The 505 1st

As of this writing, I am enrolled in a graduate stylistics course, hereafter, the 505.

Here is an assignment.


Write: Imagine you have been asked to write liner notes for a musical album (your fave).
Liner notes may give brief descriptions of songs, or may give some cultural/historical/biographical data. The genre is open. Your job: to compose those album liner notes, discussing whatever it is you want to discuss, but in a way that reflects the style of the music. So, for instance, if you choose a hip-hop album, the liner notes should read like the hip hop music they address. If you write about country, the liner notes should be in "countrese."

My fave you ask. Not the fave but a fave: August and Everything After from Counting Crows.

 Maria says she’s dying, through the door I hear her crying.

Why?

Hear me out. Hear it out. When you’ve got nothing but time this, thing between us, is worth the time.

Everything works. It all fits and it needs worn. Maybe I’m lying, maybe I’m wrong, and maybe I’ve done this sort of thing before. Maybe it’s a love/hate relationship with August. Maybe he’s not your type but I’m sure there’s something in a shade of grey.  You laugh with insecurity and tell me the words, so many words, don’t hit you in the gut and don’t make you feel wrenched or torn or wistful, and it just doesn’t do it for you. But maybe, man, I’m right. As right as the rain that falls in Baltimore, and maybe the words matter because words matter so damn much to you and me that’s why we can’t tear our ears away; not in 1993 and not and now in 2019.

Because: I walk along these hillsides in the summer 'neath the sunshine I am feathered by the moonlight falling down on me

Maybe you’re just afraid, afraid of knowing,  of giving in, of being changed by it. What would that do to you? Maybe you’re wrong. Maybe you won’t or can’t feel, in fear, the periphery from the core, the essential from the meaningless. Maybe some things are too bright. For you.

Because: Start threading a needle, brush past the shuttle that slides through the cold room. Start turning the wool across the wire, roll a new life over.

I want you to love August. I want you to feel the way I feel when the keyboard swells from nothingness and that guitar riff reverberates on the opening track like death fading to life. I want you to be transported the way I am; to know that you’ll feel something, about music, about words, about life...and how lyrics and music are important and why they express BOTH the terrestrial and the sublime of humanity. I want you to recognize. What’s wrong with you? if you don’t.

Because: Round here we talk just like lions but we sacrifice just like lambs. Round here she’s slipping through my hands.

You don’t believe me and I don’t blame you. I can’t blame you because I know what’s at stake. Judge lest ye be judged but as I write these words baby, thinking about it, I’m willing…to be judged. By you.

Because: When the kindness falls like rain, it washes her away and Anna begins to change my mind...

And your mind matters and your heart matters and you deserve this. We all deserve this; it’s why we’re here, you and me, us and them: to be moved. Like this. To know art and how it’s a door that needs opened so life -your life, my life, our lives- can be looked at, heard, felt. Lived. But you have to let it, convince it, shove it tabula rasa into your heart.

Because: Lay me down in a field of flame and heather, render up my body into the burning heart of god in the belly of a black-winged bird.

I hope you let it in.

Extreme/Confide

Life is lived at the extremes.

Can you believe I just wrote that bullshit? You probably can.

Edit: Life is felt at the extremes.

But what does that even mean?

Edit: Life is remembered at the extremes.

Ok, now we’re cooking with gas. Certainly, the extreme points of our life will be remembered more so than the banal, ho-hum experiences like commuting to work on a Tuesday in 2004.

But, [oh god here he goes] “extreme” [told you] is subjective.

[eye roll]

Climbing Mt Everest might be extreme for some while for others, ordering the veal, may be living on the edge.

I tell you this because this decade-long midlife crisis I find myself in has me thinking about life.

[fiercer eye roll]

However, with technology, the life lived in the middle, the heretofore, unremembered life, can now be brought to mind.

Behold: pictures.

Like this one I recently discovered in a box that had to be explored after our move.

That’s me there on the right with the Yahtzee teeth. Circa 1980 I am guessing, maybe earlier.

Pictures contextualize the ho-hum and the banal into a wistfulness for the mundane because you and me we were different then.

Remember?

Remember how happy go lucky you were and my god how confident you were with your let me at ‘em attitude and…

-Did you say you were having a decade-long midlife crisis?

Uh-huh, doesn’t’ everyone?

No and what are Yahtzee teeth?

That is when god has your teeth in his hand like a handful of Yahtzee dice and shakes ‘em around and then throws ‘em into your mouth all willy-nilly and however they land, there’s your grill.

You ever hear of braces?

Sure have. You ever realize not everyone in Barberton Ohio in the 70’s & 80’s had dental insurance? Or health insurance?

Hey, I don’t need this working-class hero crap!

You need something.

The point of the picture is that it reminded me that I was really a happy kid; even though we were poor and even though I needed braces and even though my clothes were often torn and often not very clean. I was happy. There on that beach on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, happy.

***

What does it mean to confide?

To whom do we confide and what does that person to whom we confide, say about us?

What if you confide to no one other than yourself? What if, as Adam Duritz sings in the song Speedway from the This Desert Life album:

I got some things I can’t tell anyone I got some things I just can’t say

Maybe you confide in others. Maybe you have people you trust. Maybe you feel known by others. Perhaps you aren’t lonely in the least bit. You might be secure in yourself and know that you are a good person and that even if you confide your fears and insecurities and all the negative space of you, that you will still be loved, by someone, in the world.

Remember how I said life was remembered at the extremes? I used to confide in people. I was a young man…and I used to confide in people; used to trust them…people.

I trusted the worst people. Trusted people that used that trust against me, in the worst possible way. And I am damaged as a result.

Irreparably?

Mr. Jones And Me

People that get paid to talk into a microphone should be better.

Are we asking too much of people that get paid to talk into a microphone?

Look, I can't afford the Amazon Audible app and I can't get books on CD because my toddler shoved a nickel in the CD player and the dealer wants a gazillion dollars to take the whole stereo out, retreive the nickel, and put the whole stereo back in, so I am stuck listening to the radio for my two hour daily commute. Don't judge me.

Ergo, sports talk radio is a part of my commute.



As soon as I heard it I asked Siri to send me a text:

Bomani Jones said "...there's literally, not a soul on the planet who can guard him."

I rolled my eyes harder than they've ever been rolled and then said something to the effect of:

"Jesus fucking christ!" then immediately turned the station.

A fucking polka station would be better than this!

Literally? LITERALLY?!?!?   Literally? LITERALLY?!?!?

OK Mr. Literally, how the fuck would a soul (a non-extended, immaterial, thinking substance) guard an extended, material substance?

It's the classic problem of parallelism you fuck!

Why would a soul even contemplate guarding an NBA player at all, let alone in the goddamn playoffs!

A soul can't even foul, even if he/she/it/god/monad/angel wanted to!


Just stop saying literally. This word must be banned.

Censorship is a last resort but this is a safety issue.

My safety issue.

Because if I hear another goddamn person who gets paid to talk into a microphone misuse it I am going to drive off a fucking bridge.

Safety first.

Please, give the mic to someone that knows how to use it:

Melancholia

There are some things in this world that set off a melancholia in me. Now, truth be told, I am of a wistful nature and have noticed this a little more in my, ahem, midlife. But having recently finished The Perks of Being a Wallflower, I can add another item to the melancholia triggers list. The book in and of itself with its universalish “we’re all misfits in some way” certainly plays a part but this is not the only thing triggering the melancholia. (You keep using that word, I do not think it means, what you think it means)

You see the author of Perks, Stephen Chbosky, is from Upper St Claire Pennsylvania; my wife is from Upper St. Claire Pennsylvania. And goddamn it, my childhood in poverty has created in me a strong inferiority complex, at least as far as it relates to fiduciary matters, and so while I’m reading Perks I am envisioning my wife in her teenage years in her wealthy neighborhood, with her wealthy friends, in wealthy clothes and her wealthy boyfriend who is the heir to a custom home construction company and this all pulls the trigger back nice and slow…till the shots are fired…

releasing waves of melancholia, of judgement of me as a person, of my worth…when my fiduciary worth is basically…worthless.

But I too am a misfit Mr. Chbosky. A misfit who has, at least for now, broken the cycle of poverty for my children but it COULD NOT have happened without my wife. She is the wage earner, she is the one that provides and I have no, absolutely no, idea how she came to marry me. I just hope she doesn’t wake up soon or come out of the dissociative fugue she must be in and realizes she married me.

Which brings me to another melancholia trigger, Counting Crows first album August and Everything After, especially those first few seconds of Round Here with the ethereal keyboard and barren guitar riff leading to these lyrics…

Round here we talk just like lions but we sacrifice like lambs
Round here, she’s slipping through my hands…

Firecracker Fuchsia

She was a marketer. Her specialty was naming colors. Her calling card became firecracker fuchsia. It won’t be in Wikipedia but everybody has something. She also loved the Counting Crows and collected choose your own adventure books; spent way too much money on this but everybody has something. My vice was collecting felonies…of the arson type. I burned up more than my fair share of abandoned sheds and cars. I ain’t sayin' it was right but I am sayin' they was abandoned and that oughta count for something. We met through a prison pen pal program. To this day I can’t think of how a successful marketer with copper mint in her color naming collection would get involved in a prison pen pal program. I sometimes wonder if it is some part of community service she has to do. Maybe for some sort of misdemeanor arson? Hot. You’re probably wondering what prison is like and if I have set anything on fire in prison. The answer is that the showers aren’t like what you hear, they are worse. Which is why I set an inmates bed on fire in prison. I told her about it in a letter. I thought I was communicating, opening myself up, risking, being vulnerable. She reported it and I got another 3-5 added to my sentence. Just great, another 3-5 years and a Counting Crows Round Here CD. Did she think I had a cd player? What kind of pen pal program puts prison inmates in contact with sadistic sociopaths that send you the lyrics to Mr. Jones? It’s obviously a song about his penis. I’m in prison for god’s sake! I don’t need lyrics about penises or just one penis, singular. I guess I have learned some grammar through the writing class but still. I still think about her. I wish I could reread the letters but I set them on fire. Maybe she’s out there naming a color, maybe it’ll be prison grey.