Moving Across the World on Horses

“Moving across the world on horses / body split at the edge of their necks / neck sweat eating at my jeans / moving across the world on horses.”*



Out in the country. The real country. The middle of Florida, in the Ocala National Forest, where the only restaurant is a Kangaroo gas station. You could stay barefoot for a whole week and no one would notice. Humidity like a blanket. White sand and forest and Coca-Cola lakes.The guy that owned the ranch was a horse thief. Really. He sold people horses and then took them back in the middle of the night and then painted them different colors. They would come back to the ranch and he would say oh no, you’re mistaken. I think he was one of my dad’s only friends, and we kept our horses there. I spent weekends there for maybe two years. I was twelve, at one point, for sure. We would ride our horses all day under the giant oak trees and through blonde fields and sometimes across lakes, and come out dripping and relieved from the summer heat. Horse dust in my mouth. The smell of horses in everything. Even now if I smell horses, driving through the country with the windows down I have this homesick feeling for them. Then I was just a kid, I thought it was totally normal and granted that I would spend my days and nights outside forever. When my dad would go to sleep I would walk around the little ranch. The black lake looked blacker, and even I knew better than to swim in it at night. Horses aren’t afraid of snakes, they have a natural immunity. That’s true. But they are afraid of hogs and pigs. Avoiding the lake, I would walk (barefoot) up the sandy road to the pasture and stay still, wait for the horses to come to me. We smelled each other. When I walked back to the little cabin I would hear them, very quietly though, walking along the pasture, following me. That was our friendship. Recognition and presence. I would go back and sit on the porch and listen to all the bugs. A whole world of creatures making one noise in the night. In the morning we would go ride out again, my dad usually leading the way trying to find some trail he made up in his head. In the afternoons it might rain and I would walk to where the horses were just to see the steam coming up off them, to put my head against their neck and rub their wet fur, both of us probably thinking: I am here. 

*The Collected Works of Billy the Kid by Michael Ongaatje 

At the Start of Summer

"A day like the days I remember, a day like other days."*
I have to start writing my goodbye to Gainesville, so I'll start with the very end, at yet another start of summer. 

We left the springs around 6pm, and sped down country roads back toward Gainesville, with the windows down, and we had all tactfully agreed without speaking on country music- up loud. Everyone ate at Bev's Better Burgers, and everyone had the day off work except for me so I was sober-ish and drove while everyone slept in the car after, windows still down. Everyone's heads were tilted back toward their head rests, limbs pushed out away- already sunburned, breathing the deep heavy breaths of a day spent swimming. Swimming in water so clear it still almost makes me cry. Swimming and not just swimming but tumbling, jumping from shaky docks into the mouths of that water below, and not just swimming and jumping but mixing rum and cokes into Styrofoam cups, and sitting in the sun and watching everyone else enjoying their afternoon off. I drove everyone home and fought the urge to pull over and run wild in the moats of flowers that have suddenly taken over all the roads around Gainesville. The sun was still out, and my friends were still sleeping in the car, and I felt like how parents must feel watching their kids sleep. The whole world and everything in it suddenly seemed like enough. 
*Donald Justice, Variations on a Text by Vallejo

The Future is a Slow Panic

"things are still the same, they're still not ok
we're clocked on and strung out on the day to day.
there's more to life than love and comfort,
there's more to life than books you know. 
don't give up on the big fear-
the one that brought you here.
the future is a slow panic, 
a necromantic, pedantic, reaganomic legacy
that still pits the organic vs. the machines.
so don't give up on nihilism.
there's more to life than love and comfort
college won't get you off the hook.
there's more to life than self-satisfaction,
there's more to life than books (yes, much more).
you were right when you were angry and scared,
don't second guess your fears-
it's still you and me against the coming years."

             I spent a few days alone in my apartment. Thinking I'd be out of town, it felt a little like a treat to stay inside and look through books, listen to records I'd forgotten about, and drink wine in the bathtub. I found the Scenery zine (#14) Fire as a Metaphor and read it this evening, with no plans and a that creeping feeling of nostalgia (dangerous, I know). The last time I read it was probably a year or two ago, but I remember reading it at 19, before I ever lived in Gainesville, and it striking a powerful chord with me because of it's topics of gentrification and where the punk community intersects with classism and economics (the zine is an illustration of an academic paper about those things). Reading it later, after I'd moved to Gainesville, it meant something different, since I'd heard most of the bands it referenced and met some of the people. Recently I went to a wedding with some friends and we ended up hanging out with Mike Taylor (the artist, look him up!) and trying to sneak into pools long after they were closed. The lyrics above, from the back of the zine, are from a True Feedback Story song, a band I'd listened to long before I moved to Gainesville, before I even met Travis Fristoe, long before he'd end up writing me my letter of recommendation to an MFA program I didn't get accepted to (no fault to him). The zine reads so differently to me now, so many years later. Reading about the intersections of NW 3rd ave & 8th St (hey I went to a party there the other night) and Pleasant St. (oh I lived at that one shitty house over there for years). Just like the stories and the people intersecting in the zine, my stories have intersected with those people, those places, and this town. 
            Living in Gainesville I spend a lot of time thinking about it. Thinking hard about it. Why do I live here? The original pull that brought me here- punk music and a good job, still seems pretty worth it. It also has a funny way of bringing people together- like that the person I traded mix tapes with in college works with me at the bar. My bandmates from the early 2000s still play in bands I can sing along to. I can walk into a crowded room, bar, show, anywhere, and know someone and feel mostly at ease. I like my stories; separated into our two seasons: summer and winter.

Winter: climbing on the roof of Wayward Council (RIP), looking down through the skylight at my friends going wild for a show. Innumerable punk bands, fireworks, too much beer, fingerless gloves and  biking home to houses I could see the ground through the floorboards. Biking sometimes not home but just to a friends bed, crawling in just for any sort of animal warmth, knowing who's doors were always unlocked. The first time I did XTC and waking my friend up to talk about punk music until I felt better. The block, rows of punk houses, at least Josh Rey still lives there. 

Summer: sneaking into apartment complex pools. Swimming at night, alone, the cops showing up and not even caring, but usually swimming at night, with too many people, and the cops still not caring. Biking down SW 2nd ave to the Junkyard at 3am when the show is still going on, at least for a few hours, somehow everyone is there, not surprised to find each other at a punk show on a Tuesday night. The whole town being at the junkyard on some nights. The whole town being at Wayward Council some nights. The brick falling on my head during Crazy Spirit and watching the rest of their set anyway, blood pouring through my hair. Sitting on a porch, quietly, watching people pass by on bikes. Finding random parties and walking in and making friends with everyone there. Summer storms coming through at the worst times, every day. The rain and the thunder and the heavy oak trees, weighing everyone down until the weather breaks along with the tension. 

            I could write so many stories about living in Gainesville. I know a lot of people have. I try not to romanticize it too much, I know that way lies only danger. Still...I can appreciate how other people's stories about Gainesville have intersected with mine, and how the Ark, Wayward Council, and the Junkyard (we still have the 911 house at least) will eventually get replaced with other stories, other characters, and other nostalgia.     
            Summer in Gainesville isn't just oppressively hot. It's also when the students from the university are gone (most of them, thankfully) and the town sometimes becomes unbearably small. There's swimming, at least. Biking across town at night can be beautiful without traffic, and the late evenings are cool, bright, and quiet. The town sort of feels like ours, just for a little bit. There's also an anxiousness that comes from your friends leaving in August, moving to New York or Portland, Austin or San Diego. Everyone eventually leaves, the stories disconnect. And another year I stay behind, biking down the same streets, singing familiar songs. 

Visit from the Goon Squad

I. Books 

"His desire was so small in the end that [he] could slip it inside his desk or a pocket and forget about it, and this gave him a feeling of safety and accomplishment, of having dismantled a perilous apparatus that might have crushed them both. [She] was baffled at first, then distraught [...] but eventually a sort of amnesia had overtaken [her]; her rebellion and hurt had melted away, deliquesced into a sweet, eternal sunniness that was terrible in the way that life would be terrible, [he] supposed, without death to give it gravitas and shape. He's presumed at first that her relentless cheer was mocking, another phase in her rebellion, until it came to him that [she] had forgotten how things were between them before [he] began to fold up his desire; she'd forgotten and was happy- had never not been happy- and while all of this bolstered his awe at the gymnastic adaptability of the human mind, it also made him feel that his wife had been brainwashed. By him."* 

        Sometimes in passing people like to drop these tiny bombs on me where they say things like, "oh but you get along with everybody." I know when it's said it's meant well, I'm never really offended, but I always think excitedly, internally, "holy shit they're right!" Then I spiral a little bit, worry about who I'm too nice to, who deserves it, if I'm not critical enough in my personal relationships. I'm not ever too nice, it's just that I might try too hard to like everyone. I mean to say that I tend to gloss over certain things in order to attain a balance- left over from a real shitty divorce (my parents) most likely- where everyone gets along and no one is trying to kill each other. I like playing this part; the middle man, camp counselor, whatever you want to call it. I like plans. I like difficult people. I like to organize, mediate, and all that stuff that probably drives my best friends crazy (but they like me because of their own fucked up problems too). With that being said, I am wild about this book by Jennifer Egan.

        I am fully aware of the criticism surrounding this book, but I can gloss over some of the criticism and focus on what's really amazing. Do I need to explain? Have I become one of those people that asks rhetorical questions? Fuck no. I bet if you didn't like the book it's because of some of the last chapters (I sort of skimmed them, not really my style but I think it took some guts, you'd have to read the book to know what I'm referring to). Cool, write about it for your professors while you get your MFA but I'm working 40 hours a week at a bar. I just want to say that the book freaked me out more than anything I've read in awhile and that's saying a lot (the next two books freaked me out too actually). To me, the best parts of the book were about how people loose touch with one another, destroy each other, forget about themselves, and betray their own instincts, all because of time passing and their own very small, innocent decisions that amount to tragedy- their own or someone else's. The redeeming quality of the book was that most of the characters go on. They just keep fucking up or eking out whatever shitty life they're trying to live, a few are redeemed (debatable) but it seems very realistic that no matter how you fuck up your life, it's just going to keep happening.That might not be a saving grace, but it's true. Characters in the book that you felt sure were going to "make it" just totally fell apart, by I guess my own standards. The book made me question my own ideas about growing up, about marriage, about a career, about what was important. I'm not even sure I had appropriate responses to parts of the book. Still, I'm glad I read the book when I did. 

"Ana Iris once asked me if I loved him and I told her about the lights in my old home on the capital, how they flickered and you never knew if they would go out or not. You put down your things and you waited and couldn't do anything really until the lights decided. This, I told her, is how I feel."**

        I think it's important for everyone to be intolerant of men whining about women, in every medium- music, books, poetry, tumblr, you name it. I don't mean whining in the sense of showing emotion, everyone deserves their own allotment of feelings, even self-centered miserable ones (goodness knows I've hammed it up a little on my own) but there's a fine line between "I have these feelings I want or need to share" and "this girl broke my heart and I didn't deserve it and she's a bad person" blah blah blah bullshit. Too often men get to use art as a cover up for their own bullshit, their own mistakes, and a mysterious girl gets the blame. I would say oh, about 90% of pop punk. However, This is How You Lose Her by Junot Diaz doesn't fall into that trap.

       The collection of short stories, mostly centered around the same character (a sort of shadowy reflection of the author) completely fucking up relationships for his whole life. He really takes the blame, and not in a passive aggressive way, but with really tangible self-loathing that I found myself relating to (there was an old Gomek lyric, "four years of youth wasted/fucking up relationships/and several houses"). Dead pan depression, sometimes witty, mostly just sad, and I kept waiting for the characters to stop, to just...stop being so fucked up to one another, but they don't. That's real life I guess. The quote above is from one of the singular chapters with a female perspective, but that doesn't mean the other women in the book aren't given incredible dimension. The mother in most of the stories is the strongest character (the one really deserving of respect and never getting it) but the woman in this chapter, who is sort of patiently waiting for things to work out or fall apart, that really resonated with me most. I used to think that, like anything else, when you fall in love you could control it, wrestle with it, rail against it...I think I know now that when you fall in love you just have to allow it to happen, take a deep breath and see how thing's turn out. Sadly, for almost every character in this book, nothing works out, things fall apart, and the main character ends up alone. Refreshingly though, he knows it's his fault. These are the accounts of all the ways he betrayed his partners, and also himself. He says at the end, "that's about it. In the months that follow you bend to the work, because it feels like hope, like grace- and because you know in your lying cheater's heart that sometimes a start  is all we ever get."

"'A writer needs four things to achieve greatness Pasquale: desire, disappointment, and the sea.' 'That's only three.' Alvis finished the wine. 'You have to do disappointment twice.'"***

        Another book about betrayal, complicated human interaction, and the degrading and redemptive qualities of time. Not quite as depressing as the first two. Inspired me to actually stay up last night and write these book reviews though. Don't judge it by the cover (literally awful, didn't pick it up several times from three different book stores) it's actually captivating and quite funny. 

       I read it in the van on my way up to Richmond with Mauser. I don't mind being cramped with seven people for ten hours if I have a good book to read, so if you find yourself on any long trips this summer it would be a good book to have. I don't have beach reads. I have van reads. 

*A Visit From The Goon Squad, Jennifer Egan

**This is How You Lose Her, Junot Diaz 

***Beautiful Ruins, Jess Walter 

The Sudden Feeling

"I'm really intrigued: these disasters, these decisions that are wrong from the start, these dead ends that constitute the story of my life, are repeated over and over again. A passionate vocation for happiness, always betrayed and misdirected, ends in a need for total defeat, it is completely foreign to what, in my heart of hearts, I've always known could be mine if it weren't for this constant desire to fail. Who can understand it? We're about to reenter the green tunnel of the menacing, watchful jungle. The stink of wretchedness, of a miserable, indifferent grave, is already in my nostrils."*

             I'm almost twenty seven years old and I have to force myself to clean my room. My car sits dead in the drive way. My scooter has a flat tire. My space heater broke the week it finally got down into the 40s at night. Records are missing sleeves. Emails go unanswered. I made my bed today for the first time in weeks (it does look amazing, highly recommend, filed under simple steps to make you feel better about yourself). I don't know why it's so difficult for me to undergo these easy, little things that are a part of being an adult. That part of my life, the physical part, being a mess doesn't really make me lose sleep at night. It's the avoidance of everything else that's the problem. I've been afraid to make decisions, since I've lost faith in myself over the summer, and I haven't been writing, because I'm afraid to get too close to what's been just below the surface for awhile now. 

"I know where these tortured musings on the irremediable can lead. There's a dryness inside us we shouldn't get too close to. It's better not to know how much of our soul it occupies."*

             I've been looking back on the past few years and realized I waited much too long to do some things and rushed in or completely fucked up most of the others. Anyone that's ever swung out over a river on a rope swing knows that too much hesitation is never a good thing. I've always let go in the last second, before smashing into the black water of the Santa Fe river, but that seems to be the only time I have any guts. This past year I failed to get into grad school and I was too chicken shit to apply to any others. I took it way too personally and now I'm staring down another academic year without credentials. I'm not saying you have to be in school to be somebody, absolutely the fucking contrary. I work in a bar where MFA students repeatedly don't tip me, and personally I think they look way too clean to be actual poets. Most of them, I'm sure, have never seen a rope swing in real life.

            The other thing that deserves a lot of personal literary attention on my part is my total failure of having a healthy relationship. I don't mean that the relationship was a failure, but more to the point that I failed at it. I thought that by this point in my life I would have shut that door and been moving on to the next part of my life, but here I am, back at square one, and it's really no one's fault. I wanted to write an epic tale of woe, all about the miseries of summer and lost love and all of the stuff that's pretty easy to write about honestly, but I didn't. Looking back I'm glad I didn't. I've mostly just felt really confused, about everything. Drinking served its purpose of numbing out a lot of those feelings, and I've been on quite a roll of forgetting and evading, and might still be. I finally came to terms with the fact that it's hard to write when you're afraid of what you might unsettle in yourself. I've crossed that boundary at least. I'll still gladly check out mentally with my friends, because it's fun to be miserable together, even though we call it a party, even though it feels good, but I can wake up in the morning and sit down and deal with it finally. 

 

"I felt the gradual return of my old loyalties to life, to the world that holds endless surprises, to the three or four beings whose voices reach me despite time and my incurable wanderlust."*

           The weather changing has everything to do with everything. Summer's long misery is behind us! Everyone feels something new in the air, and it's both real and imagined. A lot of people, it seems, are ready to do something new. The next step. I feel comforted in the fact that by this time next year, I will be in a new place, doing something mostly different than what I'm doing now. Al Burian writes a lot about fall, and I've been flipping through a lot of Burn Collector lately. It's not a coincidence. Fall has a loneliness that summer doesn't, summer has a melancholy but fall is the time for remembering. The voices that reach me are the voices that I've always looked to my whole life, books I read before I had any friends, and books I bring with me when I travel, and books that will keep me company through our sunny, beautiful winter. 

        This book that I'm reading now (see below) has already effected me more than anything I've read this year. I did finish the Dark Tower series, and fell in love with the characters and story, but I consumed it, I devoured it so fast and just wanted to continue the story. In Mutis' book every sentence is a pleasure. The story is amusing and also at times strangely dark, and the main characters and the often doomed characters around him have insights into true melancholy. Reading it has reminded me of unidentifiable aches, weird pains, and the language of nostalgia. Travel, dreaming, and failure. The articulated, tangible feelings I've been searching for since summer ended. 

*The Adventures and Misadventures of Maqroll, Alvaro Mutis.