My Robot Is Pregnant theme song!

this is a rough draft, that I’m putting up for now, will finish it tonight. If you can contain your enthusiasm, read the final version tomorrow. Otherwise, take a look at this one.

In January 2001 I realized I wasn’t gonna make it through another New Hampshire winter. The elderly were freezing solid on street corners, their blood thinners putting a dangerously high water content in their veins, so their pipes froze up like a summer camps plumbing. I was 28, using New Hampshire Liquor Store vodka for anti-freeze. I was a squirrel without enough nuts to get through the winter. Nuts in one of the more figurative senses. I couldn’t take the cold, and I didn’t like the darkness.

Up that far north its hard to tell the difference between a boy and girl. Everyone is under too many layers to show a curve, hats and scarves leave a four inch swatch of skin that turns pink. The boys might as well be wearing blush. Very confusing. Its dark from 4 pm until 9 am the next day. I was living in an apartment that had been boarded up after a fire, so I didn’t even see daylight those seven hours it was around. The kitchen was gone. Not a burn victim, that corner of the building had rotted away. The building dated back to the Industrial Revolution. Those cogs quit spinning 60 years ago, and the building started to settle back to organic matter. It moved fast.

So the kitchen was off limits, I could look in where the former appliance’s shadows sillouhetted the walls and look down into the dirt floor of the crawl space below where the plywood subfloor had crumbled in. A homeless guy started squatting underneath me, and he left food down there, so I boarded up the kitchen floor to keep rats and racoons from coming up.

There was a living room, but I didn’t do any entertaining there. It was jammed up with twenty foot lengths of sprinkler system pipe. The unit wouldn’t be up to code without that stuff installed. Long as they lay piled up on the floor it kept my occupancy illegal and rent manageable. The landlord was storing doors and windows in there as well, and his daughters couch, wrapped in plastic.

My kingdom consisted of the bedroom, with flame stains on the wall. It was just a futon on the floor and my entire collection of afghan quilts on top. 14 in all. The weight of that much yarn was like sleeping underneath a fat woman. I loved it. Still, I wore a knit cap. I’m one of those people who can’t sleep with his head under the covers.

The main entrance was nailed shut. The only way in and out was prying the wood off the windows and jumping or passing through the bathroom. A magical bathroom that had another door that opened into a tiny retail space. A ten by twenty five foot square corner unit. I was there because of that storefront. Right on State Street in downtown Portsmouth. Basil Richardson was my landlord, a local eccentric, who jogged while smoking a cigar. He ran a market, and prepared tuna sandwiches while smoking a cigar. He sold fifty cent cups of coffee right up to the end. I was one door down from the market, upstairs was a flop house.

I loved my little shop. The stores bathroom, underneath the angle of a staircase also opened into my condemned quarters. It was a bit like anne frank, living illegaly behind a secret door. I had to lean forward if I peed standing up, and my knees touched the wall when I sat down. The handbowl was large enough to rinse an apple off in. i could squeeze through and go through a door into my secret chambers. No windows there for me, just holes where they used to be, and weathered old plywood scraps nailed over that.

I was running a junk shop out of the storefront. nothing illegal, but the smells were awful. and the clientelle was often horrified bostonians coming up country to see a charming old sea port, and I was selling someones collection of Hustlers and poly vinyl iron-ons with parodys of outdated ad campaigns, like “the hell with mountains, show me your Busch”. I was the only shop in Portsmouth that carried smurfs and thundercats, and the colonial antiques shop’s with their wrought iron cookware and tri-corn hats must have felt betrayed by shabby storefront. I was a bit of blow to the cultural climate of this old nautical themed historic district. I’m not sure why the Preservation Society didn’t complain when I painted my storefront bright red, indigo blue and high temp silver.

The point of this little trip down memory lane, I should foreshadow, is I’m 34 now, and feeling like that birthday is a sad one, since it has shown me i had an overinflated sense of potential and/or capabilities. I took a quick look at my life as it is and how I thought it would be and had to go lay down with the lights out. But after a little bit of crying, I decided to take another, braver look. What did I really want for myself? Maybe I have reached some goals, and the problem is, that didn’t make me happy.

My goals in 2001.

move to california. The shop was named, “The Amazing Mystery Spot”. I had california on my mind, even then, taking the name from the Mystery Spot in santa Cruz, where due to optical illusion a roadside attraction sprung up in the mountains where round objects roll uphill and magnets don’t work. Moving to California was not going to be overcome simply by packing my grip and catching a plane. I was going to break away from a cult. I was going to leave friends and family behind, leave the sense of pride New Englanders instill in themselves because they survive brutal winters and hellacious summers, working hard and going to church through it all. I was heading to a godless country of sexual immorality and political liberalism of scandolous proportions. Banning styrofoam and plastic bags? Un-American! Decriminalizing Marijuana and sex work? Unethical! Holywood and San Francisco, the two hot spots of satanic influence, the two places I considered moving to. In the end San Francisco won out. The dream of being a cowboy was stronger than the dream of stardom. I had a job lined up working around horses, operating tractors and jackhammers, digging post holes by hand and hanging fences.

But let’s get back to New Hampshire. I was buying and selling items that borderlined on garbage. Often he thing was formerly garbage, and I just pulled it out of a trash can, picked it up off a curb, or brought it back from the dump. Then there were the flea markets. I would go as far north as Arundel Maine, far south as Todd Farm in Massachusetts. I had an eye for outrageous design patterns and color schemes, synthetic materials like mid centruy plastic and polyester cloth. In 1998, when I first opened the shop, I was collecting from the late 1980′s. These things hadn’t even become vintage. An eight year time lapse doesn’t put something in the collectable category, it makes it clutter then free box material at the yard sale. And I hit a lot of yard sales in the two years I had my shop.

The memories are flooding back, threatening to throw this reminiscing off course. Derek, my retarded 16 year old neighbor, who first got me started in the junk business…where is he? My girlfriend Lindsay, who watched the store move from our little barn to a real shop, she took Hank the cat and moved to Kansas City. There is a lot to tell, but these are other stories. The point is, in January of 2001, I took stock of my position. I had drank up all my profits at the 30 or so bars in walking distance to my shop. I was trading geegaws from the store shelves for pints of beer when a friendly barkeep was behind the tap. It was getting colder and the plywood on the windows wasn’t getting warmer. I couldn’t stay under the afghans all day. I had to get up and open the shop. But Portsmouth tourism died completely until Springtime, which was sometime in April or May, weather depending. Christmas was over, locals wouldn’t be spending money on anything but booze and pot. Those with electric heat wouldn’t even be able to afford that. The flea markets and yard sales were in hibernation like the maple leaves. What was I going to sell the next four months to make rent, and to who? I considered a grow operation, but my place wasn’t heated.

In the end I took a janitorial position at a theatre down the street. I mopped the stage and ironed Sweeney Todd’s costume. I was depressed. When a friend called and offered a place for me to crash on the peninsula of San Francisco, I decided my retail operation was folding. I opted for a train journey across the country, in keeping with my fear of flying and modern technology. What attracted me to garbage was the sense of age, my belief that the unwanted were my kin, the sense that what was made today had no sense of history compared to a pair of shoes with a worn out heel and Nixon era style. Something used had attained a sense of spirit that was missing in a brand new item. New was equal to soulless in my world. And a three day train trip across America had far more soul than a six hour flight. I envisioned I was a greenhorn from New Hampshire headed west in 1849 on the continental railroad (not completed until 1869, but whatever) to strike it rich in the new land of california.

At this point my ability to live in a romantic world was still not tarnished by the awful experiences of the Merchant Marines I had endured in 1996. The mysteries of the sea and the comraderie of a sailor’s life were both unexplained and unexperienced in my 8 months aboard a floating cage for mentally deranged monosyllabic loners and socially aggresive former killers/male rapists. The dream of the golden west was not in any way sullied with the reality of that other broken dream. I just blamed myself for not being open to adventure, and promised myself I would succeed this time in writing a great novel based on my new experiences.

Goal number two. Become a writer. become a cowboy and a writer.

Are we ready to come back to the present? I’m sitting in front of a computer at the junk mail factory waiting to get the okay to band up copies of the latest catalogue. So, I made it to california, but I’m no cowboy. Of course, cowboys don’t exist. Which makes it hard to realize that dream. For seven years I worked off and on with a couple old guys doing what felt like the next best thing to cowboying. Excavation/construction. Riding equipment rather than horses. Getting drunk on and off the job. hanging around bars and chasing women. I moved from that boarded up apartment in New Hampshire to a small trailer in Woodside California. Still no running water, still no kitchen. Taking baths after dark under a hose down the road. It was the writers life I imagined would propel me to literary stardom. I sat in that trailer with an old manual typerwriter and wrote page after page after page. It’s in boxes under my bed.

Any birthday after about 12 you start evaluating yourself. The first kiss, driving cars, drinking, all those milestones, until you hit 25. Then you start getting harsher on yourself. “Have you made any money yet?” “Are you prepared for accidents, injury, retirement?” “Have you found true love?” “Are you famous yet?”

It’s possible I had larger dreams of grandeur than most people. I was sure I would be an excellent musician, writer and actor upon maturity. Once the cable company arrived in Greenland NH, circa ’87, MTV started to work its magic on me. Being entertained was not as interesting as the possiblity of being an entertainer. I wanted people to look at me and the clothes I wore. So last year, when a friend invited me down to Hollywood to work on a pilot episode of a reality based sketch comedy show, it seemed like a natural course of events. Soon I would be on tv.

This friend of mine wanted the stardom too. Recognition. A lifestyle. One that I wanted, but also didn’t want. I had the cowboy/movie star dichotomy. One that isn’t as well known as the virgin/whore example. Briefly, to be a cowboy was someone who was a rugged unerpaid individual who worked with his hands for survival. a movie star is overpaid and relies on fans adoration for a sense of worth. The movie star might also be a musician, either way, he creates a non-essential commodity: entertainment.

I stayed in LA for eight months. There was an audition for a tv show that went horribly. The truth was, I’m not an acotr. Never trained, never tried. To be 32 before one realizes that he is fooling himself may be worse than never waking up to reality. Perhaps, had i stayed in NH, I could still wait for my big break with a happy heart. Instead I embarrassed myself in a small office at the top of a Hollywood complex on Sunset Boulevard.

And that was after the pilot tanked. At this point in my life I believe that my desire to be a writer led me to shut off my ability to related to others, in a misguided attempt to become an observer. I put myself in strange situations and then sat still and watched what happened to me and around me. Only a few times (out at sea when a man threatened to throw me over) did I realize that I wasn’t actually an observer. I was delusional.

So I’m 34 now. Also, aware I’m delusional. Also, disillusioned. I worry about making money, I fall asleep before I can get to work on my writing at night. i don’t laugh much anymore. I made it to the west coast and that’s all I can say. If life gets easier after 33 (pressures off – you aren’t going to beat Jesus’ accomplishments and he died at that age) then I look forward to this coming year. Perhaps disillusion will be the best gift I’ve gotten. Perhaps this will be my year to shine. On the inside. like my heart of coal finally has matured to diamond. No more tough guy poetry. I’m now the most sensitive man in SF.