John Prine, you wrote my life

Years ago, I had a themeless website where I collected and recorded things that interested me.  I don't know what became of most of the stuff, but one thing I managed to save was a series of posts I wrote that I titled: "John Prine, You Wrote My Life."

In honor of John and in hopes that he recovers fully from covid-19 and is released from the hospital soon, I'm going to post here one chapter a day from that writing, along with a YouTube clip of John singing the song that inspired it (as long as a YouTube clip exists of it).

I have no doubt John's songs have written millions of folks' experiences.  These are mine.

John Prine, You Wrote My Life

a life unstuck in time (to borrow a phrase from Kurt Vonnegut, Jr),

so this story can go on and on in dis-order, added to at any time the whim (or need) arises

Chapter 1

The Great Compromise©

---Diamond in the Rough

I used to sleep at the foot of Old Glory
And awake in the dawn's early light
But much to my surprise
When I opened my eyes
I was a victim of the great compromise

"Sometimes - lots of times," I said to him, "I have this bizarre sensation that my life isn't real - that somebody's got a camera rolling. Like I live in a Marx Brothers movie."

"I have that same feeling!"

Jim was a plaintiff's attorney I worked for in San Francisco in the late 70's. I could feel something not quite kosher about his partners, and it felt like he didn't see it at all. He trusted and probably even loved them. On the surface, they made gestures and talked as though they felt the same about him, but my intuition told me otherwise. I didn't trust it. I always thought I must be imagining things because other people didn't see what I saw.

I quit that job, like many others for lawyers in S.F. I don't recall why in particular, but I think it was because there was something nagging at me about the undercurrent there. Something made me tell Jim when I left that I thought he ought to watch his back, but I didn't have anything to validate the feeling. He wished me well, and I left.

A couple years later, Jim's wife slashed her wrists in her bathtub. Their 5-year-old daughter found her. Jim was drinking heavily, and he dropped by my apartment one day for a chat.

"I flew to L.A. last week. I got stuck there at the airport trying to come home. They kicked me off the plane."

"What? I never heard of that," I said.  "Why?"

"They said I was too drunk to fly. I know I'd had a couple of drinks, but I didn't think I was being a nuisance or anything. I was just sitting quietly in my seat in the back of the plane, and the stewardess came back and said, 'I'm sorry sir, but we're going to have to ask you to leave the plane.' When I asked why, she said, 'Because you're too drunk to fly', and I said, 'I know, but I'm only riding.' They still made me get off.

"By the way, you were right about my partners. They kicked me out and took all my business."

At the time, it didn't make me trust my intuition. I just happened to be right - a coincidence, as I saw things back then. I was depressed most of the time - in fact, that's probably really why I quit. Cliff P, one of those partners, had suggested my problem was simply that I needed to smoke pot and lighten up. Jim had been good to me, though. I was sorry I couldn't help him and had run away instead. I always ran away when someone seemed to need me emotionally. I couldn't bear it for some reason. I had much too great an emotional need myself. I ran like hell. And I pursued my own emotional needs with singular purpose.

A number of years later, on a visit back to S.F., I stopped in to the then very successful law business and spoke to the senior partner who said, "Jim's back in town. I think he's dried out again. He really is an incredible person. About every 8 years he completely destroys himself and then rises from the ashes."

Jim died a couple years ago. Brain cancer. I was trying to find him about a year too late. One thing I always remember about that job with him was being insulted by one of the junior partners regarding my accent. I didn't always notice I had one, but Jim told me that when he went to live in San Francisco from his origins in Indiana, the first thing he did was to practice losing his accent. He said he knew that he'd have to get rid of it in order to be successful on the West Coast (the Left Coast, my friend calls it). In the end, I guess it didn't matter how he sounded - they screwed him just the same.