Benjamin P. Toche

Benjamin P. Toche

 August 7th, 1981 – July 22nd, 2023

In the back of the cab, tucked under the front passenger seat, is a paper coffee cup that says, “Thank you for composting me.”  That is how we can begin to talk about the life and death of a man named Benjamin Pere Toche.  Like the cup, he was polite, articulate, “trash” as he would say, useful, ironic, self-effacing, a vessel for holding, and also stuffed under the seat in a nondescript cab, hoping for someone to see him.  And fulfill his request.

He was so many other things, too.  More than we can list here.  We know we can’t get it right with these words or do him justice.  But we’re going to try anyway and we’ll use some of his own words to help.

On August 7th, 1981, Ben emerged onto the world stage at Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Mississippi.  His mother was studying to become an RN and his father was a day laborer who toiled outside, his skin so mahogany that once he’d been denied service in a shop as the proprietor mistook him for black.  

Ben lived in Pascagoula with his parents and two older brothers, Francis and Jude, in a rented, brick-façaded home with a carport on Chicago Drive.  He remembered tooling around inside this house on a tricycle, like some kind of inchoate Nascar driver.  There was a window in his room, outside of which was a bush — the plant he would “get a switch” from when he’d misbehaved.  The bush’s fingers thrashed against the nighttime windowpane, often causing him to retreat to mom’s room for solace.  His mom’s bed was nice, warm, and comforting, and she’d put a towel down in case he’d piss himself; and if he did, she never judged or shamed him.  He often wondered if mothers, in all their sacrifice, knew how thoroughly they ruined their sons for everyone else on the planet. 

His education was Southern and public, after which he spent five years in the Marine Corps as an Arabic linguist. During his service, he found himself within a group of wandering young men and women who shared the hope that the military would be their ticket away from something, to somewhere they could not get on their own.  And Ben made a lasting impression.  The friendships he formed became some of his longest; as a fellow Marine said, “Every time was the best time when we were all together.” It was not all good times, though.  Because he never deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan, he was conflicted about his service.  He was glad to have escaped TBI and PTSD and maybe even death, for a while, but ashamed and embarrassed, after all that training and conviction, as he felt unused. Regardless, Ben — and his service mates in return — would eschew trite bullshit and say, lovingly, “Semper Fi, motherfuckers.”

Ben fell in love exactly three times, was married exactly three times, and divorced (almost) exactly three times.  He spoke of these relationships reverently and often, as his heart was brimful with love, but he also knew that love to be unwieldy.  Although he was sometimes clumsy with it, that love did produce three sons that Ben is, heartbreakingly, leaving behind.  Gavin, 18, whom Ben was so proud to watch become a man.  Kiernan, 16, in whom Ben saw so much of himself, which was both frightening and wonderful.  And Ulysses, 7, a child whose beauty and intelligence consistently astonished Ben.  Funnily enough, when Ben was a boy, he remembered telling schoolmates that he wanted to be a dad of nine because he wanted to field a baseball team.  His heart certainly contained enough love for all nine of those imagined children; he just overlaid it across three.

And Ben wrote.  He was beyond prolific.  In 2010, he applied to an MFA program and was accepted.  Upon attending, he was thrust into a world filled with “real, genuine people with hypersensitive thoughts and feelings about fucking books, man.”  This experience changed his life; Ben once stated, “The impression my MFA friends made on me and the support they’ve shown to me and my life has buoyed me through much suicidal ideation, and they deserve my thanks and apologies for lacking in my own friendship with them.”  Which everyone will tell you is just not true.  Ben buoyed others far more than he will ever know, likely much more than we buoyed him.  

On July 22nd, 2023, Ben died of a broken heart.  That is to say, in 1981 a child was born with a heart too big for all this beauty and a temperament too tender to bear the weight of it.  He would say that nothing worked out like he thought it would.  Being a father didn’t go the way he envisioned it. Nor did being a husband or partner. Ben, like the rest of us, was thwarted by idealistic expectations. He said once, “I really thought someone would be able to live with me, handle all my faults, accept my failings, and we would raise a beautiful and lovely family all on our own.  But that seems an impossible thing.”  He has now rendered true what should still be unknown. 

Ben had an abundance of love.  The people in his life loved him for the eccentric, dichotomous, warm, funny, dark, brilliant, wondrous man that he was.  In addition to that, he spent most of his adult life working in careers that allowed him to provide guidance and care to those without certain advantages, to the mentally ill, and to the disabled, and they beamed warmth and gratitude back at him.  And for his friends and family, he listened to our problems too, loved us, and offered guidance and help.  He was the Patron Saint of The Unwell, shouldering the burden of all our pain and strife, and we loved him immensely for that.  And for everything else.  But sadly, Ben struggled to accept that love, nor could he provide himself the same level of care he extended to others.  If he was here to read this, he would tell us to shut the fuck up.  Because, folks, beauty is embarrassing.  And he was embarrassed to call himself beautiful.  To believe himself as beautiful on this earth.  But he was.  Spectacularly.  So, he can shut the fuck up right back.  

Well, he already has.

Despite this abundance of love, he felt alone.  He felt alone as a child. He felt alone as a man. He felt alone as a father.  That is a thing that happens.  Hugs, friend.  For that we are truly sorry.

He died somewhere between more years than he thought he could give and not as many as the rest of us needed.  But he’s not in pain anymore.  He’s not here anymore.  He’s somewhere else.  In fact, as we imagine him now, he is on his couch in the house on Beaver Ave in Palmer, Alaska, Andrea, his wife, sitting at the piano playing Satie’s Gymnopédie No. 1, Uly not yet awake. There’s the fat orange cat, Captain Lawrence Edward Grace “Titus” Oates, basking on the sofa in the low angled morning November sun. There is a convincing air of mystery in the atmosphere. This is a dreamscape.

And later that day, in Ben’s own words:

I watched Uly eat a dried fig and it was positively VanGoghian. I could see the fibers snaking out of the fig’s tooth-pierced flesh in the golden afternoon backblast of overcast skies. Then we went for an excursion in the backyard and asked the spirit of the decaying jack-o-lantern of that year’s Halloween a singular question to which the pumpkin must be truthful in answering.

“How do you get up the hill,” Uly asked in a rising boyish voice.

“Don’t ask that,” I said, “He only tells the truth for the first question. The other ones he might lie, and you already know how to get up the hill. It’s right there.” I pointed with my coozied beer.

“Ask it another question, Uly-bear. A big one. Like, what does it all mean? Or, why are we here?” Andrea suggested.

“Who knows if he’ll tell you what’s right,” I said.

Uly, in his black snow-pant bibs and green hat and red jacket and yellow and black mittens grabbed the planter box’s wooden edge and faced the crumbling and moldy child-faced jack-o-lantern, the one of his own design, once more. “How does wood become wood?”

I looked around me. The inclined backyard that is the backdrop to our quaint, cedar paneled home on Beaver Avenue lay dotted with juvenile cottonwoods, the same ones in which my oldest two boys, Gavin and Kiernan, played pretend, fending off imagined enemies from their forest fortress, in a three-month removed summer that seemed forever ago when I saw them in the throes of their childhoods, still reaching for the true meaning of play. I put my hand against the trunk of the closest tree before launching into a monologue about how photosynthesis creates glucose and glucose becomes energy and how the ever-expanding circumference of a tree was the only truly living layer of that structure with the basement floors being continually converted into a dead carbon backbone on which the living crust seethed.

Then we went down and took the cat inside and made tamales, goopy ones, but ones still excellent in taste and almost preferable to the more toothy of masas and we ate and drank and now it’s Lana Del Rey again and golden tones and love and it’s too too good.

To Ben, we’d like to say…maybe you should have let Uly ask the pumpkin how to get up the hill.  Because you didn’t make it, friend; not nearly as far as we needed you to go.  But we know it’s been a steep hike for you.  Very, very difficult.  We know you did your best.  And we know you made it as far as you could.  But that’s really frustrating, Ben. We miss you, man.  We cannot contain it.  You are such a big part of our collective fabric.  The ponchoed parts of the cloth, with llamas and ravens, eagle feathers woven in there too.  

No one wants to say goodbye.  No one knows how to say goodbye.  So we won’t.  We know you were fond of saying, “You can never go home.”  So, what we will say, sir, is:  Welcome Home.  Get the fire going.  Find some good books.  Write down what you can.  And breathe.  Go easy on yourself this time.  Nothing can hurt you now, not even you.  And don’t worry.  We’ll all be along shortly.  Save us a seat.  We’ll have so very much to talk about.  

Ben’s life will be celebrated on the 25th of August, 2023, 2:00PM, at Matanuska River Park in Palmer, Alaska, where his ashes will be composted amongst the alluvium and waters of the Matanuska River.

(written by Nicholas Dighiera and Daniel Mickelson)

Don't Stop Dancing, Don't Dare Stop

The youth of the world, and I'm assuming this riverine bridge graffito was penned by someone under age 20 given the text message nature of its delivery, certainly have things on lock. "Hey, anyone notice the house was on fire? Oh, okay, you did. That's good." It's like the meme of the dog enjoying his morning coffee as everything burns around him, to include himself, as he notes that "This is fine." That's one of my favorites and I wonder how people go through the world somehow blithely ignorant of how fucked things are and I marvel at their sense of stability and seemingly stable relationships and employment situations. Increasingly, I feel like Dennis Hopper's character in Apocalypse, Now when he's ranting to Captain Willard, "Look at this shit we're in man!" and then goes on to quote Rudyard Kipling about keeping one's mind about them when everyone else has lost theirs. I wonder what side of the fence of that aphorism I fall into but I have a feeling that everyone already knows where I'm at. Hell, it's not like we keep secrets around here.

Again, also at the river, the youth have the solutions to the above pic. The rock was my contribution and, apologies for the potato quality of the picture, the heart shaped lump of granite was found out on the riverbed and was intended for placement in the apartment or for painting even but I left it with a more important message. Conversely, if you shock a dog in a cage enough and then give them the possibility of escape, the dog will not flee torture. As in Fall Out Boy's new joint, So Much (for) Stardust, (which is an absolute banger) he screams on the mic that "Heartbreak feels so good" and I'm inclined to agree with him. The record contains any number of great lines but the track that contains that line makes me weep like I've been opened up and all the raw parts of me are poked and prodded for the edification of a gallery of surgeons interested in the absurdity of the human condition. Needless to say, it's been on repeat in the earbuds.

These are, I think, forget me nots that I found at the river. They were a little more purple than I expected but I pulled up last weekend, fortuitously in front of them as I parked, and I trod up the embankment for a photo. I cried, natch, but at what I could not explain. Beauty? Sadness? The interbeing of both? The teminability of existence? The chaotic nature of sentient life? Art? Evil? Who knows? I certainly don't. Later, I walked the river and didn't cry but rather marveled at the absolute stupidity of existing. Then, I went to the bar and watched hockey and went back to the apartment and cried myself to sleep.

Look at this guy right here. Broken, yet persisting. I found this just today outside the Palmer museum. Then, I went to visit the Virgin Mary at St. Michael's and the arboretum. Someone had broken off the Virgin's hands and she stood in her blue alcove with handless arms outstretched as if she would still welcome you into her, hands or not. She stood there, looking crushed, with a garland of flowers gracing her head. At the arboretum, as noted previously, the spruce bark beetles have taken their toll of the population of spruce trees and seeing the naked stumps of felled trees like snaggletoothed grins gave me pause. There are very few spruce in the arboretum now and I went and visited with each of them, inspecting for signs of beetle invasion. Many of the remaining had early signs of infection but one in particular was near the end and I went and touched the trunk and wept like a penitent. Then I went to the bar. Natch. Gavin turned 18 last Friday. Everyday I beg for God to end me. 

Goddamn You, Goddamn We, Goddamn Us All

At the new digs, the water runs brown when you open the tap and there was a Ford Focus with a smashed out back window and a ratchet strap holding down the back end that got towed away recently. Spiders inhabit the place. Ants invade through the quarter inch gap between the door and jamb and roam the shag carpet like amphibious vehicles in choppy surf. Speaking of the water, you could but probably shouldn't drink it and I don't and so I live like some unhinged hermit using bottled, distilled water from a gallon jug to brush my teeth. Food is an ongoing mystery. I will buy ready made sandwiches for 10 dollars and a bag of chips for 2.50 and this will stretch for 3 days at least. Sometimes, I find pieces of sandwich on the floor, likely the draw for the ants. You pick it up, put it away, marvel at how much you've eaten. I'm down to 148 pounds in full clothing, shoes, and daily carry.

The river is blustery and the silt whirls up like popped smoke and curls in twisted mini-cyclones along the streambed. I went there yesterday and walked the sand. Eric Satie's Gymnopedies and Gnossiennes supplied the soundtrack and I wandered around aimlessly and wept. An eagle sat perched in its nest, hopefully atop an egg or, better yet, warming a fully hatched chick. A magpie called from the bush, unseen, eventhough I addressed her. There was a rubbish pile, seemingly from a small motor repair shop and among the rubble was a notebook whose front cover was affixed with a former felon's prison ID badge. In my probabilistic stroll, I passed a man sitting on a folding chair at the treeline. He had been close enough to possibly mistake my call to the magpie as a greeting to him but said nothing as I passed by. Another enigma. Another character. Both of us NPC's in each other's MMORPG. 

Down at the river, scrawled on a bridge pylon. It is my natural inclination to agree, but reality keeps refuting my hypotheses. This idea would be so easy if it were true, and the weak part of me wishes it were, but it's not. It would be so simple to write everything off like some sullen emo-wracked teen or some degenerate divorcee. I will say that I am heartened by the goodness in the other, even someone as terrible as the North Carolina BBQ food truck woman who sounded like my mother when I asked, already knowing the answer, if the bucket of iced tea was sweet. We had a laugh and I noticed the "Trump 2024" sticker on the inside of the truck. Nice lady. Good food. The fucking duality of man.

Yesterday was busy. I saw this dummy compete in his final home soccer game for high school where he got an assist and, late in the game, had two quality scoring chances where the ball sailed on him. Not by much, but enough to clear the crossbar. Unfortunate. When I opened the Zuck machine yesterday morning in the futon bed that's too small such that my feet dangle off the edge like some Raymond Carver protagonist, I saw a bevy of varsity soccer photos and this was one of them and I laughed and I cried like some demented inmate confined to the SHU. He finished high school, not without serious forbearance on everyone but his part, and I've never been more proud of him and more fearful of how life is going to ruin him. But that's just the negativity speaking.

Go cop the new-ish Kendrick record and pre-order the new QOTSA joint. 

Burning My Face Away

"If I took this cigarette and put it out on you, would you love me?" Dax Riggs asks on the track named "Jezebel" from the "When the Kite String Pops" album. Sometimes I like to play dumb and find my antecedents unreckonable to my current reality but this has done little in the way of gaining me friends or the esteem of my loved ones or any sort of positive notoriety. Indeed, it is a great secret to be kept from anyone in tertiary circles in which I swim. Can one imagine being at work, as an elementary school janitor, blasting out lyrics like "Turn on all the lights, so I can watch you die," in swamp metal growling along which I accompany not as sung, but plainly stated, as if I'd given that order any number of times. Or, "You bleed so easy, let the blackness roll on." Haha, I'm trending ever higher on those watch lists I surely populate. Ooh, fun idea for an experiment, try to purchase a firearm and see if I can or if I'm blackballed. Haha. 

It's officially the holiday season, even though we had our Thanksgiving early when Uly's grandma was here. I was so stressed making the dinner that not only did I have to puke, I couldn't eat any substantial quantity of the food once prepared. That's okay. I do that a lot, much to the chagrin of my special lady. I explained to her that one thing I learned from childhood was that if you burn the gravy, everything else is also, by default, ruined and you've wasted everyone's time and inflicted a wholly inedible meal upon them. Shit is definitely on the line when it comes to gravy and god help you if the fowl is dry. You'd best just pack your shit and leave forever because while your family might say it's okay, they certainly will resent you for the rest of time and nurse a deep, unshakable disgust at your very presence in the home. Oh, they'll say it's fine but you know how those closest to you lie straight to your face, every damn day. 

Working at an elementary school is legit insane, especially when you're there when all the ghosts are awake. The one I'm at is PreK - 2nd grade and bizarre labels like this abound. There are all sorts - "door", "window", etc. etc. There are also wholly deranged tablets set out like some anachronistic slates dictating the order of the day. "Good morning, Today is {day and date}. We will have Mrs. {name} for {some specified activity and time of day}. The letter of the day is {letter in lower and uppercase}. Love, Ms. {name}" all laid out in a strange, epistolary style but with certain words underlined or differently colored. I think perhaps the most absurd is the closing as all the classrooms that do this exercise sign off with "Love". Plus, add in the grossly propagandizing school mascot, "Skip the squirrel", exhorting students to "kindness" and the respect of property. Insert wholly obvious and unsubtle critiques of the clanking abysmal chimera that is American education. I suppose it's better than child labor in a textile mill, but by how much one is unsure.

Sometimes, the students, when they're not trashing the classroom with cupcake frosting or sugary "juice" drinks provided at the teacher's, not the school's, expense, crank out found gems like this one above. As all art, this can be interpreted any number of ways but I like, given the disconnect with human anatomy, that this artist was imagining a scene played out on some alien world but with referents from their earthbound life. "Mom" is dressing down some other child, perhaps not her own as that individual is unnamed. Maybe they're on the playground and "Mom" has activated her Karen genes at some perceived affront from the anonymous, Yoda-like creature. Who can say? Maybe that's the allure? The ignorance of the scene's motives? I try to never throw away these treasures in the hope that whoever created this will be pleasantly surprised by its rediscovery the following day.

"The skyscrapers look like gravestones from out here."

Every Last Time I Come Home

It's three (FAKE) in the morning. {Try that again} 

It's the last watch of the night {Better} and I've got Fall Out Boy on the personal juke and a mid strength ale and I woke up from a dead sleep because I had a verb in my head for a reimagining of the story of Ilium that will never be published.

To think, I left the warm, welcoming bed of my special lady and her cat and the probable location of the dog with whom we will cosplay a Scooby Doo Halloween situation to sit in the cold and weirdly deficient central heating of my house to write the verb (gerund?) brumbling in regards to a smoldering fire. Haha. I'm insane.

Obsessions, man. They're a thing. I've recently gotten into horse racing and college football. Watching those camblet hided beauties, both human and equine, pulse down the green makes one want, makes one desire, makes one crave that atavistic power of thighs, of shoulders. Lucifer only had to glimpse Eve how good things might be if she only partook. She knew what was up. Adam was a dumbass. 

I'm planning to make a slow cooker chili today. Bison, kidney beans, Serrano chili, garlic, onions, diced tomatoes, bacon, dried chilies, bell pepper, chili powder, salt.

We all inhabit the realities that we'd rather not.  

But I Know I'm Funny, Haha

Maybe I've read Blood Meridian too many times, but it seems like I spend an inordinate amount of my mental space evaluating people for their scalps. Haha, I just put myself on a watchlist somewhere (Haha, I'm a white male with tangential access to firearms. You go to the top of the list.) More seriously, I ended work at the farm because A: I'm old and everything hurts, B: elementary nighttime janitor season starts soon, and C: I wanted to fuck off and go see my youngest's godmother, T, and spend some recuperative, asylum type, sanatorium style time in a yurt in Homer. My god was that good. Making fire. Eating halibut. Spending copious amounts of unreplenishable monies churning through foods and goods. Living it up in stupendous crashes. That has nothing to do with the nebular dust cloud that emitted from my farm hat upon the bar table when I dropped it there after a shift under a brutal July sun that is pictured above. Anyway, upon leaving the refuge of T's graciously provided lodgings, I told her that visiting her place felt like coming home and I hope that sentiment held the weight I wished it to impart.

Haha, the VA just denied my claim that military service really fucked my mental health. But that's got nothing to do with these lettuces that we cultivated for our community gardening project, Grow Palmer. This (the VA claim, not the lettuces) will likely have employment ramifications for me in the future and, I fear, conspire to make things not as I wish them to be. But right now, in the cafe, before I descend to the bar for NASCAR, this consideration does nothing to detract from the awe of living, sitting near an attractive man with great teeth and a table of women ten years my senior discussing something and taking direction from jots lined out in a spiral, college ruled notebook and a couple standing, making decisions about seating, shielded from the world with surgical masks and the mother and adult daughter deciphering the Sunday (Haha, what a fake designation of "time".) crossword. 

Yesterday, after a public reading of some truly insane shit to celebrate the corporatist fuck stains that comprise the UAA administration's decision to ignominiously axe the MFA program, we went out for Korean food. I ate ox feet in a soup. Sad is not the right word to describe the reading's venue, held on the Anchorage museum's lawn but I can see, in a certain filter, how one might think of the proceedings as such. The readers persisted in spite of airplane, motorcycle, 18 wheeler (Haha, no one outside of Mississippi calls them that.), seagull, SUV thumping, truck revving noise with a certain gravitas, like eulogizers, as they read. I came with the crazy, but it was well received and then I watched A read and fell in love like some swooning teen. A priest has entered the cafe and I feel a joke is about to conspire but where is the rabbi accompanying? (Haha, I'm mentally infirm.) But that has nothing to do with the image of these boys up on Archangel rocks situated above. It was a grand hike and, much like the cafe and the priest, evidence of the fragility of existence. 

 

Just this morning, before I departed on my LARPing attempt at being alive, A told me that a chancery court in Tennessee ruled that a church affiliated establishment that received state funding could display signage that informed patrons that customers of the Jewish persuasion were automatically denied service. (Haha, the courts are really wildin' out these days.) That has nothing to do with this stove in beaver dam that we had the absolute pleasure of trodding upon during our Archangel stroll pictured above. Nor does it have anything to do with the scene of a woman ladened with bread loaves and chasing a toddler from the cafe. But maybe it makes the point I'm aiming at? (Haha, no son.) 

Haha, people are entitled trash.

Alter My State, To Get To This State

Ceci n'est pas un chapeau that looks like one that belonged to my 1st ex-wife 20 (twenty? LMAO) years ago sitting on a middle school gymnasium floor where I was a night janitor. There's a sentence I wouldn't have imagined stating as objective fact and not some chimeric fiction in an unpublishable story before the start of COVID insanity. You can see the phone's shadow under the overhead fluorescents, proof of my witness. I have (had?) a photo of her wearing it somewhere, where if memory serves, she's smiling, but there's no chance I'm going looking for that.

This is four hundred feet of rhubarb and it does not give a fuck about your lower back and will continually sprout flowering bodies that the farm owner demands you to rip out as they are an energy suck to the parts of the rhubarb he does want to grow. The bushes are three feet high and six feet across. The flower stalks shoot up over the bush like some kind of xenomorphic antennae. The pruning must be done every four or five days or else the biology gets away from the farmer's ability to curtail it with his own. So, yeah, I started work as a hand seasonally at a local, mostly potato, family farm. This is also a sentence that is grand in its absurdity while simultaneously capital t "True".  It's pretty wild, the farm, and I feel like I'm in a Wes Anderson movie as I'm moving around, being transported to a field in the back of a 1970's-ish diesel fueled Isuzu, or walking behind a tractor drawn planting implement that is depositing squash starts into a plastic sheet. I know the camera crew is out there and if I try only a little I can dream up an appropriate emo soundtrack to accompany the footage. 

Here's a picture of where the squash would eventually find their summer homes. This is where we sealed the desired portion of earth with a plastic sheet. My job was to anchor the plastic and the irrigation tape as the tractor unspooled the roll down 400 feet of powdery soil. After the tractor would descend the row, another hand severed the tape and plastic and then served as anchor as the tractor returned to me. I sat, waiting, in the shade of portoshitter and watched the tractor crawl back like some kind of live action Andrew Wyeth painting. Later, I would watch a wolf spider hop about and later still a beetle would try to employ me as a rock. Later still, on some other day back at the same field, a flock of sandhill cranes flew over, croaking, about thirty feet off of the ground. I took a video and considered that I was an "intelligent" ape using a highly specialized rock to access updates from people all across the globe. Haha. Man, I feel like I'm taking crazy pills. 

The River. One thing I've really grooved to, working at the farm, is how much time I spend outside, tuning into the animal nature that's carrying these dumb thoughts around. It's hot, labor intensive, and often miserable, yet at day's end when I peel off my filthy socks and clap on my flip flops and wash my face and hands and head for the bar I feel a great satisfaction with nothing, almost as if the physicality of it drains one of existential dread. Just the other day, I felt I knew a little more intimately what Cain felt when his brother's offering curried more favor with Yahweh than his own had. I'd kill a motherfucker with a rock too. Then again, wouldn't we all?

They Said It Would Be Good For You

I recently adventured, katabasis style, back to the wilds of my fostering. The aims and strategic goals of which may come to light later, but suffice to say it was complete and utter garbage. Maybe more on that later, but the cafe here, in Palmer, is slapping with all the muted violence of civilization and the denied and deeply rooted understanding of necessary bloodshed. Then again, maybe I've just read too much and this has informed my poor opinion of my fellow being. Then again, it could just be that I'm trash, like my momma used to say of other folks not to her liking. Who knows?

Mr. Hendrix here on the wall of a Hardy St. brewpub (Keg and Barrel if you're interested and in the vicinity.). This place was legit and by legit I mean it was a thinly veiled attempt at white gentrification in what had, in my memory, been a black neighborhood. Indeed, there were still many black folks going about their lives on the aforementioned street, blasting up and down the lanes, blowing loud dro out of their windows and blasting rap music of a kind unknown to me that rattled trunks and speakers. The brewpub featured many local brews from Gulfport, Hattiesburg, Kiln - the most delicious of which were the sour beers that perfectly matched the perpetual zeitgeist of the failed South in their bitterness, a perfect match to the humid, hot, racist environs of the region. Who knows what it is I'm trying to say here? The pub was nice. They had outdoor seating next to juvenile magnolia trees and yet to flower hydrangeas with beds strewn with pine straw and the hot afternoon sun warded off by giant umbrellas and a light breeze while inside was cool and quiet with close captioned sports channels. A vast oasis among the revving cars and birdnoise and human drama unspooling all around me.

I witnessed a uniquely human event during my travels - the presentation of music and the gathering of the masses on the public green - complete with brews and food provided by mostly black folks for the whites in attendance. The occasion was a Friday and it being hot in the Hub City and the need to congregate to establish that we are goddamn alive and this will all end but in the meantime we need to get in some recreation. I was poncho'd up, owl style, and received no small manner of looks. It would be some time before the train took me to the airport with the ultimate destination of home and I watched the folks behaving in strangely magnanimous ways, only taking the barest necessities from the commons - spreading their chairs and blankets with utmost respect and consideration of the other, even in a place as violent as the South, with a certain deference for their neighbors. I was stricken by the oddness of it.

This trip I spent much time amongst the dead, in their cities and beds, in the bardo of their transition, them still here somehow, yet somehow not. I marveled at their absurd monuments, the gravitational pull of their stones, the stupid desire to persist. My own journey was one of attempted right-making, taking someone where they should be and had not been for some time. A giant waste of time and resources, much like the mausoleums pictured here. And yet one hopes my charge ended up where he was destined to be.

I visited the zoo, usually not my jam because, you know, the unethical nature of housing inmates, but I had time to burn after I had completed my mission. I saw many beasts - tapirs, wild hogs, hyenas, flamingos, giraffes, alligators, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I was baffled more by the patrons, mostly white, mostly barking at their children in a way that seems not to happen elsewhere and would likely be frowned upon in other regions. There, in that place, no one gave a second look, as if that manner of aggression was preferred with regards to urchins. I saw this many places and I marveled at my own upbringing. The peacock and I communed for a good long while, within close proximity, he in his livery and me in mine, and I asked him if he regarded my plumage as a threat. He eyed me close and did not answer.

Back home at the Moosehead, I studied these things - the journey, the people, the muted disapproval of a freak such as myself flying his flag in southern Mississippi, on a mission to put someone somewhere, to close a thing, to finish a chapter, to find the right azimuth, to reconcile an existence, to be. No answers apparated and I was left alone, plunging magically toward oblivion. Perhaps I have not said what I have wanted to convey, perhaps I have been intentionally vague due to personal reasons, perhaps I have opted for obfuscation rather than clarity, yet here this thing is, signifying nothing.

Suffering from a Case of Sobriety

I just sat down in the cafe where an older white woman sitting behind me said, "It's been a month of a week." I had to move because my back was to the window and I couldn't see the street and had to keep both exits in view because, obviously, if you're not watching the street in addition to the entryways, that's how they get you. So, I moved to have my back to a wall and still have eyes on the exits but I felt like going back to the lady and asking her if she, like I had last night, inadvertently pissed their pants, toddler style, while trying to navigate the labyrinth of my belt, or that I have eaten no food for 36 hours (and counting), or that I couldn't stop anxiety vomiting all day yesterday, or that I had just cried and cried in my vehicle while on the phone with a representative from the VA, a nice lady, who helped me begin to a file claim. I refrained from the dickwaving. But yeah, I hear her and I'm sure her week has been similarly challenging.

This is a book I'm currently loving. It's atrocious. Containing lines like, "Remember, this is top secret!" and "The porter was an oriental." and a raft of characters one of whom, whose greatest affliction was not the mysterious plague broken out on a military installation or the various shady and definitely nefarious conservative agents bent on upending the nation but was the problem of his sexual impotency, in a moment of self-reflection exclaims inside his head "Goddamn, I feel horny!" The book was published in 1986 by the now defunct "Leisure Books". Things like this used to greatly upset me, but the comedy on display here is SUBLIME. I'm halfway through and it is a gasser. Few things have pleased me as much as this in some time. Make your own conclusions about this set of data.

I am a fraud. I moved on from the work at Job Corps only to move from the move and I am reminded about all the times I told the students inane, unheard, and definitely unbelievable messages about career planning and making sound, adult decisions. In the interim, I've been forced to return to taking care of things I've let slip in the wake of trying to "fix" others (e.g., the VA call mentioned above, basic hygiene - I changed out of my pissed pants and put on the first pair of clean pants in a month). It's strange, as if the dormancy of adulting for myself has erupted to the surface and I'm accomplishing all manner of concerns not to be discussed on the internet, almost like a waking from sleep. Things are terrifying, clear, crystalline, pure horror, yet right.

We've had fools' spring here in the valley. Now it's back to snow and overcast. I'm still in the cafe, spending money I shouldn't and listening to music instead of looking for employment. I'm sure you all know the feelings - the guilt, the irresponsibility, the shame - of doing so but I'm pushing away at those emotions, in a gentle, non-hostile way. As for the Pabst above, I'd advise against. It tastes like a mix of Yoohoo and a mocha flavored Monster energy coffee drink and I knew, after the first sip, I'd finish the drink and regret it. The experience brought back memories of childhood, when my mother would pack shelf stable boxes of Yoohoo into my lunch. She'd have preferred my drinking milk, but was afraid of spoilage due to lack of refrigeration at school and so she went with the next best thing, one supposes. She would have, and sometimes did, give me money for lunch at school but my middle brother tuned me onto the scam of pocketing the money, a cool $6.25 per week, and going hungry during the day. She wanted me to eat and could have saved the money I was embezzling by applying for a free or reduced lunch but there was a strict taboo in the house against getting things "for free". Hence the brown bagged lunches and the Yoohoo. Again, make your own hypotheses about those data points and their inclusion here.

Well, shit, what are you doing?

Would I Have You in My Dreams

I harbor a disturbing fear that my kin, the crab at the Anchorage museum, has passed. Yesterday, we went to the museum for the free day and to scope the wares of the Alaska Black Chamber of Commerce. I was so white I didn't even know such a thing existed and the atrium that is usually quiet jammed with noise and action and vendors and the solitary representative from the Anchorage police department, the lone white woman manning a table at the expo. The place was too busy for me and I sought out the crab in its (hers, his, theirs?) enclosure to find it voided save the anemones and the kelp and the rocks. I became distraught and began to curse loudly at grief and general bullshittery such as to prompt my special lady to remind me where I was. I sat and watched the tank for a moment. Later I would discover via the internet that king crabs can live in captivity or without human predation for up to 20 years. (This may figure later in the narrative, who knows.)

The museum experience grandly astounded, as it does. And it made one reflective and moody, quiet and stupidly reserved. Water spilled onto a drum. Globes turned in a darkened nook. Mapmakers and sorcerers conversed about known and unknown territories. The top floor of the museum is always a treat and this day's exhibit, part of a lending from an Italian artist, was the figurative cherry on top - a cube of screens that one steps into to view images and hear lies. The docents made us wear paper booties, like surgeons, and the screens showed us images of all kinds, from the world over, and a gentle, almost robotic voice recited a litany of lies the world has heard from any manner of "trusted sources". (My favorites were "Saddam Hussein orchestrated 9/11" and "Prostitution is illegal in every country in the world." Say what that does about my memory and who the meat brain is.)

After the museum, Ulybear's grandparents had gifted him a theater performance, his first, to see the dance, percussion, spectacle exhibition that is STOMP. It was the first time congregated with many folk in quite a while and as we all sat and breathed and coughed, the show came up and what followed was a true epic, a ritual, a sacrimony, an offering, truly human. I wept, my favorite parts being the symbolic combat, the high prayer for deliverance preceded by thunderous drums, the warriors' triumphant return. Man, it's getting me right now, even in memory, yet I remain confused by my fellow show-goers' inappropriate, to me, responses. They kept clapping and hooting like mad apes presented with higher ordered intelligences, somehow instinctually afraid of what, what portent they were beholding. The performers bled white while these imbeciles cheered. I am tormented by things and places, yet the desire to keep experiencing these events persist. Later, A drove us home.

After dinner at Klondikes, I stayed downtown and watched the scene. I have not been out, later than about 6 PM, on a Saturday, in some time. I described the experience later, to A, as it being like the late night bar scene, but for middle aged people, one of which I am. There was no desire to party, however, to cut loose, to "live in the moment" as it were. I read some poetry and tried to write about the experience referenced in the cave above. Failed. Wrote about the inane instead. Ditching the scene, I walked home in the dark, trailing my book filled purse like a schoolboy. Later, I would search for record of a similar act I watched in the same venue as STOMP years prior yet could not find evidence of it being penned and spammed on the tubes. (I know I've written it, probably even here, but it was a field trip for G when he was a kinder.) The search brought me into a time capsule that burned with the acknowledgement that I've never been as kind as I should have been.

I hope the goddamn crab made it a full twenty. They were (are?) my friend.

You Want Maximum Stupid I am the Guy

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.

Sunglasses

I am in a state of continual bafflement about the necessary evolutionary idiocy of human pair bonding and the delicate Newtonian curved functions of women's asses. Are these two things related? Will you make a point, ever, that is not wallowing in the obscene, the erotic? We know the answers to these questions already but as I sit here in the cafe, the wonderment about the initial mysteries is profound indeed. Despite the amount of awe these constructs procure, I've come to no real conclusions about anything deeper than a base, root code, instinct for the propagation of species. Worn ground, endlessly tracked, sure, but wonderful all the same. 

More and more, I truly believe in the audacious luck my life is perpetually becoming. I went to the store today and dropped a bill on booze and sundries. Seven dollars for a pint of vegan, keto friendly, coffee creamer. Thirty five for beer and wine. Four for a package of hair ties (I low-balled these.) Twelve for shit paper. Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. The day prior we went sledding with friends in the neighborhood. We've been feasting for days, eating like madmen barons with heaped plates of meat and cheese, bread and olives, pastries and chocolates, stood by with whole gallons of beer and liters of wine. I remember, once, seeing my old man at the kitchen table, head in hands studying a checkbook that lacked the funds he needed in order to make the monthly note on the trailer where we lived. I don't remember his face, but the scene of him staring at the wanting ledger maintains, a theme of woe, a great unavoidable burden.

As the year climbs back into lightness, I had the phenomenal luck to be party to many rituals - all of them profound. We visited the river with offerings for the birds and the moose and we hailed the river roundabout, supplicating for a blessing of another agreed upon year of togetherness. We effused goodness and warmth and, later, for our ministrations we were gifted with an earthquake, a sure sign that the animism in Nature had heard our prayers. Later still, the entire family gathered in a log communal house bedecked with fake boughs and colorful ribbons. We sang hymns and celebrated the miraculous act of conception and birth, lighting candles and hearing all the old stories. An 8 months ripe mother played a flute and a young, attractive couple dueted blissfully while a communal fire was raised and another, younger and more attractive couple ushered around bits of the flame for our candles. A brief flicker of light in the dark, an exhortation to go forth and be fruitful, a petition for tribal unity. It was the most human thing to have struck me in some time and I left elated, exuberant, cursing God in the parking lot for the beheld miracle.

 Christmas day came. I spent the day ice-breaking through reality, trying to get a handle on its faults, the rips in the fabric. It was a useless pursuit, but worthwhile nonetheless, like most things. The Packers had won the day prior and I was happy, sotted, twisted, alive as we sat around with family (man-woman-child-grandparents). As much as I wish I could, I can never forget the news clip of a Palestinian father and son murdered by Israeli snipers in the early, heady days of the first intifadah. (You've talked about that before, broken record.) I wonder what happened to the rest of that family, now, twenty years on from that afternoon. 

I'm Risking It Always

I started a new job, likely the cause of my most recent and critical terror. It's an endeavor to support homeless queer and trans young folks who haven't been presented with the most welcoming environments in their limited experiences. My colleagues at the new joint are all the worst hope junkies, furiously railing against systems and bureaucracies and the general funk of the world and the furtive realization that nothing matters except this singular instance of passing, tick, tick, tick, of the neverending present. Who knows what I'm talking about? I sure don't, but better yet, who knows what lies I will profess next?

I've been doing a multi-dimensional comparative reading of various texts - tomes on magic, religion, and the various and nigh identical communal fantasies that arise whenever more than two or three are presently gathered together, naturalistic poems concerning the majesty of the insect world, the capitalist necessity of the witch hunt and the vast legislation against the common individual, essays on poetry and translation, short stories, and a thoroughly racist account of the Killbucks' missionary vision among the Yup'ik peoples in the late 19th century, among other things. Just now, I had the thought that I felt very much like the ewer from Aesop, the one in which the raven drops stones to raise the water level so that it might drink from the vessel. I don't know what I'm talking about.

Throughout my adult life I've been stricken with nightmares, needing to be shaken awake from a moaning keen by my bedmates, whoever they might be, to stop the reel playing in my brain. The other night I had a dream of the agglomeration of the most beautiful and innocent and wonderful young girl with whom I'd had a conversation. The talk was light, airy, full of magic. We sat on a bunk bed and talked, she in a nice blue dress with crisp linen mille feuille. In the dream's logic, I had to recurrently leave the little girl in the bedroom where we were speaking, and was forced to pass by the child's corpse being stuck to a wooden peg, like a coat, on a closet door that stood outside the room. I screamed and cried, looking at her little shoes. Dangling on the peg. Her living face so resplendent in memory and not reality. I don't know what that says.

The solsticetide festival season is upon us and the cafe throngs with holiday liveried folk and well wishing and parades. Dax Riggs mellowly croons "I'll see you all in Hell or New Orleans" of that titular track from his eponymous record and I get the feel that he'd definitely vibe with that notion here in Palmer as folk shepherd reindeer through the town commons and a cobalt blue tractor hayrides bundled children along the town's streets as the tatted barista dressed as a lithe Ms. Claus delivers trays of steaming sandwiches to tables brimming with old women and their grandchildren. Does that follow? (It does not.) I sometimes wonder what it is I'm trying to say.

I can go with the flow. 

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.