September is Suicide Prevention Month

Charity begins at home, with one’s self, and I have been successful so far this month, these first 26 days. Doesn’t mean I’m home free, of course—I have not only three and a half days to go, but three months to go until the end of the year (2021), and, I can only hope, years upon years after that until a natural, non-violent, pain-free death in my sleep while dreaming of playing a clairseach while touring the cirrocumulus. 

A Very Short Interview at the Seattle Public Library

Yes, I should have been out looking for a job, but I did that yesterday and came up with zilch. I didn’t think the chances of me finding something today were that much better, so I decided to take the afternoon off. I’d been meaning to walk around Green Lake for some exercise, but I was too tired for that. Plus, it looked like it was about to start raining. So I settled into one of the two available reading chairs, which are cushioned and covered in a dark green fabric with a pattern that is vaguely oriental. I’d been sitting there looking at some incredible pictures of Lindsey Lohan in the latest issue of Vanity Fair for maybe two minutes before an older gentleman ambled over from the magazine rack and took a seat across from me. To my surprise, he pulled a decrepit pair of leather slippers out of his rucksack. He took off his shoes, stretched out his legs (towards me, mind you), and wiggled his toes before putting on the slippers, which I then noticed were stained with what I could only guess were the spillings of so many cups of coffee, jam, and who knows what else. He then reached into the rucksack and took out a bag of frozen peas, or at least a bag that was labeled ‘frozen peas,’ and from that bag (heavily creased from what might have been years of long use) began pulling out mixed nuts and what I would guess were sections of a Satsuma orange. He ate like he was feeding a dog, or a horse, by which I mean he held up his hand and sort of grabbed them out of his palm with his lips before chewing them in a circular pattern. It was then that I noticed the smell now rolling around me. Two smells, actually; one slightly stale (which I figured was part of the fog that traveled with him), and the other quite sharp (which was worse). From the shoes, I thought. Good God, I also thought, is this what it’s coming to? “Looks like you’ve had those for a while,” I said, nodding at the slippers. “What’s the matter? You don’t like ‘em?” answered the smelly old man. “Well…” I said, shrugging my shoulders. “Look,” he interrupted, “I’m old. I’m worthless. I just want to sit here and read the paper, like I do every day. And if you don’t like the way I do it – that’s tough for you.” “I didn’t say you’re worthless,” I said. “I didn’t even say you were old.” “I’m old and I’m worthless,” he repeated, crumpling the newspaper in his lap as he pulled in his legs and leaned forward. “I’m gonna kill myself the day before I turn a hundred years old. If God exists, in His infinite spite He’ll let me live that long just to see if I’m up to it.” “That’s horrible,” I said, because it was. "He knows," said the old man, nodding. I didn't say anything. He settled back into his chair. “You think that’s horrible?” He said. “Wait until you get to my age. That’s horrible. Now lemme get back to my paper.” And he shook the paper to uncrumple it as best he could, and got back to it. I sat there for a few seconds, wondering whether I should alert one of the librarians or call some kind of hotline. In the end I considered it just the ravings of dementia, perhaps in its early stages, and went back to looking at Vanity Fair.

Mountains and Fathers

Bill and Susan, brother and sister (two years apart and the best of friends), were eating salads together. They were at a wedding, a family wedding, and not being part of the party (it’s a big family) they’d been seated with a motley crew of recent arrivals. They were keeping to themselves. She had a huge pile of beets on her plate stacked up like Fuji-san, which she thought of because she often traveled to Japan on business. Bill thought of Mt. Rainier. Either way, Bill was a little jealous, since he certainly liked beets as much as Susan did, although it must be admitted (especially by Bill) that she really did like beets an awful lot. As they ate they talked about her, Susan’s, wedding a few years earlier, and she kept insisting that the paterfamilias, long exiled and almost universally loathed, had been there all along. “Of course he wasn’t,” said Bill. “That was the whole point; he wasn’t there because you didn’t invite him.” Susan begged to differ, or actually she differed without doing much begging at all. “I did so invite him. He was there, but he wanted to keep a low profile.” “I wish he had been. I do now, and I did then. I would have known he was there. And it's not like him to keep quiet.” said Bill. Susan let the silence gather around that comment, which in her view was completely unnecessary. “You didn’t say anything at the time.” “Hmph,” said Bill, which emphasized the silence more than otherwise. "And you loved playing the father," continued Susan. "In his absence. Why is it eating you now?" “Well, whatever," said Bill, "but when has he ever kept a low profile? The point is that he wasn't there.” asked Bill, avoiding the point. He jabbed a piece of chicken with his fork. “I would have heard him. He wasn’t there.” Soon the rest of the table had turned their attention to their discussion. From just listening to a few whispered comments amongst themselves, all of them were soon insisting that, yes, the Dad really had been there all along. “On the left hand side at the back, right next to cold-cut platter,” someone said (the wedding had been in the ballroom of a posh tennis club). “That duck was excellent,” someone said. “Not like the chicken here,” said someone else. Only Jimmy, coming to Bill’s aid from a faraway table, was doubtful. Jimmy was their little brother. He said to Susan, “You have to admit that you didn’t make him feel very invited. So why would he come?” But the rest of the crowd (for it was a small crowd at this point) wouldn’t hear of it, even though a good number of them hadn’t even been there. According to them, the Dad had been there, and that was that. “Case closed,” someone even said. Then someone noticed something in Bill’s eye. “It looks like you’ve got something in your eye there,” someone said. And in fact Bill did feel something. He tried rolling his eyes around trying to work it loose, and when that didn’t work, he squinted and tried to pull out what felt like an eyelash, pressing the tips of index and thumb together for steadier motion. When he opened them again, the crowd had pushed in even closer. “Nope. It’s still there,” someone said. “Yep, you gotta work that loose,” said someone else. Everybody had a comment to make, and Bill just kept working at it (he was actually a good sport, but he got even better as problem continued. Eventually everybody got tired of trying to help him and went off to dance, drink champagne, and eat cake. Even Susan and Jimmy left eventually. Susan left a pocket mirror and instructions not to rub his eye too hard. Bill sat at the table for a long time, winking and blinking to himself, occasionally trying his trick with his fingers. Sometimes he would open his eyes ridiculously wide, but that wouldn’t work either. Next morning found him back at home, rolling and squinting his eyes in front of the mirror, still trying to get that eyelash out of his eye.

Guacamole

It recently occurred to me that there are primarily two ways by which you might die while preparing guacamole. Perhaps there are more, and perhaps even these two are more dependent on my own method of preparation than any practice so common that it might be considered a general danger to the public - a public to which I am always and ever more devoted, but especially to the young, the ignorant, and the just plain clumsy. Defenseless, it should be said, and whether that pregnability might be the result of lousy breeding, bad luck, or even some heinous but mysteriously unrecognized sin is of no concern to me. Let me first state that the addition of paprika as one possible cause of the catastrophe seems to me so ridiculous as to be hardly worth mentioning. The first method – brace yourself – requires a knife. One might just slip; probably not while making the slow and steady, circular slice by first sawing into the dark green and dimpled rind before orbiting the invisible oval within. That particular cut is made so deliberately that any resulting accident would itself really have to be considered deliberate. This is not entirely inconceivable; consider the frustration that must be endured when upon those 355th (the stem*, perhaps, having long since been driven under), 358th, 359th, and 360th degrees (mother … Fucker!), and now also the 361st and 362nd degrees, one discovers that one has not, like Magellan, perfectly completed the divine circumnavigation, but botched it completely. As if the good commander had landed, not in Sanlucar de Barrameda, but some 900 miles north – in, say, the dismally bright and sunny Torquay. You will step ashore where no crowd has gathered. On a blanket, a woman with her back to you hunts inside a basket for provisions; only her child looks up at you, a little confused but otherwise unconcerned. Having completed the beginning of a spiral (but without the patience necessary to turn it into a stunt involving the suspension of this hide among those of several other fruits in some type of Caulder construction), you would then free this lovely black egg from all that verdant placenta by first laying the shiny weapon on the counter, and then gripping each unequal hemisphere – yes, yes, very much like your brain – and plying it open without so much force that either end of the entire fruit is in any way squished. With the empty half lying on the counter, you would then avail yourself of your favorite metaphor one more time in order to set the future entirely free. First, one slow motion: a kind of feigned attempt, or perhaps a wave … down … up … down … up … further up (Adios, muchachos!), and then quickly, certainly, and very forcefully Down. There must be sufficient space, it must be quick, and it certainly should be accurate. But if you were not … if you were instead quite sloppy … hmm … a brilliant ribbon of streaming scarlet goes well with the green, rather like Christmas … one thinks of it as a kind of present, very sloppily wrapped … very sloppy indeed … it might be fatigue, it might be desire … who knows? Nobody really cares anyway … Or so you’d like to think. There is another alternative – not that it really amounts to anything different. They do care, and you know they do; so why would you then give in to the greed that demands such a small amount of the stuff that you would actually put the alpha and omega into your mouth in order to suck, scrape or even wash the abject, clinging remains down your gluttonous throat? It fits your palette perfectly; if only it would stay there. But it doesn’t. You breathe in, once. Once is enough, if it is forceful enough. Call it half a breath. Consider carefully the color of your face: bright red, dark red; purple, probably, and eventually blue, maybe even green.

On the day I met William F. Buckley

On the day I met William F. Buckley, I learned that he and his wife, Pat, had discussed it beforehand. When I went to meet him at his home in the city, Mrs. Buckley met me at the door and took me aside for a moment for some quick advice. She gave me a pamphlet that her husband had been reading and was anxious to talk about – I think it might have been a Hillsdale Imprimis, but I’m not sure after all this time. In any case, if I gave it a quick read I might be more prepared to answer whatever questions he asked me, and at the very least should consider it of some educational value in its own right. So I glanced at it while he finished up with a call in his office. From the president? To the president? Kissinger? A hotel in Switzerland? I never learned. Anyway, when I was finally sitting across from him, it seemed to me that his mind was elsewhere. He asked me a long and difficult question, and just as I was forming an answer he informed me that he needed to take care of something, got up, and walked out of the room. I took this as an opportunity to study up on the question, and so turned to the pamphlet in search of an answer. By the time he came back I had slipped the little book into the side pocket of my satchel, and answered the question as if there hadn’t been any interruption. He furrowed his eyebrows a little and seemed to follow me with an intent look, but I could tell that at some points his mind had wandered off to whatever subject it was with which he was otherwise preoccupied. When I finished, he took a breath and said, “Right …”, took a second breath and began expanding upon the subject himself. I had a hard time following him, which doesn’t mean I doubted him. Not in the least. Then, in what seemed to be the middle of his answer, he stood up and announced that he needed to take care of something, and then walked out of the room. This time I waited for a minute at most, and when he came back he announced that perhaps we should retire to a bar “where we might be more comfortable.” I wasn’t about to refuse, so we got up and walked a short block or two to a place with which he was certainly familiar, exchanging a few remarks along the way about some of my own recent work and how it intersected with his own. When the conversation turned to matters such as the current geopolitical situation, I felt like I was still being interviewed, and I wondered if it had any bearing on our friendship. Of course I know now that it did. Everything counts. We took our place at a small, high table, and very soon after a waitress brought over drinks – Bloody Marys, as I recall – without either of us ordering. Obviously Mr. Buckley had been there before. We continued talking, and I still had the impression that more important gears were turning in the back of his mind. By this time I’d begun feeling that I was blowing an opportunity – a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity - but without quite exactly knowing how I’d blown it. I never learned that either. When he’d finished his disquisition on another subject, he murmured quietly and got up from the table. I watched him as he walked over to the bartender and dropped a couple of twenties on the counter and then wander back to our table. By this time I’d stood up beside my chair, and we then walked out into the bright air together. We shook hands, and for once he had spark of something in his eyes – was it because we were parting? I felt better and awful at the same time. We said our goodbyes and went our separate ways. I was sad, and even a little worried: what was I to do, if he wasn’t there to help me?