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| Thursdays can be overwhelming. A lot of bad hearts afoot. Just joy-stranglers roaming the streets. You got to hood up and get bearded just to ward them off, stroll around like Gandalf with a secret bag of power. It's going to happen, the good life. Just a touch more momentum and we can storm the lines, all a-holler. What other choice is there?
Really though, they aren't bad hearts. Just spoiled a bit, by whatever, maybe even by their own hand, willfully. It takes a lot of work not to be horrible. To be good, well, that's even harder. Could be impossible. But must try! It helps to have the bear's strength of a group of people whose mettle is an adamantium-gold, battle-tested and eager for a true meal. Communion buddies, none of this halfhearted "fellowship." The Jesus and all. Huh?
I've been reading Galway Kennell a lot. Familiar? He's quite the man about town. A soul worth checking out. A quick excerpt, from the poem "Conversation":
--Where would you like to be right now?
--I'd like to be at McCoy Stadium
watching a good game of baseball.
--I like it when there's a runner on third.
At each pitch he hops for home,
then immediately scurries back.
--If it's a wild pitch, he hovers
a moment to be sure it's really wild
and then is quick--like a tear,
with a tiny bit of sunlight inside it.
--Why the bit of sunlight?
--It would be his allotment of hope.
What else? My new-ish band is playing Friday at that hallowed old outhouse, Martin's Bar and Lounge. Come check it out. We'll have us a good time.
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| First cool night. My evening cigarette required a jacket, the long corduroy thing, almost a cloak, my momma gave me years ago. I used to sleep in it, sometimes, especially on tour. It always felt like home, that jacket, more than even my house, my bed. Cities and cities worth of me.
Thank god someone finally washed it.
I don't know, maybe it's the air, how the slightest chill makes the whole sky sharper, in better definition, but I feel it stirring, some great adventure coming on. A scary feeling, a little bit, but maybe the most wonderful one I know of.
I never talk about this, and definitely not in such a public place (if anyone even still reads these things, I don't know), but Colour Revolt left on their first real tour without me the other day. I think about waking up in the van, my coat wrapped around me, Sean sleepy driving, watching the sun come up over mountains in Washington, flat grey Kansas seems holy, a million corn fields in Indiana, the swamp waters out of Baton Rouge. I miss that, a new city, a different hope every evening.
But I can see, too, how the last four years broke me. Not just the band, but a whole tearing down of ideals, of so many ways I saw my life happening, and everyone else's life too. I realized tonight how bitter I've gotten, how spiteful, loner, and paranoid I am.
Or maybe it's just how I'm acting. I can't be this person, not really. Just a middling stage, junior high all over again. Except I spent junior high in my grandfather's easy chair, watching My So-Called Life with the sound turned mostly down, so my grandparents wouldn't hear it. Claire Danes was so beautiful in that show, with her sweaters and voice-overs. My first love, maybe. Now I'm watching them old, not able to walk anymore, my grandfather mostly blind, my grandmother terrified at just how old she finally is.
So many great and horrible things have happened. To me and everyone else. There's no making sense of it, not yet at least. And if the life I'm living isn't the one I wanted since I was twelve, well. There's not much I can do about that except make the most of it. Not in that lame "life hands you lemons" kind of way. But there's just no point in bitching about it.
I feel so blessed, really honest to God almost enchanted, sometimes, just in all the areas I never expected. Sometimes maybe the miracle is when the miracle doesn't happen. You're handed a thousand broken scraps and told, "Make something."
But how, God? What is it that you want from me, what do all your mean weird followers want from me? I guess that's not the right response. I guess I should just set to work now, trying to build something, without expecting anything except that it will be right, or as right as it can be.
And that's enough. It'll have to be.
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| I fumbled with my keyring tonight. Outside my old home in Oxford, trying to spot the tiger-striped back door key by starlight. So many keys to things that don't belong to me anymore: two for Purple Haze, one for my old van, the trailer, the hitch lock, the old case for my SG. I still have my gaudy Highlander key, appropriately sword-shaped, and the flat bronze of my parents' house.
It's a shaking off of the old locks, casting off chains of forever ago.
But it's still nice to carry the keys, to hear them jingle my pockets like a rich man.
I do feel like a rich man, a keeper of secrets, but no jailer. You can lock stuff up with keys, but that's only half of what they're for.
Happy summer's night. Love y'all,
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| I just watched two squirrels bark out a conversation on a branch above my deck. Two distinct and different tones, one's tail still, it's whole body frozen in listening, while the other gutturals, tail flitting in and out of question marks, exclamation points, even a parentheses. The back and forth. I almost felt like I could follow it.
So many languages I don't know, will never know. I like this world.
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