the arsonist

                                                     

This title refers to my propensity for burning bridges, as I’ve been historically attributed to have done. I realize now, after deciding upon it and typing the words on my iPad ( and that’s final) that I have lived in a neighbourhood that had an arsonist, and as far as I know he was never caught. There was much speculation, and as to the nature of speculation and the conclusions people will come to in a small community is something I intend to write about, all in due time. It’s not a coy reference to any past unsolved stories ( yet ah, therein lies another one, but that would have to be entirely fiction. So many stories, so little time) but how opinions followed by reckoning spreads like fire, an immediate destruction of what was once solid. 

   Beyond this particular entry ( and the arbitrary decision to stick to snappy one word titles) is the eponymous nature of the entire blog ‘ how to move in the world’ . It is a note to self, because I do not. ( Know how to move in the world). 

   I can begin this particular tale with this instance:  there was a path through a tiny patch of scrub woods, ( where once we found a nest of kittens meandering through, I still remember little White Edwina, dumb as she was pretty, goose stepping through the brambles) which attached our studio apartment to the common driveway, and separated us, kept us private. I’ve always liked the way unpaved paths, made by the trampling of feet, left the earth almost hollow sounding, like a drum or a wall. You can thump it and feel hollowness, a mud skin stretched over buried time. There was a mess of roots, and I’ll hav e you know the more South you go, the more the roots can look exactly like those shrieking root babies in Harry Potter. But this, This was a time pre Griffindor. I can recall in my first 100 hundred crossings or so of said path, I would become transfixed to a salient clump of reddish ochre root meat , the vision of which drummed up witchy thoughts, past superstitious beliefs, man’s fear of nature and women and here I am again lost to some story in my head “ get a job!” Brought me out, sharply. The words stung,  I was surprised, and they were meant to. I furrowed my brow at Hector, a long curly haired charismatic ‘good ol boy’, skinny and baritoned. Of course I had a wee crush on him, I had a thing for the first handful of characters I met, imprinted in my mind as representatives of this wild surf life, the same way baby geese imprint a water plane as mother. 

         

   I furrowed my brow at him and hurled back “ why do you care!?” And as the gas line of memory releases it’s vapours it dawns on me that the reason he felt emboldened to be causally disrespectful with his tone and message was that I was not there on the path alone, I was there walking the path to my home with a woman of reputation, a surf traveller and Opportunist. She had no trouble with working, but she also had no trouble with shacking up short term with who ever was nearest  to her first love : waves. ( And also God, she was very fond of him. If a fella didn’t like God, she didn’t stick around). Hector was 28 at the time and in committed possession of a vociferous propensity for under age girls paired with a Clintonesque appetite for numbers. I could sense his disapproval of Del and knew to whom he was directing his derision. 

 But It was that clump of fat roots I wished to talk about, this memory got in the way of chronology, the tunnel spider that occasionally made her home amongst the bramble, how I could find a univlerse inside the tiniest patch of woods. 

   He was referring to the fact that I didn’t work. And my guess is it deeply bothered him, not just on a surface level, but that it disrupted his value system. He was only able to snarkily snap the words out because I was arms length from a slut.  

    Not working is a sin on par with adultery, nay, perhaps, worse.  I recently watched the documentary on James Baldwin “ I Am Not Your Negro” wherein a Southern White woman, in a 1963 interview, catalogued sin according to God Himself. In order:  Murder, Adultery, Racial Mixing . According to her, God forgave the first two, yet not the third. There was something familiar in her delivery, I’ve watched similar pronouncements delivered as though their utterances were law, words embedded like gravestone epitaphs in their psyche. As the world shifts and lurches in another direction, I can feel the old monuments and statues crumbling, and the people I witnessed spewing archaic, even more unpopular dinosaurisms,  either throwing in the towel, or driving it underground, relegating dark sentiments safe  in the basement with all the other dark sentiments; a congregation of bitter roots, buried but not forgotten. 

For the time being I was free from the sort of scrutiny that Del was subject to.I was scrutinized, no doubt, equal fodder for the folk who pouted off their cumulative stress. Endless days of repetition builds a carapace of scar tissue, a grating irritant producing a pearl of resentment, so much hope, so much striving, so many doubtless comparisons to the soft handed customers who didn’t stop to look down on the hands that served them. So many successive days of that shit, and all to live under that impossibly blue sky, to surf that impossibly blue water. And the inhabitants, the workers, their anger escalated on schedule. Perhaps a form of bloodletting, stabbing through slabs of roughened hide to let fresh blood flow. A release. This much I would come to understand, and accept as my due.

    For the time being I was content in my philosophical hubris, a youth bred bubble wherein the universe was run like some giant checkerboard, a system of checks and balances which inevitably worked out as it should, each player fulfilling some sort of role. This auxiliary belief system disintegrated with time and experience, revealing the innate, unstudied reality of human behaviour revealed for what it was: blank, impersonal, wrong. 

   

I was content, too, my body accounted for; properly squared away, owned. I relished the safety of having a role that was understood as fulfilling by the truncated mono syllabic exhale one made on pronouncement; followed by a a slight biting down of the lower lip. Wife. My wife. This was all I had to do; be married. People celebrated that fact, smiled at me, accepting me. I’m married. It sounds like a nice friendly boat that brings you around. People wave at this boat, throw streamers when it arrives to port. The mouth arches into its corners with this word, you cannot say it without smiling. That word was a cushioning, a soft batting covering my peculiarities in a dull white muffle. I could spend my days hiking the wintry empty beach, talking to myself, and sometimes at full volume, aiming at reaching some entity I imagined, nestled behind the sun.