Do a '90 day memoir' workshop?

     Signed up for the “intro to memoir” with Alan Watt, of "the 90 day novel" fame. He professes to tell us the difference between journaling and memoir. It’s scary-but I did sign up. I mean, is it worthwhile to write a memoir, just because I love writing? And to spend 90 days on it?
    Journaling is probably my narcissistic supply first thing in the morning, so to move from journaling to memoir could be a bigger leap than I know. Could be I can’t switch, can’t keep the focus. Journaling favors the small picture, the small steps, such that I can write in any new direction at any moment. It favors discovery of connections, or revealing new things, new ideas and theories, -wacky theories, half baked ideas propelled by deficient grammar. The joy of the wonder of the new at every turn without regard for actual understanding, rather than the slow unfurling of the larger picture set in a real life scene. In short, fantasy is encouraged in journaling for me, and the presentation of ‘my life’ on the world wide stage of a book seems a far cry away.
    One thing that might aid me however is the fact that everything that I experienced back then seems to be different now. I’ve been doing so much looking back , so much recovery work, so much self analyzing & family analyzing that the scenes that I remember are endowed with a time machine quality, an elegiac glow even. Every time I return to one of them I get new stuff, new connections, a zap of realization and if not release from tension, then at least some kind of physical literal understanding. As if the postures of the people in the actions taking place were magical in themselves and glowing. Energy was transferring, a dance was occurring that transcends mere words. Even the negative memories such as my Dad spanking me for saying ‘motherfucker’, I can return to it and in the ridiculousness of the the whole being pulled across his knee and stinging wack wack wack of it, I can feel how a very particular fear of others was engendered and deposited into said buttocks, and I hear the whole universe laughing about it. And is this why I have a distant fascination with baseball, the swing of the arm, sometimes with a bat in clenched fists? Postures and intentions matter, is what I think I’m saying, and memories in themselves, can bring tears or mirth. And hopefully not malice.
    After all, it seems a miracle that people do continue to make the world go round, the working people that is. Maybe this emotional work of understanding and connection is the real work for humans and as such my switching from journaling endless narcissistic supply and channeling that towards eureka moments of my own memoir, that others can relate to, will have bonus agape value. I hope so.
    My father did let go of his antagonistic approach to parenting, as he went through tumultuous life changes, and eventually in my 20’s, he and my younger brother and I went on a two week hiking and canoeing trip around the southeast US: Okefenokee Swamp, Cumberland Island off the coast of Georgia and the Great Smoky Mountains of Tennessee. We didn’t actually talk about much, just enjoyed the views, the campfires, the woods, the waves. We’ve been good together ever since, except for that one time he got angry at me for not voting when Al Gore lost the presidential race in 2000. And judging from the climate crisis on planet Earth, maybe he was right about that.
    Because one of my wacky self propelled theories is that I was, in a profound sense, born straight into the culture wars and I’ve been lost there ever since. Is that what it means to be American? I was dropped in 14 short years from my mother’s comfy and luxurious womb straight down into the socio-politico, a charged place where war and peace are being constantly redefined. Home is yet to be definitively attained, even still, -maybe by the time I retire. I’m 61 now and thinking about retiring early at 62.

 

PS, we saw lots of alligators at the Okefenokee Swamp, the water was low because of a drought. There were too many of them so we only stayed one night out in the  bush.

Doctor on the Mayflower

  A deep melancholy, like a step up into happiness and then looking back at the wreckage of a thousand years of strewn bodies from wars no one intended to start. The deep inertia quality of these otherwise triumphant corpses. At least they had purpose, I suppose, as I lift a heavy, but entitled, heart for another breath in the present. The guilt lies almost everywhere, 99% everywhere, though I refuse to generalize completely, that would be triggering me back to childhood. And adolescence, the 70’s, America's hinge point into tomorrow. The catapult years. The days when Real Capitalism truly began stealing it’s narcissism from the products it sold and riding off scott free into it’s Trump tower and gated community heaven, when Real Capital took over the Real for good, put "heaven on earth", and the Real Earth and the 99% be damned! All the rest of the narcissists - the talkers and fibbers, the mansplainers, the doomsayers, the working class hero(lesses), the middle class models, the pop stars, the Hollywood and bollywooders, the stay up all night geeks, the stare at the screeners, the athletes shilling on ads, the rise of the mercenary armed forces - all those going for the complications of modern life and reveling in it - they still don’t cut it like the 1%. They may dance to the end of the world on that now permanent disco beat (see rave, house, deep ____, fill in the blank, etc) but to me that’s nought but Real Capitalism’s slave driving whip cracking, snapping in the air and setting the endless death spiral pace. At least rap takes that endless beat and pronounces over, past and against it. But for me I’ll always need some rock n roll, some roll through the disco rot, the machine for me just hyper charged enough, pull back from the abyss. This is melancholy, pull back from the maelstrom as E.A. Poe noticed in the days of Real Capital’s own adolescence, the Victorian era, when curtains were heavy velvet and muffled all cries of longing and loneliness for non-hierarchical spaces, almost all anyways. No wonder my grandmother got a bob at college in the early 1920’s, and then her grandmother (having taken the place of her mother who had tragically died of a back street ______, I won’t say it because of modesty for the angels, the forgotten ones, but I did get very close to my grandmother Margaret and offered her some, a little, comfort in her declining years) her grandmother made her walk around the block a few times when she returned home for Christmas. Must have been snow on the ground being upstate NY small town, I imagine. But I don’t know, I wasn’t there, I’m just mulling it over, trying to claim my small piece of the narcissistic (Plymouth) rock before I die, weave something together for the following generations. Having achieved 61 and 3/4 years and most of my close friends and lovers have either died or disappeared to far away places, and thus the melancholy.

But I’ve found a true love, near impossible in the post-modern day, a devoted and spunky (and secretly wife-ish) woman who will give me (and our decidedly normatively hetero relationship, as she put it) everything if only I do the same and maybe if I don’t, but I fully do intend to do - having a romantic and idealistic side myself and having worked out quite a bit but not all of my deep seated shitty cynicism over the last 15 or 16 years of recovery work. (I know I’m supposed to know the moment I last took a drink but I’m in denial of that perfectly discoverable date.) Cynicism I didn’t even know I had but probably should’ve, if I hadn’t been born in ’59 and living through the 60’s as a youth, those were the worst and best of times as some people say, the heyday for the American worker and also the death knell for the American worker but thankfully the adolescence of rock n roll, it’s teen years of triumph being the 70’s Sid Vicious licking the envelope to close it, and Kurt Cobain licking the stamp and the letter got sent to me. Rock n roll! means a lot of things to a lot of peeps but we need it now, more than ever. “I’m so glad, I’m so glad, I’m glad that I’m glad that I’m glad.” being the song that caught my ear and pushed my hinge. I think it was Sioux Free somehow, a genial long auburn haired lesbian a decade older than me who shared it with me, who our family knew from the Quaker Meeting in Hartford. She’d biked across the entire country and was a local heroine for a few weeks or months, with a glow of DIY accomplishment. E to W, or W to E … I think it was E to W and the winds prevailed the other way so she had had to push through them across lonely miles of the Great Plains. Or did she go with Cindy Green, her gf at the time? The two always seemed to be together and if I’d known then what I know now, would I have warned anyone about that Cindy Green? (Not that anyone at all listens to me, of course.) Because Cindy Green, bless her everlastingly gregarious heart, was eventually the ‘burning spear’ for the implosion of our little nuclear family unit. Making it more of a neutron bomb (silent but deadly) then a Hiroshima August 6th kind of deal. So just think of a house of cards, or if you think of a castle made of sand then Cindy would be a surfer on the rising tide, along with a few million or perhaps billion other women, who fascinatingly still need and at that time needed their freedom from patriarchy (I’m no fan of the Taliban, believe me you) but didn’t know what they were fooling with when they eyed up the ‘institution of marriage’, -but as I say, Cindy - the most gregarious and invigorating of peeps - entirely without an ounce of pre-prejudice towards any soul (it just goes to show that you don’t know who is the who is looking for the mother - I think it ended up me in the long run) well she was a prize of a person on earth, that Cindy, to win her over must have been something and that, my Mother did, astoundingly, and I’m still astounded today, paralyzed even, partially probably. So that’s what I’m writing about, a certain inert-itude. A certain nerdiness right next to neediness, a 99% nerdy neediness, when I take a po-mo look at a melancholy of the last 1,000 years, back to the heart of the, the, I suppose Ottoman Empire, a time when possibly things could’ve gone either way, but they didn’t and so here we are. And though I’ve lost many friends and the Covid era seems like a veil covering any entrance back to those good times of yore, I at least have the sweetest most vivacious gf who loves me for me and sings the song I want to hear. While I listen to Haydn’s Symphony No. 88 and No. 100, (both in G major emphasizing the happiness part). And poor Cindy who I wish I’d had a chance to hold her hand towards the end, has passed by now and my mother had broken up with her somewhere before, in those wheelchair bound days. Cindy was the type who would protest actively if someone parked in the wheelchair parking spot if they didn't have the right plate.

Aaah, but if only I could somewhere get rid of my own personalized debt hanging around my neck, then I could really expand on this little piece of narcissism. RnR, rest and relaxation is what I need, as well as rock n roll. At any rate, I know I’ll never be able to escape “the scream”, the sound of my mother breaking down, a few years before and invariably the reason for Cindy, and a repeat “performance” for her, a recurring “event” of an “undiagnosed” ill health; but that one scream towards the sky and the tears falling, dripping dropping from the tip of her nose . . . I was paralyzed and partially set free a few years into the Cindy ‘reign of terror’ (no, just joking, no terror, though my younger brother did become homeless then at age 13, living down by the railroad tracks in a refrigerator box, I visited and slept overnight after a pleasant evening of wandering the rust belt Worcester, MA. mid 70’s, we talked about a roof top gardens type of future and sang songs out loud from a gallon of cheap red wine) when a ‘family meeting’ brought the announcement of the end of my parent’s marriage and I cried (the only kid of four to cry) as I felt a giant egg fall to the floor and crumple into pieces like Humpty Dumpty. I always since equated that moment to Humpty Dumpty, perhaps because my name, Hugh, is similar in sound and humor to Humpty Dumpty. But perhaps that’s me in my narcissism, trying to get a piece of the Plymouth Rock. One of my ancestors, by the way, was the doctor on the Mayflower. Just a little piece of rock n roll, so I won’t be worrying my twin daughters (26) if I get any older, I’ll have something upon which to rest my weary and freakin creakin bones.