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it’s not that i don’t want to control my own virtual weight. au contraire, mes amis (i am my own worst higher power). there just isn’t an app for such a thing in the itunes store yet.  i’ve been existing on 140 characters or less for months now, purging what isn’t vital (caps and font size to name a few), and withering away to mere silicon and bones.  when i check my profile in the mirror an unfamiliar bot stares back.  and,  just between us bffs, he looks a bit bulimic since he all but eliminated spam from his diet.

he had me delete all my firewalls and security programs because he couldn’t trust which were real and which were fugazis. no doubt, a 17 year old megalomaniac from the ukraine is stealing my identity as we speak. (the joke, of course, being on him.)  all my listings have mysteriously expired from realtor.com.  good luck with that, comrade.

what i fear now is  this: if  all these ones and zeros ever do bio-degrade and dissolve into the ozone will there even be a digital record of my existence? i lost all my paper records in a basement flood two years ago and never did get that book published. paperback. yuck. too rich.

all my really good thoughts are in the notes section of my iphone; as is my music library, email, contact ppl, precious family pics and vids, restaurants on speed dial, calendar of my life—past, present and future. rss feeds, maps, passcodes, swiss acct #s, etc.  u can listen to  my voice on the greeting if  u wish to get personal although i politely request that u don’t. my battery life doesn’t permit such things and my mailbox is redlining @capacity. but if u must…lv a mssg.

i find myself praying to @god for guidance but alas, nada. i get an instant message that my spiritual tithing has slacked off and that my universal pay-pal account is about to be condemed to….fail.

alert. my karmic credit score has just been lowered.

all i can conclude is: if anorexic realtors hate the way they look on the outside…. @lord only knows what they are saying about mobile-me. #

g

sent via iphone

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The Glass Ceiling

I remember the moment I decided to stop wearing a suit and tie in public—forever. It was a couple days before Christmas and I dropped by the K-Mart to pick up a punch bowl for the office party.  I was looming  in Housewares when an elderly woman approached me with a fistful of coupons.  Alvin and the Chipmunks were singing that insidious song through the sound system.

“I want to file a complaint.”  She said.

“I don’t work here.”  Me.

“You’re not the manager?”  She asked,  insistent.

“No. I’m not the manager.“  I replied, perhaps a little snippy.

She glared up at me like…well…like I was lying.  More than anything, I hate being implicated in an aspersion when I’m innocent. I’d rather receive three french hens every day for a year from someone I don’t truly love than be deemed a liar (unless of course, I actually am, in which case, I will simply deny until totally boxed in).

“This is an Italian suit,  lady. You need to find someone with a name tag,”  I continued, perhaps a little prideful.

“That lady over there said to ask  you. That you were a manager.” She pressed.

We turned our attention to a  squat woman in a burka, a rare sight in Richmond, Virginia in those days.

“That lady over there doesn’t speak English.”  Me, perhaps a little too loud.

“I speak better English than you,” the lady yelled back across the aisle.  “I speak five languages. How many you speak?”

Oh yeah.  One of  those days.  A blue light siren began twirling above my head and something inaudible was announced over the speakers, interrupting  the chipmunk falsetto drone. I froze as a wave of shoppers began scurrying  in our direction; something about cutlery.

“You don’t have this Foot Soaker in stock.”  The elderly lady shoved a coupon under my nose as the herd surrounded us.

“I know I don’t, ma’am…Because…. I. Don’t. Work.  Here.”  Me.

“She deserves a rain check,”  Burka lady. “It’s false advertising if you don’t. Bait and switch.”

“Yes. Bait and switch,”  Elderly lady.

“Bait and Switch!“  Somebody yelled from the mob. “Bait and Switch….”

About that time an employee approached me and ask if she could please go on break now.  I turned and walked out of K-Mart forever, sans punch bowl.  We drank shots all afternoon at the office instead. That was 1994.  By Christmas the following year, I was corporate history on so many different levels.

The Trap Door

My wife, Mona got ‘let go’  this week from her Fortune 500 employer. Ironically, she received sparkling evaluations from her clients and never missed a quarterly bonus but who knows how these things are ever really decided. I do suspect there was a big fat vice-president involved but then again, isn’t there always?

She came home in tears. I told her it was the best thing that ever happened to her, she just didn’t know it yet. That they did her a favor, freed up her future…

I took her and the Kid, a looking-for-work sommelier,  to dinner only to discover, over appetizers, that  my wife was most upset because they turned off her BlackBerry with no advance notice. “How heartless is that?”  she asked me after her second glass of  Pinot Noir.  “And right before Christmas, too…”

“Dicks,” the Kid.

He then ordered a bottle of 2005 Bordeaux to make everyone (but me) feel better.  He insisted it was a good deal and I believed him.  I just don’t understand drinking wine. I understand drinking whiskey but that never really worked out for me either, come to think of it.  These days I simply sip iced tea,  observe, and if the waitress doesn’t bring the AMEX back in separate pieces, pick up the check.

“Screw it. Let’s celebrate. I’ll buy you an iPhone tomorrow, ” I said.

“Yeah. Only Suits use BlackBerrys,” the Kid added.

We all agreed.

And, since I’m a Realtor, technically, we are now all three ‘unemployed’ according to the way the government  bureaucrats report these statistics. Suits. Dicks…

Road Trip

So…we’ve decided to load up the X3 (no new car anytime soon) and hit the road for the remainder of 2009: Chicago to St Louis to Memphis to Pittsburgh to Philadelphia to Cleveland to Chicago (or thereabouts). We will listen to iTunes, eat at Cracker Barrels, stop overnight, visit loved ones, and see the country; the Wife, the Kid, and Me.  It will be like the Grapes of Wrath except we’ll be in a BMW.

We will enjoy every one of  those days of Christmas,  just like the song suggests. I hear there is even a place with Ladies Dancing just outside Charleston, WV. We  answer to no one this Holiday Season. After all, we don’t work here.

And finally, a word of advice for the rest of you to take into the New Year:

Don’t be so concerned with the glass ceiling. It’s the trap door you have to watch out for.

Me.

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When presented with an ultimatum my first inclination has always been to go for the ‘or else’  end of the proposition— a defiant tendency that was pointed out  to me by more than a few black-hooded figures in charge of my early catechism. This probably explains  the abnormally high pain threshold I lug around to this very day. (Go ahead,  smack me across the knuckles with a ruler the next time we’re doing math together and see for yourself  how little I seem to care.)  I’m convinced this emotional dereliction has to something do with a mutated gene strand that skipped a few low risk taking generations in my inherent DNA.  Clearly, I was breech born under a bad moon.  I am a Virgo, they say,  but not by much.

In the late 1960s, when the Age of Aquarius was recruiting the deflowered masses of my wayward generation, I found myself stalled,  hesitant to beam up to the mothership.  Manned with my own back alley (hearsay, to be sure)  knowledge of that dirtiest of deeds,  I actually did the arithmetic and concluded that  my parents must have lost the rhythm on, or around,  Thanksgiving Dinner, 1955.  Born in the late afternoon on August 23rd  the following leap year (and exactly three complete trimesters to the dinner bell hour later), I concluded that  had my mother only pushed a little harder during labor,  I could  have been a Leo.  But then again, if everyone hadn’t started drinking Cold Duck in the morning exactly nine months earlier, I probably wouldn’t have been…. at all.

So hence, I mentally celebrate—in my sick,  sick head—two birthdays every year:  The day of my most  probable, mathematically correct Conception (Thanksgiving dinner, badda-bing),  and…. August 23rd, that so-called celestial cusp I barely missed by some late breaking water.  When someone asks me what astrological  ’sign’ I am,  I simply spew out  my theory as posed above… and they usually go away.  It’s my own ultimatum of  sorts,  I suppose, to anyone who tries to get too close.  After all, I did come out feet first and tend to veer a little to  the left.  We breech babies are like that—a  bit contrary,  I am told.

So dear friends, enjoy my Conception-Day tomorrow and to those of you born on October 1st …. Happy New Years! (Do the math.)

G

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Can’t locate my muse but I’m working on it…

G

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The Notion

In my dream I’m always gasping for air; as if the trillion or so cubic inches of ozone I’ve already blown through in my lifetime somehow counts for nothing.  I awake, step over the dog, and scramble downstairs in my boxers in search of a physical remedy to a metaphysical dilemma. Something is bothering me and I can’t quite place my finger on it. Life is short and, on this crisp autumn eve, I’m clearly too underdressed to even be considering my last breath.  Our fifteen-year old cat follows close behind, his own mousy demons no doubt,  in tow as well.

‘Dear God, please don’t let me die with money in my portion of the Charles Schwab account,’ I think as I root through the herbal medicine cabinet,  next to the dishes, above the microwave.  ‘That’s what the Prudential life insurance policy in the house safe is for,’ I obsess. It’s an odd recurring thought, I realize. Just being forthcoming.

We keep no real drugs in our house.

Ginkgo Biloba, Paranil, Senna, Licorice Root. Green Tea, White Tea, Black Tea…where the fck is the Alka Seltzer?

Over the years I’ve developed an internal ON/OFF switch of sorts; a requirement for any man whose livelihood  simultaneously hinges on rejection yet somehow also depends on the act of a total stranger purchasing something of considerable value; house, condo, etc…. every month. It’s an Acceptance thing, I’ve learned. This emotional circuit breaker has, for a long time,  assisted me in affairs of the heart,  finance,  most of  the Deadly Sins—Fear, Greed, Anger, etc… not to mention social and personal guilt.  And in case you haven’t  been following the box scores at home this season,  I’ve been in the OFF mode for a while now.

thankyouverymuchhaveanicedaybiteme….next

Over time I’ve learned to appreciate  the next ‘Next‘  in life—I just haven’t learned not to  eat Mexican food before retiring for the evening or found a way to avoid the night scares that have startled me ever since that stupid monster began squatting in my childhood closet at 39 Vineyard Road in Levittown.  And as my Life flickers before me this particular night, I wonder:

‘What to do with the lingering wreckage of my Past?’

Just as my faithful canine companion would rather bark at intruders from inside the  picture window when it’s chilly outside, I too,  prefer to write a quick note or better yet, cower behind electronic messaging for all breaking news, good and bad, anymore. Even my foxhole prayers begin with OMG these days. I’ve become shrinkwrapped into a Twitter mentality, 140 characters at a time.   If I feel any emotion at all I toss in an exclamation point or two. Even Facebook is becoming a burden. I don’t even call it Facebook anymore. I call it FB. OMG. WTF…is @ 2 me?!!  Critical mass approaches as my social network expands and my personal circle contracts….

But I mentally carve deeper and in a brief moment of clarity,  it hits me as I hover over the sink swirling the midnight elixir in a half washed coffee mug,  old as hell goddamn cat on the counter beside me. I tip-toe into my office, dig out some dusty boxes,  and begin tearing through decades of loose leaf pulp in search of a single folded sheet.

An hour later it is in my hand.  I examine the inky yellow page beneath the reading  light on my desk.  The Amends.  One unchecked-off task remains although the list is from another millenium altogether.  A previous Life, to be sure.

I walk back into the kitchen and toast the harvest moon through the window. I  boil some water for a final cup of Sleepytime and snoop through the fridge for a quick nibble.  The  cold white light is blinding—Soy this, 1% that, Non Fat everything else. Yogurt? I think not.  Flax seed, Organic, Antioxidant…my wife is clearly trying to torture me into good health.

And,  like most things in Life that have challenged me since those early monster days in (bucolic by name only) Violetwood, once I let the problem go, the solution appears on its own…

The Reunion

I step off the commuter jet in Pittsburgh and walk across the terminal to Avis. The girl behind the counter thinks I’m ancient, I’m certain.

“What brings you to Pittsburgh today, sir?”  She asks.

“Class Reunion,”  Me.

“High School?”  Her.

“College,”  Me.

“Pitt?”  Her.

“No. Slippery Rock….”  Me.

Silence, as  always,  follows.  Two underachievers, we stand an arms length and several generations apart,  avoiding eye contact.

“…I’ve owed someone $100 for almost thirty years and I’m going to repay my debt today…”  Me.

“…then reunite with some old friends.”  Me still.

More silence.  Silence and Judgement, I sense.  I’m being judged by a rental car clerk in Pittsburgh.

OFF.

“You reserved a Chevy Malibu?”  Finally,  Her.

My wife always makes my travel arrangements so alas,  a sensible Mid-Size American ride awaits my AMEX imprint.  I immediately upgrade to a Cadillac, confirming I guess, that I am indeed… old. We’ve been doing this for years. Mona has yet to ever rent me a car I’d actually be seen driving in real life and I always end up getting a Caddy because they don’t rent German cars in this country for what-ev…..

I exit the airport complex and drive north for an hour, texting on my iPhone and fumbling with the satellite radio the entire way. I push On-Star by accident twice.  The third time they inform me I’m being charged.  Bite me.  Besides the makes and models of vehicles cruising  in either direction along I-79 (and the daunt figure that keeps staring back at me in the vanity mirror on my visor), Western Pennsylvania hasn’t changed at all in three decades.

I pull into my old college town as the Homecoming Parade disassembles. As Fate, I suppose,  would have it,  I find a parking spot directly in front of the Camelot Restaurant.  There is a line out to the sidewalk. A hand painted banner hangs from above the awning: 

Everyday.  99 cent Breakfast.

Nothing has changed. I ate a hundred of these meals for free  thirty years ago and then left town without paying the tab. What a schmuck.  I step  inside and push through the crowd into the kitchen. The interior has remained stagnant over the years. The aroma of burnt, bottemless coffee fills a crease in my mind.  An old man is hunched over the griddle frying  a dozen eggs at a time. An old woman stands beside him slinging potato hash onto chipped plates.

“I’m looking for Gary,”  Me.

“I’m Gary,”  Him.

I stare back at a gray ghost of  the man in my memories. I  hand him the one- hundred dollar bill already in my fingertips.

“I’ve owed you this for thirty years?”  Me.

“What?”  Him. A little miffed. He doesn’t stop cooking.

Hey, I’m not in the mood for perturbation on this day; not when I’m attempting to make a grandiose gesture.  I just want to get a good night’s sleep, for crissakes. I continue…

“I’m Geno. I ran up a tab here when I was in Grad School and left town without paying. It always bothered me.”  Me. (white lie)

“I don’t remember you,” Him.

“I was an actor. Streetcar,  Equus,  Hot L Baltimore.  And a writer. I had a little column in the Tri-City News…. Geno…remember? You let me eat here  free for like a year…”  Me.

“Whatever. I don’t remember.  Amateur theater around here has never been very memorable.”  Him.

“Well I wanted to make good on my debt.” Me, also a little miffed now as well but it’s too late to slip the bill back into my pocket.

“Whatever.”  Him.

I place the C-note next to a toaster.

“I remember him,”  The old woman.  But she doesn’t elaborate. No need to I suppose. Yet another disappointed woman to add to yet another unresolved list.  Not.

I turn and head off to the reunion hoping that my reception there is a little warmer and wondering if there is a Starbucks anywhere in the tri-county area.  Ironic… I never had a buck for a plate of eggs thirty years ago but I’m quick to drop a five spot on a decent cup of coffee in a heartbeat today.  I pull a Green Tea capsule from my coat pocket and swallow it instead.  WTF…

I  stroll down the Main Street  (actual name) of  my Bohemian years and stop in front of an ATM. I check my balance and withdraw the maximum daily limit  just in case I suddenly kick the bucket as I make this final turn in Life with no intention of ever looking back.  After all, they say an unrealized expectation leads to a Resentment.  And holding on to a Resentment is pretty much like drinking the poison and waiting for the other person to die.  Don’t you think?

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Finally,  a bloggable thought!

Let me attempt to serve up something  palatable on the fine tapas Chinette as I poke through the  leftovers in the upstairs icebox. I know, it’s been a month of Sundays since I’ve broken literary bread with the family.

Hey, what’s this here?

Some freezer burned Zig Zigler?  Better check the expiration date on this mentally recorded morsel: 1976?  Hmmm…perhaps I’ll just let it thaw and feed it to the hounds with the dry food…

Insert  frosty Beta into Radarange and press PLAY

‘So there’s this Chinese bamboo tree that doesn’t grow an inch for four years, barely pokes its stem out of the dirt, then, in one amazing swing around the Sun, in year five,  it shoots up ten feet…..’ and  so I paraphrase the Zig man and countless other soap box derby wearers. It’s an old story.

I’ve tripped across many versions of the above Eastern yarn over motivational time and space; some prophets claim seven years for the phenomenon, some claim five, still others  declare overnight! The same question is always begged….does a bamboo tree (Chinese or otherwise) really grow ten feet in any amount of time (save a little daily watering) after laying  dormant for 1500 days ?  And if so, why?

Oh hell, we’re are all pretty smart dogs around here. We all know why.

Personally, it took this mutt over thirty years to complete and submit for publication, a written project that was greater in length than a thousand words and didn’t involve an iPhone snapshot. The notion struck me like a branding iron as I sat at my desk  completing the final U.S. Copyright  and Writers Guild of America keystrokes (along with credit card info, of course) into my tired machine.  I can only hope that after 60 days and nights of finger pecking toil (not to mention the 30 years below the soil), what I sent off , paid for, copyrighted, and registered, is even worth stealing.

So anyway, here’s a sample of what my bamboo tree just sprouted:

SCOTTY takes two more shot glasses off the tray and hands one
to CAT CHOW who reluctantly accepts the offering.

CAT CHOW
So, do you guys whack people?

MICKEY and SCOTTY look at each other. The housewives at the
next table are making out now. Patsy Cline plays through
the speakers. The lights come up for last call.

MICKEY
No. I’ve never whacked anybody.
Murder is above my pay grade. How
about you, Slick? You ever whack
anyone?

SCOTTY
Me? Nah. I’m a Buddhist. I did
staple a guy’s balls to his ass
once but I heard he didn’t die. So
no. Technically, no.

I’ll be back soon,

G

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In dog years I’m pushing 8; city dog 8, not country dog 8.  I like a crisp biscuit in the morning and a nice can of food with an ice cube in my water at night.  I enjoy a leisurely stroll through the neighborhood and don’t really care to muddy my feet in the parkway or venture too close to the curb anymore.  Not sure what I’d do if I had to rely on chasing rabbits for food or stray bitches for frolic.  If I want to press my point, I  piss in the bushes.  At the end of a long dog day,  I retire to my own bed where the cool sheets calm my simple soul and pull me into a dreamland of temporal puppy moments.

I stopped barking at the mailman years ago when I realized that he was merely the messenger.  I stopped chasing cars when the reality of an $800 per month payment finally stung me on the snout. I’ve learned to separate unconditional  love from raw, base instincts. I stopped humping legs for no good reason.

As a man,  I will always be some sort of a dog I am told.  The best I can hope for is to be the best dog  I can humanly be.  At the very end of the run I wouldn’t mind if my epitaph, carved into the side of a red Arizona mountain,  read something like:  ‘Here lies the ashes of Geno Petro.  He was a very good dog although his bite was much worse than his bark…’ Something like that.

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The base anticipation that precedes any journey to a new destination is always more vivid for me than the denouement that accompanies the physical descent to earth.  With rare exception (perhaps Paris and maybe Vegas), the image I conjure up in my two dimensional mind beforehand always seems to fall somewhat short of the real 3-D deal.  On our first trip to Maui, for example,  my notion of grass huts  and Woody Wagons clamped with surfboards was quickly dashed the moment I spotted a Costco and a  Wal-Mart just steps from the arrival terminal. It was raining  ukuleles that day and the lone, Port Authority hula dancer was, how shall I say… Samoan? I was expecting something a bit more, I don’t know….svelte?; like the subject of one of  those Sailor Jerry tattoos I threaten to get stenciled across my chest every 120  lunar cycles or so—-pure 1950’s  South Pacific paradise-of-the-mind stuff. I think we  bought our own leis for 8 bucks each at the gift shop, rented a Taurus from Avis, and called it a day.

And it’s not just Hawaii. The same holds true for Jamaica—or as I like to call it, The Bangladesh of the Caribbean, with its human squalor, smelly ceviche,  and over-abundance of  muddy water. Even the Antiquarium in Boscoreale, Italy, beneath the shadows of a nearby looming housing project,  is sequestered by a string of barbed wire and discarded heroin needles. Not that I don’t enjoy myself abroad, mind you. I’m an enthusiastic traveler, to be sure. The foreign landscapes that ultimately unfold just never fully mesh with the spatial images dancing around in my head before touch down.

Alaska was pretty spot-on but to be honest, I wasn’t expecting  too much from that particular latitude. And while I did not get a tattoo while docked in the port of  Juneau,  I was presented with a  shiny new Rolex Datejust in our cruise ship cabin later that evening.  Since I’m clearly never retiring from anywhere,  my wife decided to give me my ceremonial timepiece a few decades early— for my 50th birthday.  Just so you know, the name MONA, is tattooed on my left bicep. (It was only erased and changed to MOM once, and then back again to MONA as quickly as possible but as I often tell whoever will listen—that’s another story for another weekend writer’s block.)  I’ve long since  admitted to God, to myself, and to at least one other expatriot on foreign soil,  that I should have re-thought that whole laser/erase/redo episode beforehand. So what if  the Rolex is stainless steel and not gold. I’m just assuming its not a fugazi.

I’ve owned 20 different vehicles and  a half dozen dwellings in my 30+  years as an adult—each one, a little disappointing in its own way;  wrong model, too small an engine, obstructed view, wrong city.  Never ‘Sailor Jerry’ perfect like those carefree models on the vintage posters—forever young and beautiful.  Never what one thinks a tattoo is going to be before the alcohol wears off, the flesh begins to rip, and the ink sets in for good.  This causes me to think of the elder men who have preceded me in this life as I  ponder their own indelible whims.

My Uncle Zip never did move back to Hawaii after World War II, or own a brand new Coupe De Ville like he said he one day would, or meet Frank Sinatra in person (Vic Damone or Buddy Greco either, for that matter).  But every speck of his being, from here to eternity, let everyone within swinging distance know that these were items on his personal bucket list.  In my uncle’s case, the dream itself seemed to suffice in lieu of the destination or even the journey.  When the old Navy dog finally did make his final pilgrimage back to the Big  Island much later in life  he would, too, find his black sand paradise covered beneath a sheet of rain and asphalt.  He died in Levittown, Pennsylvania  with a  rusting Dodge Polara in the driveway.

And as I now recall my own father, a soul whose passing is still within clear sight, I’m certain he would have preferred to  spend his final years gazing at egrets and herons through binoculars from an Adirondack chair in Cape May, New Jersey; much more so, I think, than being held hostage by the Fox News Network and ESPN via his north Philadelphia blue leather recliner while fretting  over the  pink ink of  his Wachovia accounts. Think about it—a  man can  probably die wherever he wishes with some  proper planning, enough dough, and  a little luck. He just needs a willing spouse to help  move things along.  That’s all.

Truthfully though,  I don’t give this all too much thought.  I see little use  in being disappointed in something as anti-climatic as my journey to the After Life. Obsessions, like tattoos, begin to fade after so many years in the sun. But you must admit,  those  four-color brochures that the Seventh Day Adventists leave on the front porch every summer do catch your cosmic eye—like a Sailor Jerry classic. In Paradise. ‘Forever.’  On a deep six holiday.

image by sailor jerry

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To pluck a petal from the bloom of  friend and  recondite commenter, Don Reedy, I’ve been ‘face down in a slope of iceplant’  for 30 days. Yes, iceplant.  (I’ll let the man himself expound a little later but allow me to tempt you with the essence of his yarn—- it involves a houseboat in San Diego, a Belushi Halloween costume (including handcuffed briefcase), and a lost weekend somewhere in the bowels of the 1980s. Un huh.)

You see, I too have been on a pastoral  quest  of sorts this month and  presently find myself scurrying through the  Bloodhound shadows to slip this flimsy piece under the Big Dog’s door before the triple witching hour tonight—June’s last breath.  I take a peek around the literary pound and am relieved to  find that my Wordpress password is still active and that my name and mugshot are still posted on the BHB sidebar.  Only a handful of  hours remains between me and blanking an entire month on the hallowed front post page. Hopefully I’ll push Publish before the final strike of Midnight and keep the holy streak alive.  Admittedly, I’ve been remiss in my self-imposed dogmatic duties.

So this is what has gone down since I last posted Mother Nature is not a MILF on May 30th (an essay written mostly on my iPhone that netted a total of 6 unique comments including a few of my own trite responses). I pooled my talents, sunk my literary savings into a mental Ponzie marketing scheme, and found myself  nearly wiped clean from the blogarian grid as I danced 30 days straight ‘with the one who brung me’ to this economic station in life to begin with—real estate sales.  Eleven of them to be exact.  I’ve never done eleven of anything in a single month much less an activity involving commission checks with accompanying deposit slips.  And now, after eleven hard money contracts written and/or Closed in June, I come crawling back to my digital workspace on knees and elbows on this last day of the month, famished and thirsty for Google juice; mind, gut, and Adword account all but drained. On figurative creative fumes. A quip or two every few days on Facebook (again, via my iPhone) has been my only contact with the electronic media. I forgot to pay my Comcast bill. Twice.  When I finally booted up my laptop at home to begin this piece last Sunday, the bastards had already unhooked my shit. Some nice gentleman from a war torn Third World nation assisted me with the re-connect. I think he said his name was Billy Bob.  Billy Bob Pakhtoon.

I posted my first blog in December of 2005  because my lead generation efforts had basically dissolved into sediment.  Momentum alone carried me through 2006. It was only after reading a Time Magazine article later that year that I decided to change my real estate physiognomy and commit to a low carb regiment of  dietary backlink fiber.  For the next several months I was more concerned with the BMI on my Page Rank scale than the actual dirty act of  soliciting….ahem…. property.  And as my writing skills appeared to flourish, my sales skills began to atrophy.  I showed up at my accountant’s office in 2008 with my 1099s in hand and his secretary asked for ID. I was fiscally unrecognizable. I had become the Joaquin Phoenix of  his client base. I told her she should check out my blog, that I was now a writer and a Realtor. I believe her response was, “Whatever. Cash or credit card only, Mr. Petro.”  Whatever…

So, as Mr Reedy so beautifully explains it in the comment section of a previous post, “A friend found me two days later, face down in a slope of iceplant (I’ll bring a sample, because iceplant only grows where it doesn’t freeze). It took another two days for my face to lose the iceplant imprint…”

And there, too, is where I only recently found the other half of my creative soul.  In Iceplant. Face Down. On a Slope.  Imprinted.   I’ve said it many times before on this venue; I can either write or I can sell.  I just can’t seem to do both at the same time worth a darn. So for the next 30 days or so I suppose I’ll write.  I’m in a  Francis Ford Coppola Zoetrope Screenplay Contest with an August 1 deadline. Now that’s as good an excuse as any for not selling jack squat in July.

Publish

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Now the hard part—fabricating an essay that somehow pertains to real estate and ties in with the above catchy title; one that popped into my head while hydroplaning through a stop sign in a downpour earlier this month.  At the next red light I quickly texted the lofty thought to myself  expecting to come up with an accompanying  point (and several hundred additional words) once I made it safely back to my desk—my writing desk that is. Not my selling desk. I have a separate hard, cluttered surface for each, you see.

More accurately, what I’ve set up are creative stations for each side of my brain;  right brain/writing desk,  left brain/selling desk.  And it’s not hard to tell when I’m performing the wrong  creative duty at the wrong desk, either; I basically suck at whichever task is at hand, I’m always running  behind schedule, and I don’t make any money.  Anyway, that  Mother Nature idea was almost three weeks ago.

So tonight  I was reading  Jeff Brown’s latest post (and most of the 100 or so comments that were bound to ensue) when finally, the ideal segue hit me.  Transparency!  Why not try and give that clear concept a whack myself since, as hard as I tried to think of a comment to insert, I had nothing intelligent to add to Mr Brown’s already lengthy thread.  Perhaps  instead, I could unveil a few secrets of my own that the BawldGuy might feel are nobody’s fiscal business.  Actually, I  agree with him (and his grandparents) on this one but I happen to be sitting at my selling desk  in boxer shorts now so…. down they come.  Ah transparency.

* In 2006 I earned more income selling real estate than the combined government salaries of the Vice President of the United States and a typical  City of Chicago Streets and Sanitation worker on the ‘no show’ payroll.

* Last year, according to the cover of Parade Magazine, I basically matched dollar for dollar with the average preschool teaching assistant in Youngstown, Ohio (Fail perhaps, but not quite Perish).

* So far this selling season, I’m keeping  signing bonus pace with the two lowest paid relief pitchers on the Cubs roster who have but one Save between them.  That’s only one Save more than me and I don’t even play baseball. Still, it beats the hell out of  singing Barney songs to kindergarteners and cleaning up spilt milk…in Ohio.

* I’m yet to directly make a nickel writing anything in any year, sing-along session, or administration.

* Sometimes I imagine a cute saying or vivid scene,  edit  the content  for profanity and blue imagery,  QWERTY it into the Notes page of my iPhone then blog about it later, generally at my writing desk. I try very hard to keep at least an element of truth in these sorts of writings. If  the piece winds up getting  too far out there then I just stuff  it full of keywords and hyperlinks and post it on Active Rain instead.

* Other times,  the event actually does unfold before my very eyes which immediately hurls me into  multi-talkxting  mode (simultaneously talking with one person, texting another, and drinking a caffeinated beverage while operating a motor vehicle). This is always about the time I accidently drop my iPhone in one puddle or another.

* The rest of the time I just wait for Saturday evening to arrive and, if I haven’t dozed off in a corner somewhere,  log onto my Bloodhound WordPress account and try to slip  a semi-polished post past a couple of  the sleeping big dogs before midnight.  If I’ve had enough coffee throughout the week, it generally writes itself.

This morning  in the shower a new title popped into my head.  The New York Nicks:  a story of two cooks, both named Nicholas, who work at a Greek restaurant during the day and play in a Staten Island garage band at night.  How I’ll ever find a way to make that notion somehow  pertain to real estate, I haven’t a clue. But then again,  Mother Nature is not a MILF took since May 12th to end up here.

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It’s not that I couldn’t somehow get my hands on a late model Ferrari if I really wanted one (and I doubt I’m any different than most happily married men of my demographic in this regard). After the divorce, I’d simply have to move in with relatives, liquidate whatever is left for 100 pennies on the dollar, then slap down the balance on American Express between billing cycles, that’s all. With the proceeds I could probably score a pretty decent off-lease, if not road worn,  Enzo Berlinetta…in the least desirable color—with stock rims. I’m just saying.

I want one, but ideally…I want one 20 years ago.  (Actually, I’ll just take the 20 years ago and you can keep the Ferrari and this whole real estate business.)  A 32 year old Realtor in a Ferrari is a Bad Ass but a 52 year divorcee old living at home with mother is….well, just plain sad—especially when forced to park a high mileage phallus behind her Subaru in the driveway. (God how I hate that Freud.)

So this middle-aged guy zooms into my rear view mirror on the freeway entrance ramp last evening, hesitates for a double-bump tach rev,  then screams past me on the right in 1st gear. He was neatly tucked into a couple hundred thou of  handcrafted, precious scarlet metal and buttery cowhide.  His straw gray, combed-over tonsure hovered in the breeze above a sun-chapped bald spot. A rose gold Chopard watch, with matching cuff links, deflected all remaining rays of Envy as he dissolved into the North Shore Chicago smogset.  Judging from the pink gold blur, I pegged his left wrist alone at around 50 grand. Clearly, our little speedster’s got more jack than any man knows what to do with. His engine sounded like an amped-up Joe Satriani guitar riff in the dusky ether.  His license plate read RAINMKR. I’ve been behind this ass clown before.  He used to double park his banana cream Bentley at a renowned Viagra Triangle watering hole during happier hours. Must have gotten a divorce. If he got a red Ferrari then somebody got a house. You can bet on it.

I mentally counted the remaining months on my forest green 2006  BlahsMoW X3,  followed immediately by my own marital blessings–bountiful, to be sure.  I surmized (once again) that I have a personal mortality with which to wrestle and I don’t need anybody elses.  But…. if I did get the opportunity to be RAINMKR  for a day I’d probably hawk the pink watch if for no other reason than to see the look on the pawnbroker’s face .  Then I’d  go right  back to my wife where I belonged…..but not before doing 185 (that’s when the rear wing is actuated to maintain the downforce of 775kg) on the way home; just like in that song I sing to myself every time it comes on the radio.

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“You aren’t supposed to be smiling at a funeral,” my niece whispered out of the corner of her mouth as she sat between me and her older sister in the first row of  Salon A.  The three of us stared straight ahead studying  the grim subject before us; our beloved Pop Pop Gene.  My tiny mother sat slumped in a wing-backed receiving line chair just to the side of the casket; my youngest sister kneeling  beside her on one knee, patted her slightly shaking  hand.

I peeked over to my right. A chestnut shock of hair hung over half of  the child’s face as she silently reprimanded me. Suddenly moonstruck,  I realized how both young  girls looked  just as their mother did at that same mysterious age; prime numbered Eleven. Picasso beauties, all three of them. I couldn’t help but smile even on this, the  saddest of  all wakeful occasions.

We Italianos, besides wearing a lot of black, don’t mourn so much as think about food during times of great sorrow.  Ironically,  we fill our stomachs with the very fatty pabulum that slowly kills us in the first place.  Mangiare!  Morte! Mangiare! Too many cheese raviolis spoil the life span.  According to the heart surgeon, who admittedly did all he that could, my father had 95%  blockages in every artery. We are told he never made it past the initial catheterization.  I looked around the room and wondered if everyone was as hungry as me.  The pang soon passed as I once again embraced the still, silent  gravity of the moment.

I slipped my iPhone out of the breast pocket of my suit jacket and clicked on the Notes icon.  The screen lit up the entire front row. I scrolled down to a page I had earlier tagged ‘Cheat Sheet’  and quickly reviewed the names of each of my 20+ first cousins and their  respective spouses (both alive and deceased), children, and significant others as well as my parents’ immediate neighbors, long  ago retired  co-workers,  and dearest remaining friends.  Anyone beyond that realm of  entitled preparation would receive a simple and gracious  “Thank you so much for coming.” I do a similar thing at weddings and Christmas parties.  At age 52, my memory is clearly shot.

There are at least six variations Michael in our hyper-extended family; Mike, Mikey, Mickey, etc and nearly as many Johns and Johnnys. There are also a couple of Judys and more than a few versions of Elizabeth; Liz, Mary Beth, Mary Elizabeth, et al. The most beloved of these are committed to perpetual and everlasting memory.  Everyone else is on the List.

“Put your phone away,” my niece whispered  loud enough for everyone but my mother (and possibly father) to hear—and to be fair, my mother never hears anything.  I rose up from my chair and scurried into a private room reserved for Immediate Family to quickly review the names: John and Sandy, Ricky and Debbie, Judy and Mike, Monica and Mike, Elaine and Mike (Oops, divorced… I think. Maybe not. Or was it just an affair?… I think. Maybe not. Everyone got so fat I guess it doesn’t really matter anymore), Andrea and Mike (did they ever marry?)  Wait… more than a few of these people have passed on themselves. I needed to make a separate List just for the dearly departed.  Note… to… self…

I was starving.  I looked around the chintz and mahogany room. There was nothing to eat but wrapped breath mints and ice cubes from the pewter ice bucket. I picked up a stack of St. Jude prayer cards and fought back the tears as I read my father’s printed name on the back. I put three of them into my pocket and popped a breath mint. Smoking a cigarette seemed like a good idea for the first time in years but I refrained (although I was pretty sure at least one of the ‘Mikes’ smoked my old brand).

My father was wearing his best Brooks Brothers suit and a Hermes tie my wife Mona bought him for his 80th birthday.  Everyone said he looked great but I’m not even sure what that means. I could barely focus. My sister, up  on both feet by now, took a small bottle from our mother’s purse, walked over to the casket, and made sure the parlor attendant dabbed a splash of cologne on Pop Pop’s lapel. A Knights of Columbus 4th Degree Honor Guard volunteer stood at  swaying attention to the left. My other sister insists she saw him take a couple nips when he thought no one was looking but then again, she needed a drink  right about then as much as I needed a bowl of mussels, linguine, and a half-loaf of stiff Italian bread.  Guests began to arrive and we  ‘meeted and greeted’ for what seemed like the remainder of Eternity. Time seemed to stop for all of us,  including our father who art….

Toward the end of the night I fought off the sorrow, ignored the lingering hunger, and vowed to improve my life in all areas–not the least of which being what I shove down my throat.  Alone on a sofa in the Mens Lounge of the funeral home, I typed the following into the Lose it! application on my iPhone: Tasty Slim Fast in the morning;  A cracker for lunch; A sensible carrot stick for dinner. (I would ultimately blow my diet in First Class on my trip back to Chicago. Those damn…hot…nuts…) My father’s son in more ways than one,  I love anything salty, crunchy, sweet, or spicy.  Again, I fought back the tears….

As the remaining family members said our goodbyes beneath the mercury lights of the  parking lot I leaned down and whispered into my young niece’s ear. The shock of hair  still covered one beautiful blue eye. The other, pure sapphire under the moon and mercury, gleamed back at me.

“I always think about food when I’m sad.”  Her pretty little mouth flashed the faintest of smiles—a quarter turn upward, as she hugged me goodbye.  “And just so you know,”  I continued as her older sister left her own mother’s side and joined our personal embrace…. ”I always smile when I cry.”   But I really don’t.

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As winters go, the current capricious season has been as tolerable as any I’ve experienced sober since being administratively abandoned here 14 years ago against my will.  So what if I left a smarmy sales vice president waiting (with 45 life insurance presentation kits and a slide projector) in Baggage Claim 7 at O’ Hare International for an ‘inexcusable amount of hours’ on a cold March morning  back in 1990-whatever.  Big whoop. I figure the suited puppet is corporate milk toast by now anyway so I have  no regrets in that regard. A year and a half later I had my real estate license and thirty days after that, I sold my first multi-unit building for condo conversion. ‘God forbid’  the ass clown would ever think to spring for a cab. Thinking back on it now, that’s what he  most likely had to do.  I just don’t recall it being mentioned in my Fed Exed severance package that so quickly followed.

And what I’ve concluded since that liberating (if not sentimental) six-figure parting of  the ways is this: If ever there was a super-imposed bordered, semi-landlocked example of urban, bi-polar personality disorder just waiting to spit in the face of cabin fever, it exists in  my fair city, Chicago, between the months of November and April, pick a year.  And, as is the case of  so many frost-bound salesmen who have come and gone before me, my own personal demons continue to appear in a variety of veneers (with mere weather and  spirited drink being the least seductive of my temptresses anymore).

My final hours in corporate America began to un-tick in the following way one blustery weekend a millennium or so ago. I had been sitting on the same Viagra Triangle bar stool since Saturday morning when Last Call was finally announced.  I allegedly paid another unwilling patron to help me locate my car and drive me home. When I hit the pillow and cold crashed on the bed hours later it was the break of daylight the following Sunday. I needed to be out the door in exactly 24 hours to pick up my new vice president from his 8:02 AM  flight for an important Monday morning sales presentation.

When I awoke from my dehydrated coma and rack focused my blurry vision toward the general direction of  the deactivated alarm clock on my night stand, the numbers 7:07  burned my retinas digital red. I jumped up in a virtual panic, threw on a suit and Hermes noose, splashed on a handful of Bulgari, gargled a Red Bull and Diet Coke highball and flew out the door in search of my car.  Alas, God was looking out. I located the salt and cinder mottled vehicle less than a half block away, albeit double parked beside an alley dumpster with two City of Chicago orange tickets taped to my windshield and emergency flashers just barely groaning.  By yet another whit of Divine intervention, the engine turned over on the first twist of the key. I tossed the tickets into the glove box with all the others and tore westward toward the highway from my lakeside apartment.

Once on the Interstate, I needed to make it to O’Hare in record time. My BMW was running on fumes as I tried with one shaky hand to tidy up the interior.  No time to stop on this fated day. The road was empty of its usual bumper-to-bumper rush and I felt thrice blessed as I blew by mile marker after exit ramp neck- to-neck with the unraveling clock. I emptied the ashtray out the window and tossed as much as I could from the front seat to the back seat while driving, smoking, and curse/praying the entire way.

I recall glancing at my wrist as I slid sideways past the Valet attendant in Hourly Parking and into a handicap space, a crumpled twenty already clenched in my fist.  My watch read 7:55. I hustled alongside  the escalated  pedway until I located the nearest United monitor in Terminal 1.  Out of breath with thinned blood pumping, I stared bloodshot at the blinking  diode data for what felt like an eternity: Arrival. Departure. Gates. Times. Cities. Flights. Baggage Claim. Can’t. Figure. It. Out.

I looked up through the Helmut Jahn arched skylights above and made one last appeal to the Fortune 500 heavens. The sky was a hue of impending doom, getting darker by the minute. A full hour later with the boss man inexplicably delayed, my head throbbing and empty gut wrenched dry, but  still somehow standing, I realized it wasn’t Monday morning at all…but still Sunday. Sunday evening in fact. Darkness quickly swallowed my entire being.  And it  was still winter in Chicago.

I took a seat at the airport bar and vaguely remember drinking  with a pilot until closing; either a pilot or a baggage handler, I don’t really care to recall. I lost my car again. Towed somewhere. Declined credit card or something.  Took a cab back home to the lake  and woke up the following  Tuesday. Got Fed Exed on Wednesday.  Haven’t touched a drop since.

Except once. That was New Years Eve in Puerta Vallarta, Mexico.  In 1999. Just like the song.  But who has the time to muddle through that long story. Buy me a club soda at Bloodhound Unchained later this month and maybe I’ll spill the rest of the beans.

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I choose to live in a big American city because frankly, I stick out like a sore sport in most rural settings and my accountant says we can’t afford London. One of my earliest pre-school memories was a Trenton to New York City train ride with my mother on a blustery Saturday morning.  How much of  that early 1960s day trip I accurately recall and how much is anecdotal family filler (pulled, kneaded and peppered over the redolent decades around my parents’ kitchen table) I’m not quite sure.  Still, certain sepia frames have been imprinted in my mind for life— gazing up at the sky scrapers whose dizzying heights give me vertigo to this day; creeping like a mouse through the bowels of  The Museum of Natural History, terrified of the mummies and the smell of all that marble; seeing  a man get his arm tore off by a taxi cab while standing at a busy Broadway corner…I’m pretty sure; sitting on a New York City phone book for a child’s eternity at  Mamma Leone’s, waiting for the dessert course to arrive.  Feeding the ducks in Central Park.  Observing  the landscape artists with easels and tams, their turpentined pigments slathered on thumb-holed palettes, probably all long dead by now but  full of  abstract perspective on that day.  Not peeing my pants for the entire afternoon.

A similar ferment churned in my gut when I first strolled the arrondissements of Paris; same thing along the canals of Rome; and Gaudi’s Barcelona.  And while I can easily inhale the woodsy fragrance of say, a Walden Pond (or even Dyer, Tennessee) without much complaint, I am clearly no Thoreau.  Once you think you see a guy get his arm torn off in Times Square, you can never really go back to the suburbs.  Not entirely.

As each year strikes like lightning, I find myself  being both drawn to, and repelled from, the urban twist of what once was Sandburg’s Chicago with its animal sense of outcome and yellow inner eye… ‘ hog butcher for the world.’  Liebling’s Second City.  On a calm evening the whispers can still be heard beneath the newer, vertical townhouses that just 40 years ago were stockyards.  On the hottest of days, the mephitis still rises from the soil. I had a listing down there once (before the market downturn) for over 500 days. At the very end, everyone involved got slaughtered.

I read each morning, with curious attention, as my real estate compatriots post their streaming routines on Twitter, Facebook, and the Blogosphere du monde. I imagine what it would be like to mentally attend a ‘Four Day Foreclosure Conference in Fresno’ or physically prepare ‘REO Listing  Paperwork til Midnight’  in Raleigh or hobnob with @townsquare.  I find myself, instead, cherry picking the downtown Chicago buyers I wish to work with from our own brokerage website registration and passing along the rest. I attend to only one listing these days; a favor to a friend.  I’ve become an Accidental Realtor of sorts, sitting on a virtual phone book in my iPhone, waiting for the big hogs to fatten.  The Entree. I sell metropolitan real estate because (aside from luxury yachts and illegal drugs) it’s the biggest ticket item around here that pays a commission large enough for my wife and I to live comfortably in our empty nest, still do some social good, and travel the world—or at least the country. (We’ll be in Phoenix this April for Unchained.)

At the end of  Henry James’s life the historians say he finally realized that no matter how much a man loved his adopted foreign city or how long he claimed residence to a particular Transatlantic society— unless he was actually born there, he never quite belonged.  Again, not entirely.  I’m not sure where I’ll wind up at the very end.  I can’t really recall where I came from, come to think of it.   I suppose for now I’ll just stay put here in the Midwest and wait for this house I sold myself to at least reclaim some of its original value. As long as I’m paying the property taxes on time, the City of Chicago promises not to tear off my arm. Not entirely.

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Most days I simply breathe, terminus. I place one foot in front of the other, chomp on whatever elephant is in the room—one bite at a time, and mind my own real estate business.  Occasionally,  I stick two cents worth of my neck out into the Social Networking traffic snarl… then quickly retreat and power-lock the doors after posting a terse one liner or two in the Comment section but  before the light turns yellow reminding me to STOP,  lest they find me out and veer into the HOV lane where yes, I sometimes poach alone.  The rest of the time I’m thinking of something decent to compose that doesn’t state the obvious or contribute to someone else’s conspiracy theory.

I’ve mentioned before that I only need to be 51% in favor of something to concur, though it’s not as easy as it sounds. I find myself  indifferent about so many things, in these,  my middle years, that I’m often unsure where I stand on even the simplest points or issues. Lobbying for those last few votes in my own head seems a waste of  electromagnetic energy better spent on, I don’t know…. apathy?  So here’s what’s been brining  in the mental stock pot since last I published here:

My economic survival instincts tell me I’m a conservative but my starving conscious contact still whispers liberal.

I can barely tolerate NAR but I sell real estate to make a living and thus, support the paper tiger.

I think I support NRA but I’ve never been too crazy about weapons.

I often get the two groups mixed up.

Same with AA and AAA.

I can’t stand the thought of cruelty to any animal but I love a T-bone steak,  rare.

I can usually recall the names on Facebook but not the actual faces.

I loathe the New York Times but enjoy The New Yorker.

I admire anyone who admits a mistake promptly although I’m generally intolerant of mistakes.

I prefer being a Buyer’s Agent over a Listing Agent any day of the week, especially Sundays.

‘The Take Away’ is the most powerful Closing technique  if you really want closure.

I don’t particularly like the genre but I’m working on a screenplay entitled Chick Flick.

There are some mob guys in it.

I no longer smoke or drink except in my dreams where I’m always smoking and drinking.

I wonder why guys like Lowell George make small, deep cuts in pop culture then suddenly die leaving the rest of us to listen to their small bodies of work over and over and over again.

Little Feat looks old as hell on Facebook.

Where the hell is Tehachapi?

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