POST-OPS THIRTEEN
I awoke this morning at 7:17. Auspicious, I thought. I liked the number. I get dreary and drag, and these last 4 days have been the darkest and the slowest yet for me. No one told me about Post-Op depression. It was mentioned in a pamphlet or two that was given to me about 'Cardiac Care' - blah, blah - but I really didn't catch my eye. They should have put it in caps and called it 'Post Cut-Him Depression', like they do with mothers and babies ('Post-Partum'). I guess the kids don't get depressed, though maybe they should. I've had suicidal thoughts, my entire life, but lately they've waned since I'm hopeful yet to be alive and stay so. To act on such a facetious whim is stupid. I'm dead by my own hand. OK, now where do I go? Every mechanical means founders on some sort of breakdown : the power goes out in a storm, the gun misfires, the hangman's noose wasn't tied correctly, and I end up sprawled on the floor still alive and now bruised. As Richard Farina wrote, 'Been down so long it looks like up to me.
Midway (nearly) into January and I'm trying to make sense of anything. Now is not the time to cringe. This new little city to me ('Scranton: the Electric City') I guess prides itself on that. The light in the morning reflects my soul - so barely there it can't even glimmer. Perhaps that's the entire idea behind all that - electricity lighting he world, which is otherwise pretty dark? It's prouder, and grander, here than Paterson. Better built to and lives more on its days of the present than some chimerical hosting of the past as Hamilton's 'City of Industry' built on the Passaic. That all fell through two hundred years ago, and now the place is just a grind; a fallen panel of experts still talking. People still talk and make up stories about a more-grand past (the same way they used to do in 1960, about a more-grand future), but no one does that any longer, and the last I heard Goerge Jetson was a suicide too.
Everything over my head is dark and dingy: the morning sky has no sun, the water out below me stays settled as an unmoving ice. No ground animals are about, except for the same 60 birds that my wife insists on feeding suet daily. They by now have got the routine into a habit, and just about the same time each morning too. That depresses me too - birds are supposed to be natural critters, not run by schedules and clocks, but here some foolish human feeds them animal fat for heat and energy so they can scurry along their ways and keep on a'flitting all days long. Then, of course, later the squirrels come and the two large woodpeckers (each day) and mayhem breaks loose - animals taking sides, darting for cover, rolling fast around the tree trunks, just to get their dose of fat. Even Nature sometimes subscribes to another form of fantasy altogether. I want to talk, but there's no one to talk to.
Somewhere above the buildings and all that 'Electric City' stuff above Scranton, there's a huge throwback 1930's style electric-light sign that reads 'The Scranton Times'. It's fitting. I'd imagine, back in that day, it was a powerhouse newspaper that scrounged and exposed and kept Scranton straight. Now? I haven't even seen a newsbox in the city selling a newspaper, let alone the Scranton Times. Do people still read that stuff, or is it not too now all e-print and tablet readers who scrounge the old want ads and corset ads, looking for their own days of glory; like the Village Voice on its cum-infested slide to nowhere, when the entire back half of that paper - desperate to stay alive - was 'massage' parlors and porno ads, and buxom half-naked overdone ho's, with terrible, fake, names? The silence is deafening now and most everything is dolled up in a new, downtown, form of tan stucco and comfortable finishes, and the little strips of old storefronts are mostly now lawyers and businesses with incongruous names and missions. Numerous hot dog and lunch places, all old, and all seemingly the same. They do something weird with hot dogs here: instead of serving them like a regular hot dog, in a regular bun, all the places seem to cut the hot dog in two slabs, and place them side my side on a flat bun, and it all gets covered then in whatever topping you choose. It's really nothing I can figure out, but regardless it goes on everywhere. I've had a few, and just find them messy and cumbersome. The 'Electric City' hot dog, masquerading as a hamburger, for $4.95? The only thing (downtown) that makes it cool is the old places that serve them - they usually have ancient booths, old, wooden walls, and plenty of photos from olden days gone by. Past glories once again, I guess. And never ask why, because no one recalls a thing. The world has moved on, spinning in its delirious manner.
Maybe you can see what I'm doing here? Talking raucously and wildly about most anything, just to keep my mind off the darker side of the drive. Oh, please, Heaven send some help. Over time, I've been in many cities. NYC to Philadelphia, and Baltimore to Rutland, Vermont, and San Franciso to little old Carmel and Benicia, CA. They've each had their themes and prizes. Cannery Row, looking for Steinbeck at the water's edge; going down in a bathysphere to see the deep and murky waters below. But there's nothing more murky than 'self'' - and it's a pattern, never a fly-by-night thing. Everyone's pattern is different. One has to learn it, and THAT'S how you survive, and steer through that murk. So, get on board, baby, this train is a'running, and we board at Steamtown at 3am.
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