We’ve corporated the Bill of Rights. Our lovely bottled waters overlook the misty oceans. More important, though, are our bevelled heads, eloquently sculpted, bent
into vigorous debates; we’ve delegates from the slipshod memories of pining pines, breezy breezes and precious protections of liberty strewn by the squirrels, eaten by the wood
peckers. We rise to meet our historical challenge. Every day our beds are perfumed with a continuing series of constitutional amendments. We ache in ways that give us
pleasure, America’s new blueprint for capital impoverishment. Blue balls and sogged faces.
I call it dipping their toe in the cold waters of fear. —Alfred Hitchcock
that which weaves us all together — and so intricately, so delicately — is fear.
lately, for me, agoraphobia. also, always, being on an airplane. yet the undeniable joy of getting out and about. of seeing the world.
what are phobias but fears? and what is it that fear is, in- evitably, so afraid of? well, death.
what is death? this gets a bit difficult to assess. but the fear is consistent.
people afraid of touch, of proximity, of physical intimacy (would that this were a redundant phrase).
people are so often afraid of even a little bit of death. one might add that a little death (which is no small thing) can go a long way...
...think intense and concen- trated release of tension. think marriage; think affair. think syphilis; etc.
it was a fabulous affair.
he concentrated for so long that he blew a gasket (a blood vessel in the corner of his eye).
fear of public speaking, that old standard: the purported “fear #1” ... which i equate with performance anxiety.
(yet, how embodying a character that is not one’s own can often reduce so-called “stage fright.”)
the titillation of duplicity. the horrors of same.
i sometimes enjoy something so deeply (for example, a tv series or a novel) that as the end
nears
i start reducing the speed of my intake (realizing how precious my time is with it, reveling and relishing in (the relish- ing of) it, all the while getting slower and slower ... and ... slower ...
until i simply refuse to finish it. ever.
it continues to exist, is always as alive as ever. or almost as much as it was when my focus was laser beam to the screen, to each page.
how this is only one of the numerous ways in which i deliberately and successfully avoid death.
That process of putting the puzzle of you (that’s me) together in front of the someone (whom we shall name I Wanna), at least as much as that control
is yours (that’s mine)…. It’s laughable to me that I’m even an ounce of a mystery. And I really know that I’m not (and never
was) brooding. But I can find myself (and have on too often an occasion) jaw-droppingly amazed at how large and self-important parts of me remain so unfiguroutable to the folks
I’d really think I’d get got by. That’d be those closest, especially those with whom I set out (with sheer intentionality) to make .. the most
close. I generally chalk this off to just one of those things I’ve lived with ever since refusing to be read like a book. And who really wants (to be) Ducky when Ren McCormack’s
in town?! When it comes to such puzzles, I suppose it might be true that the secret to being a you (or a me) might lie somewhere a whole
lot closer to the being than the showing. This thought, and ones of me peering out
my bedroom window over and over and over, age six through seventeen,
often accompany each other–another unnecessary mystery, perhaps, but what’s a big backyard tree if not a
puzzle of some sort? A puzzle with maybe just too many branches, I am thinking. But still .. memories. Having my eyes stretch almost all the
way through the slats of the blinds when (and how often!) up pops a little rainstorm that’s soon enough
spitting sticks (little branches of elm) all over the backyard (which is pretty big). But what’s even to be made of the concept of big when later that same week, say: your
self-same eyes (through the very same slats) are all agog with MOVEMENT. There’s
a hailstorm, to say the least. Wherein,
according to the pelted alarms going off all over town – there almost surely must have been living somewhere within it (at the very least) a tornado (or two?). Now that kid knows well
that the elm’s got sticks and that the elm’s got, well, a super extra long and thick arm of yet another elm tree .. that halfway up itself at a
ninety degree angle there’s a long .. let’s call it a
bough .. from which a weathered rope drips
almost all the way down to a small but
familiar dirt patch (that’s churning up
a loaf of mud on this occasion), that has
dangling from it, knotted to it, an old
Uniroyal tractor tire. Yes, that same tire
about which everyone who’s even actually visited has always asked “How exactly did that get up there?” (“Wull, I dunno .. Dad?”) .. And you’ve swung from that tire for ages. And
what happens when – no, don’t look out there now! –
just past where the rope is tight-strung, somewhere just about where the tree’s HEART (the
WHOLE tree’s heart) must surely beat, or so
you’ve always figured, what happens if it just
SNAPS!? And then, with a little whirl of the Pinto’s wagon’s windshield wipers, say .. after who knows
what all destruction takes place, mostly just in the form of time passing, here you are, sitting at the trunk of that great elm.
It’s not really even sittable anymore. It’s just sort of there, without anything else but the mud and a few of the old beagle’s bones. This is, needless to say, well after you’ve picked
which anti-hero you’ll still be trailing desperately (more
than likely long after you’ve given up on the idea of any hero at all, really). Gone are the days filled
with thoughts about miracles performed by Dad. Gone are the days laden with weather-related fears, or of being beholden to anything that might snap a tree in two for any other reason but to create a product
(Like a piece of that puzzle? That’s another thought that doesn’t cross your mind, of course.) Today, there’s just the mud, the blankest
canvas of the past, a bit of chicken that’s been rubberized by a long-gone dog and a backyard that if given notice at all just .. seems considerably smaller. And if one were to
approach this figure of you, one might almost hear a sort of tinkle-tink emanating from somewhere just behind
his big round eyes and think here’s a guy
who’s just about out-maneuvered lanky
into something a bit more stump-like. And, yeah,
that would be, in retrospect an unrepentant me, more drool than brood, with a head clean empty
but for a percussive, metallic-arrhythmic garble coming from a group of history’s I Wanna’s
all clinking and clanging and whining to be found and fully figured out.
