🎧 Music: “Within You Without You” by The Beatles
/T/here was a time before the advent of contemporary IT infrastructure, and the omnipresence of autobiographical citizen journalism when the forces of time and distance imbued ordinary social interaction with a sort of now extinct, or at the very least severely diminished sense of visceral estrangement. If you didn’t see someone for a long time- a dear friend or family member, colleague, etc.- even if you spoke with them periodically or regularly on the telephone or corresponded via mail (or later, email)- when you first encountered them again after any lengthy period of real world, flesh and bone separation- it would often feel a lot like catching up with some novel stranger about whom you oddly knew a good deal, but for whom the finer details of their daily existence were a sort of spontaneous experiential update. Seeing someone again for the first time in a while was a sort of reunion which no longer occurs quite the same way these days courtesy of information channels like social media.
That phenomenon, or at the very least a close relative to it still occurs on a much more internalized, individual basis in many ways. Ineffable ways in which no camera or microphone can adequately capture the meandering course of self-experienced individual growth and existence. I’m as great or greater a stranger to the iteration of myself in times removed from the present as any friend or acquaintance was then by parallel virtues of time and distance. There are entire events, people, and places that have vanished with the passing tides of time which endlessly lap at the shores of each of our memories.
The ways in which we analyze and are correspondingly analyzed by others overwhelmingly occur spontaneously. Social cues and superficial affects influence the ways in which we’re regarded and initially received.
Other people author complex stories about us at a glance when so prompted or inclined, based on their own experiences and perspectives that can deeply hue the ways in which we interact, intentionally or more often unintentionally.
As thinking, feeling, and reasoning creatures- quite literally animate iterations of the material universe reflecting upon itself- it’s in moments and shared instances of vulnerability that we often encounter the most compelling opportunities to bridge those chasms so elaborately crafted within ourselves by the forces of primordial impulse. Vulnerability, we know reflexively- and it is often socially reinforced- can definitionally be an immense weakness to the walls constructed both for us by others and by us for ourselves and others. The dualistic irony of vulnerability lies within how powerfully it can be every bit as much an incomparable and remarkable wellspring of constructive understanding. Vulnerability is one of the most potent remedies to one-dimensional perspective. Accessing these latent links within all of us is seldom for the faint of heart. It is where the superficial otherness of each of us is often challenged and deeper, more resonant, and comprehensive, communal insight emerges. Vulnerability is mechanistically anathema to ignorance. It is a channel of creative force which spills forth from the naked vain of self and over, into, around, and through the destructive gulf of other.
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/I/t’s a bleak, frigid midwinter morning in early 2009… I creak awake to the stale, hot, musty industrial cardboard box of the bedroom in my $425 a month hovel in the dumpy apartment complex on the far edge of my hometown. The suburban-rural Rust Belt epicenter of the roughly 16-mile radius where the vast majority of my first 22 and a half years of existence have occurred.
I’ve spent the last two days frail and unconscious abed, taken by the impact of a week of drinking two gallons of water a day with only one modest salad daily for sustenance, accompanied by rigorous running. All in a concerted effort to shed the drinking and depression weight I’d put on over the past two years, in anticipation of making the target weight required to be enlisted into the navy. I passed the medical examination at the processing station, and days later fell cripplingly ill. I’m young and naïve and took the passive suggestion of my recruiter to heart when he explained I really 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘭𝘥𝘯’𝘵 do such things that are known to be highly effective.
I take a photo out my bedroom window as I wait on a brick of chicken ramen to boil- the first thing my famished waking corpse has been able to conceive of stomaching in days, and name it “Life Then” on my phone. And I think to myself that someday these bleak, hopeless moments will be as foreign to me as the setting of some late 19th century novel on societal deprivations.
I haven’t told any of my friends yet that I’m to be shipping out in the fall. I don’t want them doing anything to jeopardize my escape trajectory from this wretched, dead-end existence. Besides, they’d make fun of me. They all love me for being quirky and bright but regard me as soft. Overly caring. Delicate. Fundamentally weak. Hardly military material.
I’m going to be moving back into my father’s house until my ship out date. It’s the home I ran away from at 19 and dropped out of a full ride to university to escape. Because the 2008 Recession has rendered living lethal. Even juggling three jobs at once, I struggle to keep the lights on in this place. And my girlfriend of a few years, April has long since moved back in with her own family. They’re so different from mine. First generation Puerto Rican immigrants with the biggest hearts and care for one another I’ve ever seen in a family to that point. I come from an abundance of disaffected white youths with sterile families in what my high school flame, Matt termed “Edward Scissorhands suburbia”.
I’m selling my soul against all my principles and best inclinations to not die on the streets, or at best languish in eternal hardship. I’m going to escape this berg, and never look back. And I’m going to prove I can hack it. That I’m stronger and more determined than anyone can seem to muster in their imagination for me.
My old man’s always proudly boasted that once we turned 18, if we wanted to stay in his house, it was college or the military for us. So, I guess this is it…
/T/he radiant, pastel yellow sun of long days hangs low in the sky, not quite but almost just to the explosive precipice of twilight. It is the golden hour of a late summer day in 2020, and I begin one of my many now months’ old, self-appointed ritual strolls of the otherwise empty, sizeable, contemporary corporate edifice that has been home to my office since the onset peak of the COVID pandemic.
The lone other soul ever to occupy this building, my good friend, and circumstantial subordinate Alec has kicked rocks for the day- and so I find myself in a sort of meditative, post-apocalyptic isolation but still connected by my phone and work laptop to distant strands of ongoing communication. I’m a supervisor for the regional and international security division of a global corporate goliath, and I was placed in quarantine exile from my crew as a safety contingency vis-à-vis the pandemic.
As I meander through the building to pass the time between the sundry, detail intensive busywork projects I’m assigned on a regular basis, I listen to music and podcasts with earbuds and examine the liminal space that’s been my professional residence of captivity since just before the foliage outside began its seasonal reawakening. I casually survey my surroundings and indulge in various, ongoing text conversations with a handful of people. Primary among these is my often charming, and always luminously engaging boyfriend just recently of more than a year, Ian.
Life is routine, but kinda sublime. I’m back on my feet in big ways over years past. I’m materially sound, back in great shape, and personally thriving. I rollerblade, sometimes for a couple of hours, almost every day in the niche vacant lot tucked away around the building before walking in and changing into the relaxed biz-cas fare du jour. I’ve recently finished 𝘗𝘦𝘳𝘮𝘢𝘯𝘦𝘯𝘵 𝘙𝘦𝘤𝘰𝘳𝘥 by Edward Snowden, and I even installed an emulator on the work laptop to play classic Playstation titles. Dolores, my decennial Toyota sedan, finally kicked the bucket just shy of 200,000 miles. Ian helped me find new wheels in the form of an affordable used compact SUV I’ve affectionately named Charon, which speaks to the way I sometimes drive.
In the dazzling warmth of still novel love, I yearn to mesh all the best of myself with his own. Observing the rows and levels of other offices and cubicles in the building, and staring out the sprawling windows at passing streams of distant highway traffic, I offer up to him the thought that the affects on each of these desks, in each of these spaces, and in every passing car spells the story of another complete human being I will likely never know. Another lifetime being lived, to which I will remain eternally a stranger. In these antiseptic corporate spaces lie the trinkets and baubles of the much more human presences which animate them. They pepper them with hints of substance, and personality. They are the litter of thoughts, feelings, and emotions. They are the inextinguishable, boundless, vestigial humanity of this sanitized, polygonal, Kubrickian corporate landscape.
We muse over sonder as I make my return to my particular cell. He tells me how much he goddamn loves me.
/D/awn has broken, and I’ve been relieved of my overnight quarterdeck watch. I descend the towering set of winding, grated stairs down the side of the immense dry dock to its rusted, floating ground level pier in my return to the barge where the weathered and dingy temporary berthing awaits my weary body. The crisp air is clean and stands in stark contrast with the heavy industrial setting of the shipyard where massive overhaul work has been ongoing many months now on my command. Every drawn breath feels like chewing the wintriest of gums, and the piercing sunrise casts a glow on the modest metro cityscape across the harbor. It is the early spring of 2014.
As I round the fantail of the ship, lifted high above the surface level of the pier on massive blocking- I shift my gaze intermittently from the stern gate to the harbor, and in the fugue state of my exhaustion I ponder where I might be five years from now. My tenure with the navy has nearly drawn to an end. As is customary to the life of a sailor, I’ve made and bid farewell to many friends. I’ve traveled more extensively than most people with roots like mine could imagine for themselves. And I’ve spent more time at sea than most ever will.
I love to be at sea. It’s like being everywhere and nowhere all at once. And I love taking the midnight watch while we are underway, and most of the crew has turned to rest. It’s referred to crudely (as with many things) in navy parlance as the “balls watch”, with reference to its occurrence initiating on the reg around 0000 hours. In those many midnight hours, I often found myself strolling the dimly red illumined p-ways [ship hallways] out through the vacant upper hangar (cast in muted green) and onto the smoke deck. It was a bad habit adopted for the opportunity to see the ocean, and the stars. The night sky at sea could be such an incomparable thing.
Where will I be in five years’ time, I wonder. There was a time when I was leading departmental task forces and there was talk of trying to get me in some kind of enlisted-to-officer pipeline. I have a Navy-Marine Corps Achievement Medal, a Letter of Commendation, and a handful of other awards and bravo-zulus to my name for that and the TAD [Temporary Assigned Duty] deployment stint I did to the Med(iterranean) years prior. But I’ve no intention of sticking around. I have a year and change left, and my ship, my command is what many regard as a career killer for the host of burdens and complications it entails. Most junior sailors to whom it is a first post have not gone on to extend their enlistment. We all have countdown timers to freedom on our phones. I have my own additional reasons.
Who will the me of 2019 be, I wonder- as I deblouse my trousers from around my boots and wriggle into my smurfs [uniform blue & gold sweatpants and shirt for physical fitness] to climb into a rack and conk out. The future is vague but rife with potential. I’ve worked hard and been through more than I care to revisit to attain it. It’s overwhelming and a bit intimidating to consider, but worthy. For now, however, sleep.
/C/urled into the upright fetal position, I lurch and rock myself in my own embrace on the curb outside of the grocery store where I work (in prepared foods) as a cook and steward. It is a tepid late winter day in 2018, but I would be hard pressed to tell you because of the hell I occupy. I’m suffering severe withdrawals from going off a neuropathic pain management drug called duloxetine (commercially known as Cymbalta) cold turkey. It’s an antidepressant my VA therapist (something of a hobbyist chemist by training) determined could be used to alleviate the perpetual agony of my nerve trauma, and the side effects of withdrawal are the stuff of nightmares. Morbid depression, nightmares, and suicidal ideation worthy “brain zaps” enduring for weeks. I wasn’t depressed before or while taking it. But coming off it has been a roller coaster ride through the kind of grinding anguish and misery that whittles a person to their very soul.
A few months short of a year ago, I suffered a freak spinal nerve injury- and in all the time since, what was supposed to be a brief return to New England has plummeted my life into an unimaginable spiral. I’ve been living in a homeless shelter for women veterans now for the better part of a year, the majority of which has been spent some variation of crippled, bedridden- and eventually onto wheelchairs, walkers, and canes. It took them months to finally diagnose my injury as nerve related, and not musculoskeletal- and I spent those months stuck in a bed in my tiny room in the shelter watching the sun set and rise over the course of days out the window from my bed while my left leg (especially below the knee, and down to the toes) jerked and seared and held me hostage from sleep until fatigue would take me- often for days on end. It was delirium. One delirium I traded for another when I could stand and walk enough to limp my way through driving and dragging myself across the VA medical campus to attain help.
There was a time it was uncertain I’d ever walk again without significant impediment. And during which I sincerely began researching prostheses for want and potential anticipation of being divorced from my own limb.
The host of repurposed drugs I’m juggling severely dampen my intellectual acuity and render most of conscious existence a sort of muted blur. The world has been monochrome for longer than I can remember when the passage of time is so strange, and all my thoughts are a stiller silence than the surrounding air in a skydive after pulling your chute. All my debts and financial standing accrued impossible volumes of interest, defaulted, and tanked. Including my student loans, decimating my access to the remaining vast majority of my GI Bill. But I’ve been wearing what feels like a heavy helmet over my brain for so long, and just trying to feed myself and make enough to not lose all my worldly belongings in storage back in Denver and keep my phone on that I cannot let those worries, or the relentless collections phone calls concern me. You cannot draw blood from a stone. And more than any other time in my life- which is saying something- for now I must be a rock.
As soon as I could stand for more than just a few moments’ time, I found myself this humbling job working in a grocery store kitchen- as all my savings and rainy-day credit is long gone. I’m hundreds or thousands of miles from anyone who knows or cares about me in the slightest, anymore. And I’ve long ago had a falling out with my family over deep and abiding ideological and personal differences. A very conservative Roman Catholic family isn’t terribly receptive to their pansexual, polyamorous, and non-theistic Satanist, politically leftist daughter. There are things no amount of academic or professional excellence can reconcile. I’m made of everything they abhor. A prodigal child.
I sweat and cringe, and rock myself on the curb outside the supermarket after having failed to keep myself held together in the kitchen beneath the now months’ commonplace derision of my boss lady and coworkers. I’ve begun to regain my senses and my capacity for intelligent thought at the expense, it would seem, of everything else. I’m crying, hunched over and quietly sobbing- desperately attempting to comfort myself. I cannot operate my car to get myself back to the shelter when the HR manager and customer service manager emerge from the store from behind me. For months in my deteriorated state, I’ve been regarded with all manner of derision and hostility. And they now inform me, which I can just barely make out, that they are going to drive me to a contracted urinalysis lab and have me tested (presumably for opiates).
I try and explain my situation but comply. I’ve got nothing to hide, but their assessment of my character cuts deeply. I am the pathetic, homeless mercy hire they’ve accused of so many suspicions ill-fitting of who I am- and I’m clearly a drug addict. I’ve tried explaining for weeks, months, it doesn’t matter. It falls on deaf ears. I’m in my early 30’s and homeless and poor. I get mocked and ignored taking out the trash or cleaning the kitchen at the end of every day, lifting heavy grease bags to pour into the bin, and throw industrial bags of trash into the dumpster. I’m incoherent and spacey. I go home every day filthy and broken, scraping by in my wretched existence.
The resurgence of my mind in the wake of this bid for freedom from the haze of all the drugs has been a sort of reverse 𝘍𝘭𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘳𝘴 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘈𝘭𝘨𝘦𝘳𝘯𝘰𝘯 situation. They seem offput at my sudden articulation, and sharpness. I explain through the fog and the humiliation and pain what I am going through. And how the nerve pain has been ameliorated sufficiently that I no longer need to be a zombie. It’s been months, and I don’t even limp anymore, even after full shifts. I don’t wind up dragging my leg behind me as I walk out the door. But they don’t hear me.
We get to the urinalysis clinic, and I again declare to deaf ears that all they will find are the tell-tale signs of the remnant neurochemicals my research and my therapist had signaled would be present upon cessation of dosing. It’s an aggregate drug. It takes ramping up, and conventionally ramping down to be effective. They neither hear me nor care. I am the druggie homeless scum making a scene in front of their business establishment. This, after all the hard-fought months of no missed days, and reliably hard and high-quality work. I am the scum of the Earth, and nothing else could be more plainly clear. I must be some kind of druggie or criminal, just look at me. I should have made better life choices or tried harder.
I remember wishing as they loaded me into the backseat of the HR manager’s car and ignored my obvious pain and humiliating sobs that they could hear my story. I remember wishing to god they’d bother to even try and know me. I remember all the profound and amazing tragedy and beauty of my life as I struggle against surging rivers of shambled tears to hold onto what shreds of dignity I have left.
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/D/uring my 18-month tenure as a homeless abjectly poor person and in all the subsequent years of once and again hard-fought recovery, I learned and grew considerably. Prior to that experience, while I maintained left-leaning ideals from an empathetic and rational standpoint- I didn’t 𝐤𝐧𝐨𝐰 in the essence of my being, the way I became so familiarly acquainted, the things that I’ll now carry with me to my grave. I had begun, while maintaining my ideological values, to buy into the bootstrap narrative of rugged individualism, and Darwinian survival of the fittest from a success standpoint just ever so slightly. I was a straight-A academic and professional maverick on a meteoric rise. I cherished the hell out of burning the midnight oil in pursuit of hifalutin, diluted self-aggrandizement. It’s what virtually everything in the society we’ve wrought teaches us is noble and virtuous. For me, it was about the attainment of safety and power after a lifetime of insane tragedy and hardship, of existential dangers, invisibility, and powerlessness. I thought I could command change from on high by thinking and maneuvering my way through the structural machinations that had so conscripted my life to perpetual hardship from birth.
But the idiom about pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps was originally coined as an expression of the impossible. If you bother to think about it even just for a moment, it becomes stupidly self-evident. And poverty is like the gravity in one of those coin wells you see sometimes in say, like a mall. It’s a tether, a force, a bond you have to the sets of major material circumstances in defining moments of your existence. Poverty of any kind, be it of money, love, hope, safety, whatever- wants as a dumb, cosmic force of nature to pull you back. We prefer the hell we know, and it demonstrably loves to have us. Wealth (of any kind) breeds wealth, and poverty (similarly) breeds poverty.
Statistically, while the majority of people struggle financially today (and it’s a major, increasingly obvious and looming problem)- most people will never face abject poverty, or homelessness. At least as things stand within the imperial core of the U.S. Still many, many do. But what’s even fewer than that are those among us who have for any reason been incarcerated. Poverty, trauma, mental illness, addiction- all these things are a Matryoshka doll of elements which, when observed individually, may not betray the social alchemy at play in generating the sorts of hardships and impossibilities faced by the people by whom we’re conditioned to want least to be confronted, and toward whom we’re indoctrinated socially to be disinclined to listen or even empathize.
I went into my situation with the same, facile understandings of ex-cons and addicts as most of us cannot help but harbor. And I left having made the most unlikely of friends and comrades, however fleeting, in the stark realities of the moments in life we shared.
One of my closest friends during that time was a self-proclaimed black, bull-dyke ex-convict named *****. I won’t share what she shared with me with reverence to her story, but during her enlistment in the Army it’s an understatement to say she went through hell. And her life before that as a black lesbian from a different time and place was no walk in the park. She wound up getting addicted to heroin to cope, and being black and in America, wound up in the clink.
She fought hard to stay clean, and tough exterior to the contrary had a heart of gold and the inquisitive, caring mind of a young person. I don’t say that derogatorily. She had the awe-inspiring wonder of innocence and creativity that many artists only dream of possessing. And after a series of circumstances I don’t feel at liberty to convey, after finally winning the lengthy battle for 100% disability compensation from the VA, she relapsed into the outlets she escaped to for safety and comfort under some novel duress, and was found dead in a trap house, OD’d a few months later.
I remember when the shelter administrators called me into their office to tell me first and in private, because they knew how I would react. And she was just one of a handful of incredible women society had written off and considered reprobate that I had the privilege of knowing and surviving alongside during those years.
The key to understanding and giving a shit about people and things that have nothing to do with you, or which don’t impact or benefit you in any way is to fucking listen. Just fucking be available and failing that- aware. It’s super simple, and every major historical figure who’s come along and told us to try, we’ve pathologically murdered. It’s… there’s a whole bunch of swag, films, artwork and institutions commemorating the shit out of the hows and whys of their deaths.
As The Beatles sang: all you need is love. Not love with a credit card commercial legal spiel of caveats. Just love. Just fucking love. It’s not always easy. Sometimes. Sometimes it can be, and that’s majestic. But sometimes when it’s not- that’s precisely when it’s most worthy. That’s the kind of love where you find shit and expand your consciousness as a person. Where you really realize you’re not just you, but the sum of everything- like everything and everyone else- and you’re no more or less than anything or anyone else, and none of it matters but what you do with these infinitesimally fleeting moments of consciousness you find yourself occupying, even reading these words. It’s not rocket science, but a quick glance at the world around us, and you’d think it was fucking Klingon or something.
I know this is a crude, ham-fisted terminus for this very heartfelt and thoroughly composed thing. But I realized during my time being less than nothing that none of it fucking matters, not a single goddamned iota if you cannot get out of the way of love. It’s the most powerful force in the entire godforsaken universe, and yet we overwhelmingly handle it like the unspeakable name of some unknowable deity. It’s the most abundant and profound thing latent inside all of us. The answer to virtually everything good and positive is just: love.