Blog

It’s all Saturday night and rock and roll and bullshit. Boys playing and a girl. A pledge of allegiance in absentia and a dirge. Can we get rid of the fucking president? One way or another. Signe me up for a FBI file. If I haven’t one yet, I haven’t been living my life right. Oh hly hell it’s sunday and I have no inclination toward a church or a beach or a watering hole with food in this godforesaken state.
Love always,
Bryan

I’m in Atlanta and it’s a cloudy day. And for the first time this trip I am yearning for home – I need to be home right now. But it’s not the cloud-cover that reminds me so much of an English Summer that is pressing all these homesick buttons in my heart. It’s not the comfort of my own bed that is calling me, nor the gentle poetry of cricket. It is not Queen and Country, but friendship. I need to throw my arms around my friend and tell him that I love him.
You see, I opened an email from Martin this morning. He and Tanja have just returned from a hiking trip to Utah – it was something they’d been planning for months. On the way back to the UK, they stopped off in Vegas and got married. And, unlike so many unions, I have no doubt it was the right thing to do.

I’m feeling so at a loss lately. Like I had been taking it all for granted, as if this would never end – I had found the one, and the one way, and the rest would surely fall into place bit by bit over time. I know that is not true now. And that my complacency with the situation – indeed with the state of my life – was truly asinine.
Nothing is ever for sure. I felt you slipping through my hands last night as we made a desperate embrace – like sand, or better yet slime, as a residue has been and surely will be left. I feel that I am going back to the drawing board. How stupid I was. How utterly stupid I’ve been . In my anti-Copperfieldian act, it’s magic in reverse, except I don’t make myself disappear this time. I do it to you.

Turtle

‘Oh, to be a turtle,’ she would say the hot July day we were moving again. That annual ritual picking up, boxing, packing, hiring a truck and moving at most 5 miles down the road to a place where you are sure will make you happier than the last.
‘We can’t be turtles,’ I said. Then recited a litany of the objects in the house that would not fit in a turtle shell, regardless of its size: silverware set, guitars, chest of drawers – even the collection of second hand bath towels was just too big.
If I did not have to pay for housing I believe that my lfe would be happier. I know it seems obvious, but I believe that even a prepaid one room in a crumby hotel would bring some sort of peace that cannot be found when one week out of every month is worked just to pay for shelter. I have begun to believe the old adage that we are owned by the thing we think we own. Especially those that still carry monthly payments.
Andrea used to be able to move everything she owned in the back of her Ford hatchback. I guess that is as close as we can ever come to being turtles. If I started all over again, I do not think I would collect records or books. They get heavy no matter how small the box you are putting them into is.
I believe I would collect air samples from cities around the world, crepe paper samples, helium-inflated balloons. I believe it would be alright with just her.
I don’t really want to be a turtle at all, as a matter of fact. It seems a lonely existence. For intimacy you would be hard-pressed. Your houses would come between you like Romeo and Juliet. It’s impossible to fit two turltes in one shell. Simply impossible. Let’s move and get it over with.

Me and Marlon and Owen

I got drunk on the night Marlon and Owen died. I sat in my house and drank all of the whiskey procured a week before – before G had left to go to the beach – before I realized that I, too, had a reason to be here.
I had seen Marlon last on the waterfront as he was in the midst of a continuing struggle with the big business thugs there. I had seen that movie some 20 times. It was sad that he had become so secretive as we grew older. I knew nothing about him in his old age, or his waning health. I knew he had become an island. He had gotten fat and came out of ‘hiding,’ it seemed, only for recent awful movie parts. He was the first person I ever saw on the screen that seemed real. Even though I was much younger, and there was plenty to attach myself to in terms of screen reality, no one, except possibly Paul Newman, could rivet me in that way. (Bogart entertained, but he never seemed real.) I wrote a song about him one day. Or rather it was a song about a loved one in which I imagined him and his solitude. I will miss him.
Today as I gazed up at the TV while at work – CNN – and saw the ticker telling the story of his death across the bottom of the screen, I became ‘misty-eyed’ and pulled off my headphones and excalimed to my boss. “Brando’s gone!’
Only a couple of weeks since Reagan went and I am feeling a celebrity death really for the first time. Reagan bothered me not in the least. The best I can say about him is the same that so many seem to be saying around me lately… “He had charsima!”
Marlon Brando gave me a reason for living at a time in my life in which I was ready to turn out the lights. I know it sounds hokey, but it is true. Some turn to God, I turned to Brando, and it seems to have worked out fairly well so far.
Owen Meany died today also.
A few weeks back G and I had been discussing the book and I was sure that I had read it. As it turned out I had not. For God’s sake I hadn’t. I had read ‘Garp’ but not ‘Owen’ and it was made clear to me that the book was requisite reading if this whole thing between me and her was to ever work out.
Owen and I quickly became friends and I found myself thinking of him at the most odd times of the day. I expressed my obsession with G and she began to worry of my sexuality. She knew the Wally story and it had plagued her for some time, so she was perfectly willing to believe that I could fall in love with a man who I had never, and never would, meet in person.
What I knew of Owen after some time, was that he would die on July 8th – at least that’s what he thought, and that I would somehow be complicit in the tragedy. He died a few days earlier than even he expected requiring a new slab and a new cut with a sterilized diamond blade. It was alright in the end, I suppose. He saved Vietnamese orphans returning with nuns during wartime. This ain’t no party. (Stop reading now if you haven’t read the book and plan to.) He had his arms blown off by an overzealous piece of white trash (and I use the term knowingly) who was armed with a 1968 Chinese hand grenade.
He knew how he would die, and roughly which day he would, and he knew he would be a hero, and he knew a few things that would come to pass as well:
“WHAT’S WRONG WITH THIS COUNTRY? THERE IS SUCH A STUPID ‘GET EVEN’ MENTALITY- THERE IS SUCH A SADISTIC ANGER…SOON THERE’LL BE AN EVANGELIST IN THE WHITE HOUSE; SOON THERE WILL BE A CARDINAL ON THE SUPREME COURT…”
He never knew he would die the same day as Marlon though. He never knew Reagan, or that he would die within weeks of him. He never knew that he would leave me reeling in the way that he has tonight. He would look compassionately, yet condescendingly, on the fact that I am trying to drink his death away. He would tell me that I should eat something – and I should.
I remember Johnny Gou’s poem from college, open-mike night, in which he described Brando while performing ‘Streetcar’ on Broadway. How Marlon would go out the back stage door during his down times and have a drink at a neighboring bar, in full make up, and character.
I imagine Owen was a little like that. He never left his character, although the character changed. He knew his destiny was to be savior, yet he finally let righteousness wane a bit. He would have skipped out on a funeral to have a drink with me.
Brando would have done the same.
I miss that in friends. The drop-all mentality and uncomplicatedness.
G will be back tomorrow and we will talk about it all. She did not know that so many would fall away while she was gone. You will have to suffer me less.
But even her return will not bring back Owen or Marlon. Thus, something in me dies today, I realize this now.
O God – please give them back! I shall keep asking You.

Lately I’ve been having dreams in which guys in black come into the room where I sleep and carry my rigid body out and into an awaiting chartreuse 64 Ford Fairlane. I am perfectly alive, yet immobile and turgid. It is the way I imagine my body looks when I have been on a week long drinking binge. When I haven’t eaten right in a while. I don’t want food. My body swells and I languish.
The guys in dark clothing come in and carry me into that car and we head off for Lake Mickey to check out how the city’s water supply is doing today.
When I was younger, much younger, my brother came into a duck. Or rather, a duck came into our family, and after trying to provide a proper household for a duck, and failing, my parents decided that we would take the duck to Lake Mickey so it could live in a colony with the other ducks there. We would occasionally go to visit and my brother and I would ask which duck was ours. My mother would point at one and say, “That one!” Even though we were young, we were old enough to know that that duck looked nothing like ours, but we nodded and chased it as if we believed her. We did not even keep the duck long enough to give it a name. Rochelle Street was no place for a duck.
We did keep Lester long enough to give him a name though.
Lester was a mutt of a hunting dog gotten from my Uncle Ray long before he had a heart attack in his tree stand and fell to his death. Lester was the runt and we rescued him in a way, as Ray would always take the runt, as my grandfather had done before him, and chop him briskly on the back of the neck, taking all life from him in one fail swoop. It was his own helping hand in natural selection is what I decided. I could never decide what threatening to cut my ears off with a buck knife had to do with natural selection though.
Anyway, I was talking about Lester. Lester was a dog whose cuteness as a puppy only belied the beast he would become as he grew. He was part German Shepherd, part Pointer, and part Uncle Ray. He would jump on my 8-year-old legs one day and scratch me until tiny rivulets of blood would run down my overtan legs. Four perfect parallel scabby lines down the nubile strigns that stood for legs.
That was the same summer that we would go to the beach and return and Lester would not be in the back yard, tied to the twist-in-the-ground security mechanism that we had attached him to to obey the Durham leash law. I know now it was to protect him from his own stupidity as well. (I later became a vegetarian and vowed not to hate any animal, but I could still not forgive Lester. RIP)
We returned from our beach trip that summer and Lester’s chain was broken. To my early brain, and given my experience with the bastard, I was sure that he was fierce enough to have snapped the 50 pound chain and escaped. I wasn’t sad, although my brother shed quite a few tears. I understood, I guess, as my brother was my tormenter number one and Lester was a close tormenter number two.
It was a few years earlier that, on a whim, mom had bought us hamsters. Two of them that had names which escape me now. We had kept them for a year or so it seems and another vacation came. The little rodents had to stay with friends of the family, the Belchers, who had sons roughly my and my brother’s age.
Upon return from Kure Beach, no mention was made of the hamsters for a couple of days until Felt finally asked. Mom told us that while we were gone the hamsters had died in the Belcher’s toilet. They had escaped their cage and climbed up a toilet-side mountain of dirty clothes in the Belcher’s bathroom. They had paused for a moment, looked at each other, and decided to mutually commit hamster suicide to avoid the house of filth that we had left them in. That was more or less mom’s story.
After the hamsters and Lester was Misty. She was a Poma-poo that we got from my Aunt Bonnie after she and her husband had acquired too many Chows and was afraid the little dog would be eaten up. Misty was my favorite and I cannot say much or too much about her. One side of her heart failed and all should could do was walk in circles. It was like watching Albert Einstein reduced to entertaining himself with an Etch-A-Sketch. She handily passed on the morning my mother was going to take her to be put under. She has been buried some 17 years now in the garden patch behind my parents’ house. Last summer I found 17 four leafed clovers on the ground above her grave in a manner of two minutes.
After Misty, my mother swore to never have another pet at the house. Whatever lesson that could be learned by us having them around had surely been already learned. And besides, the heartbreak was unbearable when they had to leave.
Until one day my brother arrived at home from his job painting computer parts, and in the back of his truck was a chow puppy. The puppy came with the name ‘Hulk’ which my brother had given him on the drive home as a testimony to our favorite TV hero as we were growing up, I suppose. (An appropriate hero, I suppose, as he would change into something different when he was angry, as everyone in my family tends to do, except my father. And we seem to be angry a lot.)
Hulk was with us for a few years. He grew in fits and starts, and by and by my mother came to love him after ther initial panic at having another pet in the house. He met his end with a speeding car when I was either in late Jr. High or early HS. I was awoken by the sound of a hot rod engine charging down the street early in the morning, only to be more awoken by mom’s screams moments later and our run to the top of the driveway where we found him with mucousy blood slung from his mouth and nose. My mother cried like she had been the first on the scene to find her son dead on the battlefield. Later she would tell me that she believed she heard the car speed up before it hit the dog. The only hot rod in the neighborhood with dual exhaust and glass packs that would sound like what my mother and I mutually agreed we had heard belonged to the Shepherd boys who also purportedly did and dealt drugs to the kids in the neighborhood and at the school. Drug-addled hot rod driving teenagers had killed Hulk and the world would never be the same.
After Hulk, my mother would make the same vow to not get another pet. Largely she would keep that vow. Until, of course, one day my brother arrived home with a half mutt, half English bulldog which he had named ‘Buddy’ on the drive home from the pound. Buddy lived and did not die in Dude Ranch. He moved with Felt when he finally got married to Carrla after 9 years. He died last year when his gas just finally ran out. Felt buried him in his back yard where I hope within a few years there will be plentiful four leaf clovers. I will teach my nieces and nephew the geometrical approach to finding them. We will call them shamrocks.
Tonight I will go to bed and the men in dark suit swill come again. We will go to Lake Mickey in a Fairlane to talk to the ducks. I have it all figured out out. I will make duck sounds. Talk to the ducks. I will make quack and whack and ack and quack again. Some old gray haired bag of poultry will walk out of the woods and say to me, “It’s alright my brother. I’ve been here all along. All is good. You will be good and do good. God loves you and that may very well be all you’ll need to make it in this minor place.”

Driving back from NC. That’s where we were. It was the solstice, the long one, and an argument ensued and I broke down. Wendy asked me to lay back and close my eyes for a while. Why does everyone seem to get married? Why this pairing?
I guess I was sunk again into one of my ways, my depths, and the negative excitement of arrival ensued and I broke down. Jennifer asked me to go away for a few days and think about all of the things I had said to her. I went away and thought for a while and came back and had tiny burritos for lunch.
I was locked up in the penitentiary in Oswego when an elephant walked through the door wearing a sting of freshwater pearls and a Hunt’s beans can on one front leg. The elephant was walking on it’s hind legs and had its trunk looped on the tail of another elephant, but only the other’s tail was present and nothing else. I talked to my mother on the phone and slammed the receiver down. Hilda suggested that I call my father on the west coast and discuss what had gone down. I told her I would and left for the Cask & Flagon and never made the call. He and I haven’t talked in years.
I was making my way across the Eno river when a submarine tree limb snagged the leg of my pants and I went under for a mile or two before resurfacing in a patch of purple poppies with a orange road and concrete ditch going through. I took the road until it reached the other side of the patch, where Olga was waiting and she told me I needed to get my shit together. I went away for a while and had regular bowel movements and ate nothing that could not regenerate naturally. My BMs were not solid for years.
I made a point of saying to her grandmother before I left the hospital. She lambasted me in the car that I need not do such things, that it comes out hollow, that either, “I love or don’t love, it’s that simple.” That, “You are full of such horseshit, why can’t you just be.” Lilly suggested that I go and make amends with Edith at the textile mill and things would be some better. I went away to Anchorage for an extended month and came back with frostbite in my toes and seasonal depression.
I was batting in the bottom of the ninth with two outs and a runner on second. My team was down by one and the pitch came. I heard the crack of the bat and saw the trajectory as the ball sprung from the bat; I didn’t look for where it went, or at the scoreboard, fans, here or anything. I ran the bases making sure to touch each one, all the way back home. Christy tells me on good days that I hit a homerun, on bad ones she tells me that the center fielder caught it just at the top of the fence. All other days apparently it went foul.

Here’s the night for you baby. You’ve been gone for full minutes now. There was the drugs in the bathroom which I am not to tell you about. It’s a rock-star secret. Don’t tell the girl… only to hurt the mother, and father all coming down on you in strange and opportunistic ways.
I made up my mind that I would off to the wheelhouse go. He’s got me in his. Where is it? I don’t know. Fell half in love every half mile since I left the state penn. You know what I am talking about. Or the latter in which the man became half bike, and bike half him. Here’s your Irish lullaby.
I have been drinking again and if you didn’t realize, or are not a veteran, this is the time when this place tends to bloat – for better or worse.
And you are standing in the shadows of a wide-swing tremelo. I am undercertain of the sustainability of the current circumstance.
I think of you two way too much. I think of what we will ever have.
You are in a distant part of the planet, brought closer by virtues of internet-enabled communication. You, in-love and unavailable. I guess now I know how you felt about the rest of us all along.
You, you one, and me and Chuck went one night and heard her sing and cried like adolescent boys at the loss of first conquest. She says, “take the glory any day baby, over the fame,” and I break into tears in front of a CRT, a testament to my cyborg-ness. When I have these moments they seem to be so.
It’s a wide-swing tremelo, it’s a you in a baker’s hat. It’s a creepy sensation that all of the world has closed down. No lights moving, nothing open. It’s a no-doughnut kind of world. It’s a missing you, and you, and you and you. It’s a drunken night alone. It’s a creepy sensation that this may need to be the state of affairs. It’s a sixties, throw-back, live in the woods, all of us – burn technology into a silicone lumpen mass, hell, look at me, I am naked – kind of dream.
And it is all along the shores of Lake Michigan – or the Potomac – or the pond at the Lodge.
It’s th coming through complicated, and the search for simple.
It’s what we had all along.
I figure something will happen if I lay back and wait for it to. I guess all nights converge. I guess sweetness converges. I guess the hall light will stay on all night. A half-pound of coffee you never tasted until the next day at a completely different place. I bought it for you.
I gotta get my shit together. I gotta get to bed. It won’t never make sense for many of you. But perhaps for the ones that it counts, it will.
How’s the for an errata, a filler, pro-epi-logue. This book will be a thousand pages before I turn it in, Holling.

At home, I guess it was Christmas, my mother was all in palpitation about the HGTV Dream Home sweepstakes. Apparently every year the cable TV channel builds and gives away a house that is primarily funded through product placement and advertising revenues. This year the house was in St. Marys, GA. Georgia, the state where I live. My mother and father live in North Carolina. Despite the fact that I realized chances were minimal that my mother would win the place, I occasionally allowed myself to think of what it would be like. A house in the state where I live where my parents could come, I could visit, when they weren’t there, I could possibly use the place etc.
While at home over the holidays mom and I pulled out the old laptop and dialed op to the internet and downloaded, slowly, photos and panoramas of the house. We talked about good and bad design choices made by thte decorators. We talked about which room could be the office, was it the tower, or the hideaway place upstairs?
My father just retired. I could see fishing weekends.
Today at the paper where I work I saw a small, almost insignificant headline that had come across the wire.
“Calif. woman wins HGTV dream house in Georgia”