Author: Brad Zellar

Back in my drinking days my stomach would for damn sure be a lousy mess, and my liver would feel like a fat wad of pate throbbing behind my ribs. I couldn’t sleep for shit and I’d be up and down prowling the drafty house all night in the dark, handling the various little talismans I’d picked up on my travels, every one of which seemed to have lost whatever power they might once have had to enchant.
Eventually and inevitably I would turn on the lamp above my easy chair and search for the old moth-eaten volume on my bookshelves. This book, written by a distant relative on my mother’s side, was entitled And Ye Shall Bee A Mercyfull Steward to Them Al. The author, Reverend L.C. Greenwood, was an animal rights zealot in 15th-century England, and a man of blistering piety.
I had slain a great many animals in my time, a fact that was in those days much on my mind, and I would find rebuke on every moldering page of the Reverend’s text, which constituted, in fact, a sort of harsh and ceaseless rebuke that never failed to make my blood run cold in the wee hours.
Among Greenwood’s aggressive and disturbing torrent of censure were these words, which I stumbled across in a notebook this evening:

Thee almyghtye God hath wryttn in thine hearte thys knowledge of the sanctitie of all lyfe. As ye woulde doe to the leaste of God’s creatures, so wyll bee done unto thee in the place beyonde thys teeming worlde. Doe not then trod the squirmyng thynges of the dyrte, nor flogg nor flaye the ploddyng or scampryng beastes of the woode nor fyld. Nae shall thee gyve myschefe to the wyld thyngs of wing’d grace nor doe wickednesse to the breathyng bountye of the watters, neyther the symple fysh nor the leviathan of the deepe. Howe ever muche unlyke they may seme, eache hath been shapd by God’s hande, and muste bee shewn the love ye would shew thine owne blessd spawne.
Yae, as ye treate eache flyng creepyng thynge and lyvyng mystry so shall you bee treatd by the Lorde in the lyfe to come. As ye trod so shall ye bee trodden. Suche as doeth malyce and evyll shall bee as nothynge in the nexte worlde. They that persyst in forbyden endevors shall bee stalkd and harryd and persecuted through eternitie. Theyr bloode shall bee tappd and the skinne turnd from the insyde to the out like a raggd garment, and the fat shall bee flayd from theyr fleshe and fed to the evyll doers in hell. The verye heart of suche synners shall bee plunderd pumpyng from theyr chestes and fed to the devylls coale fyres of Sheol, and never again shall they know the mercyfull reste of the blessd.

I don’t know, to be quite honest with you.

There does, though, seem to be some confusion on that question, if the handful of puzzled emails I’ve received in the last week are any indication. I’m still trying to get a handle on who stumbles in here, into The Rake‘s little sidecar in cyberspace. I’m not even sure who reads The Rake, but I’m guessing I’ll get a general idea in due time.
I should warn you right now, though, those of you who are unfamiliar with my previous stint of hard labor shoveling words into a hole: this is probably not the place for literalists, for people who are earnestly prepared to believe what they read. I am, as more than one of you has already observed, an unreliable narrator. And, yes, there are more important things in the world than the sort of nonsense you’re likely to find here, many more important things.
It’s not that I don’t care about those things. I do care, and I already spend entirely too much time reading about them and railing about them until I’m blue in the face to my wife and friends. The thing, though, is that I’m not, unfortunately, a man who’s going to be able to shed any important light on any of the pressing issues of the day. My opinions on those important things and issues are pretty much the same as those held by tens of millions of other people, and every bit as impotent in the face of the opposing views held by tens of millions of my other fellow Americans (as if you can ever really say “my fellow Americans” with a straight face anymore, as if you could ever truly say “jury of one’s peers”).
I’m not indifferent, and I’m not yet ready to throw up my hands, even when it appears that I am, quite literally, throwing up my hands. I plod my way glumly through the newspapers every morning, page by page and column by column. I do some of the things that I consider to be my duty as an American; I vote, write the occasional angry letter to public figures, and volunteer my time. I routinely give money to organizations or causes that seem worthy to me. Yet these gestures feel increasingly like inadequate acts of atonement or pathetic attempts at absolution –which they doubtless are– rather than meaningful forms of redress for the mess we’re in.
“There will be much hope, but not for us,” Franz Kafka wrote in his diaries, and like so much else he wrote, those words could well serve as an epitaph for our time.
If you’ve made it this far you’re likely thinking by now that I have, in fact, thrown up my hands. Like I said, though, I do throw up my hands, but I haven’t yet thrown up my hands, and I think there’s an important distinction in there somewhere.
The problem at the bottom of all the other many problems right now is this: political discourse [sic] in this country is insufferable. I find politicans and the parasitic pundits who live off the beached and bloated host of the American political leviathan to be as uncompelling, unconvincing, and unattractive a group of characters as has ever been assembled in any one time and place in the history of mankind.
They don’t move me. They don’t change my mind. And even given their now acknowledged place as part of the entertainment industry they fail to entertain me.
And the American heart doesn’t really move much anymore, either. (William Merideth’s “great sloth heart” has never been more universally apt.) Oh, it wiggles a bit now and then, trembles or constricts (timidly, violently, almost imperceptibly), or shifts a few degrees to the left or right, but it doesn’t move. When the heart won’t move, the mind can’t be changed, and the wonderful thing about the lost art of real, stirring political oratory and strenuous debate was that it had the ability to both move hearts and change minds. Go to the library and check-out a volume of great speeches sometime, or, better yet, get your hands on a copy of Say it Plain: Live Recordings of the 20th Century’s Great African-American Speeches. That wonderful book and CD package is full of passionate, roaring orations that moved hearts, changed minds, and moved and changed the world.
I’m sorry, but this thing –whatever it is– will never do that.

Waking, by reason of their continual cares, fears, sorrows, and dry brains, is a symptom that much crucifies melancholy men.

—Robert Burton, The Anatomy of Melancholy

All he could do was transcribe the interminable babbling voice of the night, the insinuating perverse voice of the demons.

—Pietro Citati, Kafka

One time I was in south Florida, in the central part of the state, and I was staying in a roadside motel in a little swamp town. The desk clerk had sold me a six-pack of beer, and I sat around watching something called “The National Bird Dog Field Trials” on television until the local station went off the air. I couldn’t sleep so I went back out to my car and drove out to a truck stop diner at the edge of town and went in for coffee and hash browns. I sat in a booth near the window and eavesdropped on a conversation between two guys and a woman at an adjacent table.

“They can finger you with nothing but bones,” I heard one of the men say.

“Slivers,” the other guy said. “The fucking scientists can nail you with nothing but slivers. You have to be burning very hot to do it right, and they can still figure you.”

“You can’t just toss a body on a plain wood fire and expect you heard the last of it,” said the first guy. “That won’t cut it. It wasn’t just teeth they found.”

“And all that swamp out there,” the other guy said.

“Gene wasn’t thinking,” the woman said. “He was crazy to burn her, that’s all. It wasn’t no thought at all.”

“He still would have been wise to take a step back and bury what he had left,” one of the men said. “Bury it deep.”

“Swamp it,” said the other. There was laughter around the table.

“Gene just plain fucked up,” the woman said, and everyone nodded their heads and kept right on forking food into their faces.

What if an individual is perceiving a daydream and a series of external sensory inputs at precisely the same time, and has lost the capacity to distinguish one from the other? What happens to his perceptual world? Clearly he will be peopling his universe of awareness with elements that are altogether private, presences generated from within which for him will be a genuine part of the real world; these are what he sees, or hears, or is otherwise sensing. And should he then be unable to differentiate these from his everyday perceptions, then indeed he may move into a haunted, nightmarish world, and be a very troubled human being.

—Joseph D. Noshpitz, “Reality Testing: A Neuropsychological Fantasy,” in Comprehensive Psychology

A common notion about the relationship of sleep to mental health is that total sleep loss…deranges the mind and may result in some kind of breakdown….When serious sleep disturbances are present, as they almost always are in the mentally ill, the patient’s history often indicates that the sleep disturbance preceeded the actual break from reality.

—William C. Dement, Some Must Watch While Some Must Sleep –Exploring the World of Sleep

Some nights you’d sit there tracking moonlight across the floor, or studying the garage roof next door as if it were a radar screen. Your mind on a very low flame, a few tired words alternately see-sawing in the silence or surfacing through the waves of static. You’d sit there barely conscious, but the moment you’d try to climb into bed and close your eyes the whole chorus would convene again with a vengeance. The variety show of hypnagogia. Channel surfing long before the advent of cable television and remote control. So random, stuttering, and relentless was your consciousness in those hours that you would make an exercise of trying to isolate a particular fragment, and then attempt to concentrate your mind on the fragment’s origin, trying to trace it back, if possible, to its original source. Sometimes it would be a line from a book or a television commercial, other times it might be something you’d overheard in school, or a snippet from a song or a random conversation. You would find yourself obsessing about an outrageous pair of shoes you had seen on a complete stranger in a grocery store, weeks earlier.

Ultimately, towards dawn, you were always left with nothing but the barely-beating heart of the sleeping world. The under-hum and throb of its basic operating systems. The furnace. The ticking of the clock. The world on the back burner, as close as the modern world comes to stasis: You were left with only you and what was left of the night, the retreating darkness, shadows receding on the walls, the cruel pinch of exhaustion, the terrible reality that you were going to have to sleepwalk through another lost day. What was that they were saying about what?

Eventually, every night you would reach a point where you could not fall asleep but you could nonetheless not be truly awake. You were reduced to fumbling around, grasping, in a dense and hazy subterrannean no man’s land, lost in the gauzy, impressionistic foothills of sleep. You would take a walk to try to resuscitate your sanity, to get clear thoughts moving again in your head. You moved in slow motion through a woozy, muslin-filtered border country, imagination and hallucination bleeding into reality. You heard what sounded like chanting. You heard the clanking of a cowbell. You heard the distant tolling of a clock, and a burst of faint music sucked from a car window somewhere out in the town. You heard a baby crying, then someone laughing, wretching, congested laughter. You heard a radio playing in a junkyard. You heard what sounded like a piano. You heard windchimes twisting in a backyard somewhere. You heard the barking of a dog, answered by another, in the next block. You thought of the men across town, in the slaughterhouse, exhausted on their feet in the slippery dead mess, blood bubbled everywhere, the tangy reek of animals being broken down into meat. You would go there from time to time to stand at the mouth of the tunnel that took the tired men to and from the slaughterhouse. You would stand there in the last of the darkness with a little collection can for UNICEF, and you would shake your can at the blood-soaked, broken-knuckled zombies as they plodded past blank-faced, clutching their empty lunchboxes, moving almost unconscious into the bruised light that was just then creeping into the eastern sky.

Wakefulness during the time when one ought to be asleep is frequently a distressing condition, undermining the strength and incapacitating for active and efficient work. Insomnia or sleeplessness often afflicts those of active mental habits and lays the foundation of premature decay.

When sleeplessness overtakes a brain-worker it is a sure indication that less intellectual work must be done, and that he ought to betake himself, if possible, to out-of-door exercise in the pure air of the country.

—Encyclopedia Brittanica, Ninth Edition. 1899

The victim of insomnia, having seen the slowness of the dawn, arises with every nerve tattered and the capacity for happiness ruined. His morning is a desolation.

—Arnold Bennett, Things That Have Interested Me. Third Series. 1926

Among the imposts which humanity pays for the true or imaginary advantages of what, for lack of a more consistent term, is denominated ‘civilization,’ there is not one whose tyrannical invasion of physiological law is so fraught with mental and physical bankruptcy as sleeplessness.

—J. Leonard Corning, Brain-Rest: A Disquisition on the Curative Properties of Prolonged Sleep. 1885

Aristotle, On Sleep and Sleeplessness

The BBC’s brief History of Insomnia

The National Pain Foundation’s Insomnia Page

When I lie down, I say, when shall I arise,

and the night be gone? And I am full of tossing

to and fro unto the dawning of the day.

—The Book of Job, chapter seven, verse four.

This relentless repetition of the same illegible text….

—Yannis Ritsos, “Insomnia.”

Melancholics are not so sleepless as maniacs, yet the want of sleep is often an early and prominent symptom. They do not readily sleep, and if they do, they awake soon to be tormented by the vilest misery that it is possible for human creatures to endure.

—Insomnia and its Therapeutics, A.W, MacFarlane, M.D. 1891.

Want of refreshing sleep we believe to be the frequent origin of insanity, dependent upon moral causes.

—Psychological Medicine, John Charles Bucknill and Daniel H. Tuke. 1858.

Those who pursue a desultory method of thinking are very often the victims of an obstinate and peculiarly distressing form of insomnia. During the day such persons are observed to apply themselves with apparent zeal to the regular vocations of life; but, if closely observed, there is often visible a certain absence of concentration and devotion to the particular matter in hand. When questioned upon this point, they admit that they are ‘absent-minded’; and, while only too willing to apply themselves, are frequently tormented by the intrusion of ideas totally foreign to the particular subject at hand….they carry their responsibilities to bed with them; and, while other minds are at rest, their own intellection is morbidly active. Midnight, and even the small hours of the morning, find such individuals speculating upon the pros and cons of the past and future with an intensity which often drives them to a state of positive desperation. The small ills of life assume alpine proportions, and even the most trivial circumstances are distorted and magnified a thousand-fold. When at last sleep actually does supervene, it is no longer psychological, but, on the contrary, perverted by dreams and unconscious cerebration to such a degree that these unhappy individuals can hardly be said to have slept in the ordinary sense of the word.

—Brain Rest, J. Leonard Corning. 1885.

Under [insomnia’s] influence injurious changes are permitted by the patient to be made in his daily habits; pursuits which formerly engaged his attention no longer interest him; even important business concerns are sacrificed; and against such tendencies no pre-existing vigour of intellect will afford any defence; the strongest minds (intellectually considered) may sink into apathy and feebleness.

—James Russell, M.D., “On Sleeplessness.” British Medical Journal, November 16, 1861.

After dinner, my friend drove me, in a carriage, some five miles back into the country –the greater part of the way, along the margin of Migunticook Lake, and under a terrific precipice, whose boulders every moment threaten destruction. In fact, the whole of a bright sunny day, cooled with healthful zephyrs, was spent in pleasurable excitement. Interesting conversation beguiled the evening; and, after family worship, I sunk to rest in a luxurious curtained bed. Ere long, I slept; and, about five o’clock next morning, was awakened by the crowing of the cock. This was the only night’s sleep I have had these last six years and seven months; so help me God. Since then, my nights have been tedious, as usual, without sleep, and some of them distressing.

—“An Example of Protracted Wakefulness,” Boston Medical and Surgical Journal. July 31, 1845.

Experience in private practice, and extended observation in the wards of general and lunatic hospitals, have taught me that the ordinary hypnotics are frequently unreliable, and that in some instances their use is attended by results as bad as, if not of more serious consequence than, the conditions they were intended to remove. I do not wish by this somewhat sweeping assertion to be understood to condemn the ordinary hypnotics, or to doubt their efficacy in suitable cases; but it seems to me that we run great danger of becoming routinists in the matter of sleeping-draughts….Like most of my fellow practitioners, I constantly meet patients who have run through the whole gamut of sleep-producing drugs, and find their last condition, in many instances, worse than their first.

—Edward N. Brush, M.D., “Some Clinical Experiences With Insomnia,” The Practitioner, January 1889.

How ashamed must be the loathsome models who wake up in the morning in bed with ZZ Top?

In the old bar of my early days as an inebriate there was a mural there on the wall, a tableau of drunken trolls, a forest scene, I seem to remember, a vertitable sprawl of blasted trolls, collapsed among the trees. A dark woods, more darkness creeping through the trees. They’d come through there any day now with the heavy machinery, the chain saws and earth movers. They’d lay waste to everything the fucking trolls held dear. They’d plow their world right under, drive the plump little bastards into exile. No wonder the trolls did nothing but drink, no wonder all they ever did was lay around eating and drinking and gaining weight. There weren’t even any women trolls, so when they danced it was a sad spectacle, bachelor trolls self-consciously dancing with each other and doing their pathetic best to make merry. Still, they did dance, once upon a time. They used to. They used to be furtive and quick on their feet, used to cover all sorts of ground just for the hell of it. No more, though. They knew what was coming, and there was nothing left for them to do but wait.

If you want to speak directly with a disc jockey, your best bet is to call in the middle of the night. It works for me every time.

So many white men, taking turns pushing their tired white brains down a moonlit dirt road in a wheelbarrow.

Please present a word with two w’s. Wheelbarrow. Willow. Wallflower. Window. It’s difficult to find such words that don’t start with w. Awkward.

Dear Giant: Please put your lips to that little chimney and blow this frozen man out of his chair.

The Giant’s prerogative: He can do whatever the hell He pleases.

The backs of my eyeballs feel like a chalkboard on which some invisible hand is quietly scratching a descending series of numbers.

We got a word for fellas like Clayton Eshelman where I come from, mister: pussy.

I can’t seem to shake the memory of a little cross-eyed mudpuppy, crammed in a jar of formaldehyde in a high school science lab. When I was younger the eggs in the refrigerator would talk to me, telling me stories of long dead hens, nights in the country, the distant sawing of fiddles, crickets who giggled all night long, the gravel percussion of truck wheels coming up the driveway, the soft crooning of the old woman who came each morning to carry them away. I’m extremely grateful for this opportunity to present my side of the story. Thank you for your time.

Now: Bushed. Shagged. Tuckered. Fagged. Fried. Beat. Shot. Sacked. Whooped. Whipped. Saddled. Socked. Weary. Worn out. Crapped. Crying Uncle. Exhausted. Tired as shit. Lights out. Now I lay me down to sleep. To sleep, perchance to dream. Nighty-night. Sayonara. Get a good night’s sleep. Don’t take any wooden nickels. Don’t let the bedbugs bite. I’ll see you in the morning. Good night. Sweet dreams.

All right, everybody get in line and listen up. I want you gentlemen to get some shut-eye tonight so you can get up and be ready to hump it first thing in the morning. We’ll be traveling seven miles to the east over rugged terrain. Word has it we might be in for some heavy weather as well, so pack accordingly. We’ll have six men to a piano, and each of these pianos is worth more than $50,000, so I want to make good and damn sure that everyone in this room understands the importance of taking all the care and precaution necessary to insure the safe delivery of every single piano in our possession. I don’t need to tell you fellas that nobody has ever carried a piano over this mountain, let alone nine pianos, and I’m not about to stand here and try to sugarcoat the serious dangers and risks involved in this operation. Every one of you has endured months of grueling training, and I wouldn’t send you out there if I didn’t have absolute confidence in your ability to bring this difficult mission to a successful conclusion.

Our most recent intelligence suggests that we can expect fierce if sporadic resistance from the local guerrillas. These people resent the incursion of very expensive pianos into their territory; most of them have never seen a piano in their lives, and the value of these instruments is more than most of these folks will make in their lifetimes. We can expect them to give us everything they have, and I don’t want anybody going into this with a false sense of security just because these local characters don’t have much more than rocks and sticks and old surplus Daisy rifles to defend themselves with. When the British tried to bring a piano over this mountain back in the 1950s –and this was one piano, mind you– they were badly routed and the piano was destroyed and burned by the natives.
I expect nothing less than 100% success from this mission, so I want you to defend these pianos with everything at your disposal; and, well, boys, you know what they say about making an omelet. What I’m saying is, be vigilant, and expect a tough battle. And let’s all keep in mind what we’re up to here: these are poor, backwards people, and they’ve been drumming on rocks since the stone ages. They can’t even yet begin to imagine the gift we’re bringing them. We’re gonna bring these miserable savages music, and we all know in our hearts that even if we have to shove it down their throats they’re for damn sure going to thank us for it one day.

Lights out, boys. Tomorrow let’s make the folks back home proud.

I live in Minneapolis, the fiftieth state in the union, known far and wide as the Moon Crater state and Green Grocer to the world. There are over 1000 lakes in Minneapolis, and herds of bearded reindeer in the north country.

I’m sorry, Minnesota is the fiftieth state in the union, etc. Minneapolis is the capital of Minnesota. It is also the city of big shoulders and brotherly something-or-another. Some say it is a toddling town —the toddling town, allegedly, most toddling of all the toddling contenders. It is the windy city. It never sleeps, and is also famous for being the cradle of jazz and the home of the seldom-visited Pro Football Hall of Fame.

Great battles have been fought here; our schoolchildren learn early that there was a time when “the streets ran with rivers of blood.”

There is a giant statue of Edmund Muskie alongside his ox outside of City Hall. History has happened here, in other words. We used to have a Living History museum, in fact, until it fell over. The city was discovered by Hernando DeSoto in the 19th century when he was discovering things in the New World, and the name means “Place of Many Rats” in some other language.

Today the city is a desolate place, constantly under siege and wracked by cholera epidemic. There are still, though, plenty of tanning spas, video stores, and places to get a burrito. There are not, however, any famous people here other than a swimsuit model who works in a shopping center.

There was a time when famous people would occasionally visit Minneapolis to marvel at its many attractions and eat in its legendary Shakey’s pizza parlors where old men with handlebar mustaches and candy-striped plastic aprons played the banjo. A woman by the name of Ann Landers was one such person, and she was once presented with the key to the city. I now have that key in my possession, having traded a wheelbarrow for it back when there was so much rubble and wheelbarrows were in great demand.

I am currently living in a yurt near the airport with my wife and seven children. I lost my job servicing vending machines when the airport fell to the marauders.

We like it here. We’re proud of our city.

To say anything more at this point, I’m afraid, wouldn’t be prudent.