“Beautiful Poem” originally appeared in Knee-Jerk
I usually eat at restaurants twice a day. Almost always it’s breakfast and dinner, in my opinion the more adventurous meals, although I have no special aversion to lunch. I use my iPad to photograph the meals from multiple angles and to take notes on presentation, flavorfulness, restaurant amenities, and the professionalism of the staff, specifically: cleanliness, promptness, knowledgeability, and verve. Which is a word I like. Verve. It has a quality in the saying of it that seems to imply its definition. Try saying it out loud while making a sort of decisive gesture with your fist: verve. See? Staff lacking verve, the verveless, I find inspire a reciprocal apathy in patrons, which creates an atmosphere of barely subdued hostility. I post the photos and accompanying reviews on Yelp.com. Last April my review of Lonnie’s Bagel City was chosen as Review of the Day and since then my Useful/Funny/Cool ratings from other Yelpers have routinely hit double digits. And while it’s enough to know that I’m providing a service, the ROTD was nice, like a cherry on a sundae. The cherry being a sense of personal validation.
I recently posted a video on Facebook from NASA’s Vimeo page. It was a time-lapse taken from the International Space Station showing the Earth, our one and only home, far below like a giant glowing ball rolling across a wide and soothing expanse of blackness. There were these long slashes of light stretched across it, like lasers, and someone, a friend of a friend on FB, commented: ‘Those rounded white points of light, what are they? The reflection of stars in the sea?’ Which sounded to me like a beautiful poem even though in the video description it clearly stated that the lights were just an effect of the camera shutter. But the comment was a nice reminder that there’s beauty all around us even if people don’t notice it and sometimes have to be reminded to look for it. It’s good to remind them if it occurs to you.
Here’s a quote I like: ‘The ephemeral generations of man are born and pass away in quick succession. Individual men burdened with fear, want, and sorrow, dance into the arms of death. As they do so they never weary of asking what it is that ails them and what the whole tragic comedy is supposed to mean.’ Arthur Schopenhauer wrote that and when I read it to myself out loud in front of the mirror during my self-actualization exercises I think about how significant it is, and if only it were shorter how it would fit perfectly in the favorite quotations section on my FB profile. The key to having a good profile, IMHO, is sort of brevity being the soul of wit, because otherwise you chance the tl;dr comments, which are basically like, why even bother taking those four seconds if your purpose in that time is only to shame someone on their wall for being, what, too well read in the classics of philosophy? Why do that? But still, best not to risk it and just keep it short is my advice.
Once when I was younger, I got really drunk at a party. No one seemed to want to talk with me, so I went outside and there was this dog sniffing around in front of the building, probably looking for something to eat. He was a shabby looking pit bull with one eye missing, and I saw in him the neglect I was feeling just then and knew that we were surely meant to be friends or at least maybe kindred spirits. I bought him a Slim Jim at a bodega up the road and he followed me back home. We sat on my futon eating Slim Jims and I knew I’d done a noble deed in rescuing him, which was the message beaming out at me from his one good but also, it seemed, infected eye. The thing was, a little while later I left him there in the apartment because I felt like going out to a bar. You don’t want to know what I found there the next morning when I got back, which was, I’ll tell you anyway, that he had died and was lying across my futon in a dried up puddle of diarrhea, which was an upsetting thing to have to encounter especially when I thought of how we had been kindred spirits. I most definitely continue to feel bad about it even now, but the upshot was that at the bar I met a girl, this girl being Caitlin. We were both drinking heavily and then went and made so much love on the couch in her sister’s apartment that, in the confusion and giddiness of new possibilities, I forgot all about the one-eyed dog (although, lesson learned, re: personal responsibility and re: taking street dogs back home to your house and leaving them there?).
She told me afterwards that she was visiting her sister who was attending Pratt, that she had come so her parents wouldn’t know she was getting an abortion. I wanted immediately, right there on the couch, to tell her to keep it, that we’d raise her and whoever else’s child it was together. That I could be a good father even if the child was not mine. This is how close and connected to her I felt just then. But I didn’t think it was right to say that to a pregnant person whose mind is made up to no longer be pregnant, so I told her instead that I understood and could only imagine how difficult this was for her, and offered my support in the role of a new (but already intimate) friend, one who would henceforth always see her as vital and untarnished. Then a few years go by and we are married, which was to me a wonderful blessing, and then later we are parents ourselves, which in terms of being a blessing was second to none, is how good it felt.
On the day we became parents I rushed over to the hospital to be by Caitlin’s side through this miraculous event, and I was feeling so good about it—although also scared and worried, but in lesser amounts of course—that I crashed my car into the back of a graffiti covered delivery truck. And the feel of the impact, this incredible ratcheting up of sensation, was explosive and significant on such a primal level, causing things to glow and vibrate in a way that told me with absolute certainty that I was on a good and true life-path, that I felt afterwards I could not possibly have been ready to become a father had the crash not taken place. This is how unexpected life events can change us with their significance, and not to mention also explains my small whitish forehead scar which we jokingly called my ‘Baby Lester scar.’
Now my iPad chimes with a push notification. Scott Peckman, who I haven’t seen since high school, has sent me a game request. Will I help him with his Gardenville Garden? His flowers are wilting; they need attention. If I accept the request, releasing my personal data to advertisers, his GreenThumb network will grow and he’ll be awarded 50 Fertilizer Points. I run through a quick emotional checklist, cataloging how this makes me feel, the position he’s put me in. I look through Scott’s collection of poor quality webcam profile photos of him alone in grainy rooms or iPhone photos of him hovering near groups of people but not actually, you couldn’t fairly say, with them, no little Scotts or Scottinas to be seen, no Mrs. Peckmans or even potential Mrs. Peckmans anywhere. So I click accept and now advertisers will know from their algorithms that I bought compression socks from Amazon.com. Which, considering, is not that big of a deal.
I hit refresh for a few minutes, wanting to confirm the delivery of Scott’s Fertilizer Points, waiting for new flowers to pop up on the screen, for something small but maybe beautiful to happen. The last time, when he sent me a Mafia Poker request, my bequest of personal information got him 100 Bluff Awards and 25 Family Respect Points, and he personally thanked me in a wall post and then afterwards even liked his post. Scott’s wall, though, is a lonely wall indeed. No one seems to be posting much of anything or even liking posts. And then I think how in my own life my wall became a place of much needed solace after Caitlin left because she’d found her soul’s double in her 23-year old yoga instructor, Yogi Kyle, and how she told me she knew it wasn’t in my heart to be so petty as to keep them from realizing their best selves together at his family’s yoga retreat in Aruba. And this whole episode placed me in the position of valuing my wall to a degree I hadn’t ever imagined valuing it and coming to need, I suppose, the validation via sympathetic likes and emotionally-satisfying comments, and my own leaving of likes and comments on friends’ walls in hopes of reciprocity, leading to further validation, this being a kind of proof that I was still ‘out there’ and ‘vital.’
She even took our little diamond with her, our Lester, whose own health problems it seemed only began to clear up once they arrived in Aruba. I remember dearly all those nights spent together, the three of us, Caitlin and I looking down, with mixed emotions of love and fear, at Lester in his incubator, and I knew that we were undeniably three psychically linked spirits. We’d hold hands and attempt to radiate love and positivity to our little man in his miniature plastic room, to bombard him with our healing energies. And Caitlin’s tears would in tiny percussive blasts fall onto the incubator’s clear roof as I’d try like hell to reassure her that better health insurance was coming due to my promotion which I’d long been promised was imminent, and that each day little Lester made it through his chances for growing up healthy and undamaged by his myriad ailments, which, god as my witness I do not blame on Caitlin and whatever small vices she may have nurtured during her pregnancy, would improve exponentially. And at night when visiting hours had ended, she’d ask for alone time on the porch to smoke her one daily cigarette and contemplate her personal aspirations, which I gladly gave her because who were we as a couple if not two people supportive of each others’ needs?
So with this in mind, I post on Scott Peckman’s wall a friendly, ‘Hey, Scott. Long time no see. Let’s get a beer soon, buddy.’ And his like appears near instantly, which is always good to see this kind of wall vigilance in someone. This is followed closely by, ‘Hey Alan great idea :) Tomorrow at Sully’s Wings? Message me buddy!’ Which, really, I was just being nice and don’t actually want to go for a beer with him. I don’t know how to respond, so I put it off. I set a reminder to respond later in hopes that a suitable comment will occur to me by then to get me out of having to meet him at Sully’s Wings while still maintaining an appropriate level of dignified concern.
I check Twitter and favorite some tweets from the life coaches I follow. I even retweet one of Caitlin’s (@yogaspiritmama) daily affirmation tweets, which she’s been very conscientious about posting almost daily and which, if she weren’t my ex-wife, I’m sure I would find very affirming. But I retweet it because in a small way it lets me be part of Lester’s new life in Aruba where he’s probably learning to harness vital energies already, even at such a young age. The retweet is kind of like: Hello? Caitlin? Granted, ex-husband here, but also still father and potential caregiver! Ahem?
No retweets or favorites from her on those occasions when I’ve tweeted something life affirming or soul uplifting myself. Like when I posted those photos of New England sunrises, which of course were Google image searched, but the net result still being uplifting images even if effort-wise it was search-term-centered and not actually traveling-to-New-England-and-photographing-sunrises-centered. Total social media silence. What is with her? A favorite has got to be the bare minimum of human interaction. But no, nothing. No mentions, no hashtags. No #sorry #weshouldconsiderjointcustody #IstillbelieveyoureavitalpersonAlan. At least she follows me, though, which is more than I can say for Yogi Kyle. You’d think he’d at least want to maintain some level of cordiality regarding his wife’s ex-husband. His feed is protected, which I think is an unnecessarily strong word, and so I don’t even know what he’s posting in terms of Lester and Caitlin. I should get a court order. A father/ex-husband/human being nevertheless has rights.
I read an article recently about a man whose job it was to shoot birds at an airport. They were always getting sucked up into plane engines and causing them to crash was the reason for having to shoot them. The author wrote that the man didn’t exactly love his job, but that he in a way found comfort in a small moment of it, right when he would shoot a bird—a lovely object, he said, so streamlined and perfect—causing it, in a puff of feathers, to cease midflight and fall back to earth. The cessation and puff of feathers were somehow beautiful to the man. He couldn’t explain it. But considering the civic obligation for someone to do what he was doing and his own need for employment, finding something beautiful in those dead birds and the knowledge of their subsequently orphaned chicks was probably necessary for him.
Then one day a new device was patented and put to use by the FAA which kept the birds from flying into plane engines without any harm befalling them, and the man was downsized. ‘Good news,’ is how the article says the man’s superior broke the news to him, ‘those birds that formerly you had to kill? They’ll now be safe as well as posing no further risk to the aviating public! Isn’t that something? But, also the thing they say about every cloud having a silver lining? Perhaps we should consider that the opposite must invariably be true as well.’ But it wasn’t long before he went back to shooting birds, now unpaid and unsanctioned, hidden in a blind in the marshland surrounding the airport. He was eventually caught and had no explanation for his actions, he just threw up his hands and let himself be arrested. There was even a picture of two policemen leading him out of there, handcuffed and dressed all in camo with tears streaming down his face, all the birds now safe but unbeautiful.