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Category: Random Musings

Meet Gulliver

Meet Gulliver. (UPDATE BELOW) I’ve said for many years that it’s not good for someone to be the only living thing in their home, whether that means having a partner or a pet or a plant. Gulliver is a wandering dude, aka silver inch plant, aka tradescantia zebrina. He was mailed to me all the way from Texas by my friend Amber, who cut him from her own plant. After many weeks and one additional trim, he’s tiny but he has roots. His dad plant has been around since 2004, so he’s got good genes. What you’re seeing in this photo isn’t the tip of the iceberg — it’s the whole iceberg. He’s got about a 1/2″ of stalk and some little root filaments in the pot, which I put him in yesterday. I named him Gulliver because of the wandering connotation, and because he’s tiny now but will hopefully get big, and there are many size and perspective shifts in Gulliver’s Travels, which is one of my favorite books. Send him — and his caretaker — good vibes, because I definitely don’t know what I’m doing.

(UPDATE: I took a photo of Gulliver in the Picture This app and it turns out he’s not a wandering dude [tradescantia zebrina] but instead a purple heart [tradescantia pallida]. But I’m keeping the name.)

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Podcasting note

Just in case this site is the only place you follow me, I thought I should mention that my podcast A Brief Chat is back as of this month, and I’m also back as the host of The Jazz Session. You can hear all the free episodes of each at their respective sites: abriefchat.com or thejazzsession.com.

There are also Patreon accounts for both shows. For The Jazz Session, $5 a month gets you a monthly bonus show, early access to every episode, and a thank you on an episode. Join here. The main show returns in September, but there are bonus shows all summer.

For A Brief Chat, $1 a month gets you early access, a thank you on an episode, plus travel essays and photos from my life in a van. For $5 a month, you get all that plus a monthly bonus episode. Join here.

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To van or not to van?

After yet another van accident last year, I decided I’d had enough. It was time to move somewhere, find a job, and get out of van life and back into an apartment. Eventually I moved to Pittsfield, MA, where I got a full-time job and started saving for the roughly $3,000 it takes just to move into an apartment these days.

After a month or so I realized I should have moved to State College instead to be near my son as he finishes high school, so that’s what I decided to do. I’ll be headed back there late in July. And again my plan has been to find a job in town and an apartment.

In the past few weeks, though, I’ve started to wonder if that’s the right plan. Not the State College part — I’m definitely doing that. I mean the apartment part. I want an apartment because I want my own toilet and shower and kitchen. I’m tired of showering at the gym and pooping at the grocery store and eating mostly prepared food. (My current van set-up doesn’t have a stove, although it used to and could again.)

All those things, though, could be present in a better van or a tiny RV. My son plans to leave State College when he’s done with high school, and I plan to leave then, too. If I could find a remote job, I wouldn’t even have to start the dreaded application process over again when it’s time to move. And if that were true, and I had a better home on wheels, maybe I could live the nomad life I had hoped to live when I started this whole journey in December 2020.

Nobody to whom I’ve said any of this has supported this idea. Everyone just reminds me how much I want to be out of my van. But I don’t know. Do I want to be out of a van, period, or out of my series of busted minivans? I have more thinking to do, and in any case I won’t be able to act on either path until I’ve saved up more money, so some thinking time is built in.

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Now vs the future

One of the most challenging parts of life for me is the tension between living in the moment and understanding that the moment changes. I want to be someone who is getting the most out of life as it really is. But sometimes life sucks, and I find it easy to get bogged down in the idea that the sucky bit is how life will be going forward. That’s not true, of course. If I look back I can clearly see how much things have changed, and how often things that seemed hopeless turned out not to be. What I can’t see if I look back though, is any period where the relatively better times lasted very long. One of my missions these days is to try to figure out why that is, and if there are fundamental aspects of my behavior or perception that have led to the constant upheaval I’ve experienced, or prevented me from finding … contentment, maybe? I get that these questions are both ancient and common, but that doesn’t mean I don’t need to answer them.

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Soup’s On!

Soup’s On!

My skull is filled with alphabet soup. Occasionally the letters make a word, but mostly they slosh around, defeating my every attempt to make sense of them. It wasn’t always this way. My brain used to be a series of filing cabinets. The drawers were shallow but numerous; an inch of information about any particular subject, miles of breadth. Just enough knowledge to stay in most conversations, not enough to truly master any one subject. That was fine. I liked that. A friend called it “librarian brain.” Who doesn’t like librarians? But “soup brain”? That has neither the same ring nor the same positive connotation. Soup brain means never quite having the details at my fingertips; a blank spot on the tip of my tongue. I don’t think it’s a sign of disease. Rather, it’s a symptom of discombobulation. The circumstances of my external world are so disordered that my internal landscape can’t help but reflect them. My prediction is that the presence of family and friends, along with a place to live and a more stable life, will slowly drain the soup, revealing the long rows of shallow cabinets that have been there all along.

/ / /

18 May 2022
Pittsfield MA

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Buddhism can be pretty @#$&^% useful

Thought process I went through just now:

1. I wonder if I should have a conversation with my sister about what my intentions are when one of our parents dies.

2. I might feel differently about that situation when it actually happens.

3. There’s no need to deal with it until it occurs.

4. That applies to so much of life. Too much planning and overthinking and playing out stories. 

5. The better way is clearly just to deal with what’s actually happening right now.

6. That @#$%& Buddhist approach sure does get proved right quite often. 

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Poetry and the present moment

The idea of living in the present moment is central to Buddhist practice, which I’ve been trying my hand at for more than two decades. As I’ve come to understand it, the basic concept is that the past has passed and the future is unknowable, so the only time with which we can interact is this moment right now. And right now. And … you get it.

The instruction to remain centered in the present is one of my favorite parts of Buddhist philosophy. It’s also remarkably difficult to do, at least for me. No matter how much the present might be demanding my attention, I still find myself caught up in memories and daydreams, returning to past successes and failures, and turning over future visions in my mind.

Poetry can be an aid to present-minded living, serving as it does — or at least as it can — as a textual photograph of a moment. This is supposed to be one of the main methods of creating haiku, for example, though I find even in that form I am often mired in the past. The more I deviate from the nature-word-plus-present-description method of haiku, the more likely it is that my tiny poems will contain sharply pointed thorns of memory.

I overheard one of my coworkers this morning talking about an “on this day” post they’d received on Facebook and how it had dredged up difficult memories. I’m glad to not be on Facebook, because I have too many memories I’d prefer to avoid. And yet, when left to its own devices, the Zuckerberg in my skull is all too happy to pull up some scene I’d sooner escape.

Perhaps one problem, if that’s the word, is that my current life is — or seems — very small. I work in an office during the day. After work I retreat to the 32 square feet of my van, which is where I spend most of my non-work time. This might be an excuse, but I feel like these circumstances don’t lend themselves to the kind of noticing so fundamental to poetry. So instead of seeing things in the world around me, I mine the shafts in my brain for the ore I need to write.

That last paragraph does feel like an excuse now that I read it again. Noticing can happen in any circumstances, and the present moment is the present moment, no matter what it contains. Maybe this whole essay can serve as a call to action for my own writing (I accidentally typed “righting” — a useful accident?); a reminder to pay closer attention to what might seem mundane or confined. I guess we’ll all find out together whether I heed that call in the weeks and months ahead.

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Check out the big brain on Brad

If I did the math correctly, which is highly suspect, this thumb drive has more than 31,000 times more storage capacity than the first computer I owned, which was a Commodore 64.

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Why I didn’t eat popcorn for decades

The Park Square Popcorn Cart

In about 1977, my mom bought me a bag of popcorn from this cart, and then we walked into England Brothers department store, in front of which it was parked. There was an escalator, and as my mom and I went up it I was eating fresh popcorn from my bag. Near the top of the escalator I lost my balance and tumbled all the way to the bottom, popcorn flying everywhere.

From that day onward, I could never eat popcorn without feeling nauseous. I tried many times. My family loved popcorn and made it frequently. I tried when I’d go to the movies with friends. Every single time, I’d take a handful and immediately start feeling sick. That lasted until my early 40s, when I ate some popcorn with no ill effects. I can still eat it today, though I spent so many years avoiding it that I usually forget it exists until I go to a movie.

I took the photo above during my lunch break today. I’m not sure if this is the exact same cart or a replica, but it sure looks the same as the one in my memory. I’m also not sure if this cart is still open for business. There was nobody in it today, but perhaps it’s only open on certain days or at certain times. England Brothers, where my grandmother worked for years, was razed during Pittsfield’s urban renewal.

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The art of despair

On April 11, I started a new life in Pittsfield, MA. That was the first day of my new office job, my first day living in my van again after five weeks staying with family, and my first day living in a new town where I don’t know anyone. (I was born in Pittsfield and consider nearby Lenox my hometown, but I no longer know people in either place.)

As I left work on that first day and got into the driver’s seat of my van, I faced the largest anxiety attack I’ve had in a long time. The trifecta of no home/no friends/office job hit me hard, and within minutes I was in tears. I drove to a nearby marsh that has a walking path. I walked to the end of the boardwalk and watched the geese and ducks as I got my emotions under control. When my heart rate had slowed a bit, I found a bench and meditated.

That was the beginning of two very dark weeks. I burst into tears at some point nearly every day and found myself in thought spirals every night. As the second week dragged on, I started to worry about how long it would be possible to operate at the level of distress I was experiencing.

One complicating factor was that I had stopped taking antidepressants in 2021, working with my nurse practitioner in Vermont to wean myself off them. I’d been fine since then, and in fact I was very much enjoying a renewed sense of connection to my emotions — a connection that had been dulled for the decade or more I’d been on meds.

When this latest dark period struck, the intensity took me totally by surprise. I’d certainly had dark periods before; 2020, for example, saw the end of what I thought would be a lifelong relationship and the start of my life in a van. But this was something different. It was debilitating in a way I hadn’t experienced since the breakdown that put me on meds in the first place.

This period also coincided with National Poetry Writing Month, aka NaPoWriMo. I decided to participate. Over the years I’ve likened poetry and Buddhist practice, in that both help you see the world as it is. That can be great, but when the world is a pile of poop, writing a poem every day is less about observation and more about being slowly buried. Art can amplify the bad as well as the good. Looking back at most of the poems I wrote in April, I can see a terrifying darkness and despair. And I wonder whether writing a poem every day was about wallowing rather than processing.

Somehow, for reasons I can’t even begin to name, that dark blanket lifted after two weeks, and I’m doing much, much better now. I’ve accepted the reality that I’ll have to live in my van until summer, when I can afford to rent an apartment. I’ve begun to adjust to my office job, and even to find comfort in the nice folks with whom I work and the access to a bathroom and a tea kettle and a paycheck. I can look ahead to a time when I’ve got my own place and feel more stable and secure.

This year’s NaPoWriMo gave me a lot to think about concerning the relationship between my writing and my state of mind. I’ll definitely exercise more caution if this happens again, and I’ll try to pay more attention to the interplay between art and emotion.

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