500 posts

EVE

"This album is a homage to the first Woman on Earth, Eve and the rebellion to her creator for bringing knowledge to Man."

May 4- ODaT

In a sense, everything that happens to me is a gift from God. I may resent disappointments, rebel against a series of misfortunes which I regard as unmerited punishment. Yet in time I may come to understand that these can be considered gifts of enlightenment. They teach me that many of my punishments are self-inflicted. In some way unfathomable to my human intelligence, my suffering could be the consequence of my own attitudes, actions or neglects.

This spiritual approach to my problems can lift my thinking to a level at which I can gain new perspectives and find solutions I never dreamed were possible.

Today's Reminder

All of us tend to rebel against the unhappiness in our lives; we try to understand; we resent what we cannot understand. Rebelliousness will only heap one frustration on another until we learn to get out from under, let go, and let God take a hand in our affairs.

"When a man of good-will is troubled or tempted or afflicted with evil thoughts, then he can better understand how great a need he has of faith in God." --Thomas A'Kempis

October 20

Neurosis - "We All Rage In Gold"

Conduit Revisited

In order for the message to be heard, the conduit must remain open. For the message to run clear and true, then perhaps it can be said the body of the vessel must be broken and remade, again and again. In that the body and the mind of the artist must be broken, his heart must occasionally be broken, everything blown apart and then put back together. For the true message sometimes lives out beyond the wilderness of hunger, madness and despair.

The landscaper who taught me how to play guitar told me once how he saw ZZ Top years ago down in Pungo. Some pissant festival or another nestled down in the swamp country below Virginia Beach. He said they were lean and hungry, beardless and dangerous. They wore matching garish cowboy shirts and they had to be dragged off the stage because they would not stop playing. Another friend of mine saw them in a stadium sometime in the nineties, they were fat, the music laborious, the stage lined with strippers, the music was pure debauchery and sex. I choose to think they lost their way.

I meditate on all this while I was the dishes by hand. I've done it this way for years. I watch the muscles in my arms as they work. In the mirror I look at the muscles that make up my chest. I pray every morning, I make the necessary phone calls to go back on food stamps. I fight every day and try to concentrate on my breathing. I wonder how much longer I can keep this up.

Self-portrait 4 or something

or "I Do Not Care to Mow the Lawn Today."

Solace 2

Don't worry, nobody died, this is a room in the critical care unit of the hospital where I work and I liked how it looked that day.

Putting this here for the time being

as I'm going to my parents for a week and might actually do some work down there. It's rough, I know.    

            My first day out I drove the freeway in darkness well into the suburb-end of Broad street. I waited in a dirt lot adjacent to an extended stay hotel, my truck alone other than for a couple tractor trailers.  I walked around in the morning, wearing my backpack and kicking rocks, too nervous and impatient to sit in the truck. Finally a crew-cab Chevy raced around the corner of the hotel and dove into the gravel, travelling much too fast. It was dented to the point of where I was not sure if it was exactly safe to drive.  The window rolled down to reveal the driver as possibly the fattest man I’d ever encountered.  Even as dark as it was, I could tell the cab was filled to capacity with men who had only recently gotten very quiet.  The driver said, “Hey, you Clay?” I said yeah, he said “I’m uh…Clayton.” And chuckled. He had a baseball hat and a long greasy pony tail. “Throw your gear in the back and jump in.”

                Everybody in the cab was cheerful enough and we roared out Patterson into the county, pulled into a stripmall parking lot out front of a closed down Greek restaurant. I’d been by the place a hundred times. The lot was next to a wetland surrounding a river as Patterson crossed it. The sun was finally up and the crew unloaded and commenced to unload chainsaws from the bed of the Chevy. I stood around looking for something to do. Clayton rolled up on me, almost waddling really.

                “Just hang out for a second till Redbag shows up, we gotta piss test you before you can drive. Plus we gotta wait for fuckin’ Jose’ and them to show up with the Puddle-jumpers anyway.”

                “What’s a puddlejumper?” I asked.

                “You shitting me?” he laughed “It’s the god damn truck you’re gonna be driving.”

                “Oh. Far-fucking out.”

                Clayton’s face was huge and round like everything else about him was huge and round but the thing about his eyes, even as squinted by his cheeks as they were, is that there was no meanness to them. He had the kindest, bluest eyes of any fat straw-boss I’d ever met.  It took me a couple weeks before I figured out why he was constantly having to pull his pants up. It was the complete lack of waist for them to hang onto.

                The crew bitched about the swamp for a minute and put on pairs of shredded safety chaps that had used to be orange but with years of grease and filth had assumed the color of rust.  George the metal kid had one saw taken apart and was threading a chain back onto the bar. Everybody gassed up, made sure the motors fired, after a minute they all walked off in the direction of the overpass.  Redbag pulled up in his clean white truck, got out and shook my hand.  He produced a little cup and asked me to oblige him with a urine sample.  I went off toward a dumpster just behind the Greek place.  Halfway there the lower part of my guts informed me no dumpster would cut it, so I kept headed into the woods, found a trash filled ditch and some broad oak leaves and dropping my pants, squatted there, hoping no Greeks would come out the back door.

                “What fucking took you so long?” asked Redbag when I got back.

                “Sorry, got excited, had to poop.”  I handed him the cup.

                “Oh god almighty I hope you didn’t put that in there.” He added some chemicals to it shook it gingerly with two fingers, changed hands and held the container up to the sunlight. I guess it had leaked as he wiped his other hand on his jeans.  He glanced over said, “Well you’re good to go.” And rearing back, flung my perfect urine sample into the swamp.  It was framed for a second by a perfectly clear blue sky shot through with streaks of clouds. I was sad to see it go.  He got back into his truck and rolled the window down. He asked next to see my license. I brought it out, showed it to him.

                “Just so you know, I’ve only had my CDL a couple of months. I got a spotless record though.”

                “That’s fine, we’ll work with you. Oh yeah, do you have your health card?”

                “I’m not sure what that is.”

                He looked surprised. “It’s required for you to be driving any kind of commercial vehicle. We can both get into big-time trouble with that. If you get pulled they can fine us ten grand. The City didn’t make you get one?”

                “I never even heard of it before today.” I said, we looked at each other for a second, “I’ll get it taken care of right away. Whatever it takes.”

                “Okay.” And he was gone, leaving me with Clayton. I said Shit. Clayton told me don’t worry, we’ll get you straight. Suddenly the trucks where there.

                They were called Puddle-jumpers because they were designed to go off road. You could hear them coming a mile away due to the giant tires. One was an International like the one I was on back at the City. The other was a Ford but a F650. They were both stripped to the frame with nothing but a platform on the back for the lift. They were red and were clean and they roared as they idled there in the parking lot, obliterating everything else.

                Nobody told me the truck was stick.

The cicadas seem especially loud tonight

If you love me you will listen to this song.

Also, I took down most of "Mountain" as I got it copy-edited and have started sending it out. This is kind of a big thing for me.

I found this today. It's from 1964

Excerpt 3

The ending of "Mountain."Got much more overall to edit, but I thought if I posted this part, I'd stop fucking around with it. Not sure why it took me three months to get this far. Anyway, hope you enjoy it...

             Lynn and the boy headed back to the house to search for scrap lumber to put under the two jacks.  I smoked on my tail gate and watched the swollen creek with the out building behind it. The water caught what little sunlight there was. It shone. The sound of it slowly replaced the noise of smoking ruin I had in my head. I decided right then and there, that little creek who had nearly jumped its banks, and its cousin the tobacco barn would be my idea of heaven.  Rushing along with grass waving inside of it. Fast and cold and pure.

After a minute an older man appeared in the field across the road in tan and black coveralls.  Well, I say black but when he got up on me I noticed the black were great streaks of grease, oil and dirt. I waved and called. Tall and bearded, he said nothing until he got up on me.

                “Yeah I know who you are,” after I introduced myself, “I’m Lynn’s uncle Bobby.  He asked me to come watch after you.”

                “Oh. You been hunting with them this morning?”

                “No. I was by myself over on that far ridge. Trailing this fuckin bear that’s been chewing half our hounds up.” He growled through his salt and pepper beard.

                “Really?” I asked and chuckled, “what were you gonna shoot him with?” I hadn’t seen a rifle.

                He reached into his grease stained coveralls and pulled out a pistol with a barrel the length of my forearm.  “This here.” He fixed a steady gaze on me and then put it away.

                “Oh. That might do it.” I said. He put the gun away, pulled out a bag of chewing tobacco and commenced to load up.

                “Good thing you broke down here, “he said, fitting the plug into his mouth “about a quarter mile back and you would have been on old Copperhead’s place.” He had the same grim smile Lynn had, a few small random stalks poking out from his beard. It occurred to me his eyes didn’t have the same kindness as his nephew. “Things might not have worked out so well for you there.”

                I knew what property he meant; an old bungalow next to a country-store long boarded up. The yard had multiple vehicles sitting in disrepair, four-wheelers, trucks, innards strewn about in the dirt. Not one but two confederate flags waved on the listing porch.  “You mean that old place up by the dog-leg in the road?”

                “Yeah, used to be Miller’s store.”

“Thank god I didn’t roll up on that man there in the dead of the night. Does he own the store too?”

“Yes he does. Place goes back five generations of his people. His momma and her sister kept it going till they died off and then he promptly let it all fall to shit.”

                “Across the road from there is an old foundation by the creek. Was that the old mill?”

                “Yes it was. It burned before my time. My daddy said they used to grind for the whole valley.”

                “Wow.”   And left it at that. I figured I’d better shut-up for the time being, however struck by a thousand questions. I sat instead on the tailgate and lit another cigarette, watched the smoke rise and tried to imagine what the valley might have looked like. The fun, loopy, still-drunk feeling was ebbing and was quickly replaced by a throbbing behind my eyes. I rubbed them. The creek sang its forever song. Bobby leaned, elbows on the sidewalls of the bed of my truck and punctuated what the creek said by spitting occasionally into the grass.

                Lynne and the boy eventually showed back up, “You too getting along alright?” he asked.

                “Famously. “ I said.

                They had brought an armful each of various scraps of two by eight, cut on an angle, about two foot long. They were wrapped in dirty cobwebs, potentially the drop-offs from old rafter tails.  The sides were rough hewn and brown as tobacco. I hated dropping them into the mud, but I needed to shake the worms in my head, get on the road and get on home. I tried not to think about home. I set to it, crawling under the truck and positioning the two jacks. Lynne’s boy stayed out and cranked the rod on the little one, and I found a flat on the axle where my cherry-bomb could get a good bite. It took a minute, even with the wide boards, the weight and the mud kept sliding everything out of plumb. The boy got his end straight first, started cranking a few times with the twist rod, and then waited for me. I got mine to come around finally and the back end of the truck began to rise when Bobby suddenly commanded- “Come out from under there.” I did of course, fearing that I’d done something terribly wrong, something worse even than everything I’d already done.

                “Break those lug nuts loose while you still got some weight on that wheel. It’ll be a lot easier than once she’s ass up in the air.”

                I stared at him amazed. The kid laughed. Lynn just smiled at me and said “Stick around this world a little longer and you’d be surprised at what you might learn.”

                They all stood there and let me get into the wet and wrestle the tire around. I could feel the old man scrutinizing my every move, judging how I worked, how my hands moved. Just to make conversation, I got them to describe how their land went back to where the rolling hills tucked under the darkened tree line and then crept up the mountain. They told how many generations had been on it, what all they had farmed. They only had a few cows anymore. The rest they just mowed. “Reefer turns a good crop,” said Bobby. Everybody laughed, nobody thought he was joking.

                “You ever thought about selling it off?” I asked, twisting the nuts back into place.

                “Nope.”

                “You know, I sometimes work for a contractor who’d pay good money for that old barn over yonder. He takes ‘em down and re-assembles them for log cabins up in Cashiers. Rich folks love them.”

                “Yeah,” Lynne chuckled over my shoulder “he’s stopped by here a few of times.”

                “What are y’all gonna do with it?”

                “We’re gonna let it stand there as long as it wants to.” He said

                I stood on the wrench for the last turn, putting all my weight on each lug-nut. I got up from a crouch and faced them, wiped my hands on my jeans. It was time to go. Three generations fixed the same look on me, with eyes the color of the creek. It was neither a look of meanness nor particularly of welcome either.  I thanked them as graciously as I could, apologized for rooting everything up into mud and eased it back on the road. Pointed it toward home and whatever I would find there. I figured I wasn’t so pickled anymore that I couldn’t keep it between the lines. Fierceness, I decided, it was the look of fierceness. The boy waved and called out,

“Be good.”

Why Not

been listening to this a lot lately

Give it 5 Minutes

turn it on and wash the dishes or something, you'll be surprised when you find yourself dancing

Take Two

The guitar drummed a frantic staccato inside the cab of my truck, music rang in my head like a familiar poison. It sounded like they had taken the singer and ran him through a tremolo pedal, which amplified the bleating goat quality of his voice. The truck climbed and dove through the country blackness, no houses had no lights on. Busted out picture windows g yawned on the faces of river granite stone built stores, black barn-board outbuildings loomed the curves overseeing my hurried passing. On I ran. I knew vaguely this was the endeavor of a diseased mind.


I started writing again last week, really writing, like I said I was going to. Just thought I'd share.