Frozen Hair

Two dead leaves commenced a tiny dance in the shadows of their branches, a life after death, waltzing with frozen hair and beetles all skittering along the concrete with the swirling winter wind, sounding the defiance of their demises with brittle clicks and clacks against the ground like little morse codes from beyond the grave. ".. / . -..- .. ... - . -.. .-.-.- / -.. --- -. .----. - / ..-. --- .-. --. . - / -- . .-.-.-"

Mean Maybe

I'm going to record some songs I've been working on the past year or so with my brother over the holiday break in Sacramento. So far, I've just been sending him bedroom recordings of me on acoustic guitar and singing - usually quite out of tune. But I'm excited to get something recorded again after a very long hiatus. Sometimes when I'm working on one of my own tunes (rudimentary though they may be), I stumble upon some other tune I really like.

I really like this song "Mean Maybe" by this fantastic band Yellowbirds. So I recorded a dumb little bedroom recording of it. I think you can hear my cat howling in the background of just about everything I've ever tried to record. Goddamn thing.

I Should Have Shouted

There have been times I should have shouted, but could not. Did not. Did nothing instead. Did nothing but feel suddenly hot as my blood boiled and my heart rate tripled. But that's not really doing anything. Maybe on some metaphysical level, the biological reactions I've experienced on my insides could fit the mold of some sort of reaction. But blood pumping through my dumb, dead veins all day isn't exactly voluntary. Doesn't make me brave. Or maybe it does. But no one will ever see it, or know, or deign to stretch to guess that sitting around doing nothing is actually doing SOMEthing.

I can feel when it happens; when I want to scream and when I want to scare someone. Or when I feel like some cerebral injustice is about to unfold and some fucking common sense ought to be distilled from all the half-truths and conspiracies and shortcuts to thinking that are all-but bound to stem from a panicked mass of souls, each of them afraid of dying. Of growing old. Of being alone forever. I can see it in the eyes of some of my closest confidantes when the veil of their skepticism is lifted, and everything's a grimace, and how could anyone in the world have a sense of fairness and just thought amidst this big pop culture tornado blowin' through the Bowerys, and the Bays, and the Burnsides.

Follied be they for whom extant virtues have been absorbed through mediums they can never understand. Fortunate (and rare) be they for whom sense doesn't need to be common to be just. And fair. And a life lived in the moons of neverending cosmos invisible to eyes a million years from now be wished upon to those for whom the rigors of honesty with themselves, with others, and with unencumbered pride and humility for the understanding of it all is relegated to some fantasy realm. That the fantasy is often much more appealing than the small efforts and rewards bequeathed by leading a virtuous life is the wellspring of every evil in the world.

It is to these last referenced that my silent protests, my seething inner diatribes, my distrust in humanity as a whole, is most steadily focused upon.

So, there have been times I should have shouted, but did not. For some reason figured I could not. That to rock the boat meant to chase the tornado. Meant to acknowledge that I play a role, if only as opponent, in a web of systematic insanity. With paper trails. With photo IDs and retina scanners, and workplace safety standards and lunch hours and no time for naps or outrage or questioning of anything of any real cultural significance. McKenna's maxim "Culture is not your friend" is perhaps the best synopsis, or the most succinct. Had he pointed out, in turn, that the parameters instilled into those whose entire intellectual apparatus has been hinged upon impossibly unreal expectations, has been imbued by unfair standards of role, has been smeared before even their birth by thousands of years of hate, fear of death, disgust of peace, I believe that McKenna's relatively small contributions (although terribly influential to many facets of rational thought, and to a more dramatic extent, influential to the scores of brain cells mystified by extraterrestrial research, or drugs, or humanity and fear) may have hit home harder outside of the underground world of ethnobotany and the hippie-youth drug scene who desperately want to believe that we're descendant of apes who mistakenly ate psylocybic mushrooms growing on ancient cow manure.

Then again, maybe not. Maybe nobody would have thought any different anyway. Despite the evidence. Despite the inimitable truths burning holes right into their eyes and ears. And that is what is worth screaming for. That the proof in the pudding must pale its hue to that most lethal drug: Distraction. For with the barricade of ignorance, willful or otherwise (but especially willful, which, frankly, all ignorance is), distraction's etymological kissing cousin, destruction - at least of the brain, or of any other wholly humanistic trait that separates us from wild dogs - is all but a foregone conclusion.

Live in the wild and live your truths, and be who you are. If your wild is the cultural wastelands of the valleys and the strip malls and the ridiculous facades of faux-historic corporate conglomerates, stay there. If your truths are morsels culled from television programs run by corporate-sponsored networks, or billboards, or flash-in-the-pan, hypnotic, repetitive, bland and unoriginal pop music, save them for yourself (see also: save yourself from them). And if you question, for even a second, ever, that who you are is a force detrimental to the advancement of society, or a hurdle in the thoroughfare toward peace, or a chigger in the doe hair of mother nature's vast, uncompromising-yet-delicate hide, CHANGE.

Failed Pitches

...Wherein I post treatments or pitches that were rejected by various publications for indeterminate reasons. This installment was sent to the folks at Amtrak, as I and every other writer in America with more than a passing penchant for laziness lunged to try and land a residency to write aboard a long, free train trip. I sent them a writing sample previously posted on this blog ("Cadaver"), forgetting to read the fine-print that they were not interested in any crazy-asshole rantings on sociological accounts of depressive maniacs or otherwise burnt-out fuckers bent on imminent demise. Whoops.

Anyway, here was my stupid, idiot pitch on what I would have written about, as sent to the suits at Amtrak, and which was given a big ol' "FUCK YOU, GUY":

I'd like whatever I write to be a meditation on the effects of human tendencies toward isolation/agoraphobia/complacency as it relates to a world bent on bridging the gaps pertaining to hermetic psychoses (social media, smartphones, GPS, FourSquare, etc) - the paralyzing fears wrought by lack of connection and the collective bristling of people who’d just as soon be left alone.

-An intrinsic analysis challenging the false connections people make over uniform obedience to social trends and entertainment; or the nearly blind filing-in and marching along with the ubiquitous ebbs and flows of some TV series/news story/fruitless pandemic warning.

This idea could be given further bloom within the construct/context of the writer/narrator isolating himself within a sleeper car aboard a passenger train burping across the country - the United States rolling by; interesting ramblers carousing in the observation car; the junkies and lovesick romantics and runaways and spooky old drunks; the sometimes mortifying proposition of a dimly lit dinner in a dining car at a table full of strangers. The dichotomy of attempting to expand on one’s comfortable spectrum, while being forced to abandon certain aspects of reclusive tendencies to accomplish it. Almost being commanded to.

It’s not that the story has to take place on a train. Rather, the self-imposed isolation could serve as impetus to the creative synapse necessary to spark my fledgling story of this meek figure who’s facing his fears of returning to the location of what he thinks is the source of his self-imposed isolation.

...Clearly, they made the correct decision to decline. So it goes...

Freeform/Freefall

Today you’ll write about that time you found an alpaca dead inside the city canal while you were walking to school. How disturbed you were by such a regal jaw agape at sewage currents in the muck and by lips flapping in the algae riptide of a thousand pollywogs. How you stared and stared at its lifeless husk wet with bloody rivulets cascading from untold numbers of cruel wounds. And wondering how the beast had managed to be here, then remembering the farm where the soft creatures roamed like aliens in a liquid metropolis just above the waterway. It’s fall, you remember thinking, must have been a silent dive.

You’ll write about the boldness of bloodhounds sniffing for scraps at the dirt walkway of the canal above the rodeo grounds, abandoned by their masters and hungry for anything. How their dead red eyes would zero in on ankles as the bicycles whizzed by their porches, mocking them for their exhaustion, and how those eyes said, “you watch yourself when we’re both on level ground again, fella…”

You’ll remember how you secretly wore shorts under your pants so after you left home to walk to school, along the old canal path, you could strip the pants off and give your legs some life. How you’d watch reruns of The Simpsons at your best friend Danny’s house, where his dog Blackie would stench up the place with its ancient breath. How we watched the unfolding of the Los Angeles riots on TV in real time following the Rodney King trials, and how we realized, for the first time maybe, that the world was a dark place full of danger everywhere.

You’ll write about how you threw your prescription glasses in a garbage dumpster en route to class because a girl told you you were cute without them, and a bully called you four-eyes for the millionth time. How that bully rots in jail now for murdering someone he found sleeping with his mother. How you wanted to interview him from prison for a book like some kind of revenge-craving Capote, and how you thought better of it because in a way your secret revenges are being played out without your input all the time, and without you doing anything but moving forward.

Today you’ll write, because you can. And because you have things to say. And because it’s the only way you’ll ever remember anything.

More Old Words

This is the climax to a short story I wrote in 2008, called Blackout, and which I revisit often to feel a bit more at ease with whatever chaos is swirling around. It makes me miss California in a weird way, and certain old friends more.

...When I felt myself let go—to tune out to the vision of the Dream Journal and its drug-inducing solutions—I dreamed another long, tunneling dream. The first one in a long time that didn’t involve spiders or bees. The first one I remember actually recalling almost all the way through. The one that brought me back from the shadow’s song. It was of the anxiousness of an impending storm.

In it, I went to greet the rain and winds in the middle of the park across the street. I stood alone, with cascades of soothing rain showering me, with the park people staring at me in admiration. Lining up to gape. Beaming in the low-light of the blackout. I stood in the center of the concrete that underneath once birthed the trees of John Bidwell, in a cross-pattern of limbs with one clear direction toward the southwest of town down Broadway, and back again to the rows of bars, and the other path headed straight from the heart of the town unto my Tower. I became engorged with pride of the memory of these trees, and turned toward the Tower and saluted the amber-capped apex of its phallus.

              I danced in the water like a Cherokee, inviting the surge to cleanse me, and to become one with the core of the enveloping brood of hobos. They encircled me now, applauding, as if I’d figured out what to be free and clean and true had really meant. I looked into their eyes and looked further into what I thought might be their hearts, and further to their souls.

              And all these people of the old oaks looked at me to find a higher solace within the words of their own world, and rejoiced in a singular bliss, morose and monolithic, with bitter relation to the common thread of soul and singular truth. They did not need the power; their routines persevered where others’ went awry; and the city’s citizens simple lives were now made simpler by the wrath of Mother Nature and the awe of cawing beat of Earth. It was simple, real, now…but they didn’t understand.

              The group parted ways slowly from the back of one-half of the circle and turned to let her by. Heloise walked slowly through the swarm, her eyes glowing, her perfect teeth gleaming in a familiar smile. She walked to me and the rain stopped.

              “We will find each other again,” she whispered. “Being happy is a bore. But being sad is deadly.”

Hey, Lindsay

I wrote this in the wee hours of the morning in August of 2010, the same long night/morning that I stayed out for what seemed like forever exploring every unlocked door in the Portland Hilton, two old friends in tow - one of whom I'd a fairly serious former crush for. I was stone-drunk and silly, and flitting about like some sort of lovesick wino, swimming in her beauty and the afterglow of a kiss stolen in the fluttering light of a dark hallway at 6 am. I sent this to her, but I don't know if she cares much for writing. Or writers. Who knows. I'm posting it because reading it every once in a while reminds me of how excited I can allow myself to be when I just drop my guard a little bit. 

            I stayed up all night. All fucking night. For two days straight. Wrestling with old, dull demons inside my heart, them clawing the membranes, the veins, the ventricles of the stuff inside my chest. I drank way too much, didn’t eat, didn’t think with anything but my heart, the same organ being torn by the little claws of spontaneity. Not with my brain, or whatever else I’m supposed to think with. My guts, maybe? My guts had shit for brains. None of that mattered. I lunged with the bile-heavy verve of whatever was left in the tank. I made decisions in nano-seconds, took forbidden fire exits to 18^th floor fire escapes (17^th floor?), peering unto the twinkling twilight of the west hills of Portland, Oregon, (O, funky red Montgomery Park sign! O, neon blue Volvo beacon!) with my life residing on the opposite side, my cat nestling in the shady dawn of the firs of Tabor, my bed resting flea-ridden in a sweltering southeast cubby hole, like the brimming twitches of my reason in the fervency of a Hilton haunted labyrinth. 

            I navigated the crags, the avenues, restrooms, fancy convention speaking rooms with the PA left on for everything to resonate, the unlocked pool, the unlocked useless exercise room, the elevators with the fancy buttons, evading the African security guard, so far away from the archaic, creaky staircases of my home. But barely far enough, actually. Not too far to remember why I was here. Why I longed for this moment for the last eight years. Why I knew that no matter what consequences I’d meet by virtue of this hastiness, I was prepared. I was prepared. She was here for me. I was here for her.

            And Lindsay looks at me like she did in 2002, like she did when I was but a stranger, still a stranger, in fact, in most ways, but hardly at all in these labyrinthine corridors - excavated behind the safety of the secret kitchens, where meals for broken kings have been think-tanked and prepared, to fuel bad decisions, awful fuel for awful men. She undresses in the mystery caverns of this homage to consumerism, happy for a swim, to be seen by me in her negligee, to splash in the know-nothing revelry of a west coast vacation, where we’ve finally seen each other again! Rejoice! It was not supposed to happen! We were a footnote in the aged annals of romance; a blueprint for the ways in which young lovers begin their bon voyages toward the promise of what was once promised all young lovers, but which has since been trampled.

But not anymore, you see.

We are making it right, in some way true, by usurping its banality; by proving, in some way unknown, to even us, that to ignore a rift in the alleyways of the blips in time and in a kind of love, or lust, or severe attraction, is the ultimate tragedy. That to forget the fact that time can sometimes stand still is the source of everything awful in the world. That to insist on the impulse of the heart is a triumph in the face of this electric world.

            And we grin in the shadows at each other with electric smiles, needing each other to know what we already know. What we knew eight years prior. That the forgotten folds of the heart yield not the detriments, strictly, of unknown, sulking demons, like those old, dull specters residing in stasis inside my chest. That the want of the core of us is the life of the earth, and that regardless of anything ever thought of in the history of the world, any barriers erected, any philosophies accepted and passed on, the religions of the weak, the fickle jealousies espoused from the maws of the cores of the wicked requires but a simple sidestep to ensure that which makes everything really work. That like, or love, or tender respect, or forever-admire, is something to strive toward, forever, and with serious gravity. And we will strive toward it, our hearts in our hands, in our smiles, in our eyes, until all are one for even one moment again. There is nothing more important.

Cadaver

There was a little lurch in the throttling of the old Volvo wagon - boring silver, dirty, in need of a left rear taillight - as it putted along Highway 22 outside Faredale. Bub’s head snapped up from the minutest slumber of drowsy delirium as he operated the vehicle, coming to just in time to avoid rear-ending the jet-black Expedition with the tinted windows and the stick figure-family decal just in front of him. The traffic burped along like this, like the way blood cells move in microscopic film shorts of blood moving through veins in science classes where you learn nothing but how to nap in secret.

That’s what Bub was doing, a little dance like that, appearing lucid for the benefit of the catatonic zombie-stasis commuters on the highway, but still nodding off, like a junkie in a Burroughs novel, or a sleepy baby who’s eaten too much birthday cake. Nod off… Snap up! Brake! Nod off………… SNAP UP! BRAKE!

On the stereo roiled Leonard Cohen’s “Sisters of Mercy,” itself a kind of lullaby, lolling in its pseudo-Spaniard guitar arpeggios and hyper-intellectual poetic hubris. Beautiful and soothing. Transcendent and real. A reckless choice as the soundtrack to a bumper-to-bumper snail trail of pissy drivers in evening dusk, all stomachs hungry and bladders full. Everyone a knot of fussy wires wanting to rage and sleep simultaneously. Bub didn’t have the cognizance to lift his hand to change the dial. It was as if he were a mummified lummox, trapped in 500 feet of tattered bandages and caked in the rigor mortis malady afforded deific souls whose ultimate reward is to be hidden in untraceable tombs for all of eternity, or until the earth explodes, or until their worldly catacomb is pillaged by fame-hungry archaeologists whose findings will be published in the pages of insider quarterlies that almost no one has ever heard of.

…Yes, you who must leave everything that you cannot control; It begins with your family, but soon it comes round to your soul. Well, I've been where you're hanging;
I think I can see how you're pinned. When you're not feeling holy, your loneliness says that you've sinned…

 
Bub was this awful prototype in this awfully boring car. Anonymous. Stupid. Some thing. Appearing alive, barely, for the drivers, as noted above, but not just for them. Fuck them. 

Joel rode shotgun in the boring Volvo, himself slouching in the post-work malaise of traffic, all funky stale-car body odor and droopy eyelids. They were prone to carpooling, mostly because Joel didn’t own a car. He’d reclined the passenger’s side seat back to an angle, not quite horizontally, but enough so as not to be able to accurately gauge what was surrounding the vehicle, save for the slow wisp of the passing Firs along the right lane of the highway, where Bub and Joel’d been mired for the entire length of the commute. They’d stay there, in this lane, because it didn’t matter anyway. This was post-work traffic in California. Nothing mattered and nobody gave a fuck about anybody else in this twisted thicket of idling, ozone-killing consumerism and American paycheck-flexing shit-show.

“Bub, you all right?” asked Joel resignedly. The Volvo’d just lunged again as Bub’s right foot experienced a sudden atrophy, then Bub’s SNAP UP! BRAKE! instinct mechanism snapped into place, though his foot rested on the gas. The result was a tremendous roar from the engine that skipped the two passengers into a suspended, perpendicular, pulse-like jitter that first seethed and spit and screeched like a pole car at Daytona, then abruptly halted, instigating a skeletal middle finger from the ancient driver of the posh Lexus sedan behind Bub and Joel, who’d herself likely been semi-dozing, and whom almost plowed into them. Bub noted the likeness of the skin-boned quasi-human slant-eyed in the rearview like a Southeast Asian staring at the sun with a hangover.

“Errrr, blergh…..Yep, yeah. Sorry dude. Long day,” offered Bub. “This traffic is disgusting. Unbelievable!”

Joel wished he’d cared a little. No. Not really. He didn’t wish anymore at all, in fact. He’d stopped dreaming, sparking, long ago. Loosely he’d avoided the more daunting responsibilities of the position that Bub’d secured him with as a data entry plebe at a Dotcom startup so arbitrary and milquetoast it isn’t even worth mentioning the name of.

“Maybe we should change the station, man. This sullen shit is making you doze,” said Joel.

“Yeah – ahem! – I guess maybe we should,” responded Bub. “Jesus, that day. Can you believe the paperwork they saddled me with? The next time I have to code invoices like that I’m gonna need to mainline an expresso, I swear to god…”

Joel offered a polite, thin grin, an acknowledgement of his loyalty, though equally thinly disguised for what it was, which was nothing but lethargic contempt for the whole situation. He decided not to mention the mispronunciation of the word espresso.

A few weeks earlier, Joel’s younger brother Darren had been killed in an accident at the paper mill he was employed by. The foreman’d said that the chain hanging from Darren’s wallet became caught in one of the factory’s enormous pressing machines, and that while Darren fidgeted to free the wallet from his sagging jeans, his temporary immobility and lack of focus rendered him unaware of his proximity to a malfunctioning steam valve that had been shooting out white-hot mists at wonky intervals. The steam stream blasted Darren directly into his face, prompting viscous burns instantaneously. He actually died while collapsing from the agonizing pain and hitting the back of his head on a nearby forklift fork, his face an unrecognizable blob of putty and bone with a surprised shock evidenced only by a horrifically wide-open mouth that wanted to scream in protest one last time but couldn’t.

The funeral was conducted with an anonymous, closed casket. Joel had stared at the oak thing holding his brother’s remains with a patina not unlike a plastic mannequin. His expressions, when allowed, were like Greek busts of gods of weather and luck he’d never studied and couldn’t identify. His countenance and the physiology of him was a vegetable façade. Crying on the inside but for the incredulousness of the circumstances by which he’d found himself mourning his sibling in a cold, shitty church with strange family members and his civ-like mother erupting tears into sad wads of Kleenex.

The car ahead of Bub moved forward, in tandem with the car next to that in the middle lane, as did every other car but theirs. Joel’s zone-out had reached epic proportions by that time, thinking about how his brother and he had only recently been embroiled in a petty feud about a pretty girl they both dug. 

It dawned on Joel now that he could have her, that the guilt of courtship at the expense of Darren’s feelings was no longer a speed bump. He imagined what her face might look like if he were to tell her that, how horrified by the sentiment she might be, how instantaneously she might retreat, and he nauseously recoiled. 

The Cohen coos howled like a lovelorn dissertation from an analog diary.

…I love you in the morning, our kisses deep and warm, your head upon the pillow like a sleepy golden storm. There were many loves before us; I know that we are not new. In city and in forest, they smiled like me and you."

“What…what the fuck is wrong with me…” muttered Joel a half-second before an ocean of audio pollution from a dozen horny cars paralyzed the ambiance of the freeway into a shocking stupor. Bub snapped from his mid-lane nap looking like an ancient tweaker, and quickly attempted to let the clutch out, neglecting to apply the necessary amount of throttle. The car stalled momentarily, and Bub, still groggy, still so irresponsible, started it back up and proceeded to make up the space they’d lost.

Joel’s mind, though, was still back where they’d been parked in the freeway, Bub asleep. The haunting realities of his neuroses, the frightening polarity of his competitive spirit, the alarming dedication to cultivating depressing environments to stay depressed. To sustain the element of a broken identity became his one true gift. To stifle laughter. To ignore the beauty of a sunset or the flittering of a hummingbird sucking sugar water from the red plastic feeder. Everything was postured for so long that it became real through osmosis. Chicken? Egg? All that meant anything anymore was that Joel wanted to pay for even that one thought, that one petty jealousy that marred his final weeks with Darren.

Joel looked to Bub’s sad black eyes, flitting eyelashes indicating an imminent doze off. The concrete divider separating the road from the ravines off Highway 273 to the right faded away as the lane veered to the left around the bend of the forest buttes. There were no synthetic embankments for about a quarter-mile around the bend. 

The tones of those sad Canadian love songs, and by virtue of their universality the world’s love songs, lulled the sleepy behemoth Bub into another hyphenated, half-eyed slumber at the wheel. The bend approached, and Joel saw the white lines bend left, Bub’s chin in his chest, his fists loosely gripping the steering wheel, his commuter dreams racing behind his eyelids.

Bub let out a little snore. Joel turned his head to the left to look at Bub’s sleepy visage, and whispered a tiny goodbye.

“We’re trapped here forever, and no one can change a thing. I’m sorry if sorry’s called for. But we’re in this together. We’re a flaming footnote on the ridge. Good riddance…”

As the cars ahead of Bub and Joel veered left to brace the turn on the bend, with the Buttes and sunny mountains and bushes of the valley below glinting that muted hue of a ho-hum California landscape of wild brush and Manzanita bramble, the car hummed quietly straight, toward the edge of the highway’s liquid parameters. Joel did not move to awaken Bub, and the old Volvo wagon crossed the white lines, its tires stuttering with the hiccups in the divots of the shoulder, and plunged lazily down the ravine into the void of that big green gorge, rattling the unused seatbelts against the inside of the windows.  

Two cars honked in protest, but the noise of the fussy traffic suddenly dissipated and was replaced by the simple, free silence of flying. Bub continued to sleep as Joel triumphantly lifted his arms in the air as if on the downswing of a thrilling rollercoaster.

…Who by accident? Who in solitude? Who in this mirror? Who by his lady's command? Who by his own hand? Who in mortal chains? Who in power? And who shall I say is calling?...