Sputterpub's Blog

I’m indigenous to this continent, but I am not Native American. Unlike the wives, I pump the blood of neither Creek nor Sioux. I am a product of the distilled gene pool. I am a Jew.

But I was born in America, nourished on its produce, and I am more of here than anywhere. My favorite foods are new world natives: potato, tomato, avocado, blueberries, corn. All beans except fava. Chocolate.

I am at home here. I feel connected to the land.

The tropics are lovely, and vegetation is sweet, but that fertility mutes the conversation I want to hear. Only when I stand like a gnat on the floor of Death Valley, or sit by the redundant ocean, or crunch into a monotonous Alaskan path, do I begin to detect the dialogue between the planet and the universe.

We are lush in Northern California, but we quake. We reside at the sliding clash of two continental plates and the planet often shakes off our elaborations. We are rockbound and fissured. We edge the ocean but we are spared the music vacuum of the beach.

Or so it should be. But we clutter ourselves. We add bells and whistles and mirrors, features and feathers and automobiles, till we’ve gimmicked the visual and gummed the aural and we perform these crazy dances of disconnection, from each other and from place. Just last month:

I had almost completed my twenty-minute walk to the train station one morning, a little bothered by headache but otherwise feeling fit, when a driver pulled her car to the curb near me, to ask for directions. It was a big old car – a Chevy I think – with a weather-worn dullness to its mismatched paint and cellulite in its chrome bumpers. It had mushy shocks and it rocked toward me as it stopped.

“Excuse me: can you tell me how to get to College?”She looked Latina or Filipina. Dark-haired, dark-eyed, small-nosed, chubby-cheeked. She could be any age from thirty to forty-three.

“The street?” I asked, to distinguish it from the university. She nodded. “Oh (lord). Well, you have to get all the way to the other side of town… Let’s see: you need to turn around and go a couple of miles in the opposite direction, then head left up the hill for about half a mile…”

“So I turn up here and…?” She looked up at me with a beseeching smile and a creasing brow. I realized in that moment that she had absolutely no concept of topography. Wanted me to give her the number of streets and turns from Sacramento & Cedar to College Ave. I looked in her face and started again:

“No, no. It doesn’t matter what street. You have to turn around and go back the way you came for a ways, and then up toward those hills. See?” and I swung my right arm around and aimed behind me to where the coastal range climbs to the next county.

She wasn’t getting it. She leaned toward me and tried to look where I was pointing, but I’m sure the frame of the car window got in her way. Her world was asphalt and her controls were foot pedals. She didn’t perceive the hill-to-bay slope of the land. Meanwhile my light was green. My train doesn’t wait. “I’m sorry,” I said to her. “I have to go.”

(Of course it was more complicated than that. I felt bold, setting limits, but I also felt bad. She felt chagrined and then cheerfully defiant. “Fuck you very much,” she mumbled, polite in tone but under her breath, as she maneuvered her boat of a car around the corner and started, roughly, to follow my directions.

(Her name was Josie, and she was harried because she was stealing moments away from a work errand, desperately seeking a small store on College which sold her best friend’s favorite candy. Cindy was nauseated from chemotherapy, and only craved the caramels from there, and Josie was determined to purchase a quantity of the stuff for her. She didn’t have much time, though. She had to get back to her job in Oakland. She was agitated.

(It’s true she was clueless about topography, but she had other talents. She was a good friend to Cindy, a wonderful mother to her two small children, a successful wife. I didn’t accomplish anything by desisting in giving her help. Except I made my train.)

My old friend Glen. I can see him skinny at 13, playing Casino with me nightly across one of his twin beds, dealing to the playlist that rocked out of his new transistor radio. He was consumed then with curiosity about cars and God and sex. I remember him in college, still scrawny and growing a beard that looked like armpit hair, wrestling with metaphysics, long chess games, and ideas about nonpossessive sexual love. I have Glen’s summer letters from then, missives out of Southern California where he was stuck with his alcoholic mother or his ever-silent dad, unfurling communal plans and trying to make changes so he’d like himself.

I can also see him a few years ago, telling me I’m the only person he knows whose childhood was happy enough that I can afford to recall its unhappiness. I remember thinking those words were wise, or at least charming, at first. Now they sound like something an autistic might say if he were trying to identify with a willful person.

For Glen doesn’t get it. He says no to himself; I say no to others. He grows more bitter every year.

He knows about his letters in my footlocker. Three times in the last five years I’ve offered them to him. “It’s fun,” I told him after I read my teenage diaries. “Really: it’s not as embarrassing as I thought it would be; I actually got into it and found myself rooting for the writer! I only wish I’d used full names and recorded weather and prices…”

But he declined. Didn’t even indicate he might read them sometime. He shoved the subject aside like astrology or prayer.

I could never do that: know there’s information available, easily available, and not look. That would be like refusing to unfold the map; fine if you’re playing a game but not if you want to get somewhere.

Glen used to travel for work. He used to say the only way to do it was to keep moving, as much as possible in the direction of your goal. But that was awhile ago. I doubt now he remembers his own words.

I remembered yesterday. I entered the downtown Berkeley BART station just in time to overhear most of a conversation between a potential passenger and the station agent.

They were both well-dressed, attractive, middle-aged, African American. The station agent was a woman with coppery curls and wide-open big eyes. The passenger was portly and male, wearing a brown suit, short hair, polished shoes. He carried a brown briefcase and greeted the agent with courtesy:

“Good morning, ma’am. How are you today?”

She answered pleasantly, softly, smiling, in about three syllables. I was passing them then on my way from the fare gate to the stairs.

“Can you tell me when the next train comes for San Francisco?”

“Let’s see…” and I could imagine her running a manicured fingernail across a schedule as I descended. I slowed to hear her answer because I was later than usual and could use the information myself. “Ten-forty” she said, as I read 10:30 on my watch and 10:31 on the platform monitor.

“Then I’m going to be late,” I heard the man say. I had two thoughts: “I don’t want to wait 10 minutes either” and “Well, sir, if you’re going to be late it isn’t the train’s fault.”

“I want to get to One Sansome,” the man continued.

“That will be the Montgomery Station,” said the agent.

“But there’s no train till 10:40?”

…mumble…

“Then I’m going to be late.”

That’s when the platform monitor began to flash: FREMONT. 6 CAR TRAIN. BOARD CENTER. Standing with half a dozen others I heard the whine of the wheels on the track and felt the pushed air in my face. I looked around for the brown-suited man. I wasn’t surprised not to see him. He’d made the mistake of asking a system employee instead of a rider. He had probably headed streetward, either to give up because he was going to be late or to spend a lot of money and risk time anyway, on a taxi.

A 9-car San Francisco train pulled in opposite ours at MacArthur. I crossed the platform and took a seat and rode it to the city on time.

If you don’t know where you’re going…

…any road will get you there.

Great line, huh? I heard it at a conference. I know who said it then but she attributed it to someone else, so I can’t take or even give credit where it’s due. But I’ll keep saying it.

Not that anyone will listen. Nobody listens. That used to frustrate me. Lately I find it liberating. I can say anything; it’s not like I’ll have to take responsibility.

That’s the silver lining anyway. Of course I’d rather they listen. Not so I’d be right but just so I’d get through.

I want to figure it out. Existence. I’ve made some strides. But no way can I do it alone. I need to brainstorm with others.

“You may have the best idea in the world,” my dad used to say, “but it will be useless unless you can communicate it to others.” That was his argument for a liberal arts education. Sure he was right. But he didn’t go far enough. He never considered what “communicate it to others” really means. It’s not enough to be correct or eloquent or even charismatic. You still have to get through…

Problem is, getting through isn’t possible any more. If it ever was. Whole damn culture’s gone autistic now.

I’m talking about American middle-class middle-aged culture. The post-war baby boomers and adjacent cohorts. The notorious demographic bubble.

See, here’s the simple version of the story:

Once upon a time (not very long ago), there was a war to end all wars. It was called the second World War because the first hadn’t, and although it didn’t involve all of the world it was big enough to swallow a whole generation of America’s young adults.

They went they fought they won, and they returned to covet the American Dream, which turned out to be a single-family ranch house on a cul-de-sac with a perpetual chicken in a pot on the stove and a triennial station wagon for the attached garage.

They moved to their American Dream homes in the new suburbs, leaving in the cities their older and wider relatives, who would have acted like guides for them into the mysteries of parenthood, so they were clueless, the poor war vets and their brides, about how to be.

Incompetence loves company. Their neighbors were just as lost. Coffee and cocktails and card parties became their entertainments; the children were safe and hardly needed tending. The children would be all right.

Meanwhile the grandparents tsked. Dr. Spock instructed. Vodka spiked mothers’ morning coffees. Affairs occurred. Divorces became just horribly common enough to merit a daytime reality show.

The children of course were not all right.

Until around age seven a kid’s world is magical. That’s why it’s unfair to expose them to religion before then; they’ll take it too much to heart. Until seven or so, a child’s world won’t be stable unless the child sees the parents as gods.

When confronted with inescapable proof of parental incompetence, a kid has only two possible reactions: willfulness or autism. Nothing else will address the problem. The child either has to take charge or opt out.

Few take charge. Depending upon surrounding circumstances, the willful number 1% to 5% of the population. Except for age, they don’t share qualities that permit the sociologists to predict them – they’re as rare and random as albinos – but almost all willful children assume responsibility for themselves between age five and seven.

The autistics are too numerous to assess. They comprise almost all of the culture and have to be broken into subgroups to be studied. There are agoraphobes to varying degrees, who try to stay home and avoid social contact; ragers who indulge their social frustrations in manners even kindergarten teachers would never condone; groups accused of bigotry and prejudice who in fact suffer from simple unresolved xenophobia – they were deprived of guidance by their nuclear families about how to enjoy strangers. There are a huge number of apparently functional individuals who do well enough socially but lack a basic interactive skill, like the ability to say goodbye, or any understanding about privacy in the context of personal space. But by far the largest set of autistics, the crowd who provoke the standard of measurement for the group, are the depressives.

Willful people are seldom depressed. They can suffer from boredom, but the benefits of self-control are so powerful and consistent that they rarely sink in spirit. When they do go down they tend to rebound within days, no matter what. When a willful person is impassioned, expression is outward and often forceful.

Depressives work in the opposite direction. Although often tragically apathetic, they can experience passion. And when they do they implode.

For them the storm aims inward. They swirl into a vortex of their own sadness. Still waiting for the grownups.

I watched. I’ve been paying attention. Used to be I was pulled out of my school classes, deposited into a room with the stutterers, the rockers, the arsonists. But as we got older our numbers thinned. I watched them mostly turn inward, to darkness and sadness, away from our hopping red impatience.