Dispatches from Terra Incognita 4:
Grievances, Observations, and a Warning Not to Be Judgmental
Old Guy Blues
Lately, I’ve found myself wanting to live in Spain. Not for the running of the bulls, or the Salvador Dali Museum in Figueres, or for the taste of exquisite Albarino wine. No, I want to move to Spain to be around “nice” people, “thoughtful” people—people who are becoming increasingly hard to find in a US post-Trumpian world. Friends of mine who have spent time in Spain always mention how people will let the aged or infirm go ahead of them at grocery stores. Who wouldn’t want to live in such a place inhabited by thoughtful souls like that? In the US people grumble and make snide remarks as an elderly woman wearing compression socks and beat-up Birkenstocks fumbles through her wallet for spare change. After all, we Americans are a busy people. We have important things to do. We have important things to “share” or discover on Tik Tok and Facebook. We need to pass along that Instagram video of an 89-year-old man riding a bronco buck naked. We need to get to a lot of places and buy things we don’t need using credit cards with exorbitant rates of interest. And, let’s face it, seniors live too long anyway. The sooner they die, the sooner we will have time to acquire more things and not have to wait in line at the pharmacy while some old guy is talking to the pharmacist (for the 100th time) about the 60s. Yeah, to most people, I’m sure the biggest failure of Covid is that it only took out one percent of us.
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One reason why I don’t trust the Old Testament: No way would a woman ever be tricked by a snake to eat a forbidden apple. Only a man could do something that narcissistic and dumb.
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The sand dollar! One of the only sea creatures with no predators. One could write a history about its labyrinthine complexities if one had the time. One legend suggests that the five slits on the surface of the sand dollar represent the five wounds of Christ. Another legend argues that sand dollars are really coins that have been lost by mermaids, or, even better, currency used by the people of Atlantis. If I were a sand dollar, I’d prefer the mermaid story, or to be left alone until my insides dried up on some quiet Maine beach, after which I’d discover myself in a glass vase owned by some nice old Yankee lady, surrounded by other sand dollars who, if I would listen carefully, will recount the history of their interesting lives.
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This from Eduardo Galeano’s The Book of Embraces: The Book of Embraces
“Grapes and Wine”
On his deathbed, a man of the Vineyard’s spoke into Marcela’s ear. Before dying, he revealed his secret.
‘The grape,” he whispered, “is made of wine.”
Marcela Perez-Silva told me this, and I thought: If the grape is made of wine, then perhaps we are the words that tell who we are.
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Far-right and far-left thinkers will never agree upon anything. Both groups cannot abide coexisting in the grey areas where real life is lived. Thus, the birth of simplistic thinking. For example, Nancy Reagan’s call to arms about premarital sex: “Just say no.” Or the 60s counter-culture radicals maintaining all cops were “pigs,” when most cops (a number of my family members included) were very decent people (many Vietnam War Vets), who were just pissed off that anyone would stitch an American flag onto the seat of their jeans. People embrace simplistic thinking because it’s much easier feeling comfortable in a world that’s black and white, a world where opposing forces don’t need to be reconciled. For example: about the homeless: “Anyone with any backbone can find a job and housing if they work hard.” Or death by drug addiction: “They made a choice, so they got what they deserve.”
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Here’s a story about drug addiction, but don’t tell my mother, who’s 95 and still alive, because, she will tether herself to a statue of the Blessed Virgin with a giant rosary fashioned from the remains of Saint Jude, then pray to that saint for sparing my life..
In 1971 I was 19 and working as a copy boy at the Buffalo Evening News. At that time, type was handset, and I met a number of very interesting typesetters, who often tutored me in their trade. One guy, let’s call him Hank, was a six-foot-six biker who was part of a “motorcycle club,” modeled after Hell’s Angel’s. He always wore blue jeans, a white T-shirt, a leather jacket, and broken-in engineer boots. He liked me, and whenever I bumped into him and his friends at a place called Mulligan’s Brick Bar, he’d buy me shots of tequila. He had huge hands, and it was clear that he could hurt someone if he needed to, but I never saw that side of him.
One night he told me I could follow him to a party in a tough neighborhood on the East Side of Buffalo. Upon arriving, I discovered a smorgasbord of drugs, alcohol, and the kind of women I had only seen in those 60s B-movies about bikers where Bruce Dern got his start. I would like to romanticize this experience, as we boomer males are wont to, recounting the debauched erotic evening I experienced, but, quite frankly, these women scared me.
Still, I decided to stay, finding myself, at the end of the night, sitting on a beat-up leather couch, staring at other people situated in couches that had been arranged to form a circle. Everyone was shooting up, and it was moving my way. As I watched things transpire, I noticed Hank looking curiously at me from across the room. Not angry. Not disappointed. “Amused” would best describe his countenance.
At that point, I looked closely at my companions, suddenly wondering how this old Catholic boy had gotten himself into such a situation. It was then that I felt a visceral chill come over me, so shocking that I couldn’t catch my breath, and I said softly to myself, “What the fuck, Peter?”
That’s when I got up and left the house, stumbling toward my 1959 Rambler American.
I often have asked myself what kept me from shooting up and leaping off an existential cliff into years of misery? I’d like to say it was because of the way I was raised—that is, my good breeding and the kindness and decency taught to me by my parents, especially my mother. Or maybe I was just too smart to do something that dumb. Both of these “explanations,” of course, imply that I was “superior” to everyone else at the party—a judgment that, at first, I had no problem accepting.
But here is the real reason I bolted.
I was just lucky. Maybe if I had had a little bit more to drink, or had done a bit more hashish, or if my girlfriend of two years had just dumped me for some Adonis in his second year of law school, I could have easily made a different decision.
I always remind myself of this experience every time I want to take the moral high ground and judge others’ terrible decisions.
A few days after the party, Hank finally asked me, “Why didn’t you do the ‘H’?”
I told him that I wasn’t quite sure.
“I probably wouldn’t have let you do it anyway,” he said.
To this day, that “probably” has always haunted me.
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I knew a guy who spent his whole life analyzing everyone’s imperfections, surprised when, on his deathbed, he discovered that those imperfections were, in fact, his own.
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Here’s a prose poem about the importance of simplicity and how the certainty we often seek from holy men and big thinkers and in literature and Art (with that capital “A”) often fails us.
Good Old Days
If I ever think of the “good old days,” of conversations that shook me to the bone or made me run home to make love to my wife, those conversations won’t be with poets, that’s for sure.
With priests either (except for one).
No, there’ll be no poets or priests in my pantheon.
Just a bunch of nobodies who made me laugh, like this old guy repeating, “Shit, dammit,” amazed as my son reels in another fish.
There’ll be no philosophers either, except for my dead friend Neil who said starfish can have as many as fifty arms.
We were at the beach, waiting for a metaphor to wash up on shore, or a stranded seal we might resuscitate.
“Sometimes,” Neil said, “you spend years tracing the roots of a tree only to find out it’s a tree.”
“Most definitely,” I replied, “like when I had my aura photographed in Las Vegas. It looked and vibrated like a jellyfish, yet I knew it was just an aura.”
He nodded, and we laughed, haply hip to the moment.
The kind of laughter I’ll never share with a poet or priest.
The kind that branches out and trembles, lasting for weeks.
You can find Peter Johnson’s books, along with interviews with him, appearances, and other information at peterjohnsonauthor.com
His most recent book of prose poems is While the Undertaker Sleeps: Collected and New Prose Poems
His most recent book of fiction is Shot: A Novel in Stories
Find out why he is giving away his new book of prose poem/fragments, even though he has a publisher for it, by downloading the PDF from the below link or going to OLD MAN’S homepage. His “Note to the Reader” and “Introduction” at the beginning of the PDF explains it all: Observations from the Edge of the Abyss+
I know few writers who can make me laugh and gasp with sad recognition in the same sentence.. How do you do it?
Fabulous, start to finish. And your reflections on where we are at in the ‘Spain’ section resonate entirely with my own sad assessments.