fragments from the last three months

Personal circumstances continue to be extremely trying. I am, perhaps, as mentally and emotionally exhausted as I've been as an adult. The effect on my writing has been...not good. I'm just flat-out not writing a lot. It's with me every day, in my mind, but little is coming together and thinking through it has become the equivalent of summiting K2. Let's just say I'm largely failing to summit. As Mark Lanegan says, living ain't hard, it just ain't easy.

But whining about it does no good and it will be whatever it is. Below are some random bits from the last few months. Some are false starts, some are finding their way into stories, some are from actual stories, some I don't know what they are. I guess if nothing else they are proof to myself that I'm still trying to do this. Whatever "this" is...

[story in progress, no title yet]
Even in the dim light from the single overhead grow light she could see the table wobbling. Wood and screws had given away to a jellied substance the color of brackish water that gave off the odor of rotting leaves. As she moved closer to the table, dense air clung to her, warm, its presence physical. Claustrophobia enveloped her and she fought against paranoia. Stop it, stop it. She turned on her phone light and trained it on the table.

Tiny black forms coursed through the viscous mass like ants on antfarm, causing the wobbling she’d noticed from afar. The table itself was slowly, almost imperceptibly collapsing. Eventually it would be no more than a shapeless mass on the floor. She bent down and held the phone an inch above the surface. In the direct light the mass glistened. The brackish coloring obscured the pulsing forms within; she simply couldn’t see what they looked like in any detail. They traveled in no discernible pattern, but they avoided objects buried in the mass. She strained to see what the objects were, buried as they were like chunks of meat in gravy. She concentrated the light on a long, thin piece tipped upwards. She felt her stomach sink as she stared at the knobby top of the object. Bone, human. Floating next to it, a purple phone. Daisy.

[fragment]
These are the days when we look older. After you pulled the car out of the driveway this morning, I dumped the rest of the coffee down the sink. What I had drank left an acidic trail from the back of my throat to the pit of my stomach. You’ve never drank coffee, can’t stand the taste of it, and for that I love you. It’s a detail no one else will remember; at your funeral, if I’m still alive and capable of attending, I will think about this detail while everyone else reminisces over your generous nature and vibrant laugh. It’s one of the many pieces of you I keep with me every day, whether we are in bed together or at separate office functions or passing each other in the living room. Details known to only us, they weave the blanket of our marriage. When we pass on, they will pass on with us.

These are the days we look older because we are older. Leonard Cohen once sang about aching in the places he used to play, and this is us. The accumulated miles and signs of wear and tear. I once said the body was a machine and you corrected it me. Just a wagon of meat, you said, and I loved you so much then I could never find or create the words. Just a wagon of meat under strange stars. Soft black stars. You can sometimes silence my headful of traffic; no one else has ever been able to do that. Our wagons of meat, warm comfortable and familiar. We still fit, even with all the new shapes we’ve taken.

[fragment]
The smoke of your dreams permeates our bedroom, made smaller by the encroaching furniture and seasonal clothing. Once we shared a dresser, now we each have our own. Clothes we no longer wear and mean to donate crowd the closet. Dust no longer gathers beneath the bed; every available inch filled with boxes and bags of things we think we need to hold onto. The real characters lie somewhere between these objects whose shapes seem to mutate.

[fragment]
You are like Moses, patron saint of stomach acid. Exhaustion halos circle your head, your dark eyes ever closer to the singularity. Shaking, shaking, shaking. Fingers and shoulders twitching.

[fragment from a series called "red thread"]
For Cassandra, it was like this:
The hell of it is that a coffee maker choked with red thread is useless. You could spend hours cleaning it out but it got into places that you couldn’t see, places that didn’t even exist. With the caffeine headache pounding in your skull your frustration mounts and you finally fling the damn thing across the kitchen. When it hits the wall it explodes into a bundle of red thread, the same stuff that is dripping from the ceiling and leaking out the walls. You are now facing a future with no coffee, and that’s an impossible world to live in.

[opening to a story currently called "Cheeto" but that will have to change]
    “Don’t wake the sleeping bag, you dumb fuck.”
    Crisp thought about throwing a punch, let it go. He was sick of Text’s attitude, the bullying. He also knew he stood no chance in a fight.
    “Thought Crystal might like a smoke too, that’s all.”
    Text had already opened the sliding door, knowing his words of warning were enough. Crisp thrust his hands into the pockets of his leather jacket and followed, leaving his girlfriend to sleep buried in their sleeping bags in the lone bedroom.
    Let sleeping bags lie, Crisp thought, stepping into a backyard littered with rusting bbq grills and smokers. Text used to sell them online, back before everything got messed up. Crisp never found out where he got the inventory and doubted Text ever made much money, but it was semi-legit, anyway. Helped keep the heat away, pun fully intended, from his real business selling weed to and buying liquor for the underage burners at the high school. Probably some heavier stuff too, though Crisp was smart enough not to pry. It didn’t matter now anyway.
    Text lit two smokes and handed one to Crisp, who took a deep draw.
    “Crystal is going Cheeto for longer and longer periods. It won’t be long now.”
    “You’ve no proof.” He took another draw on the cancer stick, this one too hard, and coughed. He finished clearing his throat and added: “It was different for Winston and Sheila. Sheila almost came back.”
    “Don’t be an idiot.” Text blew out a trail of smoke. “Just because she’s your girlfriend. I’m not going to tell you to stop sleeping with her either. Last night I checked in on her—on you both—six times between midnight and seven. She was Cheeto every time. I tried to wake you, but you drank that whole fucking bottle of vodka and weren’t moving.”
    For the second time in the morning he wanted to punch Text, send him flying into his useless, weed-choked grills. He clenched and unclenched his fists in his pockets. Text was an asshole, but he wasn’t lying. Crystal might even know.
    “Look man, it sucks.” Text, his attempt at tenderness, still somehow sneering. “Scares me too. But do you want her to keep suffering, like Sheila and Winston? We agreed after Sheila last week man, all three of us. She’d do it for you. You’d want her to, right?”
    “Don’t start, Text. Seriously.”
    “We don’t have much time, Crisp. Seriously.” He drew the word out sarcastically, knowing there wasn’t a damn thing Crisp could do about it. “I think it should be you. But if not, don’t think I’ll hesitate. Remember how Sheila screamed? I can’t listen to that again, Crisp.”
    Text threw the cigarette in the overgrown, dew-soaked grass and went back inside. Crisp didn’t follow, instead removing one of the plastic lawn chairs that had once been white but were now so covered with mold as to be almost entirely green from the pile on the deck. He took it out to the middle of the yard, comfortably away from the house.
    Sheila. Christ, that had been bad.

[fragment]
The hole below smells of yeast. Stomach acid drips from the walls and gradually eats away at the floor. Crawling through, it is difficult to get a purchase, the slippery surfaces denying a firm grip. Warm and humid, unbearably so. Avoiding the dripping stomach acid, one eventually faces cerebrospinal fluid pools. Looking through the clear and colorless liquid, fragments of bone are visible. They are an impossible distance away.

[from a project called "Crow"]
Crow will open up the language
Crow bangs apocalyptic fleek
Crow says all lanes must exit
Crow black belly tarantula
Crow writes poem
Crow not cat
Crow keeps the wolves at bay
Crow rides cruel highway desert west
Crow avoids the sun
Crow fosters collaboration
Crow triumphs over terror pigeon
Crow brings black pens to the late show
Crow wishes the family would wash the popcorn bowls when finished
Crow is not the only tenant
Crow switch witch
Crow replace teeth with tickling grass
Crow marches for science
Crow answers come in dreams that cause nightsweats
Crow grieves over the dead
Crow saw the ship that never sailed to North Korea
Crow thanks the inner circle
Crow sweeps hair from the floor
Crow hops on flaccid wishbones
Crow stretches the truth on occasion

fell on black days

The recently cut grass smelled so fresh today. You won’t smell the grass anymore. I woke up to news of your suicide this morning and now I’m typing this, hours later. I spent part of today in a medical center. It was a strange place to spend part of a day and the last few months have been the most difficult—in a long, meandering, endlessly exhausting way—of my adult life, and here today we have a story, a thing that has happened too fucking many times over the years.

You aren’t here anymore. But you left music. Beautiful, beautiful music.

Memories…listening to Badmotorfinger one afternoon in my Spokane apartment, smoking cigarettes and writing. The music carrying me along, giving me strength to pull words from a dark place still raw. It was sunny and hot. No one else was yet living in that apartment. I was tentatively sober (it wouldn’t last.) I was so inspired by the music! It propped me up, revitalized my bones. Made it ok to be alone. Several months later, in that same apartment, someone said I looked like you. But I didn’t. My goatee was stupid and I was ugly. You were beautiful though. You really were.

I stapled the cassette foldout from Louder than Love on my teenage bedroom wall to cover a hole I’d kicked in during a fit of anger one night. It stayed there until I left home for good. I’m sure it was probably burned, like many things after I left.

You produced Uncle Anesthesia, considered by most to be the worst Screaming Trees album. Yet I always liked it, and it led to Sweet Oblivion, to these ears the greatest rock record ever released. Perhaps it would never have existed without Uncle Anesthesia. For that alone it’s a gift. One that took me beyond these horizons.

Many more…Walla Walla Superunkown debates. Rainy Down on the Upside days. Trepidation when Soundgarden reunited…only to fall deeply in love with King Animal. Three years later, it’s still on regular rotation.

And then there was seeing Soundgarden live in 1994, a little over a month after Kurt killed himself. An emotional show, a beautiful show, and then you yelled “This one’s for KURT!” and played an absolutely devastating Head Down that set the whole place on fire. I was somewhere that made sense. This was my world. The rest of the world was already moving beyond it, and that was fine. Maybe it would revert back to me, to us, the ones there in the beginning for the music and not the fashion. Maybe it could be intimate again. Because it felt intimate, even in a huge sold out show. It felt personal. It was personal.

And magic can never be recaptured. I know that now. And the darkness always comes back around. That’s why we fight for the beauty, the light. Darkness is what most of the universe is made of. It never leaves, only recedes for a bit if we are lucky.

You killed yourself at 52. I’m 44. I tried to kill myself at 17. I like to think I learned to deal with the demons over the years. Your peers were younger when they killed themselves. I thought you’d survived. Made it through the crux. Maybe we never make it through that crux. It’s a reminder that I need to be vigilant. Not assume the work is ever done. Not assume things are ok.

Nirvana, Alice in Chains, (early) Pearl Jam—these bands wore their hearts on their sleeves. And fuck yes did that connect. Soundgarden were more inscrutable. They were every bit as dark, but the strange tunings and mess of styles and odd touches created something a bit distanced, but all the more overwhelming for it. Soundgarden were cosmic, a philosophical conversation with your best friend after a few beers. Yet I do not wish to imply there was no connection—there was. Very much so. It was a different connection, one that always felt more mature, more reasoned and more complex. Their music was dramatic, but they didn’t seem to be. The other bands revolved around volatile figures. Soundgarden weren’t a cult of personality. They were an entity. And when that entity frayed, they broke it apart rather than let it become a caricature. They didn’t come back until years later, when none of the stupid shit mattered anymore. When it really could just be about the music.

That’s what hurts. This is supposed to be the victory lap, dammit. No external pressures to carry any torches. Just tunes. Awesome tunes.

Goddammit.

It’s been three weeks since I bought the remastered Ultramega OK. Beautiful vinyl packaging, incredible sound, rediscovering this record has been a joy in a not particularly joyful spring. I was looking forward to more reissues, maybe finally getting Louder than Love on vinyl, the only one I don’t have on vinyl. Those reissues might still come, but now they will be weighed down with an unexpected sadness. The joy will still come through, but it will be tinged with sadness and regret.

And there was one great Audioslave song. Actually there were several pretty good ones, but Like a Stone, which is so overwhelmingly impossibly sad to me as I listen to it at this moment, seemed at the time to me an elegy of the raw excitement of Seattle music circa ’88-’92. Music, like all art, is about how you connect with it—the intention of the artist rarely, if ever, matters. Perhaps you wrote it about all the turmoil in your life at the time, perhaps you wrote it because of the way the sunlight caught dust motes one particular afternoon, perhaps you had no idea why you wrote it. But you wrote about lying on your deathbed in that song, and it’s so fucking sad to me now, because you never gave yourself a chance to lay on the deathbed.

Exit.

R.I.P. goddammit, R.I.P.

shoes

weird sunspots occur before your eyes, weird because the sun hasn't shone in days, tightness in your chest feels like a belt slowly tightening one notch at a time, ever present and strangely slow and the laugh coming out of your mouth is a dumb one, something you might find on a poorly-dubbed version of Sesame Street, and instead of making your eyes water (the sunspots having now passed) the incense fragrance reminds you of an apartment you lived in 26 years ago and the girl who always said she was going to make her own shoes but instead bummed all of your cigarettes, she never had any of her own and one time she said she was going to read Nausea and you cautioned against it, Jean-Paul Sartre isn't really your thing, i'm serious that book is dangerous you said and what you think you will find you won't but something else instead that doesn't stretch or contort based on physics as we understand them, you'll carry worms in your head and how will you ever make shoes then? what happened to that girl, you wonder, you can't remember her name, maybe she never told you or maybe you were drunk or stoned or indifferent, you can't recall if she was with you when you sat on the edge of the cliff overlooking the river, the empty abandoned warehouses behind you, watching you, like sentinels, outposts of a world next to this one but decaying and just out of reach, you sat on the edge of the cliff and thought about what it would be like to fall down, your body tumbling against the outcropping of rocks, how many bones would break before you hit the water hundreds of feet below, would everything inside you turn to mush, would it leak out, the movies never prepared you for this, and as you are mulling this you think of making a film about this space, a film no one can watch because you have to feel it, you have to see the ghosts trains and sidestep the broken Thunderbird bottles and painfully tug at your eyebrows, that's where you picked up the habit that would never leave, your eyebrows will forever be misshapen because you can't stop pulling at them but even if the girl was there she didn't say anything and you didn't say anything and no one said anything and that's why you liked the place so much, maybe that's why you never threw yourself off the cliff, the quiet saved you and you aren't that melodramatic anyway, you always had cigarettes and smoking gave you a next step, always a next step when everything around you and in you lacked context, you'd eventually give the smoking up and good for you now you get to live longer with even less context, what is context worth anyway, is it worth lung cancer or the ability to make your own shoes? you'll never know, and even now as your hearing fades and the incense finally starts to make your eyes water you aren't sure that's a good thing, you are still writing definitions to words that don't exist and emotions with blurry shapes and running colors and when you go to bed tonight it will be infinite and yet you'll still get up and make coffee in the morning but you'll never know what happened to the girl who was going to make her own shoes, whose name you cannot remember or never knew.