January 2011 Archives

At first, I decided, the 1991 British studio recording of Brigadoon was overblown, the big orchestra somehow too big, the voices too perfect, even operatic.  But by the end of the first half mile, my reactions were shifting.  It may have been the endorphins, of course.  You've got to admit that it's perfect exercycle music, stirring but not challenging.  And in my case, homey.  Positive associations with my early home life being rather scarce, but this seems to remain happily intact.  Old records, the first of which were 78s, of popular musicals, operettas, operas, stacked on a shelf in our desert dining room.  All far away and long ago, and here I am, a 64-year-old paralytic, nearing a virtual one mile on the exercise machine, if the digital display is to be believed.  And it is.  I believe it.  Just as I believe it is downright funny, this song from Lerner and Loewe about the Scottish lass trying to find a husband.  Two Jewish boys writing this tune about the Highlands being even funnier.  And damned if I haven't hit the one-mile mark, legs still flying.

It's a race against time, this exercycle marathon.  At 9:20 AM Lorna will return to help me get off this thing and out of my bicycle shoes.  I don't have quite enough time to do a virtual five miles, but that isn't stopping me.  Only Lorna herself stops me, and the digital readout says 4.33 miles which is close enough by any reckoning.  Lorna helps me stand up, and I am going to help her by getting off this machine fast.  Hard to say how I do this myself, but it happens all the time.  Just a matter of twisting the right paralyzed foot enough so that I can raise the left leg up and over the center bar of the exercycle.  While leaning to my right against the handlebar.  

Today the right foot swiveling doesn't go quite as easily as it should, but not to worry.  After all, I do have help, in the form of Lorna, standing by.  As I raise the left leg I can see the angle still isn't right, which is no big deal, for I've adjusted this process enough times.  Lorna grabs the left leg, tries to pull it over the center bar.  This only jams one leg against the other.  Lorna's response is to yank even harder on my ankle.  Somehow this worsens the jam, and now there's something else.  One leg is digging into the other, making a limb somewhere spasm.  I can feel myself collapsing, giving way.  Falling now seems so inexorable, I wonder if I shouldn't just allow the process to take over.  I am half imagining the descent and wondering where I will fall, onto a corner of the exercycle seat, straight to the ground....  Stop it, I tell Lorna.  Let go, I add.  The right leg makes it over the center bar.  I make it back into the wheelchair, intact, unbruised and alive.

Lorna departs for mass, for this is Sunday.  I should be attuned to whatever she is up to at the local Catholic church, scene of requiems, funerals, and other ritual acknowledgments of death.  For the moment feels deathly enough.  A narrow escape from a routine activity, and this is my life.  I sit there for a long moment, trying to pull threads together into a day.  Shopping, I must go shopping for Jane.  E-mail, I was going to answer it.  And this near fall is not a defeat, a sign that things are failing, age taking its toll.  Really, shot in the neck at age 21, I am supposed to be dead.  All this is extra, if not borrowed, time.  Existence is fleeting, and why not catch the joy as it flies?

I am extracting a message from this moment, perhaps the wrong one.  I stare long and hard at the exercycle and try to piece things back together.  After all, I do get off this thing alone and successfully.  Just now I was trying to rush, to please Lorna, to dance to someone's non-quadriplegic tune.  This knowledge settles around me.  I breathe it in, such is the advice of my anger management book.  The carport is all about cold concrete and open space sheltering me from the rain, which is coming down hard.

There is a truth to things.  David Mamet says that when someone at a party promises to tell you about himself...he is always lying.  Which is why when the president of United States says it is morning in America...clearly it isn't.  And why I find the voiceovers so annoying at space shuttle launches...we have lift off for Trailblazer Seven, a bold step for mankind...which it probably isn't, because someone is saying it is.  No need for promo, the space shuttle.  It is what it is.  Big and blasting, beyond phallic, its own truth.  Just let the thing roar and rise and shut the fuck up.

And having eliminated false truths, thank you very much, what to make of this?  No answer comes to me.  I go about the work of the day, the buying of foods, the reading of books, staring deeply into the cover crop...last year's lone brussels sprout hanging on for no purpose, certainly not the production of vegetables, just growing inedible leaves and doubtless preparing to blossom in one big botanical fuck-you.  And the truth to things, well, it becomes no clearer on this day.  But maybe in the sum of days.

Which adds up to grief.  It keeps adding up, that is my problem.  It takes two years, someone said, to get over a death...and in April, early April at that, surely this will be behind me.  Surely I can find something cheerier by way of mood.  Or maybe not.  Grief, Robert Bly says, is an essential male feeling.  For American men in particular.  And why is hard to say.  Except that our culture makes little room for loss.  Americans are winners or losers, in the conventional view.  So loss is for losers.  No one I know believes this, but no one I know is not regularly exposed to the message.  Which sparks a grief all its own.  There is something demoralizing about upbeat hucksterism.  Yet infectious.  It's time to lighten up, I keep telling myself.

Yet the opposite seems true.  Maybe I need to build in an official grief hour.  Every day.  Get down in every sense.  Necessitating a bit less of the anger management book, perhaps.  Grief.  For losing a wife.  For losing a body.  For losing the natural world.  For losing our way.  Grieve and grieve and grieve.  Then go out for a beer and pizza.  Or plant more brussels sprouts.  And get back on the exercycle, carefully, confidently.  And pedal your way to cardiovascular health or cardiovascular demise.  Throw neuromuscular caution to the winds, the cold winds, the ones that will blow you down.  And eat chocolate.  That is the other thing.  As long as there is another thing.  For which one must be grateful.

An African tribal teacher from my annual men's conference in the Midwest talked about a set of beings, gods, one might say, called filth eaters.  At least they come with an unambiguous name, these spirits.  Even better, a clear and focused job description.  I am utterly in sync with filth eaters.  On a regular basis, I think of the compost tumbler by my back fence, the months of kitchen waste that have accumulated there...with room for more.  And the next stage, I think of that a lot too.  More than the annual turning under of my cover crop, although this is in the realm of filth eating too.  The two things converge actually.  I think of how the current crop of fava beans and ryegrass, now approaching green swaying maturity in the January summer, how this will shortly go underground.  Becoming ground.  A cycle I have helped sustain for years.  And once this happens, time to dig a hole or two...a job for someone like my volunteer helper, Paul...then bury what is in the compost tumbler.  That is to say, hand months of 'filth' to the filth eaters.  And what makes this legitimately a matter of the spirit has to do with its charge.  A preoccupying thought, this matter of the compost tumbler and the garden.  Stuff going into the ground, a primal preoccupation of mine.  A frequent thought, a recurring image.

Actually, the African shaman's description of the filth eater gods varies from my own.  In his account, they are there to consume our personal nastiness.  Hate, cruelty, pettiness, and so on.  So they have their ritual purpose, these eaters of our psychic filth.  And while the bacterial compost eaters in my garden may be spiritually aligned with the African gods, something is different.  For one thing, there is the powerful sense of the seasons, the cyclical.  The stinking contents of my compost bin may stand in for evil in a psychic sense, but there is more.  The stuff feels old.  Sometimes evil, sure, but mostly old.

Then, there is what happens underground, a downright alchemical process.  The old/evil becomes good/new.  This being the oddest discovery of all.  Tomato growing is one of those annual endeavors that define my life.  As do the attendant difficulties.  The latter boil down to a couple of types of soil diseases.  'Wilt,' actually.  Anyone who looks into tomato growing learns about these soil problems.  I half expect to see the leaves of my plants begin to curl halfway through the season, a sure sign of disease.  But not last year.  The only difference in 2010 being, you guessed it, the compost tumbler.  Its half-digested contents buried in one of my raised beds.  The one with the tomatoes.  The latter being not even disease-resistant, but all too vulnerable to wilt.  But not to worry.  The plants burst from the ground, sailed through the summer with nary a botanical complaint.  A good thing, decomposing half a year of leftover lettuce, discarded teabags, onion skins, coffee filters, broccoli stems, and on and on, a carbon and nitrogen festival, according to the web.  A very good thing, a world bacterial congress.  Hosted by me, no admission, refreshments free.

Thing is, I need renewal.  Surely we all do.  Last year's filth, or last year's anything, needs to go.  Buried, transformed, eaten.  How else to withstand life?  Marlou's gray ash remains spreading from a muddy stain to an oceanic sparkle.  Sadness sinking, dolphins leaping.  Another day in Monterey Bay.  That coupled with the general futilities of a year, any year.  Although this is tricky.  Ten years after working for a gun control organization, the nation more armed and dangerous than ever, the sense of failure palpable...well, what is there to do but trust in decomposition?  Although, one must not be passive.  Important to watch as the stuff gets buried, the garden swallows...and if one is attentive...burps.

This is my own contribution to the Way of Compost, or as some of my disciples will term it, The Decomposition Path...books and seminars to follow.  No, the ground burps.  And I am here to tell you it burps up wisdom.  Vapors, emanations, or if you must be a pedant, methane.  Methamphetamine of the soul, that is my contention.  Speeding us toward action.  What to do?  For I am not giving up, but I am giving out.  Just as the teabags and broccoli stems and all the rest have.  I age.  Things age.  And what to do?  Guns.  I am not done talking about them.  Even to Americans.  It is old, after all, the firearms fetish.  Surely the gun cult has its own cycle.  I am an elder now.  It is my job to point the way.  And to keep pointing.  No excuses.

Ah, the ease and unease of a globally warmed January, lunching outside at Café Borrone.  It's pushing 70°F, and I'm pushing this meteorological oddity into the back of my mind.  More than a warm spell, almost a warm month.  Pleasant in an apocalyptic sort of way.  Light chitchat about family history with some old friends, with someone mentioning Marlou, someone who never knew her.  But had heard, heard she was quite a person.  I am hearing nothing now, tears rising reflexively.  Sparked by someone who never knew Marlou.  Just as I never know myself.  Never know grief and its workings.  I swallow down the tears.  It is a teachable moment this, and I should be open to learning but damned if I can find the lesson.

Grief hovering just under the surface.  Floating upward with the lightest encouragement.  I had my annual physical examination this week.  My fears mounted.  Prostate.  I am at the prostate age.  Would I clear the hurdle or fall prostrate from prostate?  I cleared, of course.  No heart attack imminent, it seems.  Although as the physician put it, none of the predictable cardiac indications.  The unpredictable ones...well, there is no telling.  And no hiding.  Only days earlier Phyllis, recently widowed by Clint, sat opposite in almost the same café spot, both of us trying to make sense of what happens to a person when someone close to them dies.  It's like a fever, I maintain.  Grief sets in and simmers like a diseased stew.  Is it our own mortality that awakens from its corner?  And if it is, what are these globally warmed tears about on this particular afternoon?

They are about the poignancy of trying.  An attempt at life, however incomplete, and even that cut down and cut out.  And not with a whack from fate's cleaver, but a gradual sawing.  For Marlou tried.  I tried.  We found each other trying.  But kept trying.  They would have tried us badly, I admit, these days of the Obama administration.  But we would have kept trying, I am certain of it.  Our political clashes focusing much else.  Trying and attempting until fate says fuck you.  And the saddest part?  That I give myself so little credit for the distances covered in my own life, the effort involved.  Sad, in other words, for both of us.  But better late than never, such awareness.

And it is late.  Heading south on Caltrain, emerging from the last San Francisco tunnel...the postindustrial landscape says it all.  I have covered this ground before.  Covered it for 30 years.  The Schlage Lock Company once sat there, low industrial buildings hard by the tunnel.  The paint chipped, shutters went askew, signs disappeared until after 20 years or so the structures disappeared too.  Tracks and tanks and railway stuff rusted in the half mile to the south.  But after 15 years or so, the tracks went away.  Railway ties rose in piles.  Artificial slopes that once led to a bridge stood stark in the landscape.  It became a landscape, only a few remnants of the vast rail switching yard here and there.  And now, this day, the pampas grass predominates.  Big clumps of it stand watch on the real estate.  You half expect a gaucho or two to come to come riding across the Argentine plain.

Land use?  The future of this brown field site?  I don't care, that is the point.  Things come and go.  And now I am letting go, that is the even bigger point.  I turn to the New York Times on my lap.  At least I make it this far, the editions often languishing on my entranceway table.  Boeing is having trouble with its 787.  Planes.  I have seen many.  Seen them come and go.  This one is coming as I am going.  Not immediately, but within sight, it seems.  And what is left?  Less than before.  I am done with the Times and return to reading my novel.

I am swearing, cursing, denouncing myself because...well, this is where the story becomes thin.  I have dropped something.  In this case, an envelope intended for the for the letterbox beside me.  Fortunately the Netflix DVD that just fell from my hands has slipped into a space between a leg of the postal box and a bolt anchoring the thing to the sidewalk.  The envelope is wedged there, standing upright.  This makes it easy to grasp.  Minimal bending from the wheelchair, a little prehensile action from my working left arm, and damned if I haven't retrieved the thing.  I'm holding it now, preparing to aim once again at the letterbox.  Which is what feels so pathetic, and that is the word.  Pathetic that something so simple has, and has for 42 years, been so difficult.  And since this is my life, why can't I accept the obvious and inescapable?  The answer lies in my Anger Management Handbook, the one I'm supposed to be reading now.  Helpless.  I feel helpless.  I don't like feeling helpless, even though I am.

Trigger thoughts.  That is what they are called in Anger Managementese.  Brief flashes that take one to some old and desperate place.  Childhood, of course.  Pre-disability.  When every moment triggered thoughts of the unthinkable, the collapse of the family, center of the child's universe, real or imagined.  Yes, it got to be a habit.  Fear-helplessness followed by self blame.  The easiest way to cope.  Which almost six decades later should be badly out of date.  But apparently not, psychology having a seemingly infinite time span.

For a disabled person, this matter of helplessness arises from moment to moment.  Take this last moment at the mailbox.  It is a two-handed process, the dropping of a letter in the postal bin.  The box opens with a pull-down door.  The built-in handle is easy enough to grasp.  What's harder to grasp is the concept.  One hand can pull down the door and keep it open, while the other drops the envelope inside.  Unless there is no other hand.  All hands on deck.  Sorry.  There's just the one.  Okay, so there is a way to do everything, or almost everything, in Quadriplegia Land.  In this case, the one and only hand grasps the envelope, one of its fingers extending to grab the handle and pull it down...then releases the fingers gripping the envelope...then lets go of the handle.  The very act of describing this reveals it for what it is, a neuromuscular feat.  A rehabilitation high wire act.  But not in the doing, or the experiencing.

For I am in public, that is part of it.  The weekly farmers market is under way in Menlo Park.  The locals are parking, approaching in pairs, all converging on a one-block-long display of cabbages, artichokes, olive oil, artisan pizza, not to mention this morning's Turkish singer.  They are out, on display as much as the vegetables, and so am I.  People are looking at me.  Who knows if they really are, but this is the feeling.  There is a 'we' to all this.  My rolling approach makes me odd enough, thank you very much.  And now I am revealed as not only different, but weak and vulnerable, managing simple tasks with difficulty...and easily rendered helpless.  An adult player in the community?  Or something less, Tiny Tim fumbling with his mail, inwardly denouncing himself, outwardly managing a façade of God-bless-us-every-one cheer.

I get the letter in the mailbox and proceed to the market.  The place is crowded.  The narcissus stand is not, however.  I buy two bunches of the fragrant flowers.  They will make my apartment smell downright floral.  Quite pleasant, really.  I open my wallet, extract six one dollar bills, hand them to the flower girl...who in the normal manner of exchange attempts to hand me the blooms.  Problem is, I only have one hand.  And that hand is trying to shut my wallet.  Never mind.  I take the flowers, leaving the wallet open on my lap.  This is foolish for many reasons.  But, I don't know, my confidence is not where it needs to be this morning.  I am letting people's expectations drive me.  Always a big mistake.  I rattle home, bouncing over Menlo Park's latest road resurfacing effort, trying to keep my concentration on both the pavement and my wallet.  One second's distraction and all my money and credit cards could silently slip off my lap.  Which would spark a Self Recrimination Festival of epic proportions.

To be disabled is to sense the precariousness of life in every rolling, stumbling moment.  Take this moment, bouncing home from the farmers market.  What if my wheelchair fails?  What if I misjudge my relationship to the traffic?  Mechanical failure, being struck down the streets, the vulnerability inherent in pursuing life with half a body...there is no escaping it.  Yet as I get older, everyone seems to be approaching this state.  Cancer.  Aging, arthritis and decline.  All these experiences drive home the sense of human fragility.  So how to lead a life?

Minutes later I am working on the same problem.  My van and I are heading south toward Palo Alto, a Sunday morning talk on the matter of fair trade.  My concentration is fierce, cranked up considerably since a close call a couple of days ago changing lanes.  Driving, controlling the car, ready for the fateful, it all takes vigilance.  And does this make me a safer driver?  Perhaps.  But there is some middle ground.  For excessive fearfulness makes me drive less.  And driving less makes me forget essential skills.  Like, for example, the one-footed sliding from accelerator to brake.  A definite use it or lose it principal operating here.  It is, in short, safer to take chances.  And there's more.  In driving there is no room for self recrimination.  Well, not much, anyway.  It's all about survival.  If something goes wrong, it has to be dealt with...no hand wringing, just action.

Fair trade.  A talk sponsored by the Jewish Progressive League, or somesuch.  Pictures of Guatemalan women showing their woven wares.  They have been through everything, these people.  A woman at 75 looks 95...her longevity extreme in that Central American country.  Her life in many ways is more fragile than mine.  Death is routine.  Injury and physical loss frequent.  How to live a life?  Ask her.  She isn't asking for safety or security, just for this.  A fair trade.  Her labor for my money.  It's a deal. 

I could feel the slightest jab of nausea this morning, rolling out to my van.  Cancer?  Or just nerves?  Nervous about what?  One of those mornings when action precedes consciousness, when something must be done more than felt.  That coupled with a deadline.  And the unknown.  A nine o'clock meeting on the Stanford campus.  Imagine, an entire university just over the back fence, as it were, and after 30 years I can barely find my way around.  Coupled with the fact that I barely drive.  Anxiety.

Actually, not quite enough anxiety.  Changing lanes on the way to the university, damned if I didn't misjudge the distance of the car behind me.  The driver honked.  I don't blame him.  I'm not that used to the convex mirror that hangs off the right side of my van.  Things seem farther than they are, a metaphor for life.  I escaped, chastened and sobered.  I even found a parking space near the center of campus.

How would I feel about all this with an intact spinal cord?  Perhaps about the same.  I would doubt my legitimacy in something called a management forum.  Find myself intimidated by the Silicon Valley Leadership Group, whatever that is.  And sense that mixture of elevation and inflation that seems to attend things Stanfordian.  I found the institute for policy studies.  Right next to the center for studies of policy.  With the policy study forum doubtless nearby.  And rolled inside.

Where I did well.  I found my friends from Caltrain, even wedged my wheelchair in at their table.  And I spoke up during our table's discussions.  It's not my thing being out there, but when push comes to shove....  I am capable of an adequate level of shoving myself.  Gratifying.  I am not yet out of the game.  Whatever the game is, which, by the way remains up for discussion.  I am game, that is the point.  And luckily the point is not about me.  Except that it is.  Which is one of the built-in features, no extra charge, of being an introvert.  Never mind the outer agenda.  Face your fears, take a step out of your self and into the world...and damned if you don't feel better.

This meeting is about Caltrain, of course.  And why do I find the current state of events so demoralizing?  I have enough life experience to adopt a broader perspective.  That things were always thus.  That America is like an adolescent who has never known setbacks.  It is an era of setbacks.  An age.  Still, my emotional investment leads me elsewhere.  Here it is, what until the 1990s was the only commuter railway operating west of Chicago...and has resuscitated, its rushhour speeds doubled, commuters flocking to it in good economic times and bad...and now the whole thing is $30 million in the hole.  And we have been summoned.  We?  Caltrain advisors like myself.  Politicians, executives, business school types.  And in three hours were supposed to come up with a solution.  Take action, get involved, be the change.  No sense in wasting time on this, we are Americans.

Later, in quest of caffeine and an introvert's quiet moment at a sunny table, I hit Peet's.  Where I decide to eschew silence and talk to Brian.  I like Brian.  I'm not even sure if that is his name, but we see each other at Peet's all the time.  Brian will do.  For Menlo Park, he is vaguely countercultural.  This very afternoon, for example, Brian is off to play 'transformative music,' his words, not mine, in a Berkeley yoga center.  Good for him.  There is more to life than stock options, and Brian is living proof.  While he prepares his coffee for Berkeley launch, I tell him about my morning.  I ask if he rides Caltrain.

Yes, he says, a couple of times a week.  It's okay, but from what friends tell him trains are faster and better coordinated with transportation networks in places like Japan and Europe.  Caltrain, he says, is just good enough to get by.  They just got it to the point of acceptability and decided that was okay.

What he says makes me uneasy, even defensive.  They just got it to the point of acceptability....  And who are 'they?'  Mulling this over, I tell him, yes, train systems are much more developed and advanced in other industrial countries.      Watching Brian ready his coffee for Berkeley, I want to tell him something.  There is no 'they.'  Maybe the Bay Area is small enough, or I have been here long enough, to know that there is only a 'we.'  For years I have been attending regular meetings as a Caltrain advisor.  I am supposedly the official wheelchair guy, but actually I am the train guy in the wheelchair.  I have watched the struggles and clashes and sacrifices involved in getting the trains into the 20th century, forget the 21st.  

The Caltrain staff is tireless, international and dedicated to fighting an uphill battle.  Americans know so little about trains, understand rail issues poorly and can barely grasp what it has taken to make Caltrain what it is.  During this morning's Stanford meeting, as slides sketched out the railway and its workings, one statistical tidbit caught my eye.  It had to do with the percentage of costs devoted to administration.  At Caltrain, that figure is only 5.9%.  In comparison to the other Bay Area transit systems, utterly miniscule.  No one, absolutely no one, could do more with less.

And listening to Brian, I realize that Caltrain isn't simply running out of money.  We, all of us, are running out of reality.  It's the 'they.'  The ones who can't be bothered.  Or we would be Japan or Europe, trainwise.  It's a subtle thing, the corrosive effects of American consumerism.  We shop, we decide to buy, then we head for the checkout.  Working together for a common purpose...well, that's for wars.  At least officially.  Unofficially, wars are for the underclass.  Gives them a chance to get ahead.  No sense in sending youth of the haute bourgeoisie off to get shot.  And trains?  Well, they should do a better job.

So I spent the morning with people who understand they is we.  That it's up to us.  And there still is an us.  And I am part of that us, having chosen to be.

San Francisco's Fourth Street is a work in progress, but pretty fast work as urban development goes, and I'm making good progress myself on this particular day, heading from the Caltrain station toward the center of town.  Until something stops me.  A man, an old one, though doubtless younger than I am, is having trouble with his trousers.  He is trudging in the same direction as I am, his legs wobbling, but with great determination.  The only problem being the length of nylon rope through his trouser loops, a pseudo-belt that is not doing the job.  His trousers keeps slipping and, worse, he keeps turning around, as though seeking an answer from my direction.  He is a black man, hair wild, unshaven and carrying a loose bundle under his arm, a bedroll, pieces of clothing.  His personal goods are nicely wrapped with a man's belt.  It is a bad deployment of resources, vis-à-vis trousers and rope, the sort of thing one wants to point out.  But this man is muttering, having an ongoing conversation with the morning fog.  And he keeps turning around, trousers slipping, his pubic hair on full display.  As a sidewalk obstacle, he is only one person wide.  Still, I want to pass him.  I get my chance at the next intersection, bouncing through traffic and up the curb.  I don't look back.

Homeless.  Madness.  Foulness.  Scrounging on the urban streets may not make you the most attractive person, but dangerous?  Here I reject my suburban background.  I factor in the vulnerability of being in a wheelchair.  And, no, I do not downplay how streets and wheelchairs have converged in my life - getting mugged and shot in the spinal cord as a college student.  While it would be naïve to assume this man is harmless, the other assumptions seem worse.  And those have to do with the voodoo power of the rootless impoverished.  Coupled with the horror of the demented.  It is all so far from Menlo Park California, too far, in fact.  Because it is right here, after all, at the end of the train line.  And, like it or not, this fallen man and I are following the same course, moving along the same sidewalk, in the same country.  And we all got here somehow.

I wonder what it will be like round about June.  Market Street, San Francisco's wide canyon thoroughfare, scene of tickertape parades when its baseball team wins the World Series...this is where the poor flock in reasonable weather.  Homeless or just rootless, they set up card tables to enjoy chess, hawk wares.  They play music.  They pass time.  Is it a community or an encampment or both?  By the summer, it seems a safe prediction that there will be more sidewalk people.  It doesn't take much to get here.  A hard landing in a hard economy, and voilà.  The poor are more visible in San Francisco than most places, because they are more tolerated.  Less camping under the freeway, more sleeping on the sidewalk...or so I imagine.

All of which brings us to Jared Loughner.  In an ideal society people keep an eye on each other.  As someone wanders off the deep end, their progress is noted, perhaps halted.  Those around are warned.  Something happens, something more than what happened, or didn't happen, in Tucson.  But this is America, hyper-individualistic, ever fearful of the nanny society, and conditions are what they are.  Still, one condition, a manifestation of this frontier loner mentality, screams at us.  How is it that an obvious nutcase, his behavior noted and chronicled by junior college officials and others...how is it that someone like this can so easily arm himself with military weapons?

He lives in the US, that is the simple answer.  Hey, you never know when you might want to pump a couple of hundred rounds into someone.  This is a free country.  Wouldn't want to interfere with anyone's right to bear arms.  And what are arms?  Well, at the time of the Second Amendment's drafting, they were state-of-the-art muskets.  The latter being a grip-and-shoot device, no sight, something you aimed with the accuracy of a garden hose, fired once, then reloaded by cramming a combination of projectile, rags and gunpowder inside.  Of course, arms have developed considerably since then.  We now have nuclear arms, for example.  And really, when you think about it, the right to bear small nuclear arms is built right into the Bill of Rights.  We have an obligation to defend ourselves, after all.  And when those immigrants start cooking their tortillas and taking our jobs, we may just have to take out several blocks of their neighborhood, just to defend ourselves some more.  Which is why we have the right to bear small nuclear arms.  Not the big megaton weapons, of course, although we probably have the right to bear those as well.  Problem is they're just too heavy to lug around in your 4 x 4.  Small ones will do.

See, we needed guns to settle the land.  Now we need them to settle the score.  God helps those who arm themselves.  That's how it goes.

But where it goes, well, that is a frightening prospect.  The trick is to not get frightened into inactivity.  For what is just over the horizon is the prospect of political rallies in which firearms are on open, mass display.  It's already happened on a small scale.  But that scale could easily grow.  After all, it's a right, isn't it?  And if people aren't listening to you, why not take your piece out in public and show them that you mean business?  And so things seem likely to go, and go, until...what?  Until someone decides enough is enough.

When you punch a hole in something, you've got a natural axis around which things can spin...like your life, and the bullet hole at its center.  So when you are putting your jetlagged self to bed at 10:30 PM, and trying not to remember that you have stayed up all night...in fact, past the night, it being 6:30 London time, your time, what is there to do but get a quick blast of the radio news?  Revealing that another bullet has punched a neurological hole in a woman whom voters just asked to represent them in Washington.  

Enough to keep an exhausted person awake in the Californian night, everything spinning.  And spinning out of control.  Enough to make a recent airport escapee head right back to Heathrow, and do keep the package of salted pretzels, thank you very much.  For this nation is becoming old, old in the way of things that do not mature, but age and ossify.  Or maybe this is happening to me.  Perhaps things were always thus.  Didn't 17th-century England decide to scrap the Renaissance in favor of fundamentalist Christianity and violent revolution?  Please, someone, help me understand.

It is hard enough to understand Arizona.  In the spring of 2009, just after my wife had died, I drove with my sister and brother-in-law from their Phoenix area home north toward Sedona.  It is an extroverted sort of place, Arizona, and its problems are not exactly deep and obscure.  For here they were, on full display, mile after mile.  Acres and acres of failed housing projects.  A mile of wooden frames outlining intended kitchens and bedrooms, abstract and suggestive as a vast stage set, an occasional tumbleweed animating the still scene.  Now, two miles of hulking, unpainted homes, black rolls of tarpaper on their plywood roofs...Affordable***Financing***Yours...a blown over wooden sign splintering in the desert.  And more miles, and more.  All adding up to a collective uprising against immigrants, Mexican and Central American immigrants, those people who vacuum the rooms, rake the lawns and push the strollers for half of Phoenix.

Don't try to make sense of this, for the cost in brain cells isn't worth it, unless you want to get a good snapshot of America in microcosm.  Which still isn't worth it.  Particularly, because you next have to understand that all of this, the entire housing-and-resort development house of cards was not only put on a big roulette table and spun by players who somehow lost the game but kept the winnings...desert bandits who barely saw the desert and, in any case, quietly slipped into their jets at Sky Harbor Airport and headed home to the Hamptons to escape the heat.  And not the heat of law enforcement or the lynch mob, but the good old sun.  The latter rises as predictably as the fortunes of the Sheriff of Maricopa, who like the Sheriff of Nottingham, pursues good guys to great comic effect...although the joke must wear thin if you live in Phoenix.  In any case, this is what happened here.  It was like watching a bank robbery and deciding that, gosh, someone is going to pay for this, and it might as well be the parking lot attendant.

Just don't ask obvious questions.  No one else is.  Big government is Arizona's big secret.  Without big bucks from taxpayers in places like Connecticut, places like Phoenix would not exist.  The city's water supply is sucked from the Colorado River, then pumped hundreds of miles over mountain ranges, then deposited in what locals call the Valley.  The Valley of the Shadow of Drought, but for the multibillion-dollar federal welfare project that keeps the taps running.  No one ever mentions this.  There is no big sign at the airport proclaiming Thank You, Ohio Taxpayers, for the Central Arizona Project.  Phoenix needs a Michael Moore rally to End Water Welfare -- Repay the Feds.  But that's another movie.

The movie I am in at this 11th hour begins with a body giving way, its limbs collapsing inexplicably, pavement rising toward the face, one's own face...sense absent.  It was shot at night, this movie.  But it wasn't a movie.  It was a memory of me as a Berkeley senior cramming for finals, absentmindedly wandering home from the library up a midnight street.  Barely noticing the approaching kid who stopped and asked for money.  The unknown kid who with equal casualness pulled out a revolver and shot me in the spinal cord.  Permanently Paralyzed, words with the dramatic remoteness of a film title, now my life.  Which is why I know how it happened, perhaps how it felt, a few mornings ago in Tucson.  A flash, a pop, nonsensical and remote.  The bullet and the shooter and the back story miles away from the slippage of the organism toward a blanker state.  The mundanity of the Safeway or the Berkeley neighborhood street cut loose from the picture, a virtually silent picture, uncaptioned and dimming.  Not even survival or how is this happening...just puzzlement.  And if there is a coming back, the rest of life, one's body, one's everything, impaled and twirling around this hole in the nervous system.  An opening that never closes, never heals and never fails to horrify.

We have become two Americas.  We are retreating into fantasy.  Annie Oakley is running for president.  She has her opponents in the crosshairs.  And damned if someone didn't take her just a smidgen too literally too early and, well, jump the gun.  As for the guns, they are the biggest fantasy of all.  They keep the nation's working class preoccupied with images of power, effectively distracting them from serious visits to the voting booth where they could do real harm.  An armed populace is supposed to protect us from Big Government, of course.  This sort of notion arises in a country that has never had bombs fall from its skies or tanks rumble through its streets.  Germany probably regrets allowing the Brownshirts to arm themselves in the Weimar era, but that is history, and history is Americans' least favorite subject.

It is hard to believe that I once worked for a gun control organization.  In only 10 years the very notion of restricting access to firearms has become passé.  Automatic weapons.  You aim, it shoots and destruction is guaranteed.  It is only fear that allows a people to get to this place.  And the byproduct?  Separating people from their elected representatives in the name of safety.  Armed guards flanking county supervisors as they walk through the parking lot.  A bad thing?  Not if you get to your constituents through the likes of Fox News.  It's all better on screen, under control and at an effective distance.  Want to change channels - hit the control.  Want to change leaders - pull the trigger.  It is a good time to believe in peace, nonviolence and man's better nature.  It is not a good time to be naïve.

When Tony Bennett complains that he's left his heart in San Francisco, I want to text him this message: how careless.  Get it together, Tony.  If you can't keep track of things, don't travel.  I say that quite vociferously, having had a similar experience early in my life, and in a city in which little cable cars most definitely do not climb halfway to any stars.  London.  Immense, shambling, vibrant and stupefying London.

In late autumn, Jane and I tried to tell each other, in our overly polite ways, that this was not the time.  Yes, we had tickets, but Jane no longer had a father alive in Devon...and having passed through Heathrow a total of 10 or 12 times during 2010, well, for her enough was enough.  But, well, traveling to Britain is what I do.  Other people buy Persian carpets, repair their septic tanks or make a killing in credit default swaps.  I sit in an aluminum multiplex for 12 hours, breathing, and rebreathing, air imported from the Gobi Desert...and the first thing I know the soaring Victorian arches of the Paddington viaduct appear ahead while it comes to me, year after year, that right here, Westbourne Grove, 29 people died in a railway accident, and 30 seconds later I wonder where the Royal Oak tube station really is...allowing just enough time for my jetlagged brain to drift backwards to Westbourne Park where my cousin Caroline acquired her first flat.  None of which sounds like losing one's heart anywhere.  Nor does it explain why I keep coming back.  Even for this trip, seemingly one too many, or one simply at the wrong time.

Let's take Westbourne Park.  Let's take it, hang on to it, shake it and see what falls out.  It turns out that nothing much does, or what does is so jumbled with similar memories as to be as confusing as the London A to Z itself, particularly when reading that map with middle-aged eyes.  But there it is, glimpsed from a passing train.  The station is on or near a bridge...this being as close as memory can get me...and being located at the edge of a mainline railway canyon, there is no background, only foreground.  Which makes the Victorian scrollwork outline of the small station look remarkably stark.  As though everything around it had been bombed.  Which not too long ago, was probably accurate enough.  Anyway, it sticks out, the station does, in a way that is not characteristic of London.  In fact, it gives the impression of being on a hill, which it isn't.  Unless you are a semi-quadriplegic hobbling with a cane toward that seeming wonder, a permanent home owned by a member of my own generation in a London neighborhood.  Thus, my earliest tube trips to Westbourne Park, foursquare on the Metropolitan Line...and after descending the slight incline my recollections sink into the sand just like the Mohave River.  Which, by the way, I have never quite seen, though I have driven by it enough times.  Unfinished business in the California desert.  But enough of me.  Back to Westbourne Park.

Did Caroline own two different places in the same neighborhood at different times?  Leamington Road Villas, that must have been one.  But what about Chepstow Road, just a couple of streets away?  Didn't she live there?  And why, most importantly, does any of this matter?  Unless you think you are Marcel Proust or do not have a life, which is more or less the same thing.  Problem is, the memories are so vivid.  In one of these interchangeable flats Caroline had at least two levels of downstairs neighbors.  I probably remember the neighbors because I remember the stairs.  I must have schlepped up and down them often enough in that earlier neuromuscular era.  Dee lived on one landing.  She was chirpy and old, that is to say, 45 or so, and had a cat named Titty Poo.  It would probably take an advanced degree in English history, sociology or linguistics to understanding the origins of this name.  Which doesn't matter because Caroline, who insisted that cat was a fawning monstrosity, promptly renamed it Shitty Poo.  And this really doesn't matter because the most interesting person in the building was a young woman who possessed several advanced degrees in sex...and when she wasn't conducting research in this realm, made avant-garde films.

But the real thing was that this was Caroline's own home.  Not her parents' and not a university residence.  Things were shifting.  Now there was no one to complain about picking up after Caroline except Caroline.  She was at that early and rigorous stage of medical practice that required coming and going at all hours.  Still, she managed to enjoy teatime and frequently make meals, in this her own place.  I recall at least one of the dinners, a Sunday afternoon affair.  And I recall the mice invasion.  Somehow they got into Caroline's flat and in no time flat captured the place.  They were there and had taken over more thoroughly than the Germans in the Alsace.  I suppose Caroline got rid of them somehow.  Meanwhile, she was imperturbable.  No girlish standing on a chair and shrieking.  They kept skittering about, these rodents, and while Caroline may have given chase with a broom, she realized there was not much to be done...for the time being.  I even recall her tapping on a hanging rope of garlics.  Umm, she said, that one doesn't sound right.  She banged the garlics against the wall, a mouse leapt off and Caroline regarded its high-speed getaway to some spot under the fridge.  Oh well.  She resumed peeling courgettes.

Caroline's mother described the place as a 'grotty little flat.'  I tried to imagine things from her perspective, though I did not try very hard.  Things were shifting.  Things within me, principally.  I was experiencing something vicariously as my cousins acquired their own domiciles.  What it was to have one's own life.  One's own place.  At this point, I was barely employed, still struggling to find something like a job.  I needed to imagine having my home, something that I owned, was mine.  Britons and Americans may not quite appreciate the importance of this shared penchant for homeownership.  Nothing quite like it seems to exist on the Continent, say.  But whatever our differences, we have utter agreement on the worth of mortgages...which may have sunk both of our economic boats, in the short term at least...but that is another matter.

This matter of what was the matter was Caroline's flat...well, it had something to do with my emotional growing up.  They were like adoptive parents, Caroline's mother and father, and it was time to separate.  The flat, or flats, with their stairs and mice and oddities signaled a turning toward independence, adulthood.  And I was trying to make a similar turning.  Which had to be accomplished in California.  Which, although it may not sound that way in the telling, was where I lived.  Caroline moved into her flats after I moved back to California.  I saw these places on visits.  I lived my London life on visits.  Which was distinctly different from what was happening, or not happening, in San Francisco.  And that, as they say, is another story.