1) I was to fly out to San Diego later that night for work. It would’ve been my first time in California (I have yet to go). I went in to the office to gather some things to take with me. On the way in, I heard NPR sayings something about a plane crashing into the Pentagon. I thought very little of it until I arrived in my office to my mother calling and asking was I okay – and then saying she needed to get off the phone when the second plane hit the other WTC tower (not the actual sequence of events, but the way she and I experienced it). Naively (I realize now), I still packed my stuff thinking I would make it to San Diego before midnight. 2) I leave work after alarms go off at the Monarch Tower in Buckhead – a supposed bomb threat. The parking lot is jammed with people wanting to get out. All emergency protocol is thrown aside as we are fearing that our building may be attacked to. Ironic that the naivete that made me think I may be able to fly out to California later that day did not come into play when reckoning with the likelihood of my own office being attacked. 3) Fat and tired, as I was much of the time in those years, I made it home in the late morning. I called Kathy and she said she would be home a little later. I started drinking whiskey and coke. 4) Kathy would arrive and Tommy T., our contractor friend – staying in an...
Lambchop @ XX Merge from sassafrassv on Vimeo. Had to post this. Sound is not great, but the performance makes me wish I had skipped Pitchfork and gone to this instead. Or just have unlimited time and money to go to...
All the turkey dwindling in a freezer container seven feet away. When I moved in here my parents were here and it is apropos that they should be here this weekend – my last. My fingers are scarred, thumb pads rent from the mesh. Today was a long day. The walls have told all their stories and I am itching, this day after thanksgiving, for new palates on which to plaster new stories – clean walls, my walls. I am running naked and wet through the rain tonight; the family quietly sleeps in sudden slumber. The fun that was had will be had again – but not quite in the same way – if not now, then very soon. I ate the jello cranberries: my favorite. I sucked my thumb. I played Ken and Barbie and Ken. She can’t stand up. She’s dancing to stay upright. Kicked the high-heels into the pool. Goodnight this place; it is slowly dismantling. Goodnight sweet prince; he’s dead. Goodnight Candler Park, or Lake Claire, or whatever you...
For a little over three years, spanning from August of 2005 to August 2008, I spent one hour a week – sometimes Thursday afternoons, sometimes Tuesdays, and for a brief period on Wednesdays – sitting in an office with dim lighting and half-closed blinds trying to figure out what was wrong with me. When I started going to these sessions, I was in an awful place in my life in which my then live-in girlfriend had moved out (ostensibly in an effort to save the relationship), who then subsequently left the relationship for good a few weeks later. I had spent the better part of my previous 10 years nightly carrying out a love affair with alcohol, and whereas I had tempered these wicked ways a bit in the previous couple of years, my anger and frustration with myself would still boil over from time to time – whether drunk or sober. During those three years of weekly meetings I would come to realize that I was in, and had likely been in, a deep depression that extended back into my teen years. The man that I talked to (and I mean “to”, like when a pitcher throws a ball to the catcher, because our sessions were 95% one-way) in those sessions was Stephen O’Hagan. I would come in most of the time thinking I had nothing to say, pretending that everything was okay, only to leave an hour later realizing my tongue was tired, and most times feeling much more levity than when I entered, all at the expense of tear-stained cheeks. Steve didn’t speak much, but when...
My uncle Willy died last Friday. He was 78. While alive, he was the wiry, hairy-chested type of old man of which the world does not make any more these days. He’s the first of my dad’s siblings to die and I believe that it has affected my dad in ways that even his mother’s death over ten years ago has not. When I got the message I was sitting in a park listening to indie rock music in Chicago. I couldn’t help from imagining how strange Willy would have thought the whole scene to be, and in imagining that I thought of how far I have come from my family: that thing I grew up with, and as, that I spent much of my adolescence trying to outdistance, and have spent much of late 20s and 30s trying to figure out how to get back to. What I knew of Willy is that he farmed a bit: sweet potatoes and the like. He worked for several years at the Nu-Tread tire company, just behind the outfield wall of the old Durham Athletic Park; the same park where the Durham Bulls play and where the movie Bull Durham was shot. He also bought cords of wood in the fall the at he would cut, split, and deliver to houses nearby for winter heat. On the property that he owned there are two ponds that my brother and I frequented on weekends for fishing. Bass and bream could be caught in such aplenty, with bobbers and worms or crickets or grasshoppers, that one would think that Willy stocked the pond,...
1) Grateful Dead – some of the songs are classics. If you think I am a fool, you are not listening. You are more afraid of being considered a “deadhead,” being part of that culture, than just plain disliking the music. Most people who claim not to like the music cannot name a single song even though they know 20, much less say why they don’t like it. We’re too old for this. Get over it. 2) Dirty Dancing – I was forced to watch it as a teenager by my, now dead, chorus teacher on days that she did not feel like teaching. Saw it again over the weekend and it’s a good movie. The main characters all show substantial growth. They are all sympathetic. And it’s a coming-of-age story: Jennifer Gray’s character has to deal with growing up and dealing with a world that she know nothing about. I prefer my coming of age stories to be about boys, as it is easier for me to identify with, but thankfully this one is not a male coming-of-age...
That was then and this is now. Five years or more. It happens in a bowling alley, or at the end of a night. There’s this water flowing freely under a bridge. There’s Christ and good and something in between. That all happened before now, and so much has happened since. I like to think we have all moved on. I think we have. We have to have. People of my life...
So many friends of mine here in my space tonight, some that know me, many that do not. I will soon post the favorite albums (CDs) of the year post. We should all wait it out till morning. We should all love each other and suffer in the morning. We need that commitment to one another, since we have nothing that equals it in our past or current life. I love each and every one of you. I do. I promise our parents will ever know the...
There’s a drunk and another drunk at the bar and they are both failing horribly at telling the punchline to some jokes that they earlier have practiced way too much. He’s Andre and she’s sally. The people on TV are talking too much about porcupines. If I could bite off the ass of a porcupine it would mean so little. I would still just be the guy who bit off the ass of a porcupine. It would not win me points on match.com. It would make me pariah amongst the friends. I could love though. Mouth full of quills. Quills inmy mouth, writing the things I cannot say on my own. I miss so...
I don’t like writing about the good stuff. Not necessarily the bad stuff. Just the difficult stuff. That is what I prefer. But tonight driving through this town tonight, during this time of the year that I have a psychologically disposition to breaking down, was like flying. I have laughed until my sides hurt. I have realized there is someone that knows the ends of all of my family stories when the beginnings are told. I think there are songs that can and will be sung. I think I will make it through these holidays, and the rest will become...
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