Tag: Yo Ivanhoe

Dear Sirs,

I never asked for your treatise.

Your recent manifesto bored me to tears.

Every one of your manifestos, in fact, has landed unwelcome on my doorstep.

No man over the age of twenty-five should write a manifesto. After that it’s just too fucking late.

I want you to know that I haven’t forgotten a single one of your earlier promises. By now, you once led me to believe, I should be flying around with a rocket pack strapped to my back.

By now I should have –at the very least– walked on the moon.

So much of the future you told me about never happened.

All those big ideas.

Would you like to tell me just what the hell exactly you were talking about?

Do you know what I have in place of my rocket pack and my moon buggy? Not much, I’m afraid. I am a blood mule. I spend my days walking all the fuck over a hospital with a cooler full of blood. There are a bunch of us. We have a softball team (3-16 last season in what is essentially a league for the geriatric and the obese) called the Blood Mules.

I’m not complaining, exactly. The job comes with decent benefits, not the least of which is the frequent opportunity it provides me to get shit-faced with nurses, many of whom I also sleep with.

Well, not many, actually. Some.

I just thought you should know that you didn’t completely destroy all of us. Not that I expect you’ll take much consolation in that piece of information.

Yours very sincerely,

Brad Zellar

The hostile colonization is now almost complete, my skull reduced to one more cluttered victim of American conquest and imperialism.

I close my eyes and I still see giant petroleum and fast food logos, neon beer signs, beautiful celebrities. I hear voices that should not be familiar, the voices of complete strangers that someone has made it their business to convince me I know, intimately.

Not someone: An immense network of someones.

I hear television jingles and snippets of pop songs I would otherwise be prepared to swear I have never heard. I find myself desiring (in place of my true, unattainable desires) products of one sort or another.

All of my dreams are now the Busby Berkeley productions of giant sydicates and corporations. Ideally, if the doctors ultimately have their way, the way I feel will not be the way I actually feel, but the way I have been made to feel. Even my subconscious has been plastered with decals for various corporations, exactly –or not quite exactly– like the jumpsuits of Nascar drivers.

Every thought is like a link to the webpage of some pirate or entrepreneur. This, that, and the next thing —every last thing— is brought to me by who? By whom? The purveyors, the procurers, the fucking delivery men.

I hear my son scraping away at his electric guitar in his bedroom across the hall, writing songs about girls who will not look his way. I often lie awake long into the night, listening to my son’s sleepless labors. My wife left me some years ago, and took with her our two daughters.

My son has a ridiculous haircut and a bad complexion that I feel certain is the result of an indifference to hygiene that he inherited from me. It seems to me that my son has talent, and I don’t wish to offer him advice that might be construed as anything but encouragement. I have had enough discouragement for both of us.

My wife told me that I have “some work to do,” and I don’t exactly understand what she meant, even as I recognize the apparent truth of her words.

I spend an inordinate amount of time splayed on the floor, the position in which I am most comfortable, my head rocking at the margins of sleep. I have spent years becoming this man. Slowly becoming this man splayed on the floor, peering into the dusty, dim astronomy of my skull. Weather permitting I might make my way out into my yard. I suppose I am a familiar and not entirely welcome sight to my neighbors, as I sit there at the picnic table staring into space, studying words and thoughts and memories, finding them in the dark, faraway galaxies of my head. Like my old dreams, I often do not recognize where these strange constellations come from, or even exactly what they are. I am continually puzzled when stray images and thoughts invade this private airspace.

I think perhaps my son, through his music, will give expression to this confusion that seems to have settled over our home like a cloud. With money he made selling fried chicken my son has purchased what I gather is rudimentary recording equipment, and he makes tapes of his songs.

“I’ve mastered nothing,” he sings on one of the songs he has written and recorded. “Is it too much to ask for a little something, a little bitty, little tiny, little bit of something?” Though he has no actual band, he calls the band that is only him, “Bottle Fly.” One of his songs is called “Taxidermy Dad.” I saw the title written on one of his cassette boxes.

For many years I was an obsessive documenter of my experiences and the life of my family. This was in the years before videotape became so easy and affordable, thank God; I was, rather, an obsessive shutter bug and note taker. I realized in time, however, that I never seemed to have any real interest in looking over my photos and notes, and neither did anyone else. I had no memories there. It was as if in taking the step back necessary for the documentation –behind the camera, hunched above the notebook– I had divorced myself from the actual experience of the very moments I was trying to preserve. The documentation essentially subtracted me from my own life, constructed a puzzling barrier between myself and my memories. I was never present, certainly not truly present, at any of these occasions, and so had no real memories invested in them. Looking back over them now I feel as if I am looking back at my life as it went on without me, as, in fact, it more or less had.

I believe this, though, about myself, and about the people I live surrounded by: we have the best intentions. We had big dreams, perhaps still have. We wish there was something we could do for those less fortunate. We intend to make some changes and improvements in our lives. We hope to make long-term friendships and to continue to meet new and interesting people. We would like to undertake a healthier diet and exercise regimen. We try again and again to be grateful for the blessings we have been given. We would like to continue to challenge and motivate and inspire each other. We dream ceaselessly of traveling to new places and having new and interesting experiences. And yet we also continue to find ourselves at the bottom of the day, at the bottom of another page, exhausted and out of words.

Shit blew up and shit fell down. The wind raged for days and it rained for weeks on end.

The water rose and swept stuff away. When the water finally receded, the sun broke through the clouds and the clouds dissipated and the sun blazed like an angry thing and the river evaporated and the earth turned to dust. The dust was carried on the wind that once again ceaselessly raged.

The news was an endless recitation of calamity. Everywhere there were eruptions of senseless violence and the clash of impotent armies. The hearts and hopes of many old lovers withered.

In the midst of all this gloom a fierce contagion broke out, and in the public spaces of the cities bodies were stacked like cordwood. Those who tried to flee sent back word that there was so safe harbor, no refuge left to escape to.

There were also, of course, tremendous conflagrations, and much was destroyed, and there was widespread famine and many starved and perished.

Yet throughout all this horror and heartbreak, neither heedless man nor vengeful god managed to extinguish the stars, and upon the stars wishes were still made, and from those wishes dreams were born, and in those dreams hope was sown, and out of that hope love was kindled, and through that love man once again learned to live.

I had this period in my early thirties when I would have what I guess for lack of a better word I’d have to call visions. I once saw a woman –a stout, elderly woman in a disturbingly translucent gown– levitating in the lovely chapel of a huge hospital in the Midwest.

This chapel was a spectacular and ornate place. It was bigger than many of the Catholic churches I’d attended in my childhood.

The place was entirely abandoned at the time I saw the levitating woman. It was very late at night, and the chapel was eerily silent and cloaked in shadows. I’m not even sure that what this woman was doing could properly be called levitating; she was actually floating, and hovering around up in the rafters high above the pews, her gown billowing around her and swollen with what appeared to be moonlight.

In the silence of the chapel I could clearly hear the labored, wheezing respiration of the old woman. She seemed to be having a tough time of it up there. She also seemed to be entirely oblivious to my presence. I wondered if perhaps what I was witnessing was an angel or a saint, although I could recall no instances where such beings had been portrayed as either quite so stout or so elderly.

I had some change in my pocket, which I proceeded to throw at the woman one coin at a time. I finally managed to hit her, but she didn’t seem to even flinch. Many of the coins I threw ricocheted back down to the marble floor, where they rattled around noisily. I recall listening as several of them rolled all the way down to the altar.

A short time later the woman disappeared, and I shrugged the whole thing off as an exhaustion-induced hallucination.

The next morning, however, the word was going around town that some nuns had discovered the body of an old woman on the floor of the hospital chapel, and the local newspaper later reported that the woman had a quarter embedded in her ribcage.

Out there in the country where I grew up there was once a pond that was said to be full of wonders.

People always referred to the pond as “brackish.” I don’t have a dictionary at hand –I am a refugee now, and am reclining in the backseat of my car at a fogbound rest area somewhere along the Mississippi in the American south– so I’ll have to take their word for it that the pond was brackish.

It was a brackish pond, then, and the country around it was rough country, made difficult by stones, boulders, and prickly scrub brush. There was a lot of what I think you’d call rubble as well, or perhaps detritus. There was also a lot of junk left over from the lives of the people who used to live out there and had long since fled.

Here and there you’d still encounter a weathered hut on stilts, and there were a bunch of ragged sheep wandering around in the rubble, most of them gone feral. I can tell you that a feral sheep is something to be avoided.

There wasn’t much else to recommend the community, such as it was, and it was a brutal place to be a child. There were only a handful of kids in those days, every one of us an accident born to people who were old enough to be our grandparents.

The men who remained had once been fishermen, before their lake evaporated from all the poisons pumped in there by the old munitions factory. The lake was long gone by the time I was a child, and the old fishermen would occasionally emerge from their homes and wobble along the lousy roads on bicycles. Most of the old men had long, flowing white beards.

I do still remember the pond, though, and as I said, this pond had once allegedly been full of wonderous things; teeming with wonders, was what we were always told: mermaids –a whole extended family or tribe of mermaids– and some sort of mutant creation that was said to be a cross between a dragon and a sea serpent. Pond dragons, these creatures were called by the locals.

The fishermen, bored by the loss of their livelihood, jigged every last one of those pond dragons out of the brackish pond and hauled them along the roads to be gutted and strung from clotheslines and rusty flag poles.

I never saw any of the pond dragons alive, but I do still have a vague memory of the mermaids. Old women used to go to the pond to throw stale bread and popcorn to the mermaids, which would flop up onto the ragged shore and fight among themselves for the offerings. Most of them I recall –or perhaps recall hearing– were horribly obese.

The idle fishermen, having exhausted the pond’s supply of dragons, and grown desperate and lonely from their spartan and solitary existence, turned their attention to capturing the mermaids, and began to trap, net, and wrestle them from the pond. I believe, if I’m not mistaken, that these randy old bachelors made bathtub pets of most of the remaining mermaids.

The pond, like the lake before it, eventually dried up completely, and the government sent in soldiers and heavy equipment one morning to enforce the long-ago-ordered evacuation of the land. Those of us who remained were loaded into trucks with our belongings and carted away to a relocation camp in the desert of Nevada.

I escaped from that camp some years ago, but not before hearing the rumor that one of the original mermaids from that old brackish pond of my youth is now on display in a traveling carnival somewhere down south.

I remember a darkness, real, yet stirred with a thousand fireflies, perhaps my earliest recollected encounter with true wonder.

The mosquito trucks crawled through at dusk and left behind a moving cloud embroidered with the bright fragments of skreeing children.

Even then two people armed with nothing but sticks could have a good time, could make music, could poke out each other’s eyes, could destroy a hundred lives, could start either a fire or a war that would last a lifetime.

We didn’t exactly understand that, of course. There was no way we could know that there would come a day when one of us would find himself wandering the halls of a detox ward in hospital pajamas, shivering, his face a blister, a seemingly permanent grimace. Or that another of our old, happy neighborhood tribe, so afraid he would end up just like all the other people on the planet, would allow himself to become so different that he could no longer look even his closest friends in the eye.

Couldn’t we all try to remember how magical we once thought our time in this world was going to be? How magical it once was?

Do me a big favor: Take a good look around and tell me what the hell you think you’re doing?

I’ll sit right here and wait for the fog to burn off, for the music to work its way back in, and for the words to once again start moving in me like a dance, like a dance that doesn’t even know it’s dancing.

I wonder where you were going in such a hurry when I passed you walking on the opposite side of the street yesterday?

You always did have that purposeful look about you. Even as a little girl you seemed like you were in a hurry to get somewhere.

I knew how important it was for you to be on time. When you had no particular place to go you still kept to some tight and mysterious internal schedule. It was as if you feared being late for a vague appointment or assignation that was loaded with hypothetical possibility. I suspected that your constant movement was driven by the certainty that somewhere –someplace other than wherever you happened to find yourself– something was happening that you couldn’t bear to miss.

But what am I saying? I never understood what was going on in that pretty head of yours.

I sure did find you fascinating, though. There was always something happening in and behind your lovely eyes, and there were an awful lot of nights when I laid awake trying to imagine what you might be thinking. Every once in awhile I’d get a little glimpse –or, rather, you’d give me a glimpse; you’d choose to reveal something.

Those moments felt like offerings to me, and I used to collect them and try to piece together a portrait of who you might really be. Sometimes it felt like I was getting close, but then you’d give me some new fragment that didn’t fit. And you never did stop moving, which made it hard to keep you in focus for any length of time.

I had places to go myself eventually, of course. No place special, really, when all was said and done. My destination was ultimately the sort of bland constellation of compromises that is most people’s destination.

I can’t decide if you were lucky or not, but you were one of those people for whom all would never be said and done. You’d say so yourself, in fact, and I can still hear you say it: Never.

Never, never, you’d say.

Never, never, never.

So ain’t we all inanimate, George?

–Jim Thompson, Pop. 1280

‘Je’ est un autre. (‘I’ is someone else.)

–Arthur Rimbaud

You might, you’re perhaps fond of saying, occasionally like something concrete from me, something in the way of true disclosure, painful confession, political opinion, or merely, now and again, a bit of honest biographical kibble.

You can’t love me, you say, if I won’t let you in. I can understand this, I guess. It might be nice if I could once in a while roll back the clouds and give you a glimpse of the actual flesh-and-blood man hunched over a sprawling jigsaw puzzle shot full of holes.

The truth –the unfortunate truth in a world full of unfortunate truths– is that I don’t honestly know who or what really is signified by the name Brad Zellar. I can sometimes manage to get far enough outside myself and above the world to get a clear look at the puzzle as it’s taking shape on the tabletop. I can see all the missing pieces, but that’s not much help to a man who doesn’t have any idea where those pieces might be found, particularly since the puzzle seems to be comprised of little but random patterns or, some days, a cloudless sky. Other times it resembles nothing so much as a giant abstract impressionist canvas, a riot of colors and textures that ultimately doesn’t add up to much beyond a series of vague urges and strange decisions utterly lacking in any apparent inner logic.

I fear that it will never add up to anything, never be finished, and never resemble anything that makes any sense or looks at all like what I wish I could think of as my life. Or perhaps the problem is that it looks entirely too much like what I think of as my life.

Mirrors, unfortunately, aren’t much help either. They’re not much help at all, and I avoid them at every opportunity. It scares me that I don’t recognize the face I see staring out at me from the mirror. I mean this quite literally; that man is no one I know, and I frankly don’t care for the way he looks, don’t like the cut of his jib. If I was half the man I wish I was I’d kick his keister halfway to Hibbing.

If that’s who or what I am, though, I apologize to myself, and to you, even though I don’t suppose there’s a damn thing I can do about it. It pains me to admit that my grandfather was a bit of a prophet when he told me long ago that I wouldn’t amount to a hill of beans.

All of this admitted confusion aside, I’ve racked my wracked brain for a few moments and managed to cough up a few personal tidbits that will perhaps help you to know me a little bit better:

I can’t begin to tell you how meaty I feel. Considerably meaty, on a regular basis.

Remember that insensitive remark you once made about my haircut? I’m not going to lie to you, it smarted.

I once saw my grandmother, drunk and wearing nothing but a sombrero, dancing naked in the backyard of the house she shared with my grandfather and my uncle Slim.

I have a cousin Rueben who once lost an eyeball in a shower mishap. Or at least that was the official family version of events.

My father was a self-professed visionary, habitually unemployed, who spent most of his days wandering the streets of my little hometown wearing a sandwich board that begged God for –depending on his (my father’s) mood– revenge, forgiveness, or inspiration. The story my father liked to tell was that he took a lock of my barren mother’s hair, buried it in the yard, and gathered together his no-account brothers. The whole bunch of them then spent most of an afternoon and long evening drinking Budweiser, grilling and eating Italian sausage, and pissing into the patch of dirt in which they had buried the lock of hair. Nine months later my father dug me bawling from the ground.

That’s enough for now. I’m tired.

Now why don’t you tell me a little bit about yourself? I feel like we hardly know each other.