Our Minds Are Not Our Own (Part One)

I have once again fallen behind in my attempt to post daily -- or at least on most days.  Again, I apologize.

This past week presented two obstacles, one the lack of an internet connection at home, and the other a series of events that had me running about the East Bay as well as The City.  Details below.

One of my day-long adventures last week was getting together with my friend JVD.  We have known each other since we were four years old, but I had not seen or spoken to him for ten or fifteen years.

We first reconnected when my phone rang a few weeks back, and I answered it to hear him say, “This is JVD.”

“J!” I said, “how are you?”

“I don‘t know,” he said.  “I‘m sixty!”

We both burst into laughter, and then began trying to find a time when we could get together.  We had between ten and fifteen years of living to catch each other up on. 
The time finally came last Wednesday, the 7th of August.

I left home early that morning and rode BART to the Lafayette station, where I was met by JVD.  One of my purposes in starting this blog was to be able to tell friends with whom I have not been in touch in recent years the complicated story of how I got from where I used to live to where I live now.  JVD had been reading my blog in the weeks since that first telephone call, and the blog had served my purpose.  We were able to dive right into the nitty-gritty.

We had lunch at a pizzeria in Walnut Creek, the town in which we grew up, and then spent the afternoon driving to the top of Mount Diablo.  From that peak one can see more of the earth’s surface than from any other spot on the planet except one, Mount Kilimanjaro.  We looked out over the rivers, the delta, the bay, and the Pacific Ocean, picking out landmarks and spotting the places where we live and have lived.  The ground on which we stood dropped off so suddenly that we seemed to be suspended in air, hovering over the landscape of our lives.

Because the mountain was formed -- is being formed -- by the collision of the North American and Pacific plates, the rocks get older and older as you climb to the summit.  There the most ancient strata of what was once the ocean’s floor are being exposed by the constant scrubbing of wind and rain.  Even a casual glance at these stones reveals hundreds of different organisms, from what seem familiar clam shells to oddly shaped, jointed exoskeletons that I could not begin to identify or describe.

The fossils provide a kind of metaphor for something I noticed hours earlier, when I first arrived at the BART station in Lafayette.  As I stepped off the train and made my way down the stairs from the elevated track, a great wave of memories, with all their attendant emotions, broke over me.

For twelve years after my father died, I spent every Thursday with my mother.  For most of those years, I traveled from Oakland, and then San Francisco, where I lived, to Lafayette, where my mother would pick me up in her big gold Mercedes Benz and take me home -- to her home, that is, because she and my father had moved out of the house in which I grew up within a few years after I, the last child, had gone out on my own.

What hit me most forcefully this last week was that I had not thought of those arrivals -- of waiting by the parking lot for my mother, then watching her car appear, then opening the door and easing myself into the leather seats -- even though I had thought of the Lafayette station and even imagined it in all its physical reality, its shapes and colors, its place,  the weight of its materials, etc.

My memories were not attached to my thoughts or ideas or feelings.  Rather my memories resided in the landscape, in the steel and concrete structures of that station, and the emotions aroused by those memories -- grief, affection, melancholy, gratitude -- were attendant not on any mental processes in my brain but on my contact with that particular physical location.  Memories reside in the physical world around us -- in landscapes, in objects, in sounds, in food and drink -- not in our heads.

How much of the rest of our thinking is produced not by our brains, and not by some invisible “mind” that lives as a ghost in the machinery of our bodies, but by the world, including the people, around us?
 

I can no longer believe that our thoughts and perceptions reside “inside” us somehow, as if consciousness were hidden inside our skulls, irredeemably sealed off from any direct contact with other minds, each of which is itself presumed to be similarly isolated with its cranium.  Since I expect that my refutation of this Cartesian model will take many months, if not years, to complete, I beg your indulgence as I begin slowly to explore this idea in this first installment.

*

What about the rest of my week?  On Tuesday, the day before my “mountaintop experience” I traveled to Berkeley, where I took various steps toward finding a job at the University.  I also had lunch with my friend MP, the poet whom I have previously mentioned in these posts.  And on Thursday I received a list of documents that I had to get together and forms I had to complete because I have a chance at getting more permanent housing, dependent on a meeting tomorrow afternoon.

Then Friday.  I confess that I accomplished nothing on Friday or Saturday, when I should have been writing all day both days.

Friday was the first anniversary of my second arrest, the serious one, the one which cost me my job, which arose from charges based on MRM’s blatant lies, enshrined in a completely false police report, and which has yet to come to trial.  I had not thought much about it, but when I saw the date on Friday morning, “9 August”, I slipped down a rabbit-hole into memories of arrest, incarceration, and the paralysis of depression stirred by hopeless anger at injustice -- injustice that is routinely, even mechanically, created by our laws, our police, and our judiciary.

Again I cry out:  Wake up!  Read Tolstoy!

The Working Poor, Part One

I am hungry again.

I have two jobs. For two days each month, I work as an event coordinator for a company that hosts seminars at the Grand Hyatt on Union Square. I like the job a lot, and one of the reasons I do is that it allows me to spend time in the world I grew up in, the world of middleclass to upper-middleclass life.

I arrive at 7:00AM, an hour and a half before the seminar begins. I make sure that the hotel staff has set up the room properly. I lay out materials for each participant (a pad of paper in a handsome, padded faux-leather folder, a pen, and a USB memory stick). I set up the projector that the leader of the seminar will use to show his or her PowerPoint slides on the screen at the front of the room. I confirm the food service schedule with hotel staff.*

That done, I register each participant on arrival, give them their name tags, and make sure that the leader has everything she or he needs. Then I sit outside the seminar until the session ends at 5:00PM. On the following morning, I again check that everything needful is in its place, distribute more materials to participants, and again sit outside the room from 7:00AM to 5:00PM.

Like a flight attendant, I am there in case something goes wrong. I know the hotel staff and have their cell numbers so that I can locate whatever is needed in an emergency. Otherwise I am free to read, to write, to catch up on my mail (electronic or real), to make phone calls, et cetera. I am paid $200 per day, and that $400 makes up the only truly predictable half of my monthly income.

I also do house and yard work. I started this job last fall. At the time I was applying for any job I could think of, and I was increasingly frustrated by my failure to land one. So while continuing to look for other work, I posted an ad on Craigslist to do house cleaning, etc., for $15 an hour. Better to light a candle than to curse the darkness, right?

I currently work in this capacity for two men, one twice a week and the other twice a month. I usually work for four hours in the afternoon, though at the place where I work only twice a month, I often need an extra hour or hour and a half to get everything done.

Lately, I have had additional hours at my other job too. My employer has been undergoing treatment for lung cancer and has needed my help for an extended period in the days following each chemotherapy infusion. On those occasions I stay at his house from noon Monday through dinnertime on Wednesday. I shop for groceries and prepare meals, as well as cleaning and keeping the yard watered and weeded, typically working five hours a day on each of these three days.

There will not be many of those longer stays however, in part because the number of infusions is limited to only seven or eight in the first place. What is more, my employer is blest with a large and caring family, various members of which have been visiting him from nearby and distant cities for as much as a week at a time. Thus he does not always need my help after every chemo infusion. And because he is responding so well to treatment, he is able to do more around the house during the ordinary days between treatments. So I may be working there even less than the eight hours a week I have been working.

The reader who was good at story problems in elementary school arithmetic has by now figured out that I average $150 a week at these jobs, with an additional $225 possible about once a month. Thus I earn a grand total of $1000 to $1200 a month.

My fixed expenses come to $450 a month: my storage space ($175 a month), my phone ($75 a month), and my rent (50% of my official income, which is the seminar check, so right now $200 a month).

I am left with $550 to $750 a month for everything else. Everything else includes food; transportation (bus fares to work mostly); “sundries”, by which I mean razors; soaps for the body, for the dishes, and for the clothes; the laundromat; replacing a shirt or socks from time to time; and repaying the friends who helped me with bail and other expenses when I was arrested. (In the last twelve months, I have managed to pay them $1000 of the $1300 I owed them.) The “sundries” run $50 to $75 (if I any of my clothes wear out) a month.  Transportation costs $25 to $30. So without paying my debts, I have at most from $450 to $675 a month for food.

I have difficulty getting enough to eat on $15 to $20 a day, particularly considering that I do not have a kitchen and so must pay restaurant prices for anything more than a bowl of cereal or a peanut butter sandwich. A simple breakfast of 2 eggs, bacon, and either potatoes, pancakes, or toast, with a cup of coffee, will set you back $10, including tax and tip, at even the most economical of diners. So will a dinner of two slices of pizza or a Subway sandwich, with something to drink. As a result I eat a lot of Big Carl hamburgers at Carl’s Jr., which with tax come to only $3.25. Unfortunately, one of those sandwiches is not enough to fuel a man my size (six feet tall and a muscular 200 pounds) who does a lot of physical labor, including walking considerable distances to save on bus fares.

I need about 3200 calories a day to maintain my health and strength.**  I buy the Big Carl because it has 930 calories, 520 of them from fat, and so staves off for at least a couple of hours the actual pain (cramps, etc.) that comes with hunger. I do treat myself to the kind of breakfast I described above about once a month, and I eat a lot of pizza slices, for the same reason: fatty foods forestall the discomfort of hunger longer than other, healthier, foods.

I am giving you all these details because I want you to see that I work as much as I can, am very careful with every penny I earn, and that I still suffer from hunger many days a month. Furthermore, what I do eat is not healthy for me, and my diet means that I will be likely to encounter more medical problems and higher medical bills in the years I have left.

I used to get food stamps, and that $200 a month -- $6.00 a day -- helped tremendously. Now, however, my income places me above the ceiling of the current “means tested” system.

I eat a lot of peanut butter sandwiches.  (Safeway sells Pantry Essentials bread for $.99 a loaf, and I search out the cheapest peanut butter and apricot jam I can find, one jar of both usually costing to $5.00 or $6.00 together.  Thus my lunches can cost as little as $2.00 a day.  Daily breakfasts of generic cereal, milk, coffee and sugar also cost about $2.00 a day.)

So I can just make it on what I earn -- as long as I eat an unhealthy diet.

I cut my budget as closely as I can to the bare minimum so that I can repay my friends for their extraordinarily generous help when I was in real trouble.

That means that sometimes I find myself, as I did last Friday, with $18.00 to my name and no income available until Monday evening, when I finish my afternoon at work.  By Sunday I can get pretty hungry.

(To be continued . . . .)

___________________________________________
* The morning coffee, bagels, and breads, and the hot lunches, have been stellar. I highly recommend the Grand Hyatt on Union Square, for its newly remodeled interiors, its friendly and unbelievably helpful staff, and its delicious food.

**See the Daily Calorie Calculator to find out your nutritional needs.

The Legacy

[Note:  if you read yesterday's post before I managed to add the video at the end, please scroll down and watch it.  My heart is too full to say more.]

When I “came out” -- how odd that the term for identifying myself as homosexual should make me sound like a former debutante -- or not -- one of the great things that happened was being initiated into the lore of the tribe.  In those days (yes, children, it was “When Dinosaurs Roamed the Earth”), older gay men were eager to pass on to us young’uns the oral history, the Mysteries, as it were, of our sect.

I have no idea whether this oral tradition still exists.  I suspect that it died out rather quickly with the advent of bourgeois faggotry, by which I mean the glossy magazines, television shows, and -- that indispensable sign of a group having been co-opted by the money culture -- advertisements targeted at them as a niche market, portraying them as youthful-at-any-age, pretty, and stylish consumers.  If so, I am particularly grateful for the privilege of having been heir to a long-ago kingdom of fairies.

So at the risk of apostasy, let me share a few tid-bits of what was poured into my young ears by The Ancients when I came of age:  Milton Berle had the biggest dick in Hollywood.  Rock Hudson -- also horse-hung -- loved taking it up the ass.  One must learn and be able to recite “The Women”, “Stagedoor”, and Ruth Draper’s “The Italian Lesson” or risk having your "Gay Card" taken away.  Cary Grant and Randolph Scott were lovers.  Guys who wear leather and ride motorcycles spend most of their time exchanging recipes. Paul Simon and Art Garfunkel were lovers.

[OK, listen to "The Only Living Boy in New York" and remember that these guys called themselves "Tom and Jerry" on their first record.  If that's not a break-up song, I'm Ethel Merman.]

Much of this oral tradition (why do I feel like I am punning all the time?) consisted of a roster of famous men who had huge penises.  In addition to the aforementioned, one heard of the prodigious endowments of Yule Brenner, Frank Sinatra, et al.  More importantly -- and, yes, one also learned that “important” is French for “big” -- one heard wonderful anecdotes and thereby inherited a sense of the wit that made our kind so eagerly pursued by the best hostesses in society.

For example, Noel Coward, whose ability to turn an awkward moment into a bon mot made him the source of more of these stories than I can remember, was once being followed about a cocktail party by a good-looking young man.  The youth said nothing but trailed close behind Coward and edged as close as possible to him whenever Coward stood still.  Eventually irritated beyond any ability of maintain his usual polite composure, Coward turned to face the young man and declared, “Young man!  Sharing a sexual vice does NOT amount to a social introduction!”

But, of course, it did.  I have known -- and known well -- a Trotskyite steel worker, who along with his brutal physical labor (God, did that man have a body!) worked relentlessly to convert his fellow laborers to the gospel of the Socialist Workers Party, and I have known the Ambassador to Luxembourg.  I have dined with Virgil Thompson, Madeline (“Jackie”) Horne, James Merrill, Phillipa Foote, Edmund White, Stephen Spinella, Felice Picano, Coretta Scott King, and Paul Rudnick.  I have known people from all strata of our society.  Furthermore, I have been able to move back and forth, up and down, among the classes, something that is extremely rare, for the structure of class has, like time, an arrow:  once you set foot on that ladder moving either up or down, you seldom get a chance to change direction.

I do not think that any of the straight guys I grew up with could have had the range of acquaintances that I have had.  A few of them, I know, have risen to higher and higher planes and moved in ever-more-glamorous, powerful, and wealthy circles.  A few have also foundered, one in particular about whom the last thing I heard was that he had been spotted dumpster-diving in Berkeley -- and that was 40 years ago.  But I believe that not one of those normal people has moved with ease in the company both of the mighty and of the downtrodden, and moved with ease among every class of person between those extremes, as I have.

And that has been a privilege of the greatest order.

Plus Ca Change

Things look different to me now. I got up early and walked to Peet’s for coffee this morning. It is not yet the first of the month, so I could only afford a half pound.

On the way, I walked by some large pieces of cardboard, probably the remains of an appliance box, and a cheap comforter, chocolate brown and heavily soiled. The cardboard and comforter lay just off the curb, in what would be the curb lane or parking spaces at different hours of the day. What I saw was someone’s house, and I wondered what disturbance would have driven them from their sleep in such a hurry as to have left the house behind.

My first thought was of the police.

*

On many of the blocks I walk frequently in this neighborhood, one finds brass plaques, historical markers, each describing in some detail a jazz club or recording studio or restaurant that once thrived at that spot. The plaques are embedded in the sidewalk in front of burned-out buildings, abandoned buildings, parking lots, and empty lots. I had not realized before how exactly the historical markers resemble headstones in Mountain View Cemetery in Oakland, where my parents, their parents, their siblings, cousins, aunts and uncles all the way back to my great-great grandmother are buried.

*

I learned today that the definition of “homeless” is changing. Used to be that if you were in an alcohol/drug rehab program for a few months but had no home to which you could return after graduation, you were homeless. Similarly, if you were in jail but had no home to which you could return after your release, you were homeless. You might even be homeless if you were staying in a hotel room while looking for a home to which you could move or if you were staying with friends while looking for -- etc.

Now these “marginally housed” situations no longer qualify as homelessness for purposes of being granted subsidized housing. Now you are homeless only if you are wandering around on the streets all night or sleeping in parks or under bridges and freeway overpasses. The reason for this bit of vocabularial legerdemain is “Restrictions in Funding”.

For those who prefer plain English, I translate: The Ronald Reagan/Grover Norquist strategy of dismantling government by bankrupting it has worked. The society no longer has an institutional response to the problems of poverty. If you cannot shell out -- or finance -- 3/4s of a million dollars or more (in San Francisco), you must rely on your friends or live in public, i.e., the wild. From now on, the poor must live as the Ohlone did before the Europeans descended upon them like a plague of locusts.

A Modest Proposal

I have been getting up earlier these days, and getting outside as quickly as I can.  I love the feeling on the street in the first hour after dawn.

Lately I have noticed that on almost every morning crews with hoses and steam cleaners are cleaning the sidewalks in the blocks around my hotel.  I always thank the guys in those crews, who, for hours before I get out, have been working hard in their dark blue uniforms and rubber boots.  It would be nice to think that the city was finally rich enough (which, of course, it is) to clean the streets of the Tenderloin as well as it cleans the streets of the wealthier neighborhoods.  But what the steam-cleaning of these blocks means is that the rich are coming and that the rest of us will soon be squeezed out.

I look at the faces of my neighbors as they pass. Most look old before their time.  They are getting by as best they can, managing against very bad odds to keep up their spirits, to be willing to live another day, to say often “I am happy because I woke up again this morning”, all in the face of little chance that their lives will improve.  They perform their duties.  They find what diversions and pleasures they can.  They do not think of  moving because they know that they cannot afford to live anywhere else, certainly anywhere else in San Francisco.  And more than that, they do not want to move because they have their friends in the neighborhood.  They see each other at breakfast, lunch, and dinner in the Lafayette Coffee Shop, among other places.  They bicker and banter and tease one another.  They know each other’s relatives and will be there for each other when accident, disease, or age bring any one to a crisis.

But, of course, they  will have to move.  They will lose one another.  I have seen the sign of the times above Market Street, just across the intersection from the rising tower that it advertises:

 

I thought, yes, we would all be happy to have a clear and reliable contact guaranteeing our housing, but when the words also mean that I and my fellows have no secure housing in the coming months and years, I find the sign in such bad taste that I want to confront whoever created it and tell them the truth about what they are doing.

I look into the faces of my neighbors and I think, “Most of us pay 30% or 50% of our income in rent; that is, our rent is set at 30% to 50% of our income.  I thought, “Wouldn’t it be nice -- wouldn’t it be fair -- to have those who are coming to displace us also pay 30% to 50% of their income for their housing.  Think was a windfall the city would have if it collected 30% to 50% of the incomes of all those Twitterists and Yelpers, et al.  Those millions upon millions could all be spent improving the housing of everyone in the neighborhood, restoring historic buildings and building new ones for all of us.

I think of this modest proposal as being like Reagan’s Flat Tax:  a principled idea that everyone should pay the same percentage of their income for whatever service is provided by the government, which, after all, defines all the privileges and responsibilities of landowners and landlords.

Then we could all enjoy clean streets, safe neighborhoods, and comfortable housing.

Think about it.