__________ 

I have never aspired
I just know what I want
So I do it
It changes daily
I screw it up
I don’t regret it
But there are things that I miss
It’s bound to happen when life is full of wanting and doing and changing
Missing

 __________

In my years of sleeplessness
I memorize your face
I dream of it in waking
Pulled from a secret place

Each night I see it clearer
Your eyes your lips your nose
With time to make perfection
Your perfect image grows

As life goes leaping by
I do not search for you
But wait to find you living
Until one day I do

I’m not sure how else to explain that feeling.  My brain.  It’s itchy.

That usually means that I want to make something.  Something creative.  Act, sing, dance, write.  I just finished practicing the National Anthem that I’ll be nervously wailing at the bout next weekend.  I frogger-danced across the street to get to the office this morning.  I act like I’m not exhausted every time the alarm goes off.  So if my brain is still itchy, that means I must write.

I have a few big pieces that I’m working on but I’m not interested in telling a story at the moment.  I just want a good brain scratch so I’m rolling out randomness to squelch it like a bear rubbing his back on a tree trunk. 

I love bears.  I love big huge giant furry animals.  I would love to have a pet bear.  Or a tiger or a lion.  Something large and warm and snory.  If I had a giant animal I would throw out all of the pillows in my house and just sleep on that.  My bear.  Or my tiger or my lion.  I would go for walks with them on a leash like it weren’t no thang.  That would be awesome. 

My eye hurts today.  My left eye on the lower lid.  Inside, underneath.  It’s red and tender.  There’s one of two things that could be causing it.  Possibility A.  This week has been hell.  I’ve been sailing this crazy theatre ship for a year now and I’ve passed through several minor squalls with expert precision, managing to keep my crew intact.  However, this week has decided to, as Will Arnett would say, “Take it up a notch” in the realm of the dramatic.  I feel like Joe in Empire Records.  One big motherfucking tsunami of a week.  Everything that could go wrong, everyone that could get upset, has.  I guess when you actually know people on a personal level, being an impartial captain gets a little trickier and after a year at sea, the sailors get all restless and start dreaming of mutiny.  But I’m learning and trying to take it as it comes.  Wrapping my slicker tighter around me and climbing higher up the mast to see past the storm.  I must ensure their safety.  Lots of HR meetings over the last few days just to try to make everyone happy and keep the doors open.  Artists.  If you can’t beat ‘em…they’ll never learn.  So anyway, Possibility A is that all of the tidal waves that are crashing around inside this little old bubble are finally breaking IN MY EYE.  Possibility B.  The 32 year old teeny tiny ragged excuse for a pillow that I freakishly insist on balling up under my face when I sleep shed an ancient, crusty feather in the night and pushed it into my eye.  Either way, I’m glad it’s the weekend.             

In other news, I miss my Grandpa.  Of course I do.  But not in the way that I was anticipating I would.  I don’t miss hanging out and talking with him, or playing cards and singing with him.  That stuff was amazing but it’s also long gone.  I had two years to mourn those losses, while he was sick.  I miss…worrying…I guess.  I miss the closeness of the family as we dealt with his decline.  I miss the daily phone calls and weekly gatherings and doting on him.  I miss planning transit and meals and appointments.  I miss the struggle to come up with some insignificant little gift for someone who’s had 93 birthdays and christmases and 64 anniversaries and Father’s Days, just to give him something to enjoy for a moment.  I miss waiting and watching.  I miss him occupying my thoughts.  There are times now that I’ll go for several days without him popping into my mind and when that happens I realize that until then, I had thought about him every single day of my life.  Until I hadn’t anymore.  I’m afraid to lose those thoughts.  I’m afraid of the memories fading.  I miss him.

I saw a great show last night.  I was too tired to really get punched in the gut by it but it’s a gut puncher nonetheless.  Well staged, beautifully dressed, soundly acted.  Good classic American drama.  It was a nice two hours of head clearing and enjoyment of my favorite art form in the way that it should be presented.  I don’t get that nearly enough anymore.  Ironic.

I had breakfast with a great old friend this morning.  There was gravy on my breakfast.  My friend was delightful, as always.  That was nice.  But now I’m at work.  How did that happen?  I’m going to turn in the last of my overdue reports and then to the gym and then home to commence my weekend of pajamas and TV.  I need it.  Maybe I’ll go visit my mom.  But then maybe I won’t.  Who knows.

Just an average guy (girl.)  Average family.  A couple good friends.  A good doctor.  A nice girl (guy.)  Perpetually late.  A student of life.  Just trying to get my darn loud band together. 

Everything is moving along normally.  I’m not sad.  I’m not angry.  I’m just there.  And then unexpectedly one night I end up running from some Lebanese terrorists and find myself in the past.

Trespassing on the past, as one of those good friends would say.

It’s all familiar because it’s where I came from.  But everything is different now and I’m in this parked car with my mother.

And because I’ve trespassed on the past the future has changed.  A whole fucking lot. 

But I have a window to the world that Marty didn’t have.  Instead of standing on a stage with a fading picture of my siblings slipped in between Marvin Berry’s guitar strings while my hand starts to disappear, I watch helplessly from my desktop as images spring up from the good friends in front of me and I am slowly erased from existence.  They’re the same people.  The same places.  But they’ve all changed.  I’m not there. I’m not with them.  I’ve hit the Rolls Royce.  I’m fired.  Thanks Needles.

I reach out for Doc.  I find him.  Doc is the same in the past and the future.  We’re the present.  He’s with me.  Him and the LeBaron.  DeLorean.  Whatever.

But around me everything has shifted.  We’re more fit and better looking.  The book has hit the shelves.  We have the 4 x 4 we always wanted.  He’s working for us now.  I beat him in tennis today.

Is it better?  It’s good.  Damn good.  But those pictures.  They were good, too. 

I have no moral here.  It is what it is.  I guess I’m just saying.  I guess it’s just something I noticed. 

Sometimes I feel like Marty McFly. 

Or maybe it was Scott Howard. 

What were we talking about again?  

The last time that I saw him alive he didn’t look good anymore.  He looked worse the very next time that I saw him.  You can imagine.  So that was my memory of him.  I’ll spare you the details.  But the image is vivid in my recollection.  The empty, broken vessel of a man who meant the world to me.  Gone.  And that was my memory.  A whole lot of lost for a non believer.  He was gone and he didn’t look good anymore.  The end.   

We made the arrangements to send that vessel off.  Grossly overpriced formalities.  She didn’t want anyone to see him that way.  To see that he didn’t look good anymore.  It was Her choice.  And so the box would be sealed and that final image would be lasting for all of us.  And so it goes.

And then She changed her mind, as She does.  She wanted to see him, good or otherwise.  It was her choice.  They prepared the vessel as instructed.  Heather gray trousers, classic black blazer, crisp white shirt and a red, black and white diagonally striped neck tie.  Teeth.  Glasses.  Black socks.  In his pocket two black and white wallet sized pictures of Her and him from way back and a more recent time when they both looked good.  The decoration was complete save for his iconic hearing aids and his gold wedding band which She put on Her middle finger as She was concerned about grave robbers.

I saw him first.  I’m never early but I was that day and I saw him first.  When I arrived the woman who had helped ready the vessel told me “He looks so ‘good’ for 93.”  Not a day over 75 she had said.  What’s the difference?  I drifted dreamlike to the open box and I saw him first.  My first thought was that he did look good.  For a dead person.  He didn’t look 75 or 93.  He was just dead.  Gone.  An empty put together vessel. 

It was then that I realized that this image and the previous image and the one before that were all the same.  They were memories.  But they weren’t THE memories.  THE memories had begun 32 years earlier.  He had more hair then though not much.  A bushy white beard.  He wore a sturdy watch and whittled wood.  He made with his big bare hands a cradle for a new born red headed girl.  He built and painted with intricate craftsmanship a rocking horse that he brought to her dressed as Santa Claus.  He held onto the back of her blue banana seat bicycle and ran behind her until she felt the balance inside and then he let go and she rode off.  He fixed that twisted mangled bike when she crashed it down a hill, after he carried her home and repaired her knees and elbows.  He nervously taught her to pilot and park his tiny white car with burgundy interior, then he gave her the keys so that she could pass her driving test with the automatic transmission.  He took her to swimming lessons and to tennis practice.  He sat through every band concert and school play.  He cleaned up her messes and cut up her food and took her to class and kissed her good night.  He was at her graduation.  Her wedding.  He came to visit her in college and she spent every single Christmas with him.  She danced with him and played cards with him and when she called home from far away he sang “Hello Dolly” to her over the telephone.  He had sung “Good Night Irene” to her when she was in that cradle.  Those were THE memories. 

And now he was dead.  He wasn’t 93 or 75.  Just dead.  And I had loved him as much as one can love.  But there was nothing to say and no one to say it to.  So I waited and when the others arrived I stood back and watched as they observed the vessel that had been he whom they loved and I wondered what their memories were as many stretched back twice as far as mine. 

And then I understood the point of all the expensive pomp and circumstance.  It wasn’t for him.  He was dead.  It was for us.  It was for his Wife and their three children and their eight children and their children and the people that had joined us and had loved and honored him as much as the rest.  Twenty three individuals who called themselves a family because he led the grand assembly.  Twenty three living beings who owed their very existence to a man who was now gone.  And we all came together that day for the very first time in complete unison in spite of our differences and disagreements and because of our respect and admiration so that we could each close this beautiful chapter of our respective memory books in a tribute to he who started it all.  He who made us us.

When we were all gathered and our memories satisfied She told us that it was time.  Overhead Johnny Cash and Ray Charles sang sweetly the tale of the “Crazy Old Soldier” and without a word twenty three people lined up quietly and one by one walked to the box that held the vessel and in turn closed our books.  Each man touched his stiff arm.  Each woman kissed his cold forehead.  She paused a moment longer than the rest and as She turned away, her hand, still soft and delicate in spite of her incredible strength and age, glided slowly across his empty chest and then the preparation man closed the book and sealed the box.

He left us on a Friday.  The books were closed the next Tuesday.  His battle is over and we fight on.   

“I’ve tried to forget her
and all the things that we’ve done
but as long as there are memories
I’ll never hang up my gun.”       

Tribune Tribute

I can’t eat.  I can’t sleep.  I can’t breathe.  I can’t think.

Put a fork in me.  He’s in this town…YARDS away from me…and he doesn’t even know that in this dark and dank and dingy basement sits his biggest fan.  I’m done.    

Ruby Chucks?  Check.  Big gay shirt?  Check.  Cool hat?  Check.  Letter?  Check. 

Kill me now.

Why do I continue to do this to myself?!

Oh yeah.  Because I love him.

See ya real soon Rocket Man…from the 22nd row.

That means inspiration or melancholy.  Maybe both.  Hard to tell.  But either way I’ll write.

I don’t have much to say at the moment.  I’m just flowing with the tide of life for the time being.

Thus the thoughts will come in waves.

I have an amazing job.  My dream job, actually.  But I work entirely alone in a big old drafty creepy building and the isolation is starting to get to me.  Plus I live entirely alone in ND so there’s that built in isolation as well.  And it’s cold.  And snowy.  I’m land locked.  I can see forever.  Forever is flat and dry.  Strange for a big city extrovert.  I’m going to NYC over the pagan bunny ritual weekend.  That’ll be nice.  I want to see Book of Mormon and Play Dead.  And eat sushi.  A lot of sushi.  Jeremy Piven mercury poisoned quantities of sushi.  And Thai.  And Ethiopian.  And Korean BBQ.  And and and…

My roller derby team, the Bisman Bombshellz, has their would-be first home bout this weekend.  It sort of got jacked, hence the “would-be.”  It’s still happening, but it’s…jacked…I guess.  So it’s more of a shit storm freak show now and is going to be one hell of a ride.  I’m so proud of my sisters.  I can’t wait to see them roll.  I’m not skating (or singing) in this match.  Thank the founder of the pagan bunny ritual for that one.  I’d rather live.  That and drink with my 3^rd wife and cheer for my girls.  Next time though, anthems and skates for me.  Come support.  I do love me some roller derby.

I’m in the thick of rehearsals for a community theatre festival in our neighboring state.  My scene partner and I have already put in four, solid, arduous weeks of work on the thing and still have a long way to go.  I threw together a last minute, ill-conceived idea for a Shakespeare medley in order to avoid paying royalties and to register by the deadline, and the piece is proving to be a regular bitch.  A showcase of dream roles and a patchwork script full of the most challenging, non-linear, unintuitive lines ever written.  And no regular director.  A recipe for an amateurish disaster.  That being said, we’re overcoming, and with a little more help from our friends, just may make something of the monster.  We’ll find out in about 10 days.  When it’s all said and done, it’s a shame that this astounding effort will be realized only once and in a half empty auditorium of strangers.  The things we do for art.   

The current show is mid run at Dakota Stage.  12 Angry Men.  13 very pleasant male actors wandering around the place in the evenings and wreaking havoc on my bathrooms.  It’s a nice change of pace and a break in the solitude, anyway.  The production is solid and tickets are selling relatively well.  I’ll keep my position another day, it would seem.  I like performance time.  My dark, dank, dreary venue hustles and bustles and fills up with people and chatter and the lights come on and coffee gets made in a big giant urn.  Mmm…coffee…damn, son…

Mom was sick.  Off and on for a month.  In and out of the hospital.  Again.  Oh that infernal, fucking hospital.  Shit care this time.  Shit shit shit care.  Bad enough that I got furious and staged a sit in until I got her the attention that she deserved.  “You’ve awakened the wrath of the daughter, now,” I told the hospitalist on call.  “You’ll be damn sorry that you ever went to med school.”   I think she is.  Regardless, mom’s getting better, or seems to be.  She’s back at work and I haven’t seen her in a week so we must be returning to normal.  Getting admitted is the only way that I’ll carve out time to spend with her.  I’m beginning to think that she does it on purpose.               

I just got word that Todd’s coming home for a few days.  It’s not under happy circumstances but I’ll be happy to see him none the less.  Todd = joy.  Always.  So we’ll hang out if I can make some time.  Big if.  Somewhere in this town I have an ailing grandfather that I never visit and a crypto-niece that I have yet to meet, and I desperately want to see both.  Everyone goes to bed at 9pm around here.  That’s when I start my social hour.  More isolation.  But not Todd.  Todd will “sleep when he’s dead.”  So I eagerly anticipate the company during the witching period. 

Jason is writing a new musical that’s going to be absolutely brilliant.  It could very well be his golden ticket.  I wish I was there to watch it grow.  I’m so proud of him.  I miss him.  I miss Chicago.  And I miss Allison.  Holy crap do I miss Allison.  Maybe a trip in some direction is in order.  I miss a lot of people and places.  I’m getting a travel bug.  A friend bug.  Come, summer, come.  I wish Hovden was here. 

Solsbury Hill is in my head.  Boom boom boom.  It’s been lodged there for days.  It’s springy, yes?  Grab your things; I’ve come to take you home. 

Most of my overtaxed inner circle has heard the sad sack tale of woe in regards to my late father and my wicked step mother ad nauseum.  If you haven’t I’ll spare you the details.  It’s a pathetic story that makes me feel sorry for myself and draw pity (both of which I hate) and I care not trudge down that dreary path again.  Because the truth is, as I shared with an understanding and mutually experienced friend recently, “I’m over it.”  And as much as my drama lama mama would beg to differ, I truly am.  Of course my past affects my present and shapes my future, but I really don’t have a problem with that.  I often say that I have one regret in my life and that’s letting my ex husband keep my dog.  Honestly.  The rest of it I wouldn’t change because I love me and I wouldn’t be me without the back story, however harrowing.  But the events surrounding the untimely demise of my dad, while incredibly important in that journey, were extraordinarily difficult, and they were very hard to “get over.”  I had to dig deep, clean out a lot of closets, and make some tough decisions to finally meander to a place where I felt I could find solid footing and march on.  And I have.  My memories of him now, miraculously, are mostly pleasant ones, and while I will always miss him and have moments of wondering what our relationship might be like if he were still with me, the anger and sadness and longing that consumed me for so much of my brief time on this planet have vanished.

So when I opened the letter from the DVA and saw the name BERNHARDT, EDWARD S in bold printed above the now too familiar social security number that was my battle ID during the crooked estate review, I expected a Pavlovian reaction to the metaphorical bell that would spiral me back into a drooling state of comfortable, extended angst.  But it didn’t happen.  I just stared at it, confused.  Both by the message and by my notable lack of emotional response.  In fact I read it three or four times before my brain actually registered the implications of the correspondence:       

“…special review of the above veteran’s claims…”  “…retroactive benefits…”   “exposure to certain herbicide agents in Vietnam…” 

And an endless lists of required documentation to be provided by the next of kin.

That’s me.

So here we go again.

But this time, I have no fuel for the fire.  I don’t care this time.  I’m over it.  So what the hell do I do with this information?  Since my father bought the farm I have been harvesting.  How’s that for poetry?  Through the seemingly endless span from his diagnosis until step mommy dearest ultimately sold the house in the valley and skipped town, taking her brand new visage and our would be inheritance with her, my brother and I were consumed by properties and wills and statements and lawyers and bonds and policies and burial plans and government mumbo jumbo, not to mention a warring family that puts the Corleones to shame.  It nearly tore us apart, demolished the remainder of our collective youth, drove him to the brink of addiction and sent me to the verge of a nervous breakdown.  We pressed on for what seemed like centuries, trying over and over again to heal the wounds, only to have them ripped open each time some new piece of the puzzle was discovered and thrown back into the picture box.  We sure as hell didn’t do it for money as we came out of it with virtually nothing.  To cycle back, many of you know why we did it, as well as what the outcome was, and those of you who don’t and actually care can ask me about it sometime off line.  For the rest of you it’s not important.  The point is that it was a lost cause from the beginning and we got screwed out of the opportunity to properly grieve and mourn for our father.  That took some serious “getting over. “

And then opportunity, in the form of a manila military envelope, comes a knockin’.  But opportunity for what, exactly?  To avenge my wronged and fallen father?  To take revenge on the widow who wronged him?  To finally get the compensation to which I’m entitled?  Meh.  Yeah.  I said meh.  Once upon a time, this chance to rise triumphant from the ashes of our terrible loss would have sent me directly back out onto the battlefield with my sword held high and proud.  I would have vowed to make it all right again.  To prove that the good guys do win.  I know that I would have because I did.  Each time I found some new loophole, some new possibility, some new hope of exposing the scam, I pursued it relentlessly.  Over and over and over again.  And you know what?  The good guys were never avenged.  And it didn’t bring him back.  But really, in the end, we did win.  We won because we stuck together and got the fuck over it.  That’s what I have finally, finally learned.  And now.  Now my stability is being tested.  Clever old trickster, pop.  Always getting the last word.

So as I sit here, turning this official document over in my steady hands, trying unsuccessfully to dredge up some sort of emotional reaction to it, the new and improved logical me wonders, “What the hell do I do now?”  Without that beautiful, painful hubris coursing through my veins I simply have no motivation.  If I were alone in this world I wouldn’t have even opened the thing.  It would have hit the circular file on my way to the bathroom never to be thought of again.  But even though the reactionary me has been absolved and lies dormant, I’m NOT the only one to consider here, and my fierce loyalty to my sibling, though no longer full of rage, remains packed tightly in my gut.  In the grand scheme of the whole sordid affair, I have nothing to complain about.  I didn’t want to touch any of it with a ten foot pole.  It was HE who faced it and I who ran.  And HE deserves his just desserts for what he went through, being the only son and heir to our father’s estate. 

So part of me, a logical part even, wants to take action on his behalf.  But to what?  Spend weeks on the phone with California courts trying to collect the necessary files, toss away big bucks on legal fees for processing and representation and then, worst of all, track down the “executor” and have to deal with her face lift and cockatiel haircut, only to collect our $8.37 a piece from the class action civil suit?  Uh, no thanks.  Been there done that.  But then again…what if we’re talking 20 g’s?  There’s always that possibility.  The kid just bought a house and is trying to build the American dream for himself.  The comfort and stability that he’s always wanted.  That would help him a lot.  And I’m not gonna lie.  As a career pauper, I could use the scratch.  After all, there are those aforementioned student loan and credit card bills to contend with. 

But yet, there is no desire.  No passion anymore.  Not when it comes to war, this one in particular.  I pawned that sword long ago, hit the road and pledged eternal peace.  So that old, forgotten instinct to kick it into high gear and mow them all down can’t help me with this.  That’s probably a damn good thing, considering it never got me anywhere but stalled on the roadside or in a mangled wreck.  So I’ll mull it over.  I’ll figure it out.  Or not.  Whatever.  Meh.  I don’t care.  I don’t care!  That’s so weird.  That’s, I guess, the real issue here.  I’m used to my new internal governance, that hokey pokey power of positive thinking shit, giving everything clarity and launching me into infinite successes.  It really does work, by the way, but that’s for a different installment.  When it comes to THIS, however, to dealing with dad, I’m so accustomed to flying off the handle, that I’m really just baffled at my complete lack of concern at the moment.  It leaves me really lost, which is also weird.  I’m a decider.  To sit here locked between the past and the future, with absolutely no response, is very…strange…to say the least.  Wondering where I go from here.  I won’t go back, I know that for certain.  But can I go forward with this complacency?  I guess I have to talk to Cole.  What a concept.

I’m super stoked, though, that I don’t have to worry about not getting my American Legion Auxiliary membership renewal notice in the mail.

Kiss my lips my darling on the stairs up to your door
I whisper in your soft ear you’ll be mine forever more
I see the steps impossible as lines upon your face
But my lips will taste the memory until I leave this place.

Lay with me my darling on the quilt upon my bed
And let me stroke your precious cheek and rest your pretty head
In a separate room a fitful slumber I now keep
But my arms will feel the memory until the time I sleep.

Take my heart my darling hold it to your supple breast
I haven’t now a need for it as you have all its best
And when the night is over and my body’s gone away
May my silent heart remind you that we’ll walk again someday. 

I came kicking and screaming into the world that very night, and when the old doctor plopped me on the woman’s deflated stomach, the dark and vigorous young couple, delirious with love for their first born child, stopped abruptly and gawked.  “It can’t be,” the new mom croaked.  “No shit,” Ed said, staring in disbelief at the scrawny, pale, almost-translucent creature laid out on his wife with its mop of wild, untamed red hair.

30 years of alienation, feeling outside, feeling different.  A face that didn’t relate, a complexion that didn’t match, a body that didn’t fit.  Alone and unusual.

Maybe it was an unconventional childhood, or typical adolescence, or forced indifference as an independent adult that made my entire life pass by without recognition of the similarities.  Or maybe it was her unconventional and typical indifference that made them invisible to me. 

But I do fit.  I simply hadn’t noticed it before.

A shy, serious social consciousness.  A timid reservation and vulnerability masked by an air of confidence, control and a misinterpreted snootiness.  A snobbery if you will.  A put on to cover up a vast personal insecurity generated from an existence of self worth wrapped entirely in concern for the care of others.  A gentle way of being pushed far inside and shrouded in a surly, steady, sound demeanor.  An edgy, biting, self deprecating wit.  An easily underestimated intelligence, intuition and perseverance.  I knew that she possessed these qualities.  I always knew.  But I never noticed them in myself before.  Therein lay the irony.

More than that are the subtle features and manners skewed by time and distance but still so very much the same.  The small, scrutinizing, dancing eyes.  The hard to coax yet charming smile pulled reluctantly from a pouty mouth.  The inability to speak without the aid of sweeping gestures created by strong hands tipped with long, slender fingers.  Busty and hippy.  All legs.  A head thrown back, mouth wide open, full belly laugh when the mood strikes.  The mood.  Moody.  Bossy.  Knowing.  Large and in charge.  Me.  She.  Us. 

“I went there because it was the option that got me as far away from home as possible,” she said recently of her youthful journey.  I could relate.  I left when no one else would.  Faced the judgment and criticism and negativity inherent in change in our family culture.  I was most afraid to tell her that I was leaving.  “Good,” was her surprising reaction to my news.  “Good for you,” she said.  “Go.  Live.”

So I did.  I went to “find myself.”  I searched for years and grew and changed and became increasingly self aware and when I was “found” I came back.  For her.  I came back, with all of my worldly wisdom, to offer her some service, some assistance, some much needed help.  I should have known better.  I should have known that she wasn’t the one who needed help.  It was me.  It turns out that I wasn’t “found” at all.  I was coming together but I wasn’t actually self aware because I had never really noticed it before.  How could I know me if I didn’t know her?

Being here and really knowing her is self awareness.  She serves me.  She assists me.  She gets me.  Her spirit is my spirit.  Her humor is my humor.  Her genes are my genes.  And suddenly I fit.

Now.  Now I see it.