Congenial-speak #18

Musing on the subtext of my just released book, I meandered my mind to discover the following story in its own right:

International Intrigue (11/15/92)

Rome collapses for me in a day. I am in the wrong place at the wrong time with the wrong disposition. I see what I see and the writing on the wall appears to me. It's telling me to get out of Rome, make an about face to the train a return to from where I had come. The man dragging a cig was obviously suspected of drugs. This was zero tolerance as I had never seen. The two male police held the man while the woman thrust her knee to his jewels. He doubles over in pain, his face is twisted and they are barking orders to him sharply in verbose Italian. The man is cuffed and they pummel him more. He is a public spectacle and I am the horrified spectator. They are commissioned gladiators, beating a man because he's broken the stiff Italian drug laws. In the US possession of drugs is an offense, but distributing them is much, much worse. In this case the mere whiff of a cigarette draws attention to something a little foreign looking in its substantiate nature. The man, besides, looks ill, pre-occupied, more than a common Romanesque pedestrian should.

“The oblivious doobie, or smack—lit up

like the dogs wander a bit, pre-piss.

The blinding him brought a knee to

the groin.”

__Journal “Tripping '92”

We pull out of the station. My defeat at the Colosseum is shuffled through the great rectangular windows as speed mounts. Now I have a moment, a calm in which to consider the assault I just witnessed, the brutality that made me flee the scene like I was the next unsuspecting drug taker. I am dark and might pass as an Italian. Again the walk trips me in my tourist endeavors. The last thing I want is a night in an Italian jail. The man's face sticks in my mind. It is tearful, it is confessional, it is angered, it is assaulted, it is fearful. The female cop's knee extending up to his jewel box plays over in my mind. I want to get far from there and promise I will thank myself later for leaving Rome.

Zurich was nice. The Swiss seem to not make what everyone is up to a top priority. It is happy, industrial, proactive. In Italy small clusters, covens of cops amble the streets. They are light and cocky, cool in their secure government jobs with he smart uniform. They play games. They're sly boots and walk the market squares pretending to be lassie-fare, pinning on white-washed mimes a lack for a reason to care. I'm glad that they are there, overall. I did not trust that they would not eye me with the same suspicion of the man with the crushed jewels that a slow day gives. I don't get this read in Zurich at all. I can glean a lot from spending some time in a city's train station, the hauptbahnhoff. I can read a lot from a schedule.

“As the rope drew tight his armband strapped its growth.

The needle pushed in. As casual spoon-fed coke stayed on

rotted tables to snort, the heroine of Zurich clawed at her

face pleading to trace a fix about to explode.”

__from journal “Tripping '92”

I find myself in Needle park as I walk along the Zürichsee. Lake Zurich offers recreation other than shooting up, but I am mesmerized, curious, with a suburban innocence. I have never witnessed heroin being shot up, never observed the human rawness of the urgent end of a fix. I needed once to see the practiced connection, the euphoric reflection when veins surge and then are quickly tied to constrict. I wonder about the fate of these teens in Platzspitz Park, their success in willing it to be known as a drug taking haven.

At 22 year of age I have a few bong hits in college on my natural soft drug prove-that-I'm-not-a-tight-ass resume. Anything harder is dangerous, expensive, and I certainly don't need that monkey on my back. Ironically, I am living in a small efficiency apartment in a so-called, tempting, paradoxical “drug free zone” in downtown Minneapolis. Weed is sold on the streets, although it is stuff I would not smoke with a ten foot bong. Crack houses (“A Gentler Place” from my collection Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation) stand, stately, deceptively dilapidated in their manner. They are the next stop as the junkie flys by my kitchen window, following red blinking taillights like they're profitable fire-flies. So I do have drugs accessible to me. I never see heroin but don't doubt that it's being shot in some vein. I decide not to fall into that culture and, aside from a pesky chewing tobacco habit I picked up on a backpacking trip, I have few monkeys. As reads in “A Gentler Place” I question the decisions that a junkie I meet makes in spite of what he can do that I cannot.

Tripping continues. I follow my bread crumbs back to the train station. Safe in the car, the bar section for weary and thirsty travelers, I slowly nurse a 12 ounce bottle of Hürlimann Gold. I begin to watch it foam in the bottle from the train. Its side to side motion rocks me to a high. I appreciate my more or less affection for beer and think how that may blur my interest, my ever having any conceivable desire to try harder stuff, to wind up with that zombie-like deadness of dependence I had just seen. A small man in a conductor's hat with a light blue shirt slides the door open.

“Passport please,” he says in a vaguely French sounding accent.

We are crossing the border into France. The accent will grow. I can measure our depth into a country by the strength and acuity of the accent. Dijon sounds nice, strong enough, but weak enough to pass without knowing the language, maybe not experience the full wrath of France-rude rumored to exist. Not my experience at all. I find people to be nice, much nicer than the Munichers or what I saw in Rome. Rain falls lightly on the rivers' convergence, the Suzon and the Ouche. Dijon lies on a plain along the eastern border of France. I watch people fan their umbrellas, offering me a seat as I am allowed to unburden myself again. I smile and they forgive my English. Sinking back in my chair I re-assess my trip. Right there, at a French cafe in the presence of blue collar Frenchmen on lunch-breaks, I pigeonhole my tripping.

Prosaic Interlude # 6

International Intrigue

She ran her hands over my underwear and folded them nicely. The Dutch woman smiled permissively as she patted them again. Standing at a folding table at a gate in Schiphol Airport I unburdened myself in what was not to be the last time. It put me in the frame of mind of our unburdening in 1983 when a group of us went though Checkpoint Charlie to experience to gray chains of East Berlin. Then armed police (Polezi—three syllables verses one) and dogs hunted for propaganda. Now, in Holland, drugs were scavenged. No police or dogs, though, that committed to memory. Funny how those barking, bristling, lunging German Shepherds in '83 stay so vivid in mind. Our plane had stopped over—two hours—long enough for a pot run over to Amsterdam. I just sat tight in Schiphol after getting my bags re-packed—better than I had—by a comely Dutch woman. I did make a call to a friend that lived near Amsterdam. He was not home. People never are at the most opportune times.

Reflection on the way things are—to

which we lean near and far.

__from journal “Tripping '92”

Snow fell hesitantly on Munich in flakes mitered the same. My plane landed at 1 p.m., Thursday November 12, 1992. Our plane taxied slowly, with that rush forward immediately after landing, when you fall forward toward earth and then relax in the hold. I knew it was moments before I'd be thrown into a culture that, judging from a previous visit, had somewhat lofty idiosyncrasies. They were pristine, one might say charmingly so, but likely wouldn't. There were few variables. Few thing were subject to interpretation. I had been north and south and southern Deutschland I found people more amiable, less abrasive, less concerned with your life and how they might make it less comfortable or gemütlich for which there is no appeasing translation. What I saw, what I'd seen, had an exclusive sense for detail that might come in handy some day. The Germans just struck me as a people, in general, who went out of their way to hold their heads a neck higher than the rest of the world. Maybe it was because they had lost two world wars and, I think everyone will agree, those are the most important to win. But I just don't know. I got a vibe, even as I watched from the portal of the plane, from the way the baggage handlers took bags from the plane, shoving them hard and grudgingly on the belt-way to be retrieved in the Flughafen (airport). The language was cunningly ironic. Airport. The workings, cleanliness, security, ticketing, transportation all were more efficient than anything to which I had grown accustomed. That word, their word in German, needed three syllables verses our two. Just an observation.

Munich was geared fr the holidays. Christmas, the anticipation of it, is a big deal. Europe is amazing. They get so much done, the trains and planes run on time around the 24-hour clock, or the chronometer we reserve for the military, the medical profession, and apparently, McDonalds. They get more done with half the area and time on the job. I looked eagerly from the back of a cab. I had plenty of traveler's cheques and a wallet brimming with a sufficient amount of crisp blue tinted Deutsch Marks. My uncashed money was dispersed in pockets of my pack and in my carry-on bag. I never put all my matzo on one rock.

Standing under the doorway of the Hotel-Pension-Mirabell, two block from the Hauptbahnhoff, I teach myself to walk better. I plan it this way. As my tripping begins, as I wake Friday the 13^th to the dawning of adventures, to the clash of culture, to the potential for multi-lingual hostilities, I want to be in walking distance to the main train station. This is my MO I decide and nothing should derail my plans. I aim to get an early start tomorrow, on the day legend has traced its fateful superstition back to the Last Supper.

Checking in the place, set off balance by my pack, I felt the line “Bist du betrunken?” was but there waiting to embarrass me. Just as in Scotland (detailed in “The Cheeky Lad” in my book Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation) I have a sixth sense telling me that my alcoholic consumption is on the mind of the desk clerk offering me a room. He is suspicious and looks at me more than twice, enough to pick me out of a line-up, perhaps also noticing the off-black tone of my skin. The elevator does not work they tell me. I have my doubts. After an exhausting climb of two flights I open my door. There, from my window, from Hindenburgst. 20 in Garmisch-partenkirchenn, I see the Bavarian Alps. I figure I've seen them before, throw my pack on the bed, and begin to jot down notes on my travels thus far. I am not easy on myself, but I am particularly critical of the staff at the Mirabell. I think I know the local language well enough and consider my knowledge of it—so far—to have been helpful.

Downstairs a little bar or cantina serves, among other things, alcohol. I go in for a sandwich, some chips, maybe even some kind of wurst of a German nature. I walk in, sober as a hosteler with no access to alcohol, and the room dulls in its levity. Amidst the travelers they sensed a more foreign element, transcending race, creed or geographical boundaries. I felt the eyes upon me as I settled on a bar-stool. After about 5 minutes of being treated like a gracious ghost, I go to a table, re-asserting my presense in the process. No one served me. No one wanted my crisp blue Marks. Money did not talk, but I walked. I left, having a sketchy idea of why I was not served. Piss on them. Fucking Nazis, I mumble. I had morning on my mind and refused to let Them blemish my trip before it got out of Germany.

Also in “The Cheeky Lad” I explain how I like pushing envelopes. Spontaneity is never next to somewhere. I decide where to go when I look at the schedule that morning at the Hauptbahnhoff. I've never been to Switzerland. It is small, full of mountains and blonde blue-eyed women. Also, I might be lucky enough to go to the German-speaking part.

“Zurich!”

I look up, thrilled my travel plans were going according to the seat of my pants, glad that the wind is with me as I carry my pack. The Swiss are nice, on prima fascia evidence. They are hospitable, seem willing to help and I, in turn, am forthcoming in my amenability. Upon request, they direct me to the Kunsthaus in Zurich. The city museum has many painting suspended from its walls, works collected over decades of careful random curation. I ask, in time, where the restroom is located. That is an experience in itself. Using facilities in Europe is not always the creature comfort lavatory check-list Americans know.

“I growled in Europe,

shedding excess on creá

paper toilette—and then

came the logs—conspiring

on bare-botom bowls.”

A smell emanates from the bowl. It's like a watering-down of usual elements is a least half a globe away. It is definitely something, like shitting in the woods (Norway {part D} blog post), that I will avoid having to do. I come back, having left my pack with the nice man at the door, and browse around some more, determined to get my admission's worth of art. Most of the day is left, thanks to my early start, so I board the train again. I decide on Rome and try t get my worth out of my Eurail-pass.

The Colosseum faces me and I imagine blood-thirsty crowds. I see emperors turning their opposable thumbs, determining the fate of gladiators. The roars are deaf, and centuries predate the Christians going to the lions. Walking along the way I'm in the shadow of the ruinous arena. The sections of clay seats come into view, as well as something else, foreign and modern, but equally as terrifying. Out of the grayness, the darkness that wafts Rome each time a pope is falsely selected, a loudness is heard. An altercation is around the corner and a man jumps out at me! He is a shiftless drifter, an Italian who did not play by the rules. His hair is mussed and a cigarette hangs from his mouth. Three law enforcers, one woman and two men, flank him. They ambush to restrain him, teaching him a lesson he will not soon forget. They create a spectacle worthy of what went on in the Colosseum over nineteen centuries ago. What happened next ended my wanderlust abruptly.

Congenial-speak #17

Frosted Eyes of the 45^th POTUS

He said he'd build a wall. It was going to be a beautiful 2,000 mile 30' high wall. It was going to have a unmistakable grandiose door in a key spot accessible to all. Mexico was going to finance it. They'd cough up the 70 billion no question asked. Campaign promises. Red meat. Herrings. Metaphors. The master showman, the real-life Harold Hill goes to the White House. Trouble right here on the southern border, in Rio Grande city. An unscalable, impenetrable, intimidating, discouraging, physics defying wall is needed desperately to keep out all the unidentified bad hombres.

On the last day before what can only be described as organized chaos in a room full of idiots turns 100-days-old, not one bragging point has been achieved—least of all the errection of a wall. Appointing a SCOTUS judge greedily out of spite, thievery and belligerence is the only notable accomplishment, but that was not a point—not mentioned in the campaign much at all. Not ad nausea like the wall, repealing ACA and locking Hillary up. It was not a “red meat” item. Trump threw chum to the toothless sharks, the bush-whacked counter-culture of the right wing. He knew the back roads of Appalachia, where West Virginia looks for some road out of economic neglect, where they need—but may be too proud or stubborn to admit they need—affordable health care.

So Trump and the rest of the Our Gang cast scrambles. They pump out EOs like drug addicted doctors use their Rx pad. They execute military raids and offensive actions with a calculation that makes me think of a scene in STRIPES. The moniker Trump-care never caught on. The bill was DOA. He could not get his own party, for the most part, to support it. It was ill-conceived, non-specific, catered to those who have never given health care a thought, and destined to throw 24,000,000 to the wolves, to the streets, to decide between feeding their family or getting a life-sustaining operation. And then there was the idle (I really think it was always in idle) threat to cut federal funds to “sanctuary cities” such as Minneapolis—a city that has the first Somali legislator. The cities are havens were immigrants, perhaps those with misdemeanors, those waiting to become citizens or those simply with demeanors that are misjudged, don't have to fear deportation. The EO, though, in contet, evidently neglected to define precisely what a sanctuary city is, thereby enabling a circuit court to impose a temporary injunction. And the Trump tax plan: one page of bullet points on a pocket-himself-and-the-rest-of-greedom trajectory. In 1986 Reagan at least offered a well-thought out plan that actually reformed tax codes to close loopholes frequented by the Trumps in the 99% crowd.

I often get the sense that deep down Republicans know they're fucked. I've seen that dance before (I imagine it was quite a show in the 60s) but now the steps are high, fast, but lack any existential rhythm. They know it's wrong and implausible to pass, or try to pass, legislation for less-than-half of their constituency. They are saving face in so many instances. I saw it on Paul Ryan's face when, after his a Trump's HC plan failed, he said the ACA is the “law of the land” and we will have to abide by it until something better comes along. Don't hold your breath.

When all is said, when all is failed and Trump's current inklings and ill-conceived thoughts have been derailed, the wall stands as a monument to broken dreams. It is a symbol of unrequited promises, loyalties never reciprocated. That god damn border wall can stand as a metaphor, a parable, an homage to Robert Frost's 1914 poem “Mending Wall.” Will the bad apples of Mexico invade the property of America's “pine cones?” Are such borders necessary in a land of such “freedom and discovery?” No.

Congenial-speak #16

Trips to find my Tonic Origin

My book, Finding me — and Them: Stories of Assimilation, will be available for purchase by mid-May to be sure. It is the culmination of years of story-telling. It is the semblance of numerous incarnations, iterations, alterations and revisions. What follows is the story behind the stories:

And then there was tanqueray also. “A Cheeky Lad” addresses insobriety, the fun I had, the faces I met, the thresholds toed for tolerance. My bet is insecurity. It was a suppression, a refusal of depression. No one was going to tell me I was always going to be at half mast, quarter mast, or not fly at all. Why should I be fated to be an eternal target for ignorant security workers, law enforcers, bouncers, jogging suited Scottish constables? When I was old enough to walk again, to shuffle, apparently, miming inebriation naturally, in downtown Minneapolis I felt it. I felt my first brush with 'protect and serve' and my assessment of law enforcement has not been the same since.

Then, downtown at 15, I was sober as a judge—although that, in itself, is a judgment call. On a spring day in 1980 I was brash, a rebel who was never going to be told to do something, who had some wild idea that respect is a two-way street and can't be expected at will, should not be assumed to be forthcoming from a 15-year-old kid who has continually been disrespected. I had hostility, issues, anger maybe misdirected. I was the teen who said in silent pantomimes “WHO THE FUCK DO YOU THINK YOU ARE?” or “WHAT MAKES YOU THINK YOU CAN TRIP YOUR SHIT ON ME?” You knuckle under I guess, eventually. You mature and become a docile punching bag (I did have a heavy bag in the basement. It never fought back).

A man must consider his limitations. He knows what he can do that might show people that he means business. “Exercising Demons” is me fighting back. It was my plan, my devise to show who I was, what I could do. The weights I began to lift would show bullies that I could make something of myself. Respect might follow or, it might allow someone to respect me, what I did, for what I was trying to become. It didn't always work that way. Often times, as has gone my experience, no amount of dedication, fitness, politeness, or respectfulness will be returned unopened, unexamined, only judged by a facial view.

As you will read, surmounting from tonics brewed in instances as early as those in “My Day of Reckoning,” I had the grounds to be a hostile witness. To me, how I saw myself (then) and how I saw, or thought I saw people seeing me. They were the law enforcers, though, those obliged to 'serve and protect' me from others or, more likely, myself. To them—that's the Them—I was judged before my feet hit the ground. If I walked into a bar, if I was savoring my end-of-the-week beer at my favorite watering hole, I was fine. No questions asked, they knew me. But if I decided to go somewhere else on a Friday night the barkeep, if I even got to the bar, looked me up and down as I sat—sober as a judge. Friends, Friday night connections, occasionally asked if I wanted to mix it up, try somewhere else. For that very reason I said no, and suckled under at my watering hole with a fierce loyalty.

The ten stories follow a theory of relativity. They lay out blatantly, plaintively, and weigh issues of perseverance, discipline, alienation, identity and overcoming. My explanation of myself, of my demons and deuces, of my straight and narrows for ruses, transcends genre. The nonfictional autobiographical me meets the fictional autobiographical depiction of me. I eclipse myself. I overwrite myself and no one is there to underwrite the expense. The character witness I create can damage me, there is no insurance.

A life that could have been, scenarios that may cross the adopted writer's mind, crept forth. Spiritual altitude is explored in the supernatural as it clings to fiction. It is also weighed as it applies to the nonfiction. Four stories in this book ping-pong issues of faith, religion, the spiritual world and its logistical capacity for an after-life. They are fact and fiction. They are fiction based on fact. In “The Genuine Article” I created a dysfunctional family. To one member, one generation of the family who struggles with her mother's agnosticism against a gentle nudging of devout Catholicism, a lesson is given. I came up with the simple super-natural idea at my biological mother's memorial party, the rest is merely filler apropos of nothing (although the surrounding plots do casually, genuinely, lend themselves to a final epiphany). The main character has many of her qualities, feelings I got of who she was in the 26 years that I knew her. A story “The Burial Plot,” I believe, dovetails that. It is nonfiction and meshes the hypothesis of a logistical after-life with lawful Jewish circumstances that surround the funeral and traditional unveiling of the grave for my grandmother by adoption. The issue of identifying with Judaism, because of being adopted into a Jewish family, is worth exploring. I happen to find it enlightening, real, and adapting—as I've had to sometimes—to the times. Adapting to limitations its law often conflicts with the physical world. The story “A Lesson from the Shema” shows what I found, needing as an adolescent, in Reform Judaism. I identified with it, it showed me how to rise up against the bullies in life, big and small, those malicious and those simply ignorant. It set me wandering, later in life. That story, I feel, dovetails “Ramifications of Schadenfreude” in which the main character is tested by various antagonists as he plans to locate and meet his biological mother. In the fray, in the college unions, foyers and ministries he begins to question the various faiths, specifically Christianity. He struggles with the contradictory teachings of his adopted practice of Reform Judaism. These fictionalized wanderings culminate in the nonfictional “The Divining Weeks.” I learn as a disabled college graduate, who has witnessed though the years many merciful solicitations (I suspect because of the disability), the true value in faith as it applies to a person in a wheelchair.

prosaic interlude #5

Norway (Part E)

I was in the woods, in a very clean latrine, in Flam. America seemed far, distant, a dream to to become real in less than a week. Nature's laughter was around me, the foreign birds' songs and the domestic putzing splashes of mu troop. I looked to the sky. Though light plastic corrugated roofing the pines outlined in their game to dwarf me. They swayed back and forth, humbling and then fading from view, building me up again. It was n one of the downward swaying that I thought of this. I had finished my duty, accomplished my objective, and I noticed the absence of TP in this latrine of European efficiency.

I never waste time in that capacity. Searching for TP or a substitute was not high o my list. The decision was an impulse, perhaps a defamation, a desecration, in the vulnerable throes of unclean deification. I paused in my anarchistic matter to calculate, to gauge my need for US currency and how much I had exchanged to Krone. Would I have enough to last me the trip. Was the exchange rate worth it. Could I live with this. It was better than walking away dirty. My mind was made up, I sacrificed my last green money for hygiene. What better president than Andy Jackson t get a little shit on his face. My gut said that our 7^th president would not have hesitated for a second to do the same to a human being. Quickly went the wiping and my last remaining green spot fell into the void of the latrine. It was only paper, possibly originating from one of those trees.

Norway (part D)

A limited reservoir of daylight precluded us. Still within the basins of fjords, the humble human intellect knew where they were. They marveled at the history, the epic nature of the geology surrounding them. One could feel how time had been a constant for eons, for short days and long nights. They pictured viking ships shrinking in the mists to rhyme, to coincide with the subtle calms that led to oceans from sublime bodies of watered-down time. We were in Flam, Norway at a public pool.

I was never much of a putzer, a frolicker in pools. I swam seriously, for exercise, mostly and the dunkings, splashing and cannon-balls were not my speed. Eventually the pool was ours, cleared for, or because of, our troop. Some of us had not showered in two or four days. So the water was filtered through its chlorine. It grew a grayish slick surface hue. They splashed on and frolicked or putzed like people their age, older with younger scouts. I sat on the side with the fathers, watching the last of the female publics towel off and exit through chain-linked gates.

Eventually I lost interest in watching what was childish fun, listening to the fathers timidly feudally argue points on what to do with the rest of the trip. Ideas floated around in seruptition. Not one elder knew really what to do, they tried to politicize our 400$ per-person trip. I left my comfortable pool chair to find a bathroom. It was rustic and rural. The area we were in was heavy with pines named for the country of origin. Places to pee were everywhere I turned. I needed something more, a place I could take a little longer, not risk being caught in a helpless and undignified position. I have only shit in the woods once and recall it as the most humiliating, trepidacious, aesthetically displacing experience in my life. The chore is inevitable for most of humanity apparently. Much thought has gone into where and how to successfully accomplish it with minimal pain or humiliation. So much so that a book, How to Shit in the Woods (1989) was written on the subject. It is something I since have tried very hard to avoid having to do. On scout weekends, on real camping sites void of outhouses, latrines, or even “slammers,”I kept it inside. Rather then find the cross-boughs of a tree, sitting in them praying they did not break, blindly grabbing for a fistful of leaves nearby, my colon became the student of negative reinforcement. I could go weekends without feeling the urge to purge the way station for our chili-mac.

Even in the BWCA, long after scouts, I sub-consciously suppressed my colonic desires. There were the aforementioned slammers, a wooden box upon which one sat to shit in the box, not the woods in a literal sense, in any sense of the word. There you were, trying, pushing, exercising muscles you hoped you would not have to for the duration of the trip. Nature's elements were there in all their luridness, seeing you at your most humanly functioning. There was usually a half a roll of TP left on a slab of cement before you, respected by other campers as the essential Geneva conventional item it was. You completed your human evolution, stood up, pulled up your pants, let the lid fall, thus sending a SLAM echoing for a half-mile radius.

There were foreign elements to consider. I knew my current situation, my seclusion among the pines. I could get lost in the green needled desolation of nature, the odd discovery of a three seated latrine. Like everything I had seen in Norway it was clean, with one lacking, TP. I settled down for a civilized movement, like European clockwork had been set ahead for one hour. I heard the putzes and revelry of my troop lasting the daylight, beating the night for a moonlight serenade of calm gray bubbled pool water. I considered our time left in Norway, my dark hair, my darker skin among all the Norwegian sons. How had I blended in so far? I was the odd man out always, and usually ultimately played that card to the deck's favor. That's the only way I can assess what happened next.

Prosaic interlude #4

The Other Side of Fitness (4^th set)

A sedentary mentality nipped at me. Technically, in a macabre statistical way, I was pushing the envelope. In 2003 I was 38 and mid-way into a conservatively averaged longevity. Most people beat the average by 10, 20, even 30 years sometimes. I was long overdue for a crisis, a shift, a redirecting of energy a reassessment of what I wanted from life. I could finally stop the insanity. I could stop the 50 repetitions of abdominal crunches, walk down the stair climber forever, I could stop trying to remember poems I formed roughly as I biked the loop.

In 2012 I left medical records on a technicality. I was dismissed for miscounts, for errors brought on by, in the end, negative visual reinforcement. A case may have been made for a gradual, methodical, framed termination. The events that led up to April 2^nd that year arguably violated the ADA, albeit in a much contrived fashion. I have no doubt that a case for wrongful termination could have been made. I chose not to find out. I have never been so happy to lose something. After 14 years of a job whose best get was a paycheck and a location next to a gym, I was more than happy to go. I may have even thanked the manager of all negligible omens. (I did recently hear of her termination and felt a bit vindicated.)

Mistakes on the job were never conscious. Would a writer, just as their own experience might channel into a book, unconsciously try to sabotage their day job. The idea for Agent of Orange came to me at work. Yes, my thoughts drifted from time to time, but there were environmental factors also that were beyond my control. (That is another story, blog post, or testimony.) I wanted to write. I simply wanted to write. I was born to write, I was bumped in the head by a car to write. It is quite circumstantial, my want and need to write. It is what I studied to do. It is what I practiced to do, honing my craft by writing to publish, following a pattern of many misses leading to the occasional hit. To make a misanthropic analogy, it was like the repetitions with a weight in a set leading to that climax, the failure of muscle elasticity, the “after-burn.” That was, in many ways, as randomly found and incrementally satisfying as a publication.

I took off. I could focus on writing in my forced “retirement.” For the first several months I journaled my changing attitudes and graditudes of living. I recorded my thoughts, my progresses, my recesses, my re-accesses. I did make an effort to work again, in time, at a pointless position in medical records. Does one have to find their daily job objectionable? Is that a requirement? It seemed to want that spiteful quality, that intangible nagging that makes one curse the alarm clock each morning, so I kept on searching for a working-for-the-man (or woman) kind of exercise in self-destruction until about 2014. No one wanted a tech with a checkered history who could not type 20 words a minute. Apathy set in, reality, chronology and logic set in somewhere close to me. It was close enough for me to reach inside myself, to learn something about myself and be happy. I would try to get that respect I went without everyday. I finally snapped and condoned the hell with it. The hell with me as they see, or as I see, or had seen for year, what I should be. The hell with Them, the them as in the title of my upcoming collection Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation. It was not for lack of trying. I tried, in a possibly too proud way feesable for someone of physical difference, to ingratiate myself to them. I tried for the best—and worst—years of my adult working life to find their niche, not mine. So I gave it my all.

Gyms, health clubs, treadmills are a past life. I notice, if I need to crawl into a small space, it is nice not to have that muscle. It is nice to be able to sit cross-legged. I eat whatever I want as often, or infrequently, as I want. My wife works, although I will not call her the “bread-winner.” To me this too convenient euphemism implies that someone is supporting someone, that they are supplying their bread. She is not working any more than when I was working. Writing is actually harder, much harder, in endeavor, than my job ever was. If a writer were paid hourly, like a lawyer, for the time spent writing, revising, rewriting and then marketing a book, a good book, they'd be a millionaire. But, unlike from a pointless unfulfilled career, or the incidentally and logistically motivated trainings in a health club, they wouldn't retire.

Prosaic Interlude #3

The Other Side of Fitness (3^rd set)

Time won't wait, so priorities change. The amendments are circumstantial, logistical, physical or financial in their inclinations. In the winter of 2009—when it was the most daunting for me to walk to LA Fitness—the Balleys club in St Louis Park closed. Its members transferred, their accounts were honored at the new club. At first their single-tracked slicked salesmen tried to sell me as if I was fresh off the street. I think I paid an initiation fee that was eventually refunded after legal threats. I had been a loyal member of Balleys since 1989 and for many years had been paying $5.35 a month. I got that rate.

The initial thrill of competitive bodybuilding had worn of long ago. I had achieved the gold at the 2001 natural amateur Olympia. I had been to the top of that very unprofessional mountain once and had done what I did, what I, for whatever reason, wanted at that point in my life. I was getting a very political vibe in the whole ABA (amateur bodybuilding organization) that felt very disingenuous. I had long suspected that for the physically challenged division, which was quite new—anywhere—when I began in 1997, it was not really understand how to fairly judge athletes with disabilities, the 'challenges' that made training harder for them. I lost my first competition to a lower uni-lateral amputee who was less defined. My challenge is symmetry and I don't think that was ever understood or factored into the judging.

So that competitive fire had burned out and, near middle-age, I was feeling the singes it its embers. I really wanted to devote a larger part of the day to writing and at least a half hour had been added to the whole process of working out. I pay attention to time. I wanted to have enjoyed some significant success as a writer by the time I was 50. All the factors weighed, they toddled meekly up to the scale, accepting their weight with the dignity with which I had accepted the judges decisions. For a month or so I did walk after work the short distance through a back lot and down Park Center Blvd. to the club. But I was no longer a V.I.P.

LA was probably twice the size of Balleys. Members caught up with me eventually. It was never the same though. I did not get the initial rush, the shot of B-1 to my self-esteem. Any expertise of anything, any helpful pointers I may have looked to have had, was lost in the enormity of the club. Many more, intense, fit, personal trainers were working there. One even looked like he may have had some chemical help in his fitness from an third-party. The psychological draw for me was gone. That winter I stood waiting for a bus down 36^th street. I took that back to a stop on Excelsior, back in front of Park Nicollet, and usually waited 10 minutes for the 604 home. During the months of training for a competition, when I got home after working out I'd bike the 18 mile loop on the trail—stop the insanity! This left time for dinner and a little vegging out before bed. I got to where I'd only get to the gym 3 days a week, then two, and one. Fridays worked in—and out—because I met up with friends at Granite City. They were friends from high school or college. In all the time I worked at PNC I never developed any level of friendship with anyone, one that could stand the occasional demands having a beer might require (they did all come for a signing when my first book came out).

My weekends were my only real writing time. Biking to the club on a Saturday (no buses) all together is at least a two-hour production. The turn of events, the situational factors, the chronological truths abetted my setting of priorities. Everything that had motivated me to go to the gym with the rigid reliability of a German train was gone. All that remained was the nominal monthly charge for that membership (which I'll have presumably until I cancel it). Money, or the lack of it, can't buy esteem. I worked out Fridays after work for months in prelude to my week's end at the bar. To be honest, that was the draw, that and the slowly dying fire that kept me going there. I was wearing out. Getting through a 1 and a half hour work out was not as easy as it had been in 2002 when all the motivational factors were there. I powered through, met up for my social outlet, and always found my way at home.

prosaic interlude #2

The Other Side of Fitness (2^nd set)

One discipline needed the other. Fate put me in that location along Excelsior Blvd., each day, so I'd have easy access to the club. It became a co-dependency. I went to my job each morning to work, to keep it, to earn a paycheck, but also to work out afterwards. At my job in medical records I got no respect, no recognition, no acknowledgment of a job well done—or even well. Zero. Bupkis. A daily indifference to the job I performed by which one could set a clock. One or two comments—besides the one routine, mandatory job review—a month, even a year, would have brought me a wealth of self-actualization. I'd have worn that badge of approval across the street feeling less plain.

“Go ahead, we know you,” the woman at the desk said. Rarely did I need to dig my membership card from my gym bag. I was a V.I.P. I guessed. I walked into the club after work and I was on an opposite plane. I got respect. Younger members, those there to get fit, toned, or even step on a bodybuilding stage in time, asked my advice. My advice—me—the person who twenty minutes ago was never asked anything, never trusted to train anyone and second-guessed every step of the way. They asked and before I answered, gave my humble advice they obviously thought was worth something, I looked a bit in shock. I appreciated being asked, being considered to be someone who knew what he was doing.

“Mike seems to know what he's doing,” rather than he knows what he's doing. My boss and the technical support people said this when our company was adjusting to using a new computer program. Other employees, many of whom had been recognized for their work and trained people, were not processing the records correctly and, as a result of not navigating the new program's glitches, were wasting reams of paper. I seemed to be doing it right. I seemed to have found my way around the nuances of the program. Me—the diligent, work-ethiced employee who no one ever asked anything. They still did not ask, wasted forests of paper, and probably still are.

I was on a pendulum. For more than a decade I was visited upon daily by each end of an esteem-ridden spectrum. After 8 hours of solitary existence, drone-like utility, Dickensian confluence, I was ready to enter a place where someone actually valued my opinion. At h health club job in New Hope I had opened the club! I covered many mornings for irresponsible high school kids. I picked up in the locker rooms that looked like a super bowl party had gone on the night before. Without me the club would not have opened on time, and we catered to yuppies and ogres who had very rigid schedules. At Park Nicollet I did not even have security clearance. No fair level of trust was established in 14 years. Either I looked shifty or the head of the tidy obscure records pool within the clinic did not think I was smart enough to remember door codes.

I did my job, anyways, with few words. For a while I kept a small refrigerator in my cubical. I stored my whey protein. It was probably unauthorized and I knew it pissed off the director of HIM (health information management). It was convenient and appeased the real estate maxim location, location, location. Park Nicollet was close enough to bike to in the summer. The rides were beautiful. I miss them. Waking up before the birds own their songs, watching the bakery trucks rattle through the cusp of dawn with their deliveries made, seeing the beads of dew on car windows in our condo's lot. I set out east on the Cedar Lake trail. I looked to the right and found my way in the fog lifting from the wheat fields. Then I turned to round Cedar Lake and a small orange ball baited the lake, rising to hours for hooky players while I was at work.

The logistics went my way accidentally. I was on a bus line. The 604, down Louisiana, through Methodist Hospital and up Excelsior. But at the height of my fitness/bodybuilding insanity (2001-3), having the club so close sure was nice. It became something that I took for granted and, in about 2009, when LA fitness bought out Balleys, working out was no longer so convenient. Buses did not sync up, and it was—my god—a three to four block walk! How badly did I want to work out? How badly did I need to work out? And after my life-ordered job, my disposable career, how much more time did I want to invest getting there, working out and getting home? Convenience had also left me time to write.

prosaic interlude #1

The Other Side of Fitness (1^st set)

Scrapes of the maintenance man's shovels echoed in the lot. It slept, around my apartment, at 4 a.m. I followed by breath as though I did not know, shaking off the shivers as I walked diligently into the night. Streetlights found joggers' trails of air, the sound of snow crunching on streets, leading them to the club. They were the same faces that I saw everyday. I walked past building security, through back matter where facades did not know. I passed dumpsters where divers so often sheltered so the wind could not blow. And then he club stared out with its red neon signage, its eaves that swirled in flurries of snow.

From the winter of 1996, and continuing for the next 8 months, I was employed at a health club. I checked the Ph and chlorine level of the pool. I cleaned exercise machines. Questions wrapped in bitches (from those wrapped in towels) always seemed to land on my ears. Most, though, were from an old denizen, explorer for the perfect temperate whirlpool, we came to call the ogre. At 5 a.m. I opened the club, and from that hour until I was relieved I stood at the front desk. The call was bound to come from the younger employee whose job I was doing. Either they could not get in or their alarm did not wake them. Members were in line chatting, visibly respiring, holding hangers on which hung their work clothes, scattered down a partially shoveld walk.

In those days I was working out, training for competitive bodybuilding, incrementally increasing the weight I lifted in low repetitions, eating clean, low-fat frequent small meals. I knew what I took to cultivate skeletal muscle. The GNC store next to the club was my connection for whey protein. After a good hour and a half workout, within 45-minutes, I had a tall glass of whey. I thought I could fell the muscles doing their thing, repairing themselves, each fibrous string doubling. It lasted as an after-burn, a glow, a high, a weakness that made you stronger, bigger, if not physically, psychologically and able to get in the gym and kick ass!

I can't discount the logistical factor. My 34-year affair with weight-lifting, fitness and finally bodybuilding was built in part on location. In the early days I biked (see story “Exercising Demons” in my upcoming book Finding me—and Them: Stories of Assimilation) to workout at a YMCA or a real gym. When I lived in the Stevens Community (read “A Gentler Place”) 4 days a week I rode a bus for 20 minutes down Nicollet to the Balleys in Richfield. But most of the affair the club or gym was in close proximity. From 1995 to 2003 I worked out at the health club in New Hope a block from our apartment. In 1998 I began working at the location of Park Nicollet in St. Louis Park. A Balleys was across the street.

For me, the location of my place of work weighs heavily. This situation precipitated my move to the Stevens Community. In 1990 I was hired at a nursing home there and I did not want to commute from—Richfield. (I was going back there almost every day as it turned out!) I walked down my alley to get to that job for 4 years. So, the location of a job more less dictates where I live. Maybe at this point I should emphasize that I don't drive. I hate wasting time on a bus in transit (did that many years), and Metro Mobility has a way of turning a 5 minute transitory ride into an hour long tour of the city.

The health clubs, the proximity to them, was total serendipity. I did not ask my interviewer where the nearest health club or gym was. The job was always my first priority, although maybe not in the last months of training for a competition. I had a work ethic that was transferable. For 12 years it crossed the street with me from Park Nicollet to balleys.

Congenial-speak #15

Dropping on the Run

Leaves tumbled. They sounded crisp and crunched at my heels. Harvest moons threatened my path, approaching the storied house on my appointed round, my first literature drop. I'd seen many before, legs at shoes of family, friends and foes. Some were the DFL associates, the loyals who long ago threw their time to have a measured shot at stopping Lyndon Johnson in his tracks and bringing a decisive end to the Vietnam War. My role models had been “clean for Gene” McCarthy, the Minnesota Senator who upset the favorites.

A house in back of ours, on Aldrich Avenue, was rumored to be haunted. It was down the block and behind our neighbors a few doors down. One walked to a typical rambler with a normal smiling suburban housewife answering the door, and went though the house into the backyard. Within yards, a warp was sustained, an altering of dimension and security—perhaps reality. Windows were always filled with cobwebs in the frames, the wood partitions that played tricks on young eyes. It was called the tree-house and stories of mental instability were known to have circled the neighborhood. The from of the house, facing Lyndale Avenue, had a dirt yard that suddenly grew into a great unkempt lawn. In the middle was a tall old oak tree. Its roots rumbled through the grounds like thick muscles of sanity. They were mossed and buried in many season's leaves. From the street tall grass hid the rue nature of the house, the lure of eccentric appeal it could have to a kid.

My first candidates were likely the local and state people. They were Don Fraser and Wendell Anderson. They were Joan Growe and Warren Spannus. They were people who I might someday see face o face. State legislators like Shirley Hokanson were talked about a lot around my house, and it is likely I campaigned for her. I went though our first neighborhood, though, with innocence, with a curiosity to do what I'd seen my folks do. I was four or five and bundles of DFL literature were delivered to our house. It was as though everyone at the top knew the bottom, the grassroots, and Barbara Amram knew things grew from the bottom up—not the top down. That was the DFL way, it was the mainstay of our fray. It was known that, as 3^rd district chairwoman, Amram would get the word out, either by phone or in print.

When I stood on my own two feet, before I crawled, I wanted to help get the DFL message out. I guess I was tired of just watching and listening,learning and guessing which way the answers waved. I got in the act. My small packet of literature was parceled out to me, thoughtfully ladled like a bowl of soup from a pot bubbling with urgency, simmering with glues to one day yield a better society. I had my blocks, my quotas, which included that house of my design. I began at the next-door-neighbor and worked my way to more difficult territory. I advanced, door by politely listening door, to the lesser-known hermit houses, the curmudgeons who were most likely not planning to vote. I thought they still ought to know what's out there. They should in a democracy, even if they chose not to exercise their vote, have the opportunity to know how good their life could be.

I took my time, I skipped to houses, I dropped my materials between outer and inner-doors. Those were the air traps that I lifted, dropped literature to the bottom, and gently pushed shut. Some had a glass pane, some did not. Often I really hoped no one heard me, and I just ran away as though I'd left a flaming sack for them to see. By the end of my round my supply was getting low. I made sure I had enough for the tree-house. I felt, if anyone should know the candidates they should. This family of suburban dwellers on the fringe of status quo, this misunderstood mystery house was curious to me. Around its oak tree was a house, with ghosts or blanketed occupants, and any séance in my old neighborhood in Richfield most likely got its spirit power from it.

Congenial-speak #14 (Norway partC)

Hostel Youth

We spend four days in Bergen. In from the fjords, the playing field shrinks again. Norway's efficient and clean. Existential rationale surrounds us, and we sense the Norwegians' pride in their landscaping majesty. Our new digs is the Montana Youth Hostel. It appears to be empty and we, about 20 youths and 7 adults, have full run of the place. It is only a place to throw off your pack to roam the city unfettered. Most of us never unpack, canteens hang off packs from top bunks, sleeping bags remain in stuff sacks bunji corded to the frame of the pack and hiking boots wait under the bunk. They are hastily swapped out for tennis shoes, the only item unpacked.

No one wears the uniform anymore. We go out as the average American tourist—jeans, T-shirt, shorts or sunglasses. One kid wears his scout shirt. It's all wrinkled and baggy and probably slept in with bits of campfire chilly mac staining it. He mocks the idea, perpetually displaying his scout rank, his sloth and lack of motivation to ever rise above the first “given” rank. He is the exception to the rule though. Most take things like advancement with some nod to sincerity. I know I do. I have my Eagle ranking at 18 and I know this is my swan song. This trip is the last thing for me with this troop. The fathers tell me and the older scouts, all who will likely also leave their legacies behind them as they debark the plane in Minneapolis, to “set an example” for the younger scouts. I am not a leader material (far from it) but, as it turns out, can be inclined to accept a challenge.

The discotheques pepper Europe. It is a feeling like the short-lived American trend, the ilk, the forum, has invaded Europe. We hang out in one in downtown Bergen—even a few fathers—perhaps as infidels. “When in Rome”—we are vikings. We are plunderers who pillage and scout the most beautiful-women-on-the-face-of-earth with the noblest of intentions. The discotheque is not like an American bar, dance clubs or even halls. None of us—but the fathers—are old enough to have ever entered a disco, to really have gotten the leisure suited, bell-bottomed flavor of the time. We were in though, drinking at 18, and no bouncer ever checked our ID. We hang out in the shadows, in the ambianced pockets of the joint, the spaces sound knows to dim and dull its vibrations. This is the beginning of my “dance king” phase. I go out on the floor and dance solo to Springsteen's “Dancing in the Dark.” The others are laughing. They're egging me on as I get things going, as this dark-haired blue-eyed kid apes “the boss.” With subtle undulations of my shoulders I summon the undecided, the few waffling blonde-haired beauties skirting the discotheque. They smile, genuinely I think. There is not the obvious insincerity I've seen deep in the eyes of American girls. The song ends and I go back to their table. We hear “Mony, Mony” strike up, and I wonder if the crowd will fill in the overt sexual entente, the refrain that I hear at every bar in the States. They do, “get laid, get f----,” and I realize that mentality, that release of sexual suggestion, is international. By this time the room is pumping, bass thunders the music, all of my troop and those high fidelity fathers—the ones who revisit the 70s—are dancing with the average Norwegian beauty. The girls and I go outside to talk.

We look at one another in the streetlight, under the neon of signs, the fringes of Bergen. The disco is still close enough to pulsate. The records inside can be identified, like the patrons are not, upon entry. A lot of body language is tossed through the waves of sound. Few words need be said and a fascination begins—or continues—perhaps because of who I am. The three women are smart and, even though we were rarely in a group, know that I'm with the rest of the troop who can easily bass for the average guy from Norway, I stick out in my troop. I ethnicize the Scandinavian picture.

“Set an example” is annoying. I am trying my best to reciprocate, to parry the flirtations that surround me in the cool night breeze. Taxis speed by with their signs lit. I think of the rank I achieved last November. It probably was my own sketchy morality, my suspicion that our troop was far from innocent, that the laws and ideals of scouting were flouted regularly, especially in a foreign country where blonde women were in such perfection. I excused myself, and felt like a dork right away, just climbing into the cab. It was as though a battle had been fought in my mind, a battle that most likely did not need to be fought. A moral battle that I lost. Or maybe it was just me projecting my own cowardice, feelings of insecurity, of inadequacy, on a conscionable moment. Was it that I really thought setting an example to the younger scouts was a priority, an insane idea to even put on the table, or did I simply doubt somewhere that I could return the trios' apparent attraction?

The cab speeds through the streets of Bergen to the youth hostel, quiet, empty at 1AM. In the back I wrestle with the thought of the last gesture I would ever make in that troop. Should I, would I, could I be remembered as a conscientious Eagle Scout or a foolish idiot, a sap, a sucker who gave up a possible night of—not necessarily sexual—but meaningful international relations with three of the most beautiful women I'd seen. If it was sexual, I missed what would make me the envy of all men—the menage a quior.