Lately I've taken to wandering around and watching the world on mute. It's strange with no auditory input. Really sharpens the edges. Take, for instance, just now at the Moosehead where I am ostensibly "working from home" there is a gigantic television playing the series "Supernatural". I've never seen this show outside of the bar and the only reason I know of it is that it airs on TNT network which sometimes has hockey games but must fill the day drinker's viewing schedule with reruns and trash until said time as puck drops. All manner of spooky things are happening - a car drives without a pilot, a little girl's playground goes maliciously poltergeistish, a child is lured by a malevolence to be locked inside a refrigerator. The adult actors are trying with all their might to be serious, dramatic, full of affect. It's like watching your children in a school play. ("Aww honey, you were so good up there!" Proceeds to nurse a hidden whisky flask in the middle school theater lobby.) Is it bad? Is it shlocky? Maudlin? Disingenuous? Outright lies? How far from poetry has this performance drifted? How far have we?
I was watching pair bonds happening in the cafe earlier. My god what a wonder. There were two tall, thin, Celtic-looking motherfuckers hunched at a table, over their phones, sharing each others' air and tertiary attention. I imagined a cave-dwelling couple, hunched next to a fire, both working individual pieces of chert, each to their own crafting and purpose. (Oh look, the malevolence is conspiring to drown the episode's child protagonist in a public pool! Much drama. There is an 11th hour rescue. All is saved.) There were other folks there too. Olds. Witches. Shamans. Warriors. Fathers. I could say any number of things about them. Women with children spaced roughly two years apart, lugging their brood around with such insouciance, trailing bags and car seats and whole corteges of misery and plastic. I watched a woman smile at her baby and fortuitously enough, my friend Nick had recently supplied a quote from Denzel Washington that roughly said "when a mother has her first child, it's the last time she ever falls in love again."
I recently discovered a new, to me, band named Alvvays. It's probably basic indie pop and a nothingburger critically, cranked up on echo effects and subtle production autotuning with a hint of reverb. Who knows? I'm certainly not qualified to say, but the lead singer's voice makes you want her to scoop you up and pet your head while you cry about being alive in that dualistic way of wanting to be off the ride yet not wanting the fun to stop. Who knows what she's even saying in these lyrics? All I know is she's a true savior, a right bastion of goodness. (Hey, look another episode of something. There is a wedding, delightfully sporting not one but TWO whole interracial couples, graciously black female/white male and black male/white female, maybe one of the guys is Latino. What could they be trying to teach us about race in contemporary America? Black bride affixes her tiara'd veil to a young blonde girl's head. I think it is the cop-drama is "Bones"?) I don't know the woman's name, the lead singer that is, but her existence is like being in the forest and spying a particularly fantastic fruiting body of some sort that only you will see before its decay into the nitrogen cycle.
For work I went to Talkeetna. An episode of uselessness and terror. I vomited 8 times in one day due to stress induced anxiety at having to talk to strangers in some sort of professional capacity. A true Gallipolli, none of the objectives planned were achieved save the tenuous beachhead but I met some good (false modifier) people along the way. A sorceress in the library, a gremlin hooked to an emphysema pump, a sundry goods store cat, the barkeep who was so glad I'd said I was from Palmer rather than Wasilla, the bar patrons who then proceeded to roundly trash Wasilla. Talkeetna's a place, that's for sure, and the pic above is from the only bar that was open on 25 January and only one of four establishments of any sort that was open to commerce. My friend D has written about this very inn and I highly recommend his collection of stories that contain said experience. I stayed in a cabin that my employer was supposed to pay for but didn't and I turned in early after watching Wheel of Fortune. It reminded me of my old man when, one of the contestants asked to buy a vowel and then solved the puzzle, I protested loudly as to the contestant's dumbness at having thrown money away when the phrase was so obvious. (Now there is a pro-adoption commercial featuring a black family wherein the adopted teen discovers how to create a dish before heading off to independence and his adoptive mother finds a prepped dinner for mother and father after he'd gone. I cried. Idiocy. Cretinism. Other stigmatized words indicating less than average mental function.)
As always, the puzzle of existence, of sentience remains. As always, not in any methodical, rationed way but more in a vacant catatonic internal scream reverberating in a standing wave inside the skull's bowl. Sometimes I wonder what it's like to be a person who has "no bad days". There is a couple that comes into the bar, retirees, every Thursday afternoon to share two Coors Lights and hash out their week. Here comes the second round right now. There's a guy, slim, likely white, awkward, who plays predictable oldies on the juke and sings along as he shoots terrible pool on Wednesdays at 3PM sharp. It's Mike's birthday today and there is a cake and balloons for when he arrives in about 30 minutes. The afternoon bar is a hell of a scene. You can do anything here. Take a shit. Read poetry. Cry. Watch sports. Vomit. Listen to dead people sing via a hand computer. Write. Be.
Be.
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