Bonus: 'Excerpts From Western Massachusetts' Continued: Circa, 2003
I
When I was fifteen I had a theory that once you reached sixteen it was all down hill. Freedom would only be exiled into a place only to be reminisced about until it’s pardon somewhere around sixty-five. I had figured that when you were sixteen, whether through peer acceptance or societal necessity, acquiring a driver’s license was a mandatory rite of passage thus opening the door to the very steep hill of decline previously mentioned. This is how the theory worked in my omniscient fifteen year old mind: you had to get the license which in turn meant retaining an automobile; either one to use or to own - eventually the latter. This meant money either for gas or car payments and insurance or some combination thereof. Also, if you had a license or a car or a car to use then you were compelled, if not required, to go places and do things. Again, this all meant money, which of course usually leads each and everyone of us to some sort of gainful employment; gainful being a relative term. So, you acquired the license, a car, a job, and why the next thing you knew it’s off to college or a trade school or an apprenticeship: some way to accumulate more money. Most of your time prior to that eaten away by a job and the rest of the time spent driving around spending what you’ve earned (even if just on gas); time ‘drops it’s hammer’ so to speak and you find yourself dangling from the precipice of eighteen. Well, then it’s bigger and better jobs, steadier and stronger relationships, growing financial responsibility, family, loans, and it all tries to forget about itself in the confines of a hot bath only to be dried off and dirtied up again until you’ve reached sixty five and you could endlessly bathe without fear of dirt. At fifteen I thought I was getting ready to climb into one big toilet that I would soon be forced to flush. Spiraling down through the pipes to find myself, hopefully, floating in the ocean somewhere off Key West.
I was now seventeen; four cars, one ridiculous car accident, one recently purchased lemon, a steady girl for a year and a half, and impending post-high school continuation. All had past since I was fifteen. It is quite easy to see why I deemed post-fifteen mudslide theory as one of one hundred percetn accuracy. I had decided at that point more responsibility was probably not my friend but rather my wolf in sheep’s clothing - one big dire wolf. A quick break for a year or so and then off to the eminent temporary death of higher education was in order. Needless to say, my mother did not agree and so goes the great modern American story of youth.
We were living in Southern California at the time and it was nineteen ninety-three. I was the oldest of my mother’s four children and the first grandchild in the family to face this mammoth change. I would look out my bedroom window and pray for time to freeze, but in mother’s eyes college was going to happen when it ‘should’ happen no matter how many time-freezing gazes I shot out at the world. Graduation came and went, as monumental as it was it seemed just like one more reason to have a family get together and a big fancy table of food. My father had come out on the train from Massachusetts and my parents sat in the same room for probably the first time since my christening at age six, so in a way it was monumental. Due to my lack of enthusiasm and some sort of hope that I would not have to go, I chose odd colleges to apply to. San Francisco, being the epicenter for deviancy that it was, seemed like a good place to go. I humored myself with the idea of applying and getting accepted to the San Francisco College of Mortuary Science. My mother’s reaction alone would most surely have made her drop dead, thus supplying me with my own cadaver to practice on and in my mind maybe even gaining me free tuition since I would arrive with my own supplies. I nixed the idea after contemplating how I would have to explain to my grandmother that, yes, her firstborn grandchild would be attending college, but her firstborn child would also be going as ‘school supplies’. My attention swiftly turned to San Francisco State. This became a mistake. My mother thought, “Oh! Great! In-state tuition, good school; maybe he will go!” They lost my application three separate times and I found myself staring out the old bedroom window even more, this time trying to freeze my hand from filling out yet another application to good ol’ San Fran State!
At this point my mother was viewing my attempts as pure procrastination and swiftly recommended that I apply to three schools promptly. She also informed me, that due to a longing for the infernal snow of her youth, she would be moving the family back to Massachusetts. She suggested that one of the schools be there and then I would only have to fret over the other two choices. I was very confused about it all, now more than ever. Sitting on the edge of the bed in between freezing rituals and writing poetry I would think, “Ok. If they leave and I am not going, where will I go or live or do?” Thoughts of my mudslide theory came avalanching into not just my brain my whole being. Lose my steady girl; all of my friends were going away so I would lose them anyway, but lose Ann?
Now I should explain that it was a weird relationship from the get-go but it had mellowed out and well, it was my first real long term involvement with a girl (we all think those are forever!). In the beginning she made me lose my virginity to another girl, convinced me to smoke and made me think that however good nicotine was, drugs and alcohol were bad (which seemed a tad hypocritical, but in my inexperience who was I to judge). Ann lost her virginity at fifteen, so instead of thinking of anything close to my theory of responsibilities she was skipping school to go to motels and get ravaged by a guy named Alfredo who was eighteen and religiously carried ‘prolong’ cream everywhere he went. I wrestled for a couple of years in high school and my first year on the team (before I knew Ann), Alfredo and I would eat together after getting weighed in at wrestling meets. We would sit in his car and in between the seats would be his tube of ‘stay hard’ jelly. He would say, “You gotta use this tuff, it makes ‘em crazy!”. He had this weird Mexican-Italian accent that made it sound silly. We would laugh and it seemed sometimes that I was laughing more at him than what he said. When I found out that Alfredo was Ann’s first, after we had been dating a bit, it gave a weird meaning to the phrase ‘hindsight is 20/20”. Once everything had mellowed out in the relationship (virginities and non-smoking behind us) all I did was think of her. I found that if I wasn’t with her or figuring out schools for my mother, I was masturbating thinking about Ann’s long, thick, red hair.
Procrastination, red hair, and cigarettes seemed to me to have something greater in common than the obvious fact that they weren’t ‘in common’ at all, but what did I know? I thought about that for awhile one day and decided that it sounded too much like country music for me to give it another thought and that in itself was inspiration enough for me to pick out my schools. I thought about obscure places. Places you would only go if you were a merchant marine. I thought if I picked schools based on that, that it would be my last chance at not having to go with the exception of not getting accepted.
Choice number one was Humboldt State University. I figured there was probably more marijuana there than all of South East Asia and South America combined and I knew the grass would at least be better. I knew a couple of people going there and heard the standards were low, so instead of freezing my nice white hiney off in some backwoods puritan hell hole (if I was even going to go) I would at least be going in the great American tradition: in protest as a hippie! Unfortunately my plan backfired right in my kisser. In nineteen ninety-three there were too many dirty hippie potheads in Northern California for some legislative windbag to stand, so the standards were raised. Mandatory GPA went up a whole point and SAT score requirements went up 400 points. What I thought would be my acceptance letter turned out to be a different sort of acceptance letter. Maybe I wouldn’t need to go after all!
Choice numero dos: University of Alaska, Anchorage. Reviewing their strict standards of acceptance (you only had to actually have a GPA, SAT not required), I figured I was a shoe in and it was so remote that there was no way in hell my mother would let me go. It turns out that it was the first acceptance letter that I received. Yippee! I then researched the on campus crime statistics; rape, murder, burglary: zero percent or at least under two percent across the board. Alcoholism and suicide: something ridiculous like sixty-five percent. I figured at that point if all my friends were going to be dead or drunk that I should have just done the mortuary school thing after all.
Last choice, the New England choice: University of Massachusetts at Amherst. Thirty six hundred miles away from everything I had known since junior high in order to live three hours away from where my family would be and for what? To say that I had gone to school at the lesser prestigious school next to where Emily Dickenson had lived? I didn’t even like Emily Dickenson, I was a Charles Bukowski fan. I was accepted and I packed my things.
Bonus: Prologue From My First Novel: "Excerpts From Western Massachusetts": Circa, 2003
The dreams that flooded my eleven year old brain (the ones that I will probably always remember) were not the dreams that we all refer to by any of the definitions adhered to the word ‘dream’. They were more the dancing of synapse that occur betwixt and between wake and sleep. Sleep; where true dreams of one type cradle, love, lust, confuse, and scare the shit out of us until day releases us back into the humdrum. Wake; where a different type of dream, yet still true to definition, slingshots us through our hopes and aspirations into our perseverance and discipline with the force of a trebuchet.
I would lie there, certainly not wanting to sleep and not wanting to wake up if I should. Eyes shut but not asleep. Eyes shut but not awake. Flashes of my room; the posters, the stereo, the television, a few models; would colour my eyelids convincing me I was still awake. My breathing would be slower, my heart chugging along at the “you are almost sleeping” pace. The silence coning, coaxing, and compelling me as if the lack of sound itself had donned a striped jacket and matching straw brimmed hat in order to guise itself as some carnival barker verbally frozen into pantomime. Then I would hear it so softly rubbing the quiet that I could have easily convinced myself it wasn’t there; snapping my eyes open and rolling over, re-sealing my eyes into attempted slumber. I could hear it in both ears but it was not a stereophonic image surrounding me, it was more two different sides moving towards each other. Two opposing forces working their way into the colour of sound. I would look from ear to ear without moving my head and see the arcs of two distinct horizons being splattered with balls of lightening. Each infinity oozing; velvet green plush with corrosion, reds that would harden and crack as each droplet shattered on the earth; fiber optic snowflakes turning black as they bounced up off the ground. Each night new colours, new sounds, brand spankin’ new ways of building and building.
From beneath the colour, from within the sound, I could begin to see the shapes as my head would feverishly tic-tock it’s way left and right as if watching the Wimbledon of meth-amphetamine. First banners and flags hung high upon pikes and poles with words I could not read. The sound, ever gradually building and with such presence, forced the mottos and creeds to epileptically rip into shreds. The shadows beneath them, holding them, began to take shape all with building colour and sound. This is when fear would rape and pillage my sanctity of curiosity, pummeling it down and injecting the foul stench of panic. I would look forward and see the two horizons meet and the sound would die, the colour would stop. Looked right, looked left, and again straight ahead. Then it would be there again with such an abrupt entrance I would not be knocked down but knocked up into a vibration that only the darkest point of the night must feel as a star explodes into it. Sound vibrated not to me but through me, while fear and panic and despair would not just take me over but become me. The shadows rose up taller, more defined into less definition than before.
Sometimes my ears would bleed me to sleep, while at other times my eyes would melt. On two or three occasions I came to the conclusion that it was war; it would stop and then attack with more ferocity than ever before. Most times it would just fade away leaving me confused. I had always known it wasn’t a dream but was never quite sure if I was awake either. I never knew what was happening. It wasn’t real. It wasn’t fake. It just was and was for two years.
All seven of the dwarves have rubbed their knuckles bare with the work that makes them bleed. Their sweat breaks hard like rifting waves crashing into the sands of footless blessings. They look in my direction and the sleeping one dreams of me. They know they have it better. They mine deep and toil like Captains. None of them would wish their lives upon my labours.
Hawks and falcons screech above with a shrill cry that cracks the soul of the moon in half. They circle above shrieking loud intermissions from the fluted chirps of extended evolutionary grace. Is it mating or intimidation? Asking again and again in order to distract myself from the midnight tasks at hand, the tasks that make the little men laugh, makes them cry.
There is nothing to check out anymore. The corners have all been turned, the circles erased and made square and then they fade into lines that no one will ever observe anyhow. A conundrum of whether or not to persevere, to carry on, to move on down the road with some sort of tune that could quite feasibly be construed as theme music. Everyone needs theme music. My speakers are blown and my ears have bled. My cerebral oatmeal is dried and gummy; a fork points up to heaven with it’s tines buried deep between the receptors. Synapse, my friend, neurons - thought. No more, never needed much anyway.
Thinking back to girls dancing in dresses that kiss their ankles as they twirl and ravage the cortex of visual digestion. Dance, mama, dance! No money makers, but shakers none the less, and the music can not be eaten by my soul anymore. It all has become so redundant that not even the dancing girl can be formed into that mind’s eye; only traces of outlines can fade away into what they shall never be again.
Lay down and breathe. Inhale so deep that your back hurts. Make it hurt. Hurt. Hurt. Deep. Let go, exhale. A rush of existence in one simple action. The time to need to be one with time. A simple yet profoundly abstract acceptance of our own mortality all in the eyes of something far more mortal than we would ever want to admit. Sometimes it is as simple as function. Time does not exist. It is an illusion we all accept to justify the moving forward that is inevitable. Sad but true. Yes, that is what I said.
Fat thumbs make young boys sick. Brassiere fumbling should not be confused with smoking braziers or Brazier Foods. Written words can be destroyed, spoken words last forever in the hearts of those that hear. Little bus stop bumper boys throwing sticks and stones. Someone grab the fat kid and put him down.
Rest in the breast of a lover and her smells. The thought of never having to leave those arms and never having to ever say anything again. The ultimate truth of silence. Silly, silly silence, noise is for kids. And then you are there. A moment when the pin tip dots of light shoot through what you thought were shut eyes but they were not shut at all. Never a thought between the wink, blink and nod. Sail high above the birds boys, as the little men watch you and your syllabus of action in action.
Look under the covers, look behind the bookcase. Under a car seat somewhere. Maybe in a soul that never has been rattled or flung open. It might be time to clean the cage.
Drink through the curdled cream until your throat burns like sandpaper scrapings. Shreds of torn flesh to choke on. Never a thought given twice as the mouths move and gums flap. Silence! Throw down the gauntlet and make a stand.
While I was ‘away from my desk’ I found plenty to occupy my mind and it was that pre-occupation with discord that left my pages bereft of phrase or verse. I would like to share with you all where my head has traveled and maybe we can all laugh about this brochure of distraction when it is all over and done with; after all there are far more serious and entertaining things for me to be writing such as my fiction.
It all began with becoming introduced to a place, a show, a video clip that made me laugh and for some reason made me want to laugh harder than I could seem to muster and this is where I was left for days upon days. These finite extensions of my doubt only left me wondering why I could not participate with more zeal. I laughed more than I thought, but it left me empty somehow:
The ‘Wheel of Fun’ seemed to be far more profound to me than it should have been to anyone, even a recluse on a mountain side gazing off into the infinitum of malnutrition and bizarre odors. I would awake in my morning with both the theme song and the party song stuck in my mind. They played over and over again until I was one with the clip; I even had a little bum wiggle dance that I did when I sang the line “gorgeous tiny chicken machine show”. I had integrated with inventive stupidity.
This is right around the time that I took a hard serious listen to the supermarket muzac at work in hopes to be inspired by some sort of upbeat tune that would get me going into fourth gear and get some serious shelf stocking done. I found one song that would come on every now and then; I would only catch a melody and a word or two here or there. You must keep in mind that I am on a five year delay of ‘hip’ music. In other words, I don’t listen to a lot of new music at all and then about every five or six years I listen to it all and play ‘catch-up’. I am right now at the tail end of one of those ‘suspensions of all things hip and new’. The song reminded me of Led Zeppelin in some sort of way so that led me to WolfMother and then to The Darkness. Finally, after really listening to the words and writing them down I found this:
The White Stripes are who I found and I was kind of disturbed that I was enjoying them as (after hearing one of their other songs a couple years back) I did not understand the hype. When I went around melody humming to people (much like Al Bundy singing ‘mmmm … go with him’ to everyone) I found that the most common reaction was to mention the 1965 Dobie Gray song titled ‘The In Crowd’. I then would describe it to people as Prince singing ‘In Crowd’ while Led Zeppelin backed him up. For days and hours I was filled with this song and the plate smashing images and piano pulling pictures shown in the video. I go where the ‘in crowd’ goes.
This brought me to another weird-similarity-to-other-creativity found in a popular piece of current music. On my ride into work I would hear it on the fabulously predictable and boring, yet ‘cutting edge’, KROQ of Los Angeles. The whistling in this little ditty haunted me with it’s reverbed presence that made me wonder how big the hollow log I just crawled into must be to make that resonance evade escape. I found that it reminded me of a group called Yo La Tango but, alas, it was not. I found it’s similarity in something completely different. While you listen really get that whistled melody stuck in your head and compare with it’s mental solder in my cerebellum afterwards:
Does anyone remember the Saturday Night Live skit with Horatio Sans, Jimmy Falon, Tracy Morgan, and Chris Kattan playing a small band that sings the Christmas song, ‘Christmas Time Is Here’? It is the one where Chris Kattan is the member who holds the keyboard and moves his head from side to side. Tracey Morgan just snaps his fingers and kind of wiggles in place. Horatio Sans plays his ‘traveler’ guitar and sings. The guitar solo he plays during the song is the same whistling echo heard in the above song by Peter, Bjorn and John.
Of course all of this video viewing led me to many minutes and even hours that I dedicated in some sort of zoned-out hypno-surfing on YouTube that even led to me having a small but present favorites list. Yay! I came across one clip of amazing music and beautiful everything that inspired me to come to terms with the hiatus and to end the sabbatical and drift backward in time in order to catch up to now and be part of the present. It was more the bridge and chorus in this that grabbed me but the imagery in this video is worth the price of admission and a large popcorn:
Regina Spektor captured me with her story and imagery. The wavering lyric of ‘mind’ is almost breathtaking and brings a tear very quickly to the edge of forming and falling from my eyes, while the ‘he-art’ chorus is so upbeat and full of hope and smiles that it illuminates all that could make up anything close to a soul in this old cupboard of me and my being. Something to be said for colour to be found in the black and white; or is it something that we really must make a mess with in order to fully partake of their impact on us as a whole? How many voices are in that mind? Halcyon anyone … ?
Then back to the store to remind me that all is better than Trans-Am/ Firebird boogie of Revere nights and hair so big that even the Aqua-Net is afraid (and how scary is that - my Word spell check recognizes Aqua-Net!). I thought back to a supervisor I had on night crew in a different supermarket back in my early twenties. The song ‘Stroke’ was the only song that could rise this guy from the proverbial dead and get his ass moving fast enough that he could get the store looking primo for the arrival of the store manager upon the dawn’s early light. Not ever being a huge fan of the song to begin with, I now can not listen to it at all with out screaming. It has become a personal torture and trauma to have to endure even just one moment of that little ditty. However, I can rock, roll, and get it all done while listening to this:
Billy Squire. This is what I get for shunning one man’s positive productivity just because it was not my cup of tea. The lesson to this one is that understanding is the only thing that makes diversity happen with any sort of progress and ease is understanding (it is also worthy to note that understanding can accomplish the same ends as diversity but diversity can not go it alone thus requiring understanding which is just fine by itself). The other lesson is that I thought this was Led Zeppelin too and I obviously have something for any fem-bot-boy voiced lyrics about sex backed by heavy riffed blues rock being music that I like but would never instinctively buy or play. Mmmmmm … everybody wants you.
This is where my head has been. This is what stopped my writing for a month. I was far too busy playing music detective to scribble down pieces of prose to be read by the masses and accomplished by I. From chickens spinning for fun and dancing unicorn-cows all the way to the last lines of the Squire: “The more you understand, seems the more like you do. You never get away...everybody wants you “.
Could it even have made sense if I tried to make it make more sense than I may or may not have already manifested without malicious or malevolent motivation?
