Journal of Fear and Hope (2023)

The Guiding Hand of Fate
December 1, 2023

I waited three hours in a hotel lobby for a job interview. Didn't know what the job was. When I fianally made it into the room, I was told I had five minites to prepare a speech on a random topic. "No problem," I said. "I'm a comedian."

I nailed it, and I've been at that job for eight years. I'm sure my few years as a school teacher helped, but it was my oratory skills and ability to think quickly that got me the job. Skills I honed doing hundreds of stand up comedy open mics. I didn't become a professional comedian, but it still got me employment.

The path we walk is a twisted one.

For my final test at the end of my training, I had to deliver a fifteen minute presentation. When I was done, my manager said, "I could listen to you talk all day." Her compliment confused me. My voice was goofy, slurry, funny. But I took the W.

As I've trained my classes down the years, people have told me I have a nice voice. A radio voice. When I tell jokes, I'm frantic. I get loud. But at work, I try to sound sage, calm, melodious. When you talk for nearly seven hours in a day, you figure out ways to make the time as pleasant as possible.

I guess I learned how to talk good.

So my job gave me a computer, a decent microphone, and taught me how to deliver long strings of text in a pleasing manner. Okay, universe, I get it. I'll make a podcast.

I Can't Wait to Share
June 30, 2023

I stood outside The Orange Peel one February night, waiting for Henry Rollins to come talk to me. There was a large throng of people out there, too, all shivering in the cold. We had just seen Rollins give a spoken word performance, and we all wanted to meet him.

I waited at least an hour as he shook hands, signed things, posed for photos. The cold clawed into me, and I was shivering as I finally stepped up to meet my hero. I had him sign one of his poetry books. I also wanted to give him something.

A few years before, I had recorded an album of songs on my home computer. I burned it to a CD-R, printed out the lyrics, cut the paper down and stapled the sheets into a booklet. On the cover was me as a child, wearing a cape and mask. Beside my photo was a picture of Henry Rollins, taken from the “Liar” video. He wore a superhero cape, too.

It was a pure DIY artifact, cobbled together out of angst and self-righteousness. I wanted Rollins to know how much he’d impacted my life. I wanted him to hear my music as I’d heard his. And way in the back of a secret drawer in the bureau of my heart, I hoped he would see my email address in the liner notes and write to say he loved my record.

I held out the CD case in my trembling hand. My blue, shivering lips could barely form sounds, but I told him he had inspired me to make the album, that I put him on the front. He took it. I think he said, “Thank you,” but I’m not sure. I just know he went inside his tour bus with an album full of songs I’d written.

I hoped he would give the CD a spin, but I truly figured that would never happen. He’s a professional musician; he can’t listen to amateurs for the same reason Stephen King won’t read your unpublished novel. What if you accidentally write something similar to what he’s working on and try to sue him for plagiarism?

But now I’m not so sure about that. Rollins listens to everything. He collects bootlegs and private recordings by the stack. So maybe he did hear me. I like to imagine my hero turning through the booklet I made, reading the words I wrote while listening to music I recorded through a RadioShack microphone.

Did he like it? No, that’s not the right question.

If I could I talk to Henry Rollins about that CD, and he admitted to having heard it, this is the question I would ask him: “Did you listen more than once?”

Leaving Behind That Empty Feeling Inside
June 9, 2023

It starts with a simple mistake. You coulda done it faster. You coulda done a better job. Maybe you forgot it all together. You apologize, make up for it. Cool, right?

For a while.

But they remember. That mistake—that accident—is what you are. It defines you. Mess up again, and they remind you of the last time, of all the times. You thought it was forgiven, water under the bridge. Nope.

“You did it again. How could you? Why would you? Didn't you even try?” They say that to you a lot. So much you start to hear it even when they're not around. Then you start to say it to yourself.

“What's wrong with me?”

Judgment turns to insult. You doubt yourself. You hate yourself. You isolate, sometimes for years, in the echo chamber of guilt.

In time, you manage to get free. But you've forgotten how to relate to others. There's no happiness in doing what you once loved. You don't know who you are or how to regain your sense of self. But now that you no longer have degradation and blame flung at you daily, you remember how to relax. You begin to heal.

In time, you try to reengage with the world. Slowly. Timidly. One day, you smile, and you don't instinctively try to hide it. You make something, you visit someone, you try something new. It takes effort, but you step out of your hiding place.

It won't be easy, but you won't be alone.

Remember, there was joy. There were friends. There will be again.

The Way the Wind Blows
June 2, 2023

The poet William Stafford used to say, "I never know what I want to write until I've written it." That's a powerful idea to me, because I often have no idea what I'm doing. I just do it. One night I started talking out loud to no one but me, and I fell into a memory. A memory of my friends and me driving without aim or plan out in rural Nash County, among countless tobacco fields, cotton fields, barns consumed by kudzu, abandoned stores, trailer homes, dirt roads, dark and lonesome intersections in the middle of nothing. The furthest we could see into the future was the next CD we would slip into the radio. We couldn't ask for anything else, and we didn't think it would end.

It did.

I wanted to write about that. I wanted to paint that picture of driving through darkness, unaware of the future hurtling at us like a bowling ball, soon to knock us into our separate gutters. The poem I thought I would write would take each of us, one at a time, and contrast the perfection of that moment together in the car with the disappointing destiny up ahead.

I couldn't because I don't know what happened to my friends. I know a little. I know Joe developed the schizophrenia that put his father into a mental facility. I know he used to jump trains, ride boxcars to wherever and call his mom to pick him up. I know Brian lived with his mom for a while, then his dad, then moved into his mom's old trailer when she moved out. He had an accidental kid, married someone else, divorced, worked as a plumber.

All that was years ago. I don't know what those guys are doing now. Is Brian or Joe happy? I can't write about their futures, and I certainly can't pass judgment on their choices. Maybe life is better for them now than back then. I don't think any of us ended up where we hoped to be, but I'm not sure if anyone does.

Anyway, this poem didn't end up like I thought it would. Instead of unspooling the lives of three people, it compresses them into one. But it's got some good passages, and I'm glad to have a new thing completed. I don't know what I'm doing in my life. I'm finding out as I go. But I do know I've always wanted to write. I'm still figuring out how.