Lower Topia • Chapter One

Preface

To be honest this preface is really for me. It’s actually an index for me to follow as I write; a checklist.  But you can look over my shoulder if you want.  It doesn’t really matter anymore, soon you will be reading so much of my private life; my “dirty laundry” of sorts, that your opinion of me will surely become skewed anyway.  I would like this preface to be my worksheet of reasons why I wanted to write the vignettes, life events in the first place; justification for believing in the things I’ve considered possible, validation of my existence even if it only was for my last quarter of life.  It is important to try to catalog beliefs before the commitments, thoughts before the comments, reasons before the actions and decisions before the events. 

I really do expect to live till I am 100.  Don’t tell my children, however.  I don’t want to give them the luxury of believing they have plenty of time before they get re-introduced.  A sense of urgency sometimes makes good people make amends before it’s too late. But they’re almost past the due date of reasonable acceptance anyway.

They were part of the Gen-X generation. What I can determine from my research, I’m screwed. But then their life had so many road bumps, that might have put my nuclear age [post Korean War recession, Polio pandemic, latch-key psyhce] fears to a close second with their rendevous with VCR babysitters, MTV virtual reality, punk rock, heavy metal bands called Suicide, grunge. They knew what teen spirit smells like and what transpired when Ferris Bueller had a day off. This is a cohort that witnessded the personal computing revolution first hand. They came of age during the Reagan and Bush Sr years. Then polished off with 9/11. It was Gen X firefighters and police that responded to the crisis. And with all that, their Baby Boomer dad wants respect. Not sure I’m going to be too successful.

One last paragraph or 2 about my family; afterall, they did occupy over half my life, so there is a lot to consider. I have a question, it’s about PTSD; Post Traumatic Stress Disorder. I was wondering if its inception in the early 1980’s had any correlation to the creation of the social network MTV? I mean, watching the creative freedom being flaunted on the TV screen, with the flashing timelines that are reapidly streamed throughout its programing, one can only wonder if it were possible for the parents of the Gen-X cohabitors of this era could become victims of PTSD. No, please don’t misunderstand, I don’t mean to be offensive to those combat survivors, but seriously, what those GenXer’s could do to a parent was, and still is, unspeakable.

I made a huge mistake almost 60 years ago. I insisted and convinced my girlfriend to stay with me. We had a fight, not sure if it was of any significant issue, I should have agreed with her and driven her home. Since I can not turn the clock back, I swore I would never do that again. In the last twenty years of my life, I’ve decided, that if my children want to go their figurative home, I will let them. Go home! Take the 50 years you took from me, and go home.

Enough about my children. This is not their story. It’s mine trying to weave them into it. I most likely will not be too successful, and I am beginning to resign myself into the realization that I will be alone in my last 20 years. I will try to reinvent my world.

Not long ago, to help myself unravel being overwhelmed by all the events and experiences that have occurred in the past 78 years, I decided to reach out to the professional world of mind healers for help. Saddened that I might have wasted or lost too much time in order to recover anything, and dazed by life that passed me unnoticed or ignored, I went on a quest to get mental assistance from the professionals. I found two psychiatrists, and over a short period of time I sat with each. Sadly, these visits didn’t work at all. The fact I only ended up paying $25 per hour for the $175 per hour they charged  convinced me that I will tar and feather anyone who cries about the injustices of socialized medicine.  Those sessions, however, ended up being a total miserable waste of my time. The series of visits from the first psychiatrist resulted in a compiled pile of copious notes for the pure enjoyment of the healer to categorize and analyze after I left her healing walls.  My portion of the visits came filled with advice that I needed to start the conversation; to invoke, beseech and press for a dialogue, rather than what I had hoped for and expected; that the sessions would advise and suggest how to make it a shared event. With this healer trying to convince me that it was only my responsibility, as the parent, to mend any broken bonds on my own; this made me feel even more isolated.  While the other psychiatrist ended up being worthy of the acronym, ‘OMG’; she yawned!!

So, released under my own recognizance and responsible for my own actions, I was left to be engaged with understanding my personal world of pain by myself. I had to believe that my success was to be a valued entity, that it would be obtained singularly, and would become self-serving to a degree; to satisfy just my quest and no other.  I probably will find that no one else will really care much about my conclusions; except maybe you the reader. And, I guess it really doesn’t matter what others think in the end about my life’s decisions. And so, I do feel totally comfortable sharing my stories with you. What are the odds that you might even find similarities and duplications with your own life’s challenges? In the end, I won’t know who reads these vignettes, but that’s a good thing, I guess.  But if I knew someone cared to take the time to read them, then I might not need to carry the burden all by myself after all.

If you, dear reader, claim to have a story to match and compare with every story I will write, have written, then please stop reading my posts. Write your own damn blog.  But, if you also claim to have a perfect family, fully functional, respectful of each other, united, and with no need of a secret ‘garden’, even though I am happy for your wonderfully ellusive legacy, it’s hard to believe you.

You must have realized by now that I do not have a dedication page.  Who would want to carry that standard for me anyway? Far be it for me to just assume to lay that responsibility on just anyone. I seem to have soloed my life so far, and dedications imply that someone was there for me from the beginning, and that’s not happening. Maybe my dog Tucker?  Hell, why not.

Throughout the pages that follow, there will be stories of my life and relationships within each reality. There are so many different personalities and multiple realities; I transformed so many times.  A battle of what is real with what seem to be illusions; my make-believe world, my daydreams surviving my reality.  It will be my journey throughout each part of my life that will ultimately and hopefully lead to a rebirth, to recreate my being so that maybe the last quarter of my life will have some purpose; assuming that I live that long.

As for Charlie [my younger alter ego], I’m going to leave the character analysis of this fellow to the reader; not to allow this introduction to do that for you.  That would be unfair to him, to me and the very premise of this story.  Even after he leaves me, he never escapes my grasp.  For I am him. Charlie was the ‘big bang’, the opening scene, the inauguration of our personality, the start of all that I would become. There is no end, however. Our lives are cyclic, intertwined, interlaced. I hope you like Charlie; as the adage goes ‘he meant well.’

Lower Topia, the dwelling in this dialogue, will be the location of my last residence. For a lack of any better place for Lower Topia to exist, let’s say for the sake of convenience, it is located in the ultra reactionary state of Florida. It’s not that far from Utopia, just a little south of it. Let’s imagine that in order to show weather patterns in the Mid-Latitude region, a teacher attempts to draw the United States on the blackboard. The teacher will than make a joke of his drawing, and say his illustration of the country looks like a cow. With a chuckle, he adds that his drawing would then make Florida look like this country’s utter. To many of the students, however, it wasn’t a cow they saw, but rather a bull.  Thus, coincidentally, Florida, in accordance and conjunction with its present political view and alignment, would have certainly owned its resemblance to a significantly different body part. I probably would agree that Florida looks more like a Bull than a cow. Lower Topia will exist on the state’s west coast which has been filtered by way of the Eisenhower’s Interstate highway system, with mostly mid-western Americans, with their prudish, puritanical and Christian nationalistic values. But, weirdly, I will find this to be a good place to live. Finally, a worthy clearance center for my life’s struggles to settle and find some sense of normalcy. 

Because our existence is so dependent on the product of our past, and because many of us want our past to be something that should not be erased, but rather to coincide with the rebirth of our future, I believe that my future might need to start metaphysically. That is to be independent of what really happened, which then would hopefully help create a new realism. My only concern would be whether can I successfully forge my new realism in time to enjoy it.  Lower Topia, I hope, will make it all worth the struggle. Unless you know something I don’t know, then I hope my time in Lower Topia will show I survived any transformation.

Why would anyone, like me, with my New York liberal values, move to Lower Topia, or any where on the west coast of this forsaken state. In Lower Topia, I knew exactly zero people, a place with which I know even less about. I was determined to stay away from the east coast of this state. I needed something new and different, something so dramatically opposite from where I came; I wasn’t at all disappointed.  I ended up, willingly, in ‘Middle America’, with the ‘Silent Majority’ as my neighbor, and with ‘Tea Party’ members standing behind me in the Publix checkout line as me; sharing a smile. I live here where conservative politics, NRA code of ethics, and a dutiful membership to their congregational churches would be advantageous. At first, I thought this place would be notably absent of  Synagogues. On the contrary, there are sufficient ‘Jewish Churches’ scattered around that fit perfectly into this South of Utopia society. Lower Topia adores Israel. All of this would become the mainstay of the civilized world, for me, here in Lower Topia that I would grow to love from a respectful distance. Here in Lower Topia the houses of worship have steeples that shout their bragging rights of which one with have the tallest spires, so as to better attract their god’s attention; just as proficiently as a middle schooler’s raised hand does with their teachers. Homes with a hundred guns neatly stored in their closets, confederate flags hooked to their car’s rear window, all while their virtual fireplaces are crackling in their framed wall mounted 75 inch TV screens; all of which will forever define these residents living inside their compounded neighborhoods; like branding iron logos.  Oh yes, and kayaking down the Braden River when your curiosity gets the better of you and moments later you find yourself paddling into a narrowing creek, where you are certain you are in a ravine filled with echoes of banjo music and scary men fishing the same water. Lower Topia has welcomed me home, in so many different ways. Its harshness, its bold characterization of a stark world of regression, with which, hopefully, will drown out the pain of my realization that I might very well have wasted well over 50 years of my previous life.

It is okay most of the time.  If you were to compare Northern hospitality to Southern hospitality, it would actually end up as a tie, albeit, didn’t approaches.  For example, if you were lost in New York City, and asked a resident for directions, the stereotypical ‘type A’ New Yorker would willingly take you into the store that sold maps, pick out the particular map they felt you would need to find your distination, and then go as far as to even buy you the map. The New Yorker would hand you the map, and tell you “…where you want to go…it’s on this map…”   Then leave you to do the rest on your own.  New Yorkers, you see, are self-reliant people and will expect nothing less from everyone else. The Floridian just loves to wave hello.  Who the hell are they? “…waving at me from within their car while Tucker and I are minding our business…walking on street…not looking for any recognition from any total stranger.” I asked my northern friend as we talked on the phone. “That regal wave, like someone I should acknowledge, as we walk through the intersection. What do you think? Normal? Should I wave back?” I asked my friend. And, then there is the ‘Parking-Lot-Floridian-Stand-Off’ at the front entrance to Publix.  “Not a problem at all…we’ll just wait for you to walk to across the parking lot to the entrance. We’ll wait.” They stop, they wave me to continue. I stop walking and wave them to move past me. Then they wave back even more politely, for me to continue on my way to the store. I reply with a more insistent wave.  They don’t move, I don’t move.  “Oh, fuck it!”  I walk across their path, but do so ever so slowly.  Ah.  Floridian love.  And then there are their guns.  Hey, New Yorkers love their guns, too: just as much as Floridians love theirs. However, I think Floridians have more.  In New York your worst nightmare is someone will shoot you from the shadow, and as you go down you just know they will be smiling posthumously. But here in sunny Floridan, the evil protagonist will smile at you, and win you over with their warm smile and caring soul. But you just know that while they are framing your shoulder with their arm, they shoot you.  You end up as dead as you would be in New York.  However, in Florida, apparently, you died happier.

In his high school years, Charlie informed me that he learned that every Preface will eventually need to follow the basic rules of high school English class; eventually you will need to end the preamble with “in conclusion”. Not wanting to alienate Charlie any more then I will in the pages that follow, I will not divert from this rule. So, allow me to add the appropriate windup at this point.  In conclusion, not just in this last quarter of my life, but throughout this entire dialogue and storytelling, I will try to find acceptance of my personal issues, and to prevail over any emotional pain. Throughout my entire childhood and parenthood/adulthood I only wanted to be happy; happier.  We all do, don’t we?  We somehow succumb to accept our existence with the lingering pain in our gut from past events, relationships and thoughts that have gone so wrong. I think Forest Gump got it right when he said “Shit Happens”. I took that a step further, I think.  On my refrigerator there is a sign magnitized to its door that says ‘It’s Beginning to Look a Lot Like Fuck This.’ Trying to make today void of those past bad moments will be the basis of  my mantra: “Make today okay”. I do believe, because, I don’t want to be unhappy anymore.