jawn /jôn/ noun - (chiefly in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area) used to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to. Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word ‘thing’.
Example: "A jawn just fell off that dude’s car and hit our porch."
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jawn one.
In this house here, you might at any time find dust/ dirt/ crumbs/ crumpled up chip wrappers/ spilt chocolate milk/ soda spots/ mystery cheese/ dog hair/ dried dog piss/ dried food/ ice cream bar sticks with dried ice cream gunk/ wet towels/ wet socks/ wet t-shirts/ wet shorts/ small mud clumps/ empty plastic bottles/ half-full cups of juice or soda or milk with bugs floating dead on the surface/ dirty dishes in the sink/ leftover food left unwrapped and untupperwared on the kitchen island/ half eaten meals on plates abandoned on coffee tables/ blood stains/ enough popcorn in the couch cracks for an American movie theater small size worth approximately $7/ probably dried boogies I don’t know about and I don’t wanna know about/ dog hair tumbleweeds/ unidentifiable splotches of gunk/ broken toy bits/ loose Legos/ tiny kid drawings/ dropped pizza sauce dried and hammered by feet/ human footprints in the Swiffer streaks that stand and reveal themselves in the front room at dusk/ ancient Funions hiding like Roman coins/ Sharpie art on furniture/ splattered sauce or dog mess on Covid-era painted walls/ human hair in the sink/ action figures down in the full hamper/ tvs on with no one watching/ fans running/ air conditioners powered on in the strange mode of ENERGY SAVER in which electricity is neither used nor unused/ half empty ramen containers that have been left to the dogs to tip over and suck/ dead bugs, intentional and unintentional/ vintage records laying on the floor with damage from dog piss and kids stepping on them like they’re colored mats back in kindergarten/ dripped toothpaste down in the sink and on the faucet handles/ toothbrush spit-out splosh up on the vanity mirror/ fidget spinners scattered like cartridge casings after a street battle/ sneakers and shoes of various sizes slipped off feet and left wherever that happened/ missing remote controls in rooms with no TVs/ permission slips for school activities scrunched up and shoved down behind book cases/ Hulk pull-ups pre-soaked with hot piss and then hidden way back under beds/ busted pencil bits/ parts of pens disassembled for unknown reasons/ paper plates with various sauces including Chick-Fil-A, Siracha, Crystal Hot Sauce, ketchup, mustard, marinara, and chocolate syrup/ hardly-charged iPads laying out in the open upon heavily traffic’d floors and on heavily used couches and chairs/ various sized used spoons randomly distributed on book shelfs and the tops of vinyl stacks and on the floor/ sneakers with dog shit on them kicked off in the mudroom and abandoned/ mouse turds/ bat guano/ flies and their babies gathering in the kitchen/ crushed chips under the kitchen seats/ long strings of dehydrated Great Dane slobber on tabletops and television screens/ a heads-up lucky penny caked with chewed gum on the other side/ empty cans of Diet Coke possibly left behind as a fuck you message to elders/ dusty copies of old paperbacks no one has read yet/ dirty pillows on the couch/ half painted walls, half decorated walls/ countertop coffee stains that look like a penis or a ghost or Greg Allman after you’ve guzzled six beers/ bird feathers from long ago/ cracks in the fake wood floor where dust gathers like destitute migrants in a violent storm/ Santa Claus shit during summer/ Halloween shit during summer/ half burnt out strings of holiday lights tacked up to the entryways/ all of which magically disappears when the sun goes down on the good nights/ and I have a jelly jar of wine/ and I understand, ephemerally, what it means to be king.
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jawn two.
Too many people are driving right through the heart of summer with their car windows up. This is my stance and I cling to it with radical aplomb. Cars with air-conditioning are allowed in my world, I guess. I’m not trying to be a straight-up tyrant or anything like that, but as a seeker of truth in a world absolutely jack-punched by infowar brain melt I have to stand upon this little hill of mine and holler it from the ridge. Riding around with your AC on in the car all the time is making you dumb. And it’s draining your humanity battery faster than you could possibly imagine. What you think is luxury/ or comfort even/ is actually self-imprisonment/ holding you back from the gashing gush of the hot wind that carries the bugs/ propels them like tiny lost moons at your squinty face in the middle of the wide open afternoon. Oh how much you miss when you are fully ensconced in the driver’s seat of a motor vehicle with the windows up tight and the outside world shuttered away. I’m not messing around here. I’m dead freaking serious. It’s almost like a class war I wanna wage, a truly diabolical battle between the lit-up forces of natural poetry and the hard darkened forces of sheltered living. Don’t you remember that music, real music/ good music/ soulful songs and stuff that hits your spirit upside the head with the horny smile bat/ don’t you remember that that kind of music sounds way better with the windows of the car rolled all the way the f*** down?! AC/DC = windows down. Rolling Stones = windows down. Bruce Springsteen OtisRedding Fleetwoow Mac JamesBrown Iron Maiden The Replacements Dolly Parton The Who The Beatles The Killers The The The Cure The Cult Marvin Gaye Bill Monroe Nina Simone Billie Holiday/ you get what I’m saying/ plug in whoever you like and it will be proven by scientific fact that listening to it with your windows down as you barrel along through your evaporating life will make you stronger and better in bed and it will give you talent where you had none before as it raises you to the level of Greek God simply because you are being smashed by the world rushing in and the heat wrapping you in her arms as the antiquated lanes of hot summer welcome you back into their magic embrace, panting down your neck, whispering in your ear. Sweat a little for mankind, man. Not for environmental reasons, I’m not preaching that right now. I’m talking about loss of impact. I’m talking about the great missing out coming down all around. I’m begging you to hear my prayer because I care about what I see when I am flinging down the road in a Honda with no AC and no radio and only a shitty Bluetooth speaker to guide me along. The music is mastered in some AC riddled studio somewhere by so-called experts traveling at 0mph. But in truth it can only ever be honestly born to flourish when it is surrounded by the chaos of living. The audio and the visceral and the sensational all at once. One lucky penny is all it takes in this world. And that sort of supernova moment never comes with lottery wins or any of that. I’m talking the gusts and the sun here. I’m talking the spider on the backseat and the bee on your dash. Riders on the wind. The trucks roaring by. Your fingers in the hair of our witch who is earth. The sky rushing in all the while.
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jawn three.
The numbers game adds up like this. A certain amount of years allowed are what you get. No more, no less. You have very little say in what the number is unless you choose, at some point, to take your own life. In which case, you forfeit any forgettable playing out you might have had coming to you in exchange for something mired in the total unknown. For the rest of us however, there is the solid number, down to the hour and the second, which, although not recognized by us just yet, it will likely be soon enough. Thus, the numbers game we play isn’t voluntary nor is it even always pleasant. Hell, for many of us, the days and nights add up to a crushing weight upon our chests at times. We have trouble breathing across so many 2ams because we are simply spent from the seemingly endless slog up a proverbial mountain that never ever rolls up over a crest. What does it mean then? What is the point of even ever discussing a set number in reference to our life spans when most of us are too busy trying to make ends meet or keep our kids safe or raise our credit scores or seek revenge on the ones who hurt us or get tickets for Taylor Swift or land that promotion or take up mountain biking (GOD PLEASE NOOOO!) or conquer our demons or pay for a vacation or trying to get noticed as an influencer or recognized as pretty or seen as having it all together despite the fact that we know (and so do a very select few others) that we are a hot fucking mess of sizzling crazy dancing ‘cross the skillet of lies? Like, what is the purpose of considering the end when everything is happening full throttle right now? Hmmm. This is a good question, I must admit. And likewise, I must confess, as I often do down here under this shady bridge called Thunder Pie (with the river that smells like eels and the racing traffic sounding off high above us on the echoey overpass), that i don’t have a goddamn clue what I’m getting at one way or the other. I just keep whiffing the burning brakes of time, this mountain stank of smoldering rubber, and in it I can detect some kind of something telling me to hurry up and open my senses. To notice what is happening right now, right this instant, before it sinks back into the ether forever, never to come this way again. The heaviness of such a force to be reckoned with maybe slants us all towards a less intense approach to survival, I guess. After all, what good is mindfulness- or whatever it is that I’m harping on here today- if it can’t be utilized to make you life better? To make you feel better about everything that has happened, about everything that is set to unleash itself upon your humble world? I suppose it might be because I struggle personally with my own search for meaning at times that I end up seeking it in the minutia of a life that has in fact known grander things. What is it that I am trying to understand? What Jedi Power am I chasing here, you know? I’m not sure. I think I’m just trying to feel the cool spot of a dirty penny underneath the sole of my foot some morning. And to recognize that for what it really is. A miracle. The most beautiful moment in the history of everything that has ever happened or ever will.
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jawn four.
Now I will trust you with a secret that I don’t even try to keep any more. Iron Maiden came late to me. The reasons why we miss things sometimes only to discover them later in life are, of course, varied. Yet, for the most part, I think it can all be chalked up to one fairly obvious one. The time is right when it is right. And when the time is not right, it is wrong. Lately then, listening to the magnificence of Maiden’s unstoppable 1985 live album, Live After Death, I find myself overcome with bolts of joy and excitement as if I was a teenager, in fact: the very teenager I actually was: long ago: hair down to my ass and a cigarette in my lips as we stood in a circle in the sunset woods/ behind the strip mall/ someone packing a bowl of shake/ no girls present/ not because we wanted it that way. Those days, those Friday nights, were filled with a longing to live that fades over time. Which isn’t to say that I don’t enjoy the ride anymore, it’s just glaringly obvious that the original voyage I was on at 16 has been fully replaced by a different one. It’s still fun and all, but let’s face it, you spend a lot of time later in life trying to figure out how to be young again without looking like a total loser to the world at large. Aging is perhaps the most heavy metal thing of all. The most Maiden thing of all, even. For in its incessant grip, each of us, in our own way, is grappling to slay the dragon with these meager chintzy pelotons and songs written in our 50s and pictures of our kids college dorm rooms that we call weapons. We pretend that financial security is a massive sword. We tell ourselves that our jobs are solid maces and that we swing them to survive. Our homes? Fortresses protected by decent odds. And our unknown futures? Probably not so bad if we toe the line, wear the exact same civilized armor as our neighbors and the beautiful people on social media. Iron Maiden, taken wholly, without backstory or any knowledge really but the music itself, stands as a testament to an unlikely but sublime flashlight on existence for someone like me. I am older now and I am more forgotten every day. The passing of time has found me battling forces I never considered when I was a younger man. Which is righteous, I might add. When I was 13, 16, 20, 25, there was no taste of anything finite on my tongue. I was ablaze with juvenility/ I was the warrior laughing at the sorcerer. Back behind the malls, deep hits locked into our lungs and tasted like copper pennies. It was such then: my tribe traversed the landscape under the banner of primal beauty. Our needs were basic and they were met through selfish harvesting, through dime bags and porn mags and the cassettes that we held tight like diamond daggers. Iron Maiden would have been sensible for me then, but they didn’t stick. I liked the Stones. I liked Springsteen and Steve Earle and some Motorhead, even. I liked Robert Johnson and The Temptations. I liked all kinds of music, but I never found Maiden necessary for my youthful quest. And what a delight that turned out to be because now…somehow…I have stumbled into them here deep in this dark forest of mid-life crisis. And what, I beg of you, could be further from exposing the truth about a 52-year-old ex-rocker dealing with transcendental questions of mindfulness and existence in a world enslaved by shadowy dark forces than falling in love with a metal band’s spectacular feat from long ago (complete with epic overdubs I gladly accept!)???!!! Pure driven drifts of Hell’s own snow have parted off my shoulders to reveal the silvering man emerging from the blizzard! He is squeezed in the massive hands of a the most ferocious beast you can imagine! The beast’s name is Eddie! And I offer myself unto him as a sacrifice in all of your blood-stained names!!! MWUHAHAHAHAHA! \,,,/
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jawn five.
Anchovies are so good on pizza but the salt overload makes my face look like a puffer fish come morning. This isn’t a big problem for me on a regular basis because in the rural l town where I live, the local pizza joint doesn’t even offer anchovies. No one around here would order them, I guess. Most locals have probably never even tried one. I once gave a farmer from two valleys over his first shrimp that he ever ate. He made a sour face as he chewed it and when he ultimately swallowed it he said it tasted like “a grub worm.” I still laugh at that description. Was it the texture or the flavor? I don’t know and I don’t need to know. He won his brilliance in my book forever with those select words lost to all but me.. We ate a lot of pizza down the shore last week. Delaware has some good pizza places and they all have anchovies. So. Yeah. I entered the beach each day looking like I was hiding an anaphylaxis storm in the warehouse of my skull. Seagulls fell from the sky in fear. Little kids could be seen shitting their bathing suits when I walked by with my monstrously swollen gourd. I heard some of the beach regulars hissing to themselves: ANCHOVY MAN IS BACK! I’m not sure how they knew to call me that. Maybe it was because every time I was about to catch a wave when I was boogie boarding, I would yell really loudly, “ANCHOVY MAN WILL RIDE THE LIGHTNING, BITCHES!” That’s probably it. It was worth it though. It’s worth it to take things into your realm sometimes that are probably not great for you. Things that you like, things that you really enjoy. I’m not saying you should be down the shore hammering away at an 8 ball of coke or anything like that either. I’m just saying that there has to be room for flashing the bird at common sense sometimes. Hell, my kids do that as a rule. They have no common sense whatsoever and they’re doing alright overall. Don’t ever give up on pizza, okay? I need to know that you won’t do that. This fucking world beats you down, man. Think of all the oppressive knocks in the neck you have had to endure all your live long days just to be able to move forward just a few inches towards the so-called better life notion they have been selling us for years. Trying to make a go of it without a slice or six now and then is a total fail. I’ve even had pizza every night of the week at times in my life and I don’t want to act as if I’m in total denial of science and health and all of that shit, but in all honesty, if you are ever living through another pandemic and you feel like everything is collapsing all around you, take my advice. Order three pizzas with whatever toppings you want. Order anchovies if you can handle them and when the pies get to your place, open up some wine or a bottle of beer and just sit on the floor watching some Iron Maiden on YouTube with the main people you care about and any pets you have and just fuck the world off for a while. I swear it’s the only way. I went to the beach last week with no idea that I would become ANCHOVY MAN while I was down there, but guess what? I did become him. And it felt powerful and real. And tiny toddlers shat themselves in my towering puffy presence. And that matters. It does. It really matters to me.
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jawn six.
Somewhere in the bottom of my junk box, I have a passport that expired. It has been a while now and I don’t know if or when I will renew it. Where would I go? Or more importantly, how would I go. Traveling is not for peasants and that’s what we are. I don’t say that to disparage ourselves or to be self-deprecating either. Not at all. In fact, I am quite proud of who we are, of our working class roots and our living ethos’ that are born up out of two hard-lived lifetimes (so far) in a world where human excess and greed has destroyed so much. This I know: Arle would love to see more of the world and I’d be down with that, I think. But I get to wondering about it sometimes and I turn inwards, selfish. I think my system is over London, done with Paris. When people think of travel they often think of the classic cities and fair enough/ especially if you’ve never been to them. But I went when I was more energized for that. I went to the cities on the wings of rock/roll, where it felt insanely satisfying to be standing in city squares and walking down little euro alleys that dated back to before time itself/ understanding with each step I took that it was our songs that had lifted us into the sky and our shows that had blown us gently over the sea to settle down in all the ports of Europe. There we could hold our heads high as we plied our wares from stages big and tiny, hitting them all the same: as if there would never be another show again. How would I stand in such cities now, then? How can a man once hold the magic in his hands, hold it up the sun to see it silhouetted against the foreign sky, only to let it down many moons later to discover that it is gone? There is no magic left. There is only the ghosts of who you were scattered across the hotel lobbies, left propped up against famous places you thought you’d never see again and were fine with that. I know that is such a self-centered way to ponder traveling, especially when the one you love never had any of those kinds of experiences. But these are the maddening mines we have to enter if we ( or I) want to write my raw truth without glossing over the stuff that matters. I don’t travel all that great anymore. I used to be a warrior, a force upon the trader’s road, driven by impulses not unlike the vikings or the outlaws or the great explorers of yesteryear. Now though, I’m infected with cynicism. I’m bloated with anxious fallout from years of trouble and hurt. Does moving through airports and checking into far off hotels sooth a tired soul or does it shatter it in one last hammered blast? I don’t have a clue. What gummies should I take to want to go to Japan for the first time? What tincture would maybe make me want to go back to Ireland again? Or Scotland or Serbia? Are peasants even meant to roam so far from their villages? Why is Gettysburg (right down the road) not as enchanting as Edinburgh (galaxies away)? I think I understand the answer. It’s because I’m a goddamn fool, huh?
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jawn seven.
To this day, whenever I find a heads-up good luck penny on the floor or in the street, I pick it up. I pick it up for luck because, by all accounts, a penny facing heads up is a good luck penny. And who among us couldn’t use a flash of luck, am I right? Often though, I will already have a penny in my back right pocket (my chosen pouch for good luck penny storage) and so, in the name of not being a gluttonous cretin who only cares for his own fortune and not the lives of his fellow man, I pick up the newly discovered penny/ examine its date and its patina/ its Lincoln still alive, encrusted in the soot and dirt of time and travel/ of fortune and pain/ and then I carefully fish out the old good luck penny I’ve been wandering around with since the moment I discovered it. This move commences a brief, unheralded ceremony in which I gently place the old penny down in the very exact spot where I found my new penny. This, in turn, allows for me to be freshly rubbed up against the hips of hot new luck while also selflessly leaving what remaining luck lives on in my old penny for the next observant penny believer who comes along. Because of this ritual, I have found and left pennies (and pence and euro coins and kroner or whatever the hell else I have been around) in many many places, under many many flags, always with nothing but the simple spirit of excitement and hope driving me. It is one of the last bastions of uncomplex existence I know of in my world. I take up the new penny wondering where it has been, who it has known, and I feel like it naturally has been infused with plenty of luck again just for me. I set down my old penny, my old companion of time gone by (sometimes traveling with me from foreign lands!), so that someone else (one of my own kids maybe, or a stranger through and through perhaps) will hopefully find it and wonder about it as they slip it into the place where they keep a little hope happening through another throat punch day. So if you find a penny out there in your travels, it might be one I left along the way. Please to enjoy it, my friend.
It’s good to be back in Thunder Pie Town once again.
Thanks for keeping the candles lit, the horses watered.
Serge
Thunder Pie is always edited by Arle Bielanko.
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Photos/ Art: Serge B.
Things I Liked This Week.
The ocean at our feet. The ocean under the full moon. The ocean hopped up on hurricane, then the ocean like a glass coffee table. The ocean at sunrise. The ocean at dusk. The ocean spitting dolphins at each of us.
The DNC convention was about as good as those things can get without stuffing them with even bigger and better musical acts. There was spirit in the power lines. There were cheers and smiles falling off the TV and onto my skin. That doesn’t happen all that much. But when it does, I sure as hell notice.
We got sucked into a traffic vortex on the way home from the beach. It was my fault/ my highway bones are rusty. Ended up on I-95 in Mini Van Halen, Arle’s ride with 195,000 miles on it. It made me lose my mind and that sucked for Arle. Then after a while, the GPS rectified itself and poured us out on some country roads in Maryland. It felt so much better to be out of that deep hard river with the kids in such an iffy boat. I put on The Rising after we stopped at Wawa. The sun was shining. We aimed ourselves north. We aimed ourselves home.
Here is a perfect country song that will live forever.
Most of us watched Despicable Me 2 as a family this past Saturday night. It’s such a monument to how good Hollywood can be when all the stars align. That whole Despicable franchise is just pure genius, I think.
Oasis are reuniting after 15 years to play some live shows again. I love that band so much and I love the Gallagher brothers unabashedly. Come on, lads.
Jawn 1- way too funny and observant!!
You should renew your passport- may need it for other reasons besides travel
Love anchovies but no one will eat them with me. We need to go out on a pizza date.
Am so excited that Oasis is doing some shows (if you wanted to go see them you would need........
your passport!!!!!!)
Anchovies? Awww, maaaannnn. Had em once, that was enough. I dug the salty, but once the second slice cooled a bit… ooh ooh that smell… Not for me. Glad you guys had a sweet week by the ocean. That sound can soothe me like no other. 🌊