Stuck in my head

I love music. It's the one thing that's always been important in my life.

Right now I have this lyric from Gordon Lightfoot stuck in my head:

Her name was Ann and I'll be damned if I recall her face/She left me not knowin' what to do.

I love that lyric. I love the way it frames a man's struggle with heartbreak. Pretending to be strong, with a vulnerability that is at once immediate and a thousand miles away.

Collared

I'd like to further explore (but probably not very deep) a concept I introduced in my last blog.

Skilled and unskilled.

I've discovered that I feel guilty because I don't have a real job.

That doesn't make any sense. I have responsibilities, outcomes, paydays, reviews, co-workers, projects...all of the things that make a job.

But I've realized recently that I don't FEEL like I have a real job.

Now I think I know why.

I am white-collar. Decidedly. But I don't have any white-collar references. All of my frame of reference is blue-collar, and bitter blue-collar at that. I grew up in a place where you don't trust men in ties. They have the money, and they don't want you to have it. They don't get their hands dirty. They don't work for their money, which makes their having it all the worse. They are pencil-pushers, or schmoozers. They won't be useful after the nuclear apocalypse. They won't be able to weld things, or build things, or fix things...or anything.

But that's me, white-collar. I have a degree, but feel as though I have no skills. Not the skills that the paradigm in my mind finds valuable. I'm soft.

So, I rail against my white-collar job. I sabotage myself. People like me (paradigm-me, blue-collar me) don't have to dress up, so I don't when I should. People like me don't have to shave our ratty beards because we're REAL, not like those pretty softies in glass offices. People like me, people like me, people like me...

It's weird to realize that you are not who you feel you are. Now, don't get me wrong, I don't think there's anything wrong with what I am, intellectually speaking--I just don't quite know how to be that. I'm not inauthentic, I'm just out of my own league.

So here I am, white-collar. Weird.

Our House, is a very, very, very fine house

This is a photo of the last house I lived in with my parents. I visited a friend this spring, but he wasn't home, and I found myself sitting on his porch, face-to-face with a relic from the past.

This is a lousy house. It was lousy 15 years ago. It's worse now, but not a lot. The windows are covered--with blankets, not curtains. The front door appears unusable. I saw a woman pull up and use the back entrance while I was watching; the back entrance that leads to a mudroom where our cocker spaniel, Leon, lived in fleas and feces, neglected until he finally died. We can all share the blame equally, we rarely paid attention to him.

This is the house to which I brought Megan to meet my family.

Though my siblings will blanche, I really feel that I have a lot of experience with the houses of the poor. I wonder about them, at the same time that I remember living in, and visiting, them. Why do they all look so similar? The sunlight is blocked out of so many of them. More often by blankets than curtains. Why? Odd sleep schedules defined by the only work available to the unskilled?

Unskilled. I've been thinking about this word a lot lately. What market skills do I have? On the surface, I can talk to people. That's about it. And it's not the sort of skill that skilled workers like welders or electricians put much stock in. It's not a man's skill.

What are those windows hiding? The world from the occupants, or the occupants from the world.

More later.

It's all so overdue

Winfield was great, after this almost killed John and me:

We continued to build depth in our village, most of which is at Winfield with us, in our camp and elsewhere.

I'll try to get back in the habit of recording these things that, without record, fade too quickly.