You create your own world.

Much of what I’ve learned over the last decade validates that. The industry of self help books like The Power of Now and The Secret have re-written that sentence a thousand fold and marketed it. Its hard for people to believe that we can manifest who and what we want when its essential. Fact is: the world we live in, faults and all, has been co-created by us. I know this and forget it regularly.

I thought of this reading my friend’s blog today. Many of my most difficult years have been odd numbers. (Last year was cool though it ended kinda awkward…) But with this even number new year, I want to take advantage of manifesting with intention. Here’s my 2012 To Do list:

1.) Watch and remove my habitual, negative words, language and thoughts.

2.) Stop Trying. A pilot doesn’t tell his passengers: I’m going to try to land the plane…

3.) Write an hour every day after work

4.) Collect names and ideas for my Black History Month project (like, uh, pronto!)

5.) Finish at least 2 twenty-page plays

6.) Get back to dating and Find Her

7.) Attend at least one open mic a month

8.) Visit the Jewish Art Museum and the Asian Art Musuem

9.) Find a new yoga class

10.) Get a new computer

11.) Get my camera fixed

12.) Play Chess more often

13.) Fast the weekend before my birthday

14.) Read Regularly

15.) Create a collage

16.) Practice Drawing

17.) Take more evening walks

18.) See more live comedy

19.) See more live theater

20.) Submit poems for publishing

21.) Use my dusty recipie books and cook different things

22.) Buy a suit

23.) Take more photos and videos

***

I’ll stop at 23 since I’m at work. Now go get em.

In lieu of listing 2011′s successes and errors, or even goals for the coming year, i turn the mic over to the Dalai Lama for guidance through 2012 and beyond. God bless us– every one

***

Let it be known– this i09.com article entitled: What if Twilight Were Written By Famous Writers is officially my first favorite thing in 2012

Keith was one of three black men that regularly attending the Above Paradise poetry series in San Francisco I loved. Bruce was another– he’d read early on the open mic and read so quietly the audience would lean in and hold their breaths to hear him, and he was worth it. I was the third.

Keith was interesting because he seemed like a homeless man who worked odd jobs. He was a brilliant writer who seemed to pull stories and poems from the top of his head regarding his day. He would come to the mic in work clothes: huge dusty boots and a shirt tied around his head like Afghan’s headscarf, and present these incredibly detailed, funny, engaging story poems that I loved.

I hadn’t seen him for a long time after the reading closed until I went to one reading at random and saw him, older, thinner, suited. The last time I saw him, I was late to the reading and he seemed to be gently agitating the audience. “Can I Just say one thing,” he asked– he was standing at the side of the crowded room in a suit. A woman– I think it was a woman– had just gotten off stage, she was German. And he had something to say about Nazi Germany and its history. Whatever he said may’ve been true, but nobody was trying to hear it, not especially from an African American dude interrupting the already marathon poetry reading in a small hot room.

That night, he stopped me and asked for my address. I respected him and knew him for– damn, maybe more that 10 years now. 15? I didn’t think. I just gave it to him.

And sometime later, I revieved a letter from him, but it was a few pages of articles he’d copied from news papers. In the columns, he’d write a small note or just leave the page as is. It was both like receiving a newsletter and being forwarded unremarked junk mail articles from your uncle.

One day, this around Thanksgiving, I received a package from him. The post office left me a slip to pick it up. I never did.

The post office was awkward to get to and required a Saturday effort that i usually didn’t have. And it would be closed after I’d get off work. Time elapsed and it was returned to sender.

This past Thursday, I receive another slip. Under sender, instead of a name it read: Somewhere Over The Rainbow. My first thought was foolish– one of my sarcastic relatives sending me ‘something’ at Christmas. It could happen! Its been a while since I’ve been a participant in anything. Maybe this was to bait me. Hmph. I was desperately fooled.

I woke up at 9:30, and walked down the hill to the bus stop. The bus circled around the outer edge of Downtown Oakland and dropped me a block away from the post office. I expected there to be a crowd: it was Christmas eve after all. But I stroll inside and there’s no one standing at the counter and no one in line. I stood at the counter and saw a middle age Asian woman on the phone. Then, from off stage somewhere, a voice: Sue! Sue are you out there.

Yeah. She said. I’m on the phone. I’m the only one working out here.

She hangs up. Disappears behind a wall, then reappears before me, slightly flustered. She barely says anything to me and I give her the slip. She comes back with a moderate sized box that rattled.

I looked over the writing; nearly a child’s script. The return address– beneath Somewhere Over the Rainbow– was carved sloppily by an ink pen and said Richmond. I took the box, thinking: Its Keith, not any relatives at all. I stuffed the box in my backpack and walked back to the bus stop.

What the fuck was in the box?? Its not like we ‘know’ one another or owe each other anything.

And why is it RATTLING??!?

Before I even opened the box I thought about returning it unopened to sender or forwarding him a card, asking: Would you please stop this? But I went to the bus stop and sat down.

The bus stop was outside the Veteran’s Administration building. The public garbage can was piled high with garbage bags full of belongings: a well used frying pan. Children’s books and magazines. Dirty stuffed toys. Shoes.

I took the box out of my backpack and turned it over in my hand. It rattled inside. I didn’t shake it. I set the box on the seat and carefully opened it from the bottom.

There was no note inside.

It was a seven inch high, handmade, green Christmas tree made of candle wax. Inside the box were little white and green triangle chips from where the wavy waxed leaves broke off. The leaves resembled waves of water. On top, there was a black pea sized wick from where the candle had, at some point, been lit. The tree was decorated with dust, tiny whisps of fabric, and a couple of stray hairs I pulled off and let float away.

It disturbed me. It was one of the ugliest things I’d ever seen.

I tore his return address and mine off the box and left the box open at the top of the trash pile at the bus stop.

I couldn’t open it in my house. And I most assuredly couldn’t safely burn it– I had no idea who, truly, made it and what energy they had at the time.

The bus arrived and I took it back to Chinatown, treating myself to a rubber tree plant and two heaping fistfuls of dim sum and bbq pork buns. I felt only slightly guilty over tossing A Gift, and truth told the only christmas gift I’d received. But. Sorry. No. I was weighed with more questions than any feeling of safety to bring it into my house. Blessings and Thanks, Keith. But you’ll have to try again.

The top of the garage glowed with a string of Christmas lights and just beneath it, a series of images of what appeared to be a cat dancing on its hind legs. I knocked and the garage door opened. John sat watching the television. One floor heater at his feet, another which had cartoon image of a fireplace on the other side. I sat down and immediately shared shots of Grand Marinier with the man, who in my life behaves as an uncle. We immediately started talking about family, which I’d been thinking about (mostly negatively) all week.

Every family needs a griot, he said. One person who keeps everybody’s story. I’m the griot in my family.

I wondered to myself who that would be in both families I hail from. My mom was the griot for the family I grew up in. My eldest sister is probably the griot in the family I was born from. During the wedding in San Diego this past summer, it was her who sat next to me and rattled off names and stories for everyone in the circle. Those who were present and the rest. I realized what little I told her, about the girlfriend, the break up, the job, will be recorded and passed along like a signed postcard.

John talked about his father, Robert, whom I name respectfully here since he was so lovingly mentioned last night. He spoke about how his father disliked drinking alone, and would get up in the mornings, walk down to his friend’s house and knock on the window a few hours before work, then venture down to the liquor store before it opened, how he’d get the key from the owner, go in and get what he needed, then leave the money on the register. His stories were beautiful. I quarter-remembered one he told long ago about how he sat with his father for the first time and really talked. John said that was when he was about 17 at his mom’s funeral when he and his father sat on a porch between the funeral home and the liquor store, drank and talked deeply and closely for a long time and for the first time.

I told him how my own family makes me feel lonely and he said that happens all the time.

If you have a family of 100 motherfuckers, he said. There’s only gonna be 2 or 3 you see a couple of times a year– if that.

He talked and wrapped his gray dreds on his head and I thought about these videos I encountered on youtube this week of native american elders giving advice and sharing wisdom.

We finished the bottle of grand marinier right down to the last drop– i almost refused the last glass, then realized there was one swollow left in it and it filled my glass perfectly.

Do you want some gumbo, he said.

He went into the kitchen and came back with two bowls and some ritz crackers. The gumbo was deliriously good– the roux creamy and rich. We ate & watched the news.

I got a Christmas acknowledgment for you, I said while digging through my backpack. I had no clue what to get him. My last visit he was off alcohol, so gifting a bottle felt out of place (though I should have figured the moratorium wouldn’t have lasted long, especially with the altar of alcohol on a table across the room) and he has more money and art than I… So earlier in the day I called Rasputin’s and found the last in-store copy of the Madlib Medicine Show’s 420 Chalice All Stars, one of my favorite finds of the year. Its a thumping collection of reggae and dub music. John opened it immediately and put it in his CD player, an old style wooden box designed like a 1940′s style radio. The room filled with thumping dub and reggae. For a minute he’d sit there and say the name of whoever was vocalizing (Eek A Mouse!) then fall into a trance over the music or dance out to the kitchen then dance back with beers. It got to the third track and he got up and restarted the entire cd again. I knew then it was in good hands.

I had a long commute back and got up and excused myself. The night was cold and beautiful. From the bus stop you could see the city glowing white and yellow and red– twinkling dense in starlight. Beneath me a neighborhood chirped from the sounds of children playing, shouting, being. I wanted to be with them so badly.

After the funeral, my aunt stood at the door to my house and asked me to come with her. Framed in the doorway by a shaft of light from the mid afternoon sun, she turned and tossed this to me while I sat in the living room, “alone.” She’d said. “In this big old house.”

I said no. It, the house, was all I had and knew. And her family was so much bigger than mine; her 12 children to my mother’s ‘me’.

And I was adopted.

That was the last time I physically saw her.

I called on the phone once a matter of weeks later. I don’t remember why. It was before money ran out and I would be in the most deepest trouble. I called because I was lonely. That Big Old House, she’d said. Her daughter, Leila, answered the phone, but with me was impatient. Handing the phone to her sleeping mother nearby. The call felt awkward, inconvenient and mostly unwanted. Saying I Love You rattled in my hollow chest like a bolt come unaloose. I didn’t bother calling back. She called me back the next day the for sale sign was hammered into the lawn. She found out from the neighbor across the street– the neighbor who passed calling me and called all the way to Los Angeles. Both my aunt and Leila on the phone, both more about where the money was going for the sale of the house.

There wouldn’t be any. My mom had taken out a loan with the city, and the city went ahead and sold the house when I couldn’t pay. It would be nice if your ainie could get five dollars. A hunnert dollars. Something, she’d said.

But I was kicked out of the house and barely got bus fare.

Time goes long. Stories tumble by.

I talk to one of my favorite cousins, the one who smirked and gossiped over the family that left me behind. She died soon thereafter from cancer.

I talked to another favorite cousin, but more to his wife. Whatever friendship we had as kids had gone to seed. That seed produced nothing.

Time pushes further. And gradually, first through cards, then through six month phone calls, then through me forwarding flowers on mothers’ day and her birth day, my aunt and I begin talking again. Like a planet come back into orbit. I talked to her Sundays– once or twice a month– on and off for a long time. She never met my girlfriend, but I was happy to talk to her during our sacred yet churchless sunday mornings. And I talked to her after that relationship had run its course.

People who live in my heart will rattle the chains I’ve locked it down with every so often. And every so often I need to reach out to them. Last week it happened and I called and talked to her. Most of the time when I call she’d subliminally mention money. All roads lead back to money, it seems. So this Christmas, I decided to do it. Partially inspired by my last trip to the dentist. The dental hygenist asked: You finished with your holiday shopping already.

All my people are dead. I said. I don’t have to shop for anybody.

That’s good, she said.

And that was mostly true. All whom I considered family, all whom were closest to me, on both my adopted side and my blood side, all who did the most work and showed the most of themselves to me, were gone.

My aunt seemed to be unavailable; held in captivity by a extended distance, by me not having a car, and by all our conversations hinting that my presence wouldnt be welcome because of her daughter, Leila. I never clearly understood why. Did she expect kick backs from the sale of the house? Did she hate me for selling it, without ever asking or being involved in what was happening? Did she not consider me family because I was adopted? Was childhood memories of me and the time I lived with and took care of her aunt not enough? Did she understandibly lose it over the deaths she had to endure? Her own son. Her granddaughter. Whatever the reason, my aunt would often say to me: You can come see me. You’ll just have to excuse Leila.

So last week, the day I received my bonus, I did something I’ve done three times now that I think of it. I get a check and people pop up like mushrooms in the background. I call my aunt mid morning while at work. She subliminally namedrops currency and I hear her. I buy a card then go to the bank and ask for four $50 bills. They smell freshly mown. I drop the card in the mailbox.

Yesterday, while at work, I get a call from my aunt and she nearly sounds out of breath. I want to say to her: You Got Mail. But instead just listen, say I love you while co workers stroll by my desk and Well, Merry Christmas.

Then she floors me: Come for new years. Its all right. Come!

And I don’t know what to say. How many years have transpired? 14?

I’ll call you back in a couple of days, I said.

We didn’t talk long. I hung up and thought: If I have to pay to be family, pay a ransom to be loved, is it worth it?

Last Christmas my girlfriend’s family bought us a hotel room since their house wasn’t large enough to host all the sisters from out of town. Christmas eve the family decorated the tree together to danceable Christmas songs and storage boxes boiling over with ornaments. My girlfriend’s father and I unstrung Christmas lights and tied the tree up with them. Then I was ordered to choose some ornaments and get to decorating.

The process was spiritually delicious. The feeling of light cords in my fingers, the smell of pine, the hanging of bulbs and figurines. It’s been decades since I’ve touched a Christmas tree. (I’m NOT writing a sentence that begins or ends with ‘since my mother died’. How to write around it? Um…) My girlfriend kept watching for reactions, waiting to see me bristle or be cynical or for any trace of element WTH. There was none. The only child in the house bounced around helping with this or with that. They danced to Do They Know Its Christmas. And ultimately embraced the holiday with generosity and warmth. This is the Christmas Spirit they talk of on television every year. The Christmas Spirit I’ve heard so much about. This is what families do. Families with history, traditions, and an artery of love pulsing through and connecting them all.

Afterwards, we piled into a couple of cars and drove to Christmas Tree Lane, got out and walked the streets admiring the decorations. (The Nightmare Before Christmas house was stellar). A troop of Girl Scouts provided hot chocolate for the visitors. Santa Claus was posted on the street island on a huge throne and a line of kids and families waiting for some private time.

By late night, we all separated and settled. My girlfriend and I went to the hotel and slept. We’d been together just past a solid year yet our rhythms were that of an old married couple. We never bickered, just quietly comfortable with one another. We had sex at daybreak– a personal first for me on Christmas. And she left to join her family for more ritualizing and cooking. I slept in for a while, got up to write, then ventured to the lobby for a muffin or coffee or something. How spoiled. The snacks at the main desk were sad and wept openly in their vacuum sealed pouches. Someone from the front desk approached –

Do you have any muffins … or anything? I asked.

The man looked around the room as if muffins commonly sprout from the walls like mushrooms. Seeing none, he said slowly:

Muf-fins. Hmmm.

Not wanting to scare him, I put up my hand and backed way. Nevermind.

I filled a water bottle at the drinking fountain, made coffee in the room and sat back down.

The rest of the day was awesome. I was given mandatory gifts, more than i expected and more than I could give back. (“You don’t have to give anything.” My girlfriend told me. “Just accept it. My family’s like that.”) A lot of food, from breakfast & brunch thru dinner. In the middle of the day a group of family friends showed up. Educated blacks from the islands, college and high school friends of my girlfriend’s sisters. My girlfriend was quiet as I and we spent most of the time in the back of the house with the television, watching Devil and Cyrus until the visitors cleared out and dinner was served.

***

That Christmas memory outlived our relationship, our friendship even.

Two weeks ago I lay on my dentists chair, being strapped in for x-rays. The dental assistant:

Have you finished all your Christmas shopping?

All my people are dead. I don’t have to buy anything.

Well, that’s good. She said

I left the house 5:30 for a 7pm show. The bus I most wanted was scheduled to leave in 48 minutes. Too long. I went for the alternative bus, transferred at Chinatown and the bus arrived and went on.

I plugged in the address for the place I was supposed to be in my phone, but could barely make heads or tails of where exactly I was and where was my end point.

A woman on the bus with an English accent kept asking aloud for park street until a man stepped up to help her. He empathized, being from the middle east.

I’m from London, she said. And lived in Sonoma for two years. This is my first time here.

The man was eager to point out her stop for her.

The buses in London make so much more sense, she said.

The man got off. The woman turned to me to ask if that stop had passed already.

I don’t think so. I said. I’m looking for an address myself.

I never found it. She got off the bus and I ended up going to the end of the line feeling defeated. WTF happened?

I got off the bus and looked around. I’d been here so many times but this time I felt like a tourist. I nearly got back on the bus to retrace my route, but stood there as the bus started and pulled off.

I looked at the clock, mourned not having a car, looked at the Nextbus schedules. I tried looking up the curators number, but didn’t have it, then sent two emails saying I was lost and didn’t know how to get where I was going. I felt panic, the impending realization I was about to flake, but deeper within me I felt something else.

I was at work earlier in the week when the curator for the reading posted the advert for tonight and I wasn’t listed. She’d written me nearly a year to the day asking, and then subsequently went on without me and seemingly asked someone at random to fill my slot.

If i hadn’t said something, I would have been forgotten.

Somehow, this feeling in me standing at the end of the line of all buses, I felt and thought about — not the curator — but rather the woman who gave birth to me. How easy it was to just go on without me. My hurt about abandonment, about being left behind or forgotten… The real word I want here is: Disposable. My hurt over feeling disposable strolled up and took my hand and stood with me in the cold while I thought: I’d rather be home.

If everything happened as promised, if there’d been no misunderstandings, I would have probably taken a taxi there an hour early. But instead, I stood there thinking how everything transpired over the previous couple of days, and my desire drained from me as if somewhere a plug had been pulled.

I went home.

***

The previous night, Friday, I was asked to read for the anniversary gathering of a local theater that has been shuddered. A vibrant hub of the artistic community, the Black Box theater was established 10 years ago and a group of people put together a celebration to acknowledge its place and legend in the bay.

The event took place at a huge office building just off the lake. I arrived just after 9. I wasn’t sure where the event was taking place since there was no signs and no activity, but i found a way in and up to the mezzanine. The event was divided into two large rooms. One was a large open space full of local art on display. One one side of the room were five glassed offices where five artists set up tables to sell their jewelry and other wares. A bartender was posted in one far corner, and a modest stage in the other. On stage was a dj booth, a drum set, and some guitarists, plus mics.

Beginning at 10 pm, There were about 20 poets scheduled to perform– all dynamic and powerful writers and performers, all of whom have a history with the theater and are making history with Oakland. I was scheduled to read second.

The room was cavernous. Minglers scattered around, standing, drinking. The opening performer read. i sat in a folding chair in the front row at her feet and heard her voice, float on a dense wave of conversation flooding this room. I went up on stage suddenly ashamed of my work. I consider it good if you’re listening and being present with it. But to run in the background while you’re already talking, drinking, distracted and half listening — I don’t know what it would sound like. I read off the page and looked up. A woman came in the room, approached a group of folks standing in a tight circle and hugged someone. I glanced over at another part of the room and saw a newscaster from the local news, standing looking at me as if trying to figure me out. I became nervous and plunged my face back into my book.

No sooner than I got off stage was I tapped by this dude who demanded to talk to me. He wanted to know about the Sandwich poem I read, then said he wanted to tell me an idea he’d been thinking about, but if I used his idea he’d have to kill me.

He said this without a stray chip of irony or humor.

I said it was safe to tell me, though I was distressed at being just feet away from the stage while another performer read and being engaged in a conversation. It felt disrespectful since I couldn’t hear her. While listening to him talk about his turkey sandwiches connection to the revolution, I looked at the young woman on stage who was performing something from memory. I saw her scan the room with her eyes and then — lose it. Lose her place in the poem and her memory and flow stopped dead. The room was a black hole of energy.

I turned back to the man talking to me– his nose seemed like it was transplanted onto him from an egyptian mummy. The skin around it was smooth and taut as if covered with a dark skin-tinted saran wrap. He talked and talked until finally the woman who opened the show came over and said to the man: Excuse me, May I rescue this brother. I need his help.

I grabbed my jacket and pack and followed her to the door.

We both stopped at the young woman who followed both of us. I hugged her lightly. I felt for her. Being on that stage right now is hard.

I followed my other friend out of the room and down the escalator. She wanted me to walk her to her car– she was going home and had to let her babysitter go before a certain time. On the walk across the street to her car, she asked:

Do you know the brother you were talking to?

Not at all. He just heard something I did and wanted to talk about his idea. Said if I stole it he’d kill me.

She said: Well, he used to lightweight stalk me back in the day…

And she told me what she knew and remembered about him.

Once back at her car, she said: You’re going back, right?

No, I said. I’m going home.

***

She dropped me off home and I immediately jumped on line.

the only person I told about the event and who said she was going to come, had sent me a message: I’m here and in the second row.

I felt defeated not only because I’d already left, but because she was in the second room that had been set up for the music half of the event. It was a theater with seats and a huge stage with a video loop running on the backscreen.

I wrote her back, panicked and a bit embarrassed. But she said: no worries. She apparently showed up after I’d gotten off stage down the hall and would’ve missed me anyway.

She told me, for the record, what she saw on the music stage was good and she had a great time.

Its already 7:30 and i’m not looking forward to my hour long commute home. At the far end of the raised lightrail platform, a man drunkenly screams at someone, at himself, at people across the street. His voice is effortlessly lionine. His ‘mother fucker’ must be a rally cry heard for blocks.
I don’t smoke coke, he told someone or no one. I drink!
His chest took air like a cannon and he shot curses that could crumble brick walls at a distance.
I looked down for a forthcoming train and saw nothing but street lights like flakes in the darkness.
Then it occured to me: what if he gets on with us? They’d end up stopping the train anyway because he can’t be in a closed space this drunk, this loud.

He didn’t sound angry or agitated. He shouted at a bus driver on break across the street asking if he was taking a shit. He accused someone near him waiting on the platform of smoking dope, which he was proud to not do. His mouth would spill over loud curses simply for the joy of feeling the vibrations of his voice rattle his chest.

Mutha FUCKA!!

And what will become of us? The rest of us wanting to get home or wherever we were headed?

Standing there, thinking that, right then i looked down and saw an asian bus driver in a shuttle bus. What was he shouting? “T! this is the T line” he said, then made the sign of the cross.

No one else seemed to move, though certainly others saw him. I bolted. I needed to be heading home, needed to be moving and anywhere else but here right now. Of all the people on the platform i was the only one to jump on the shuttle.

And the shuttle had only six people on it. When I got on board, one woman stood in the aisle herself as if she were drunk. A puddle of water in the floor, spillage from something, hopefully not her bladder. I went past them and sat in the back. The driver couldn’t get anyone else to ride, so he pushed on to the next stop. By the third stop I saw a lightrail train parked, empty and a group of men in reflective jackets examining the front of the train. It was empty, no riders. We went on, picked up a couple more people, before stopping at a place where two trains parked, each heading different directions. We were instructed to get on the lightrail and finish our journey. Across the street for the other direction, a long line of people lined the walls and waited. The lightrail pulled forward and we went on.

My evening had been a good one. I took out my notebook and wrote an outline to help remember when I would later journal.

1. Crowd at bus stop
2. Cigarettes, importance of
3. Baby Carriage
4. Tactics Squad
5. Garage
6. Customer Service
7. New Chair.
8. “Grab you a beer. I’m passing today. My dui instructor would be proud.”
9. Meat man
10. Sam Cooke memories
11. Ghost of the Soul Stirrers & Harmonizing with the meat man
12. Brother enraged
13. Shuttle bus driver makes sign of the cross
14. Two trains not running.
15. Line of people at the transfer point, a picket fence of dark shadows

This coming weekend I’m doing a couple of readings. One in Oakland as part of the Black Box Theater’s 10 year anniversary gathering. The theater itself is closed, but the people who performed there are still around and i was happy to be asked to read and am curious how the night’ll turn out. They gave me 10 minutes and even though its been a minute since anyone’s invited me to play and i’m grateful, i still haven’t gotten it together and solidified my set. I was so anal about this stuff when i was younger. Now i’m old and cynical and eh, whatever. But it be nice if i could make a good impression and it be even nicer if i could motivate myself to sit and work and create. I printed a bunch of poems to consider and am happy i have some new stuff. But the black box isn’t all of it.

The next night, Saturday, i’m reading at this art center in Alameda. Curious. The organizer sent me an email, which I still have, from 2010 asking me to read on December 10, 2011. I said ok and asked them to send me a friendly reminder email since, damn, its a whole year.

But I kept that date and calendared it and watched and waited for a confirmation that the reading was even still happening.

What I got was a message on facebook announcing the reading with two different readers.

wtf?

Um. Ok. I went back to my email box and found the last correspondence from 2010 that she sent asking me about that night and forwarded it to her. I asked: So, do i still have to read for this? And she wrote back kinda dismissively: yeah, wrote you to ask for a bio that you never responded to (misspelled my email– ed.) so two days ago I asked Someone Else and they said yes.

And the flippancy around her message, and disregard for reserving my time a year in advance AND THEN PRETENDING THAT DIDN’T HAPPEN nearly made me want to grab my computer montior and crush it between my hands then shove the debris down her throat for, well, frankly, fucking with me.

BUT. To her credit (this make me laugh) she finally ADDED ME as an extra reader for the night.

So it feels like I’m a tacked on ps to a night I was initially invited to do. This is not helping my depression.

I nearly cancelled out of bitterness, but decided, since she was being nice and i didn’t want to be an ass and I agreed to, ahem, Read Anyway.

Those two nights will be vastly different, yet I haven’t figured out how or what i will do. But I’ll write reports on what happens this weekend; including the open mic i’m looking forward to tomorrow. That open mic is about doing new material and it excites me. To be excited about anything writing related is a good thing…

Have I ever told you how every sunday for several weeks, I would travel to a park and sit and write letters to people I could never mail. I began by writing my biological mother in response to a postcard she mailed and realized my response was inappropriate. Angry. Crass. Unmailable. I wrote and wrote, trying again and again and ultimately had several pages of Stuff and no letter that could be easily mailed. But writing made me feel better and I kept writing. Choosing other people to write and so on.
The reason they were unmailable is because… well, turns out there’s certain truths that are difficult to say. The truths are hard because they were truths for me, as an individual, and what’s true for me isn’t/may not be true for the recipient. Its hard sometimes to be honest without having to hurt the feelings of the person you’re talking to– in particular when that person is being kind and isn’t weighed down by the same issues you carry. This is to say: I wish all those people addressed in that notebook were close enough to me spiritually that I could stand and tell them exactly what’s what without them needed to do anything but be patient enough to receive it. In writing those letters, I didn’t need a response. Somehow the writing was therapuetic enough.
And all of this is to say– I got a email this morning and instead of sending the first draft to them, I thought I would write it out for myself.

***

Dear _____

Holidays have troubled me for years. This weekend I went back to the only place and one of the few tables I’ve most felt comfortable and at home. My friend has been more than a friend for me– emotionally, spiritually. He’s been a brother to me. Its hard to describe what that brotherhood means to me because I lived so long without one. But may I say: the feeling I’d been searching for was a relationship that educated me, a friendship that encouraged me to grow and doesn’t criticize what and who I am. I need a brother as I had been missing a father, I need a brother as someone to help witness my life, someone to help me not feel so incredibly alone. Someone who truly sees me and, yes, loves me in a way that makes me want to grow and push forward in my own life. He has so generously opened his life for me in the last few years, I realized I want to sit at his table with his mom and his family more than I’ve ever wanted to be anywhere my whole life. Being at that table made me think of my own mom, the thanksgivings I grew up with, and the love that his family shows me is thrilling and encouraging and frightening. So many relationships in the past have left me hanging and feeling like all relationships are transient. Here is a brotherhood that makes me feel at home, while deep within me, the broken child I have been sits quietly wondering how long this will last before its over. I can’t tell him any differently. Every relationship he’s had has expired, either by death or indifference. Its hard to navigate the feelings for you. I can say I made a pot of greens… Every year, each time I make greens I feel like I can never make enough. But I made them and went to my brother’s house. It was just four of us. His cousin, mother, himself and me. Amazing egg nog that, after all these years I’ve finally grown into. I remember tasting the first glass of egg nog your mother made back when I first met her and how guilty I felt for having alcohol since I never had before. You should see me now. It was so frothy and the M.M. used was so mild and delicious and rich. I ate like a pig, though not a adult pig, more like a young piglet who eats and stops and waits until it can each its weight again. We watched a couple of movies — Super 8 which seemed to hold a secret message for me about letting go of moms, of old stories, of old pictures… and Horrible Bosses which was just fun and funny. I packed up so much food– three, four containers of dressing, turkey, pie– some of the greens I made, a ziplock bag of chocolate cookies and tea cakes and a whole sweet potato pie. That last item was desperately needed in my house. A staple. I had been thinking for several weeks that I should make the trek out to this bakery I know of and buy a pie for myself. That pie came to me just through my fantasizing of it and, less a week’s time after, its half gone with just me and some previously banned ice cream. I ate without ceasing and filled myself to capacity over and over. Its more awesome than I could explain.
There’s something else I wish I could explain, but I haven’t been able to explain it even to myself.
I left his house at 11 for my own long trek home, weighed down with left overs and this huge aluminum pot. It took me an hour to get home, but my connections were easy. The ride left me thinking about what had happened, maybe thinking about my entire life. What is the word for wanting to cry, but you never do? What’s the word for feeling like you could scream or cheer or feel sad or feel happy all simultaneously? What’s the word for missing the life I had, wanting to see the family I loved the most who now are all dead, and being so desperately in love with a family (again) I’m not connected to by blood or thereby any responsibility? Decades ago, when I went to Alaska to work, I was on the ocean during storm season. Yet that year, the water was so still and quiet. I was close to God then, and recognized the vessel had several Open Christians and I could feel my mother and the church praying for me. But while we sailed, the ship’s hands and workers remained superstitiously quiet– as if to admire the still water and the clear sky would be to challenge God to represent as is his will this time of year– with huge explosive waves and rain long as old school rulers. People walked around as if they’re mouths were fastened, as if to speak anything would break the spell of beauty around them. That was what I felt like after I left his house. Safe, loved, welcome. I felt my heart full. And maybe it is a fake brotherhood and just a friend who owes me nothing, but good lord– this time and this moment is the happpiest I remember being since I last sat at a table of my own family, grey haired and maddening as they were, but they were mine and they wanted me there and they loved me and that’s that. And I’d forgotten that feeling until that night, when I returned home alone. God, I was ecstatic. I wanted to shout and say something to someone, but my house at midnight was cool and empty. I felt love. I missed my mother. And otherwise had a great time. No wishes, here. My time was special and remarkable. The day and night found me very thankful. The previous year, I stood up my girlfriend and her family Thanksgiving night, because there was only one place I really wanted to be. Its funny. A year later, she is gone having erased our friendship. Where I was, was where it seemed I was always meant to be.

PS: My brother met me at the elevator when I arrived at his place– trying to scare me since I wouldn’t have expected him, but knowing him, I did expect him to do that. But I didn’t expect him to be wearing the t-shirt he swiped from me a couple of years ago when we used to run 3 miles every couple of days. That shirt always hung off me like a monk’s robe. It fit him perfectly.

***
What I Actually Sent:

Hey Bro:

All’s well. I was pretty well rested and ready to come back to work. (Every weekend should be four days). Sounds like you had a pretty good time — pollinating houses for food like a bee! I know J— had it hooked up. Goodness knows how much you scored in Sac.

Anyways, keep me posted on movie night and we’ll see what’s what.

Be well

jms