Journal of Fear and Hope

Lost In a World of My Own
April 9, 2021

Sometimes I just want to be alone. For miles and days. Those last-man-on-earth stories? I consider them training films. Rule number one: bring extra glasses.

No one to please or answer to. No one to care for. No human contact at all. Just retreat and withdraw. I know it’s not healthy, but neither are cream-filled doughnuts, and I want to eat them all. It feels like victory, to shut out anything and one that might hurt, to burrow down and blow up the outside world. Maybe it’s worse in the long run, but it sure feels good at the moment.

Just as one doughnut won’t kill me, a short time alone won’t either. So I enjoy the silence when I can, stretch out whenever the space is mine. I’ll be back. Just don’t expect me to share the doughnuts.

Anthem of the Mind
April 2, 2021

It’s time for a new album of songs. I posted one last year, the year before that, and two the year before that. One day I’ll break out the bass and record music for them (and my daughter will immediately start cranking the tuning pegs and hogging the mic), but for now there’s just the sound of my voice. I like my voice. I sing my own songs to myself all the time. It’s a way to reflect on the world, on my memories, on my dreams. Keeps me sane.

That’s what I get out of all this work, a calm mind. There’s a lot flapping about up in my cranial attic. If I can open a window once in a while to let one of those noisy birds out, the rest of the house settles into something resembling peace.

You Can Call Me Faithless
March 19, 2021

Once, at church when I was a kid, I leaned forward in my seat, put my head down on the back of the pew in front of me, and fell asleep. When I woke up, I found I was being prayed for against my will. The pastor and a couple of other adults had placed their hands on my shoulders and on my head and were joining me in what they thought was an honest appeal for god’s salvation. I had just been up too late reading by flashlight.

But I went with it. It didn’t look like they were going away any time soon, so I figured, what they heck, I’ll do some prayers. I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to pray for, so I just said help me over and over, threw in a request for world peace and a good old please help the starving kids in Africa, which was a common prayer topic in my day. Eventually, they did leave, my mom patted me on the back, and the whole church applauded. I was left wondering what had just happened and if I could talk my mom into taking me to play Putt-Putt later that day.

I tried to be religious, tried to enjoy church and Sunday school and hymns and Bible stories. But when I tried to read the Bible from alpha to omega, I got hung up in the begats. Page after page of walk-ons who had kids, and their kids had kids, and their kids had kids, and what did this have to do with anything? Why was this part there? Why did God kill that guy who tried to stop the ark of the covenant from falling on the ground? Seriously, it was the unique Wu Tang record of its time, and he just wanted to make sure it didn’t get covered in mud and ox flop. God could be such a dink.

And what good is prayer, when even the people who do it professionally can’t tell the real thing from a nap?

I’m being intentionally obtuse here. I do know the power of prayer. For the person praying, it often feels like the only weapon at your disposal to combat whatever is currently beating at your door. It’s a pact between you and god, or whatever you believe is on the receiving end of your request. Buddha, Allah, Jesus, Jehovah. The formless space between the stars. I’m not trying to cancel prayer. If you ask me to pray for your sick dad, I won’t try to convince you that it won’t help. If you offer to pray for me or my family, I’ll say thank you. But, I don’t expect much to come of it. I did once. I also thought stars would grant wishes and werewolves were real.

I don’t know if I lost something or if I wised up. I’d rather be in charge of my own ship, rather than beholding to an angry god to spin my sails. So rather than angels, I’ll just talk to myself. I do sometimes wish werewolves were real though. That’d be cool.

I Like That Story
March 12, 2021

In the Calvin and Hobbes comic strip, Calvin repeatedly asks his dad to read him a book called Hamster Huey and the Gooey Kablooie. His dad hates it, or maybe he just hates the endless repetition of reading it every night. While my daughter doesn't have a single book she requests at every bedtime, she does have a rotating collection. There are the Five Little Monkeys books. They all have a refrain that appears throughout the story, and my daughter likes to join in. So when the crocodile goes "SNAP!" so does my daughter. When one little monkey has a brilliant idea to clean up and sell the family car, she and my daughter say, "I know," in a cute, lilting tune. I've read just about all of them many times.

Sometimes we read the same book two or three times a night. She loves pop-up books and lift-the-flap books and pretends to be surprised every time when Spot is not where his mom thinks he is. We have a great book about castles with some amazing pop-ups. There's a draw bridge, a catapult, a fully-suited knight, two knights jousting, two pages of medieval workers doing their tasks. She has a habit of pulling the action tabs too fast and too hard, weakening the infrastructure of the book. But, man, I love reading it to her. Or, rather, I love making up stories about the images with her. We don't always stick to the printed words.

It's a ritual we both look forward to. Some nights, due to an unhealthy lack of sleep, I sometimes fall asleep mid-sentence. Then my daughter kicks me or yells, "Wake up!" Sometimes I slip into a kind of fugue where I hear myself talking, and I know I'm no longer reading the book. When I snap out of it, I cannot remember what I was talking about, except my daughter is staring at me real strange-like.

I know some day she'll read on her own, and I'll lose this time with her. But for now, I treasure every moment. The ones I'm conscious for, anyway.

I hope she'll always love to read and pass the habit on to her kids if that's something in her future. Maybe that castle book, taped and glued down to the point of immobility. I hope she remembers the fun we had with it and forgets how it once took me twenty minutes and seven naps to get through one page.

Hey, what do you know? I did find something cheerful to write about this week. Mostly cheerful.

The Tip of the Iceberg
March 5, 2021

I know this is twice in a row. I know it makes me look... troubled. But here's another thing about suicide. It's just something I have to unload, toss into the sea and watch disappear. I wish I could say I'll have a cheerful topic next week, but who am I kidding? Just about everything I write is dark and depressing. It's been that way since high school when I would drop short stories onto my teacher's desk when she wasn't looking and run. My name wasn't on any of them, but she figured out who wrote them. And man, they were bloody. Still, she was happy that someone in her class was able and willing to type out three pages of prose, and she helped me get into Governor's School. There, I wrote more poems and stories about people dying. It's my thing. I'm fine. Really, I am.

I hope you're alright. It's impossible to really know how someone feels from just their appearance. We're taught to keep a stiff upper lip. Stop bumming everybody out. Smile more. Folks around you might have the completely wrong idea about what's going on in your head. So I hope you're okay. If not, then I hope it passes. As a wise man once said, "All plagues have passed. So far."

If it doesn't pass, I want you to know there's no shame in asking for help. If that person doesn't want to listen, then ask someone else. Someone needs you. Someone wants you to stick around. I promise.

I'm going to stop now because so many silly and clichéd phrases are coming to mind, and you don't need me droning on. Just keep at it.

Just keep at it.

Someone Set a Bad Example
February 26, 2021

When Robin Williams died, Henry Rollins, my hero, wrote an essay in which he said some bonehead things. In his essay, he wonders how anyone could commit suicide, contemplates on the singular nature of depression, then vents his anger at people who take that way out. Robin Williams had children and was therefore ineligible to ride that particular train and a coward for hopping on board. He makes an allusion to the murder of his friend Joe Cole as an example of someone whose life was for-real tragically cut short then drops the mic after anouncing he’s much too strong to end his own life.

It’s not a great statement, certainly not a very empathetic one. People dragged him hard for that. Even lovable, goofy T.V.’s Frank tweeted an angry “Fuck You, Henry Rollins!” The next week, Rollins offered what felt like an honest, heartfelt apology. He said he needed to take stock, learn, and try to evolve on the issue of severe depression. But if his initial stance made you cut him from your reading and listening life, he would understand.

I know a few people whose lives have been bruised by suicide. Someone in my family tried to commit suicide but failed. I bet we all know someone who has tried or thought about it. Maybe the thought crossed your mind. It has mine. I haven’t made plans, but it’s hard to keep that whisper away when depression drops on top of you and smothers out all other voices. "You’re not alone" is a cliche, but it is true. You’re not alone. Maybe Henry Rollins hasn’t felt that tugging thought, but plenty of others have. T.V.’s Frank has thought about it. Drew Carey tried to kill himself. If you’re struggling and just barely holding on, I hope you can find something to tighten your grip. A friend when you need them, a piece of art when you’re alone. Like that movie where Leo DiCaprio invades someone’s dream to have the world's most boring snowmobile chase, your totem will be unique. But keep it. And stay with us.

I Envy Them for All Those Things
February 19, 2021

One time, in junior high, a guy came to school with a cast on his leg. The lucky bastard got to leave class early, and people volunteered to carry his books, usually girls. He got female attention, special privileges, everyone signed his cast and cleared a path for him, and all he had to do was break his leg.

I was jealous.

I actually coveted his broken leg. I would happily walk on crutches for months to get those benefits. Of course, I didn’t want the pain that came with fracturing your femur in multiple places. I hoped that one day it would just quietly break on its own. My mom would rush me to the hospital, and they’d send me home with a bitchin’ cast and a pack of Sharpies. Hello, instant Big-Man status.

What I failed to take into account was that the guy was already a Big Man on our little campus. He was on the football team. I was a Dungeon Master, so technically I outranked him, but I could never get the school council to acknowledge my superiority. In addition to the sympathy sponge of a broken leg, he had charisma. The girls didn’t fall out of a tree at the sight of his wounds, he already knew them by name.

I just saw the obvious thing everyone else was talking about and wanted it for myself. The thing is, he wasn’t able to play football that year. And his girlfriend wasn’t happy about his sudden new pack of admirers. Imagine if I had broken my right arm. I wouldn’t have been able to finish painting my skeleton army. My dice skills would have suffered, not to mention my sex life. His life probably got much worse. But at the time, I only saw what I lacked.

Drive You When You’re Down
February 12, 2021

I, um, finished my book. I say that with trepidation because I don’t want to jinx its chances of becoming a real-live published book one day. But I have to tell someone. So I’m telling you. It’s not the first book I’ve written. Two have come before, and they were failures. They are officially known as My Two Shitty Novels. This time, I think I did something worthwhile. It’s taken me about ten years to complete, a period of time that’s much too long. Last year, I made the promise-to-self that I would buckle down and write the two final scraps in what is now a ten-tale quilt. I met that goal, stitched that quilt, and it just barely covers the bed, but it’s done. Those two novellas are the two best things I’ve ever written. I’m editing the collection now, and soon I’ll start the stomach-churning process of searching for an agent.

Of course, I’m afraid that search will end in more failure. I don’t know what I’ll do if all this comes to nothing. It’s a bleak thought I don’t want to give much headspace to. The year before last, I was sitting on the couch, bouncing between writing a story on my phone and reading a Hap and Leonard book. I tweeted that to Joe R. Lansdale, told him I was having a hard time with my own words but was drawing inspiration from his. He replied with something to the effect of “Keep at it.” That was what I needed. I did, indeed, keep at it. That single sentence of encouragement did me a galaxy of good. It’s bringing me close to tears right now as I write about it.

Maybe this book will join the first two in the septic tank, but Joe R. Lansdale told me to keep writing. So I will.

Anyway, I wrote a book. Just wanted to punch the sky and take a quick victory lap before I go back at it. Wish me luck, if you would. Tell me to keep going. So I can.

A Bird in Flight
February 5, 2021

There's this poem by Wallace Stevens I've always had in the back of mind, "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird." Whenever I read it, I find that I've forgotten everything about it since the last reading. It's the effect that sticks. Each of the thirteen stanzas is a different way of viewing or imagining or experiencing a blackbird. It inspired a poem I wrote in college that my professor praised quite a bit. It was his praise that kept me writing poems all these years despite my clumsiness at it. Had I not swung for the fences with that one, I might have given it up.

Here's a weird thing, and it's probably a coincidence, but I keep finding dead or wounded birds in my life. In the driveway, the yard, on the porch, coming out of the doctor's office. I'll show you my camera roll one day and give you shivers. I remember a day a friend and I at college found nearly a dozen birds flapping on the ground, their tongues hanging out. She supposed they'd eaten some poisonous berries, you know, the red ones on bushes your mom told you to stay away from. One day, coming out of the cafeteria at the same school, a man had a huge falcon perched on his arm. It had just flown into the window and stunned itself. It's sounding like a Python sketch, I know. I've heard that sound several times. The hollow rap at the window combined with the sick snap of what can only be a spine. You don't forget.

Does this happen to other folks? Just bird after bird found randomly dead? Or does it only happen to poets?

Living in their Pool
January 29, 2021

There's a little pond where I work, a man-made body of water surrounded by rocks and a hedge, fountain in the center. Last Spring it filled up with tadpoles. They were always at the edge, squiggling about like black sperm. (Not my fault that's what they look like.) Hundreds, thousands of the things all busy eating and pushing out stumps and shaping those stumps into legs. Now I’m not the first person to ponder the lives of animals and think how similar their lives must be to mine: brief, crowded, and damp. But me and those tadpoles had a connection, you know? I would stop by the water’s edge on my lunchtime walks and compliment their new limbs or tails, wave to them, write them poetry. But soon as they reached full frogdom, they wouldn’t give me the time of day. Wouldn’t even croak when we passed in the hall or saw each other in the breakroom. They acted like they didn’t even recognize me. Now is that gratitude? This must be just how Mark Twain felt.

Emotional Feedback
January 22, 2021

Just like before I wanted to share my favorite podcast discoveries of the previous year. There are literally more podcasts than people in this country, so finding good ones to devote your time to can be difficult. These are my suggestions to you. Take 'em or toss 'em, but know they got me through some dark days. I laughed, I learned, enlarged my world, lightened my heart.

In a Cloud of Doubts and Fears
January 15, 2021

You’re going to get the vaccine, aren’t you? Why wouldn’t you? Afraid of the effects? Well the effects of the virus itself include death. The vaccine will stop that. Good old death-guard. Hard not to like that. Oh, the virus isn’t real? You say it’s a hoax? There are several hundred thousand people who would beg to differ if they could. What do you think they died from? You say they were old, or already ill and going to die anyway. I see. Sure, but you could say that about anyone. You’re going to die, but if a bulldozer were trundling your way, you would step out of its path, wouldn’t you? Take refuge from the hulking force of destruction before it can grind you beneath its treads? And if your father or grandfather were in the way of that bulldozer, you would do your best to escort him to safety, would you not?

Okay, wait. Say that again. The vaccine is a ruse, and the medical staff of every single hospital, clinic, and pharmacy in America is actually injecting people with tracking devices? That’s what you read on the phone where you stored your personal information and the names and addresses and pictures of everyone you know along with all the places you visit every day of your life? You’re refusing a vaccine against the largest plague of your lifetime because you’re worried about being spied on by technology?

Look, all insanity aside, yes the vaccine has risks. It might not work for you, and you won’t know it till it fails. You might have a reaction. But here’s this, there is a non-zero percent chance that an airplane will crash into your workplace and kill you. Don’t laugh, it’s happened before. But you go to work. You get on planes and eat sushi and drive vehicles at speeds that would have driven folks mad three generations ago. You cook with fire that is piped into your home and walk among people who every once in a while go insane. And you think nothing of it. But now, all of a sudden, you’re worried about a vaccine, after having gotten multiple similar vaccinations in your life. You know what, that’s fine. You can be scared. You can be paranoid. But allowing yourself to be a conduit for the disease puts others at risk. You turn yourself into a walking bomb with the capability of detonating again and again wherever you go. That’s what you’ll be, a suicie bomber quietly exploding in the name of whoever told you those lies about tracking devices. With every cough, every sneeze, every close-quarters exhalation, be sure to shout that name at the top of your soon-to-be diminished lungs. I hope they’ll treat you well in the afterlife. At least no one can track you there.

Spark Another Fire
January 8, 2021

My reading list for last year may be the shortest I've ever had. I had time to read, I just didn't use it well. Spent a lot of my precious time passively scrolling. That's one of my resolutions, read more, twiddle less.

I had planned to write reviews for all the books I read, but I only got around to a few. But because I love talking about and praising books and passing along recommendations, here are some nutshell reviews of what I read in 2020.

I took comfort in a couple of Joe R. Lansdale books last year. Of Mice and Minestrone contains a few short stories about the early years of Hap and Leonard. Mostly Hap, actually, though they are the full blood brothers we know them as by the book’s end. We don’t get the tale of their actual meeting, though. Maybe Joe is saving that for a later day. The final story is a good reminder of why I fell in love with those two characters and Joe’s writing in general. It’s a meditative piece full of shadowed, weary hope. Hap, recently out of prison for refusing to go to Vietnam, picks up Leonard at the bus station as he returns from fighting in Vietnam. They camp, make food, eat, talk, stare into the woods, and it’s beautiful. An extra bonus is a handful of recipes written by Joe’s daughter Kasey. The recipes are based on the foods mentioned in the stories and contain a bit of canonical history of the two friends, making them the first Hap and Leonard “stories” penned by someone other than Joe his own self. I didn’t try any of them and probably won’t. I’m sure that makes me less Southern now.

The other Lansdale book I read was More Better Deals, a novel about a car salesman who meets a beautiful, lustful woman with a husband she hates and a possible inheritance, and I think you can guess where that story goes. It’s a trope we’ve seen before, but this book gives proof to the saying, “It’s not the story, it’s the storyteller.” In Joe’s confident, humorous, and unrelenting manner, the story takes on new color. The plot and subplot go to places I didn’t expect, and one particular scene set at a grave gave me chills. Lansdale knows what he’s doing.

As a quick aside, I saw Lansdale post about these two books and another on Twitter last year and asked him, in amazement, “You have three books coming out this year?” He responded, “Five.”

We Stand On Guard is a great book written by the soon-to-be legendary Brian K. Vaughan about a scrappy band of survivors fighting for freedom after their country is invaded by… wait for it… the United States. The occupied nation in question is Canada. Tight scripting, clever payoff, and some truly terrifying images that will be difficult to shake from your head.

I discovered a graphic novelist I’d never read before, and I must get more of his stuff. Unfortunately, David Small seems to have only written two graphic novels so far, but they are fantastic. Stitches is his memoir of growing up in an emotionally-distant family in the 1950s. His father is a doctor and attempts to cure the boy’s constant childhood ailments with heavy doses of x-rays, something medical professionals apparently did back then. David gets cancer. The visuals are amazing, slipping seamlessly into David’s fantasies and subconscious, then bursting up for a disappointing lungful of reality. He may have been taught by example to tamp down his emotions, but he expertly puts them all right on the page.

The other David Small novel, Home After Dark, tells the story of a teenage boy who moves with his father to a new town where he struggles to fit in and navigate the emotional minefield of adolescence. He embraces then questions the brash machismo of his classmates, ponders his sexuality, and is asked to do the right thing when doing the right thing means siding with a community outcast. Then his dad abandons him. Told with spare dialog but with intricate and calculated visual angles and arrangements, this sometimes feels like a ghost story, but with you, the reader, as the haunting presence.

The best book I read last year was My Favorite Thing is Monsters by Emil Ferris. The very construction of the book is intriguing. It’s made to look like the lined, notebook ink drawings of the story’s protagonist, a young girl who imagines herself not only as a werewolf but also as a private detective. Since she finds it difficult to fit in with her peers at school, she just goes all in on the werewolf fantasy. Of course they don’t understand her, she’s a monster. And she meets other monsters in her life as well, a tall boy with facial scars and a square jaw, a girl who dresses in black and hates the daylight, another girl that no one else has ever seen and who seems to live completely alone in an abandoned house. The story twists and turns and often stops completely so side stories can take center stage. A woman with a mysterious past is murdered in the apartment building, and our lycanthropic gumshoe takes on the case. She learns of the woman’s history and lays out all the inconsistent clues for the reader to follow. Along the way, she uncovers secrets about her own family and begins to discover secrets she'd hidden from herself. It’s a beautiful book, full of fantastic ink drawings, blue or black in most panels then bursting with color as emotions erupt. The only negative I have to say about it is that it’s the first volume, and the second hasn’t been published yet. I absolutely need that second half.

So there you have it. That doesn’t cover my full reading list of last year, but it does come depressingly close. Go, seek these books out, then pass them on to someone else. Or give them your own favorites. Times were dark last year, and they may stay dark a while yet, but good stories will keep us warm, keep us company, and keep us going.

My Heart Changes Overnight
January 1, 2021

It's time to start over again. Renew your interests or pick up new ones; make promises to yourself; change yourself. We've all decided that January One is the time the clock starts anew. Good a time as any, I guess, but you can do that any day of the year. Whenever you feel you've reached a wall or you're just tired of the track you're on, pick a new way. Any day can be the start of a new year. If you fumble or fail at the resolutions you made at midnight, just make new ones at noon.

--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