Travel light for the revolution

 Zsu Zsi laughs as I make a panicked, last-minute shuffle to stuff one more item into my travel bag, a book on poetry co-authored by Kim Addonizio and Dorianne Laux, a gift from an ex-girlfriend.

I don’t really need the weight but I’ve been feeling poetic, writing lots of poetry, and I’m enjoying “The Poet’s Companion.” So the book’s coming with me.

I had been up late the night before, reading the chapter on “Witnessing.”

It may seem strange to write poetry during dark times, the authors begin, sort of like “fiddling while Rome burns.” But it is “a necessary act, one that allies itself with hope rather than despair.”

This doesn’t mean, of course, that poetry records only the beautiful, or frivolous, but every act, human or otherwise, that touches our lives in some way.

“A poem of witness,” they write, “wants to look at the realities and name them, to retrieve them from the silence.” That’s what I want to do, name things, the beautiful and the absurd, the run-of-the-mill and familiar, the forgotten and the oppressed, and retrieve them from the silence, from the marginal, where an increasing number of Americans now live.

The media don’t often do an adequate job of telling the stories of those who live on the margins—the unemployed, low-wage factory and warehouse workers, the millions who have recently lost their homes, the millions more of American children who suffer from hunger. By most accounts, they’re just numbers.

To really witness such things, to retrieve them from the silence and name them, to make a poem or story out of what’s actually there, takes courage. I’m learning that the act of making of poem, any kind of poem, is not for the faint of heart.

Just the other day, while listening to a friend warn of an impending irreparable breakdown of our economy and government, and of a coming revolution in the U.S., I started to feel a panic until this came to me:

Strengthen your core
listen, watch
and be ready.

Not great or even good American poetry, but it has helped me to feel less fearful of alarming developments in the global economy, the ever-increasing gap and the injustices that follow between rich and poor, the destruction heaped upon ordinary people by a corrupt banking system and hostile government, as witnessed by the thousands of protestors who have occupied their cities and communities across the U.S.; it has helped me to focus more on staying healthy, being strong, observant and ready to act. This “poem” bears witness to what feels to me like a perilous time.

Zsu Zsi has come as a favor at 6 a.m. to take me to the Amtrak station for the first train out of San Luis Obispo, which runs every day to San Diego. It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m going to spend a week with my mother and daughter, a welcome respite from my chores at the farm, and a holiday gift that I’m already treasuring, quality time with the two women I love most.

“I know, it’s ridiculous,” I explain to Zsu Zsi, tightening the pull string on my bag. “I try to travel lighter each time I get on the train,” I say, hoisting the pack over my shoulder, “but my bag always ends up being heavier than I want.”

“Why don’t you get a Kindle?” she asks. “You can put a whole library of books on a Kindle, and it’s light.”

“I will as soon as I can afford one.”

They’re only $80, I’ve been told, which isn’t much but it’s more than I want to spend. I wonder, given my lack of disposable income these last three years, where every dime is like a dollar, how anyone can afford one.

Still, I’d love to travel more lightly, and when I can afford to buy a Kindle, I will.

Were I homeless, which seems as great a possibility now as finding a low-paying slum job, I’d be pushing a shopping cart with all of my belongings spilling over the top, extra shoes and clothing hanging in heavy soiled clumps off the sides, and a box or two full of books on the bottom rack.

I need my creature comforts, which remain adequate at the moment, but I wonder: How much longer will they last? As the gears of the U.S. economy turn clunkier, chewing up the carcasses of minimum wage workers, I’m learning to live with less. I’m traveling lighter.

Like many of my friends, I find myself downsizing, scaling back on unnecessary expenses, growing more of my own food, learning to do my own repairs, thinking about harvesting rainwater and solar energy, building up the local community, preparing for the possibility of a complete breakdown of the system that robs from the poor and gives to the rich.

I’ve been on the tightest budget of my life since the economic meltdown of 2008—where banks made off with billions of taxpayer dollars while taxpayers were left to fend for themselves during a period of record home loan defaults. Money’s tight, people have been saying. And it doesn’t look like it’s going to get better any time soon.

Zsu Zsi and her husband, along with other friends, have kept me from falling through the cracks, providing places to work, rest and eat.

It’s not much easier for them either, I’ve noticed, as friends and family watch their income and savings and retirement dwindle with each passing day. They’re working harder, and longer hours too.

Oil companies, meanwhile, report record profits; and banks, rescued from the brink of disaster, appear to have bounced back, returning much of the capital they borrowed from taxpayers. In some quarters, at least, the system seems to be up and running again. News reports paint a rosier picture of the economy as we head into the New Year. Jobs are increasing, unemployment is down.

The reports, however, come off as false assurances based on projections made from dreams not reality.

The decline in numbers of unemployed doesn’t include the millions of job seekers who no longer qualify for unemployment benefits. The increase in the numbers of jobs is likely the holiday uptick of part-time and seasonal wage slaves. Some economy.

The situation as I view it from our increasingly upscale little beach town on California’s Central Coast, where truly the rich get richer and several of my less privileged neighbors have lost their homes, still appears to be dim.

Job prospects also appear unpromising for many people, unless they’re willing to pour coffee or sling burgers, not that there’s anything wrong with service jobs but not everyone aspires to putting on a Wal-Mart uniform or pushing boxes in million-square-foot warehouses full of cheap goods imported from China.

We’re a warehouse, service economy. Those are the jobs that have most likely increased and which will continue to increase unless we can find ways to rein in our consumer demands, and get more imaginative and creative with our resources.

A little after 6 a.m., Zsu Zsi’s truck winds south along Highway 1 between black open fields under the pitch-dark winter sky. We rumble along comfortably in the late December chill. I feel safe, secure and warm inside the roomy cab.

It’s a big truck that uses a lot of fuel but is necessary for the daily tasks of running a ranch with chickens, and tending a field of blueberries. As oil becomes more costly, however, I wonder, how will she and other farmers and ranchers power their tractors and maintain their fields? How will we get food to market without it becoming too costly for most consumers?

I see a crisis coming, not just for commuters fed up with the high cost of gasoline but for the whole fossil fuel-driven system that brings food to most households throughout the U.S. Mere threats from Iran to choke the supply of oil passing through the Strait of Hormuz last week sent a shiver of predictions of $150 per barrel, a spike that most consumers can ill afford.

Just ask any farmer what he spends on fuel and he’ll probably tell you he’s not sure how much longer he can make it. Subsidies help with many farm expenses, but those appear to be drying up soon.

Zsu Zsi’s big Ford is a much better ride than my beat-up but handy 25-year-old Toyota farm truck that leaks when it rains.

As we cruise down the road, lights glow eerily through the darkness from the National Guard’s Camp San Luis Obispo, a site for high-security operations, followed by the sheriff’s facilities and county jail next door, and finally, just across the highway, the state prison, the California Mens Colony, where Tex Watson, handsome assistant to the murderous Charles Manson, once resided. This whole area of the highway gives off an eery institutional glow in the darkness.

It reminds me of a fictionalized account I read once of a future San Luis Obispo County, which served as the government’s staging area for attacks on citizens, a top secret training site and encampment for a nation built on incarceration and fueled by terror.

When I first encountered the idea, it seemed strange, both plausible and a little fanciful at the same time, but now it’s become a quite possible reality with President Obama’s support of recent legislation that allows the military to indefinitely detain any American citizen it considers a threat to national security. The system for mass incarceration (yes, this was just supposed to be a whacky conspiracy theory) is already on its way to being intact with at least 20 newly built detention centers across the U.S. (see PBS Frontline’s “Lost in Detention”).

The president promised to protect citizens from the legislation’s potential for abuse, but never explained why, with such reservations, he went ahead and signed it any way.

I’m guessing that it will make a convenient excuse to detain Occupy protestors in the next wave of occupations that are likely to take place in huge numbers coming this spring.

In three years, the Obama administration has already detained and deported more illegal immigrants, processed and warehoused in newly built detention centers across the nation than the Bush administration could accomplish in its two full terms of office.

Further up, another cluster of lights present themselves from Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, where 20,000 of some of the country’s brightest minds and most privileged students pursue technical studies in agriculture, architecture and engineering, all supported through huge corporate injections of funding.

This little corridor of government operations in defense, education and imprisonment provides a pretty good living for a lot of people in this mostly rural county, rich in agriculture and tourism.These are the best-paying jobs.

Austerity budgets at all levels of government, however, have begun to take a bite of out those jobs too. We’re learning of high-paid civil servants who earn hundreds of thousands of dollars for doing little more than push paper.

People are pissed off about that and, with the help of actual and threatening federal, state, and municipal bankruptcies, priorities are shifting, and money’s not available for new hires or much else.

Beyond government-funded industry, there’s not much in the way of high-paying jobs here. Most people get by, sometimes holding down two or three jobs, working in restaurants, contracting services for building and repair, and running mom and pop shops, candy and antique stores, coffee joints and gyms. And, of course, there’s farm labor.

As we cruise along, the darkness to the east begins to turn cobalt above the institutional lighting. I’ve been telling Zsu Zsi my woes of living on the financial razor’s edge, suggesting that I may have to move to another area, yet no matter where I look, things appear bleak.

“I don’t know how much longer I can do this,” I say, thinking of a recent story I’d read about debtors being threatened with jail. I have unpaid debts but none as great as those owed by the government. You don’t see many government officials going to jail for their debts. Yet, to listen to some politicians, you’d think only lowlifes don’t pay their bills.

“Well, at least you have a place to go, if things don’t work out,” Zsu Zsi says as we descend the hill that divides the state prison from San Luis Obispo. “You can go to live with your mother.”

As much as I love my mother, that’s the last thing I want to do, but in this economy, it may be the most practical, at least, for staying off the street.

As we approach the sleepy college town and the Amtrak station, Zsu Zsi, a native of Hungary who helped bring an end to that country’s Soviet occupation in 1991, puts poverty and homelessness into perspective in her accented voice.

“I asked a homeless woman, how can she live on the street with no place to go? No place to be safe, no place to just let go and share a meal with friends or family? You have no one when you’re homeless. It’s so wrong.”

I try to imagine what it would be like to miss spending a week with my mother and daughter because of homelessness. It makes me shudder.

It’s Christmas time, Xmas time, the holidays in America, when friends and families gather and reconnect, and all I can think of is that it’s been hardly a week since the Associated Press reported that one out of two Americans lives in poverty, the highest rate ever.

“We’re fast becoming a third-world nation,” I say to Zsu Zsi. “Half the country lives in poverty.”

“That’s what happens when you cut education,” she snaps. “When you have a country run by a bunch of dumb shits, what can you expect? Poverty!”

Yes, I think, it’s hard to advance as a culture when one of your national goals is to make people dumber. The one advantage to dumbing people down, though, is that they’re easier to manipulate, easier to turn into stooges and henchmen.

Zsu Zsi’s own homeland struggles under a resurgent neofascist movement that seeks more seats in Hungary’s parliament, where they hope to restore the glory days of right-wing violence, racism and bigotry, all outgrowths of poverty and ignorance, and lack of education.

“It’s scary,” she says. “There are places you don’t go in Budapest, if you are Jewish.”

“Are you serious?” Already I feel naive for having asked, yet I can’t help adding, “After what Europe has already been through?”

“I’m dead serious,” she says.

The revolutions for freedom from oppression that have erupted around the globe and continue to spread will meet their fierce resisters; they always do.

It’s no different here in the U.S., where once it was possible for right and left to agree, as conservative stuffed shirt William F. Buckley and Black Panther Huey Newton once agreed, that the success of any revolution will be measured by the degree of its humanity.

The shape of our government is anything but humane; it supplies the world with its most sophisticated and deadly weapons, kills innocent people, barters in violence and mayhem, and uses torture to terrorize its enemies and its citizens.

The revolution that I envision will be a turn away from the inhumane, will be the joining of citizens who seek to rebuild their communities as they see fit, without fear, without corporate influence and government interference, and with the courage to create a world free from violence and terror, a world built on just and humane principals.

Some are saying that we will have to fight for it, maybe even take up arms to defend ourselves against increasing government encroachments upon our rights as a free people. That may be the case but it’s more likely that revolution, if there is one, will occur through the resurgence of strong local communities lessening their dependencies on outside resources and agencies, with homes designed to create rather than consume energy, and people learning to travel more lightly, write more poetry, and name more realities and retrieve them from the silence. §

WHATEVER!

whatever

so rude, so dismissive

whatever

so easy, a conversation

stopper.

whatever

your words, your feelings

don’t matter.

whatever

is like saying

“fuck you!”

“you don’t matter!”

WHATEVER!

Forgetting themselves

the mindful are not so

mindful

forgetting 

tons of dharma

tons of karma

themselves

oblivious to the moment

the bliss-filled 

moment that arrives suddenly

out of nowhere

PARANOIA IN THE HALF-MOON LIGHT

my shadow jumped out

from the corner

of the cemetery road

and it spooked me.

I laughed and fell

into a dream 

fearless

of love

fearless of the moon

and the half-moon light

sparkling 

in the wet black sand

dripping diffuse

warm and blue

teasing out love

pulling down the tide

sweeping me off

my feet 

until they

danced.

I gave my nakedness 

to her beauty.

I am that willing

I am that overwhelmed

no longer afraid

no longer paranoid

in the half-moon light.

Greed: The Real American Dream

At my college graduation in 1984, a candidate receiving a degree in American Studies stepped up to the podium for his diploma, and someone in the audience proclaimed loudly, “What the hell can you do with a degree in American Studies?”

I had taken an American Studies course, the “American Dream,” as part of my training as a journalist and Communications major, a degree for which one might have asked the same question. Still, I remember thinking, “What an asshole.”

Thankfully, I found my study of our “you-can-have-it-all” myth eye-opening and took the enthusiasm from that one course into my work as a journalist and found it helpful, if not enlightening. It gave me a newer, more critical perspective on our ad-driven, commercial culture, where standards are measured by how much you earn or own rather than by your character or how much you contribute to the welfare of others.

I’d enjoyed a semester of uncovering the many layers that go into the often vague definition of what that dream is supposed to be. Is it a house in the suburbs, a family, a beautiful wife and a new car? A steady job? A climb up the career ladder? That was about the extent of my dream when I started college. It’s become so much more than that now.

The term is so flippantly tossed around, and those who use it seem to assume that it’s the same for everyone. But it’s not. My dream isn’t about money. It’s about something more than that. I’ve learned to live small and work hard to be a helpful presence in my community. My American Dream is simple: Small is beautiful, and people are more important than money. 

That same year, another questionable degree, the highly touted MBA, began arriving in newsrooms across the country, turning down the money meter and pinching editorial departments. If you wanted to make real money, you got an advanced degree in business. That was the way to go. 

With MBAs, came tightened purses, reduced expenses, and newspapers were soon inching up profits from the desired 12-15 percent to the more wealth-inducing, newsroom-destroying 20-25 percent. 

The resulting clash between the advertising and editorial sides of the enterprise, of course, could only end in disaster for journalism. More and more, the strength of editorial decisions was given over to the ad department, and newspapers, now big money-makers, became a vehicle for promotion and propaganda. Sticky ads began appearing on the front pages, pasted over the tops of headlines and stories that some sorry sap editor and reporter busted their asses to produce for the front page.

“We have to do it,” said a local publisher once when I complained of the practice, “it’s the only way we can stay competitive and make money.” I argued that he should let the editor decide what goes on the front page but it fell on deaf ears.

It marked the beginning of the end for newspapers. Money killed newspapers just as much as advances in digital information exchange. The more money owners made, the more they tried to squeeze out profits, laying off workers, demanding more and paying less to those who remained, the more irrelevant newspapers became. To be accurate, it wasn’t just money but “the love of money,” as greed is described in the Bible, that killed not only the news business and the quality of news but other industries as well.

Greed, the love of money, became a 1980s mantra and the guiding principle in most schools of business, and we all bought into the idea that more is better and that we can live large while the rest of the world starves or ekes out a living; it was a message that permeated every level of American culture but apparently one that only really worked for those who had massive amounts of capital. The rich, of course, got richer.

Even the once-sacrosanct newsroom, bedrock of free speech, protected by the First Amendment, where stories on government or corporate corruption could be written “without fear or favor,” couldn’t compete with money—or people with MBAs. It became an extension of the ad department.

  

The people on Wall Street know this better than anyone: Money—not just money, but lots and lots of it—talks. When it concentrates into fewer hands, however, there will be trouble as witnessed in occupations around the U.S. these past several weeks.

A Facebook friend, an activist for human rights, posted the following comment, pointing to the rage of Occupy Wall Street, and challenging The Nation Magazine’s recent bright cover, which listed selected occupied cities in the U.S., over which were the bold blood-orange letters: “Wall Street Invented Class Warfare.”

“I don't buy that!,” he wrote. “In my humble opinion, when the Founding Fathers wrote & codified a Constitution which initially granted and protected über rights and privilege to ‘white, male property owners’ - [that] created class warfare.”

In other words, white male property owners who codified rights and privileges allowed only to a select few more than 200 years ago created the class warfare evident in the Occupy Wall Street protests. My friend’s comment raises both the issue of privilege and race, not just class warfare, which can be enforced through the validation of greed and ownership as promoted in American culture.

Class differences have always been a factor of American life, even though we like to imagine there aren’t any class differences, and if there are, all you have to do is work hard and be smart and you’ll get rich one day too.

Wall Street showed its disdain for the common person long before its operatives looked down their noses at protestors marching in the street below while sipping champagne on the balcony above. That image played on YouTube was Wall Street’s “Let them eat cake” moment, when it became screechingly evident that indeed there are class differences, and that perhaps soon the mighty, and maybe a few others, will fall.

Class warfare keeps us divided but it isn’t the root issue. 

More fundamental even than class warfare is greed, which permeates our culture, from Wall Street to Main Street. Of necessity, the whole system must implode, it will by nature destroy itself, unless we learn to live within our means. Greed, like pride, as the Good Book says, always leads to disaster. Some are saying it’s already too late.

Greed is the root problem. I’ve always thought of greed as having more than you need to live, which is probably too narrow a definition. By such a definition, we might all be guilty of greed. 

I say this as a person who owns absolutely nothing. I have nothing but my skin and bones, and yes, I’d like to have more than I do now, yet I'm still willing to learn how to live with less. In  the future, I suspect, that’s how things will be. I doubt we’ll ever see such an explosion of growth and wealth as the U.S. experienced in the years following WWII. 

Americans are today more fat with more wealth than any nation in history. Blame Wall Street all you want but in many ways we also are to blame for thinking there is never enough.

Greed permeates down to almost every detail of our lives, from the cars we drive to the houses we build, enormous, monstrous things. That we continue to manufacture and drive gas-guzzling cars is but one example of not only our pride and lack of thrift but a lack of imagination, an odd unwillingness to think beyond the endless waste brought on by cheap fossil fuel.

It’s in everything we do; so entrenched is it that we can’t think of a way out, or imagine that another way is even possible. 

Endless growth, unlimited growth, bigger and more are better, all these were never meant to be more than a bubble, a hope gone delusional, that we can continue to strip the planet clean of its resources and think that it will never end.

The “American Dream,” as it took shape through the ‘80s, had to end; it couldn’t go on forever, an ever-expanding economy to drive a lavish lifestyle unlike any the world has ever seen and one that could in no way go on without finally breaking down. Greed gets a reckoning. Sooner or later, it takes everyone—the guilty and the innocent—down.

It won’t be long before the disenfranchised, the hungry and the poor, the angry homeowners who have lost their homes to the bank, begin tearing down the ramparts that protect and insulate Wall Street from the commoners.

Meanwhile, for those who still hope, it’s time to re-scale the dream, think smaller and lessen our impacts, as has been suggested for nearly 40 years by those who saw this upheaval coming. It’s time to think about how to live with less.

A friend said recently: “I just have this feeling that suddenly everything’s going to get really small really fast.”

“What do you mean?” I asked.

“I mean we’re going to have to start depending on our neighbors. Thank God,” she added, putting a hand on my shoulder, “we’re in a good place to do that.” 

Yes, we are in a good place, where there’s water, healthy agriculture, and people who care. Will the system break down as my friend imagines? It sure looks that way.

These days I don’t worry so much about what I’m going to do with a degree in Communications. I’m happy to have a roof over my head and food to eat, and I look forward to getting to know my neighbors better as the world economy and Wall Street falter, verging on imminent disaster. §

Through the window of a train

Mom called me about two weeks ago to ask if I’d like to come to a party she wants to throw for a bunch of old pals. She called it a “Geezer Gathering,” made up of high school friends from more than 50 years ago. 

“No, not really, mom. That doesn’t sound like a lot of fun,” I said.

“Well, would you consider coming down to help me set up?”

“OK, sure, mom. I’ll go to your geezer gathering.”

So, here I am, riding the train somewhere between Lompoc and Goleta, two hours into a six and one-half hour journey on the rickety Amtrak rail to the Santa Ana station, not far from mom’s old Victorian home in Tustin where she plans to have her party.

The ride along the pristine California coastline is hypnotic, the noise of the train and chatter of passengers are muffled by a modern take on “The Music of Thelonious Monk” jangling through the ear buds plugged into my laptop.

Even with this technology at my fingertips, I feel “old school.” No tablet, no Blackberry, no iPad, just a clunky old laptop and cheap cell phone with pay-as-you-go service. No special features anywhere on my person—unless you’re looking for something non-digital.

The train is generally a good ride, if for no other reason than you don’t have to worry about driving or paying for gas, the view is nice, and you have the option to tune out the world if you like, indulge in a book, bury yourself in a computer, or take a nap.

Today, I ignore the passengers as much as possible. I don’t feel like being social, even though I’m generally a social person and feeling a touch lonely.

A cute but annoying little girl swings her legs in the aisle, supporting herself on the seats in front of me, she pushes up with her hands, lifts her weight and swings. Her grandma eats donut holes and looks at the rugged coastal terrain through the window.

For some reason, today’s view from the train evokes a nostalgic kind of hope, the sort of hope I knew and indulged more as a younger man, when the world seemed larger, filled with new and endless possibilities. As I get older, I’m sadly learning, the possibilities seem to get narrower, and less inviting. I’ve noticed how much more difficult it is for older, boomer types like myself to get too hopeful, especially now with the economy as doubtful and uncertain as it ever was, but even more so as we turn gray and decrepit. 

But today, if it’s not hope that I’m feeling, it’s at least the suggestion of something like hope, a mystery, any way, that isn’t shrouded and foreboding but perhaps even gleaming, putting a different—if not new—light on things.

The Pacific, under the heavy marine layer, summer grey and wet, pops in and out of view through the train window, the misty morning holding down the coastline under a white blanket of timelessness. It’s hard to tell time in this coastal purgatory of summer mist. Is it still morning, or afternoon?

In either case, the landscape of scrub oak, green cypress, marshes, and sea birds dropping into view out of the mist brings me back to the present moment, the only moment I know that has any real possibilities, as I look out the train window. 

I’m amazed at the long, long line of old fence posts tilted and worn, no rails between them, holding nothing, just standing awkwardly erect, one after the other, for a distance that seems absurd. It’s a ghost fence that runs along the tracks between the train and the ocean below. What could that fence line have been built for? How long has it been standing like that with nothing to hold or keep out?

I’ve got other absurdities on my mind as well. Amber said we should end our love affair. We should try living as roommates, she said, until one of us decides to move. I’d like to move; so, I guess, would Amber. Neither of us can really afford it. We’re both broke. 

“Get out now!” a friend told me. “You’ll be sorry if you don’t.”

I thought he was being alarmist, a little melodramatic, as friends can be when they’re watching out for you. I didn’t know that he’d gone through a similar breakup. I didn’t know that he also had kept separate rooms in the same house with his former girlfriend—for nearly six months. 

“It was fine until she started fucking the guy she left me for in the room next to mine,” he told me. “You better get out when you can, dude.”

It’s only been a few weeks, and now Amber has moved in her 12-year-old son, and asked me yesterday if I’d thought about finding another place. It’s a good idea, she suggested. It’s nothing personal, she assured me, and I believe her, it’s what’s best.

As I look out the train window, and ponder the flight of a distant heron, the message sinks in: It’s over, it’s time for me to move on, and I’m a lot older now than I was seven years ago when we started, the possibilities for lifelong companionship narrowing ever more precipitously. Ah, the end of another conjoining of minds and bodies that could only wrap themselves into a tangled web of tears and unhappiness instead of blissful companionship.

“We’re not right for each other,” she said. 

All those years, we kept pushing the wrong buttons, couldn’t seem to find the right ones, and each time it got so messy and hurtful and confusing. 

“I don’t want you to feel sad,” she said.

I wouldn’t feel sad if I wasn’t a bit touched, hounded by a confusing mix of the cynic and the romantic, always hoping, always doubting. It’s a curse, really. I don’t know where it comes from but the tension between hope and doubt seems always to bring my relationships to ruin. I do feel sad.

As the train rolls on, I can feel myself moving on, drifting, searching, hoping, doubting.

“So, are you gonna find yourself another cute hot young thang—huh?” teased a friend after I’d told her that Amber wanted to separate.

“I’m not looking, really. I’m happy to be a free agent, that’s all.”

She moved her body close to mine and put her lips next to my ear: “You like young pussy, don’t you?” she whispered.

I gagged. Well, that’s not the only thing, I stammered. 

Amber’s young, and beautiful, no doubt, but she’s smart and caring and—for some damn reason, we don’t get along very well. We agree on that. We’ve had some fine moments amid the turmoil and troubled times. I’ve seldom felt the difference in our ages, only when the occasional stranger mistook her as my daughter. Sex wasn’t the only thing that kept us together.

Still, it feels absurd, in a way, if not entirely liberating, to be moving on, at least at this point in my life, where I’d like to be more settled, and it becomes clearer by the moment that my days are numbered. I try not to think too hard that life is short, or at least not get morbidly obsessed with the idea, just acknowledge the fact, that I’m older now. I’m no spring chicken, as mom likes to remind me, and it’s quite possible that I will remain alone. 

No one my age wants to be alone. I learned this a long time ago from a friend, a monk, whose entire life was dedicated to celibacy and solitude.

“The thing I fear most,” he said of death, “is that no one will notice that I’m gone.”

Even in his solitude, he wished not to be alone. Even in that final separation through death, he wished to be remembered.

I had high hopes, and so did Amber, that we could work things out, work through our troubles and stay together until the end—and be remembered. Along the way, perhaps, we both knew it wasn’t going to work, but we’re stubborn, and kept at it, and maybe, in the end, our stubbornness is what brought us to this painful juncture.

Now, I’m left with this thought: “Why did I hold on for so long? Will I soon be living in a trailer park, sad, lonely, broken up and finished like so many other geezers who grow old and die in their aluminum cages without so much as a hint of their loss?”

Or what about this thought: “Will the white blanket of timelessness that obscures my view of things and seems to rule my mind lately be swept away, as the coastal breezes outside the train window now lift the misty veil, to uncover lighter, more hopeful possibilities? Are any possibilities left?”

The damned romantic and cynic in me are at it again, stirring up the ridiculous inner tension between hope and doubt. Where do these feelings come from? My Buddha nature, governed by so many Western follies, is too weak and immature to overcome the turmoil, but I can at least feel it, breathe it, and observe it. That I can do. I don’t like it, but I can do it, even though I’m not Buddhist.

Frankly, I’d rather drink beer. I’d rather go to my favorite bar, Schooner’s, and sit comfortably, get blissfully shitfaced, and then quietly observe and meditate. It’s probably not the best way to practice mindfulness but I’ll bet Alan Watts would approve. 

At the geezer gathering, I’ll be co-host with mom to a party of older folks, people in their 70s who are much closer to the precipice than I am, whose view of any sort of timelessness or aloneness is probably much sharper and more poignant than my own. Perhaps that precipitous view is where the romantic and cynic in me may actually, one day, finally find common, quiet ground.

Like my monk friend, in death I fear not being remembered; in life, I fear being alone.

I look through the train window into the distant fields where farm workers hunch low from the waist to pick strawberries. I ate a piece of strawberry with my yogurt this morning; it was surprisingly sweet and delicious. The breeze outside has broken the white sheet of marine layer into patchy clouds and blue haze, a perfect August day. The beaches must be crowded by now. The train barrels down into L.A. §

I may be poor, but I'm not destitute

I know enough about poverty in the U.S. to be something of an expert. I earned less than $9,000 last year, the year before that was less than $5,700. 

That’s money earned with hard physical labor. I don’t qualify for unemployment and haven’t for years.

It’s not something I’m proud of; ashamed is more like it. In the U.S., being poor, unemployed, or underemployed, even during rough times like these, is like wearing a badge of dishonor. You don’t advertise or talk about it. You suffer it—quietly, because no one, really, wants to hear it.

Or, when they do, they seem to have little clue about what it means or how it actually feels, what it does to your sense of wellness, to your sense of place in the community.

“I couldn’t live on that for a month!” a friend recently declared of the $9,000 I earned last year. Then, he smiled, and said: “In a way, you’ve got an advantage over a lot of people who’d probably kill themselves if they had to live on that small of an income.”

I didn’t know what to say. It seemed like a compliment. I couldn’t be sure. Perhaps it was a slanted reference to some kind of resourcefulness that the poor are supposed to have when money’s scarce and steady decent jobs with living wages are difficult, if not impossible, to find.

Or maybe it was an unintended commentary on the shallowness of people whose lives are so fully defined by what they earn, what they wear and what they buy that they must kill themselves when those things are no longer within easy reach.

If so, it suggests that greed has made fools of us all. We thought we could have it all, but guess what? We can’t. 

I felt sad for anyone who’d want to kill himself simply because he had to live on less. I may be poor, but I’m not destitute. I have friends, I have my health, and that’s plenty, but I’d sure like to pay my rent on time.

I no longer have to juggle my bills; I simply can’t pay them. I live on a wing and a prayer. I’m as resourceful as I know how, but without my friends, without Amber, I would be destitute.

Still, it hurts to be poor.

I get a queasy, sinking and embarrassing feeling each time I drive through town, for example, in a truck that chokes and sputters from an exhaust system that’s about to fall off the chassis. I don’t know a damn thing about trucks. I’d fix it, if I knew how.

I hope no one sees me when I drive through town, the only way, really, to get to work, but they do, and they laugh. I’ve observed them, my own hometown people, laughing at me.

“Hey, your truck smells like gas, really bad,” remarked a village elder recently as I approached my truck parked in front of the liquor store, where he lounged on a plastic chair, resting from his daily rounds through town.

“Yeah, I know. Thanks,” I said, hopping into the small, rusting and disheveled 25-year-old Toyota truck cab. He shook his head in disgust as I turned the ignition. It did smell bad, fire hazard bad, and it choked and sputtered as I drove away. 

What could I do? It’s been hard to pull enough money together to buy parts. I need the truck to transport tools to the farm every day. I need the work. I’d take a bus but the bus doesn’t go to the farm, and it would be impossible to carry my tools.

I’ve thought about asking the boss to give me an advance but I don’t like doing it because it just puts me further behind and I hate the feeling of trying to catch up. I don’t like indentured servitude.

I traded some garden labor with a mechanic friend for repair work on my truck. He’ll do the work if I buy the parts. He doesn’t like working on cars but he’s a good friend and he wants to help out. I spent a couple of days weeding, trimming and potting plants in his back yard and earned about 12 hours of mechanical labor in trade.

In the off years, when steady work as a journalist or editor hasn’t been available, I’ve picked up work as a laborer, growing blueberries at the farm and installing landscapes. In fact, in this economy the best job prospects for the unemployed are the military and farm labor.

I’ve already done my military service and I’m grateful for the benefits I‘ve received from it. I picked the latter opportunity, which, as it turns out, isn’t too bad. I like it. Unfortunately, farm labor doesn’t pay that well.

I’ve been lucky up to this point. At 52, I’ve managed to stay mostly healthy and I enjoy the physical labor. But it’s beginning to tell in ways that I never expected in my 20s and 30s, when such work didn’t seem to hurt as much or as long as it does now. The aches and pains are the same, plus some new ones, but they don’t go away very easily, and it takes longer to get things done.

I’m not complaining, but I worry sometimes how much longer I can trade hard physical labor for truck repairs, food and money.

“Jesus!” I declared recently to Amber’s and my own dismay, “Do you realize that in 20 years I’ll be in my 70s?”

“Do you have to talk like that?” she responded.

I don’t like it either but the realization that time passes more quickly with each day hits hard when you’re past 50 and broke and few jobs are available. Like many boomers of late, I have to ask: “How will I support myself when I’m old?”

“A lot of people mistakenly think you’re my sugar daddy,” Amber said recently.

“I am, sweetie, I am your sugar daddy.” 

Where do people get these ideas? I haven’t paid my share of the rent in more than two years, not since the economy tanked. It’s been hard on both of us, but mostly on Amber.

“Maybe you could get a job as a bartender,” she said, offering encouragement. “You’re good with people.”

Not really, not that good, I think. I’m an angry white person, a displaced cynical journalist, who’s beginning to understand what it means to live on the financial fringe, to be an economic outcast. If you don’t have money in the U.S., it’s assumed that you’re not a player; you’re little more than a sorry loser.

I’m not saying that’s the way things really are, I’m not saying I’m a loser, but it feels that way sometimes. It feels that way when people laugh at me as I drive past in a smelly, choking rust bucket. The looks I get seem to say, “Why don’t you just fix the damn thing?” 

I love my truck and I’ll get it fixed as soon as I can, as soon as my finances allow, and I probably could grow into a likeable bartender. I’ve got other friends who’ve spent their best years tending bar, who would teach me how, but I like what I’m doing. I like growing plants.

Unfortunately, no one tips at the farm.

“When you get the money,” my mechanic friend said, “you’ve gotta replace that leaky exhaust system; it’s really bad to drive around like that. That’s how they used to kill Jews.”

He was born and raised into a Jewish family and says things like that when he gets frustrated at my apparent lack of concern about odorless deadly gas leaking into my truck cab.

“Don’t worry, Larry, I drive with the windows down. Soon as I get some money together, I’ll let you know.”

One disadvantage of being poor, I guess, is that even if you don’t want to kill yourself, you’re much more at risk of dying from hazards such as leaky and broken exhaust systems, or bad tires and brakes, or, as in the case of so many uninsured men and women my age, from unattended ill health.

I’ve been fortunate and I count my blessings for my health, for friends like Larry, and for my partner, Amber, who has picked up the slack where I’ve been lacking. And for the healthcare assistance the Veterans Administration offers to indigent veterans like myself.

The feeling of contributing little, or sometimes nothing, is the most devastating part of being poor in the U.S., especially for a man who is supposed, at my age, to be easing into retirement and living the “good” life, driving a nice car and smoking expensive cigars.

I blame mostly myself. It’s not just a bad economy that’s made things tough. The choices I’ve made have also been a factor. I’m not a “player.” I hate corporations and people who think they’re superior because they wear suits. Were it not for the lack of adequate financing, and feeling bad about it, I’d say my life is pretty good. Why throw it away simply because I’m broke?

“You’ve gotta be yourself,” Larry said as we sat in the garden one recent afternoon. I lamented the lack of a steady, good-paying job. He said: “Not everyone can work the nine to five routine, put on a coat and tie and play the game.”

Think of all the poor damned souls who have sacrificed the better part of their selves just to make a buck, he added. They’re mere shells, not fully realized individuals, even if they do have money and all the toys to go with it.

On the other hand, I thought, how many fully realized individuals do you know in the U.S. who earn less than $10,000 a year? In India, maybe, but not the U.S. Americans are definitely not enlightened when it comes to living on less.

I’ve recently picked up extra work writing for two online publications but it’s tough to get the juices flowing sometimes, especially after a day of working hard in the field, especially in the midst of harvest; and the pay for writing and editing doesn’t appear to be what it once was when print dominated readers’ attention.

Still, I push myself the best I can and try to make the most of my opportunities, and learn to live with less. 

Recently, I managed to get enough money together to fix the thermostat, which was causing my truck to overheat. Larry patched it up, put in some new plugs and wires, and said, “OK, let’s turn it on and see what happens!”

I turned the key and she started up without a hitch, and the temperature gauge held steady on the cool side. Great, I thought, at least she’s running cool and on four cylinders now instead of three, thanks to the new plugs and wires.

“Oh Jesus!” Larry cried. “You can’t drive this thing. Turn it off!”

The fuel pump’s gone bad, he said. It’s leaking like crazy. We drove to the auto store for the third time that day, each time buying more parts which, when added together, came to a total of more than $150. 

It may not sound like much but it’s a bundle, and a burden, when you’re struggling to pay the rent. Being poor certainly has its pitfalls, none yet that are worth giving up my life for. I certainly wouldn’t kill myself for a reduction in monthly income of $9,000 or more to less than $1,000.

Yet, it hurts me bad when Amber asks: “Are you going to have your share of the rent this month?” And I say: “Well, it’s not looking too good, honey, but at least my truck’s running.” §