Frank the poet.

While living in San Francisco in 1978 and '79, I had a friend, don't know what happened to him, who made his living designing boilers. He designed boilers for apartment buildings, for heating, and for various kinds of industry. I'm not certain what was the biggest one he ever designed, but he seemed to like the bigger ones.  

He found his job humorous. In fact he found practically everything humorous, in some inscrutable way. (He wasn't into self-analysis.)  He was also a poet. He wrote long, complex poems, which I couldn't make head nor tails of, but they looked impressive, and he was an insider at the City Lights Bookstore.   

He lived on Geary Street, near Chinatown and he was a third generation Irish San Franciscan.  I had a whole crew of these Gold Rush descendant Irishman friends who I met partly by accident, by running into them in the neighborhood, where I lived in a piss-in-the sink hotel owned by Hindus.  

I say partly because I am half Irish-Wasp cross, and looked more that way than Montenegren, at least when I was younger and thinner, and these Irishmen, several of them cops and firemen, thought I was one of them.  

Frank knew North Beach as well as anybody.  He took me around to the Jazz Clubs, where I met one of his good friends, Horace Silver.  He also told me, and here I'll have to pussy foot around a little, we were both former drunks, about a day he spend sharing a gallon of Gallo Pisano [sp.] with Richard Brautigan. They had found a nice comfortable empty abandoned apartment in Chinatown, off Grant St., and were settling in, when there was a minor earthquake tremor which caused the floors and walls to wobble.  Brautigan panicked, and Frank sat down on the floor and leaned up against the wall, and said, "Com'on over here and lean against the wall, it's the safest place."  Frank leered and chuckled when he told me this. He seemed to know I'd get the joke. He had the standard San Fran Local's view of earthquakes, which amounted to a very hearty fatalism. 

I suppose as one drunk to another we were both familiar with the tendency to take foolish risks easily but reasonable risks fearfully. And I expect that is why when my sister read my previous post, she was concerned that I was being too revealing concerning something in my history which I referred to somewhere as abuse, which I surmised may have contributed to my preferred drug of choice in the Sixties. So I should make it clear that I'm not Blogging here for the purpose of dumping my damaged psych on you for the purpose of illustrating how I put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Let's just say that like most people, I wasn't able to avoid some hard knocks in the process of aging.

My main purpose in advertising for myself is in convincing The Other, whomever and whatever will listen to me, that my combination of voyeurism and fascination with narrative has been put to some good use through my habit of writing things down.  

      

James Pennebaker

My book is out there in the world being read by a couple of people.  Not publishers or editors, just lay people I guess you'd say.  I did get a nice rejection from the agent Rita Rosenkrantz. I have a couple of new projects planned, either start on a second book or do a short story based on the War Years in Amagansett; something I'd like to do.

I'm speaking here as a legitimate writer which I am but only in my own mind, not according to the reality therapy of having made money at it.

Today I'm depressed. Don't tell anyone In Recovery about this. I know what they'll tell me.  Yes, I am being selfish and self-centered. It's what I always planned to do with my retirement. You show me yours, and I'll decide whether I think you've come up with a better plan. If it includes Bridge, Golf, or Fishing, you lose. Ditto reading Trade Publications.

As for the reason I'm depressed. I'm reading Jim Pennebaker's, [Can I call you Jim, Jim?] book The Secret Life of Pronouns.  I heard about it through Malcolm Gladwell's book Blink, and also through reading Barbara Oakley. Pennebaker did research on writing therapy; having people write about trauma, in short bursts, repeatedly. I decided to write about an episode of abuse when I was pre-adolescent. So I wrote a short piece, a page, and let it sit.  Figured I'd read a little more Pennebaker and then re-look at it. So, for the first day of sitting on it, I'm feeling that low grade depression that I've become so used to not having. This is real human Guinea Pig stuff. Also though, it's about tweaking some future writing.  ....Three specific episodes of abuse stand out in my memory of my childhood, including my High School years. The last one, which I don't mind talking about here in this format, was probably not abuse but more simply trauma, when I was punched in the face on the school bus, hit my head on the steel corner of one of the bus seats, and had a severe concussion.

Years later, I read, in a feature in Harper's Magazine that was a regular feature some thirty years ago, about the connection between concussion and alcoholic Blackouts. (In younger days I was a severe blackout drinker.)

What I find interesting as I mull this experiment over, this idea of revisiting a couple of specific, brief, but unappetizing moments in my past is that, even being a professional oral historian and contentedly autobiographical wool-gatherer, it's never occurred to me to do this particular kind of 'multiples of instant replay' experiment. [I just added that "multiples" terminology on my own...]  So, depressing or not, I'll continue to sit on it for the time being, and let you know if anything comes of it.

Three years later.....decided it was a bad idea.