thinking that she might feel safer
later she took my hand and squeezed
it on her childlike breast,
my shakes rolled in and
tore up the night
Hours went by
before she said softly,
Charlie, It’s make peace not war.

I’ve been raped every night
for the last four years
she said
go to sleep I said,
drifting smoke images of  the Pieta
slow danced across the spackled ceiling

I saw the Pieta at the ’64 New York World’s Fair
She seemed aware,
in her patient
stone cloak, pried loose as it had been
from our rough beginnings,
of having been touched by God’s hand,
And yet she remained silent and cold, very cold

She is barely alive,
we  are barely afloat
in our indifferent ocean.
I held her so tight,
she held me up,
held,
we made our way to morning

Let’s call Eaton she said
He’s got the best shit in town
After  awhile, “we’ll call him,“
a few minutes later we did.

Image Credits

Photos by Michael Lebowitz. All rights reserved.