City of Legends

Let me see…my Dad’s 88th brthday, my 56th.

Dropping Elric off at University of Hawaii at Hilo.

Dante starting to Old Dominion University (ODU).

Earthquake.  Hurricane.

Yep, that was August.

I miss my boys.

Delivered Elric to his new college at University of Hawaii at Hilo, Dante leaves for Old Dominion University in two days.

Still haven’t finished release of "Selected Poems and Passions"…don’t have the emotional stamina for it, with all else that’s going on.

Survived my birthday on the 16th…hundreds of well wishers, which still was not sufficient to overcome my funk for my Sunday Girl being out of touch.  I admit, wounding…but one embraces what one can and accepts the rest.

I have been writing, sporadically, but some good material.  I need to find a way to decouple my creative/emotional energies from the roller coaster ride of my lovelife…

My front license plate was stolen, right off my car, inconvenient.

Just staying busy, as best I can…feeling in a bit of a holding pattern.  Why is it that whenever I fall into the horse lattitudes that random women come out of the woodwork, seeking a position as new muse? 

Oddly enough, professionally and personally I am doing well…just feeling unmotivated to blog.

Elric and Dante both leave this month for college…I, personally, will be escorting Elric to the University of Hawaii at Hilo for orientation.  Poor kid, trapped for 4 years in paradise.

Dante is gearing up for Old Dominion University, he is majoring in Math with a minor in Physics.  He is giddy over getting into a true academic environment.

My relationship with the Sunday Girl remains strong, if complicated…in time I will tell you the tale and you will go "Huh?"

The delay in final release of the last book ( Selected Poems and Passions: 2004-2011 ) seem to be resolved, and it should ship in the next few weeks…

The other day my son, Elric, expressed grief over a friend he knew, solely from online, whom he had been told was dying from leukemia.  Part of me sought to comfort him, part of me knew he had to cope with his own feelings on his own terms and part of me was, frankly, skeptical.

I think I am a long way from a cynic, but over the years I have encountered more than a few people who, out of malice or insensitivity to the impact they had on other people, made the internet a web of lies.  I recall the young woman everyone knew in the old Writers Club at AOL, full of life and energy and dying of cancer, who so swept everyone up in her story that a major author donated an account to her, several published authors dedicated works to her and for whom one kind soul gathered recipes from fellow writers to put together a cookbook in her honor.

Then, one day, she admitted to me that she was not a 19 year old cancer patient, but a mid-thirties housewife who was working through some childhood issues by taking on the persona and it had "gotten way from her".  I don’t believe she went into the charade maliciously, but perhaps insensitive and ignorant of the impact it would have on others.  I counseled her to come clean.  She did, and the backlash of rage and even hatred against her was monumental.  I do not believe I have encountered her, online or otherwise, since then (but you never know).

I have had real friends, real loved ones, sicken and die, or die suddenly, flowers too soon taken from the garden.  If my childhood friend, Michelle, had not been killed in a tragic car accident in her mid-teens, I almost certainly would not have taken her name for my daughter’s middle name.  And who knows, maybe we would have one day been more than friends.  Maybe, in a lower drama worldview I might have never turned to poetry to express myself.

Flowers too soon taken from the garden.  My older brother’s fiancee, Carole, who died just weeks before she graduated high school, months before their wedding, in a car crash.  My uncle Francis, who died a decade before I was born, on a battlefield in Europe in World War II.  I have been told the telegram telling his family of his death arrived during his son’s 9th birthday party.

And for every life ended too soon, others pass into shadow and become the walking dead, tainted by hatred and pain, by the twisting of our souls and hearts in the hands of fate and others.  There are days I envy those who give up feeling only that which sustains them, the anger that burns like coals of a poisonous tree.

I do not know, and indeed, Elric does not know, if the online friend is dead or dying, if they ever really existed, or if they are either an exercise in self-expression or a malicious attack by a dark heart or even a predator.  He and I may very well never know.  If the story is not true, I have to feel a prick of anger at the person who would feign such drama and bring hurt to my son, but there will always be the potential for veils and falsehoods in any relationship.

Nevertheless I would never counsel him to doubt and would hope that I myself would never fall to such cynicism as to believe automatically that people are anything other than what they express themselves to be, in the real world or virtual spheres.

My son, Elric, the other day dared to ask me if I understand women.  He pointed out I have a great deal more life experience than him, have met and dated many incredible women (by whatever standards one may apply to extraordinary) and have been married, write some pretty decent love poetry and have an above average IQ.

I think I may have confused him with my answer.

First off, I told him that women are neither more nor less complex than men, just different in that both their brain chemistry and the experiences they have in this life can and are often very different.  I have met no men who have had an abortion.  I have met few men who have traded their body for drugs.  I have met no woman stupid enough to get her hand caught in a jar or so cruel as to not give a truly penitent friend a second chance.

Then I created, for him, an allegory.

Let us presume there is a wild animal in the back yard.  Doesn’t matter what sort, but let us say a fox.  I know what a fox is, what it eats, its methods of hunting and the way it socializes with other foxes.  I know female foxes are called "vixens", baby foxes are called "pups" and that fox hunting is sick and disgusting.  I know many folktales and fairy tales that include them, and I know they are often considered a symbol of sly malice.  I know a great deal about foxes, including that they are considered a high risk for carrying rabies.

I know a great deal more about women than I know about foxes, but I also know this:  Generalizations are dangerous.

I do not know if a particular fox is rabid.  I do not know if it is hungry.  I do not know if it has had rocks thrown at it by stupid boys or ever been hit by a car or chased by a dog or accidentally eaten poison.  I do not know if it is currently under duress, deaf, blind, in estrus or high from eating some stoner’s stash in the woods.

To have a one in a million chance of predicting what that fox would do if I walked down into the back yard and offered it my hand to sniff, I would need to know all these things and more.

And women, as a rule, are more complicated.  At least the ones worth getting to know.

Do I understand women?  Enough to respect, love and fear them as a feral race placed upon this earth to challenge my eloquence, my patience, my heart and my IQ.

God love ‘em all.  Of course, now Elric knows the secret, the obvious secret of the complexity of people, regardless of gender, and the folly of ever thinking you’re one step ahead of the curve.

I’d tell Dante (my other son) the same thing, but I don’t think he wants to hear it, yet.  he’s going to need to have his heart broken a few times before there is a need for the secret to understanding women.  Which is to say, we don’t understand them, we love them and find their most arch elements to be charming.

Last night my son, Elric, was brought before me by his mother who pulled back his long, Hugh Grant-ish floppy hair to reveal an odd patch where it looks like someone shaved or cut very short about the front 1/2 to 3/4 inch at the hairline.  The fact his hair flops forward had hidden this slash-and-burn zone, which I estimate to have been so ravaged about a month ago.

"Did you cut your hair," his mother demanded.

"I don’t know," was his response.

Remember the Bill Cosby routine where his son got a reverse Mohawk and plead ignorance about when or how it happened?  Dead-on re-enactment.  I laughed it off.  Whether he had been futzing around with his new electric shaver and the lawnmower man took it over, or space aliens had decided to skip the anal probe owing to his flatulence, or whatever, I figured we’d never get a straight answer.

Reminded me of me when, in high school, I broke up my unibrow with a safety razor.  BIC, as I recall.  And the width of the razor was such that my eyebrows looked like I was prepping for a drag queen makeup contest.  My mom noticed them and asked if I had been shaving my eyebrows.  I mumbled something that passed for a denial and continued on my way.  They grew back, and I believe all pictures of me from that era have met an unpleasant, fiery death.

I have to admit I have more patience with and empathy for my sons than my ex-wife does.  She was never a teen-age boy, didn’t even have any brothers.  My sons, the twins, confound her. Their hormones take them places she never dreamt of in her maddest imagination.

And suddenly I find myself living in a Bill Cosby sketch re-enactment.

My son, Elric, who has taken a deeply philosophical turn of late, dabbling in theology and metaphysics, asked me for my perception as to what the difference is between a prayer and a spell, beyond the purely theological notion that prayers are to God and spells invoke other powers.

I fumbled a bit  for a moment, looking for the right metaphor, but then this one struck me:

It is the difference between asking someone to pass the salt and telling someone that you are entitled to the salt because you followed the niceties of the request form.

I agree with him that a lot of people treat prayer like a spell, that if they ask for something the right way God is obliged to give it to them.  That’s ridiculous, and those who tell or teach or preach a guaranteed intercessory prayer is missing the point and poisoning the spirituality of not only their own soul, but of others touched by it.

I know I have been quiet the last few days.  Much of this has been because I have been out of town and out of touch.

Friday night my nephew, Joshua, was married.  I travelled down to Wytheville, Virginia, to attend the simple but very sweet service.  I like his new bride, she is very pleasant to talk with and I think it will do him some good.

Saturday was my father’s 86th birthday.  He and my mother were down at my sister’s for Josh’s wedding, so I and the boys (Elric and Dante) had come down not just for the wedding, but to see my Dad and spend some time with him.

Saturday morning we went with him and my mother to a friend’s house who restores antique cars and they posed for photos with a 1933 (the year my mother was born) Buick and a 1923 (the year my father was born) Chevrolet Superior.  Then we took a ride in the Chevy.  Nice car and well restored.

On the way back I and the boys bonded by listening to a recording of Denis Leary’s classic "I’m an Asshole" song, which they joined in with me in singing along with.  It’s a guy thing.

I was getting ready to post a heady essay I had just written on the nature of Christianity divorced from mythology.  It’s not bad, and it makes some valid points and I will eventually post it.

But…

It occurs to me my world is all but abstract to most of my readers.  They don’t know or see what is and isn’t happening in my sphere, so I am going to try harder to be more earnest and forthright on a personal level.  Nothing, God help us, against the poetry and the thought.  I just felt the need to connect as a human being.

A long time back I wrote a poem about such things, during the darkest days in Venice, where I despaired that so many women saw me as an abstraction that I was never going to find anyone to settle down with.  Half true to history, but the mystery of my second marriage and its eventual demise (that’s for another day) only tells a part of the tale.

Hi.  I’m William Francis DeVault.  I am 53 years old.  I was born August 16th, 1955, in Greenville, South Carolina, in the United States of America.  I have three children, two ex-wives, my parents are still alive, as are my four siblings. 

I am most often associated with Morgantown, West Virginia, where I came of age as a poet, and Venice Beach, California, where I feel the most at home and have written some of my best work.

My life, which seems exotic to many, seems rather average to me.  I have been places and done things that many have not, but not so much as some.  I have never jumped out of an airplane, fired a handgun, or been elected to public office.  I am above average in IQ and if my ethics and morals seem a bit hard to explain or understand, the key is simple:  I don’t always blame others or even try to justify my mistakes.  I have had several times in my life where I told a friend or lover that, should things go badly, they are to tell whatever tale gets them out as injury-free as possible, they can count on my silence.  Although I have been driven to near madness more than once when an unprincipled person takes that too well to heart, I have held up fairly well.

Despite my years, I still feel quite young.  I sometimes have to fight for that…but that’s okay.  I like feeling 17, especially with the experiences of this life to call upon (the old "If I knew then what I know now").  And before you begin to snicker know this:  The last woman I was with was my second wife, on February 12, 2004.  Prior to that I had not been with another woman since the summer of 1997.  So let’s lay aside the "can’t keep his pants zipped" assumptions.  They are ignorances and prejudices, two things that are not tools for the evolved mind or heart

I am passionate and sexual, but I have chosen to guard well my heart and soul this time, as I know I am passionate and sexual, and I am just gullible enough to allow myself to walk into disastrous situations with blinders on when lead by my hormones.  I still write about the joy of a woman’s body and presence, but until I find one trustworthy and just plain worthy, I think I will stay the dichotomous monk I have evolved into.

Yes, I have been connected with one or two women who were married in the past, but with one minor and notable exception (a long time ago), in every case I was lead to believe the situation was far more dissolved than it was.  Nothing quite like getting an angry call from an ex-husband who isn’t an ex-husband.  Have I allowed myself to be gullible because that was the most convenient thing for me to believe.  Yes.  Without a doubt.

My father, who is going to be 86 next month, was the best man at my first wedding.  He is still someone I love and admire.  At the time I did not have a male "best friend", so I gave him the job.  I hope he was touched.

Of late, I have four good male friends.  Friend is a hard word for me, as I have a brutal definition of friendship, having been quoted as saying "A friend is someone you can trust behind you with a sharp knife and a good reason".  I hope I will pass that test of character even with a stranger.  Of these four friends, two are fellow poets, one is a musician and one is my older brother, Robert.  We spent most of our lives at loggerheads, being the alpha pack dogs we were…it is nice we have learned to cooperate.

When I fall, I fall hard and completely.  Aubergine, the last woman I said "I love you" to, warned me that she wasn’t very good at relationships and I would fall from a great height.  I accepted the challenge and the fall was great and terrifying. I have empathy and sympathy for those who continue to dare to love and accept their fall.  I will see you on my next trip up the pillar and off the cliff.

My mother just turned 76.  She’s a firecracker.  We have lively political and religious debates, as I have drifted to the left of Al Franken over the years, she to the right of Dick Cheney.  I love her greatly.  I would not vote for her for President.

My children are joys to me.  My daughter, Peri, lives in Los Angeles with her husband, Brian.  He’s a good guy and they are good for each other.  She’s half me and half her mother, not always having gotten the best of us.  But I adore her like no one else in this life, even when she treats me like tick crap.

My sons, the sons of thunder, turn 16 in about a week.  Elric is so much like me as a teenager it is frightening, although Dante has some of my traits as well.  Between the two of them there’s enough energy, intellect and appetite for life to start a new civilization on a distant planet.  Of course, they’d need to find the right women, first.  Good luck.

Today is an ordinary day.  I am in the office, doing some work for a defense contractor, helping with some proposals and quality programs.  Not poetic, but it pays okay.  I’m worth a lot more than I am getting, but in this economy its good to hold onto a job.  The building we are in shuts down air conditioning on weekends.  It is about 2:20 in the afternoon, the sun is shining and you could wring my sweat out of my shirt.  Not ideal writing conditions.

Contrary to what I have heard, last summer’s illness was not self-inflicted.  I am violently opposed to that avenue.  But it did screw up my tour, my digestive system, my schedule, my overall health and physical conditioning.  Remind me to only eat at Taco Bells in my own neighborhood.

Well, I have meandered enough.  Thanks for taking the time to read.  Yes, I know there are a thousand unanswered questions.  Be patient.  We have time.

And if you know a nice woman who wants to be worshipped five hundred years from now as an icon of romance and passion, send her my way.

I am spending way too much time inside my own head, but that’s one of the joys (?) of having a son who is in that philosophical-existential-angst phase where he doesn’t want to know if a hammer falls, but why it falls and what purpose does it serve in an entropy-laden universe on a planet that won’t even still be around in a few billion years and where there is strife, war, disease, famine, genocide and Spencer Pratt.

But it helps to reflect on my own path, sometimes seeing in his thoughts and words moments that I myself endured, sometimes seeing new things that cast new illumination on old experiences and allows me to think again about things that may not have gotten fair shake.

Everything from the nature of God to the nature of truth to why people believe what is in their best interest over what is apparent, all is in for a go.  He (Elric) is planning to take Philosophy next semester in high school (along with Gourmet Cooking, which I tell him he is only taking to meet girls).  I sometimes marvel at his insights and wonder if I was that evolved at his age (I was considered pretty mature as a teenager, even if I was prone to the occasional lapse of reason (usually because of a pretty girl)…come to think of it, I haven’t changed that much, at least not to my own perceptions.  Greyer, thicker and with a few well-earned lines, but there are times when I can feel myself as a 17 year old boy.  I actually find that troubling as I was always lead to believe that there were levels of maturity beyond that, or is it all facade for everyone?)

I don’t know.  I want to know.  I need to know (for the next time that topic comes around and Elric looks to me for wisdom, or at least a good joke).

I’ve already explained to him my views on life, death, God, love, war, religion (not the same thing as God), politics and proper dating ettiquette.  I hope I have instilled in him the knowledge that people who treat you badly are generally those who have a mistaken impression, and that he should be careful to avoid blaming people for their own ignorance in matters concerning him, or anything else for that matter. 

It’s tough, as my value system and his mother’s are different, coming from different backgrounds and religious views, and I have no desire to create a false conflict just to "win".  Her beliefs are fine, just different, in as my favourite food is chicken livers, and her’s is chocolate.  It is good that we are different, all of us, otherwise it would be a world we would swiftly define as grey, drab, same, boring, redundant.

I’m trying to teach him how to stay calm in the face of adversity, to think strategically when possible, but tactically when required.  I want him to understand that no matter what you do, there is someone out there who will think you are an idiot for doing it.  That they take the time to criticize you just means they think you are an important enough person to criticize.  There are others who will think you a hero.  those are the people who don’t know you very well.  There are few real heroes left.

I tell him it is impossible to lose my love.  I may not agree with him or even like him in a given moment, owing to something he thinks, says or does, but the love is unconditional.  If it isn’t, it isn’t love.  And also, that I am not the final arbiter of what is good and bad, right and wrong.  He has to kinda feel that one out for himself.  I can tell him what my experiences have been, and I don’t hold back on that.  And maybe, maybe a bit of what I am not necessarily am but of what I would like to be, maybe that will find its way into his tapestry.

I’d like to think so.

If you’ve ever watched the film "Wanted" with James McAvoy, Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman?  McAvoy’s character achieves a sort of an epiphany in the course of the story, and the film ends with him addressing the change in his life.

I understand and relate to his words, even though I am not a man of violence, as his character becomes.  I’m not so much into the final line, but in the entire soliloquy, especially when he addresses taking back control of his life from all the corrupting and distracting elements that had always sought to manipulate, use and abuse him.

I always believed enough in myself, my intellect and abilities, to believe that I could walk into a random event and still come out the other side in a good position.  One of the best friends I ever had used to marvel at the fact that I had never stepped outside of society to live by my wits alone.  I didn’t have a good answer for him, aside from the fact that I had just always played within the confines of the game.

Some would call that cowardice, or a constellation of cowardices and fears.  Some would call it arrogance (believing that I could step into an existing framework and still win).  I don’t have a good answer to that.  Some have called me too passive, others too cruel.  Some think I am a bully, a victim, a hedonist or a saint.  Again, I can’t answer that question to the satisfaction of anyone, including myself.  Certainly the partial ignorances and arrogances of others drive their perception.  Knowing only what they themselves have seen or said or heard in rumour.  It is a source of occasional bemusement and constant annoyance to me.  The fact that I am, in some cases, proscribed from correcting false impressions due to a rather Gordian code of honor only makes the conflicts more vivid.  I know people in this world who despise me out of ignorance, but to correct those misconceptions would bring harm to others. 

My son, Elric, has recently taken to posing the question of who he is, of how he would be defined and perceived.  Not unusual when you are 15.  Not unusual when you lack the focus of the truly driven.  His twin brother, Dante, is more like a laser-beam in his drive to excel, academically, and thus has less time for self-contemplation.  There are times I think I, and certainly Elric, should envy him. 

I do think I have gotten a bit lazy, allowing forces and people around me to dictate my agenda.  While this seems just good manners to some, not wanting to create conflict, it also means I am operating well below the red line.  No one benefits in the long run when I sit in the back row.

So, I need to reach deep, tap in to those last few thermonuclear reactions at my core, and take control of my life and environment.  I need to take back control.  It won’t be easy.  It won’t necessarily be very popular with some.  But it is the thing that is necessary, for me not live as a hypocrite.