Category: Paul Gerald Writings

Just Paul Being Paul

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The Churros Place

Small steps and tasty treats in a new city.

Even in my head, I call it the churros place because, right now, churrería is just too damn hard to say, what with the rolled double-r followed so closely by another r, which I am not sure is rolled or not. I can get it all out, haltingly, but I know it sounds terrible, which is a common state for me these days: Spanish people can’t make out what I’m saying, and I am probably using the wrong words anyway, even if they did understand me. Which they don’t.

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Home and Away

We know who we are at home, where all is familiar. But who are we away?

When I was a kid, going to Ole Miss football games with my Dad was kind of everything to me. I didn’t yet know about travel, or drinking, or girls, or hiking, or anything else that later would get me excited. So when Dad and I were at the game, watching our team together, everything seemed to be exactly in place.

And, in fact, those games were in a place: Oxford, Mississippi. That’s where we tailgated, walked to the stadium, took our seats, usually saw our team lose, and then commiserated together in the car afterwards, in time for dinner at home with Mom. They were home games.

And then one time when we saw them play somewhere else – away.

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Looking For a Place to Land

I have learned that there are levels of fatigue one is not aware of until one reaches them.

It’s like exercising for the first time in a long while, exhausting muscles you haven’t used in years, or working outside on a hot, dusty day and being reminded of how filthy you can get.

As long as you have a home, you can access levels of rest, relaxation and recuperation which you are not aware of until you give them up – and I gave them up more than two years ago.

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Already Gone

I’m not sure I’m actually here.

I left Portland two years ago, and in two weeks I’m leaving again. And that right there should tell you that I am in some weird in-between place that is very hard to describe. I left, but I’m still here? All I know is, whatever it used to mean to be here, in Portland, it no longer means that. I no longer feel like I’m really here.

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On Tilling the Earth

When things get too crazy, stressful, or just plain tiring, it’s probably time to get back to the basics.

So many of my worldviews and beliefs flow from my time with the Grateful Dead, and here’s another one.

There’s a show called “Anthem to Beauty,” about the period of time when the Dead transformed from a completely tripped-out, acid-gobbling, experimental rock band that owed their record company money, was plagued with infighting and was basically losing its collective mind — around the time of their album “Anthem of the Sun” — to a time when they were recording two fantastic and successful albums filled with solid songs that became staples of their shows for the next 25 years: “Workingman’s Dead” and “American Beauty.”

I can’t find the exact clip on YouTube, but Mickey Hart, one of the drummers, basically said that their music, their lives, their whole scene was just getting too weird and was threatening to break itself apart, and they needed to get back to the basics of songwriting, crafting music, and as he said, “Tilling the Earth.”

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I’m a Runner

The first time I ever went to a 12-step meeting, I brought one problem with me, and I found one immediate piece of solution. The pattern continues to this day.

When, after years of self-inflicted misery, I was finally able to walk into a 12-step meeting, I thought I had one problem and I needed one solution. I knew that I kept getting loaded even though it made me miserable, so I figured I just needed to get sober and I’d be on my way.

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What’s the Plan?

Plans aren’t everything, and they change all the time, but it still helps to know what the current one is.

The most extreme example I can recall of needing to remember the plan was when I jumped off a 200-foot-high bridge. I was bungee jumping, which of course I had decided to do, but a large part of my brain did not care about that as I stepped to the edge. It was screaming “No!” on every channel.

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On Voluntary “Homelessness”

A random “update your profile” moment on Facebook triggered a contemplation of where I (don’t) live.

I have been without a fixed address now for something like 22 months – a deliberate and somewhat planned state of affairs which one might call voluntary homelessness. Certainly, it’s addresslessness, unless a mailbox in Portland, Oregon counts as my address. And it does, to much of the official world. But Portland hasn’t been my home since I drove away from my apartment on May 31, 2021, bound at the time for Wyoming.

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On (Not?) Missing Things

Somebody asked me the other day if I missed Portland, where I lived for 25 years, and I immediately said not really.

The ease and conviction of that statement caught us both off guard. Portland was a major chapter in my life, the place I chose when I chose to leave home, to go and build myself a life away from everybody and everything I knew. It’s a place where I learned and grew and lived and loved and had adventures and miseries and got sober and wrote books and the whole damn thing.

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