Everybody!

New York, New York

Today I have a free day.  I have a free day tomorrow too.  I don't have to go to work or teach anyone, or ride the green line up to the Bronx.  Last night I enjoyed a simple night out with friends which ended early and allowed me to get a full night's sleep.

That means I can explore the city as much as I want to today.  There are still so many places I have yet to revisit since I moved here.

The best part of New York is it doesn't take much imagination to turn yourself into an adventurous tourist, even if you live here.

Intuition

"Some people feel that when things like this happen, it is not just a coincidence, but a manifestation of some higher power or order where all things, including our thoughts, come together.  'Ridiculous!' say others.  'That's all superstition!'  Perhaps--but let's take a further look before we jump to conclusions.

We all know that some things exist even though we cannot see them with our own eyes: electricity, love, pain, the sun on a cloudy day."

-  Exploring English 6 by Tim Harris and Allan Rowe


We read that in the first class today right before time was up.  One of the themes of the chapter is Love, Faith and Miracles.  Then I went to the next class, where we had the final exam.  Beforehand my supervisor gave them a speech about their next class and what to expect, and how they're going to have a different instructor because it's good for them to get experience listening to a variety of accents.  Then we had the test, which was forty minutes.  I didn't have anything to do, but I happened to have this Deepak Chopra book I'd bought in Japan a few years ago.  As the students answered questions about the present perfect, past perfect and future perfect tenses, I cracked open The Spontaneous Fulfillment of Desire: Harnessing the Infinite Power of Coincidence:

"The fifth stage is called cosmic consciousness because you have two qualities to your awareness, local and non-local, at the same time.  In this fifth state, when you sense your connection to non-local intelligence, synchronicity really starts to manifest.  In this state, you realize that part of you is localized and part of you, being non-local, is connected to everything.  You fully live your inseparability to all that exists.  Your intuition increases.  Your creativity increases.  Your insight increases.

The sixth state of consciousness is called divine consciousness.  In this state, the witness becomes more and more awake.  You not only feel the presence of spirit in yourself, but you start to feel that spirit in all beings.  You see the presence of spirit in plants.  Ultimately you feel the presence of spirit in rocks.  You recognize that the animating force of life expresses itself in all objects of the universe, in both the observer and the observed, in both the seer and the scenery.  This divine consciousness allows us to see the presence of God in all things.  This is not a constant state of consciousness for most people.  You move in and out of it.

The seventh and last stage of consciousness, the ultimate goal, is called unity consciousness.  This may also be called enlightenment.  In unity consciousness, the spirit in the perceiver and the spirit in that which is perceived merge and become one.  When this happens, you see the whole world as an extension of your own being.  You not only identify with your personal consciousness, but you see that the whole world is a projection of your own self.  In this stage, miracles are commonplace, but they are not even necessary because the infinite realm of possibility is available at every moment. (Chopra 258)

After the test the students had a pot luck party and I scrambled to grade their tests by the end of the class.  Meanwhile, they insisted I eat some of the food they brought, and then as time ran down, they kept bringing more and more leftover food to this tiny table I had transformed into a desk and insisting I eat that too.  I didn't get many proper good bye's, but I got a lot of pizza, cupcakes, orange juice, fruit and napkins.

I was very late to the next class, but they didn't mind because I brought leftover pizza with me.  Then we learned about the song "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers.  Everybody needs help sometimes, and everybody can help other people at times.  Unity.  You can't be helped if you have too much pride to admit you need help.  That story took up most of the class time.  Bill was raised in a coal mining town in West Virginia.  Coal mining is one of the hardest and most dangerous jobs on Earth.  It was a good reminder that despite sleeplessness, at least I was able to talk about music and stories instead of working in a coal mine.

This is just how my mind works: upon seeing the word "miner" I thought of an Abraham Lincoln quote I gave as a writing assignment to my class in California:

          "All creation is a mine, and every man, a miner.

          The whole earth, and all within it, upon it, and round about it, including himself, in his physical, moral, and intellectual nature, and his susceptibilities, are the infinitely various “leads” from which, man, from the first, was to dig out his destiny.

          In the beginning the mine was unopened, and the miner stood naked, and knowledgeless, upon it.

          Man is not the only animal who labors; but he is the only one who improves his workmanship.  This improvement, he effects by Discoveries, and Inventions…"

                                                   -President Abraham Lincoln

          What distinguishes human beings in regard to the creation of a civilization, Lincoln emphasizes, is their capacity to apply cerebral power to observation and remediation, to invent techniques and devices that raise the quality of human life.

-Gabe Kaplan, Lincoln: Biography of a Writer

This class definitely couldn't handle something like that though.  Even so, I like to think that every day I am mining the cosmic unified divine consciousness for some inspiration to help me appreciate the constant miracle of creation.  The next song didn't appear to help though.  As per the rules I created, I let a student play a song and distribute lyrics to everyone.  It was a song called "Impossible."  It was all about impossible love, or something like that.  Really intense whiny emotional lyrics with pop orchestras and so forth.  Apparently he won a reality talent show with it.  It really brought me down at the end of a long week, but we had just enough time for one more song, so I improvised with another Bill Withers tune.  Although Withers sang it, Grover Washington, Jr. is credited with the track because it's on his album.

I don't recall mining my experience living in the East Bay for much gold during the month of July, but on Independence Day one of my roommates kept playing the song "Just the Two of Us" again and again.  (6:41 pm)  I became addicted to the song, and it was the first song I played when I was reunited with my car in August after visiting home and couch surfing for a few days.  It's also the first song I played when I took that same old 190,000 mile car in dire need of new shocks and struts on a journey across the US.  Today we closed the class with it.

Maybe just the two of us is impossible.  Maybe it would take a miracle.  Then again, everybody needs someone to lean on, and most people need more than one person.  We need a community of humans to help us through the journey of life, whether or not we reach unity consciousness.

After class my supervisor told me that I will actually be getting most of the same students in my 10:00 class next week, even though she just told them in front of me that they would have a different teacher.  We will have less focus on grammar and more focus on speaking and vocabulary.

As I was leaving, my only Japanese student explained she had been late because the 4 train didn't come for some reason.  I asked which direction she had come from, and she said downtown, so I figured I would be fine heading that way instead of coming from that direction.  I don't know why.  I could have just taken the D train and been fine.  Instead I walked to the 4 and stood the whole time because I'd heard Sly and the Family Stone's "Stand" on the way to work and I was in a generous mood any time a seat opened up and someone else appeared to want to take it.  While standing I experienced another coincidence relating to something I had mined from my experience in the East Bay in July: a man next to me was wearing a t-shirt with Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo and Animal crossing the street in the style of The Beatles' final album, Abbey Road.  I had only seen that shirt once before, in the kitchen of my sublet in the East Bay, on July 24th.  Their smiling faces, especially Kermit's, reminded me that I was in the right place.  It may have been a cloudy day, but the rainbow was flowing every which way.

Once we reached 138th street (we started at 188th street), the train stalled for over five minutes.  Then we finally moseyed into 125th street when they informed us every train was experiencing delays and running locally to 59th street.  So I switched to the 6 train where I found a seat and thanked God for making me appreciate it more, having stood the whole way to work in the morning and most of the way back.  But of course we were stalled for over ten minutes, and then again at 110th street.  We must have waited for over 15 minutes there, and then stalled again at 103rd street.  Apparently there had been an incident at 33rd street earlier in the day which had caused all the 456 trains to run on the same track and become congested.  I was listening to "Hotel" by Broken Social Scene and then "Better Things" by The Kinks when I realized I could rest my head by propping my hoodie up on my lap, atop some bananas one of my students from Ghana had bought for me as a present.  Then the guy next to me got up and left, so I had the corner to myself.

It was then that I began thinking about divinity unleashed all around me and every little annoyance currently bothering me and everyone I could see being part of some sort of planned synchronicity.  The next song was "Hey Jude," which always reminds me of the magical rewards of patience, and I realized then that I could use my hoodie as a pillow.  I stretched out comfortably in the corner and dozed as we stalled at every station.  Once we were stopped in between stations and they cut the power, so the lights dimmed and there was no sound, and it was very eerie.  But I had the synchronicity in mind.  I didn't understand the timing or where it was taking me, but it was taking me where I would be happy to be, supposedly.

By the time I emerged into the open air in Queens, I had been underground for 2 hours.  It was cloudy, but I felt like I had just emerged from a day of work in the coal mine.  The sky had never been so beautiful.  I couldn't see the sun, but I knew it was there.

Later we were having a few beers at a bar with live music.  We had a great time, but at one point one brief subject of the conversations sparked a momentary but terrifying feeling that all of my dreams were for naught and that I would just grow up to be sad and bored with unfulfilled hopes.  Yes, I know: irrelevant, irrational, and unlikely if I continue to work hard and believe.  But still, it very momentarily got to me and I was starting to feel unhappy... but then the band started playing a zydeco version of "Wagon Wheel."  It was the first time I had heard it live since I'd lived in New York City years ago.

To Jean Lynch, Care of Heaven

Dear Jean,

I miss you, and wish I could have talked to you, seen that lovely smile and heard that wonderful laugh of yours one more time.  Thank you for reading so many of these while you were here.  Whenever you gave me positive feedback on these posts, it truly made my day.  I'm sure you have much more beautiful depth to experience wherever you are, but this one's for you:

Today I taught three classes of mostly cheerful humans from literally all over the world.  During the first class we learned about the history of American music in our textbook, which meant we covered country music, jazz and rock music.  I guess the book wasn't big on hip-hop.  I found myself explaining jazz for the second time in two weeks.  Last week we had a sentence in the "reported speech" lesson that said, "I like jazz," and a guy from Ghana asked me what jazz was.  I described the typical instrumentation and explained the history and complicated nature of the genre, but the epicenter of the explanation was clearly improvisation.  I explained that being able to innovate and adapt while being in the moment is what sets jazz apart from other styles of music.  That's exactly what the text book said today too.  It talked about all of the genres and the super famous guys like Louis Armstrong, Duke Ellington, Count Basie and Benny Goodman (in a few decades they'll have Hiromi Uehara in there too!).  Almost none of the students listen to jazz, which is a shame.  Then again, barely anyone knew the name Bob Dylan either.  Most people knew The Beatles and Elvis Presley.

That class finished at 10 am and the next one began.  We reviewed all 10 chapters of our text book because we have a final exam tomorrow covering everything we have learned in the past five weeks of this course.  After that they are finished, and I will likely never see most of them again, unless it happens to be in the hallway before or after they go to someone else's class.  It's strange to think about how unfamiliar and cold they appeared when I began teaching them, and how much I missed my comfortable happy San Francisco class that I had left to move to New York.  But now we laugh a lot and they smile, and we make jokes and pick on each other, and it's fun.  Also, more importantly, I know how to teach grammar now.  That wasn't big on my to do list as an artist, but since teaching pays my way in life right now, I might as well be really good at it, and grammar was my weak point.  The San Francisco class didn't like learning it, so I only taught it as much as I absolutely had to.  Anyway, we're going to eat after the test, and then that's it.  New students on Monday.  There will be a different text book at least, so I won't go crazy.

The third class began at noon, and it was the musical stories class that just began this week.  It gets bigger every day.  I'm up to 23 enrolled students, the largest class I've had at this school so far.  I was worried the first day because there were only 8 students when we began, but they filtered in once the class began, and now there are a few new faces every day.  This has also made it the most diverse class I have ever taught.  I am teaching people from five different continents, and I am teaching them about stories and music.  As Louis Armstrong would say, what a wonderful world.

Even better, the past two days we've been talking about baseball, because the song was "Take me out to the ball game."  I began by explaining almost all of the rules to baseball, "America's past time," which not only helped explain the song but also was consistent with my school's requirement of adding supplementary cultural material to the lessons.  All of those years of sports fanaticism come in handy sometimes.  A lot of the students thought baseball was boring, and even though I didn't change their minds (or completely disagree), some of them admitted it was very helpful to finally know what it was about.  That's the number one reason most people find most things boring: they don't understand them.

The most important aspect I emphasized about baseball is that it is a team sport.  Even though I love basketball more because I think it's simply more fluid, fun, exciting, creative and athletic, it's easy to get away from the team aspect.  That can be good, because you can't always count on other people to help you.  Sometimes they let you down.  But we can never do it all alone either.  That's why I never liked golf, amongst many other reasons.  Yet baseball is 100% a team sport.  I mostly learned how to play by throwing a ball at a net alone by myself, but it was only fun when I finally joined a team of my peers and we played together.  Everyone on the team had a job to do.  My job was third base, and the next year it was short stop.  I was a good batter but a better fielder.  Even though I had to get the ball by myself, unless it was a fly ball, I had to throw it to somebody or it meant nothing.  And I never hit a home run (I was a small guy), so if I got on base, somebody had to bat me home.  The best play of my life was a double with the bases loaded that came just ten feet short of a grand slam, and all the runners scored, giving me three RBI's.  The pitcher, although a few years younger, was already being groomed as the greatest athlete in our town, but I wrecked him.  It was my final game in organized baseball too.  And it wouldn't have been as epic if my teammates hadn't all gotten on base beforehand.  And I wouldn't have known how to hit that ball if my dad hadn't taken me to the batting cage in Baltimore when I needed an escape from the hospital waiting room as my sister recovered from her surgeries.

Today we read a story about a woman who was the first woman to play on a professional men's baseball team.  Her name was Jackie Mitchell, and she played on a minor league team, but she was such a good pitcher that the New York Yankees came to play them in an exhibition game.  This was 1931, which means Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig were on the Yankees.  Babe Ruth is worshiped as the greatest baseball player of all time, and held the career home runs, RBI's and slugging percentage records for decades.  He still holds the records for most home run and RBI single season titles during a career, and was partially responsible for the popularity explosion of baseball during the 1920's.  Some consider him to be the first American sports celebrity.  Meanwhile, Lou Gehrig held a long standing record for consecutive games played until Baltimore Oriole Cal Ripken, Jr. broke it in 1995.  That record earned him the nickname "the Iron Horse."  He held the career grand slams record until this year, won the triple crown and was MVP twice.  He was the first player to have his number retired by Major League Baseball.  4,000 people watched as Ruth became the first major league professional player faced by a woman.  The home run king tipped his cap to her as a sign of respect, and then she struck him out with three pitches.  Then Gehrig also struck out.  After the game the commissioner of baseball sent Jackie a letter saying he had canceled her contract because baseball was too "strenuous" for a woman.  She played in mostly show games after that, and even pitched while sitting on a donkey once.  She quit after that circus farce, and never played baseball again.

Now there is a Japanese woman who wants to pitch in the major leagues with men.  The discussion questions asked the students to say if they thought women should be allowed to play baseball with men in the major leagues.  Keep in mind this was baseball, not all sports.  Most of the students said no, but it wasn't a big majority.  Many said yes, including several male students.  They had to give reasons, and just about every person who was against it said that men are faster and stronger than women.  Some, including women, said that although they are for equal rights and opportunities, women wouldn't be able to keep up.

Although my job wasn't to disagree with them or sway their opinion one way or another, I couldn't help myself.  After all, I had just explained to them that the definition of discrimination was holding somebody back based on unfair and irrelevant measures of their worth.  For example, if Jackie Mitchell could strike out the best player in the history of baseball, how do speed and strength enter into the equation?  Especially given that the American League has designated hitters for pitchers, there is no reason why she couldn't hold her own.  All she had to do was stand on the mound.  She wouldn't even have to bat or run.  Her only job was to strike out the other players.  Her job wasn't even to strike out the best players ever in the history of the game, and she still did it.  Nothing else is expected of a pitcher.  So why can't she play?  Those students sound like that simple-minded (or fearful?) commissioner of baseball that canceled her contract.  Anyway, if this Japanese woman can play, what other measure matters?  That's the whole method of destroying discrimination: equal opportunity for equal talent.  I guess in Jackie's case she was superior talent, and that made her chauvinistic enemies fearful of her power.

After the break we learned about some new songs.  A Mexican woman brought in the lyrics to Sonny and Cher's "I Got You Babe" and played the song on her iPod.  I didn't know the story behind the song, but I knew some basic information about Sonny and Cher, so I shared that and then played the song.  It's about the rest of the problems of the world not mattering as long as you have someone to love.

We still had twenty minutes left, so I improvised based on the first unit's theme of "Finding Lost Love," and taught them the best song I could think of.

I played "Wagon Wheel" by Old Crow Medicine Show for them, and then explained each line to them.  That meant I had to tell them about bluegrass, the south, reasons for hitchhiking and rules surrounding how to do it, New England, gambling, Bob Dylan, bouquets of flowers, pioneers going west in wagons, and similes ("Rock me mama like a southbound train").  I think some of them liked the song.  I didn't tell them about my own hitchhiking experiences.

Then time was up, and I got to go home and take a nap.

Even though it was a great day of teaching, I received extremely sad news right before we learned about "I Got You Babe."

Last night my Aunt Diana's mother died.  Aunt Diana is one of the kindest mothers and thoughtful listeners on the planet.  Her mother was Jean Lynch, but we all called her Mimi.  I was not related to her by blood, but I've known her since I was 10.  She glowed with warmth, sweetness and joy every time I saw her.  I really can't think of a kinder and warmer individual I have met, and I have met thousands of people.

Right before I went to India we had a family gathering, and at one point I was sitting next to her and she struck up a conversation.  I told her that I was going to travel and write a book about it, and she was very encouraging and told me I would have an amazing experience.  She thought the whole idea was wonderful.  Then she mentioned that she was going to be in a book soon too.  A reporter was doing stories about great romantic stories of how couples met, and somehow he had learned about hers.  She met her husband at Grand Central Station in New York City.  She was traveling with her friends, and he was in the navy, on his way somewhere.  Amidst one of the most hectic and chaotic crowds in the whole city, he accidentally bumped into her so hard that she dropped her suitcase.  He helped her pick it up, and that was the beginning of a beautiful relationship.  He died years ago, but her Facebook picture is of her standing in Grand Central with a picture of him.  I was about to travel in hopes of bumping into someone similar, so I liked that story a lot.  Random universe, eh?

When I got back from my first big journey, she was the first person to publicly ask me about my travels.  We were at a party at my uncle's house on Long Island, and I had been home for over a month.  Before then everybody had greeted me with excitement, was very happy I was back safe and sound, admittedly impressed and told me they wanted to hear all about it.  Even so, as a whole, I thought people would be more interested and ask more questions about what I had seen and experienced.  I think most people simply didn't know what to ask or where to start, because my experience was so foreign to them.  I had thought some of the older men in the family would have been interested to hear me report about our world, but they seemed to care more about talking about most of the same things they usually talked about.  Then, out of nowhere, Mimi engaged me from across a circle of chairs on the patio and began asking me questions about everything.  Soon her interview and my replies made us the center of attention, and the whole family was listening.  She asked great questions, and gave great insight and feedback while supplementing her interest with a few of her travel experiences.  While in Turkey a stranger approached her and asked her to buy silks, and she said, "I just LOVE your country!"  He replied, "I love YOUR country!"  My uncle joked, "And then he tried to kidnap you," and people laughed.  It was an okay joke, but the kind of joke that I think hinders the world's progress of being less afraid of itself and enjoying itself more.  Then again, Jean more than made up for that fearful attitude with her glowing appreciation and admiration of everyone she met.  I didn't know her that well, but she seems to me to fit a common description of Walt Whitman: it's hard to believe that she ever got angry, and it's probably true that there isn't a person she ever met that she didn't like.  If she did, she probably kept it to herself. 

Every time I saw her after that party we always had a great discussion, and she smiled and laughed in all the right ways.  She had a way of making me feel like a good person, something I feel like most of the time but sometimes gets confused when I'm traveling alone so much and facing so many complex situations.  When I shared with her and she shared as well, her compliments lifted me up to the sky.  As I read the many posts on her Facebook page, I'm realizing that she had a way of making most people feel the same way.  I'm not surprised.

I hadn't gotten a chance to see her since returning from Japan, and I realized a few weeks ago that I might never see her again because she was in the hospital.  Very often she would read my web log and comment on my Facebook page that she had enjoyed it, or would thumbs up a picture I had posted and send an encouraging message.  She returned from the hospital a few weeks ago, but she was already saying that it was her time to go, and last night she finally left.

I wish I could have seen her one more time and seen that smile again.  I know she would want everyone to keep smiling and believing in the goodness of their world, so that's what I will do.

Tomorrow is a new day of school.  The song for the next chapter is "Lean on Me" by Bill Withers.

Ford 'em till you find the King's bridge

Sitting on the subway, on the way to work twice in one day.  It's 7 pm.  So sleepy.  I look straight ahead and see a bear smiling at me.  Or is it smirking at me?  It has one bright eye that appears to be smiling, but another somewhat shaded eye that appears sinister, if only somewhat mischievous.  The same goes for the mouth.  Half and half.  It's hard to tell what this bear is up to.  It's got a good side, but it ain't all rainbows and unicorns either.  I don't need to clap to keep it away.  It's a teddy bear.  This makes the smirking smile that much more unsettling.  I would wonder how it got there on its own, but it's not even there.  It's a picture of a teddy bear.  An advertisement for an exhibit at this new MOMA building.  I've been seeing this bear on the subway and having stare-down's with it ever since I moved back to New York.  I almost miss my connecting stop because of our stare moment.  I am listening to "Solo" by Ludovico Einaudi, which is a lot like his song "Mattina," which my sister was playing a lot this time four years ago when I was getting ready to begin the journey in India.  Some guy interviewed in the movie Waking Life would call this a "holy moment."

Luckily I don't miss the connection and I'm safely on the 4 train, heading north to Fordham Avenue.  It's express, so it doesn't take long to get from 59th to 125th street, but then there are ten more stops, because apparently people in the Bronx need a subway station every three streets.  We go above ground at 161st Street, right by Yankee Stadium, home of the winningest sports team in American history.  I've never liked them, but I'll let myself be inspired as I can see the seats and the field from my seat on the subway.  That is, I can see them in the morning.  It's night now, and it's not baseball season, so there is nothing to see.  Besides, I keep closing my eyes and trying not to drift off.  Sleep, sleep, sweet sleep, how I miss you.

This morning we talked about family roots and ancestors.  Most of my students' ancestors are from the same countries that they are from.  Americans tend to be different.  We play the composition game.  How much are you of this?  Where are you from?  No, not America.  Where is your family REALLY from?  My split is something like this: 50% England, 25% Ireland, 12.5% Germany, 12.5% Poland (or perhaps Belarus?).  Anyway you trace it, we are pale and adapted to cold weather.  My family name is Sanford.  It was once Sandford, but they misspelled it on my grandfather's birth certificate, and the government never makes mistakes.  Sandford means "sandy ford," or "sandy river."  Ford is also a verb, which means to cross a river by walking through it.  Pioneers and western settlers had to ford rivers all the time when they were heading west.  I'm not heading west.  I'm heading north to Fordham.  When you say it, it sounds just like "Ford 'em," which means "ford them."  I am very tired of my work schedule.  It is starting to make sense to me that the first week of my truly full time schedule (the first one since harvest a year ago, when I worked 75-105 hours per week) I have been asked to substitute at night.  It makes sense because that's the one thing I wanted to stop doing once I got more hours in a row in the morning and afternoon.  But they needed my help and I'm trying to bargain for time off after Christmas (we are expected to be at work at 8 am the day after Christmas!).  I shouldn't have to bargain because I'm not salaried, the whole idea of substitutes began with the teaching profession, and none of the students will be around anyway.  Even so, I'm being extra good now so that I can use it if I need it later.  The reason this trying schedule makes sense to me is that it's just like India: the first part was the worst part, and it was all easier after that.  Once I don't have to go back to work at night, the day will seem incredibly easy to me, and I will continue to be productive at night.

I'm viewing this whole tiring work schedule experience involving four hours of subway commute time each day as a journey test packaged in with my transitioning back to New York move.  It's not even that it's annoying at this point.  I'm simply fighting to keep my eyes open at every turn.  I'm seriously behind on sleep, and there's nothing I can do about it for now.  But it's life, so even though these wide rivers keep popping up on the route, I've got to ford 'em.

Of course, as I think this, I am listening to music.  "Graceland" by Paul Simon.  Then I switch to the next song, "Diamonds on the Soles of Her Shoes," whose soothing opening harmonic vocals lull me to sleep just as I approach Fordham Road.  Luckily I am only gone for two minutes and realize what has happened at the next station, Kingsbridge.  Plus I am twenty minutes early, so it's all good.  The moon is very shiny too.  It has an enormous halo around it, shining down on the gritty city sprawl of the Bronx.

After class I find out that the original teacher's wife is okay now and he is coming back to work tomorrow night, so I do not have to substitute and will have a normal day where I can nap and write.

Hallelujah!

"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.