Sincerely Cliff

My heart is tired.

Not from pumping blood but from expelling love, and then watching that love drip into the cracks and dry up on the sidewalk.

There’s the pervasive, every flowing acts of love: caring for kids, near and far, holding that low grade worry that they’ll break their pencil and not have another one, that they’ll be left out of the circle.

And then, the painful acts: caring for my ailing mom, witnessing time take hold of everyone I know, my heroes of childhood, my family, my neighbors’ parents, me.

The unacknowledged acts: throwing a smile at the schizophrenic woman on the street, letting someone merge ahead of me, getting off the couch to make spaghetti.

And so many more: the selfish acts, the heroic acts, the confusing acts, the desperate acts, the unexpected acts, the openly showy, unjustly dismissed acts, the hidden acts, the misunderstood acts…

But then, as if all of these expulsions of love aren’t enough to tire my poor heart, there’s this constant pressure around it — not my doing! — a squeeze that’s grabbing onto all our hearts right now: the people who don’t care, who also happen to be in charge.

They seem to have tireless hearts.

Or no heart at all, which I guess are one and the same, or at least allow for very similar acts.

I wish I could give my heart a rest, not figuratively, I mean literally.

Pull it out and put it on ice, or in a hot bath, I’m not sure what my heart would prefer. Cold gentle hands around it sound nice, a soft stroke with a single fingertip.

I’d love to see my heart up close. I get the sense it would make me cry, seeing that thing that’s behind all of this, a small, modest knot that’s been working so hard for me all this time.

For me.

And this heart, the one that’s in my chest, pumping my blood, and doing whatever it does to make me the way I am; it deserves a rest.

It deserves to know what it’s up against.

Or maybe it’s better that it doesn’t, like a runner who focuses on the next step and not the next mile.

Doing the impossible in tiny increments.

Bump, bump…. bump bump

Maybe that’s its secret.

I think we know too much about each other.

Or rather, I think we know too much about people we don’t really even want to know.

I moved out of my hometown for a reason.

I love some of the folks there, and I appreciate that it shaped me into who I am, but the place itself wasn’t right for me.

So I moved across the country.

But now, thanks to mobile phones, social media, traditional media, which has basically become social media, VR, and AI…

That place that I left is still very much in my life.

I don’t want to be neighbors with the muscle-head who tried to beat me up in high school, but, strangely, with the algorithms the way they are, it’s hard not to be.

Here’s something weird to say out loud as a guy who deeply values connection and community: I think we were better off when we weren’t connected to everyone everwhere all the time.

In reviewing the quasi-arguments that happen online where no one changes their minds and no growth is happening on either side, I gotta say, maybe echo chambers aren’t all that bad.

I can raise my flag in San Francisco and that muscle head back in my hometown can raise his flag in his small corner of the world, and neither us would have to know the other exists. We each get our friends, we each get our views.

But that ship has sailed.

Social media has shrunk the world. The land I put between me and the things (and people) I don’t need to care about has disappeared. Now everything’s in my face.

And yours.

At the risk of sounding like a luddite hermit with tinfoil on the antenna of his TV, I don’t think our species was meant to get information as quickly and as broadly as we do.

We’re a long way from the Pony Express.

Our brains aren’t supposed to process the holiday dinners of 10 different families in 30 seconds. We’re not supposed to know how the tribes in other continents are celebrating their kill. And we certainly don’t need to watch it while it’s happening.

Animal brains with futuristic gadgets.

Not supposed to happen.

But here we are, unable to write something without publishing it, unable to have a moment without recording it, unable to have conviction without public support.

Stepping into heated arguments with people we don’t even know, reviewing photos of people we would never ever move next to, participating in fake discourse, which create emotions that are very very real.

I suppose that’s the part that burns me up.

We get riled up the most by the people we don’t care about: some troll of a troll three thousand miles away.

They hijack our minds for hours, sometimes days. We’ve all been there: screaming in the kitchen at no one, coming up with our best comeback in the shower.

Without that faraway neighbor and his infuriating flag, I’d just be making eggs.

Sounds better to me.

But I’m not sure.

What do you think?

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I was making a right at the 7-Eleven. It was still sunny out, so I had both windows rolled down. I was in a good mood, headed to Trader Joe’s to (finally) pick up some olive oil, eggs, and milk so we could (finally) get back to having a normal breakfast.

There wasn’t a light at the corner, but I was stopped anyway because a teenager with one of those mop-head haircuts was just stepping off the curb, head down, looking at his phone. His pace was extremely slow, like well below the level of sauntering.

I was there long enough to acquire 3 cars behind me, also looking to turn, as well as a third car trying to make a left from the other direction up that same hill, stuck in the purgatory of the intersection.

The boy missed it all. He only looked up when he got to the other side of the road., off to my right. He saw me looking at him.

I wasn’t pissed; just feeling cosmically wronged and in need of a little acknowledgment.

“C’mon, dude,” I said, both palms up, shoulders shrugged.

But I didn’t get what I wanted.

“Hey, fuck you,” he said, with a real hard look. And then went back to his phone.

I was already traveling up the hill so’s not to cosmically wrong the people behind me, but man did I want to beat the shit out of that kid.

I pictured driving my car into him
Knocking him out of his slacker shoes
Cracking him in the nose with my fist, his mop-hair flying up.
No wait, I’d kick him in the balls first, then punch him in the nose.
Okay, maybe I’ll just turn around, track him down, pull up on the curb, and tell him to fuck off.
Would I get out of the car, or do it from inside the car?

It went like this, all the way up the hill.

My body was tense, my mind no longer on eggs and milk, but now on ass-kicking and clever comebacks.

That little fucker, bumming my trip.

It happens a lot, don’t it?

The outside world not lining up with your inside world.

Getting wronged in a way that sticks with you, that stays in you.

Where the fuck is karma? How long does it take to arrive? And who really cares if it arrives if I can’t watch it do its thing all over that kid’s face.

But, then I crested the hill, and was coming back down.

A metaphor?

I made the decision to let it go.

Not easy, seeing as that boy deserved an ass-whipping, I mean, like the whole world deserved to have me kick that kid’s ass.

There I go again. It’s a process. But I found my way out.

You know what I thought of to help me let it go?

Us.

The good people who want things to be good. The adults in the room. The folks who have lived long enough to know that more anger and more hatred don’t do a goddamn thing. For anyone.

Don’t get me wrong.

Getting mad is important, I’d even say essential.

But holding anger is hurtful to the holder, like trapping a wasp in cupped hands.

So, I thought of us, and that helped.

Then I thought of him again, going back to his mop-head friends and doing mop-head things for a few years, going around and fucking up the cosmos, making karma work double shifts, and maybe eventually sorta who-knows hopefully probably coming around someday and stepping out of that small circle into the bigger one….

where we all stand, when we finally come to realize that we need more good things in the world than bad, that the balance of it all is up to us, individually, together making hard decisions to not squash the wasp.

A lot to think about on the way to the grocery store, but I’m glad I did, because when I got there, all those people looking for milk and eggs weren’t in my way. They were there with me, like me, (finally) taking the time to tend to their needs.

I waited patiently for a man to pick out his milk. He grabbed the whole milk, then went for the 2%.

“Sorry,” he said.

“No worries,” I replied, much happier than either of us expected.