What Wishes to Live – Why a Blog?
“Not dying young can be a real dilemma.” – Jim Carroll
I never anticipated living into my 50s.
The first beer went down smooth at nine years old, from one of my dad’s little 8 oz. Budweiser pony bottles. Grenades, he called them. He had given me sips before, but this time I was allowed to finish it. The effect was instantaneous, and I adored how the hoppy after-fizz gave way to what I can only describe as an enormous sigh of relief, standing in the living room of our mid-century stone ranch on Parkwood Drive. It was late summer, 1978 in Colonie, New York. I remember it explicitly, like Baby Boomers recall where they were when Kennedy was assassinated, or almost everyone knows what they were doing when the first airplane hit WTC Tower 1.
At the dawn of the 80s, a girl named Tracy taught me how to properly inhale Marlboro smoke on the wooded path behind my home that connected Red Lobster’s parking lot on Central Avenue to Forest Park Elementary. She had huge lips, beautiful teeth and a massive boom box that blasted Black Sabbath’s Vol. 4 on the school bus every day as she blew smoke rings across the aisle at me, and the only thing louder was the hoarseness of her laughter. Not long after, I properly inhaled burning dried leaves from stronger flora on that same trail with my buddy Joe, who rolled them up from a sandwich bag with EZ-Wider as he stood in cut-off denims astride a silver Schwinn Varsity (he still has it) in the smothering humidity of another lazy, Upstate summer.
Then, at 12, I woke up one day and found my father dead in our basement. He died in his boxers as I slept right next to him, and an ocher dampness had spread out from his lifeless body in all directions, the bloodshot blue eyes fixed on our acoustic ceiling tiles, rings swollen around his fingers. In her 1948 Lake Arrowhead Bible Camp version of duty to god, my mother insisted we move forward with my scheduled confirmation at Pine Grove Methodist the very next day, but it didn’t matter. I had already found my religion.
By the time 10th grade rolled around, anesthesia was the order of every single day, my raison d’etre, my raison d’etat. No exceptions. My mother remarried quickly, and one frigid February morning at 15 I was put to the streets under the guise of “tough love,” which in hindsight was a far greater abandonment than dad’s. Survival mode begins there and ends when I die, like childhood, in Pound’s diffidence that faltered. There was little to do about it, except surf the couches of friends, eat their parent’s food and permanently borrow clothes, money and time until all welcomes were worn, which happens sooner or later with all one-sided deals.
At first, sleep came in little league dugouts, pocket parks and heated shopping center vestibules, until an angel named Marilyn Schwager rented me a spare room in her tiny cape, where she once raised six children, my friend Marc being the youngest and the only boy. I cut her lawn in the summer, she fed us beef stew and yelled when we came home all hammered and Marc would hang his buckskin coat on her tiny head as he stumbled past to the refrigerator. Despite the intensity of her hysteria at times, she remains one of the scant few Christians I knew who lived what she believed, who actually internalized the paschal mystery, the road to happiness through love and charity. She was the only person when ever chided my mother for her actions, telling her that “no true Christian would let their only son live on the streets like a dog.” No one else – teachers, principals, pediatricians, pastors – ever said a word.
Due in part to Mrs. Schwager and either nature or nurture on my end – I’m sure that will be one of many recurring themes in this blog – I kept showing up for school (physically, anyway) and my $3.35-per-hour deli job at Fairway Star Market, regardless of blood/alcohol content, which happened to be a stiff .32 when I finally made it to Troy’s old Samaritan Hospital detox in 1987. Apparently, this required about 16 drinks for someone my size back then, even though I hadn’t had a drop in almost 24 hours. My stomach was bleeding and I couldn’t hold anything down. I said this to the intake nurse, who took one look at my BAC and said, “There’s no reason to lie to me, honey.” But I was trapped and tired and zittern wie ein blatt so she got no argument from me.
I wish I could say that the show ended there, but it didn’t. In fact, it had only just begun. There would many more years of blackouts, burglaries, reckless endangerments, stained awakenings in wetlands and unfamiliar homes, crashed cars, vandalized properties, questionable procurements and broken hearts. I knew where all of it was headed, and though I was horrified every next morning, it didn’t move me. A stereotypical white kid frozen in survival mode. Our neighborhoods were filled with them.
Soon, all of that poured into a sort of low hum of acceptance and routine. When one lives life as an apparition, the risk of actually becoming one before 30 is wagerable, but see, there’s a certain freedom in that. The concept of caring about anything becomes sort of cynically adorable, like life insurance or grousing about weather (which my mother did incessantly). It also stands to reason that your mid-life crisis comes at about 20, so when most of my friends were checking out graduate programs, Mr. “Up Yours Truly” was checking out how to make rent with magic mushrooms.
What to do then, for the next decade, following that one weird week of Maalox, Librium and 12-step meetings? Smash and throttle one’s way through the alt-rock Age of Insouciance? Play whiskey fever drums in dive bars and crash forklifts in distribution centers? Prepare for a social distancing experiment 30 years in the future by permanently removing myself from all family events except painful Christmases and lurid Easter breakfasts in church basements? Yes. That. Those. Full beer pirate, low rent, clinical conviction. At one point, home was a storage space, under a stairwell in a Gilded Age rehab on Albany’s not-so-Grand Street, and I never cobbled together more than a few consecutive days of anything remotely resembling sobriety (especially the emotional kind). But then, in the summer of 1999, with the dawn of the 21st Century up the road hitchhiking like a serial killer in drag, a weird thing happened.
I did.
And because I did, I got to live. Somehow. A LOT. I lugged my oversized Pearl drumkit all over the United States, playing explosive music with extraordinary and hilarious young men. Hopefully we’ll delve into those years here, with some help from several who helped me survive it, though a little worse for wear in the audiology department. When I was off the road, I worked in the shipping department of a local music distributor, driving forklifts and whipping 40 lb. boxes of vinyl and cassettes around like they were made of foam. I got to meet Alice Cooper, Stevie Ray Vaughn, Cheap Trick and even Melissa Etheridge when no one knew who the hell she was, and Island Records was still trying to dress her like one of the Traveling Wilburys.
I ventured to Europe for the first time with a high school friend – whose writing will inevitably pop up on this site too – and as we followed the incredible but tragedy-prone Wildhearts across the UK, I had no idea we were trudging less than four miles past the grave of my 12th great grandfather Sir William Cole III. This guy was literally appointed by James I (yes, the King James Bible guy) to build an English settlement there as part of a wider campaign to bring the Irish province of Ulster under English control. He lay at relative peace at St. Margaret Lothbury while just down the road in Camden Town we were getting the crap kicked out of us in the pit to “Love U Till I Don’t” on the closing night of the tour.
And because I got to live, I got to write. A LOT. I studied English literature and journalism, freelanced for bike mags like Dirt Rag and also the locally-legendary Metroland Magazine, a weekly whose editors (to my disbelief) printed pretty much whatever I wanted to say about anything, though it was usually about music. I got to interview some of my rock heroes, including a reconnect with Alice (who didn’t remember me from the warehouse but talked for almost an hour!), Dave Lombardo from Slayer and Eddie Spaghetti from the Supersuckers. And the free concert tickets? Ridiculous. Ray Charles, Tom Petty, CSNY, B.B. King, Henry Rollins, Ani DiFranco, Pat Travers, The Allman Brothers, H2O, The Casualties, Queens of the Stone Age, Les Claypool, Stanton Moore, Anthrax, Carl Palmer, Blue Oyster Cult, Bela Fleck, Kiss, Judas Priest, John Fogerty, Kings X, Willie Nelson, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Hank Williams III, Aerosmith, Hatebreed, Ratdog, Eric Idle, Jason and the Scorchers, Celtic Frost, Clutch, Deep Purple… the list goes on and on. It was work, but it was real.
Then came what we’ll call the “The Anomaly.” It happened quickly. During undergrad, SUNY Albany offered me a 15-credit internship at the NYS Assembly, and I took it with absolutely no idea what an assembly was, except something your parents were supposed to do with your Christmas presents. I justified it by expressing a fascination with how hard it was to obtain information from any government office – which was required as a part of an investigative journalism class I took with the brilliant Cailin Brown – but really it was because those 15 credits were all I needed to graduate. I was a lot older than most of the student body and badly wanted off that hot party-hat campus, but shortcuts, half measures and accidental tourism can be awfully dangerous, especially if you’re like me and care too much about what other people think, which I would have denied back then but was ultimately as true as turd.
Once on site at the legislative office building in khakis and an ungodly brown corduroy blazer, I was assigned to a brilliant assemblyman from Kingston who had crazy, Irish eyes and led with his head when he walked, blasting forward with his body at a 60-degree angle into any busy room, a stack of folders tucked beneath one arm. He promptly deemed me his secretary, bill drafter, communications director and chief of staff – he had no one else in Albany – and it was it was mind-blowing for a guy who just stepped off a rock and roll short bus with bike chain lube on his calves. Our tiny office quickly became a veritable snow globe of paper, fast food and loose lips, with a cartoon cast of characters from lobbying firms pandering for anything from higher tobacco taxes to less stringent excess line insurance regulations to creating new library districts. I had no idea people like this existed just a few months prior, when my only sociopolitical concern was poverty – namely, my own.
After the internship, my new boss asked me to stay on as his legislative director, and it is at this precise moment where the arrow either soared or bent. I’m still not sure. On one hand, the fateful appointment eventually led to an outlandish journey of appointed positions in the legislature, state agencies and special interests that any oddsmaker would have deemed socially if not constitutionally unavailable to me a year earlier. In 1998, I couldn’t tell you what I had for breakfast much less the name of the state’s agriculture commissioner. But there I was, a year later, getting offered a $25,000 salary, health care, dental, vision and a 457 plan. That looked pretty fucking good to a bloke with thousands in school loan debt, overdue rent, cavities in his teeth and exactly two pairs of underwear.
On the other, I wanted to write. Publish. Pitch stories to editors, be an editor, write memoirs, explore the compelling universe of non-fiction, investigate, deconstruct and harmonize. Fertilize the frontal lobe, network, join a community of creators like college offered without the tuition and the artificial milestones. It was possible for a while. The Metroland work was steady, even if the paychecks weren’t, and it was as good an early bedrock as any for building a writing life. But like so many my age in the First World, I bought same line by parents did decades earlier, which was that money-making and resume-building and possession-grabbing was just what you were supposed to do as an adult. Play it safe. Risk is bad. Besides, it felt good (sometimes) and just made sense. Besides, it was my due after years of sitting in the cheap seats. “Check out Ketzy-poo over here, would ya?!” I took the bait like it was a winning lottery ticket, and pretty soon my days at the weekly were numbered.
Then, things I really never imagined during those frigid, feverous nights in the dugouts and dungheaps of my birthplace started pouring into view. Real final frontier-type stuff. Married the love of my life, a woman I’ve known since we were in our teens, even though our love affair began with a terrible electric fence scenario. I wasn’t supposed to touch the fence – the consequences were obvious, immediately painful and (in hindsight) permanent – but I just couldn’t help it. So we defected to Bethlehem, took out loans, bought homes, cars, washing machines, pest services and garden hoses.
Around the same time Facebook launched as a site for Harvard University students, the call came from assembly leadership to work as the speaker’s policy analyst for agriculture and animal policy, which I readily answered. This gig doubled my salary, tripled my stress level and cut my average nightly sleep time in half, a pattern that persists to this day. And of course, the more you earn, the more you spend. And so on, as Vonnegut liked to say. Before, I would bitch and moan about coughing up a few hundred bucks for new rotors on my old Buick Regal and suddenly we were pricing out $4,000 roofs, $5,000 driveways, $8,000 furnaces, $10,000 window replacements, $15,000 hardwood floors! My mother, who was born during the Great Depression, would “tsk-tsk-tsk” her opinions and disapproval through the landline.
The Fertile Valley Kool Aid kicked in big time too, and along came two amazing children who are these incredibly flexible, durable, dynamic and courageous entities of light; none of which they got from me. Or my wife for that matter. Both of us are painfully stereotypical Gen-Xers; minimally-parented survivor types, solitary, hardened, cynical, mistrusting, disaffected. It’s like we picked them out of a Buy Buy Baby catalogue or something. 
If the cost of owning a home didn’t cave in my skull the cost of having kids surely did, and now I know why grocery stores keep the baby formula locked up with the cigarettes! Me, I locked up my journals instead, because writing – which often requires the loneliness of the long-distance runner, only in soft white light – started to seem more than inconvenient; it was impossible.
I managed to publish a few things here and there, including a widely distributed, obediently male perspective on fertility. Then there was a half-hearted but hilarious journal reboot, with these hysterically pious and rageful (read: early sobriety) entries. I had a website up to showcase my work and all these cool new experiences I was having a freelance drummer, but even those small efforts came to a screeching halt when I got the call to run intergovernmental affairs at the NYS Department of Agriculture & Markets. 
Another huge leap in salary (like new-tax-bracket huge) but I hadn’t even found the coffee pot in the office before the commissioner – a friend, the guy who appointed me – notified me that employees in the civil service workforce at the agency were sharing my website and complaining about the foul language and “off color” subject matter. He didn’t ask for an explanation, I didn’t give him one, and I immediately removed the offending material. I had been in government long enough to realize that as an employee of the governor and as his representative to the commissioner, I would have to take the site down. Which I did, feeling like a chump but choking it right down.
Why? Because I was scared, plain and simple. Because after 30 years of not much to show – of treating life like a game show in hell where the old drunken Bill Ketzer sprints across an infinite minefield of flaming dogshit toward the liquor store before it closes, chased by some lesser demon in a 1970’s glass glitter motorcycle helmet with dildos for horns and Mike Pence’s “O” face spewing bastardized Descartes in a tutu (“I think, therefore I am an asshole! I think therefore I am an asshole!”) – things didn’t smell so bad anymore. I suddenly had a lot to lose. Suddenly that middle finger was busy doing other things, like flicking stink bugs off the baby crib, or tapping a calculator to make sure we had enough cash in checking to pay the mortgage after the holidays. Even today, I joke that fear is the primary reason for what little success I’ve had in my career, only it isn’t a joke. It’s true. Fear of not enough. Fear of being poor. Fear of being disliked. Fear of pissing people off. Fear of being abandoned. It looks dire on a therapist’s note pad, but for humans it’s relatively standard kindling for the bonfire. So much easier to let myself be hijacked and reek, as the once-poet Joe Cardillo said, “of bullshit values I wasn’t even sure were my own,” commitments that paid bills but created a lot of anxiety and shame. It should have been no surprise, since that phenomenon was so well-rubbed into the constellation of my character that I mistook anything better for the enemy.
Sound familiar?
Throw a wholly inappropriate capacity to function on 3-4 hours of sleep per night into the mix, a little British heavy metal and a fresh pot of coffee and you’ve got alchemy on the cob while it lasts. But this was all channeled into someone else’s life work, not my own. And by that time, I hadn’t only lost my love for writing, but also my ability to read anything that wasn’t talking points, executive summaries or poorly-drafted legislation; a crushing irony considering near-infinite volumes of the world’s written words were by then just a mouse-click away, while most of us sat in front of our PCs, those god-forsaken, incandescent rectangles as big as double-burner griddles, watching funny cat videos on YouTube. For hours and hours and hours.
When I left government in 2012 to lobby in the not-for-profit world, I figured it would be more of the same, only crazier. And in some respects, it was. I was dealing with a finer area of public policy that was more consistent with my underdog values – animal welfare – but was responsible for legislatures in five states, all of which did things a lot differently than New York. The learning curve was enormous, and the culture shock was exciting but completely disorienting. A lot of my new colleagues were much younger and activism oriented, spoke a whole new language (most without ever uttering the word “fuck,” which I found suspect), ate strange things and didn’t have the simultaneously far-flung-but-tightly-tethered vibe a lot of G-men exude. Suddenly, I had no secretary to make appointments, compile expense reports, answer the phone, draft letters, be the firewall. That old terror, that groundlessness rose up, but I dipped like David Byrne in “Once in a Lifetime” to meet it, with less sleep, less family time, and of course, no writing or reading.
If you’ve made it this far (congratulations!) you’re probably waiting for the point in the story where I walk away from my career in a gutsy leap of blind faith and follow my bliss, where to my transcendental surprise the money soon follows after a cinematic period of tested faith and tribulation. Well, that didn’t happen. Hunger strikes aren’t popular in America, and here’s a funny thing about the banks that lend you money: they eventually want it back, plus interest.
I’m still a huckster for our four-legged friends, as long as they’ll have me. I do love the work and I really love fighting for the underdog! But being a lobbyist for any cause is all about waiting and seeing, and the hard pill is that you’re usually waiting for a long-ass time. If you get the cake and wristwatch at the end of a 30-year run in government and can point to two or three laws you wrote that actually made a sustained, measurable difference for some person, place or thing – out of the hundreds of bills you poured months and sometimes years of your life into drafting, selling, passing, and getting signed and implemented – you’re a success.
Well that sucks, I hear you say.
And it does. But accepting that does allow for a deeper dialogue with self about the meaning of success, and that was never called into question more than when I received a job offer from an old friend in government a few years ago, national in scope, a nice title and control over a sizeable workforce. The intrigue was visceral, because of course the ego loves this stuff. To death. Ten years earlier I would have leapt into that gig like Martha Stewart into Snoop Dog’s 1967 Brown Sugar Caddy, but for once I did something smart. I made a “pros vs. cons” list, which looked a lot like this:
PRO: Cool new title.
CON: Paid about the same as current job.
CON: A lot more work.
CON: More stress, headaches, and emergencies.
CON: More time in meetings.
CON: More time answering email.
CON: More employees to manage.
CON: More travel.
CON: Still no administrative help.
CON: Way less time with family, in fact possibly Harry Chapin “Cats in the Cradle” level absenteeism, physically or otherwise.
The answer was obvious, but still, I sat the fence! I sweated it out like a squirrel trying to get the last acorn on earth out from under a sleeping screech owl. Making the call to my friend and turning it down stung hard. I could barely breathe, and it bruised me. Just like when I had to take my website down, just like paying rent at 16 while all my friends bought records and concert tickets and cool T-shirts at Colonie Center. Like waking up in a total stranger’s house, walking down their stairs 
and looking at framed family pictures of people I would never know, wondering if I accidentally passed out while trying to rob the place or something, and making it outside without waking anyone to realize my car was nowhere to be found, and I had no idea what town I was in. But I had finally internalized the message Tommy Teardrop, my first AA sponsor, gave me about this all those years ago. “Billy, part of being sober is feeling like a chump almost every day but doing the right thing anyway” he said. “Just stop reacting to that feeling and maybe, just maybe, god will take over.” He was basically saying what everyone from Siddhartha to Sid Vicious taught: the human ego doesn’t really care about the difference between a right choice and a wrong one; it only urges action based on perceived threats to its existence.
So hey, after cleaning up at 32, it only took another 15 years to realize my ego sees everything as a perceived threat. So what? But it was a big deal for me, because this middle-aged guy suddenly made a deliberate life decision based on facts and values that spun outside a tireless orbit of antiquated, fear-driven choices, or a sort of simpleton’s tourism. I chose wisely, and the person who got that job instead turned out to be 100 times better at it anyway – like, different travel class on an ocean liner better – so there you go.
Another thing Tommy said was that “gratitude is a verb,” the theory being that people like me aren’t grateful for anything, so the only way to express gratitude is through (a) doing things for other people, (b) not expecting anything in return, and (c) not having to tell everyone about it every 15 minutes. He said that all the time, so I started to game up by deliberately taking on volunteer work locally, where I could see the direct results of something I helped create in our own community. I joined the board of the local farmers market, got heavily involved in our PTA, served on the school district president’s council, and got involved in the town’s comprehensive planning efforts. Best of all, however, I started to do research and write articles for the Bethlehem Historical Association. 
I sent in the membership fee with a letter to its president about a serendipitous encounter I had with a distant relative in my dad’s great uncle’s wife’s family (got all that?) right after we bought our first home in Glenmont. We met for lunch in Albany after he responded to one of my Ancestry.com posts about the Ketzer name, and he proceeded to give me more information on my family in 30 minutes than I had in 30 years. Part of it was that the first generation of Ketzers in the United States is buried in Our Lady Help of Christians Cemetery, less than a mile from our front door. That was the day I started to question coincidences.
According to another distant relative (Dr. Karlheinz Kienle, who appeared out of nowhere in an unsolicited email) my father’s paternal ancestors hailed from Prussia, in a small village called Erbach near the Township of Koblenz, close to where the Rhine and Mosel rivers meet. 
Most of them were originally “guestworkers” from Belgium and worked in nearby iron factories at the beginning of the 17th century. Karl said that their descendants fled the homeland in the mid-1800s due to “bad social conditions,” which is a polite way of saying they were sick of their village getting pounded into compost by intense poverty, endless warfare and religious and political persecution. My 3rd great grandfather was one of them, coming to America with his family in 1852. The only public record I have of him is an Albany Morning Express clipping from November 20, 1862 indicating that he was “arrested for public intoxication and sent to jail.” Like his ancestors, he was a blacksmith and trained his kin to follow his footsteps until the mass production of the automobile forced his grandson into the teamsters’ unions, driving trucks for local beer companies like Dobler Brewing. They were one of the few breweries in Albany to actually survive Prohibition and my grandfather ran their union shop for several years. He died before I was born and by all accounts was an insufferable, unscrupulous man, and also an incurable horndog. 
Whenever I asked my mother about him, she’d pinch her face in disgust and describe how at every holiday dinner he’d just leer at her. “You felt like he was undressing you with his eyes” she’d say. So it wasn’t a big reveal that no one broke their arm to pass these stories down to me, no great uncle handed me a box of newspaper clippings, no weird cousin mailed me a few old pictures, because almost all of them ate, smoked and drank themselves to death at young ages, and from what I can tell, they all hated each other. Bonus fact: my father told everyone his birth mother died in the 1950s until my mom saw her obituary in the Knickerbocker News a few days before my 4th birthday in 1972. “Well she was dead to me,” he told her. Suddenly I didn’t feel like such a black sheep, and I couldn’t get enough of this stuff!
More accurately, I was transfixed. Squeezed into motion by the tendons tying today with yesterday, I started using Facebook to reveal them, which is far preferable than how I previously used it – to mindlessly verbalize whatever my brain was obsessing about at any particular moment. Make no mistake; social media is everything people say it is. Enchanting, nostalgia-fueling, isolating, incendiary, numbing, ego-waxing and, if you’re not careful, the most practical way available to magnify your personality flaws in lithe, jaw-dropping, and sometimes catastrophic ways that make your ancestors blush from beyond Valhalla. You can literally tease out every single character defect you have, and when you’re done you can move on to the ones you never even knew existed.
What’s more, we’re double-duped, since everything we say, every picture we post, every emoji we emote, every destination check-in is captured, analyzed, sorted, cataloged and sold on the free market so your online experience is presented in a way that capitalizes on the aforementioned flaws. Marketing firms call this “reflecting your interests” or “maximizing your online experience.” It is so integrated our browsing practices now that we don’t even realize we’re watching one endless commercial, because our lives are the commercial. We’re the product, folks, and we’re giving it away for free. Not that there’s anything we’re going to do about that.
But hey. Life is full of these inconvenient truths (some more inconvenient than others), and we’ve been victims of this of commercial mind control since the printing press was first patented, only now the precision is clinical. The fact is, however, that Facebook – and its flashy little Gen-Z sibling, Instagram – also helped rebuild my writing routine, my love for stories, for storytelling, and reconnecting with a lot of friends and family in the process. I would post a sepia snapshot of my grandmother, who emigrated here from Denmark in 1910, riff off into the history of her family (farmers originally settling in South Dakota and Colorado before moving to West Laurens, New York sometime before 1915) and people responded by sharing immigration tales from their own families. Then my own relatives chimed in with facts about my grandmother I hadn’t known. There are definitely far worse ways to spend a moon cycle.
So began several years of extensive, illustrated social posts on steroids – vignettes, really – about the history of our property, my mystifying incursion into public service, the chance and perilous tourism of familyhood, friendships and curious unions with an overwhelming number of truly kind, crazy and captivating people in our lives right now who would have fled from me in high school as one would flee the melting core of a nuclear reactor (except my wife, who actually ran towards it for some reason). I realized exploring what is timeless and immeasurable in us through researching history had become the primary, involuntary, underwriting and overarching theme my writing – and ultimately my unexpected second half of life. In storytelling, the epiphany – be it battleship anchor or beautiful balloon – was the realization that there was so much false in me, and this call back to a writing life I had long since abandoned for other forms of necessary suffering was what I was meant to heed, regardless of who cares to read.
Social media excursions became the primary means to quiet the voices in my head and put these vignettes, journal entries, treatises, negotiations with circumstance and extraordinarily brief moments of True Presence out into the world as an opportunity to experience timelessness – its elasticity, exceptions, unwritten rules, bittersweet sanguinity, heartache, the eventual death of everything that’s false inside – whether I liked it or not. And that’s where my natural tendency to unpack the history of even seemingly trivial artifacts really started to wander, until immersed in what modern mystics call “deep time.” The connection to deep time is important because without it, humans tend to separate themselves from the general dance of life and death. We pretend we’re never going to die. “Living in such deep time, connected to past and future, prepares us for necessary suffering, keeps us from despair about our own failures and loss, and ironically offers us a way through it all,” the Franciscan friar Richard Rohr says. “We are merely joining the great parade of humanity that has walked ahead of us and will follow after us.”
Here’s an example:
Last year, I had to replace an old, American-made P & S light switch in our upstairs bedroom. This remodeled attic is ten years younger than the rest of the house, but nonetheless these switches have been used every day, by only three families, for over 60 years. The last human to hold that switch in hand was pobably the guy who installed it in 1958: Francis Gerald Denson. Fran was the contractor who converted the attic into said bedroom for previous owner Howard Goold’s three young daughters. Denson was a wiry lad from Middleton, Wisconsin who stood over six feet tall with brown hair and blue eyes. He served in the U.S. Navy during World War II and eventually retired from NYS Office of General Services as a construction supervisor. He and his wife, the former Norma Wiley (over there to the right), had a summer camp on Sacandaga Lake.
Norma was a 1944 graduate of Bethlehem Central High School, so how Fran got to Delmar or met his future bride is anyone’s guess, but after their nuptials they lived at 25 Marlboro Road, and later, 43 Lyons Avenue in Delmar. This means their daughter Lucinda, who graduated from BCHS as well (Class of 1967) went to the newly constructed Hamagrael Elementary – where my kids currently go to school – just a few years after its completion in 1954. Cindy took piano lessons from Miss Vivian Granato (to your left), a daughter of Italian immigrants who still lives down the road from us on Maple Avenue. Vivian also gave lessons to Deborah Geurtze, whose father Harold was on the town planning board in the 1960s and also the general contractor who built our screened back porch with mahogany floors in 1998. In the 1970s, Miss Granato was a music teacher at Forest Park Elementary, where she taught me and my old friend Don Arnold how to play the melodica in 2nd grade, not long before I used the trails behind the school as a pharmaceutical testing site. She was the first person who suggested to either of us that making our own music was possible, if not inevitable.
See how this works?
These “Six-Degree” exercises are more than a simple game of fascination; they vaporize any notion of separateness and give us permission to tap that deep connectedness we have, to everything and everyone. Unpacking history, and internalizing it, not only enriches the experience of living here beyond measure but it quiets the ego and fuses souls to Rohr’s deep time, reminds me that I am just a steward of this property and that I really don’t own it, or anything else for that matter. That’s the great illusion from which we can all awaken. After I’m gone, most people won’t describe me by my possessions, like, “He had that great John Deere X320 tractor with hydrostatic transmission.” For better or worse, they’ll be more likely to say, “He was alright,” or “He talked too much” or “He was a lobbyist,” or “He was always out picking up twigs.” That is, if they talk about me at all. On the deathbed, it all passes from us, effortlessly, as children blow seeds from spent dandelions into an early summer breeze.
Though it may seem paradoxical, learning and internalizing the known history of anything – which requires diligent reflection on the past initially – can improve one’s capacity for living well in the present moment. And there are so many tributaries! Not just in history but in living, in silence, in love, in comedy, in just puttering around with the wood-splitter or guessing the age of a mulberry tree and learning how it reproduces, or how long it can continue to deliver nutrients to its roots long after permanently defoliating and sagging to earth (hint: practically forever). This fascination can be all-consuming and seemingly infinite, and reflective of infinity itself. Maybe. Hey, it’s not like humans really understand infinity, but I do think its reflection can be caught occasionally, if we’re paying attention.
One thing I do understand, however, is that social media is a dreadfully poor medium for unpacking, for exploration, for deep-grooved time travel, for giving someone a deliberate space where they can dwell inside a piece of writing and form their own opinions without the insidious, polarizing bombardment of TwInstaFace. And selfishly, those platforms offer writers nothing in terms of the ability to catalog and maintain their collections (though at some point I’m sure Facebook will figure out a way to do that and charge you for it, because in the 21st Century, again, we are the product). My hope with this blog is to spend less time thinking about how to write on social media and focus more on actually writing, because these days my window for putting it down on the page is about the size of a porthole on the hull of Elf-on-the-Shelf’s off-season schooner. But fuck it. I’m doing it.
Because I chose poorly in my first half of life, I write in the small hours, the witching hours, when even the fox is asleep, the cell is merciful, and the shelves are being restocked. If needed, I write in our mid-century basement bar, designated the “Rumpus Room” on the original blueprints, next to a Slingerland drum set that came out of Chicago before I was even born. That kit was steam-bent into life by a company whose founder was the 5th great grandson of a Dutch businessman named Teunis Cornelius Slingerland, who lived on the Normanskill Creek, not 5 miles from our home in Bethlehem! Had his family not been Loyalists to the British crown and fled to Ontario during the American Revolution, his descendant might never have won the company that still bears his name today during a riverboat card came on Lake Michigan in 1912.
See? There it is again. Deep time.
If you unpack history far enough on any single thing, infinity emerges. We are no separate from one another than a bunch of photons swimming infinitely in a ray of sun. I can connect my limited tenure here on earth with deep time, with longevity, with the infinite, with just about anything. It manifests in a distinct, sighing sensation that materializes when I press my body against an old Elm tree in our woodlot that has somehow has miraculously managed to avoid Dutch Elm disease, or when I read Robert Frost’s Birches, or when I prune Brenda Unright’s massive Red Heart Hibiscus at the front of our property, because I know it came from her grandmother Minnie, a coal-miner’s wife from Old Forge, PA whose father was a shoemaker in England before coming to America.
It comes when my sons dig up an old hand-cut nail or an enameled brick by the barn.
It’s why I’m more interested in the cemeteries on Cape Cod than the beaches.
It’s the reason I still have a working 1977 handheld Mattel Electronics Football game.
It’s Motorhead’s “Out of the Sun.”
It’s why I buy old yearbooks and municipal directories on eBay, and can kill a whole day looking at old cabinet card photographs in an antique store.
It’s even what drives my sobriety. It’s what’s for dinner whether I like it or not, and despite all the old fears (I’m not good enough, I’m not safe enough, I don’t have the instruction manual) it feels like God to me. And God, like gratitude, is a verb.
None of this is extraordinary, of course. The longer one lives, the more most narratives in life contemplate either longevity or the lack thereof, and then, finally, the infinite. But maybe the reason it captivates me so insidiously is because I actually survived my youth, albeit as one survives a Somalian minefield. And maybe that too is no big deal. A lot of people survive childhood trauma. Some even actually overcome it, and others still actually thrive in direct response to it. But for me, it has become about so much more than survival or victory or choking out tribulation in the Filthy Octagon of Real America; it’s about what Rohr calls “falling upward.” About cracking away the increasingly-thin shell of the false self, the masks and titles and roles and binary thinking that once made sense to make the mortgage but poisons the proverbial well on the ass end. And let’s face it; I’m not going to be doing that by staring into various glowing rectangles for 10-12 hours a day and bending my body into one big sailors knot, with every 150-email day a stable whiff of Kafka’s toilet.
So this blog, I’m thinking, is my attempt at exploring all of this in a more deliberate way.
Because if I’m honest, I really don’t want to go to my grave laying in history’s unmade bed, as the great Jungian psychologist James Hollis puts it. I’m not going to look back on anything I just wrote, my sad little “small me” story, when death is peering into my Ring camera disguised as the UPS guy. Shit. All of us are dying, right now. I’m not going to advise my sons to keep their resume updated or return every phone call. I’m just not. As Mark Twain said, loyalty to petrified opinion “never broke a chain or freed a human soul.” No.
To me, success happens in the now. The infinite happens in the now. The obviousness of interconnection happens in the now, whether it be in preserving the oldest existing deed to our property (hand-written in 1826), or simply forcing myself to exercise and take a daily beta-blocker to keep me out of A-Fib. It’s in planting a monster bed of asparagus that will feed my family for 20 years or trying to coach my sons to do the opposite of what I did as a teenager, in hoping I’m still here when they are old enough for me to share just how deeply those choices warped my thinking and drive my actions to this day, whether I want them to or not. Or as a parent, coaching myself to do the opposite of what my parents did, and suffering madly in a struggle to model better behavior only to have it fall on blind eyes and deaf ears anyway. Or when I in turn ignore my own parental goals to slide back into the assemblage of behaviors that make me just like my parents, like the body’s musculature twists the spine out of alignment yet again despite regular adjustments.
I don’t believe this. I know it. Huge difference. There is a life force in everything that reflects what some people call (and others miserably refuse to recognize as) God, and human beings are the only entities on earth cursed with a curious neurosis that incessantly strives to override the act of simply basking in its inscrutable lightness. Let this space be an antidote for that, because all of this ultimately points to that old spiritual axiom that life is rough, and then you die. And here’s something else:
It’s shorter than we think.
I know it’s easy to dismiss. Who cares to contemplate their own mortality when they can be watching The Masked Singer? There are meetings to make, leaves to rake, selfies to take and cakes to bake, but standing in the muggy August afternoon of life, I understand – deeply – that I’ll never need to buy another roof for this house, will probably never need to plant another asparagus bed, or plan for when the oceans rise enough to bury the coasts of this unlikely nation (but my children will). And soon, there will be more hilariously alarming degrees of this. In no time at all, I’ll ever need another overpriced dishwasher, another drop-forged hammer. Then, another car, or another good pair of dress shoes. And eventually, another birthday cake.
Tick-tock.
So. I’m putting these stories – of local history, collecting, homeownership, personal memoirs from youth, of my messy, curious and crazy family – out into the world in this new way, hoping that it might inspire someone else to do the same. You’ll see reissued pieces here, as well as new efforts to capture this life on earth, in the United States (for now) of America, in the State of New York, the Town of Bethlehem, the hamlet of Delmar, on Elsmere Avenue, in an oversized 1948 Cape that sits in the exact footprint of the original farmhouse of a Revolutionary War lieutenant that farmed 400 acres of land seized by the Dutch from loyalists to the British crown. These are the experiences of a stumbling, distracted, male-type human being in his roles as father, husband, historian, manager, builder, writer, reader, drummer, winner, loser, server, quitter, collector and consumer.
Not as a means to thwart death, but to honor what wishes to live.
Bill Ketzer
May 2020