Woke up to an inch of snow on the mountain, shaved, showered, checked the blood sugar, took my pills and made a pot of coffee.  Checked email and called my client in Orange County to verify a meeting.  He's sick and so we cancel the meeting and push it out two weeks.  No big deal I'm on retainer.

Still need to drive down the mountain, buy some milk and Guinness and deposit my monthly check, but I decide to kill an hour to let the traffic thin out while the snow melts.  I’m reading the comics and surfing the news when my well worn thrift shop office chair slowly, almost softly, collapses.  Dragging my ass up off the floor I manage to get to my feet and flip the damn thing over to discover that tubular steel frame of the base has cracked from metal fatigue.  Since it’s the only thing I have to sit on other than my tool boxes, I pull on my jeans and boots, grab my checkbook and jacket and head out the door.

After I scrape the snow off the windshield of my trusty rusty 1991 Pathfinder, I drive down to check out the thrift shops in Crestline.  The only place with used furniture is closed so I drive through town and head down the mountain.  There’s a WalMart around the corner from the branch bank in San Bernardino, so I’ll kill all my birds with one trip - bank, beer, milk, a new pair of reading glasses and a new chair as well as some shelves for the kitchen that I’ve been meaning to pick up for over a year.  Since it’s a forty mile round trip from the house to the bank and back I try to make each trip down the mountain count.

Two hours later, I carried the groceries down the drive way and stairs to my hole under the main house.  The snow hasn’t melted and as a precaution, I shoveled the slushy stuff off the stairs before I carried the shelves and chair down to my little front room.  Last May when I tripped and fell down those stairs, it cost me two surgeries, seventeen days in the hospital with $118,000 bill, which I have no idea how I’m going to pay.  With the snow cleared I safely navigated the two trips down from the car and began the assembly of my new chair.  It went together without too much hassle but the end result isn’t nearly as comfortable or flexible as my old dead chair.  It doesn’t recline so watching TV is not going to be as easy on my arthritic back.  At my age gravity is almost never my friend.

Back up and running I surfed the net and checked out Leonard Cohen’s new music and the blogs on Open Salon reading some of the Valentine’s Day posts which made me recall the woman who broke my heart:

The Sisters of Mercy

Memory – it’s just not anything to be trusted.  Unlike dreams, memories are consciously edited.  Like dreams, the detail gets lost in the blur of time.  Lost detail reduces our resolution to what we can accept, to what we allow into our conscious mind.  So our memories are shaped by fear and dread, love and desire, anger, hope, regret and pain – outrage at our own pain and embarrassment at the pain we’ve inflicted on others.  Facts have little to do with how we assemble our personal recollection of any event.  So much of memory is circumstantial – not what or who, but how we see and hear and feel about the situation.  To those of us who’ve lost our religion and are facing our mortality, the last refuge is the worn existential cliché, “In the end, we are how we’re remembered!”

So I reach into the crusty goo of psychic scar tissue and remember.  I remember an anxious, frustrated, angry and frightened kid who’d just turned twenty while hitchhiking from Texas to LA.  He’d just got his first paycheck from got a job in a print shop and rented a small room, actually a large linen closet; from a bunch of hippies in an old five bedroom mock Victorian north of Hollywood Boulevard.  In the candle lit living room with his head on a big pillow, he was lost in the drone of Leonard Cohen’s voice.   The Sister’s of Mercy, whores as nuns as whores, wrapped around his troubled mind, but he couldn’t hear the lyric because he really wasn’t there.  It’s hard to listen when you’re not in the room and when you’re a fugitive, it’s hard to stay anywhere for long.  Then he realized he’d been so busy running and settling into LA, he’d forgotten his own birthday.

1969 was a strange year.  The world was shaking apart at the seams and that angry scared kid had just stepped off the edge into freefall.  What frightened him made him angry and the only thing he really trusted was his low rage.  It helped him as he hang glided over the collapsed abyss of what had once been his life.  Between that summer when Buzz Armstrong first set foot on the moon, and the fall of 1977, he’d played Cohen’s song hundreds of times, but he never heard the words because there were lawyers, lovers, friends, reclaimed family, near death experiences, hospital emergency rooms, doctors, more lawyers and even an Indian Chief - all of it culminating in a doomed fairytale love affair with the seventeen-year-old bastard daughter of Leonard Cohen’s Susanne.

Six degrees of separation and the boy, who was now a man, became the white knight that rescued the virgin gypsy princess from the seductive attentions of her alcoholic mother’s twenty-something boy toy.  She was the love of his life, but he was incapable of sustaining chivalry and after eight months together, she was gone - along with his mind.  They made love one last time and then bathed and before he went to work, he put her on the plane to Montreal.  He was shredded but incapable of surrender until, weeks later, he snapped and destroyed the club where he tended bar.

The cops who arrested him were amused, even more amused were doctors and nurses in the UCLA emergency room where they tweezed out the broken glass and stitched up the cuts in his hands and arms.  The resident explained, “At some point everyone here has wanted to just let go and rip this place apart, but we don’t because later tonight and throughout the weekend we’re going to have to deal with a lot of blood and guts and we won’t be able to save everyone.  Your case is lightweight and your story is something that we all understand.”

He bailed out and pled out and he then was on probation, in court ordered therapy, alone, broken, and at the bottom of that abyss, when he dragged himself up and out to find:  The Sisters of Mercy.

“Yes you who must leave everything that you cannot control,”

This time he really listened.

“It begins with your family, but soon it comes ‘round to your soul,”

He actually heard the words.

"Well I've been where you're hanging and I think I can see how you're pinned,"

He was finally in the room.

"When you're not feeling holy, your loniness says that you've sinned."

 

He had no other place to go.

So on this Valentine’s Day I raise my glass of Guinness and silently toast to no one here, “Here’s to beautiful losers, heart broken boys and lonely old men.”

except for attributed photos and text all content is copyrighted  © 2012 JKM