My driveway is two parallel concrete slabs. Since I sold my chevy, the slabs are empty. They run naked along the side of the house, an equal sign for passing airplanes and aliens.
I wonder why I attribute feelings to stone and structure. The face on my humidifier, the soothing mind of a white noise machine, the acute loneliness of an unridden bicycle. When I type with too much force, I lean in close to the letters and whisper, “I’m sorry, babies.”
I’ve asked all my free-wheeling friends to fill the hollow space as much as possible. But our neverending winter and the gangs of roaming snow plows have built a wall of ice between the slabs and the street. Strangers see a slick opportunity to park in front of my unguarded spot while I snooze in a rocking chair robe, a dozing baseball bat athwart my lap.
My driveway is a principle, a way of life. Not of a lost van, but of quiescent friendship, budding, unrealized new love, revving hot over the ancient flying saucer signals — I still have moves. Someday, I swear I’ll be flying off the concrete in a cherry-red Camaro. Or maybe just a lousy Audi with a broken odometer and an endearingly bad paint job. Waxing and waning in the summer sun, the spigot clearing the suds away, the space must remain open!
In order to rely less on my imagination to account for my surroundings, I measured the slabs. 23 feet 10 inches long, 13 inches wide, crossing growing cracks, the muddy valley in between. I took count in the dark with bare feet through remnants of snow over mostly frozen ground. Crazy as it seems, I am pure liquid optimism against the doubt. It is a new beginning, a birth in a smoky taxicab. You should know this, I had doubts even before I was conceived. I remember my tail. I remember swimming like greased lightning because I didn’t want anyone to see. I thought I could make it move so fast that I might be able to both exist and disappear. (Guess what? It worked!)
Imperceptible smoke signals float from my ears and I am caught against the collar of your winter coat. I smell lavender and sweat, aged water trapped in a green poly blend.
We initially embraced in the way that embraces begin. Two faint smiles meet, limbs lifting in reaction to opposite lifting limbs, reaching for passage past and through the underarm arch, all the way to the back plains, to the spinal ravine that splits us the same.
I’m not frightened of hugging. This isn’t an indictment of the act, this isn’t a rebuke of you. But I don’t understand the universal acceptance of pressing our bodies up against each other to say hello. I prefer saying hello. I prefer saving the good stuff for the right ones in the steamy radiance of spring, the dismal fog of autumn. At airports, on Thanksgiving. The Last Call Hug after we’ve barely finished a beer yet spoke all night. Before we both go home alone, one last innocent bunt up the first-base line — we’re out.
Seconds feel like hours, the hug marches on. Panic builds into frenzied daydreams of escape, of being the last person alive and running through a wide-open field of late summer grass. And then, exhausted, acquiescence down to the delirious knotted kingdom of roots and bugs.
Animals hug. Elephants do so to console each other in times of distress, touching faces, touching trunks. Yet I am increasingly distressed by a conscripted act that’s supposed to feel good.
One hug will not destroy us. But sometimes it feels like every ounce is weighing me down, squeezing me dry, not only trying to destroy me, trying to destroy our souls alike — a heist, a corruption of the grandest proportions in the most miniature of actions.
I don’t care if anyone reads my smoke signals. If you are here, I won’t know it. If you like this, I won’t know it. If you think I’m a bilious, grandiloquent fuckface, I won’t know it.
It only matters if it matters.
When the hug is over, I realize I was wrong. Not always, but often enough and especially this time — as we depart, your soft face shows me that you more-than-sarcastically care, an indisputable museum smile in the afternoon, infinite hope, turning and gone. Next time, let’s just kiss.
I can crack the code. I know I can.
At night, I moonlight as an unremarkable movie star in my mind.
The lock is stuck, time is running out. A close-up on the forehead sweat, a digital red countdown shot askance.
In the corporeality of the following scene — unashamed, curtains wide — I practice a flying back kick in my living room. The kick disrupts the still-life of a wine mug and diluted fake blood pours across the oak floor. If my time-sequence training continues, there will certainly be further wreckage.
Acoustic guitars maintain their various oblique reposes, slackjawed, longing for a better life wandering the late muggy nights in Nashville.
I can crack the code. I know I can. But as an actor, I’ve lost my motivation. The mirror of memory, the mirror of modernity. A window, a lamp, shattered, sorrowful victims of my clumsiness and duck calls.
Love has to surpass the script. It has to be more than a million-dollar crane shot over an unfulfilled fade out.
Disintegration, so loud it feels like Robert Smith has connected the oxygen supply to my stereo.
(We apparently need volume to breathe.)
The wind is alive. It has to be. You can see it in the sideways rain and supernatural trash.
There’s a frazzled pine tree across the street, a friend of the wind that’s desperately trying to get through to me.
I don’t speak tree. And there’s fear in the misunderstanding. Maybe the pine can see over the colonial steeples, a fire at the cigarette-stained Super 8 across town. Maybe the roots are sensing a shift in tectonic plates, the tsunamis off the Hudson! Perhaps it knows of an impending humanity-ending, brain-eating parasite. Or it could be that the tree is telling me I’ve got it all wrong with my hobo songs.
Whatever it’s saying, I can’t look away. I may only be an extra, but I take my part seriously and stare straight into the arms of the tree, straight through to the film.
“Someone to whom I recently showed my glass beehive, with its movement like the main gear wheel of a clock…Someone who saw the constant agitation of the honeycomb, the mysterious maddened commotion of the nurse bees over the nests, the teeming bridges and stairways of wax, the invading spirals of the queen, the endlessly varied and repetitive labors of the swarm, the relentless yet ineffectual toil, the fevered comings and goings, the call to sleep always ignored, undermining the next day’s work, the final repose of death far from a place that tolerates neither sickness nor tombs…Someone who observed these things after the initial astonishment had passed, quickly looked away with an expression of indescribable sadness and horror.” Fernando from The Spirit of the Beehive
From a dimly lit room in Kingston, New York, I humbly say don’t look away. Even if it’s all pointless, our existence is some seriously magnificent pointlessness to behold.
Sure, the days keep squaring off through ordinary cycles, the size of my popsicle-stick words framed against a torrential cosmos, pacing the tight perimeter of a brick home exactly three miles west of Kingston Point.
I was a fool to believe the promise of February’s drunken warm breeze. Winter doesn’t relinquish in a day. But under the bark, I know we all know it — there is a buzz. Spring is resolute in its eventual return.
(Cue hobo songs.)
I was a fool to believe the promise of February’s drunken warm breeze. Winter doesn’t relinquish in a day.
It’s a mess out there. Snow, slush, rain, ceaseless. The streets are full of potholes, deep wounds from scraping steel plow blades, testing the suspension and attention of vehicular wayfarers.
In a car, there’s a jab to the spine. On a bicycle, an unmentionable jolt. But in both stories the world momentarily falls away. Surprise, frustration and wonder at the sudden hollow space, a microscopic cliffhanger and the powerful machines that could so easily chew up the pavement and turn it into sweet emptiness.
A similar blank page is what I frequently seek. It is a struggle to establish clarity in the present moment, to willingly/unwillingly fall into an instant of nothing. To hold a new, unmarketable thought and the follow the thread until it is understood. Or until it is masterfully misunderstood. Conversation, dreams, sex, songwriting — discovery, from start to finish.
“I read the news today, oh boy
Four thousand holes in Blackburn, Lancashire
And though the holes were rather small
They had to count them all
Now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert Hall
I’d love to turn you on.”
An alveolate connection is as visible now as it was when I was thirteen. Not only the size of the emptiness, but also the struggle to quantify that emptiness and give it life through music. The eternity of being turned on by the mind of another human being.
The whine of a single-engine airplane. A baritone kazoo, a full-throttle concert B, punctuated with insistent, barking crow calls.
Then silence. Car-less, voice-less, bird-less, bug-less, wind-less silence.
Nonetheless, this silence still sustains an ambient high hum, somewhere between a soft, sizzling rub and an unseen breeze, blending with the tinnitus, a lifetime devoted to amplification.
I see the murky reflection first, wide-winged and drifting out over the glassy water — a bald eagle briefly soars at the edge of my eyesight, instantaneously disappearing into the blur of leafless, brown trees.
This is the show I came to see. Barely perceptible and electronically unquantifiable. I lean back and smell eager grass ready to grow under last fall’s dead leaves.
An Empire Service Amtrak train cuts a straight, low line across the horizon. The purple and blue Catskills hold the background — they invariably carry the scene in these parts. They are so damn patient and cool. (Yes, I am jealous of the control that inanimate objects contain. A consciousness always searching for a cure.)
I was walking through the woods in the rain today, where the green lichen was brighter than the gray sky above. Upon a soft sponge ground that has had enough of the melting snow.
It’s an exposed wire-frame representation of pure transition, the wait that encompasses most of our time. Sulking water, stuck between frozen and flowing.
Five juvenile turkeys surprised me in a bleak clearing by the water’s edge at Onteora Lake. We all slowed down to get a load of one another. These were some badass birds, sauntering, aloof. They held twigs in their beaks, pretending to smoke unfiltered Lucky Strikes, the steam rising up off the forest floor.
A change is gonna come. A faint pulse. Warm life, breathless in the wings.
This conversation may only be in my mind, so you don’t have to nod if you’re there. Still, I wouldn’t stop you or laugh at you for addressing the corresponding surface. Spontaneous, unselfconscious in your bathtub style. We all have our private coral colonies, our snores, our nonstarters. And if you were who you are when you’re alone, I would let go of my life in our split-second collision. I don’t care if you treat me like an object. We are involute gears on the same unwinding string, the functionality of our human bodies straining to translate an avalanche into truth. We don’t know one another, yet we still wait. A vague religion of innocence and hope. Sidewalk foreigners with identically mirrored movements, jumping over temporary ponds in temporary spring, the ice floes under our legs. Suddenly the same and still ourselves. The humble honor of celebrating an abstract series of planetary conditions in temporary spring.
Within a fake elevator, I ride high into the sky, shooting up past the edge of the Catskills, over the sill of Slide Mountain. This could be how a heavy rocket feels, how it all looks so small, assembled with blue and green frosting.
Breathe, beast, breathe. It’s not bad to be sat inside a box suspended in the heavens. It is more than any thermionic map could ever imagine. Real eyes touching real space. The curl of the Hudson as it fades into haze, a distant hint of those New York castles, the concrete canyons where yearning bursts under siren and strobe.
Sometimes, I want to put my finger back in that electric socket. I can already taste the metal, I can guzzle the trouble. The intentional sleeplessness, the metropolitan swells and buckling steel — a superfluous circulatory system, a limbic orchestra composed of headlights, tail lights, enlightened, inebriated chaos.
Coming down, back down on northern earth, I tap the keg and control the foam. I play Led Zeppelin 3, challenging anyone to wrestle over flipping the cassette to Cream, even though everyone here could probably kick my ass. This life and this mind were the ones I chose. I’m good with that, I’m good with whatever gold these space gloves can dig up. Even if I only get twigs and bones and decaying leaves upon cold cheeks.
Anyway, who wants to party?
(Crawling with the stars on a stone wall stretch. Synchronized silhouettes of empty beer cans appear in passing high beams, foreshadowing along dirt road shoulders. I think I can hear laughter in the stables. Soft, blue radiation behind the gentle, irregular shapes. Half asleep, antecedent to the sun.)
I’m searching under the sofa for my favorite pen. It’s silver with blue ink. The tip is slightly bent but words run smooth when they’re willing. A silver Avant Pro.
Spread-eagle and wriggling through tufts of fuzz and runaway pepitas, I pull myself down into the subterranean realm.
Right here, someone sits down above me. The cushions press, pushing couch ribs against my human ribs. Trapped, panicked, followed by a brief cave nap.
Stuck in a lazy crevasse, I take stock of my supplies. There is a half-drunk can of seltzer, once rolling, now standing still from heavy thumb depressions. A Milan Kundera book hiding out, waiting for the tides of cultural relevance to swing back to a bearable focus. A freak ten ninety-nine reminding me that I have to change every gear once I get myself upright. (No more seltzer, no more novels. Just a crisp green visor and real talk from here on out.)
My fingers inch across thighs, searching cloth cavities and finding only receipts, sticks of gum.
Beneath the breast pocket is my flattened breast. No nutritional value, nothing to gnaw upon.
Finally, I get a single index finger inside the small secondary pocket of my jeans. There is one key — a novelty key that unlocks nothing in my immediate incarnation. Yet I keep it nearby, just in case there’s a sudden, unexpected rusty lock.
Because for all my doubts, darknesses and hobo eccentricities, I still carry a metaphysical bindle of magical hope. Princesses are real. Jerk.
I think I can hear laughter in the stables. I’m hoping it’s mine.
Begin communication. Pause, question everything. Stop. Erase.
Begin communication. Cough, disingenuously. Stop. Erase.
Begin communication. I am the same as you and completely different.
The similitude, the tom-tom heart under a bellows of rib and muscle and hope, a cape of derma, to protect, to feel, our parallel fingernails running up and down blue jean threads, the desire for more, the desire for love, our eventual shared paradise of oblivion. All upon a singular class M planet in the middle of an unfathomable cosmos.
And we are different. We laugh and grumble at different parts of The Graduate, disagree on which Paul Simon album reigns supreme. We are tempestuous magicians with our moods, wine glass adversaries, conversational expats. You don’t love pickles the way I love pickles.
My love of pickles makes you doubt me — you see it as a fashionable fondness, to set myself apart from the swarming self-editorializing masses. Like a bad ponytail, a dramatic insistence upon fixed-gear bikes. The high-fidelity facists.
Your doubt is a crust of snow, materialized in the middle of night, bringing stinging winds, small tornados of white dust whirling behind passing cars. A bear, roaring hoary, unforgiving. Ice on my stoop crackles underfoot, and I sip coffee outside with my shoulders hunched as if to summon heat.
Reborn in the flick of lighter, a mid-afternoon fire might finally save us from the serpentine petty threads. If we could only survive this winter.
Jódete.
It is 5am — writing these words in my head as a future message to myself. (Don’t worry. There won’t be any space-time continuum shifts due to my temporal improvisations. It’s only a pantomime. One scruffy harlequin, fully adorned and annoyingly silent beneath the Bois de Boulogne pines.)
Eyes pinned closed as I stare down the under-lids. Like undulant green-black felt, a gentle distortion. Some seconds of red, a trace of white. It is the wall I build to contain myself every night. Redolent, calming.
Honestly, the felt curtain underneath my eyes isn’t calming. Actually, the cloth has been waving anxiously since the early, blue hits. New babysitter, first day of school, dentists, step-families, more step-families, scuba diving, stranger danger, poorly maintained public address systems on stages run by disenchanted sound engineers, video shoots, dates, loneliness, laugh-a-thon.
(I smile and mouth laugh-a-thon to myself because I actually mean it. To be honest, the worst curtains were lifted after the darkest knights — the quest itself is the destination, the struggle is sexy, the blindness is vision. Let’s risk again.)
Sleep will not take me! Over and over, I’m a shuffling horizontal explorer, slowly falling through dank space and time.
Eyes are open. There’s only the green light of the humidifier in my humming room. Viridescent moisture and a white noise machine to guide me in my slumberous capsule-castle.
Back to the Pink Floyd black light poster from high school, the glow-in-the-dark paint that made my personal universe come to life. Falling asleep, unselfconscious, laughing at how stupidly cool it all looked. As if a freakish blast of wind had ripped the house from the foundation — orphaned and fictionally brave beneath a world of my own creation. The brilliant stars and faces above me in that distant dank basement.
From 5am til 8am, I’m wide awake. I consider reading the splayed book on the sheets next to my cheek. I consider picking up the guitar. I consider the phone, mulling the screen-stutter of news, the social slide shows, the acquiescent fall of humanity heralded by electronic confetti. I replay all my worst moments, re-arguing cases of twisted personal principle with friends that don’t exist in reality. I ponder running these words up a muddy mid-winter hill, shouting and disheveled, finally allowing me to unwrap the unfolding mystery of my faithful insomnia. Shouty.