Light Storm

Grey window

The weather service puts up a notice on Thursday:

Special Weather Statement

… A frontal system followed by an upper trough will bring a
transition to cool wet weather…

Large amounts of rain (an inch or so: large for this part of the world), blustery winds, mountain snow levels descending to mortal levels. The Special Weather Statement wants us to know that spring is receding for a while.

I appreciate the Weather Service’s delicacy. It’s difficult to know when or what to warn about when the warnings so often turn into hoopla for a protracted period of overcast. When the snowmaggeddon predicted during the season’s big snow didn’t materialize, local media howled about a swindle and misleading scientists. Caught in a funhouse world where climate change is a myth and we elect addition-deficient Presidents, I’m sure they thought this one over carefully. Something should be said. People don’t like lectures, warnings, or advice. Just call it a statement. A special one.

The forecast hieroglyphs show dark clouds.

The week warps back to November: overcast, rain, a little wind, highs in the 50s. I sense relief, expectation. The warmth and sun has refreshed the memory of what those things are like, but demonstrate how my west-facing townhouse will be overheated at summer’s height. The fat, smothering light gets too much after a solid week of it. As cheap as I am trying to be I wouldn’t mind the heat coming on, once or twice.

The Special Weather Statement remains through the weekend, portending simple rain and some bluster. Preparing people for disappointment seems to be its main function, as I’ve now lived here long enough to sense the weather will put everyone back into standard issue Northwest jackets and enclosed shoes, faces weighed with hangdog looks. Clouds roll in on Sunday with drizzle by midmorning. I am prepared, meaning it is no surprise.

Spring cleans out fall

Dental work first thing on Monday sounds like a sitcom writer not trying very hard, but this is how I’ve arranged it, driving against traffic to the dentist I’ve had for several years. The old guy has given up lecturing stupid kids with teeth falling out of their mouths and handed the practice over to a fast-talking blonde Russian woman, who, like all Russian women in my experience, seems to have commanded infantry. As she and her demure Chinese assistant repair the damage brought on by braces thirty years ago I focus on the rain, the grey.

Outside it’s raining hard enough to form a living, serpentine surface on the parking lot. A flat broad stream of it pulses toward the drain and I wonder why it moves in pulses like that, what causes wavefronts in the constant flow. The same interruptions persist on the freeway, bunching cars up, letting them go.

The week goes on in grey, not so much cold as needing a jacket. Windows look out on spring’s first riot of green, the leaves not so iridescent with no sun to power them. Nobody talks about it, bothers with a coat to walk between buildings. It’s just rain, the local constant.

Walking to lunch in the rain

After a week grey and rain and a little wind are normal again and sun is something that happens to other people, in other places, in other times. Only a light coat is needed, and it’s not cold enough for the heat to come on. Grass which had faded to yellow and brown from the last week’s sun is green and dense again. Water gurgles in drain bottoms.

Drains have always fascinated me. As a kid of seven I can remember peering down into the cast iron grates at school, at curbs, in the strange dark holes in the middle of ditches. Water, dark lumps, apple cores bobbed in the ones at school. I saw the pipes come in, go out, the flow between. Sewer grates with their strange mixed smell of churned decomposition and laundry detergent rose up in concrete beehives, the dark torrent echoing within. We climbed to the tops of these and peered through the small holes. Did it connect with the grates at school? Where did it all go? The sea was a mystery, and distant. Here in the world of cartoons and phonics we watched the water fall in and be carried away, everything neat, the adults with everything figured out.

Hardest for last

Rain rings off the glass building, runs down the petite gutters hardly seen on the bus. Windshield wipers pour themselves back and forth, taking long breaks. It is a hard rain but not that hard. It is a change but not a storm.

I don’t have a TV so don’t know if the local tenders of panic are whining in their fetching All American way of this darn rain, but no one in the real world brings it up.

Yesterday the sun returns, halfheartedly at first, then the clouds get the hint. The Weather Service warns of thunderstorms, not so common here. With sun beaming long low orange over the water, thunderheads do bloom by the mountains to the east. There is no noise or flashing, though. Oftentimes the clouds build, huge white prominences with furry heads, but it’s only show.

No storm ever came. No leaves have been knocked loose, but sidewalks are thick with maple seeds.

Holdout

Defiant

Microsoft spends a fortune on landscaping. At least once a week a small army of men in green coveralls and ear protection show up in their yellow pickup trucks, display their rakes and leafblowers, and cultivate green. Nature is selected, tamed, controlled, given a haircut. Everything is trimmed; nothing is allowed out of place.

Weeds do not exist. Chemicals burn and warp them, and the men spend hours pulling stragglers. Appearance has an immune system that is tireless and thorough. Nothing escapes that does not fit the image.

So it is that this lone buttercup is startling. It has survived the onslaught and emerged defiant to the sun. It will be detected and eliminated within a week, but now it is a yellow beacon to the desensitized green. It has a moment and it is taking it.

Microsoft is an order machine. It counters entropy by providing tools that collect, number, label, put in the right box. Nothing they make really does this, of course: their tools create a model of what order should be. We in the world of things and time are left to make the machine’s vision real. All will fit the model of what our machines can do.

Nothing is more critical in today’s world of market-researched appearances than the mirroring of external reality to internal image, and Microsoft knows this. It projects stability, process, control–all things its mid-to-largeish-sized business customers lust for. Never mind that inside the right-angle stone and glass buildings all is disorder, argument, mixed messages, doublespeak, and an overdubbed language laden with definition but devoid of meaning. Everyone has faith that the lists and processes lead in sequence to the final order where all is answerable and solved. That these processes and lists never change, that the tasks never end and that the end long-sought product is only immediately replaced is curious evidence, but never questioned. We have faith, straight lines, green grass, and a line of people with money in their fists. They want green grass and nothing else.

Wild flowers persist, rising unbidden in the most unlikely places. Wild flowers don’t need tending, right angles, or mission statements. All the machines and all the people in thrall to them will spend the last drop of petroleum to deny this simple fact, but the wild flowers will outlast it all.

Wild flowers will outlast this monoculture lawn, the parking lot, the buildings, the streets, the city, civilization, and me. The sun shone on it, as it has for a few billion years and will a few billion yet, and I knew all this, and felt just fine.

Alone in the sun

Painting, Briefly

Hold when dry

Among the unfinished new house bits there’s nothing serious: missing cover pieces for cabinets, door hinges not screwed in properly, the carpet strips not tacked down well. Through winter I hardly open the back door so never noticed the railing was never painted. Primed, yes: the gritty grey surface shows that. But a rail should be white and glossy.

This is an eminently male painting job. No color choice is required, and any finish would be acceptable. The most inept man could do the job at least as well as any ten-year-old. Given the lack of judgment or specificity, I can enjoy the hardware store trip for one quart of cheapest high-gloss exterior white paint. I already have a brush.

The job is small, pleasant: the weeknight evening kind. The can instructions are too small to read but I know to shake the can, upside down. The back deck steps feel smooth but gritty, as if floured, but the paint goes on in smooth, messy strokes.

As I am painting I am painting. I don’t feel driven to write blog posts about my inner landscape, about the need to be somewhere else, do something important. It all seems like a lot of work that belongs to someone else. I am painting. The white is very white, even in shadow.

The brush hushes the paint on.

The job ends easily, without incident. The few drops wipe up and the paint shines. Some hours must pass before the second coat, but I’ll do that tomorrow. It’s not urgent. I don’t feel driven to do it. The back door is open and the radio is on. It is okay. There is nothing to fear or consider or even know. Children can paint. We can all do this. It isn’t work when it is small and seen for what it is.

Jobs are small

 

 

Images

Sky line

Summer is coming. The light says it with how things are flattened, the air made bulbous with its weight and presence. In winter the colors are spectacular and thin, but in summer they are painterly, luxurious.

Look up and you can see this. In winter the contrail would be thin, white and brittle as spider silk. Now there is blue in it and it droops, all from summer.

As a kid you had views like these: sitting on steps, trapped waiting for a ride or food or to be told what to do next, powerlessness to act, but with all the time in the world. Nothing on the TV and all the books read, you looked up and thought about the exciting powers adults had. They could fly. At least you could watch, and wonder.

Now knowing adults aren’t all-powerful, looking into summer satisfies as it never has before.

Looking out

Repaired Triumphant

The new joint

My car eats CV joints. Whether it’s a design shortcoming or deliberate engineering to make sure an otherwise bulletproof model provides some long-term income for dealers, my car ends up with the distinctive clak-clak-clak on sharp turns with eye-rolling regularity. Every two or three years I hear the noise and know it’s another hundred-and-fifty-bucks-or-so to get the thing fixed.

If you look through the Fortune archives, you’ll find a story about when Ross Perot was on the General Motors board. As with two years ago, so it was twenty years ago, with the clueless corporate behemoth circling the drain: Americans had finally gotten a clue and GM couldn’t sell their junk (except for trucks, and the monster SUVs Ford had recently invented with the Explorer). New to newish GM cars were showing up at dealerships with ruined transmissions, often having been repaired previously. Perot, in his inimitable style, commanded a young lieutenant to not ask permission or make excuses, jes’ git out there an’ fix the problem. I imagine the young executive wannabe in his suit and tie poking around GM dealerships wondering what he’s gotten himself into. He has the good fortune to find a dealership mechanic who has it figured out. He too noticed cars with inexplicable transmission leaks which continued after he repaired them with the genuine GM gaskets. When he made his own gaskets out of gasket felt, the cars stayed fixed and the transmissions didn’t fail. The young exec takes the clue back to HQ, where he eventually finds that someone at GM saved the company tens of thousands of bucks by making the gaskets thinner: saving a dime a gasket over millions of cars adds up. That this ended up ruining the cars and GM’s last shreds of reputation was not anticipated.

I wonder if this happened with my 1990 Civic. Pictured above is the new right-side CV axle: the left end goes in the transmission and the right end connects to the wheel. The right end is the problem–this is the part of the shaft that flexes left and right as the steering turns. The black boot protecting the joint inside inevitably tears, exposing the joint to water and dirt. In a few months, clak-clak-clak. It seems simple enough: put on a better boot. But they all come with these boots, and they always tear.

Nothing to be done, really. At one time I remember aftermarket boots one could use instead. I remember them in auto parts stores because of their lurid fluorescent colors, but I haven’t seen them in years. Kids aren’t interested in that kind of thing, and a new shaft with new joints is only fifty bucks. Attention and salesmanship is elsewhere, I guess.

In the past, I heard the noise, groaned, and made calls to figure out where to take it. One would fail and the other would go some months or a year after that, so back again for a few years’ peace. But I am trying to save to not work a job so much, or perhaps at all. I look online and see the part is only fifty bucks. I call three places and nobody calls back, and the best estimate I can get is “uh, about a couple hundred”. The friend who put me up in his forest home has a garage, tools, the necessary spiritual fortitude. I look online and some kind motorhead has posted detailed pictures of how it’s done. It means a morning, or perhaps a day, of wrestling, moderate dirt, and the prospect of failure. On the other end, saving at least a hundred bucks and the modest triumph of having done it myself.

The noise is bad. I email my friend. He’s available Saturday.

The part removed

Yesterday morning the anticipation makes me a little sick. My friend is offering his free time for something that could be frustrating enough to be friendship-souring. It feels a little like going to work felt on jobs I dreaded, always one wrong word away from the hammer coming down. But it’s sunny and I have the directions ready to be printed out, and last night a high school kid posted it’s easy, half-an-hour tops. Remembering twenty-some years ago to transmission leaks and parts that didn’t fit with the car I had before this one, I am moderately hopeful.

My friend has his engineering organizational skills prepared. Harbor Freight Tools may be another devil importing cheap Chinese tools, but they let him get the things we’ll need for a lot less than Sears or Snap-On. A real shop jack lifts the car, sets it on stands. I shake the car with vigor, remembering someone who had a car fall on him. It’s steady. The black steel 32mm socket, big as a kitten’s head, goes over the axle bolt. It turns with surprising ease. We are both cautiously hopeful.

Like anything else in life, we consult the pictures and are grateful someone wrote down steps to follow. Bolts come out and the arms swing away exactly as described and with an eerie ease. Our biggest mistake is forgetting to have a pan underneath when the transmission side is popped out. It releases lickety-split and red fluid spills. He said to drain it beforehand, right? Yes. No big deal. After many paper towels my friend’s garage floor has a smooth shiny spot.

The old part his heavy, solid, something you trust to deliver power. The boot is torn in half around its circumference, and the bearings and cages that make up the joint are clearly visible. The noise was bad but it doesn’t look like it was in danger of falling apart. We’ve spent maybe forty minutes all told, and the joint is out. We are both amazed as we go inside, lather with the bright orange Goop, get hands clean enough to check local store inventories. I couldn’t get a part beforehand as it comes in two versions, and this can only be determined after the axle is removed. But the closest parts store has one, says the website, and we have a drive in the sun.

I love auto parts stores: the new ones with the pleasant marketing-pro atmosphere or the old dumpy ones with flies in the window and heavy metal on a beat-up radio; the shelves of chemicals; the rows of oil filters and floor mats; the grimy, dog-eared look-up books. It’s the library for boys that don’t like to read, a little temple of physical things that can be touched, removed, made whole, improved. The old part, wrapped in a garbage bag, is set down as the guy looks it up for us: exactly one in stock. It comes in a long narrow box like a round of ammunition. We check them: identical, one dirty, one clean. The guy puts the old one back in the box. I don’t even have to come back for the core return.

It all feels good in a suspended, evolving way. Things are aligning. I will hopefully not take up my friend’s entire day. It is coming together.

My friend and I talk in the car. We are both seeing women and things are working out. There has been great progress and change since I slept on his futon last summer. We are evolving as this little drama is. We are replacing our own broken parts and doing it ourselves with some help.

Installation is reverse of removal. The transmission side slides in, snaps together with a few taps from a rubber mallet; the wheel side slides on with minimal jostling. Just put the strut fork bolt back through the lower arm and it’s done.

Just put the strut fork bolt back through the lower arm and it’s done, but the fork end won’t line up with the lower arm. We puzzle over it, though honestly he does a lot more. We get the jack and some steel blanks and push up on the fork, compressing the spring, but it keeps sliding. We can’t get it lined up to go through the hole. It’s hard to hear him with his head in the wheelwell and I keep jacking the wrong way, at the wrong time. My fear is being realized. I keep working the jack.

So close. How often we come to a wall or a hole at the very end, the one that’s too big. Never does it taunt you. It isn’t defying you. It is too big to know you are there.

My friend has sweat dripping down his nose. We’ve been doing this ten, maybe fifteen minutes. Maybe more. He sits back, stops a minute. By chance he pushes on the lower arm. It goes down. Down to where the fork is. The light instantly goes on. After the bolt goes through it’s another ten minutes and it’s done.

My first car was my mother’s 1971 Ford Pinto, the very lightest powder blue seen as white unless a piece of white paper was placed on the hood. My father and I replaced the water pump one school night. The parts coming off, the new one going on, all the tightening and steps and keeping track culminating in the turn of the key and proper operation. It was dazzling. We could have been flying.

This bright Saturday almost thirty years later it is the same. It’s barely past noon and the car drives out without noise, without red drips, without problems at all. There is a succinct, quiet, giddy sense of triumph.

You deserve a yeoman’s lunch–name your place, I say. He picks upscale Mexican takeout. I feel like I’ve used him but he doesn’t seem to mind. We sit in the fluorescent sterility, an undercurrent of 80s pop as we talk about work and the women we have met, what’s coming, where it’s going. I’m grateful for the talk but it seems like not enough to give. At one point I say I wouldn’t have made the changes I needed without having friends give me a place to go. That place to go is there still, with its tools and shiny floor.

On the way home I stop to get the recommended front-end alignment, and the guy says I need tie rod ends. I thank him and go. I can look up how to do it when I get home.

The light underneath

Workingman’s Death

Workingman’s Death (2005)

The night I see this movie there is a death, but not in the movie. The only death in the movie happens to goats and cows.

Emails announcing thinly attended arthouse films arrive all the time, and I seldom go. When this one came a week ago it grabbed me the way a sunset would, or a random woman baring her breasts: it was stark and unadorned and showed without daring. From a paragraph and one picture I knew I needed to see it without knowing why. I looked forward to it in a measured way, like Thursday evening on an easy week. I didn’t want to overdwell and make it bigger than it could be.

My phone chimes on the way up the street, and through drizzle misting the screen a text from a girl I hardly knew in high school asks if I knew anything about Matt B. Facebook is full of posts about his unexpected death that day. I had a fuzzy memory of who he was–big but short, played drums, gentle oddball humor–but hardly knew him beyond that. I apologized, typed out I had no information, and turned the phone off.

The theatre was fullish, a small line of people still waiting for their hand-torn paper ticket pushing the showing back. Seats rose high and narrow like a coliseum, my head at the waist of the person behind me, the screen far closer to the ceiling than the floor. I thought of all the other arthouse or downmarket theatres I’ve been in over the years: the old Ridglea down the street from where the Jackalope was on Fort Worth’s Camp Bowie Boulevard, a beat-up but well-loved Bostom theatre near Harvard where I saw big-screen Koyaanisqatsi for the first time, and the little hole-in-the-wall in Victoria, BC where I saw Spike and Mike animation shows and Eastwood’s masterly Unforgiven. All those places seemed lonely at their heart, and remembering I could not tell what was my own emotional projection and what was the essence of the place: dark rows, beaten-down seats, tickets bought from the candy counter from someone who seemed in the grip of a profound disappointment. This place was different: lively, the walls draped in pleasant colors, the preview loop an interesting and well-done PowerPoint of upcoming shows and class announcements. People chatted: older Freud lookalikes in George Burns glasses, stocky lesbians in knit caps, thin Euro couples carved from toothpicks, and many knots of post-college types with their nose rings and ear discs. The place felt warm and awake, comfortable but for my neck craning too much.

A bright blond woman on the older side of young comes before us. We are thanked for coming, told of some upcoming shows, reminded the director is here and will answer questions after. The lights dim and the movie comes on.

The first time I saw David Lynch’s Eraserhead I was nineteen years old, in a strange city, alone in the dark. The theatre was a deep square box with a looming screen, and the scratched and wrinkled print shone down on me in dim silver. The surreal images, the strangled emotion, my own young turmoil made a horrible beauty. I sat frozen between laughing and screaming the whole movie in its glass orbit: held but always falling.

Workingman’s Death is the same. The print bumps on, the first few titles unreadable from the scratches and dents, but it smooths out, and you can see. Illegal coal miners squeeze into an abandoned Ukrainian coal mine, maybe a foot of space to writhe through–no respirator, no goggles, just banging out glistening black coal with hammers and metal spikes. Cut to Indonesia where wiry men scale the sides of an active volcano and crawl around great powder tongues of sulfur, breaking them up and putting them in baskets, carrying down the mountainside in wicker baskets, the only sound other than the mountain’s grumble is the wicker squeaking. Cut to a halal slaughterhouse in Nigeria: a vast, open space, the ground layered in slimy black putrescence, hordes of filthy shouting men pulling incurious cows and goats to spots here, spots there where they haggle with a man who will slice their throats in Allah’s name, as is proper. Heironymous Bosch is an amateur compared to this mundane horror of squealing animals, men scaling garbage pits for filthy water, roasting pits fired with hunks of burning tire, everywhere smoke, blood, oily carbon grime. Then (gratefully) men breaking ships on Pakistan’s beaches: twelve hours a day with cutting torches burning metal, slicing ships open like loaves of hollow bread, work so dangerous a man dies nearly every day. Then, briefly, Chinese blast furnace workers thrusting poles into the open roaring mouths of the furnaces. Then, briefer, some pre-teens scaling the pipes and stacks of an abandoned smelter, the whole place turned into a park, the whole thing a brightly lit metal maze.

Each image is relentless, alone and joined to the ones before and after. They are overwhelming, too big in the way O’Keefe made her flowers too big: so people would see them.

The lights come up. Michael Glawogger is a tall, shaggy guy with a kind, ingrown-sort-of face. He looks a little like Jeff Bridges as the Dude, but speaks softly and with gears turning in his head. The Freud-look-alike asks an intelligent question I can’t remember and to which Glawogger provides a thoughtful near-silent answer. The twentysomethings ask eager, earnest questions as only that age can, that age that still believes there is some secret that, once learned, will break it all open. Glawogger is kind but insistently baffled at the girl next to me who persists with how the cows fell being like how the cut-up pieces of ship fell: what does this mean, what was he going for? No, it was just there and we shot it, is more or less what he said. He does not pretend he and a crew do not change what is being observed: he will ask people to repeat things, to get another angle. This is not cheating: they do the thing on their own first. He does not direct or expect anything.

The woman next to me won’t have the fiftysomething’s shrug of an answer. It is impossible at that age to believe things can simply be, that you can just relax and let things fall into place. Weren’t you looking for this sequence, shaping these images, creating the story for us? Glawogger doesn’t lose his cool but puts his frumpy foot gently down. No, it was just there. I shoot it, I turn it into my editor, and I leave. They spar a little more on truth and perception–the woman wants a right answer. He says: anyone who says they’re showing you a truth, or the truth, is a fucking liar.

We are in the second row, the young woman and I. He stares at her like an old wizard. I laugh. So does the balance of the room. The woman is peeved and says something else, but the other guy on stage takes it away from her: okay, let’s get another question, another question, yes, you?

On the way out, the director stands like a bemused but world-worn tree by the candy counter. We briefly look at one another, but a woman speaks to him, thanks him. The brief look is enough. We both know there is really nothing to talk about, that the thing is done and whole and seen, that there is no going back, there is really nothing to talk about and the film is its own thanks. I know this now. Out in the Wednesday night it is drizzy up the street from the city’s heart.

The other death is real at home. Messages through Facebook, in email. They are sorry to have to tell me, but want me to know. Heart attack. He was my age. I thank them in short replies. I didn’t know him that well. Thank you for letting me know.

I was not close to Matt B. He was in middle school and high school band, a talented and driven drummer who would keep on drumming and support himself as a professional musician. He was in one of the many throwaway bands people started in high school, pounding away with verve, purpose and skill more polished than those he played with then. He wore burned-out t-shirts too small for him and loose camouflage pants with untied drawstring waists, filling them like a meat fire hydrant. He tended toward quiet, in that he did not speak, but had significant presence. The closest thing to a conversation with him I can remember is helping him load a van with his drum kit. The gig sucked, but that was okay. Better than being famous, he said.

He had an uncanny Scooby Doo imitation. In high school he had a brown Chevette that was T-boned into a U-shape. He was one of the guys who worked overnights at the little town newspaper, wrecking walls and machines, staying up all night and somehow getting through school the next day. He was my age. He will now always be my age now.

After the ships are broken, the men cut the metal into small plates, all irregular shapes. Vast hills of brown plates rise up behind the beaches, built by one or two or three men taking a plate, walking it up the rusting sides slippery with dust, and dropping them. A big guy with a walkie-talkie walks with them but never carries, and points.

Why that piece, then? Why there, in that spot, instead of somewhere else? The pile is all heavy shards, all different but essentially alike, all in the same haphazard mess together. Why this plate, that place, this pile? Why is there a pile at all?

Fat little men with walkie-talkies like piles, like to tell others how to make them. Why is there a pile? Because things stack, because a man is pointing for it to go here, because there are piles, and this a plate. Down, bang.

Earnest young people want answers. In science, innocent but distracting non sequiturs are described as not even wrong: they cannot be wrong because the frame of right and wrong is meaningless. She wants to know why. The old wizard can only shrug because that is the best answer.

People post kind things on Facebook. He was a great person, kind, giving, open, funny. People are shocked, sad, both. They offer their best memories of him. Matt B’s wall is now an artifact, the posts directed from and to our shared subconscious which doesn’t understand time, that things can be gone. There is nothing wrong with this. It’s an old solution, but the best answer.

Workingman’s Death at the Northwest Film Forum

Zoogz Departed [explicit language]

Zoogz Rift, "Island of Living Puke", SST Records, 1986

Whether I had idols and heroes as a kid is hard to say. Finding flaws and faults was easy even at a young age: that everyone has lacks was apparent.

I remember a high school English assignment where I was to write about three people I idolized. I remember staring at the paper wondering if I should chance the answers I felt were closest to what the assignment would regard as truth: Carl Sagan, Mister Spock, and…nobody. I think I wrote about Martin Luther King like everybody else, except everybody else wrote about parents, grandparents or their pastor/preacher. Even working to avoid it I took a risk.

—

Music was something I warmed up to slowly. Most of my experience was with classical, as this was what my mother listened to and what I believed was suitable for someone on the accelerated college-bound track. My father’s adoption of country, along with a set of boots and open containers from that uniquely Texan institution of the drive-through liquor store, horrified me. I remember a drive in our 1973 Gran Torino station wagon, the black vinyl seats radiating heat even with the A/C blowing full out, the window down, my father slapping his thigh to Mel Tillis’ I Got the Hoss:

Well, Ah gawt the hoss an’ yew gawt the saddle

We like to ride side by side

Well, Ah gawt the hoss an’ she gawt the saddle

Together we’re gonna ride ride ride

I couldn’t have been more than ten, but the song repulsed me. Not at all for the sexual innuendo–all over my head–but for Tillis’ yowly caterwauling which encapsulated every beer-swilling boot-wearing kun-tree lummox sauntering through the countryside, his hubcap beltbuckle cinching his sprawling spare tire, ya’ll-ing to others like a jackdaw, speaking in vowels paradoxically smoothed round while abrasive enough to strip paint. This stuff poured out of every AM radio and every store PA, wafted out of every pickup truck. There were a lot of pickup trucks. After school and summers I would listen to the Funk and Wagnalls Classical Collection records my mom had bought each week from the grocery store, listening to Chopin etudes and Brahms symphonies from a motivation I can’t really describe now: not “because I was supposed to”, or it was educational, or I thought I was impressing anybody–more some sense that this was the best our species could do, and I ought to know about it. If aliens came, I wanted to show them these records and not Mel Tillis.

As an A/V dork kid I knew other A/V dork kids, none of whom had any taste or interest in music beyond the technical minutiae of its reproduction. One guy liked Ferrante & Teicher, a pianist pair that rendered Liberace’s soft noveau-classical content but not his act. This guy provided cassettes and open reel-to-reel tapes of their soaring plink-plink-plink that always reminded me of those post-war Cinemascope water musical extravaganzas that had dryad women leaping into fountains timed to the score. Another guy was crazy about Tomita, the Japanese electronica pioneer whose interpretations of The Planets and Firebird I will admit to repeatedly listening to late at night, a pillow around the headphones as the weird analog voices panned hard left, hard right.

This was middle school. It was impossible to not be aware of the role music was playing in others’ lives, and it seemed of critical importance to the girl species: allegiance to band or somebody on a poster was of critical importance in determining in-group status, and liking the wrong things resulted in public ostracism. It took another year or so but boys followed, dividing into two groups: ropers with allegiance to country, and metalheads devoted to the white Kaepa tennis shoe, Levi blue jeans, and logoed band t-shirt, this last being most important and revolving around Iron Maiden, AC/DC, Motley Crue, and less so Blue Oyster Cult. The roper uniform had uniformity without strictness–as long as jeans, belt-buckle, boots and a pearl-button shirt were worn, no emphasis was placed on make or quality.

I found the displays of both sexes baffling and more than a little frightening. Going to school was like walking into a National Geographic special of warring tribes spearing each other because of some incomprehensible affront. Adults circled like ineffective white blood cells, directing the ropers to take their hats off, rhetorically asking the metalheads if they wanted to grow up to be losers–never in so many words, but everyone knew. Adults assumed the metalheads were pumped up with drugs but seemed less interested in precocious roper alcoholism. I hated going to lunch and expected Mel Gibson and Tina Turner to burst from the ceiling, throwing chains and flame.

Music was still an abstraction for me personally. I had found my parents’ collection of Dave Brubeck and would rock out to “Take Five” when certain I was unobserved. I listened to Gershwin’s “Grand Canyon Suite” repeatedly, as I did Holst’s Planets. A big label produced a series of classical LPs with brown covers and printing in large, black sans-serif typeface, and I still remember the Planets album liner notes describing Holst escaping English damp to ride his bike through Egypt. I spent far too much time dithering over what brand of cassette to dub the LP onto, so I could trade it with the other A/V dorks. I sensed worrying about a few db was missing the point, but not quite brave enough to say anything.

Ninth grade was high school, a relief after a traumatic eighth grade where I missed the first month to mono and felt assaulted on all sides, not least so by time. I remember an August morning on the high school parking lot, out in the near-heat for marching band practice as the air coiled in anticipation of its daily boiling, walking into the cool, fungal band hall and thinking: it will be better. Being band the test of music was as intense as middle school, but a little more sophisticated: camps revolved around fusion jazz, show tunes, poppy-jazzy-rocky stuff like Barry Manilow. A guy I’d been friends with since the fifth grade cemented his conversion to eighth grade asshole by thrusting his Chicago cassettes in my face and demanding my allegiance to it. Seniors towered above like lumberjacks and I wondered if four years of this was worth the trade of getting out of PE.

The Blues Brothers came to me on a VHS my mom’s friend recorded from HBO. I love that movie still. Even if my attention was focused on how to use a second-hand cop car to trash a mall or chase neo-Nazis into the drink, it made me realize there was music with words that had something to it. Sam and Dave, James Brown, Cab Calloway and Aretha had a solid, electric power–as well as a sort of alluring illegitimacy–I had never experienced before. The updating of Laurel and Hardy by Belushi and Aykroyd reversed the rip-off the Stones and others had perpetrated on black music. Their black suits and ties, and the sunglasses, projected cool, as well as obscurity. Two white guys bugging out to black music completed some social calculus that somehow righted things. No, ma’am. We’re musicians. 

I was still the kid that bought Star Trek movie soundtracks on LP–and whose first LP ever purchased will always be the soundtrack to Carl Sagan’s Cosmos–but I was hearing more. In high school you meet different people, hear and see different things. By 1984, punk and new wave had made it even to suburban Texas.

I was bulled, but not quite as much, though mostly by one person in particular. (That we shared the same first name wasn’t so much ironic as something that invigorated him.) I don’t remember much more than shoving, but my mood was always shaky, and I was already afraid of everything. When I was rescued by a display from the black-and-camouflage, Doc Martin boot-wearing group of intellectual prankster misfits that was convincing enough to permanently scare off the current and any future bullies, I was grateful, but suspicious. The group of them informed me of their favor, done gratis as a public service for a fellow weirdo, hulking over and around me with the inscrutable teen expression of distant nonchalance. They looked like character studies for grotesque versions of Fat Albert and the Cosby Kids: thin reedy guys with hands the size of basketballs, little wiry guys like Chinese gymnasts, lumpy solid guys like pigs with Coke-bottle glasses, guys with bad teeth, guys with bowl haircuts. I was the kinda-tall kid with tinted aviator glasses and wore the high school version of Garanimals. The last group I fit in with would be the anti-cool.

As judgmental as they were in their adherence to non-judging, they included me, which is to say they gave me the opening through which I could include myself. If and when I chose. Whenever. They had divorced or distant or uninvolved parents, and they had the secret fearless energy I sensed all around but could not dare to imagine as my own. They had cars, and they listened to music in them. My introduction to punk was swift and untutored: Dead Kennedys, Sex Pistols, Misfits, Suicidal Tendencies, Circle Jerks, Husker Du. Half the group leaned backward to the previous generation’s counterculture, and weekends would have Doors, Rolling Stones and Alice Cooper thundering from the big Eighties component stereo at the divorced dad’s house, out in the woods where furniture could be burned out back unquestioned. Music was raw and subject to the adolescent’s withering critical ear which had a jeweler’s sense of noise. From my vantage point in back seats I couldn’t understand the shouted lyrics, and the shouted lyrics were so loud I couldn’t understand the current conversation. It seemed all right, somehow.

I knew even then that I did not like the music per se, but I liked the idea of it. It turned its lack of sophistication and polish into an asset, creating its noise with marginal competence on garage sale instruments recorded on Radio Shack tape. It was loud and fast, full of sick profanity and crude images. It knew something was wrong with the plastic college-bound aerobic supply-side Cold War air conditioning and tried its best to say so. It did not hide, and that it was not more widely seen was not its doing, and it reveled in this. It gave meaning to wearing black and looking like a deadbeat. It embraced the paradox of being happy to upset its grandmother, while only wanting her to know its furious love, a love that it could only reject for itself. It was not produced and was not a product. Its amateur incompetence was genuine.

But I was a poseur. The black-and-camo group had no test of purity but it was clear I was not up to their standard. They were one of the dozen or so competing music ideologies, all extensions of the primitive middle school country-metal division. I didn’t commit to any one, mostly out of being too cheap to spend much. I was eclectic and non-judgmental, and attracted to free dubs. At gatherings and whoever’s house I nodded along with whatever the music religion was and was careful to evade questions. Nobody asked me anywhere country would be played so swallowing bile was not required. I began to realize Johnny Cash and Willie Nelson weren’t the same as the kun-tree leaking from the radio and I listened to my father’s handful of old late 70s albums, but I kept this very quiet, even to my conscious mind.

—

Zoogz Rift, "Water", 1987, SST Records

This is the cassette that brought it all together.

I first saw it in the last weeks of 1986*, in English class. Heady with the approaching holidays, kids impinged on each others’ desks, talking, screwing around. I have a clear memory of working on my pre-algebra homework, and a flash at the edge of vision. D was showing something to W. Both were caught in the constricted spasm of the adolescent boy driven to rapture by something forbidden but hilarious and struggling to keep quiet. I could see D had a cassette case in his hands, and W had a Walkman’s headphones on–using the most verboten of objects in plain sight, W bending over the desk, biting his hand to not laugh. They had some business speaking quietly, rapidly, taking off headphones and replacing a black cassette in the case. W brought it over to me and, in a voice strangled to clownish wheezes from trying not to laugh, said: oh, man, you have got to hear this.

Zoogz Rift was the antithesis of not only the produced, market-researched music products that were paraded on MTV and the radio with all but orders for kids to like, but was also the antithesis for the bad music parents and church types hated–mostly heavy metal, but any rock with some fuzz on the guitars. He was music like Alan Ginsberg was poetry: talented, rhythmic, full of the profane but smarter than porn. He was degraded and degrading, enraged at all the waste and idiocy and Leave It to Beaver and oh-my-goodness Reagan faces everyone wore while shitting on their own children with Cold Warmongering and wars on drugs. He is not political per se, working at a more base, close-to-the-metal level with the adolescent’s pure innocent rage. He confirmed that it really was all stupid.

Water was a revelation, an explosion, an escape-velocity ejection from being just a weird kid to a kid whose eyes had been opened when the bottom fell out. The music was loud and driving but not like punk: it had a rich guitar heart with an electronic skeleton, and lots of drums. The melodies were far more complex than the simple beats of punk or mainstream rock, most songs with distinct thematic sections that changed radically but fit together, more or less. At the time I had only the briefest exposure to Frank Zappa, and none to Captain Beefheart, but he unquestionably draws from both. To hear that kind of complexity underlying those lyrics was a contrast that blew my mind.

And what lyrics! Stories about the ghoul inbreds in the heart of America’s deserts, going to hell and finding Jimmy Falwell there, an elaborate surreal recounting of Daddy’s horrors with the Secret Marines. Zoogz used every bit of foul language I had ever heard and introduced me to the wonders of scat-bop profanity made up on the spot. It didn’t always work but it mostly did. It didn’t pretend to greatness or virtuosity, but it was very good, unfiltered, unrepentant. Like a cadaver opened up, it was horribly beautiful.

Water’s second-to-last track is “Mongoloid Middle America”. It is one of the few songs whose lyrics I have solidly memorized. Imagine it is 1986, you are sixteen years old in one of the more conservative parts of the Bible Belt, isolated, angry. Then you hear this:

[The dull, muffled drone of an engine. ]

[Then, the sounds of echoed splashing, as if black water sloshed in a deep, concrete cavern.]

[A distant calliope.]

[A man, with the smarmy, proud voice of a second-rate airline steward, speaks as through a tinny PA.]

Congratulations! You have just shown the rare courage to take this bizarre trip through Mongoloid Middle America. Before we begin our strange journey, please remember that there are some very sick and dangerous people out there. So please: keep your arms and legs inside the boat at all times, and keep your hands on the safety rail in front of you. Under no circumstances should you leave the boat for any reason during the excursion.

[The man's voice drops in tone and gains an edge.]

And now: try to psychologically and emotionally prepare yourself for an odyssey from which you may never quite fully recover–your grand tour through Mongoloid Middle America.

[Silly, bouncing Hanna-Barberra cartoon sounds. The sounds of a screaming man being strangled. A voice repeats: Hubba Bubba!]

Sick….demented….fuck! ugh!

[Something gross must have hit him. Then: the motor dies.]

Uh oh! It seems that our tour boat has broken down. Tough shitskees, daddy-o. It’s gonna take big money to get us out of this one, I’m afraid. You’d better check your wallet to see how much you have left. None of us may ever leave this place–alive!

[His demonic laughter folds into the silly flinging sounds of drowning and the calliope. ]

[Cut to a driving, inverted march of a baseline. Zoogz speaks.]

It’s a little creepy driving through these small towns

Sometimes one gets the feeling that there’s no one around

But every now and then I’ll see a filly or two

Working as a waitress at the Hullaballoo

Come on, all you people, and gather around

We’ve got a rock band here…that’s wants to play in your town

We don’t ask for much ’cause we know you won’t pay

Besides you didn’t ask us to come here anyway

You may think they look alike, but they’re all the same guy

You ask him out his sister and she spits in your eye

She’s everybody’s brother–and that ain’t no lie

She’s a cute little dish–want to get in her pants

Reach down deep inside. Daddy’s dick in your hands!

[The song's hallmark: a weird, twanged series of guitar notes. An aural Uh oh!]

Lookit that damn Yankee! as I went to take a leak

They think they’re all Frank Capra but they’re just a bunch of geeks

Monday night is football and Tuesday night is bridge

Let’s all go do the laundry and check what’s in the fridge!

Christmas, Easter, Halloween–it’s enough to drive ya nuts

Some retard in a cop car is pulling on his putz

While some jerkoff in a taxi tells us that he’s lost

Man, I gotta get outta here, no matter what the cost!

[Zoogz sings]

You’ll be back, Pappillon, I heard my woman say [You'll be back Pappillon]

As they carried me away to Pittsburgh yesterday

And try as I may to make my crime pay

I could not escape, and I started to cry.

I felt so betrayed, Daddy’s dick in my eye!

[The twanged notes, then a shift to uptempo, garbled Leonard Bernstein]

What I can be in America

Mongoloid Middle America!

[Return to the up-down-up-down march. Zoogz speaks.]

Take the old country roads to the place where I belong

‘Cause any place is better than bein’ here

Take me to the riv-er!

Drop me in the wa-ter!

Bend me, shake me, any way you want me

I sense the end is near

I’m-a finished with the jokin’

My car is a-chokin’

Time to make the get-go while the gettin’ is good!

[Zoogz sings]

Made my way outta Mars and into Barkieville

Little Barkie the Dog! Gonna check my motor mounts

He be a smart leetle pup! That son of a bitch

Looks okayda me! Mechanic’s a cinch

What a price to pay for freedom! But at least I got my wish

[The twang, and then a descent into flash-handed garbage guitar]

Whoa nellie! Liddle Joe! Ha ha ha!

[The guitar drops out for the normal bass and drums: up-down-up-down. Zoogz sings.]

Put it all together and what have you got?

A truckload of shit and a shitload of snot!

No matter how you slice it you don’t end up with a lot

One thing I know is I’ll never go back

I don’t think I’m needed–Daddy’s dick up my crack!

[The twang. The music thrusts into guitar blasts underlaid with random electric piano spasms. It is strangely beautiful. There is the long fade to silence where you are sure the music is still going, even still.]

First hearing this, my despair and anger evaporated. I felt giddy with doing something naughty. I was glad to have followed advice to wear headphones.

I didn’t think Zoogz was a fellow soul, or idolize him. He was not a hero or an anti-hero. He was, I suppose, the inverse of the image we are programmed to want to be, and which I still did. But there was a comfort–a release–to know there were people out there who flipped off that image. He was angry at the stupidity and banality and not afraid to let you know.

How could a shy, smart dork kid not like a guy who had albums with titles like Island of Living Puke and Idiots on the Miniature Golf Course? With songs titled “Dinkle Dance”, “Restrooms of Erotic Fantasies”, “Santa’s on a Diet”, “You Fucked Up”, “Ironic Woodwind Interlude”, “The Secret Marines Sex Kitten Beach Party”, and “Shut the Fuck Up”? Even now, twenty five years later, it’s hard to type this I’m laughing so hard. Yes, it was shocking and naughty, but the songs were about something. They were not shock jock antics, but smart. They had no illusions about being popular or appealing to anyone but Zoogz and His Amazing Shitheads. They were the truest anti-rock-stars I have yet found.

Zoogz became a not-quite-open secret for me. It wasn’t anything I could share but for the three or four other people at school who already knew him, and who would understand. Parents could never be told–it would be therapy or church for sure. That girls would have nothing to do with it was a conclusion so obvious it never needed to be tested. Cassettes were copied and listened to. When enough money had been saved up for the luxury of an in-car cassette player, the car was the safest, most obvious place to meld with Zoogz. How better to see idiots in their repulsive suburban habitat than by driving through, pointing and laughing behind glass, in perfect safety?

Zoogz was the other end of the knowledge I understood would free me, the dark, disgusting side to the high art I liked and was forcing myself to cultivate. He was a low-down, louder Vonnegut, striving to be plain to reach people. He was someone I was sure I’d be afraid of if I met in person, but was someone who, like one of his album titles, was at a safe distance. He was my proxy for the anger I could not articulate.

Each new album made no noise in the world, but I got them as I learned of them. I ordered a half-dozen of them from SST in California and could barely contain myself when I picked them up from my Bible-thumping neighbor, who had accepted the box from UPS. If only you knew what you held, you two-faced judgmental shit. The box included “Water II”, which is tied with the original “Water” as a favorite. A few years later I had the good fortune to be in a Tower Records and find almost every extant Zoogz album. I have them all still:

All the Zoogz

For all my cassette-era illegal copying, I consider myself absolved.

The college years brought his best work yet. 1990′s Nutritionally Sound featured the brilliant juxtaposition of hackneyed keyboard sounds layered and layered in the days before digital editing but still retaining some classic low-fi sound. His first CD release, I listened on the stereo at home before class to the creepy but dazzling “Skeleton Protopunk Quagmire 10″ and peed my pants at “Crazed Be the Lord”. War Zone the same year was more difficult and less even. I sensed the world turning.

He was something I shared with my closest friend at the time, laughing like our bladders would fall out in his first apartment, turning it up because everybody else had theirs turned up. He was living the dream of anger and saying no to the stupid, and we both said no together with Zoogz. We wrote to Zoogz, a letter that would most likely be embarrassing now if I found it squirreled away in my parents’ attic, using our crazy Monty Python language and trying to beat his imagery in the same sad way editorial writers did when Dr. Seuss died. Zoogz wrote back. He said something about getting letters from dumb pinhead morons like us and why didn’t we grow up. We thought it was hilarious, a treasure. We were touched by the greatness that would never be great.

Zoogz faded when I left college. I was worried about grad school, my feelings of being a fraud as a college graduate, the slow living death of getting a job. I kept him in the corner of my consciousness in the way one did in pre-Internet days: getting catalogs in the mail, sending in postcards.

Zoogz was moving on and changing too. His music became even more experimental, and the last albums were instrumental jazz fusion sorts of work. His last angry album was Zoogz to his utmost. Five Billion Pinheads Can’t Be Wrong didn’t live up to the previous rapture I’d experienced in high school, but in retrospect it’s not realistic to expect that at the age of twenty-six. Only now, fifteen years later, do I even realize that between this last album (1996) and my first hearing of Zoogz (1986) was a whole decade. I smiled listening to “I Work on the Retard Farm” and “Triumph of the Won’t”, and even sent the extra twenty bucks for the Criminally Insane Kit: a t-shirt, a little squirt gun, bumper stickers, and a diploma to mark my graduation from the School of the Criminally Insane. But the magic was thin, like a movie I had seen too many times. I wanted something else, maybe even more desperately than I knew.

As years went on I followed his websites, all free hosted affairs where he posted his art and sometimes stories of his foray into the world of pro wrestling. I was appalled at first but then got the twisted irony: he was faking in another thing wholly fake, that everyone knew was fake, everybody laughing at the poor subclass sucker fans. But wresting was too dumb for me to follow, and I’ve never liked soap operas. Zoogz released a few more albums but I didn’t think to get them.

Through all the change of the past several years, I have not listened to him, not once. Even my twenty year high school reunion did not ignite his memory, send me digging through my LP box. On irregular cleaning purges I would see the that box, or find those old dubbed cassettes, and smile. I think I threw the cassettes away. I was glad to have known him and to know he was still there, but in my later thirties I understood the distance. The kid who listened to him in 1986 was as disappeared as he had been in 2008, at that reunion. Like all those other people I met over those few burning August days, that angry, self-hating kid had turned into something else.

It didn’t seem like Zoogz had. He had marriages that ended, and exited wrestling. My website visits made me wonder what a grown man older than me was doing making Photoshop collages of magazine pictures and posting old favorable reviews. One of the friends who had followed him with me said it aloud: sometimes I just wonder why the guy doesn’t just grow up and get a job. But I liked that he didn’t have one that I could tell. He had not sold out.

I hadn’t thought about Zoogz until March, when for some reason I looked online. I saw a news story. I found the Facebook group. Scrolling back in time I had the inversion of reading the postings of pictures found, gratefulness for sending along memorabilia, the thank-yous for all those that showed at the memorial, the announcement of his death over a year ago.

It was quiet to read, a complete thing. I knew what was coming–I did not feel sad. Nothing wrenched away. It made quiet sense. There was no surprise, just a sort of: oh.

Some time before I discovered Zoogz, my mother’s childhood friend died. I remember it happening in spring, my mother leaving for a few days. Her friend, a typical East Coast brusque loudmouth that I liked, had been diabetic; complications ultimately claimed her. Some months after this, I clearly remember opening my mouth to ask Mom how her friend was doing, and then remembered: oh, she’s dead. I caught myself and floated in a clear, held place with glass walls and the reverb quiet that comes when the wind stops.

Zoogz had diabetes. He was always heavy. I found a YouTube video of him being interviewed by two post-high-school wrestling knuckleheads, the pair not quite sure whether they were being insulted by the master. It was a strange thing to watch. Three of them on a very suburban California-looking patio on plastic chairs, cars and hoses and empty planters and all the suburban detritus scattered around, the kids trying to joke and be cool, Zoogz replying with a mix of serious reflection on his wrestling accomplishments and simple jabs the kids didn’t know what to do with. He sat in the chair as if poured in a bag he was leaking out of, hiding behind sunglasses. He laughed but did not seem all that happy, like a grandfather visiting grandchildren he doesn’t like.

When I took Zoogz’s albums out of the box and photographed them, I did not run my hands over them, take them carefully from their sleeves, regard them with a quiet broad smile. I have laughed at listening to them–they are still funny, unadulterated. I think a little about how unhappy I was when they were fresh, and how now it is safe to remember that time. They are not just albums, but they are closer to that now than twenty years ago. They fought something I was fighting. They are still fighting, trapped within themselves. I am not. Zoogz isn’t either, now. There is no need to fight your way out when no one else is fighting.

—

Water ends with “Water”, the eleventh track. Instrumental: guitars, bass, 8-bit electronic sounds of 1980s samplers and keyboards. I see the electric, phosphor green dragonflies buzz in their square blocks or symbolized by an & or an %. Primary blue water, orange triangle flowers, yellow square sun. Layers of Atari and oscillators and Radio Shack beeps fade up and down, repeat, fade again. At the end, there are the rich peals of blue bells.

—

* While my memory places my inaugural experience with Zoogz Rift and “Water” as late 1986, the album is © 1987. I am certain of being in Mrs. Lewis’s high school English class when I saw the cassette, and also that this occurred later than fall of 1986, when I missed a large chunk of school. By the fall of 1987 I was in college, so it’s possible the events recounted here took place in later winter or spring 1987. Memory isn’t what we think it is.

Huck Finn Fence

Midway through

Homeownership is presented as a schizophrenic dream, and I remain surprised that grown people do not speak of the irony. It is physical proof of one’s judicious work and sensibility, of delayed gratification, of attainment of the right kind of class. Purchase of even the most modest home is an almost transcendental act that makes one at most prudent, forward-looking, patriotic, and spiritual. Or was, until recently, when people realized that homes were just one more physical object subject to the laws of thermodynamics, and that even the new ones are running down. Kids today are walking away from college, hanging out in their bedrooms, working slum jobs and playing in bands. What’s the point of going to college for a questionable degree that leads to no job for a lifetime of debt? they want to know. It’s a wise question their parents still refuse to ask about owning a house.

I am prudent, which in buying a house is a nice way of saying cheap, which should not be confused with shoddy. I bought a place because the house payment would be as much as rent, especially given rent’s universal increase given all those walking away (or tossed out of) the homes they formerly owned. I had to provide for books, a few bits of furniture, and a cat with no particular tastes. I didn’t need granite countertops or central heat or a multitude of bathrooms. That somebody else went broke and sold the place for a West Coast song is serendipity that I tripped over.

Maintenance is one of those things people grouse about, and deservedly so, though for me this is more from time consumed and less so money. (Rest assured spending is carefully, sometimes ruefully, watched too.) In general, I can fix and maintain things myself; my ex and I did all the remodeling work on our previous houses and tended to all but the most technical or specialized work ourselves. Of course it doesn’t pay to have a licensed, bonded and insured professional come out for every little thing–it would be ruinous! With the interwebs there is no excuse. Everything else is found in a hardware store.

Still, like the lawn, there are some things I resent. Our single-family house had a large deck, and taking care of it and sealing it took several days. Subsequent years proved the 5-year stain guarantee worthless and every year the cleaning, scrubbing, painting. Some combination of it being outside work (where the lawn is) and my mother’s annual annoying quest to paint the interior in yet another coat of indistinguishable white make taking care of decks the worst kind of work.

So of course the new place, with its tiny bit of side yard, also has a fence. The builder cheaped out on its construction, the guys across the street tell me, their fence freshly stained a pleasing redwood color. Wood’s already aging, greying, cracking. Oughta seal it.

Finally beyond Ikea trips and long, pained excursions to the hardware store, I would like it to be done. I don’t want to weed or buy bark or prune two whole trees, as much as I ended up finding worth and quiet in that work. I do not want to return to the Saturdays of childhood, spent up early with Dad to get to Payless Cashways to get the stuff to do the work before the weekend ran out. The task is always longer, more expensive, more drawn out with errors and Dad’s swearing and Mom’s meddling and carping, than the weekend is long. I had homework to do but I am out in the sun with my father and shovels and hammers and I can’t remember what, fretting about Monday’s multiplication test while I am digging a hole.

Now I am 41 and my precious free time, still depleted from such youthful wastage, should no longer be required to care for the place that’s supposed to shelter me. But here it is, apparent with the neighbors’ red stain. Ignoring it will only cost more in the future: the cheap person spends the most. So another trip to the hardware megastore, another half-hour spent untangling the overwhelming options. I get a jug of cleaner stuff, a four-inch brush, a gallon of some eco-friendlier oil stain, and a quart of less-hazardous paint thinner. I could save two bucks on the cheaper traditional petrochemical stuff, but like organic food, I’m well off enough to afford health.

The stuff sits for a couple weeks owing to rain, but then the sun comes out. I get the dollar-store bucket I got in October, the new hose still coiled tight from my first coupon-induced Lowe’s trip, some old brushes, and squint at instructions so small I could have barely read as a tween.

I don’t think to take pictures of the before state. This is the closest, with the stain already halfway on:

Halfway is the new start

Cleaning is pure work. The cleaner is diluted and sprayed on, then scrubbed with the deck brush left over from our first house. Wood foams and grey-black glop seeps out of the wood as I imagine my grandfather stressing put your back into it. I hate it: the pointless task I’ll have to redo every year, the expense, the time. Why did the builder cheap out with such materials? I’m ending up the one that pays the most, not him.

Leverage doesn’t work in the vertical. Getting any bite into the wood is a struggle for the bottom half of the boards. The painted panel above is stained at the bottom, the boards cut too long and only a few millimeters above the ground. Algae is in there and I don’t want to buy something else, read more instructions, buy more tools, wait. I spray more stuff and scrub harder, repeatedly.

Summers my mother made lists for me of onerous yet petty chores she didn’t want to spend time on. Worst was clean brass, meaning all the brass knicknacks and platters and other Pier One junk store clutter on every flat surface. It took cans of Brasso and piles of rags to get anything close to shining, the rags turning black as shoe polish. I sat in the garage to hide from the heat, rubbing and buffing and working Brasso’s strange fine liquid grit into my hands. The metal warmed as it was scoured, over and over, trying to get all the black off. The Brasso reduced it but there was always more, more to wipe away, more to coax out with more Brasso.

I had so many more important things to do. I was starting to write as as much frightened and confused as inspired by successful writer advice, mostly about writing all the time. Polishing brass is not writing. Polishing brass is not preparing for the SAT, or whatever else I was worried about. Blind summer sun hammered down and all I had was brass that was never all the way clean.

Thirty years later I am on a different coast, in a different life, staring down another dirty inanimate object that will just get dirty again, need more care again. Black glop flies on to my sleeves. Wind sometimes catches sprayed cleaner and blows it in my face. I decide the outside panels facing the street are enough, get the hose, spray the black glop off. Cleaned boards emerge, glowing faded tan. The difference is startling.

This is Friday, with two full days of sun until Sunday, when I expect it to be dry enough to stain, or seal, or whatever the stuff in the can is. The can talks about waiting two weeks for boards to dry, but it’s Seattle–there won’t be two weeks until August, and I’m not scrubbing again. On Sunday the sun is out, the wind less, the boards as dry as wood seems to get this side of the mountains. I shake the can, get the brush, pry the lid off, and start.

It’s more yellow than I thought. It must darken or redden when applied, to match the cedar color of the neighbor’s can. It’s thin as water and runs from the brush, but I get a slat painted, another slat, dipping constantly. It’s very yellow, but a pleasing, sullied yellow. It doesn’t match the neighbors, but the can is open and there’s no stopping.

The work is not like the scrubbing but is still work: repetitive, manual, skill-less. Brilliant sun courses down the street behind me, but the fence will be in the house’s north-face shadow until the solstice, I think. The brush slap-grinds against the bare boards.

Traffic roars up and down the street, people walk by, bikers struggle up or whiz down the hill, and I paint six inches at a time. The wood is thirsty, or ravenous. The repetition, the manual movement, is easy. I don’t slow down but the brush moves with more ease. Something is happening: I am realizing time is different now. Interminable work that had no end to a twelve- or thirteen-year-old is moving right along. Two hours to do four fence panels does seem long, but no that long, to an adult. As an adult there is some satisfaction in seeing the can imperceptibly empty itself, the fence go from baked nakedness to tended. Somebody lives here, somebody who can take care of a fence.

People have been telling me I am too hard on myself. I need to relax, they say. It has occurred to me, at various points, that the determined push to move ahead, stay current, be finished, has been counterproductive.

I remember putting the Ikea shelves together, stopping, slowing down to be with it. By the middle fence panel I am in the sun and grass and freshly laid bark with the brush hushing up and down as the fence turns dirty yellow. It’s all right, it’s working out. Sidewalk people do not say anything but I see them looking, and a couple pulls in the driveway and a woman points and says something I can’t hear.

Brushing is a smooth sound as much as a motion, like music, persisting long after the sound is gone. The wind blows and I hear kids playing and stereos and I am an American guy painting his fence, but not as petulant Tom anxious for escape from it. I wonder what Huck Finn would be like had he grown up, gotten away from his nowhere town, thought a good while about all he’d seen on that raft. Were he to paint a fence then, I think, it would be a serious but carefree doing.

The fence is done:

Fenced

Cleaning the brush in the enviro-happy paint thinner, the low-odor stain curdles into pudding and washes down the drain. I remember all the brushes my parents kept in coffee cans, occasionally pouring more thinner over them and sloshing them around. They never got clean, run through with paint soup and hard flakes, most drying out into a hardened mass that was still kept on garage shelves. That fate does not await this cheap Chinese-made brush, even if it was intended. The sun streams in and I use plenty of thinner to make the brush as clean and supple as the new brush it is. This is also a job worth doing, manual and plain, work done by people who do real work, and are earnest.

It rained that night but there was enough sun and wind that the wood was dry, and the water beads on the top rail. The fence glows dirty yellow now, buffed and clean (at least on the side everybody sees), like all that brass I polished and polished. I feel calm about it, remembering these two opposites. Even in the here and now we are a little somewhere else.

The Ten

One at a time

Ten years ago was when the illness descended. Ten years is a long time to realize was ten years ago.

My birthday had been a few weeks ago or so; I don’t remember exactly, but still April. I think I had felt sick around then, but a normal sort of sick: some stomach junk, sinuses, the raw sandpaper feeling growing inside-out in the throat. Minor cruddiness; usual annoyance. Spring was grey and loping, subdued and cinderblock like the university basement where I worked part-time. I remember being in our house and that the kitchen was clean.

Now, far away from it, memory is fragmented: starting in the stomach with shooting, tearing pains as if layers were being peeled. Electric starbursts in the large muscles of my legs and arms, arcing lances through my chest. Something was wrong with breathing–some inability to inhale properly, or as if the air itself was empty. Something pulled inside my head, tightening my scalp. I went to bed and have the clearest memory of lying with sun streaming through the sliding glass door, reading a book on the history of Wal-Mart (of all things) that was almost too heavy to hold, stomach and legs full of burning electricity.

I had never felt anything like this. I had been sick before: the worst was missing the first weeks of eighth grade due to mono so severe I lived in the bathroom, unable to eat, vomiting mucus. This was much worse and a different character of experience. The sickness itself was sick, cut through with garbled sensations and pain that made no sense. I didn’t know how to describe it.

Doctors were suspicious. My Group Health HMO doctor–a physician’s assistant who had always been affable if moderately disinterested–doubted my complaints without saying so much. He was reticent to run any sort of tests but ran a few basic ones: blood tests, other trivial ones I don’t remember. These would come back normal.

I got worse over the next week. More pain in new places, all with the same burning, congealing feel of electric ashes. Something seared just inside my skin and the whitehot rays of pain went into my knees, through all the joints in my hands. One night I had an overwhelming urge to get to the bathroom. I was crossing the kitchen and remember being on the floor, my wife calling after me. I couldn’t move aside from flopping upwards like a fish with a broken spine.

The PA hooked me up to an EKG, ran some traces, didn’t see anything concerning. He was far less concerned or gripped with urgency than me. Maybe an internist, he thought. They would contact me with a referral.

April 2002 had nothing to suggest it would be in any way different or extraordinary than the years before. I was working part-time after leaving the dot-com I’d been recruited to. I was no longer wracked with anxiety or a sense of failure over turning 30. My marriage, always troubled, had stabilized. Nothing wrong with the house four years ours; no issues with money. She was all right with me taking time to write, even though I felt guilt as her own job was so demanding. All normal, adult things until I woke up one day and the universe had changed.

For the next year I got sicker. My mouth burned and filled with sores and glop. My hands shook and my feet stiffened to the point it was difficult to walk when first getting up. The pain and weakness continued. It went in my mind: my vision blurred, my memory became terrible, my ability to concentrate and understand anything of any complexity markedly degraded. My part-time job of copying tapes in the university basement became excruciating and exhausting, my hands barely able to close on the tapes, my mind fogging and the world spinning as I moved to tend the machines. My intestines coursed with electric snakes and eating was no pleasure, giving hours of gurgling pain, warped taste, and pain of anything touching my tongue or roof of my mouth. It went in my muscles, joints, tendons. By early 2003 it was hard to walk, and short distances were exhausting.

Fear and anxiety were the worst. I remember realizing both were stronger and more present even than the darkest days in high school. I went to King County Public Health for an HIV test. There was nothing else I knew to test for, and if it was somehow positive I wanted the result to be anonymous. I remember clearly the tiny, white-painted cinderblock room where I had the blood drawn and to which I returned a week later. Big posters with tempra-colored happy dinosaurs encouraged vaccinations for the niños. Wedged between a desk and a grimy window I sat in a bent metal chair, watching the door, realizing that when it opened, whatever happened, things would be different. The door opened and the big-boned, kind white woman edged in, holding a manila folder–what will she say, will she–I wonder how many times she’s done this. She had a perfect, neutral, encouraging tone and told me it was negative. I don’t remember what else we talked about. It was a hard day.

Group Health had nothing to offer. I saw a series of internists who appeared to have gone to schools that advertise in the back covers of comic books. I saw a urologist, neurologist, dermatologist, rheumatologist. I had diagnoses of Guillain-Barre syndrome, Reiter’s syndrome, and some others I don’t remember. Nobody had any treatment or ideas, not even the rheumatologist, whose discipline is generally eager to pump people full of steroids and metabolic poisons. Everyone looked at me like I was crazy or desperate for attention. I wondered what they were writing about me.

I met the cruel truism that it is the sick person burdened with all the tasks of getting well, the first of which is figuring out what’s wrong. The cruelty of it falling to you, the sick person in pain with the degraded mind, to do all this work makes it no less true. I took their diagnoses and looked into them, following the primrose path first to medical books and websites, then to the medical-esque ones for all those who get nowhere with the straight dope. There are many such people. Are they all attention-hounds, Munchausen types, nutjobs? Some must be, but hardly a majority. I have better things to do than be sick, in pain, struggling to out-think a wet paper bag.

A fight is at least something to do, and I took it up because no one else was going to. I bought books and read them, talked to people on message boards, emailed those who seemed especially cogent and together. I got tips on what to look for, treatments to investigate, doctors to look into. I revisited the uncomfortable truths about medicine I remember from high school and college, when going to the doctor about bad colds and intractable fatigue got it’s just a virus or a similar dismissal. Things were done and not done for reasons of cost, for reasons of not questioning orthodoxy. I realized most doctors follow recipes to stay out of trouble, that there is too much to memorize, that they’re taught to not believe they can do much, that their prime function is pushing pills. In the HMO case, where pills are the biggest cost, the result is nothing is pushed. I wanted to believe I could find help from a doctor–wide boulevards down wild rabbit holes are not far from standard medicine’s narrow path. I would rather stick with science than the endless worlds of  multicolored feelings, electric implements, and practiced breathing that struck me as delusions from the nineteenth century.

I did not involve my wife. I did not so much keep things from her as not volunteer and try as best I could to not complain, though given my mildly hysterical nature I doubt I did this very well. I didn’t want to worry her. She had enough problems with work and of her own to not need mine, which it was clear, said experts, nothing could be done anyway. Maybe this was not the best decision and I should have opened up more. But I was as quiet as I could have been and kept most things to myself.

Group Health allowed two annual visits to a naturopath. It was a way that at least split the difference with me: somewhat on the edge but receiving what I would recognize as medical training. I had a handful to choose from and picked one near the UW. The office was cramped but clean, the doctor a compact athletic woman with tattoos and a sailor’s mouth. She was (and is) thoughtful and thorough, though with what seems like a wild streak. She took me seriously, and because of this I followed her leads about thyroid and yeast even though I had no real faith in them being related to my issues. I went on a diet of rice, greens and fish for six weeks to rule out allergens and drank more water. Group Health reluctantly filled some prescriptions she advised, but the antifungals didn’t seem to help as much as the diet’s first week. (I was rewarded with some of the foulest dumps I’ve ever experienced, and then my guts calming down at least.) The staff seemed rushed and semi-professional, but even if appointments were very late, she spent as much time with me as I needed, as she had with all those before me. It was worth being late to be taken seriously.

I continued to look for doctors in what I can imagine looked like doctor-shopping, though since I wasn’t asking for downers I didn’t fit the usual pattern. I went so far as to try some local superstar doctors, all very expensive, none taking insurance. One was kind, if distant; I remember the visit as if drifting down a warm stream, his suggestions and course of action vague. He did suggest a supplement that had a fantastic effect for three days and then abruptly ended. I don’t know what it was. The second superstar doctor was an asshole who sat behind a large desk and at one point accused me of heavy drug use. His nurse supplied me with a packet of elaborate instructions and procedures I must follow to continue seeing him, including using his (and only his) audiocassettes to record journal entries following his rigid format, which I could transcribe myself or pay to have his staff do it. I threw the stuff away and decided superstar doctors aren’t worth it.

I didn’t get any worse, but didn’t improve either. I took handfuls of vitamins and supplements and plowed through each day as if I worked at a mine, or in the fields: endless upstream pushing against gravity, sparkling pain, a syrupy confused fatigue.

The diagnoses all fell in the vague no-man’s-land of autoimmune disease. Looking into this deeply was more hopeful than not, though not if I pursued standard treatments–the rheumatologist’s cortisone and worse. The book The New Arthritis Breakthrough by Henry Scammell was unhysterical, careful, and reasonable. Scammell advocated low-dose antibiotic treatment for rheumatoid arthritis, lupus and other so-called autoimmune diseases based on the theory all were caused or exacerbated by slow-growing, difficult to detect microorganisms that fooled, evaded, or subverted the body’s defenses. The treatment was simple (tetracycline-family antibiotics), safe, measured, logical, and was presented not as a wham-bang cure-all but a process that could take years with many ups and downs and an honest admission that recovery could not be guaranteed.

2003 was one of the bleakest years. I don’t remember the holidays, or New Year’s. I don’t remember any news, or successes, or pleasant things, or even unpleasant things. The pain and difficulty was a constant and consistent static making itself known every waking moment. I remember a call to a friend moved back to Texas who was also jobless on how to save. (The best I’d come up with was switching to online billpay, saving stamps.) I got up, went to work, came home, went to bed early, slept fitfully. Reality was subsumed in a low-grade anxious vibration. When the Space Shuttle Challenger disintegrated on re-entry, I learned of it by turning on the TV. It was a habit I’d gotten into after 9/11, to see if anything terrible had happened. Outwardly, aside from some rashes, nothing had happened to me. But I was just as different and changed as the rest of the world.

I became that patient with the file folder full of Xerox copies and books with Post-its sticking out the top. I took it with me to the Group Health PA and did not beat him over the head with it, or even open it. I said I wanted to try minocycline as the book described. His hand held the pen over the thick phone book my chart had become; he did not look at me and listened. Then he said something like: sure, I don’t think it’s a problem. As he wrote the prescription I felt a sense of triumph and release as big as graduating college.

The naturopath had heard of antibiotics used this way, though I don’t remember if she used them. (At the time, naturopaths could prescribe very few drugs in Washington. Now they can prescribe anything but downers and cancer drugs.) She advised taking them an hour before or two hours after meals and with some supplements to increase absorption and penetration deep into tissue. I shuffled my supplements around, dropping most. I walked as much as I could. Running every night, as I had for years previous, was far too much.

Minocycline comes in real capsules, half grey and half white. I arranged my schedule around them, taking a vial to work to take one mid-morning and just before leaving, during the empty-stomach window. The pain in my feet, the burning in my mouth and lungs, the blurry vision held. I took the pills, with the water, with the supplements, and waited.

For reasons I can’t remember, I stopped taking them. Maybe a Group Health doctor said something that spooked me, or I lost nerve, or doubted. I wonder what would have happened had I continued, where things would have gone, at what rate. But there’s no way to test the abandoned past, and am working to give up wasting energy.

In 2003 I decided I couldn’t keep copying tapes part-time. Even if I was sick I had to contribute more, be something besides sick and unable to enjoy anything from pain and anxiety. Video production, which I’d meandered in since dropping out of grad school, had poor prospects in Seattle, and it became clear I would forever be beating my head against that wall. One less wall to beat my head against was welcome, so I decided to retrain in something, something computery, since I’d always been the computer guy at jobs. I went to DeVry for exactly a week: when the dean told me that, of course, there were no job prospects with an engineering degree, I got my 90% refund. (I remain thankful for his casual remark. The work was far too hard for me.) I looked with greater care and a cheaper eye and thought a generic helpdesk/web development certificate from community college was the best bet. I started classes at Seattle Central Community College in September 2003. I bought a pillow to sit on, the joints in my hips too tender to take the school seats. I could barely concentrate, came home exhausted after class and then work in the afternoons. Everything floated in a hot, sandpaper fog. I bought my books on half.com and kept going.

Around the holidays in 2003 I went on the antibiotics again. I don’t remember why, exactly, or even precisely when, the best I can remember something about needing to try something, and this being the only thing. The grey and white capsules came with me every day, taken at water fountains or from a sport bottle one hour before or two hours after eating, the two time windows anchoring all other events. I always knew what day and what time it was.

Only in retrospect could I detect improvement. Quarter by quarter in school I would realize I no longer needed to carry the cushion around to sit on–normal chairs were fine. I could type and hold a pen for longer periods without pain. The stinging and burning under my skin seemed less, and it was easier to learn and remember. The change was imperceptible and only apparent long after the fact. I didn’t realize anything was improving until forgetting the chair cushion one day.

This was my life. For moments upon waking I was conscious of a painless, floating state, and then waking would bring everything back, and it would be grey morning again, time to ease out of bed, get my legs to work, gen up to focus with the background unvoiced worries of will I ever get well, what about money, this is not fair to her. I began to forget what it was like to be well. I had phone calls with Matt and my friend Paul on what I was going through, guilty about dumping my state on them but hungry for something I felt they could offer. I asked my parents for money. My mother enraged me in calls by always ending with stay well. I saw the naturopath who had nothing to really offer. I didn’t have lab tests or any other reasons to see the Group Health doctor and so never went in, though I always had the unconscious worry my refills would not go through. People online talked of buying some antibiotics at feed stores. I went for walks, rode the bus. The world was grey.

In early fall 2004 I persuaded my wife to change health insurance away from Group Health to Regence, opening up the doctors we could see. I’m not sure why I wanted to see the doctor I’d found: maybe he was recommended by someone local, maybe because he was an osteopath and I had found that school more pliable and sympathetic in the past. He worked out of his house out in the Issaquah wilds, back a huge converted den with wood paneling and broad windows. He kept his implements in a Sears tool chest. Same thing as one of those doctor cabinets, he said, just a lot cheaper. His expansive rec room office reminded me of something out of middle school.

He took a long history, poked around, drew some blood. He said something about it being a fibromyalgia-type thing, which he felt new research was caused by kidney problems. He advised some testing not covered by insurance that would supposedly show how healthy my cells were from the inside out. Whatever. He’d call me with results.

His excitement was audible on the message. At last, out of all the tests that had been normal, he found some that weren’t. They showed I had something called polymyositis. I needed to come in.

Polymyositis is a supposed autoimmune disorder where the muscles, connective tissue and skin are targeted by the immune system. The testing had found elevated levels of this sort of destructive process. The usual treatment was steroids, though the alternative sites and books I’d already researched listed the same antibiotics as effective. I assumed the good doctor would apply his knowledge of antimicrobials, but instead he wanted the steroids. I was hesitant but he assured me how mild the stuff he used was. I consented to one injection. In a few hours I felt as if I’d regressed a year.

I hadn’t seen the naturopath in some months, having given up on her as much as the Group Health doctors, but as I felt every symptom coming back as if I’d just woken up that morning in 2002 I could think of no course more fruitful. When I got in to see her I all but yelled at her–this guy found a diagnosis and just made it worse, and why didn’t you test what he did? She yelled back. People on the sidewalk must have heard us.

What exactly happened I don’t recall, but a course of action must have been formulated. I had a working diagnosis at last and some test to at least monitor. Antibiotics were adjusted. By Halloween I was feeling better, more or less back to where I’d been. Of the two tests, the scarier result was back in normal range (and has not been abnormal since), while the other dropped significantly. I never saw the other doctor again.

Christmas 2004 ended school for me. The holidays felt a little like those in high school or college: a little happier with the sense that something had been earned. I looked for work on New Year’s Day and found a contract job designing a Microsoft website. Others were horrified at how little it paid, but I was happy for anything that was a Real Job. The anxiety of having a new job was extreme: now I had not only my own doubt but the fear I’d not understand something, be too tired, too distracted by pain, have a seizure. Working a job in the belly of the beast and not knowing to take it less than seriously weighed on top of the weight, but winter turned to spring, then summer, then fall, and they kept me around.

Getting the job in January I checked in with the naturopath. She changed the minocycline to doxycycline, thinking it might be better. Late spring we changed back and I noticed marked improvement. That summer I realized I didn’t feel so bad. Still greatly fatigued, still twinges, still the rashes and burning, but there were breaks. Down in the bowels of the parking garage one Friday after work I realized I could remember, a little, what it was like to be well. The garage was dark and silent but I felt a thin, hopeful filament in the fluorescent light.

With occasional terrifying retrenchments, I kept getting better. The retrenchments were fewer, less severe. The worst were my own worries when lab tests were less satisfactory, my fear it signaled a return to the low cell of 2003. The fatigue never left, and was in some ways the most troublesome. Sleep remained poor, but I started writing again.

After a time, I allowed the tentative, equivocal victory of considering myself essentially well. One doctor I rarely saw to refill the meds the naturopath could not had told me he’d seen lots of people become gravely sick with some incomprehensible malady just gradually work out of it. Nobody knew what it was, why it came, or why it left. I felt I could be happy with that.

Late summer 2009 the naturopath suggested some new tests. She had a number of patients like me, she said: very sick, a garbage can diagnosis (chronic fatigue, fibromyalgia, other lingering but indistinct syndromes), slowly better and now mostly well, but never completely. The leaden drape of fatigue could still make the most timid day a challenge. She’d been to conferences and done some reading, and her hunch had proven with her other patients she’d tested so far.

The tests were for Lyme disease. They were pricey, and given how little usefulness tests had provided to this point, I hesitated. Insurance would cover a little, it turned out, so I went ahead.

A week later we were in Montana, escaping a few torturous, rare Seattle days of 100-degree heat. The tiny motel at Glacier National Park’s edge had overpriced ice cream and t-shirts and the thinnest edge of cell reception. Back from hiking, a voicemail came through. Standing on a rock and plugging my other ear, I heard the office assistant report the test had come back “very positive”. In the tiny room unchanged since the mid-Fifites, I stood in the screen doorway and felt a mix of relief and exasperation. I’m more or less well, and now they tell me.

The test changed nothing real: I was well, working in a new field, living in the city, the worst days thin memories I made a point of not dwelling on. The masses of papers and files still chronicled my normal standard tests and doubtless doctors’ notes about an agitated patient with no obvious symptoms. Outwardly I looked the same as I always had, and inwardly I felt the same mostly-certain wellness. But now I had something the bureaucracy must accept, that all the piles of rules and gatekeepers could not push away. I had my own piece of paper. I finally had a test I passed.

The test came back in August, 2009. I had been solidly well for over a year: no interludes, relapses, weird episodes. I swam regularly and went for afternoon-long walks and day hikes. The naturopath changed my meds around and I took then with a confidence I never had before. I had no side-effects, no dramatic response, but some things got gradually better: joint pain, soreness in my feet, rashes. A fog I didn’t realize I still suffered from lifted, and my thoughts were faster and more complete. My vision sharpened even further. I noticed vitamins seemed to work better, which was demonstrated when I forgot them.

I keep up the vitamins, having returned to a dedicated, or perhaps hypochondriachal, attention to them learned from my mother. I read Linus Pauling’s book on vitamin C and take large quantities of it, and I wonder things would have gone had I read the book at its 1986 appearance. I wonder other things: was the severe mono that kept me out of the first month of the eighth grade, after which I never really felt well, the start of this? Could I have had Lyme all through high school, explaining my blurry thoughts, inability to remember anything, extreme anxiety, knotted stomach, breathlessness with any exertion? Or did it really come on in April 2002, a ton of bricks with no name?

Back in September, someone observed that 9/11′s decadal anniversary was significant because it marked the point at which we could begin to forget. We have forgotten volumes already, most so the raw emotional punch. A formerly solid world twisted to surreal threads, warped planes, sinuous echoes. Here in the future, that past is dreamlike: somehow sensible but the gravity is wrong. It was all so sharp then; now things have blurred, gratefully.

Now this may be happening for me, for being sick and other things. The memory is indistinct and has the same feel of watching old VHS from high school, kept in a box, pulled out on moves or purging binges. Remember, remember? Well…maybe. The farther away things are, the less I’m sure what I remember. Cops and neuroscientists know memory fades, is malleable. I know I am not there now. I know it is better to be here, that I am more well than I think.

 

 

Sheets to the Wind

New plastic in plastic

In the strictest sense I don’t need new sheets. One set is fine, washed weekly and replaced, but I have the thought and I act on it. Leap and the net will appear, a friend advises. She means flying off to Cambodia and starting companies, but seventeen bucks for sheets is my level.

Sheets were one of those odd sticking points in the marriage. She didn’t sleep with them, which I found incomprehensible. We compromised on flannel sheets, since they were the thickest and most blanketlike. I like their substance and easy fuzziness just fine. The first set of sheets I bought when I moved in were some Target’s on-sale finest grey flannel.

The thought to buy something other than flannel never crossed my mind. Sheets equal flannel. Only yesterday, in the dim flea market atmosphere of the Ross plunked down like a lost spaceship in a part of town struggling to rejuvenate itself, did I open my eyes to other things. Microfiber. They make Sham-wows out of that. A set with extra pillowcases is only seventeen bucks. It takes twenty minutes to buy them, trapped behind two immense black women arguing with the straw-thin clerk, her head bobbing like a balloon inside her headscarf while the women argue about the price of bedazzled skirts.

They fit fine, but feel thin. Sleeping in them feels elevated, like being in a nice hotel. Did I really need to buy them? The past month has the first comfortably low Mastercard bill in a long time. I am keeping things light, avoiding the material, not distracting myself with the consumer treadmill. Those seventeen bucks here and there add up when the statement comes. When you quit your job to write, as you claim to be planning, won’t you worry about that seventeen bucks?

Cats don't judge

Leap and the net will appear. Works for cats.