This Be Fiction.


First of All.

First of all, first of all, let me tell you, that indeed, I am a momma's boy.  At this late age, late in the game, I'm coming to grips with that, and of how I've spent my life.  The problem is, you see, that she was the one who taught me to read, even when I was four and didn't want to read, there with Richard Scarry and the help of drawings I liked and Huckleberry, the cat, who was me.  And then I got it, and reading what not so bad after all.

Drew I did, a lot.  But eventually, the words themselves came to replace the drawing, after they had trained my eye, to awkwardly pick up what there is in writing.

Mom's home has always been a pile of books, everywhere, and my own disheveled piles of books, glorious as they are, are getting to be the thirty-years-earlier version, even creeping on my bed now, as her bed has been overrun.



And so, and so...  my problem is one of self-acceptance, and perhaps it always has.  I go do yoga out with my mat in a garden on top the flag stones warmed by the October sun.  My guts groan.   My lower back is sore still, but a shoulder stand and a better plough today than yesterday.  I am off today.  I do not wish the phone to ring.  I enjoy the peace found in yoking the body and the self within to yoga.

Light layer of cotton clouds move in on the sunshine, and I go back inside with my mat, to refresh my cup of muddled lime, turmeric and sea salt, hot water.

Self-acceptance...  what does that look like?  What does that mean for an old mamma's boy who can't keep up with the silverback gorillas, male and husbands, providers, neat lives, striving men and women adapted to the city and the information age, to the subtle call-out of the little guy on his falsehoods of livelihoods and career self-lies...

What does that mean as one works himself, his body, limbs, chakras, spine into better balance and tune...  What do all these books about mean, if I had the clarity that has to be reinforced somehow has a habit, in quietude, peace and quiet...

What if... what if I were allow myself the space to be myself, to not try to fit in with places and people with whom I don't belong, trying half-heartedly, knowing subconsciously that the act is not me, and no wonder they keep the illusion that is me at a distance, not seeing the deeply sensitive god-forbid-male and the spirit within the act.

Fitting in, is so automatic, of course, these days, the culture wars, the culture police...

How to admit after years and years of act, hey, friends, this isn't really me.

Yes, one day with my mother old I went and did yoga in the back in the garden and saw fresh inner life wanting finally to come out.  I remembered being comfortable as I had been when I was a kid, reading, drawing....


There is something about that old pose, the Lotus.  Strength is a good word for it.   Personal, inner, steady in the flux of the world.  Not pandering to a crowd.



I have always trusted my mother.  But she, because of her childhood and what she saw, her parents coming home from the restaurants, drinking and fighting, is anxious, hard to work with, questioning the motives of others, even as she is politically astute.  High strung.

Immediately after college, I was just about her only help, when she went off to grad school, out on her own.  And without knowing it, this troubled me, depressed me some, enough so that I never really had the energy to start my own career or life.  There was Hilde from my hometown, who I was in bed with at my father's, but I had to go help my mom move from one apartment to another in a different town, showing up late, with her crying over the kitchen sink.

"She's sucking the life out of you," my brother would tell me.

And indeed, psychologically I go around with a caution toward engaging with women.  And if that is so, then the rewards for being an adult, if you don't find a mate, for love and comfort, are decreased, and so the desire to get the grown-up professional life that goes along with that.


Work then becomes like the carrying of the Cross, or a retreat into the Buddhist monastery.  And along with that a sense, the inevitable spirituality, at least in the effort to find something worthy of it all far beyond financial renumeration.

In the old days, people grew up together, in lives that had traumatic things seen up close.  Death was seen up close.  19th Century stuff.  Reflect on Kerouac's life, poor little Gerard, the Merrimac flood that took his father's printing business, his father's illness, death lived up close, as it was for my own father whose mother died of consumption in an upstairs room.

So do authors retreat into childhood and adolescence...  And thus were generations upon generations of us susceptible to the joys of literature, Biblical stories, novels, stories.

Whereas now one wonders if we don't rather tend to put a clean hands-off electronic distance between ourselves and stories of note and sad immeasurable things.  Life prepared us for the great irrationalities known through myth and retold.  And now our myths are Apple, Google, Amazon, robots, artificial intelligence, self-driving cars and checkout stands.

And things written down, in the effort of clarity, are laughable pursuits these days, like this.


I get home, first night of a new week.  I read Larkin poems.



But what can you do?  Try to find some meaning in life...