(2)

I am, too often perhaps, an angry man.  Too often – or, perhaps, not often enough.  Lately I can't seem to decide.  Anger can be a difficult emotion to handle, particularly when it's directed towards other people.  There's always the danger of its getting out of hand and landing you in trouble.  But I think that anger is sometimes justified; there are times when it might even be called compassionate.  When anger is combined with clarity – that is to say, when valid criticism is projected with force – then I think it may be called compassionate.  I remember saying to Robert once (for he struck me often as being privately very judgmental towards people he treated kindly in public) that we should not judge others.  "Judge not lest ye be judged . . ." and so on.  But he said:  "Of course we should judge each other.  It's part of our function as human beings to judge each other.  If we don't do it, who will?"  I did not agree with him then.  I do now.  Still, I sometimes think that, lately, my anger is simply irritability carried to an extreme.

I wonder about the degree to which my environment influences me, and just how these environmental influences should be factored into what I think of as the "self-ordaining laws" that make me me.  I have long tried to find a place for myself within my environment, to understand my relationship to society, to my co-workers, to my family.  I have tried to find a "context" within which to exist.  Without much success, however, even at the most basic level:  I feel drawn to nature, for instance – love nature – but of course like most everyone else I live at one remove from it.  And I interpret it always, filtering it through a particular set of understandings, expectations, and beliefs.  Though this is unavoidable, I sometimes think that it's a mistake.  Sometimes I think that our brains are a sort of mistake.  Or – not our brains exactly, but our minds:  that abstraction born of the brain.  The brain itself, after all, is simply an outgrowth of, a balloon-like appendage to, the nervous system; perhaps we simply misuse it.  If we learned to still the mind, as so many sages say we should, perhaps we could learn to use our brains more appropriately, as a sort of superior, delicately attuned sensory organ.  What, I wonder, would happen to the faculty of judgment then?

Snow begins to fall regularly here in my small town, blurring the sharp angles and hard edges of the world to a softly rounded inconclusiveness.  It's quite beautiful, this rounded softness, especially when juxtaposed with the stark blackness of the trees and the spiny, jutting brown stalks of the withered weeds.  As the weather turns colder, fewer and fewer customers stop in at the convenience store.  Sometimes hours and hours go by when I'm left completely alone, especially when I'm working the night shift, as I've often lately been called upon to do.  As for the people who do come in – well, what can I say?  They are, so often, "odd."  They are people who, one way and another, strike me as being mentally askew.  I sometimes have to wonder:  Is it just here in my hometown that such people proliferate, or are their numbers this high everywhere?  Growing up, I saw many of them wandering the streets:  my parents would point them out as we drove by in the car, attracting my attention their way.  There was one woman who was known as "The Cracked Lady" because of her habit of always being careful to avoid stepping on cracks in the sidewalk.  She'd walk around with her eyes peering downward and lift her feet up high whenever she saw one, stepping as if over an imaginary wall.  Another woman was called "The Rubber Band Lady" because of her habit of picking up rubber bands and pieces of string wherever she found them and stuffing them into her pockets.  What she did with them no one knew.  There was one young fellow I privately dubbed "The Soldier" because he walked around town with the brisk, exacting step of a soldier performing a drill; at corners he would come to a complete stop and then execute a perfect ninety-degree turn.  There was one man who claimed he was Jesus, and another who said he was God (I don't know if these two ever met).  One man, seen around town daily for years and years, was a mildly retarded deaf-mute.  Very friendly, he grunted and waved to everyone he met.  Alone, he fluttered and twitched his hands about in front of him, making a series of mysterious gestures and signs.  Apparently this was his manner of muttering to himself.

How any of these people lived I do not know.  There are a couple of group homes located in town for those who have various mental disabilities, and some lived in these I suppose.  Others would appear and be seen wandering the streets for some months or years, then suddenly vanish.  Sent back to the institutions from which they came, I suppose.  They are the truly displaced, wherever they exist.

One woman, named Barbara, mentally deranged but not to the point at which she need be removed from society, has made it a habit to stop now and again in the store during the wee hours of the morning.  Some organic deficiency, some chemical imbalance of the brain, makes it impossible for her to focus herself, to make the appropriate connections between herself and society.  Like many of the mentally ill, it's difficult to guess her age:  life has dealt with her differently than it has with most of us, and leaves its marks upon her in different ways.  I would guess her to be in her late thirties.  Her hair is a long, dry, tangled mass, brown with a few streaks of grey in it.  Her face is narrow, her nose and chin pointy, her mouth unusually wide.  She wears a large, dirty coat that flaps about her like a cape, and thick glasses that magnify her eyes, emphasizing their vague, makeshift awareness.  Her eyebrows are bushy.  Her teeth are bad:  she's missing one of them in front; the others are a greasy sort of yellowy-black.  She smokes incessantly.  She comes into the store to warm herself, and to talk; her talk is an endless, nervous, circular complaint:  "This town sucks, don't it, Simon.  Huh?  Huh?  Don't it.  Am I right or am I right?  I mean, the people that live around here, they're full of bullshit.  They're just full of bullshit.  Ya know what I mean?  Huh?  Huh?  The fuckers.  It ain't right, the way they treat me.  Ya know what I mean?  It's just bullshit.  I mean, these people . . .  They're just fuckers.  Huh, Simon.  Huh.  This town sucks.  Ya know what I mean?  Ya know what I mean?"  She sleeps, she tells me, sometimes at a shelter for the homeless, sometimes with friends who have a room, or an apartment, or a trailer, of their own; but really, she just lives on the streets.  She goes through dumpsters, sifting through the garbage to find whatever might be useful there.  She's always showing me her latest find:  a sack of half-rotten potatoes, a used notebook, a broken telephone – it could be anything.  What she does with these things, where she keeps them, I have no idea.

Barbara likes me though.  I do not chase her away.  I give her free coffee and day-old doughnuts sometimes.  In return she regales me with her repetitious opinions on life:  "This town sucks, don't it, Simon . . ."  And she complains of what has become of her kids:  "Oh, it ain't right, what they done with my kids.  That's just bullshit.  Ya know what I mean?  These people . . .  I mean, what the fuck!  It ain't right.  Huh, Simon.   Huh."  "Yeah, well . . ." I say, wearily, indifferently, for I don't know what else could have been done.  Barbara has given birth to five children so far – is now pregnant with a sixth.  They have all, of course, been taken from her; it could not have been otherwise; but she feels, instinctively I suppose, the injustice of it, of society, of "the system," which does not and never can do as much to help her as she feels it should.

"It ain't right.  It ain't right.  This town's just bullshit.  It's just bullshit.  Ya know what I mean, Simon?  Ya know what I mean?  Huh?  Huh?"

She is an irritating woman.  She cannot hold a job.  She receives food and money from social agencies which she then in turn constantly berates; she's provided with shelter when she cannot stay with friends; her children must be given to others to care for.  She's a drain on society, and gives nothing in return.  Her only defense against the world she lives in is that she cannot help being the way she is.  Is that defense enough?  Society answers, "Yes, it is" – but only just barely.

I live in a small apartment, a converted attic, with two neutered male cats for company.  I do not drink; I no longer use drugs.  I have very few friends, and no lovers.  I spend most of my time alone.

When I was younger I attended college, but never graduated.  I refused to take that one last step, choosing instead to spurn the path society had laid out for me, refusing to bear the burden of all that is entailed in becoming one with the status quo.  My parents were disappointed in me.  They were disappointed for me.  I was the square peg they had failed to make fit into the round hole.  They tried to make me fit for many years, tried to cram me in.  They tried out of love – or so they have told me; out of a sense of compassion for me.  They wanted to help equip me for survival.  There were afraid for me.  Their fear centered upon my relentless pursuit of total independence and individuality, on my fundamental disregard for all that society considered to be "normal."  They didn't know what to make of such a reckless endeavor.  And they feared, rightly enough, that society would not know what to make of it either.

We are such a strange species, we humans.  Strange, and at such an awkward stage in our evolutionary development.  We do not "fit it" with nature anymore – but how can we think that we've outgrown our need of it?  We are all of us warped, really, one way or another.  Endless numbers of books have been written with just this theme at their core:  that we are warped; that we don't fit in:  and here is the why of it, and here the how; here is one way we might learn to cope with the dilemma, and here another.  But the problem we present to ourselves is never solved.

Tonight is one of my nights off from work.  Outside, it has begun to snow again.  Where is Barbara now, I wonder?  Is she safe?  Is she cold?  Do I care?  Heavy, fluffy flakes come drifting down, as if from nowhere, as if from out of nothing.  It's one of my favorite things to do, to sit at my window and watch these frozen white flakes falling down out of a pitch black sky.  Wonderful, the sense of peace it brings to the irritable clamor in my head.  Snow falls with such a silent sound.