It is a silent film except for the crunching needle ice underfoot. Through the barren woods in jagged shadow and light, an amateur actor (playing the lumbering pioneer) struggles to lose track of a voltaic world.
Most puddles and ponds are fractured alabaster, embroidered with soil, rust-colored leaves, frosted twigs in mid-reach.
And yet, in the sunlight, a few bodies of water break from their frozen form. All glass. Where glimpses downward catch the face in full.
(Back in the mainframe, reflections are decidedly clearer than the objects they emulate, wayward visions that pretend to encompass and reveal more vitality than the real thing, through telephones that seldom sing.)
I throw rocks at my lazy twin. Maybe the splashes of my appearance will ring and intersect with the splashes of your appearance, the distortions forcing us to look up, to engage ginuwine skin, hair, mouth. Sure, another obfuscation of our multi-layered selves. But this one is close, as close as we’re going to get to that holy mountain of the mind.
An airplane above hides in the distance between light and sound. The engine howl echoes across the cold, under a descending sun. Liquid curls back into crystal crust. Meditative, shy winters.
The game is Sleeping Monsters! Stand in a sleeping bag, the head at the foot, blind, limbless. Cumbrously chase all shrieking participants, knocking over furniture, withstanding kidney punches, head butts, tickle torture, eventually falling, hyperventilating, sweaty and unable to move. Endless fun!
The game is World Championship Paddle Ball! Unearth any available paddle, any ball with even the saddest bounce, find a blank concrete wall in the basement. Only one hop is allowed between the wall and the paddle. After ten unbroken volleys, every hit is a point. The imaginary crowd goes wild! (Since this is the activity of a withdrawn, anxious child, internal punditry is the point. Each score is accompanied with interviews, slow-motion replays and the complete cinderella-story commentary.)
The game is Snakes! There are at least two participants. (No nervous, lonely kids for this one!) Each person holds up a hand in the shape of a cobra and takes turns striking the other player’s shoulder. The first one to lower their snake loses.
The game is Killer On The Loose! It’s basically Hide n’ Seek. But now with more murder! There are horrific threats and screams while the located victims are metaphorically slayed and resurrected as savage zombies. The last living person is the winner! (Or are they?)
The game is Beauty Model Dress Up! When I say go, run upstairs! Raid your parents’ closet! Find your mother’s most garish dress! Tear into the frock and stuff the front with toilet paper, socks, underwear, anything! (The champion will have the largest fake breasts and the most lipstick on their face. Very sexy.)
During a time-out, camera one cuts to camera two. The imaginary crowds have no idea why anyone would ever want to kill time, when time is all we have. They grow wilder as the ridiculousness grows more ridiculous, boundless as time becomes irrelevant to those actually living in it.
I’ll have you know, I once made sense to a barnful of goats. And toddlers often agree with me when I yawn. This isn’t a hippie preaching in the Price Chopper parking lot: Why do we persist in letting our collective consciousness, our rare and beautiful imaginations, be ruled by the arc of a dark algorithm? Because I’m sure that there was once a nervous, lonely goat that felt the same way as me.
Take me, sleep. Take me, visions. Take me to the place I’ll always be home, sliding in my cerebellum. To the last film of my life, the late showing in an empty theater soiled with popcorn debris. The ushers have left for the night, the projectionist is drunk, the sound is garbled. The flickering light of ordinary adventures, of trudging to the grocery, of dancing by the fireplace, and all the unselfconscious laughter following a surprise snowfall. Won’t it be grand?
At the Dream Olympics, triumphant upon the podium, a small circle of great friends saunter in their pajamas, loaded with fake shiny medals, stupidly grinning, holding a twelve-pack of stolen Milwaukee’s Best high overhead. Deep down, I’m unshakeable — we can still kick some unserious ass. I know it.
(My first peek at a real rock n’ roll band rider was from Modest Mouse. Some vegetable sense, some boozy excess. But the best line was the last line — four dozen black socks, Hanes or otherwise. We plagiarized that poetry for many years. Some nights, at some colleges and some over-blown private concert halls or high-class sportswear events — we got our socks.)
The ancient holidays come back clearly.
I was shorter and quieter back then. Small and nervous, a regular chimpanzee. I waited for my sisters to show me how to react: to make the giants feel better when they couldn’t get it right under the tree, to smile and remain unnoticed. My sisters told me that the easiest way to get by was to get out of the way — advice they always ignored.
My sisters. They are sitting on the circular stone table by the barn. They are laughing in the stables. They are dressing me up like Linda Ronstadt. They are howling to Paul Simon. They are hiding their hickies after defying victorian curfews. My sisters are driving away from the school parking lot, sipping Bud Light in the back seat, never looking back. My sisters smell like fire, perfume and cigarettes. My sisters are wildly confident and awaiting their escape — private school, college, bars, babies and the untethered life of an unforeseen rock n’ roll soul.
What we all eventually find out is that the ensuing adult tethers are so much more than our parents could ever enforce. Our freedom was always there, in an endless summer afternoon, in the winter nights, under a fresh fallen snow, the snowball straight to the face. We were just too dumb and young to see.
The only good thing my first stepfather ever did was to fill the winter woods with quickly frozen water and hang Christmas lights all around. We sang stupidly to the sky and unwove ourselves, layer by layer, out of the cold. We skated over roots and fell and skated until the bruises forced us back indoors. We were free as fuck.
If you ever think of me, if you ever want to make me happy with something from the physical world, if there’s ever any desire to impress, console, elate, commiserate, rouse, inspire, affect — bring me a feast of socks.
Drifting away, I initially paint the lies to calm my mind.
First, there’s an easy, sloping porch and a hilly field expanding out in front of it. The landscape is a watercolor cocktail of upstate New York and the rolling California contours outside San Francisco, now and forever green. I try to remain, where the only music is light wind on bent grass.
There is no needless noise, no cluck and clatter of the modern grind — the slapstick velocity of an algorithmic race. Just soil, muscle and breeze.
Deeper, down past the semi-conscious notions, beyond my cerebral controls, falling, floating into a hospital bed — a dream.
Nobody speaks english and my french is too feeble to test. Translucent, pale curtains absorb light and hide the artificial reality. Nurses bring me pleasantly bland food and pretend to love me. Just enough, just enough.
I’m sick, but nothing seems wrong with me. From the straps on my legs and wrists, I realize I’m stuck in an outtake from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.
Pulling, tearing, I break free, escaping to an amusement park, hiding in the attic of a medieval castle. A tour bus pulls in. A tractor behind it. As I peek out, the tractor driver sees me and becomes enraged. He rams the building until it starts to topple, the floor breaks and I black out inside my vision.
When I reawaken — still asleep — it’s almost impossible to see or move. Two doctors are carefully looking me over with gentle voices. They tell me I’ve fallen four stories and that I’m lucky to be alive. Another medic appears with a larger-than-lifesize reproduction of a throat. She loudly points out that my neck is broken and that it’s my fault.
Unable to move off my stomach, I flail and scream. The medic is escorted away. The initial two tell me not to worry. Yet they’re furrowed with concern.
They send me to an animal safari, load me up on a chairlift to see the wildlife. They want to observe me in nature. They think that I might learn how to move by interacting with the animals.
There’s a dog playing with a horse, some raggedy lions, a few giraffes. The ride seems to take forever, the animals are mostly hiding. At the end, I’m forced to crawl off the chairlift and out the exit. The doctors are pleased, while I am in pain and exhausted.
I wake up into the real world, soaked in sweat. (When I fall back asleep, I’m in a boarding house where everyone must adopt a baby seal with small sweater.) I wake up again.
A life of sleeplessness spent shadowboxing with the hoaxes, hoping for one strong showing. Someday. Throwing gray punches for the breath to breathe, the breath to breathe.
Half asleep here in my own bed. The morning mind blurry, a roan throat filled with gravel as light slowly shifts shape across the floor.
What I love and hate about music wrestles silently in the front yard. Siblings, clawing and punching in snowy dirt. A headlock might be an embrace. A curse could be a kiss.
Over hundreds of shows, after millions of miles, there is always the repeating moment — crossing the threshold of a squalid rock club. What’s it gonna be tonight? The convoluted chess of a sleepy concert in a nameless town. Odin is only a cat that keeps herself warm behind the beer coolers.
Supine tornadoes roil over the sheets. The gods of doubt cast miniature lightning bolts across the blue and green striped comforter.
Oh, these juvenile delinquent theories armed with tennis balls — aimed at the ego, aimed at the crotch. A periphrastic brain groaning about human lives measured in cash and clicks. To take pleasure in emptiness? To obscure loneliness? I will gladly accept more of less.
Words crawl toward noon. The defunct fireplace is still warm from last night’s blazes. The living room lies in ruins from an epic, insignificant celebration. My best friends are up in the sky, flying home. I am done.
For peace and trust can win the day despite of all your losing. Ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh, ooh-ooh.
Climbing down into covers on a cold night, I tentatively approach sleep. Eyes rolling back into my head with the images of an erstwhile illuminated world still on display under electric lids.
There is canon fire in here. Strobe light in my mind’s sky. Small furry friends, interplanetary puppets, soft fangs, the apocalyptic comedy cannot save me. Anxious thoughts line up on the starting line and wait for the gun to race in circles. Supposedly chasing dreams, but really looking to raise hell.
(Down in the bunker, I read that my perspective was steering pointless — due to my gender, due to the color of my skin. Strange times in an uneasy cosmos. Many chronic wrongs are righted, while scads of tender graces are simultaneously smeared. The value of a voice shouldn’t be swayed by the fashion of culture or the culture of fashion. This dictum does not wear well. Isn’t it more important than ever — that we hear one another?)
In my dreams, we are performing in a basement banquet hall. Fake flowers, stained curtains over fake windows. All my friends and especially all my ex-friends are there. They say “great show!” even before I’ve climbed on stage. People are dancing out of time, the Hawaiian Punch is mostly vodka. The band and I flash across time and space to our hotel room. We are being interviewed by the skeevy night porter, he touches the cellist’s thigh and I chase him with a steak knife. Since he’s hotel management kin, we have to take matters into our own hands, arms and legs thrown over the balcony edge, he lands softly in the shrubbery and smiles up at us — the devil is down there.
This is the Sunday night struggle. How to fit the world of light and noise inside a creaky cranium. My next mission is to escape. In the new year, into a new world.
This moon is becoming a true sphere out here, frosted against pale blue sky.
Outcroppings with similar hues sit cross-legged below, impatient in coniferous ski hats, barely controlled laughter.
Before, it hung lazy like a sliver, a crescent. I didn’t believe the negative space was anything more than deep-space nothing, dark matters, death.
But I can see that moon, it’s going to be a true sphere. There is no agenda except for tides, sex and truth. We are turning toe to toe, face to face.
The only sound, the water below, slapping rocks, respectfully.
Right, don’t know if I need any other noises or shapes or lives as I gnaw upon a pine needle brunch. The fight to feel fine has been won in this round. Circling the lake while the lazy moon circles me.
Through the ceiling, I can hear it all. And I don’t know if I totally understand the garbled inflections between untreated pine floorboards. The underpinnings of a struggling argument and the buttresses of a weak rebuttal. But I know a thing or two about a thing or two. Everyone is willing to be unreal for the sake of their own personal interest.
My mother once threw an entire apple pie at me on Thanksgiving. I ducked, she missed. But I fully deserved a classic pie in the face.
I was an Olympic eye-roller, a sarcastic ball of fire, a professional sigh-er doing victory laps around the living room. I was a classic dick.
Banished, I’d crouch in the basement dimness sipping a secret fifth of Southern Comfort, hidden behind the bookshelf her father had built — that man was a stoic, white-bearded genius, a gentle gin rummy giant. I loved and looked up to my grandpa, as both a book lover and brawler. He didn’t take any shit.
(And the teenage me? Long bangs hanging over the eyes, head shaved on the left side, fingerless gloves, scarred shoulders. Damn, I was a dick.)
Through the floor, my sisters laughing with my mom.
Listening, back to the way we were when we were kids, wrestling over the last mashed potatoes, pulling hair, ripping buttons, loving the shit out of one another.
I feel like I’m still listening to the world through the floor. (Yet I know now: my eyes roll less, my hair is pure scarecrow style, my thoughts are still clouded — but they’re clouded with the screwy idea that love can conquer a little more than an anthill. Also, Southern Comfort is an internal apocalypse.)
What I do know. I know that we have good tattooed deep inside our muscles. I know that we’re supposed to try and understand one another. That even the most twisted tentpoles have a place in this world.
If you’re listening to me, happy thanksgiving. Uncapitalized and common as it is. I am thankful for you, for this ceiling, for these clean sheets, firm pillows and for this stupid universe inside my brainbone, the same as yours. The same as mine.
The body is still capable, the brain still sparks. Highways continue to fall in line underneath a moderately steady hand, a deliberately heavy foot. In daylight and in dreams, the glowing gauges of a Chevrolet dashboard always appear in front of me.
It was all a monophonic blitz of belief. Stopping to pee was nearly forbidden, stopping to think was pure blasphemy.
I initially wrote music because I couldn’t make sense of my own thoughts. Trouble and doubt ruled the disquieted kingdom behind an uneven fringe, easily imagining the books I would read in jail.
And then I realized that my senselessness connected me to the space outside of this body. The clear-cut reflections of a dipshit New England kid running through thick pine forests somehow resonated with the world beyond my world. As if we only made sense together.
For a couple decades, I didn’t stop to question the seasons or the reasons for the acceleration. No broken bones nor rumbles of criticism would grant me permission to pause. Lightening, as a way of living. Ain’t it funny how the night moves?
The first snow of the season is falling while I write these words. Like a moment underneath moonlit sheets, totally disconnected from time and space, and yet still flashing forward.
As a feral creature from the woods of northern New Hampshire, I came up with a way of thinking and speaking. But the language I’ve created risks repeating itself and shattering, a figure eight worn deep beneath chattering hockey skates. (To fall through the ice and succumb to a frozen pond — now that would be funny.)
I’m looking for another way of speaking, a better way of being. So that I don’t completely disappear. A faint morse code to last through another winter, tracing paths unknown, intersecting a spring melt to meet first-timing eyes.
Lately, the moon has been circling my house. Telling me about other people, other planets. Yakety yak. Trying to get me to shake the symmetry and jump into the waves. I wrote The Moon Rose as the best farewell my brain could wrangle. Admitting, accepting and celebrating the silver strangenesses within our small, shared lives. We don’t have to give up on one another.
Instrumentals, remixes, duets, all done as a plain-clothed, honest aloha. And yet I still blindly and wildly believe I can do better.
The body is still capable, the brain still sparks.
Out under leafless trees, in the descending cold and dark, there are soft, sibylline conversations with myself. Gloved fingertips, like ten wriggling microphones, picking up the personal press conference. I run along palatial suburban streets, random trellises of bare maple branches, columns of stately pine, the guardian lions are just a couple beat-up trucks, built Ford tough. Immersed in fantasies, a luxury cruise to the corners of my mind.
A knight or nobleman, the king of my small kingdom. (At the core of an active imagination is the requirement that the main actor is actually real.)
To an intruder hiding behind boxes of unsold vinyl, my gray terry cloth robe might appear to be a black velvet cape as I traipse through unlit halls, a serpentine stairwell, banisters carved with depictions of Eden stretching down to earth. Down, down to the scullery. Down, down to the settling porch with a van seat chaise lounge.
There are so many ways to escape this world. But the only true path seems to be through an outdated, ragged mind. The pirates in the rafters shout, “Leave it all behind!” and pour syrupy mead on my head.
In the real world, an elderly woman pushes a trolley full of groceries to her car on a cold November afternoon. I look at her and mouth the word “hi.” She looks at me and looks down, moving faster. I am soon inside the store, and she is on her way home. But in that moment, it felt like she was embarrassed. Humbled by the life she lived, shy of her looks, the split-second balance of confidence and doubt in long life that I know nothing about.
It was beautiful and I was willing to worship her. If only we could’ve stopped and talked, maybe we would’ve found out more about each other and ourselves. Maybe we were supposed to fall in love and laugh about politics, adult diapers, bowling, gin rummy, sunlit porches with astroturf carpets, the enduring company of Johnny Carson.
Out on the Hudson, drifting away from the apocalypse in a ramshackle houseboat, covered in fake fur. Woolly, outwardly gruff and inwardly elegant. I see us with our telescopes and binoculars. Searching, and yet completely content. Another tin of spinach, another box of wine.
Love is harder than anything else. It is a mess. Bad timing, bad taste. Burnt dinners, loquacious mornings, silent nights. Strange smells on a shipwrecked bed, between half words and snores, surrounded by uncertain seas. The earth shakes, the waves rise, wind whips, rainfall floods, lava rushes up from the stormwater grates. To live for the disaster of love. That’s why we got tickets to the late night showing. That’s why we’re here.
One letter apart. One swift autocorrect away from the complete, opposite meaning. This struggle (straggle) to get the word to conform to its intended spelling. (Twice, the machine minds behind the screen pushed me to write “spilling”.)
Run and ruin. Speed and adrenalized rushing blood will not give in to a state of societal devastation.
Copse and corpse. The thriving thicket versus our lifeless body. (Despite my adolescent darknesses, I choose the trees.)
Scent and scant. A nose filled with freshly cut grass, the nostrils flare at rancid trash. Or the absence and emptiness of a trace (grace) that’s worse than nothing. A tease of knowledge and nothing.
Food and fold. To eat in the washroom or to crumple under the sink (sank).
Better and bitter. Warmth squares up against cold in a late-night alley. How can I be better when I am often bitter? How can I convince myself of (off) the beauty in humanity when we are trying to secretly outdo everyone around us? Selflessness has to make a comeback soon. Art for the sake of art has to be resurrected. We cannot trade souls for screens, we cannot give up on the trite, worn-out, ugly sweater that is love. (Like and lack don’t conveniently line up for my new-age punchline.)
Free and flee. These words are both the same and totally different. Freedom allows one to flee. Fleeing creates freedom. But I run the same loops around town to keep my mind, stable. I flee to stay in the same place, to give my mind the ability to wander. The abandoned gas station resembling a cheap Stonehenge, the deer assembled in the gullies along Hillside Terrace, the speed trap on Lucas Avenue, twin Stewart’s Shoppes with the same bad, brown logo and tired design design, beckoning dog walkers, SUV’s, kids with stolen change trying to cop a cone of the sweetest ice cream.
In this sweaty, mindless state of motion, I’m perpetually a fingertip away from having everything and so far away from knowing anything real. Just a few letters shy of a completely different life.
*** There is more to explore here, these growing spell checks that lead us into our brave new world. Always more to find (fond), more to master (muster).
I wake up in the wild panic of a deep dream, a state of extreme anxiety, a place beyond Iowa, where an unfathomable abyss fits neatly within the subconscious description.
I’m in a submarine diving, saturated red lights flashing. The overwhelming flail of complete powerlessness. Sweat rivers run over eyelids, breaching eyelashes, salty and blind.
The director shoots from odd angles to accentuate the dread, the camera trembles for tension. Some lost lovechild of Martin Scorsese and Tony Scott behind the lens, as I blunderingly act and climb to meet the consciousness upon my pillow’s summit.
Ahoy. These are the submersible dreams of a broken redneck.
To some, the word redneck implies a thicket of backwoods ignorance. A hick, a hillbilly. Unruly thoughts, camouflage overalls, loads of ammo and party-packs of enlightened beer. It’s true, rednecks taunted me for wearing boat shoes. Rednecks laughed at how I baled hay and always assumed I was gay. Their cars had to be both deafening and supersonic. They only knew what they knew and the rest was irrelevant and exhausting. My favorite quote: “That cotter pin couldn’t hold up my pecker.”
Though my vernal experiences were often fraught, I grew to appreciate my friends’ fathers up in New Hampshire and across the river in Vermont. I could see through the barbs, the colors of impatience, realizing that rednecks weren’t worth my textbook scorn.
A redneck’s nape is crimson due to the work that’s been done in an unforgiving field. A redneck knows how to fix anything with some copper wire scraps and mangled duct tape. A redneck isn’t quick to familiarity, but when they do finally let you in, they’ll speak in poetry about their lucid, beautiful world. Simple, staccato truths.
A redneck will cover up inexperience with crass laughter. Perhaps rude jokes or uncouth anecdotes add to the contours of the mask. (Please note: those who attribute rednecks with racism and misogyny are mistaking them for racists and misogynists. There are good and bad librarians, too.)
To feel the speed of a field, surrounded by windy waving trees, the gear shifts, the foot clutches in an unseen, singular lapdance. Down logging roads, the stone walls bouncing, carousing in the headlights. Terrifying, thrilling. Hell bent on finding the balance between life and death.
There is a compromise between the wildness of youth and the acceptance of life’s looming responsibilities. A redneck will shirtlessly embrace and wrestle these states of being until their motor oil heart becomes too weak to speak. When the lungs have consumed their last gulp of driveway dust. All beings, all beasts resting beneath the growing light of a withering night. Empty, apoplectic cans of beer sleep along porch railings, the only monuments that make any sense in a life that was stunningly brief and infinitely impossible to understand.