Hey, Hey!

Here's a collection of depressing things I've found on a recent trip to Bishop's Attic, and maybe some commentary. 

When you witness heartbreak in the real world, what does that look like for you? Has the child died? Is this Raymond Carver? Is this Hemingway? The child has died, regardless, in theory or experiment, for this item has made its way to this image. What is the baby's name? Who did she look like? What is her (possibly inextant) arc? There are billions of heartbreaks flowering all around us.

Absolute insanity in any direction, a blanket of non-stop wondrous living, pushing into the right void of nothingness existence in a moment that cannot be replicated. And the sound, sound, sound of it hammering, concordant, disconcordant, at times harmony, at others noise. There is a portion of us that pushes against the false reality and gives the briefest moments of smeared clarity that also cannot be fully resolved. Look at this little girl's face. Feel every instant of her being. Joy.

This life, my life, has been a spectacular spiraling about things that keep surprising me. As if I'm some idiot continually reminded of the shit that's happening outside my window. It's as if you live in a haunted house but become acquaintanced to the ghosts. You get to know shaky drawer Beth who rattles the silverware, Moany Pete who can't shut up about his heartbreak, Cold Area Maver who you just put on a blanket and sit with.

50 years only to end up in a thrift store. Who would buy this? Who could drink from such goblets? Me. Imagine sucking down the lifeforce of 50 years of co-being. Imitative magic in the extreme. Parrot the thing you wish to happen. I left the set on the shelf as a faded ghoul in the rear of the thrift store hacked and hacked at some catarrh. Later, I would go to the bar.

Uly and I engaged in the old, the ancient, the creation of magic amulets and medallions, the genesis of coins, of numismatics, of record keeping, of bureaucracy, of grain, of slaves, of property. He's a quick study, the lad, and he knows things writ deep in the nature of his soul. These things we inhered with special portent, in the hopes that they might see the sun through to another passing, another moment, another everything.

Don't be so hard on yourself.

 

First Blanket

A few weeks ago, my friend D dropped by the house when I was at work and delivered a cache of books. Likely his aim was to buoy my literary spirits, a sort of life preserver in the intellectual sludge that is contemporary "literature". (If you doubt the truly garbage nature of what currently passes for short stories as an art form, look no further than what graced The New Yorker's fiction pages for the week of 10 November 2019.) He, D, as he usually does, blew me out of the water with his offerings, not least of all this story collection by Donald Ray Pollock. It's the real deal, delivering punch after punch after punch, much like a Hubert Selby Jr. or a Henry Rollins in terms of horror displayed on the page. It encouraged. It brutalized. It gave one the idea that gritty stories still have a place in the world, despite all the Yiyun Li or Weike Wang or Tessa Hadley or Oates-level droning and uninteresting useless wastes of 6000 words. No, these stories had life, hard, messy, beautiful life, the kind that makes you want to put fists through panes of plate glass. That it was published as recently as the late aughts was a thing to give a motherfucker hope. 

Here's Uly on Halloween night, not even in need of a coat. Felicia claimed that as a child she never remembered a trick or treating without a snowsuit, a sentiment I've heard voiced by several Valley residents. The point, I suppose, is this year's weather has been atrocious. The summer was dry and record hot, with wildfires and terrible air quality, with memes admonishing folks not to complain about the temps in mid-August as there would be blizzard conditions in 6 weeks. While that may have been the past norm, things are different. Just as recently as last week, a cousin of mine posted a temperature comparison between Biloxi, MS and Anchorage wherein the southern city's daytime high was some degrees cooler than A-town. It was a record, besting a century's worth of temperatures, the coldest since data began to be collected. Biloxi was sub-freezing, Anchorage still hosted liquid puddles. Strange things are afoot, no doubt, and the chaotic nature of complex systems will continue to surprise us, but there is little room to debate that things are not what they should be, or, at least, not what we are accustomed to, especially those of us on such pitifully short timelines who are able to pinpoint such differences between the current reality and our foggy memories.

The snow finally arrived, just today. Uly saw it first. He looked up from the Diego Rivera puzzle, "The Flower Carrier", we were trying to assemble and declared, "It's snowing," with all proper and right amazement. A came back from dance and a piano job and we chatted with Gavin who was home alone playing Minecraft while his brother was being transported to a school orchestra concert in Wilmington, some hour-ish away from home. We talked about an art project Uly and I had worked on, and how to produce obsidian in the blocky digital world, and school. Later, I walked to the bar in the snow while listening to shoegaze-y tunes delivered to me via cell data. There was a massive flock of starlings in the neighborhood downtown, the largest I'd seen this year, and they flitted about in the falling snow like dark Euclidean murmurations in a vast 4-D volume, perching and flying, perching and flying, ultimately old and restless. Later still, at the bar, I watched a smaller offshoot of what I imagine the same flock dance around the bushes and trees across the street from the bar. They did not stay long, and as they departed, their wings flapped incessantly, bearing them off elsewhere, their receding form like television static in the grey sky. 

Here's is a pic of where Nick has recently stayed. It's a sky completely void of cloud, immensely blue, incapably fragile, as if it could just shuck itself from the earth at any moment. Earlier, I watched a woman hold her child, perhaps an 18 month old, and wildly kiss her before strapping her into the back of an idling SUV. This week at work, I listened to a student who I'd known for all of five seconds divulge to me the highlights of the student's life's trauma reel, a vast sewer of unbelievable events but ones that happened regardless. The student had been through things no one should endure, and yet, this person was here with me, telling the story, relaying the information, asking for help. I told the student of the innate strength and resilience of which we are capable, of which the student had displayed, was displaying, in trying to alter the future for something better, something real. Who knows if anyone will succeed? There is today. There is the snow yet. It is still falling. There is Uly's art project. There is music. There is writing. There is a young man playing video games, another performing in an orchestra. A grown man shouldn't cry this much.

A Ski, A Walk, A Funeral

Skiing up Archangel road the Monday before last, I was the poster child for unpreparedness in the wild: I ventured out alone; no one knew where I was; my phone was without service; the new snow was damp and the temperatures had been warm-ish previously; I was traversing a known avalanche area; I had no food, water, change of clothes, rain gear, shelter, nor fire starter on my person; the road up to Hatcher Pass (up which I'd foolishly driven) was un-plowed and un-sanded and likely to be so for quite some time.

Once on the trail, an ominous fog filled the valley and the sky turned a humid overcast, one that suggested rain instead of new snow, a disastrous turn for me thermally. Animal tracks littered the ground, the most recognizable were of snowed over moose imprints. The beast(s) had used the road much as I was, moving up (or down), not crossing like all of the other tracks which ran perpendicular to the roadbed. The feeling that I was accompanied by large and unseen creatures began to crowd the trail as I skied. Noises from my person gave me pause and I tended an ear to the surrounding brush only to find the silence of the swishing river some distance away. The fantasy that I was the sole human being in a large volume of space was easy to indulge.

I thought a lot about death.

Monday past my special lady, who is ripe with child, had the day off with me, the first in what seemed like quite a stretch. We woke up, made breakfast together (eggs, pancakes, bananas, and syrup), before driving down to the Matanuska river where we went on a walk to, among other things, scout out a place for our son's placental burial.

The snow was crisp, in those little frozen balls it makes, and not the flakey variety. The noise we raised as we descended onto the covered river stones and walked along the stream bed was a thing that you believe certain to be on the highlight reel of your life as you lay dying in some hospital bed or on the scene of some horrible accident. We crunched along, she and I, when we saw a raven come to light on the ground about a bow shot away. We investigated and the raven flew off, cawing. We found the bird to have been at some mysterious foraging, the object of which was not discernible to us. We returned home.

After, I went for a separate walk to meditate on the Joyous Mysteries. During the journey, I slipped and fell and the impact jarred throughout my body, then and afterward even. I made my way, feeling that corporeality, as I stood at a grave and talked to an old lady. I cleaned her headstone of a fresh, wet snow and told her about the change of seasons and of lives.

Later still, I went out to the alehouse to watch the football game. I drank beer and ate quesadillas, with relish and gusto and all manner of fevered existence, before returning home again and eventually to bed. I read for a bit, Dostoevsky's The Idiot, before reaching over to quench the light. My arm was over my lady and with my hand on her belly the in utero movements of our child reached me. I imagined him there as he slept or played or danced or fought.

I thought about his coming birth and all its . . . vicissitudes.

Tuesday I dressed formally. A mentor of mine (a beautiful man I'd like to call my friend) had endured the final (yet never ending) loss of his son. Gussied such, I set out. The day was wintry, cold, with a sky of promising snow. A few flurries dusted the streets as I drove to my local cafe. I needed to load up on coffee before the Mass and the beauty of that short trip struck me. Various birds arced through the sky. A raven sat on a light pole. Music blared from the van's speakers. The sky, a harsh metallic hue, promised nothing but pain. I found myself shouting at everything. I parked and went in.

The cafe was filled with Marines, one of whom walked with a cane and had a jacket that heralded him as a member of a unit involved in the Marine Corps battle of the Chosin Reservoir. They were lately celebrating the 240th birth of the Corps. They were boisterous. Loud. Glad handing. Semper Fi-ing. I sat and had coffee and advanced work on a story, one about a mass shooter styled on a person I'd known during my own enlistment in that storied organization, until it was time to leave for the service.

Snow fell. The Mass was prayed. The sky broke and the sun cast light through the stained glass, coloring the kneeling faithful. Eucharist was received. The priest blessed us and bade us go forth. I hugged my friend and said I was sorry.

On the road for home, I wept, filled with thoughts.