Don't Look Too Closely

If you are one of those folks who plan their lives out to the finest detail, I bid you step back from that view for a moment and hear the story of my old friend Dave, who had no time to prepare.

Dave was impossible to miss. His skin was the color of buttermilk; he had bright orange hair (well cut) and a heavily freckled face and at a skinny six-foot-one, moved effortlessly and with a surprising grace. At 23 — unlike me at the time — he was comfortable in a suit and tie. And though he could not get a date to save his life, he would describe his married life to-be in great detail in the breakroom at Simmons Burke as we wolfed down donuts and slurped coffee.

Dave would always sit quietly at the long conference room table during the Monday morning meeting as the golden boys hatched their plans for market domination. Simmons Burke, Inc., the family run Baltimore company, specialized in selling and servicing photocopiers and word processors. The word processors were made by Wang, which should give you an idea of when this story takes place. (Hint: 1985.)

Dave was a salesman, and he really had the gift. He could sell the hell out of Xerox copiers and Wang word processors.

I would often tail him, motoring around B-more in my clunky Celica with the racing stripe on the side, sweating through the wool suits I stupidly wore in July and August simply because I had no others. Getting lost; circling blocks endlessly before finally locating our customer companies. Then, leaning over the shoulders of the secretaries, I would enlighten them in the ways of word processing while doing my best not to stare down into their V-neck sweaters and blouses.

Sometimes, when Dave would allow himself to pause in his sales calls we would meet for lunch. Over burgers at TGI Fridays, I learned that he had a very specific design for his life. He was saving up for a house, making plans for a wife and a family, investing his sizable paychecks in stocks. He had it all lined up; I was impressed.

One year at Christmas I received a Gwaltney 10-pound bone-in ham as a year end bonus. Dave won Salesman of the Year — an all-expense-paid trip to London for two.

A few days later he waved me into the conference room and under the glare of the fluorescents lamented the lack of a woman in his life. Someone who might be wooed by a whirlwind trip to England. Then he got an altogether different idea.

“Hey, you want to go with me?” he asked with his characteristic enthusiasm. I was his best friend — something I didn’t even know.

“Hell yeah,” I said without hesitation.

My excitement lit up the subsequent days. I spent two weeks actually enjoying the job. Everything just glowed.

But I never made it to London. And neither did Dave.

He didn’t show up at work — for a week. I phoned him but he didn’t answer. Erma, the beehive dooed woman who was the head of Human Resources, would only say that he was ill. I knew little about his family and I wasn’t even sure he had any friends. I rapped on his doors and windows to no avail.

Dave was gone.

The weeks ticked away. The calendar pages flipped up and whooshed off into the vortex. Tumbleweeds blew across Dave’s desk (well, it caught some dust).  Eventually, I forgot about Dave and got on with the task of being undirected, at which I excelled. Every so often I lamented the trip that was not to be.

Months passed.

Years.

Decades.

I moved around the country — the Bay Area, L.A., Washington,  Boston — hoping to find myself  (for an embarrassingly long time). I worked jobs in marketing communications and got pretty good at it.

I found myself back in Baltimore in late 2010 on a visit to see family. It was a cold March afternoon as I buttoned up my coat against a razor-edged wind and marched into the Pikesville public library. I settled into a chair and picked up the closest book, a photo essay of the Caribbean.

A homeless man shuffled by in ripped jeans and old Reeboks trailing dirty laces. He was cocooned in a balloon-like coat, straining under the weight of a huge backpack on his shoulder.

I recognized Dave immediately. His trademark orange hair was now gray and had grown long and wild. His face was cracked granite and white whiskered, the irises of his eyes tinged in yellow. He was still thin.

I stared over the top of my book, flummoxed. As Dave drifted by I watched him tote the big pack, which I could see was filled with many things, maybe even all those plans and dreams — the wife, the house and the stock portfolio — buried among the cans and bottles and who knew what else he’d picked up. I imagined that other future, the unlived one, pressed tightly into some inner pocket, pulsing with latent energy.

It took a long time for him to look around but when he saw me I smiled and offered my warmest hello.  He examined me uncomprehendingly and then turned away.

“Dave,” I said.

He didn’t respond or even look at me.

“Dave? Do you remember me? Simmons Burke?”

His head slowly turned my way. But his blank expression was my answer. He gathered himself up and hurried to the other side of the room.

I took a few breaths, then went over and asked the librarian about him. She nodded. “Schizophrenia,” she said. “He’s been coming here for years. Poor guy.”

“Jesus, man.”

I thought about it. Apparently, back in the almost London days, Dave’s genes had tripped a switch that set off a time bomb in him. The Dave that I knew — that Dave was gone. The illness, I knew, could hit perfectly healthy people as early as in their teens and twenties.

I stared at my old orange friend, felt a gust of cold air blast through the London-shaped hole in me, putting a chill on the warmth of the library. My mind flitted back to the trip that was not to be, the mystery now solved. London, I realized, had been, and still is, for me, not a world city but a place that will forever be tinged by the injustice of nature’s wrath — a sad story written as plain as day on the man’s face over by the wall.

Dave was squatted down, examining a speck on the ground. Watching him, I wondered if he ever thought about London, if he remembered being salesman of the year, or that he had once been a young man with a bright future.

* * *

There is scene at the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan where we come to understand that many soldiers have given their lives to save a single man. The captain of the rescue team, who is about to die himself, whispers his last words to Ryan, the man who will return safely home to lead a normal life. ”Earn this,” the captain says. “Earn it.”

Sitting there in the library, I imagine the old — or rather, the young — Dave there beside me, drawing his last healthy breath, just like the captain, saying those same words to me.

It was a December day a few years back when Anthony Hopkins and I shot the breeze on a deserted beach in Malibu.

I had a few hours to kill before meeting my daughter at the fast-food emporium of the Westside Pavilion in Santa Monica, and Zuma Beach seemed a pretty good place to spend a warm and sunny afternoon.

The beach was totally empty when I pulled up — no cars, no people. I kicked my Tevas into the rental car and legged it barefooted across the expanse of sand and jogged for a while on the hard packed surface near the breakers, slowing  now and again to cool my toes in the surf.

A small dot up ahead slowly became a lone man sitting on the sand. As I neared him I could see that he was roundish and pink and smiling unabashedly at the open sky. Long strands of thin gray hair danced on his shoulders. He was shirtless, wearing only bathing trunks, his arms wrapped around his knees.

When his face came into view I couldn’t help but noticing that he was Anthony Hopkins, the famous actor.

I stopped, thunderstruck. I scanned north and south — over by the dunes and toward the bluffs — for security, spouse, onlookers, fans. Anyone. But I saw not a single soul.

I was alone on a beach with Anthony Hopkins.

I had been dabbling in a Buddhist teaching back in Maryland and one of the practices was to try to separate yourself from the barrage of thoughts that assail you at every turn. The idea was to find the deeper, truer you beyond all that. “You are not your thoughts,” the teaching went. Rather, you are the being glomming on to the damn things, then calling the resulting unstable and impermanent construct, “me.”

Most thoughts, the teaching continued, are repetitious and useless. Worries, past conditioning, fears. Ninety percent garbage.

And so, standing before one of the world’s mega-celebrities, I was aware of the inner rattlings growing rather intense, telling me things like how important Mr. Hopkins was in the grand scheme of things. Far more than moi. In fact, I was a mere speck of dust in comparison.

I felt myself starting to shrink. But I didn’t. I caught it. I un-glommed.

My knees didn’t buckle, as they had a few years back when I ran into Jackson Browne hiking up a river path at Temescal Canyon. Back then I didn’t have the mind-detachment mojo going and I promptly dissolved into a heap of jelly. I practically genuflected, as I recalled how perfectly the man’s early song lyrics had catalogued the peaks and valleys of my teen years.

Some gulls landed a few feet from Anthony Hopkins and he shooed them away. I looked squarely at him.

“Hi,” I said.

“Gorgeous day,” he replied pleasantly. He was squinting, staring out to sea.

“You’d think a beach like this would be crowded,” I said. “This is amazing.”

“Is it?”

“Sure.”

I didn’t want to walk on just then. That would have been the easy way out. I wanted to enjoy not being tangled in the mind, not being awed by Mr. Hopkins.

I started chattering to him, commenting on this and that, and within a few minutes (and I cannot say exactly how it happened), found myself sitting knee to knee beside Anthony Hopkins. Two buds just enjoying the day.

“I absolutely love it here,” he said. “I’ve lived so many places. There’s nothing like this. I moved here and it feels like home to me.”

“I never found anything in L.A. that feels like home to me,” I said.

“Really?” he said, genuinely surprised.

“It’s so transient. You never get comfortable here.”

“Hmm,” he said. “I find it very welcoming.”

We talked awhile. I laid out how I was dealing with the emotional side of visiting my daughter after being away, and the situation with her mother. Then I wound into some other areas, like the way the traffic and intensity of L.A. tended to bruise my sensitive nature, and how I wished it didn’t.

He waxed on about the beauty of the ocean. He looked like a guy really enjoying himself. When I examined him I was struck by how vibrant and, I don’t know, clear, he seemed.

We looked out at a dolphin or something jumping up.

Then we were standing up. He looked at me, kindly, and reached out his hand.

“Tony,” he said.

“Warren,” I said, feeling his palm on mine.

“Nice to meet you, Warren.”

I must admit, when he walked off I felt pretty damn good. I’d kept my cool around a guy that millions know. No buckling knees. No jelly.

I wondered what he thought about me not recognizing him. Did it even occur to him? How could it not? Was that why he had hung around? Or had he sussed me out, knew what was going on, and was simply going with it? It didn’t really matter, I decided.

I called out to him a ways down the beach. “Hey, Tony!”

He turned around, squinting. I noticed he was in pretty good shape.

“I love your work, man,” I said with a grin. “Thanks.”

“Thank you,” he said. “That’s very nice of you to say.”

He walked off. Very nice indeed. Soon he’d shrunk down to a dot again and was gone.

I had met a few celebrities during my two years in Hollywood. I was a minor functionary in a few inner circles. I worked for Steven Spielberg and the prestigious Bedford Falls Company. I’d shaken hands with Denzel Washington, Michelle Pfeiffer, Brad Pitt, Mel Gibson, Sting, James Woods and Kirk Douglas. Once, Steven Spielberg introduced me to Liam Neeson outside my office at Universal Studios.

But those were always just quick Hollywood hellos. It was never like this. Never on a level playing field. Mano a mano. Just the two of us.

The part of it that has stuck with me all these years, the sliver of that experience that remains precious, that makes me smile, was when my friend Tony said my name. “Nice to meet you, Warren.” In that voice you and I know so well. It felt, I don’t know, like a gift.

Soon I was cruising down Pacific Coast Highway toward Santa Monica. When I arrived at the Westside Pavillion eatery, Meghan was sitting at a table over by the railing, drawing a Sponge Bob in yellow crayon on a sheet of lined paper. She smiled and ran over to me.

Read more at www.WarrenGoldie.com.

In October of 2004 I drove my aging Camry out of Baltimore for Los Angeles — without knowing, at least at the time, that L.A. was my final destination. My ignorance of this fact led me to stop in Boulder, Colorado and live there for five years.

During my time in Boulder I learned much about the behavior of mountains.

Item one: mountains don’t like people.

This sounds extreme. I know. But hear me out.

The Rockies draw many physically fit humans (such as the hikers who wear T-shirts bearing the slogan, “Sea level is for Sissies”) and these people will claim, or assume, to have a friendly relationship with the mountains. But the fact is, they simply don’t hear very well. If they did, they’d know better. It is not their fault. They are not equipped to receive the kinds of messages the mountains send.

To them,  the Rockies are beautiful and awe inspiring – locales in which to sport. But to those of us who truly know what’s going on, it is quite another story.  A far darker one.

The mountains, if the truth be known, are narcissistic. They are cold and self-congratulatory. They are haughty. A mountain is like a beautiful and unattainable woman who will not give herself to anyone because she is constitutionally  unable to. And I can assure you that every one of the fifty-five 14,000-foot peaks in Colorado is vain.

One day, I actually heard Long’s Peak, a devastatingly gorgeous forteener, tell me to f-ck off. And I was not even standing on it.

The problem is, we have been admiring them for too long. They know this. They take for granted their beauty and have no understanding of the way it affects others.

As I say, I lived in Boulder, in the shadow of the Rockies. Boulder, as a town, is ideally suited for two kinds of people: 1) well-to-do young couples with children, and 2) a certain kind of athlete including skiers, cyclists, hikers, climbers and runners. I have envied the physiology of the latter type on many occasions. These folks, few people know, spend their exercise laden days as high as a kite, gorging on one tidal wave of endorphins after another.

Not fitting into either category, I often didn’t know what to do with myself in Boulder. So when my friend Tom offered to loan me his Suzuki 350 dual sport (road and dirt) motorcycle, I rushed out and got a motorcycle license.

I rode the purple-and-white fun machine for two glorious summers. I would motor from Boulder up into the canyons and backroads and endless dirt capillaries that snake through the Rockies. I sped along the Peak to Peak highway from Nederland to Estes Park with the sun at my back, jaw-dropping views at every angle and the wind sandblasting my face, creating a hair phenomenon that was truly frightening. I was a white Don King.

I traveled as many roads and trails as I could find. Bumping or speeding along, forgetting for a spell my life down at 5,430 feet, I let my mind mingle with the terrain. I would pull over and cut the engine often and sit or stand there in the total quiet. Sometimes I’d spot an interesting trail and veer onto it and ride as far as I could, or dared.

I saw the beauty. I felt the majesty. Secretly I listened to their spare exchanges. But even as I opened up to them, I had the impression they were lying in wait.

One time they hit me with a torrential downpour and I rode grimacing in the knife-pelts of rain until I could take it no longer. I pulled over, dropped the bike and crouched under the protection of a friendly tree until I was able to ride back down, sopping wet and freezing cold.

Their consciousness, of course, isn’t like ours or even close to it. It operates at a wavelength that is difficult to find, like a radio station that isn’t, say, 87.5 or 91.1 but more like 85.2234. But find it I did.

On the Peak to Peak, there were always other riders. There is a hand signal bikers give to one another. In some ways it is not unlike the unspoken acknowledgement that New Yorkers or Parisians feel—that here we are, together in this, the greatest place on the planet. The wave goes like this: You lower your left hand down and point your index and middle fingers toward the road surface. Very casual.

You must only do this to bikes similar to yours. A rider of a smaller 350 cc bike like mine, for instance, would never sign to a passing Harley. Personally, I believe that the message in the sign is this: The mountain hasn’t gotten me, either.

But my body never adjusted to the high altitude, the thin air or the aridity. The air in Boulder and Denver, at about 5,200 ft., contains 17 percent less oxygen than the sissyfied air at sea level. As it turned out, I preferred that extra bit of O2. There were some health issues.

In August 2009 I decided it was time to head out, or rather, down.  After packing my car up very carefully and scientifically, with the help of a very organized friend, I drove the heavy and listing (now) Nissan Altima west. Out of Boulder I rolled – down Rt. 93, up Rt. 70 and into the Rockies toward Utah.

Listening to the Counting Crows belt out some roadworthy tunes, I mentally asked the peaks for permission to leave. As I passed Silverthorne and Vail and Glenwood Canyon, I complimented all these places on their majestic sights. And I drove very, very carefully.

As I rocketed down the western slope toward the state line, I realized how jaded I’d become.  One gorgeous alpine village had started to look like the next. This, I am certain, was another reason the mountains were angry at me. I’d gotten over them.

The moment I passed the Welcome to Utah sign, I pulled over, got out of the car and silently thanked the terrain I was leaving. Then, turning away, I couldn’t resist a little fist pump.

* * *

There exists on this globe myriad varieties of the human animal, and one wonders if perhaps we incarnate from wholy different interdimensional origins. I think about all those folk pedaling their bicycles along the gorgeous Boulder creek path or ascending the trails of the fourteeners, and I know they are different from me in very fundamental ways.

There is no judgment in this. It is like considering the difference between yourself and a person from another culture. The differences are just fine — maybe even what it’s all about. Maybe the Earth is like the tavern in the first Star Wars movie with the bug-eyed creatures enjoying cocktails beside humans, discussing business, lamenting their woes, and just hanging out. Maybe the point is to be okay with this. Or better yet, to revel in it.

I lived among the Coloradans and their unique terrain. I learned from them. I wish them all good things in place that is at once gorgeous and forbidding, home to strange and unmoving beings, and definitely like no other.

Read more at www.WarrenGoldie.com.

Sonia sits at a high table near the tall windows that look out onto Ventura Boulevard. In profile she is attractive in a sun-melted, deserty kind of way. But there is madness in her eyes. The gray tangles that sprout from the part in her raven black hair add to this effect.

Her tabletop is obscured by a mountain of papers. Sometimes, as she stares at them, she will pull three or four marbles from her purse and pour them, back and forth, from hand to hand. She is unaware of the chilling effect this ritual has on others. But she is very smart and perceptive. Perhaps she doesn’t care.

The papers are handwritten. The writing is childlike, with many misspelled words. The sentences, which travel across the unruled pages in perfectly straight lines are highlighted in green, yellow and orange. From six feet away it looks as if Sonia is holding small canvases of abstract art.

There is something compelling in Sonia and her papers, and the overflowing grocery bags that sit on the floor at her feet, and the strange and muddy mixture she drinks in the café cups, which she says is essential for her stomach condition.

When I look at her, sometimes I see the John Nash character from A Beautiful Mind, the man who wallpapered his toolshed with notes that detailed the intricate plots which existed only in his mind. I wonder if Sonia’s writings map the madness in her as well.

The other day I was looking across the cafe while wearing my reading glasses, which blur everything more than an arm’s length away. I will often gaze for a few moments at the unfocused shapes ordering mocha lattes or the amoeba-like heads of the writers leaning toward their computer screens. I didn’t realize the dark shape I was staring at was Sonia.

“What is that tea you have?” she says with a practiced smile that belies a side of her that is not evident when she is immersed in her compulsive pouring.

“Sencha,” I reply, setting my eyeglasses down.

“It smells like fresh cut grass.” She blinks like a bird. I can’t place her accent.

She asks for my astrological sign—a subject that comes up a lot in Los Angeles. I tell her and she asks me guess hers.

When I do, and get it right, she squeals delightfully. “That’s amazing!”

But I have an uneasy feeling that any guess is a correct guess.

Sonia asks me about the writing device on my table, which is called a Neo. The Neo is simply a keyboard with a 4-line LCD window which stores the words you type. Unlike a Mac, the Neo does not try to lure you into cruising the Internet or trying to find just the right background song for whatever it is you’re doing. The NEO is a 1965 VW bug to the Mac’s Lexus.

Sonia asks if I’d be kind enough to check the spelling on her pages. As I approach her table, I feel a sense of privilege, as if I’ve been invited to spend time at the walls of John Nash’s shed.

I take the pages from her. They are, as you might guess, a little unnerving. Many letters are left out of the words, but I am able to make out what she’s written. Across the tabletop, I hear her pick up the marbles.

Her story is shocking. It details the many sexual abuses she has suffered at the hands of local police officers, and the years she spent as a sex slave. The text includes the lines, “He pointed a gun at my v—-a and told me …” and “I was locked in a room and starved for a week.” “They made me …”

She was poisoned, which is why she must drink the muddy concoction. She had been held hostage and abused in horrible ways. She is preparing these notes, she tells me, to send to the newspapers.

“When did all this happen?” I ask, shifting in my chair.

“Five years ago,” she says.

When I ask why she is doing this now, she doesn’t respond. She turns to the window. She is both looking and not looking at the people outside.

I finish the edits, even as I wonder about leaving my own trail on the sheets. I hand the pages back to her. She stares at me, saying nothing, and I see that the crescents beneath her eyes are not just dark but rich in deep lines.

Images assail my mind. It can’t be helped. I see her doing to me the kinds of acts that they did to her. The abuses that have ruined her. To make matters worse, I believe she knows what I am thinking. She smiles thinly, knowingly.

Trauma is a deep gulch. I wonder if the rift she is trapped in is just too deep to pull out of. I wonder what is true and what isn’t. Five years ago her life started to unspool, and it continues to come undone.

I retreat to my table and I put my hands on the Neo, comforted by the familiarity of the little machine. I glance toward Sonia and see something that surprises me: a story of boredom written on her face.

There is a man, Scott, folded comfortably into one of the deep leather chairs. I watch Sonia smile invitingly at him. I see energy flow into him. She calls out, her words traveling across the space in which I’m sitting, as if we’d never spoken a word.

“Are you an Aries?” she chirps.

Scott, whom one look will tell you is a lonely guy, is attracted to her form, her smile, the little workout outfit, her lithe and petite body which has been both a blessing and a curse. She smiles a smile she has used many times, then jumps down from her chair. She asks him about his coffee drink, tells him about the history of java. She can no longer drink coffee, she says. I can no longer type.

There are rivers of thought and emotion flowing beneath what is visible to the eye and the mind. There are untold passages through which these rivers flow. We all have them; not just Sonia.

Scott takes out a scrap of paper and writes down his phone number, as Sonia’s face takes on that far-away look. She is staring out the window.

Read more at www.WarrenGoldie.com.

[Fiction] He strides in to the office authoritatively, dressed in a burgundy turtleneck sweater and crisply pressed grey trousers. He accidently brushes against a wooden chair that sits beside the receptionist’s desk; the leather strap of his shoulder bag catches on the backpost. With his next step the strap pulls tight on the post.

The chair tips, its wooden legs rising up off the floor.

The second hand of the man’s watch leans into another tick. But not quite yet.

Several days pass in the life of a fruitfly buzzing nearby.

The shoulder strap slides off the chair post and starts toward the man. But it pulls taut immediately, pulled down by the weight of the man’s bag, which holds a heavyish laptop computer.

The chair bounces down with a sharp knock. The force of the impact sends it slightly back up again. If anyone was looking at it, they would probably have missed this second small jump. The chair wobbles, then settles down.

The fruitfly finds a mate.

The man, arriving at his desk, is unaware of what has happened with the chair and the strap, and certainly with the fruitfly. He is focused on the workday ahead. He unfolds the laptop and waits for it to boot up. But he might have glanced at the chair. He no doubt had felt the pull on the strap, the momentary extra weight, and the release.

He is far too busy to note such minutiae. However, a part of his mind has absorbed every detail, for the mind is like a recorder with no off button. Like it or not, the marriage (and subsequent divorce) of shoulder strap to chair post has taken up permanent residence within him.

When he is sleeping, or drinking Vodka (as he often does in the evenings), or daydreaming (which he rarely does), or when, many years from now he is laying on his deathbed in his last throes, the chair post, the laptop bag, the shoulder strap – and all the other meaningless minutiae – will percolate up from within him as though from a loudly boiling kettle. They will intrude on his awareness. The chair and the strap will announce themelves with the same urgency as any one of the man’s many accomplishments, which had all seemed so important and momentous.

Open up. Go deeper. This is your time — use it.

JL’s voice drifts down from the speakers high up on the walls of the spacious chapel, mingling with The Fray’s How to Save a Life as if it were written right into the song. Sitting cross-legged on the carpeted floor I watch his slender form meander through the softly lit room, stepping deftly through the sea of bodies.

Go inside. Let it happen.

JL wants us to turn our vision inward, to discover and sit in the steaming center of our personal goulash, to mingle with it — and, hopefully, to cast it off.

I’m perfectly ripe for this. I’m at a time in my life when I’m losing patience with my past conditioning and old patterns – ”the long bag we drag behind us,” the poet Robert Bly calls it.

Back in March of 2009 I was straining under the weight of that bag. And I’d been noticing my friends doing it too: struggling with the same challenges, limitations and insecurities they had been for years.

The exteriors always changed, to be sure; the interiors, though, remained suspiciously the same. It was as if our evolutions had been slowed, and now were in danger of grinding to a halt.

A woman named Rene told me about a meditation group called the Miracle of Love. She said the work was cathartic, that it could loosen some blocks. That sounded good to me, so I drove down to Denver for an introductory talk held in a chiropractic office in a dark and empty strip mall, then I was invited to a longer, more intensive gathering at the group’s chapel.

Go deeper. Let go.

I close my eyes. It is hard to not be moved by Donna De Lorey’s imploring In the Sun. I’ve never meditated to background music before but I kind of like it. I climb up on a diving board located somewhere in my frontal lobe and swan dive straight into the melody.

When I bob back up a few minutes later, I hear someone sobbing. It takes only a moment to realize it’s me.

Wow. That was fast.

The glowing face of my 15-year old daughter fills my mind. Blades of love and longing cut a crisscross path through me. But before I can even consider what is happening, she is gone, replaced by another image: me, as a ten-year old boy.

Go with it.

My throat tightens. Donna’s soprano notes beckon me to push in further, and I sense not just this one memory burn but many others connected to it.

Spider webs shoot out to my childhood spent in Brooklyn. Playing stickball with a pinky in the courtyard at Montauk High. Dashing between parked cars to catch a football. My refugee mother and her sister placing jars of cucumbers that will become pickles on a windowsill of cracked green paint. The pinups thumb-tacked on the walls in Uncle Alex’s basement. Superman and Archie comics stacked in the foyer of our brownstone. And my rage at being taken away from all this, to a new house in suburban Baltimore.

I’m connecting to an archive that feels far more real than anything going on in my current life. In fact, compared to this, my real life feels pretty thin.

Around me, many shadowy bodies stir. Sounds wrench me from the warm caress of 41st street. There is much activity: moaning, crying, writhing, crawling, jumping, dancing, clothing being shed. It feels like I’ve been transported to a graveyard on Halloween night.

JL’s lips are a millimeter from the mic. His breaths are in my ear. It’s okay, go wherever you need to.

You got it, JL. I reach deep inside the long bag, intoxicated by primal power, and jump right into the current. Stress and worry fly off me like roof-shingles in a hurricane. I get up and start to dance around like a crazy person, like many of the unencumbered others.

At one point I freeze in mid-pirouette when I hear a sustained scream from a few feet away. It is powerful but muffled as if by a pillow. I notice more of these quiet animal-like wails. I realize they have been going on all along.

Then I remember. Of course!  I reach down for my scream-towel and hold it tight to my mouth and throat, as instructed.

There’s no reason to hold on here. This is your time. Go in. Let it go.

The wrenching 15-second scream that shoots out of me is powered by the energy of that 10-year old boy. I do it again and again, until I start to sweat and my throat dries out, and then I run over to one of the bowls of cough drops and suck hard on one of the little disks.

The air is pulsating, heavy with the chemicals of raw emotion. Colored light vibrates off the stained glass windows. Figures rise, fleece-shirted arms lift up. The meditators spin in circles, run, punch the air, swoop their arms heavenward; pad, stocking-footed through the huge space. Everyone lost in their own world, their own dream.

There is a different story at the back of the chapel. There, meditators kneel at an altar laden with sacred objects, communing with photos of the gurus. Others sit up, scribbling notes on pads pulled from their kit bags.

A half hour later the music softens and I fall into a heap on the floor.

The participants, who have journeyed for three hours to places that will not be discussed, lay motionless on the carpet for a cool-down period, after which we pick up our things and congregate on pew-like benches in another room. I see quite a few very serious-looking women and men, many, if not most, upwards of their forties and fifties.

I feel pretty damned good, I must say. As if I’d just successfully climbed a mountain or taken a long and arduous hike. I’m spent and energized at the same time, walking out into a frigid wind, following the pack, saying nothing.

As I drive home through a night that is unusually crystalline and clear, I feel certain I can reach out of my window and catch some star dust floating down from the sky. I feel … lighter. Something is missing, and have a good guess what it is. The long bag.

There is madness in all of us. The detritus of the past, seen or unseen, pushes up and seizes us and we become it and lose who we truly are. The human experience is wound up with such bloody interference. There is no way to avoid it because we are structured this way. We can erect walls to box it in and we can try to manage it. But that doesn’t change the fact of what it is and does.

But there are ways to release from it — for a spell, anyway. If it means howling like a wolf in a den of the possessed, so be it. If means spiriting off into frighteningly unfamiliar territory and leaving behind a conservative and increasingly restrictive culture, so be it. I wonder if what I’ve experienced is akin to the tribal practices led by shamans of the past. 

I think about the Miracle of Love hosts, a population unto themselves. They are a spiritual community or a spiritual cult, depending on your point of view. The three or four hundred (worldwide) devotees of the late guru Kalindi are determined to break free of their conditioning, and bring you along, if you care — or dare — to join them.

Indeed, there was something about them — a peacefulness, a serenity. Perhaps it is their practice of reaching into the bag often and hurling out whatever they can get hold of.

They appear physically younger than their years, shockingly so, though many are far past middle age. There was a freshness to their faces, an openness, an absence of distress.

And there was something else. Something that even now, months later, I can’t quite put my finger on.

I will get back to you on that.

Read more at www.WarrenGoldie.com.

Dec. 21 — my mother’s birthday. Dec. 21 — the anniversary of my father’s funeral. He died on Dec. 20, 1983 of colon cancer at the age of 56.

Though I grew up in an ordinary suburban neighborhood, there was nothing ordinary about the vibes whooshing around our dinner table.

My mother Fritzi was born in the Transylvanian Alps of Romania in 1926. She and my father, Harry, were married for 30 years. They were so devoted to each other that when he died she said she would never go out with another man. She never did.

My father grew up in a Brooklyn orphanage, even though his mother lived only a subway stop away. That was because her husband, Joseph Goldie lost his business in the Crash of ‘29 and decided to depart the planet rather hastily, thus leaving her alone.

Tibbie found herself with three boys and a Great Depression on her hands. And though she had converted from Judaism to Christian Science, religion didn’t help her much in this one. The money ran out.

She couldn’t afford to raise all of the boys and had a Sophie’s Choice crisis. So she decided to keep Arthur, the oldest, giving up Buddy and Harry to a Brooklyn orphanage. The two tykes possessed all the survival skills that any three- and five-year-old have, which is to say, none at all. Both boys managed to survive a string of foster homes as well.

Fritzi, on the other hand, 4,800 miles away in Romania, enjoyed a care-free childhood. Her parents, Rose and Wolf Perl, had six children: five girls and a boy. Fritzi was the youngest. Her main childhood occupation was dodging kisses.

The Perls lived in a picturesque village a few kilometers south of the Russian border. The Perl children skied and climbed and swam in streams clean enough drink from. Until the Nazis showed up in 1944, Visuel de Sus was a most excellent place to be.

A few year’s earlier, in the early 1930’s, Fritzi’s oldest sister Estie saw disaster looming in Europe, as many did, and decided to get the hell out of there. So, when a dashing young Cuban traveling through Romania on vacation fell in love with her and later proposed from Havana by letter, she boarded a ship and sailed off to marry him.

Someone once said that courage is doing something difficult by choice rather than out of necessity. I, for one, count my aunt Estie as one brave gal for taking that one-way trip across the ocean. (All turned out well.)

So, when 1944 brought the Nazis to Visuel to bring their evil deeds, the hiking and skiing and idyllic life pretty much ground to a halt.

Just before the trains arrived, Fritzi’s brother, Anci, hightailed it north into Ukraine where he became a forced conscript in the Russian army (which was no picnic either). After the war, he walked across Europe to Tel Aviv and lived out his life there. He married Rozi and had two daughters, Leah and Ziva. My cousin Ziva was runner-up for Miss Israel, back in the day.

Many of my mother’s family died on the transport train to Auschwitz. What was really unlucky was that the Nazis arrived in northern Romania at the very end of the war. A few months more and none of this would have happened (and I’d be a Transylvanian). My mother’s family were really close to escaping the whole horror, scot free.

Stepping off the train at the gates of the Auschwitz, near the sign that read, “Work will set you free,” my grandmother Rose chose to go left to help a friend’s family. She should not have done that. That was the end of her. My mother’s sister, Shari, went left as well, to the same fate.

Which left Fritzi and her sisters Piri and Susie at Auschwitz – for six months. I don’t have to tell you that story; you already know it. Then they were sent to a munitions factory in the Fatherland itself to be slave labor.

At war’s end, my mother contracted typhoid fever and was quarantined. Her brain heated up pretty seriously and she almost died. When she recovered, there were some sizable gaps in her memory. She has told me on occasion that is probably a good thing.

The three Perl sisters made their way to a displaced person’s camp in France and tried to make contact with sister Estie  in Havana.

If God had returned to the Continent and bestowed a blessing on the Perl sisters, it came in the form of a friendly British officer who wrote a letter to Luis Rosenthal, Estie’s husband in Cuba.

Luis sent money to a cousin in Paris who arranged for papers for the girls and got them tickets on a ship bound for Cuba. (Luis, by the way, worshipped his wife. As my father did my mother. Something about Romanian women?)

After the horrors of Europe, the sisters thrived on Luis’s estate in Havana. They played tennis and tried to forget the awful things that had happened, a task that cannot be easy to do. Some survivors are better at forgetting than others, I have learned.

One day Luis sent a letter to an old friend, Alex, in Brooklyn, New York. Alex was a Hungarian who had joined the U.S. army during the war and was automatically granted citizenship. In the letter, Luis placed a photo of his three sister-in-laws. Alex, a batchelor, was intrigued by Piri’s image and drew a circle around it and mailed the photo back. And before you could say long distance romance the couple were married and living in Brooklyn. Around that time my aunt Susie married Morris in Cuba. Not long after many of my cousins arrived on the planet.

My mother visited Piri in New York and met my father on a blind date. He said he was an engineer but he was only a lab tech.

He attempted to woo her with her the poetry of Robert Service, which is not exactly appropriate material for courting. Service wrote about the rough men such as Dangerous Dan McGrew who tramped up to the Yukon territories in search of gold. But since Fritzi didn’t speak any English, and Harry had a great voice, it may as well have been Yeats. They married six weeks later and she moved to New York from Cuba.

My father surprised everyone, including himself, by turning out to be a kind of scientific genius. But until he got married and settled down, he had no idea of what he was capable of.

My parents, my sister Rhonda and I lived in a brownstone rowhouse on 41st St. between 15th and 16th avenue in Boro Park. A warm and wonderful cocoon.

Never having much of a family, my father became close to my mother’s large clan. Everyone was pretty tight back then. Piri and Alex, and my cousins Sharon and Rita, lived across the street from us. We played in alleys and on stoops and in the street. I lived and breathed punchball, stoopball and stickball.

All was good, but one could sense Europe seething down there below the surface. My mother and Susie never talked about it. But Piri would tell us some hair-raising tales. Like the one about the kapo who made lamp shades out of human skin. Or the line-ups and selections with Josef Mengele, one the most evil doctors who ever walked the planet. (Piri, by the way, just passed on this fall, at the age of 90.)

While supporting our family, my father put himself through college at night. He earned a Masters degree in electrical engineering and invented a new way to protect radars from powerful incoming signals. Westinghouse made him an offer he couldn’t refuse and we moved to the Baltimore suburbs when I was six.

My parents loved their ordinary suburban existence. In fact, all they wanted was ordinary. On the outside, they were secure and happy. On the inside, the currents of their tragedies and traumas continued to flow.

What was interesting, at least to me, was that my father was this brilliant creative scientific guy – in some ways like my grandfather Wolf, who traveled all over Europe on business – and my mother was this simple, good natured and nonintellectual woman. They were complete opposites. Yet totally enamored of each other. If they were dating today, they would have clicked over to the next profile.

Not long after logging his 35th U.S. patent for yet another invention that would make Westinghouse millions (while he drew a regular salary) Harry was diagnosed with colon cancer. He died on Dec. 20, 1983 the way colon cancer victims do: emaciated, drugged, and far different than what we were used to . It is incredibly painful to see that happen to someone you love. My mother was at his side every day, often sleeping in his hospital cot with him.

The line of cars traveling to the cemetery for his funeral was about a mile long. Many people miss him. My mother, who sometimes speaks to him in the early morning hours in that state between dreaming and waking, most of all.

[Fiction] Kendra stood on the shore of the sandy island and gazed out at the fast flowing river, realizing only now that the wetness on her body was borne of it. She squeezed the cold water from her hair and shivered as it drained down her bare back. She wrapped her arms around herself for warmth the way people do when they are  naked and vulnerable, feeling the chill of her fingers and arms upon her.

There was a crumpled-up blanket on a nearby rock and she snatched it up, and pulled it tightly around her. Oddly, it was warm and bore the scent of another human being on it.

She wheeled around suddenly, searching for who that might be, but the island was small — no larger than the basement rec room in her house — and she was certain she was alone.

Not knowing what to do, she sat on the rock and just watched the river flow. The moon beamed down its cool packets of light, as Kendra’s skin dried.

When she looked closer at the water she realized it was more than it appeared to be. It seemed to be swimming within itself, for visible just beneath the surface were quick and shadowy movements. Realizing what they were, Kendra felt a chill in her body far greater than that of the cold water. The movements revealed themselves to be an endless stream of translucent hands, reaching up towards the surface and plunging back down in swimming motions.

Kendra stood up, startled, as the sound of voices rose up from the river, and the blanket slid from her shoulders. The travelers spun downstream, heads bobbing up and down like apples, grasping hands reaching skyward, clutching at the empty air — even while others rode in the current with apparent and untroubled ease.

Just then a scream cut through the river’s roar, and she saw him: a man struck violently into an accreasion of rock, his body half submerged, his hands gripping at the smooth stone as the river tugged at him. A stream of blood snaked down his cheek.

He turned toward her and stared at her.  Right at her. That first contact unnerved her. She felt the pull beginning, though she could not know it yet.

Another movement entered her field of vision, just beyond the man. It was a woman standing knee deep in a cove that Kendra hadn’t noticed before. She  was naked, like Kendra, her black hair flowing over her shoulders on skin that was shimmering and moist.

Kendra’s gaze shifted  back to  the grasping man but he was gone. There was only the rock, bearing lines of fingernail dust.

And the woman slipped below the surface, leaving only the calm still water.

Kendra closed her eyes. And started to remember.

She had been walking in the foothills of burned grass, doing her best to accept the fact of Teddie’s murder. For five years the memory had dug at her daily, even hourly, with no sign of letting up. He had been standing at a dark ATM when a thug in a stockinged mask struck him in the head. Kendra’s love fell, and the blood poured from his wound into a pool on the sidewalk.

Thinking about it now, reliving it, as she had done so often, Kendra became fatigued. All she wanted was to accept it, but she had never been able to quite get there; now, finally, after all these long years, maybe she had. She couldn’t explain how she knew this, but she felt certain of it.

Once, a year after he’d gone, she had lay down beside a briarwood bush in the foothills and fallen asleep, awakening when she heard Raine, her youngest, galloping toward her. “Mom! Mom!” the girl called out, her blond hair jumping and tumbling. Kendra couldn’t recall what it was Raine had come to tell her.

She stirred from the memory of Raine, and the foothills, and Teddy as if awakened from a dream. Had she been sleeping all this time?

Around her, the little island had grown still. The river flowed steadily and she saw no one anywhere.

Kendra stood up. There was a slight smile on her face as she tiptoed to the water’s edge and watched calmly as the fingers of the river reached up and wrapped themselves around her and began to pull.

[Fiction] Michael travels to places few people know during his twenty minutes on the treadmill at Planet Fitness.

He works nights pouring drinks at Jackson Mighty Fine Food and Lucky Lounge. In the mornings he is so tired he can hardly pull on his clothes and get on with the day. But he does. He knows that if he can just get the workout started, everything will be fine. The magic will happen.

First thing Tuesday morning he steps on the treadmill and sets the speed to 2.4 mph – barely faster than a walk; in fact, it is exactly a walk. He doesn’t walk, though. He trots like a jogger, albeit one going in painfully slow motion.

The machine faces a mirror (all but three do) so he cannot resist admiring  the sculpted muscles of his upper arms bulging out of his sleeveless T. He will gaze approvingly at his height (6′ 3″) and his smartly shaved head. About once a month someone tells him he looks like Bruce Willis. He has to agree.

He bumps up the speed to 3.5. Still a walk but a brisk one. The woman to his left is sprinting full out, her blond ponytail twirling like a propeller. The black man to his right is trudging up a steep incline.

Michael finds Springsteen’s Radio Nowhere on his iPod. The driving beat immediately pushes him to move faster. He ups the speed to 5.0 and drops the iPod into the cupholder. He jogs full out for some time.

At the eight minute mark, gasping, he jumps off and straddles the belt. A minute later his chest has stopped heaving and he feels the energy flowing into him. He clicks the speed up to 7.5 and hops back on with practiced skill, catching it just right.

Now there is no holding him back. He sprints full out.

At forty-two, having suffering many respiratory infections from the asbestos in the walls of the house in Sante Fe where he grew up, Michael will not be able to go at this pace for very long. But he won’t have to.

The iPod cord springs up like a jump rope with every stride. He’s trying not to watch the TVs hanging down from the ceiling or the people around him. At the Larkspur club everyone is fit — a powerful lure for the eye. He forces himself not to look. He remains focused on his own body. He adjusts his every movement for the various aches and pains, and monitors his breath.

Then it happens.

Lift off.

To everyone else he’s just another guy running without going anywhere. But in his mind he’s flying. He’s Elliot pedaling across the night sky in E.T.

But he’s not flying randomly.

The path is predetermined, and though it is not visible to the eye it is most certainly exists.

He punches up the pace to 8.0 as his destination flickers into view. But at the same time, the club is in sight, too.

When it’s the club, he’s watching a TV news program showing images of dead bodies covered in blankets from a suicide bombing. When it’s the club, he’s watching a flooded out neighborhood in Pittsburgh. When it’s the club, he’s watching Wolf Blitzer’s concerned face as he speaks imploringly.

But when it’s the other place, he’s looking at a gathering of people up ahead, down in a clearing. They are waving as if expecting him. He’s been here before, so he doesn’t question how he can be soaring in the air toward them, like a jet descending toward a runway. He glides toward the waiting crowd.

He knows them. He knows them and yet he doesn’t know them. They are a memory–only one he isn’t sure is his. The memory says this: Come home, long lost brother. We are your kin. We will welcome you and you will fall into our love.

Michael’s eyes start to well up. The tears mingle with the sweat until his face is glistening. He doesn’t care. He can barely feel the club anyway. And no one would think of messing with a menacing-looking guy like him anyway, no matter what he’s going through.

Wolf worms his way back in. He is good at that. He slips into view, whispering to Michael. Come here. Come to me. It’s just you and me. Michael tries to stay with the gliding sensation and keep going toward the people in the other place. He wonders if he’s going crazy and if watching Wolf might be a better idea. But the other place feels so much better. His legs are pumping effortlessly. He is running full out. And the pain is gone.

He starts to make out some faces in the crowd. A young man with a long beard. A pretty girl with a bright smile. An old woman wearing an orange robe. They wave to him, imploring him to come and join them. How do they know him? And why does he want to be with them?

He will not find the answers, not today anyway.

He’s panting now, completely out of steam. Whoa. That was fast. One can only go so long at 8.0. His lungs burn, his chest heaves. He gasps for air. The fatigue is crushing. He must stop. Damn. Damn. He wishes he could keep going, so he can get a little closer and see these people who are real or imagined, who want him to come to them, these people for whom he yearns without knowing why.

Read more at www.WarrenGoldie.com.

Sunday at One World Café — a brick-walled, triangular-shaped bistro bordering University Ave., 39th street and a few nondescript alleys, huddled in the shadow of the Johns Hopkins lacrosse stadium.

Outside, a warm rain sweeps down the sidewalks, promising that spring is on the way. So, despite the damp sting, one is optimistic. And to think that only a couple of weeks ago I was smashing tennis balls in L.A., shirtless  in 82 degrees. The dislocations of modern life.

Two Hopkins girls are camped out at the next table. The remains of a blueberry muffin sit like a Roman ruin on a plate between two barely touched mimosas. I’m impressed at how slowly they can eat. My own oatmeal cookie has been begging for mercy. Sorry, bud.

The girl’s laptops touch at table center as their fingernails dance on Chiclet-like keys. The taller one, a talkative blond in a gray hoodie, focuses on a massive textbook but only begrudgingly; she’s far more interested in the updates on her Facebook page. It goes away often, but seems always to find its way back.

Everyone is documenting their lives these days, broadcasting all those excruciating details. We are communicating in far too many ways, in my opinion. We are like drunks at a still. The thirst, of course, is for connection. But can the clicking of keys really provide it? Who has hypnotized us to think that we can be satisfied with this?

I am just as guilty. Well, not quite. I do write to a close friend frequently, only I do it with traded voice mails, a variation on the clicking Chiclets. But still … “We should talk soon in real time,“ my friend messaged me not too long ago.

I have been pondering this at One World Cafe, dressed in my Boulder-bought clothes, which have traveled to meet me in several ways: crammed in suitcases, mailed in shipping boxes, wedged into the cavities of my Altima on the cross-country journey.

I hauled those threads a long way; our relationship has become strained. They are not notable or extraordinary, these clothes. I could have gotten them anywhere. I did. They trail me like a lover who does not realize the relationship is over.

So.

Not far from the Facebook girls, at the long and open bar, the corpulent guy in the army fatigues, who was reading Proust, has metamorphosed into a wiry guy in tight jeans and Converse low tops. Time has passed.

In many ways.

Two weeks ago people were slender and bronze-colored and acutely conscious of the makes and models of their automobiles. Now they are compleckted in shades of anemic white and bonemeal and wear flannel shirts and read textbooks as heavy as bricks.

I am back in Maryland, the Old Line State. Here history oozes out of every stone and brick structure in far different ways than it had in the flimsy wood and stucco West. There it hardly mattered what had happened in the past. Not here. Oh no. Here the 19th and 20th — and even the 18th and 17th — centuries grab you and hold you and demand your attention and respect. And you’d better give it. Or else you’re just that flaky California guy.

One afternoon, when I was in the fifth grade, I wandered the child strewn fields of Randallstown Elementary School. It was the chaos of children unleashed: every grade, everywhere. Playing ball, fighting, pulling wedgies, supressing the pulse of sexual energy. I was just minding my own business. Walking.

Suddenly there is an explosion in my left eye. I reach up and touch a solid mound of dirt embedded in the eye socket. The clump starts to crumble and spill down my cheeks. I hear the footfalls of kids scattering.

I don’t know how but I’m on the ground, tasting grass. I cup my palm over the eye, wanting to rub the dirt out. But I don’t. I know, instinctively, I’ll be scraping the tender structures of the eye into some kind of damage.

Then my mother is there, that hysterical tone in her voice, the debilitating horrific fear that is the Camps internalized. She doesn’t realize how obvious it is. She never gazes in that direction (I wouldn’t, either).

The Emergency Room doctor picks out the dirt with a pair of tweezers. “Smart kid,” he says. “If you had rubbed this, you might not be using it anymore.” I smile to myself at my good instincts. My mother, though, has a hard time hearing anything ominous, even if only as a potential.

I must wear an eye patch for a few weeks. Eventually the eye heals and I can see again.

Years later, in high school I am struggling to maintain my grades. Then in eleventh grade an eye exam indicates that I need glasses. I’d been passing the exams until then by squinting and relying on the good eye. I thought I’d get into trouble if failed.

The left eye needs a significant correction; the right, not so bad. There is an astigmatism — the eye is misshaped. I wonder, as I still do, Did the dirt bomb do that or was I born that way?

* * *

The Akashic records are a library of every action that has ever occurred on planet Earth. The Akashic records don’t actually exist — at least not on this plane or reality. According to the ancients Hindus, they are located in some in-between netherworld where we go when we finally shuffle off the mortal coil. The Akashic records could be a fiction, of course.

If I do run across them, I will absolutely look into the eye affair. I will see if the dirt bomb caused the astigmatism. I will learn who threw it and what became of him. I will see if he admitted the crime to his friends or parents and what they told him. If he felt any guilt over it when he saw me in school wearing the patch. I will learn if any karma resulted, and what that karma caused.

I will get some answers.

P.S. I will also find out what happened to the dinosaurs. And Elvis.

There was one thing about Boulder I had never encountered before. It was this: No one wanted anything from me. In fact, quite the contrary. People seemed content with their lives and didn’t want them changed in any way at all, thank you very much. You never got the feeling of being pulled into anything. People strolling the Pearl Street Mall weren’t sending out tendrils of need, weren’t psychically probing at you all the time.

Los Angeles, on the other hand, is quite the opposite. You feel the people reaching out to you with their eyes and minds and wills and desire, wanting something. What is it, I wonder? What do they want? Sometimes I have felt like a shimmering tumbler of Johnnie Walker standing in a population of very thirsty alchoholics.

I wonder if I have that something they want, simply because I haven’t been back here for long, and after a time I will lose it and then start to seek it in others, too.

[Fiction] Gil emerged from the pilings at the base of the Santa Monica Pier, shook the sand from his hair and made his way to Ocean Boulevard. Looking as scary as he did, it took him a full hour to beg a couple of bucks for a coffee.

By mid-morning he was sitting on his favorite bench on the Third Street Promenade, watching people walk by.

And listening to their thoughts.

Though it was burdensome to bear witness to so much naked truth, Gil never complained (to whom?). Instead, he drank. Liquor, he had decided, was the best defense against the clashing cymbals, pounding bongos and peircing guitar solos that assailed him pretty much all the time.

Sometimes he got so soused he would see some strange things. Once, he saw the pores on his arms opening and closing like little mouths. And maybe he did. He was a man of unusual talents.

But today he was not drunk. His mind was as clear as the Southern California sky. Today he was on a mission. He was going to find a pure human channel — someone who could flawlessly translate the holy flaupungementent that percolated up from deep in the human psyche into thoughts, words and deeds.

Leaning against a light post in front of Hungry Herman’s, he scanned the mass of Christmas shoppers. Listening. Most of them simply wanted to be relieved of themselves. That was typical. A few wanted affirmations they were okay. Many thought only about food. Some wanted to feel the touch of another, and these Gil drew away from, for their thoughts were coated with a molasses like substance. Some never thought about people at all, but only of their dogs  or cats waiting at home to slobber on them or sit in their laps.

Gil sometimes could feel the full force of the flau moving beneath all that wanting. This deeper level, he was certain, was every bit as true as the other was false.

If you saw Gil, you’d probably do what most people did: walk faster. He knew that. He was no fool. Physically, he was a stooped-over old man with a massive nose and gray hairs sprouting from ears that wiggled slightly when he talked. The street kids called him the gnome. If anyone had taken the time to get to know him, it would have been obvious that he was a kind of angel.

When I first came upon him sitting on a wrought iron bench in front of Wahoo’s Fish Taco on a sunny afternoon, I too assumed he was just another crazy old fart, or mentally unhinged through no fault of his own, like many of the people who dressed in filthy clothes pulled from the dumpsters behind the shops.

He was holding three helium balloons given to him by Piter the Ballooner, who formed balloons into animal shapes and sold them to the parents of small children. I stared at Gil for a long time, for a sensed something. There was an incongruity in the man in the dirty overcoat who could see the thoughts and feelings inside of people shifting like tectonic plates.

No one had any idea that great turbines of understanding were churning inside of the hunched-over figure. But none of these well-dressed pretenders and deriders could hold a candle to Gil.

Last week I saw him leaning against a Starbucks. I asked him if he’d found the pure human being he was searching for. Clandestinely I checked the pores on his arms, which thankfully, seemed to be quiet.

Yes, he told me.

Really? I said excitedly. And?

Gil started coughing. I mean, really hard.

I said, I’ll get you some water.

I ducked into the Starbucks. Surprisingly (for this area), there was a full pitcher and paper cups, free for the taking.

But when I arrived outside, Gil was gone.

There was a piece of paper at the base of the wall, pinned down by a rock. I picked it up. The writing was almost illegible. It said “It’s me, ha ha.”

Peet’s Coffee & Tea, Ventura Blvd. Sunny and warm.

Two pregnant woman showing bare bulging midriffs, an old lady in a dirty charcoal bathrobe, a man and a woman in full motorcycle leathers (but seeming like white-collar pretenders), and the usual stunning faces and bodies — the plentiful blond, sunglass-wearing beauties. An old woman with a hairy chin asleep in a deep leather chair, the newspaper on her lap rising and falling gently. A sour faced Jewish guy paging angrily through the classified ads.

Despite the exteriors, there is a cooperation among the people here, as if they instinctively understand that there’s just too many of them and the best course is to just get along. It creates a necessity of communication, and a resulting community, a joining that is significant and makes them feel part of as larger whole.

There are words and there is the sensed energy behind the words. Often when she talks to me or supports me (as has been the case lately) there is a rote quality to it, a going through of the motions. She’s often exhausted, but who knows … maybe it’s me. At times I have felt a depth in her words but not lately. It chills me when I hear them and there is the feeling of empty space behind them.

We will have to see.

The purpose of life not about accomplishments or deeds or anything you do, though those things can be fun and rewarding. Doing is fine. Doing is what is called the dance. But a dance is only a dance; it’s just an activity. It’s not you. Not the real you.

What the real you wants, and the purpose of existence, is nothing less than this: to let the flaupungimentent wash into your life and fill you up.

What exactly is the flaupungimentent, you ask. The flaupungimentent is what creates everything in this world. There are some unenlightened people who call the flaupungimentent God, the divine, the force .. . There are many names. But that is precisely what gets in the way of knowing it – names.

As soon as you say one of those names or swear allegiance to it, the flow of the flau in your life becomes obstructed. That’s why it is called the flaupungimentent. You can’t say it. You can’t remember it. You can’t spell it. You can’t shrink it down so that it becomes something it is not.

Beware of anyone who talks about the flau. If they really knew it, they would hardly speak its name.

If you see them coming, take my advice. Run like hell.

Stopping thinking about how to be happy.

I am in a room with four other guys. We are all sitting on cots. There is a globe-like green ball in the center. We must all must hit our heads on it. I am the only one who hasn’t, and I am not looking forward to it.

Shift.

I have found the little paper on which the name of someone who knows my grandfather is written. I call the guy but he’s not there.

Shift.

The little paper has fallen to the ground, so I think it into my hand.  I can feel how this process works, how I must make my mind both empty and desirous at the same time . I think: I have to remember this.

I’m on the street in a city with the three guys from the cots, and some hoods surround us. I hardly notice it because I’m talking about my plans and how I have the power and all, but my companions gently whisper, Hey bud, we should get the hell out of here.

We walk causually, and when I look up I see my ceiling. I’m awake, physically tired but emotionally exhilarated.

As with most dreams, I have no clue what it means.

The morning brought intense sunshine and crop circles on my living room carpet. Two rings eight inches in diameter, one by the front door, the other over by the stereo.  I didn’t wake Svetlana, I was lavishing the feeling too much.

[Dream, repeating] She calls out to me in dreams. She is either a woman or a child. Once she came as a 5-year-old standing teary eyed before me. Her eyes were big and sorrowful and her blond hair tumbled over her shoulders. I think she had traveled far.

We have a bond, I am starting to remember. She is more than the inhabitant of a dream.

I am twirling in a field. The scent of honeysuckle fills the air and the sunshine is warm. My form is easy to move. It is the body of a child. The cool grass beneath my toes, the wind caressing my skin, the rush of birds, crickets and dogs — all these sensations flow through me, unobstructed.

There is only this moment that seems so full.  Around me I sense a larger presence. I can almost stretch my awareness out to touch it, but I cannot quite get there. Can it smell the honeysuckle? Can it feel the grass?

I know what this place is. It is the school with no walls, no ceilings, no rooms.

Once in a while I see her somewhere, always as a girl or a woman. I don’t know how I know it but I know it’s her. She always looks at me and smiles knowingly. She wants me to remember something.  I wish I knew what it was.

           Each day brings with it another person, and until I open my eyes don’t know who it will be. There are the well-rested mornings inhabited by an optimistic, smiling man, and I revel to see this hale and hardy chap smiling back at me from the bathroom mirror. (He even winks at times.)

          Then there is that cursing, hobbling gollum who slinks down the hallway dreading his reflection, for, among other things, the skin under the eyes of a thirty year old should not be mountainous and yellow. Thank God for the veil of glasses.

            The days are adventurous. Who’s agenda will I fulfill today? Which one? Who am I?  Is this my fault? Or the curse of the DNA?

            Yeah, yeah, yeah. Questions.

            But I do wonder.

The emptiness that stalked me
as a boy
dissolved like a highway mirage
in the strange warmth of the Smith’s house
when Cape Cod’s occasional roads
gathered sand
and tires cut trails
visible for days

We chased each other
through that grand Victorian
rosy-cheeked space travelers
safe in the Smith’s cocoon
where entropy never bothered anyone
and the family never ended

One cool August evening
someone asked, Who are you
of a supper guest no one knew
Why, Mr. so-and-so, he said
and departed after gin rummy with a plate of pie
the relatives left aglow in the TV light
of Ed Sullivan

And me, walking home on the railroad tracks
my cheeks deflating in the moonlight
my gait grown limp
I drag myself into our sterile kitchen
my mom struggles to smile
I feel it even now
the mute pain inside of her

She asks about the Smiths.
I can’t bear to tell her
smiling the way she does
The Smiths are alive, I think
but do not say
I whisk off to my room instead
and wait for tomorrow
the way a child shouldn’t

As I drift into sleep
my mind wanders
down the road
and my heart aches
for the warm richness
of that other family

It was in the Tom Petty song, Last Dance with Mary Jane. The characters meet, fall for each other, share themselves and then decide to call it quits. They do all that in a shorter space than this entry. To wit:

We were introduced and we both started groovin
She said I dig you baby but I gotta keep movin

Modern life.