Author: Brad Zellar

I’m opening the phone lines for suggestions, but I’ll start off with a sample from one of rock’s most literate songwriters, and a perennial candidate for any list of great underrated musicians. This one always comes in handy for any unhappy relationship or untenable work situation:

I’m giving you my notice,

and it works this way:

In two weeks time, you will

notice I’ve been gone

for fourteen days.

—Nick Lowe, “Fourteen Days,” from The Impossible Bird

—Daniel Corrigan, Eddie Potomac. Publicity photos for Warriors: The Musical. 1984.

I don’t know if there’s a way to measure how high you are, but I was super high. I was baked to the point where my brain was running two or three steps behind my tongue. Or maybe it was the other way around. No question about it, though, I was fucking flying, like…like an eagle, I guess.

There was no way I could play Frisbee, and Hacky Sack was likewise out of the question. I was way too high. I could still listen to Bob Marley, though. I could still hear Bob Marley, and it was exactly like I knew what he was singing about, even though I really didn’t. I mean, on some level I like to think I did. Peace and all that, which I agree with.

There was this humongous bonfire –a bunch of guys had thrown some car seats and gasoline on there– and I liked looking at that and thinking about the world, about how fucked up the world was. Or at least rushing out. I was kind of bummed to discover that I’d gotten mud all over my new suede Pumas.

I wished I could get in the backseat of a car with one of the girls –they were all drunk enough that it was maybe even possible– but I was way too baked and hypnotized by the bonfire. I tried to sing along with Bob Marley, but I really didn’t remember the words. I don’t think, actually, that I ever did know the words. It wasn’t even my tape. I knew how the songs went, though, most of them, anyway, but I guess that’s not the same as knowing the words.

At some point I must have gone in the river, because when I woke up in the tent all my clothes were super wet.

Oh, yeah, we also blew up a bunch of shit.

The whole weekend totally kicked ass.

to be a discoverer you hold close whatever

you find, and after a while you decide

what it is. Then, secure in where you have been,

you turn to the open sea and let go.

–William Stafford, from “Security”

Is the path to the waterfall an ascent or a descent?

Descents have a bad reputation that is mostly unjust. The metaphoric and melodramatic abuse of the whole idea obscures the fact that a descent can be an exhilarating, breathtaking thing, and far less arduous and fraught with competition and peril than the ascent.

On the way down, just so long as you’re not falling, you have a chance to catch your breath and take a good look around, to access whether all that climbing was worth it, and to see what you were climbing towards and from.

You have to turn your back to see what’s behind you, and it’s always a good idea to take the occasional long, hard look at what’s behind you. How else are you ever going to learn how far you’ve strayed, if in fact you’ve strayed.

I’m sure you’ve strayed. You must have.

But the human instinct is to keep going, and to associate this notion exclusively with forward motion. Implicit in this assumption are the ideas of both survival and progress, which strikes me as severely wrong-headed at the moment.

When you’re returning from some journey in the mountains aren’t you still moving? Isn’t retreat sometimes necessary for survival? And when you retrace your steps to retrieve something you’ve lost or left behind, aren’t you making the most important progress of all?

Easy world, you gave it once–

please quietly welcome it back,

that hand.

–William Stafford, from “Going On”

Gogi? I remember saying. Is that your real name?

She said something to me, something impertinent I’m sure, that was lost in the whirring of the blender.

Grasshopper? she said a moment later, offering me a thick green drink in a jelly jar.

I swear, I said, I could drink these all night.

I do, she said.

Later, she put a record on her turntable and said, My mother used to sleep with this guy who’s playing tenor. She used to follow Shelly Manne around, and I’m sure she slept with pretty much everybody in his band. She spent half of her life chasing after musicians, until she got too old and worn out. Then she started tending bar in this law-and-order dive, and all she ever dated were old cops. The last twenty years of her life she dated one cop after another. The same guys who used to make life so miserable for her old musician friends. They treated her like shit, the fat bastards. Funny, isn’t it?

She went back to the kitchen and fired up the blender again, and when she returned she settled back in on the couch and said, My mother had this big, fat scrapbook full of signed photos and I.O.U.s from jazz musicians, most of them written on cocktail napkins or scraps of placemats. It was like a who’s who of jazz musicians, seriously. Those sponges fucked her and drank up all her money and then dumped what was left of her for the old cops to pick over. I wish I still had that scrapbook. I wonder what happened to it? I’ll bet something like that would be worth a lot of money.

She got up and put another record on the stereo. I’m sure my mother screwed this guy too, she said. I remember him coming around and crashing on our couch in his underwear. He was an A-number-one creep. Creep central. Bad complexion, bad teeth, nothing really to recommend him other than a decent wardrobe and the fact that he could play music. I guess that was enough for my mother. Me, I’ve always hated musicians. Every one I’ve ever met was a bum who never even pretended to be a decent human being unless he was on a stage somewhere, and that was just so they could get some woman like my mother to sleep with them and buy them drinks. Don’t get the wrong idea, I love music; I just hate musicians, and don’t even try to tell me that’s not possible or I’ll claw your eyes out.

I’m sure it’s possible, I said. I don’t have a doubt in the world it’s possible.

Oh, Jesus, she said. Don’t kiss my ass like that. It’s so unbecoming.

I had some fine times with Gogi. We laughed a lot. She really did drink grasshoppers every night, and she had one hell of a record collection. She also had a lot of nice clothes. She hated crowds, I also remember that. I lost track of her when I moved in the early eighties, which wasn’t unexpected; I should warn you, she’d told me when I stopped by her place to say goodbye, I don’t keep in touch, so this really is adieu.

I found her obituary online a few weeks back, in a Phoenix newspaper. She died in 2002, at the age of 52, which meant that she was older than I thought, but still not nearly old enough. The obituary didn’t say how she died, or, rather, of what. She wasn’t survived by a husband or any children, which didn’t surprise me, of course. Just a brother in Boston, I think. No flowers, please, the obit said, and suggested memorials to the Humane Society. I keep telling myself that one of these days I’ll get around to sending a check.

Maybe you’ve seen my tongue limping in circles, yoked to the whip hand of my brain, sinking further and further into the muck. The words don’t come out the way they’re supposed to, or the way they used to. Something happens. Happened. It’s like when you take a picture and the print looks nothing like what you saw when you looked through the view finder. I think you could define that feeling as disappointment.

This world astonishes and appalls me in equal measure. It keeps taking things from me and trying to hoodwink me into believing I’ve given them away.

This from my horoscope yesterday (Scorpio): “Don’t trust little ones with potentially dangerous tools.”

Okey-dokey.

Was Job cursed with sleeplessness? Do the damned sleep in hell? Not likely, I realize, but is it official anywhere?

It’s almost funny how long ago long ago was. It’s not funny, though, how much my hand and wrist have been cramping lately. Eventually, I realize, I’m going to have to learn how to write left-handed.

You there, little man, little speck, when did you forget how to leap? Leapless, you’re helpless. Go back to leap school, dammit, and relearn your old gift. How else are you ever going to leave this planet behind, even if only for an ecstatic instant?

One last observation, or whatever this is: My eighth grade shop teacher was the creepiest character I ever met, the way he’d sit there on his stool whittling the calluses on his hands with a pocket knife. I remember one time he said, “I could teach any one of you morons how to get out of a pair of handcuffs in five minutes.” He had a tattoo of Jesus wearing his crown of thorns. It was on his chest, and every day when the bell rang at the end of class he’d pull down the top of his tee-shirt to reveal the tattoo and say, “Believe in this man.” People around town said in his younger days he was a motorcycle racer who’d fathered children in damn near every state of the union. Once upon a time he’d allegedly bragged about having received more than fifty citations for urinating in public. He said it was a hard habit to break, and I’ve no doubt it is.

That’s all for this morning.

Thank you.

All summer I’ve had a retired shop teacher in my skull, trying to teach himself to play the marimba. I liked it better when he stuck with hammers and power tools.

I know my tongue’s tucked away somewhere in my face, but I can’t feel the damn thing. The world outside my windows looks like a silent Bunuel movie, and I keep trying to find an appropriately disconsolate soundtrack that’s just loud enough to drown out the marimba. I’m not having much luck. I’m open to suggestions. I’m thinking creaking violins and accordians might do the trick.

I’m always open to suggestions, whatever that means.

You can’t believe how fucking hot it is, unless you’re one of these people who will believe anything. There are trails of perspiration running down the walls. However hot it is to you, it’s at least ten degrees hotter for me. At least. My body is a furnace. I’ve taken off all my clothes and I wish like hell I could take off my skin. I wish I could turn my body inside out. Every hour represents a pendulum swing between collapse and plodding stupor.

I watch presumably religious people wearing ties come up my sidewalk and ring the bell. I think about answering the door naked to ask them if they can get God to do something about the weather, but I don’t have the energy to climb up off of the floor.

The last time I left the house the old Swedish baker (I think he’s Swedish) up the street told me a story that, unless I am mistaken, had something to do with a farmer feeding a bucket of diamonds to a cow.

As I sprawl on the floor staring up at the ceiling it occurs to me that what I’m up to is really pretty simple, if nonetheless hopeless: I’m looking for revelations. At the very least this epiphany, repeated over and over in the monotone voice with which it took shape in my head, should prove useful when dealing with telephone solicitors.

A magic wand would be useless to me right now. What I need is a magic weapon, and I’m not even sure what I’d do with that. I’m pretty sure I could find something to do with it, though, something useful and satisfying.

Suddenly, I realize, it’s grown dark, but it doesn’t seem to have gotten any cooler.

Among the thoughts that crawl across my head as I stare at the ceiling is this: It’s never a good sign when a town has more than one fudge shop. And: This could almost be the moon, if little bastards next door shot off firecrackers all night long on the moon. And: I’m not even sure what tense I’m living in.

And, finally, this: No, sir, this is not a comfortable situation. This is not a comfortable situation at all.