Dated Friday November 2, 2007 3:45pm
Hung in the sky between here and there

It is the summer of 1980 and we are walking into Jerusalem looking for God. There is something I am hoping to find. There is always something I'm hoping to find. I am always looking.

The generation before me, my father's generation, went off in search of America but that journey is long since over and done. They did not find it or found it and lost it before I was even old enough to know something was missing from our lives. This was in the days after our souls had gone missing, before we realized anything was gone. This was before I went looking for something that wasn't there and found a hole where I was supposed to be. They searched and returned home and then I was born into a generation of emptiness, of boys and girls with minds as sharp as clear winter skies and hearts like any other generation of boys and girls…and holes in the places where WE ourselves were supposed to be.

Just blank space. And silence.

Or maybe it was just me. Even with a clear mind, the world is an unclear place and sometimes it's hard to tell where you end and everyone else begins. All I know for sure is that you do end somewhere and somewhere they begin, and in between is a bridge you are supposed to cross to find a place for yourself in someone else. But the part of you that knows the way across, or even how to see the bridge at all, is just a hole. So you stay at home and look for something inside. But before too long, you fill the gap, and the daylight, with cartoons on Saturday and comic books, and later with longer shows from the nice people at the alphabet factories where they make the pictures of the world we live in, and you take those pictures with you to school and try to use them to find and cross the bridge because eventually…eventually and inevitably…you look up one day and find that your eyes are filled with the eyes of a girl who sees you.

And you wanted someone to see you.

But it's just holes staring into holes and so…and so you are blind and the bridge is nowhere to be found. Or maybe it is just that I am blind, because maybe it's just me. And even though I FEEL filled to bursting with everything, I AM empty of anything, or at least anything I can see.
Just more blank space. And silence.

Or maybe it is, as Carolyn Forche once wrote, that "the silence of God is God."

So, in any case, it is July of 1980, it is 102 degrees outside in the sun, and I am walking into Jerusalem looking for God.

I am, in truth, already in Jerusalem but there is a city within the city and I am walking through its gates into the House of David and the flight of Mohamed and the death of Jesus and the Temple of Solomon. I am walking through millennia into a 3000 year old marketplace, a cooler covered dark endless maze filled with a cacophony of color and language and silks and spices, and I imagine everything is very much how it has been since there were Romans.

It is a relief from the hammer of sunlight outside the gates and I am walking towards the places where millions of people have asked the same questions I will ask. I am walking towards the places some of them have found answers. I am going to look for something specific in a place where someone like me could really only find something vague. But I don't know that yet. Right now I am really just looking for a bong.

Well, not really a bong. It's actually called a hookah and I have the picture of it engraved in my imagination. It will be tall and carved out of wood. I will have a shiny brass metal base and a huge brass bowl blooming like a flower at the top. It will have four hoses coming out of its sides, four tightly woven cloth hoses, with four wooden mouthpieces at their ends. It will carry a sense of community with it. It will, in other words, get my friends and I so high when I get home that our brains will hopefully explode out of the tops of our heads and send us somewhere different from where we are, maybe even across a bridge I have given up on, a bridge I have forgotten I was ever looking for in the first place.

It is the summer of 1980, I am walking into Jerusalem, it is hot as fuck, and, these days, this is what passes as looking for God.

Days pass wandering through the marketplace and I don't find the hookah of my imagination. I do find that, in Jerusalem, no one cares how old I am and there is pretty much as much beer and hashish available as any one of us can consume. All we have to do is climb out the hotel window, tightrope the 10 feet across the wall to the tree and then down two stories through the branches to the ground without getting caught. After that, the city, and the night, are ours. We put them to good use.

Weeks pass and we leave Jerusalem behind to wander through Tel Aviv and Haifa and, because it is 1980 and the Sinai has not yet been returned to Egypt, we wander south past Eilat and down through the desert until it ends at Sharm el Sheikh where we go snorkeling among the sharks, even after we have been warned not to, because we are boys and we are stupid and we want to seem like men.

Two years later, as bombs are being lobbed from the hills of southern Lebanon into northern Israel, I will return to Israel and get drunk in Eilat and go joyriding offroads south towards the desert forgetting that it is now a separate country. I will meet some friendly, if extremely well armed, border guards who are nice enough not to throw me in jail for being a drunken 17 year old idiot trying to illegally cross a border in a borrowed jeep.

But back in 1980, I get sunstroke on the beach in Haifa and start hallucinating that evening during a bizarre showing of "The Rocky Horror Picture Show" subtitled in Hebrew, Arabic, and French as people act out the movie onstage in three different languages while the sunstroke boils my mind.

I find myself later outside of Beersheba near the Gaza Strip working on a Kibbutz for a little while. I do well in the apple orchards so eventually I get to operate the cherry picker, driving the motorized ladder around and elevating myself to the tops of the trees to get the apples no one else can reach. This lasts until I get caught pelting my friends with rotten apples. That lands me in a grain silo alternating between filling a bucket 20 feet below ground in the choking dust and hauling said bucket up in the sun on a pulley with a rope and a hook. Neither the silo or the chicken farm or the peanut fields I eventually ended up in are exactly heaven so I get no closer to God but there is still a lot of beer and hash so my journey retains some continuity.

Eventually we return to Jerusalem and I return to the Old City and the marketplace. But things are different now. I've been trashed pretty much every day since I arrived in Israel and the idea of the hookah doesn't hold the same excitement it once did. Nevertheless, I return to the Old City every day anyway but now I wander further and deeper past the marketplace and down to the Western Wall.

I visited the Wall before but now I go there every day, spending more and more time there and less and less time in the market. There are always chairs by the wall and I always find one. I pull it close to the wall and I sit there, sometimes touching it, sometimes resting my head against it, and sometimes just sitting there staring at the bare and ancient stone.

I have no idea why.

I don't know what I am doing there, only that I am there. But there is something. There is the faint brush of something hanging somewhere in the distance just out of sight, something I keep thinking I can find, as if a person could look at a wall and squint their eyes and see a bridge. So I stare at the wall.

And then one day something is missing. Well, maybe not exactly missing but it just feels like I misplaced something. I don't remember what it is, only that I have lost it. And just like that, I am lost again as well and the wall, which, just for a moment, seemed like a bridge, is not. And it is now late summer in Jerusalem and there are no clear winter skies. There is only the haze of heat rising off the open streets or the muddy borders of the shadows that cover the corners of the marketplace through which I walk every day.

I am walking in Jerusalem. But I am not finding anything except the ugly daily awareness that I am an empty thing.

And now I wish there was a sense of God or something waiting for me as I rest my head each day against the wall, but the once present faint brush of promise and expectation is gone now. The air is hot and still and my legs sweat against the plastic chair. There is just me and a wall and a chair of metal and prefabricated molded plastic.

Metal and prefabricated plastic…surely a sign of God if ever there was one.

And then one day a man comes and pulls up a chair and sits down next to me. He's about 30 years old, from Chicago he says, and he teaches at one of the Yeshivas in the old city He's been watching me there every day and wondering why I come back over and over again. He asks me if I am a Jew and I tell him that I am. He asks me if I have come to Jerusalem to study the Torah. He asks me if I am a Yeshiva student. I tell him I have not and I am not. I tell him I am just a kid with a tourist group traveling around Israel on my summer vacation. He asks me if I have enjoyed it and I tell him I have. He asks me if it has been an enlightening enjoyable experience and I tell him I've had a lot of fun. He asks me what I've found to be the best part about being a young Jew in Israel.

I know he wants to hear all about what I've learned about my heritage and the history of my people and how being there has changed my relationship with God and all that crap, but the question just pisses me off for some reason and he suddenly seems so uncool, especially because he's such a young guy to be a rabbi. And anyway, I'm 15 years old and an arrogant little asshole so I tell him that what I've really discovered is that I like being in a country where the bartenders don't give a shit that I'm only 15 and where hash is really easy to find and, even though I haven't found it yet, where I know a giant ornate bong sits hidden in some obscure corner of the ancient marketplace waiting only for me to stumble upon it.

And that's it, he says? Pretty much, I tell him.

So then, he asks me, why do you come every day, day after day, to this holy place and sit on a plastic chair in 100-degree heat staring at a wall?

And, I must admit, I don't have much of an answer for that.

Silence.

So he gets up and says, are you here for much longer? No, I say, we're leaving Tuesday. Well, he says, someday you must come back and tell me the answer to that question. I'm going back to America, I say, it's kind of a long way to go to talk philosophy. That's ok, he says, I'm here almost every day.

And then he walks away,

Silence.

"The silence of God is God."

Two years later I will go to college. During the Fall term of my freshman year, I will hear the 1st REM ep Chronic Town, I will read Carolyn Forche's 2nd book of poetry, The Country Between Us, and I will lock myself in the lounge across from my dorm room, sit down at the piano, and write my 1st song. The very existence of a band like REM, and all the other bands from a tiny college town in Georgia, and what that meant, the rise of college radio, and the feeling of endless chaotic possibility inherent in indie rock will make me wanna play rock and roll. Ms. Forche will be the mother of my writing, by far the biggest influence on the words that will form my future and make my life. Several years later she will publish again, this time an epic book-length poem called The Angel of History. I will turn a page in it and read the words "The silence of God is God."

I will have no more idea then than I do now if there is any truth to it or even what it means. Unless it is simply that God is the thing we lack. And that his unending millennial silence is either the proof of that or simply its definition.

But back in the summer of 1980, I just get up and walk off across the plaza and up the slope towards the market. I will walk out of Jerusalem without a sense of god or anything else. I will walk out of Jerusalem without any sense at all. My mother will leave home to begin Medical School that Fall. My sister will go with her and I will head east to boarding school. Sometime that year I will wander into a bathroom in the middle of the night, look in the mirror and realize with horror that I don't recognize the person I see. I don't mean that in any metaphorical sense, by the way, I really just don't know who the guy is. It will be 4am and I will stand in a bathroom hallucinating. It will go away but it will be the beginning of deterioration in my mind. Five years later it will happen again and last a full year. A decade after that, I will find myself hospitalized "for my own good". It will go on and on throughout my life, this slipping further and further into silence. I will eventually write songs and sing them and leave them, like fossils, as proof that I was here and, even in the midst of the inescapable quiet, I was not myself silent.

In the summer of 1980, we were walking into Jerusalem looking for God. I left without finding him and, worse still, I unknowingly set myself up for a moment, two years later when I returned to Jerusalem, when I would find the answer to the rabbi's question and, in doing so, hold, for three days, the answer to every question. For three wonderful terrible days, I would believe in something. Then, overwhelmed by fear and guilt, I would lose it all, flee the country and never go back there for the rest of my life.

The silence of God is God? Well, what does it mean when no one else says anything either? I walk up the slope in the summer of 1980 without the answer to anything.

On the way up the hill, I run into my friend Helene and some of the other girls on our trip walking down out of the market. They've been lugging their cameras around all day and they want to ditch them before going hiking so they ask me if I'll take them back to the hotel with me. Being a gentleman, I, of course, agree.

A few minutes later, almost immediately after entering the shadows of the marketplace, I take a wrong turn into an unfamiliar alley with a small shop at the end. I walk through some tapestries to the back and there against the rear wall is the hookah I've been looking for all along. It's perfect in every way.

The shopkeeper and I haggle for awhile until we settle on a price where I can feel I got the deal of a lifetime and he, being far better at it than me, can comfortably bask in the knowledge that he has robbed me blind. The sale, like the hookah, is perfect in every way.

Wanting to show off my prize, I run back to try and catch the girls. Hopefully they're still hanging out on the plaza. I know I'm probably too late but I'm excited so I run through the alleys of the market and out into the sun, down the stone streets, and back and forth along the small walled cutback alleyways until I turn a corner and the path is blocked.

There, in the middle of the path is an old man and his donkey. They're just standing there and there's no way around them. I guess the donkey was considering whether or not to take a crap or something and the man, not having himself just purchased an exciting new hookah, was perfectly content to stand there and contemplate whatever he was contemplating while the donkey made up HIS mind.

I say "HIS" mind, by the way, because at that moment I noticed that the donkey had the biggest hard-on I have ever seen in my life. It looked like a leg. And all of the sudden I knew how to perfectly cap off this imperfect day. So I got out all the girls' cameras and took a few really good pictures.

This will seem silly to you but you have to remember that this was 1980, they were girls, and we were all on our first trip out if the country. They were almost all assuredly taking nothing but slides because the first thing their parents were all almost assuredly going to do when they got back to California was set up the slide projector, invite all the neighbors over, and spend an evening with family and friends re-living their daughter's summer in the promised land. Sure, most of them were probably going to look at the slides before the show so they could arrange them into some sort of presentation, but there was absolutely no way that at least one of them wasn't going to be lazy enough or bored enough or even simply tired enough from the jet-lag to just toss all the slides in the projector, dim the lights, and start the show. And the thought of that perfect moment when everyone was gathered together in the pristine living room of their beautiful home with their lovely daughter, newly returned to the bosom of her loving family, watching in the dark as her summer memories flashed by one by one on the small white retractable screen…Jericho, Tel Aviv, Masada, The Sinai, Jerusalem, Kibbutz Nir-Oz, The Western Wall, an enormous donkey penis…

…well, I mean, what more is there to life than that?

Don't bother answering that question. It's rhetorical. Of course there's more to life. But still, anytime you can trick a girl into accidentally showing her family a photograph of a giant donkey penis…well, that's good day even for a mopey fucker like me.

And speaking of good days…

Today in 1920, on Tuesday, November 2, 144 years after the establishment of our democratic republic, women in the United States of America first exercised en masse their long overdue right to vote. Yes, we still practice discrimination, and no, we're still not, and probably never will be, a utopia. But today in America, and on every day since that Tuesday 87 years ago, we make our mistakes and our triumphs together as one nation of free people in which every one of us has a voice. Your vote is your voice. Some people fought a war to win that right, other suffered through centuries of slavery AND war before getting it, and lastly, on this day in 1920, after nearly a century and a half of demanding what they had deserved all along, the half of our population that was still being denied their voice finally spoke out and made this nation whole.

However many different ways we are splintered as a people, we always have a chance on every Election Day to be whole, to be a truly United States. It will always seem like the most divisive of all days but it doesn't have to be and, if you think about it, it really isn't. It isn't divisive because even in disagreement, we, as Americans, have agreed. We are all here and we have agreed to come together in this compact of democracy. After all, the truest proof of a strong Union is a people who have sworn to live together peaceful and united not in agreement, but in disagreement. Agreement is easy. Our mutual and national disagreement is a vow and a compact we have sworn and re-affirmed over and over again for 233 years now, failing only once to live up to the ideals our founding fathers set down in the summer of 1776.

There were times in our history when our democracy was not truly a democracy, when some Americans had no voice, but that isn't true anymore. This is our country and it will become what we make of it. We are not victims. We have a choice. Go out and make that choice.

And do yourselves a favor: mark down November 2, 1920 in your calendars. Remember it whether you're a man or a woman and regardless of the color of your skin because, although we accomplished our democracy in fits and starts over a lot of years, we did accomplish it in the end on THIS date. So remember November 2, 1920, because, in a way, today was the 87th anniversary of the day America truly became the United States.

And that's even cooler than the thought of a Jewish princess projecting a photo of a giant donkey cock on her parents' living room wall.


POSTSCRIPT: It's now late Sunday night. For some reason, I procrastinated on sending this but I think now that was for the best. I went to the movies last night to see a film my friend Tracy Falco had produced. Last night, my friend Tracy, former resident of Hillside Manor, after years of struggle in a crappy thankless industry in which she rarely got the credit she deserved for the work she did, took me and a few other close friends to the premiere of HER film "Lions for Lambs". Robert Redford directs it and it stars Mr. Redford, Tom Cruise, and Meryl Streep, along with some great performances by Derek Luke, Michael Pena, and Andrew Garfield.

It's a perfect movie. Clocking in at just 88 minutes, it's manages to fully present three separate storylines with clear detailed characterizations and show the ways in these people's lives are all inextricably intertwined. And that's really important because although some people are going to say that the film is a critique of the media or a critique of the government or a justification of some political agenda, they're all just wrong. This film is about the fact that all of our lives are inextricably intertwined and the things we do inevitably have an effect on the people, and the world, around us. This is especially true as Americans because, in America, we are, by definition, an inescapably involved part of an intertwined greater whole. I say "inescapably" because, although you may think you can avoid your involvement by dropping out or not caring or not voting or just NOT…you ARE here and you ARE involved and what you do or don't do WILL touch our nation, your life and the lives of those around you whether you like it or not.

Please go see the film. Even though the Republican senator Mr. Cruise portrays may not be presented as the most likeable character, and even though Mr. Redford's character councils several of his students in the film AGAINST joining the armed services, I realized after hearing him speak and seeing the movie that his film is REALLY about the service we all OWE our country, whether it be service with a camera, a gun, a voice, a pen, or a vote. Because Mr. Redford's character respects his students choices even as he disagrees and Mr. Redford, as a director, respects the Senator's commitment to doing something even as he himself, as a liberal, may actually fear and disrespect the archetype the senator represents. The movie, at least to me, says we do not have to agree, but we are doomed if we do not care.

America is a compact of service. That right of democracy we're gifted with or born into comes with a compact of responsibility we're in debt and bound to and "Lions for Lambs' is a beautiful, brilliant, and heart wrenching story about what happens when people both do and don't respect that compact. And surprisingly for me as a liberal guy, the movie actually takes a harsher view of the people who don't take part whether they're left OR right, even when you know the filmmakers disagree with the viewpoints of some of the people who DO take part. Maybe it's not so surprising though. After all, the point of the movie is that we have a responsibility to take part, horrific consequences or not, because to surrender to apathy or acquiescence is to surrender the nation to those who would make it less than it could be. Actually, I got that wrong. To surrender to apathy or acquiescence is to BE one of those who make it less that it should be.

Look, the world's going to turn either way. Wake up and be a part of it.

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