Beat It

As I alternately sit with it and run with it, I settle in to singledom. When I sit, I meditate - or try to. Mostly I squirm and think, "Stop thinking, just breathe in the bright white light of positivity; breathe out the black smoke of negativity..."

When I run, sometimes I go off the beaten track.Two weeks in a row, I'm out past my bedtime reading poetry, you dig? I somehow swung a feature gig at Drip, a tiny coffeehouse in 5 Points. There I was, in Al Black's Mind Gravy spotlight, surrounded by college students and supportive friends, plus one crazy man who kept proclaiming his love for me until finally getting thrown out. When the young'uns in the front row put down their iPhones while I read 30 minutes' worth of my stuff, I had a Sally Field moment in my head: "You like me! Right now, you like me!" Even you college kids! 

My man, Lawrence.

Which was really great since I have in fact never stopped thinking of myself as a college kid. I mean, when I'm not sweeping coarse gray hairs off the bathroom floor or rubbing Biofreeze into my arthritic shoulder. I feel I'm Sally Field and 27 in my head. (Yes. I was still an undergrad at 27.)

The "lonely old courage-teacher."

After the reading, my friend Cynthia - a professor of literature! - called me a modern day Beat. As an actual twenty-something, I'd hung out at North Beach's City Lights bookshop reading all the beatniks plus Charles Bukowski. I sort of worshipped Lawrence Ferlinghetti. So it felt damn spectacular to be referred to in this way.

And then, at the end of the open mic portion of the night, this kid in a baggy knit cap and draggy blue denim got up and recited - from memory - the only Allen Ginsberg poem I ever loved: "A Supermarket in California."

There we were - me, a generation removed from Kerouac, and this kid Ethan, a generation removed from me - sharing a Beat connection in a little city in South Carolina, about a million miles from where it began.

To listen to a reading of Ginsberg's poem that's nowhere near as good as Ethan's recitation, click here:
A Supermarket in California