"It Hasn't Been Easy"

I’m in a room full of students, who are laughing and joking and caring about anything except improving English.  I don’t know why they are paying for it, but I’m getting paid, so it’s not of my concern how they reason these things.  It’s almost 10 pm.  I’ve been asked to substitute for an older teacher whose wife has gone to the hospital.  Supposedly she is very old and may not make it.  They asked me to do this last night, at the last minute, and I said no, because I already had plans.  But I don’t have any excuses tonight or tomorrow night, or the next night, and money is helpful in getting me into my own room somewhere and paying my credit card bill accumulated from many amazing travels around America (strangely, I had no credit card debt from any of my other travels.)  So I’m teaching these people who love to be here and are pretty good natured, but they don’t have any discipline whatsoever when it comes to learning.  And they’re lower level than my normal classes, who are already pretty low level as far as I am concerned.  I like them as people, but these guys aren’t good students.

We turn to page 152 in the review unit of New Beginnings: A Complete English Course, Level 4, prepared by the New York Language Center.

Part 6: It Hasn’t Been Easy

It’s 8:00 PM.  It’s been a hard day, and it’s not over yet!  I still have to work on that report.  I began it last night, but so far I’ve written only two pages.  And it’s due tomorrow!  Work has been so difficult lately.  I’ve worked late every night this week.  I feel exhausted and I didn’t get much sleep last night.  And, of course, I miss [lover].

Since I last wrote I’ve had a ton of fun and been completely exhausted, even during most of the fun times.  The gods should seriously consider adding an extra three hours to each day, preferably between 2 and 5 am when I am sleeping.  That way I won’t feel pretty terrible during my waking hours.  Just slow down the Earth’s rotation.  I’m sure we have the technology lying around somewhere amidst all the iPhones and androids and electric cars.

The bright side is that after having spent most of the past year living a social life comprised primarily of sporadic conversations with whoever happened to be my roommates and teaching students from around the world, I have a real and consistent social life again.  That’s good because I get to spend quality time with people, express myself and listen to others doing the same, joke around and laugh.  The bad part is that I have less time, energy and focus for writing, which bothers me more than ever.  Bukowski said that you make time to create no matter what, but he was a jerk and said a lot of things.

Even so, I can’t complain about seeing good people more often than before.  I spent Wednesday night having drinks with several college friends, including my old roommate in Queens from before the journeys began, a fellow writer from a college magazine who attended my third Bonnaroo with my cousin and me (and lent me a tent when he and my cousin left early, which resulted in me getting a smile scar on my arm), a friend who lived in the house behind us senior year, and my current host.  We drank beer in Manhattan and laughed a lot.

On Thursday I finally met up with my cousin Dan, who I have known forever.  He just closed the biggest deal of his life earlier that day, so it seemed a fitting time to catch up.  We drank in Manhattan and realized that even though our jobs are almost completely different, they are both based on being able to talk to people.  That realization led to more realizations of common perspectives and ideas about the deeper things that everyone deals with no matter how they spend their waking hours, something which I have been spending a lot of lately due to lack of sleep.

On Friday I was all prepared to go to bed early, but only after watching a few episodes of Breaking Bad.  We only had six left, and we had just begun the first one when my writing friend Jake invited me into Manhattan for drinks.  I could have said no, but I hadn’t been out on the town on a Friday night since moving to the city.  I’d been to one party and visited home twice because I had nowhere to stay those weekends, but I hadn’t gone out on the scene.  I had a great time catching up with my friend, but drunken strangers and wallets that are thinner at the end of the night than you thought possible have gotten old.

I had to substitute teach at 9 am on Saturday morning, so I was pretty miserable the rest of the afternoon.  I was running on three and a half hours of sleep and a twenty minute nap when I attended my friend Glenn’s birthday party.  I’ve known Glenn since I was 5.  He’s my oldest friend not related by blood.  A large group of actors and actors’ girlfriends/boyfriends made up the majority of the group, and we had an excellent time eating a fancy Italian dinner and singing karaoke in K-town.  That is, I tried not to fall asleep while the others sang with all their hearts.  I sang along for a few songs, but I was seriously holding on with everything I had, especially after all of the requisite alcohol.  For all of my discipline with healthy eating habits and refraining from smoking (it’s been a month since I’ve had a happy high), simply wanting to healthily associate with my peers has left me feeling completely awful the rest of the time.  I feel alright in the moment when I’m teaching, but as soon as I’m finished and every minute beforehand I’m struggling to keep my eyes open and my head up.  I missed my connecting stop on the subway on the way home today because I had fallen asleep right before we got there. 

I finally didn’t have anything to do on Sunday, which was nice because it was a dreary rainy day.  Laundry, a reasonable amount of sleep, moving my car and talking to the folks on the phone was about it.  At night we concluded our epic five season sprint through Breaking Bad which had commenced four weeks earlier.  Now that it’s over, I don’t have to watch any TV.  I’m kind of a binge TV guy.  I tend to go long stretches without it, besides streaming online segments of The Daily Show and spending 20 minutes on a new South Park the few times a year they actually make episodes.  But about every seven years I get hooked on something great that has a connecting thread through every episode and builds as an overall story.  When that happens, I just want to plow through it to discover what’s next and remember that television can be a quality art form when done right.  But only once every few years.  TV is too dangerous otherwise.  I remember when I worked in art book publishing and went on some sort of field trip to a printing center, and the entire conversation of all the editors around the hotel dinner table was about all of the good television shows that were on at the time, and how there were just so many one didn’t have time to take them all in.

Anyway, the Breaking Bad series ends pretty gruesomely and depressingly.  The fifth season is somehow much more depressing than the previous four, and that’s saying something.  There is hardly anyone to root for by the end.  At the beginning they all have their lovable quirks and funny lines despite their breaking the law or insufferable straight edge adherence to the law, but by the end I couldn’t stand any of the characters.  Sixty plus episodes of deception, violence and rampant self-interest supposedly in the name of “family” (from all sides involved) had me feeling pretty down about humanity by the end.  It was still entertaining and incredibly well-written, filmed and acted, but that doesn’t mean I have to like the message.

When the main character becomes a real player in the drug game, he takes the pseudonym Heisenberg, after the brilliant German physicist Werner Heisenberg, who is considered to be the father of quantum mechanics and the “uncertainty principle.”  If you know the position of a particle, you can’t know its velocity, and vice versa.  He basically ended Einstein’s dream of explaining everything with general relativity and determinism (although there is still something called wave-function determinism, it’s not as exact as the one determinists hoped for, which could theoretically predict everything in the future down to the smallest detail).  He won the Nobel Prize in 1932, even though it should have been shared with Max Born and Pascual Jordan.  He admitted as much, but it wasn’t his decision.  When Hitler came to power, he avoided being killed for being different and pretty much did what he had to do to keep working on science in Nazi Germany without getting murdered.  The Allies captured him and interviewed him after the war, but let him go, so he kept working for decades.

One of the ideas about the main character assuming the name “Heisenberg” (which eventually makes him feared as a tyrannical monster throughout the drug world) is that the world is simply chaos without meaning.  During one flashback scene toward the beginning of the show, he is writing down all the chemical components contributing to the composition of the human body.  When he and his female partner have been through them all, she says that something seems like its missing.  She suggests, “The soul?”  He responds cockily, “There’s nothing but chemistry here,” which of course has a very suave meaning at the time, but later appears to be very telling of who he truly is.

Right before the final episode I had to excuse myself and go take a long walk outside to get the blood flowing after a day of mostly resting indoors while it rained.  I got some groceries and listened to music.  The first song on my headphones was “Joy of Man’s Desiring” by Johann Sebastian Bach.  The organ version by Wolfgang Rubsam.  If there was ever a song to restore one’s faith in humanity, that’s the one.  I think I had my Top 25 most listened to songs playing on random on my iPod.  Heisenberg would agree it was random, but Einstein would keep saying such an idea isn’t the whole truth:

“Religion without science is blind; science without religion is lame.” (He didn’t mean organized religion).

Of course, the next song was “Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots, Pt. 1” by The Flaming Lips, and then as I returned to the apartment with two steaming hot slices of New York City style pizza, Moby’s “Grace” played.  Then I finally got to see the conclusion to the most highly praised television show in recent memory.  At least it involved the death of a Nazi (or more?  You’ll have to watch for yourself…).  It’s always nice to throw some Nazis into a show so you can get past all the uncertainty and know who you truly want to root against.  But Heisenberg, both in the show and in real life, had no problem shaking hands with them when it came to business and mutual interests. 

The show’s setting of Albuquerque, New Mexico had me pondering some of the adventures I had had out west, especially my most recent move from West to East.  The previous post is pictures from Pyramid Lake in Nevada.  It’s Indian land that wasn’t affected by the government shut down.

After two nights at Pyramid Lake I drove about twelve hours through the mountainous desert of western and then southern Nevada, through Las Vegas, on my way to Flagstaff, Arizona.  I was supposed to visit a slightly older friend from NYC who had just moved there.  I hadn’t seen him since right before I left for Japan, and since he was one of the only other people I knew who had been on a solo backpacking tour through Asia and worked as a teacher, I thought it very important to catch up, seeing as how I finally had some teaching experience myself.  Unfortunately we were having trouble with phone tag, what with me changing my plans at the last minute and then camping in an area with no cell phone reception.  I would drive twenty minutes to leave messages and texts, but then wouldn’t know if he had gotten back to me until the next day.  By the time I left Pyramid Lake for Flagstaff, we hadn’t finalized any plans.  He must not have gotten my voice mail or texts, because he didn’t get back to me at all that Sunday of travel through Nevada.  My plan was to camp somewhere near Flagstaff and hope he got back to me before I had to hit the road again on Monday.  I was trying to get back to New York as fast as I could, but I could make one exception for a good friend.

The terrain across Nevada was some of the most beautiful I had ever seen, and it was a new experience as I had never seen so many mountains in the desert before.  I was used to mountains or desert, but not both at the same time.  Sunset was spectacular, as were the lights of Las Vegas and the desert stars once I sped away as soon as I had come.

The last time I went to Vegas I had hitchhiked from Bryce Canyon in Utah, and my final ride was with two heroin junkies on their way to score a huge amount for personal use.  They never completely admitted it, but it wasn’t hard to tell.  They were going to go back to St. George, Utah the same night after meeting some guy they admittedly didn’t like at some hotel.  They also told me that they shared their house with the guy’s father, who used to sell drugs and was currently addicted to crystal meth.  Luckily, this time I had my own car and didn’t have to worry about any of that, although my drivers had been very nice people who went an hour out of their way to drop me off during Friday night traffic that December evening in 2010.

I had been driving for almost twelve hours by the time I entered Arizona.  I didn’t think I was awake enough to drive two more hours to Flagstaff, so once I drove through Kingman, Arizona I pulled off the interstate and immediately found a patch of dirt on the side of the nearest highway.  I parked my car and decided to rest in the driver’s seat for the night.  I re-arranged my belongings so I could recline my seat and cracked open the window just enough to get some air circulating.  Then I pulled my open sleeping bag over me and curled up beneath the stars.  I figured nobody would bother me there, since it was mostly open desert terrain, and the nearest town was ten minutes behind me on the interstate. 

The next morning I woke up shortly after sunrise and saw a text from my friend saying he could meet once he got out of school at 3.  I hadn’t heard from him in two days, so I was very pleasantly surprised.  I actually felt pretty good after sleeping in the driver’s seat.  I had become so used to my car that I felt a special bond with it while traveling, as if the home I had been searching for all this time had always been with me.  We drove to Flagstaff and then down to Sedona, a place I hadn’t had a chance to visit years earlier that last time I came through.  Luckily I had seen the Grand Canyon the previous time, because it was closed due to the government shutdown caused by people who really didn’t want other people to have health care.  I haven’t had health care in four years, only incredibly inexpensive travel insurance that covered the basics when I was on the road.  Besides that I’ve eaten a lot of broccoli, carrots, onions, bell peppers, tomatoes, cucumbers, spinach, eggplant, tofu, beans, rice, apples, bananas, oranges and fish the past few years.  Orange juice, tomato juice, green tea and milk have also helped me stay away from the doctor’s office.  I’m due for a physical, which I do about once a year, but besides that I don’t see a need to pay a lot of money for insurance every single month.  I wouldn’t mind paying a little to cover the basics, like when I was on travel insurance that covered air lifts out of remote areas in case I was sick or injured in the Indian Himalaya or Cambodian jungle.  But as with most things in life, I think we spend way more effort on treating things than preventing them.  Not to say there are non-preventable problems or people who suffer from conditions that can’t be aided in any other way.  But as a whole, we tend to drink, smoke and fast food ourselves to the doctor’s office.  At the other extreme, we stress over every single detail, which can’t be good for us either.  The mind is part of health just as much as the body.  Even so, I think it’s fine for the government to try to make it so that more people can afford health care and that shady rich companies can’t rip people off as easily.  Either way, the greedy guys shut down the government, and I went through Nevada instead of southern California, and didn’t visit the Grand Canyon again because they had somehow closed off one of the largest holes on Earth.

I got back to Flagstaff with enough time to change my clothes and clean up my car a little, since I was picking up my friend and needed room in the passenger’s seat.  I found a Target store and looked for a spot near the back where there were trees with shade.  I pulled up behind another truck/van and took my time emptying garbage and changing clothes inside my car.  I was almost done when the owner of the vehicle parked ahead of me came back.  His car was parked just a little over the line, into my space, but I hadn’t cared.  It was inconsiderate, but no big deal.  Also, he had some kind of extension on his truck that made part of it stick out a few feet beyond his bumper and over the hood of my car.

He said, “Excuse me, but I need to open the back of my car, and you’re parked really close.”  He wasn’t very old.  Perhaps my age, perhaps a little older, maybe a little younger.  Brown hair, no facial hair, not dressed up but not raggedy.

I looked up and agreed, so I apologized and agreed to move my car.  But he wouldn’t let it go.

“You know, I parked here so I would be away from everybody.  One would think that if you saw a car parked away from everybody in the back, there might be a reason for that.”  What the hell was he talking about?  Meanwhile, there were two people sitting in a car parked two spaces away from him, witnessing this strange one-sided dispute that I thought was already over.

“I mean, you parked only a foot away from my car,” he said, his voice rising with irritation as he inaccurately illustrated the distance with his hands.  That was almost true: I was close, but only because his extension stuck out over the hood of my car, and his tires were over a foot into my space, and I couldn’t park any further back or I would be sticking out into the part where cars were supposed to drive.

“Don’t worry about it,” I said.  “It’s no big deal.”  I turned on my car and shifted into reverse.  It shouldn’t have been, at least.

He kept going, shaking his head, as if I were the stupidest person in the world.  “You’d think it would be obvious that someone wouldn’t want anyone parking near them when they’re over here, and you go and park freaking inches from my bumper.”  Somehow, by his account, I was getting closer to his car even as I pulled away.

I replied in a calm voice, “Seriously, man, just calm down.  It’s nothing to get angry about.”

“I’m not angry!”

“Yes, you clearly are angry, but there is no need to be.  See.  I’m parked away from you now.”  I had simply pulled back into a spot across the traffic path and one spot down, as there was already a truck in the spot directly behind me.  He kept giving me these weird looks as he loaded his car with these large plastic containers he had just bought.  I looked back at him in confusion, but also with a hint of my own irritation at his belligerence.  I had just as much a right to be in a parking spot in a parking lot as he did.  The witnesses looked very puzzled by his actions.

My first thought was the first thought I always have when my imagination runs wild and someone is overly protective and secretive about their home or their car: “What?  Do you have a meth lab in there or something?”  I didn’t even watch that show yet.  I kept organizing my car and eventually left with little concern for the childish “man” who was such a prissy baby about having plenty of space for his shady car.

At 3 pm I waited outside the high school where my friend worked and couldn’t believe that I once used to ride on those same yellow school buses every day.  What would the sixteen year old me think of the 29 year old me?  Soon my friend appeared, called me, “Mr. Sanford,” and shook my hand before hugging.

Later, over dinner, I told my friend that I had slept by the side of the road just beyond Kingman, and he said, “Kingman, eh?  That’s the meth capital of America!”

“Seriously?”

“Yeah.  Needles, California is also up there and not too far away.  It’s really big all around this area.”

I thought of my confrontation in the parking lot with the man who was overly sensitive about his large vehicle intentionally parked away from other vehicles at the back of a parking lot.  He had purchased many large plastic containers, as I recall.

A month later I would finally watch the show which begins with small time meth cooks running an operation out of an RV, and during one of the episodes the guy sends his partner to Home Depot to buy large plastic containers for their supplies.

After dinner I got back in my car and drove halfway through New Mexico.  When I got to Albuquerque I was greeted by a rainbow tunnel, and then I found another desert spot just off the interstate highway where I could park my car and sleep in the seat.  I woke up to a glorious sunrise.

 Then I drove across America, repeating that pattern in Kansas, Kentucky and western New York before finally making it home to Lake Champlain, Cambridge and New York City.  Although I guess I’m still searching for home, because I don’t have a room or a bed yet.  As romantic as the desert stars were, this couch indoors beats sleeping unprotected in areas with meth fiends and cooks running about.

Monday began my new schedule.  They added a new two hour class from noon to 2 pm, so I am now working 6 hours a day, which makes me pretty much full time, especially since they’re adding a four hour Sunday class to my schedule at the beginning of December (six days a week is no fun, but doable).  Even better, the title of the text book for my new class is:

True Stories Behind the Songs

We listen to songs from a book, learn their stories and discuss.  I’m free to play my own songs to teach them, and I encourage them to bring their own as well.

As fun as it was, I was pretty tired when I finished, so when I got a call on the subway ride home from the Bronx to Queens asking me to come back at 8 pm to teach for two hours, I said I already had commitments.  This was kind of true because I planned to write all night.  But I also thought, “That’s fair.  What if I was in some kind of weekly sports league?  What would they have done if I hadn’t just driven across the country out of nowhere, showed up at their doorstep a month ago and started picking up all these classes and substituting every time they’ve asked me until today?”

When I got home I had a text message from my old roommate, Joe, reminding me that we had agreed to play basketball in Jersey City that night.  It had been a year and a half since I’d played, and that time I was in hiking boots because I didn’t have any basketball shoes that didn’t have enormous holes in them.  And that was only two one-on-one games.  I hadn’t played in an intense pick-up game since right before I went to Japan.

I thought I was going to be horrible and die on the court, especially since I was falling asleep on the subway ride to Jersey.  But we warmed up for thirty minutes and then played these other two guys in two-on-two.  They mostly had a height advantage, but we won all three games, including the third one where we were losing 5-0 but came back to win 11-8.  We made a great team.  Joe is a much better shooter than I remember, especially since he didn’t play at an organized competitive level.  And although an inconsistent jump shooter, I did make just as many insane circus shots as I have been known to do.  Sometimes opponents ask me which planet I am from.  I don't consistently dominate the competition, but I tend to make the strangest shots they’ve ever seen.  And sometimes I do dominate the competition.  Practice makes perfect.

Anyway, just like last night, even though I was exhausted from going back to the Bronx and teaching those crazy disinterested students for two more hours at the end of the day, I’ve managed to summon the energy to write this, if only to stay in practice.

Finally, I will close by telling you that the theme of the first Unit in my new Music Story class is “Finding Lost Love.”  The first song is “You’re Beautiful,” by James Blunt.  I hate that song, and the story is sad too.  Luckily the CD they gave me doesn’t work, so we haven’t been able to listen to it yet.  On the plus side, there is plenty of material in the textbook, so we read a happier story about a couple that had been separated for an absurd amount of time but still found each other.  Then, to fit the theme, and to finally play them some kind of music instead of just talking about it, I hooked up my iPod to the provided speakers and played them “I Will” by The Beatles.