Burn the Season

Start by burning the season. Take the keys; there is just enough gas to get far enough up in the hills. The road will turn from gravel to mud, the ruts will be deep and the axles will protest. Take cigarettes if you need them. Take all the useless paper. When you think the car will push no further, you’ll find a meadow. This is as alone as you can get. The stars are wide and distorted here.

In the middle of the meadow, start a fire.

Burn the season. Burn your shadow. Burn under your ancestor’s eyes. When the fire is well and truly ablaze, take off your clothes and toss them in. Let the greasy gasoline smoke coat your skin. Weave a new covering from the altered air surrounding you. From the flames pull out the hottest stones and push them through your chest and into your heart. Your old body will dissipate and a new one will form.

It’s not a resurrection story. It’s not a rebirth story. It’s a story of choice.

A Teaching Moment

Back in the early aughts I had a LiveJournal account. LiveJournal was one of the earlier social media platforms (it still technically exists, but it’s a fully Russian operation now, and I’m not aware of anyone who uses it.) LJ functioned more like a blog than anything, but also had a community aspect. For those of us with wordier tendencies it was a nice platform, but once Twitter, Facebook, et.al. came on the scene it rapidly became obsolete for most users. I was a heavy user in my peak years, at one point writing almost a post a day for my two different journals. I wrote whatever was on my mind; it really was a journal for me, just one available to the public. I certainly never had a large readership, and what I did have was mostly comprised of people I knew in real life or had a connection to.

I certainly didn’t think about what I wrote in terms of audience. My audience was my friends. So when I wrote a snarky, somewhat condescending post about The Imago Sequence, a collection of stories by a new author, Laird Barron, I’d just finished reading, I didn’t think anything of it. I can’t remember exactly what I wrote, but it essentially boiled down to: everyone in the field is talking about this new author, and I can’t figure out why. This collection did nothing for me. I just don’t get it.

The next day I saw there was a comment on the post from a LJ member whose name I didn’t recognize. Turns out the member was Laird himself, and I can quote exactly what he said because I’ve never forgotten it: “Sometimes there’s nothing to get, you like it or you don’t. Thanks for reading.”

I felt terrible. Never did I think there was a chance that an author might read something I wrote on my dinky blog. I had no wish to spread negativity about a writer’s hard work, and I certainly would not have done so in the condescending, snarky tone that I’d used had I any idea it would be seen by the author. I thought Laird’s response was spot-on and classy, much more than I deserved. Whether he intended to or not, he held up a mirror, and I didn’t like what I saw. Ever since I’ve tried to be much more thoughtful if writing about something I don’t care for, since all it boils down to is “well, this didn’t work for me but that doesn’t mean it won’t work for you.” Anything else is just ego games, right? Keyboard warrior bullshit. Now, I’m not above taking a crack at a megazillionare like Dan Brown, but even then I recognize that a lot of people have gotten joy out of Dan Brown’s books and that’s really all that matters. I don’t want to piss all over their joy, and I do not think myself any better than them just because we have different taste.  

A couple of years after this incident Laird put out a second collection entitled Occultation. I wanted to give him another try, and am I glad I did—Occultation is fantastic, definitely one of my favorite books of 2011. Once I finished it, I went back and re-read The Imago Sequence. This time I did get it, finding the collection to be fresh and original, with a powerful and startling voice. I wondered why it had not hit me the first time. Was it a timing thing? Was I just not in the right headspace? Laird’s best stories worm their way into you. They often don’t grant instant gratification, and perhaps at the time I simply couldn’t wrap my head around them. He’s certainly been one of the most important voices in the field for the last decade-plus, and one whose work I hold in high esteem and derive great pleasure from.

With so many books out there to read, it’s easy to write something off if it doesn’t hit you immediately. Most of the time that’s not a bad practice, but I’m sure I’ve missed out on some great work over the years by not giving it a second chance. Circumstances play into reading almost as much as taste, and circumstances are always changing.

I’m grateful that Laird left a comment that day. It was a turning point and a teaching moment. The internet is massive, but you still never know who might be reading. If it’s not something I’d say to the person in real life, it’s not something I’ll write in cyberspace. I’m beyond tired of snark and condescending tones, and I truly hope I’ve grown beyond that. In that simple, two-sentence reply, Laird taught me how a real author should conduct oneself. It’s a lesson I’ve never forgotten.

Two Excerpts from the Crow Journal

Crow waits violently.
Who cut all the barbed wire
   tattoos off of thousands of arms?
Shards of flesh, little skin books.
That was then, this is hurt.
Crow waits.
Crow will sew the sky together.
Crow will shape the sky.
Crow will string barbed wire
   together, remove it from
   flesh, make it something else.
Crow will do this at
   the appropriate time.
Crow waits violently.

*

Crow there you go
throwing glass perfume
grenades,
dancing on tinderboxes,
choking a wailing saxophone.
Crow there you go
and here I site,
growing fat drinking water.
One of us will strip naked
and crawl into bed
One of us will refuse
to release final words.

Garbage Mouth

Garbage mouth. I thought you called me that because of how I swear. Too often, a pan dropped on the toe or a red light taking a long time to turn green. But it wasn't that, you said, I can't hear the what swears you say because when you open your mouth garbage comes out. The refuse of the world, regurgitated by your speech. Disgusting, rotten. Garbage mouth.

I can't cook too well either. You can't make an omelette without breaking a few eggs--bullshit. Whatever I make is broken. Wholeness doesn't exist. What kind of ideal is that, perfection? There would be no point if perfection were attained. There may not be any point anyway, but at least when things are broken there are endless possibilities to keep a body occupied. I put barbed wire in my frying pan and it didn't scratch anything. You have to know how to handle these things, broken though they may be. I don't use gloves. It feels better when the skin is touching.

Sugar and methamphetamine. Impossible luxuries for a garbage mouth who can't cook. All the burners on, the oven is hot, and everything tumbles from my mouth. The acrid smell fills the kitchen as it heats up, burns. I will stay in this inferno until I am empty. After, I will gather the ashes and leave them on the steps of your cathedral.

Louder Than Love

As a writer, I deal in myth-making. What is more fundamental to story making than myth creation? One could go so far as to say every story is a myth. I have actively spent a large part of my life creating and participating in myths and myth-making. As someone in his mid-forties, I've long witnessed the cultural events (especially pop culture) of my younger years turn into myth. It's a cycle that's as natural as breathing, perhaps accelerated in this era of mass media culture, but a process that has been going on as long as there have been humans.


I honestly did not realize this as I began writing the above paragraph, but today marks one year since Chris Cornell passed away after a lifelong battle with depression. I guess I must have known subconsciously, because today I found myself reflecting on the myth of grunge, or more specifically, how grunge itself fell victim to very myths of self-destruction it initially railed against. Except that's not true, not really. Grunge was in part a reaction against the shallowness of mainstream rock music, but these bands were full of rock stars. They were just shaded differently. And then the shading went totally black. Grunge's cultural moment can be discussed from a distance now, safely in its myth, but for me personally it's still all too close to home. I don't believe I'll ever have that distance.


1992-93 were arguably the peak years of grunge (at least as far as its cultural impact--the actual scene in Seattle was well into its dying throes by then). In 1992 I graduated high school, in 1993 I lived and worked on my own, college not being a path I could pursue until the end of 1993--and which would only last one semester. I had numerous interrelated demons (depression, anxiety, substance abuse, relationship problems, etc.) Grunge music not only spoke to me--it saved my life. I'm not being dramatic, it truly did. It made me feel less alone, and the darkness inherit in it was a darkness that I well understood, a familiar friend. There were other bands that spoke to me in that time, but grunge (along with Metallica) prevented me from trying to take my own life on more than one occasion. It is one of the greatest gifts art can provide--bringing light and empathy into the darkest corners.


And then the leading lights started dying. And there was nothing glamorous about it. If the famous "27 club" deaths (Hendrix, Morrison, Joplin) had been pitched as almost romantic to those of my generation--live fast, die young--then the violent, bleak deaths of Cobain, Staley, Wood et. al. felt anything but. These deaths would have a long tail. Cornell's death last year shocked me in a way that none of the others did, because I'd bought in to the second, related myth: that of the survivor. That if you somehow made it through the 90s and got the professional help you needed, you had the tools and everything would be, if not fine, at least survivable. I projected my own narrative on it, as we so often do with artists we admire, and that narrative helped me in my own life.


But it's myth. All of it. Surviving is a day-by-day process, and sometimes, tragically, people don't make it. The hurt and darkness that drives so much great art and makes it relatable doesn't vanish. It might recede, but it will always be there. And that's why we need each other. It's why we need love and support, but it's also why we need tools to deal with it. Those tools are out there. You are never alone.


My children have grown up on grunge music and they love it, but it was already a thing of myth when they were born. They know how much it means to me personally, and I've done my best to be open and honest and puncture any lingering rock star myths around it. These deaths are not glamorous and never were. There is nothing romantic about it. The music is beautiful and will continue to resonate. The one advantage my children have is distance--for them, it is about the art and nothing more. As I mentioned above, I don't think I'll ever get that distance, at least not entirely. The sadness at losing so many powerful artistic voices feels personal in a way that's hard to explain. It's not nostalgic--when things are purely nostalgia, they are safely locked up. This music has never been far away and is still a part of my daily life. It is one of my tools for surviving. I so wish it could have helped those who created it for longer than it did.


I'm grateful for the voices from this music that are still here, and I mourn those that didn't make it through. And I can't say it enough: there are people out there who can help. You are not alone. You are never alone. Reach out, as difficult as it might be, and get help if you need it. There are more shoulders to lean on than you realize.

Wave Propagation

Here is what I will not say to you: let's go down to the sea. Here is something I will never ask you: do you remember? I might ask you if you can feel the contours, but don't worry if you can't; they are wobbly, like radio waves plucked by unseen hands. You were the one who threw the rock in the sawmill pond to teach me about wave propagation. It was not the first time I didn't understand what you were explaining, nor would it be the last. But I understand now.

Here is what I will not say to you: let's go down to the sea, where darker mysteries await me. Throwing a rock in the sea does not create a wave. The wave is already there and it will eat the rock, along with anything else stupid enough to penetrate its surface. Here is something I will never ask you: what did it feel like? You can tell me if you like, but I will not ask. I will offer you shelter with me in this dreary oceanside room but I don't expect you to join me.

Here is what I will say to you: hands can push with the force of rocks penetrating water. I don't need to say this to you, but I will.

The Blue Door Incident

I’ve seen the blue door just once.

It was a warm summer night. It had been roughly 36 hours since I last ate anything, but I had cigarettes. In those days, that was enough. I sat cross-legged on the worn mattress that served as a bed, my body a thin slice of electricity. The mattress, covered by the only quilt I owned, sank beneath my weight. The air in the apartment pressed down on me, a physical sensation at odds with the tingling sensations running throughout my body. I closed my eyes for a moment. When I opened them, the blue door was in front of me, just inches above the mattress.

A warmth enveloped my head. I stood up slowly, afraid if I moved too fast the door would disappear. It was a pedestrian door, a standard closet model you might see in any living space. The only thing unusual, besides its location, was the striking color blue it was painted. Azure: a middle hue, not so dark as navy, not so light as sapphire. Not a crack in the paint job, not a streak or smear. Still, it was merely a door. Are we ever interested in the door? No, only what lay behind it. I realized there was one more unusual thing about this door: it had no doorknob or handle—not even a mark upon the door to indicate where one might once have been.

Standing now, I stepped off the mattress and looked on the other side. The door looked the same. Azure, no handle, no distinguishing marks. Ok. My body hummed, vibrant with electricity. My veins had become powerlines. Did it matter what side I opened the door from? I had no context with which to approach this question, any more than I did for any question involving the door, since it couldn’t actually be there. That it was there rendered all but the most basic musings moot. I returned to the mattress, reasoning that I should open it from the side that initially faced me. I didn’t know if I had conjured it, but I didn’t know that I had not conjured it either.

I gently placed my hand middle-left on the door and pushed. It swung open.

What I saw was water and sky. The water went in all directions, emerald green and oblique. The sky was clear, light blue, and met the ocean on the horizon. All seemed peaceful and empty. Though I could not prove it, my electrical bones told me there was no life in that sea, and my electrical bones seemed to know more about what was going on than my rational mind, which was at a loss for the whole incident. I stared at the sea for a while, waiting for something further to happen, but nothing did. I leaned through the opening, keeping my knees firmly planted on the bed. The air was a tad cooler through the door, but I had no difficult breathing. In fact, the warmth in my head was spreading down my body, de-buzzing my shell and allowing my breathing, which had been coming in short sharp bursts, to steady.

I thought to touch the water, but kept my hands at my side.

I pulled my head back in and closed my eyes. When I opened them, the door was gone. I’ve not seen it since, though I’ve thought about it on occasion through the ensuing twenty-five years. If you would ask, I would dismiss the whole incident as a hallucination, brought on by too little food and too much warmth (the preceding day had been quite hot, getting close to triple digits.) I accept this explanation, and I know it’s false. False because the nature of reality is far more subjective than we generally allow ourselves to believe, and false because the door was not a lie. Just because I did not and do not understand the door or where it opened to, does not mean it did not open to a truth. The rational explanation allows me to get out of bed in the morning and do things. The rational explanation lets me sleep most, but not all, nights.

Take apart the fear and clean out the arteries. How does an atheist define soul?

Can an atheist have a visionary experience, without ascribing it to a higher power? If the atheist attributes the experience to something unknown, does that something unknown become a higher power? Processes are happening across the universe at this very moment, witnessed by no one. We still do not know what dark matter or dark energy is, even though—at this moment—we are reasonably sure it exists.

It is true that in the preceding two years leading up to the blue door incident, I’d done a fair share of drugs. It is also true that in the year leading up to the blue door incident, I’d gone from an intense crush to having the crush returned to being in a relationship, the first truly serious one of my life. Love is a drug, as the saying goes. Love alters perception. Triggers chemical reactions.

When the blue door incident occurred, I was in the midst of a two-month window where I was largely drug free. I was stone broke, jobless, living alone and in a long-distance relationship (my girlfriend some 200 miles away, and I had no transport or money, visits were rare.) I wrote a lot: letters, poems, stories. I read a lot: fiction, music journalism, philosophy, religion. I walked a lot: miles every day, around the decaying, empty and sometimes sketchy parts of Spokane. I had no phone. I was the most invisible I would ever be, the most alone, and perhaps the most free. Everything was worthy of exploration.

At the time I could not call myself an atheist; I remember deciding firmly I was an agnostic after reading one particularly passionate passage in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot that set my heart racing, bursting with joy at the wonder of it all. An agnostic didn’t have to be noncommittal, I thought—simply open to ideas. Certainly to evidence, should one ever manage to prove the unknowable. I didn’t want to risk giving up the idea of ecstatic experience. I also was beginning to falter in my belief that I would not live long, and in those moments when the light managed to shine through the cracks, I wanted to perhaps hedge my bets a little.

But the blue door was not an ecstatic vision.

It was just a door, azure blue, that appeared slightly above my mattress and opened to an empty world. Did it exist in “this” world? I was the only one in my apartment; there would never be any independent verification. I didn’t want to accept it on faith, yet I seemingly had no choice. Accept or deny. It happened, or it did not. I came to realize over the following years that this is a dangerously limiting perspective.

It should perhaps be mentioned that I was only a few months removed from a drug-triggered nervous breakdown and so my definition of reality was a bit shaky. Not in terms of seeing things that weren’t there, or talking to ghosts, or anything so melodramatic. What gripped me was the fear that such a state as I’d been in during my breakdown could randomly happen again. What if my heart is beating too fast and I can’t control it? What if I can’t talk, my mouth gluepaste and sewn shut with wire? What if I die? What if I think I’m dead but I’m not? Etc. In this alone, empty time, I was doing my best to confront the fear. To acknowledge it, even respect it, but not let it have control. Intuitively I grasped that if I did not do so, I would never build a life for myself or believe myself to be worthy of love.

During the blue door incident, I surprisingly never felt fear. The tingling, electric feeling was not one of anxiety—my body was simply extremely awake. I felt curious and perhaps a bit detached. When I opened the door and saw the water and sky, I felt I knew the place, and this allowed me to remain calm. I didn’t know the place, of course, not in this world anyway (dreams are a whole different matter, I can’t claim I haven’t glimpsed it while traveling those strange pathways) but I felt open, open to the very emptiness of the place. An emptiness that was somehow…warm. Like my soul had been wrapped in a blanket. My mind, for once, was quiet. Not running in a million directions, not full of endless buzz. It’s similar to the state I enter when the writing and creativity is flowing and I cease to exist for a bit. This was different, though. I was not channeling anything, I was not creating anything. I was observing, but I could not be sure if it was with my conscious mind.

I’ve never been a practitioner of meditation, though I am attracted to the idea in abstract. It could be argued that I was in some sense meditating that evening when the blue door appeared, just like it could be argued I was already in an altered state, depending how liberal one’s definition of those terms are. I certainly associate that strange empty warmth with such a state. If that is what death feels like, then death is not something to be feared (and fear loses its value; don’t all our fears boil down to death, either ours or someone important to us?) Of course, death is the process of vacating the body; physical sensations like warmth presumably cease immediately. Could it be some part of my soul (for lack of a better term) perceiving something my conscious mind has no framework for, and as such my conscious mind reached for the images and sensations that best translated this perception? A bit of mind/soul teamwork?

Ah, but now we are into metaphysics and treading dangerously close to New Age pablum. I’ve never owned a crystal, I’ve never chanted, I’ve never done woo stuff because I’m simply not drawn to it. An atheist can excuse it if they want (we are just talking in metaphors, love, good ol’ metaphors—we don’t literally believe it) but that’s not something I’ve been comfortable with on a personal level. The blue door was real, even if it wasn’t. It was a rehearsal for death, it was outside the scope of death. If I could untangle that paradigm…well, I worry that my conscious mind would break. And that is a fear I’ve never quite shaken, no matter how much I think I’ve made my peace with my breakdown.

I kiss the sun in fear. I never learned to swim.

I have an irrational fear of drowning (though I quibble with the term “irrational”; I mean, if I fall into the ocean I’m fucked.) I’ve had many dreams of drowning, it has frequently figured prominently in my creative output, and I can’t peer over the railing’s edge on the ferry. I can’t even get close to it. At the same time, I am fascinated by shipwrecks, by stories of drowning, and by deep bodies of water (strangely, I’m not obsessed with fast moving bodies of waters like narrow rivers or waterfalls.) Behind the blue door lay endless water: my fear and my obsession. I perceived a world I could not possibly exist in. It would be romantic to say I conquered my fear, but nothing changed. The water was a metaphor, then? Well, I can’t discount that theory, but I don’t fully buy it either. It was there. It was a definition of reality.

Take apart the fear and clean out the arteries. Changing the diet doesn’t guarantee clean machinery going forward. We will all die. We all hope to meet death with a measure of grace. This is not enough, to wait for death. We have a lifetime to practice grace and kindness.

And that is the one conscious change this incident triggered in me. Ever since, I do my best to greet each day with a measure of grace and say goodbye to each day with thanks. I do not always meet this challenge, and in fact my percentage is much lower than it should be. But I strive for it, every day. Atheists don’t pray, but we do talk to the cosmos. Some of us do so quite frequently.

I will never untangle the blue door incident. I don’t think it is meant to be untangled, at least not on a conscious level. None of us—not a single one of us—has an iron grip on the definition of reality. We all create our definition, we all create our worlds, and we could all stand to be kinder to our fellow travelers. A little warmth goes a long way.