COVID Clouds.

“I think I lost my job today, I think” yelps Jerry Wick on the Gaunt song “Hope You’re Happy Now”, I remember the circumstances surrounding the line from this song. Jerry was working at Used Kids and even though he lived only five hundred feet from the record store, in his sparse one room apartment above Larry’s he had a difficult time making it to work on time. We were lax with time, me more so than Ron or Dan, both who arrived early and took great pride in this fact, a marker to show that no matter how much a person drank, arriving at work on time meant that there was not a problem with alcohol. I had only missed one day of work due to a hangover, and this was only after calling off as I was dry heaving in the back alleys as I groaned towards the shop. But Jerry was late, constantly and he did not have a phone. “Why would I get a phone, I can just use the store’s” he would reply without irony. He was in the midst of breaking up and breaking in with a woman whom he wrote the two best Gaunt records about, she worked a professional job of which she would tell Jerry, “I have a real job Jerry when are you going to grow up?” Working at a record store allowed Jerry to pursue his art and live the lifestyle that was better suited to his philosophy of living on the edge and being non-committed. He was able to tour with Gaunt, record his songs during the night and afternoons he had off and still make enough money to pay his meager rent. He mostly ate at the record store where lunch and dinner was provided by opening the cash register. He didn’t eat much, hence the name of his band. At one point Dan and Ron got sick of his tardiness, I would try to stick up for him but he would basically force every one around him to question their relationship with him, it was as if getting close to him was a dare. Get to close, have any expectations and he would burn you and scorch himself. He eventually got fired.

 

I left my job recently, one that I loved a great deal, that provided a sense of duty and mission. The work I do, while satisfying can be exhausting, at times I am complimented for the work I do, “it’s amazing you can do that job” but the day to day work of helping the homeless, addicts and mentally ill is never very tiring, everything else that comes with it is what I find taxing-working with systems that are not geared to help the less-fortunate but actually do the opposite is what would keep me up at night. This past year I developed insomnia that has prevented me from getting more than five hours of sleep a night, I experienced chest pains, shingles and finally vertigo that has ended up costing me thousands of dollars in medical bills but that I finally have a treatment that has kept me vertigo free for over two months. COVID has only increased worry and anxiety but it has also provided something far greater than existential fear of the future and the anger that has arisen from living in the breathing callousness of the world we are living in. Sometimes some of the worst circumstances have the power to transform us into something greater and more human than we have thought possible. I have learned what is important for me, while working from home half the time has put pressure on me in a variety of ways by always being on call, always feeling the need to check email, write a report or finish a training, all from my evening couch, I have also enjoyed and relished being with my children almost all day long. Making them lunch, going for afternoon walk breaks with them, finding other ways of connecting that I didn’t notice before. I realized that I liked my smaller world and wanted to refocus, to realign myself with my family and those I care about. I was losing my ability to keep these things my priority.

There are periods where the world keeps itself too close, pressing in until it feels as if you have swallowed in all in a giant bite and the feeling of choking becomes overwhelming—like the Chinese proverb of the boy who could swallow the ocean until it burst forth from his cheeks and killed his brothers. I have eaten my world bit by bit until I have retched on my own inner greed and pain, what I drank to relieve me was killing me. In my twenties, there were periods where I lived in panicked emotional state, drunk dialing, pulling my dogs in close, never going long without someone to share my blankets—it wasn’t so much as sex but as not wanting to be alone. I had a list of late-night friends I would call, Gretchen, Chris Biester, Katy, Haynes, Michelle, Jenny S., almost all of them women and none of the lovers. Maybe the lovers knew me in ways that prevented my from reaching out at 2am, I needed tethered to something to keep me grounded until I could finally sleep-most likely the edge of sex would have tainted that simple quest.

 

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If I ever own a house again I want one with as many windows that can let in the sun as possible, to invite the outside world in and to invite my inner world out—I don’t want to have anything to hide not to the neighbors, not to the wind, not to the moon or trees, all are welcome. I have been learning to watch the clouds, I have an excellent teacher—someone whose eye for detail is almost mathematical but without the numbers, who as someone in the 19^th Century has the “touch”, that is, she is gifted on a higher level in the language of emotion. “There’s a good one” and I don’t even have to look at her, I only have to look up to see what she is pointing to, and there it is, an entire ocean built in the sky, every cloud a pigment of some heavenly cosmic paint. “Yeah, wow.” I find myself trying to say something but how does one say something that is unspeakable without sounding like an idiot? So, I usually, touch her back or lean in and kiss her. I am now cloud watching all the time and, in the evenings, when walking my dog, I gaze at the moon, as if it were a companion walking every step in the damp grass along with me. A few nights ago, after a day of inhaling the world in deep gulps—I was brittle and tired, and I got into an argument with the kids. Nothing of consequence, perhaps it was the dog not being walked, or one of them simply asking for specific groceries but it was the last leaf in the barrel that caused it to overflow. An eruption that was lit over generations in my family, a coarseness and sense of self-righteous fairness that left much of my own childhood with me being not only being bewildered by my father’s rage but more importantly being scared as fuck that an adult would act like this. I knew, even as a ten-year-old, that something was amiss. As much as I have tried to temper and smother that flame inside of me, it’s there—mostly a small smoldering speck but it can transform rather quickly if my mind isn’t in the right place, if I am holding the world in my cheeks. I blew up, unable to come back I raged in the car, at the kids, at the dog who is compelled to bark “FUCK YOU!” at every motorcycle we pass on the street except her “Fuck You” comes out as a high pitched bark that blasts through ears like a bark-y explosion. In the back yard, I sat in the parked car—the kids went inside, no doubt wondering and thinking the same thoughts that I had about my own father over forty years ago and I sat, I listened. I tried not to hear the sounds of depression, of wanting to be annihilated, to submerge myself under waves. To call it out while sitting in my car, breathing, each breath one more step away from that wanting to be engulfed. Bruno knocked on the car window, “Dad, Saskia is yelling at me. I cleaned the living room.” He held up a can of Pledge and a dirty sock. “Will you come in soon?” Closing my eyes, “I’m not quite ready yet, I will though. A few more minutes.” I watched him stroll back to the porch, his bare feet climbing the steps and he disappeared inside. I listened some more. I looked up and saw the moon, a haze in the city sky but a comforting haze, my blurry companion. I saw the clouds, rolling over the sky in slow moving waves, and I let myself be engulfed but by something far more powerful than the depression that has nibbled on my insides all my life. After a few more minutes I went inside, said my apologies to my kids, that I was wrong to yell. An apology was something that was not offered by my father, he only handed his children blame, a cruddy way to live life and in my own growth something I never want to do. We got in the car, we laughed, and I pointed out the moon and we drove through the drive-through where I managed to make them laugh. Not everything has to end the way we feel they might. I left whatever future scar I might leave my daughter on the front seat that night and traded it in for take-out Chinese that we ate and laughed together with.

I love my new job as well.

 

 

 

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