Note to self (not that I'll pay it any attention): please avoid writing these entries late in the day, and especially later at night. Ideas that seem perfectly clear in the head tend to come out only partly formed, and, I'm afraid, unintelligible to anyone who might, oh, I don't know, actually read any of this...
Today, it so happens that I'm taking just half an hour, in the middle of the day, to put my notions on... cyber paper. When that half-hour is up, I need to prepare for a trip to Jersey City, where I'm scheduled to see a urologist, who will, I hope, either confirm my suspicion that I'm dealing with a shifting kidney stone, or tell me that I've got an overactive, masochistic imagination, and should take two aspirin and call him in fifteen years...
But I want to clarify something I think I either tried to write yesterday, or meant to write but forgot, or something in between. It had to do with cats and a caring Deity.
Briefly, I continue to wrestle with the insistence, at least in all the churches I've ever attended, on my essential dirtiness, and the over-riding concern and attention being paid to me, by an invisible but powerful, and sometimes touchy, God entity.
Now, I actually do like the idea that someone or something is watching over me, although there are times when the notion of always being on a sort of display is a little disheartening. What distracts me from really being able to dig into this notion, and hold onto it with any conviction, is what seems to be the remarkably sloppy job of paying attention that is, at least in my experience, being done.
And this is why I mentioned my cats. (At least I think I did) I'm no genius, nor an expert in animal health, but I think that I do a pretty good job of providing for, and caring about, and tending to these three furry creatures John and I allow to live in our house. I don't think I'm overly solicitous, but when, a while ago, our big boy Silas seemed to be having a problem with using the litter box, I took him to a vet right away, where an examination proved that his colon was so impacted that his bladder had been completely flattened against the inside of his stomach cavity, if that's what it's called. The cat got x-rayed and scanned and shaved and emptied and innoculated, at a handsome cost -- but a cost we were willing to bear, to make sure this big black-and-white cat I found in an alley in Philadelphia would go back to his usual indolent life of sleeping on whatever warm surface he found fitting for the day.
When our third cat, lovely miss Coco appeared, just after October's hurricane, I took her to a different, less expensive vet, where she was also poked and prodded, filled with vaccines and anti-bacterials, and sent home with people who, at that point, still weren't sure they could legally keep her. And when it seemed as if, no matter how many flyers I posted, of this chocolate-faced, blue-eyed beauty, no one was going to step forward to claim her, we took the next step in responsible kitty care, and had her spayed. More shaving and drugging and snipping and sewing. And now, she is slowly integrating herself into the feline population, although she prefers to sleep in the coldest spot of the inside of our house, and appears to have been fed from the table, where she lived before, because she's a beguiling beggar, who now goes away with nothing, but a perpetually-filled food dish.
What I'm saying, in a rather capacious nutshell, is this -- I would be perfectly happy, I think, with a loving God that only took as much of an interest, and as appropriate a level of care, of me, as I am able to provide for my cats. Who will never write motets in my honor, or build cathedrals, or paint luminous triptychs, or write treatises on my nature. Who might, as I scoop through their litter pans, to remove their droppings, might reasonably suspect that it is I who worship them. I've often joked that, if there really is such a thing as reincarnation, I want to make a bid to come back as my own pet. I could do so much worse.
And really, to wax just a little bitter here, might it not be just a tad more responsible if, after all these centuries, an organized church might decide to drop the charade, and devote some time and energy to helping all of us deal with what seems to me, at least, to be our core challenge -- how to deal with, how to navigate, a treacherous life, locked in a vessel that is sure to fail, and to cross an expanse where betrayals lurk, and that ends in the gut-freezing finality of death? How much could that hurt? How much more kind, if only to the gullible children, who swallow whole all the pap, and then spend the rest of their lives wondering why there's such a difference between what they've been told, and what they're experiencing, and suspecting that if there's any fault, that it must be theirs...
Well, my half-hour is up, and I haven't even talked yet about taking off all my clothes in public. I think I'll attend to preparing for my appointment, and hope to finish this in a little while. Through the miracle of time and space, this shouldn't make any difference to you at all... I'm so jealous.
Ah, back again.
(By the way, I did want to clarify at least one thing, relative to the above entry -- I'm not complaining specifically about my own life, which I recognize as something great princes of the past might have imagined, if they'd been creative enough. Misfortunes and injustices that happen across the street often bother me more than similar events in my own living room) (Now...)
Back to the part about taking off all my clothes in public.
While I was in the second grade, and while we lived at 222 South Jackson Street, Belleville Illinois, my mother once told my father that she'd caught me dressing up in her clothes. This seemed to cause great consternation and disapproval, and I remember my father standing over me, in their bedroom, threatening that, if I was ever caught wearing my mother's clothes again, I would be dressed up entirely in her things, with a hat and makeup, and would be taken downtown and publicly shamed.
This solemn oath on my father's part made a deep, echoing impression on me. Never mind that I have no recollection of ever having played with my mother's things, even though she insisted that I take my dreary daily naps in her room, on the big bed, rather than in my own room, on my bunk. I suspect that there may have been something else involved -- perhaps I caught my mother with one of her boyfriends, and this was a way to let me know how she could have me punished if I said anything.
Whatever the case may be, I retained this sliver of toxic fear, and the sense that, at any moment, I was going to slip somehow, and bring tremendous shame upon myself, for decades. When I was on the verge of graduating from college, and had a particularly active summer, acting in a Central PA community theater, I was cast as Hysterium in the Stephen Sondheim musical 'A Funny Thing Happened to Me On the Way to the Forum...' It was a great deal of fun to play, and I truly loved working with the other actors, and would have told my parents about this event, but for one thing: in the second act, my character, through plot twists too bizarre to enumerate, ends up wearing a wig and a filmy white Roman-style bridal gown. This was, apparently, one of the comic high points of the play, but I couldn't let my father know about it -- even though, thinking about it now, I'm not sure what he would have done. (This is the man, though, who, when one of my brothers chose to take training courses in nursing, rather than go to jail for a very serious gun-related offense, remarked to his drinking buddies, 'Well, I guess he'll have to start wearing a dress.' Better be a man in prison, than someone somehow less than a man, living in freedom and, oh, incidentally, saving lives?)
Now, it just so happens that there's a play for which I've already auditioned, and for which I've been called back, for more movement and singing tryouts next week -- and this play, and the role for which I'd like to be cast, doesn't involve cross-dressing, but full-on public nudity. And of course, there's a little jab my dad gave me, when he had taken me out to buy my gym gear for high school -- we were about to buy an athletic supporter, and he smirked, 'Well, you certainly won't need a large.' (It was only decades later that I realized those totemic bits of men's wear are sold by waist size) But somehow, now -- perhaps because he's been dead for so long? perhaps because I'm having a spate of perverse self-abasement? -- I'm sort of looking forward to, if not the nudity itself, the chance to play a man who is in such straits in his life that this step is the only one left for him, in his quest for self-esteem. Besides, there'll be other naked men on stage at the same time, and years ago, when John and I used to go, from time to time, to the nude part of Sandy Hook, it took remarkably little time, not only to get used to seeing such an array of naked men and women and boys and girls, of all ages and sizes and states of health, but to find that without clothes, there was a curious falling away of sexual tension. I found myself looking less at how naked people looked, and more at what they were doing.
Now, if I get this part, I'll be a naked guy dancing, and then doing a kind of bargain basement strip-tease, but I still don't think it'll have a great deal of sexiness in it by then. And really, when I first decided to audition after all, I told myself it was only to provide myself with the ne-plus-ultra of public humiliations, something that would help perfect strangers understand how abased I have felt, from making such a political mess of my college professorship, that it was impossible for me to go back and teach any more. And who is more threatening -- who gets the policeman's attention sooner -- than the naked guy in the train station, or on the street, or in the supermarket? But now, the more involved I get in the initiatory process of singing, and seeing other people with whom I might work, it strikes me as an oddly brave kind of human venture, on which all of us will embark together.
And if someone starts to smirk, when they recognize me in the produce section, pawing through the plum tomatoes, they'll really have no reason to laugh. They'll have nothing on me at all. Because, at least on a physical level, they will have seen everything I am, and will know that I haven't hidden anything. And more importantly, in all likelihood, nothing remotely like this could be said about them.
Now I've got to get back to my gruelling exercise regimen. I'll have abs if it kills me.
© 2013 Walter Zimmerman
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