As the years pass, I am coming more and more to understand that it is the common, everyday blessings of our common everyday lives for which we should be particularly grateful. They are the things that fill our lives with comfort and our hearts with gladness -- just the pure air to breathe and the strength to breath it; just warmth and shelter and home folks; just plain food that gives us strength; the bright sunshine on a cold day; and a cool breeze when the day is warm.
- Laura Ingalls Wilder
You and me and maybe one other kid, we should just go. Put some things in a backpack and go. On our Mongooses (on our Mongeese) we should ride into the afternoon sunshine while we can, you know?
I don’t see this as one thing or another. We come back around dinner time, I guess, but whatever. Maybe we don’t. Maybe we don’t, huh?
Maybe I tell you my vision on the bus home and you don’t say much. Know what though? It hardly matters. I know you and I know you are up for it. I know deep inside: you are smiling even as you’re just staring out the bus window at old houses along the wooded street. The flashes of sunshine that strike you are violent. The bus is in and out of so many shadows and then openings of sky, one after the other, at blistering speed, so that the whole effect is you/ your head turned away from me/ the back left side of your face barely visible/ your pink ear/ your red hair drifting down from under your ski hat.
You should see you right now. I mean it. Darkness and light trading places so impulsively/ with such silent force all over you/ and you just sitting there taking it/ unimpressed with anything/ uninspired by me and my bullshit rambling again/ and this magnificence that surrounds you/ these shadows and beams/ these penumbras eclipsing you/ swallowing you whole/ spitting you out so swiftly with troutish rejection. It all unfolds before my eyes, my schoolbag down on the bus floor, clenched between my sneakers, and the feeling I get as I try to keep up with this puff of mad sparrows flitting all over you/ revealing you/ hiding you/ like you’re some kind of 16-year-old witch.
I suspect you are, you know? I figure that you aren’t quite like the rest of us but I can’t put my finger on it. It isn’t one thing, or even a few things/ it’s more like everything. All the things I know about you, the things I see and even the things I don’t fully witness but, like… I don’t know, I sense them, I guess/ these all add up to something mysterious about you for me.
What is it that you’ve got going on?
Huh?
You’re not gonna tell me, are you?
The sun pops through the canopy racing by above us and for an instant you are ravished by illumination. You are burning with the light of the master star and inside of all of that/ all that it entails and all that it could possibly mean for you or me or even maybe both of us/ inside of all that radiant shining falling down on you/ sloshing you with dazzle even though you don’t move or react/ except I can feel you squinting over there/ even if I can’t see it/ your eyes are going thin and your face is falling back within itself so it can protect you from going blind or even burning up in this herd of rays that have traveled millions of miles through frozen space just to slam into you right here, right now, while I’m trying to see if you’re into my idea or not.
The bus driver shifts gears at times and we can all feel that in our butts and our thighs. I feel it in my pants too. I feel the bus rubbing its fingers up and down my jeans and I react the way I always react when that happens. I just tense up and try to think about my dog taking a crap. I don’t know. It’s mostly so I can concentrate or whatever, I guess.
I wonder that about you. Like, do you get that ever? Not maybe from the bus buzzing underneath us but maybe from other stuff? You would probably blush if I ever asked you that. I might ask, too. I feel daring with you. I feel dared by you all the time. In your eyes, the way you smile just enough to show a feeling but then move it back behind your face so I know that it’s still there (because I just saw it), but I can also tell that you regret letting it slip. Or even if you don’t regret it, you maybe did it on purpose just to mess with me.
Kind of like you’re messing with me now.
I am being quiet against every desire in my body so I don’t press you too hard or rattle you with my excitement or any of that stuff. You sometimes make me feel that I’m over the top with you, and that maybe that’s not something you really like. You frown at breezes and it looks like you are frowning at me. You make this face that appears to be you getting frustrated with your blood hair being rapped across your pale face by some rude 5pm gust out along the woods behind the strip mall. Then it seems to be something else. The things shuffle in my mind and I get nervous landing on newer possibilities. Maybe your face isn’t about the wind at all. Maybe it’s because you just had this thought occur to you about wasting your time running around with me after school all the time.
Look at me?
No?
I talk to you inside of myself all the time, do you know that?
I ask you to look at me and every now and then you do. You look at me right when I say that to you inside myself and it’s magical. But do you think you have ever noticed me being like that? Like, me being all like: flushed and breathless and going dead quiet right when you look at me and I realize that it has happened. Do you ever just know that kind of thing is occurring or no?
It has to be no. I know that. I know enough to know that much.
The leaves are all deeply golden mostly, with a few red and some browns scattered among them. This antique painting of an autumn forest is observed by us, but it is real out there. And we are blazing by it. Other kids are mostly quiet. It used to be loud on the buses when we were younger, huh? Remember the high-pitched squealing and the chaotic voices all colliding with each other when we were in elementary? Everyone was loud then. It was as if we utilized volume to soothe ourselves once. It was as if we understood how to assure one another that the fear of monsters appearing- or whatever we feared back then- was ridiculous. We were, we unconsciously assured one another, too wild for danger. Our very existence was preserved, we sort of understood, by the simple song of our lives being sung out of tune and louder than bombs, collectively, like a chorus in a play.
Now things have changed. We have changed. We aren’t loud anymore/ not on the bus anyways. We are sullen, it might seem to a stranger, or perhaps deep in thought. And I suppose both are true; nothing to apologize for there. But beyond the teenage angsty pout thing, there is more and we both know that.
You know it because you seem to know so much. And I know it because I want to watch you being gilded and charcoaled/ pushed through this sunshine that believes it is shade/ dragged down through these suburban hollows on a platform in a tube/ insulated by the glass and the metal and the movement/ me and you allowed this rarified perch looking out over the world/ this romp through the countryside/ on our way back home.
I want to watch you when that happens.
I want to watch you when the bus slow rolls up to your stop, two stops before mine. I want to watch your face as it moves away from the window and shifts to the floor, innocently, naively, either acting as if you don’t feel the need to meet my eyes or trying to figure out how to let me know that each moment you don’t peer into me is a moment of torture that you feel ashamed to have.
Grrr.
You gather up your backpack from the floor and you feign standing up as the motion that has gotten us this far slows and the trees outside begin to emerge from the rush/ to stand singles and doubles again/ to creep out of the impressionistic blur we had been caught up in/ the street climbing out of its artful costume to reveal this strange naked skin tattoo of people’s garages and their pick-up trucks and their Halloween decorations flapping in the harsh afternoon winds/ trying to escape the brutality of their porches.
These simple untouched photographs that I get fooled by all the time.
Our lives, I sense, as you move past me towards the aisle, your backpack deliberately bopping me hard in the side of my face as you go, your ass in your jeans, your hair from your hat, tumbling down onto your army jacket shoulders with the force of mountains coming unplugged/ ancient underwater veins bursting/ the hidden streams where blind trout dance beneath the steep rocky drifts/ all these fucking hills looking down on us/ the detonation of nature/ the massive boom/ the charge raining down on everything and everyone/ but mostly on me/ maybe only on me/ as I watch you slip into the aisle behind the Moyer boy who lives three doors down from you and plays football and fights other boys and sometimes men on the weekends/ and I feel so overwhelmed by hatred and glory and these feelings of your dancing light and shadow slapping me and caressing my cheek at a thousand miles per hour/ all the poets spitting down on me at once/ from the flood roaring down the mountainside/ each of them holding fast to a homemade raft that will shatter in the end like everything always does, you know?
I’ll call you in ten minutes, I say out loud, breaking the silence, as you move away, leave me hanging.
You turn then, the pinks and whites of your face framed by your red hair, your Scottishness breaking through the fourth wall, a stone wall, a farm wall, you rising up from behind it with tiny twigs and bits of straw in your upside down river of dreams sloshing down all around you/ and you smile gently, warmly, but also brazenly like only you can manage to smile.
You better call me in nine minutes, you say. And then you spin back around, moving away, turned a millisecond to disembark, then gone for real.
_____
Now I am me again. Older. Much older. I wish to make sense of the ride I’ve been taking with you here, but let’s be honest. The randomness of the writing leaves a lot to unpack. And in the end, despite the sorcery I think all writers fancy themselves dabbling in as they toil away at backlit screens all that bloated daydreaming of praise and acceptance, I have to admit that I also dabble in a slightly different variant of whatever this is as well.
There’s this other version, you see, different from all this believing I do when I lose myself in writing. And in this other place, well, instead of speaking with myself: instead, I swing a hard branch rashly, ferociously, in the blackness of this unlit room. And sometimes, I must say, it feels like I know precisely what I’m doing. Other times though, and there are many times like this, I have no idea whatsoever as to the point of my words or even the nature of their presence. I bash into walls. I slam hard into studs and then quickly again into hollow surfaces, all the while creating destruction unseen, but felt, and maybe understood. But loosely at best. The very act of imagining, for example, a bus ride long ago, with a person from now, a ride that never took place and sadly never will, and yet I treat it like it did happen, like it’s even happening now. What does that indicate? What does it say about me, about my willingness to suspend history and accountability in favor of a parallel past? What does it say to the reliance of a self-proclaimed essayist when he outs himself as being marinated in fantasy. I am so taken by the wall-less castles, the stuff of legends, the mythic lands.
And by that I mean just one thing: my past with her in it.
Black magic as fuck.
Witchcrafting for love.
_____
On the phone, your voice is closer than I had imagined it would be today. I have spoken to you so many times now, so many calls to you because you like it best when I do the calling. Today you pick up and you are chewing something. You know it is me too, don’t you? You know it is me from the ring of your phone/ the way the bell rattles a little to the left when the connection comes through/ the ringing coming off the wallpaper wall with more force than usual. It is suddenharsh, a thrusting of my cardboard swordness directly through your kitchen heart. You are eating potato chips when you detect an electrical current, a delicate whisper of a thing, tickling the hairs on the back of your freckled arms. It is magical and suspicious at once, but most of all: you know, right before it happens, as much as you have ever known anything in life before or maybe even since, that the phone over there (as you ride the intoxicating salt fat wind), is about to fucking ring.
It enters your body as nothing but certainty. Not a feeling, not a hunch. Not a guess or a hope, not an idea or even a sudden wondering. It is simple in its presentation to you.
You chomp on chips and you are looking out the window and then in the next instant you are being feathered with a plume of unseen energy and your body is on edge and the music on the radio is singing just to you (‘Lonely is the Night’ by Billy Squier) and a bird flies by the glass and looks you dead in the eye and your gazes meet across the plane of differing existences and the bird, a common low sparrow with the heart of a lion, he snarls at you in this cool flirtatious way and you are feeling shaken in a curious style by this unexpected development when we finally get there.
Your goosebumps are out.
That phone is going to ring, you hear yourself saying.
And then the phone/ it’s a nest of hornets/ hit with a stick/ ringing all over your skin.
_____
_____
Our lives intersected, corollated, aligned if you will, to bend all space and time. Is it really too much to ask? Does anyone even really give a damn if we bend the rules just a tiny bit, go back in time to rearrange some things for the better? I mean, come on. Don’t you cops have anything better to do than give me tickets for driving home from work? You know what I mean?
Turn the other cheek, motherfucker. Let’s let this pizzafat pothead deer camp poet run around with this red-headed blossoming tomboy witch and the hell with it.
What’s the worse that can happen?
The impossible whimsy of a middle aged romantic collapses the structure of everything we know and trust?
Meh.
I guess that’s possible.
I don’t know.
Whatever.
_____
Hey.
Just pick up the phone, okay?
I know you’re freaked out by the whole “I knew that was going to ring right before it rang!” thing, but don’t hold back right now. It’s now or never, I’m afraid. I don’t know how I wrote this into the simulation but I did. Somehow, I did it. Or at least, it feels like I did it.
Just pick up the phone?
Please?
_____
Twilight has that time before it, but what is that called? Twilight is such a beautiful word. It holds the power of things I cannot understand at all. The word itself is a three mile UFO and it is dangling so many things under the dark shadowing body of the ship. A word like twilight, it moves slowly over Kentucky hills, drifting like a cloud from beyond some horizon/ a cloud shading, ever so slowly, the ridge looking down on you and I/ until the gleaming of the fading light faints into the choke of the violet cool.
That is twilight.
But in the half hour or twenty minutes leading up to twilight, we are less informed with words. And why? How could that ever happen? Nothing else matters than this right now, and nothing should have mattered like this for some time, if you ask me. I have been rattling around on these dirt deer trails for decades now, always wondering, always searching, for the time right before twilight. The feeling encompasses my very soul. It is a storm of feeling, of raw beautiful sensation. Dusk has a mother who came just before her. Now tell us, please, what is her name?
_____
Three kids are looped around a dead buck on their bikes as I drive by. I give them a wide berth, drift over fluidly because this country road doesn’t scare me. No one is coming, I can see that plainly, and even if they were it wouldn’t matter much. I could just slow down and let them go by. And while that was happening I could take a good look at these kids and what they’ve got going on.
Teenagers on bikes. That alone is intriguing. Especially a little traveling caravan of them. Two boys, one girl. They barely notice me as I crawl by in my Honda. My window is down, the afternoon is warm for November. I listen as much as I watch, but they say nothing as I get ready to pass them.
The buck is a good one, 8 points at least. One of the boys is fingering the antlers, respectfully I’d say, as if he understands that what is in his hands now was once, not long ago, high atop these ragged hard hills.
It’s almost as if these kids can close their eyes as they straddle their bikes, float on to some other place and time. I am going slow in my car as I see each of them awaken in the dense cover way up this ridge above Spring Mills. They are birds now. Cold birds, hungry and fine. In trees they are perched, separate but close. And beneath them, from the morning wall, steps forth the buck, silent and cautious. His antlers seem to radiate light from within and each bird’s beak falls open with true awe. The deer is alone, as mountain bucks so often are, and his every movement is testimony to the unspoken truth of nature as a whole. He is unstoppable even if he can be stopped. His majesty is simple, godlike. His moves are deliberate and come infrequently. He is in no rush. The very air he breathes is slower than the stuff that keeps us going. Time is nonexistent for the buck on the mountain. There is light and there is dark. There is hunger and there is fatigue. There is peace and there is fear.
The three birds are spotted by the deer and he watches them intently as a jet plane gently scrapes the sky a mile above them all. The sound is mellifluous, a familiar stranger in this part of this world.
The buck steps gently into a crunkle of leaves.
One bird sings a short bit of song.
The buck nods, goes still.
A crow unleashes three pumping caws from somewhere down the mountain.
The jet leaves a vapor trail in its wake.
It is an Aer Lingus bound for Dublin, Ireland. Out of Los Angeles late last night. 10 hours and 10 minutes if all goes right.
The delicate birds are weeping in the presence of the glorious buck. They know he will die soon. But they also know he will never truly die.
How do I know they know such a thing, you ask?
I see it in their eyes as they finally look at me, the fucking weirdo who has been slow rolling them, Mr Creepy Gawker staring at their young faces, which are now all taking me in instead of gazing down upon the dead deer, which is half on the shoulder and half in the middle of the goddamn road.
_____
Do I believe everything I write?
Again, that is a great, great question.
And I am honored to answer it here for you.
I believe it all. If it wasn’t true before, then it’s true now. If not forever, then at least for today, I hope.
_____
Waning.
That’s a lovely word too. Don't you think?
Could waning pre-empt twilight?
Let’s see if it could work, I guess.
_____
As waning comes, we sit bedside our bikes, you and me and your little brother. We are in our fall jackets, our sleeves are flannel or wool. Beggar Tick seeds cling to our arms and we are picking them off, one by one, as we are immersed, slowly, one at a time, down into the honey shades of this glass of amber we are living in. You are painted first and I watch it all happen as if it were the only thing I have ever wanted to see.
The evening is a virtuoso so touched by the hand of something more mighty than imaginable that each passing moment is, in its own right, another masterpiece born up totally apart from the one born moments ago. Light shifts in an undying arc that follows the sun across the horizon and the brushes that work so intently leave hues and shadows and details unsettling to the naked eye.
What profound naturalism the coming twilight will bring.
But what overwhelming peace the waning leads with.
I light a Marlboro and the smoke wisps upwards, a blue ghost fleeing us. I watch you as you eat some of the potato chips you brought in your backpack. You go between the chips and the bottle of Mountain Dew you brought too. Your brother is eating a cold hot dog you packed him. There is no roll. He pretends it’s a cigar at first so he can ultimately satisfy himself with the mad notion that he is actually eating a cigar.
I watch you both being lowered down into the melted gold. It slides down your hat and over your hair/ I watch you pay it all no mind, this shifting light/ as you alternate between eating your chips and picking stickers off your sleeve at your wrist. I blow a straight bar of smoke at you and it lands all over your pretty face. You cough, look at me and frown and say quit it.
Your brother is watching us.
I wonder what he thinks. Then I wonder what he maybe even knows.
Now, the world is changing. The light that we have previously known, this day of days seeping out of our hands, it moves through scales of color and shade more remarkable than any kid can truly comprehend. We try though, because the radical sunset comes at us hard. Now I can see you, your face backed by the hemlocks and the oak trees along this ridge, and you are more than I can fathom. Your freckles on your cheeks appear as planets on a space map wall, with the faded white skies of a tired day giving way to a darker countenance, a shadowy cheekbone and a long bruise of neck.
Where your old sweater meets your chin, I see a broken chain, flecks of sun clinging to you like shavings of gold. I notice your brother’s winter Batman hat move into a spotlight. Some kind of late stage mellowing tries backtracking light along his forehead but it’s no use. The imminent dark comes so quickly, erasing each burning wire, killing the sun like it always does.
Up here on this mountain, with waning moved to twilight and now the twilight falling to gloaming, my lungs are holding on to pops of air the likes of which I may never know again. Inside of my chest, as the cragged treetops around us are slithered up into their trash bag shadows, I detect the hum of life urging me forward/ pushing me towards you/ begging me to try your hand.
To see if you’d pull it away.
Your Chuck Taylors point towards different paths. You wipe chip crumbs off your lap and you talk about how pretty the evening light is. Your brother notices it all for the first time right then, just as the changeover is almost complete. Me, I look at you now like I look at you on the bus. I’m always wondering if you want me to leave you alone. I’m always wondering how I could ever tell you that I can’t.
A crescent moon has appeared in the sky. Beyond it a bright star shines hard.
It must be a planet, I say out loud.
Maybe it’s Uranus, your little brother replies.
We all laugh wildly then. We all laugh and stand up as if that’s what the script calls for and we are smiling through our chuckling as we lift our bikes up off of the dusty trail and straddle them. We are separated only by a millisecond, the three of us mounting our Mongooses almost in raw organic unison.
You move first, just like I knew you would. Shoving off from some invisible dock, you enter the slipstream of the mountain’s ancient descent as if you have been doing that for a billion years now. Your brother follows you and quickly the two of you vanish into the cover of pines that start just beyond this small clearing where we hang.
I breathe in the coming night. I can hear the clunking and clanking of your bike down below. I can hear your chain tapping as you throw yourself into the rocks and the turns and the fast rising jumps without ever touching your brakes because you are insane.
Because you are part witch and part deer.
Because you overpower me without hardly ever trying.
Because I find you under every rock in every creek, over and over and over again.
In the final wisps of twilight, a breeze blows from the east and someone emerges from the high tree line. In moonshine darkness, the silhouette starts moving down the trail where I am. I hear the last rattling of your chain rising up from down the hill. I hear your muffled voices, you and your little brother, talking to each other, but your language is distance and your words are nothing.
My heart blows blood through my young veins and I am scared. Who is this? Who could it possibly be? A hunter? A murderer? I push my Mongoose into the current and lean forward and begin my ride down but just as I do: I peer back over my shoulder to see the figure running after me. It is horrifying and exhilarating. I smell his breath in my face as I speed into the pine dark all alone.
I see his face, too. In that fleeting moment I see who the hell it is. It is me now, at 51, chasing 16-year-old me back then. It’s unbelievable/ I keep telling myself/ as I run that trail/ trying to catch up with you/ flying faster than I have ever flown before.
Son of a bitch! I holler back up into the woods behind me. The trail vibrates, I rush along by feel. The shadows of treetops guide me somehow.
I am so fucking scared.
I am young and alive and possibly in love.
And I am running for my life tonight.
Hello there. I hope you liked my writing this week.
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Serge
What a nice night for an evening.
-Steven Wright
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Things I Loved This Week.
Lonely is the Night- Billy Squier. Mega mega mega. Listen again in a whole new light?
Playing Wanderhome with Blake, Milla, Charlie, and Arle. We lit candles and had homemade apple crumble and it was epic.
Time of the Season - The Zombies. This song is haunting and cool and will never ever go out of style.
WTF Podcast interview with Joan Baez (Episode 1481). Marc Maron’s talk with the ultra-legendary Joan Baez was way more charming and intriguing than I ever would have thought it could be for someone like me/ someone who has never ever paid much attention at all to the woman or her music or her story. Baez is super sharp and down-to-earth and I found myself really wanting to see this new documentary about her called Joan Baez: I Am a Noise.
We are listening to Christmas music. I like Sinatra and Vince Guaraldi/ Arle likes Elvis and Ella Fitgerald. It’s all so good.
Thunder Pie is Edited by Arle Bielanko
Digital photo collages: Arle Bielanko
Middle pic: SB
Email: sergebielanko@gmail.com
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Probably the happiest period in life most frequently is in middle age, when the eager passions of youth are cooled, and the infirmities of age not yet begun; as we see that the shadows, which are at morning and evening so large, almost entirely disappear at midday.
-Eleanor Roosevelt
Is it the province of those who’ve found love unexpectedly in middle age (again I use that word somewhat prosaically) to imagine what it would have been like to have met this love earlier in life? Before life got to us and took our hairlines and waistlines and naïveté and innocence? Before life took our teenaged sexual stamina? Before life _____? Maybe. Maybe that’s comes with later in life love. Wanting to have been part of our love’s past. To have been THE ONE. The only one? The first? To have shared forty years rather than ____? To have had that history. But if so what would our lives be today? The same? Better? Worse? Different, that’s for sure. Our kids would be other. Not who they are, but some crazy mashup of you and her, not recognizable to 2023 us. Would I have three? Or would one have been the limit? I know my wife would have done the best she could, be she never had kids and would have been stressed and resentful and at the end of her rope AF. Sadly, she’s not a kid person. So her having not having kids was a good thing. But I always wanted kids, so what would have been? Still, I’ve played the “what if” game and run the scenarios of how I’d have made her life better and she’d have been my one and only great love and blah blah blah. Even though I know. My wife is only four years younger than me and grew up the next town over and knew a lot of people I knew, so it’s not so beyond the realm of possibility that we could have met once upon a long ago, at, say 18 and 22.
See, once again, you’ve triggered my thought process. It’s reassuring to know that I’m not alone in my imaginings/wonderings/fantasies of a love out of time that might have been. But, to quote John Lennon, “there’s nowhere you can be that isn’t where to you’re meant to be…”
Thanks, as always, for the musings. Have a good week!
PS. That quote from LIW is spot f’n on.