This page is moving

Yes, finally (and with the help of my friend John in Ohio, sine qua nihil) I managed to get the new site up and running. This blog is probably going to go away as a result, and even if it doesn’t, this will be my last post at this URL.

For that handful of you who have faithfully followed whatever it was I had to say, most of the content here will move to this new and improved URL:

http://www.atfulcrum.com

That’s where you’ll find the latest information on @Fulcrum and quite a lot of my musings on music, along with shining musical examples and hints on the best way to buy them and keep me solvent. (As if.)

However, certain posts that appeared here will not appear there, but instead at @Fulcrum’s sister site:

http://www.rick-mealey.com

which is where you’ll find information about projects extracurricular to @Fulcrum and, for those of you who don’t find such things stultifyingly boring, my spiritual ramblings. Whatever appears there will more than likely also tie into my personal Facebook page, once I suss that out.

So stop coming here, start going there, and I’ll meet you halfway the way I always do. Kiss kiss.

 

Me, circa Ostara

More navel-gazing today. Taking time away from the music, and the new track now intended to end the first Describing An Arc album, to re-assess where I am, where I’ve been, where I hope to be headed, and where I’m probably headed if I merely ride the tides. It’s a fit day for it, being the Equinox and all, a sign of new beginnings.

I find myself at a stage right now where I don’t resemble what my natal chart tells me I should be. Over the years I’ve allowed the Cancerian part of me to overwhelm the Aries: Cancer was rising when I was born, and my Moon conjuncts it in the 12th house, and both Moon and Ascendant form a rather hard square to my Sun. It’s only recently that I’ve determined that certain of my Cancerian Moon traits haven’t been necessarily serving me well in my quest for internal peace and happiness, and may indeed be holding me back from the abundance that Spirit tells me I deserve.

So, in addition to inspecting the natal chart again, and learning about harmonic, persona, and return charts in the quest for some semblance of new insight, I’ve also started learning about and throwing the Tarot in the last few weeks. The deck that chose me at my local New Age shop was Arnell Ando’s Transformation Tarot—imagery herein is only tangentially related to the more traditional Rider-Waite deck, and loaded with Renaissance and aboriginal shamanistic symbolism; Ando is also an established art therapist. I understand it’s not usually a good choice for someone’s first deck, but strictly speaking it’s not my first deck: this was (and I had bought the Rider-Waite deck previously, but that was a stocking stuffer for my ex-wife, who presumably still has it).

Never one for half-measures, the Vernal Equinox seemed a good day to throw Rahdue’s Wheel: a massive spread using all 78 cards, as outlined by tarot educator Eileen Connolly in her book Tarot: The Handbook for the Journeyman. If we can accept that the Tarot contains most, if not all, the various aspects of life in its 78 pictorial images, I imagined that throwing all 78 might show me in the most detail where I was headed in the right direction and where I have been deficient. And as I only found minimal information on the spread elsewhere on the Interwebs, I’m reproducing it here for further advancement (yours and mine).

I have no idea how this is going to translate to your browser, but the full spread sequence looks somewhat like this:

 

						38
68	69		37			25			27		59	58
67		36		24		12		14		28		57
66			23		11		1		15			56
65				10		13		2				55
64	35	22	9		26		39		3	16	29	54
63				8				4				53
62			21		7		5		17			52
61		34		20		6		18		30		51
60			33			19			31			50
						32
		49	48	47	46	45	44	43	42	41	40
		78	77	76	75	74	73	72	71	70

 

One of two pages I’ve found on the web that had any kind of guide for interpretation at all is here. Both of those pages say more or less the same thing, but this one goes into a bit more detail as regards Connolly’s own thoughts on the spread. And even then it’s not all of Connolly’s thoughts: for that, I guess you buy the book.

The first part of the spread deals with the wheel of the present life, dealt out in a clockwise pattern to represent the hours of the day (and, probably not coincidentally, the houses of the zodiac), along with a 13th card in the center which acts as a summing up of, or solidifier for, the previous 12. Next is the wheel of future potentialities, twelve more cards dealt outside the original clock positions of the present-life wheel, with a 13th card placed below and to the left of the first solidifier card (the 13th). A third wheel follows to indicate past life activity, twelve cards around the clock and a 13th placed to the right of the 26th card. That accounts for half the deck right there.

Then, ten cards are dealt from right to left to shed some light on the immediate past life of the querent (in this case, me) as it pertains to a situation in the present. Connolly states: “The information we derive from these nine cards only presents the patterns of similarity between one life experience and another—the karmic pattern.” They get read as a unit, with the 49th card acting as a solidifier and “key to the present life”, and I figured that I could borrow a technique from British Tarot educator Paul Hughes-Barlow and use his card-counting technique (along with his theory of Elemental Dignities) to glean a deeper understanding. One would think that having lived through the immediate past I would be well aware of what had happened, but I was looking for a fresh angle and maybe an undercurrent of which I had not been aware.

Ten more cards comprise a second block to be interpreted as a unit, this one in light of past life relationships, from bottom to top and to the right of the three clock faces. The 59th card becomes the solidifier for that pillar, set to the left of the 58th card, and represents the “key to knowledge” according to Connolly: “…The solidifier confirms, consolidates and refers only to past life relationships that are relevant to the present.”

Ten further cards are dealt in order to bring light to past life experiences, again from bottom to top and with the 69th card laid to the right of the 68th. Card 69 acts as a solidifier, the “key to open”: it “holds the lesson of the pillar”.

Having dispensed with 69 cards, the final nine are to be used for specific questions posed by the querent, and are to be laid face down. The querent may ask up to nine questions, with a card turned over in answer to each.

That’s Rahdue’s Wheel, and that’s the spread I threw earlier today after I came up with nine questions for the last nine cards. Now to get down to the mammoth task of actually interpreting it…

 

The demands of broadcast, or of self

Actually, broadcast probably has nothing to do with what I’m up to at the moment.. it’s more for myself than anything.

I’ve been hunting around the Innertoobs (be vewy, vewy quiet) in search of progressive-rock-minded radio streams that may wish to take a chance on @Fulcrum music. Silly me, I thought I could just throw my muse up to Tunecore, and it would automagically find its progressive-rock-minded audience. (bzzt) “Tell him what he’s won, Johnny!” “First, a grand total of three or four actual sales off iTunes in the space of a year and nine months! Second, the latest in ladies’ fashion with this Speidel gold-plated wrist band!”

So marketing and self-promotion come into the equation after all, at neither of which I consider myself too terribly adept. And having a listen to the two albums available for your dining and dancing pleasure, I find that one sounds great—this would be the one I did in three weeks, Movement Along A Path. The other, into which I sank three or four years and my marriage, not so much. That would be Luminous City, the current objet d’art under discussion. Mixes collapse into the black hole of phase cancellation; entire instruments drop out at unexpected places; the vocals sound by turns like I am singing from a great distance from the microphone, say atop K2 with the mic (not even an SM-58, but a clone of one) down in a valley, or as if someone were trying to cram marshmallows (or a down pillow) into my mouth as I sang.

While I knew it needed to happen sometime, I hadn’t intended on revisiting Luminous City until after the third (fourth?) @Fulcrum record was completed; I projected a remix for down the road a few years. But on revieing the album with a mind towards actual airplay, it was clear to me that I needed  to revise my plans a little, so as not to embarrass myself or sully the good name of @Fulcrum too terribly much.

And so here in the Sanctum, the Mac sits in its road case for the time being, waiting. I have my old home-built Frankincense pee cee running again for the first time in God knows how long, and am reacquainting myself with the joys of Sonar, Cakewalk’s flagship DAW. It’s been, um, enlightening:

• Decisions I made at the time in order to conserve CPU resources, for example printing tracks too hot and with too much effect, are coming back to nip at my bum.
• The tracks weren’t recorded all that well to begin with, a function of what I had to work with at the time.
• My Traveler interface so far refuses to operate above 16 bit/44.1kHz under Windows XP. This is a head-scratcher. (By contrast, I’m recording Describing An Arc at 24/96 on my Mac, roughly 18 times the resolution of Luminous City.) I cannot work in Sonar’s preferred method of dealing with audio hardware, WDM, because then nothing happens: either the transport fails to move me through the audio, or it moves and no audio actually shows up at the Traveler. I have to use the slightly-more industry standard ASIO driver for any communication to take place, which Sonar will do, but it’s clear to me from working that it doesn’t particularly enjoy speaking a foreign language.
• An entire track failed to get backed up to my dual-layer DVDs back in 2009 and needs to be recut entirely. I can’t find the session on any of my other backups yet, and it doesn’t still exist on my hard drives. Naturally, it’s the song I think sounds the worst of the lot. Maybe that’s a blessing in disguise.

To my relief, some of the stations I’ve contacted like what they hear and have consented to add Luminous City to their rotation. Just as soon as I can get them a CD or a halfway decent sounding empty-three.

I’d just rather not give them the thing as it stands. For the reasons I’ve described, I’d rather not take a chance that someone hears a song from it and gets turned off by the shoddy workmanship that went into the first mix—which I will readily admit came from the process of being on the low end of the learning curve of the craft of engineering at the time.

So that’s what’s happening down here at the moment. Work on Describing An Arc is at a standstill for now, as (wonder of wonders) I find myself satisfied enough with the models from the first disc that I can feel comfortable presenting them to other musicians for overdubs.

I’m also still working on moving this blog to my own domain, using the standalone WordPress software, but there are the usual technical hurdles to overcome first. As those stations and streams begin playing @Fulcrum, I will let you know here, or there, without fail.

 

Road map

In the very near future I expect to drop the official @Fulcrum web site on the world.

The plan at the moment calls for it being built around WordPress. I’m still looking into how well the WP framework can accommodate the things I have planned for the site, and what it will take for WP to run on the server that will host both the @Fulcrum site and its sister site, rick-mealey.com. I’m working with wiser minds than mine, but like me, their schedules leave little time to consider these things.

Because I’m kind of in love with my own writing, and so that it shouldn’t go to waste (or the black hole of the Internet bit bucket). I will make a game attempt to move the music-related posts that appeared here over there, and other less musical-related posts that appeared here to a new blog at rick-mealey.com (also to be built around WordPress), and this page will go away.

I have no idea when all this is going to happen, as it seems I’m caught up in other things like corralling my fellow musicians to cut tracks for Describing An Arc, gigging, learning new material, and generally keeping myself alive and sane. But I hope it will be soon.

 

Some days are like this

Rose quartz.

This might be my longest one yet. (I know, I know, that’s what she said.) But a lot happened in a compressed space of time, or a compressed time of space, and I think I need to share it all.

I guess I should start with the big news: yesterday I became a Level II Reiki practitioner.

During the course of attunement, I sensed an entire corps of spirit guides present to watch and aid the master as she worked. I didn’t recognize most of them: I guessed that these were people who’d gone down this road before me. I did sense both my grandmothers, my friends from Sultani Trip in California, a friend from Manhattan, another from Iselin, and (least surprising to me) the higher self of the friend in Lincroft whom I have recently banished from my orbit of friends. She was the one who first noticed healing qualities in my touch. In a very real sense she set me on this path, and I believe these words are the closest she will ever get to understanding how grateful I am that she felt that.

I differentiate between the woman I unfriended and her higher self. My intuition, which with her influence has grown considerably and errs less often than it used to, tells me that when she finally betrayed and cast down the mantle of friendship once and for all, she was acting purely out of selfishness and not out of her higher self. All our higher selves (you have one too) act uniformly and unerringly from a place of love, as mine unfailingly did for her when she needed someone on whom to lean, and as hers only rarely did for me in any of her dealings with me from day one. Both of us will blame the other for the chain of love and friendship being broken between us, and hold ourselves harmless, and we will both be right, and we will both be wrong.

It might have been this that Jane (the Reiki Master who performed my “upgrade”) sensed as she noticed imbalances in several of my chakras. She didn’t specify which, but in light of what she had to say immediately after she finished, I infer that it was the bottom four of the seven: those which deal with (among other things) the survival instinct, self-esteem and sense of personal power, love, and sexual energy. I did note that she gave me stones to hold over my breasts as she worked, but my eyes were closed throughout, so I didn’t know till later what they were.

Afterward, Jane said (no, this is not a cue for song–I wish it was) that all of my future relationships were going to end the same way as my recent ones had until I was finally able to change myself. I told her that I had been working on it for at least eight months now, that the core of the next album was devotion to that self-work. She was glad to hear it. After performing Reiki with her on a couple of willing volunteers (her daughter and her daughter’s friend), Jane ended the session/attunement by starting me on my collection of handy crystals to have around during a Reiki session. She gave me a small kyanite stone, to cleanse the aura and any negative energy other crystals might absorb.

I treated myself afterward to a few more crystals, a dollar apiece at my local New Age shop. Snowflake obsidian for the first, root chakra (the soles of the feet to the perineum), blue lace agate for the fifth (over the throat), and one of the stones Jane gave me to hold over my heart: a somewhat heart-shaped rose quartz for cleansing the fourth (over the heart).

But her words troubled me. How far had I come in those eight months? How much work remains? Certainly, the Reiki has helped me to this point–and excising Lincroft from my life has helped too. But still, I am only dimly aware of what is broken, and then only on this physical plane: I’m a Reiki practitioner now, but I have yet to gain my first client, my practice is not yet established in any sense of the word, and I am still living under my parents’ roof. These conditions of unemployment and dependence on my parents have caused me to lose much of the confidence I enjoyed when I was married and in my own place.

Other than a brief interlude of wakefulness and a rather trying encounter with a hurting friend (who wound up lashing out at me in her anger over someone else), I slept last night for about 13 hours solid, and awakened feeling curiously empty, powerless, restless, as though something had come in the night and carved chunks out of my soul as I slept. Voices I didn’t recognize were taunting me, telling me that I was late to the party of life again, and that all I was good for was for cleaning up and being dismissed immediately afterward. Love was entirely out of the question: my role in life is to be used and discarded.

But Jane had advised me that I could expect my third eye chakra to open even more now that I had received the second attunement, and I got guidance. I sensed being told to lash my bike to the car rack and head out to Bluff Point in Groton, look for a quiet place in the woods, and meditate there for a while with the rose quartz resting on my heart chakra.

It was not easy getting to Groton: traffic headed for the Shoreline towns east of New Haven and the two casinos in the southeast corner of the state saw to that. I noticed that no matter which lane I got in, it immediately ground to a halt.

There are days when I have been known to display the patience of Job himself. This wasn’t one; the day was getting hotter in my non-air-conditioned car, and I was getting crankier and more fidgety as we all inched along the 95. I wedged the rose quartz between the shoulder strap of my seat belt and my tee-shirt, atop my heart chakra, and hoped for compassion.

I didn’t get that, but I did get a message from the future: the nondescript voice of the lover yet to reveal herself in my life. Telling me to hang on with everything I had, that she was close, that she was looking, that she loved me and felt my love for her. I clung to that for as long as I could, but the traffic demanded more attention than I had been giving it, so I decided to wait till I got to Bluff Point before trying to connect with that feeling again.

Two and a half hours after setting out from Orange, I pulled up in the gravel lot, stretched, pulled my bike from the rack, mounted, pedaled precisely once–and the chain broke.

And if you don't love me now, you will never love me again.

Lincroft and I had been working on a cover version of a certain Fleetwood Mac song earlier in the year, and it lay dormant from January until late May, when she requested that I render a WAV file of the song for her to cut her vocals over, in the studio of an old family friend. With the project the two of us had been working on winding down, I sensed that the end of our relationship was also near, and that it had needed to die for a while: its twitching carcass was causing more than its share of unrest in my soul. I was certain that once she had the file, my purpose in her life would have come to an end and she could safely push me out of her life once and for all with all ledgers balanced in her eyes.

I rendered the file. Sure enough, when I left New Jersey for Connecticut, I barely heard from her unless it was for something I could do for her, or for her to complain about how her life was going–never once asking how I might be faring, or sharing good news with me. And when I lapsed into a deep depression early in June and went to her for comfort, she let it be known in no uncertain terms that she could not be bothered with me. I told her to kiss my ass goodbye, and have not spoken to her since.

I won’t deny that there have been second thoughts, third thoughts, wondering about the circumstances under which we might eventually be friends again–but when that chain broke, I understood finally that there were none under which that would be possible without a lot of personal growth on both our accounts. We had served the purposes for which the universe brought us together, and now we were, and are, truly separate again. Perfect strangers.

I wondered whether this was the real reason I had been guided to Bluff Point, and why I had to travel so far to come to this insight. But here I was, and now I was going to have to get where I perceived I needed to be on foot. I didn’t have my Timberlands with me; only my Reeboks, my cross-trainers; they would have to do.

Bluff Point State Park and Coastal Reserve was, at one time, John Winthrop’s home when he was Royal Governor of the Massachusetts Bay Colony in the mid-1600s. According to the state’s Department of Environmental Protection, this 1.5 square mile parcel is the last significant piece of undeveloped land on the entire 618 statute miles of Connecticut coastline. Access to the bluff and the adjoining beach is by dirt and gravel trails wending through heavy woodland that has overtaken all the building sites over the last 350 years, and because it is a coastal reserve, motorized vehicles are prohibited, so you can get there on horseback, on bicycle (as I had originally intended), or on foot. Off I went.

Couples riding bicycles past me; sleek, beautiful women on the main trail when I found myself on a smaller trail parallelling it; a sense that now I was walking by myself for real. That old Robert Frost poem we all had to read when we were in grade school sprang to mind.

I made the beach, watched women stripping down to bikinis while their consorts stripped down to swim trunks, passed a lesbian couple burying their child waist-deep in the clam shell-layered sand for his comfort and amusement. I kicked off my shoes and waded into the seaweed-snarled water to alleviate the itching from numerous mosquito bites. I wondered what the hell I was doing here, and found myself wishing my ex-wife were with me: it was with her that I discovered this place.

And just as I was about to put my Boks back on, something changed.

My foot stepped on a smooth stone, about the size of my palm. It was the kind of stone I thought my ex might like–she always liked collecting beach stones and presenting some to me as little gifts–so I put it in my pocket and eventually carried it back to the car.

I walked up to the top of the bluff–the Point itself–and looked out over about a 270-degree view of Long Island Sound: New London off in the distance to my right, Mystic and Stonington off to the left. Below me, Hispanic fishermen were casting their lines into the waves, and coming up with flatfish. I thought, that’s very cool, they’re seeing something for their effort, they won’t go hungry tonight.

Behind me, two women had made their way onto the promontory. Both were attractive, but one was amazingly radiant. Sleeker and prettier than anyone I’d encountered there; short light brown hair blown here and there by the breeze; eyes narrow as they focused on the sunlight reflected off the Sound, but still shining; smiling as though she couldn’t help herself. A tight white top concealing a floral bikini beneath, short skirt revealing a decent pair of legs. She could have been in her early 30s. As they chatted with one another and passed behind me to head to a more private area of the bluff behind the copious scrub, we exchanged smiles for one another.

I remembered my purpose and left them to their conversation. The main path doubled back into the woods on the other side of the peninsula, and the place to which I felt I was being guided lay along this part of the trail. En route I chatted for a moment with a kind and pretty married woman whose bike I admired (all the chrome!). It turned out she needed to know whether she was headed in the right direction to get to the Point; I told her she was, pointing back at the two attractive women (I lingered over the sight of the radiant one), visible in the foreground with the Point behind them and hidden by a thick layer of rosehip bushes.

It had been a while since I’d been here and didn’t know the extent to which the place had changed, so when I looked up and saw a clearing to my right I felt that that was the place. I took a path into the woods that I didn’t recall being quite as narrow, and looked for a way in.

It wasn’t. There was no way to that clearing from this path, and as I walked I realized I’d never been on this trail before, and that that wasn’t the clearing I remembered. Mosquitoes and gnats saw dinner coming, and I did my best to swat them away or kill them as they landed. The quartz still safely in my pocket, I composed myself and asked aloud, “You brought me here to get eaten alive?”

The response was swift, and kind. “We advised you to look for a quiet place in the woods and meditate with the rose quartz over your heart. We didn’t actually specify that it had to be here. Anyway, you should have listened to your ex-wife when she was trying to tell you not to go into the deep woods without bug spray.”

I shook my head as though little tiny bits of brain hadn’t assembled themselves into the proper sequence. They were right; they hadn’t said that. And now I did hear the voice of my ex-wife saying exactly that, as she had been all along; but with me focused as I was on finding the clearing, it became so much ambient noise, like the sound of planes taking off across Mumford’s Cove at Groton-New London Airport. I should have known better, and now the only way out was through.

At one point the path I was on began to parallel the main path, and through the trees I saw the two attractive women walking. I hoped that the path would veer back toward a connection with the main, but instead it went the other way.

It began to undulate up and down; large boulders could have been altars, tree roots on an uphill climb could have been the steps to a cathedral. But I was in my first chakra then, trying very hard not to become a human blood sacrifice for the swarming insects, and too busy with that to notice what I would have seen if I’d been in my seventh.

I finally came out onto the main path again, and could see the white top of the radiant woman far ahead in the distance, walking with her friend. And directly in front of me, a sign pointing to the foundation of the Winthrop homestead. The clearing to which I thought I had been guided. I felt either I could abandon my purpose and follow the ladies, or stay true and let them go.

What happened next occurred maybe in the time it takes to blink. Without thinking about it, I sought out the radiant girl’s higher self, and found her almost immediately. “Hi!” she said, wordlessly, just inside my third eye.

“Hi! Listen, I don’t know you, but I want to send a little energy your way. Is that OK?”

“Please do! I love to be loved.”

The women were climbing a short rise on the path in the distance, and once they were descending it, they would be obscured from view. Aware of the rose quartz in my pocket, I drew the distance symbol over the image of her in the distance, and held my hand out toward the radiant girl’s heart chakra. My palm tingled for an instant, then grew hot.

And as they walked down the other side of the rise, I could vaguely see her turning around, as though something had hit her from behind, and I sensed a smile coming back. Then they were gone.

I turned back to the foundation of Winthrop’s old house, now overrun with brush and thicket, and I heard: “It’s OK. Don’t go in here, there’s more bugs. Find someplace else.”

And I realized that this was the purpose for which my guides had brought me to this place: to give Reiki to that girl, and to understand that it helped her. And to remind me that I have that gift now, and to remind me what that energy is made of.

I never did catch up with them before they left the park, but I don’t think I needed to. It was good to leave things as they were. Even the subsequent drive home felt better; although there was traffic headed southbound on the 95 as well as northbound, this time I managed to get into the lanes that were moving.

My guides had one more suggestion for me as I drove homeward. “Why don’t you stop at that music store and see if that cute girl is working there. Ask her if she’s playing with anyone and go see her band if she is.”

She was working, and we wound up talking a little shop as I browsed the various drum kits in her area. It turned out that she doesn’t play with anyone; she knows what to do with a practice pad, but isn’t all that much of a musician by her own reckoning. Simply a music lover who wanted to be around music. We talked about drummers and cymbal manufacturers. We exchanged names as I was walking out; her name (I presume it’s a nickname) rhymes with mine.

And I’m home now, and not out in the woods, and as I finish this up it’s about 11:30 PM. I’m going to go into the next room with the rose quartz, lay the pseudo-heart over my beating heart, and expect nothing, and everything.

 

Someone else’s house

Amazing. Just when you think you’re past something, you get an echo that sets you tailspinning all over again.

I have a bad habit of not locking the keypad on my Blackberry when I stuff it into my pocket for transport out to my car. Sometimes, while it is in my pocket, it dials people up without my knowledge.

This time it dialed my ex-wife. We spoke for a few minutes, but she was busy with the move from her second-floor apartment to the floor above: unpacking those remnants of our marriage that she took with her. And I was busy with a few errands for my parents.

Then, in Walgreens on one of those errands, Heatwave’s Always And Forever came on the Muzak. “There’ll always be sunshine when I look at you…”

It’s not even like it was our wedding song; that was Louis Armstrong’s version of A Kiss To Build A Dream On. But that line, and the sentiment behind it, always seems to bring me back to the day of our wedding, a day of such promise for the future, with a woman I loved such as I had never loved before. There was, and is, sunshine in that goofy little grin of hers, and it explodes into a nova when that grin breaks out into a smile or a full-throated second-gen Italian-American laugh. It’s one of the things that attracted me to her to begin with. And on that day, always and forever seemed not just doable but inevitable for us both.

The intervening ten years of financial hardship, of an economy ground to a halt by Republican pro-business and anti-labor policies, and the physical toll it took on not just the two of us, but an entire generation who realized that theirs would be the first generation to not at least equal the level of success of their parents, slowly chipped away at and finally shattered the ice sculpture crafted on that wedding day.

And then, as it inexorably will, walking out to the car from the checkout counter at Walgreens, next up on the iPod behind my eyeballs, Photographs and Memories.

Memories that come at night
take me to another time
back to a happier day
when I called you mine…

Summer skies and lullabies
nights we couldn’t say goodbye
and of all the things we knew
not a dream survived…

But we sure had a good time when we started way back when
morning walks and bedroom talks, oh how I loved you then

I have not lost my ex-wife the way Jim Croce’s narrator did. One of the reasons we divorced to begin with was in order to preserve the friendship that otherwise would have been chipped away along with the rest of that ice sculpture. We’ve been successful at that, and can look back on the good and bad days of our marriage with a bit more wisdom and humor than we had while we were going through it.

But in listening to her tell of the emotions dredged up by the move one flight up, which has been happening now for several weeks, I find my mind drawn back to those days, and that house about an hour north and east of where I am now. My mind has begun to wander the halls and rooms of that old house: the walk-up attic, the half-finished basement, the living room we painted, the dining room a friend from church painted, the spare bedroom that was the first Sanctum Sanctorum, the spare bedroom in back that we shared when I had to work graveyard shifts at IBM, the oversized two-car garage, the back yard I mowed with vigor and the victory garden I planted.. the neighbor’s back yard I mowed when his heart didn’t feel up to the task (not that I waited to ask him how he was doing)..

As I involuntarily wander those rooms now, I encounter other people I only dimly recognize as the people who bought the house from us, when we knew we would have to sell it or else have it taken out from under us via foreclosure.

And I wonder that I ever thought I had adequately grieved the end of all that.

I look around me at the semi-organized clutter here in the basement that has become my new Sanctum Sanctorum, the space where the next @Fulcrum album is taking shape. IT contracts, let alone IT jobs, are nowhere on the horizon, and the unemployment checks are not large enough to justify getting my own place; in fact, no job I could get now would provide me with a check big enough for that without a second job and forever abandoning the musical aspirations I have held since just before I was a teenager.

Turning my back from that horizon, I have a steep mountain in front of me: the new path I have chosen to follow. No one in my family has ever been an entrepreneur, and have no advice to give me as I start on this path of self-employment other than to give it up and find a nice, safe job in IT somewhere close with benefits and a steady paycheck. And I feel those shackles around my ankles now, along with those of my own misgivings.

My parents, whose roof I share now, with their pensions and their Medicare and Social Security, do not understand the extent to which the economic climate has changed in the last thirty years since Reagan took office. I recall the night in November 1980 sitting in the student union at Emerson College with my roommate, watching the election results coming in, thinking that things were going to be very different soon. I had no idea how different, or that the effects would linger for as long as they have.

I am typing these words in someone else’s house, thinking about a house that was mine and is now also someone else’s, and I find I can’t stop the tears coming now as I remember what’s been lost and regard the mountain before me, which I must scale in order to gain even a little of that back.

And I don’t cry. I haven’t cried in so long that I’ve forgotten what that feels like, and the last time anything moved me to it.

But I am walking now through the blurred vision, with the terrain shifting in front of me as water distorts the ocular perception, and I am walking a gentle grade upward. It will get steeper, and I will not walk as quickly as I otherwise would into a new experience, until the chains around my legs begin to rust and fall away.

I have friends, including my ex-wife, to cheer me along as I begin this path, and my gratitude for their presence in my life is a comfort I cannot even express now.

And I am chanting to myself. They are the words spoken to me by my new path, the words of Usui Mikao.

The secret of inviting happiness through many blessings,
the spiritual medicine for all ailments.

Just for today,
don’t get angry
don’t worry
work diligently
be kind to yourself and others
count your blessings.

Every morning and evening,
keep these words in your heart
and chant them with your voice.
Improve your mind and body.

Here I go…

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A eulogy for Van

The more commonplace circumstance is for a wife to bury her husband, and I stood by as that happened this morning. But in a perfect world, that happens when both have reached a ripe old age.. not when the husband was about to turn 59 in a few months.

Infinitely more so when the funeral bell is ringing insistently above our heads at the Orthodox church, pastor and Psaltis cantor singing the service in the ancient tones of Byzantine chant, swinging a canister of frankincense over the coffin and the grieving survivors– and the parents are sitting in the front row with the surviving wife and son, the mother wondering aloud through her anguish why it isn’t her instead of her son in that casket, pleading with him to wait for her at the gates of heaven; the father letting the tears fall freely and remaining mostly silent and in wordless conversation with his maker.

Not a month ago Van was here at the house, caulking as much of our shower stall as he could reach (leaving the rest for a tall guy like me to finish the job– which I still haven’t done), talking about introducing me to his Reiki therapist, offering to take me along to a Qi Gong class with his brother. And in turn, I was offering (again) to take him over to the VA hospital for his scheduled treatment if his mother were ever otherwise indisposed. He’d been fighting the lung cancer for about a year by then, and other than the complete loss of hair looked very much like he was going to beat this thing: joking around as per his usual hale self, easy to be around, optimistic in the face of what could be coming. And did, finally, on the 10th at about 9:45pm.

Van and his wife Judy were in Ohio at the time. None of the family could understand what possessed Van to get on a plane in his condition. Only later did we discover that the disease had begun to spread again, this time with little to get in its way. One eye had gotten lazy without the muscular support to keep it under the control of his brain. He must have known his time was coming very soon, and he wanted to say goodbye to Michael, his adopted son attending Ohio State.

As near as I can determine the timeline, they got off the plane in Dayton either Sunday night or Monday morning, but the next thing we knew he was in a Dayton hospital on a ventilator. And from all accounts, suffering. We got the news that he’d left us at around 10pm our time.

All my mother could say at the wake was “Not fair.. it’s not fair.” Van had the charisma to own any room he walked into, and to make you feel comfortable while he was in there owning it.. but never displayed any of the arrogance of awareness of owning the room. Some might say that becoming an actor at the late age he did was a little peculiar, but he never minded that, and it came naturally to him; he was as easy playing Louie (or was it Eddie?) in Lost In Yonkers as he was playing Linus in You’re A Good Man Charlie Brown (a role for which I understand he had to learn to sing). His friends came from all backgrounds and ethnicities, and he moved easily between them and the Greek community in which he was raised.

For his brother and sisters, he was the go-to guy who got things sorted, and he willingly took that yoke on his shoulders for the rest of the family too. When a deck needed building for our above-ground pool, it was Van who planned it and helped my dad build it. When our family needed another car, it was at his suggestion that it be a Saturn. When he no longer had a need for that old Kay guitar on which he had learned to play Walk Don’t Run, he knew of a musically-inclined cousin who could maybe get a little more mileage out of it. And I played it– badly– till the glue no longer held the fretboard to the body of the guitar.

At the cemetery, as the 21-gun salute went off in the distance and the bugler blew Taps in honor of his Viet Nam service, and as the seaman handed Judy the flag that had been draped over the coffin, saying “On behalf of a grateful country..”, I had a vision pre-empt everything that was going on in front of me. The pre-cancer Van, face shining, looking up in profile as he beheld the place we came from and to which we will all eventually return. I guess I heard the voice of C S Lewis speaking up in my subconscious, through his imagined senior tempter Screwtape, pondering what I believe Van felt in his last moments of life and first beyond it:

“All horrors have followed the same course, getting worse and worse and forcing you into a kind of bottle-neck till, at the very moment when you thought you must be crushed, behold! you were out of the narrows and all was suddenly well. The extraction hurt more and more and then the tooth was out. The dream became a nightmare and then you woke. You die and die and then you are beyond death. How could I ever have doubted it?”

As I write I am recording his last voice mail message to me into my computer from my cell phone. In the next day or two I will be collecting those messages he left on his sister’s and his mother’s answering machines and recording those too for transfer to a CD, so that we can preserve the sound of his jocular, kind baritone for the next generation.

He saw me play out precisely once.. and while he had the misfortune to witness perhaps the worst performance I ever gave, he had nothing but encouraging words for me and the band. I take comfort that he’ll be present in some form the next time Old Man Noises take the stage, and I know he’ll approve.

And I think I’m going to feel him hugging me and giving me a peck on the cheek.. something he was never ever ashamed to do for family and friends alike. He taught me. He taught us all.

I wish I were better at applying his lessons. In time, maybe I will be.

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