Unreadable Garbage

He had kicked the can of the apocalypse down the road for a long time now.  God, feeling both lazy and ambivalent, kept putting off "the inevitable."  Like growing up, the end of the world seemed more bother than it was worth, more mess than solution, an unnecessary disruption to an otherwise lovely day.  He was patient.  Why rush?  The contented farm boy in him let the weather--nature itself--get inside him and bend time to its own purposes.   This day, this hour, this minute was eternal, burning beyond imagination or memory, into something someone might call "real."

(Breathe deeply.)

The thunderhead on the horizon was cotton candy, bright vanilla taffy being pulled out of thin air.  Summer.  God had twine woven through the belt loops of his dungarees, well-worn Converse All Stars on his feet.  He was shirtless for August's afternoon sun and ambled the gravel road without direction.  The familiar rubber tip of his sneakers connected again with the rusted, dented can; a cloud of dust billowed briefly, a miniature storm, God's wrath (and his laughter, musical and filled with the bright light of youth and harvest).

What will come, will come.  In time...

-------

The idea of annihilation is not new to me.  I was a boy once, too.  By the wizened age of five, the weight of anti-matter, the gravity of unbeing, haunted me from the inside, a whirlwind inside a black cavern, all bluster and noise and (unreadable) garbage.

These anxieties, the aching that they caused, ignited in me a curiosity that wanted both facts and spiritual succor.  But the bigger the book, the worse the prognosis.  The material and the magical were both racing to the end (of the page, of the day, of the life).  It is as if the universe in its adherence to certain laws had lost sight of the little man.  The shrinking individual was being devoured by the gang, the mob, by the exploding species.  The significance and influence, that is to say the actual autonomy of the individual was eclipsed by the nearest star.  Small already, we were each dwindling, disappearing slowly.

In this substantial shift in axis and tide, the creation was compassionate in phrasing its answers but largely disinterested (and naive) to the actual battles of being.  For example, the various and seemingly tailor-made maladies and handicaps that describe the human condition are, perhaps sadistically, custom-designed, corroding the body and eroding the mind; each one seems to be a hand-crafted gift created "just for you."

-------

Its personal.  Personalized.  Purloined.  We have stolen this life, this consciousness, out of the jaws of a gnawing jackal pup.  He will sharpen his teeth, his wit, his mind--like us--on anything he can find.  We too are scavengers.  We are satisfied with dead meat.  We are, ourselves, already dying.  Your gut shuts down for a second.  Sinking.  You want to be light, lifted, dancing but there is heaviness that holds onto your feet, your tongue.

Hold your tongue.

There is nothing about your death that will matter.  There is nothing from your life that will retain.  Because we are inconsequential, both urgency and burden are removed.  They are extracted, bad teeth or extradited, bad eggs.  A just balance is found between expectation and obligation.  (I promised you a new brand of freedom.)  With waxed soles and a Wonderbra, we will have to unlearn habits that have settled into us as nostalgia and believe again that we can dance.  When we wish to dance, we must revive.  We can dance away doubt . We can dance down despair.  Orphaned by God, we will dance like a dervish in meditation and prayer.

Again, I am six or seven.  I have--instinctively--fixed my eyes on heaven.  Momentum comes in outstretched arms; I spin.  I spin.

There is rotation,

there is propulsion, 

I am spinning.  I persist at the bottom of a thin and nebulised thread.  I am the good-luck spider that is suspended, at the end.

The velocity of the centrifuge will, inevitably, turn all of us into ourselves, while tea leaves cannot help but tell their tales out of turn.  All the memes that would come to destroy me and all the memes that would try to rescue me were part of childhood's amorphous stew of anxiety and fear.  This was the stuff of bad dreams.  Anticipation is a kinder word for dread. Nostalgia is a kinder word for regret.  But then... 

I was paralyzed by my desires.  (You were too.) They were circulating around me without benefit of vocabulary,  indecipherable, ghosts from the future hosted by my soul, in my body, run by my mind with its over-active imagination.

-------

When the sirens find this road--adrenaline red ignoring the yellow ribbons, the black tar--it turns me, changes me, turns me inside out.  And I run screaming, hands held cupped over the ears, past the house, through the yard beyond the fragrant wall of lilacs into a muddy patch sprouted loud with rhubarb, its broad and honest leaves (and the snakes that they conceal).

I am crying.

These tears are a kind of sweat.  I am enduring something.  I am enduring the idea of loss or threat that the sirens imply.

The Doppler's cry subsides, that strange and  histrionic bird.

Tears dry.

The palms I have been pressing, invested on each ear, slide down to my sides (wiping what embarrassment still stings in salty pools, in alkali rivers that cut something into my four-year-old face.  Tears...).

-------

For fears are nothing more than fantasies of loss and/or annihilation, dark imaginings that might instruct with their obsessions.  Sometimes too obvious, sometimes succinct in disapproval, judgment, the lessons arrive inevitably late and looking like something that you swear you knew all along, something you believed.  You spend your middle years (and later--more desperately--your final years) trying to craft that handful of sand called learning into something you could prettify and pass off as wisdom.  But you know, now, humbly, that this is just a jumble of words.

That is my intention, my obsession, here.  I want to traverse the muddy headlands of meaning, of vocabulary, and "make sense" of something.  Or, if that ambition is too much (for this late hour)--the ephemeral and mutable mots moving with the taunting and slippery grace of butterflies--I will content myself to look for bones and stones and berries to string together.  I will bead the seeds of some new language, laughing.  And I will wear the weary string around my neck.  It is enough to create patterns here.  It is enough--meaning aside--to piece together something pretty with which to decorate my naked, trembling self.

-------

Meanwhile,
God has gone fishing, followed by his faithful hound.  The worm squirming on the hook of this humanity hasn't a prayer at this point, at least one that could be heard.  He can't be bothered, a small town judge in semi-retirement, an 8 year old knowing only these forty acres and (at least for now) satisfied with the path along the river, the whispering sandstone caves, the lower pasture punctuated with wild flowers--white, purple, and yellow--where the horses are like statuary, dappled by the sunlight fractured in the leaves of the oak that first found this spring.

--------

These storms, warmed in that sapphire eye, rose to writhe and boil.  They come as a cataract; the thunder is persistent like the fictitious friction one imagines on the approach to a tumult of falls.  It is just half an  hour now.  The waterfall is waiting round the next bend (or the bend after that).  The cold stream dreams of the basalt walls, and aches for the moss-eaten boulders down below.  When you stand close enough, the mist is more like rain.  And all of that energy is dissolving into the effervescent dare to act.

To be.  

To plunge.  

But I am under a spell.  Hell demon or well-meaning angel,  you caution me:  Don't cross the creek on the slippery log.,  Stay on the farm., and  Run when you hear sirens.  Each day is an agenda crowded with a thousand novel fears; you think of Everything.  Wake up.  What can I worry about this morning?  You devoured my confidence for breakfast and brought limitation into the world.  By lunch the hum of summer was behind everything--the humidity, the heat--like the low pulsing of a fuzz guitar before it possesses the world, flirting, fighting and fucking.     Turn down the volume or you'll go deaf.               

Meanwhile, there is a willful teen in each garage practicing guitar and the art of being popular.  The younger kids, the middle-schoolers, laugh and gabble playing sack in the street.  Their fathers make the mowers go and know (without hesitation) that their children are as high as they were, once, on some Sunday in August two decades ago.    Summer is noisy; it is claustrophobic, even for the sun.  The bikers unzip the main drag; black asphalt is tanned by the vibrating migraine of these machines.  Mix in the cliched song of cicadas,  the sizzling grills and the hissing transistor radios. 

It occurs to me:  Both my nervous breakdowns happened in Summer while those around me were basking in the enforced happiness of the season.  I tried to disguise it; but under the legendary sky--blue, unblinking--I went slowly, confidently, mad.  Today, I lay like a corpse in a hammock, eyes closed, reflecting.  I am motionless.  I am patient.  I can hear the television through the open window, the neighbor's radio, the cluster of wives convening in the cul-de-sac (gossip in equal portion with angst).  You think I am asleep but I am listening intently.  I am waiting to hear a forecast.

Three Photographs: 2. Liederhosen

1967:  The photograph is square.  Modernists have deemed the Golden Mean old and mean and retrofitted our visual vocabulary with something just the right size to slip in your pocket (if you get my meaning).  

And, what am I?  

There among impressionistic roses, I have a flaxen crew cut, a smirk instead of a smile, and corrective shoes that look like a wing tip mated with a Converse All-Star, a strange high-top made of brown leather that suggests, simply by being, a single word:  polio.  Everything here--the green moss against igneous rock, the waterfall, the lager I am holding in an imaginary advertisement--suggests Bavaria.  It may be the summer of love somewhere, but here...

I, four years old, am wearing leiderhosen made of a soft greenish-grey suede that feels good against my inner thighs.  I am a pretty boy, a kind of flower among the fading tulips, the towering glads, the sad mums now humbled by the array of colors.

Is this Hitler's garden? There is so little to control the myth.  It comes and goes, evolves and grows.  But soon enough this alpine costume caved in on itself and went from adorable to deplorable.  Even I knew that.  The Teutonic traditions were damaged by a little something called the holocaust, and now Hansel's knee socks, bib overall shorts, and jaunty felt cap were evocative of fascism.  

I am so small in them that they hang off the suspenders like the proverbial barrel or a bell.  The "shorts" end up almost to the ankles and a dozen hipster retailers are competing for every scrappy moment in his charismatic arms.  I will wear the comfort--growing into and then out of the liederhosen--until the fit, tight and barely beginning the trip down my naturally muscular thighs, becomes something vaguely erotic to me.  I take great pleasure in "forgetting" to put on underwear before buttoning the leather cod piece closed.

And so it was then--down the obscure tunnel of time--that I was the same animal, feral in the garden.  My eyes are blue.  The sun is hungry.  Tomorrow belongs to me.

A Place to call Home

I see your house.

They used it in that movie.

Your house

looks pretty good

on television.

The idea of "house" and the idea of "home" anchor us in a slough of expectations, desires, wants.  A core value.  A basic need.  A fundamental right.  Housing, habitat, hospitality.  Your home away from home.  Mr. Blandings builds his dream house. 

The blueprint describes the dilemmas of design and designer.  Then the questions:  "How do I act, interact, and be in the space that I will call home?"  "How will I impact the space?"  "How will this space with its specific contours, its honest angles, its secret rooms efffect me?"  "Will I be changed?" 

An imaginary realtor takes you on a tour of the world.  She shows you the quaint ideal, the cultural cliche, of home for a variety of peoples.  Across borders, people are consumed by the romance of place.  While an infinitely small group of people actually reside in the idyllic space that would meet their criteria for "home", the pictures of this place are firmly planted in the brain.  One cannot help but project and compare.   "This is not my beautiful home."

"This is not my beautiful wife."  And "home" contains the gravity of family, the rewards and obligations.  The tender trap of "love". 

I dream of my childhood home.  It is freshly painted, white enough to absorb the entire summer sun.  The picket fence is also glowing.  It is luminescent in the way one pictures heaven, just beyond the eyes ability to adjust.  The edges of everything are fuzzy giving the sense that everything is enlarged, engorged with light, with God.  My father paints the front door red, fire-engine red--and nails a plaque with a blessing at eye level, a door knocker, made of bronze.  The sun finds the metal and shocks my eyes.  But the yard is crowded with lilacs, a soft pastel fabric that is a balm for them.  The smell is memory and comfort.  The swing set cries, a creaking pendulum.  The dog is eager for attention.  The cottonwoods can't help themselves;  rooted here, they are subject to the wind...

Beat Box Banshee

At the edge of town, there are no sidewalks and the eccentric houses are connected by a narrow dirt track that knows well the path decided beneath the cottonwoods.  There are dogs in the yards with voices high and low, friendly and threatening (at times, simultaneously).  They come out of their dog houses, the pads on their paws cold on the fresh snow, their breath boiling out of their mouths like steam from a kettle.  Ignored, they drag the chains behind them and retreat back inside.

The kitchens call the residents out of their rooms and down to yolk-painted breakfast nooks that look out over fields of starched linen:  the red wheelbarrow overflowing with the drifting gems, the ponies with their shambled furs, the baby blue pick-up remembering the fifties on a radio that hasn't sparked in years.  The truck is parked (for the winter) in a bank of plowed meringue.  

While inside there is coffee, bacon, and the babies soiled diaper.  The smells--collectively--are the perfume of promise and possibility, the coming day, the baby's life ahead of her.  Her parents imagine the tens of thousands of tomorrows.  But outside, in your black tire boots, the sense of smell is the first to go.  Your breath condenses on the Nordic knit of your scarf.  No one knows these flags and so, the motif  of scarf, of mittens, and of ski mask evades them.  And they think you are a super hero, must be, come to the playground from afar, from across the desert.  

It is dark still.  The little town is inching toward the solstice.  The Christmas concert is Friday.  The fourth grade girls have descended on the monkey bars like crows, and they are singing, stomping their feet.  This is a raucous version of Do you hear what I hear? Standing atop a mountain of snow zealously shoveled by early-morning nuns--penguins almost giggling in the December darkness--you already know the answer to the plaintive lyric.  You do not hear what others hear, nor do they see what you see.  

"We live as we dream alone."

You see the eastern horizon begin to bleed.  The color spilling over the jumble of the Crazy Mountains, igniting the Milk River on fire, and striking the frosted metal of the play equipment like a bell made of light.  The bundled children cast long shadows.  The nuns in their ear muffs tower over the scene.  The bell rings and we line  up like cattle, rosy cheeks and the blue ice of your eyes.

The light has come, as if conveyed on wings of angels, bestowed upon us by the sky.  Thus another day, draped in the temporal blue of winter light, finds its way down the valley, through the main street and over the high brick walls of the convent.  As if it had been searching for you, the sun illuminates the hope in your gaze.  

I remember you with the snot bubbling out of your nostrils in your bright blue snowsuit.  I want to take off the horned-rim nerd that sits on my nose.  I want to take my glasses off and look through the sapphire prisms of your Prussian garden...  Everything that is anticipated is still tucked in under the quilt and the gun.  In time for vespers, the stained glass explodes with daylight and the fourth grade girls start singing...

again...

Summer Comes

In the backseat, center, of her father's silver convertible, Blair's head is leaned back against the red leather upholstery.  Her blue eyes are closed against the winds that have enveloped her.  Her chestnut hair is dancing around her head.  Tangling and untangling, the strands shimmer and flash.  The adolescent's penchant for gold has been caught in the shattered sunlight that arrives without fanfare through leaves and branches to land, oh so briefly, on our ingenue's face.  The shifts from shade to sun and back again, the patterns both in rhythm and representation that play on Blair's beguiling features, pulse on the screens of her lids.  The projections are hypnotizing, as is the rush and hush of passing cars, the buzz of the Lincoln's tires, the radio's broken rendition of World on a String straining to hold together from the front seat where Blair's parents are softly singing along with Sarah Vaughn.  It is 1972 and Summer has come.  Blair knows this because her father has unlocked the back garage and brought this behemoth back into the light, back onto the road, the river of cars...  And when she sits back like this, eyes closed, absorbing the sensations of this premier ride of the season, she can (or so it seems) remember every other year, every other summer coming, every other song on the easy listening channel that she has heard in intermittent waves of sun and wind.  The whole of this ritual is magical to Blair; it has the rare capability of combining a comfortable feeling of security with the exhilaration of being alive.