The Flavor Country

Today sat down and wrote a letter to KT that I will never send. If she wants it, I will glad provide it to her, but I doubt she will read this, and I doubt that if she did she would subsequently ask for it.

The letter is essentially the last things I have to say about the closing of the three best years of my life. This post, however, is to say that, for the time being, I am laying The Flavor Country to rest. Right now I have nothing left that I can say. I feel that this blog was ultimately, unbeknownst to me when I began it, a chronicle of how I failed to become the man she deserved. Until that feeling passes, this travelogue of the trivialities, tragedies, and triumphs of my existence will lay dead-but-dreaming of a new story, one which ends happily; one in which I am decent man every day, not just never-to-upwards-of-occasionally.

Perhaps tomorrow I will wake up and feel differently, perhaps next year. Perhaps never. I have no idea where I am going from here, but right now I am going to try to tell that story here. If a picture is worth a 1,000 words, please feel free to join me as I learn how to speak again. If you have stuck with me through the whole story, thank you.

I feel like Ripley, at the end of Alien, “This is Ripley, last survivor of the Nostromo, signing off.”
Until we meet again, I wish you horn sections to accompany your smiles, and violin solos to accompany your tears.

Talk to ya in a bit,
-RevBLK

On Saturday, December 13th I dragged myself out of bad t 10:15am. It’s a slow process.

The basement cold seeps into the bones and muscles, and leaves you waking with a feeling that you are somewhere between wood and stone; the most lively thing in your body the tiny sparks dancing from neuron to neuron in your skull. You make the conscious choice to send a rogue impulse to the end of a finger and see if it still curls. When it does, you move a finger, then a wrist, and arm and so on. Eventually, you send a blanket impulse to all the nerves, one clearing house all hands on deck blood howl that turns on all the lights, sucks in a huge shock of air, and outputs a low, guttural groan as all the bits and pieces of the machine begin to spin and whirl and click and pop in unison.  You manage to turn on the space heater and defrost some of the meat. Eventually you bring yourself to a standing position.
You do this every day.

But December 13th wasn’t any day, it was Santacon. I went out in the rain with a backpack of extra layers and an eye toward Gladstone street. Once there I was given bacon, pancakes and my own uniform and weapons, and we decked our respective halls and barged rudely with waving arms and candy-canes into the restless dreams of Portland’s autumn as it hunkered down into its last sleep of this year. We didn’t know that when autumn woke the next morning and crawled begrudgingly from her blankets she would be winter.

The events of Santacon are fodder for another post. Suffice to say that the majority of the day involved lots of santas marching around portland, drinking heavily, and generally causing a ruckus.  The end.

Well, sort of.
At 7pm the group had been unexpectedly rifted, with different sects of santas finding themselves at different locations, and I called Janus and we mutually decided to splinter and go to see the Blue Scholars at the Hawthorne Theater. I have really come to love the Blue Scholars of late, but despite that, had I not been just the right level of gung-ho tipsy I probably would not have made the mistake of going back to the Hawthorne. It is an absolutely awful venue. The sound, the set-up, the staff: all absolute shit. If you’re ever inclined to go to a show there, do yourself a favor and don’t. Otherwise something like the following happens:
-Headache sets in from the talentless opening act as some community college chick comes over and starts trying to pester you into answering questions for her thesis about how “the Hawthorne Theater produces sub-cutural community” ‘cuz, y’know, people with similar interests in bands congregate there. Hey would you hold my beer?
-Headache doubles in strength as second act comes on the stage and seems to claim they are the opening act? You can’t be sure because you are so far at back of the venue and can’t see shit and damnit, is my vision blurring?
-Headache is splitting by the time the headliner comes on, and your compatriot has had enough to drink that by 15 minutes into their performance, which is admittedly sucking ass, he is enraged that the gathered throng wants to simply be moved by the vibrations and not the message of the music. At the point when he starts yelling, “I’m disillusioned! I want to kill them all. They’re sheep, fucking sheep! BAA BAA!” you may decide that the $15 you paid isn’t worth the inevitable shitfest that is a show at the Hawthorne, and promptly decide it’s time to set shoeleather to sidewalk.

For reasons possible similar to those outlined above, we decided to leave the show early, and as were standing outside the theater, lighting a cigarette and calmly trying to decide what to do, my dear friend leveraged his superior intoxication to create a moment of stunning beauty. In his heightened state of agitation he stopped two young gentlemen who were walking down the road. Imagine for a moment the visage of a surly santa with a candy-cane dripping like a lonely icicle out the brim of his santa cap, pointing an aggressive gloved finger at two strangers and saying something such as, “Excuse me gentlemen, but would you do something for me? Would you please justify your existence? Please explain why you deserve to exist?”
Most men would shy away from actions so likely to get their ass beaten, but he dared go where few men would go and in response, the two of them:
-hugged us-
just hugged the two of us. All four of us exchanged hugs, and the two unknown dudes continued on their merry way.

Janus turned to me, mystified by the experience, and I said to him, “my friend, you just got told!” He responded with, “damnit! I *really* wanted to hate the world!”
After a few minutes he asked what I wanted to do, and I told him he had two options: he could get on a bus and try to make his way to the afterparty, or he could get on a bus and go home and get some much deserved sleep. For my own part, I indicated that my hangover had come home to roost and I had designs on crawling into my bed and passing out, and nothing else. He told me that I could certainly do that … if I was a lame-ass. By way of response I paraphrased Lao Tse’s wisdom as, “Lao Tse tells us, ‘Know when a job is done; do the job, and be done with it; know when it is enough.’ I don’t know about you, but I just had my faith in humanity restored, and I want to end the night on that note.” Janus looked at me and said, “You’re an amazing man.” I still have no idea why he said that, but we locked arms to keep from falling over and we stumbled from 39th down to 26th singing xmas carols and waving to folks.
He proceeded to pass out directly on my couch, and I went down to the basement and crawled into bed naked, not because it was any less cold than other nights, rather moreso in fact, but because I wanted to sleep unfettered and invested fully in my trust of the blankets that stood my guard through the long winter night.

When I woke in the early afternoon of that premature Sunday, I put on my robe and ambled up the stairs and walked immediately to the dining room and stared out through the large picture window at something I haven’t seen in five or more years. I watched as the first snows of winter came drifting down to the lawn like an invasion of tiny glass faeries. It was one of the most beautiful things I have seen in months. Even thinking about it now brings the familiar sting of sentiment to my eyes.

There was only one thing to do. My friends, there is only one thing you can do when presented with such an opportunity. You have to go out in it. You have to take a taste.
After washing and dressing for the occasion, I walked out the door and down to the coffee shop. The snow had been coming down for hours, and there was already an inch and a half in the places where it had been allowed to accumulate undisturbed. My roommate Guy came for the walk with me, and said, “this kinda sucks. I hope this isn’t gonna stick around.” My incredulity flared, “are you kidding? This is beautiful! This is gorgeous! This is wonderful!” He smirked and just said, “is there anything you don’t like?”

We got coffee, and there were cigarettes in our pockets, so we turned and went out to the bench. My hands were cased in cotton as I brushed off the fresh powder that had piled on my usual bench and Guy asked if I was seriously going to just sit out there indefinitely. I told him that warm, cold, whatever, it didn’t matter. This was too beautiful not to be out in and a part of. Fresh powder snow is loose and light and falls out of the sky like a million tiny bits of glitter, like god is a cute little raver girl with multicolored dyed hair so doused in sparkles that it showers the world when she undulates wildly, out of her mind on ecstasy and under the full unrelenting grip of the bass beat.

Guy took his leave, suggesting that it was too cold for any person to sanely remain outside. Maybe I’m not so sane. I stayed outside for awhile, and left my headphones off just to listen. The first snow is always quiet. It is perhaps that only sacrament my old friend Boreas honors. Snow is the greatest of the gifts given to man by the Northern Wind, and while he is rarely beneficent, neither is he truly inclement. The snow falls with no sound, but when it falls everything seems to stop and wait for it, even as vehicles pull aside for emergency servants or gentlemen of old held doors for ladies. Everything goes dead quite, like the world has drawn a great breath which it is unconsciously holding as it marvels at such a perpetually unexpected wonder.

The breeze picked up so that I could trade whispers with Boreas. We caught up on each other’s live, and his condemnation of me seemed mixed with equal parts empathy. He reminded me that it took a southerner to teach me the meaning of septentrional, and that no hyperborean dreams bloom in the dark of the winter. This is not a season for growth or regrowth; it is a season to take all that flows from us and freeze it so as to examine and understand it. “You are on thin ice,” he told me, laughing at his own wit and spraying me with so many new flakes that by the time I made it back inside the shop my wool coat looked as though it could tell a story about the wildest of the cocaine parties this side of south america.

When eventually I walked home, my sneakers making the squeaky sort of crunch that always sings out from compacting snow, I tasted the bitterness of wanting to share this moment, yet still being completely alone. I felt my friend’s punishing wind make the skin on my hands dry to the point that it ripped open, demanding a bloodletting only to freeze the blood in place like a stain or tattoo of the frailty of our humanity.
I saw the darkness of the winter night wrap its jaws around the paltry throat of the December sun and drag it thrashing beneath the waves of the horizon.

And all of it was beautiful.

I want to write something. I want to write anything. I want to empty my head out, spill it forth and let it run forth over any surface that it hits, oozing into the cracks and the crevices, drying and crusting until this muddled cognition is an inveterate stain that can’t be denied or removed.

I am sick  to absolute death of swinging wildly between epicharikaky and mudita; sick not of my job half so much as I am sick of railing against it simply to pretend that doing so preserves some shred of my humanity; sick of the misplaced rage I am overcome with each time I find a spider crawling through my covers and over my bed.

My family is fond of the phrase “he doesn’t know if he’s coming or going” and right now, I don’t. I feel like I’m being flailed about like a rag doll in the bestial fists of a child caught in the wilds of a tantrum, oscillating being ecstatic joy and incapacitating despair. Somewhere in there is a recurring need to drink coffee, just to feel like maybe this time it will ignite the pilot light in my mind.

How about a section on metamorphosis? Ok, let’s do that. Is this what it feels like to be in a chrysalis? Nah, y’know what, that isn’t working for me. Caterpillars and skin-shedding-snakes are over cooked metaphors. I wake up each day and dress myself in scraps of my past; bits and pieces that have stuck with me at the bottom of suitcases and storage boxes. I end up looking like a refugee from time; a fashionstein monster all patchwork and derelict. My daily outfit consists of a short blue scarf, one of three earth toned pairs of cargo pants, a green flannel jacket that is missing just enough buttons that it won’t close properly, a random selection from my t-shirt collection, and a pair of dirty white high-top sneakers that I found in a box along the side of the road. The major redeeming value of this outfit is that it’s comfortable.

The air here is clear and cold and it makes me cough, and it cuts into my hands and splits open my skin. I was expecting this though. I thought it would make me feel alive. I was wrong though; it makes me feel like I am falling apart or coming apart at the seams. I still go walking, now in the early evening darkness, and I look out at the lights of the downtown core across the river, and drown in my headphones. I can’t stop listening to the same handful of songs. The more fragile my skin feels, the more I feel like something is writhing in my chest, raging against its constraints. People talk about “wanting to explode” but they never say with what. Whenever I hear somebody use that phrase without any qualifier, I like to assume that they will explode with candy. Just one big meaty piñata, blowing goo-covered bite sized milky ways and kit kats in every direction. This ain’t that though. It’s suffocating, like somebody has wrapped me in a wet bed sheet and duct taped the whole fucking mess together. Not that duct tape sticks particularly well to wet fabric, but you get the idea.

I feel like I am two completely different people, and I don’t know who I’m going to wake up as each day, and each of me hates the other. I feel like I am top-full and brimming with some goddamn song, and it is playing at earsplitting volume all the damn time, and I can’t hear the lyrics, and the speakers are fucking terrible. Inside my skin is some primal crescendo, and I can’t tell if it sounds like an indie rock indictment or a night of whiskey stank leather clad power chords.
I can’t stop singing. Literally, actual audible singing. My back catalog of songs are generally not work appropriate, but that doesn’t mean my tongue will be stilled from it’s rendition of ‘Sixteen Tons’ any time between 9am and 6pm. Down in my basement bedroom, I can’t stop it rolling over old Ray Charles or Charley Pride.
If the words “I hear the train a-comin’” come out of my mouth one more time on the production floor, they’ll probably shit-can me.

I want to bask in the sunlight, but they’re going to have to start rationing it out because there’s so little to go around. I was told I have a bad case of “the grass is always greener…” but I can’t seem to help moving to places that are perpetually wet and some exotic green color. I just need the occasional opportunity to see the evergreens in the bleak fall noon-light.

I am trying to listen to the little compulsions that I generally shrug off. I got off the MAX downtown the other night, and I knew I was going to walk across the river. I  didn’t feel like walking all the way home, just across the river. Hopped a bus once I’d reached dry land. The lights from the bridges fall on the water like some warped carnival caricature of shadow. Their formlessness is given seeming body, and elongated down the river’s length like some kind of rancid taffy.

And if I stop, just close myself and stop everything, and breath in, and let all of this wash over me like rain, I can exhale and everything feels ok. The effects aren’t lasting, but they are enough. This isn’t a sad post, it’s just a post to try and scrap some layers of rust off the top of my pen.

It is so cold here that I can’t sleep naked. I hate sleeping with clothes on. It’s so dishonest.

I need to write something. I need to write anything. I need to cast something off into the great murky depths, so much jetsam-cum-lagan, that I might have some room left for new thoughts.

I returned from Le Bois in the early hours. Caught the red line back into town, chatted up the overweight bus driver, and got off right as some girl with a bunch of bags was finishing hugging her friend and getting on the bus. I said to her, “I’m comin’, you’re goin’ huh?” She looked at me like I was speaking the click language. I got off the bus and said to her over my shoulder “Have a safe trip.” She said, “Thanks” like it was some involuntary contortion of her tongue; more like gagging than speaking.

Lesson learned: dudes wearing only a leather jacket over a black wifebeater are not allowed to be friendly at 7am in the morning.

The hard plastic handle of the suitcase rubbed and dug into the flesh of my right hand, only exacerbating the dry and cracked flesh so recently abused by the dust of the treasure valley. Blood occasionally jumped to the surface, just to see what was going on. By the time I reached the house I was fairly sure that I was going to lose the arm. I haven’t passed out like that in a long time.

There wasn’t time enough to do everything I wanted to ID, and one of the things I sacrificed was the opportunity to speak with the dead. And, all respect due to my dearly departed, but I don’t feel terribly bad about it. I didn’t even have time to see all of the living I wanted to, and if I can’t make time for all the living, certainly the dead can wait. I concluded that my dead would probably prefer I spend my time with my living rather than spending it ranting at stones in the ground. I will try to visit them on the next go around. I have a feeling they’ll still be there.

At some point in all the walking and strolling and jaunting, I’ve started to feel acceptance of all the things going on in my life. I’m not going to commit to saying I’m totally there 100% of the time, but I’ve started getting there.

I spoke with Ace today, and things are not great, but they are ok. They are at least honest at this point. I suspect we may both be kind of upset with each other for awhile, but we do love each other and genuinely want each other to be happy, and as friends we seem to be slowly working through this.

I read about something yesterday that I told some of the boys about tonight that gave me some perspective. I don’t know how I missed hearing about this for four years. Apparently in 2004 a dude who felt he’d been totally fucked over by the town of Granby, Colorado got his revenge by converting his 32 ton Earth Mover into a no shit unstoppable tank. He then went on a rampage in, what was to be later dubbed, his “KillDozer” and did, like, $7mil worth of unrequested demolition in Granby. The footage is pretty fucking unbelievable. Here’s nearly-live footage via helicopter. Here’s a link to a youtube search. Here’s a pretty solid write-up of the whole story. And here’s a music video with some of the best footage edited in. In the end his KillDozer got stuck, and he swallowed a bullet rather than be taken alive. And despite having over 200 rounds of ammo and three grenades lobbed at him, he managed to get his vengeance without killing anyone but himself.

Some folks on the internet vilify him as a madman, some eulogize him as a hero. Most seem to take him as a dramatic test case for the bounds of human ambition and the depths of human cravenness. In the end he was a man in an armored bulldozer. But from this man in an armored bulldozer I’m reminded that we are all equally and simultaneously forces of genesis and entropy. We have, at every moment, the opportunity to do something magnificent, or something tragic.
The question is only, “what will it take to drive us to that point?” Also, we should ask “How fucking metal is that?!”

I feel groggy, like I’m just finishing the process of waking up. It’s not pleasant, but it’s necessary. I’m ready to wake up.

I’m having sever trouble getting to sleep, because after today I now have answers to questions that were easier to handle while left unanswered. But at the same time, I know that I am not alone in this endeavor.

While I was in Boise, a piece of scripture kept running through my head, enunciated like a punch line:
Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death…
But tonight I am trying to keep my mind on the line that follows:
I will fear no evil: For thou art with me.

Many folks have roundly rejected my adherence to the old adage that “the more things change, the more they stay the same,” and I think tonight that it’s because it’s a peculiarity of the place I’m from. It’s 1am here, and I’ve been back a total of 7 hours. And everything is the same.

I was struck dumb with the feeling, stronger than it has ever been before. We got in the car and left the airport. My mother’s hair is longer, and my half brothers are clearly older, but the differences only serve to highlight how little things have changed.

I could keep listing new buildings, or paint changes, but every time I saw a new building I thought, “That’s new, but it’s exactly the building they would build there.” I think one could conclude that this town is stagnant, but that’s not it. It’s outside of time.

You can feel it in the air. It’s as though the city doesn’t exist within the regular chronological march of time. It was a perfectly beautiful BOI summer afternoon, and it is a perfectly beautiful BOI summer night, but what is truly striking is the feeling that this afternoon and this night are every single summer afternoon, and every single summer night I’ve ever spent here. I can breathe in the air, and it is the same air I have always breathed here. Not, “it tastes the same” but it *is* the same.

My family’s home looks exactly the same on the outside, but has been severely remodeled on the inside. What is surprising is that the city helped finance the remodeling because this is a classic home, and what they managed to do was take the appearance of an old Boise interior, and turn it into a new Boise interior. Different as it is, there is still the overwhelming sensation that “this is what this is supposed to look like,” and that feeling pervades. Everything is infused with it. I have long tried to convince people I met in other parts of the country to visit here, and I think now that it is this feeling that unconsciously I wanted to share.

Tonight the moon hung down just over the foothills, an unbelievable bright orange, like it was on fire. I sat on the front step and smoked a cigarette, and when I’d finished I walked out into the middle of the street and stared up into the sky, in exactly the same way I have done hundreds of times before.

I explained to Janus the other day that I had long had trouble accepting the death of my grandparents, and tonight I think I understand why. In a place like this, where nothing can change, where no lurch forward into a new era is ever possible, it becomes nearly laughable to try to conceive of accepting that someone living here has died, and will never be seen again.

So this week I will do the same thing I have done every time I have come back here to slip out of time. I will drive out to the edge of the city, and I will talk to the dead.

I was asked the other day if I believe in ghosts, and I can’t say as I’ve ever had an experience that would lead me to believe in them definitively, but here, like nowhere else I’ve been, it seems that we are all ghosts, and that our dead are no more inclined to leave than our living.