This is a confidential picture of a beehive. As merely a simulacrum of synchronicity, it doesn’t contain the scope or significance. It’s going to take more than a passing glance to pierce this vision.
I’m on an Amtrak train, shielding my face from the conductor. A pressed gray suit, Havana Gold Carrera sunglass, no one can see through my incognito iciness. I am heading to the city, smuggling this image to you. If I make it, if I find you, if you see it — you will understand.
Every half hour, I have to set the bees free in the locomotive bathroom. They can’t stand being trapped in the paper. I casually lurch down the aisle as if I were a normal person, slide the door shut and they swarm. The buzzing leaves my skull, a flock of dark thoughts drains down into the blue toilet water. I flush and laugh with the bees.
The bees fly back inside the page. I have to make it to you. I know you’ll understand. These bees are so far beyond my scratchy voice, the infinitely flawed persona I’ve assumed. Even stationary, they continue to waggle and dance.
I return to my seat and make sure no one’s on to me. I use the shiny edge of a switchblade as a mirror to secure the perimeter. The metal catches sunlight and flashes, light moving across the carriage ceiling, alive, the spirit of a single fearless drone, out in the world alone.
Good morning, wine. I fell asleep after my first glass while you patiently waited on the bedside table. You are purple and perfectly still. Sparkling softly and here to greet me with the sun.
I probably knew that I wouldn’t drink you. But there’s some kind of strange comfort in knowing that you would be there if needed. A friend indeed! If I had been parched in the middle of night or if the ceiling had collapsed and I were trapped, you would’ve been right by my side to quench my soul.
I cannot recall the flavor of the first glass and this could be the wrong kind of conversation to have in front of a fresh glass of wine. Like lovers, we may want to be measured on the merits of our singularity. I’ll tell you this, wine — that wine never waited for me through the night. Whatever cheap thrills I had with the first cup, it does not come close to the deep bond we’ve cultivated in this gray and tranquil bedroom.
I remember your label. “A resonating quiver, filled with arrows of pomegranate and oak intent upon assassinating your tongue. Notes of joy, notes of victorian languor and sorrow. An impetuous blend of naughty varietals, paired best with costly, local cheeses and fruits from foreign mountains.”
Your label doesn’t define you, these words cannot capture you. It is our true kinship that gives us both meaning. We were there for each other, we lived together from midnight to dawn, naked and trusting.
I will drink you, wine. Despite the prim conventions of the ante meridiem crowd, I will drink you in from your face down to your legs. A lusty celebration of our lives on this very morning. Sing to me, Whitney. Sing to me, morning wine.
Fall is the reason we first found each other. After our summer of freedom, we grew cold. You glowed in your sweater, a history professor without a curriculum. Accordingly, I wanted all your knowledge and at least half of your warmth.
Do the trees shed their leaves for us so that we can get a better grasp of the dwindling sun? The light comes down at a lower angle every day, upon gilded cheekbones that barely tolerate me. I promise that I won’t take anything for granted like I did when we were drinking cold red wine and swimming in the Esopus. In the lush valley of rushing water, where we could retreat and still be victorious.
If I were unselfconscious and unafraid of sarcasm, I would say that the fall is supposed to bring us all closer. A cheap excuse, a platonic pick-up line to get to the truth.
My heart is a shitty map. A badly folded collection of dimming fields and faces. New Hampshire, Philadelphia, Florida, home. I dwell in a diminutive brick fortress, caffeinated and pacing the scullery. From parapets, I type to the window panes, the rain soaked streets below marionette power lines. I sing to your satellite dish sweater and all that it contains, all your similar guts and strange brains.
In the beginning, there was just me and a badly-tuned twelve string guitar.
Deer Apartments was my first full-length album. It took about three years of stumbling through the concrete Philadelphia forests to complete. I was going to make one album and move on with my life. That didn’t happen.
Josh Kramer was the engineer and the king of patience. He was also my first true bandmate. We haven’t spoken in over fifteen years. He loved strong coffee and jazz cigarettes. Josh was a good egg.
Jim Hostetter joined us in mid-recording. I’d spotted a cello coffin case while moving his furniture. Between professorial ambitions and my rock n’ roll fritters, I was the world’s greatest/skinniest furniture mover.
A fascination with The Beatles, Jeff Lynne and Shostakovich drove me to throw caution to the wolves, and I asked him to record with us. Jim didn’t have the best technique. He was often angry at his instrument (and the rest of the world). But he wrote amazing parts and, over pyramids of beer, showed me the magic of Guided By Voices and Steely Dan. Jim was the first musician I sincerely respected. And strangely, he believed in me.
(That belief was my fuel. For the first time — and beyond any other familial or intimate relationship — I understood the true, mutual responsibility that human beings share with one another. Even though my name was on the cover, we had one dream.)
There are lumps and chunks of this album that will never make sense — lyrically, structurally. The tinny production, the yodeling. There are a few emotional turns that fill my cheeks with the bright red of an autumn sugar maple leaf. Yet Deer Apartments set me free from my chronic listlessness, altering the heading and propelling me forward.
Heck, everybody’s got to start somewhere. Right here, this is where I began. Twenty years ago. Whoa.
Download Deer Apartments here.
It’s been a backwards countdown since the first day of fall.
Numbers drop past windows. Divers, with daylight and cold caught in the equation.
I loved your summer calves. Small balls of muscle wrapped under tight bronze skin. They pushed you up Panther Mountain and I remained focus on the left-right throb until the rolling green world unlocked at the top.
Is there an easier way to think? A trick, a flip of the switch so that we finally see the corresponding glow of our cheap skeleton costumes. A magnetically resonating image of nearly exact bodies simultaneously doing nearly the exact same thing. Hiking up to ledges and freezing time.
I don’t know what’s possible. Along with worshipping your golden calves, I’m a diver and I look for trouble in glowworm caves, bus stops, dive bars and brambles. I like the feeling of the fall. I like knowing we might lose it all, pushing against reason until reason becomes unreasonable, til the crease between your eyes becomes a canyon and we can’t control our majestic, snorting laughter.
Two divers in the corner of a dirty pub always trying to climb a mountain.
Asleep by the ocean until the punk tide stipples my tennis shoes.
I wander the golf course at night, where sand-trapped teenagers shoot off fireworks. Red and white bursts, crackling, a smoky yellow glow surrounding the stark cutouts of trees.
I drink three cans of Alpine and stretch out on the soft, green grass. Then the blessed stars, the profound depth and intensity of astral light against pure blackness. I’m assuredly unworthy; the brilliance of the world is beyond my feckless existence. Yet, I snuck backstage and somehow showed up inside it all. Connected and completely alone.
Pardon me, but did we silently decide that we don’t have souls? At this intersection of interpretation and scientific understanding, I choose mutiny. I choose to rebel. And I will play with matches, crack wise and mythologize the sea and stars until my face turns royal blue and the cows come marching home from war once more.
My uncle is struck by a golf ball and explodes mid flight. We weave the scattered plumage in the bearded lichen of his favorite tree.
At the funeral service, our slick blue-black feathers shimmer between the jack pine tree needles and wild apples. We share stale bread and summer bugs. Inside my beak, I feel the sentience transform into sustenance.
I peck these words while wind and tide impel the sea up the shore. We perch beneath a pale daylight moon together. Lunch is a rotten fish. Holiday tinsel for the nest.
Now is now. Our plans aren’t plans; they are codes of bark plate written into our hides. There are no stories. Everything happens because it happens. Isochronal and immovable, the laughter of a dying leaf.
Flying, a thrill so singularly real there’s no fitting translation. Muscle, follicle, shaft, feather. Sailing through air, above glittering waves, above the film in true time. Below daubs of gray clouds filter sunlight onto our orchard, the khaki-colored grass and maple leaves dipped into the first reds of fall.
We can’t control anything yet we somehow retain the impulse to survive and the ability to love. The last peck is a period.
I want to show you everything. The sea turtle patterns engraved on my crabgrass lawn, the spitting image of Willie Nelson in the window dust, the beckoning curve of the bannister lips. The way it is when I’m alone and president. In black and white, I try to reason with the blooming clouds who respond with downright indifference. A surging, speckled green world beneath the surface. Churning below a rainy August afternoon.
I want you to see that I know that I never got it right. I keep being pulled by the tide and wondering how to stay alive. It is all that I am. A buoy, a pencil, a catalyst, a spleen. Not a tool unto itself, but a tool that requires another tool to operate. I swerve across the wood without a steady hand to guide me. While you risk your shirt in a sea of my potential pointlessness, a casino in our washed-up Atlantis.
I want to show you everything. Do you want to see it? Not as a photograph or a story, but as it is. Bristle-faced on the crumbling front steps of my house, arms folded, frowning at the poorly parked cars. (After that, we could go through the milkweed forest that feeds the monarch butterflies. Or pretend we’re disgruntled giants, stomping o’er the postage stamp yard. Or bicker with overbold marigolds, shadowing the bottom of the screen as we watch Ingrid Bergman under the pines. Up on the roof, we will wait for the storming sky net to clear and the Perseids to braid flashing light overhead.)
It could be obsolete and may have no value for anyone, from here until the end of times. As if the meaning of life were a nuisance in pursuit of being swallowed by the electric sea. But if you’re asking out there, if you’re knocking against glass and wondering about the tool at the other end of these words — I want to see it all, too.
We used to speak to each other. Whispers, only for ourselves.
I could spin silk out of the base of my spine back then. You said it was disgusting and beautiful.
We would hang from the ceiling, ecstatic, scared, weightless. Watching the night slip by, sharing our small sounds. Murmurs, the susurrus of sheets, snorts in our spun sugar hammock. A chorus strung together with muscle, tuned to lungs and heart.
This was how people were once friends, this is how we fell in love. Sticky, suspended. No one else needed to know, nothing else mattered. We built chrysalis cities for ourselves that would soon disappear, dismantled by dawn. This face was only for you. Below us, screwed up quilts rippled, tail lights flared through windows, sideways satellites, the low setting of an AC window unit humming a solid E major, ephemeral and forever.
As if summoning an ancient, unwritten language, I try to pull it all back into the present. I cling to the taste of chocolate and sweat. My eyes are closed, I’m ready to be anything but I feel like nothing. Ice cracks in a glass of seltzer beside the bed, settling down into a slow fizz. It’s 2:30am and I’ve totally forgotten how to sleep.
“Love in an Elevator” whistles through sunburnt reeds. Clouds and spanish moss swim along as I descend. I’ve been falling slowly like Alice Liddel.
I pass trees clinging to broken rocks with desperate roots. Red-tailed hawks cast cold looks from prehistoric bookshelf cliffs. Cupcakes, champagne bottles and blue jeans hang along the edges, the rubble of an extinct inflight party, the afterthoughts of the aftermath, of all the fun that fell before me.
I’m traveling the same speed as a lazy splash, I see my expressionless face, fish-eyed in the watery curve. I often feel blank falling through the times but I have not given up.
Eager for the ending, blunt kitchen knives and ball point pens divebomb past my ears. Impatient magazines mimic seagulls, flapping and swooping below. The chaos around me shifts into a dead sea lull, discarded cotton balls and pigeon feathers giggle and swirl, yet I calmly maintain the same speed. As long as the gentle, pulsing thrills continue to accumulate, the soul has enough fuel to reach the ultimate goal.
I am down with this course and the universal coordinates. Gravity, reality, the span of a life, the spin of a sycamore seed. In order to wholly hear the music play, the needle has to drop. (I often feel blank falling through the times but I have not given up.)
When I was four years old I grabbed the metal handle of an ungrounded chest freezer and had a fleeting encounter with the unchecked electrical current. We were swimming and I’d gone to the garage to load up with popsicles for the rest of my family, a soaked conductor in blue trunks. My hand’s muscles involuntarily contracted and I was stuck, convulsing, until my mother and sister pulled me off.
I only recall patches of my previous life but I distinctly remember the scene, looking through the garage doors, the jittery version of the dirt driveway and fields surrounding our house. Sugar maple trees billowed on the hillside, while I floated with the leaves and screamed. There is a calm that comes with intense pain.
Electricity continues to find me, snapping at me as I cross carpets, standing my hair on end for fun in the kitchen, the nine-volt battery taste test. My life in music has been punctuated with hot SM58 microphones, stinging my mouth as it helps to complete the circuit. Every few years I re-experience the full-on connection through loose wires, car batteries, frayed cables, the motionless parade of ungrounded appliances.
The current is an outpouring from the other side. Rushing to speak, flooding me with memories, certifiably anxious for us to be together. A power-driven spirit-friend that will not shut up, the desire to overtake the totality of my attention.
At night when I’m alone, I carefully flip the switch on my bedside horse lamp, hoping none of the wires have come undone. The light keeps my constant insomnia company. Controlled and easy, we share dull stories until it’s finally time to slip off into the darkness. We laugh from exhaustion, muttering about our dwindling powers, magnificently honest as we withdraw from modern consciousness.
The first songs appeared out of quiet teenage squalls on the coast of Newport, Rhode Island. I had run away from home to live with my girlfriend and her parents. Her mother hated me and my asymmetrical haircut. I was washing dishes at a rundown resort near First Beach. I became a master of the Hobart machine. The servers fed me beer and cigarettes as our whirlwind shifts would slow, grinding down to an inebriated, humid ending. I was disappointed by my inability to get addicted to cigarettes. They made me feel sick to my stomach, dizzy, full of dread. I couldn’t hold a Camel Light comfortably, it looked wrong in my fingers, diffident and drooping in my mouth. Even after practicing in the mirror, I never got it right. An undiscovered moviestar without any gravitas, empty of even make-believe emptiness. At weddings and around European wanderers, I have temporarily tried to renew the habit that never was. I puff, cough, spit. I realize the most real facts about myself as I recall the alleys where I made the least sense: I remain the worst cigarette smoker in the world.