Fresh Kills _ Another Kick - Day 25, _ DNA - Day 26

Another Kick - Day 25

This is about me forming a new circle, sphere around the circle, sphere of life that has formed and nurtured me.  The symbolism is real here if I so choose to make it real.

In a way I am creating another level, another peel of an onion skin around the first nurturing atmosphere of life on earth. Now I am creating or at least discovering and trying to sustain a growing layer, skin, peel in a growing accommodating environment.

I am growing here.

I look all around me and see light and forms melt away.

The outer skin of a box is taking shape into a sphere.

Another kick. This is like birth again and all over again.

It is my own awareness taking shape in this new strange environment.

Like the diagnostics of a fetus’ brain making test runs of electric current to growing flesh and muscle, another kick.

I am forming into some final shape or substance to jump into another brave new existence.

I must continue to peel back more layers and examine that other place before I can continue here adding more layers to my evolving nature.

Kick. Kick. I hear my own heartbeat.  And I heard a greater heartbeat of the universe, beyond, sustaining and urging me ever forward.

The thoughts fade and I must return to some final reckonings.

DNA - Day 26

DNA?

From a single tear drop?

Am I crying?

Am I aware; awaring?

I would have thought that they might find a piece of truth, the truth and fact of me, the once living breathing wonderful entity of me in some bone spec.

I can remember those relic things.  An older cousin had borrowed one and showed it to me.  It was like small glass enclosed medallion with a piece of paper in the middle with a spec of dust, a dark spot on the paper.

That’s a piece of a saint? What is the point of all that anyway?

In my case, if that is all that is left of me to certify my death, then so be it. Half is better than whole.  One ten billionth of me is still me or at least part of me.

Aware in that other world that some certification of my end has been clarified. The specifics do not matter here.

(But if specifics do matter to some.  The lab technician that had practiced their art over and over again to find D.N.A. out of the primordial like soup mess left at the WTC, they catalogued the source of my DNA as probably saliva off the bit of paper, a fragment of a paper coffee recovered and not pounded into cosmic dust like so much other stuff on that day.

If the truth be told in some cosmic verifiable way, my certifiable DNA from a body fluid was not saliva but from a tear. That in a split second of reality, between the reality of life and the certain reality of death, I probably was trying to piss and shit myself, but there was no time.  There was however a tear drop falling from my face that it hit the rim of the paper coffee cup on the desk in front of me at the final moment.

And in a symbolic, metaphoric, philosophical, and perhaps spiritual sense that one tear drop represented the thousands of tears shed by the victims at their last moments of mortal existence and of the millions and billions of tears shed not just for one human tragedy but the tragedy of that moment that had turned the whole human race in a different direction. A direction that race had not yet become aware of.)                                               

And I am aware that when I leave here I will go back in time if that is the correct turn of phrase and be at my memorial service or at least observe it in safe distance and in a proper perspective of it as I transition from life to afterlife in this quarantine dimension.

Then I will see the face of my wife and child.  The images, direct and abstract still elude me. For some reason, my new essence with perhaps on next level have to deal more directly with the tragedy of the end of my life within the context of those who I had in my immediate comfort zone of love.

Another level? That is so gravitational in perspective?

So there have always been the many layers, perhaps spherical wrappings, between one world of the living and the final world of the dead.

The number seven comes to mind.  The human race finds a good number and then keeps it to tell many stories.  Seven levels or spheres outward of heaven?

In a way, seven levels, of seven segregated heavens, seven stepping stones all come to mind.

Is this whole temporary experience just one level above the sphere of the living world?  Do I have to graduate from here to go onto six other levels?

Let’s stop here.  This is all sounding like some dogma shit.  All of a sudden a dozen Ph.D.’s in divinity are going to show up and tell me how I am to experience the here and now and then try and sell me a ticket to the next level?

No way Jose.

I do have the thought that if there are seven levels of heaven in terms of a journey up to seven plateaus up a mountain to speak, than I wonder if those seven places are not unlike my need to raise eight dark corners around my life into one sphere layer. 

Perhaps these eight corners are microcosm of the greater journey.  But eight is not seven.

I must think.

In an instant I envision that seven journeys, seven levels toward truth is a whole. If it is a whole, it is something.

Falling back on my previous thoughts, I surmise that the seven levels of heaven in fact could be the hand of God.

And the eighth part is a separate whole.  That I am the eighth part. I must respond to the clap of one hand containing seven heavens and I must clap back in correct coordination to signify completion of some task.

So be it. I will deal with it when I have to.

So much of my thoughts learned in life get too intertwined with things that may or may not matter.  That long term planning is always a good idea.

But inch by inch, life is a cinch.  Mile by mile is a trial.

This is definitely a long mile.  Stick with one thought at a time.

A distracting thought from the past, the living past.

Did I visit here once before in an earthy dream?

Fresh Kills _ Panic Attack – Day 23, _ Kick - Day 24

Panic Attack – Day 23

The fuzzy thought reoccurs.

I am up against a white thing.  I seemingly white thing.  I am in gray and mist and up close, you can see everything eventually.

I touch the white thing again. Is it stone? Is it concrete? Is it plastic?

I am losing control of what I thought I had achieved here.

A panic attack!

…and if only in a second, a thought occurs, it then fades. All is black and yet the mind does wander in thousands of possibilities to label the moment. The mind cross-references and distills. The moment projects common, already acceptable explanations and then begins to search hidden archives on the fringes of reality. It is in this far reaching realm that fear and or fears often hide or live if that is the word and then…?

A blinding distraction appears on the retina. An essence, the crystal of light, of inspiration, flashes a bulb giving temporary brilliance. Outlines appear in levels focusing out away from the former center of brightest whites. These outlines disappear and seem to be reborn but less brilliant with pulsating, diminishing energy traveling down through grays and finally to the darkest shades of dark into blackest black…

Kick - Day 24

A kick!

I felt a kick.  Something within me reacted to everything.

My thoughts went backward toward death. I saw the hot white light of death of friction and heat exploding against steel, glass and flesh.

The image at the second of death has always been a marker or signpost in my journey on. Not onward.  Just on. Too many words and their energies do not translate into the light of death.

That if the whole universe operates at close to absolute zero in Kelvin scale, the universe as a whole is a cold sluggish place except for hot spots like stars or souls.

The spark of divinity that I carried within me in that dark sluggish cold near absolute zero universe did not prepare me for this limbo between that world of fixed physical laws and the bright non-fixed non-stagnant world passed death.

I find myself tumbling, readjusting mild form and mental status and am back into that once small tent in the small dark corner of that old box of mine and most of humanity’s existence. The light outside is still bright.  I look outside the tent. The bright light has become equal to the level of gray I have been existing in for some days and weeks now.

In a way the tent has expanded. It is above and all around me.  I have created a sphere of light, of intelligence, of purpose of full purpose and soul.

In a way that gray bubble provides enough light and energy to push back against that pyramid like once dark corner.

In a way I feel like I can push farther and finally inflate spheres, bubbles in all the eight corners of ignorance of my life. 

A kick!

I felt a kick.  Something within me reacted to everything.

My thoughts went backward toward death. I saw the hot white light of death of friction and heat exploding against steel, glass and flesh.

The image at the second of death has always been a marker or signpost in my journey on. Not onward.  Just on. Too many words and their energies do not translate into the light of death.

That if the whole universe operates at close to absolute zero in Kelvin scale, the universe as a whole is a cold sluggish place except for hot spots like stars or souls.

The spark of divinity that I carried within me in that dark sluggish cold near absolute zero universe did not prepare me for this limbo between that world of fixed physical laws and the bright non-fixed non-stagnant world passed death.

I find myself tumbling, readjusting mild form and mental status and am back into that once small tent in the small dark corner of that old box of mine and most of humanity’s existence. The light outside is still bright.  I look outside the tent. The bright light has become equal to the level of gray I have been existing in for some days and weeks now.

In a way the tent has expanded. It is above and all around me.  I have created a sphere of light, of intelligence, of purpose of full purpose and soul.

In a way that gray bubble provides enough light and energy to push back against that pyramid like once dark corner.

In a way I feel like I can push farther and finally inflate spheres, bubbles in all the eight corners of ignorance of my life. 

Fresh Kills _ Landfill - Day 22

Landfill - Day 22

It was the largest municipal landfill in the world on Staten Island.  They had recently closed it, was were going to ship all of New York City’s trash to empty coal mines in Pennsylvania or dump it out in the ocean past the legal limits? I don’t remember which now or care. I’m dead.

It is not that the other four boroughs picked on the “forgotten borough” SI.

It’s that it’s being on the Jersey side of the bay made it a quiet place full of sleepy factory villages and farms up until they built “the bridge” over from Brooklyn in 1964 built by Trump’s father.

There were towns in the late nineteenth century.  Parts of the north shore were bedroom communities of the thriving downtown Manhattan Wall Street area.  And it was usually cooler here on this side of the bay every summer before air-conditioning.

But somehow this “garden of the world”, this paradise as described in some British’s officer diary during the Revolution had always been hills and swamps and not much in between.  Don’t buy a house with a basement here unless the ground is elevated.  Otherwise the swamp comes back and seeps into that basement.

Where better a place to start a dump in the thirties or forties than here in rural, disconnected from New York City, Staten Island.  Disconnected from “the city” except for the ferry boat always crowded with tourists, with the best, cheapest, view of the Statue of Liberty in the bay.

Most tourists come over the boat and go straight back on the ferry. Not much to see except for some very steep hills in St. George.  Of course SI is three times the size of Manhattan and almost the exact square mileage of Singapore.

Too bad I had to die.  I wanted to see the secession from New York City movement happen and build a great new mighty American city, Singapore like republic, here in the garden of the world and stick our middle fingers up, back over the bay at all the Manhattan snobs who get all the tax money spent on their turf in this so-called city of five equal boroughs.  And every time it rains in Staten Island, the whole island seems to flood.  Whatever.

The Fresh Kills landfill is back open temporarily and they are sifting through the rubble with bulldozers.  Bigger pieces of the stainless steel skin of the dead WTC are easy to find.  Scrap metal to be sold overseas, remelted, recycled into forks, knives and spoons no doubt to be made in China.  Boy, is that bubble going to bust and blow up in their Wall Street faces one day.

All the king’s horses and all the king’s men won’t be able to put Wall Street back together again.

Here, there was a bubble here when I died. I could not afford a house.  We, I said we, good.  We went out to Arizona a decade ago to be near mom in an adult care center.  Well, we went to visit but somehow in that boom and bust thin redneck economy, I could only find suitable employment a hundred and twenty miles south in Tucson.  When we could get the time or really the gas money together to visit her three or four times a year. 

My older sibling was her guardian and lived nearby her.  There was friction of course between the siblings thing over mom’s care and taking time out to go to county guardian meetings, doctors’ appointments etc.  In the end, she died and we got tired of the thin economy there and moved back east. 

One of my jobs in Arizona in that boom and bust thing was the mortgage business.  Well, to put a long story short, they did not learn one thing about the Savings and Loan Fiasco.  When I went from a legitimate mortgage company to one run by insurance salesmen types, I saw that putting phony documents into a government guaranteed mortgage was the norm in that company.  I had to quit and move on to preserve what I thought was a clear conscience.

Coming back to New York City and on Staten Island in particular, with what I knew about how the basic mortgage business I learned out west, I could see a real estate bubble ready to burst and at any moment.

This makes me think. This is winter.  This is 2002.  The bubble must have burst by now. And with it being a war zone? War zone? Housing prices must have crashed by now and especially on the front lines of a war zone in NYC. I knew something but had not given it consideration yet.  I did not have to yet face certain facts about my death.  I had many, many more days to face the truth. War zone?

What is truth?

It is point on which the whole yin and the yang of all things sit upon.  If you want balance the good must swing into the bad.  The pleasureful must swing into the painful in order to maintain the balance of all things, the universe.

In a way, God in some way must be a fluid energy but a balanced energy, if all things must go forward, on some imagined universal time line, time having really nothing to do with that formula.

Truth is the doorway to all energy, things, lives; delusions must cross over into really in order to keep the mechanism, the machine, of the universe going.  White becomes black. Black becomes white. The two sides of all things reveal the truth, when all things are in balance.

The creative hand claps.  The other, the me, we, nature must clap back and in correct coordination in order for the tick tock, tick tock of everything to chime out in harmony.

Truth about my death, my life, I am refining, approaching in some manner to the doorway across the path I have designed and built to go onward.

Truth is that when the price of a workers house, a working class house, go up twenty five grand every six months, something is not in balance.  Doesn’t the Fed know that this is inflation?  Why aren’t they reporting this inflation?

Well if you can get all your relatives to co-sign a mortgage you can afford overvalued property.  When you as an unskilled laborer, as primary mortgage holder can skim off tens of thousands of unearned equity every couple of months and buy SUVs and dually pickup trucks, who is to worry?

Except maybe you and all your relatives are illegals and the mortgage company does not even check the legitimacy of a Social Security number of the primary mortgage holder, the bubble has got to get bigger and bigger.

It is going to pop, sooner or later. Sooner than later.

The nastiness of some seagull picking at my earthly remains, at the Fresh Kills landfill only at first bothered me.  Then a realized that only some, very little, really nothing of me was part of the bronze scrap metal.  In fact, a remark of a searcher who picked up the object remarked how much bronze was selling by the pound for scrap. 

No doubt I had hitched a ride over here to Fresh Kills.  The greater part of me is spread out all over the place.

I find it ironic that the Dutch word for river, rivers is Kill, Kills.  I find it irony that they have nature and bird preserves here amidst the trash and what is left of the basic SI of swampland and estuaries, that it all sounds like it is about death.

And of course I was not killed yesterday.  I am no longer a fresh kill.

But this, for what is left of me; Fresh Kills is my final resting place.

Oh dear.

Fresh Kills _ Hands of God - Day 21

Hands of God - Day 21

I am in a new milky gray world.  Not white, not dark/black.  Perhaps a fine mist or a fog is an appropriate word or energy.

Hands of God.  The phrase will not leave me. 

Somewhere the literal energy mixes with the poetic metaphoric energy as I realize that Hands of God is not the grandfather in the sky, Sistine Chapel, God.  This God is something else.

In a way, I pave my own way and I mark my own time as I carve that singular pathway, my pathway to heaven.  I do it here and now.  I have been doing all my life both here and just previously.

If and when I get to the end of this prison, this transition to another space or time or dimension, I know that the real God should He, She, It really exist, I will deal with it in that other future space, time, dimension.

Here is someplace special.

A rumbling, a shaking, an awareness forms into being.

Part of me is free of the rubble of the World Trade Center.  Did they find my body? Yes. And no.

They have not found me yet but by chemical breakdown of that former body, a piece, a major piece of me has somehow been scooped up and is being transported on the back of some truck.

Where are we going?

Which way are we going?

Dusty.  My past death senses are about dust.

I think I sneeze in conscious acknowledgment of a past sinus situation.

“Bless you” I hear.

Bless you?

I reach out and touch something cold.  A piece of metal?  A piece of bronze.

I reach out and am in strange ecstasy.  I feel in the metal now warm and not cold by my psyche touch what seems like a woman’s breast.

And indeed to focus on imagined there is part of a head?

In momentary disgust I back away only to realize that I am looking at a piece of mangled metal, a once precious sculpture and only a piece of a sculpture.

The energy of words I begin to search for the mystery of this metal.

The world shakes and rumbles.

Oh yes, we are being transported someplace else other than the old Dutch city.

I look at the partial mangled metal and begin to see the hair of a male near the female breast and all is lost in male female body parts and something sticking up, a tree trunk, a large penis? No. A large thumb.

What is this?

Hand of God - a pause - by Auguste Rodin.

An authorized copy?  I ask myself.

What is this? A piece of junk.  A piece of priceless art in a trash heap.

Is that what I am?  A piece of trash?  Merged, my earthy molecules with or near junk art?

Strange thoughts. Then words. The energy of words and the energy of thoughts and impressions of those who had viewed this objet d’art.

And in perceptive, it was a decent decorative sculpture. But entwining lovers within the womb like large hand, the so-called hand of God, was a bit gimmicky for its time over a hundred years ago.

Cutting edge? Hardly.

A great loss to the art world. Not really.  Rodin never broke his molds.  They keep schlocking them out again every generation or two when the commodity art market demands it for a new wave of nouveau riche crooks.

I am dumbfounded. One minute I am in the heat of a Muslim pilgrimage thing in Mecca, then I am part of a trash delivery to parts unknown.

And I thought I had heard the term Hands of God. That was a plural.  There is only one hand displayed in this sculpture.

Then I heard or think or feel the energy of some eastern mystic talking about the sound of one hand clapping.  A conundrum? A spiritual weekend trick to impress the temporary audience and their terrible yoga and breathing.

Breathing. Breath. I am breath. Part of the great lung of the universe.

And like some shallow little pilgrim to the weekend resort guru I realize that anything can offset the sound of one hand clapping.

The point is that there is no sound.  It is a yin and a yang thing.  One does not have one without the other.  That the only thing that can hear one hand clapping is oneself or a split version of oneself.  One self to set in motion the clapping empty sound.  The other self to catch the non-sound or to at least catch the ball of the concept of sound, non-sound, motion, non-motion (thought, perception).

So too, the lovers in the sculpture don’t have to make love, even if the hormonal instinct it to couple.

In a way, God set the world, the universe, into motion.  But only his creation must cooperate in the program.

The hands of God are two hands, one belonging to God, the other belonging to me (us).

Even the silent sound of God’s one hand clapping can only make sense when it comes into the sphere, energy of me (our) thought reaction to original energy and or another concept of God.

I hear in my hand clapping.  Clapping of one entity and or two hands clapping together in correct coordination.  Syncopation. Synchronicity. Etc.

Before I dismiss this distraction of this art work, I see or think tags and tangents.  This piece of bronze had been in the other tower I think.  How do I know that? 

The things at the top of two building falling eventually land in the common pit of the grave at the bottom of life’s heap.  The rich man’s sculpture in his lobby merges with this working poor guy’s pocket change.

Why would I be the same proximity of this piece unless some breath of the gas of what was left of me had somehow coated its surface?

And maybe a few molecules of me are now a part of this trash.  We are sliding out into the light of earth twilight.  The sun is setting in magnificent Arizona colors. There is a cold chill.  I think it is winter.  And the sound of seagulls flying and fighting for any scraps of edibles left in the trash of the now deceased world trade center.

Shit! I am back in Staten Island.

Shit! Again!

Life sucks. Then you die.  I died and went to Staten Island?

I close my eyes.  No.  I rest my thoughts.

Fresh Kills _ Tyranny of Chance - Day 20

Tyranny of Chance - Day 20

I begin to fade. I am feeling dizzy.

I am not in a physical body but I feel like I am being tossed back and forth with great pressures on me.

Is this some sort of punishment? This roller coaster ride effect without a body?

Am I being submitted to some anger from some other quadrant?  Do my relatives object to my telling of my tale which interweaves with part of their tale?

In fact I have to wonder.  Does everybody with a simple tale or a complex tale get the same forty pieces of time to dissect and reconcile a past life, the recent one that is? 

I used that past life term. I have nothing against the concept of reincarnation except that in my recent life I came to the conclusion that being reincarnated by reward and punishment levels is just another religion con job but only done mostly to the people in the east. 

That somebody is born rich because they deserve to be rich is so full of crap.

And worse than that, that I was born poor because I am being punished for some other life.  

It is all just a social con and another form of crowd control.

The whole universe revolves about the tyranny of chance.

It’s by chance that most things happen.  Somebody has to be the bloody Queen of England and somebody has to clean out her bloody stables. It is chance. It is a tyranny of numbers.  Just so many slots at the top of a pyramid or food chain.  And many more, in the to be eaten, bottom of the food chain, pyramid of life.

That people have memories of other lives is another con.  In a life of millions of frames of TV, movies, uncatalogued memory data, anybody can remember a childhood dream and embellish upon it.  Anybody can dream.  And sometimes a dream is just a dream. Like this one.

The shaking stops. 

I have been thinking of the Muslim limbo or purgatory where two nasty angels are supposed to rough you up or feed you questions in a test or some other nonsense. In fact in the back of my mind, I had been thinking that the two lost coffins in Number Two’s lobby might have been an entrance device for such angels to enter my post-death dream here.

In fact when I was just shaking and thinking about the two angel tour guides or whatever I remember the two Patricks.

I had not thought of them for decades.  They lived in some other quadrant of my community.  They were walking home another way one day and I remember them, not so much because of the pushing shoving kind of normal boyhood animus they were displaying but they were displaying it in front of me. I was not certain how to react.  I wanted to jump in and play their game whatever it was.

But on this one day in particular, I was supposed to bring home a loaf of bread and I went into a store I never went into to avoid them so to speak and they followed me in with youthful loud exuberance.  I got a dirty look from the German storekeeper as I made my purchase for the dinner table.

The bread was pre-plastic.  It was wrapped in a thick wax paper.  Needless to say the bread got crushed in the strange walk home that day with the two Patrick’s.  It was a strange social interface for me.  I was always so painfully shy all my life.  And I grew up in a strange corner of the geography where there were no children my age amidst the row houses and factories and the noisy elevated train one block away and visible across an empty lot.

Empty lot. The thought comes to mind.

My mind is receiving energies.  Energies?

What was it that Saint Peter said about energy?  Words are energy.  Words printed on paper are energy.  I exist as part of that energy.

In some essence, I, more likely what is left of my mortal body, is now part of some lot.  It is not empty yet but emptying out into another space and becoming an empty lot.

They are removing the World Trade Center piece by piece by bloody piece.

I see some photo on some Internet site.  I see a chuck of meat, is it meat? No is part of some body’s human thigh.  It is red. No. It is more orangey.  Is that what a body part looked like drained of its blood?  Or is the orange color some plastic or chemical that has merged with it as was part of the imploding building collapse and thrown out, tossed here and landing right on the sidewalk of 130 Liberty St., a building with a great a big mesh net over its façade.  I see the draping material is there to conceal a great gash in the façade of the building.  And I focus on a big American flag draped on the building over the mesh fabric.

It is the “black widow”.  The energy of the words, of the thoughts formed in the other real world, they are filtering into me and I can see the sad witness of a building still standing but wounded and still witness to what is left of the mess of the destroyed world trade center.

For some reason I cannot turn.  I do see a reflection of the mess in the reflection of glass, dirty glass, behind the mesh, and I hear the word Kaaba.

Kaaba?  What is that?

And as if to answer the question, I am in a crushing surge of living humanity all pushing and in circular motion around another masked building somewhere covering in a fabric material,.  What is this? It is that Arab thing. It is that Muslim thing. That pilgrimage thing I have read about. What is the name…

In my typical shy fashion, I wish to escape this crowd, this mob caught up in some animal like fervor.   

Am suddenly inside a strange room lite by hanging votive candles.  What is this, a church? The interior has white marble walls and paved marble tiles on the floor, there are three pillars supporting a roof.  The room would be symmetrical except that there seems to be a closet in the corner with a brass like door.

I am inside the Kaaba. A rare privilege. Really?

What is this curious building? What is it? What was it originally? A stable, a warehouse, a temple? …

Outside tens of thousands are marching in circles in streams of sweat, energy, chaos, purpose, energy.  Are they in imitation of a whirlwind, a vortex, a galaxy?

The noise and the smell are human but the thought is God. …

And in thought of the word God comes a phrase.

I am in the Hands of God…

Fresh Kills _ Grandparents - Day 19

Grandparents - Day 19

Awaking out of a mind experience of trees in a forest, near a small quiet waterfall and the sounds of birds, I begin to reconnect to last thoughts.

It was perhaps that later in life, when I myself matured, that I saw my parents’ lives in segments.  For my father who did shift work, he was around in the daytime occasionally in childhood memory.  But mom’s time on a timeline, I see starts and stops, segments of time, of a life lived differently at times.

And I am reminded of my father’s mother who I never met.  I heard the story from my maiden aunt who related the story that grandmother was a wonderful seamstress.  That she would go downtown, look in the fanciest department store windows like Strawbridge and Clothier’s or John Wanamaker’s and study a dress or even a winter coat and from memory could start from scratch and build, replicate, that article with a professional look and style. 

And my maiden aunt who made it all the way through the Catholic high school system had been particularly grateful for being able on a yearly basis to be in fashion with the other girls, who mostly were an upper caste of Catholics, who could and did afford their daughters the luxury of a high school education instead of being forced by economics to consign them to some millwork jobs designed for young women.

That from my aunt I got the story that my skilled seamstress and housewife grandmother had wanted to become a doctor. That she read it was possible to do such a thing in some fancy woman’s magazine of the late nineteenth century.  That her father was a well to do man who ran a large blacksmithy shop set up in a coal mining town in upstate Pennsylvania.  He had the means to finance his daughter’s doctor dream but he refused to give his daughter that right and entitlement.  He was a survivor of the famine and he came into modest wealth by luck and hard work in the new land.  His mind however never left the old sod.  His two oldest sons got pushed into the seminary as a way to make a statement about making it in the new world and a return of favors to his deity.

So in building my reconciliation of myself to the things of my mother I also judge against the possibilities of her life, I measure against those of another female ancestor, which in a way is unfair.

My mother grew up in great poverty in north Philly. That her grandparents owned a dozen or two rental properties were the basis of having a roof over her head through the depression.  Her father, my grandfather, a rather gentle man when I knew him through my childhood, was a man who had been beaten and left for dead by the local Irish mafia when he refused to throw a fight as a prize fighter as a man in his young twenties.

He somehow survived with a gold plate in his head to replace a piece of kicked out skull. To add insult to injury, the state revoked his boxing license.

It was always when my grandmother, my mom’s mom would want to nag or sarcastically ridicule my pop-pop that she would use the timeline reference of that was before or after you “lost your boxing license” line. “Remember?”

So mom got raised in rather typical north Philly, Kensington style poverty of living in a ten foot wide row house that in her case housed herself, her sister, her parents, an uncle, and an aunt and her husband in a three bedroom, one bathroom house.

That her meals most nights was a mile or more walk to her grandmother’s house to be one more soup plate on a big family kitchen table.

Pop-pop was not a bootlegger but he was a distributor of bathtub gin during prohibition in between occasional long haul trucking jobs found here and there.

All in all, he did not find regular work until WWII which brought his manual labor skills back into demand by the war effort.  From there, he worked until he died.

Fresh Kills _ School - Day 18

School - Day 18

In the day to day living, I have say that my mother was a very dutiful mother. I, we, never wanted for the basics, food, shelter, hand me down clothes.  Shoes were about the only new thing I ever remember getting in the clothing department.  I do remember picking out a set of trousers at the discount Robert Hall men’s clothing store on the Avenue for my entry into first grade.

That we did not go to kindergarten I have often wondered about. In the age of the post-World War Two housewife, there were few if any daycare centers. They started with Lyndon Johnson and his government handouts to the poor.  Though in a way they were really a masked way of getting women out of the home and into the workforce of the mighty Military Industrial Complex of post WWII.

Kindergarten was a public school thing.  And my father had one of those holier than the Pope kind of attitudes against the whole public school education thing.

But then again it was Philly where the parochial Catholic school system was built after the so-called Catholic riots of 1844 and the Know Nothings and their swastika like pure white American political party getting all paranoid and angry about all the Paddy and German immigrants breeding like rabbits and taking over all the older real estate and slums in Philadelphia county. And taking the crumby manual day labor jobs away from the natives.

The immigrant Bishop, a Sudetenland German, went to the W.A.S.P. establishment and their wasp bankers and made them lend him the money to build that separate but not equal (superior) Catholic school system.  Perhaps that is what my father was concerned about, the quality thing more than the wasp ethnic thing. Whatever. Check mark.  Reconciled.  Won’t go there anymore. Well, not quite.

In a way those riots were a building of consensus among diverse parties to agree to separate and agree to disagree and to build the new infrastructure of Philadelphia City out of the rural Philadelphia County that soon followed.

In fact, looking back up at the Schlichter tower of that rope mill, I have seen a photo of it in some historic archive when it was built in 1858. It is like two blocks long and reminds me of those pictures of the Detroit assembly plants geared up during WWII.  One has to wonder if it was coincidence that this factory got built, if it was out of investment, speculation of a growing industrial future or this monster of a rope factory was a buildup to an intended war not unlike the German buildup before WWII.  And there was all that cheap immigrant labor to man acre after acre after acre of factories and mills all over this local patch of land.

The mind does wander.

Anyway back to dad.  For about a dozen Saturdays before I entered the first grade, he made up a series of learning cards on cut up index cards.  And for a very painful two hours each Saturday, I had to put up with his Prussian style of teaching as I learned the alphabet, a few cat and dog words and painfully, very painfully, learned my signature in cursive.  First sixth months of first grade I glided through.  I had already done the Cliff Notes via dad.

I don’t want to dwell on this.  But dad and the public school thing, his sticking his nose up in the air attitude, the first day, my first day, in Catholic first grade had 104 students.  Hey.  It was post WWII baby boom time in first grade. After a few weeks, the herd had been culled down to 99.  I could count by then up to 100.  The sister would mark the daily attendance on a corner of the black broad for the attendance monitor in the eighth grade to come in and record the number.  Ninety-nine in first grade.  Down to sixty-six by eighth grade.  I hear about this crowded thirty children public school classrooms crap these days and wonder what that scam is all about. The unions? The construction contractors? The bribes in city hall?

As it turns out, Saint Bishop Johannes Neumann thought he put one over on the wasp bankers when he made them finance his private school system.  As it turned out, the bankers not only got satisfactory return on their equity, they got cheaper taxes from not having to build so many public schools to accommodate wave after wave of cheap immigrant labor and their children’s physical needs.  But then again the Catholic school thing was always about the soul thing. Right?  Win, win for the bankers.  Win, win for the church.  Win, win, win-lose for the pacified literate labor force?

Getting back to mom.  Looking back at the housework she did, which I witnessed as a young child, was pure drudgery. And then she would be there at lunchtime to dole out a meager Franco-American canned spaghetti and grilled cheese sandwich meal to four kids. Well, we did not know we were poor.

That whole housewife is home, housewife can make lunch for kids, sort of fed into a very cheap parochial school system that depended on the slave labor of women married to God, no Jesus, doing the teaching and not being part of any Protestant public school system and their cafeteria lunch programs. I think the feed the students at lunch in the cafeteria thing got started with the suburbs where they had to bus, drive long distances to school.  No cafeterias even in the inner city public grade school system or so I understood it back then.  I can remember a Prot cousin, near my age, talking about school lunch in a cafeteria and I was like bewildered. Really? What else do you do in public school? In the burbs?

Mine is a narrow perspective perhaps of the whole picture.

Mom got a factory job after my younger sister graduated from eighth grade. High school was a stay at lunch situation, cafeteria and all.

Irony is that the factory mom got her job in was a modern factory built during WWII and on the site of the old Shlichter family mansion. I always from first grade onward as I walked the long walk to school wondered why the modern one story white brick clear glass factory was surrounded by a nasty old dirty granite stone two foot high wall that had once supported an iron fence surrounded the building. Later I would research it.  If you are born in Philly, the history city, and surrounded by history, eventually it becomes a hobby for some.

Part of this afterlife experience puts me in mind of being tired and exhausted in real life.  But here, the focus is always awake.  In a way, I have learned to turn down the volume on the thought process thing.  There is such a thing in reality and in abstract realness of too much thinking.  Time to rest.

Fresh Kills _ Pearly Gates - Day 17

Pearly Gates - Day 17

Again the questions.  What’s next? Is this real? Is reality a state of mind?

Is there really a heaven on the other side of this bubble where my soul nurtures itself, reconciles itself to the next great pain, birth into the next level or whatever?

I have to say that if I get to the so-called pearly gates, I somehow know that Saint Peter will be on the right side of the gate and Moses will be on the left side.

Why are you here Saint Peter and not enjoying your reward inside?

There’s a reward inside?  Nobody told me.

(Thick.)

Actually I am here because I doubted three times or so I have been allegedly quoted as saying.  Words are energy.  Words on paper are a form of energy too.  I exist in that energy.

And you Moses? You doubted as well. Can’t you go inside and chill?

I could say that maybe I doubted a little but just a little. I am maybe considering if it is worth it to doubt a second time.

But then again I could say that I am keeping an eye on the guy on the other side to the gate, my partner so to speak, make sure he stays honest with the in and the out thing with the gate.  Maybe he won’t let some minorities through the gate if you know what I mean.

Peter shoots a fierce look at Moses and gestures his attention and body language as if ready to walk to the other side of the gateway.

Stay where you are at my good man.  Stay on your side of the street.  I was on this side first.

The image fades.

The day is over.  No stroller or baby carriage for my baby sister.  My mother carries her on her hip as we walk home.  Stroller, carriage, such luxuries for a working class housewife and mother etc.

Fresh Kills _ Swing - Day 16

Swing - Day 16

My mother mounts me into the junior swings; I am too big already for them.  She has my toddler sisters already mounted with the safety bar pulled down over the chain in a box seat.  She pushes gently and sets the whole thing in motion.

For me, she lifts me into the bigger kid swings and teaches, instructs, hold on, move your legs forward, backward, and then leaves me to my own device as she returns to the baby.

I am getting the hang of it and moving back and forth and looking across the bare dusty playground up towards the mill tower and its clock.  It bellows a chime on some hour.  I notice the noise and its direction but do not yet know what time is or even what a clock is. 

Time is the thing, isn’t it?  We all only have so much of it and we use it.  There is no user manual.  Do we have to use it right?

Somewhere along the timeline, some holy man or philosopher or celibate in an ivory tower started the leisure time question regarding the quality of life thing. 

The average human for centuries had just lived, hunted, gathered, foraged, survived.  Just lived. Then died.

Then these clowns come along and ask about the quality and meaning of life.

Useless facts to the average dude and dudette.  Dogma forming. Cottage industries.  Cathedrals.  M.I.T.!

Somewhere along the timeline, they made up a set of rules to get into paradise, heaven, the afterlife.

Well I am here and all your dogma and questions just suck, suck, suck.

I have to write my own user manual here in stage two of my life.

Fresh Kills _ A Prada Moment - Day 15

Prada Moment - Day 15

I guess I have to begin at birth.  I am not one to remember pain but then again maybe nobody at birth knew how to identify pain.

Somehow it got stored in some miscellaneous data base until it could be identified and archived.

Surely females, when they give birth, feel the pain their mothers felt when they gave birth.  Not to say females understand what the infant feels.  Of course, infants for the most part cry being thrown out of warm liquid comfort zone and forced to change environments on a survive or die scale.

Perhaps for an infant, ignorance is a blessing.  That absolute no going back, you’re here, live with it, do or die, birth moment is best forgotten and left uncategorized and uncompared to any other.

Still I have wondered through the years, that maybe that Yung thing in psychology is the first two years of your life in data collecting still rumbling around uncatalogued or not capable of being catalogued later in life.  It is lost data.  It was useful data as is, at the moment, in the moment kind of way.  It was perhaps also strung together in memory, in hours or daily loops of learned behavior communication, which did not make it to the final eye opening totally present, that each of us marks our backward history by.

In a way it is not like riding a bike now in the present.  It is, the past, all that compressed, forgotten attempts to ride the bike fully.  To put together desire, passion, balance and perfect flight marks a multiple intersection of data rather than any one or few strings of data or memory.

Who, on the moon in a space suit and walking around a whole new environment remembers the first few days of flight training as a cadet?

I started this subject with birth and I guess I have to in this outer waiting room to the afterlife have to reconcile the mother thing. Life begins with mom.  Our earliest habits, tastes and behaviors mimic the person we first saw after birth and the one we clung to both before and after that birth.

With mom, it is difficult to reconcile the thing.  I am looking back.  I am using adult prejudice and adult preferences in dealing with, dissecting and commented on past memory data.

In a way there always was a distance between myself and my mother.
 

I begin to see her face in silhouette.

The scene is a seemingly rare moment when she acted out of the normal. In fact I have probably played this scene over in my mind through the years and seem to know all the facts underlying that scene now.

I am four years old.  We are walking to a nearby playground.  In my mind I have always known it was gray blustery March.  The impressive tall Schlichter clock tower over the old Schlichter rope factory dominates its surroundings as it has done since before the Civil War.  In fact, this building had supplied a very large percentage of the rope and rigging that ran the U.S. Navy in their blockade of the South during that war.

The playground is quiet, empty on a school day.  Seeding will be done in another month or two to replace the grass on one baseball diamond on the space. Years later my research would reveal that this playground for factory workers’ children, had at one time been a black chimney belching mill just like Schlichter’s.

The cyclone fence surrounding the playground is rusting just like the batting cage surrounding home plate of the baseball diamond.

One sole small building housing the boys and girls bathrooms and the groundskeeper’s office and supply closet sat sadly on the lot.  Nearby were two sliding boards, one small and the other large for bigger bids.  So too were a set of swings, one junior and one senior.
 

One “Jack and Jill” with stairs, platform, monkey bars and broad slide, with its gazebo like roof over the platform completed this working class recreation scene in Harrowgate, Philadelphia.

Next to the playground as a boundary marker and artificial wall was the elevated embankment of a factory feeder train track, the Trenton Avenue line.  The embankment was beyond more rusting cyclone fence and the large chunks of gravel on the embankment seemed to carry the black accent of coal dust and train soot of over half a century.

Into this cheerless, colorless, world, comes my mother with a four year old boy and a one and half year old sister, trying to do something different in her life. Perhaps her day trip was some kind of out of the box of a row house life experience, that house only some three or four blocks over.

Was this trip into the cold March day an escape from her depression?  Got to mention the depression.  She suffered from it and my father too.

Of course, nobody in those days went to see a shrink to talk about depression.  The thing was not called mental health.  You were either crazy or not.  Any problems, you talk to the priest.  Salvation of the soul was more important than any mental health issues.  Right?

I am looking back at my mother on this day.  I have looked back at this day as sort of a singular photo.  In a way all the millions of images available on TV, the internet, used to only be available in books and or encyclopedias.

In a way I am not framing this moment in a black and white photo thing in a photo album.  This image in the wind of the day is my Prada image, touchstone image on which all other images and memories have to go through as a gateway in and out of my own personal archive of memory and imprints on my soul.

Is this what it is all about?  Condensing? Compressing? Memory? A life? One life.  A soul.

Well, the Prada image that should have been painted by a Goya both in normal tones and lights as well as in the maddening images that only a Goya later in life, and crazy from the lead in his paints, could paint.

Don’t I deserve a Prada or a Louvre to store the treasures of my life?  Am I not the king of my destiny? Was the king of…

This reconciliation with mom and her issues that overlapped with my own issues in living never had a simple ending, a typical ending, a final closure.

The family broke up after my father’s death.  And I for some reason was not attracted to points west. Though in retrospect, his wife and my siblings had to leave, run away from the reality of my father’s death, his suicide.

I, perhaps instinctively, perhaps with unseen or unheard advice of guardian spirits or ancestors, did not want to follow them out west.
 

I had been away, out of town, when a man cheated out of his lousy steel worker’s pension of $240 a month, by some corporate raiders, had taken his own life on the last week of his last unemployment check.

And in retrospect, I could have done more but I was young and trying to get away from that damned Philly Quaker self-loathing subculture, a puritanical culture that overlapped with the self-hating Catholic culture of that other immigrant culture layer.

In a way I look at my Prada Image and see a decaying rope mill built before the Civil War.  In a way I can see a bright shiny thing of enterprise.  I can see a great grandfather, right off the boat, running away from the Potato Famine and drafted to go fight in Lincoln’s corporate war fighting for the northern mill owners, northern bankers, and northern railroads.

If I look at the death of an inner city like Philly I see the death of the old highways, the railroads, obsolete, gone.  I see the factories, and the factory workers culture die with the factories attached to these obsolete railroad highways, railroads accommodating factory workers and factory workers’ housing and economy dying, off in favor of the white burbs, plastic city on a hill destination, invented after WWII.

I can see a handful of generations in my bloodline each having to accommodate and bend with massive economic changes.  My own flight to New York City made me a migrant, an emigrant from this dying city.
 

I had since reconciled myself to the many economic factors that contributed to my father’s death.  Economic statistics are sometimes easier than the personal statistics attached to a death, any death, in a family.

The personal secrets that my mother and father harbored beneath the mean, hard factory workers life were always there, always just beneath the surface but always only for those who did not fear to tread, seek, find, understand, reconcile.
 

At this point, and my appearance in Limbo, I sense that I had finished with dad and his inputs to my life.  I had time and years and shrinks to help me reconcile my life regarding dad.  I had not put my faith in the power of priests to comfort or smooth over the pain of day to day living with a few pithy sayings and prayers. That damned fear of God thing.

I knew instinctively early on in life that I was surrounded by some weird bubble of secrets in the family, the culture of the neighborhood, in the national psyche, the global soul.