Running Journal Entry #2

Running Journal

Entry #2

I get the feeling that I am writing for my life. I get the feeling that I am running for my life. No kidding. It seems so severe to say such a thing. Even, I’m sure you are thinking, pretentious &, frankly, a little dramatic. But right now in the calm & serenity of my kitchen with the Carnival of the Animals (The Swan) playing & the whoosh of insane traffic on Glenford Wittenberg Road reminding me how dangerous the world is I have Michael Chabon & Moonglow to bring me around. To calm me down. He is telling me to write it down, like he writes it down, because it helps. It must help him. It most certainly is helping me. Because even when sitting I can’t stop my legs from tensing up & cramping. In part due to the fourteen & change miles I ran yesterday & the rest I can accredit to the Delgado Men & perhaps even the Kearns Men, though for some reason I feel no kinship to them. Maybe it is my mild strain of misogyny that gives all credit to the male side of my ancestry? & that it is only the dark ghosts of my father’s family that inhabit me. But in fact the male ghosts of my mother’s family, fuck it, my mother’s family, are equally at work here… this only being revealed to me now as I write.

Once, I cannot recall the occasion at all, I only have this fabricated image: I am sitting in the living room of my childhood home with my mother. We are alone. I must be in my thirties. I must, because I am in the throes of an alcoholism that has consumed my life like a fire in a dry field. It is the two of us together & she is making meatballs & recalling or bringing up, for reasons I know not & know now, in retrospect, I would gather, neither did she, the way my grandfather, her father, drank. By the way, I can no longer dredge up my mother’s voice. It is gone from my memory completely. This fact is, alone, completely heartbreaking. I could stop this journal entry now & we could all ruminate on that fact for awhile & discover that we are no longer able to continue. That life is an undeniable tragedy & we are victimized continually until we too pass away & become absolutely nothing. Just some made up, imaginary memory to serve some deluded story or journal or attempt to live out a life.

Anyhow, the story I recall my mother telling me of my grandfather’s drinking is a simple one. He had a favourite chair he would sit in. On the small table next to him would be his drink. The drink would be whiskey & coke. As far as the actual brand of the drink, I dunno if it was actually “Coke” but who gives a shit right? The point is the drink is whiskey & coke & the drink is contained in a small glass. Not a pint glass or average-sized water glass. Furthermore, it is not a highball glass or even a whiskey tumbler but a small plastic cup. Opaque & slightly brownish or yellowish. Formidable & thick. He would drink the drink & then head into the kitchen where his impedimenta were stored. A bag of ice in the freezer & a fifth, I would assume, perhaps more, depending on local discounts or specials, &, I would suppose at the time, several bottles or cans of aforementioned coke. He, I’m talking about my grandfather here, would fill the empty glass (cup) with ice all the way to the top then pour whiskey almost all the way to the top. More than three fourths you see, almost filling the glass, then add what can only be described as a splash of coke for fizz & for color & for, of course, a little sweetness. He would return to his favourite chair in which he would sit & drink the drink. Now this did not take long, because the glass (cup) was inordinately small, & what I mean by this is is that the glass (cup) is not regulation size or common or really even made for a whiskey & coke, especially for a career military man, an Irish Alcoholic like Nicholas Kearns, a man of the variety one could only classify as textbook or stereotypical, in other words A Drunk. Often jovial & garrulous, most notably lovable & loved, especially by his children, my mother, of course adored him & he, Nick, was at once loved ferociously & hated vehemently by his wife, my grandmother, Paula, predecessor to both my mother & my wife. Listen, the strangeness of the resemblances of my mother’s side of the family & my mother specifically to my wife is uncanny & this journal entry may not be able to, & most assuredly won’t, address said uncanniness, although the subject of ghosts & playing out lives over & over again & being inhabited by spirits or souls trying to get things right is absolutely essential to this journal entry, & to one of my main, if not my main, thesis that threads it’s vascular way through all of my writing & songs. I just don’t have the time or the energy to get into it here. I don’t. First & foremost, I feel like I am against the clock already & have thought of fifty things I need to do before my daughter comes home from school, in other words, I am trying to get out of writing, because, after all my life depends on it & I am, most of the time, not interested in saving my life, my main thrust has always been to torpedo my existence with useless acts of violence, mayhem & lunacy to the point of complete failure & denial.

The cup is too small for an alcoholic. The drink disappears too fast. It goes down too easy. Especially as the evening wears on. However, this could be the morning we are talking about. I have the feeling, mostly because I was a morning drinker, & I assume, because of the similarities between my grandfather & I, I’m talking about my mother’s father here, he very well could be drinking, & probably was, in the morning. The drink disappears rapidly & needs to be refilled. Whatever else that is going on while my grandfather, on my mother’s side, is occupying his chair, reading, listening to the radio, television, I don’t know about television, if they had one, or if it was too soon for such a thing, I am a shitty historian & an even more abysmally accomplished researcher. It doesn’t matter, like nothing mattered, because whatever else that is going on while my grandfather, Nick, my mothers father, is drinking his drink, it is, in fact, inconsequential, because he is drinking for effect. He is drinking to get absolutely, one hundred percent, & I think the clinical DSM-IV term here is: Shitfaced. He is attempting to block out the sun. Destroy the moon. Crush the longing inside of him. Still the temptation to be somebody or something or to love his family or himself in any meaningful way. He is trying to hurry along the inevitable. Why? I dunno. I dunno why. I really don’t. Lethargy may be a more insidious demon than we know? It could be that simple. I don’t think it is. Maybe I wish it to be Lethargy. I think it is more sinister. I think real harm is at the root. There is an anger in there. Inside. An anger at what I’m not quite sure. Ok I’ll go for it. Insecurity? A belief deep down in the inner-workings & mechanics of his human body, in the blood, deep in the cortex of his brain, in the rhythm of his weak heart, where he thought, he truly believed, he was No good. A Loser. Nobody. Destined to Lose. Not Worthy. It all seems so thin out in the light… right? Certainly there must be more. I think there was a fundamental belief, a voice, deep down in Nick’s Soul that told him to ruin everything. To just give up. I do.

So, once the drink is drunk, Nick returns to the kitchen & pours another. Ice to the top. Whiskey almost to the top. Coke for fizz, colour & sweetness. Return to the chair. Repeat until the path is increasingly more difficult to traverse. The whiskey slowly disappears, the hurt is encased, the mind, in fact numbed & the heart debilitated beyond all recognition. What Nick might say or do now is wide open. A vast territory of possibility. Become so unbelievably funny nobody can stand it. Become reckless & mean & probably violent. Become a man of sexual appetite so enormous, so ravenous & wolf-like that his family & wife are no longer a concern, or, at any rate, a thought or a concern to be placed on some back burner in his mind, a problem he will deal with & undoubtedly conceal at a later date, because for now he has only one focus, the object of his now hyper-focused & absolutely bestial desire. & I wonder where Nick will bump his head or leave his clothes or smash his toes beyond all recognition so that when he wakes up there are splintered toenails & cuts & dried blood & where are Nick’s shoes!? Why is there only one? Or none? Where will Nick sleep it off? & what will he say to Paula? What will he say to Paula when she asks him, “Why Nick? Why do you keep doing this? I will tell you what he will say to Paula. He will say: I dunno.

When my mother, who I can longer remember properly, who visits me in dreams, who accompanies me in public as a large & invisible ghost, who laughs at & mocks people in social settings & guffaws at the insane amount of bullshit we wade through in our daily routine, when my mother, who before her death & was the cause of said death, weighed probably very close to four hundred pounds, because the same motherfucker that whispered to Nick, now had my mother’s ear,  recounted, remembered the way her father, Nick, drank, I was stunned. Do you want to know why I was stunned? Well, I am assuming if you are still with me, if you don’t want to know, you are at least able to hear why. Here is the Why. I was stunned because she had just described to me, Marc, son of Kathleen & grandson of Nick, the exact same way I drank. To a T. Look, I never saw Nick’s glass (cup). I don’t know if it was the same as mine. & I am not a betting man. I’m not. But I bet it was the same one I had. You wanna hear something crazy!? Something I believe. I think it was the exact same glass (cup) because it seemed ancient to me. My cup. I don’t know where I got it. I frequented carnivals & fairs & I was a veteran of the dime toss. I often stocked whatever meagre kitchen & dining arrangements I had with utensils & glasses & cups & plates from the dime toss. No kidding. I was really good at it. & maybe that is where my cup (glass) came from? I dunno. But I had this inordinately sized, opaque, yellowish, brownish, plastic cup that I would drink whiskey & cokes filled all the way to the top with ice from a bag in the freezer until I passed out somewhere, not before engaging in all manner of debauchery & mayhem which, in fact, kept me drinking & hating myself & routinely saying to myself: Marc you are no good, man.

The routine was identical. Small glass. Back & forth. Fill ice to the top. Whiskey almost all the way to the top. Coke for effect. Back to the chair. Why not have everything on hand? Why the back & forth? Why not stop after one or two? Why why why fucking why? I think you know the answer friend. Think of two palms upturned toward the sun. Think of shoulders shrugged. Think of the mouth turned into a slight frown. The eyebrows raised. The lines on my forehead myriad. Manifold.

There are a lot of voices in my head. That is something you should know about me. I am often contending with many voices. My mother’s four hundred pound ghost. My father’s admonishing tone. Mr Sorrow. Look. We can get into Mr Sorrow later. I’ve spoken of him before. I don’t want to get it into it right now. My own voice & my many personalities. Mean. Funny. Heartbroken. Kind. Hopeful. Bewildered. I just noticed dust along the cabinet doors above the toilet in the bathroom. Something stops me from cleaning them. Then, I picture myself in the yard cleaning up, then I see myself making dinner. I might make dinner. I will undoubtedly, not make it out into the yard. If I had my way, I would not have written this. I wouldn’t. I woke up at four thirty am automatically. The voices began. Somehow, miraculously, I went back to bed until six thirty.. I spent the morning with Melanie (my wife) & Mary (my daughter) & we put her on the bus to third grade. I looked around my yard while waiting for the bus & felt a deep shame. No kidding. I came inside & made a coffee & picked up Moonglow by Michael Chabon. The novel I am reading. My legs were convulsing & cramping because I ran fourteen miles plus yesterday & this is the longest I have run yet since living here in Woodstock, NY. It is not an easy run. There are a lot of hills & a constant whoosh of seriously dangerous traffic. One must be a vigilant runner. Running against traffic. Changing sides often. Constantly listening for & looking out for cars. I picture the run in my head. I know, before I go, exactly where I am going to run to. I drive the route in my car & scope it out. I have this strong desire to run all the way to Phoenicia & back.

My father, as I have said, was a pretty good runner. Accomplished. Focused. Dedicated. However our house was always in disarray. It was cluttered. It was full of junk. What I mean by that is it was full of stuff we didn’t need or use. Things were broken & needed repair. My father was often angry & detached. My mother tempestuous. A storm of moods ranging from absolutely hysterical to obsessively loving to abject rage. She beat me a couple of times. No kidding. I loved her so much. I spent all of my time with her. We went out to eat. We went to movies. We read books & bought & read countless comic books. Were were pals. I cant remember her. I am haunted by her ghost. I have to make her up.

I have a strong desire to run to Phoenicia. I don’t know why.