Rubber Tramp Stories 1: Big Rock Candy Mountain is Hollow

I met a hobo once, through a mutual friend. He came in on a southbound CSX and hopped off about seven blocks from my house, near a McDonalds. 

The only number he had was my friend JP's number. Naturally, JP called and invited me to hang out at his place in Middletown. He was always wanting to show me his world -- the world of trains and hobos. I've never met a man so in tune with his world vision, so able to bridge the connection between belief and action. Nearly everyone has ideas. Very few people actually live them. And while I think I'm not shabby in that particular area, I always embrace -- even if I am sometimes amused and/or frustrated -- by his attempts to educate me. 

Although I can't prove it, I think sometimes he thinks because I've spent a good deal of my time in school that I haven't lived.  This point of view isn't a new one, and in his case it isn't rooted in the usual good ol' American anti-intellectualism; no, for JP, the fact is that formal education abandoned him and he's managed to be a pretty well-read and self-educated guy anyway. But when he called and told me I needed to come meet his friend, I knew what he really meant. 

He meant "You're never going to believe THIS motherfucker."

JP and I haven't traded You-won't-believe-this-crazy-motherfucker stories, although we've traded here.

plenty of others.  And no, I haven't hopped trains -- mostly because a part-time hobo with a house out in Oakland named Dirty Face told me, without skipping a beat, that I was too old to start at 42. But I have done my fair share of traveling... as what the old timers would call a Rubber Tramp. When you travel off the beaten path for any length of time, you end up meeting some really interesting people... ones that I wrote about

So made it over to meet JP's hobo friend. I'll call him D. D is neither his given name nor his hobo name -- yes, that's a thing. He was still a little jumpy by the time I got there, but he'd had a shower and JP fixed him a plate and some coffee.

D talked primarily about two things -- a friend who died and his graduate work in Para-psychology. His friend died when he got trapped under an unstable load on a train he'd hopped. He was usually pretty smart, D said of his friend. But sometimes it just happens.

He was more animated talking about his graduate work. He was writing a book, he said. The whole basis of his thesis was that happiness is infectious, and if he just tried to get people to smile, that it would make the world a better place. I pointed out there was something very sociological about that and D shook his head. It was about the spirit, he said. And people, he said, almost always get that shit wrong.

People act like the big spirit is in the sky, he said. But really, it's under our feet. He told us about his epiphany, about how the Earth is hollow and how there's not a molten core at the center, but a city where a beings of a higher plane live.  People keep looking up for inspiration, he said. But all a long it's under their feet. Like tree roots.

I hung out for a little while. We talked and listened to Sun Ra records and drank coffee. But then it was time to go. And while I can't quite get behind the idea that the Earth is hollow, I found myself paying a bit more attention to the terra firma.

[Check out my friend JP's work here. It's good for your soul. I promise.]

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Learning Along the Dirty, Sacred, River: Fathers, Teachers, Elders, Part 2

[Part one can be found here]

Me (Left), Dad, and my older brother. Dad was my first hero.

The best and most important lesson I have learned from my father is that I am not him.

I am not him. I am not my grandfather, nor his father, nor his father. I am not them. And while it is fashionable in some circles to worship our dead*  doing so means we lose not only something important from them, but from ourselves, too.

Although I grew up listening to stories about my grandfather Daniel, the truth is my Dad told me very little about his own life. I've written before about the book he and I never got to write -- a memoir of sorts we were going to title Every Man Is A VIP. He told me he was waiting for me to be old enough to understand.

Over the years since his death -- this September 3rd he will be gone 24 years -- I have come to different conclusions as to why he thought it was important to wait. After all, don't fathers regale their sons with stories about youth and prowess? That seemed to be the pattern of most of the fathers of the sons I went to school with, went to church with. Not that he didn't share stories about himself, but almost always they were funny stories. Most often, he was not the hero of his stories. He was never the villain either. When he told me the reason he never ate bananas he did not shy away from his own culpability. (He ate bad ones in the Navy while at port in Hong Kong... and so did the entire ship, including the Captain who ordered them NOT to eat the bananas. The entire crew ended up with dysentery... including the Captain.) When he told me the story about his military induction, he did not hold back on his feelings of inadequacy standing naked in a cold gymnasium with a thousand other young men. All men have their failures and all men have their triumphs. But for Dad, a story about him 1) was funny and 2) was educational, even and especially at his own expense.

The only time he told hero stories was when he talked about his own father, who was far from perfect and probably in need of some understanding, if not revision.

Grandpa Daniel "Boone" Parsons, with me and my brother

 Men are not perfect creatures and it does us all a disservice to worship our elders to the point that they become symbols of divine infallibility.

Grandpa Parsons died when I was 3, so my own memories of him are limited. Most of what I know about him, I know from stories Dad told. I learned a little more from My Dear Sweet Ma, and some from my Grandma Dunn, who knew him because they lived across the street from Dan and Minnie Parsons on S. Charity Street. He was not an easy man, though he, too, loved to tell stories.  I have come to suspect that my dad's ambivalence about dogs is rooted in the fact that maybe sometimes the dogs ate better than he did. Grandpa was fond of whiskey even though (and probably because) his wife supported the temperance movement. He was also something of a flirt and probably a philanderer, which made Grandma Parsons terribly (and likely understandably) jealous.

Then again, being personable isn't the same as taking your pants off and Bethel, like all small towns, has always operated more on rumor than substantiated fact.

He was a stubborn and argumentative man. One of my favorite stories about him is the one in which he stopped speaking to his barber over a political argument. He still went to the barber. After all, there was only one in town.  He just didn't speak to him. But he was also a man who took no guff, who did not simper and skulk.

Grandpa (Clay J, Sr.) Dunn at Bantam.

Grandpa Dunn died in 1988. He worked with his hands, which means he also worked with his mind. I once watched him working on a design for one of his carpentry projects. He was drawing it out on a napkin at the kitchen table. It struck me, being as young as I was and thoughtless as I was, that he was far better at complex math than I was at simple math -- and that he had dropped out of school.

Most of his world was cut off from me. I was too sick to be in his workshop, too sick to wander the woods much... or at least, that was impression I was given until I was 10 or so. Most of his world was cut off from me, but the one thing I learned from him, though he spoke very little around me, was that being educated is not the same thing as knowing. And while I was being raised to embrace education, I tucked away the knowledge that there is more than one way to learn something, and that I could learn by doing as much as I could by sitting in some stale classroom, waiting to be told what is important.

I keep that in mind every time I step into the classroom to teach. This lesson keeps me grounded as teacher more than any pedagogy.

It wasn't until recently that began to (maybe) understand the Old Man's motivations in not telling me the rest of his stories. Every boy grows up in his father's shadow**. But there's a point where the son must extract himself from that shadow, whether it is an oppressive one or whether it is a comfortable one. A boy doesn't really become a man until he fully extracts himself from that shadow. My Old Man castes a large shadow, and so did his father, and I'm guessing that his father did before that. Dad had to leave home before he could properly see himself in the light of day. The same was true for his father. The same was true for me. I like to think now that the Old Man understood this -- that bearing down too much on a son will keep him forever in the shadow. He did not want to be worshiped. He wanted to be understood when I had the appropriate context and experience.

I am not my father. But I am my father's son. I don't need to sit and wonder what The Old Man would do in any given situation because it is not my father who is in any of those situations anymore. But I can look back over what he taught me, the things he tried to tell me, and I can find my own answers. 

______________________________________
 *Worshiping the dead is not the same thing as Remembrance. Remembrance implies meditation, consideration and reconsideration, paying attention, and LEARNING. To worship the dead means fitting them into whatever convenient framework makes us feel better about ourselves and our world view, no matter how incorrect that view might be. See also: every public school history textbook. See also: every sermon by James Hagee, Pat Robertson, Robert Tildon, Joel Olsteen, Jimmy Swaggart, and Oral Roberts. See also: any nightly "world" news show on a major television network.
** This is true whether the father is present or not. Absence does not negate the father. Absence just leaves more room for interpretation and selfish revision.

Learning Along The Dirty, Sacred River: Mothers, Teachers, Elders, Part 1

I was cooking dinner for my daughter and her boyfriend last night*, trying to explain why I clean up after myself as I cook. I was telling The Kid about her Grandpa Parsons (my Old Man) and how it was that he became  a not too terrible cook in spite of always managing to dirty every single dish in the kitchen. He started to learn how to cook because my Mom was often in class and unable to cook; it didn't help that other than chili, the only other things he could cook with any proficiency were hamburgers and hot dogs. And, if there was an egg cup** that did not have some smattering of slop in it, he would find a need for said egg cup just to have his record of dirtying every dish uncontested.

Stella (The Kid) informed me that she was the same way. Then she laughed a little and said that her Grandma Dixie (My Dear Sweet Ma) once said of the tendency that "it must run in the family."

In order to explain why my dad cooked at all -- other than to make chili or to cook out on the grill -- I talked about how My Dear Sweet Ma, when I was 10, decided to go to college.  in 1983, it was neither common nor encouraged for middle-aged married women to go back to school. The prevailing wisdom was twofold: 1) people ought to be working towards   retirement, not working on homework, and 2) that a married woman with two young boys ought to be at home.

This last view point was most vociferiously supported by some people in my extended family among the Dunns, her people, who felt that if she did anything other than fold laundry, watch soap operas, and sculpt her hair into a fine, fine beehive, she was not being a proper woman. The Old Man was intolerant of that view, and showed his intolerance in the manner he is most remembered for: he simply told them all to go to hell after putting on the mantle of Ol' Sarge^ ... against which there was no real or imagined defense.

As I was telling the story of why I try and clean up after myself, I was once again struck by the unusual progressiveness of a man who I had, for my entire childhood, attributed with an almost caveman-like  sense of right and wrong.*** And I was also struck again by just how strong an individual my My Dear Sweet Ma is. 

You wouldn't necessarily know it by just looking at her. She is not one to loudly make her way through the world... certainly not in the heavy-footed manner by which her youngest son (that would be me, Dear Readers) makes his way through the world... but she has made her way nonetheless, and except for my father's death, she has pretty much made her way on her own terms. She graduated after earning her bachelor's degree, and went on to complete her Masters. She taught public school for 26 years -- first as a Special Education teacher and then as a 5th grade English and Social Studies teacher.

I love my mother's story -- the parts of it I know. There's more to it,  but it's not all mine to tell here and now. I love my mother's story as it happened. I love it as it is still unfolding. She is embracing her post work life with the same quiet and relentless reserve ... a reserve she might attribute to her faith... that she has used to embrace all the important things and people and circumstances in her life. I love my mother's story because it helps me place my own story, and the stories of other family members into some appropriate context. And I am glad that I noticed it while it is still in the process of unfolding.

The Kid will turn 20 in September. This July, she is planning on getting married to the boyfriend, Will, who I have at times called  Plus 1. As she grows into an adult it occurs to me that there are things she needs to know.  (Shhh. There's no need to tell here that 20 isn't an adult age, simply an age that the legal system has arbitrarily decided is old enough to vote (18),old enough to get shot at defending corporate profits (18), but not old enough to by beer (21). ^^ ) She needs to know how to fix a leaky toilet. She needs to know how to diagnose simple mechanical issues. She needs to know how to change a tire, change the oil, change a battery. She needs to know the things I've learned, and the things I was taught. I've let loose of some of that over the years; but there are things she needs to know that transcend my life.

This is my Grandma Dunn, Lonnabelle. She was also, in her own way, a quiet but strong woman. I used to spend a lot of time with her when I was not allowed outside. After Grandpa died, almost all of his extended family deserted her. Her own family was scattered. Her maiden name was Ackerman,and she grew up around Crystal Lake, Wisconsin. Her own mother died when she was young and her father remarried a woman named Lucille, who I wish I had a picture of because she remains in my mind one of the sharpest, funniest, most blunt^^^ people I have ever known.  Grandma Dunn made the best chocolate chip cookies in the world, knitted quilts until her hands wouldn't let her, and loved crossword puzzles, word searches, Reader's Digest, Alec Trabek, and Pat Sajek. She also liked playing Gin. She once told me she enjoyed playing cards because as a child in Crystal Lake, her father -- who was a religious man -- would not allow any card games into his house that used face cards. 

Why, you might ask? He associated face cards with gambling.

Later in life, one of the things she did was tell stories about her life to elementary school children. She enjoyed this deeply, as it gave her a chance to talk about the happiest times in her life, and about times she had come to remember as less complicated. Being the snot-nosed shit was, I was far less interested in her stories than I should have been... a mistake that, when I think about it now, physically pains me.

When I was younger and in my extremely religous phase (Please note the ontological difference between "religious" and "spiritual".) and was seriously pondering a life in the pulpit, she would talk to me about religious and biblical matters. She would ask me my interpretations of biblical text, and ask me what I thought it meant in a modern world. We talked about the Beatitudes and the Sermon on the Mount. We talked about the Golden Rule and the Great Commission. We talked about The Song of Songs and the Book of The Revelation. She was the one who pointed out to me that church wasn't just a building... that church could be anywhere, because Grandpa didn't need to put on a tie and sit in a pew to worship; he just took a walk in the back 40 and talked to God himself, mano y mano.

This is my Grandma Parsons, named Minnie. She died before I was born, so what little I know of her I know second and third hand. She was a small woman, with bright red hair. Even when he was a child (and, by his own admission, a snot-nosed shit) Dad teased her and called her Pinky.  Her maiden name was Blackburn, and she was, I believe born in Clermont County. She endured the largeness of my Grandpa Parsons' personality, raised three sons and a daughter, and died almost 10 years before her husband, who was actually actually a decade older than her. She was a prohibitionist in spite of my Grandpa's fondness for whiskey, and though she sometimes confided in her youngest son (my Uncle Bill) she never once faltered in her own beliefs. 

I didn't get to know her... but given that I know me, my father, and some of the stories about Daniel Boone Parsons... I'd say that she was one tough woman. Parsons men require more patience than most women have ... and I say that as a man who respects the deep and abiding capacity of women to shape the world.

The day before yesterday was Mother's Day. And while I wasn't in Losantiville to spend it with My Dear Sweet Ma, I did call and wish her a Happy Mother's Day.  I may be the son that gives her the most  trouble; but I hope she knows that, at least, I've finally learned to pay attention. 

____________________________

*She requested that I make this sausage rice pilaf dish she likes during my visit. And since she is a culinary school student,and knows more about what good food is than I do, I took it as a compliment and happily complied.

** There was no egg cup. Ours was not a high falutin' family. But if there HAD been... lawdy, lawdy, lawdy. 

*** Sorry, Dad. I should have been paying more attention.

^He was a retired Air Force Master Sgt. Standing in the face his full fury was like trying to stand up against a hurricane with a one string mop and a bucket with a hole in it.

^^ All lines are arbitrary ones, whether they are legal distinctions of adulthood or lines on a map.

^^^ Blunt was not an adjective I would apply to Grandma, or most anyone in the Dunn family. And other than Lucille, I have never met another Ackerman. Lucille died fairly recently, outliving Grandma by well over a decade. I understand that up to the day she died, Lucille still read the stock market pages everyday.

Culpeper Tells, Winter Talks Back

The Traveller's Angel and I jaunted east of the dirty, sacred river, barrelling up I-64, through the deep Appalachian darkeness of  the West Virginia Turnpike at night. We left River City Friday afternoon on a warm and sunny afternoon in order to make for the second day of Culpeper Tells!, a brand new storytelling festival in Culppeper, Virginia.

Culpeper is a pretty litttle town that has, over the past gfew years, built itself back up from devestation. The town has survived four earthquakes in the last year. The Big One, though, happened in August 2011. The town of Culpeper  built itself back from a 5.8 magnitiude earthquake. 

We had the opportunity to see some tellsers we've seen before, and to hear a few we haven't. Naturally we signed up for the story slam. But time ran out before the Kentucky contingnent could storm the stage.

We left Culpeper Sunday morning and rolled down VA 17 towards Norfolk to visit The Kid. And, as is almost always the case when I travel, winrter was at my back. The storm warnings blew up behind us, ad we hit the coast a good couple of hours before yet one more last hurrah of winter rolled through dropping ice, snow, and sleet in a wide swath from Loiusville to the coast. 

The North Atlantic coast may not seem the most romantic of destinations in March. Even without the interminably long winter  weather, it's still chilly, windy, and rainy.  But it's been a while since I've seen The Kid's smiley, shiny face. It's also been a while since I've seen Will, the boyfriend -- who is a nice guy, in spite of the fact that no one will ever be good enough to date my daughter.

We're staying at a Super 8 -- the same one I managed to stay in when I was here in January 2012. That trip was a very different one. I was here then to deliver bad news, among other things. I was convvinced that I was on my way to disappearing, convinced that, with the dissolution of my marriage that I most certainly would disappear, because I had convinced myself that no one weould see me the way my ex had seen me. 

I didn't know that I was on the road to put myself back together. I didn't even know I was broken. 

Amanda travels well. She's smart, pays attention to her surroundings, and drinks up new experiences. She wants to see everything she can,learn everything she can, experience all that she can. Although we've known one another for nearly 20 years, I like to think it has taken that long for me to get back to her. That it's too me 20 yeasrs to see myself in a proper enough light that I could allow her to see me. Some processes take longer than others.

And now I am here, with her, visiting The Kid -- who isn't really a kid, I guess -- and even though the North Atlantic winter is lingering outside, I am basking in the wearmth of a deeper, lovelier and more permanent light. The light where all the stories and poems and songs come from, where road unrolls under our feet and there is blue sky ahead.

Williston Update: Heading Out

Dew is water to see,
Not water to drink:
We have forgotten water to drink.         
Yet I am content
Just to see sunrise again.
                                      -- Wallace Stevens, "Three Travelers Watch a Sunrise"

Image from The History Channel

The difference between traveling and going on vacation is the level of planning. The difference between being a tourist and being a traveller is the ability to roll with last minute changes and to think on your feet.

The bus to Chi-town pulls out of Louisville at 11:50pm tonight -- if the schedule holds. I'm in the process of completing last minute preparations.

A load of laundry.

Packing minimal provisions like trail mix and a few fresh apples.

Getting a new journal ready. Tying up the Cincinnati Day Book.

Trying to get some paperwork for a new gig tied up.

Keeping myself present, but remembering that life happens in all three tenses simultaneously: past, present, future.

There are still poems in the Cincinnati Day book that need to be typed. Some of them made into this blog. I'm planning on turning them into a chapbook once I get back from Williston. There are also plans for a limited, hand-made archival quality volume combining The Crossing of St. Frank, Whitman By Moonlight, and End Notes to the Deep Atlas of Time.

I'm looking for some freelance work and hoping to get some classes. I'm even looking at going back to school.

Right now, though, I have this trip. I'm looking forward to being on the move, and I'm hopeful that this trip to Williston will be fruitful.

And thanks to fellow writer, blogger, and highbrow/lowbrow culture devotee Misty Skaggs, I have learned that Larry the Cable Guy has decided to descend on Williston with his television crew, some brew, and truckloads of pork rinds to work on his latest project. In short, I'm now competing with a guy who got rich wearing sleeveless flannel and making jokes about the merits of incest.

It's a crazy, cruel world, Dear Readers.

I suspect we have divergent enough focuses that we probably won't cross paths. I also suspect that The Travel Channel security team and his entourage of faux-rednecks will create enough of a barrier that he won't interfere with my plans to find the kind of stories that don't make it onto NPR or The Travel Channel, or the pro-business scribblings Bloomberg.com

But we will see, Dear Readers. We will see. Stay tuned. Consider a small donation to the travel fund, and I'll mention you by name in the blog. Also, I'll send you a signed copy of Excerpts From The Cincinnati Daybook when it's ready.  

And I'll love you forever.

If that's not too creepy.

Gawd Bless!

Intermezzo: Don't Mourn (Joe Hill and the Slow Enlightenment)

Now the boss the law is stretching /Bulls and pimps he's fetching/And they are a fine collection/ As only Jesus knows. -- Joe Hill, Where the Fraser River Flows



97 years ago today the state of Utah assassinated Joe Hill by firing squad after a kangaroo conviction for the murder of Salt Lake City grocer John Morrison and his son. According to legend, his final word was "Fire!"

I use the term assassinate deliberately. The evidence against Hill was flimsy, and the only reason they bothered with the firing squad was because the first bullet intended to silence him without the bother of a public trial didn't do its job.

After, according to the legend, Joe's ashes were sent to every state in the union-- except for the state of Utah, at Joe's request; he didn't want his remains to ever exist in the same state that murdered him.

Those of you familiar with his legacy know that his final exhortation to
his fellow Wobblies was not to waste time mourning for him, but to organize. Joe Hill believed that an organized and honest union was the only thing keeping working people from being exploited by organized capital -- those who get rich by mooching off the sweat of others than by their own work.

Today isn't the only day Joe Hill crosses my mind, of course. I enjoy the music he left behind -- those old Wobbly standards, many of them written to parody religious hymns -- and I thought about him quite a bit when I was Out and About earlier this year. I wrote earlier in the year about Cletus the Dog Man, who I met in Rapid City South Dakota; he was one of many I ran into or saw or overheard who were simply out looking for work. Most of them had no interest in leaving the place they thought of as home. But they felt like they had no choice.

That's part of the impossible situation created by those who have political power and influence in order to keep those of us who really have the power from ever being able to exercise it. If there's no work where you live, you're supposed to have the guts to pack and go find it -- as long as you have the gas money or ability to travel, of course. And if you can't do that, well, you're shit out of luck. The Michelle Bachmans and the Rand Pauls of the world would say that maybe God doesn't want you to have a job.

And don't forget the other caveat: if you DO travel around looking for work, don't travel by bus, because that means you're white and/ or ghetto trash and automatically a homicidal maniac and rapist.

Or, as I was mistaken for twice, Mexican.

In other words: work and pray,live on hay, you'll eat pie in the sweet by an by.

I do appreciate Joe's sense of humor. Though fewer people know the hymns, the parody is still a good one, and the satire is apt. The 21st Century is shaping up to be a repeat of history we've already lived but seemed to have learned nothing from.

Good thing I'm learning to play guitar again. There are plenty of songs that still need to be sung, and plenty of stories and poems,too. We're not done yet.

Location:Louisville, KY

Two Clips: A Story and A Song

Some Prominence

Done Laid Around

Brief Introduction to The Atlas of Deep Time

Roads cut into mountain rock like long memories,

though the names and dates and reasons

have all been forgotten. One fresh grave

among the long lauded and appropriated dead

give us something to tell stories about,

each with a hint of mysticism and rebirth.

What is this place? Known and unknown,

traveled and unconquered, mapped and mysterious?

There are stories to be told, wood nymphs to chase,

crones filing ageless knowledge away in dusty bone husks.

Worries about the garden. Beware the killer mosquitoes

and the wrath of left turns.

If he is not careful, a man can come to this place

filled to his gills with the knowledge of good and evil

and leave feeling new born. Conspirators and coal barons

and tornadoes come and go, the sound of them

simply become rhythms to the songs

that have been sung for generations

and will be sung for generations more.

If he is not careful, a man can come to this place

broken and find his messiah

sitting beneath a tree in a lone cemetery

blessing the fresh grave of an infant

lucky enough to avoid the curse of naming

knowing love and turning back into dust.

Scratching the Itchy Foot

The first part of the trip will be to go visit my daughter, Stella. It's been a couple of years since I've seen her and I want to make sure she's not taller than me. Stella is 17, focused on getting out of high school alive as well as intellectually and psychologically intact. She's also starting to look at colleges and is looking for a job.


That used to be an easier thing: finding a job. When I was a kid, all you had to do was go fill out a McDonald's application and you could have a job. There was poverty, there was unemployment -- but a kid who wanted to earn money and begin that lifelong love and hate relationship with the IRS had a reasonable shot at finding some sort of demeaning, dignity impugning, soul killing job that paid very little and left none of  the feelings of satisfaction often talked about in pre-employment literature.


Right now in America, there's 4 people for every available job. And that doesn't include the 15% unemployment rate for veterans returning from the wars they fought to keep Halliburton in business. Unemployment benefits are stretched, and there are those -- we call those sons of bitches REPUBLICANS -- who would cut off unemployment insurance and let people starve. We also have some folks -- we call those assholes DEMOCRATS -- that are going along because their mommies keep their balls in a silk bag in the back of an armoire. Right now we're living in a country where we have The Haves and The Have-Nots. Right now we're living in a country run by politicians who are signing away our freedoms. Right now, the banks and corporations have taken over.


Right now, it's only getting started.


And right now, there are stories to be told. Someday, we'll have historians explaining to our grandchildren what all this recession bullshit was really about and what the long term impact of shrinking civil rights and banks on the national tit was. Or maybe we won't. Maybe we'll have talking heads and history memes on social networks, lost in the shuffle between the Two Girls, One Cup video and the latest free social networking game that eats up computer speed and distracts people from seeing the world for what it is.


Re:visionary is my way of trying to tell the real story in real time. There are stories to be told, songs to be sung, poetry to be written. Re:visionary means,  for one, revision. Life, like a poem draft, often  requires revision.


For another, it means Re(garding) Vision. How I envision my self, the country, other people, the world. 


And I'm hoping you like what you read.

Excerpt from New Manuscript

Since I had the cash, I went against my better judgment and decided to pay rent. The next day I woke up in the late afternoon and walked up to the gas station on the corner and bought a money order, two corn dogs, and a 40 of Miller High Life. On the way back I stopped by the manager’s office, the money order through the mail slot near the bottom of the locked door, and went back home to burrow in and avoid the day light. When I got back, there were two more messages on my phone. One was another message from Lynda, wanting to talk to me. The other was from my mother, asking if I’d talked to Rhea lately.


The corn dogs were hard from sitting under the heat lamp too long, but I added enough ketchup that it didn’t matter, and the beer washed it all down nicely. I tried watching TV for a while, but I couldn’t talk myself into sitting through any of the shit on any of the channels. They’d be doing me a favor, I thought, if they just shut the fucking cable off. How many years had I wasted watching television? Over my lifetime? It’s enough to stupefy the imagination. The time people waste never occurs until it’s well past reclamation; I spent my life doing what I thought was living. I worked – sometimes. I married. I had a child. I divorced. I worked – sometimes. I remarried. I got a career. I paid taxes, amassed debt, missed car payments and rent payments and utility payments. When I had the money I always tried to tip at least 15 percent when I went to bars and restaurants. I spent recklessly. I survived hangovers, evictions, break ups, break downs, deaths, funerals, births. In my mid-30’s I was able to look back and see a life not unlike the lives of other men my age. I wasn’t so different.

So why did most all of it feel like malingering death?

There were only two things I did right in my life, as far as I could tell: having Rhea and marrying Lynda. But Rhea was getting too old to visit and Lynda took a job out of town for a few months. She told me when she left it wasn’t me; but I knew it was.

“You never do anything. You don’t go anywhere except that bar. You don’t have any hobbies. You don’t even write anymore; and it used to be so important.”


“It still is.”


She shook her head. “But you’re not doing anything about it. You’ve been moping around the apartment for a year, Nick. A YEAR. I can’t take it.”


“So you’re leaving me because I’m a little depressed.”


She shook her head. “I’m not leaving you. I’m working out of town for a few months. I need to get out of here. I need to do this for ME, ok? Besides, the time apart might be good for us.”


“Whatever.” I didn’t believe for a second that she planned on coming back. She’d go off with her gypsy theatre friends and send me postcards that read Wish You Were Here (Not!).


A car honked outside. “That’s my taxi.”


“I could have taken you to the airport.”


“It’s not a big deal.”


It would have been, I thought. Once.


“I’ll call you when I land.”


“Ok.”


She sighed. “I still love you, Nick.”


“Yeah.”

She walked out of the apartment and got into the taxi. I stood there watching her leave. It felt like my entire life was riding off in a yellow taxi.

That I wasn’t working wasn’t the issue, although that played a role. Lynda, unlike most of the women I’d had dealings with in my life, wasn’t obsessed with money. She worried over it sometimes, but not out of some shallow social-status issue. Her fears of poverty had deeper roots than even I understood when we first got married, and I had come to take them seriously – even if my own nature got in the way of doing anything about it.

I walked downstairs because I was tired of standing in the middle of the bedroom. Of course, once I reached the bottom of the stairs, I hit the wall of smell that encased the entire first floor. What had Randall called it? Dead fish and dirty ass? He was often an intolerable human being, but he could be (entirely too often) astute in his observations.

“I really need to clean,” I said. My voice echoed. It was a wonder that Marie Rubio didn’t say anything about it when she dropped off the delinquent rent notice. For all I knew, the odor was starting to creep out under the door and out the edges of the window. Hell, it could’ve been seeping through the walls; the walls were painted concrete blocks, which gave the place a cave-like quality. It also dated the construction of the complex to the late 1960’s to early 70’s. Before advances in central air and energy efficient building materials, the best way to build houses in the desert was out of cement blocks; they kept the cool air longer. It made for shitty insulation of course… but the winters were mild except for the nighttime temperature and the cold always burned off by ten the following morning. That was one of the things about living in the desert Lynda and I didn’t realize; I suspect that most people don’t realize it, either. The winter nights get cold – sometimes below freezing. It’s not the same kind of cold; it’s not that mid-western cold that gets into your bones the way it gets into the ground and freezes solid to stay until the spring thaw. The desert ground doesn’t hold onto the cold in the winter. There’s not enough water or soil or clay for that to happen. The temperature simply drops, and maybe there’s a micro-thin layer of dew the following morning; but that, along with the cold, disappears quickly and leaves no trace of its existence.

The cave-like atmosphere of the apartment held the smell in like it held the cold; sometimes I had to hold my breathe from the time I walked in the door to the time I made it up the stairs to the bedroom, which was the only sacred place left. When Lynda first left, I couldn’t sleep upstairs; trying to sleep alone in our bed was simply too much for me. And no matter how much I drank, I couldn’t sleep in our bed without missing her – the feel of her next to me, her radiating warmth, the little snoring sounds she always made (and always denied making). I missed the way she talked in her sleep and didn’t remember it the next day, and the way she used to cling to me in the night when she had a nightmare. I missed the weight of her when she’d lay on my chest, listen to my heart, and play with my chest hair, always pulling out the gray hairs and accusing me of turning into a monkey. So for the first month or so, I passed out on the couch downstairs and slept with the lights on to erase the memories that lingered in the darkness and kept me awake.

Eventually, though, the smell downstairs and the uncomfortable couch pushed me upstairs; and I made sure to drink enough that I wouldn’t wake up, and I kept the television on to block out the sound of all those memories whispering at me from the shadows in every corner of the room.

Coffee, I thought. I need a little coffee and then I’ll scour the place clean. I steeled myself and waded into the kitchen. Dirty dishes stacked in high in the sink and spreading onto the counter top when the space ran out. Old, dried out food encrusted on the plates, the bowls, the silverware. Empty, crushed beer cans and drained bottles that once held wine, bourbon, and scotch. The floor was sticky. The stove was covered in layers of crud and stained with meals I didn’t remember trying to cook and the burners were riddled with acne-like little circles from Randall lighting his cigarettes on the burner. Old pizza boxes. Rancid delivery and take-out containers. I had to clean the place; if Lynda walked through the door at that moment, the sheer horror of it all would have pushed her right back out again. It was not evidence of a Man Debauched – which she probably expected – or even of Dedomesticated Man – which might have been forgivable. There was some other evil at work there altogether; it was something older and more rotten. In the light of the morning – and why that morning I didn’t (and still don’t) know – I began to understand that it was more than my laziness or depression or drunkenness. The thing I faced in my kitchen was not months of neglect, but that ageless decay that all civilizations succumb to in the end. It was the thing that took down the Aztecs, the Mayans, and the Roman Empire. It was that impulse that lived on in the stories of the Christ’s crucifixion, the murder of Osiris, the death of Mohammed, the execution of Patrick Henry, and the railroading of Sacco and Vanzetti.

I found the coffee pot much in the same condition it had been in when I abandoned it the previous morning. How bad do I want this cup of coffee? I told myself I could walk back up to the gas station and buy a cup of their burned, yet still amazingly weak java. Then I could come back reinvigorated with something resembling caffeine and the fresh air, and take on the filth of the centuries that had taken root in my kitchen. The beer and the shitty corndogs were brewing in my stomach, churned by the deadly cornucopia of smells I had no choice but to breathe in.

Lynda would have a fit if she walked into this. She wasn’t a clean freak or anything; if anything, she was as absent minded as I was when it came to the daily futile chores of eradicating the dust, grime, and filth of living. But she would know what it was before I had a chance to try and explain it.

My stomach was in knots and I knew I was going to throw up if I didn’t do something. So I went back upstairs and took a fast shower; I made sure to turn the water up as hot as I could take it so I could burn the filth off my skin. Then I dressed, held my breath as I went down the stairs, and retreated from the apartment.

Instead of stopping at the gas station, I kept walking until I got to the bar.