Author: buddycushman

Part One:

I don’t know how to be cool. I wear beat-up jeans and too big sweatshirts. I don’t feel a need for social skills. My primary focus in this world – every day, every moment – is slow dancing. (And saving the planet.) I rarely get embarressed.

On a dating site I would offer as my profile: “I rent a room in a trailer, I hardly have any money, my 24-year-old car has almost no paint left on its trunk. My idea of a fabulous vacation is to go to Starbucks with a book. At four o’clock in the morning I go outside to look up at the stars, freezing my ass off, feeling both very small and very big all at once. Oh – there’s nothing more romantic on the planet than slow dancing. Lastly, I barely give a rat’s butt about other people’s opinions…or my own………So, who’s interested?”

Not cool.

And yet I sit on a mountain bench listening to Motown, and find myself joyous and free, dancing.

Terminally hip.

Part Two:

Every day I am sitting still, as if in meditation, upwards of an hour. Every day I am reading from ‘these’ books upwards of an hour. Every day I am writing three pages in a notebook about this life of mine now.

I am never not doing these.

And I live in a trailer with my mom (said Zen Master Eminem).

Following the divorce, I stayed with my friend Kate at her house in Milwaukie, Oregon for a month before finding on line and moving into a room in a house in Encinitas, California. One of my worst living experiences – wild drug and alcohol use, 100,000,000 ants crawling daily on my floor, wonky hardly-ever there internet. While there, though, I applied for and was hired by a San Diego agency to serve as a “support person” for a young couple, both with Down syndrome, in their apartment in San Marcos. From Encinitas I could take back roads to hang out with Kristen and James, maybe 20 miles round trip, two days a week.

Then I fled the insanely expensive and rather evil Encinitas house and landed in a room in a condo development in the Golden Hill neighborhood of SD, a much nicer experience for half the cost. The one drawback was the new commute to work with the kids:

About 35 miles each way, up the 163 and up the (gulp) 15 and west on the (another gulp) 78, SD to SM. I worked Mondays and Tuesdays as my role in the support team, so up and back twice a week, like 140 miles, and for seven months – Calculator please: just under 4000 of those 26,869 miles I’ve traveled in my car.

One morning after those nine months – and the joy of being some kind of service – came to a close, I called my boss and said I can’t do this commute anymore. She said she’d been waiting for my call. I gave three weeks and was gone

Driving to the Rhody Garden in Portland, OR brought me to a place of wonder and magic. The way longer drive to San Marcos was as fulfilling and joyful – lucky, lucky me. Fortunately, I get to follow their lives together on FB, and for some reason I am tagged in ongoing “support team” emails about that mid-thirties couple – in 2022 they’d been married four years and together 13. Wasn’t it that ancient Zen Master Eminem who said, “You can do anything you set your mind to,” and especially if you lead with the heart.

There’s a P.S. here about a guitar and and amplifier falling out from the sky into the room where I type this, but it’s another of these odometer tales for another day.

Lucky me:

Some of the few miles added to the Camry’s odometer came from driving briefly from Nehalem Street (home) in Southeast to Portland’s Rhododendren Garden, also in SE. Generally into the smallish parking lot, but if it was filled, across 28th Ave to one of Reed College’s lots. I almost always went on the day of free admission, Tuesday or Wednesday – I can’t remember everything.

Generally there were lots of tourists (people touring) amidst all the plethora of rhody colors, long winding paths, unique passageways over and through the waters of Crystal Springs Lake. The whole space was a dazzlement, an ongoing wonder just to be in it. And with plentifully people’d, as is my way, I wandered to a far boundary and a bench almost always empty until this guest accepted its invitation. This bench:

I cannot tell you all the moment by moment magesty and solace and the fact of grace I found there, so many, many times. And I won’t try. This is a story falling out from the odometer.

“That’s me in the corner, that’s me in the spot light,” blogging my religion. All this chatter:

On the wings of Ebay appear three new books (like totally, new), just seeing and touching and loving, cherished, prizes, imagining a trip to Paris, or Corvallis, Oregon. Or Trader Joe’s.

Prized things, already encouraging the kid on with sheer beauty, the flowery whispers of a breathtaking witch, cackling on her wind-driven broom: “Follow me home.” Magical thinking.

P.S. — Tomorrow, as promised, the return of stories falling out from the sun-splashed Camry odometer. Fortunately.

It all started on Thanksgiving, five days ago. The winter’s chill of giving thanks, alone. How can you (one) talk cogently about mental illness when you don’t have it? Probably. I cannot speak cogently about my life growing up in Lincoln, Nebraska, cause I didn’t. I did, though, fly on my bike down Lincoln Hill in my hometown close by old Cape Cod.

I’ve always liked this image of men in white suits (it’s always men) coming with their butterfly nets to catch the mentally ill. Think the 1966 song, “They’re coming to take me away, ha-haa.” To the funny farm – something of a warm and fuzzy glow juxtaposed to all the bricked state hospitals throughout the land. Cows and chickens laughing it up.

And what’s all this about? I couldn’t tell you. Perhaps, as John Tarrant Roshi said once – “When you take the position of host you know the guests are arriving, and you get to treat them with courtesy.” Something like that. Butterfly nets, bicycles, laughing chickens.

And last Friday I was scheduled to work and I was paid time and a half and I’m lucky I have a job that’s mostly fun in which I get to say “Welcome” over and over – saving the planet little by slow. And I’d still rather not work, I’d rather lol around and dawdle through the day. Go outside for a while and just smile.

Somehow this life has scraped away much of what has been in my head. The wicked aloneness. All the music. Sleeping in a thin bed which floats on the dreams of compassion.The way bees find themselves walking on the ground – something other than expected.

How many brain cells come and go? Who is hearing the rain? “It is I,” someone in old China said, “alone and destitute.” Thoreau in the woods – “Simplify, simplify.” There’s an osprey on a pole eating a fish. A fish with cousins and sisters, at home in the ocean’s movements. “Obladi, Oblida.” It goes on, it stops going on. Splish splash only 45 seconds ago, freedom not being just another word.

What is better than the stars in the sky? Coffee? Rock and roll? Slow dancing? As Abbie Hoffman once said at the end of a talk at Salem State College – “Answers, anyone? We all know the questions.” Like I read in a new book this morning – “The Landscape beyond landscapes.” Or The Rascals – “I think I’ll go outside for a while, and just smile.” The faintest of grins.

P.S. My scraped head. My swollen heart.

Last week in my ‘Ode to the odometer’ I mentioned both my friend Gavin and the April morning my then-wife Susan asked me for a divorce. At some point when the talking and listening were done I wandered out of the art studio and through the house and out onto the streets of Portland. I could not see through my tears.

Aimless and unable to breathe, after a while I called Gavin. He talked to me for an hour. He held me up, and mostly together, from 600 miles away. In fact he called me every single day for the next month – every single day: “How are you? Are you okay today? You’re gonna be okay.” At some point in the conversation the first morning he asked if I knew the Fleetwood Mac song “Gypsy.” I said I did, but he explained it to me that day in a way I’d never understood. He said there was a lot of me in it. A lot.

Last Sunday driving home from a walk along the railroad tracks a Fleetwood Mac song came on the radio and my mind went back to “Gypsy,” and to that day. And the vast friendship and care I was offered. I went home and looked up and copied the lyrics. These:

So I’m back, to the velvet underground
Back to the floor, that I love
To a room with some lace and paper flowers.
Back to the gypsy that I was
To the gypsy that I was

And it all comes down to you
Well you know that it does
And lightning strikes, maybe once, maybe twice
Oh, and it lights up the night
And you see your gypsy
You see your gypsy

To the gypsy that remains
Faces freedom with a little fear
I have no fear, I have only love
And if I was a child
And the child was enough
Enough for me to love
Enough to love

She is dancing away from me now
She was just a wish
She was just a wish
And a memory is all that is left for you now
You see your gypsy, oh
You see your gypsy

Huh. Yeah. Still dancing away.

“Thanks.”

Flashback — I’m one of a four-member crew for the Wareham (Massachusetts) Park Department a summer after my high school graduation. It’s pouring down rain and we are in the little shack on the other side of town from the main building, a daily respite place.The superintendent (Billy), who walks around like he has a large stick up his butt, comes in through the door and asks Frank, my boss, “What are you doing in here?” Frank says, “It’s pouring down rain.” Billy says, “What about the rain gear?” To which Frank asnwers, to his boss, “Fuck the rain gear.”

This conversation taking place sometime between 1967 and 1973 has always stayed with me, now more than 50 years later. “What’s right?” It’s always felt like that. “What’s right?” In this very situation, at this very time. “What’s right?”

It’s a good question.

The other morning writing my Morning Pages the phrase ‘Kit and Kaboodle’ showed up. Google shared this definition – “All of something, the entire lot of people or things….Origin – ‘Kit and boodle.’ ‘Kit’ – collection. ‘Boodle’ – bundle.”

So cool.

Each post from here, onamountainbench, each day are my whole kit and kaboodle.

Promise.