Where I Lived, and What I Lived For
(Part V of a Weird and Terrible Saga)
It has been a long strange road for Liz and me. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve managed to stay together in spite of the lows, sometimes out of nothing more than sheer mule-headed stubbornness and spite. We call that love.
At first our relationship was simple. If I wanted to stay up all night playing guitar, that’s what I did. If she wanted to go out with friends, she did it. We were together, but we were also free, so it made commitment easy. Eventually, complications set in. (Complications always set in, for what is life other than a series of complications?) As far as complications go, this was one of the biggest: Liz became pregnant. (I love the phrase “became pregnant.” It’s like we all pretend we have no idea how this possibly could have happened.) Life and death: the biggest complications of them all.
Liz had her own baggage she’d collected through life, some of it relationship related as mine was. (I use the past tense, but our baggage never really goes away. It’s always there, riding around the luggage carrousel with our name attached to the tag tethered to the handle, waiting patiently for us to pick it up once more. The best we can do is build up enough muscle to carry it to the parking lot without straining too much.) Eventually, decisions were made, regretted, and made again. Eventually, the die is cast.
The idea of impending fatherhood caused me to reevaluate the course my life was taking. I was earning decent money as Implementation and Support Coordinator, but toward what good? I was helping rich people stay rich and get richer. I found it difficult to justify bringing a new life into an imperfect world without making any effort to contribute positively to it. I decided I needed to at least try to make things better in whatever small way I could. As someone with a degree in English, the obvious choice (out of a limited few) was to become a teacher. (Boy, did I feel like an idiot now with that whole Master’s in literature debacle!) Liz and I discussed my going back to school, and we concluded our best option was to move from L.A. to northern Nevada where my family had relocated.
And so, here we are, lo these many years later. I worked in a warehouse days and attended school at night. Liz could not find a job that paid more than the cost of daycare, so we struggled trying to make ends meet. We were forced to spend all our retirement savings to make it work. Consequently, I’ll be working until I’m dead.
Story 1
Pat, Joe, and I have gone to Sacramento to go to the movies. We are fifteen, and Placerville offers us little entertainment. In the theater waiting for the previews to start, we see two young ladies about our age seated closer to the screen. Pat and I convince Joe to go down, reconnoiter the situation, and report back. We anxiously watch him as he advances, does not speak to them, and returns. “Well?” we ask. “One’s a beast, and the other’s obese,” he says.
Story 2
Liz lives in the Seattle area where she moved from Missouri to attend college. Her boyfriend has a friend who manages a cinema near Country Club Lanes off Fair Oaks Boulevard in Sacramento. The friend enlists them to come down to California to work for him in order to facilitate his illegal scheme. The plan is that they sell tickets as normal, but rather than tearing the tickets in half, they instead return them to the box office to sell them a second time. Since the ticket stubs are the owner’s only way to monitor sales, they can pocket all the money from the resales as profit for themselves. They hold a massive party at the end of summer with the ill-gotten cash.
Life is weirder than fiction, isn’t it? I learned about the above adventure from Liz after we had known each other for years. I was shocked. I was well acquainted with the Capitol Theaters near Country Club Lanes. (In fact, it was next door to a Carnation Ice Cream restaurant.) I even remembered going to those theaters that particular summer. Eat My Dust with Ron Howard played there. I never saw it, opting instead for watching Scorsese’s Taxi Driver over and over. (“Are you talkin’ to me?”) (I saw Red Sun with Charles Bronson and Tishiro Mifune and Pocket Money with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin at the same theaters a couple of years earlier.) (Why do you suppose this section has so many parenthetical asides?) Liz is quite zaftig, and I am certain I would have noticed her as an adolescent. Therefore, when I was fifteen, I travelled from my town to another town and went to a movie theater. Liz travelled from another state and was at the theater at the same time. Since I went on multiple occasions, she probably sold me tickets more than once. Fifteen years later, we meet again in a city of 10 million people and end up married. Weird shit, huh?
And so, gentle reader, as we near the end of this jaunt down Memory Lane, what have we learned? Not much of value, I dare say. This whole Vivagreb enterprise is largely a way for me to circumvent power structures and modestly publish my various creative endeavors. After suffering a massive thrombosis that nearly killed me, I discovered a rebirth of creativity, mainly expressed through poetry. Although I am frustrated by disinterest in my work from traditional publication methods, poetry is useless sitting in a drawer, so I am putting it out to the world myself. I have no illusions of fame or riches, and so I have no desire to hold hands in some pathetic poetry circle and dissect one another’s work and make suggestions for how to “improve” it and reassure one another that what we write is worthwhile even though no one else seems interested. I know what I want to say and whether I’ve said it. Hopefully, my expression can help someone learn something new about life and themselves.
And so, gentle reader, I ask again, what have we learned? Maybe just that life is nothing more than a ratty old carnival ride held together by spit and duct tape and rusted screws. As we make the curve, the whole thing shakes and shivers horribly, and we can see the carnies down below smoking Marlboro cigarettes and staring off into the oblivion of the darkened midway. We begin to pick up speed as we clear the corner, and one, scratching a festering scab on his forearm, looks up long enough for us to make eye contact. It is like looking into the eyes of a shark, cold and lifeless and with absolutely no human recognition; not a look of hatred or anger, but dispassion, total ambivalence to our condition. And then the ride moves on until it stops.
(Part V of a Weird and Terrible Saga)
It has been a long strange road for Liz and me. It hasn’t always been easy, but we’ve managed to stay together in spite of the lows, sometimes out of nothing more than sheer mule-headed stubbornness and spite. We call that love.
At first our relationship was simple. If I wanted to stay up all night playing guitar, that’s what I did. If she wanted to go out with friends, she did it. We were together, but we were also free, so it made commitment easy. Eventually, complications set in. (Complications always set in, for what is life other than a series of complications?) As far as complications go, this was one of the biggest: Liz became pregnant. (I love the phrase “became pregnant.” It’s like we all pretend we have no idea how this possibly could have happened.) Life and death: the biggest complications of them all.
Liz had her own baggage she’d collected through life, some of it relationship related as mine was. (I use the past tense, but our baggage never really goes away. It’s always there, riding around the luggage carrousel with our name attached to the tag tethered to the handle, waiting patiently for us to pick it up once more. The best we can do is build up enough muscle to carry it to the parking lot without straining too much.) Eventually, decisions were made, regretted, and made again. Eventually, the die is cast.
The idea of impending fatherhood caused me to reevaluate the course my life was taking. I was earning decent money as Implementation and Support Coordinator, but toward what good? I was helping rich people stay rich and get richer. I found it difficult to justify bringing a new life into an imperfect world without making any effort to contribute positively to it. I decided I needed to at least try to make things better in whatever small way I could. As someone with a degree in English, the obvious choice (out of a limited few) was to become a teacher. (Boy, did I feel like an idiot now with that whole Master’s in literature debacle!) Liz and I discussed my going back to school, and we concluded our best option was to move from L.A. to northern Nevada where my family had relocated.
And so, here we are, lo these many years later. I worked in a warehouse days and attended school at night. Liz could not find a job that paid more than the cost of daycare, so we struggled trying to make ends meet. We were forced to spend all our retirement savings to make it work. Consequently, I’ll be working until I’m dead.
Story 1
Pat, Joe, and I have gone to Sacramento to go to the movies. We are fifteen, and Placerville offers us little entertainment. In the theater waiting for the previews to start, we see two young ladies about our age seated closer to the screen. Pat and I convince Joe to go down, reconnoiter the situation, and report back. We anxiously watch him as he advances, does not speak to them, and returns. “Well?” we ask. “One’s a beast, and the other’s obese,” he says.
Story 2
Liz lives in the Seattle area where she moved from Missouri to attend college. Her boyfriend has a friend who manages a cinema near Country Club Lanes off Fair Oaks Boulevard in Sacramento. The friend enlists them to come down to California to work for him in order to facilitate his illegal scheme. The plan is that they sell tickets as normal, but rather than tearing the tickets in half, they instead return them to the box office to sell them a second time. Since the ticket stubs are the owner’s only way to monitor sales, they can pocket all the money from the resales as profit for themselves. They hold a massive party at the end of summer with the ill-gotten cash.
Life is weirder than fiction, isn’t it? I learned about the above adventure from Liz after we had known each other for years. I was shocked. I was well acquainted with the Capitol Theaters near Country Club Lanes. (In fact, it was next door to a Carnation Ice Cream restaurant.) I even remembered going to those theaters that particular summer. Eat My Dust with Ron Howard played there. I never saw it, opting instead for watching Scorsese’s Taxi Driver over and over. (“Are you talkin’ to me?”) (I saw Red Sun with Charles Bronson and Tishiro Mifune and Pocket Money with Paul Newman and Lee Marvin at the same theaters a couple of years earlier.) (Why do you suppose this section has so many parenthetical asides?) Liz is quite zaftig, and I am certain I would have noticed her as an adolescent. Therefore, when I was fifteen, I travelled from my town to another town and went to a movie theater. Liz travelled from another state and was at the theater at the same time. Since I went on multiple occasions, she probably sold me tickets more than once. Fifteen years later, we meet again in a city of 10 million people and end up married. Weird shit, huh?
And so, gentle reader, as we near the end of this jaunt down Memory Lane, what have we learned? Not much of value, I dare say. This whole Vivagreb enterprise is largely a way for me to circumvent power structures and modestly publish my various creative endeavors. After suffering a massive thrombosis that nearly killed me, I discovered a rebirth of creativity, mainly expressed through poetry. Although I am frustrated by disinterest in my work from traditional publication methods, poetry is useless sitting in a drawer, so I am putting it out to the world myself. I have no illusions of fame or riches, and so I have no desire to hold hands in some pathetic poetry circle and dissect one another’s work and make suggestions for how to “improve” it and reassure one another that what we write is worthwhile even though no one else seems interested. I know what I want to say and whether I’ve said it. Hopefully, my expression can help someone learn something new about life and themselves.
And so, gentle reader, I ask again, what have we learned? Maybe just that life is nothing more than a ratty old carnival ride held together by spit and duct tape and rusted screws. As we make the curve, the whole thing shakes and shivers horribly, and we can see the carnies down below smoking Marlboro cigarettes and staring off into the oblivion of the darkened midway. We begin to pick up speed as we clear the corner, and one, scratching a festering scab on his forearm, looks up long enough for us to make eye contact. It is like looking into the eyes of a shark, cold and lifeless and with absolutely no human recognition; not a look of hatred or anger, but dispassion, total ambivalence to our condition. And then the ride moves on until it stops.