ATTENTION
Almost everything we do, or I do, after basic human needs, is looking striving hoping for attention. Anything I write is looking for someone to read it. I get very little attention from what I write though sometimes I do get some. When I stare at the computer screen for hours it works opposite—I am spending my time reading stories, both political and personal, attentively watching the screen.
I don't get much attention hence I don't deserve much attention, or I'm not trying hard enough to get attention. Some people have busy lives giving bosses and co-workers attention, giving children attention, and therefore welcome a break from all the attention, which counters the theory that no matter how much attention you get you always want more.
There are many kinds of attention and often people are lacking intimate attention. That is what divides the winners from the losers, in my opinion.
A sexy woman walking down the street might enjoy the attention or maybe not. Yesterday I saw a woman in the post office and I was too mature, reserved, or scared to say, “Oh god your ass is so beautiful!” A good response from her might have been, “I know. Tell me something I don't know, creepy geezer.”
With the polarization of the sexes it is completely unacceptable and an act of war to tell that woman what you really think. The attention received from that observation could be annoyance. However if a woman said to me, “Oh god your ass is beautiful!” I would not be bothered at all. A likely response in that case might be, “Thanks. No one has ever said that. So do you need glasses or are you just a liar? Or both?”
These are my thoughts on this cool morning in paradise with harvest upon us.
GIMME JUST A LITTLE MORE TIME
I see why my mother is against going into assistant living. Besides the fact that it's not in her culture (she and her sister took care of her mother into her 90's) it's a life sentence without parole, she will never get out of there. Her apartment is also a death sentence but it's like one of those Mexican prisons where you can bring in girls, have meals cooked to your liking, and still run your drug empire. Granted my mother's dope-selling operation has gone from smack to tweak to just a few high-schoolers buying joints from her back door, but still it helps with the income and she feels useful delivering stoney weed to developing minds.
It's all about her, it's all about me, and it's all about now. Now she wants to be home and if she dies, better there than institutionalized. It's gonna cost $7500 a month for twenty-four hour care at home. My mom has nothing, except one painting by a famous artist and it's on the next flight to New York: ever heard of Andy Warhol? That might buy her a year or two.
Then what?
SOLD!
We did it, sold our painting at auction! After having it for sixty-five years we finally cashed in on generational wealth (sorry black and other poor people) and now each of the four siblings will get twenty-five grand, whoopie.
Should there be a guilt tax, should we each give up five grand to a random black or poor person, donate it to an existing charity? Well two of us are struggling as it is, though both own their own homes, so should the well-off siblings donate their share to the others? It would mean a lot more to them than us, maybe put it in a trust for them, and keep the wealth for the whites?
Fuck it, it’s a windfall, a tax-free inheritance, some sucker just paid 139K for a work by a famous artist before he became famous, a painting which was the backdrop of our lives through the years and now, because my father worked on the same college faculty and befriended the artist all those years ago, I will have this unholy pile of cash and can do whatever I want with it.
We treated that big painting shabbily over the years and just tacked it up on the wall as my father followed the teaching jobs. When we moved we rolled it up, put it in the back of a variety of used station wagons, and it went with us to the next landing spot of the itinerant English professor desperately seeking his PhD. (For years, decades really, that was the refrain heard in the house at Dysfunction Junction, my mother typing up the drafts, intense stress permeating the atmosphere, and it was finally finished in 1970.)
In 1989, after some big family fights, I convinced him to have it restored and framed, rented a van, laid the canvas down in the back, and drove it across state lines to Oberlin College to get the work done.
And now it’s gone, someone else can deal with the insurance companies and the alarm system they are demanding to insure the painting, which was the main reason we chose to put it up for auction, though it was uninsured for sixty years.
Although the painting is gone the saga will continue: we have another of his paintings which he called “permanent loan” when he gave them to us, but we conveniently sublimated, ignored, and forgot about that designation over the decades and considered them ours. I always worried the family, estate, or foundation could take them back at any time, and what could we say, possession is 90% of the law?
FIGHT TIME
Sometimes with fights we couldn't even remember why it started. (Probably I had looked at another woman or said something insensitive or provocative.) I learned that the hurtful things we said during the fight became the new issue, what the fight evolved into, worse than what it was originally about.
Sometimes she would get angry and I would not engage or react. That was the best solution. In an hour or a day or two days she would get over it.
I discovered it was not wise to have a king size bed. During or after a fight she could scurry away, far away to the other distant side of the bed, but then like a magnet she would soon be drawn back, seeking the warmth.
TREEHOUSE, WITH GRAVITY-FLOW WATER
Another dirty hippie arrives in Whitethorn, April 13th, 1975. The Sunday softball game is going on at the school and everyone is on acid. Easy-out Steve is welcoming with his big smile while Richard Enright runs the bases backward. Dale and Buffalo offer to rent the treehouse on their back forty for $25 a month. It seems pretty cool at first but gets a little old going up and down the stairs for every little thing. (The treehouse was featured in the book Hand Made Houses that came out in 1973)
Dale and Buffalo have all kinds of scams going on. Dale is on ATD (Aid to the Totally Disabled, later SSI) for diarrhea and when their rent is due Buffalo goes over to the Four Corners house, steals some two by fours, hammers them onto the wall of their rental, and tells the landlord (the Adairs) that the improvement is good for the month rent. The dirty hippie declines to go along on that board-harvesting venture and after a month can't afford the rent for the treehouse and moves out. Free lodging is found for the summer squatting in Elaine's old plastic house back in Thompson Creek.
My first column in The Independent:
G’ville Gab
By Paul Modic
“Better to be silent and have people think you’re a fool, than to open your mouth and remove all doubt.” (Mark Twain)
***I was stapling a packet of “How To Apply To SSI” handouts onto the bulletin board at the post office when Joe Kirby, editor of The Independent, came in. He said there was a good reaction to the article about SSI the previous week, people learned some stuff (he also joked that the Indie could use SSI), and when he was about to leave I remembered what Beat poet Gregory Corso had said one rainy night in San Francisco after a poetry reading, when about to invite me and my stash to a party: “This is your shot.”
“What’s it take to get a column in your paper?” I asked, and Joe gave me one! (Getting paid with attention, something we all want and need, right?.)
***Things are usually not what they seem: Once while seeing my therapist I looked down at my watch. “Are you bored?” she asked.
“No, I’m just hoping there’s more time,” I said. (Talking about myself must be my favorite thing.)
Carmela, who I highly recommend, had one vital question she had us ask ourselves: “Which decision should I make, what path should I take, to have the least amount of pain?” (On every bill she wrote “Anxiety,” and over the years I’ve realized that to help deal with that universal affliction we need to: know ourselves, accept ourselves, and maybe even like ourselves.
***Tourist Tips: Thanks for coming and you have got to visit our Community Park! With walking, running, frisbee golf, bike-riding, and more, it’s the jewel of the area. You can rove the trails, through the woods and meadows, jumping over creeks, or having lunch and parties with friends around the picnic tables, a paradise we’d love to share. (It’s just down the hill out of town, if you want better directions ask the guy dressed like a redwood tree with a purple crown, waving his trident while riding half my washing machine down the street.)
***Perseverance is helpful to write a column, a trait the late Jacob Shafer had, publishing one here with intelligence and integrity every week for many years. He was an accomplished columnist and sports writer, from The Toy Department of Life, and serious about his craft. Thanks Jacob, for showing being fearless was necessary to stand up and be heard. (Years ago when he was a kid his father Eric said that Jacob saw one of my ‘zines and said something like “I can do that!”)
Jacob Shafer
Loved and Remembered
Rest in Peace
***The first time I hitchhiked out to California, forty-eight hours straight, I discovered a tick had also traveled the 2200 miles attached to my left nipple, from an old farmhouse in southern Indiana. When I started living here for real, squatting in Elaine’s plastic house, I put my dirty laundry in nearby Thompson Creek, with a rock holding down each item, then hung them up to dry.
Later, when I opened the dryer at the Redway laundromat, a bunch of twenties fluttered out, and when I finally bought a washer/dryer for my off-grid cabin in the hills, I figured I had no social life anymore. After about a year the dryer stopped working and I asked Janet Branscomb what was wrong. (I had bought it at the Sears shack she ran behind Murrishes, now Shop Smart).
“Did you clean the lint screen?” she asked
“What’s that?” I said.
(hillmuffin@gmail.com)
My latest column in The Independent, coming out today:
Bulletin Board Life
Bulletin board culture was interesting, I met some quirky characters, and now I’m an expert as I’ve been poking around most of them in the Southern Humboldt area putting up and refilling my Old-timers Guide To SSI envelopes. (Call Social Security to apply: 800.772.1213) Most boards were crowded and it could take half an hour to rearrange other notices to make space. (When I walked into a post office with stapler, tape, and push pins I “played God” in the bulletin board hustle, deciding whose to move to a worse spot to create the best spot for mine.)
I met the “Bulletin Board Hog,” so it’ll be up to me to gently mention she might kindly consider taking down one of her two full-page flyers when the board is crowded? She might act perturbed or defensive, or maybe she’ll realize that the good times are over, and she’ll have to give up some informational real estate on the Bulletin Board of Life? (Update: It’s anarchy there, I never said anything.)
One day outside the DSS office I ran into Dylan, one of my flunkies from way back, mentioned my volunteer outreach gig, and he tried to figure me out. “So it’s community service?” he said. “Did you get a DUI?”
“No,” I said. I wondered how I could explain to him that I was trying to inform seniors that SSI wasn’t just “crazy money” or disability anymore, that it was government assistance for anyone over sixty-five who hadn’t paid enough into the regular Social Security to qualify, had less than $2000 in the bank, and owned only one property and car. “You see, sometimes I wake up with a smile on my face feeling great, then feel instantly deflated thinking about family, friends, and people around the world suffering.”
“So you’re an empath?” he said, insincerely.
I thought about that and said, “Yes, I’m an empath!…No, not really, hey, we’re all empaths. It’s annoying when someone says they’re an empath, like they’re somehow spiritually superior.” (He invited me to drop by for a OO% Hieneken at his bar on my way back from bulletin boarding in Miranda.)
***The Court Jester of Dep: Limping down the street I’m paying the price for my youthful enthusiasm, and the big bill has yet to be received. I used to go up and down mountains chasing the Yanqui dollar in search of garden sites, young, strong, and out-of-control. Often I found out-of-the-way patches with little sun but plowed ahead anyway, wasting time and energy. (Yes, I was a fool.)
In 1990 I decided to try light-dep, but not just nearby around the cabin, I invented remote dep. I set up a scene halfway down the hill and another all the way down at the bottom by the creek, then hauled camo-painted two-by-fours to build the greenhouse frames, as I hadn’t envisioned hoop houses. Yes, I planned to go up and down that very steep mountain, three hundred vertical feet twice a day, to cover and uncover the plants, my legs and energy had no limits.
On the first day of covering I had my flunky Dylan helping me. As we tried to pull the bulky six mil black plastic over the sharp wood corners I announced, “I’m going to be the King of Dep!” But the structure was so poorly designed we couldn’t even cover the plants once.
“More like the Court Jester of Dep,” the smart-ass kid said, and he was right.
I took down the plastic, just let the huge plants grow on the hillside, and later that summer “Operation Greensweep” helicopters came and took it all away.
(hillmuffin@gmail.com)
A new definition of Mental Masturbation: I’m the only one who comments on my posts.
(smile)
Paul, you write to get others’ attention.
Paul, you want a response.
Why not write to express yourself? Then, you wouldn’t need a response.
Hey, and what am I chopped liva’ (liver)?
Good one, but obviously I don’t need a response, over the years there are rarely any and I’m still here, but in other news: I got one, a mercy response from my begging! What the hell, I’ll take it! (At least you’re still reading, after the paper paper went down, I don’t read much here, just skim through Ed Notes…)