PART 3
MESA AND PHOENIX
23 MARCH 1996
The next morning I woke up and went into Phoenix to visit Peter Ragan at Metropopophobobia A trip to Phoenix is not truly a trip to Phoenix unless I stop by his place. Please keep this in mind. If you are in Phoenix you WILL stop by Metropophobobia at 621 North 3rd. The store usually opens around 4:00. He has a wonderful selection of books, zines, music and things -- plus is always good for discussion. And there's usually a few others around to hang out and chat with. I will say here, as I told Peter today, that Metropophobobia is the saving grace of Phoenix. He also has a huge backstock of old issues of BVI-Central and several old BVI Cassentrals -- so stop by and buy a few....
He showed me the three new Life Garden CDs that have come out since I was last here as well as the precursors to a Life Garden videotape that looked phenomenal. He and the other Life Gardeners have started their own label, AGNI. Life Garden is a group of Peter and now two others that usually play all acoustic instruments with heavy effects. The final sound is very amazing. The base is often, but certainly not always, percussive. The music envelops you. Please see the review of the Life Garden collection.
Peter and I talked for a few hours about many things. It was good to just sit around and talk and try to pull my mind away from the not-encounter with Heidi the day before. It was still bothering me. Not for the reasons you may think, either, but because, first and foremost, it was a nonsequitir. Our last two encounters were not negative and, in fact, were rather uplifting. Now, if she had said, "I have had negative repercussions of our last meetings," that would be very different.
But Peter and I discussed such things a
where one chose to make their home, and how that impacts your art. The amount of time one
had to devote to art was a primary concern. We discussed our friends who had moved to San
Francisco, where there was so much to do that all they did was do things and didn't
actually create anything. I was reminded of how much we did in Grand Island, Nebraska, as
kid (my old peer group -- not me and Peter) compared to the amount I do now.
We also discussed stress, Portland, Bill Burroughs' slight and fleeting interest in BVI, Trevor Blake's research on the SPK and how your location influences your creativity as far as content. So now that you know all this, don't dally -- go to Metropopophobobia and do something.
Then I went back to my parents house where I had a long chat with my father, which rarely happens. We sat around for the balance of the afternoon and talked about stress and its impacts on health and living, baseball and the industry, and the ruling class of Grand Island, Nebraska. My father went into great detail about the demise of those who caused his demise. Those who caused his demise lost big on the Savings and Loan scandals of the late 80s and ridiculous insider trading fiascoes.
My mother then came home and the three of us went to dinner. First we went to some place in Mesa that had "the biggest salad bar you've ever seen." But that place was jam-packed. My parents couldn't understand why. I posited that it was because it was one of 9 restaurants in Mesa and it was Saturday night in the winter. So we left there and drove out to the Mesa airport where there was an Italian restaurant that sits at the end of the runway. The runway was neither and attraction nor a distraction as not a single place landed on it the entire 2.5 hours we were there.
The food was okay. But in the middle of a
sentence I found out that Roger, college roommate and one time nearly family member was
dead. "No one told me Roger was dead," I said. My parents were shocked that I
didn't know. They filled me in that he had, unbeknownst to anyone, had heart problems.
Apparently, he was living in Atlanta and working in various choirs, then was doing some
sort of contracting work (remodeling), then was becoming more and more depressed
(clinically), then had a heart attack, couldn't afford the medical bills, lost everything
he had and was living in his car. His sister in Montana had found out about this and went
to Atlanta to find him. She did so, miraculously, and he moved up to Montana with her.
After he had been there a few months, he had another heart attack and died. This really
bothered me, as I had plans to see him the next time I was in Atlanta. Guess I won't do
that.
After this we talked about the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt -- mostly because I was telling them that the last time I was in Atlanta was for a NAMES Project conference and spent time with my friend Eric and didn't call Roger. I told them all about the upcoming display in October in Washington DC and what my chapter had been up to in Seattle.
Then things came back to Roger. He had said that he wanted his ashes strewn over the ocean, but he was instead buried next to his parents. I asked if they couldn't have strewn some of the ashes and buried the rest. They thought this was amusing, so I told them the story of Charlene & Trevor, in which Trevor does end up with a portion of Charlene's ashes and distributes them at places special to them. I'll tell that story in detail in a later article.
After this uplifting dinner we came home.
It was now about 10:00 PM so I didn't go back into Phoenix to see the show at
Metropophobobia. It started at nine and I wouldn't get there until about 10:30. So I
stayed up and talked with my dad a bit more. Since the evening had a them, we went on with
it.
We talked about the death of my dog cookie, who died years after I left home. This dog was all set to have a short and unhappy life. The couple that we got her from beat her and fed her chocolate to apologize. When we got her she weighed 35 pounds, quite a bit for a small poodle. But we took care of her and had her for 14 years. At the end, she was a mess. She would routinely fall down flights of stairs, couldn't jump onto beds or couches, would get lost in open yards, and so forth. She was like this for about a year. When they called and told me she died, I said, "Good."
The never told me how she died, however. So my dad told me. Apparently they were lying in bed watching television and Cookie, who had been barely able to quietly bark, sat up and howled loudly. Then she ran over to my dad and threw her front legs around his neck and hugged him. Then she passed out.
I mentioned that given that and the way my Grandmother was before she died, it gave one lots of room to think. My Grandmother was old and very weak. They told her that she had only a few months to live. She said, "I'm going to live until Easter!" They patronizingly informed her, "Irma, Easter was last week." She said, "I know that, I mean next Easter!" She died the day after Easter the next year. Towards the end she could barely talk. She had absolutely no strength. But she would go into these trances where she would have long discussions with her sister, when they were 12 years old. So was directing her sister where to move furniture. When in these states, she sounded exactly like a healthy 12 year old girl. Every so often she would pop out of her states and sound like an annoyed 72 year old woman and snap, "No, No! I'm not ready to go yet! Now, we've had this discussion before! You just wait!" Then would slip back into the 12 year old reality.
Needless to say, it freaked my dad out.
After finishing with Irma, I went to my parent's guest room and sat down to write. I tried to write about the day, then some fiction, but nothing came. I wrote about 15 sentences, but was still brooding. I shut off the computer and laid in the darkness.
I laid there and thought about the path and course of disillusionment. My aim when I was coming into town was to have dinner with a friend whom I hadn't seen in a year and a half. She let me know that she considered our friendship dispensable, which I really did not. I don't consider any of my relationships to be that way. So this was the fundamental aspect of what had been bothering me. While I see relationships as evolving things that change as those involved in them change, other people see them as static things. They see them, and people, as switches that can be turned on or off. Since Heidi and I had conversations about this very dynamic, I was under the impression that she conceived of relationships as I did. So now I was in the regrettable position of understanding that I would have no more contact with this person. Hence being disillusioned about her stand on people and relationships.
Actually, my thoughts about the above dynamic were about that short. After I had come up with it, brooding about the facts made no difference. So I turned my attention to what disillusionment is. What happens when it occurs. How it impacts our lives.
It seems that disillusionment occurs when
you put a certain amount of faith in a person or institution and that person or
institution does something violently contrary to the basis of your faith in them. Faith is
a very powerful thing. It is beyond emotion. Faith involves emotion, to be sure, but also
includes intellect -- for faith is often borne of a decision making process. Faith is a
line with naive and jaded at the termini. It is a continuum. We all lie at different
points along this line and our position helps guide how much we trust, how altruistic we
are, how much we love, and so forth.
Often naïveté is equated with youth and as we age we become more worldly, or jaded. The trick, I believe, is to balance at the midpoint of this line of faith. Being jaded enough to not be prey to huxsters, but being naive - or open enough to still have faith.
This is tough because faith always comes with disillusionment. It's the end of the ride. Relationships are all initially built on faith that people will do certain things or behave in certain ways. Well, guess what, we're all human. We're flawed. Our assumptions are always going to be proven wrong -- especially when we're dealing with something as complex as another person. So there will always be a certain amount of disillusionment. But we must see past that disillusionment and figure out what faith still exists and what more we can learn from someone.
This does not mean that relationships are
forever. It may turn out that after living with someone for several years your
relationship needs to lived apart, no longer intimate. Perhaps, for Heidi, in this case,
her relationship with me is better lived with no contact whatsoever.
Of course this is a simplified model. It does not take into account the different levels of attachment people have in a relationship. Simply because one person is ready to move on does not mean that the other person it. That other person still needs things that the first person is not willing to provide. In short, this bites.
No, really, it does. It very much throws a spanner in the works of my above model. My faith dynamic is one of probably hundreds of thousands of processes running around in people's heads that have a bearing on how they relate to people. I think it's a pretty major dynamic, however.
And I was thinking it was a pretty major dynamic as I fell asleep in Mesa, Arizona.
The next day I went home to Seattle.
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