Étienne Léopold Trouvelot, Aurora Borealis, 1882
H’s father doesn’t rely on meteorologists or the Farmers’ Almanac—he gets his weather predictions from wooly worms. H’s father used to deliver propane, but one day he forgot his gloves. Propane is stored at negative forty-four degrees, so when it splashed on his bare hand, it gave him frostbite to the bone. “It looked like raw hamburger,” H says. H’s friend, C, asks if I like Biden. “No, I’m a Marxist.” “What do you think about guns?” the friend asks. They’re blasting this:
I ask H how he conceives of a higher power. He tells me he’s a Christian Elevationist, which means he uses marijuana as a sacrament. His son wakes up and H tells him to expect an uppercut the minute he turns sixteen. When H was in jail his sister forced his sons to eat off the floor. He forgave her as part of Step Nine in NA.
A’s uncle received a call that one of his properties is on fire. Her boyfriend survived a heart transplant.
G recently ended her marriage of thirty years. Her ex-husband is the only man she’s ever been with, but she never loved him. They have two sons.
M invites me to his home, but worries the vacuuming will not be done. He worries the laundry will not be done. He worries that his pants are wrinkled. “You do understand that you are way too great for me to be holding your mildest captivation,” he texts. “Red or white?” I’ve never been to a trailer park, but it appears the same as a neighborhood with houses affixed to foundations. I ask if he can transfer the cigarette to his right hand so I can hold the left one. “I’ve never held hands with a woman,” he says. He is trembling and also drinking straight vodka from a travel mug. We walk to the pond at the edge of the trailer park; it’s named after me: Lake Mary. On Mary Lane. I ask him to stop shouting and he bellows, “YOU ARE SAFE!” across the pond. He has a loaded shotgun and two hunting knives beside his recliner. We order a pizza and he feeds me the last piece.
S whispers that she accidentally exposed her breast to two cooks. “And of all the breasts, it was the left one!” She explains that she never wears brassieres because they’re too constricting. She tells me she’s been diagnosed with cervical cancer and will try an experimental pill so she doesn’t have to take time off of work. I give her my copy of The Undying.1
D has a bandaid over her third eye.
P has an MFA in Poetry.
J has an MFA in Photography and takes us to the Astronomical Society to see the 120 year old telescope. It’s too cloudy to see stars, but we get a tour of the antique equipment. A asks the young scientists, “is it true that you can wish on a shooting star?”
M watches Groundhog Day every night. I tell him he should be watching it in the Museum of Contemporary Art, wearing his Santa coat and holding his camouflage rifle.
K explains that the dog vomited inside his only pair of shoes and shows me the paper towel now lining the shoe.
J is sent home after throwing up in his hand and passing out in the locker room.
In my new blue collar life, there’s no depression or neurosis. But there’s an honest-to-God plague of surrealism, and it’s the surrealism that drives me to take high dose CBD before my shift. Everyone is on drugs and dealing drugs, but lesser drugs than the ones for which they went to prison. They have Section 8 vouchers and food stamps even while working full time jobs and running black market side hustles. I have a lot to learn.
My Uber driver has a PhD in sociology. I ask his favorite book and he tells me Cultural Reality by Florian Znaniecki.
One night I get home from all this and have a letter from the IRS rejecting my appeal. “Insufficient funds or financial difficulties are not acceptable as reasonable cause for the cancellation of penalty charges.” The bill is $23,000. I start laughing and cannot stop, I fall on the floor laughing because this is the greatest gift imaginable. Just this afternoon I walked through the forest listening to the Rev Left podcast about Saint Francis. If you own property you have to defend it—the origins of violence. If we were living our supererogatory ethics, we’d give everything back, the raw resources melting back into the earth, the bosses returning our surplus value, and we’d all roll on the ground laughing at our terrible folly.
I’m trying to say we have—not nothing to lose, but less to lose than we think. If I earn more money it will be taken from me, so I may as well earn less. We may as well turn our attention squarely to enjoying a subsistence income and applying for the grants and residencies to write the books and plays and jokes, draw the maps, throw the pots, build the huts, bake the buns, and whatever else we always dreamed of learning and doing.
And let the subsistence income be earned with incrementally greater ease. The beginning to all this, if I may merrily contradict my last post with a leprechaun kick, is to train ourselves in the understanding that we have everything we need. Certainly not in terms of debt management, successful romance, career satisfaction, or direct democracy, but in the spiritual-material sense (yes, hyphenated!) of being well and content in this moment. Of becoming real through love.
Fantasies live and die in an instant, but reality has ineluctable, heady, frothy, enduring presence. What if, therefore, reality is superior to our hand-wringing plans and projections? What if being is the sole criteria for goodness? This heretic idea keeps coming to me in moments of distress. All will be well insofar as all is well because all is manifest. Lord, make me an instrument of events as they unfold, independent of the chimerical desires I interpret as my will.
Where there is fantasy, reality.
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