Eviction Notice -- a little free write about love and stuff

I sat through a couple of half-day writing seminars at the LOFT literary center (a.ka. OPEN BOOK) in Minneapolis recently. One of them was a bit repetitive, so as I sat in the audience, I got inspired to work on a little piece.

Here it is. Don't know what, if anything, I will do with this, but I'm thinking of calling it "Eviction Notice":


EVICTION NOTICE

Back when we were living together, but shortly before the end, my last serious girlfriend angrily informed me I was not 'detail-oriented' enough. She was territorial about the kitchen and offered this criticism as we shelved canned vegetables together in a lower cabinet. She had more than a tone. Soon afterward, I called my older sister in New York to complain.

"You're not," she confirmed.

Ah, well.

I have learned this much from love: There are things we try to police in ourselves and improve in ourselves, but ultimately we are who we are, until we are changed. I still think my ex-love over-reacted. They were, after all, just vegetables.

Before I keep going, I should say that I am writing this in a certain context: sitting through an eight-hour writing seminar to which I've shown up 39 minutes late on a chilly Saturday morning in downtown Minneapolis; the elections of 2008 are just behind us; my rent is not due but the alarm clock we all keep at the back of our minds keeps fluttering back to the date, as if it were.

An hour's drive north, a 28-year-old man I interviewed in prison on Wednesday must at this moment be by laying in bed in his cell, no doubt meditating on his 2-year-old son, dreaming of his next visit. The prison unit is on "lockdown" because of acts of violence between prisoners, and except for my interview, he and the other men have not left their cells in days.

I had met his child for the first time two days earlier; he called every man "dada," even those flat images of men he saw flickering by on the television screen. Mother had divorced father months earlier. I'd written about them both, back before the child was born, in more hopeful days.

Last night, over goodbye drinks for a departing co-worker, I heard an old story about a school administrator who had a habit of popping Viagra pills and then walking down supermarket aisles in his spandex shorts. My co-workers thought they got him, eventually, on indecent exposure.

I am imagining a middle-aged man, hair like Caesar, pale as most Minnesotans are pale, round at the waist, dressed like an entrant in the Tour de France, trundling to a wide-eyed older woman in the dairy aisle, she of the big blue hat and the winter scarf, the crisp, refrigerator air doing nothing to cool the chemical want between his legs, his offering obvious but never mentioned, a silent hello protruding from beneath small talk about the rising price of Kemps milk.

What no one will understand later and what he cannot fully explain is that this is more than a thrill ride, an obscene bat attack on an unsuspecting mailbox, a sexualized cow tipping. He is not doing this because he can. He is doing this because he must.

I am glad I am not him. Or her.

But I am not sure how it was determined that I be neither of them, that I am me and not them. The soul is unique; our actions are self-chosen; but that's not the half of it. What more, I can't say.

-- cut: There was something else I was going to tell you here, but I have forgotten. --

But consider this:

At the prison I mentioned earlier, the very large associate warden came out to the guest lobby to talk to my photographer before the interview. "You're wanted in New Mexico," the very large associate warden said. "There's a warrant for you -- something about a moving violation."

"But!" my photographer said. "That was! Years ago! I thought! I paid that!"

My photographer has two or three kids. He has a wife he took to the hospital on Monday with what he prays is a cold. He did not want to be locked up with the hurt and the deadly here in Minnesota, not for breaking the speed limit a lifetime ago in New Mexico. His heart beat faster.

They did not arrest him. He promised to get to the bottom of things, to make amends.

Do you know this joke?: "How do you make God laugh? Tell him your plans." The writing coach is now telling this joke to the class, and it is apropos.

That is life though. All that planning that we who call ourselves professionals pour into ourselves, it's to move us forward in one direction. But we only set the compass and head out and pray. Where we end up -- that's fate or chance or what have you.

Here's another thought: Who we are when we're miserable or tired and who we are when the sun hits us after a long gray morning are sometimes so different, it's like we've forgotten ourselves and suddenly noticed the forgetting. "I'm back," you want to say. "I feel myself again. I didn't realize I was gone but I'm back."

This may be how an alcoholic feels during lucid times. This feeling hits me often.

That girlfriend I told you about, the one of the canned vegetables. She was beautiful, that one, but it would never have worked between us. When she told me to move out, I asked her why. She said: "I'm not going to tell you. You never listen."

Ah, well.

Let me close the way a good meal starts. Here's my prayer. Here's my constant prayer: I want to let go of self-recrimination without giving up my perpetually-interrupted commitment to self-improvement; to hate my disorganization less while working on it more; to accept me without losing sight of a better me. I want to learn from the past without being tethered to it; I want to forgive everyone, including myself.

I want next year to be better than the last. I want it all fixed up and better. I want all these things and many more. But I expect nothing.

Okie dokie then. Alright. Amen.