take a pitch

He needs to take this pitch, the radio says

I shut the car off before finding out if he did.

By the time I’ve finished grocery shopping and returned to the car the game is over

No comeback in the 9^th

I’m barely paying attention anyway.

I would do well to take a few pitches.

I turn the postgame off and try not to think about whether next week’s groceries will require a dip

                into savings.

It’s only 3:30 in the afternoon.

Beneath the Kindle I discover an Easter card that my in-laws

                gave me last spring.

My in-laws gave me an Easter card.

That’s the kind of people they are.

The card is full of puns

The world could use more people like my in-laws

I should throw the card away or store it somewhere

But I leave it on the end table beneath the Kindle

It’s found a home there and

There is enough rootlessness as it is.

My hand shook this morning but it’s steady now

I had two cups of coffee early like I do every day

Maybe it’s not good for me

But I do it anyway

Gear up for the known

Still the shaking concerned me

I imagined arthritis and dementia, aneurysms and heart attacks

I told myself I’m 42 and in decent health

Take a pitch, that’s what I should do

Look for the curve, look for the change.

I had an out-of-body experience on my 18^th birthday

Brought on by LSD

I looked at my rag doll body slumped by the toilet

There was a pile of housekeeping magazines on the floor

My arm draped over them

Like I was hugging them

I was deeply unimpressed with myself

I thought about Naked Lunch which I was reading at the time

I wanted cosmic spies and talking assholes

Not my silent body hugging housekeeping magazines

I realized I could die and even though I was out of my body I still had no idea

                what death meant

After a while I figured I’d better get back into my body

Didn’t want to die and leave my fellow partygoers with a problem

Didn’t want to die hugging housekeeping magazines next to a toilet

I was most of the way back in my body when D. came in and asked me where I’d been

I moved my lips and my limbs

Thought of the Stephen King story “The Raft”

                how the colors hypnotized the kids

                just before they were eaten

I told D. I was admiring the colors

It was a stupid hippie thing to say

There was no way I could take a pitch then

There was so much infield to explore

So much outfield to traverse.

Fear tastes like tangerines.

I don’t much care for fruit

I eat too much salt

Salt leads to aneurysms

Salt leads to excessive exit velocity.

Harry S. Truman was not a folk hero

He was a stubborn idiot who thought

The mountain would never harm him

That belief got him buried in tons of hot ash and mud

His lake ejected into the air

When the lake landed it was choked with dead timber and poisonous gasses

There’s nothing noble about becoming a myth

There’s nothing romantic about ignorance

Reid Blackburn and David Johnson died in the line of duty

Their deaths were no less painful but they weren’t ignorant

Their work gave something to the world

Harry S. Truman was a hook for sensationalistic TV pieces

I felt bad for his cats, though.

Take a pitch.

Every seven years or so I spend 3-8 months in a state of anxiety

A continuing panic attack

Convinced my heart is about to stop beating even though it’s beating too fast

Convinced I’ll forget how to breathe

My chest tightens and hurts

I think I’m getting dementia

Sure that I will soon be unable to string words together

My daughters will look at me

Their eyes sad and scared

What happened to our father?

They’ll think to our earlier discussions about how the body is just

                a wagon of meat

And they’ll realize it’s true

This blubbering idiot in front of them

This empty meat bag

Was once their father

Is still their father

But he seemed fine, they’ll say

He was laughing and joking and singing Def Leppard songs with us

Until he wasn’t

What is mom going to do now?

This is selfish this is unfair this is a mistake

Where’s our father, where did he go?

Curveball.

Change.

Heater.

How naked we are in front of love.

The bones in my hand hum to think of it

I want go to Jupiter

Naked, pleading, desperate

Take a pitch, take a pitch.

I’m going to name it even if it’s just out of the frame

I’m going to name it even if I never sleep again

I’m going to name it and change the pillowcases

Burnt toast smells like childhood

Char on the teeth and tongue

In future years the char will get rave reviews

                in the foodie publications and websites

But for now it is just grit in the mouth

Scraping and wonder, longing and butter

Take a pitch, spitball, butterball

A mouth full of spiders

A handful of dried leaves

Crackling as they are crunched in a fist

Seasons circle back and eat their own tail

I still love autumn

Even when everything hurts

Even when everything is breaking

The playoffs start in October and it is

                even more important to take a pitch

If I can just steady my hands

Erase the swirling in my eyes

If I can just take a pitch

Then I have a chance

To stay in the lineup.

Seven Things: Thursday Sicko Edition

Thursday night and I’m sick. Yeah, yeah, I’m a sicko yada yada. That’s not what I meant and you know it. I rarely get ill, but when I do it’s usually a doozy (the bigger they are…) Not sure the scale of this one yet but ugh. And it’s a week where I’ve worked overtime already. Since my brain is both fried and on fire (along with my lungs) it seems like a good time for another episode of seven things.

1. Blair Witch

So yeah, I saw the new “sequel” Blair Witch. And it was fine. Not great, not bad, just kind of there. The original is one of my favorite movies ever—one that has somehow retained its power even after the overexposure, one that I still watch every couple of years. The initial sequel, Book of Shadows, I actually quite enjoyed and I think I’m the only one who did. (On opening night, in the theater I saw it in, there were less than a dozen other people. It was a bomb.) It wasn’t a perfect movie by any means but it wasn’t slavishly devoted to the original and went after a different spin on the story—something that Blair Witch could have benefited from. There were effective moments in Blair Witch and if you’re claustrophobic you might want to walk out before the ending, but the pacing and lack of character development (it desperately needed a scene like the original’s food discussion; this is what makes characters real) prevented it from being truly effective. Still a good popcorn movie for a Sunday afternoon. But Book of Shadows has Erica, who I may or may not still have a bit of a crush on...

2. The Elementals by Michael McDowell

A fantastic, literate Southern Gothic horror novel from the early 80s that deserves to be well known. Yes, this is the guy who wrote the screenplays for Beetlejuice and A Nightmare Before Christmas but he was a damn fine novelist who should be read by anyone with an interest in the field. I loved this book and I’m going to track more of his down.

3. SubRosa: For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages

There are a lot of book nerds in the heavy metal world. Heavy metal itself is a pretty nerdy culture, especially if you get into the underground side. Still, it’s not too often an album comes out based on a nearly 100-year old Russian dystopian novel. One of my favorite bands since I discovered them in 2011 with No Help for the Mighty Ones, SubRosa’s crushing heaviness (highlighted by two violinists that are integral to the sound) is everything great about doom metal and much larger than doom metal. Quite simply one of the best bands going. 

4. You’ve Read All the Stephen King books from the 70s and 80s, Right?

Would you believe I haven’t? There is just one novel I haven’t read from this period: The Talisman (co-written with Peter Straub.) I’ve been jonesing hard for some classic era King lately and finally decided to read this instead of re-reading a novel from this era. I’ve just started so no “hot take” yet. But I’ll be shocked if I don’t enjoy it.

5. Homemade Nachos

With cheese, jalapenos, black beans, chicken or beef, olives, salsa, sour cream, guacamole, hot sauce…few things are finer.

6. Rose Tea

Not to be confused with Red Rose tea, which I remember my dad drinking for a brief period when I was around kindergarten age. He went back to coffee soon enough. I’ve been experimenting with herbal teas at night as a way to help get my anxiety and stress under control, which has been some negative physical effects on me lately. And I’ve discovered, to my surprise, that herbal rose tea works well, even though I generally despise perfume-y teas (or anything else.) Maybe it’s all just in my head but it seems to be helping and at this point I’m not picky. It’s my head that needs the help anyway…

7. Finding Value in My Creative Work

I spend a lot of time (though not nearly enough) writing. Some of it’s good, a lot of it’s bad and most if not all of it will likely remain largely unread. But in the process of trying to get some of my work into a shape that someone might want to publish someday, I’m finding that there is value in it for me on a personal level. That the writing is not merely a waste of time, and it deserves to have that extra attempt at polish, at making it work. It’s ok that it’s hard, it should be hard to do this. And working through the process is its own reward.

the cafe at the edge of the world

In 2006 I wrote a novel, the last novel I’ve written to date. Life decisions had to be made, and it became obvious to me that I simply did not have the time to revise the novel to truly make it work, and as such I made the decision to concentrate on short fiction. One aborted attempt at a new novel aside, it’s a decision I’ve stuck with since. Yet on occasion I’ll pull out a piece of the novel and play with it some. I’m very attached to the characters and certain things in the work.

Today I want to tell you about one of those things—a location, to be exact. It’s called The Café at the Edge of the World. In the small town of Firetrap in which it exists, it is a refuge for the outsiders, the weirdos, the forgotten. Here is a little bit about it:

                The Café at the Edge of the World is a refuge for anyone with artistic inclinations that lived within fifty miles of Firetrap. Built in 1943, it was initially a bar called Cadillac Joe’s. Joe Hentley built it himself (well, mostly—he had a little help from his brother Sean when he was sober, which was not often) and named it after his 1941 Cadillac Series 62 coupe, which was the only thing he was more proud of than the bar. Out fishing one March afternoon in 1965, Joe dropped dead of heart attack. Sean, who was with him that afternoon and had to drive his dead brother fifty long miles back to town, never did leave the bottle after that. He had enough self-awareness to know he’d be a failure at running Cadillac Joe’s, which he inherited upon Joe’s death as Joe had no other family, being a committed bachelor. He sold it to a young folk-music lover who’d just returned from a year living in Greenwich Village, one Larry Kensey.

                Larry, who had grown up in Firetrap, was an enterprising sort who wanted both capitalize on and provide a forum for the folk music he dearly loved. Thus Cadillac Joe’s was converted from a bar to a café, albeit one that served beer and wine, but nothing harder. There were plenty of places to go get drunk in Firetrap if that’s all you were looking to do, as Larry like to say. Folks around town scoffed at the whole thing, but somehow Larry stayed in business. In time, The Café at the Edge of the World became a hangout for misfits of all types. Affectionately known as Old Man Kensey (even before he was old; his hair having gone grey early and the wrinkles in his face appearing young), Larry became a father figure to many misfits over the years. He was now pushing 73 with no thought of retirement. When a local news program did a “slice-of-life” bit on the café, they asked him why he kept the business.

                “I like to think I’m providing a service,” he replied. “I’ve got no problem with making some money, that is nice. But a lot of these kids—this is a home to them.” And this was true. Several generations of artists owed the survival of their formative years (and occasionally beyond) to this modest brick building and its kind-hearted owner. One such kid was a musician, Jim Strafford, who would go on to have a successful singer-songwriter career in the mid-seventies and earn three gold records. He sent each one to Larry, who hung them on the wood-paneled wall of the café. It was the only wall decoration in the whole café.

                The cinnamon rolls were excellent. The absurdist plays written and performed atop the corner-most table by Taft Daffy (a pseudonym, natch), should you happen to catch one, were tolerable. The coffee was ever-changing. For every relationship that broke up beneath the teacup chandelier (so named because the lights were housed in blue, red and yellow teacups) two more formed. Teenagers could not smoke cloves inside but employees turned a blind eye if they did so in the alleyway behind the café. The spinach and portobello omelet was to die for, the ham and cheese not so much but at least offered a familiar alternative for less-adventurous diners. Teens with guitars were frequent, teens that could actually play less so, but no one heckled inside The Café at the Edge of the World and some of those teens found their voice and talent while tangling over frets and cracked vocal cords, a steaming cup of coffee or chai (free refills on the coffee, ten cents for the chai) nearby. Above all, The Café at the Edge of the World was safe.

                The rest of Firetrap, not so much.

The Café at the Edge of the World is, in one sense, my idea of utopia. A place where misfits and weirdos are welcome, where creative expression is valued, where ideas are exchanged and debated without turning into personal attacks. Where there is no elitism. Where there is no caste system. Where the baker of those great cinnamon rolls and the teenager with purple hair and black fingernails and the cynical, wearied waitress who should quit smoking but won’t are all equal participants in what makes the place special—and safe. It’s a place I longed for as a struggling teen, a refuge from the darkness and brokenness that pushed me down until all I could taste was dirt. Inside the café, the darkness and brokenness did not disappear, but you could transform it. Take it and build something, maybe even something beautiful. And have a fantastic cinnamon roll and a cup of rich, dark coffee while you did it.

Want to sit alone, scribbling into your notebooks? That’s fine, no one will bother you. Want to go talk to that may with the stuffed shark hat (it looks like it is eating his head) reading Jacques Derrida? He’ll welcome you. The purple-haired girl dressed all in black and wearing combat boots you have a searing crush on? Ask if you can buy her a cup of coffee but respect her if she says no. It’s a safe space for everyone, a place where you will not be bullied or put down. There is plenty of danger when you are outside of the café walls, and while you are welcome to stay for hours on end, you can’t actually live there. You will never grow if you don’t leave, and you know that. If you stay too long, Old Man Kensey will gently see you out the door. It doesn’t happen often.

It’s a place that is so vivid in my mind, from the smell of the cinnamon rolls to the worn wood tables that radiate warmth, to the aforementioned teacup chandelier, that I sometimes can’t believe it’s not real. If I could build it, this refuge for all of us broken, I would. I think it will be the last place standing when all the lights go out. At the edge of the world, before the darkness eats you up.