A-W-P

24MAR-31MAR2019

Oh my God I am heartily sorry for having offended Thee.

A and Uly left for PHX after a dinner of Mexer food and a solitary beer each for A and I before the airport then I drove back in the rain without them and listened to Dwight and sang along sadly and then got faded as hell on a little vodka and played video games and was alone. It was good.

Cruising altitude on the way back home, somewhere over the Pacific and I am a messy wreck of a psyche. I saw a man follow around his daughter in the terminal at SEATAC and on the train up from Portland there was a woman with her son, maybe 5, 6, and the way she loved him in those three hours of train travel made me know that he was ruined forever. Fuck all that. Here are some photos from AWP.

Street art, of a type, from the commissioned to the graffito. A large part of me is shifting, internally, on the nature of art and what that means and the awful terror that you get when you see something old, even if its shitty, but a shitty-ish thing that human hands wrought and yet persisted. Today, in the PDX Amtrak station there was a display of shit dug up from a century ago during a recent-ish renovation of the station and it was trash, all of it, broken bottles and ceramic toys and bones and metallic pieces of offal much abused by oxidation and it was the same as a 5th century BCE curved bronze and early Attic scraper that ancient and uselessly dead athletes used to rip the grime of their labor from their skins after their contests that I observed as part of a "collection" in the Portland Art Museum. I felt very afraid and on the border of disassociative most of my time in PDX.

AWP itself was a terror. Filled with what I'd heard was 12K shuffling souls (mine included) in a convention center wholly grotesque and itself on the verge of a cataclysmic geologic event that would usher in its own destruction and NO-ONE seemed to be aware that we were all that Kurtzian invertebrate sliding, slithering along the edge of a straight razor. I believed, as fervently as I ever have anything (love, God, beauty, women, liquor) that irony was a thing not in anyone's wheelhouse who had bothered to attend the conference.

 
Outside the local church. A and I tried to get in but the doors were locked. I picked a bloom and walked about the streets of Portland.This was where a Mary should have stood, her outstretched arms welcoming. Later, we encountered many homeless and the evidence of their passings. Later still, when A was not with me, the homeless would not bother to ask for alms. Sometimes, this world. This fucking timeline.

 

There are many words to describe the time, hell, all of my times, in all aspects of my lives, as if I were some DFW chronicler but I prefer to go the Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra route and speak in ill informed metaphors. This does not bode well for the writing career, it seems, wherein editors require more exposition, more spoonfeeding to "engage the reader". I am rambling. The bunnies were from the PDX museum of art and they were terrifying, but not nearly as much as the other things I beheld there. A darkened closet of childhood. A night I spent at an aunt's house, my mother's fraternal twin, where there was a ventriloquist dummy in the closet whose room (my cousin's, Wesley's or Alex's, or maybe they shared a room?) in which I was supposed to sleep. Dead people and dead people and dead people and the funerary marble portraits of accusing eyed man and daughter who were immortalized and judging forever as I looked at the man's curly beard and the woman's hand uplifted and gesturing and the Roman epitaph of a man to his wife and myriad portraits of Marian visions with children in a love I'll never know, at least from my end.

Guys, I may be losing it. My sanity feels very fragile. The Sneaker Pimps are not assisting.

Jonah, when instructed by the Lord to go and prophesy against the city of Nineveh said, "Nope on that, Yahweh" and fled from God and went on to be eaten and regurgitated by leviathan and then had an unfortunate interaction with a gourd before relenting and doing as God had said and then, when the Ninevites repented only a day into his prophesy, he was bereft. 

30000 feet plus. Here's hoping this gourd of a vehicle doesn't wither and die as the shade of my homecoming. 

Kyrie Eleison, Christe Eleison, Kyrie Eleison. 

Back to the grind.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 2

17MAR2019 

We went to the mountains and me in a chemical haze. A drove. There was hiking and Uly remembered a dog on a sled from our previous visit on the trail. Then there was skiing and sledding and the requisite meltdown upon learning of the need to leave. We journeyed home to a dinner that I can't quite place at this remove save to know that it was good and filling and nutritious and all the doing of A. I had tutored PTSD guy but even that reality failed to blunt the crest of goodness that the day held. Later there was reading and untroubled sleep.

20MAR2019 - Vernal Equinox

Two weeks sans drink.

21MAR2019

I made a trek into Eagle River to meet with a doctor who has previously roto-rootered my colon. The way in, after a trip to the gym and some Taco Bell breakfast, was a blaze of Bach cellos reaching up my spine and ripping chunks of shivers from my temporal lobes. I arrived 30 minutes early.

The doctor is a specialist, liver, GI tract. He wears an orange-ish salmony colored shirt and a pinkish tie in a loose half Windsor that dangles undisciplinedly from his top button, as if he has loosened the noose for comfort. His shoes are similar to mine, calf leather, brogue-like. Creased slacks complete the look. His hands are meaty and soft, the way I remember my old man's being. In a different light, we could be almost contemporaries, him in his late 40s, early 50s, and me stolidly plowing through what is my own middle age. 

The exam room is spare, thankfully, denuded of those posters of the human frame with layers peeled away and artistic renditions of all the grotesque and hidden abnormalities a body can hide, at great length, until they gather the needed resources for a final assault. I feel good, my blood pressure's down, yet I pace the 10 by 5 room like an animal shelter inmate.

We, the doctor and I, chat benignly about all the things that are likely wrong with me. I minimize, defer, unwilling to change behaviors. He can see this and I freely admit this is my tack. Tests are ordered, blood, CT scans, and schedules made to review/interp the reconnaissance. 

I'm probably fine and would be wholly ignorant of my situation and possessed of the ego-less drive to hurry up and drop dead at 55 if I'm lucky were it not for diagnostic procedures and all the concomitant mental energy devoted to knowing just enough to be anxious about the non-consensual and absurd machinery of my life cycle. Fuck modern medicine. 

The drive back is sublime.

23MAR2019

HIPAA violations up in this bitch like a mother. I can't imagine anyone would want my white cell count, but hey, look at that badass AST level. Fuck yeah within normal limits. 

I went to the doc this morning again. It's absolute horseshit. I biked down under overcast battleship skies and chilled air with grimy puddles in the gutters and sad effigies of snowbanks crusted in gravel and filth. After the doc, I walked to the cafe and as I crossed the road to my ultimate destination, there was a woman holding her baby with a toddler in tow coming across the street in the opposite direction. The child saw me and smiled, waved, her wispy hair a cyclone in the street's backwash. I waved back, swamped with all manner of emotive chemicals.

This morning I awoke in a decent-ish mood but this quickly turned as the realities that I've been tamping down encroached - packing for AWP, the terror/anxiety of kissing Uly and A goodbye as they prep to ascend to cruising altitude, the uncertainties of condominium pools, rattlesnakes, scorpions, et al. in a nightmare scape Arizona of my imagining all conspiring to murder this boy in his beautiful curiosity and nascent independence. Christ is he a magnificent aberration.

They leave in 8 hours.

NO BOOZE LIVE BLOGGING LENT, Episode 1

This isn't really a live blog, more like a, I scribbled some shit down as it happened or in retrospect or maybe some crazed and meaningless sludge from my sleeping subconsciousness that I've plastered the digital walls with prior to and during my Lenten pilgrimage this year.


Weekend prior to Lent, 28FEB - 02MAR2019

06MAR2019 - Ash Wednesday

Mardi Gras had come and gone and I went to work, early-ish and hungover properly to struggle through the hours before it was time for one last pre-Mass debauch with A at the Moosehead as we'd not gone in previous to alert the staff (Sarah, Kelsey, Carol) that we were abstaining from our usual Wednesday night hockey pints and Sunday NASCAR vroom vroom day liquoring and not to worry. We sucked down pints like arrant and sunburned tropical sailors. Mass was scheduled for 7PM but Uly got too squirrelly and we had to repair home for tea et al. before the long slow dryness of this year's purgatorial Lenten progression from sinner to penitent to forgiven.

11MAR2019

Today I decided to go to the gym after seeming to catch up on all the sleep I've ever missed. The sleep without booze was my biggest fear for this Lenten season. I've abstained before, sure, but recently it's been a daily encounter on the field of substance use with my favored weighted blanket of alteration. In its absence, I've been supplementing with tea and smoke and edibles and it's been a bit of an amelioration to the longing for that which is forbidden but not something I'm altogether okay with in its execution. Questions arise, in this state, about my long term drinking's feasibility with respect to liver enzymes and an already scarred and fatty liver and all the health rot my provider parrots ad nauseum. Almost as if she doesn't get that I've got to get through the next 12 hours with a minimum of suicidal ideation and what happens to this frame when I'm 60 takes a backseat to my continued churning into the present. Why don't more folks understand this?

Notes: 
1. Dreams are absolutely insane and memorable and nearly always nightmare.
2. Two older middle aged white dudes wearing MAGA hats and holding a Corgi puppy named Thor stock up on copious amounts of weed of a 1030 Monday morning at the shop where all the cute lady shoptenders know the puppy and benignly look away at the red ribbon of these dudes' political leanings. What a world.
3. Yesterday, did it even happen?

12MAR2019

Flight and lodging logistical horseshit with train and plane timetables and scheduling and all the inane horseshit borne from a lack of a truly integrated public transport system. Like, why in the fuck can't I just get on A train and have it ferry me to AWP. A, as in a singular, fucking TRAIN. This can't be that difficult.

Sober sleeping. Wouldn't recommend it.

The problem as I've come to understand it, and I've not read so many substance use narratives but I've asked around enough to the shades who dip into escape's gravity well, is the inimitable boredom of quotidian horseshit. Wake up, dress, work, small talk, moil, drudgery, small talk, home, dinner, diversion, wait to sleep. It's absolute bullshit. Why go through that with full on pain and reality? It's like speed running a video game on legendary difficulty. Dial it back to merely hero and you can actually get some enjoyment out of all the PvP and NPC content. Hell, download yourself a bottle and really amp up the fun buff of your living stats. Sure, I could revel in the utter terror/goodness of watching Uly and A play Chinese checkers while stone cold but why do that when I could do the same twisted? Makes little sense. 2 weeks until the oasis of AWP.

14MAR2019

Blustery day. Proto-spring. Waxwings are about and furiously chittering as they lap from pools of snow and ice melt. Self-worth plummeting; sense of fraud rising. Libido is trash. So many hours to fill.

16MAR2019

Saturday. Loneliest of all days of the week. Normally, I'd wait until noon and amble to the Moosehead for socialization by proxy with all the old drunkards there backslapping and guffawing and pull tabbing and sportsing and bell ringing and all the chintzy and low-rent sparkle-light thrills of the poor. Bottles of top shelf whisky never touched, gathering dust. I'm in the cafe right now, perusing the drama of flesh. I'm aware that Lent is supposed to be a spiritual journey and that none among us can shoulder it alone and therefore the need for supplication to the divine in our period of bodily abjuration but this is missing on the current Lenten adventure. Probably accounts for the difficulty level. Team Sleep, the soundtrack. 

The cafe is all bougie white folks while outside in the hallway a team of Southeast Asian ladies janitor the facilities, stony faced, enduring.

I've been reading Colson Whitehead's Underground Railroad. I do recommend.

I Unabashedly Am Ecstatic about Patrick Stump's Vocalizations

Ain't gonna lie, Stump really kills me. Maybe I'm perpetually 12, as A messaged me this glorious pre-spring crispy day but maybe I'm just possessed of a poor taste. Analysis of anything withholding, I'll let you think of that one what you will.

Last night (several nights removed now) I ate spicy kukkik with chicken from the local Pho and Thai place native to the burg. The fallout (get it?) from that has yet to be endured, but as I finished, the bliss-agony of the inflamed broth was wholly worth it. I keep going on, doing things to this body, dulling its newness, down into decay. I'll miss it when I'm gone, but there is solace in that reality as well.

This cafe is full of beautiful women in various modes of conduct. Good Christ, send help. Last night, we made home pizza and I sat on the barstool at my kitchen island and watched A draw out the piping discs and rest them on boards and a rack and then she took up the copper accented and wooden handled pizza slicer that her parents bought us and she hacked through the crusty bread and molten toppings steaming up and up and up and I loved her more in that image than maybe ever before and she asked why I was looking at her like I was. The spell crashed.

 

I walked downtown today on a bad Achilles tendon (Christ is that older woman statuesque. I'm in a real time PVP art museum.). This morning I cranked up Dax Riggs and I saw one of the pictures of my old man and Mom on the wall in our trailer in Mississippi and the music truly grooved with that scene. Mystical and dark, Satanic, Mom would have called him, solely for the titles of his songs (Cassie Eats Cockroaches, Demon Tied to a Chair in my Brain, Living is Suicide, et al.) and various groups with whom he's been frontman (Acid Bath, Agents of Oblivion, Deadboy and the Elephantmen, etc.). There was a connection to a place, phantom I know, that infuses yet my crippled psyche, a vision of a vast river and wetlands and rot and completely divorced from the frigid sterility of the mountains.

Today I also prayed the rosary for the first time in a while. Joyful Mysteries, not necessarily my faves, but ones that focused me on the hyperperturbing nature of parenthood. I feel like there are things that I continually learn anew, in terrible and intimate ways. I could picture the surge of relief as Mary rushes to embrace the pre-teen Jesus on the steps of the temple. The other day my IRL bro posted a link about a possible extinction level asteroid strike at the end of this year and my brain went to the place where would I kill Uly and spare him the agony of obliquely starving in a post-human world or would I strive The Road fashion and shoulder on into the ashy dark of his being alive, in the current instant, in the obscene hope that he would survive, somehow. 

Like my friend Nick says, "The trouble is being a writer."