Public garbage cans

A garbage can in San Francisco

   When you grow up in New York City, as I did, you become accustomed to the sight of dumpsters in the street, large containers parked outside apartment buildings where construction or renovation is going on. My father used to love climbing the sides of these receptacles to see if there were pieces of wood, slightly broken chairs or tables, or wooden wire spools inside which he could use to make furniture with. I used to enjoy helping him retrieve the things from these bins, and was always fascinated by the absence which the objects seemed to illustrate.  At one time integral parts of other people's lives, these castaways were the only thing about these people that were in any way tangible to me, and the mystery of their previous environments always captured my imagination. Although I never become the dumpster-lover that my father was, my experiences with him transferred onto another part of the city that pointed to the absence of others for me; the garbage cans and trash one finds on the street. Although in San Francisco, California, my current home, one is less apt to see garbage in the street than in New York City, and the garbage cans here hide their contents more effectively, I have been again thinking about the subject of public trash receptacles. 

   As I sit down to write, I recall a teacher of mine who in art history class quoted on more than one occasion a few words from F.T. Marinetti's futurist manifesto of 1909. The words were, "Oh, maternal ditch", and were used by Marinetti to describe his near rapturous state when he finds himself in a sewage ditch, submerged in filthy water following an automobile accident . I don't find the thought of laying in dirty water particularly moving, but those words seemed very important to my teacher, and the emotional response that the words illicit in me still resonate very strongly, and have stayed with me all these years later.  For me, it is all that is unknown about where the refuse comes from that is poignant. 

   When I see a garbage can being utilized, my mind fills with the negative spaces of all that I don't know about the things inside; where did they come from, who put them there, and why were they no longer needed? If I choose to see the receptacle less in terms of absence and more in terms of construction, the thoughts change to what is being assembled, and how are these ideas communicated by the different contributors? Either way, the questions and empty spaces overcome the known, and I am left wondering. I assume that this absence and loss is for me is a kind of spirituality, and that the body which houses my soul is a garbage can.

Garbage cans from my younger years in New York City

Napping

                                   

  For me, there is a time during the day when my brain is telling me to close my eyes, lay down, and give my ability to reason a rest; it is nap time. Napping, as an activity, is even more necessary to me than vacationing, relaxing and dining. In fact, it is the prerequisite for making these other activities enjoyable. It is the nucleus which holds the pleasurable aspects of the world I exist in together.
   Usually beginning around two in the afternoon, I start to get a little cranky, I grow impatient with the people and things around me, and I long for escape and rejuvenation....but mostly escape. There was a time, what seems like a lifetime ago, when drugs or alcohol seemed the logical way to avoid having to exist consciously during all those waking hours. But now that I am older, and those solutions don't work like I'd like them to, I've returned to my original love; the nap.
   I remember growing up and watching my father nap on the days when he didn't work, of the peaceful look on his face, and recall how refreshed and better spirited he appeared when he woke up. It was clear the benefits he received from this rest time, yet he seemed so weak in some way to me, needing to do that as he did. As a person in my early teen years, it seemed like he was wasting so much time; now, it seems more like a way to die temporarily, and when I think of it in that way, it just sounds so great.
   It often feels like I never give my brain a rest, endlessly using it to assess, calculate and recalculate. It seems so overworked. A friend of mine used to say, albeit jokingly, that the only way to really rest on a vacation was to be on life support. I think that kind of gets to the root of it for me.

   Above, is a PET scan of a brain during sleep deprivation.

Wild animals

   This is a picture of a coyote that I took in the Marin Headlands, just across the Golden Gate Bridge, north of San Francisco, California. My wife and I often take a short drive there at either dusk or dawn in hopes of seeing animals in the wild, and this time we were lucky. The coyote leisurely trotted next to the road, which is near a small body of water called Rodeo Lagoon, seemingly undisturbed by our presence. I treasure these moments of encountering something in the wild, because they seem so much more real to me than the other experiences I have in my life. A wild animal in its' environment seems so much more natural to me than mine.  The word nature is also used to connote what we see when we leave the city to experience tranquility, and a slower pace of life. How can anything be more natural than nature?
   The Merriam-Webster dictionary's first definition of the adjective 'natural' is "based on an inherent sense of right and wrong", but the first definition for the noun 'natural' is "one born without the usual powers of reason and understanding". So, it seems that is is natural to be born without the ability to make judgments based on reasoning, but it is unnatural to not develop it inherently. It's confusing.
   We all live in the environments that we do, and it is the reality for us. The coyote in the picture goes about it's routine, searching for food and water, sleeping, assessing things around it, and keeping clear of danger, much the way animals confined in a zoo or controlled habitat do, albeit in different
surroundings. As a human being, I do much the same thing that other animals do, but my searches seem more regimented and planned.
   I can easily see crows, pigeons, ducks and gophers here in the city, but they seem much less wild to me, so I venture to 'nature'.  Is one environment more authentic than another?
   Maybe if I could manage to think of myself as something that had to traveled to in order to be seen, as something mysterious, I could manage to feel more real. Perhaps I could then look in the mirror, and see a wild animal.

The voice of Gene Clark

   I've been wanting to write about Gene Clark for some time now, but have always felt somewhat overwhelmed when I think of how to describe how I feel about his music. While I don't love all of his material equally, there are some songs which I find so hauntingly sad, that I just want to listen to them over and over again, to be able to live in that pain for a while.
   Gene Clark has been written about by many, and there is always talk of his stage fright, fear of flying, and his alcoholism and drug addiction. Of course, there are many reasons why people develop the emotional responses to things that they do, but for me, even though he was said to be unpredictable and difficult to work with, it seems like Gene Clark was just too fragile. When I listen to the song, "With Tomorrow", and I hear the opening guitar, how it seems that the notes are just barely able to be pulled out, it seems the entire structure is in danger of collapsing. I don't find this to be necessarily true of all of his songs, but there is always a bittersweet quality, a crushing vulnerability.
  Gene Clark died at the age of 46 of a heart attack, one year younger than I am now. After years of health problems, he had undergone surgery three years earlier, where he had much of his stomach and intestines removed, those areas having been irreparably damaged by ulcers. It's as if the world had infected his body, and removing it proved difficult, and not without complications.
  With hindsight at my disposal, it seems that Gene Clark's voice carried with it his past resentments and regrets, current fears and anxieties, and his body's future pains. That's a heavy load for a voice to carry.

Greetings from my car bumper

 I'm often fascinated by the bumper stickers people put on their cars. Sometimes political in message, other times amusing or espousing a kind of annotated version of one's life philosophy, it's always seemed to me like a really odd place to put a message. If your car is parked next to another car, it will certainly be difficult to see. If you're driving at any kind of decent speed, and able to be read by the person behind you, they're most certainly too close. A traffic jam seems physically like the ideal time to take in the message of the person in front of you, but emotionally, probably not.
   In these times we live in, where everyone is constantly looking down at their smartphones, I often have a kind of floating feeling, like I'm not really sure if I'm here at all. There are people around me, but they seem to be somewhere else and here at the same time. I wonder if the people they're texting, or the news or pictures they're seeing, are as real as me. It's like living in a painting where the perspective is off. It's hard to feel rooted.
   I thought that this bumper sticker makes some sense, in that it expresses some of these feelings for me. If it's on the rear bumper on my car (as it has been), the person behind me would need to be pretty close to me to see it, but to read it well would have to be seeing it in their rear view mirror, so it would no longer be backwards. Their relationship to me in that position would be strange. In a way, that seems to make sense.

The chew that hints at another world...

  I don't find many commercials very memorable, mainly because they are usually so commonplace and lacking humanity. Even the more unusual and expressive ones are so seamless and well executed that they become banal. There's no room for me, a breathing, imperfect person. I am alienated from myself because I am too organic.            

  Sometimes, however, there airs a commercial which manages a space for me to enter, and the portal can be created from its' poor quality, an awkward moment, bizarre dialogue, or a strange image. In a new commercial from Long John Silver's Restaurants, it's the final image of a man chewing, which invites me in and says, welcome to another world. In the fifteen second spot, two employees of the chain restaurant (with the Pepsi logo proudly displayed behind them) inform us that they make their chicken with their "world famous batter", whereas "the other guys" (presumably, their competition) make chicken with breading. The counter is stainless steel and spotless, and the restaurant appears without customers, or more correctly, emptied. It is antiseptic and cold. The scene then cuts to show two pieces of chicken, batter being poured into a bowl, and a basket of chicken and french fries on a table. 

  Suddenly, we are treated to a flurry of activity as we see a busy restaurant with our man putting his fork to his mouth, and beginning the enjoyable process of chewing his food. He chews with self assurance, but looks like he has nothing in his mouth, even though we've seen him put a piece in it. His chewing is so, well, chewy, and his mouth is so closed, that it almost looks like he trying to tell us something with the shapes his mouth form. Front-to-side he chews, as if imitating a machine, when suddenly, the commercial is over, but not before leaving us with the image of that final chew, a motion that looks like the one before it, yet is cut too short and abbreviated to really register as a human being masticating their food. It's more like something else. What is it like? I'm not really sure, and it's there where I can enter.