Townie

New York seems like a fever dream outpost from an endangered experience. I feel a widening disassociation from it, as if it had been a place I once visited, went to a great party and tripped on the last step. I was awakened from a coma today by a scarred knuckle hitting me square in the face. These enigmatic feelings though true, equal a betrayal in my loyal mind. They are entwined in a conflict. The small Massachusetts town where I now live has molded me into a calmer, and more predictive driven life. I read, cook and fix things. I clean. I help my elderly mother whom I live with. I garden and write. I take photographs. These things bring me joy. I feel useful here in equal measure to the troubling and burgeoning thoughts of dread and defeat there. I feel needed and appreciated in my new life. Naturally, challenges do pop up.

Some days I drive along double lane Main Street that tightens into a single road through towns west where everything feels freer, and oddly drier. I gas my way through miles in a direction that opens into grander and more natural landscapes. I pass local town halls and churches most of which are 19^th century structures. They can look to be quite older if one doesn’t teach themselves the many clues to their ages. The town I live in was established on Halloween night in 1741, a hundred years after the first settlers arrived and two hundred before California joined the United States. I admire the early period homes and later municipal buildings of small door entrances centered between giant pine-turned columns, a symbol-cue of a Roman legitimacy. This message in architecture for the bloodied and liberated colony was a smart one as far as unification and pride. It wasn’t quarried marble. There were no gold leaf flourishes or reliefs, just a simple yet regal structure that said, we are legitimate and this building says so. All this history dotted between new architecture, a gas station, and a collapsing slate stone of the first inhabitants’ graves.

There’s a sweet little clapboard house nearby that is from 1733…old even for these parts. If one allows their imagination to travel, the oldest homes were built purely for shelter from a wilderness replete with cougars, bears, coyote, rattlesnakes and wolves. The cougars and wolves have been eradicated. Though I recently learned that Coy Wolves a co-mingled species are a breeding population in the state. They are coyotes who rendezvous with the rare off course lone wolf that tracked east and never looked back

The gym I joined is housed in a structure circa 1978. It sits at the end of the connected L shaped strip mall of a nail salon, a computer repair place, and a drycleaner. I go to this gym a few times a week. I don’t enjoy it, I tolerate it. I see fast benefits when I see myself in a mirror, but I still dread going. It’s not the exercising that bothers me but the hard facts of my isolation that stirs wildly when I’m there. For the first time in my life, I’m completely friendless where I live. As a writer, alone- time is essential. It always has been. I like spending time alone when I’m working on an essay or framing a new idea, which is often. I like to go for a drink alone and I don’t mind going out to eat alone. Human interaction can be fulfilling, yet only every now and then is it interesting. I like the option of being around humans. I’m an observer and a listener by nature as are most writers. Details are important. My talking too much would cause valuable clues to slip by unnoticed, clues I must capture that will then filter into my writing somehow, somewhere. For these reasons and others, I’m often quiet. I am not anti-social. Being alone in public can at times create an air of intrigue around a quiet guy. Throughout my life this has channeled interesting situations for me. ‘Alone’ to the outside invokes mystery. People are curious to learn about a new character in town who asks no questions…except here.

Rarely are there more than 7 people at the gym, though sometimes in a nearby room of mats and mirrors groups of women come in for classes where an instructor yells at them a lot. The hollering and commanding voice of the instructor bugs me. Is it necessary to be screaming that loud for an hour? If you need that to get into shape, pay me to yell at you. I’ve determined that gyms are mostly social gatherings. The men who come in are of two demographics, 40-50’s or 18-25. The older guys talk too much, but not to me. They banter about money and cars, who has what and what they each would like. They hardly touch the weights. The young guys come in as a unit. They talk and show each other pictures on their phones. “I was gonna call her but then I said, I’m waiting until she calls me.” It’s that sort of script. Last week, one of the young guys smiled and said hi to me. I returned the pleasantry. It felt good to have an interaction. He’s small-framed yet muscular. I place him to be about 20. He’s the only one from his group that works out with intent. When I was leaving, he introduced himself with an extended hand. “I’m Graham, like the cracker,” he said with a smile. “Michael,” I replied, “like the angel.”

In a take charge moment, I thought about joining a Hunt and Fish club one town over. I fast dismissed the idea as the silliest thing that ever popped into my head, and one born from a punishing isolation I sometimes feel. I don’t hunt. I’m not against it, but I cannot kill an animal. The thought of joining caused me to shake my head with a wry smile. I don’t own a gun, I’d like to have a gun, but how would I use it? It is as the Beatles would sing, a “nowhere man” idea. Besides, getting a gun license in the Northeast is as likely as finding a spa in Death Valley. Ironically, Massachusetts known for its well-earned reputation of a deep blue bastion of liberalism, and strict anti-gun legislation, was once the largest exporter of guns. Smith and Wesson originally formed in Connecticut and then moved to become a Springfield Massachusetts based company. To this day, a Massachusetts company manufactures the most cinematic of weapons popularized in the 1980’s Clint Eastwood movie, Sudden Impact, the Smith and Wesson .357 Magnum. I can’t think of a .357 without hearing Clint Eastwood, barrel cocked and ready with his grit threatening whisper, “Make my day.” I wonder if Graham, like the cracker, has ever heard of Clint Eastwood. Does he know anything about New York?

In July I picked up some things from my place dead smack in the center of Manhattan. I was there for a few days. I’ve been reverse engineering my recollections and I can‘t figure out if being away had made me clear-eyed or upon my return plunged me into an overstimulation of densified activity. I could only see crass and chaotic commercialism jeopardizing the health and safety of visitors and degrading the quality of life of its residents. The city doesn’t operate by any rules, there are no longer any procedural urban norms. The message from the top is, ‘everyone do whatever the fuck you want’. The Citi bikes are broken; the homeless guy is naked on the sidewalk screaming, as tidy tourists with small children, seemingly from another planet, stroll by on their way to see a musical. There is a constant and defiant jam of pedicabs, their drivers looking for fares while blocking traffic. They refuse to move and there is no one to make them move. The horns are deafening. Everything distorted and bad has been normalized. I’ve witnessed the city inching towards this model for a decade in the uncomfortable perch of a front row seat. I guess a highly ideological new population of no opinion, no merit, no judgment helped this along. No one seems to mind the too numerous soot-spitting charcoal pits and acridly sweet propane tanks burning daily on the streets. The animal fat grease is staining the sidewalks, flowing into the sewers. It feels unhealthy, unsafe and with a dusky cloud of a violent threat spinning overhead. As the great Jean Genet wrote, “Violence is a calm that disturbs you.” That resides safely within romantically transgressive works of fiction, but accepting it takes some risk and grit in real life.

Once upon a time I lived within the mecca of intellect, dynamically cool, and a creative progressiveness. All this quite magically only happened there, until it no longer did. I learned a lot. I am grateful. I will now take my chances with the Coy Wolves, or possibly further one day towards the majestic Gray Wolves of an Idaho wilderness. My mind conspires with my heart in drawing a snow crested cabin where a wood stove is burning hot. I will own a gun. I drift into the embrace of new territory. I am grieving the loss of what I had long relied upon as normal. I am also carrying a peculiar sense of feeling orphaned. Aging and the left hook of an abrupt shift in the culture fuels this insecurity, or is it insight? Time feigned slow movement as it sped by at a fast clip. Nice trick. All things pass, transform and bend to the will of destiny. I am a passenger here, the deeds and wishes of my best efforts may be remembered yet never missed. Onward goes the march. To its enduring beat I enlist.