My Darling, My Insomnia

in which our tired heroine gives herself over to temptation

Thought is the death of sleep.  As soon as I feel myself begin to rise to the surface of consciousness at one or two or three a.m. I think “don’t think” and my eyes spring open because I’ve thought a thought and now I’m doomed.

First, to contemplate my long complicated relationship with insomnia.   When was this sleepless dye cast?  With the baby and her hunger?   Earlier, when the asthma only allowed for two or three hour trysts before my lungs couldn’t draw another shallow breath and I’d get up to alternate between pacing and the lion pose until I could try again?  But really, it was probably all the way back in college, when loving sleep was up there with watching television in the hierarchy of not cool.  So we haunted cafes with our novels and our notebooks as late as we possibly could, only to turn up on campus five hours later and be expected to think our brightest thoughts.

Next, to ruminate on how much of myself I gave to people I didn’t love and how much love I lavished on the people I did.  Until I didn’t.  Or couldn’t.  To catalogue those moments of brilliance, bright light broken on soft water, that compelled me towards him or him or some other him.  To weigh those moments against the other moments to confirm that always with them it was the law of diminishing returns and I got out before I’d been replenished.

And finally with the name calling.  Idiot.  Lazy.  Bitch.  Coward.  Bad Mother.  Quitter.  Hack.  Crybaby.  Slut. 

It is never the getting of it, it’s the keeping of it that’s the problem.  And oh how I would love to keep this thing.  Weren’t my fingers made to dig in and grip?  Weren’t my hands made to hold to the point of hurting?  I am fighting a thicket of thoughts and on the other side is an unconsciousness I will fall into like a well-earned plate of food or a fuck.

 But some nights, instead, I decide that my mind is a boat in a sea of thinking and I know, strangely enough, deep down where I know my most certain certainties, it’s the boat that gets agitated not the water.  If I can keep the craft calm, the sea responds.  And anyhow, it’ll be ok, because there’s nothing other than these thoughts.  Nothing to reach on the other side of them.  No answers.  No conclusion.  And certainly not sleep.

Randle, Washington By Way of the Rhino’s Horn

In which our rambling heroine rambles in a completely unsurprising turn of events.

I think I could wait tables in this little town, walk across the highway to my rusty old double wide covered in creeping vines turning red in the autumn chill.  I think I could crawl under quilts with something heady to read after a long shift, feel my muscles and bones soften towards sleep.  I think I could be happy enough.

Our waitress is young beneath all of her makeup.  Her thick eyeliner has been applied by a steady and practiced hand which makes it difficult to know for certain but she may even still be in highschool.  The first time I waited tables I too was young.  Young enough to wish I was cruising main street while Rita closed out the night with Chris de Burgh’s ”Lady in Red” on the jukebox.  I would stand on the back slab of concrete staring deep into the darkening horse pastures wearing the itchy, distracted skin of youth and dream about living in a city.  Then, I’d set about emptying the three gallon jug of chicken blood Ollie left just outside the screen door.  He was Norwegian and I always thought this somehow informed his theory that the blood would draw the flies out of the restaurant even though I could see it was only bringing more in from the fields. 

Now I often feel the memory of a dry wind shift the order of my thoughts and I recall with shock how wonderful it felt, how rare and infused with light, to live in a town where strangers passed through only once or twice a year.  I would take up the entire strangeness of them, take it all into myself and be sustained by their otherness for a while.

The last time I waited tables I’d dropped out of college for a semester and returned home where everyone my age was gone or married.  I spent my days off listening to slow music and requesting obscure books from the two-room library on the second floor of the old highschool in front of which, one day, I found a young man I’d never seen before snapping photos.  He also had left college and was working for a seed company picking up and replenishing expired packets of seeds all over the rural southwest.  I asked him to come with me to the little reservoir.  The water had been drained off and hundreds of silver fish were rotting in the soft slope of mud.  The odor was oppressive but the photos would be brilliant.  I drove him to Lyman Lake where one of the Crosby boys took us out in a motorboat.  In the evening I brought him home and cooked him dinner while he made shy conversation with my father.  If he ever told me his name I have long since forgotten it, but the next morning he left a packet of flower seeds on my front doorstep and I planted them in my yard.

More Than Can Be Numbered

in which our restored heroine finally gets the splinter out of her finger.

I’ve gotten good at breaking up with things, which is to say I’ve grown skilled at letting a thing so thoroughly run its course that in the end that thing and I pull apart at our most worried spot without too much resistance.  In this manner I’ve quit everything from gym memberships to religion, piano and guitar lessons, my marriage, writing (twice), the idea of ever returning to work in books and also, most recently, my thirties.   

Here is how I make my exit: First, I collect what matters most.  Then, I assess the remaining debris of what has passed and say ”I cannot” or “I will not carry you”.  Finally, I pull the door shut on a silence where there should be a voice asking me not to go.  

Here are the things I gain and lose:  Optimism.  Belief.  Sorrow.  The opportunity to make amends.  The desire to move forward.  Comfort.  Discomfort.  A really soft t-shirt I used to sleep in.  My ability to think clearly.  A cat. 

What has all this leaving left me but a child, a stack of advance readers copies and a hope, beyond experience and rooted in an abandoned faith, that all that has transpired has mass and weight.  So that some day, like a tired and old American spiritual song, I can give myself  permission to finally lay my burden down.

A Sort of Homecoming

in which our optimistic heroine gets out in the world to encounter hearts like fists, hearts like old paper, like nets, like bear traps, like puddles and the heart that is a lean-to, shade from the heart that is summer, shelter from the heart that is storm.

I thought if I ever set foot in Arizona again it would only be when I could gather my people up in a room somewhere.  What a big nostalgic noise I’d planned on making.  What a joyful reunion.  Instead, I found myself quietly driving just south of the border through a small town called Fredonia with nothing to recommend it except that it was there that I first returned to Arizona after being away for over six years. 

We were on a road trip without an itinerary and stopped at a  little thrift store to look for books and plates.  The sky was expansive and the highway disappeared into a rippling horizon.  I felt almost reverent.  This was the terrain in which I’d come of age, fallen in love and given birth.  Where my father and brother were buried among relatives that lived and died before I knew them.  Now all that remain of us have been scattered like cottonwood seed putting roots down in foreign soil.  I watched my daughter wilt and redden, her hair sticking in tendrils to her ruddy face.  She was frustrated by the inescapable nature of that much heat and I thought, “She doesn’t even know she’s a southwestern baby.  How could she possibly know?”

It seems I’ve chosen exile over most of the last decade from the only geography where I feel truly at home.  Swapping dust and cedar brush, first for the verdant farmlands of central Pennsylvania and now this city and it’s adjacent dripping dark forests, its rivers slicing up the topography, so every direction I go I’m confronted by water.  I’m a desert girl, that I know.  As I dried out in Zion’s park and drove through Kanab and then across the southern border my skin burned and my lips chapped.  I felt hollowed out.  Everything had come to the surface and evaporated in the relentless sun.

Satisfied Blues

in which our rested heroine shelves something unnecessarily clever and goes out to the garden to thin the beets

 

The bullet points of Mississippi John Hurt’s life read like an exercise in patience.  The man recorded some really important tracks in his 30s.  Four decades later America listened to them.   I understand he spent much of the time in between those two events working as a farmer. 

I think about this while I’m thinning the beets and carrots.  It has been raining for weeks and weeks.  Months, actually.  Days and weeks and months of rain.  I’ve been rushing through it with my head down as if anything peripheral might deter me from getting to the other side of all this weather.  As if what awaits on the other side isn’t, inevitably, more rain.  I’m impatient in general but I’m exceptionally impatient for sunshine.  Still, now that I’m out here among the vegetables I realize how loose the soil, how easy the work.  I roll my fingers at the base of the leaves gently and the stems sort themselves out.  I tug ever so slowly and the fine roots give.  This would be a hard job if it weren’t for rain and Mississippi John Hurt to contemplate while I move along the rows.   I consider, what is the better part of a life, the farming or the music?  Both require labor and both yield fruit.  Both wear us out and both fill us up. 

 At the end of it I’m covered in soil.  It’s seeped through my pants, soaked my gloves and worked its way down into my boots.  I’m not any warmer and the sun persists in its elusiveness but I have looked up and about.  My heart is slow and my breaths are long.  I pull on a clean pair of jeans over my muddy knees and think of Tabby, repentant skinhead and former den mother to the strippers of Bourbon Street Circus.  I think of how she would often tell me, ”God made dirt and dirt don’t hurt”.

Mississippi John Hurt performing \”You Gotta Walk that Lonesome Highway\”

Home, Body

in which our reckless heroine considers the distance between two points

Here I am, swinging my 3-year-old in wide arcs, dipping her slowly and snapping her back up so her laughter catches like chirps in her throat.  I am in love with the heft and weight of her, the relentless pull towards schedules and information.  In love with the space she takes up and her single-minded almost brutal pursuit of joy. 

There he is, draped over a cup of coffee.  Half asleep in the middle of the day, mentally picking through the sticky cotton of a banal hangover.  Unapproachable for at least another hour.  In the kitchen with the leaky drain, the chipped tiles and the cracked cabinet.  Outside, the weeds are creeping up the walkway. 

I’m amazed a thing can grow with this sirocco cutting a swath through our household.  Yet here she is as plump as a berry.  I turn her upside down, tickle her neck, keeping one eye always on the doorway.  I tell her, ”My darling, it’s true.  I was made for you”.

The Two-step Artist

in which our stymied heroine attempts to answer Cameron, who took the time to wonder why

In my youth I didn’t want loneliness to feel colloquial, sorrow to be pronounced with a twang, a broken heart accompanied by banjos or strummed out in a simple and repetitive chord progression.  My emotions were baroque and required complicated phrasing and stringed instruments.  Or so I postured.  And so I posed.  But put me at a country dance where I could hear any version of “Sea of Heartbreak”, any bad cover by a local band, and I secretly had to acknowledge that was really what it felt like for me.  A ship listing on a goofy sea of wanting. 

Even as I was becoming aware of this, I happened upon the poem “Patterns” by Amy Lowell in a cheaply bound anthology we had kicking around our home.  This was different from other poems I’d read before.  It had tricky line breaks and unusual, inconsistent rhymes:

“I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.”

It might offend literary purists out there to know that Lowell became inextricably linked in my mind to Don Gibson, but there it is.  It had less to do with the theme of loss in either poem or song (I had yet to have my heart broken and couldn’t choose if it was more like being ”boned and stayed” or set adrift) and more to do with the evolving realization that you could use the shape and cadence of language to create the type of vessel you wanted to contain and convey the unruly sentiment of loss.  The chorus of “Sea of Heartbreak” has a truly clever rhyme scheme which may be mapped as abbbcca with an internal rhyme of “love” and “of” and “divine” and “mine”.  Or maybe it is abcbcddfa with no internal rhyme but long upswinging syllables .  Whatever it is it felt like an ascending spiral in my brain.  Conversely, the poem “Patterns” felt like a descending spiral.  Obviously, I prefer ascending.   

Now that I’ve taken a few licks I realize, if form ever presupposes function, I was not built to love an elegant and languishing sorrow with its indecipherable rules and messy boundaries.  Less sturm und drang, more strum and twang, please.  I’m made for the slant rhyme and jaunt of the road house.  Slow dancing, draped across your partner, clinging and undulating and swelling like sea weed, that’s great for love songs.  But if I have to live for a spell within a break up song I want to be able to two-step all the way through it.

Hypothetically Speaking

in which our inspired heroine digs in her heels 

Let us suppose you are a self covered in the gritty stillness of your hometown, overwhelmed by an adolescent longing for anything beyond the present tense. And this self is connected also to your self that is kneeling on a twister mat carpeting the fort in your grandma’s pear tree where the fruit and leaves are decaying in the shade. Which is connected to your self hiding at the top of the rocket slide after you gave all your pocket change to some kid so you could look at his old playboy.  Which is connected to your frightened self that watches in fascinated horror while a highschool football player walks around the bonfire hoisting a coyote head on a long stick, half-skinned and dripping.  Which is also, somehow, connected to your self that longs to be tangled up in an endless and irresponsible kiss.  Which is connected to your self in a ring of people surrounding two boys circling each other, sweating and cussing, feeling a collaborative yearning for someone to throw a punch, for someone to finally do something.   Which is inevitably connected to this self longing in reverse for a moment you now know was never going to happen because you were given a perfectly constructed thing and spent your lifetime disassembling it in an effort to understand how it worked.

May the Circle Be Unbroken

in which our reluctant heroine considers mothers, mothering, muthahs and music

On more than one occasion I’ve had an argument with my mother that culminated in her listing the criminal rap sheet of a musician as evidence of their credibility (that’s right, credibility) in their field.  In order to appreciate the context of these arguments it should be known that my mom is a very devout mormon, full of faith and strict in her moral judgement of all people.  Still, good musicians get a pass.  The most recent example of this took place last spring in my car.  We were driving to the grocery listening to Johnny Cash’s America IV.  Somehow my mother was offended that everyone thought he was such a bad-ass ever since the film ”Walk the Line” had come out.  But he wasn’t a tough guy at all, she said.  Did I know that the only times he was ever in jail were for alcohol related charges?  Whereas, Hank Williams had actually killed a man in a bar fight.  I found myself defending Cash’s music by pointing out how hard he was on his woman and how he nearly drank himself to death but she was unimpressed.

I can’t find any evidence that verifies her Hank Williams story and I don’t know why she hates Johnny Cash enough to fabricate a more criminal background for an imaginary criminal background throw down between the two.  I always assumed it was due, in part, to my dad’s dirty revision of the song “I Walk the Line”, the chorus of which goes “I keep my pants tied with a piece of twine.  Because you’re mine, untie the twine”.  Pretty annoying stuff.  But maybe she took issue with Cash singing lyrics she didn’t think he could own up to.  Whatever her reasoning, it means something to me that she loves music enough to feel protective and think critically about it.  That she’ll argue with me and listen with me.  That she once defended Shane MacGowan’s drug addiction because he was, you know, Irish, and they’re a sad people.  That the night I discovered the brilliant Junior Brown at a show I also discovered she had four albums of his I could borrow.  That even though I connect with her on so few levels, I sense the emergence of her self through this ongoing conversation.

When I was 11 my mom came home with Willie Nelson’s “You Were Always on My Mind” on vinyl, walked straight into my brother Kevin’s bedroom, put on his clamshell headphones and listened to that album repeatedly, sitting on the floor in front of the stereo, singing along with the sleeve on her lap.  By then she had had all six of her children.  I stood in the hall and watched through a partially closed door while several things occurred to me in this order:

1. My mom doesn’t have a very good singing voice.
2. I’m watching something private.
3. She looks really pretty right now.
4. Like a young woman.
5. She is having an experience I am not having.
6. My mom is a person who is not me.
7. I am a person who is not my mother.

I doubt my own daughter will get to arrive so abruptly at the same shocking fact of her separate identity from me.  We spend so much time in conversation and I’ve never been discreet.  Still, if I can’t pass on every gift my mother gave me I can continue this conversation about music.  I can pepper our morning drives with comments as simple as ”That’s auto-tuning.  Her voice isn’t strong enough to hit that note.”  Or as grandiose as “Dylan completely altered our expectations of what lyrics should be.”  Or as fundamentally life affirming as ”It isn’t a cuss if it’s in a song”.

.

I’ve Got a Friend in Jesús

in which our reluctant heroine contemplates deep and abiding friendships and recognizes that all things are political with the exception of actual politics

 

On the day the second George Bush was elected for the first time,  Damon Moss had bummed a cigarette off me and observed wryly, “that guy hasn’t even set foot in office and already I’m a hobo”.  Early on during the same administration he threw a flower themed party to warm his new digs on Flower Street.  Patrick attended in a floral print skirt, I covered myself in rose-water and the party rolled forward the way all of Damon’s parties did back then, a perfect blend of humorous conversation, sparkling personalities and sangria.  On the way out Patrick and I convinced Jesús Garcia, who was heading for the bus stop, to ride home with us.  I said “Come on!  We’ll both sit in the back like rich people and pretend Patrick is our fancy driver”.  He passed up a disc and asked him to play track 8.

Conor Oberst’s voice is a temper tantrum of a thing, I learned.   It warbles and frets and sounds mostly frail.  It seems to appeal primarily to females under the age of 22, like tiny pants and long bangs and striped crew neck sweaters with 3-quarter length sleeves.  In fact, the first time I saw Bright Eyes perform I actually tripped over Oberst wearing a striped crew neck sweater with 3-quarter length sleeves.  He was so little, half-hidden and crouched down in the shadows along a wall and I thought “somebody needs to give that girl a sandwich”.  I felt self-conscious enjoying his music as much as I did.  But there’s a sort of brilliance in his ever-changing cacophony of musician friends and by then I’d realized that many Bright Eyes songs contain these moments in which they simultaneously recognize and reach the fullness of their potential.  It was a serendipitous stroke of cosmic symmetry that my friendship with Jesús arrived at its own such moment  while I was with him listening to “Kathy with a K’s Song” arrive at its.

In the back seat Jesús held both of my hands and pressed his forehead into my cheek.  My heart stuttered with happiness as the road and the song and the car and all of us in the car rolled quietly forward until he said something like ”here it comes” and this sparse, acoustic love song seemed to explode into drums and cymbals and something synthesized and amped and so much yelling that it blew the top off my heart.  Jesús was drunk and sentimental and overwhelming, but something in me rose up in desire to drag him safely to a place of well-being and I recognized in him the same quality.  We were mirror images of our good will towards one another.  Jesús Garcia was my comrade.

On the day after the second George Bush was elected for the first time, Jesús had said, “Punk rock is going to make a huge comeback”.  I loved the simple, bright-sided optimism of that observation.  Later, after the twin towers collapsed beneath the weight of all that history and rage, after we found ourselves at war in Iraq and had begun to feel much less optimistic, Jesús took me to Nita’s Hideaway to see Bright Eyes play.  Just before what would be their final encore he yelled “wouldn’t it be great?” and I knew what he meant.  But what were the chances?  That little guy was pretty prolific with an arsenal full of unplayed songs to choose from.   Still, when the band walked back on Conor Oberst said “I’m going to do a song…it’s a love song.  Because we all gotta love each other, ’cause we have an asshole for a president and we’re all gonna die”, and launched, as a sort of nod to those serendipitous strokes of cosmic symmetry,  into “Kathy with a K’s Song”.  The crowd exploded upon hearing Bush vilified.  But we were perfectly still.   Pondering, I suppose, how the very best songs of protest really are the love songs and how, before you can stand in solidarity, you have to choose your friends.