Journal of Fear and Hope

Born Only to Suffer
September 12, 2020

I don’t really care for religion. If it works for you and gives you peace, that’s great. But on a global scale, it seems to have done us all more harm than good. We’ve started wars, murdered children, enslaved whole peoples, flown airplanes full of people into buildings full of people, all because those scary others pray to the wrong piece of wood, or to the wrong lump of gold, or to the wrong invisible whatever. Even now--and I mean right now--in America, the political party that shouts the name Jesus louder and more often than any other uses his message of charity and goodwill to claim the poor aren’t doing enough to pull themselves up by their own bootstraps, completely ignoring the fact they have neither straps nor boots.

For centuries our gods have been pretty vicious figures. They rape and kill and smite with burning swords and heavy hands. They fight among themselves, overthrowing each other more often than fascist governments. We’ve gotten so used to gods of anger that we haven’t been able to fully accept the idea of a peaceful, loving deity. Jesus was a weirdo with long hair and questionable friends. God of love, you say? Pish posh. Get back to me when your dad can at least drop burning hailstones on those folks over there with the funny hats.

Do we need ‘em? I don’t think so. I say kill ‘em all and let mythology sort ‘em out.

From a Lonely Attic Room
September 11, 2020

I have a theory that our level of happiness is directly proportional to the amount of control we have over our own lives. Miserable people are often trapped in conditions they can’t escape. So they lash out at others or at the government, or they harm themselves, because that’s all the power they have.

I seek out things I can control. In my entertainment, I like to have a level of agency. When I discovered Choose Your Own Adventure books as a kid, I was immediately enthralled. The amount of control was far more limited than the book covers let on, but it was enough to draw me in.

As it was for many, that series led me directly into gaming. Role-playing games, both at the kitchen table and on the computer, let me set my own pace for exploration and pick my own path. Again, the choices were limited, but they were real. On the computer, I could solve the puzzles in whatever order I wanted, or so it seemed. With my friends, I could be the star of every story ever. Or so I imagined. But it was enough.

Even limited choices are better than no choices. If you bore down into the core of any hobby, you’ll find someone who is flexing every ounce of power they have over a small, insignificant thing. Stamp collecting, bird watching, archery, music, rice painting, gardening, and even writing, is one person acting as god in a small space, outside of which is a world that barely notices them at all. But in that space, making those inconsequential choices, they are happy.

Choosing the Uphill Climb
August 28, 2020

I owe a thanks to The Mountain Goats. If you don’t know who they are, do yourself a favor and check ‘em out on the streaming service of your choice. Earlier this year, their front man, the lyrical genius John Darnielle, wrote and recorded an album in ten days as the quarantine locked fully into place. He recorded a song a day directly to cassette using the same boombox with which he recorded the now classic, lo-fi album All Hail West Texas. He had a few thousand tapes (yes, actual cassette tapes) made, and they sold out immediately. The money generated went to keeping the band and all their families afloat as live shows became untenable for this brief (fingers crossed) moment in time.

I bring this up not just to shout praises for this band and that great, home-recorded album, but as a direct reaction to it. When he came up with the idea for the album, John was reading A Chronicle of the Last Pagans, by Pierre Chuvin. Many of the songs he wrote on that ten-day bender were inspired by that book. What a challenge, eh? To purposefully seek inspiration from what would seem an unlikely place to most anyone else.

I thought to myself, I can do that, too.

The last book I had read at the time was The Changing Land by Roger Zelazny, a book I tried to like but ultimately couldn’t. What if I wrote a batch of songs based on the plot and/or themes of that book? I wanted a challenge, and it seemed like fun.

For the most part, it was. I started out with “Gods of a Lesser Hell,” considering an actual character from the novel, a tentacled, mad god who is the cause of the titular shifting land. It rages and quakes, and reality around it goes all wibbly wobbly. Once I had the first verse and chorus, I was off to the races.

But sometimes this project was not fun at all. From the beginning I wanted to write a song about revenge, a major theme of the novel. But I’m not a vengeful person. I’ve known vengeful people, but that’s not a mindset I can think from. I took several runs at the song and failed every time. I met my songwriting ceiling, and it hurt to face those limitations. John Darnielle has written somewhere in the ballpark of 500 songs. While I’ve recorded fewer than fifty, when it comes to actual lyrical content, I’m getting up there. But JD of The Mountain Goats is the superior songsman. No contest.

Still, I’m proud of the attempt and of the songs I ended up with. I want so badly to record them, with bass and percussion and overdubs, but that’s just not possible with the way my life is now. I can however, sing into my phone and present the vocals alone. I like the melodies I came up with, and I want to share. Plus, it’s something I’ve never done, so let’s throw one more novel idea on the pile. If the world insists on constantly changing, I can do that, too.

Standing in a Time Capsule
June 20, 2020

When I became a Rush fan, their most recent album was Presto. So the first that came out during my time as a listener was Roll the Bones. I was fifteen, living in Tennessee, learning to drive, on a bowling team, had my room in the basement of the house, and just looking at the cover of that CD brings the memory of my room flooding back. I can tell you where I was and what my life was like with every subsequent release. I measure out my life with Rush records.

When Counterparts hit, my family had moved back to NC, and I was hanging out with my high school buddies, sneaking out to do dumb things at night, lounging and playing games and making every moment of our last summer of freedom count. Music was our oxygen, and we breathed deeply.

I was in college when Test for Echo made its disappointing arrival. I hate to call any Rush album bad, but it was not good. Still, I listened in my dorm room, and knew the next one would be amazing. The guys would knock it out of the park. I graduated. Got my first apartment. Got my first adult job, which was just as crappy as the ones in my youth. Had my first car accident, bought a car on my own for the first time. Come on, Rush, I need some relief here.

Well, we all now know Neil was going through some stuff, too. Lost his wife and daughter in the same year. Went into retreat. The story, as I understand it, was he considered quitting music all together. But he found peace, and the boys got back together, and they dropped Vapor Trails on us like a train. Now, this record gets some flack from fans, mostly because the mix was off. But it was new Rush, and it was glorious. I can still remember listening for the first time on the way to work. “Peaceable Kingdom” came on and immediately became my favorite Rush tune. The guys hadn't rocked that hard in years. I drove circles in the parking lot and punched in late because there was no way I was going to interrupt that righteousness.

Then another five years passed. I followed a woman to Florida, she left me there, I met someone else, we moved in together, I started web design classes at a community college. Oh, and driving through Florida, looking out at all the deliberate sameness of one neighborhood after another, the opening synth line of “Subdivisions” would automatically play in my head every time. Snakes and Arrows finally arrived, and I bought it but held back on listening to it for an entire day. I had to make an hour-long trip to take a proctored test for one of my classes, and what better way to spend that time than by listening to new Rush. First couple of songs were good, then the quality began to lag. There's something off about that album, I can't put my finger on it. Is it lacking in melody? Are the lyrics not on the same level as usual? Hard to say, but as soon as I finished hearing the first new material in half a decade from my all-time favorite band, I immediately wanted to hear something different. I put on Hemispheres instead.

More life changes. I escaped Florida, changed jobs of course, another car accident and another car. Info on a new Rush album began to trickle out. The first song I ever bought online was “Caravan.” I put it on my iPod. Amazing stuff, this computer magic. I remember hanging out at a friend house, and “Headlong Flight” came on a satellite radio station as a preview. It sounded great, and my friend said he hoped this album would be a good one, because it just might be their last. Before buying Clockwork Angels, I made a place for it in my CD rack, but it never left my car. It lives there now, along with Black Sabbath's Paranoid and Dio's Holy Diver, three albums I always want within reach.

And now we're here. I moved once more, met someone and had grand adventures, smashed that iPod leaping from a cable car in San Francisco. We got married, had an awesome kid. I'm now working a very rewarding job. Not a week goes by that I don't crank some Rush at my cubicle. Skype headphones also work with Spotify, don't you know. But there will be no more. Maybe a newly discovered live recording here and there, a re-release and repackaging of an old record. But no more new songs. I do have twenty albums to revisit whenever I want. I got thirty years of lifetime soundtrack from the band. I hope my daughter finds a band that creative and productive to mark her life events with. I was lucky. I can't complain. I just wish it hadn't all gone by so fast.

Through the Eyeglass in Reverse
May 22, 2020

Okay, so to jump right into the middle of the story, my daughter got hold of my magnifying glass and started looking at everything through it. Her toys, pictures, the carpet, her hands, puzzle pieces, her parents. She held a magic artifact, one of the greatest she’d ever seen. The pure joy radiating from her as she pronounced “It makes it bigger!” over and over was one of the greatest things I’d ever seen. So I wanted to share something special with her.

It was getting late. I’d been following her around as she magnified everything, and I really needed to start making food. But, come on, let’s see one more wondrous thing. I opened up my comic book collection. To her, for all the years she’d been alive, it was just a long, white, cardboard rectangle in front of the closet. It held the doors closed, and sometimes I put my socks on it. When I removed the lid, that changed.

I wanted to show her how comic books were colored by lots of tiny dots. Look through the glass and behold the illusion of shading. But it didn’t look all that magnificent. Maybe the books I took out were too new. Maybe if I could find an older one from the sixties the effect would be more pronounced. My attempt at magic was a failure.

At least it was from my perspective. She had no idea how printing worked now or then and wasn’t going to be impressed by the advances in the transference of ink to paper. She had discovered treasure.

In that box was a long row of superheroes. She recognized Batman and Spider-Man because I had toys of each, and recently they had joined forces with the Paw Patrol pups. I picked up Batman: A Death in the Family because I’d forgotten I owned it. My daughter said she wanted to read it. I told her it was scary. She said, “But I like scary.” She doesn’t. She just wasn’t taking no for an answer. She found a book with Spider-Man on the cover and said, “Let’s read.”

But… It was getting late. She needed to eat. And it was a pretty violent book. Not suitable for a four-year-old. So I said to my daughter, “I can’t read comic books with you now.”

It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to say in my life.

Enough to Be Afraid
April 24, 2020

This poem is a true story. A man really did pull into my Granny’s yard one day and ask if he could buy her trees. They were beautiful, pink formosa trees. Their bark would peel away like skin from a sunburn, and one of my favorite things to do in her yard was crush the strips of bark into dust. Such a satisfying sound.

But, yeah, the guy seriously wanted to buy full-grown trees that had been there as long as I had been alive. Grownups did weird things.

Now I’m a grownup (an involuntary shiver went through me as I typed that) with a four-year-old. She doesn’t understand why sometimes I’m there in the morning when she wakes up, but other days I’m not. She doesn’t know what I do when I’m not there. My wife described my job to her like this: “Your daddy helps the doctors with the computer, and they give him coins to buy food.” She knows that coins have value because in her tablet games, doing certain tasks awards you coins you can then use to unlock items or characters. I’m a video game to my daughter, and I’m not sure if that’s awesome or sad.

She has a surprising grasp on the quarantine, though. She knows the park and the library and the Chuck E. Cheese is closed because there are germs everywhere. They will make her sick, so she can’t go. That makes her smarter than some adults.

Some things are still out of her grasp for the moment. She thinks you can just declare any day to be Christmas, and presents will be there in the morning. She also doesn’t understand why hurling my glasses at the wall isn’t hilarious.

But I get it: Grownups do weird things. Most of us have a remarkable lack of toys. We walk around muddy puddles rather than through. We often go weeks at a time without opening a single present. We demand the right to be hurt by germs then bring the germs home to hurt our children. Maybe one day this will all make sense to my daughter. Then she can explain it to me.

Happy in Their Shade
April 10, 2020

There’s a line of dogwood trees on the campus where I work. I like to stroll down there once or twice a day as a break from my desk. Last year in March, I laid down under the blooming branches, and the last line of “London Calling” echoed in my mind. The petals have all fallen now, but I took lots of photos, this year and last. It’s a special place to me, a place of retreat, comfort, peace.

A few weeks ago, beneath the canopy of blossoms, I wrote a poem. I spoke it into the air then went back to my desk to write it officially. On the way back, I had ideas for two more poems about trees. I call them the Trilogy of Petals. Each is more complex than the last and was harder to write. It was a challenge I put to myself, and I’m proud I rose to the occasion, no pun intended.

Cold Comfort
April 5, 2020

I posted fourteen songs last year over the course of fourteen weeks. That’s three and a half months. When I posted, they went to the top of the website, stretched across the page, up to eight thumbnails in view at a time. Then, as I posted more things--an essay, a poem, some reading reviews--they shifted to the left. Today, the last song in that cycle, or album as I wish they might be some impossible day, fell off the new item display.

I worked hard to write those songs, to choose the accompanying photographs, to learn how to display them all on a single, fullscreen page. And now I’ve replaced them with more things. I’m sad to see them disappear. Though of course the songs can still be found on the site, they recede from memory. The walks and drives and lonely times filled with the confounding and wonderful act of writing and singing to myself. Falling into memory, fading from thought. Gone. All gone.

I have no illusions about their longevity. They’re unimportant to anyone but me. I put up songs and poetry and essays and whatever else, and it’s all there for the whole world to ignore. Then when my bank account closes along with my eyes--or some hideous blip in our wretched history causes the internet to fizzle--all the art I ever struggled to make will be gone forever.

I have three new poems I’ll be posting in the coming weeks, and then everything I made last year will drop off the header. Then sometime later, those poems will do the same as I continue to pile new things on to cover the old. I don’t mean to sound self-pitying, though it does sound that way, even to myself. I’m doing what I was made to do, and I’m proud of my work. I’m happy when a new idea comes (zero ideas and no work is a far worse curse, believe me), but it’s always a little sad when a project comes to completion and dwindles in importance as something unknown steals its fire.

Digital Kid
March 27, 2020

When I can, I play Nintendo on my phone. Mostly old RPGs like Dragon Warrior or Final Fantasy. Inevitably, my daughter saw me having fun on the phone without her and asked to play, too.

At first, she just watched, but she quickly picked up on certain aspects of gaming: When your status bar turns red, that’s bad. Treasure chests are tiny boxes of joy. Defeating monsters is a rush. In fact, she calls it “Monsters.” “Let’s play Monsters,” she says when I get home. Gladly.

Right now, we’re playing Final Fantasy Mystic Quest. It’s probably not something I would have started on my own, as it is derided by gamers and was never seen as a “true” Final Fantasy game. But after I saw a video review, I figured it would be perfect for my four-year-old. I was right.

There is only one companion in your party at once, and you can set the game to control them completely if you want. They come and go, one replacing another as the story unfolds, and the singular aspect of someone saying goodbye is eventful for a small child. When the first companion got sick and had to leave to recuperate, my daughter kept asking about her every time we played. She wanted to return to her bedside to check up on her. When another companion was shoved off a bridge, my daughter would bring that up at random times in the day. She couldn't wait to tell her mom about it. She has empathy for these pixelated people.

Weapons and armor simply equip themselves when you find an upgrade, so you don’t have to juggle inventory or weigh the benefits of one weapon against another. It’s a simple system, yes, and if I were playing alone I would probably not enjoy it. But it’s easy for my daughter to focus on what she likes, which is vanquishing monsters. You can switch between weapons. Her favorite is the claw, I think because it makes a scratch across the monsters’ images when you attack. Of course, it’s not always the best weapon to use, and I try to get her to use the “right” one.

I encourage her to use the spells that are strong against certain monsters rather than the ones she likes. She especially likes the Quake spell. When she calls for it, she shakes her whole body and pretends to be in an earthquake. It’s super cute, but it’s not always the most effective spell to use. However, it’s her game. The player character has her name. When I hand her the phone, she’s in control, and I should let it be. That’s why I fell in love with video games in the first place. They offered a world in which I could control my own fate, my own actions. If she wants to use up all her spell points instead of swinging her axe just so she can watch meteors and fire rain from the sky to defeat the final, already weakened monster, then I say let her. Play your way, kid. Play your way.

The Spirit of Podcasts
March 6, 2020

I have a relatively small list of podcasts I listen to regularly. Of course, I get bored with the tight format and familiar voices from time to time and cast my net into the cyber sea in hopes of catching something great. I discovered a few new podcasts last year, some brand new to the world, some new to me. Here are my favorite discoveries from 2019.

Dolly Parton’s America

When I lived in Tennessee, I visited Dollywood a couple times, and I would hear her biggest hits like “I Will Always Always Love You” and “Jolene” on the radio. But I really knew nothing about Dolly Parton, other than the boob jokes. Until just last year, I had no idea she was such a goddess to so many folks, folks from around the world and a wide spectrum of cultures and ideologies. This podcast asks how that came to be, how one woman can have an almost universal appeal to such a fragmented population. Along the way, it examines Dolly’s lyrics, her history, and her absence of politics.

Her lyrics contain a deeper emotion than I knew, commenting on death and sexuality from a woman’s perspective. She says feminist things but says she’s not a feminist. That frustrating contradiction is the core topic of the series. More questions arise than answers, but the best art is always that way.

Stay Free: The Story of The Clash

The entire history of The Clash, narrated by Chuck D. That description, alone, was enough to sell me on the podcast, but the research, plotting, and content was so far beyond what I thought I would get. I learned loads about the band, from their origins (the bass player didn’t know how to play at first but was chosen because he was a good dresser), fan reactions, their experimentation with different musical styles, the creation of London Calling, to their burn out and break up. Interviews carry most of the weight, but intermittently, Chuck D. weighs in on his own personal experiences in the music industry.

The Clash were always a band I was simply aware of. Heard the hits on the radio, knew they were important to punk music, and Henry Rollins liked them. But listening to this podcast drove home how uncompromising, innovating, and, yes, important they were. They burned hot and quickly, hardly ever taking a break during their years together, and changed music for all time. When I finished the series, I immediately downloaded London Calling and Combat Rock. And my daughter danced to “Train in Vain.”

I Only Listen to The Mountain Goats

This podcast is a series of conversations between two people. Occasionally a third will drop by, but usually it’s just two guys sitting in a semi-comfortable space to talk about art. You don’t have to know who these two guys are, but it helps. They are Joseph Fink, co-creator of the Welcome to Night Vale podcast, which I confess I have not gotten into, and John Darnielle, singer and songwriter of The Mountain Goats, a band I have gotten into because of this podcast.

Ostensibly, they discuss a different Mountain Goats song each episode, but they inevitably veer into other topics like literature, ancient history, or how awesome possums are. They don’t just break down what a song means or how it was created, they talk about what art can do, how to exist in this world as an artist, and how fans connect with both the creator and the creation.

One thing that makes the show interesting and lands the conversation on unpredictable shores is that Joseph is a fan of The Mountain Goats and wants to delve deeply into the tunes, but John, the writer of those songs, hates talking about his own work. You can sometimes feel the tug-of-war between them as they each attempt to steer the dialogue where they think it should go.

With each episode, you get a full Mountain Goats song plus either a demo or a cover of that song. And most of them are fantastic. Well-written lyrics sung passionately. Check out the podcast to get a taste of the music, if nothing else.

The Memory Palace

This is now officially my favorite podcast. I first heard it on a different podcast. Radiolab showcased it, and I immediately needed more. It’s a history podcast, but rather than a big-picture, Ken Burns-style generalized look at history, it zooms tightly in on individuals. The backstory of Samuel Morse, inventor of the famous code, is especially moving. Then there’s the story of the most famous lighthouse keeper in America. She was seriously badass. And the story of John Wilkes Booth's brother. And the story of the people in the box seat next to Abraham Lincoln. And the story of the only human in historical record to be struck by a meteorite. Last year’s Halloween episode about Bobby Picket is wonderful. All written and spoken by one person, Nate Dimeo.

The topics vary considerably, but all are told with great attention to detail. More than just a list of facts, the host connects the stories of the past to our present. History is not a dead thing of the past, but a living organ of the current body. On first listen, I was hooked and spent the next two months binging all one-hundred-forty-odd more. Now I wait on baited breath for a new story every two weeks. I want more all the time.

This podcast has also stricken me with an unshakable urge to make my own. I always thought podcasts had to be two people gabbing at each other or a cast of many recreating the old vibe of radio plays. But now I see it can be one voice, talking about whatever it wants. I will never be able to top the brilliance of this podcast, but damn it, I want to try. That’s the greatest compliment any writer can give to another.

In the Grip of a Nameless Possession
February 21, 2020

I got this journal for my birthday last year:

My wife wrote a wonderful message, and my daughter drew shapes on the inside-back-cover. After a month or so of hemming and hawing, I finally opened the thing and put pencil to paper. That was an important moment in my life.

I set my goal to write about something good that happened each day, something that made me happy. Which I did. Sometimes I missed a day. Sometimes I missed several. But I filled that journal up last year. Then I kept writing journal entries in digital form.

Today, I reached page 100.

Last year, along with the paper journal and the digital, I wrote a book of poetry (coming soon), an album and a half of songs (Quiet Lions and another coming later this year), a couple of essays, and a short story. I did all that because I had to. If I don't write, I fail. That's my motivation. But I found the strength and dedication by writing something in that Snoopy journal almost every day. I have a journal entry for every day of this year. And since the turn of the decade, I have written something else, usually a few paragraphs in the new story, every single weekday.

I established a habit. That's how you learn anything new, by forcing yourself to do it till you do it automatically. That's how I wrote 25 pages of a new story this year, and that's how I'll finally finish the book I started a decade ago.

Before and After
February 7, 2020

Six years ago, I sat in the cafe of a Barnes and Noble, on my lunch break, and started writing a short story in pencil on loose leaf paper. Slowly, a few paragraphs or sentences at a time, I wrote seventy-five pages. I was just about done with the first draft of the longest thing I’d ever written by hand when my life changed, and my focus shifted away from that story. I was fired from that job, which turned out to be a godsend because I then found the best job I’ve ever had--but it was a scary month of free falling. Then my daughter was born.

The story has been in my notebook and on my mind ever since. I wrote other things, songs, poems, a few stories to accompany that long one in a book. As the years went by--sorry I automatically sang the beginning of this sentence because it’s a line from a Rush song. I’ll start again. In time, the story became a hulking beast I couldn’t face, a snarl of vines I couldn’t untie. But this year, I made the commitment to get it done.

At first, I thought I would pick up a freshly-filled mechanical pencil, write the ending, then transcribe it into type. But reading from the start, I realized the story needed serious rewrites. The beginning, as might be expected, was an unfocused, rambling mess. I had no idea when I began what the story wanted to say, where it wanted to go, who the characters were or how they related to each other. So I started writing, this time with a keyboard.

I knew what would come later in the story, so I was able to set some of that up in the beginning. I knew who the characters were, so I was able to write better dialogue between them. The writing felt good and, most importantly, it was fun. A week or so later, I had a scene that didn’t exist in the first draft, but it had been seeded by what I had done six years ago.

I was having the other half of a conversation that I had started, with myself, in that Barnes and Noble cafe. A lot of what I wrote in the original draft I now recognize as pretty dumb. I wrote a lot of bad prose back then. This is not going to be a case of simple transcription. My characters over explain everything. They’re surprised by things quite obvious in the story. They make stupid decisions. However, when I wrote this mess years before, I thought I was doing a great job. I was proud of it. I guess it’s a sign of growth that I can spot the mistakes in my own writing, but I am proud of what I’ve written in this new draft. Am I blind to new mistakes? When I look at this years from now will I be just as disappointed?

There are some good lines, though, that I was able to lift and drop into the updated version. Like this one: “He grinned like a magician who had just successfully fooled you into believing he conjured an elephant out of thin air when all he’d done was merely pull it from his sleeve.” I like that one. Maybe I wasn’t a complete blockhead back then.

It’s inevitable that I’m a better writer now than I was before. I’ll be a better writer six years from now. The one thing I know that won’t change is I will always hope, but never know, that I’m good enough.

Celebrating 45 Years of Sobriety
January 24, 2020

I try to avoid thoughts of what my life might have been had I been dealt better cards or rolled better stats. That kind of thinking is pointless. I'm not where or who I thought would be when I was a child, but I got exactly what everyone gets, a lifetime. And in that lifetime I got to do some pretty great things with some pretty great people. If that means swallowing an ounce of depression for every cup of comfort, then I say bottoms up.

There's no guaranty my life would have been better. With my father as role model, I might have been a drunk, a junkie. I could have died on a waterfall that one time had I not been lucky. Any number of things could have gone wrong and ruined or ended my life. I got what I got, and I try to sift out the broken glass and hold on to the gold. There's a lot of gold in your life if you look for it.

--More Journal Entries--

"Too many flames with too much to burn, and life's only made of paper" --Ronnie James Dio

"Words are flowing out
Like endless rain into a paper cup
They slither wildly as they slip away
Across the universe" --John Lennon

"Bow to the paper Gods in a world that is paper thin
The fools in town are ruling now" --Duran Duran

"Here I sit writing on the paper
Trying to think of words you can't ignore"
--Alice in Chains

"Working for paper and for iron
Work for the right to keep my tie on
Working for paper and for iron
Work for the unicorn and lion" --XTC