Expulsion

Perhaps I'm stretching the word "expulsion" beyond the physical, but I've been carrying around ideas and thoughts and observations for the last twenty years, and they seem to be bursting up to the surface like underwater bubbles, exhaled by some adventurous scuba diver.

I'm aware that this post is making little sense, but I'll publish it anyway.

The short version:

Today I decided, with certainty, that I am going to write the things that I feel that I need to write, not from spite, but because those things are going to battle around inside my brain until I can get them onto paper.

So I'm going to write a poetry thesis.

And now I am done with self-seriousness and contrived metaphor, if only for the evening. If you read this far, thank you and I'm sorry.

An Open Love-Letter to Halloween

Dear Halloween,

You are, without a doubt, my favorite holiday. That's not to say that you're perfect, because you're not, but your imperfections are what make you perfect in my sentimental eyes. I love that you give every shut-in a chance to rally a friend to watch Blood Feast because getting out of the house isn't that much fun anyway, or to eat candy excessively and then get really bad stomachaches afterward. I love that you give people a sensible reason to scare others, or to walk around unfamiliar neighborhoods in dangerously sight-obscuring masks, or that you let everyone feel like they're five again. I love that you give every loser a chance to be Ferris Bueller or Jill Valentine, if only just for one day.

In short, I love you a lot. Thanks for giving me a free twenty-four hour pass to Being Cool.

Gearing up, late '70's style

Discovery ("Long, Long, Long")

One of the most pivotal moments in my musical discovery came during Christmas of, let's call it 2007. That sounds about right. I would have been thirteen and in eighth grade at the time. Unbearably awkward and uncomfortable, as are I think most people at that age, I found immense comfort in music--again, as most people do. So for Christmas that year, my dear sweet parents asked me what I wanted, and I handed them a list of albums by bands that I liked. I discovered a lot of music at that time by listening to Nights with Alice Cooper on 99.7 KY (which is, sadly, no longer operating under that same classic rock format). But to get to the point, I heard Mister Alice playing songs by bands like The Yardbirds, Jethro Tull, and KISS, and to my impressionable adolescent mind there was nothing better. My parents, recognizing this appreciation, got me the albums I'd asked for. They were, if I recall correctly:

London Calling by The Clash
Electric Ladyland by The Jimi Hendrix Experience
Led Zeppelin IV (or whatever you prefer to call it) by Led Zeppelin
Dark Side of the Moon by Pink Floyd
Self-Titled by The Beatles

...and I believe one other album--maybe Bryter Layter by Nick Drake? I can't remember, but it's written down somewhere.

So this post is heading, as most of mine do, to a YouTube video of a song that I like. And while I was reading the other night, listening quietly to the second half of The White Album, I began reflecting on my first strong experiences with music (such as the junior-high winter described above). That led me to thinking about the specific album I was listening to, and what a fine, fine song "Long, Long, Long" is. I'd argue that it's one of the best songs on the album, and I love a lot of songs on that album. There's something so emotional and heartrending in the way George Harrison sings it that can't really be described (which is, I suppose, a description in itself). It took me a long time to appreciate it, though. When I first listened to the entire White Album, I was most interested in songs like "Julia" and "Blackbird": predictably enjoyable and comfortable songs with acoustic guitar and quiet vocals. I think I probably found "Long, Long, Long" to be creepy and weird. It's remarkable how time can change thoughts and opinions like that.

Enough blathering. Here's the song:

Janine

A strange and lovely love song, recorded at The Knitting Factory:

"If you were the Baltic Sea and I were a cup"

"Janine" by Soul Coughing, from Ruby Vroom (1994)

"At Sunset"

While I was nosing around at the Grolier this weekend with my mom, I came across a poem called "How I Am" by Jason Shinder. I'd never heard of him before, so I did some reading (of course) and found out that he died in 2008 of cancer. He wrote in these journals before he died, journals he called “cancer diaries.” It seems remarkable to me that, even in the face of mortality, he was able to maintain a realistically optimistic perspective on life: “The hours are left for vanishing and also for joy and for blessing and gratitude.”

Here is a poem he wrote.         

* * * * *

“At Sunset”

Your death must be loved this much.

You have to know the grief—now.
Standing by the water’s edge,

looking down at the wave

touching you. You have to lie,
stiff, arms folded, on a heap of earth

and see how far the darkness

will take you. I mean it, this, now—
before the ghost the cold leaves

in your breath, rises;

before the toes are put together
inside the shoes. There it is—the goddamn

orange-going-into-rose descending

circle of beauty and time.
You have nothing to be sad about.

 

by Jason Shinder, from Stupid Hope (2009)

The End

The West is The Best.

From The Doors' self-titled album, 1967

Solitude

I just tried writing a really lengthy and self-important post about what solitude means and then I realized it was drivel so I stopped.

But basically, I think that solitude is a great, great thing. There is so much to be gained from spending time alone with oneself, and speaking personally, I am much happier when I'm able to have those moments alone than when I'm spending consecutive hours with others (even if those others are people I love and care about). Which is not to say that I don't love being around people I love, because I do. I simply feel more content and ordered when I can have sufficient time alone. That's basically the pared-down version of the huge long thought that was in my head.

And because I am me and can't state a thought without some musical association, here is a Grandaddy song:

- "Disconnecty," from Just Like the Fambly Cat, 2006

Saint Casimir

I preface this post with an admittance of ignorance--even when I try to write things about the past, or my family, or any number of things, I realize that my ability to do so honestly and accurately is continually and inevitably obstructed by memory. Like anyone, I remember things as I would like to and have no idea what the truth really is at any given time. So. Even though I found this thing I wrote and am sharing it with the Internet here, it's clearly not my place to definitively claim anything more than a subjective understanding of events outside of myself, especially since half the time I don't even understand what the things I make mean.

Sorry for the convoluted explanatory apology above. Here is a stanza of something I wrote, and maybe something I will continue to work on and revise if I feel so compelled.

Inky trees hunch above me,

cowering from the wind

of a ruthless Chicago winter.

The sky is impossibly blue and thin

and as cold as cracked skin.

Everyone is gone,

and I berate myself

for wondering if my dead

great-uncles will receive special stead

in Heaven for dying so young

under their only country’s saint--

Death doesn’t work that way,

I don’t think.

Hasten Down the Wind

"Hasten Down the Wind," by Warren Zevon, Self-Titled, 1976

Waking Early, Sunday Morning

"Waking Early, Sunday Morning"

O to break loose, like the chinook
salmon jumping and falling back,
nosing up to the impossible
stone and bone-crushing waterfall –
raw-jawed, weak-fleshed there, stopped by ten
steps of the roaring ladder, and then
to clear the top on the last try,
alive enough to spawn and die.

Stop, back off. The salmon breaks
water, and now my body wakes
to feel the unpolluted joy
and criminal leisure of a boy –
no rainbow smashing a dry fly
in the white run is free as I,
here squatting like a dragon on
time's hoard before the day's begun!

Fierce, fireless mind, running downhill.
Look up and see the harbor fill:
business as usual in eclipse
goes down to the sea in ships –
wake of refuse, dacron rope,
bound for Bermuda or Good Hope,
all bright before the morning watch
the wine-dark hulls of yawl and ketch.

I watch a glass of water wet
with a fine fuzz of icy sweat,
silvery colors touched with sky,
serene in their neutrality –
yet if I shift, or change my mood,
I see some object made of wood,
background behind it of brown grain,
to darken it, but not to stain.

O that the spirit could remain
tinged but untarnished by its strain!
Better dressed and stacking birch,
or lost with the Faithful at Church –
anywhere, but somewhere else!
And now the new electric bells,
clearly chiming, "Faith of our fathers,"
and now the congregation gathers.

O Bible chopped and crucified
in hymns we hear but do not read,
none of the milder subtleties
of grace or art will sweeten these
stiff quatrains shoveled out four-square –
they sing of peace, and preach despair;
yet they gave darkness some control,
and left a loophole for the soul.

When will we see Him face to face?
Each day, He shines through darker glass.
In this small town where everything
is known, I see His vanishing
emblems, His white spire and flag-
pole sticking out above the fog,
like old white china doorknobs, sad,
slight, useless things to calm the mad.

Hammering military splendor,
top-heavy Goliath in full armor –
little redemption in the mass
liquidations of their brass,
elephant and phalanx moving
with the times and still improving,
when that kingdom hit the crash:
a million foreskins stacked like trash ...

Sing softer! But what if a new
diminuendo brings no true
tenderness, only restlessness,
excess, the hunger for success,
sanity or self-deception
fixed and kicked by reckless caution,
while we listen to the bells –
anywhere, but somewhere else!

O to break loose. All life's grandeur
is something with a girl in summer ...
elated as the President
girdled by his establishment
this Sunday morning, free to chaff
his own thoughts with his bear-cuffed staff,
swimming nude, unbuttoned, sick
of his ghost-written rhetoric!

No weekends for the gods now. Wars
flicker, earth licks its open sores,
fresh breakage, fresh promotions, chance
assassinations, no advance.
Only man thinning out his kind
sounds through the Sabbath noon, the blind
swipe of the pruner and his knife
busy about the tree of life ...

Pity the planet, all joy gone
from this sweet volcanic cone;
peace to our children when they fall
in small war on the heels of small
war – until the end of time
to police the earth, a ghost
orbiting forever lost
in our monotonous sublime.

by Robert Lowell, from Near the Ocean (1967)

Since I'm in a class on the guy, and it happens to be fairly early on a Sunday morning, I thought I'd share this.

Glass Hotel

A long, long day gave way to a long and fulfilling evening. The highlight was probably when Stephin Merritt's boyfriend told me he liked my saddle shoes. Or when I got back to my room and got to cocoon myself away from the rain.


I will have to talk about my love for Robyn Hitchcock another day, but here is a nightcap for you. If you're reading this, thank you.

-Robyn Hitchcock, "Glass Hotel," from Eye (1990)