The View From Scranton

Presence

I am not here. Okay, so I am. Here, that is. But only just. Even when committing bloggery, supposedly an act of utter presence, I am somewhat removed. Whether excused to the craft or blamed on the guile, I remain wrapped in faraway thought. Wrapped up. Thinking about what I was thinking about to write. Thinking about what I was thinking about to say. Thinking about what I was thinking about before I was thinking about thinking. Taut.

I am not there at the job; if I were I'd be basketed. The grueling numb, the repetitive hum, the hollow drum of thoughtless, thankless tasks. Many of my co-workers must think me a moron I am so not there. I don't talk. I don't inquire. I don't pay attention. I don't care. And so I go elsewhere.

In prison I perfected the art of removal. Removal of myself, that is. I drifted. I darted. I deployed. As if being absent would save me from the absence.

At the hillbilly jail in the County of Bradford, I walked counterclockwise laps in the pipsqueak gym and imagined myself in London, New York, Miami, Chicago, Los Angeles, depending on the time zone, the unstruck mood. I'd picture whatever city, its traffic at that any given hour, and immerse amidst. In better words, I'd go there. I'd be there. Swinging and strutting and scheming and clocking. Wherever it was I wanted.

In State, once the fall had kicked in, I had no such compulsion. No such talent. Instead I walked the gravel Yard and pictured all my wrongs, catalogued. I'd pull 'em all up on an imaginary flat-top, put 'em in pityingly-named folders like Jerk, Dumbass, Idiot, and, yes, Scumbag, then scroll through, again and again and again, till my numbskull cracked from the shellacking. Reliving every ugly minute. Believing every fisted insult. Wallowing in each worthless, unshod tear.

That didn’t last long. It couldn't. Otherwise I wouldn't be here now not being here. One can only smash one's soul against the wall for so long before it splatters. Eventually you gotta clean up the mess.

At Mahanoy, stop two in State, I came to my nonsenses and kicked 'em outta my ever smalling world. I mean, there wasn't room enough for me, let alone some humdrum pity. I'll admit, at first the bareness hurt -- there's something tremendously comforting in a blanket of down wallow -- but it hurt a whole lot less then it should've. A whole lot less than I wanted it to.

There, with a Yard big enough to almost get lost in, I turned inside out, to books, and the stories they held, the promise they proffered. This list is relentless -- some 500 titles in 44 months -- and to single out a single one would make me a singular fool. I've been fool enough, long enough. Let's just say I read the books, walked the books, thought the books, and I became a part of the story.

And I talked the books. Oh, not to any of my con colleagues -- the few times my mouth lit into a title I got some seriously wrong looks -- but to my correspondents, the far-flung faithful, who's cards and letters I kept as trophies, keepsakes, links to my own peculiar elsewhere. And of course I talked the books in Bully. Blessed, blest, Bully.

Sometimes the books talked back -- a pal had read it, a plugist had plugged it, a writer who had written it. Sometimes the books talked trash -- why aren't you in it, why haven't you lived it, why hadn't you written it. Sometime the books didn't talk at all. They didn't have to. Their silence and their still was plenty.

At Chester, State stop three, the Yard was a lot, literally, so I took the book talk inside, to my cell, where I had a con's eye-view of the Delaware. I took it in to myself, where I was trying to look. Since everything I said was overheard, I said nothing aloud. But I never stopped talking. The French call it thoughts of the stairwell; I call it thoughts of the jail cell. All the things you should've said and done. But didn't.

Yet still I wasn't there. And except for the odd few times when I felt seriously in danger (more later), and the too few times I was blessed with visits (ditto), I remained elsewhere. At large in a little place. It was instinctive, something hard-wired into my thick head. It was expansive, something larger than me. And it was existive, something that made me feel alive.

Now I can't seem to shake what I learned, what I fell to. I walk these Scranton streets, still silent lest I be overheard, a good three paces off my stride, and I'm elsewhere. Unmindful. All that chatter, all that matters less and less. Occasionally I'm caught without thought, beyond thought, but that occasion is seldom. When it does occur though -- at the foot of a building, in the face of a humor, on the line of a missive, that chat with Rube -- I rejoice. So this is what it's like to be there. To be somewhere. To be here now.

posted by John Hood. @ 12:26 PM