Couch Surfing at 70 – Page 23

Morning Conversation

You have to look between the rain. Between the rain? Right. Look at those places between the rain. That’s where you celebrate. Celebrate? Right, in those places between the rain you celebrate – maybe you dance, maybe you bow nine times, maybe you write a letter to the editor of whatever it is you read…

By BuddyCushman 10/19/2019 8

It Makes Me Sweat

“I now write from an old mind and an old body, long beyond the time when most men would ever think of continuing such a thing, but since I started so late I owe it to myself to continue, and when the words begin to falter and I must be helped up stairways and I…

By BuddyCushman 10/16/2019 3

Cheap Thrills

Mostly what I buy these days are books and Trader Joe’s salted Almond Butter. I’m capitalizing because it’s a real thing. The books I buy come unexpected. It works like this. I’ll be reading a book or an on-line magazine article or essay by someone I like and another book will be mentioned and…

By BuddyCushman 10/14/2019 0

Bookends

Sometimes, out of the clear blue, one or the other of my knees will scream out in pain. It’s only for a moment. Then that knee goes back to doing what knees do. Knee-ing, I guess. Almost every morning, when I bow nine times to the cushion on which I have sat in meditation, my…

By BuddyCushman 10/11/2019 5

The Breitenbush Chronicles – #3

There is a guy — very tall, thick and big — who showed up yesterday. Here at Breitenbush. I think we first saw him at lunch. He was wearing an incredibly loud bathrobe, a whitish and black geometric-design thing, nearly floor length, made with a very light, thin material. Now, there are always people in…

By BuddyCushman 10/09/2019 3

The Breitenbush Chronicles – #2

Writing way uphill here, from a low chair up to the table in the dining hall at Breitenbush. We, my wife Susan and I, are the only ones in the hall save for some guy who keeps walking in and out. We sat in a naturally heated hot spring pool first, in the pitch dark,…

By BuddyCushman 10/08/2019 0

The Breitenbush Chronicles – #1

Well, we’ve arrived, deep in the Oregon woods, a spiritual retreat as advertised — my wife’s favorite place. It’s pouring down rain out there. I had to remove my shoes before entering the silent library in the main lodge, so you already know what I think. I’m at a place where they tell you to…

By BuddyCushman 10/07/2019 5

To Tell Stories

There’s too much dawn, I realize when I walked out into the backyard to capture in my eye the familiar constellations I had witnessed an hour earlier when I was back there praying. Before meditation, before cough syrup, before coffee. Way before the writing books. I’m hung up on this idea of “Need”. I…

By BuddyCushman 10/05/2019 4

At Sitka Sedge

From September 20: It is looking like suddenly through fumbling around entirely haphazardly over and through the net I have found a blank ‘Word” doc I can actually use on this laptop which I am only borrowing. Whether I can save it someplace to which I will have access later, well, that’s a donkey…

By BuddyCushman 10/04/2019 0

Father and Son Excursion

From our journey to the Oregon coast – September 18. Well here, Wednesday afternoon, sunshine unexpectedly streaming in through the memorized windows, egg-shell blue sky flooding the heavenly horizon. This on a day predicted wild and menacing with storms off the Pacific. Early in our journey there was to be sure fear and real loathing…

By BuddyCushman 09/29/2019 4

Dance to the Music

Note: This piece was written one week ago, at Tierra Del Mar on the Oregon coast, in a cottage shared with my son Spenser. Someone asked me what it’s like to be 70. Is that a question? Is this a multiple choice test? In seventh grade a few of my more devilish classmates stuffed me…

By BuddyCushman 09/27/2019 4

Billy MacDonald

I graduated from Cape Cod Community College in the spring of 1969 and transferred up to Salem State. My high school classmate Ricky Fleming was in the same circumstance, and we found an apartment together in Marblehead. I hitchhiked back and forth to and from the college. Maybe a couple of months after I’d started…

By BuddyCushman 09/25/2019 12

From a Deck at the Coast

I’m sitting out here in/under the abundant sun and the idea comes to me that I don’t have anything to say. Seriously. I have thoughts, I have opinions, I suppose like everyone. But in terms of trying to say something which has value and is worthy of asking for peoples’ time? Nah, not so much.…

By BuddyCushman 09/22/2019 2

Forecasts

It wouldn’t take long to clear off the ping pong table for use today and possibly tomorrow as well. I had the thought upstairs, a short while ago, to delay the trip to the coast for a day, seriously consider a Wednesday morning departure after looking at the forecast on my phone. It’s up for…

By BuddyCushman 09/16/2019 1

Note to Self

I’ve been reading a book on the writing of short stories. A ‘How To’ book. And in the reading absorbed The need – I have a need – to sit at the keyboard, my keyboard with paint splatters all over it, with the intention to tell a story, hopefully a story which will draw…

By BuddyCushman 09/12/2019 1

Thoughts Unbidden on a Rainy Sunday

One piece of good news, now that the rains have returned, is I do not need to lean over for extended periods to water the vegetables. This is a good thing for my back. Another piece of good news is/was me reading the Andre Dubus piece on short-story writing in the book on that subject…

By BuddyCushman 09/08/2019 0

800 Acts of Potential Portuguese Kindness

Timed – 17:45: And yesterday I was lost in thought all about kindness. I’d like to think it’s a natural inclination – pretty sure it is. Okay, a quick one here, well as quick as 17:45 flows by. Was thinking of the opening line I wrote last night and then the second line earlier this…

By BuddyCushman 09/06/2019 3

Morning Pages Pouring

Friday, Aug 30: “It’s what I thought the first time I read that blog back when you started it …that you should have your own news outlet it and really be hammering away @ that aspect of your creative essence! There seems more than the painting something REALLY DEEP AND PROFOUNDLY POWER FILLED SCREAMING TO…

By BuddyCushman 09/03/2019 1

Seventh Morning, San Diego

Back here this morning at the in-laws, some 13 miles out into San Diego County, the sounds of the early morning – the dawning music – so very different from our last five mornings at the beach. Upon first awakening, and noticing stars out and up from the back slider, so as to indicate no…

By BuddyCushman 08/29/2019 0

Sixth Morning, San Diego

Today is my sister Nancy’s birthday. She’s still younger than me. She is there, celebrating her life anniversary, back in our hometown of Wareham, Massachusetts – hard by the salt water known as Buzzards Bay. Nancy refrained from coming back to our hometown for many of the years of her life, thought it was lacking…

By BuddyCushman 08/28/2019 1

Fifth Morning, San Diego

Well, first this feels like a tangel this forest – Wow, start again, start over, try to match each word I am considering with what I am copying down here. In this morning’s Morning Pages, where now filling three pages is feeling like something near an extraordinary challenge. Sitting here in the, at the dining…

By BuddyCushman 08/27/2019 0

Fourth Morning, San Diego

This is how I want to live – exactly like this. Is that the best way to say it? Perhaps, this is what feels like the perfect life, as it is experienced in the moment – moment after moment. These last two days, pieces, parts, and times of the days. It’s all only one man’s…

By BuddyCushman 08/26/2019 2

Third Morning, San Diego

I can always tell when it’s 6:30 in the morning in Ocean Beach, California. That is when the first airplane passes overhead. Like, real close overhead. San Diego’s Lindbergh Airport is only a mile or so away, as the seagull flies, and is unique as an airport in that it offers only one runway. Just…

By BuddyCushman 08/25/2019 1

Second Morning, San Diego

I keep jumping up from the curvy cushioned chair in which I am sitting and reading and drinking coffee in hope of seeing the flocks of loudly chattering wild parrots which fly and roost and chatter in this up-the-hill neighborhood of Ocean Beach in San Diego, California. But I never do – see them –…

By BuddyCushman 08/24/2019 0

First Morning, San Diego

I’m writing with a pen lifted from the Mark Spencer Hotel in downtown Portland. I’m writing on an oblong table in a large breezeway room at the in-laws in San Diego – out in the County, some 13 miles from the Pacific Ocean and the edge of the continent. I’m writing this down in a…

By BuddyCushman 08/23/2019 0

A Week of Stories

I spent the last week with my wife Susan in San Diego – specifically two days with her parents out in the County, and five glorious days in San Diego’s Ocean Beach. Our first morning, at Ann and Bill’s, awake before all others, I performed my usual morning routines and rituals which end with writing…

By BuddyCushman 08/22/2019 0

Strolling for Joy

I walked out the back door this morning, right around 7:00, with the daily intentions to empty the coffee filter, check on our tiny vegetable beds, and open and walk through the garage studio. Pretty much every morning, after meditation and coffee and reading in the recliner, I do these things. Like today. We have…

By BuddyCushman 08/13/2019 0

Inspired to Keep On

From The Morning Pages: Late to the party this morning, got hung up reading a bunch of my old Blog posts. I, for the most part, dig them, there is a voice – my voice – and there is both a gentleness and a fairly clear sense of loathing and doom. Again, the idea…

By BuddyCushman 08/08/2019 1

The Value of Me

I have a painting – this one, oil, which is now framed and under glass – and I painted it with a palette knife on a piece of 15 x 11 watercolor paper. The painting slightly influenced, in my mind while I was making it, by the work of Hans Hofmann and Robert Motherwell, primarily…

By BuddyCushman 07/28/2019 3

Saucer, Krasner, and Mrs. Maisel

I have one distinct memory of the 1950’s. I was walking on my street – High Street in Wareham, Massachusetts – knocking on doors of houses and encouraging anyone who answered my knock to vote for Dwight Eisenhower for re-election to the Presidency. This would have made it sometime in the fall of 1955, and…

By BuddyCushman 07/23/2019 7

New People

I was out on a walk late yesterday afternoon and twice along the way I smelled honeysuckle. A surprise and a gift – twice. Later, before nine, I was in the basement involved with an eighteen-minute timed-writing session. Channeling words and sentences. One sentence formed in the expression of hope I begin a new oil…

By BuddyCushman 07/13/2019 5

On the Orleans Rotary

“Some day I’ll fall back into the pattern of the world. I’ll still be free On the Orleans rotary.” From “Some Day”, ‘The Automatic Poems’ That’s poem number one in the Cape Cod “Summer Daze, Deserted Winter” section of my newest book of poetry, the first stanza. It’s a hopeful poem, I think, and…

By BuddyCushman 07/09/2019 6

Atomic Monkey

I’d like to talk about my poem “Atomic Monkey”, and in doing so, talk about my whole life. When I got sober I use to go to these meetings where people trying to get alcohol and drugs out of their lives would gather and talk about how that was going. Sometimes a whole group of…

By BuddyCushman 06/13/2019 5

Walking in the Rain

I was the victim of a scam this week. I say “I”, but my wife Susan played a role in the victimization as well. Also a victim. This afternoon I texted my friend Gavin in Oakland and asked if he had any time to talk. That I needed to talk. He got back to me…

By BuddyCushman 06/08/2019 9

Tuesday

This is Tuesday and I have decided to fast today. It’s 1:25 in the afternoon and so good so far. I am also home alone today, always a treat. It’s 1:27 in the afternoon and I’m all alone here. I was aware of both facts last night, – fasting and alone-ness – meaning I knew…

By BuddyCushman 05/14/2019 0

Lesson

After I was about three and a half months sober I’d saved enough money to haul my sorry self off my sister’s couch and move into an apartment of my own – actually less than half a mile away, also on a third floor, above the family who owned the house and lived on the…

By BuddyCushman 04/30/2019 6

We Give, We Get

For many years I made an annual donation to The Jimmy Fund – the Massachusetts Children’s Cancer research and treatment fund. The Boston Red Sox have been affiliated with The Jimmy Fund for about forever, and one year my donation was large enough that I was afforded a lunch in the Fenway Park press room…

By BuddyCushman 04/28/2019 1

Hey Bro

I woke up Wednesday morning, and after sitting on a cushion and drinking coffee discovered someone had become my third patron on my new Patreon creator’s site. It was my friend Butch, all the way over in Florida. Hey Bro. I’d been thinking for a few days that I’d only managed two patrons on this…

By BuddyCushman 04/25/2019 0

The Me of Me

Periodically, I’d say maybe three or four times a week – more if I’m “on” – I sit at this keyboard and do “timed writings”, kind of stream-of conscious, automatic writing in which I try to begin with a particular thought and then dish on that from there, the timer on the phone set for…

By BuddyCushman 04/21/2019 0

Shower the People You Love

I am about to ask you to become a Patron of mine. A someone who supports my devotion to and efforts at creativity – in my particular case as a writer and an artist. And as an artist working in both oils and acrylic, drawing with pencil and charcoal. Working at keyboards and coffee shop…

By BuddyCushman 04/17/2019 5

Two Cans of Ballantine Ale

I remember it being sometime before 11:30 when I let myself into my sister’s apartment – like 11:20. A Friday night. I could not tell you where I’d been the last seven hours or so, other than flashes of being in my car driving on Route 1, I think through Saugus and maybe as far…

By BuddyCushman 04/15/2019 7

Thirty True Fans

Well, that didn’t last long. I’ve toyed with the title of this post, asked myself “What’s the goal?”, and decided I’d leave it here -“Thirty True Fans” – where it’s been a while, a title only, because in fact that is the goal. The not lasting long was my re-entry into the world of nine…

By BuddyCushman 04/05/2019 9

Coming Soon

….to a Monitor directly in front of you. Ah, maybe a mobile device. Some screen. Lots and lots and lots of goodies from me. Stuff – mostly new stuff, a bit of old stuff, recycling maybe. I have much to say and a burst of plans – you’ll see why – and all…

By BuddyCushman 03/28/2019 6

Gifts

It is crystal clear. I do need to buy the Mary Oliver book (“Upstream”) and then pick it up and read it regularly. The way people early in recovery read “The Big Book” and “The 12 and 12”. I feel entirely filled with inspiration and awe and a bit of regret and the hope for…

By BuddyCushman 03/07/2019 5

Thin Slicing

Here, now, is a slice or two of my mind. Back on October 17th of last year I published a post called “Risks and Other Things” in which I talked about a suggestion I had read – to begin each day by coming up with and writing down 10 Ideas. Every day. It would not…

By BuddyCushman 03/03/2019 0

In Between the Transport, There’s Kindness

I had a friend, a while back, named Linda. She was a lesbian on whom I had a wicked crush, and while she chuckled often at that – as in dream on – we hung out together every week. This must have been back in the mid-nineties. We talked about all kinds of things, and…

By BuddyCushman 02/20/2019 13

Quickly

It has been a while since I posted on Couch Surfing at 70, too long, and I plan to have a lengthy update early next week on three of the current “adventures” in my life – trying to find a job; trying to sell my car; trying to read 50 books in one year. All…

By BuddyCushman 02/14/2019 5

My Last Mistake

I made my last mistake yesterday. At the tail end of a job interview, an actual in person person-to-person gathering to which I was invited as a result of an emailed application, resume, cover letter — and please believe here that before the interview began I grabbed the empty air space to thank the woman…

By BuddyCushman 02/01/2019 1

On the Cusp

I am filled with questions, here, on the cusp of my 70th birthday. A day before the first day of my eighth decade on the planet. Still up here, above ground. Still upright, no white chalk outline around my body. Not yet. And I wonder – will I get another decade? Out on a walk…

By BuddyCushman 01/18/2019 6

Lost and Found

Sometimes I feel lost. Not too often. But, yeah, I do sometimes. It may be connected with self-talk – all those things that I say to myself, generally about myself, through the day, days into weeks, at this point so many weeks. Want to know how many? This many – 3639. Multiply that by seven…

By BuddyCushman 01/10/2019 0

Back on the Chain Gang

I recently pulled my resume from the ‘Do Not Disturb’ pile where it has been collecting dust for some eight years or so. Reading through it I see how it must have been a nightmare for any perspective employer who had received it in the mail – good old snail mail – or later on…

By BuddyCushman 12/18/2018 8

Number 9, Number 9

There’s a story here, one of mine, if you’ll hang with me for a moment or two. I’ve talked off and one about the “10 Ideas”, written first thing every morning because, well, ya can, and one of those ideas for me being to read 50 books within a year. I described in some detail…

By BuddyCushman 12/14/2018 9

Here’s a Day – Irvine

Repetition breeds familiarity, and familiarity breeds, what? – Comfort? In other words, is there comfort in a butt-and-back-worn seat on a Greyhound Bus? Like the one I’d taken from Boston to San Fran. Just tell the story. Now a month on my friend Bob’s couch, and having struck out in my lofty job search for…

By BuddyCushman 12/04/2018 6

The Other 364

We have flannel sheets, Susan and I, on the bed. Soft chocolate brown. I think they cost twenty-five or thirty bucks a year ago, maybe it was two. But, here’s the thing. I crawl into bed at night, it’s cold, I’m always cold now that I lost all this weight, and the sheets are already…

By BuddyCushman 11/22/2018 6

My Taurus

I walked onto the lot of Bonnell Ford in Winchester, Massachusetts one warm afternoon in May of 2003. I was with a woman named Mary, with whom I was living at the time up in Lowell in her house. My 1996 fire-engine-red Ford Taurus was near death. I needed another car, and I was clear…

By BuddyCushman 11/14/2018 4

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