Nothingness haunts being

           The only man sitting at the bar smelled sour, like curdled milk.  Sweat saturated his t-shirt and left a jagged line of evaporated salt along the collar.  Maybe he had been touring the city all day? Maybe he had been standing in an interminable line for tickets to a Broadway show? Maybe he had been loading crates headed for Los Angeles?  He wore still white running shoes with dark blue and orange lightening bolts on the side.  A tourist. It seemed odd that a tourist would be drinking alone in a bar on a beautiful Saturday afternoon. Where were his companions? Only his slightly used walking shoes led one to presuppose this man was a tourist.  He did not carry a camera, nor did he have with him any shopping bags emblematic of Soho.

The middle-aged man appeared to be waiting on someone to walk through the front door.  He leaned on the bar and propped his face up with his right hand, so that, he could easily check the door every fifteen seconds.  His watchful gesture was a mere tilt of his chin to the left.  Like a tomcat greets a breeze. He was so close to the door, he would sense the moment it cracked open.  Was he looking forward to this person’s arrival? The man finished his pint with three gulps.  Was he anxious about the person(s) coming through the door? Was he drinking alone to avoid a confrontation with who ever might be coming in? Possibly the intention of the meeting was a hostile confrontation, rather than a happy reunion.

The visitor did not wear a wedding ring.  This smelly bachelor may have been waiting to meet a beautiful woman and was drinking to loosen up, release his authentic self. He sat with his legs winged apart, his head in hand, hardly the posture of an expectant lover.  A dark V-shape of perspiration from his shoulders to the small of the back accentuated his stout frame and protruding belly, making it possible to apprehend this man’s indifference to his being and his impact on his surroundings.

Nonetheless, this man sat in the way of a phenomenon. Something would happen, as we know from experience.  A woman with strong perfume crosses your path causing you to sneeze. You look up and spy a thief freeing a woman’s handbag from her shoulder.  Behold this man who was drinking a beer at this bar on a Saturday afternoon!  Whenever the door should open, when desire should manifest in the doorway and through the bar, this man, his being, would become a part of the background to the phenomenon, the same as the stool under him.  After six pints, this pungent bachelor left the bar.  Subsequent events in the bar would not negate that our hearty binge drinker who left moments before had sat on a stool close to the door.  

It's YOU (meaning me)

I was catching up with a friend last night over Jameson and a cheeseburger and we got onto the subject of how people who give advice think they are trying to help, but really they are judging you or talking to themselves. We've all experienced the veiled message of "you're just not good enough" as "Yeah, I did that but I ... you should..." I've been the deliverer and the receiver of such conceit. It's not worth debating whether or not doling out judgment in spoonfuls of personal-wisdom-that-pats-them-on-the-back is good or bad. It happens. Why it happens seems more interesting to me.

Reading Eat, Pray, Love, I felt as though Ms. Gilbert was telling me to take the time to really work on yourself and you'll experience generosity, grace, and ultimately love, but YOU gotta be ready for it! So, she prepares herself by getting a divorce (not married - failure!), getting a book deal that pays for her fabulous trip (no one reads this blog, how can I get a book deal?), and then she spends hours meditating (I have a boney butt). The saying goes, "Good things come to those who wait", and not "Good things come to those who can chant for three hours every morning in a remote village in India."

I know, it's a book. I just wish someone else out there as put-off by E,P,L as my friend and I are put off by conceited advice. To Ms. Gilbert's credit, I finished the book thinking, damn that woman is smart! She exposed herself as a control freak, a needy, clingy woman, a chatterbox who needs constant attention. And she did it with humor, with candor, with clarity but more importantly - care. She likes herself and she writes herself on the page with sympathy. Maybe if I were more sympathetic towards myself I could read her book without throwing my hands up in the air in defeat when she contracts a urinary tract infection from too much awesome sex with her South American businessman in Bali.

Vacation curve

It seems that I can make anything into a challenge to fail, even vacation. It took me a few days to shed New York City, pressures at work, troubles with friends, and the man thing to allow my shoulders to drop, my thoughts not bounce from one thing to the next, and just be. And then, I buy Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert and tell myself, I can finish it all while I'm on vacation. Not enjoy it. Finish it.

I'm half-way through the book by grit. Eat, Pray, Love is not a story that makes my liberal heart bleed. She's in her early 30s, an author, with a career in writing, a country home, and a husband. She has a pretty enviable life by conventional standards. What's with the crying to God in the bathroom? I'm bad. I know. How can I judge? If all those years at Calvary has taught me anything it is that successful people and screw-ups alike seek out God, who is supreme, reassuring, affirming, and the origin of grace. I opened my heart up with each page and try not to look at her smiling, golden-haired photo on the back cover and smirk.

I'm on vacation and I have spent an entire week away from the office and the people, situations, and pressures that make it such an unpleasant place for me. What do I wake up thinking about today, the penultimate day of my vacation? Uh, huh, work. This sad realization has lead me to another realization that I must summon Nacho Libre - my chubby, slightly touched masked champion - to wrestle my control issues, my frustration, and my fear of failure to the ground. Andale!

Pulpit Fiction

It's Monday. I have work.

Last night, I watched a pre-recorded Meet The Press on which David Gregory interviews Pastor Rick Warren. I got so angry I fast-forwarded through most of the interview. What set me off was how he did not answer Gregory's question [paraphrasing]: Will you campaign for prop 8 again, knowing now what you do about AIDS through your charity work? Warren's response sounded rehearsed. He said [paraphrasing]"I'm not a politician. I'm a pastor, and my job is to love everybody.

Pastor Rick continued saying that he has been very clear about his spiritual stand on homosexuality. Chirp! Chirp! Chirp! Mr. Gregory rolled some footage of his stand against the sin of homosexuality from his powerful pulpit that speaks to tens of thousands every Sunday. I just couldn't stomach anymore.

Ms. Bauer, in Not That Kind of Girl, believes in God and arms herself with a message from her Catholic priest that sinning makes us appreciate the grace. At this point in the story she is a 23 year-old assistant, sleeping in a window in Carroll Gardens. She has yet to loose her virginal faith in God but would she have been able to stomach Rick Warren? Her faith in a God is not vengeful but merciful, not bigoted but accepting.

Her ability to love God and live in the world is challenging to me. She has given up on the idea of finding a place to worship and continues to believe in destiny. Her book is beginning to read a bit like a Christian novels teenagers advocating abstinence, thinking for yourself, and staying true to your inner faith. Despite this underlying message, I am enjoying it.

Now to work. Sad face.

Turning me over

Last week, I finished Jeff Sharlet's expose on radical fundamentalists influence on politics in America. I have moved on to Carlene Bauer's "Not That Kind of Girl", which is a memoir about how she freed herself from her fundamentalist Christian upbringing. I first read about this book in Time Out. Reading the praise for her first book, I felt a lump in my throat. Carlene has beat me to it, I thought.

Going from Sharlet to Bauer is like going from the Library on Fifth to a bedroom in content and tone. It is so much harder to read Ms. Bauer's book without constantly comparing her experience to my own. Sharlet's book was about discovering a secret world I know very little about, but I know what it is like to grow up born-again. I know how I came the decision to leave the fold and yoke myself unevenly with the world and lost souls.

I'm at the part where Carlene is in love with a brilliant student, Joshua, who was kicked out of the ivy league and ended up at her catholic college in Baltimore. She writes this about how he makes her feel:

Someone had demanded to meet me, and now was demanding to know what I thought about every last thing. Someone was looking at me, taking me in, turning me over in his palm, wondering where to put me. In diners, in cafes, in his minivan, in my room, in his room, on streets under heavy clouds.

On break, she took a job as a waitress to subjugate self to the customer. Carlene decides, while on hands and knees picking french fries from the carpeting underneath the booths after her shift, that she can no longer just be friends with Joshua and endeavors never to speak to him again. Joshua was forcing her to listen to herself, her desires. So, Carlene clarified what she wanted from her relationship with Joshua - while crawling on hands and knees in polyester, as she put it, "mortifying the flesh."