Au revoir, Bear Cave.

It's a room roughly twenty feet long and fifteen feet wide with dark paneling on three walls and, mercifully but inexplicably, one accent wall of off-white mottled panels, the sort you find in value-priced pre-fabricated homes. There is a sizable foyer and a walk-in closet, and there is an afterthought of a bathroom (toilet and sink, but no shower). In one corner of the exterior wall, an air-conditioner occupies what might once have been a window but which is now simply a cutout that gives the AC access to the outside. Other than the cutout, there are no windows. The only way to know if it's day or night is to have faith in what the clock tells me; the only way to determine whether I'll need a jacket or possibly an umbrella is to descend the stairs and step out onto the sidewalk. It is strange and occasionally insufficient and frequently surreal, but for the past thirteen months it has also been home. It is the Bear Cave.

How and why I came to be living in the Bear Cave is a less than inspiring story: I went broke, as a wise guy once said, gradually and then quite suddenly, lost my marbles, lost my house, and then spent the next ten months living off the largesse of friends. I finally managed to scrape together a few bucks, but only a very few, and in a stroke of what felt like genius it occurred to me that I didn't need a big, fancy apartment: what I needed, quite simply, was four walls and a ceiling, with a lock on the door, and this being Waterville, there was plenty of low-rent, no-frills office space available. The lack of a shower has certainly been less than ideal, but just as necessity is the mother of invention, it is also fair to say that poverty decides the relative value of convenience. My friends Chili and Smurfette gave me a mattress and a desk, I lugged my remaining belongings up the stairs, and for the time being I had most of what I needed.

Not unexpectedly, living in a windowless cave has its downsides. The lack of ambient light considerably screwed with my sleep patterns. Stretches when I was flat broke saw me hunkering down in the cave for a day or two at a time, not venturing out for any reason. The walls, already close, crept in, casting a pall over already dark days. A couple months after I moved in, I scratched "RIP GB," very faintly, into the desktop. With the overhead fluorescent lights on, you can't even see it's there, but if I turn out the lights, illuminating the room with nothing more than the glow of my computer monitor, the inscription jumps right out at you.

It wasn't all bad, though. There was a reliable unsecured wifi signal. There were distraction-free hours sitting at my desk typing away. For a few months there was a long, tall dame who dared to cross the threshold from time to time. And there was a roof, and walls, and a lock on the door.

At the end of my first summer after college, I moved with my girlfriend to Seattle. This was 1991, and Seattle was an outstanding place for kids like us to go for an adventure. The day after we arrived, though, she announced that she didn't think we should live together. She wasn't entirely wrong: it didn't really fit her sense of herself, this shacking up with a dude she was sure even then would never become her version of husband material. Of course, she had no sense of how or why this was devastating to me: she didn't know because I'd never really talked to her about my own sense of the precariousness of HOME. She was a nice upper middle-class girl from Winchester, Massachusetts, and as intriguing as parts of my story were to someone like her, that part I was still keeping to myself. We were staying with her sister and broth-in-law for the first few weeks in Seattle, and when she made her announcement about our future living situation, I walked out the door and made my way up to Capitol Hill, where my friend Q was living with his mother. It was a long walk, and I made it longer, pausing frequently to ponder the terrain, sizing up benches and discreet corners where, as far as I knew that day, I might soon find myself holed up. I was twenty-two years old and three-thousand miles from home and scared shitless. And I hated my girlfriend's guts a little bit right then, not because she didn't want to live with me, but because she could have told me that before I got on the fucking plane.

But it wasn't her fault: I put myself there in that distant city with a girl who was, ultimately, a placeholder. Just as I put myself here, in the Bear Cave which, a week from tomorrow, I'll have to vacate. In spite of the fact that my landlord is kind of a dick, this isn't his fault -- he's been patient. Plus, I wasn't really supposed to be living here in the first place. Even a dick is entitled to his money, and a cave is no place for a man. There are things I'll miss about the place, but they are the obvious things. I can't say I feel at all sentimental about it. Anyway, until further notice, the view from this particular Bear Cave will be cloudy at best. I'll leave you with a little Twilight Singers for your Sunday pleasure. You can dance to it if you want.

Underneath the Waves -- Twilight Singers

Practical Ethics

Let's review. The chair of the board of trustees of my alma mater, Colby College, was forced to step down as CEO of Barclays because of his role in the LIBOR rate-fixing scandal. A legendary college football coach was stripped of enough career wins to knock him from first to twelfth place on the all-time list because his image meant more to him than the most basic level of human decency. Twelve people died and almost sixty more were wounded because they went to the movies, and a congressman from Texas said it was essentially the result of not letting God into our lives.

I don't know Bob Diamond. I knew who he was, knew he was a rich and powerful banker, knew he was a Colby alum and benefactor and trustee -- in other words, one more among the many with whom I share the vague connection of having attended a fine liberal arts college, but that's where our similarities mostly end. As to Mr. Diamond's ultimate culpability, well, I suppose opinions will vary. I've read some of the texts and emails that, to absolutely no one's surprise, portray precisely the sort of culture we all tend to fear in the realm of highest finance: insider manipulation as a standard operating procedure. Mr. Diamond may not have been directly involved with either those individuals or their actions, but make no mistake: bankers know where their money comes from. Bob Diamond understood precisely the environment over which he presided. I have heard some suggest, essentially as a matter of what I'll call "practical ethics," that what these bankers were doing was, in the end, benign, that the only real benefit derived from these practices was the boosting of any given bank's prestige/image, and that neither significant monetary gains for the banks nor demonstrable losses to consumers were the result. You'll have to find an economist you trust to answer that question, it's far outside the scope of my understanding. What isn't beyond my comprehension, though, what should not be even remotely beyond any reasonable person's comprehension, is that these people were doing something fundamentally wrong. I don't subscribe to "practical ethics." I tend to apply a very simple standard, one you should feel free to try at home: picture the person in your life whose opinion of you matters most; now imagine telling that person what you just did; if, based on how well you know that person, you're confident he or she would be disappointed in you, well, what you did was wrong. Bob Diamond, think of your dear sweet granny: What would she think of this mess you've made? And while we're on the subject, Colby College, recipient of many millions of dollars from the questionable coffers of Mr. Diamond, what would your dear sweet granny say?

The NCAA this week came down hard on Penn State for the failures of leadership that allowed a serial pedophile to thrive for decades in their midst. The university will pay fines in the tens of millions, lose a significant number of scholarships over the next four years, and will not be eligible for either its conference championship or bowl games during that period. In addition, the NCAA stripped the football program of all wins and honors going back to 1998, which was when, at least as far as anyone knows, those in charge at Penn State, including Joe Paterno, knew of but chose to essentially cover up questionable behavior by Jerry Sandusky. Joe Paterno, in his last days as the coach, insisted he did everything he thought was proper: he relayed information about the allegations to his superiors, trusting that they would handle the matter responsibly. Based on a small handful of internal communications that have come to light since Paterno's death, it seems reasonable to conclude that Paterno's involvement in the handling of those allegations was nowhere near as hands-off as he claimed. And the only reason that came as a shock to so many is that, for decades, an awful lot of people believed Joe Paterno was a model citizen, that somehow the many-headed behemoth that is big-time college sports had not in all those years managed to darken the soul of that one man. In the last decade of his career, many called for Paterno to step away from the game: the quality of the teams he put on the field had diminished considerably, and there were many who thought the game had passed him by. I was firmly among those who maintained that Joe Paterno had more than earned the right to walk away when he chose and on his own terms, not simply because he had, for many years, presided over a successful, winning football program, but also because he appeared to represent a level of integrity all too rare in that realm that is fueled from every direction by vast sums of money. Money is a temptress, to be sure, but so is the prospect of becoming the sort of legend whose accomplishments are all but guaranteed not to be surpassed for generations. Paterno, it now seems to me, stuck around the game longer than he should have not because he believed he had something to offer college football, but because college football had something he could take and certainly not relinquish in his lifetime: the all-time wins record. Given his status and stature on the campus of Penn State, that record, in Joe Paterno's eyes, must have seemed attainable even as far back as 1998, the year he had to make a choice: protect current and future victims of Jerry Sandusky, or preserve a personal legacy. Make no mistake: there certainly is such a thing as bad press, and Joe Paterno wasn't willing to let such a specter fall upon his little fiefdom in Happy Valley. Here, perhaps, is another measure of ethics, although this one can only be applied in hindsight: when the end result is the worst of both worlds -- an untold number of young boys suffered, and the old coach was stripped of his accomplishments -- it's fair to say you did something very wrong. Sadly, finding out years later that you chose poorly isn't terribly instructive. Paterno did say, looking back, that he wished he'd done more. To that, I would say this: it's always easy to apologize after you've gotten caught, but when you do, it almost never sounds like the regret you feel is so much about the consequences for others as it is about the consequences, now, for you. Had you lived to see it, Joe, I bet you would have been really sorry to see yourself go from first all-time in wins to twelfth. Bummer for you, Joe. Would it make you feel better to know there are plenty of people out there, like former players Matt Millen and Franco Harris, who insist you've been mistreated?

I was visiting friends in Portland late last week, and I woke Friday morning on their couch to the sounds of the varmint patrol in the back yard, sizing up the potential squirrel and skunk risk. This, roughly, is what my friend told me after I sent him a squinty-eyed text from downstairs. Since I was awake anyway, I strolled out to the deck for a smoke, and my buddy joined me a few moments later. Almost the first words out of his mouth (after explaining away the varmint patrol) was something about a whack-job shooting up a movie theatre at one of the opening night midnight showings of The Dark Knight Rises. I was still groggy and so did not immediately process what he'd said. It sank in and I began asking questions, but at that point he had no real information. In the hours and days since, of course, a considerable amount of information poured forth. Twelve dead, fifty-eight wounded. The gunman tossed tear-gas canisters into the cinema, then sprayed the crowd with automatic weapon fire. Some were hit while trying to shield others. Afterward, the gunman was found sitting placidly beside his car in the parking lot and was arrested without significant incident. Police later discovered the gunman's apartment had been rigged with a variety of explosives, booby-traps designed to take even more lives.

What little we know about the gunman, James Holmes, tells us nothing of any lasting value, and there's no need to rehash any of it here. As is always the case when a random person does the unthinkable, we try to find out everything we can about that person's life -- his history, his habits, his makeup -- mostly because we want an answer to what is almost certainly an unanswerable question: why? There is, of course, another question that floats through all our minds, the answer to which we also hope to find in the portrait of this killer: do I know anyone like that? Is he my neighbor, or the guy who works at Staples, or one of the pointless drifters on Main Street? What, if anything, can you tell me about this guy that might help me recognize the next guy before I end up like one of the people who didn't walk out of that movie theatre in Aurora, Colorado last week?

I don't want to get into a lengthy discussion about guns, but I would like to say this: it is far too easy in this country for stupid people and crazy people to obtain not just guns but arsenals. If you are among the millions of people who read the Second Amendment and believe its intent is to make sure you're entitled to carry around a comparable arsenal, you're an idiot. That is not even close to what the framers had in mind, and if you had the vaguest sense of American history in general and Constitutional history in particular, you'd know that. James Holmes was able to acquire the assortment of overpowering weapons he carried into that theatre precisely because jackasses like you insist on maintaining your supposed right to have access to such things. If your ilk had any sort of collective conscience, incidents such as this one, or the Virginia Tech shootings, or Columbine, or take your pick, would make an impression on you. The fact that the only apparent impression this leaves on the likes of you leads to the assertion that one or two good gun-toting American in that theatre might well have neutralized that gunman indicates to me not only your lack of conscience but your lack of sense. You're despicable.

Amazingly, though, not as despicable as Texas Congressman Louie Gohmert, who in a radio interview after the shootings, in what I'll admit was a clumsy, haphazard way, seemed to suggest that an incident such as this is the price of not letting God into our lives. Gohmert has since attempted to distance himself from his comments, claiming, as people so often do, that the comments were taken way out of context. I read his comments last weekend, and just now I listened to the interview in which he made the comments, and I gotta say, Louie, I'm calling bullshit. You said it, you created your own context. Now, if you'd come out after the fact and said, "I didn't mean it, I was speaking off the cuff and wasn't prepared for that line of questioning," then okay. Except you can't say that, can you, Louie? No you can't, because you said exactly what you meant: that we have become a Godless society, and that means we've got some biblical reckoning coming to us. Never mind that this person, James Holmes, is clearly among the -- what? what would you say? tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands? -- among the very many people in this country whose delicate internal wiring is just feeble enough to turn them into an orange-haired, assault-rifle wielding mass-murderer. That's not God, Louie, that's insanity. I don't think a life of praying to Jesus would have kept this guy from turning the corner. Nor do I think prayer in public schools is going to eradicate the ills of society. You know what might help, though? Replacing empty rhetoric with meaningful discourse. In fact, I would go so far as to say part of our overarching problem is that there's a ridiculous number of people in this country who maintain that the only valid system of morality is belief in a book of fairy tales. When a Louie Gohmert asserts that his God's absence from the public life of America contributes in some way to the pain and suffering of victims of mass-murder, what he is saying, in effect, is that I'm responsible in some way for that pain and suffering because I'm firmly among those who neither believe in his God nor support the imposing of his beliefs on secular life. I don't want my daughter, in her public school, to be subjected to Louie Gohmert's God or Louie Gohmert's Good Book. My daughter doesn't go to church, nor does she subscribe to the particular teachings of that Good Book I just mentioned, and guess what, Louie? She still knows the difference between right and wrong. She possesses what I would call genuine moral fiber. How is that possible, right? Maybe we just got lucky.

You may be wondering what the point of all this might be. Perhaps I'm grasping, but as I thought about each of these events and their surrounding contexts, it occurred to me that they share a common thread: some rather disturbing takes on ethics. Bob Diamond was involved in what was, at the very least, shady dealings, and yet his money (because, of course, it's a great deal of money) is still good at Colby College. Joe Paterno cared not at all about the welfare of a bunch of kids from the wrong side of the tracks, and yet there are still those who dare to suggest that the dismantling of his legacy is unfair. Louie Gohmert stood on the backs of twelve murder victims to further his right-wing christian agenda, and legions of like-minded Americans stand behind him. Perspective certainly renders much in life subjective. But ethics is ethics. Someone show me the massive grey area I must be missing in any of these three conversations. Please. I just want to be a better person.

Dirty Old Town

We've all had them: those relationships we know are over long before we ultimately manage to make our graceless exits. For a time you willfully ignore the obvious indications that the relationship is on life support. Of course, you maintain hope at first because, after all, there was something of real love there once. Then you're holding on because admitting defeat, accepting the flaws in your dreams and expectations, is only slightly more palatable than a bowl of stewed rat testicles. Even when you've come to terms with all of that, there is, finally, the dubious prospect of facing the unknown. Transient comfort is easier to bear than the prospect of near certain distress.

I moved back to this small city from a considerably larger city eleven years ago. By then I had spent a year driving up and down the interstate to see my daughter on the weekends, and that bleak drive, amplified by the bittersweet farewell at weekend's end, compelled me to follow my daughter and her mother back to Waterville, the place where I had already spent much of my life. Growing up in nearby Vassalboro, Waterville was "town," the place where everything was: groceries, school clothes, doctors' offices, the movie theatre. When it came time for me to go to college, I chose Colby, which is technically in Waterville, although the gulf that exists between the city proper and the campus on the hill is measurable not so much in miles as in the elements that comprise the essence of privilege. After brief forays into the wider world, I made what I intended to be a mere pit-stop here, just enough time to patch my old Volvo together before I headed west to points mostly unknown. Instead, I met a girl, and I stayed. Twenty months later, we had a daughter who still, seventeen years later, makes me glad that old Volvo of mine wasn't anywhere close to ready to roll across the continent in the fall of 1993.

We were living in Portland (Maine -- when I say Portland, it is always Portland, Maine, unless otherwise noted) by the time the little beast arrived, and we would spend most of the first five years of her life there. It was a pretty good time to be living in Portland. We didn't have much money, but back then it was still pretty affordable as cities go, so we lived in a decent apartment, ate out at good restaurants once in a while, and wandered all over the city. The relationship's death knell tolled right around the time the cost of living in Portland skyrocketed, and with two households to support rather than just one, soon there was little choice: my daughter and her mother made their way north to cheaper climes. Again, a year of making that drive every weekend wore me down, but it was more than that. Being in the same city had meant having midweek options, impromptu dinners and sleepovers or just a sweet half hour sitting with her on the steps eating ice cream. A year without any of that was more than I was willing to endure, and so I followed them back home to Waterville.

For the first seven years, I could have been living anywhere: the place was mostly irrelevant because I found a job that occupied most of my waking hours. I worked fifty, sixty, sometimes seventy hours a week, and when I wasn't working or sleeping, I was with my daughter. Waterville existed, for me, as little more than the backdrop to my ongoing life. It wasn't until that job ended, quite suddenly, that I poked my head out of what was then my cave and found myself in the midst of a burgeoning scene.

Those were impressive times by any standard. Everyone was young and smart and interesting and enthusiastic. People were involved. It felt very much like the future of Waterville was not just promising, it was assured. There was an award-winning author, a doctor, college professors, journalists, world travelers, a librarian and her punk-rock husband, a hippie farmer, a concert promoter . . . a remarkable array of talents and experiences. I knew at the time it was rare, but I never guessed it was also fleeting.

People move on, they move away for jobs or family or whatever. All of that happened, but there was another element to our disintegration that was, at least in part, my own fault. I fell for the farmer's girlfriend, with foreseeable consequences: the group splintered apart. Where once any given evening could find a dozen or more of us joyfully spread around four tables pulled together in a corner of the bar, suddenly no gathering was easily made: allegiances had to be considered, as well as wagging tongues. I certainly lamented the change, but I was no less besotted and self-absorbed than that simpering twit Paris under the gaze of Helen of Troy: I was more than satisfied that my relationship with the farmer's girlfriend remained one of the few unscathed by current circumstances. Meanwhile, in ones and twos, my friends began to move away. Eventually, so did the farmer's girlfriend, although she didn't go so far away that I couldn't still see her. She had ended things with the farmer, and because pretty young women of a particular stripe thrive on unqualified affection and the constant tacit reminder that they are desirable, she kept me on a string for a short time -- just long enough to find her way in the new version of her life, long enough for her to stop feeling desolate and alone. Once her own sense of order had been restored, she cut the string, and I sank rather briskly into my own personal oblivion.

For a long time after that, Waterville became for me a place with ghosts around every corner. The bar, the good restaurant, the coffee shop, the footbridge, my own house: all of it was fraught with her. I considered leaving then because, at the time, it was impossible to imagine seeing any or all of this every day and not constantly seeing some flash of her in my periphery. It was grotesque. Time passed, though, and it was she who became grotesque, not the things she had touched. I had new eyes for Waterville and, not without considerable modifications, I settled in once again.

Joyce had Dublin. Faulkner had Oxford County, Mississippi; Hemingway Michigan's Upper Peninsula, the Florida Keys and, of course, Paris. Steinbeck had Salinas and Monterey. Places as desperate obsessions, grimy windows on the near world. I have, for most of my life, had a dying, decaying mill town perched on the edge of a river. In my youth there were two still thriving department stores spitting distance from one another right downtown. Today, one of those buildings is a cobbled together collection of shops, offices and event space; the other is a derelict. The good restaurant, the one that had sustained itself for decades, closed three months ago. The coffee shop is the hangout of strange misfits, Jesus-freaks, and old people. The bars are full of bad music and loudmouthed drug dealers. The sidewalks are crowded with the desperate, the mad, the medicated. None of this is entirely new -- it's worse, of late, but it's certainly not new.

No, what is new is this: I see no hope here. With barely more than a handful of exceptions, my closest friends have drifted off to other places, other lives. What was once a fair copy of the Algonquin Round Table is now little more than a lunch counter of barely audible witticisms. Opportunity is scarce: it seems the only sort of "business" that finds this place appealing these days is low-income elderly housing. The city's current motto is "Converge and Create." I believe it was my friend Chili who quipped, "It should be 'Converge and Cremate.'" That's right, folks: come here and die. But, because so many of the ones who were supposed to comprise this small city's renaissance have moved on, I suppose I can't blame the rich old white men of the chamber of commerce for being enthusiastic about the prospect of Waterville becoming a de facto retirement community. Old people commit comparatively few crimes, after all, and they're off the streets before dark. They are a dream populace in this disposable age.

When I need a break from writing, I wander down the street to the park, where I sit and smoke a cigarette and let the sun do what little it can for a guy who spends most of his time in a cave. There's a crazy homeless asshole who sits at the edge of the park on days like today, and he's taken to muttering at me every time I walk past him. What he says is easy enough to ignore because, well, he's a crazy homeless asshole, and for a handful of reasons he probably resents having his routine disrupted by my routine. The fact that I don't even acknowledge his existence almost certainly rankles him as well, but believe me, I don't dismiss him simply because he's firmly ensconced in the shallow dirty end of the human wading pool. I pay him no heed, yes, but the thing I can't ignore, the thing I shouldn't ignore, is the sense that, the longer I stay in this town, the narrower the margin between that guy and me becomes. You never can tell what the consequences might be when you linger just a bit too long.

We've had some times, though -- we've had some times. I've fallen in love, kissed a lot of ladies, been drunk, been sobered, found and lost friends, {NOTE: It appears something went wrong when I originally posted this entry, and about a sentence and a half at the end of this paragraph got lopped off. I apologize. I also wish I could tell you precisely what I said in those words that are no longer with us, but I couldn't recreate it for all the money in your pocket. It is gone, and we must not grieve. Take it on faith that whatever I wrote, it was pithy, quite possibly poignant, and probably included a reference to a once beautiful succubus.}

Waterville, je t'aime. I want a divorce.

Cure for Sleep

Look at that, it's one o'clock in the morning. In the last month and change, I think I've had literally three nights when I've just fallen asleep when I climbed into bed. And one of those nights was the Fourth of July, when I was drinking beers at a friend's house all day and eating lots of good food. Actually, even that night, after everyone else had gone home and my friends had gone to bed, I stretched out on the couch and spent an hour drunkenly reading six pages of Rob Lowe's autobiography -- which I'd been looking forward to reading, but I was in no shape to try to make heads or tails of it that night, I just wasn't ready to close my eyes on the off chance I'd actually just go ahead and go the fuck to sleep. But the beauty of being at least a little bit drunk (or better still good and drunk) is that your brain is highly unlikely to clamp onto the one thing you tell it not to -- like you say, "Okay, let's not think about . . ." whatever, whatever it is that makes you anxious or ashamed or angry. And then of course you think about that, and you might as well put your pants back on and play sudoku on the computer for three hours.

And that's the part that truly sucks about insomnia: I'm not sharp. Like right now -- I am NOT sharp. I don't have any deep thoughts, anything interesting to say. I'm fucking tired. That's why I went to bed in the first place TWO HOURS AGO. I was tired, I'd used my brain more than enough today, and it was time to let the big muscle rest so that I can use it again tomorrow. Except about a minute after I closed my eyes, this went through my head: "Hmmm. Okay. Feels good. Feels right. Feels like I'm going to drift right off to (pause here for a heartfelt yawn) sleep. . . . Glad I'm not thinking about . . . Aw fuck! No! You stupid stupid sonofabitch. Why? Why?! Why do you do that?" I rolled over. I opened my eyes, cocked an eyebrow, sighed, then threw back the covers, grabbed my pants, grabbed a shirt, and here I am.

I was thinking about doing a kickstarter -- do you know what that is? It's where you go to this website, you make a pitch for a project you're working on, and you say, "This is how much money I need to do my project." Then you post it everywhere you know how, email it to your friends and family, get them to send it to everyone they know, people pledge money, and if your pledge goal is met in like a month, you get all that money (minus handling fees and a small slice for the kickstarter website) to put toward your project. My friend Doug did it for his cowboy poet documentary, and I'm very happy to say he met his goal. It's pretty cool. Anyway, it turns out I can't do a kickstarter because you have to have a bank account (obviously), and I don't and won't. But, hey, you can still contribute: just send your checks and money orders to my attention at the Bear Cave, 105 Main Street, Waterville, Maine 04901. We also accept sandwiches and packs of Camel lights.

Some nights when I can't sleep it's because, for one reason or another, I've remembered something else I left behind in my former house. I used to refer to all those lost items as things that were lost in the fire, but that's disingenuous, isn't it? No, there was no fire. I just couldn't stand to be there. Which, objectively speaking, is pretty fucking ridiculous . . . unless you've ever had the experience of a happy familiar place suddenly haunting you. Anyway, most of what I left behind was just stuff, baubles and trinkets and endless dead weight. Some of it, though, mattered. Some of it meant more to me, and in random moments I can still picture exactly where those things sat in my house, or where they were at the end, the last time I walked through, throwing this and that into boxes that Hank and I tossed in the back of his truck, with every intention of returning -- soon -- for more. But we never went back. I couldn't stand to be there for more than a few moments, and after that last time, I had so many opportunities to go there, I could have literally gotten everything I owned out of the place. Then one day, more than a month after the last time, some friends drove by the place and saw the signs on the doors: locked down. The bank, she took the house.

Which in a strange way was a relief. Until that day, I was operating on the assumption that I'd be going back in there -- that I would have to, because I still had stuff there, some of which I still wanted. In truth, though, for a long time after I fell apart, I didn't want any of it. Duh, right? Why would you want stuff if you're so severely depressed? But in bits and pieces I grabbed a boxful here, a boxful there. The books I loved the most (of the couple thousand on my shelves) I got out of there. Pictures of my daughter, most of those made it. Some clothes. My computer, of course. A weird ceramic pencil holder my college girlfriend made for me. A coffee mug my younger brother gave me for Christmas a couple years ago. My electric clippers. Shit like that. Shit I still have.

Sometimes, though, I wonder about my two-volume collection of Proust. Did that end up in a dumpster? What about the copy of The Sound and the Fury that I read in college and marked up with my pithy annotations and bold underlines? Or my massive dictionary -- where the fuck is that? Shift gears: what about the cupboard full of board games Braden and I used to play? Or her Legos? She had a lot of really fucking cool Legos, man. Castles and ships and houses and Spongebob. All gone.

Of course, losing sleep over any or all of these things is senseless: they're gone, they've been gone for more than a year, and dwelling on them avails me nothing but a later than ideal start to my day tomorrow. Still, there's something about remembering all the lost pieces, connecting them to a time before everything seemed hopeless, recalling how they felt as my fingertips passed over them in the time when all had gone very much to hell, and looking back now from this peculiar time that is neither. That's the thing about the descent into the maelstrom: you and all your stuff swirl round and round on an inexorable course toward the bottom, the maelstrom spitting out only what it chooses, only when it chooses.

Come to think of it, I'm not sure I saved my Poe.

The Day the Music Wouldn't Die

Today it’s a sixty-something guy in the coffee shop. He’s set up a small portable stereo, and he has an electric guitar and a trumpet. He puts in a CD, and then he sits back on his little stool and accompanies the CD, sometimes on guitar, sometimes, god help us all, on the trumpet.

If he were singing, it would be called “karaoke,” which is a Japanese word that, loosely translated, means, “No talent, no problem.” I don’t know the word, in Japanese or any other language, for what this guy is doing. Perhaps there’s no need to name it: let’s just call it yet another step toward the end of civilization as I thought I knew it.

He’s committing the ultimate sin, of course: he’s playing along to “mood music,” that easy-listening, light-jazz milieu created to justify the existence of the likes of Kenny G and John Tesh. “Adult contemporary,” some would call it. I think it was Norm Macdonald who was hosting Weekend Update when Kenny G released a Christmas album some years ago, and Norm said it better than I could ever hope to: “Happy birthday, Jesus – hope you like crap.”

I’ve felt the noose of live amateur music tightening of late. At my favorite local bar, where it has not been uncommon to find me seated seven nights out of seven, it is a rare evening indeed that some at best half-talented two-chord strummer isn’t perched on the stage trying to outsmart the lousy brick-and-basement acoustics by – of course – playing and singing louder. Genius.

The week begins, as it almost certainly must, with Open Mic Monday. The regulars include an anxiety-ridden young woman who – and you’d never guess this in a million years – has a wild preoccupation with the deep and heartfelt musical stylings of Alanis Morissette. Some nights the Colby kid who thinks he’s witty because he sprinkles his lyrics with lots of tasty f-bombs shows up with his sidekick the human beatbox – they’re crowd favorites, as you might imagine. Here’s the thing, all you human beatboxes out there: unless you invented it (and all but one of you did not), cut it out. It’s fucking asinine. Let’s see, who else? Ah, yes, there’s always at least one muscled dude who glares malevolently at his guitar (presumably because he fears it will give away his dirty secret – he can’t play!) and sings everything, from Bob Seger to Tom Petty, as interpreted by Creed. Creed – music for meatheads who love music for meatheads. But, hey, it’s not all bad: we also have a local singer-songwriter type who always brings with him quite a distinguished following of twitchy, unemployed cigarette-bummers. I’m sure his day-job as a coke dealer has nothing to do with the fact that he has an entourage. Just listen to his songs, man. Sometimes he wants to jump so high he touches the sky. Imagine wanting to do that! He also has a special fondness for his lady’s beautiful eyes. I’ve never seen her, but I’m sure I’ll recognize her when I do – I hear she has beautiful eyes. How could I miss her?

Which brings us to Tuesday. In this particular race to the bottom, it is admittedly a tough ballot, but I’d have to say Tuesday night is by far the worst of many bad options. The evening starts, any time between four and six, with a wrinkled little “blues man” who plays, without fail, the same old blues songs, the same old way, week after week for the dinner crowd. The little man can play, it’s true, but I challenge you, right now, to spend one night a week for the next four years listening to the same performance as though on a loop, and then tell me how it’s a good thing. The only variation comes on those occasions when the little man gets a bit deep in his cups and pauses between songs to tell everyone how much he loves them. Oh, man, that’s the real stuff right there. That’s old school blues. But wait, it gets . . . more! After nine o’clock, a collection of mismatched true amateurs wheel in their instruments, and from nine until closing time, they blow the bricks out of the walls with – wait for it – the same songs, played the same way, week in and week out. In a sense, it’s a masterful feat. If they cut the volume forty percent, it would very nearly be almost tolerable.

Once upon a time (meaning until about two months ago) Wednesday was the one guaranteed bastion of freedom from auditory offense. And then Acoustic Wednesday was born. It’s fairly telling that, thus far, the highlight of Acoustic Wednesday was the night some of the letters feel from the marquee, leaving an announcement for “AC U TIC WE.” I would quite possibly pay money to see ACUTIC WE. I bet they play rippin’ ska. Alas, it was an optical delusion, and Acoustic Wednesday happened as expected. The most endearing quality of Acoustic Wednesday is that it is, in fact, a showcase for one lucky performer from – you guessed it – Open Mic Monday. That’s right, folks, if four ballsy, deeply personal renditions of Alanis Morissette’s top hits wasn’t enough for you day before yesterday, pull up a barstool and strap yourself in, because now the songbook is open for business. Regrets – you’ll have a few.

I must confess Thursday holds a special place in my heart. The evening begins with a rousing round of trivia (questions composed by yours truly, not because I’m the smartest guy in town – I am, but that’s not the reason – but because I have the most free time). Thirty questions are asked of all the teams, words are consistently mispronounced by our beloved emcee (I confess, sometimes I’ll throw in one because I know he’ll botch it, and it will make me giggle), there’s some grumbling and complaining (one woman tried to convince me tin isn’t an element – I thought I was going to have to punch her in the husband), and the pot usually goes to a team comprised of roughly eighteen people (they barely break even, but so what – if you don’t like it, go find more friends). And when the dust settles and two-thirds of the bar empties out, karaoke begins.

I go a little easier on karaoke than you might imagine. Sue, the karaoke mistress, is a friend, and she has a fine voice. Beyond that, karaoke in its purest form is essentially harmless. Sadly, in practice it is rarely pure. Just as a rolling stone gathers no moss, an open microphone, almost without exception, gathers no talent. Add to that the fact that the range of songs generally runs between those you’ve heard a thousand times and those you wish you’d never heard once, and what you have is a recipe for lasting bad memories. The Japanese invented sushi and sake, and I praise them no end for it; they also invented hara-kiri and kamikazes (the suicide planes, probably not the cocktail): somewhere in between falls karaoke. They are a boldly inconsistent people, are they not?

Which brings us to the weekend. I can’t quibble with live music on Friday and Saturday nights – people have slaved away all week, give them something different to look forward to when the work week ends. It is a mixed bag, though, to say the least. There’s the white hip-hop duo who bring with them their little gaggle of low-rent gangstah thugs, and those tend to be nights when you’d rather be humping your own leg. There’s also the spunky and oddly orange-hued woman who prances around the stage singing girl-pop from the eighties and nineties to the accompaniment of a much older dude (nudge-nudge) on guitar and synthesizer. In that environment she is slightly more out of place than a thong on your grandmother. But she does have a “wind-machine.” That’s pretty cool because, you know, she has long hair.

Some call me too critical, too judgmental, or just plain mean. “Hey, man,” they say, “these people are getting up there and doing something. You should applaud them for trying.” I will not, sir. Because, minus the repeated use of the word “too,” you’re absolutely correct: I am being critical, and I am being judgmental, and when I’ve had way way more than enough, yep, I’m going to be mean. Because if you’re going to perform publicly, the public has both a right and a responsibility to be critical, to pass judgment. It isn’t your space, it’s our space, and if you’re going to fill it with your music, I am going to respond with my estimation of your efforts. Ultimately, this is a question of entitlement: just because you learned to play three chords on your acoustic guitar, that doesn’t entitle you to the expectation that I’m going to clap my hands and say, “Good job, Cody!” Just because you’ve written a couple dozen songs that do nothing more than rearrange canned, obvious sentiments, that doesn’t make you a musical genius, not even by local standards. And how sad is it that a guy who shares hard drugs with his misfit “posse” fails to connect the dots? Dude, they don’t care about your music. They just love you for your endless supply of drugs. No, that’s not sad at all.

What appears to be a lasting (and potentially devastating) effect of the information age is that we’ve evolved, by and large, into a culture that has become convinced we need constant stimuli. Forget the question of whether we can simply enjoy the silence – good luck even finding it. You can’t even put gas in your car without encountering a mini television screen broadcasting headline news. Are you fucking kidding me?

An interesting (and perhaps equally self-defeating) side-effect of the ubiquity of blaring sounds and flashing images to keep us entertained is the post-narcissist expectation that we all deserve attention. In a certain context I have no problem with this – hell, I post on Facebook quite regularly, and I write a blog. Clearly I want attention too. But I keep it where it belongs: on the interweb, where the millions of other web users can simply choose to ignore me if they wish. I don’t occupy a bench in the small tree-lined park in my little city’s downtown and pound out one remarkable turd of a song after another on my ratty acoustic, determinedly feigning indifference to the question of whether anyone’s listening. Of course we’re listening, Cody: you’re making loud sounds in a public space. Those of us with ears can’t help but listen. And not for nothing, but even the squirrels are contemplating puncturing their eardrums with ice picks.

For a time I gave these modern-day minstrels the benefit of the doubt – by which I mean I was willing to wait, a while at least, for one or more of them to impress me. I wanted to witness a moment that wasn’t so obviously and painfully derivative. If you’re going to take Whitman’s advice and sound your barbaric yawp, make sure it’s your barbaric yawp, and not some flaccid, overwrought impression of somebody else who has gone before. Imitation may well be the sincerest form of flattery, but nobody ever admired a sycophant.

Fair’s fair, and I’m a guy who is generally willing to put his money roughly in the vicinity of where his mouth is, and that is why, starting today, I am going to wander the streets and bars and restaurants and coffee shops and hair salons and insurance agencies and knickknack shops with my ubiquitous notebook in hand, and I will walk up to acquaintances and strangers unbidden and read to them selections from my own work. I simply can not wait to see the white sweet light of appreciation in their eyes.

Right now, the Chuck Mangione/Pat Metheny wannabe is glaring at me as I sit here with my headphones on, not fifteen feet away from where he’s imitating art. As luck would have it, the triple-A battery in my headphones has died, so the noise-canceling feature is out, but no matter, I’ll just turn up the volume. Because I’m listening to the Afghan Whigs, my friend. Love or hate Greg Dulli as you will, but there’s no mistaking the fact that, for good or ill, he’s felt every word he’s written, every note he’s conjured. Mangione-Metheny over there prefers music for the imperturbable. It’s doubtful he’d feel anything short of me pulling a Bluto Blutarsky and smashing his ax into a thousand merciful shards around his head. And if this really is, as I’ve suggested, the end of civilization as we know it, would that be so wrong?

Junior Seau

Today a man fifteen days younger than me put a gun to his chest and ended his life.

Tiaina Baul Seau, Jr. and I never met. He was born in American Samoa, grew up in San Diego, became a four-sport star athlete, and decided to play college football at USC. Seau had to sit out his freshman year because he fell ten points shy of the aggregate minimum SAT score of 700 required to participate in collegiate sports at USC. By all accounts -- and anecdotal evidence from scores of interviews and his short-lived television series Sports Jobs more than bears this out -- Seau was anything but a dumb jock, but the sting of going from exalted status to cheerleader never set well with him. His junior year at USC he was a unanimous first-team All-American. A few months later the San Diego Chargers made him the fifth overall pick in the NFL draft.

I'm a New England guy, a Patriots fan, so except for playoff match-ups, I rarely saw Seau play in games that carried a lot of weight for me personally. Still, in the dozen seasons he played on the left coast, I saw more than a couple handfuls of Chargers games that didn't involve the Pats, plus a lot of highlight clips during the postgame shows, so I was as familiar with his impressive career as any casual sports fan. I vaguely remember him playing a few seasons in our division, for the hapless Dolphins, but after that first season in which he started all but one game (and recorded 133 tackles), he was injured much of the remainder of his contract and the Dolphins finally released him in the offseason of 2006.

A few months after the Dolphins released him, Seau announced (tearfully) his retirement from professional football. I don't begrudge him the tears: it was a game he'd mastered and which had, but for the caprices of competitive sports, treated him well. That combination of love for something outside of yourself, coupled with reciprocal affection from a massive fan base, is hard to walk away from. Plus, I believe on the most fundamental level Seau was lamenting the loss of something that felt to him very much like home.

Fortunately, Seau wasn't homeless for long: four days after he announced his retirement, my beloved New England Patriots offered him a job. And goddamn if he didn't play his heart out in New England, people. That first season, he looked like a man ten years younger than we all knew he was: smart and wise as his age would dictate, but quick and fierce and strong, like a rookie trying to make his bones. It was goddamned gorgeous to watch, and I felt myself, as a fan, experiencing something the word for which I use painfully judiciously: blessed. In November, after the better part of a solid season, it was more than typically painful to watch him jog off the field after he'd made a tackle that broke his arm against the Bears, ending his year. It was more painful still a season later to watch the ass-fucking New York Giants outplay us and, after an absolutely remarkable undefeated season, deny the Pats another Super Bowl title -- thus denying Seau, after such a brilliant career, his first ring.

The rest is mostly incidental. He played another season and change with the Pats, but overall it was a holding-pattern season: Brady was hurt, and the lingering heartache of 2007 tinged everything with faint loathing. In 2009 he played in slightly fewer than half the Patriots' games. In January 2010 he announced his retirement for the second time, but again, incidental.

There's much that I will remember about Seau. As a football player, particularly a linebacker, he was an early version of what is essentially common today. Once upon a time there was Lawrence Taylor, a fearsome giant (and Giant, pun intended) whose speed and strength far exceeded that of anyone who would keep him from the backfield, allowed him to bite a stiff-arm off at the elbow and chew straight through to the ball-carrier. In the 1980s we all thought that was the direction the linebacker position had taken. And then Seau arrived and we realized it was possible to package the closing speed, hands and agility of a Pro-Bowl cornerback in the body of a linebacker. The results bear it out: he put up Hall of Fame numbers, and was the guy offenses schemed to avoid. He was a one-man defense.

He was also charismatic as hell, in his Trilby hat, rolling out that multi-million dollar smile. He was as fierce a competitor as there ever was, but he was also a guy who loved the life he'd made for himself.

But he was also a man who, by virtue of not just his chosen profession but also the position he played on the field, placed his head at or near the impact point hundreds and hundreds of times over the course of a professional career that spanned nearly twenty years. It's staggering to think that we are only just now becoming painfully aware of the real consequences of head trauma. Read my friend Travis' heart-wrenching and thoughtful article here. Or google suicides by former NFL players, and take note of how many of them (Seau included) killed themselves in such a way that they left their brains fully intact, at least presumably so that medical science would have the opportunity to examine their brains and identify the effects their pro-football careers had on the soft tissue buried deep beneath their helmets and skulls.

At the first high school I attended, I played part of one football season (because they didn't offer soccer back then -- the only fall sport I'd ever known, and one poor kids could easily play because the equipment requirements were far less costly than those of peewee football). I gave it up one day when I found myself stretched out on my bed two hours after practice, an ice pack on my swollen and bruised elbow, and my best friend walked into the room and said, "Hey. How's it going?" I looked at him for a full minute before I knew who he was. I was fourteen years old, and in practice that day I'd managed to experience what was almost certainly my first concussion. I only ever knew one way to play sports: all out between the whistles. In my heart of hearts, I still believe that's a worthwhile philosophy, in sports as well as in much of life. But I was ill-equipped to exercise my ethic in that environment (I was undersized at my position, and little did I know that a helmet was more of a suggestion of safety than a guarantee), and the adults who were responsible for making sure I didn't do any lasting harm to myself were ill-suited to that task. The next day I quit the team, and I never regretted it for a moment.

But please don't misunderstand me: I am not suggesting we ban football. Not by the remotest long-shot am I saying that. Nonetheless, something must change, and it must change now, not eventually. A little more than a hundred years ago, after a spate of college football related deaths and serious injuries, President Theodore Roosevelt called the coaches of Harvard, Yale and Princeton (the powerhouses of the early twentieth century) to the White House and encouraged them to reform the game in ways that would minimize the risk to the young men who played the game. The changes that were made -- from such landmark alterations as legalizing the forward pass and eliminating barbaric practices like the flying wedge, to simply enforcing existing rules more harshly -- both revolutionized the game and made it, if not entirely safe, then at least manageably so, and many credit Roosevelt with saving the game of football. That was 1905, and it was college football. In this current multi-billion dollar professional football industry, who will step in and have the stones to save the game and the young men who play it?

Tiaina Baul Seau, Jr. was a tremendous athlete, a fierce competitor, a great teammate, and a gentleman ambassador for not only his sport but the sporting life. If you don't believe me, watch the episode of Sports Jobs in which he's the equipment manager for the Washington Capitals (and does a stint in net -- on skates, no less). Whatever else may be said, whatever may come to light in the days and weeks ahead, Tiaina Baul Seau, Jr. -- Junior Seau, as it seems everyone knew him -- was far too young to reach the end of his rope. Suicide is always a staggering tragedy, but if it proves likely Junior Seau chose to end his life rather than continue to deal with the demons brought to life by a football-battered brain, then shame on everyone who has ever enjoyed watching and/or playing the game. Ask yourself if there is anything worth loving if it kills the ones who make it worthy of your love. Fix the goddamned game. Fix it now.

Gut-Sick

I've been gut-sick for three days. Three days is two days too many for me to pretend it's anything other than what it really is. So I won't.

When a thing ends, even when it ends well, ends right, it is still more than a little sad. Knowing all along that it would end and that there would be no hard feelings, no acrimony, no doors slamming or desperate, angry phone calls somehow offers less consolation than it should.

Let me tell you a few more things about this girl Milly. First and foremost, she is happiest when in motion: she travels, she runs, she works like a mule that has been granted the precious gift of opposable thumbs. I'm not suggesting she's unique in this way -- there are plenty of people in the world who are energized by being active. The point is that she falls firmly into that category, and one quality most of that ilk share is the urge to prolong their capacity to engage in such pursuits by maintaining something I'll simply call good health. Don't get me wrong, she'll dabble in the occasional self-destructive binge, smoking a few too many cigarettes, downing a few too many cocktails and so on, but on balance . . . well, on balance, she seeks balance. And regardless of whether or not that is necessarily for everyone, it is nonetheless admirable -- not because it's the right way for a person to live her life, but because Milly understand it's the right way for her to live hers. She also possesses the kind of integrity that allows her to walk away from something she otherwise loves but that doesn't fit the larger picture, rather than muddling through indefinitely in the no-man's land between trying to force the situation to change to suit, and compromising her principles.

One remarkably consistent trait of contentious relationships, to my mind, at least, is the ongoing struggle to reshape the person we claim to love above all others into somebody other than who he or she actually is. It's a remarkable phenomenon, don't you think? We fall in love with a person, we consider that person to be more important than everyone else in the world, and still we can't just be happy with who he or she is -- we still have to fuck with it. You're too this, not enough that, you smother me, you don't pay enough attention to me, your feet smell, you don't like my friends, all your friends suck . . . and on and on and on. The part that baffles me most about this is not that people do it, it's that they too often don't seem to recognize that's what they're doing. I'm not suggesting I have an answer to any of this, won't even pretend to offer advice. I just know it's out there, see it every day, and point it out only as stark contrast to this thing that was Milly and me.

I'm the guy to whom friends and random acquaintances quite regularly offer unsolicited observations about my lifestyle. I smoke like Bogart, drink like a Scot and eat whatever the hell I like. The only exercise I get, other than walking around town (because I don't own a car), is in bed. And I currently live in a windowless cave with no shower. There is, admittedly, room for criticism. But here's the thing about criticism that too few critics appreciate: go fuck yourself. By which, of course, I mean feel free to offer me your thoughts and suggestions, but don't ever assume your sense of the right way to do things entitles you to tell me the right way for ME to do things. I'm not your kid and I'm not your fix-it project. I'm a person who is entirely comfortable living with the consequences of my own choices. Even when one of those consequences includes losing Milly.

Which brings me to why I'm not the least bit bitter about this ending: Milly has never once tried to push or steer or coerce me into being someone other than who I am. She's never tried to get me to skip the next cigarette, eat a salad, leave the bar early, or change my ways in any fashion. The delightful irony of that approach is that, in the seven and a half months I spent with her, she got me to look at some of the world differently -- not by insisting, but simply by showing it to me and letting me draw my own conclusions. That's the right kind of person to have in your life, whether as a friend or as something more.

And we are friends and always will be. But she knew the something more was never going to pan out the way she wants her something more to go. And she had the guts to say it to me, with no mollycoddling, no guile, no bullshit. If I didn't love her before, I would certainly love her for that.

But I am gut-sick still, I'm sad for myself because I don't get to be that guy. It's the kind of sad for which there is no immediate cure: there is no replacement part like another girl, or string of girls, no magic elixir like two days of solid drinking, no soothing release like an hour in a therapist's office or an afternoon talking it out with your best friend. It mellows in time, then goes away, if not entirely, then enough. And someday soon I'll be sitting on a bar stool beside Milly, we'll eat BLTs with extra-crispy bacon (mine with extra mayonnaise, because I really do thumb my nose at the army of tantalizing raiders determined to destroy my body), sipping mudslides and making each other laugh. I look forward to that day. Today, though, I'm sad as shit, with apologies to no one.