Friday the 13th? What of it?
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DARKNESS, DARKNESS
So I have this mouth shut-off button installed on the side of my head, and I am constantly laying on it full force to try and stop some of the really stupid shit before it ejects from my mouth. No way I can stop it from running through my head, but . . . It is the end of spring, the beginning of summer. This is normally one of the brightest times in my year. This year, though, the darkness is unrelenting. I need another button that shines a Q-Beam, to try and see through the blackness. I’d be laying on that one, too, if I had it; not that it would do much good now.
I had a dream one time, back in my heavy-duty partying days. I dreamt that I got so messed up this one night that the vicious hangover I woke up with the next day didn’t go away, I had to deal with it for weeks … for weeks, walking around with a pounding headache and the sound of shattered glass rustling around inside of my head. In my dream I briefly considered a gun for relief, but instead ended up smoking some kick-ass cheeba with this dizzy chick I’d met, before going to bed with her for three days. That got rid of the hangover, but then I had this hippie chick hanging off of me . . . I had that dream my junior year in college, while in real life I was dealing with the girl of my dreams getting pregnant and deciding to keep the baby and abort me, instead. After that, in quick succession, academic probation, check (I literally partied for days on end, no time for class or books that semester); death of a friend, check; parents’ divorce, check; death of a close friend, check.
That was one hell of a semester, boy. The only period of time in my life I truly ran off the rails. I ended up spending a lot of the time “experimenting” with window pane LSD, with my friend Phil. Purple micro-dots and shit. I guess I felt like I needed to expand my mind or something. Awhile after that, I had quit the psychedelics and was staying down at the beach cabin for the weekend, and a couple of friends showed up one night. They were tripping, and had just come from the Eagles Lodge down at Crystal Beach, of all places. I tried to imagine what the normal clientele in that place must have been thinking, looking at my friends; who told me they were so fucked up that they sat in a booth and ordered beers, but were too freaked out to drink them because the mortar between the bricks on the interior facade of the lodge was literally oozing out and running down the walls. So they got the fuck out of there, and came looking for me.
Around that same time some drunken girl picked me up in the bar at Steak ‘n’ Ale one night. She planned to take me home with her, I think. But instead she ran her LeSabre off the road at 70 mph, out in the middle of fucking nowhere, some rice fields off of IH 10 between Winnie and Anahuac. She never even hit the brakes. We skidded wildly across rice fields, taking out a couple of barbed-wire fences along the way, before going nose down into a 10 ft. deep drainage canal. I was belted in but still hit the windshield hard enough with my head to crack it, in a circular pattern roughly the size and shape of my skull. Noticing that was the last thing I remembered, that and seeing the girl trying to get loose from her seat belt and climbing long ways up the inside of the passenger compartment, to get to a window. I also had the vague sensation of really cold water creeping up the legs of my jeans, just as I slipped into shock and unconsciousness . . . Some farmer found the car, six hours later, while riding his tractor around in his fields. It was nearly half a mile off the road, semi-submerged in this fucking ditch. The car was perpendicular to the ground, and the only thing that stopped me from drowning was the seat belt, which kept my upper body out of the water. I was submerged from the waist down. I did break three of my ribs; but that seemed minor, considering. It took them three days to find the girl, who had made it out of the car, and then took off across the rice fields in the dark, in a panic. She’d looked over at me after I’d passed out, and thought I was dead.
Anyway, point being, I’ve had some eventful times along the way. But I never was fazed by any of it for too long, because I always had this inner sense that I was being looked after, and that I was doing what the person looking after me wanted me to do, more or less. Maybe not some of the specific details so much, but I was living my life, not sitting through it. And I could bounce back from anything.
So, that’s about it. Right now, I’m in one of those dark times again, when I cannot tell down from up, and the only thing I know to do is dive off of the deep end, and see where I end up.
Like an Inca, or something.
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LOST IN AUSTIN
I was sitting in the Liberty Lunch, pretty fucked up already, nursing a squat 12 oz. bottle of Red Stripe beer that was rapidly getting tepid. I didn’t even like Red Stripe, but I was drinking one. The bottle was sweating, and every time I grabbed it I could feel the beer inside getting warmer. It was humid as hell. Back then, Liberty Lunch had no roof on it, and as I stretched out at the table, trying to un-kink some of the muscles in my back and legs, I found myself gazing up at the firmament, spread out above me like a big black tarpaulin with a bunch of little holes poked in it, letting light through. That in turn reminded me of an old Bruce Cockburn lyric about kicking the darkness “‘til it bleeds daylight.” I was very much in the darkness then, figuratively and literally; but to that point I hadn’t been doing much kicking. In truth, at times I felt as if I were sinking fast, like a stone.
As a distraction from my thoughts, I turned and watched two girls do the bump and grind with each other on the dance floor, just off to my right. They were moving to the music of the local reggae band up on stage, doing a lame cover of Bob Marley’s “Get Up, Stand Up”. I had been mesmerized by the band for a while; mainly by the lead singer, who was about 5′ 7″ and had long, unkempt white-boy dreadlocks down to his knees, almost. As he sang he prowled the small stage, swinging his hair around for effect. It was interesting for about five minutes.
Anyway, these girls dancing next to me were real lesbians, not like the ‘lipstick lesbians’ one saw in R-rated movies, all soft and pretty and desirable. Like a lot of guys, I found those sort of cinematic depictions of otherwise normal hetero girls suddenly overtaken with the compulsion to do each other to be pleasantly compelling, in their way. But these girls weren’t anything like those. Not at all. They were the real thing, going at it in earnest, and I realized the whole thing up close like that was the opposite of titillating to me. Eventually, I had to look away.
I left the bar pretty soon after that, stumbling down 2nd Street into the darkness, without much of an idea of where to go or what to do next. It would be a couple more years before I did get some kind of idea about that, but that is not really the point. The thing is, I learned something that night; or had something re-enforced I knew already. That is, sometimes things that look real good from a distance or from an obscured or distorted viewpoint, don’t look so great when you see them clearly and up close. Myself, I had been following a dream I’d had for years, a dream to live high and wild and more-or-less outside the rules. It was really a dream of being free, or at least what my idea of ‘free’ was at the time. I had taken just about every wrong turn one could take in pursuit of my dream, and now here I was. This is what my dream had led to – me being high and stupid drunk on a dark street in Austin, with no place I really wanted to go, nothing I really wanted to do, no one I could go see to tell my troubles to.
I think it was around then that it occurred to me, I might want to start looking for some other dream to follow.
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SAD, BUT HAPPY
This is going to be a great Labor Day weekend. We are all moved into the new house, garden home, whatever. Also, my ex recently moved out of state, in the pursuit of happiness (I wish her well), and she left my 15-year-old back with me, presumably permanently. I smile every time I think about that. The hurricane that was supposed to come here didn’t come here. And, oh yeah, I found a new thing to barbecue – thick cut “country” pork back bone, specially cut for me by the butcher at the Market Basket on Phelan and 23rd. Marinate them for a couple of days in a brown sugar-based rub, then put them on the cooker with a trimmed brisket and 10-12 bone-in chicken thighs, throw on a handful of Zummo’s Party Time links at the end. Fucking awesome! The backbone is tender and juicy and tasty – smoky, and vaguely sweet. Damn, I’m fired up about that.
Finally, I really like these new Miller Lite 16 oz. aluminum bottles, the ones that come in a nine-pack. I can hear the sneers from here. You know, I’ll drink the classy stuff, out of glass and with my pinkie out, when the elite crowd is around … and I am sitting in the air conditioning, discussing passionately the relative merits of Bon Iver and/or Grizzly Bear or Edward Sharpe. When I am at the beach, with the ‘Stones cranked up to 11, or out in the backyard, barbecuing meat with the Black Angels turned up so fucking loud my new garden home neighbors are whipping out their lists of deed restrictions with one hand while dialing 9-1-1 with the other … then, I’ll be slamming down the Miller Lite 16 oz.-ers, thanks. My new neighbors had better get used to it, by the way. Love the Black Angels. And fucking awesome, these aluminum bottles.
The unusual nine-pack configuration means I have to brush off the old math skills, too; which can only be a good thing. Let’s see … I currently have 26 29 27 of those kick-ass motherfuckers iced down in the cooler on my back porch, getting nice and cold for Daddy. And they should all be gone by the time this weekend finally peters out, many hours from now. Awesome!
I was driving to work one day this past week, and I was pretty bummed out about it, more so than usual. The weather was shitty, for one thing. My neck hurt. I was pissed off about something at work, and it had been distracting me and gnawing at me for a couple of days. I was a bit out of sorts, to tell the truth. That is not me, and I was really screwed up by it.
I was idly listening to the XM, the Underground Garage channel, and Andrew Loog Oldham’s show was on. Oldham was prattling on about something … “todgers”, I believe he was saying, whatever the fuck … Keith had a big todger, Jagger’s was not so big … it was annoying, and I thought, “How much more fucked up can this day get?” Then Oldham finally got back to the music, and played Leon Russell’s “Stranger In A Strange Land.”
“Yes!” I love that song so much. I looked through the windshield of my truck, at the low, scudding, grey clouds moving by, remnants of the far outer reaches of Hurricane Isaac. I thought about my son, who I had just dropped off at school, being home with me again. And I thought about my girl and how lucky I was to find someone like her at this late date. Someone who gave me my human edge back, who made me smile, and laugh, and love unconditionally … who reawakened me after I had been sleepwalking through the dark for so many months and years. Someone who made me think I wanted to live in a fucking garden home, for Christ’s sake.
I thought about all that, while meanwhile this gorgeous song was booming out of my truck’s speaker system. A stranger in a strange land – it sounds quaint, but I suppose I have sort of felt like a stranger in a strange land for a while now. Tell me why? the song says. I don’t know why. And listening to it, and thinking about all the things it made me think about, made me realize that I will never really understand any of it – not in this life, anyway.
In a way, I have always known that. What has always made me happy is just riffing on being here at all, slowing myself down and watching it all unfold, however it will unfold. That is what makes me feel so good. Just watching it all unfold. I just have to remind myself sometimes.
Or be reminded. I looked up at those clouds again, and said thanks. To who or what I cannot say, for sure. I have heard all the arguments against some of the things I believe in, and they are compelling on a certain level. But in my truck on the way to work the other morning, there was no way in hell you could have convinced me my gratitude was misplaced. Sometimes, you think just know.
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