Shaker Heights and Youngstown in the House!

Before I get started, I just wanted to say a little something about this Ramon/photo situation. I have known Ramon for a real long time. I consider him one of my best friends. We don’t talk all that often, but whenever something important happens in my life, good or bad, Ramon and or Rosa are always either the first or only friends to ever pick up the phone and say anything about it. Not that I’m knocking anyone for not calling. I am notorious for being so hard to get a hold of that most of my friends have long since resigned themselves to not calling me anymore. You can’t be disappointed if you don’t care. And don’t ask how rare it is to get a call from me. Most have probably written me off for dead years ago. I am a right bastard after all and I know it.

Ramon has always been someone who is not afraid to speak his truest feelings on things. While this is something which is virtually impossible for most people, it is second nature to Ramon. I think that a big side effect of this facet of his personality is that some people tend to get their feathers ruffled because they can’t hang with so much directness. I’ve met people who utterly despise him after just one encounter. I personally call that a talent. God knows he’s pissed me off before, and I can only hope I’ve returned the favor. But I seem to get that he isn’t a total ass like some think him to be, while others will always just see him as an antagonistic jerk. They’re painfully wrong to summarize him that way, but whatever, he can handle that.

But here’s the deal: he is one of the more thoughtful people I know, and I am not just taking this lightly. Just watch him around his son. I’ve never seen a better example of loving parenting in my life.

It strikes me as more than a little hilarious, then, that Ramon has this uncanny ability to cause some people to simply loathe the guy without him even trying. I mean, his directness can come off as brash and condescending, but what I’m talking about here is stuff like this photo debacle that has reared its ugly head. For some reason, the mere fact that Ramon used some guy’s photograph in his blog to poke fun at one of our ranks, and in the process gets a legal threat from a guy who seems to be almost entirely without levity is classic Ramon. It’s just a part of who he is, and I love him all the more for it.

So keep your photo, Marc, and welcome to our world. Hope you enjoyed the stay.

Now for the post proper:

Being creative is a trait that seems to have run through my family, on both parent’s sides no less. My father spent a great deal of time on oil painting when I was very young, and he returned to it several times throughout his thirties. If you consider his upbringing, a middle-class Midwestern white suburban kid in the fifties raised to be tough and solitary by his widowed mother, who grew into a stocky, muscular star athlete in high school and college, it’s hard to imagine that this guy was also not only gifted as an artist but able to recognize this in himself at a time when that might be seen as weak by his usual crowd.

He was, and still is, every bit as hyper-masculine as I have described him to be both in my writing and in conversation. Some of the things he has done in his life are nothing less than deplorable, and he has shown a knack for cold distance whenever it suits him.

Nonetheless, my father is also a very talented painter who applies his perfectionism into his paints and his canvasses, who always seems to impart a palpable sense of melancholy in even the most happy of paintings. I’ve always thought of him as fundamentally unhappy anyway, which may be somewhat exaggerated on my part, but in the way with which he has dealt with his first wife (my mother), and the fallout from their broken marriage, I saw a man who was lonely, unhappy, and prone to bouts of inward torment. Not the he would ever tell anyone, god forbid, because that would be considered weak too.

But enough of that, because this post is about how despite the talent and creative skills that have been gifted upon both sides of my family, no one has really been able to capitalize on it as fully as we should have, to date. And this very much includes me.

On one of our interminable cross-country drives from Texas to Ohio, my father and I (traveling just the two of us), ended up passing by his old childhood haunts. Usually this sort of thing is something you endure from those you care about because you have no point of reference, but in this instance, doing this trip with my dad, there was a poignancy that struck me fairly hard. After we saw his old high school, his childhood home, and my childhood home, he began to get a bit wistful, which led him to reveal one of those rare personal things that he has shared with me in my 39 years. He told me how he really regretted not becoming a professional painter instead of the businessman he ultimately became.

“I mean, I have been very successful with the choice I made, but I will always regret that I didn’t try and make it as a painter. I was a damn good one, you know?” He said.

“I know, dad. You still are.”

That’s a shitty piece of luggage to carry around with you for your entire life. And the name of the game in my family is luggage. We’ve got a lot of it, and we love carrying it around with us wherever we go.

Take my uncle on my mother’s side, for instance. I think I may have mentioned in one of my first NAP posts that my uncle is an amazingly talented guitarist. He’s been playing since he was in high school, and he has a fluidity and style that is fun to listen to, and that’s with him playing without any accompaniment of any kind. His lead runs were always very tasteful and well thought out, his attention to detail also bordering on my father’s obsessive levels.

Many times my uncle has told me the story of how he took a college deferment in order to avoid being drafted into the Vietnam War. The way he puts it, he had graduated from high school and was standing there with his guitar in his hand, amp in the other, ready to take off and try to make it as a musician. This is something that gnaws on him still today, and that’s a real shame. I used to try to get him to play at open mics and things like that, but he always said that he was past that part of his life now, and that it was time for someone else to do it. I used to hate that about him.

And here we are with me. Easily the most successful person in the family regarding creative endeavors, I am no less an underachiever than the rest. I played guitar slavishly for years, poured countless hours into becoming a decent guitarist. I’ve been in and around music now for almost thirty years, and yet I am what John Lomax calls “semi-retirement,” which is as good a term as any to explain my near total musical demise.

In my family, we’ve always had the ability. It’s when it comes down to the resolve and the ambition that things get a little murky.

And I think that in part this can be attributed to the world in which we live and to the eternally pliant quality of human adaptability. Survival is a real strong fucking instinct, and if survival means working shit jobs and submitting to the time and energy drain of raising kids, then it’s quite easy to see why people like my family end up taking the road more traveled.

Me, I have never abandoned creative life, and I never will. To me, quite simply, the goal and the meaning of life is to appreciate life and being and the whole package as being beautiful. It is in the aesthetics that life begins to deliver on its promise. Call it a sort of goofy secular spirituality, or whatever you like, the point is that for me, life is in the appreciating and the experience of it. It doesn’t really matter what you do, it’s what you take from your time that makes the difference.

I hate to get all Tony Robbins here.

I guess what I’m trying to say is, you can sleepwalk through life, or you can walk forward, head up, eyes open, and find yourself at the end of it all thankful for the time you got. It really is nothing more than that.

Why completely blow the one chance you know you get?

Sometimes I feel like that’s what I am doing, but then I catch myself getting caught in that trap.

And then I look at the little things.

And I remember that playing the guitar, or drawing, or writing, or whatever way I decide to add to the world is entirely at my mercy, and that the tools will never hold you back, it’s the rest of it all that does that dastardly deed.

I am intimately familiar with beauty. In so many ways it is inseparable from what I see as reality. Get angry and tell everyone how you feel. Laugh at whatever you think is funny even if you’ll never laugh at it again. Enjoy that record that no one else gets for good reason. Talk to the guy everyone thinks you hate. Do whatever it is that makes your life have value. Those choices are the most personal of all, and the sooner you recognize this about yourself, the rest is just gravy.

People often worry about me and the things I think in my fucked-up brain, but I’m all right, it’s everyone else you’ve got to watch out for.

My dad hides from it. My uncle doesn’t think he deserves it. Me, I breathe it in an let it become me.

This post is for them. May they find their voice.