On Remaining Misunderstood: Moxie

"On Remaining Misunderstood: Moxie", or, "Musings on the Psychotropic Nature of Obscure Summer Drinks"

Moxie

I did a shopping run this afternoon, and soda was on the list.  My daughters had a middle school dance to go to and needed to bring soda and chips.  In the soda and chips aisle of our local Stop & Shop I ran across a plastic bottle of "Moxie",  something I hadn't had in, gawd... years... and so I stuck one in the cart.  Not since I was a young kid living at my grandparents' house in Westerly, RI, had I tipped that venerable unlikely-tasting brew over my hapless, resigned taste buds (with all the grim relish of a pre-pubescent would-be Dr. Jekyll).  All these years have gone by since those hazy memories settled into their place in my psyche; how have I just walked by it so many times all these years? 

I got home from the supermarket, my eldest helped me get the loot out of the trunk and we got it all put away.  About an hour or so later the girls and their mother went off to choir rehearsal, and I found I had a quiet moment on my hands for a little Moxie-induced reverie.  I pulled my favorite glass out of the cupboard and poured a sample of the ancient elixir... there was the familiar smell, that fizzy, funky taste ... and in an instant I was transported back to my grandmother's kitchen.  There I was, 6 years old sitting on the red Cosco (tm) step-stool in the corner of the over-sized kitchen under the big wall-cabinet, my glass of Moxie sitting there next to me on the old granite counter-top.  The fulness of my youth-through-early-teens period came flooding back into my awareness.  It was a pretty interesting moment, like seeing your past in a movie that you could stand in the midst of.  I was re-living my childhood.

I was suspended in that bridge of atmospheres between the "then" and the "now", and my attention was quite fully arrested by what I was experiencing.  "This is how it was when you were 6"... if a voice-over could have been present, that's what it would have said.  It was a sudden, but not unpleasant change of awareness.  I was being transported to the life of what seemed a whole other person, but was not disoriented.  It was me, you see, and it's really something to be able to truly know a moment in time, 40+ years back in the recesses of the long, twisted path that was your life, as if it were happening right now.  But it is, after all, where you come from, what was formative to who you are now.  You have to reckon it, to recognize yourself, and take account for it. 

It was really, really cool.

My cousin once said that Moxie tastes like "carbonated asphalt".  It still tastes the same. 

Ride

It just happened.  I've been waiting for months for this day, and it's come with its typical stealth, like a cherry bomb in a mailbox.  I'm sitting in the Smithfield Home Depot parking lot, having just got a ‘jump’ for my suddenly disabled Mercury Villager from a pair of friendly older cats in a white work van.  We got my heap started up, they drove off satisfied with a good deed done, and I limped 200 yards further down the 2-acre parking lot to where my much-abused mini-van settled to rest with a quiet, sputtering cough.  Silent, we sat, as I considered my predicament concerning the days' work.  Work is everything right now, naturally, and the fact that I have some work is why this sucks... so, finally resigned to the efficiency of my cellular network, I made the call to Chuck and Sons' towing, presumably to escort my Old Faithful to her Final Destination... such is the state of mind I had incurred by this time.

I'm not prepared, particularly, for this, even though I am well aware that the poor crumpled thing has over 307,000 miles on her.  Pretty good for a ’92 “used-to-be-a-soccer-taxi” Mercury Villager- but I must focus some credit on where it’s due:  It's the Nissan Engine, still running like a top, which has outlived her poor old adopted chassis and 'peripheral' systems, which gets the color-guard and 21-gun salute.  Here's to you, old friend, thanks for the ride!

I have been living this way since I can remember, driving ‘whatever’ to its bitter end, and ‘getting out and walking’, as it were, until I find a new, old piece of technological discard to climb into for another 100,000 miles or so.  I just have never really cared that much about what I drive, as long as it gets me there, unharmed, with my stuff.  That whole “American Love Affair with the Automobile” is just a largely alien paradigm to me- I’ve never been able to get my proverbial Velcro Hooks into it and raise my glass.  It's an essential ethic to me, really, to simply drive a ‘necessary vehicle’ and stay out of at least some debt because of it.  It may be unglamorous, but it's paid for, you see.  This brand of thinking is also the result of doing the kind of work for my livelihood that dictates having a vehicle that doesn't need to be washed and waxed, can carry ungainly objects and large power tools, and will still look "like it's supposed to" after a few scratches and dings have become part of the presentation.  

 Okay, so it’s also a money issue- I spend way too much time being broke!  Ah, and speaking of “broke”, here comes the tow truck now...

Later that morning...

I got the tow and left the van at the garage.  It appears to be an ‘alternator issue’ which is easy and cheap enough to fix.  That's assuming the van isn't going to take the pipe the day after I pay for the repair- but I’ll have to take my chances at this point.  Most wise of options would be to have a new (old…) vehicle on-deck, since the advent of such a development is pending anyway. 

The next day...

I'm still here.   I hope it gets repaired today- that it even CAN be repaired- or I'll be shopping the used car lots, getting my ears bent sorely out of shape by badly angling salesmen, and reciting bad jokes.  Or writing my blog from the Pine Street Inn... Either way it's going to be a long day.

Growing Up

Let's see... since I last participated in my own blog here we've put railings on the two staircases up to the front and back doors of the house, gone through a flea infestation, the wife has left a nice little post as organist/accompanist at a local church (there's a story, but no matter- she liked her post there...), and my eldest has become tank-mother to a fine, small community of Madagascar Hissing Cockroaches.  Nice.  Life is pretty good, even if I am still crawling around through dirty old houses for a living.

My kids are older, and it's a bit like being put 'on notice' that they are suddenly able to take charge of those little parts of their lives that you used to be needed to help with.  They're taller, more person-looking.  They say things that you don't have to lean over, metaphorically-speaking, to process.  You still have to pay for everything though, and there's a major crossroads that delineates between childhood and adult-hood, in a very material way.  Whatever their relationship to you, whatever the content of the intellectual, emotional or spiritual relationships that you experience with them, that right there is the 'line in the street' that makes some real decisions for you.  I'm not there yet, but I can see it like an intersection in the road 300 yards ahead... it's an interesting time.

Sometimes I wonder what they'll say about me when they're living their own lives, and I'm gone...

Aarduous Täsk

My friend Manny made up the name Aarduous Täsk when we worked at Paddy's Restaurant in Misquamicut one summer.  The restaurant business brought out the need for a well-conceived and smartly-expressed sense of humor to offset the regular battery of in-your-face confrontations that would occur at any point in the day, busy and hectic or slow and labored.  The ability to laugh in the face of offense became as important a skill as knowing where the lemon-wedges were in the walk-in cooler during lunch-time.  Your ability to pay the rent was in direct relationship with your ability to maintain a aggressively healthy attitude.

Attitude is important.  Other names for it are "heart", "backbone", "spirit", "gumption".  It's not muscle or speed that wins at the Olympics, though without those you'll never even get there- at the end of the trial it's attitude that brings you to the Gold Medal.  What a waste to get there and lose, because you had no attitude in place.

The deal with attitude is that you don't get any, unless you get yourself into that special position of being sold-out to what you're doing.  It's another example of "taking the plunge", as it were:  You have to walk into it and get up to your chest- you have to be where you can't get out any more without going all the way through.  This kind of decision-making immediately changes things in your life and perspective, and now the only thing that's very sharply focused in your field of vision is THE GOAL... it's such that a kind of desperation sets in, the kind of desperation that creates that sharp focus.  A low level of adrenalin becomes present in your system, and the prospect of trying to escape the present situation threatens to invite panic, and then loss... but the prospect of completion, of attainment- that becomes a shining beacon before you.  Properly reconciled, all that is good, bright and hopeful awaits at the end of your now full-on, all-consuming commitment.  You don't get attitude without getting some dirt on your face, a little (or a lot of) grime under your fingernails.  You're going to have to clean up when you're all done- but it's a mark of successful rite-of-passage to where you need to be in your life.

Get some attitude.  It doesn't mean you have to become unfriendly, or unkind, or boorish to your friends, it just means learning that the real muscle comes from within. 

"Faith"...

People believe what they feel makes them belong in their skin.  Belief is personal.

Religion is the practice of applying/imposing one's own belief to/upon the lives of others.  Religion is social.

Belief is non-threatening, non-engaging socially.  It's one's own coping mechanism, and operates quietly within the most intimate confines of one's inner life.

Religion is culture, and is woven into and through a society.  Religion brings tension close behind, like a dutiful sister-in-tow:  It seeks conflict by its very nature, and speaks of its own interest.  And conflict always comes.  Sides are formed over lines in the proverbial sand...

Ozzy Osbourne, in his song "Rock N' Roll", sings, "Rock n' Roll is my religion and my law".  This bold, jagged line flies in the face of our organized, denominational, sectarian monotheistic society with its forward sentiment and matter-of-fact, challenging delivery.  Rock n' roll is and always has been about rebellion, and the throwing off of artificial mores and behaviors of the prevailing popular culture.  This is especially true as relates to the ordering of such social straitening established by the religious authorities-at-large with threats of eternal separation from God, in their constant and vigorous attempts to homogenize society and discourage the cultivation of personal identity, free thought, social interaction and innovation.  People are easier to herd about, after all, when they are made to behave like a "flock" of simple creatures with a common idea.  In "Rock N' Roll" Mr. Osbourne declares his conflict with, and throws a stone in the path of what he sees as an oppressive prevailing popular culture, by means of his own diametrically-opposed, perhaps desperation-driven counter-culture.  Leave it to the Brits to put a humorous spin on the bitter pill of torment-borne cynicism.

Religion is social...

Springtime

I always refer to the coming of springtime as the "onset" of spring, as opposed to the "advent".  This is because it tends to be a long, slow, anti-climactic curve into warm weather, replete with all the environmental disruptions that naturally accompany such long, slow changes in the natural world.

The prevailing temperature segues from really really freezing to "temperate"- 50s or so into April, bringing warmer air temperatures, rain, and bouts of gray, lowering, cool dampness... the kind of air-borne "wet"  that cuts through your clothing and sucks away your naturally generated body heat, making the +/- 50-degree air temperature feel more like high 30s, unless the sun happens to be out that day.  In the early morning the prevailing temperature may be as low as high 20s or low-30s.  All-in-all, springtime brings with it not only the promise of sunny, warm days to come, but also the kind of weather we New Englanders call Raw.  One endures the onset of spring.

The piles of "snirt" (snow/dirt) that lie along your habitrails and tower over Target and Home Depot parking lots remain for weeks, piled up by the town or city snow-plows in front of your house and down the road, lining and straitening the way to school and work.  If, like us, you only have street parking, then over the tormentive weeks of spring-time change from winter to warmth you get to experience the slow-but-pretty-sure "joy" of inching closer to where the sidewalk actually exists in front of your abode, allowing you to periodically nudge your vehicle a little further off the middle of the street and toward the sidewalk.  You eventually find yourself experiencing the particular,  pleasurable relief that can only come from the soles of your shoes actually making contact with the surface of the steps that lead to your front door, newly (perhaps only mostly) unencumbered from the cold months of built-up frozen slush... now as likely to be un-frozen, puddly, grimy slush you take new pains to not track into your living room.  Still, it's nice to be able to see the ground.

So, yes.  Spring.  Ah, the pleasure, the new lightness of being, the awakening to new life and a brand-new start for all...  Meanwhile I'm still wearing my long underwear and not leaving the house without a hat.  We'll talk to you in another four weeks.