Restless Writer

It is an unsettling feeling to be older than your dad.

I'm not talking about when your mom marries a younger man, or as sometimes happens, dad runs off with a woman younger than you. I guess that's tough to get your head around. Tough but doable.

No, today I thought about my mom and how I should call her, let her know I'm OK, because she worries about me in this economic climate. That's not to say I don't have similar concerns for her. Making ends meet on a fixed income pension and seeing savings eroded by uncontrollable living expenses is difficult at any time. I should call her; let her know she doesn't have to worry about me.

Then it occurred to me that I am older than my dad's age when he died. I have passed the age when he last had the capacity to worry about anybody or anything. I don't feel older than him.

In my mind at least, he as aged gracefully, at the same rate as my mom. Only photos break that illusion, so I don't have any. But, the fact is I am older than dad and have been for five years and it's not right she has to worry about me. I should call and tell her.

Why would anyone scam an unemployed person? For the unemployment benefits or the contents of an empty bank account, playing on the last discard of an empty hand?

As I scan the growing pile of junk mail cluttering an overburdened inbox, it's clear that at least they understand I no longer need Viagra, or penile enlargement, although the Valium is tempting. Even fraudulent Nigerian bankers have given up on me.

 Instead, a new crop offer hope and change in the form of refinancing, loan modification, and a deal not to miss - making a fortune typing or with Google surveys. The most optimistic amongst the swarm, offer a powerhouse investment opportunity, presumably using that stimulus check now available to me, shouted in capital letters and obscure spam filter defeating symbols.

More worrying is the semi-credible offers that link my first name, email address and street address in a carefully crafted seduction to accept a new lower mortgage repayment.

I wish I could use these same offers to heat the house, burning them in the wood stove as I do the junk that comes courtesy of the US postal system. Instead, they consume power and bandwidth and on one sad occasion, four days of effort wiping and completely re-installing my PC's operating system.

The time is approaching rapidly when I must leave my email address to expire, lapse or whatever happens when we move on to a new one. For nearly 10 years, it has been an everyday part of my life, like sleeping and breakfast, growing with me, and me with it.  Embracing more friends, more subscriptions, and more customer service files until I have no idea what may happen if I simply ignore it.

Somehow, I just cannot abandon it to the masses.

or are people in the black community in Boston smiling more today, meeting my eye directly and with warmth?
Perhaps it is simply a reflection of my own feelings, similar to those dark days after 911 when all I wanted to do was to reach out to others; to offer an outstretched hand and a hopeful voice.
This was my second night at the 10-week Grub Street writer's workshop aptly named "novel in progress".  Both on the 'T' journey downtown and more so on the way back there was a buzz in the air.
Older black adults appeared stately, even serene; the young and one twenty something girl with scalp tight hair pulled into three lobes each blazed with red, positively effervescent. Other black youths sat on the edges of their seats, nodding to the sound of an inaudible beat, fed upwards by dangling white wires.
The girls laugh filled the carriage and as I looked up our eyes locked, and did not look away in the normal accidental brush of embarrassment. We simply smiled at each other.
As she stood to depart at her stop, she waited next to my seat, small hips swaying with the trains slowing motion.

I continued scribbling about her and others in my notebook, and then said simply, "I like your hair."
"You like it?" she said raising a hand and patting at the tightly pulled buns. "This."
"Yes. The red design, it shouts danger."
She looked at me, with an unspoken question.
"Like a danger signal."
As the doors opened she smiled again, as if she liked the idea and said with a nod, "Danger signal, right."

I sat for a short moment lost in our brief interaction, scribbling, waiting for the doors to close and train to depart.
Then I realized I had reached the end of the line. My stop. Nowhere else to go but home.
I hesitated feeling doubly stupid; making sure the girl was out of sight.

The truth is I wanted one more infusion of her energy, a glimpse of her shock of red hair, and to hear her laughter. But more than that, I  wanted her to remember me as a friendly white guy who noticed, who reached out and not to mistake me for a stalker or an inadvertent threat to her happiness.

Riverfest at Cambridge on the Charles River on Saturday was a blast. Can’t believe we been here seven years and this was the first time we’ve been. Six hours of free music and dance, vegetarian and vegan food and of course sunshine and ice-cream - wicked combination.

It’s difficult to compare or rank since they were all so different, and high quality, but based on spending hard earned dollars on Cd’s then Bongo Love – playing a mix of Zimbabwean percussion and American jazz lines and accompanied by and very impromptu appearance of OmBellyCo, an American tribal belly dance troupe were tops. But Maya Azucena – an indi blues and soul singer, back by percussion, vocals and acoustic guitar – was a close second.

When we open our computers, when we store personal information via one of the many bookmark or community sites, when we Stumble or Myspace, we open up in a way we would never do in any other public forum.

Imagine going to Harvard Square, flinging your coat or jacket open and saying to a perfect stranger, “reach in, see and touch the inner part of my life.”

 Of course, some people do this all the time. But they are on a stage and get paid to expose their lives. None does it better or with more crude honestly than Billy Connolly, the aging Glaswegian comedian, who by the admission of his own touring title is “Too old to die young.”

With tales of farting upper class British attending an open-air opera (and thank goodness it was by his account) to the most intimate and arse felt tales of prostrate examinations that included an episode of prostrate squeezing which resulted in what Connolly called “milking”,  no detail is too much.

Even when the audience precedes laughter with that “eeeugh” sound that only tales of vomiting women, not one but three, as if such stories are better in groups, does Connolly let up on what he does best. And that is his own brand of “milking”.

He takes the audience on a big dipper ride of expectation - for surely everyone who paid their $50’s knows what to expect - before plunging them down in a stomach churning loop through stories of his past, given new life - and ample embellishment –, in the present. Gaining speed throughout the performance, he paces about the stage in crepe-soled shoes, the long tail of his black tee-shirt that covers his backside, flapping behind. He is a master of timing and distraction and continues his rants until most of the audience wipe away tears of something and gulp for breath.

And then, suddenly, it’s over – he’s out of steam. Waving Churchill’s famous victory sign in a mid sixties hippy salute to the masses, he exits stage left. And that’s how it felt, we the audience were left - without an encore, although some tried mightily to induce one - with the feeling that Connolly, for all his story telling acumen, has perhaps journeyed way beyond the angry young man to become simply “too old to be a hippy story teller.”

When a voice has no sound it matters not at all what it is saying.

That’s also true of the thoughts in my head.

To everyone else they are silent unless I force myself to talk or write.

I guess that is the nature of loneliness.

Alone, without help from others, the thoughts roll around until I dismiss them.

Just like this one.

It is unacceptable in modern America to seek, but never find, to try, but never succeed, to desire, but never have.

Millions of people face dozens of choices daily, weekly, yearly. Some do it without thinking. For them, making the right choice is as automatic as breathing and they never have to consider that there may even be a wrong choice.

Others agonize, lose sleep, give up eating as they try to reach the “right” decision or in doing so they may slip unknowingly into the shallow mud of binging on junk food, booze and addictions ranging from drugs to sex to daytime TV. They procrastinate; they avoid people and situations, preferring to search the internet for solutions to a problem that is theirs alone. They have too much information or not enough information, too few or too many choices, distractions and difficulties. They are frozen, unmoving, unable to “get to go.”

And how they dread trigger questions, no matter how simple.

“What do you want to do? Where do you want to go? What’s wrong with you?”

Heart rate increases, adrenaline courses, moisture evaporates from the mouth and throat as rapidly as the tongue swells and the mind goes numb. It begins to slow down like a computer system using up memory paths as information floods the hard drive in the onslaught from a virus. Panic sets in and words other than “I dunno” refuse to form. And it’s true, they don’t. They now live in the perpetual state uncertainty, transfixed and aching from the agony of choice. 

How can anyone break out, re-engage and re-vitalize their life?