Menopause Man Excerpt

SamSara

A Novel by Mel Mathews

Samsara begins with a brief introduction by a Wise Old Man concerning the origins of this novel's original manuscript. Then, in the first section, In the Beginning, in diary form, the protagonist, Malcolm Clay, introduces the psychological and social heritage of which he is trying to escape. Next comes, Leaving the Nest, and... well, if drinking coffee with dirt farmers from twice filtered grounds and shagging parts for broken down cotton pickers and grain combines to sipping cappuccinos and eating brioches and budino d'risos for breakfast in the center of Firenze isn't leaving the nest, then what is? Then next scene, All Fools day, Plus a Few More. In this section, Malcolm leaves the heart of Florence and once again, ventures out into unknown territory, Southern France, all alone, without the help of the eighteen women psychologist to rescue him from the terror of his very own existence. After three days of growing closer to his daemon, as close as he cares to at this point in his journey, he sets off for Paris by train – where he hopes to catch a flight to Dublin and be rescued from his ‘condition' by a beautiful Irish lass whom he'd met five months earlier for an entire ten minutes in a coffee shop back in California. In the finale, To Be or Not to Be, Malcolm pursues the Irish woman, but the crafty lass flees and leads him on a chase, forcing Malcolm back upon himself, forcing him to look within, and away from, what for most of his life, he has attempted to satisfy ephemerally.

We never really leave home:
Just return from different directions.

Malcolm and I first met in a coffee shop in downtown Carmel just a few weeks after he turned thirty-six. Six months later, by chance, we bumped into each other again. He'd returned to the Peninsula for the weekend. A close friend of his had just died and he seemed quite shaken. He explained that he had been raised a Calvinist, had suffered from life's normal existential beatings and, at twenty-five years of age, had checked himself into a rehabilitation center for alcoholism. I mentioned the possibility that he might some day be able to accept that his life and what had happened to him was simply just the way it was. Malcolm's response to my suggestion was that he needed a new image of God and of Woman. He said that he had no idea what that meant; yet he knew it to be his truth.

We discussed a dream he'd had that day, and once a week from then on over the next few years, until just a few days before he left for Europe. The last correspondence I received was an e-mail message from Malcolm while he was still in Ireland. The letter said that it was time for him to get on with his life. After that, he never replied to any of my queries. A few months passed and I received a hand-written copy of this manuscript in the mail, along with a note of thanks. What precedes and follows this brief introduction is solely the work of one: Malcolm Clay.

Adam Sinclear
Monterey,California
December of 2001

In the Beginning...

December 21, 2000

It seems that I am dying; yet I have something to say. My greatest love affair has been with my neurotic victimhood. My grandest infidelity has been to myself. I write about me, and I write with many an 'I'. Any other way of expressing myself seems unauthentic. I can only tell you about me and what has happened to me in this life; at the same time, I reserve the right to be wrong or to lie to you, as well as to myself. The lies will be honest, as everything I'm about to report was seen through my eyes and experienced with the senses of my singular body, and that in itself will bring distortion to the reader. I'm distorted. Like every human being, I have experienced the physical as well as the psychological trauma of birth: being spit out of the womb - expelled from my personal Garden of Eden. I also carry a personal heritage, one that is divided between the ancestry of sperm and egg. In addition to my own genetic make-up, I also have a universal lineage, the collective heritage, in which everything that is unfathomable and mysterious is contained.

It is so hard to wait. I've been waiting for forty years to start living my life and something still has me shackled. Don't ask me what it is because, if I knew, I'd be out living my life instead of sitting here writing about it. I wouldn't be living in this little studio apartment, playing solitaire on my PowerBook until two every morning.

If I wasn't an alchy, I'd be drunk; if I wasn't drunk, I'd be high; if I wasn't high, I'd be bedded down with some sweet young thing who was twenty years my junior and saw me as God, and if not God, then at the very least, the father she never had, or the opposite image of the father as the object of her rebellion. But no, it seems that consciousness has a way of robbing a man of the illusions that once served him, that once led him to believe that he was really living life to its fullest. Now, having said that, I shall begin my lie:

I need a new lie, a noble lie, a lie that I can believe in. It's as if I've been robbed of all truth and have a desperate urge to once again believe in something: something so mysterious that it can actually entrance me.

Yahweh, the wrathful God of my youth, no longer sits enthroned in heaven. I have been robbed of this belief as well. Yahweh, too, has become an inner phenomenon, a part of my psyche, and I can no longer blame him for my victim's role in life, just as I can no longer blame and punish all women for the sins of my mother, grandmother, Eve, or Sophia.

It has taken forty years for me to learn that Yahweh rules from a throne within me and that I am actually my own judge, jury, and executioner. It has also taken forty years for me to realize that the mother of my youth, my physical mother, and all that I learned from her about woman and how a woman relates to a man is not the gospel truth. I've learned quite the contrary. It now seems that my inner image of mother, who for years I've been toting around in the recesses of my soul, is blasphemy. I'm not telling this to be rebelliously irreverent or to discredit and dishonor my physical mother's humanity; I'm writing this in reverence to myself. I'm writing this in an attempt to exorcize my demons, or most certainly to expose them in hope of developing a conscious relationship with these unseen deities.

I believe that my mother's image of man is distorted. I say this because of all she had to endure in the innocence of her youth: her parents fought like Zeus and Hera. I also believe my mother's image of man is distorted because of her Calvinist heritage. I believe that her whole view of man could quite possibly have been seen through the eyes of my Grandmother, who, undoubtedly mother-fucked my grandfather in the presence of her four daughters, pointing out every one of his human imperfections, and his inability to measure up to the dogma of her puritanical standards.

My grandmother, fearing Yahweh's wrath, has suffered dearly her entire life. At eighty-six years of age, she's still preaching damnation from an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent, punishing God who stands ready to deliver his just wrath upon the unjust. Now, if she's that way to her grandchildren, multiply it ten times to get the degree to which she drilled the dogma into the souls of her own children. Hell, at least the grandkids got an occasional peppermint Lifesaver on Sunday mornings while enduring the infectious splinters of those hard-ass wooden church pews.

So, my mother suffered that shit and then handed it down to her four boys. We were all baptized as infants. Mom's four boys were sprinkled with the droplets of the church's puritanical dogma, and we continued to have shit-heaps of belief, which were literally translated from ambiguous symbols, shoveled upon our developing innocence as we attended Sunday School and the same private Christian grade school that our mother attended in her youth.

I believe that my mother's image of God, and in turn Man, is skewed. Think about it: how could she spend her waking hours waiting for Yahweh, her heavenly father with whom she was constantly on guard against invoking His imminent wrath, without becoming a little disturbed. Then there was her earthly father who, in spite of his well intentioned piety and affiliation with the church as an elder and a consistory member, had one hell of a time staying sober, winning a bet, or keeping his poker in his pocket. And, Lord knows, that all the pissin' and moanin' my grandmother did over the injustices of my grandfather did nothing but add to my mother's confusion about Man.

It is my guess that deep down inside, my mother is deathly afraid of Man in spite of how she may present herself to the waking world. It seems she married my father as an unconscious compensation. My father is nothing like my grandfather, not that he won't have a pop or two now and then. He's just a very fine man who likes people and likes to help them out in any way he can. Dad's now retired after forty years of service. He started out in the District Attorney's office and worked his way up to Superior Court Judge. Everyone knows Dad like they knew my grandfather, but enough of that. Let's return to my mother and her relationship to my father.

You see, I'm just now coming to terms with the fact that for my entire life I've seen my father through my mother's eyes. My image of Man, and how woman relates to Man, has all been translated to me through her eyes. The poor guy could just never measure up. Believe me, she spent plenty of time mother-fucking him to us boys just like her mother did her father to her. She cut his fucking nuts off, and I must admit, as much as I love my mother, if I had been my father, I'd have divorced her ball-busting-ass years ago.

I recall the early years before she went to work. My father was the breadwinner and Mom took care of the house and us kids. She'd charge things and then hide the bills. The creditors would end up calling my father at work. He'd come home at lunch, embarrassed and pissed off about the call, to find the bills stashed in the bottom of the stereo cabinet. My mother was sneaky. She still is, or at least my image of her is.

Mom turned eighteen only a few days before I was born. She was still a girl: a little princess who believed her husband would treat her like his daughter. She probably got away with that kind of shit with her daddy and was bound and determined to act out the same behavior with my father. It's hard to grow up; I know. For years, money was what they fought about, but after she had the first three boys, she went back to school and became a nurse. She got pregnant with the fourth child when my father accompanied her on a trip to the Bay Area to take the State Boards. Once licensed, Mom took the evening shifts, working just short of a week before having Angus, her fourth son. Within a month of delivering my youngest brother into this world, she was back working the same evening shift, leaving us four boys at home, motherless, and in the hands of an emasculated father; the same man she mother-fucked by day. Truth of the matter is, they both mother-fucked each other.

So I had a pissed off father and a mother who hid from her family by night. That's why, had I been my father, I'd have divorced her ball-busting-ass long ago. But, I guess, my father was too much in love with her or somehow still a needy little boy who could recycle his unfulfilled need for a positive mother-image and/or the missing feminine within his own soul. Then again, maybe not. Maybe I'm the only one who is doing this.

I don't know if this is true, but it appears to be something like this: I knew my paternal grandmother, but I never knew her well enough, nor did I have the conscious awareness while she was living, to analyze the heritage of my father's youth. My paternal grandparents were of Irish and American Indian descent, Cherokee Indian I've been told, and my grandmother was of very few words.

Mother couldn't leave an unfulfilled marriage because Yahweh's cloud of wrath was floating around in her heaven. Yet, it appeared that she could sneak around the Old Boy, by taking the evening shifts and using the nobility of her profession to excuse the abandonment of her husband and family. She cloaked all this behind a veil, justifying her flee from Egypt in the name of economically contributing to the family, much of it to pay the tuition of our puritan education. This is why I say she's a ball-buster, sneaky, and dishonest. Had she been honest, she'd have faced Yahweh and her marriage, or divorced my father in spite of hurting him; she'd have at least handed his balls back to him in the process.

Fuck! I'm getting pissed just thinking about all of this. They needed each other to carry on a tradition. It wasn't the injustice of just one; unconscious forces run them both, just as it still runs me, but it pisses me off just the same.

Then again, maybe I'm the only one who's fucked up. Maybe my parents' unconscious suffering has had its advantages. After all, they're still married and in good health, have four boys, three daughters in-law, and a half-dozen grandchildren. Hell, on top of all that, my eighty-six-year-old Reformed Dutch Calvinist grandmother is still preaching about and praying to you know whom. For the last forty years, she's been certain that she won't be around to celebrate Christmas with the family next year because the Lord will soon be taking her home to heaven.

So anyway, what I'm pissed about is that it seems I've inherited a distorted view of Man and Woman, and, in turn, a distorted view of myself. I have no idea in the world what it means to be a man, or how to relate to a woman, or how to simply be myself. I've been searching, at the very least, for the last fifteen years on a personal level, yet on a collective level it could well have been since the time of the reformation, or, better yet, since the day that Adam and Eve originated sin.

And I still say that it was all a set-up, and I'm not talking about Eve either. I'm talking about God. God needed the original sin so that He could be God, so that He could be Yahweh and shed His everlasting wrathful love over all His creation. Yeah, I know, I'll probably be struck down with some catastrophic disease for this heretical blasphemy, but what the fuck, I'm dying just the same.

December 23, 2000

It's Kelli's birthday today. I met her last September in a coffee shop in Carmel. She'd just given up her place in Big Sur and had plans of moving to Spain. A friend ran across her e-mail address a few weeks ago and forwarded it to me. We've been communing ever since. She's having a hard time finding a place in Spain, so she's in Ireland, staying with her mother in Dublin. She's beautiful: a blue-eyed blonde goddess teeming with magic. I sent her an e-mail to wish her happy birthday and to complain about not knowing what to do with my life.

December 24, 2000 - Mid Morning

Heard back from Kelli, thanking me for the happy birthday. She had a question for me: "Okay, if anything was possible, and money no object, what would you do with the rest of your life?"

My reply: "Fall for a beautiful Irish woman, chase her to Spain, and make love to her eternally!"

December 24, 2000 - Midnight

Kelli's response to my bravado: "A gentleman with patience!"

December 26, 2000

I turned forty-years-old today. I'm ready for the land of milk and honey.

January 2, 2001

There were no emails to answer this evening. I haven't whacked off in three weeks or so, but I did get laid on my birthday: It was Mary, an old flame who needed a little action just as I did. I don't know what my problem is these days; the drive just isn't there, not like it once was anyway.

Instead of pursuing any kind of physical love affair with a woman, I'd rather be obsessed with a benign bump on my balls that the doctor has assured me is a harmless part of my anatomy, the epididymus, where the tubes enter the testes: That's my sex life. I have a sexual disorder. I have an obsessive-compulsive relationship with the terrain of my left testicle.

I gave Mrs. Shams, my landlord, a thirty-day notice today. It feels good. I'm moving out from under the constraints of her criticism, out of the patriarchal structure that still dominates her eighty-one-year-old mind, out of what she thinks is best for me. I'm moving on to what I feel is best for me. I'm going to follow myself while she continues to follow the masses. While she continues to doubt herself and quote others, I'm going to quote myself and doubt her. She told me that too much introspection is not good for me, and I told her that maybe it was just too scary for some people. You know what, fuck her, and fuck me, too!

Moving has actually been in the works for some time. Over the past few months, on my visits to family and friends in my hometown, I have slowly been putting things into my storage unit. I had tentatively planned to leave on the first of February; now it's official.

Sheila, a physically non-intimate young woman-friend of mine, as if I had any other kind of woman-friend these days, is going to take over the studio. She broke up with her boyfriend and is fighting with her roommate. When she found out that I considered moving, she asked me if she could have the studio. I didn't think that Mrs. Shams would go for it because the old broad always talks about how she wants a man around. The token man, I suppose, makes her feel safe. That's why the rent is so cheap. Well, cheap monetarily, but after living there for a year I began to realize the rent wasn't as cheap as it first appeared; I've been paying in other ways.

I had asked the old widow what she expected of me when I moved in, figuring there must be a catch to the cheap rent; her only response was that we weren't going to be chums. That lasted for a while, but then I must have grown on her or something, because she was trying her damnedest for my 'chumship.'

Before I knew it, I, a forty-year-old man, had to sneak out of my room like a grounded teenager. For some reason, she decided that I was a wayward soul in need of her divine guidance and the wisdom that old age has bequeathed her. For the last year she's really been getting under my skin, but I've had a hard time letting go of the 'cheap rent.' Then again, maybe it's her abuse that I'm so fond of? Anyway, I presented my leave as only temporary, so that Sheila could have a place to stay, that perhaps will turn into a permanent situation as time passes and Mrs. Shams grows fond of her. If they don't hit it off, I'll still have my foot in the door in case I return. The old broad went for the grand scheme, too.

January 12, 2001

Adam and I are in Sedona, Arizona attending a seminar on creativity. It has been in the works since last June. I was sitting in the bar at the hotel having a drink with Adam and Sophia. Sophia is one of the presenters at the conference. She's a charming southern woman with a heavy Alabaman accent. She's tall and slender, with long blonde hair, blue eyes, and a beautiful smile. My guess is that she's in her early sixties, simply a lovely woman. From out of nowhere, and I don't know if this was the scotch talking or if Adam was fucking with me, but the old boy really knocked me out of my saddle.

"You know, Sophia, Malcolm's really bad when it comes to women. I mean, he's rotten," Adam announced, and looked at me with a great big smile. "But I was worse," he added, in a proud-of-himself tone after a few moments of silence had hung in the air.

Sophia looked at me and with her southern drawl asked: "Is that right, Malcolm? Are you really bad?"

"Just a little," I answered, as I wrinkled my nose and held up my right hand, wiggling it in a so-so manner, an effort to wave off my sense of shame, not wanting to go any farther into the realm of confessing the exploits of my former life.

Who the hell did I think I was fooling? Sophia was the mother of three boys and two daughters, and on top of that... well, let's just say Sophia was wisdom incarnate. She was lecturing on The Sacred Prostitute, a book written by Nancy Qualls-Corbett. Sophia had me pegged ten years before my conception. She could sniff out a flighty Puer half a continent removed.

"I can tell you one thing though," I answered, after recovering from Adam's confession.

"What's that?" Sophia asked.

"I was having a hell of a lot more fun before I met Adam," I answered, and then we all broke into a belly laughing session.

It was the damn truth, too. I had had a hell of a lot more women wanting to work me over until this conscious making act took hold; it seems that my transformative experience has stripped the baited hook that once attracted a multitude of women, unconscious maybe, but women just the same.

I recall the days when I cared nothing for any woman's reaction to my promiscuity. If the truth was told, reveling in my wantonness probably got me laid a hell of a lot more than being one of those sensitive nice guys who could feel all of womankind's pain. My nice-guy honesty was a facade anyway, a facade that seemed to fail me more and more. I suppose that growing up demands a sacrifice, and it seems I am only now becoming aware of what exactly that sacrifice is.

For almost four years now I've been delving into my dreams with Adam, and it's had a profound impact on my life, on my whole existence. Adam is a shaman, a sage, disguised as an old man who plays tennis and wears one of those funny white hats even when he's not on the court. He's a coyote, I'm telling you, and it takes a real trickster to deal with someone like me. I've learned that not only do I dream at night, but also in my waking life as I invite the outer world to participate in the dramas that have constellated within my soul. In other words, the events that transpire and the relationships in which I engage are in a sense a movie that is produced within myself. The world is my screen, and I'm the projector.

Of the many things I have learned about myself, and the human condition in general, is that suffering is an inescapable part of life, at least if a greater consciousness is to be born, and for some reason I have chosen to cease blindly following various and sundry dogmas. Through this process, for better or worse, I'm learning to consult my inner self. By diving into the unconscious world of my dreams, waking and sleeping, I'm learning to commune with my higher, or better yet, larger self, that part of me who knows on a universal scale, the path or destiny of my true calling.

I've learned that the images of my dreams and the people whom I encounter, or dream up in my waking life, are all symbols of myself. In other words, I make people into who or what I need them to be. They are carriers of the human qualities or idiosyncrasies that I am unable to accept or recognize within myself. They are integral pieces of me that I have avoided at any cost, be it a perceived positive or negative aspect of my humanity. In my world, the events and the people in it who most annoy me are all my teachers. I'm learning that all I believed I knew is of little value, and that most, if not all, of my beliefs have robbed me of a grander existence.

Problem is I don't like what I'm learning; it's kicked the foundations out from under me. The other problem is that understanding all this doesn't make it any easier, especially when I'm caught up in some drama. It's only after time has passed; then I can look back with an objective view and have an idea of how I was shucking my shit off onto another.

It seems from what I was taught of the fairer sex in my youth, be it from my mother's lashings or her many other unconsciously dishonest ways of relating to my father and to the world around her, I now see Woman from a very distorted and skewed view. But, at forty years of age, blaming my physical mother, appealing as it sounds, would make it much easier to remain in an infantile state of helplessness, as opposed to accepting the fact that the mother who continues to haunt and rule me is an entity within.

Then there is the confusion of God and all that was bequeathed me through my Calvinist upbringing: Good old Yahweh, that wrathful God whose omniscient presence my maternal grandmother unrelentingly warned me of. The vindictive punishing God constantly watching, waiting for me to sway from the Church's puritanical doctrine, the canons of my grandmother, and that of my mother, which has for years been literally interpreted and handed down through the maternal side of my ancestral heritage. His presence looms eternal.

After forty years I am beginning to realize that Yahweh, too, is an archetypal energy within me and not a physical phenomena that looks down upon and rules the world from the throne of His celestial palace. It seems that I too possess these Yahweh aspects, judging and condemning the world and its inhabitants that don't fit into my distorted, self-righteous view of how things are supposed to be. The judge, jury, and executioner are all within me, and I have spent a good portion of my life unconsciously acting out my own wrath and other Yahweh characteristics onto others and myself. I have failed to understand that in condemning and rejecting another, I have also been condemning and rejecting myself.

Little did I know at the time that what was really going on behind all the unconscious acts of the pious do-gooders and better-than-thous of the church and clergy of my youth was a displaced energy fueled by fear. This blind following also allowed for not having to be responsible for the very lives that we had all been given. Living a pious life, according to someone else's rules, can only leave a man dead to his soul. It's impossible to have one's own religious or numinous experience when another's recipe is being followed.

Now I'm toying with the possibility that we are all vessels through which God can experience Him or Herself in different ways. As I wake to this phenomenon, I'm having a glimmer of my own God experience. To me, God is unconsciousness being made conscious through the manifestations of all creation. In other words, perhaps God needs humanity in order to experience Himself. He needs our eyes, our bodies, our feelings and experiences to know that He-She actually exists. God, without man, can only doubt His existence, yet, I, without God, have no purpose, no meaning, no reason, no need to exist.

January 16, 2001

We left Sedona yesterday. It was snowing, but the Expedition had four-wheel drive and all-terrain tires. About fifty miles west of Flagstaff the snow turned to rain. I drove all the way through the desert, over Tehachapi, and down into Bakersfield. Just north of Bakersfield, on Highway 99, we found ourselves behind a big truck. Adam had been sleeping, but he began to shift in his seat.

"What the hell's that?" he asked, a confused, sick look on his face.

"Dead cows," I answered, between my belly laughter.

"Dead cows?"

"Yeah, that's a tallow truck in front of us. They pick up the dead cows from the dairies around here and haul them to a rendering plant to make soap and stuff," I explained, as we passed the truck.

"Oh, yeah, I've heard of that, tallow," Adam answered, before he leaned back in his seat to fall asleep again.

Adam will be eighty-five on the fifth of February. He has a forty-seven-year-old wife and a nine-year-old daughter. He's one sharp cookie too, sharp enough to be onto my shit and love me through it all at the same time. Adam has packed several lifetimes into his eighty-five years of existence. Just being friends with him has changed me. He hardly ever suggests that I do anything, just listens to me and occasionally makes a subtle suggestion.

Adam knows what a rebellious little bastard I am. He knows that the only way to teach me is to let me learn myself, and that is exactly what he's been doing, providing a space big enough for me to learn in, only occasionally nudging me back to the center when I get to dancing on the periphery, in danger of falling off into the abyss. Delving into the unconscious is tricky business, and scary, too. He took me there and hung out with me until I could get comfortable out there alone. I guess you could say that Adam introduced me to myself, parts of me that I have been running away from for my entire life.

I drove another fifty miles or so and then decided to see about a room. Adam stayed in the Expedition while I ran in to negotiate. After haggling over the price, I registered and returned to park the Expedition and unload.

"What the hell is that?" Adam asked, as he stepped from the Ford.

"Cow shit," I answered, just before doubling over into another belly laughing session. The whole town reeked of it. "There're dairies all over the place around here. You're surrounded by real live shit factories," I giggled, tossing a few of our bags onto the ground.

"Good gosh, where the hell have you taken me?"

"For all we know, Adam, this might be heaven."

"Well, I'm ready to get the hell out of this heaven."

"We are, first thing in the morning."

[Back to Mel Mathew's Page] [Back to Malcolm Clay Site]