Everyday Life in Middletown Directive
Summer 2024
Diarist A01
Home
From a fairly young age I’ve liked to see myself as nimble and mobile, and so I’ve always seen whatever place I live as temporary. I’m unsentimental about “home”—maybe not 100 percent, but mostly so. My original home was an economically depressed, very provincial small town in Pennsylvania, a former mining town. It was an interesting place to live—very safe for kids, I was able to run free—but lots of alcoholism and poverty (not that I would have recognized the poverty in exactly those terms). I knew I would leave from a very young age, but that place plays a very powerful role in my identity and psyche, even though it’s been more than a decade since I’ve been there and I don’t expect or desire to go back. But in a strange way I take a certain pride in it. It gave me imaginative resources.
Since I left I’ve always thought of every home as temporary, and I’ve always anticipated living somewhere else eventually. I’ve usually felt fine about where I lived and in some cases really liked it (neighborhood, house). In a sense, though, “home” really means where I live now. If I have emotional associations with it, they have to do with my wife. My home is where we live together, wherever that is. We’ll find a new home in a couple years as we shift towards retirement, if all goes well. I have a lot of thoughts about what I’d like, but I don’t know that I’ll ever think of any place as “home” with the emotional associations that word carries. Of course I want shelter and safety and comfort and convenience as much as anyone. But my desire is to keep moving (in all senses)—or maybe even more so to feel like I’m moving—and so “home” isn’t that much of a value.
I live in a 1,300-square foot two-bedroom, one-bath craftsman house from 1929 that I rent with my wife. It’s on the edge of a toney neighborhood. We’ve been there for six years. We’re not “house” people. We had a place and a mortgage in a subdivision for about 17 years but didn’t enjoy home-owning. And we were able to find our current place in a neighborhood we really like with a good landlord, an attractive place with some character. I can walk to bars and restaurants and grocery stores and a book store and a record store. I can be on the bike trail easily. I have an office where I keep whatever books relate to whatever I’m writing or studying at the time; and where I write and meditate and do my office work-from-home days. We have a nice, old-fashioned front porch. It is by far my favorite place I have lived.
I’m a book person and a music listener, and these are the things that I need to arrange to be happy in a house. I also like to cook, but am not a kitchen fetishist—if there’s space to conveniently put everything and to chop and do prep, that’s enough. “Making a home” is also a kind of sentimental-sounding phrase that doesn’t register much with me. We don’t have kids, which is certainly a major factor in all this. But “making a home” for me means being with my wife and having an atmosphere in which I can think, work, write, cook, listen to music, have people over. My wife is good at decorating—she has a style that expresses aspects of our personalities and costs very little. I like it and am grateful that she’s good at it.
Maybe it’s a little ironic that I say all this now that I’m in a place I really, really like. I’ve lived in fine places and “meh” & rather crappy places—soulless apartment complexes, bug- and mouse-prone apartments in houses, etc. I definitely take pleasure in where I live now—walking around my neighborhood I frequently register my gratitude for it in my mind. But in those other places…I was still happy. I’m an upbeat person overall and think I’d be happy anywhere minimally adequate.
The only thing I don’t like about our current place is that the windows are ancient and bad. There aren’t up-to-date storm windows so we infrequently open them. But we’ve not taken any steps to remedy this. If you looked carefully, you’d see countless dings and imperfections which, if we owned the place, we’d be compelled to fix. As it is we don’t care—the place looks fine and we like living there. And we’ll be moving in a couple years.
When we had a house & mortgage, it was a major stressor to my wife. I work in Muncie and we live in Indy, so I spent many hours a week commuting and was rarely nearby during the day, which left her stuck with most of the management of the house. She hated it. I liked that house fine while we were there—it had a nice sunny library room at the front, a nice yard with a brick patio where I liked to sit. She had no feeling for that place whatsoever. And, it is true, in that subdivision-world nothing is walkable. Now I feel like I live in a city, which was something I was always interested in.
We pay a service to clean once a month. My wife does most of the tidying and cleaning; I do about 60 percent of the cooking. She does most of the shopping. These percentages will change when I am retired, shortly. We each do our own laundry. We also pay someone to cut the grass. All of this also negotiable after retirement. These are luxuries we’ve only felt we could afford in recent years.
Spirituality, etc.
The simplest thing to say about this is that I am becoming a Buddhist. “Becoming,” because I’m a woefully inadequate one. I don’t belong to a sangha; I meditate inconsistently; I read intermittently. But my basic beliefs line up with the American, somewhat self-helpy version of Buddhism: an endeavor to live in reality, to not be governed by ideations (whether personal or cultural) that aren’t real, to value the real physical world and care for it & its creatures. To recognize the difference between ideas and interpretations as opposed to concrete realities.
I don’t believe in a creator or any metaphysical forces intervening in our world. (The physical forces that underlie the world are miraculous enough!) I see everything as impermanent and in flux. I practice trying to live in my senses, be aware of what my body and mind are experiencing, witness the world around me, to not hide from pain, to “experience joy and sorrow” and “live every moment to its fullest” and “look on all creatures with eyes of compassion,” as one set of prayers has it. I try to practice compassion and to view the bad things that people do and say as emanating from internal drives and individual deformations based on people’s lives and experiences, and to view them gently. And since I believe that ideas and institutions are things that people made up, I believe they can be changed. You could say that the universe stands for me in the spot where god stands for monotheists. I believe in the universe; I try to love it; I am grateful to be a part of it and to have it in me. I value science and other means of understanding it.
I can’t say that I believe in reincarnation (except in the Physics-y way that our actual bodies will get recycled), and I haven’t really read up on it. Something about your consciousness living on? I’ll get to trying to understand it one day.
I’m also humble and in this one sense agnostic: I recognize that my view is extremely limited, and I have no objection to others’ beliefs, as long as they don’t use them to oppress or vilify other people. (Which even Buddhists do—in Myanmar—but I do think Buddhism is much less prone to this kind of thought, because of its non-dualism.)
I say all this, and yet (this is a flaw) I do, I cannot deny, look down somewhat on people who are convinced they’re going to live forever if they behave and/or belong to the right church. Or that god has a plan for them and will take care of them. I was at a Catholic funeral recently, and the priest was more intense and distinctly—“religious” is the only word I can think of—than I’m used to at funerals. And he was vociferous on Jesus having “conquered death” and on assuring the survivors that they would see the 96-year-old deceased again in heaven. My ethical view says, “Live and let live” on this stuff. But confronted with it, I think: these are folks who, in this one way, were unable to become adults.
I arrived at this place via many twists and turns. I do, on some level, have a fundamentally religious nature. My practice and my desire is to praise the things of this world, to value them, to experience them—including people. My mantra, which I’m not sure comes from or is even consonant with Buddhism, is that everything is sacred. Non-dualism.
A fundamentally religious nature: as a six- or seven-year old, in a loosely practicing but believing Catholic family, I wanted to go to church every day; I thought it was amazing that God loved me, and I wanted more of Him. My (late) brother, even then the purveyor of the norms of middle-of-the-roadness and toxic masculinity, told me that wanting to go to church every day wasn’t normal. But I was a believer, if inconstant in my practice, throughout childhood. Then I met a girl at 17 who I was really into, and who (in the denouement) was less into me but very into sharing her faith with me, and I became a born-again protestant for a while. I served as a youth counselor at a Presbyterian summer camp. I went to Bible studies in my first year of college. But I gradually converted again, this time to the Grateful Dead and all that it entailed. (Which, through other twists and turns, led to me not graduating from college on that attempt). There followed a muddy, half-believing, non-practicing decade that ended decisively with my second stint in college, where I learned about the horrors of the early modern religious wars in Europe—which happened a few years after the fatwah against Rushdie & the first Iraq war. At some point in here, I became done with monotheism, without a feeling of loss.
I would say that I think about my beliefs daily. I frequently say the short prayers referred to above. Various teachings come to mind all the time: impermanence, inability to predict the future/outcome, the need to detach from desires, the miracle of the present moment. I do yoga in the mornings twice a week and always end with prayers. (Not prayers to an entity! To the universe!) I sneak in meditation here and there, and hope to regularize and routinize that soon. I also plan to start looking into Buddhist communities nearby.
I am happy and comfortable with my beliefs, which generally make sense of the world to me (or explain its senselessness in a non-fairy-tale way), and I seek to practice more, and more effectively.
The one thing I envy church-goers for is the community. Community is hard to come by and even when you have something like it, it feels not completely adequate, somehow. I feel like we live in networks more than communities nowadays—like if we’re lucky we have a hundred people we know, and sometimes little groups of them are connected, and sometimes we actually get together in the same space with some of them—but basically we’re this lone little node interconnecting with various others and clusters of others. I recognize that this is sentimental/nostalgic but I sometimes wish I lived in a different time when we had strong kinship networks and not everyone moved all over the country and the globe for work. We evolved in little kinship groups and I think we desire that. Ridiculous, I know! When we were evolving like that, we were at the mercy of the elements in ways we can’t even imagine now: step on a thorn, get an infection, die: no antibiotics. Not to mention that I grew up in a small, pretty tight-knit town and found it oppressive. I think this is really characteristic of being human in this place and time—to want both community and absolute self-determination. (This has something to do with capitalism, but that’s another directive response.) But the notion of belonging to a group of affiliated people who, whether they really know you or not, have some stake in your thriving, and can be called upon to help you, is attractive to me. I guess some folks in nice, local, religious communities have that?