Took a walk around town this morning. Didn’t have a particular direction in mind, just started walking and let something else take over. I always wonder what the something else is but I can never articulate it. I can detect it though, at least I think I can. It can be noticed like the way you can tell someone is standing behind you even if your back is turned to them. You sense it somehow.
Was walking past the bus stop and noticed a penny on the ground. Decided to pick it up even though I usually don’t bother. I don’t know why I don’t anymore. My brother and I would do it all the time as kids. There was something exciting about finding money on the ground, even if it was just change. I check the date instinctively. The year was 1981.
I try to think what was going on that year. I wasn’t alive then and I could probably look up some things but I stop and imagine what things might have been like. I try and imagine my current self and age in 1981, taking a walk and thinking about whatever I’m thinking about. Everything I think of as me the same, just in that year.
It feels like it doesn’t work. Like all that can be felt is the current year, with all its prevailing characteristics; the tornadoes of fads and opinions touching down, things known as current events, all wreaking their own brand of havoc on the day, decade, or century of prevalence, then disappearing, waiting to reappear again.
Cross the railroad tracks. It’s like a divider that splits the town in two hemispheres. These tracks have significance to me. They were one of the first exploratory paths I walked on, a sort of forbidden highway that went straight for a little bit then curved around a bend and out of sight. Where do they go and how far? It always seemed like they just kept going. And you could walk on them if you wanted, though as a kid I got the impression this was frowned upon. And sometimes I’d see people passing through our town start walking up them to the next one. Man, it’d be cool to follow them all the way to the end someday. Maybe I will.
There were some people who walked down these tracks that never walked back the same. I’ll get to that later.
As I step over the rails and creosote soaked ties, passing under the loom of utility wires overhead, I begin walking up the path toward the street and see there’s a tiny American flag planted in the ground next to a telephone pole. It’s an odd spot for one to be and like so many of the things I see, I wonder about how it got there. Who had this with them, decided to stoop down then work this back and forth into the hard packed ground, which probably took a full minute or so, and why?
Maybe one of these passersby planted it. Could be a local but the location feels too haphazard. The path from the street, down the slight embankment and over the tracks to the street on the other side, sees a decent amount of foot traffic on a regular day, especially if the weather is nice. This informal path connects a nearby bus stop, shopping center and main thoroughfare to a road which goes into the next town over opening one up to different bus lines and points beyond. Crossing the tracks is a cut through point, and if you stay on the tracks instead of taking the road it’s kind of a shortcut into that next town, even though it parallels the road the whole way.
Tobacco highway. Walking the tracks up to that next town takes you to an offramp that connects you with a road that’s a few hundred feet from a convenience store that would sell you cigarettes or whatever age restricted products you wanted. They really didn’t care but sort of pretended like they did. You had to go in with someone who was approved, or that was my understanding and how I remember it. It was a big deal and a form of bragging to be “sold” to. ‘They sell to me’ was a common phrase heard and anyone who wasn’t sold to kept company with those who were.
It went like this. You took the walk up to the store with someone who was approved, went in with them so they could buy a grape Game or whatever, and as they were paying that person would indicate in some way that you were with them and cleared to buy as well, by yourself next time.
Sometimes it worked. There were times it didn’t. Sometimes a family member or friend who didn’t know this operation would be working that day and ask for ID. Or just take a look at you and say no.
Near the tracks is one of those whiteish barrel trashcans and next to it is the disemboweled innards of a computer. Judging by the pile, it was an old PC desktop. Why it was right next to a mostly empty trashcan and not inside it is anyone’s guess. Could have been one of those situations where you have something with you that needs to be thrown out and something somehow gets screwed up with every opportunity you have to do so and so after awhile you get angry hauling around this stuff and in a sudden fit of irritated panic chuck it out the vehicle in a drive by dumping, finally ridding yourself of this weird feeling of having this stuff that was supposed to be thrown out following you around.
When you zoom out, the life of a person looks more bizarre than anything else.
I keep walking. It’s a crisp Saturday morning but perfect for a stout hoodie. My hands are a little cold but my body is warm. A Hellcat roars off from the neighborhood convenience store it was parked out front of. The muffled sound of blasting music made sometime within the last year momentarily became louder and crystal clear when the driver opened the door then became muffled again and drowned out by the snarl of the engine.
I head towards the main road, a busy three, occasionally two lane highway not really built to handle the volume of traffic it saw now. I was about to cross it, because I wanted a coffee and breakfast sandwich from the convenience store chain located catty-corner from me. It used to be the site of a restaurant our family liked that we would sometimes go to for various occasions, like birthday celebrations or funeral luncheons. It had a 5 stair out back that we used to skate, and a trick down it, even just an ollie, felt amazing. To the right of the stairs was a ledge with a curb that was about a foot high that separated the higher level of the parking lot from the lower level. As a kid this drop seemed massive. I remember one time we were all out there skating the stairs and this one kid’s stepdad’s son was with us and came over from another town to see what our spots were like. He was unimpressed with the spots we took him and was generally just an asshole. He took a look at our ledge and ollied it first try like it was nothing, then immediately kick flipped it as if to say fuck your spot. We looked at him like he was a god.
It’s wild to know that a human could be free from all interior pain and suffering in an instant. Like that. But this is thought to not be possible, and if it is it’s approached in every way that does not and cannot work. In all honesty, nothing works. So now what, I think.
There’s no changing it for anyone else. It could change for a particular person, were that person to become so goddam fed up with a life of constant pain and misery that they were willing to jettison everything they’ve ever heard or been told in their entire life to see something for what it actually is, thereby freeing themselves from the suffering of that particular problem via some type of visceral understanding, so thorough and comprehensive that inner turmoil no longer has the conditions necessary to arise. And continuing in this direction eventually leads you to the source of all suffering, the final boss on the last level, the mind itself.
I think abiding peace and freedom from the mind is the birthright of every person. However this birthright goes unclaimed because it is thought not to exist, and if one suspects it does, chases it through a variety of intermediaries without realizing it, all while going nowhere, suffering every step of the way.
All existing paths lead nowhere. The only path that takes you somewhere does so like a carpet that unrolls itself before you with each step you take, in increments perfectly sized to the stride.
I get the coffee and start off down the sidewalk next to the highway facing the oncoming traffic, heading out of my town and towards the next one.
Across the street is the old Chinese buffet, now an auto parts retailer. Miss that place. They may not have always had the best food handling practices but man if they didn’t have a great lunch special for years. I always thought it was funny how sometimes you’d be in there up at the serving area, spooning some pork fried rice on to your plate and look over to see some unkempt dude a few feet away coughing up a lung while emptying the entire tray of crab Rangoon on to his plate just because. There was probably a cellphone clipped to a holster that was attached to his belt and he was probably wearing a stained t-shirt with a sarcastic statement written on it. Buffets are magnets for this type.
Today I happen to be walking along every artery traveled by people who only walk everywhere for a variety of reasons. The TDBU interstate, but it’s not just roads. These paths go into small wooded areas that sit on the borders of towns, often with a small clearing and somewhere to sit in case you need a private place to drink beers during the daytime, down embankments that lead to mini rock beaches beneath bridges, and around the backs of boarded up retailers to the loading docks with locks rusted shut, pallets piled up, and the kind of graffiti bored suburban kids write on the big roll-up doors. Abandoned trailers with flat tires sit nearby and wait, and sometimes a cop monitoring traffic or a utility worker on break in his truck wait with them.
What’s happening.
I walk past the hotel where the cops are always getting called. It’s the kind of place you go if you just need a really cheap place to stay for the night that’s actually not that cheap but less than the nearby alternatives. Most of the incidents that happen there have something to do with drug use, once heroin but currently fentanyl for the most part. My recollection of addiction in this area involved the people I grew up with from this town and the next one over. Kids I played Little League and whiffle ball at the courts with, skated with, rode bikes and walked around town with, kids from the area. The more routine experimentation with high school drinking and finding someone to smoke a blunt with at some point veered into trying pills, and gradually spread out further like a ripple in a pond. This one kid got a hold of his grandma’s perc script after she got her hip replaced. This was his entry point and they became fun to take plus lucrative to sell, until that day, that one day whenever it happened, impossible to pinpoint, this other friend was telling me years later, the day you wake up sick. You wake up knowing you need one, and you can’t go long without it. Those fun times were replaced by an unspoken compulsion: we have to get these one way or another. And so began a trajectory in the lives of these kids, the ones who took that walk down the tracks and around the bend to the trestle to do what they did and hang with the heads that were down there, and the unfolding of all this over a decade plus period of time, a timeline that saw incarceration, death, and the destruction of life in a variety of ways.
I was in the mix but not a regular fixture in these groups. Whatever the reason, skateboarding, family, friends, sports, or a sense of something that couldn’t be articulated at the time, I didn’t get pulled into the vortex of addiction that came to define this area so heavily during those days. It feels too hard to conclusively say why this didn’t happen, considering how many opportunities there were and being at the age and time of life where it takes almost nothing to try something. It feels like it could have maybe gone either way in all honesty. Because there’s always a counterexample to a situation. The kid from a good family who destroys their life and ends up dead literally or for all practical purposes. And the kid from the worst neighborhood with the worst parents who seems immune to the effect their surroundings exert upon them. Why something goes one way or another is a matter not determinable by a person in this lifetime, not that this is all that important, but if curiosity wonders why, it’s possible events of enormous significance turn on decisions as small as deciding to go outside and hang with a particular friend on a particular afternoon. Something about some day, that day, whatever it was, just saying fuck it why not for some reason, let’s see what’s goodie, see who’s at the tress. Could’ve changed the entire direction of life. Who knows.
I walk past a small roadside memorial that’s been faded by the sun. There’s three crosses decorated with artificial flowers and another decoration in the shape of a butterfly made out of the same. They’re all propped up against the fence and partially covered by some vegetation hanging down from the top. One of the crosses is leaning up against the other, like someone being embraced after receiving terrible news. The fence behind them is like a filter, preventing the leaves and fast food wrappers from passing through to the other side.
I cross over a small bridge that goes over one of the tributaries of the Delaware. It’s hard for me to tell whether this is a stream, a creek, or a river, and if what it flows into is a marsh, swamp, or bog. It looks like a mess, not like a pretty, scenic body of water like you see on the tourism brochures in hotel lobbies. I look over the side of the rail and several feet below me are a few shopping carts sunken into the mud. It’s low tide and they jut out of the top of the water much like the plant life that calls this environment home. One time as a kid I saw a couple dozen or so carts that had been thrown into the water on the other side of the road, the one closest to the shopping center. Maybe some angry customer chucked them over the side in a fit of rage, trying to get back at the retailer for not accepting an outdated coupon or something. Could have also just been some bored kids with nothing else to do on their summer break.
I walk past a used car lot that has locations on both sides of the road. There’s a lot of these places up and down this route. I remember my dad telling me that way back some of these places were getting cars on the cheap that had been flooded out by Sandy and were sprucing them up, turning back the odometer a bit, then reselling them.
I look the lot over. Not much selection on this side. Might be an overflow lot. A few older sedans, a work van, a couple trucks. A clean white pickup catches my eye. 96 Dodge Ram 1500 Club Cab Long Bed for $4,996 as-is, no warranty. Looks decent. Mileage is 190,688. Automatic trans. 11 miles city, 16 highway. Seems like the kind of truck you would buy if you knew trucks like that and just needed something to tool around in. Maybe plow a little snow on the side.
A few months back I was driving home from work along this same road and a naked woman was walking the same direction I’m headed now. It was in the 40s that night. She looked haggard and distraught, talking vigorously with her hands while shouting to an invisible audience. Probably came from that motel.
I would do this anywhere. Walk on sidewalks, trails, roads, and tracks just to see where they go. Sometimes I just need to walk around and look at things. It allows me to pick up on the subtext of life; seeing patterns in action.
Passing a building materials company, self-service car wash, a pizzeria coming up. Mobile home park across the street. I remember this one time growing up my friend, my brother, and myself all rode around in the back of his next door neighbor’s pickup truck while he drove us around that trailer park looking for the person or people who stole my bike, which was outback my friend’s house one sunny summer afternoon while we were all hanging out inside. My friend’s neighbor was a cool guy but also inclined to switch into this extreme anger mode if something provoked him and when this happened he could be scary. It was this single minded focus he had on destroying whoever or whatever he perceived to be his enemy in that moment that made me realize years later how fortunate we all were that we didn’t find that bike or whoever had taken it. I remember him putting a bat in the truck saying let’s go get your bike back dude. There were also multiple weapons of opportunity in the form of work tools he kept in the bed. When he jumped into action after we told him my bike was gone, we immediately followed his lead and hopped in the back as he reversed down the driveway, not knowing what to expect. My adrenaline was pumping, wondering if we would get into a fight, if the cops would be involved, and how cool it was to be a kid riding around in the bed of a truck as it swerved and sped around the streets of our town. We didn’t stay out for long and basically just searched the area for the bike or a clue as to its whereabouts. For some reason we decided to take a ride through this trailer park although I don’t remember why. Maybe someone we talked to said we should. I kept thinking something bad was going to happen there because we were driving around slowly looking at people’s property and I think the residents were starting to wonder who we were and what we were doing there. We returned to my friend’s house empty handed and although I never saw that bike again, in retrospect I think that outcome was a blessing in disguise.
They ran out of sidewalk apparently so now I’m on hard packed dirt with grass flourishing on both sides. I’ve passed the businesses and am now technically on state owned property I think. There’s small clusters of yellow buttercups blooming all over this tract and they look really nice on this unimportant patch of grass. It’s these little random patches of dirt or grass near intersections, roundabouts, and underneath overpasses. Little scraps and parcels of land that are used to park construction vehicles or highway department equipment. Sometimes wildflowers grow here and you’re not supposed to cut them although I don’t think anyone is doing that. You pass these areas all the time when you drive. I’m not saying they’re important but these are the things I notice for some reason.
1-800-Gambler. It just pops into my head. No one is calling that. It’s just a disclaimer. If you’re addicted to gambling, or anything else for that matter, you’re on your own. This is how it’s always been. It all comes back to the same thing. If you don’t have a stop-at-nothing desire to be free of something, you won’t be.
Which makes me think of something that I don’t want to think of but rings out inside with a tone that is synonymous with truth. I must want the turmoil of my life. The ups, the downs, and the rest. I must like those rollercoasters. They give me something to do. They’re how I see myself and explain things to other people. Something I can point to and say look at what I’m dealing with. This turmoil is the bricks of a self-image constantly needing work, attention, maintenance, effort. It’s exhausting. And believing it to be real. I have set up refuge in this amusement park and called it my life. Don’t fully know why I continue to accept this but it has to do with the perception of it all. It seems like this is the way things are. It doesn’t seem like they could be different. That maybe my life doesn’t have to be this way is a dawning thought moving at the speed of a glacier. I guess I just don’t want to be free of this yet. Maybe ever. Because then what. What will I do then. At some point. If and when I’m so thoroughly sick of this charade. I’ll find the strength of Samson within me and bring those columns down. The temple of self-image. Collapse it once and for all. No more images, no more identities. And buried within the rubble will be what I currently think of as me, those images and identities, now comic and indistinguishable from the debris of my old life surrounding it. And what possibilities that opens up, I can’t even imagine.
More random thoughts pop up. I have a college degree but I don’t use it. I don’t know why I got it. I just thought it was the next thing to do. A person just goes to college if they can. There’s nothing wrong with it. I’m just not wired for the jobs that would require it, and frankly employment in general. I can’t be anyone’s employee for any significant period of time. My final conclusion is that I need to make stuff, anything. That’s the only thing I can do in this world that stands a chance at satisfying me. I wouldn’t have made it 10,000 years ago, let alone a shorter timespan. I realize that now. Even if the only safety and survival was the group, I’d inevitably get fed up and still bolt at some point, even if it was the last thing I did. Starve to death, get mauled by an animal; I’d feel the pangs of hunger from my body, the spike of adrenaline and terror as I make a futile sprint from an animal that doesn’t know or care I exist, only sees its next meal. That would be my life.
Maybe one comes back. Maybe one doesn’t. Maybe things get recycled and recast in different ways. Come back with a different set of aware-able functions. Maybe they don’t.
Getting to walk around but not having to is the kind of day I’m having. Lot of the people I pass or encounter have to walk. They might not have a car, or a license, or be allowed to get one. Life is insane. No one knows anything about life. Almost everyone thinks they do. And what that does to the life of a human…it’s unspeakable.
First it was percs, then heroin when perc prices skyrocketed, now fentanyl. Then it’ll be something else. I remember this girl from the area. She would disappear for weeks or months at a time, her family would put up missing posters, she would reappear and come home for a bit then disappear again. Once an attractive and well-liked girl, last picture I saw of her was on someone’s Facebook. She was unrecognizable.
All my thoughts are trash. The mind is false. It’s not good. But it’s not bad either. It’s just the mind and churns out thoughts all day long. And if I think the thoughts enough, then that is suppose to make them “me” somehow? That’s how that works? If that’s what this is. The same mind that just fires off thoughts from wake until sleep, and sometimes while sleeping. I don’t need this mind. But I have it. Feels like cancer in the sense that cancer is essentially taking a normal function or process of the body and turbocharging it in one direction or another. Whatever the mind is, it’s become this thing that some part of my awareness ability has begun to realize and subsequently treat as a separate entity embedded within me, all powerful but with an Achilles heel I have yet to understand. It’s dragged down my life because I believe what it says. The rub is I enjoy the deceptive pleasure of the mind’s carpet bombing more than the perceived pain of transcending it, at least that’s where things currently stand. I do get something out of it. But what am I really getting? What have I actually gotten?
I’m walking back towards the house now along this little path that connects me back to the town I started this walk in. Didn’t feel like taking the road. Was feeling nostalgic instead and decided to see if it was still there. It starts off as an access road for the power line towers then gradually branches off into a foot path that links up with the tracks and railroad trestle. I’ve always thought of these little paths and even the tracks themselves as a kind of alternative highway system that exists out of sight of the general public. The concrete bases of the towers are the equivalent of rest stops along the turnpike. Even though you’re maybe a hundred yards from a housing development or road, you sometimes feel like you’re in the middle of nowhere.
I cross over the trestle and stop for a moment which turns into a few minutes. I look around and remember the people who hung out down here, myself included, and it feels like returning to the aftermath of something, something I don’t know exactly what. A certain kind of ground zero. Sitting on the tracks, smoking a cigarette and taking in the surroundings, being a kid and thinking so differently than now I wouldn’t know that was me if it wasn’t for my body. I almost don’t think it was. Everything in life is an illusion. Am I the thoughts I had a second ago, or 16 years? Is that what “me” is? A collection of likes, dislikes, thoughts, words I spoke becoming things I “said?” Petrified accumulations people associate with me that contributes to the buildup and creation of something called a “me?” If that’s the case I don’t need a me.
I resume my walk down the tracks and am passing the backside of the American Legion. An old man is wearing a baseball cap sporting a little red flower attached to it with a piece of paper the size of a fortune cookie message underneath it smoking a cigarette and it smells good. I wonder what era vet he is. Probably Vietnam but maybe Korea. He’s just staring off into space, the cigarette clamped to the corner of his mouth, everything but the smoke perfectly still.
As I pass him I hear the sound of a train off in the distance. It’ll be here soon but I’ll be long gone. Other people will hear the train, maybe even part their curtains to catch a glimpse of it. I’m about to pass the tiny American flag planted in the soil and make a left toward the house. For some reason it reminds me of Iwo Jima. I found out that the planting of the flag on Mt. Suribachi, the second flag planting of the day, was an ordinary moment to everyone involved and it was only afterwards that the particular image snapped off by the cameraman became the symbol of the war that it is today, of American victory in a campaign of insane bloodshed and tribulation in a war of more of the same.
I toss out my coffee cup in the trash can with the computer guts spilled next to it, even though I could just as easily throw it on the ground and it would blend in immediately with its surroundings. It’s been a good morning as far as I’m concerned. It’ll be time to start getting ready for work soon and I can feel it warming up as the sun climbs the sky. At this rate I know I’ll have to take the hoodie off soon.