There’s a haze along the ridge, Pusch Ridge, as they call it after an early settler of Oro Valley. Small plumes of smoke sully the slopes for a few miles like a sulphuric mountain acne. The heat of the day compounds all this, so that the light itself seems to have been smudged by an artist’s gum eraser. After a half hour at a Verizon store, bombarded by high tech verbal jazz, I am fit to be tied and speed back to Rancho Vistoso Boulevard where my condo rental is. I swallow cold seltzer and take a few herbals for my enlarged prostate. The heat saps strength and I feel spent. Not much comes to mind at the moment, and I am waiting to be surprised as to what will flow from me. It feels good not tohave designs on myself, to cede control, to let the machinery just hum along to do its job.
Mt. Lemmon has no consciousness. It is an inanimate there. And what happens to it is of no importance to it. The mountain affects us, esthetically, geographically, and so on. It is our habitat, much like the earth itself. Time can do with it as it will; we can set fire to it if we choose, or inhabit parts of its wilderness. It simply is. We identify with, we project upon it. We can make it part of an ecological ethic, if we decide to. Awareness will never dawn upon its crest. It has no meaning other than what intentions we give it. Mt. Lemmon has no present meaning, no past, and not future. It is an inanimate there.
The more I contemplate the mountain, try to get inside its inanimateness, the more I cast light upon myself. Several times this week — at a bank, with a community management office — I’ve had to prove I exist, that I reside at a specific address, and any variations thereof. The fact that I’m not at my residence, but at a nearby rental until a paint job is completed, makes the authorities more and more adamant. They speak of identity fraud as a frightful and on the rise crime; they bridle when I say it is a harassment of a kind, given the circumstances. And have you noticed the voices all these young women have, the rpm of a Milwaukee drill. Rigid, calcified, poorly educated, their orgasms conditioned to go off like a bank vault alarm, orderly, regularly, swiftly — smoothly calibrated — the brain dead zombies of corporate Amerika. “You have a nice day now,” they croon. Their good-bys a kind of hideous and unreal expectation. What if I don’t want a nice day? Pressure. Sometimes I can get under the nails of the suicidally inclined and almost taste their life-weariness in this grossly conditioned culture. To feel intensely in America is to teeter-totter on the edge of doing away with oneself. Mt. Lemmon and many of the sentients that observe it are inanimate. When I deal with an inanimate sentient, it is as much as expecting Mt. Lemmon to rear up on its granite loins, and yell “Fire!”
I can sense-feel their annoyance with this old cocker, this disruptive soul, this “grumpy old man,” this Walter Matthau who is in their faces. And why do I identify with good old Matthau? In short, he sees through shit. And he wants nothing of it. Moreover, he implicitly, often explicitly, demands an adherence to some reasonable value system. W.C. Fields, who for a part of his young life lived in a hole in the ground, saw through the shit as well. The anarchic Fields knew very well that governments kill men, democratic ones do it with hypocrisy and guile, not quite as honest as a good dictatorship. Perhaps a well-intended sucide says more about the failure of culture than it does about its victim. Thus, suicide can be an act of courage, of an inner tiredness with the struggle of getting through to others, of getting through the night.
Make no light of it, these guardians at the gate are mean-spirited, stony, cold little shits. The geriatric fears is that when he comes to pass, the medicos at the hospital have the same attitude, a “by-pass” attitude to this elderly piece of “junk” they are taking care of. When was the last time we each met a human being who had enought spit, hair and gristle, to be with us when the going got tough. When my wife died in 1999 in an awful car crash, her closest friend, and at nurse at that, made the grandest commitment to be there for me, my son and my hospitalized daughter, also a victim of the same accident. In short, she faded, couldn’t be found, disappeared, in effect. Her cowardice was appalling, her explanations for her absence weak, absurd, lacking incredibility. When it came down to crunch time, she folded. I have prided myself on the fact that I don’t fold. So our friendship was rendered asunder. Much like a Jewish rabbi and Catholic priest who cannot agree on first principles — he rose or he didn’t rise? On this we part. Stand tall, don’t fold — or don’t stand tall. After all I lost a wife and almost my second daughter. This bag of sand had lost nothing, for she had no inner grit. She was an inanimate soul. I thought there was more to her. There wasn’t. She was a cacophony of Mes. And I and my remaining family was betrayed. I recall now as I write how her daughter called upon me to help her as her mother was crying hysterically, for she was in the middle of a divorce, and had been cheated upon. I remember how her own daughter could not handle her mother’s melt down and left, (it must run in the family) leaving me to hold and soothe her mother who had apparently lost it. I expected nothing in return. I did this as a friend, as a human being not wanting to see such pain. Like a rat, her daughter fled. I stayed to pick up the pieces. Years later I learned I had to pick up my own pieces — don’t we all?
She tried to reach my kids to contact me, when she thought better of it; I would not let her in. In a note, I advised her to let us be and aptly diagnosed her behaviors as “parasitic.” She later went on to become a social worker. To all her clients, run. She is invasive, she will leave you bereft like an empty shell. As the psychoanalyst Robert Langs would have it, a disturbed therapist — and there are many — will drive his or her patient nuts.
As one of Langs interviewees in his book Madness and Cure, I should know. I was Mr. Edwards in that book. I fought off a disturbed shrink — and won out. And the ultimate irony was that I, in turn, became a therapist. Like the old cliche of the wounded soldier falling in love with his nurse, I chose not to do that and to become a psychotherapist!
Is it in Hamlet that the phrase “sterner stuff” is used? I like to think that I am of that fabric; for there is something in me that has always admired antique courage, the 300 Spartans versus Xerxes, Shadrach, Meschach and Abendigo, Churchill, in our time, and so on. It is a folly of mine, but I prefer, in fantasy, to think I am capable of a beau geste. If it is in mind, it is real close to actuality. I am sometimes pressed by the exigencies of good acts in mind so that intentionality takes over and I use what expertise i have to bring them about. On my stone, write: He was there. However, I am not Mt. Lemmon
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