What a Long Strange Week It's Been

So, the book came out last week, the culmination of years of pouring myself out onto blank white pages. Then I crashed emotionally. Went into a non-intentional, self imposed exile. Only went out of the house twice all week, and everything got quiet, still, and sad. Sad, for the obvious reason that Joanne is not here to share in this accomplishment. Quiet and still because of my inability to pick up the phone and call upon my friends or family when I'm overcome with this ongoing and profound sadness. Quiet and still because of my fears and insecurities about the book, and all of me being out there for everyone to read about, or worse, not read about. Fear and insecurity that it isn't good enough, fearthat I've become irrelevant, invisible, forgotten. For two days, I sat, paralyzed on the couch, staring at the phone, wishing it to ring, trying to muster the courage, or whatever it takes to call someone, anyone. A long strange week ends today...I will get up, get out, buy and plant some flowers, go hang out with mom, go to a Super Bowl party tomorrow, then start a new and better week.

Thanksgiving

I spent many years living and working with convicts, criminals, and addicts…spent with intent; the intent of helping to lead people out of misery and pain. Not alone, but with others who found their way out. With all my heart, I believe that people lucky enough to overcome their misery and pain experience far greater extremes of bliss and joy than people who have no misery and pain I have known - - A woman who wrote in the autobiography she was asked to write in treatment “my nightmare as a child began the day I was born. My mother was addicted to heroin”. -A daughter who begged her mother to come out of a “nod” to just talk to her -A mother “nodded” out for 25 years, never considering the option of stopping – her grown son didn’t know her without heroin. -A man who has served 25 years for a murder in a drug deal gone bad; he has more character and goodness than most people I know. -A 58 year old woman, who remembers a rage deep enough at age 17 to kill her stepfather; she stopped because of the tears welling in her baby brother’s eyes. -A young man serving life for putting a gun to his crack dealer’s head; the crack dealer who pressed charges; the grandfatherly crack dealer who owns an apartment complex and sells crack to women and children. -A woman robbed, attacked, raped by three ski-masked men; 25 years later, she cannot be in a house alone at night; the nights forever changed. -A child with no childhood, born addicted to heroin – yet still innocent, naïve, later, so full of pain, taken out by five bullets in his chest. -A bright young woman who mutilates herself with sharp objects; to erase another pain far worse. -A man whose only dream was to have a television in his cell -A woman out of prison 21 years, haunted still by the memories of the times she ‘sold out’ morally to ‘survive’. -Men and women that lust desperately to ingest something into their noses, mouths, veins, eventually their souls– to escape the pain of their existence. I have known men and women, who lived on the bottom, grew up on the bottom –and then rose above the bottom, never to return. Thanksgiving – what a great holiday; it allows us a pause – to just be thankful! We all have a story that brought us to this day, this moment–stories of pain, trauma, betrayal, loss and grief, and as well, bliss, laughter, love. When we are able to overcome our story, integrate and cherish it, we will find profound peace of mind, gratitude, and humility. We cannot give thanks unless we are humble – we cannot give thanks without appreciating the bittersweet fact that somewhere, someone is worse off. Somewhere -A man, woman or child is dying of AIDS, or cancer – alone -A grandmother spends thanksgiving alone; her children lives are too busy this year -A child cowers in a corner, afraid of the beating to come -A mother cowers in a shelter; her eyes blackened after the beating -Unkind strangers avoid the hollow empty eyes of the homeless man who asks for a quarter -A man or woman is doing life without parole -And someone today, mourns loss that words cannot express… I am thankful for all I have learned, have yet to learn and for being able to share it with so many. I am thankful that I’ve had the privilege of dreaming for people who couldn’t yet dream for themselves. I am thankful for the gift of friends, and family. I am thankful that beneath the grief, I had twenty-five years with the love of my life. With all my heart to all of you– Happy Thanksgiving

Why this book?

Now that there is the absolute potential to get this book published, I've been advised that it's time to really start promoting it. Here are a few comments made by one of the many who have helped me to edit Five to Fifteen as to why this book. "Five to Fifteen is the detailed, inglorious, and riveting account of my descent into addiction and finally prison, then my battle to be free and to thrive. In part of the book, I describe the hardships and traumas – some bizarre and extreme - suffered by my parents and my parents’ parents, tracing some of the threads of my own inability to cope functionally to their choices and patterns of thinking and behavior. Not for the purpose of assigning blame or playing victim, though: my choices were and are my responsibility. Five to Fifteen is my story of trying to live, which very early on became a struggle; and ultimately, a fight to protect what piece of my soul might still be intact underneath layers of coping mechanisms. Fortunately, there were also magnificent times and events to remind me of life’s beauty."

I’ve heard the song of life a million times before, and as though compared to infinity, a million is practically none. I’ve learned to walk, to talk, almost to sleep. I’ve survived, and not survived – my skin, at times, no longer fit my face and I grew tangled feelings about talking and dreaming, my mouth and eyes open most of the time, yet I saw and said nothing until I came through, to the other side of the sky…the place where I learned that if I figured out a way to cherish the pain - to integrate it –then it became invaluable and precious. The same place where I learned that the vast realm of human emotion, the extremes of pure pain and pure bliss is relevant and in all of it, there are lessons to be learned. There were times I wasn’t and still am not sure what the lessons were, but I am confident that they exist. I garnered the strength to overcome the pain, but only after figuring out that I didn’t have a patent on pain, that pain is relative and everyone has it; albeit the details may differ between people, but mine is no more or less than anyone else’s. This realization afforded me compassion, empathy and solace, as well as the ability to laugh at the absurdities in life, the instances that make absolutely no sense, the knowledge that what seems unbearable today will be humorous tomorrow.

Glorious Chaos

The dream of being an author has been there since I a teenager. I had to figure out how to write myself out of reality. A reality of chaos, confusion, horrific abuse and beatings at the hands of my third stepfather, a mother who’s fear of him kept her from rescuing me, and three younger siblings who, no doubt, experienced helplessness at witnessing their sister slip that sixties subculture that was, both magic and madness. Fast-forward, fifty years…I finished that book, forty years in the making, and lately, find that I have nothing, and everything to say, but can’t write it out. (Writer’s block or reality block, not sure which) It’s a few days from a macabre massacre where a guy killed and wounded children, women and men who simply went to see a movie. Juxtaposed with such television fare as America’s Got Talent and the Olympics, the nearing football season (yippee for football!) and everything in between, I can’t write it out, can’t write out what my reality is now, at almost sixty years old, and young (young in my fantasy reality). I was able to integrate, cherish, and transform the pain, chaos, and consequence of my younger years into lifework that gave me heartbreak and miracles; both, which healed and gifted to me, such a rare and precious reality. I daresay, no other work or life could have been better. So, I’m semi-retired, with the finest circle of friends one could ask for, a complicated, yet loving, lovable family, and the love of my life, kicking it after almost 25 years of work, and I can’t write out the world in all its glorious chaos, or, perhaps I just did. Have a glorious day!

On sunsets, monsoons, prison, "the hole"- 1978 or so

For the next two years, I become intimately familiar with doing hole time for infractions of one kind or another. One particular point of contention came up repeatedly. That was about sunsets – or rather, being deprived of them. Sunsets were something precious, a big deal to me. Having lived in Arizona most of my life, during the monsoon season of the year, I had been privileged to witness the most exquisite on the planet; they took my breath away. It was rough losing those completely natural, free displays of magnificence, and my defiance on this issue resulted in my being sent to the hole three or four times. Officers Hatton or Valenzuela would announce across the yard on a megaphone “YARD CLOSED!!!!!” On more than one occasion, I resisted and declared, “No, and I’m not going in.” At this, the officers radioed for recruits and four- pointed me; in other words, I was tackled by four officers, who secured both my arms and legs, then dragged me to the hole. I was left there for fifteen days each time, punishment for refusing a direct order.

An excerpt from a day in that life....so long ago

Days and weeks passed. I remained unnoticed, provoked my own isolation and stared into the blankness of my living room. Rain. Soft thoughts and memories of convicts as they laughed, hands joined as they walked in the rain. Rainbow-skied reflections in steel prison puddles. We were, sometimes, ironically, happy. The beauty of some morning-bright sunrises tauntingly escaped my pen. I just couldn’t catch the words. Writers’ minds - be they poets, journalists, classicists - must be painful things, always, because of all that never gets written. Unspeakable, unprintable things occur in a day, or an hour, or in some unreachable recess of their mind.