oddfellows

You know, sometimes, and just a very rare, kind, sometimes, old life starts seeping in to the cloudy way life changes. Tonight I watched an episode of Ken Burns' documentary Baseball. Satchel Paige, one remembers, was, maybe, the best pitcher in all of baseball. He was black, and so he never got the shot to pitch against Murders' Alley on the Yanks, which is too bad, because that would have shut their asses down in a way that would have made anyone I know & love happy, 'cos, really, fuck the Yankees, but, anyway, it reminds me of the tiers I exist within. So, what--I google search our past--we can all find memories of ourselves--I found pictures of me guitar in a band that I loved being in with my best friends, of a show in southern California at the end of a very long & hard tour and all that sort of thing. We had traveled from Arizona out to Tennessee and back, had one night in AZ again before hitting the west coast. I stayed that night, after a show & party, at my girlfriend's place. We were 18 or so--like, candles and radiohead and we took a pretty memorable shower together--and we didn't know how our van would make it up the I-5 tomorrow. But, you know, it's a little lucky, and I hate to say it, how the internets allows these things to survive.

The show, in particular, I was able to google image pictures of  was at a very special place called Koos Cafe in Santa Ana (do you remember this place from the '90s?). I recall seeing flyers from a show a few nights before still stapled to the phone poles for Forstella Ford, who we had played with three or four times before all over the place. On the porch of Koos there were condoms--some new, some used--and a vegetarian kitchen where the real kitchen of this place used to be in the pre-war state where a family kept a place there. I felt so cool. It was cold for an Arizona boy--probably I had on my dickies jacket--and before the show we hit a Korean doughnut shop that was vegan. The old living room was the main show space. There were fireplaces on either side of the room. It was very long, and full, and there were people standing outside, looking in thru the windows to see us play. I don't remember who we played with, and I don't even remember where we stayed that night. I remember getting stuck in traffic and being on The 5 which I also remember was not the best way to be getting there. It felt like I was doing something special with my life, even though, especially now, I know, it was only cool to about 16 people in the world. Ten, or more, years later, tho, I can look these pictures up on google, I can tell you that the shirt I was wearing I stole from my sister's goodwill finds, my amp and cabnet were from Mike Pinkstaff, the cool punk kid from my high school. I had two tattoos, and felt so cool for having them.

It's been about ten years since that show. It's even been about five years since I started this blog. In that time, I've gotten married, had two kids, got divorced, had two kids, some degrees; I've lived in four or five different cities and gotten a lot more tattoos and maybe even figured out the type of life I'd like to lead--I don't really know, yet. Really, tho, not a lot has changed, and this makes me feel conflicted. As I write this, I hear kids skateboarding outside my apartment. There are some guys drinking and some other guys collecting cans and bottles. On the floor of my apartment I have a pile of clean clothes, and another pile of dirty clothes, I have a few stacks of books, some papers I need to grade, lots of shoes--a bill and a bag of corn chips. Not much has changed. I still feel punk rock, even as I know that punk rock kids would never see me as such. I think I'm fat, I worry about how I'm going to keep my daughter in the yellow dress, I wonder if I've missed my chance to make poetry writing my life. Every night I have nightmares. Some of them are terrible all the way thru. Some of them are only terrors once I wake up. I live in a city I hate, for example, but that I'm tied to, that I know is offering me something during the current economic downturn.

My apartment has two things hanging in it: a painting of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and a painting by my friend and fellow poet, Zach. They kind of face each other in a strange way, like they're asking something of one another. I have a housekey on a nail, a painting on a cross-section of a small pine tree trunk that my daughter made. Above my bedroom, I have the horse shoe from my love's apartment in Arizona to catch any good luck that comes my way. It isn't working in the way I'd like. Some nights, I think it just catches bad memories that I wish would escape with the steam.

The way I thought I'd earn my life, or my ease of life, is not working out. Before, like ten years--maybe--ago, I'd look at me and think that maybe I'm making it, or maybe I'm poor but happy. Now, tho, I'm living it, and I don't think I was right. Sure, I can point to this woman, and I can point to some poems that people have maybe read somewhere, and I can say that I'm a good dad, and maybe even a good person in general. I can check off a list of things I've wanted to accomplish, and that looks better than maybe some folks' lists look. But I'm still very alone, and when I think of myself in the future, I see me alone there, too--save some calls from my daughter, maybe some kind letter from an old friend. But the idea of carving a special arc out of my life feels foreign on some level. Making a difference in someone's life has gone from immediate to in-a-few-years to when-I'm-late-career-in-poetry to nonexistent much more quickly than I'd have liked to fancy.

In the mid-'90s there was a Victory band called Snapcase.  They had an album called Progression thru Unlearning. Since it came out, but especially since high school, I've really like that idea. I now see times where the idea was spot-on, and I feel empty, and other times where it really does feel like a proper progression, which is to say that things feel like they're getting more grey, they make less sense, but that allows me to be more forgiving, more kind, and, I can (very luckily) say, more aware and open to the new things I need to learn and to be in my life.