Abest friend of mine just went off to a 30-day, out-of-state treatment center. Better late than never, I say. He is damn lucky to be alive at this point in his life.
We have loved each other, for the most part, for years. Our two lives mirrored each other’s in ways: We came up through that life-altering energy of music and song, a shared magic had us convinced we could walk across a swimming pool, which became our only way to accept reality. He and I would hear, see and pay attention, or get completely taken in by the same beauty and sadnesses in moments when they appeared — in song, in books, in nostalgia, in life. Too much attention to that stuff can be a way of thinking against yourself — the sadnesses get unwieldy — which, I’m convinced, can be all it takes to let go of self-harm protections and kickstart booze and drug addictions at impressionable ages. This destruction and its attendant dependences yank you down until the inevitable collapse. Whatever pseudo-religious or spiritual belief in any of it — the art, the music, the lit — becomes just a toilet and your own vomit.
I am super proud of him. Here’s hoping for some clarity to combat the deadness inside, to inform a heart that still has room to grow. I know songs that will still make him cry. A handful of my close friends never even made it that far. They’re all six-feet under now. Had I not sobered up, I know I wouldn’t be here, and, so, as I consider that, neither would my young daughters.
Yet it is a time when topical things weigh heavy in our personal daily lives. Like, for example, the slaughter of thousands of innocent children in Gaza, where newborns are blown to bits by Israeli bombardment. With newborns of our own, the full weight of such present-day facts in a post-truth world pollute so many waking moments. Israel can call it a war, this layered, ongoing crusade to ethnically cleanse a population with no air force, navy or army. But to me it is genocide, it is murder. How could I ever explain this to my children? It is difficult enough explaining some of the people I write about and sometimes befriend who have lost children, who were abused and defeated as children themselves, and now, as compensation, have nowhere to lay their heads at night
My Jewish wife Maggie understands the people of Israel are not Benjamin Netanyahu. She takes steps in ways to aid civilians of Palestine. Our twins were born the week the conflict began. Maggie was in the NICU, watching over tiny Ava and Nora, who were kept alive by the electric warmth and pure air of incubators, when news broke that Israeli bombs had killed the electricity in Gaza hospitals and Palestinian doctors were pulling the babies from their isoletes. Maggie points out it is a random chance ours were born here not there. This is not about religion or politics or a nation’s pride, it is about humanity.
I can’t imagine a parent on earth not wanting the world to reorder itself in the face of ever-waning prospects, if even only for the benefit of their offspring.
I have struggled to reorder a universe, from the inside at least. Maybe I’m just another in a long line of dudes with children at parks and preschools still trying his best to distance himself from his old piece-of-shit ways. When I am down I compare myself to other parents who I inevitably see as centered, happy and industrious, full of confidence and purpose. Compare and despair as they say. I at least know now how grievous whims can fly at you from all corners. But in such times, I understand, and am aligned with the concept, that children really are the only things that matter, when you get right down to it. There really is no room for the destructiveness of self-obsession, much less madness.
This life is an entirely different conversation now. To be keenly aware of the toddler fevers, flus and fights, and the poop smeared on floors and mirrors. Also how the needling responsibilities go undone: The weeds in the yard, the piles of laundry, the mopping of floors, the scrubbing of toilets, the work for pay. Such tasks become almost silly when yielding to a toddlers’ world, its (lovely) jumble and litter. At home it is often like the house had been turned upside down, shaken, and placed down again, transformed into a staged scene of someone’s else’s turmoil, where any sense of control is merely a fraction of the background noise. There is such force in the directness of childhood roles. Our children “are doing their work,” my wife said the other day as I was cleaning a mixture of purple and green paint and poop off the kitchen floor and a stack of books. She is correct, of course. My own parents had a very different idea about our work as children.
Yet there is sustenance in the mundane, a few minutes of effortless observations and splendor kicks in like never before, a kind of panic-soothing recall of the fading and the gone: The tawny buffelgrass upholding a Styrofoam Polar Pop cup and jutting from a gravel yard, the sweet repetition of electrical poles along Speedway Boulevard, an overturned home recycling bin tipped to curb and the kitten finding shelter inside. Later, the slow, strangely purple transition of sundown to evening, a breeze blowing in pleasing wood-burn aromas from a neighborhood fireplace, ending on a moonlight’s forever hint of otherworldliness against a dozing child’s unhurried breaths.
A writer friend of mine, Travis Neal Todd, died a few years ago after a night of drinking in Seaside, Oregon. The guy was hilarious. He told me one time that no matter how great we do anything in life, there will never be a troupe of sculpted, trained dancers backing you, choreographing your favorite song. You can play that shit out in your head. I think of my buddy in life-saving rehab, the various lives he’s led, great and horrible. I can imagine some dancers backing him though, graceful as can be, giving life to Mott The Hoople’s “All the Young Dudes.”
This article appears in Jan 25 – Feb 1, 2024.