JUNE 1,1997
This is where we are now. He and I, and those about us, the living props of our ordinary, and through a leap of faith, by a stretch of the imagination by god!-maybe extraordinary lives. Through the balcony window we see luxurient trees and further on past the carefully tended grounds also green,with patches of brown hard packed earth where the boys of westminster summers have successfully paved basepaths and bases through their hundreds of games over the fifteen summers we have lived here, is the pool. We have not been swimming in several years.
It is a long story, how we got here, our staying here and now our imminent departure for greener pastures in Warrington,which through our stay has become as congested and commercially viable as Manhattan was in 1982 when we left for this reason.....Ah I am trying to be inspired,trying so hard but the birds who visit our balcony are tweeting at me,derivesively it seems.......Sunday morning.
JUNE 6, 1997 Another work week is almost over. Friday morning. We've all been waiting for the weekend,plans are in place for some, for others the excitement lies in making the plans, seeing the plans come to fruition. Personally I have no plans. For me to make a plan involves a part of me which has been inactive for almost a generation now. Now plans are made for me by my family for whom I am a vital cog. I am always the designated driver in this family though the boys are catching up. Brigitte will never drive again after discovering her incompatabilitry with the road but Nick and Greg will be driving on their own before the year is out. Then they will pass us by. I accept the inevitability of their generation surpassing ours. I only hope they will someday take the world seriously. For it seems while I successfully made them see the humor in every situation, I was unable to impart the underlying seriousness of everything, the importance of achieving the proper balance between the two modes of experiencing. But I have faith and I look forward to seeing how they solve the puzzle......
JUNE 16,1997 We've been trying to find a house to rent in Doylestown,which is five miles away from where we live now,but light years ahead in a sense only someone who has lived in Manhattan and walked to work along a path that passed by the Metropolitan Museum of Art and through Central Park, can appreciate.New York snobs that we are we have tried hard to fit into the community we have inhabited for almost fifteen years now, but apparently failed, and in our failure, succeeeded at keeping our noses up in the air. We, Brigitte and I, like walking around on paved streets past houses and stores,old Victorian houses and charming cafes and shops which have a style not born in some real estate agency but in utilitarian need ,adhering to some esthetic standard not tainted by greed and the bland face of modernity. I hope we find what we're looking for , or everthing leading up to these years will have been leading up to nothing and ending up nowhere. Then what will we reminisce about and where?
JUNE 29,1997
Its Sunday morning and my energies are being concentrated on the big move.Yes we found a place, not in Doylestown , still in Warrington, but a different Warrington,an oasis(as Brigitte has labeled it) within Warrington. A unique house featuring stainglass windows, a waterfall cascading down the living room wall, a bamboo forest and other amenities you dont often find in modern houses.
Now all we have to do is go through fifteen years of accumulated "stuff", sifting through this huge stockpile of seeming necessities to siphon off only the essentials that will enable us through the next two years. Of course everyone's idea of essential is different ,especially between older and younger generation, where the concept of time is radically different,thereby further stretching and redefining the quintessence of essential. As for me I need just about everything or I wouldnt have saved it all in the first place.I hope my wife doesnt read this....
JULY 8,1997
Hi.Long time away from my desk. I love those answering machine messages from people at work......."away from their desk" as if they were chained to it when in reality they are probably never at their desks and may not even have a desk. Or stationary which reads "From The Desk of" to denote the severity and authority of the memo writer, in lieu of the presidential seal. Well anyway I have moved into a house at 2196 Juneberry Court and the rest of the family will trail along in the next few days. I am the trailblazer, the pathfinder, the one who goes in first, the one who knows the way, the original dweller, the proverbial one who gets in on the ground floor. Basically its me living temporarily amongst unopened boxes and furniture strued everywhichaway, in other words chaos.
Last night when I went to sleep I was suddenly assaulted by fireflies or lightning bugs, creating wierd lights around my room. At first I thought it was tiny alien craft upset about the mars p;ictures, the clarity of our effort there, and then I thought it might be a flash back or a true flashback to the first lights in my bedroom at 1248 Avenue U. A literary metaphor in the flesh. Then I remembered the landlady's remark about lightning bugs at night, a piece of detail I didnt even think I had retained from our few rambling conversations. I thought I never listened but I guess I saved this unwittingly. Wow I said to myself and continued my journey into sleep.........
JULY 27,1997 The apartment where we spent fifteen years , a solid chunk of my life is empty of our furniture, save a piano which B struggled to add to our possessions years ago, to give her sons a musical legacy. For a while it sat in the building lobby, crying out to me,causing me to sign inwardly for my wife and her good intentions. Later one of my sons studied briefly on it(it was no longer in the lobby then, a man weighing they say four hundred pounds, carried it into the elevator and out of the elevator into our apartment). Now it waits for a new home.
Everything else is here or in the trash.on its way to better life. By here I mean our now official residence at 2196 Juneberry Court where we sweat out the hot summer days without air conditioning but enjoy twilight meals in our courtyard, remembering similar circumstances in New York, pre-children, pre-middleaged angst (as distinguished from teenage angst from which our sons suffer intermittently).Still, though empty ,though a bare shadow of its overstuffed self when we lived there and barely survived or thrived later but were on top of each other and crowded into corners by our tattered and tenacious possessions, I walk the rooms sensing the loss,feeling still as though something has been left behind, not the cat, not the razor blade in the medicine cabinet, not the odd sock or the odd oddity undiscribable but something tangible, something real some protoplasmic being fifteen years old coughing dust balls, belching out thousands of hours of second hand smoke,but underneath it all, an innocence, a virgin purity, made expressely of dreams unrealized, potentials unfilfilled, tender faithful patience and eternal love.......
SEPTEMBER 1, 1997 It has been a while since I reported to myself or to those of you who are able to access this page and read it with interest. There is after all so much to read on the internet, the web, the whatever and everyone is crying for attention. I realized this in New York the other day seeing the thousands of people walking the midtown streets each trying so hard to be noticed to be realer than the next guy to make a difference to make an impression to live a life unlike any other, or in some cases just to keep up. But its so hard! And so many fail! So everybody comes here but nobody can come HERE except me and you and its a lonely feeling indeed. So if you visit, dont be shy, talk to me........
OCTOBER 19,1997 Its late in the season. Fall is falling, our outdoor patio is covered with leaves where cobblestones used to be,actually pine cones since we have a veritable forest out there. Im off from work today and naturally I park myself at the computer to be entertained and possibly to entertain,through this engaging media. Much has happened since we last spoke but most of it is just water under the bridge. And I cant picture the water or the bridge,its just an ungainly metaphor that doesnt connect anything to anything,its just words limply expressing the feeling of life passing by in a vaccum. Little is felt, time is used and abused but not perused for its intrinsci secrets:how within the space we are allotted can we access the heartfelt emotional wells which lie deep below the surface,rarely stirred. Ocasionally a stone falls in there and sends out ripples which naturally cause a rippling effect and I awaken and wonder what year it is and what Im doing....
(NO DATE-NOVEMBER?
I have been in a strange mood lately, although Im pushing fifty,
interested in the future, still dazzled by the past. And the past is suddenly in the room with me, when I talk on the telephone with ghostly figures of years ago, those I had relegated to the pages of my autobiographical fiction, in forms I created from their actual presences but distilled through the lens of my own perspective.
Then they come into that space and transcend the bounds I had created for them;trouble brews. But it is easily rectified by thinking:they are no longer relevant, the characters are forever, this new information is only pertinent to my social self, not to my creative self. I own them now and can do with them what I wish, the fictional beings that belong to me by virtue of my having invested my own energies in their manufacture, in recording their essences at the time they were intertwined with my own past selves, also lost to history but preserved for historians or ordinary readers with their own imaginations.
Specifically I am speaking of Harvey Siegal and Caroline Hand, not even their real names. Within the last few weeks I have spoken to both and now their present images cloud the fictional horizon. What the hell is he talking about.....Well last time I saw her Caroline was still living at home with her parents. I had met my wife and our ways parted. Not till the other day did I speak to her, not after seventeen years of separation, though there were many times I thought of her, or at least of the person I had known and entrapped in my own creation, something half her half me,all mine. Like Dean Moriarty was half Neal Cassady half Jack Kerouac and Cassady himself later called himself Kerouacassady, a combination of his own personality merged with Kerouac's vision which had draped him in all the years since the publication of "On The Road", made people's expectations what they were, and had no doubt influenced Neal's own perception of himself.
Caroline had not changed,she still sounded her old mischievous self, a little dimmed perhaps by circumstances but still up for adventure. She told me she was glad we could now "reunite our energies" and I looked forward to that, whatever form it would take. As for Harvey, his story is told in Canarsie 2 and will continue as I find that which I need to continue, that energy, that motivation to tell the tale; and we will see which is stronger, the past with its dark shadows and bursts of heavenly light or the present with no color or shape until you take the picture.
DECEMBER 6,1997 Its a lazy Saturday, December 6, day after my mom's birthday. The plumber is here fixing leaks....Im killing time before I have to go to work...I notice people visiting my site but no one writes to let me know what they think. So I have to proceed without caution,,certain that everything will be all right,which I truly believe. That what I think is relevant to others, and resounds in others lives,, to make them read on. We're all just trying to get by, watching the others trying to get ahead, as if their was a place to get to where you could rest on your laurels or count your money in peace, contentment and security. Ive never been interested in money, some say that was my problem. I have found out its value, how a little more can make your life a little more bearable, but this still does not awaken my competititve spirit or rather my non existent tendency to whore my talents for money, to sell what I know or what I think to the highest bidder. So hats off to me, Ive maintained my integrity. Though I have sold my time cheaply to various companies over the years. But as I told my wife this morning, its all just a game and you can play it any way you want to. This is a variation of what I told her...I started to tell her life was a joke but then remembered what Dylan said and I drew back from that, how some say life is a but a joke but you and Ive we've been through that and this is not our fate....No there are serious things here but they have nothing to do with the daily job situtation, what goes on there is not to be taken literally, just passed through as Kerouac would,,just a soul passing through not desiring or wishing to jeopardize his enlightenment with the tarnish of the world of barter.
Boy can I ramble....but you've had the same or similar thoughts or know of someone who did and want to understand their point of view so here it is for you to behold....Thanks for listening
DECEMBER 21,1997 Im feeling somewhat depressed but i havent been terribly elated lately so its not a big step down. Nothing special is happening in my life except its continuance which is a blessing but a mixed one at that. I have been workin every day so there is no time to think deep thoughts,the kind that have sustained me all these years. I tender my interests only briefly and in a haphazard fashion, unable to commit any further, due to lack of time. And lack of time leads ultimately to lack of enthusiasm. And these lacks leave me lackluster and bored, battling this middling depression not even severe enough or threatening enough to cause me any pause in my basic activities. I function but that is all and it is not enough..
JANUARY 1998 If this is a new year(1998) how do I tell it from the old one? Nothing has really changed. I am working as many hours, still not doing what I want to be doing and feel as frustrated and lonely as I did before. So how is this a new year? Perhaps in time, as the months roll on and over, will I see a difference, a subtle change in the way the business or personal nature of the world is reflected upon myself. When those of us who are self centered, egotistical creatures tend to our chosen(not necessarily by ourselves) trades we suddenly realize how the world truly pays us no mind, how our individual souls with their particular needs desires and quirks are of no practicual use whatsoever:they are only revealed at our own expense, for our own gratification, and the world at large could certainly do without, that is the ultimate conclusion. And of what importance is any of this soul searching, philosophical cul sac? None whatsoever, that is my point. Ha ha ha.......
FEBRUARY 16,1998 Its been a while. Either I have had nothing to say or conflicting voices in my head kept me from saying it. Mostly I lack motivation,feeling as though these words trail off into space......The other side of me(as there were only two,while actually I might just resemble an octagon,metaphorically speaking,soul-wise) doesnt care about public consumption,simply involves itself in the regurgitation,of impulses,of self parody,of implosive elements which must be uttered or burn us in here with their intense heat or light....Ah fiddlesticks,this is why I gave this up...!
NOVEMBER 26,1998 Much,much later, Thanksgiving day, the other truly american holdiay but much quieter than the fourth,more respectful of decency and calm tradition,almost religious when you think of the indians and the pilgrims sitting down to their feast, laying down their weapons and their mutual fear and thus,dislike for each other. But I dont think of the pilgrims and the indians, not that im not religious or calm or decent,I cant help but think of John Callison and I Lucien Golden or Silver or Silverfish or Crystalball,sitting down to our blue plate special feast at a restaurant in Columbia Missouri on thanksgiving day 1977,mutually bereft of our families and having no one else to dine with,sharing this holiday with each other and our terribly religous thoughts.I was thinking of suicide,he probably of killing me for telling him how a girl that he had shared a night with and probably was about to share his heart with,had made a pass at me,tendered an invitation and though I had declined, out of respect for him, it didnt matter I was the messenger and had to be killed.Or maybe this happened later, it probably did, Im taking the liberty of compressing events from the actual past into the fictionalized past for dramatic resonance. And Im thinking of this awfully important american holiday and missing my many families, my original crew from harlem(the great Henry "Hank" Golden)my strong promethean type father who loved me as no other and died when I was still a kid, many thanksgivings ago, and my still alive,still feisty once supermodel beautiful mom, the gracious and gregarious Evelyn Golden nee Fatblatt. And of course my brother whose association with the biggest department store in the world once enabled his little children to ride on the floats, while mine had to watch from the wilds of pa. on television because we were somehow estranged though born out of the same genetic pool,swimming farther and farther away from each other as the years narrowed down to a precious few. And the next generation of the missing(to me)my children Nicholas and Gregory who hate me at the moment or maybe for the rest of their lives if they choose to disregard everything that came before, the eighteen years I spent on their behalf,being mean and crazy but secretly devoted to their well being to their increasingly extravagant christmas gifts.I love them and I need them in my life or this is no thanksgiving, there is no peace,no mutual respect of lifestyles,no laying down of arms.I am the wild indian, thought to be savage, they are pilgrims in america who do not understand my strange ways.
APRIL 27,2002 We live in Hatboro now,around the corner from a mysterious establishment known as Daddy Pops. Its really not a mystery per se,as it is quite clear that it is an old style diner. On Sundays especially the parking lot is jammed, the sidewalk outside is crowded with enthusiastic diners and would be diners, and what you or someone older might call a hubbub is definitely ensuing. But then in the evenings when the doors are closed and only a few lights remain on, you wonder how a restaurant can survive just by serving breakfast, no matter how many flapjacks they flip or eggs they scramble. That's the mystery,right there, right now. And the "we" has changed as faithful readers of this diary(heh,heh) must have noted by now.I have a new partner in crime, a young lady who once lived in the Bronx(as a child) and Manhattan (as a young adult) and now shares this townhouse with me in a quiet and scenic area,where the only noise sometimes is the ocasional quacking of the ducks that spend most of their time in the creek behind our home, or wandering the nearby streets,seemingly in a daze, since they are totally oblivious to the threat of the auto traffic going by. One thing that hasnt changed is how long some of these sentences are,influenced I suppose by an adolescent dose of Kerouac who too, wanted to jam everything into one sentence,trying to keep up with the frantic ministrations of his mind to the fibre of reality running rampant through it-wow aliteration too.I think thats what they call that
NOVEMBER 30,2002 Hi,back.Whassup!? thats what they say now,can you dig it? Im an old man I guess,this lingo reminds me of my faraway teenage days,we had our own language then too but the difference is,it never passed into the mainstream. The voice of youth was not heeded then, the media did not take its cue from what the boys on the street were saying,it had its own agenda.
Ive been reading everything Ive written here in the last five years and in part reliving some of the moments written down for posterity.(this is posterity now,but there will be more later).Another thanksgiving has passed, spent this year with Jamie's relatives in a huge house not too far from the modest town house we will be moving into in a few weeks.He's a dentist, Im in retail.
NO DATE(FALL 2003?) Much,much later. Jamie is history.History is history,history dickory dock as I said in a poem once Its back to me, my move,always one move from checkmate,searching my infinite mind as the choices narrow down,till you can actually see them and count them. And that's frightening. We parted ways,five years after the waves parted to allow us to leave bondage in Egypt.
November 5, 2004- I just added the huge picture you cant help but see if you've gotten this far.Its my ego talking over the words.That last comment about "bondage in Egypt"?- I dont know what I meant by that. Sometimes Ill write quickly in Kerouacian mode, writing from the bottom of my mind as per his instructions for spontaneous poetics and the results read later will warm my mind but this comment makes no sense and I cant interpret it to anyone's satisfaction. So Ill move on. Now Ive been back with my wife for over a year and its not bad at all. We live in a strange house on Juneberry Court in Warrington, PA. The kids are all grown up but still here. We keep accumulating books and music but some of it we sell and the rest will end up on the garbage heap when we're dead. I always thought I was putting together a library for my children but I doubt they'll savor these treasures as we did. The one who talks to me doesnt read(though he's an astute critic of cinema,thanks to me) and the one who reads what I used to read doesnt talk to me and may not care to inherit this legacy from his biological father.For now...
MARCH 15,2005 Way in the future Eight years ago we were trying to find a house near Doylestown but ended up still in Warrington. Recently when asked to vacate that house(by mutual consent on my part, my wife was reluctant as was one of my sons)we finally achieved that goal of what now appears to be many years ago.Our mailing address is Doylestown, though we almost overshot our mark,landing precipitously right on the borderline between that sophisticated burg and the probably less sophisticated Plumsteadville though I will not decide this definitely until later,giving everyone the benefit of the doubt and realizing that sophisticated is not necessarily the way to go here. Its a big house probably about twenty five years old and when we look out our window we see a highway sign that reads "Main Street"-thatta way. So we're kinda in the country which is what the wife kinda wanted and close to the city which is what I wished for when I was a child, and now that Im an elderly adult Im fairly content but wishing I had more time since our childhood notion of time is so much more idealistic if a little less realistic. You know exactly what I mean.
JUNE 11,2006. Has it been that long?!-the insincere friend says to the long lost acquaintance-my,you look great! How have you been,since last we parted? Getting right to it, I just finished editing all the previous entries here and was right pleased with the general flow of the prose. Let them know I was thinking right up to the end, still fighting for justice or just to be heard. In a week it will be Father's Day and Im still thinking of that story I was supposed to write for my father and all the other things I was supposed to have done, to have accomplished by now. But you know the way I see it,everything happens exactly the way its supposed to happen, we seem to be in control of our destinies minute by minute,though the subtle hand of fate is always guiding us gently by the elbow, the way Ive lately been guiding my wife across parking lot traffic to the supermarket. You reach a point where it becomes faintly clear that whatever you thought you were supposed to be doing was just one possibility,one way to have edited the film. And who's in the cutting room with the dailies,why I think its you all the time,the hand of fate is your hand on the rudder,youre the captain of your soul,as various parts of you try to wrest control from each other,as you alternate from windtossed stormy seas to clear blue skies where the sailing is smooth and uninterrupted by incident,almost boring if you fail to appreciate the value of serenity.Amen.
JUNE 15,2006 Hey its only me. It's evening and its very dark up here in my bedroom/office.It was my day off today. I spent it with the wife and family(the two kids and I had little contact,one doesnt talk to me or I to him and the other who usually does slammed my door when I gave him the wrong answer in response to his request to use my car).Just trying to get through to the next payday.Step by step,breath by breath. But intellectually my mind is all over the place.Reading the New York Times every day gets me going,in all directions.New technologies,old wars, new artistic endeavors,old artists dying. And my own mortality,waiting in the wings.But you gotta keep going,if only for yourself because you started this thing and though you resent it that other people dont seem to pay as much attention to you as you pay to yourself, you would resent it more if you also stopped paying attention. Too much attention isnt good either,witness the perenially young legend in his own mind visiting the bathroom mirror fifty times a day,unable to come to grips with the older visage he sees,but slowly,inevitably grasping the significance of what he refuses to see. And so you keep smoking and eating, sending out feelers to anyone you ever had contact with that you can still get ahold of,if only to confirm your past and validate your future,what's left of it
March 16,2009
Almost three years since the last entry. As though nothing at all has happened,as though I have been suspended in animation, frozen in time,comatose or worse. But I didnt stop living or writing or thinking about writing;I just didnt do it religiously or conscientiously. I remember as a young man reading Jack Kerouac's intructions to Neal Cassady, who so wanted to write and be in there with the intellectuals who never seemed to pay him any mind: Well what do I know about it, said self-effacing Jack, I just know you have to stick to it with the energy of a benny(benzedrine)addict.
I think thats what he said and I have thought about it ever since, avoiding being bogged down in that kind of addiction, despite its adverse effect on my "writing career" I used to have that kind of energy when I was seventeen years old, a year after reading ON THE ROAD, when I channelled my ripening hormonal energies into prose, page after page,rapidly typing away at my manual typewriter I had inherited from my brother who had no use for it accept to type his "papers" for college. Which was rare. Pounding the keys as though I was hammering my joint,reaching for that elusive, ethereal feeling I had felt once in a dream, of which I remembered, even then only the last image of a shotgun being loaded and firing, a metaphor if there ever was one.
Then I was able to persevere. I had little social life. I went to classes at Brooklyn College, didnt mix or mingle, sat in class and ogled one prime female suspect per class but never made a move or exchanged anything other than significant glances. And all the time I could have made out like a bandit if I had but known what I know now, that I had what they wanted, which was that I wanted them. Still I persisted in my niavity,I wallowed in my self imposed misery and layed it all on the poor typewriter which had fortunately been built solidly by master craftsman for just such a battering. I wrote two novels in my first year at Brooklyn. I still have them somewhere, they've never left the house. Few have read them. And there were many poems churned out and first drafts of stories which usually petered out after the dynamic tension of their creation had dissolved over the course of a session and left me drained and melancholic.
We have been keeping a journal of sorts. Here we shy away from the intellectual approach and attempt to engage the world directly, not hiding behind metaphor.
© 2000 Lucien926@aol.com
RIDE THE 14TH STREET CANARSIE LINE
FURTHUR MONTHLY APRIL 2009