The middle-aged woman with the raccoon mascara sidles closer. Dragging from a slender cigarette, she mentions casually that she was the inspiration for Gretchen. “You know,” she says with a dusky voice that pierces the smoke in this place, “…James Michener?” She says she likes the way I play the piano before remarking on my accent. “You’re American.”
I counter that I’m Canadian.
“Oh, you sound like an American.” (more…)
I must have been around ten when my amazing ability to withstand a human punch first surfaced. I’d been walking home from school when I passed a group of older kids shooting hoops in the park. Looking back, I can see how my appearance might have chummed the waters just a tad. Tight, noisy, friction-generating corduroy pants, Michael Jackson Thriller jacket, and wearing one of those skinny leather ties from Chess King. I also had a sweet, prepubescent obliviousness to the way my hair looked; pot roast-brown and sculpted into a lush helmet[1]. I must have sensed trouble for when I glanced back I saw them all huddled together. Mumbling. Conspiring. Home was a block away; I could make out the slope of our hill from where I stood. But just as I began to pick up the pace, one of the kids—a lanky, olive-skinned kid with pimples like smashed cherries—shouted the classic line that for eons all creatures great and small have uttered as a segue to a butt-stomping: (more…)
To know in a way mortality could never award how rhythmic and intertwined the dance of night and day was. To know the Darwinistic injustice of a jay-raided nest and hear the first hymn of autumn as it roared across the valley and cry in happy sadness with the stars at night. If some period of servitude was required from all who die, and if the grand design required one to ache from the sting of life’s missteps, then let it happen here. For every meadow was its own village, every weed and sprig its own prefecture.
–The Portraits of Gods (excerpt)
Emerging from a week spent alone in the solitude of our cabin is like stepping out from a dark theater into the bright day. Traffic lights blare like neon. Storefront windows reflect the sun like a thousand mirrors. The people on the street glance at you in passing as if sensing your struggle to readjust. When I stop for fuel, I make idle chatter with the guy at the pump next to mine and my voice sounds tinny from its underuse.
In solitude, you see life through a different filter. It’s the catalyst for creativity. Everything is stripped down. Empirical. Shedding the fear of being judged, the taint of seeking acceptance, you get to be yourself; so much so that you feel almost fraudulent when you consider the person you are when you’re with others.
There’s a transformation that takes over when I’m alone. The funny, self-deprecating guy you might encounter in social gatherings is gone, replaced by a man whom I suspect—and hope—is my essential self. Genuine. Calm. Perceptive to every nuance of my existence. Accepting in knowing that everything I see will outlast me.
Campfires by night. Hiking by day. Sitting out in a golden meadow where dragonflies dip and rise over the reeds in a summer dance. Clothing-optional dips in our lake. The truth is, I’m a better man—and writer—because of it. For as long as you don’t equate periods of being alone with sadness, the inner peace you feel from a bit of solitude makes you realize that in life, there is nothing more to wish for.
If you’ve ever spent time in a morgue—and let’s face it, we all will some day—then you’ll remark on just how spic-and-span everything looks. Scrubbed, ivory-colored, tiled walls and gleaming linoleum. Shiny stainless steel pans and scales hanging everywhere you look. Ultraviolet bug lights making periodic ZAP sounds beneath the soft hiss of constantly flowing positive air. And then there’s the VIP seat. (more…)
I was willing to ignore the phantom reek of rotted yams and insecticide that I had narrowed down to the kitchen cabinets. And those jokers from the halfway house next door weren’t so bad once you got to know ’em. Located along Flint’s Second Street, nestled comfily at downtown’s outskirts between such wholesome-sounding streets as Chase and Asylum, I had found a place to call my very own. I was 18…and, so far, I was liking it. (more…)