Chickawho?





Today I brought my daughter for a visit to the house on View Street in Chickahominy, the badlands. I was supposed to work today but our twice a week nanny called in sick.
My wife as I had said works in the music business also, and she is contracting, which means running the orchestra, which means hiring each player, making sure they show up and calling the breaks and such, (very union), for a new Broadway show musical cast album. So I had my daughter today because there was NO SCHOOL again due to TEACHER CONFERENCES and we went to the other house on the other side of the tracks to lay out a new carpet and hack around. She, and my son, love this house, it has a beautiful vibe. It has a lawn jockey in the front but they painted the face white, the victim of political correctness. He must feel like a fraud, not himself, but I keep rubbing him in the hopes I will eventually rub him back to his self. We call him Buddy, and with each symbiotic stroke I feel he gives me luck in return.
The first thing I did upon entering the abode of dissolution was to go down to the basement and bring my daughters plastic horse up to the little playroom. The same plastic horse I felt so terrible about relegating to the basement days ago. It felt so good to rescue the little fella. These are the little things that make this separation, hardly a word deserving of what is happening to me, these are the things, like rescuing a plastic rocking horse with rusting springs and peeling paint but somehow expressive little plastic painted eyes, these are the things that make me whole. Because I paid attention to my instincts for once in twenty years. I didn’t balk at the idea that it would make any difference at all where this inanimate object would reside. But it makes ALL the difference in the world if I believe it does, and I believe it does.
So he is rescued, and my daughter feels this somehow. We have evolved into disbelievers, into a society that truly believes in nothing, holds nothing accountable, nothing above ourselves, nothing above what we make, what we drive, where we eat, and who we lie to, including ourselves. But I think listening and following some kind of inner voice is the path to quote unquote God. I don’t believe in any ridiculous religion whatsoever, but I do believe in something. Because of and perhaps only because of, the path I had chosen of denying the possibility of finding some sort of connection with the “universe” has been such an abysmal failure for me. This lack of faith has failed for all of us. Our reaction (and mine today as I lunched with Josie at McDonalds), should be one of horror at the waste we are creating, the slaughter of innocent beings, and I love meat, but not at this level. All these little experiences should bring us closer to betterment, not status quoism not more of this, but much, much less. And marriage is not helping this problem. It feeds the insatiable appetite of the dark lord of establishmentarianism and khakis. We are being Entertainment Tonightified, and we are ignoring everything horrible going on in this magnificent world in favor of conformance. I was watching a baseball practice for my sons’ team this afternoon, and I brought a beer. A delicious Corona Light. An interesting phenomenon occurred. The other men, other than the coaches, were dressed in the uniform of moneymaking, not even in different hues of the same theme mind you, there is only the light blue oxford, the dark slacks, and the loafers adorned vindictively it seems to me, with tassels. These men looked at me, in a tee shirt and jeans, enjoying a refreshing and utterly satisfying bevy in a bottle, with some combination of horror and distain. Hadn’t I heard you only drink on the Stamford local in the bar car on the way home? You don’t bring it home, you come here and you get back in line buddy. You get back in character. This is Old Greenwich, and we don’t drink beer at the ballpark. Who are you? What firm are you with? This does not compute. How can YOU be here in a town in which the average cost of shack is two and a half million dollars?
And then there was the reaction from the wives. Because of the apocalypse of my marriage I have been obsessively going to the gym and have also achieved soul wrecked weight loss, and I look as good as I ever have, better in fact, but now, there’s a mojo going on, and it wasn’t there before. Because I stopped caring what these people think of me. Sweet freedom, thy name is change. I was watching my son, but my friend Vinny was watching the women. He pulled me aside and whispered for me to glance over at them occasionally, and I saw it. I am finally a bad boy again. I have come home. I don’t belong, and now I don’t care.












The Institution





I had my son for a sleep over at the billet de disjuncture last night. We had another perfectly awesome time. We watched Jackass Number Two with Johnny Knoxville and laughed our asses off. At one point I felt like asking him if he wanted a beer, I really felt like I was hanging out with my friend, what a feeling. I took him home to Moneyville and decided to take him and my daughter for the day. We went to Wendy’s, where my neighbor here in Chickahominy works and we got free frosty’s. It just doesn’t get better than that my friends. Then an old friend took us all out sailing and we froze our balls off, but had a great time. I didn’t think about my wife very much, other than to wonder if she was feeling what it would really be like if I was permanently gone and we started joint custody. Which of course, is a distinct possibility. Now I am back here wondering what has become of my life. My wife must think, for some inexplicable reason, given all the evidence to the contrary, that you are some prize I can’t afford. You don’t want me? You are so desirable because why? You deserve my obsession because you….what again? I forgot. You are so sexy because, wait, I forgot, why? I’m not desirable because why? I fucking forgot. I want you because wait, I forgot, why? And you, don’t want me anymore because why? I fucking forgot. You know what? Are you kidding me? I don’t have someone who wants me yet, and until then, this will be harder for me than you. But come the day, when someone loves me not in a complicated way, not in the twenty years of bullshit way, but for what I am, it will be a good day.
I have never in my life let a woman or a man get the better of me, and now, at what seems to me to be the end of my life, am not going to start.
Mae West once said “marriage is a great institution; I’m just not ready for an institution yet”. Could it be that at the inception of marriage it was a good idea because two thousand years ago when marriage was “invented” in the traditional Christian sense, people only lived until they were twenty five?
Now we live to seventy five, and the marriage has to endure many more years than when it was first introduced. Today my son asked my estranged wife when Daddy was going to be moving back. This is a first. He has to this point expressed only pleasure at my occupancy at the End of the line Motel. But now he is getting hip to the reality. My wife told me about this conversation I was not privy to and sold it to me with a positive twist. “I think you just need to put him to bed more, otherwise, I think he’s fine”. She is now buying the crap she is selling. Any good dealer knows you don’t do your own product. The truth is, and I know it is, is that he is starting to feel the burn. And there is no Clinton like spin control that can clean this thing up and make it go away. Eventually, this man needs to be told the truth. What’s that you say? What is the truth? I‘d be happy to tell you. We’ll almost certainly never live together again because mommy and daddy are not IN love with each other any more. My wife walks around in a happy fog, enjoying the best parts of this separation, well, I think we’re about to hit a serious pot hole. I think she thinks she’s driving a hummer, equipped with stabilizer control, side curtain air bags, and a roll bar. But we’re in a broken down Honda Civic we bought from a drunken preacher from Atlanta, giving us the marital benediction while stinking profusely of Wild Turkey. This thing is gonna hit this pothole and the axle is gonna break like a thin twig in January underneath a fat red neck’s hunting boot. We’ll keep driving, but eventually, I hope, she will notice the old jalopy is on fire, and we had better egress, my love, for we will burn inside this vehicle forged from bad workmanship and delusion. Buy American! Get married! Die! Everything is fine, the kids are fine, this is a period of growth! Yay! Well, ashes to ashes, and dust to dust, a worm needs to die before he gives his body to become soil. So how much of this marriage is the dying worm, the cycle of life? How much of this new awareness will be born from death? And what exactly will die to give life? I fear, my friends, that you don’t get something for nothing, I just have to make sure that the life cycle isn’t going to take my children’s confidence to exact payment for our adult “growth cycle”. And I seem to be the only one starting to wonder if this gamble with their little souls is worth the price of the admission to enlightenment. I’m pretty good at poker, but then again, that’s largely due to my ability to bluff.