Ben slumped in a chair and leaned on his crutches. “I need a place to rest this leg tonight.”
“Salvation Army‟s about four blocks thataway.” He pointed.
Ben turned away.
“Too proud huh, Bub?”
Ben looked at him.
“You‟ll get over that foolishness. This ain’t no place to be proud.” He pulled hard on the last of his cigarette, threw it on the floor, mashed it out; dragged his hand down over his stubbled face, yellow ulcerated eyes, gapped and twisted brown teeth.
He looked at Ben, sighed. “Ain’t that cold, Bub. Get yourself a bottle of hooch and curl up with it down under the riverbank. One night won’t kill nobody.”
Ben came back with the picture, gave Cliff the hundred and asked for the nearest liquor store.
He took the bus, bought a fifth of Jim Beam, and crutched to the river drinking out of the sack. The bite, the scent and the heft of a bottle felt familiar; never thought he’d go back to the booze.
He caught his reflection in a dark window. Behind him the empty street, bare buildings raked with amber, beside him elegant women naked under nefarious nothings of sleepwear. Him, unshaven and downcast, rumpled, torn and dirty, he saw what he had become. Look as bad as I feel. To complete the tableau he raised his sack and drank, sweet drink. He looked the glass ragman in the eye, turned away.
The river was contained by a seawall high above its slightly swollen waters. Black clouds framed a white pyramid of a mountain to the east, faded to yellow sky and another mountain in the north. A boat left round shiny ripples on the river; they animated the first headlights of the evening on the interstate. The sounds of traffic skipped off the river and thrummed at him from the buildings behind.
He drank again. The bite eased. He turned the bottle up and drank, shook his head. He felt the fuzz grow behind his eyes. Familiar fuzz. Oh yes. He drank again. Yes. Turned to the walls of glass and grinned, raised his bag in salute. He watched and drank, listened and drank.
Another drink and another. Smile at the buildings, turn and smile at the river, the mountain, fading now. Click. Somewhere deeper than the fuzz. No inside, no outside, no here, no there. Narrow window watching, only watching, only waiting.
He staggered against the seawall, lost a crutch and fell. He saved the bottle. Drank, looked for the cap, found it, blew the dirt out of it and managed to screw it on the bottle. Shook the bottle and looked at it through squinted eyes. He pulled himself vertical, stuffed the bottle in his front pants pocket and looked around. Saw a Yellow Cab. Hailed it. Cabby looked and drove on. Sonofabitch! Saw another, dug deep in his other pocket and waved a handful of bills. Cabby stopped and helped him in the back.
“Where to?”
“I need to… I need… get me a beer. Hell!” He waved his arms wildly. “Buy everybody a beer.” He looked out the window, lay his face against it. “I‟ll buy the goddamn place…”
“Oldtown Inn do you?”
“Les go.”

This is only the beginning for Ben, for many. I spent several days and nights in Old Town Portland, living with the homeless, the ones not yet homeless but on the way. It was nearing Christmas; cheerful holiday lights in display windows were filled with dreams, a fantasy world for those with no means, no family except the imperfect, sometimes predatory family of the street. I won’t soon forget those days, nights in bars smelling of stale beer, sometimes puke. Ben came alive for me there. Sometimes I almost think he does live, and I’m responsible for his pain.

Bob Rogers first posted this article on http://newbohemians.net  and shares it here for background on the author of The Return of No. 44.

Attention! Attention!

The French accent did not disguise the intent of the word our languages share from the Latin.

Whirrrrrr clunk clunk, gone. The melon sized rock, descending a French Alp at terminal velocity, would have taken my head off, had I not been fully attentive at that moment, and hugged vertical ice encrusted rock with the intensity of a lover.

Climbing vertical rock and ice has a way of acutely focusing attention and releasing an delicious sense of aliveness. A mid-life crisis in my early thirties sent me off to Europe to spend a summer trying to kill myself doing obscenely difficult Alpine routes, with just a few climbs on a small rock in West Virginia under my belt. I survived somehow, and learned one of my most valuable lessons, the value of attention to this life.

This seemingly basic concept of attention deserves a closer look.

From Wikipedia:
William James, in his textbook Principles of Psychology, remarked:
“ Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear and vivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains of thought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implies withdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a condition which has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French is called distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German.[2]

I wonder if our increasing tendency to multi-task (I am guilty) is robbing us of the ability to, and affinity for, focusing on the precious intense moments of living that are within our grasp daily.

If our brain is trying to accomplish several things at once, something is lost, and that something is the intense pleasure to be had from focusing on one thing; one simple, beautiful piece of, or moment in, the universe.

I don’t want to focus on the negatives of multi-tasking, but on the rewards of attention:

The day I am writing this my wife Claire and I rode our bicycles to Ski Valley in the Santa Catalina Mountains behind Tucson.

We began at sunrise in saguaros heavy with white blossoms, and a faint acrid scent of creosote, both signatures of the Sonora Desert, and ended at nearly 9,000 feet in aspens, and the eager gobbling of a turkey in the deep forest. Along the way, the saguaros gave way to bushy oaks and the scent of dry grass, then the gin smell of juniper and vanilla of ponderosa pines, punctuated by the liquid descending call of a canyon wren, and finally the clean sharpness of spruce and thin air. You get the idea, I was paying attention, close attention, to the subtle changes of climate zones that span from Mexico to Canada, all in three hours.

Of course we could have driven it in a motor vehicle much more quickly, and we do sometimes, but we would have missed most of the smells and all of the sounds, and the involvement of our bodies.

Muscles working against gravity have a way of demanding one’s attention, and contrary to popular perception, the sensation is mostly pleasant, if focused on instead of trying to ignore the “pain”. Pain and pleasure can be interchangeable with attention and attitude.

On the way down, the sense of speed was intensified by gusts tugging at the light bicycle and skinny tires; attention is not only rewarding, but required. Forty, or even fifty miles per hour on a bicycle is pure joy, if just on the edge of scary.

At a rest stop for a snack, and to enjoy a view of the city, Claire was using her water bottle to wash a bug from her eye. I got close to see if it was gone. The aliveness and attention of our day together coalesced into a desire to hold her, and I did. I focused my attention where our damp bodies met, the smell of her hair, the sun on my back. And I told her something very personal that I had been wanting to tell her about my desires for the end of my life. I’m not sure any other combination of circumstances would have led me to that revelation.

Life is only fully appreciated through attention, sometimes attention to emotion.

This subject deserves more than I am giving to it now. Perhaps I will come back to it later. For now, those muscles I used so fully, are demanding me to give full attention to a fade into a long deep sleep.

Bob Rogers first wrote this article for Just One Opinion copied it to New Bohemians and now wants to share it with visitors to this site. It has nothing to do with The Return of No. 44, but does suggest to potential readers some of the social values the define the author.

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We are the most prosperous people in the world; it’s our birthright. At least that is what we thought until recently. It is a new day. Angst has replaced arrogance, and we have a new uncomfortable understanding of limits.

Americans, particularly the middle class, are suffering with varying degrees of wealth loss, and our sense of personal security and prosperity has taken a big hit. Consumer confidence levels are at historic lows, our stress levels high; not a recipe for happy citizens.

Tough times bring angst, depression and anger. Tough times also offer a great opportunity to reexamine our core beliefs, our basic assumptions, about how we define prosperity, happiness; how we perceive the good life.

Now is a great time to ask some challenging and potentially rewarding questions: Would we be less happy without all the possessions we have come to assume are the necessities of modern life? What if the reverse were true, that one might be happier with less?

This idea that limiting our possessions could lead to more life satisfaction is akin to religious blasphemy, the religion being consumerism. It’s a religion that has made us wealthy in material things, but hasn’t made us happy.

Children playing and singing on a beach in Fiji

The very nature of a consumer economy is that we are forever dissatisfied with our station in life, as defined by our possessions. We learn at an early age that he, or she with the most toys stands at the top of the social order. The problem is, no matter how hard one works, no matter how wealthy one becomes, there is always someone with more wealth, more cars, houses, yachts, club memberships, more toys.

While hiking in the mountains around Tucson, I notice that the higher on the mountain, the more expensive the lot, and the larger the house. It is a very literal representation of our need to place ourselves above others to show that we are superior beings, perhaps closer to our god, because we can afford to live higher than others.

Having once owned a house with spectacular mountain views on one side and an island dotted strait and snow capped volcano view on the other, I know something about expensive lots, and expansive views. The novelty wears off; just the same as it does for the new luxury car, the third and fourth houses, the larger yacht, the fawning of the spa staff…

Most people work fairly hard to achieve a high plateau of consumption, and might reasonably think the reward ought to be great happiness. Not so apparently. The rich are happier than the poor, no surprise there, but that difference probably comes from knowing they have a cushion of security; great health insurance comes to mind, that the poor lack. But their possessions have little or no relationship to level of life satisfaction.

On the World Database of Happiness, America is currently at number 23, a somewhat humble number considering our wealth. The happiest people now live in Denmark, a small European country known for it’s somewhat unique balance of capitalism and socialism. They have a vibrant capitalist economy, combined with cradle to grave social system. No one is extremely poor but no one is extremely rich either. No one pays for excellent healthcare or education, but few have opulent lifestyles. They are the 11^th most-free market economy; not remotely socialist.

It’s not as if Danes with more education and drive don’t get ahead, they do, but their rewards are more likely to be in professional and social prestige, rather than things. They take pleasure in community and social interaction, not individual aggrandizement.

All this capitalist freedom lives sided by side with the highest taxes in the world. That goes against all we came to believe in 20^th century America: low taxes, small government and a loose spending populace are the only route to prosperity. We may have to reconsider that premise. We may no longer be able to sustain the consumer driven model. Many have come to the end of their rope; they just can’t work any harder. Couples have to work long hours, sometimes at multiple jobs to provide the American Dream, only to find they are spending their happiness, sense of security and even their health for a dream that, by its very nature, must always remain out of reach.

The Danes know how to be thankful, and how to be satisfied with fewer possessions, but more time to enjoy them, more sense of security and more happiness. That might not be the trade-off some would want to make, but the American middle class may soon realize it is they who are doing the real work, and benefiting the least. It is seldom the poor who start revolutions, but the middle class. This last election could have been the first shot fired in a bloodless war against worn out ideas. The middle class may no longer be content to be the spending engine of an unsustainable economic model.

Of the countries we have visited, mostly by bicycle and sailboat, our overall impressions of the people’s sense of well being, their smiles and eagerness to interact, follows the happiness list fairly well, like tiny Vanuatu, at number 24, just below the U.S.

Sometimes it is the poorer peoples who understand happiness best. When Claire and I crewed on the catamaran Songlines, we anchored off remote islands in Fiji, similar in lifestyle to Vanuatu. The people grew their food and lived in shacks smaller than many garden sheds in America. One afternoon as we strolled a beach, we were invited, in sign language, to join two ladies for tea, in the shade of their windowless home. We drank strong tea from inexpensive but ornate mugs, an obvious source of pride, ate home made scones and jam, shared photos and “talked.”

After an hour of warm communication, we reluctantly left to row the skiff back to Songlines, a modern sailboat probably worth more than their entire village. No money changed hands; it would have been an insult to their hospitality. As we parted, their faces showed the joy they had received from the giving, and our faces beamed our genuine appreciation.

It is a moment we will not forget. Human happiness is a far more complex idea than having great success, many possessions. Happiness is sharing, the giving and receiving, of that most precious and limited of possessions, time.

Callers ranged widely in the cults they struggled with. I was quite surprised to hear a two men describe fundamentalist Christian upbringings, as if they were cults, and I was at first puzzled. I assumed that cults were always non-Christian. 

But as I listened to the callers I recognized the sometimes subtle pressures brought to bear in the “mainstream” if conservative and rural church, that was central to my youth. Questions which brought up any of the many inconsistencies of the Bible, simply were not allowed. We were told sometimes people were “churched” for asking uncomfortable questions, and that the only unforgivable sin was to become a Christian, be “saved” and then leave. Either of course would land you in Hell, a concept we were taught to fear as very real fire and endless unbearable suffering. All this was a means of exerting control by the group on individual members. It began to dawn on me that my experience was not that far from the sphere of cult. I just had never given consideration to the idea, because it all seemed so normal to believe in my youth.

If the idea of cults interests you I suggest Richard Kelly’s Growing Up In Mama’s Club. It is his story of growing up, and escaping, the Jehovah’s Wittiness cult. This young boy of five has to come to terms with his lack of faith and his mother’s total commitment to some very strange ideas.