Scroll of Jawns / Ep. 13
When you pay attention to boredom it gets unbelievably interesting.
-Jon Kabat-Zinn
jawn one.
There are ghosts here, Arle says. She swears she saw one at the foot of our bed once when we first moved in. I believe her. Maybe because I want to, or maybe because her tone is true. It was moving, she says/ floating like/ from my side of the bed over toward hers across the closet door. The fact that no one has said they’ve seen one since doesn’t bother me. It’s possible that another ghost has been encountered here and it was just too eerie or confusing for the witness to try and explain it to everyone else. Not everything about being around a ghost goes like it does in the movies, I figure. They can’t always be that cliche. Sometimes I think that human beings might not even know exactly what they encountered or how when it comes to these things. Like, if you are asleep and you have a ghost staring at you or hovering by your side, and then you wake up somehow and you lay eyes on it (or even simply sense it there), what are the odds that your brain will be able process what has happened? It might be more fascinating than frightening. And it might feel more personal than communal, you know? Maybe ghosts aren’t scary at all. Maybe we are scary to them. Maybe the night is dark for a reason.
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jawn two.
Not every summer has meant a vacation. Some years we went to the beach with my mom. One year we went to Disney World with her and Mom-Mom. But later, there was less of that. By the time I was a teenager we didn’t go anywhere. I’d go for day trips with my buddy, John, down to Ocean City. His mom would drive us and the three of us would hit the beach, maybe a bit of boardwalk, then head home late afternoon. Crossing through Philly as the evening settled, I’d watch the city lights twinkling in the twilight. It all seemed so subtly sad to me even then. This vast sprawling metropolis and all these people unseen, their apartment lights, their unified front that none of them even probably cared about. Together but apart, I thought to myself. My hair smelled like ocean, my skin was freshly tanned, and my eyes were heavy with the view from the bridge as we flew above the world and I saw streets where- unbeknownst to me at the time- I would one day live my life/ play my guitar/ walk for hours just a little stoned and in love with every corner, every alley, every freak and druggie and girl I passed. Sometimes summer, for me anyway, wasn’t that exciting. But it’s when I learned to live in my head. And that’s been everything, I believe.
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jawn three.
I took Henry to run some football drills at the baseball field the other morning. It was pretty early for him but he seemed well-rested. This indicated to me that he was into this, that his love for something (in this case: football) had at least set its claws into him enough that he had managed to get himself into bed at a reasonable hour. He’d slept well, I deduced, and now here we were. The air was lox-colored vapor the way the mornings around here can be come summer. There was dense humidity already, a heavy damp heaving from just behind our consciousness, pushing through reality, forcing itself into a scene that might have been perfect if it weren’t for that. The grass was slick with dew and I told Henry that he should be careful as he tied his cleats on in the dugout. He didn’t say much to that though. He mumbled something like he wasn’t worried about it and then I figured that I ought not worry about it either then. I have no real clue about how to get ready for a football season. I played when I was young, maybe his age, but barely really. I never got in the games. I never made the weight, was always too heavy no matter how hard I tried. And I was too afraid to move up to the next team. Those kids were men. Hairlip mustaches and cigarette breath and violent helmet slams that would knock your brains into another dimension. So now, all these years later, I have little to offer up to my son when it comes to any of this. With baseball, I can hit the grounders and pitch the batting practice and talk about the basics of what you need to know. Or do. But standing there in the wet grass the other morning, overweight again, my legs stiff from life, my arms weak from living, I had no idea what the hell I was doing. It doesn’t matter though, I figure. There I was. There Henry was. I executed the drills like he told me, so he could practice things. I watched him skipping in and out of the rungs of a rope ladder. I threw him little flash passes according to the plays we called. And all the while, other people pulled in to drop off their cans and bottles at the recycling bins, and I pictured what they must be seeing, unexpectedly, on a Wednesday morning before work. A dad and his kid. Kid wearing a football helmet. Dad holding a ball. Horse pasture behind them. And beyond that the ridge. And beyond that, somewhere out there, Harrisburg, and then Baltimore, and then Georgia, and then what? Everything. The universe. Touchdowns and tackles and glory and brain damage and Friday night shining like a firefly all alone.
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jawn four.
Everyone else seems to have made their way towards a career and it pisses me off sometimes that I seemed to have missed that. Or that maybe I ignored it when I should have maybe zeroed in on it. I lose sleep wondering who gets to decide about me/ about whether or not I was a success or not. How does that happen? How does a regular person in the western world end up so far off the path of righteous independence the way it’s been set up for us? How did I end up so far to one side/ telling myself that I need to live the life my heart tells me to live just to end up paying such a high price for that every damn day? Most men my age have things figured out to one degree or another. They have a little savings. They have a bit of credit. They have health insurance and homeowner’s insurance. They have a job they work at 40 or 50 or 60 hours a week, week in, week out, so that the money shows up in their account regularly/ familiarly/ like it’s supposed to in this life if you are living right. I don’t have those things anymore. Mostly I never did. Or if I did, they felt so big and beautiful for a while, like I was mature and alive as an adult in the world, but then they slipped away from me. The health insurance premium went up a lot. The homeowner’s insurance company wants us to put a new roof on the house when we usually struggle just to pay the internet bill each month. At every turn there’s always someone or something there telling me that I am, somehow, not enough. And that my choices were poor (rock/roll dreamer fool) and so now being poor is my lot in life. I write a Substack, I create art, I sling vintage shit, I move in and out of lawn mowing jobs or construction jobs and then they slide away after time. The work is done. Or the people just let me down. I lie in bed at night like some voice in a fucking Springsteen song, staring at the ceiling, wondering what new hard times tomorrow will bring. I bite my lip, count my blessings, try to smile at the kids, hold Arle in my arms, and all the while I smell the burning wires in the wall. The smoldering trouble biding its time. Pick yourself up by your bootstraps, cowboy, the wind says as it taps against the glass. It’s not enough, what you have done. It’s not even close. But I’m so fucking tired now and my mind is bruised, my energy is strange. I’m confused, dejected. And look man, I thought I gave so much of me for so long and now what? Now what? Goddamn this rat race.
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jawn five.
Nothing says summertime like the taste of chicken hot off the grill. I don’t care who you are or what you usually eat, this is the season for getting you some grilled chicken asap! Oh, how I love to hear that fat thigh sizzle the moment it lands down on the grate. It sounds like southern rain on a shack tin roof! It sounds like country creek just a bubbling on by! The trick, they say, is to make sure you don’t start moving the damn chicken around too soon. You have to let it sit longer than you think. The white hot coals are enough. The whole chemistry of the experience is enough. A trigger finger grill master will flip a bird part too quick/ before the time is right/ and that in and of itself is a goddamn sin, I’m saying! You need to listen to some old bluegrass music as that chicken melts into the scalding iron just so it can melt back away from it when the time is right. That’s what happens, you see? When you are cooking things properly, they stick to the so-called pan until suddenly they don’t. That’s the magic moment, friend! That is when you somehow know, after many, many years of trial and error, that the thing is ready to be gripped in the tongs, and gently flipped like you’re a giant clearing a headstone from the grave. Grilling chicken is something ritualistic for some people and those are the people that I trust the most. I know that a burger on the open fire is a good thing. And I know that steak, chops, hot dogs and corn all have summer slathered up inside them, but hear my song here, people. The chicken is the king. The chicken is the bird. The chicken is dumber than hell but also smarter than you think and when they die, they die hard, for me and you. For all of us. And I know I’m all over the place here but that’s exactly what happens when you’re a chicken man, you see? I lift a thigh off the coals (I never cook with gas) and I touch the crispy golden skin to my lips and it burns hellfire but I bite in nonetheless, mere moments after it was on that grill, and as I connect with the heat and the flavor runs up into the roof of my mouth and rises like country mist up through my skull, up through my hard old brain… I come together with the ancients before me, the ancestors and the legends and the killers and the lovers and all the young kids down in the crick and all the men passing a bottle back behind the store as the sun dips low/ as the long day scuttles across the barnyard and hides over in the dark corner of it all. Lick that sizzle grease at the sides of my teeth/ I am rolling it all around in my mouth now/ the essence of a mountain/ the morning soundtrack of a farm/ the rooster in the dusty road/ the flag flapping like an uphill train/ two lines of battle/ a green field in between/ men will live and men will die/ but later tonight/ someone will cook a chicken on the fire. Pray you’ll be watching the flames licking up at them bones then. Pray you will find yourself among the living still, grateful for this warm fine evening at the end of a bad, bad day, the sweet peppered waft of chicken grilling floating up your nose/ filling up your face/ calling you back from a thousand years ago/ a million years ago/ come now/ come now/ come one and all/ and eat this chicken the moment she’s done.
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jawn six.
Maybe the worst thing about this new administration hellbent on collapsing stuff is the real probability that before long now, the public land will go. And mark my words, when the public land goes: everything will change. The big national parks disappearing will be tragic, sure, but also little plots here and there and everywhere. Land is money and money is the thing now, you see. So being able to walk on down to the river and skip rocks or try to catch a bass or hop on your inner tube and crack you open a cold Budweiser like you are fucking Kid Rock in a lame-ass CW commercial/ all that beautiful dream will be extinguished. And fast too. It is, however, quite hard for Americans to see this ever happening. We are a stubborn people, tied to our heritage like a plastic bag whipping like mad way up in the tree. The idea of not being free to go hunt a damn deer in the forest seems impossible to us no matter what side of the hunting fence we fall on. Land means places to hunt for certain, but it also means so much more. Ballfields, playgrounds, little strips of suburban woods where you take your dog to shit, all of it will soon become fought over and absorbed in ways that make the posted signs of today seem cute by comparison. They will sell off your natural places as sure as the sun will rise in the east. They will cash in like motherfucking warlords too. They will sell off mineral rights and water rights and whatever they can sell off because they won’t give a flying squirrels titty if you or your kids ever touch an autumn leaf again. The cost of everything will skyrocket when the land is gone, naturally. Meat, potatoes, an apple, whatever the hell you can think of, the price for it will shoot through the roof because the government will no longer be involved in any of that shit. Let them fight for the crumbs, they will snicker to themselves. We will be Godlike in our fortified epics. The land will burn as the small people wage war! Jesus, I know that sounds mad and I know I sound more than a little socialist here, but there you go. I have always believed that when the streams and the meadows and the hills and the woods are all one day gone from us/ from our daily lives/ when the access is taken away and being caught out there means you are shot on sight/ who will rescue us? Who will save you from the very private planet? Where will you find water? How will you survive? It won’t be their problem, hoss. And that’s why freedom ain’t free.
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jawn seven.
The boredom of summer is old poetry. No one wants to notice it any more, although many of us were raised on it and nurtured by it once upon a time. It seems impossible now to tell my own kids about what summer used to be like. For children born entirely in a time of internet and cell phones, the very notion of a world without them is unlikely to resonate. For a few years at the start of their lives, my own kids played and laughed and lived upon the very same plains of real time real life that I grew up knowing. But then, at a young age, they were allowed to experiment with an iPad. Then an iPhone. Quickly, so very, very quickly then, their old selves died before my very eyes. The same kids who had once stood in the warmth of the noonday sun and tried to visualize a thing to do or an experience to have, now they lay down in the sunkiss’d park and perished. And in their place: the forever tranced. Minds shackled to device energy, they exist in real time situations only when absolutely forced. School, work, these things remain. For now. But other than that, they retreat into the shadows of the screens that own them. Into a wilderness of apps and chats they go, as people like me try to figure out what the hell is happening. I used to be so bored in the summer when I was a kid that I could practically feel the heaving slog of each passing moment. Tuesday afternoons, say around 2pm, as the sun slid gradually like some frying lizard across the upside down desert of a sky, I could look down at my shoes on the cooked macadam of our street and feel the weight of the entire universe locked tight in full stop mode upon my tiny little boy back. Nothing was stirring. Nothing moved or even mattered except the fact that even the distant buzzing of the bugs and the far-off accelerations of the sedans and pickups and Strohman bread delivery trucks up on the main drag and the barely audible double sounding bell ringing at the Getty station when someone pulled in for gas, all of it, melted into one single hum, one slow burning vibe, that rose up through my slight body like vapor, like smoke, until I realized, with my slow stopped brain, that there was nothing at all to do and that there was no one around and that this was all that there was for me in the world right now: this steady still humming silence of the boring summer afternoon. I can still feel it now. I can still hold the inescapable sense in my mind, of utter nothingness coming down all around me. Even a dead bird half melted into the tar on the street might have moved me somehow, provoked or inspired me towards some new feeling, some kind of enfilade on the monotony, but never did it come. It had to play itself out, you see. The only ending to the boredom happened natural, after I’d been down in it for so long, walking around blindly kicking at stones, heatstroking out as I looked down at the sidewalk all by myself and saw black spots of old gum turning into planets in a white hot sky out in a new outer space I had never known before. Inside my own head, my consciousness attempting to save me from myself by creating cerebral lies I could truly live in, I moved blindly, like a dying mule, overcome with hallucinations brought on by a world uninterested, as of yet, in offering me nonstop titillation 24/7 forever. Eventually, some other kid would show up. Bob on his Mongoose or John pinging his aluminum bat off the burning blacktop. My brother holding a Tahitian Treat. Butch or Jackie moving out of the alley and into my line of sight, snapping me out of my haze, the boredom spitting me from its deep summery guts back onto the street in front of my house where I’d just been floating in a dream. Humans brought me back to life then but I was groggy, slightly removed, the inner workings of my imagination refusing to let me go completely. Later, behind the tilting cup of a stone cold cola Slurpee, I could feel my heart freeze in the 7-11. Over by the Sports Illustrated mags and the arcade games, underneath a gushing AC vent from God, I came to understand that I was trapped down in a magic summer. And that I was never ever getting out.
Howdy. How are ya? Here’s hoping you are having a great summer so far. Today’s Thunder Pie is a FREE one, which means if you aren’t a paying subscriber you are still getting a chance to read the whole piece. If you like it, please consider paying me for a full subscription??
If I can find just get a few new paying subscribers a month, then this Thunder Pie project makes so much sense. I actually really believe my writing voice is pretty unique and worth having out there in the nonstop mainstream overflow of too much and too many.
Thunder Pie is cool.
Let’s say that together.
Thunder Pie is cool.
Anyway, little reminder: if you sign up as a paid subscriber I’ll send you new original writings every Friday morning at 9am EST. It’s $120 a year. Or $10 a month. That’s a good deal, I think. You’ll get like 48 new pieces this next year alone PLUS several years worth of archived writings. You can also give a subscription as a gift to someone you think would dig my stuff.
Okay, thanks so much. See you next Friday.
Serge
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Things I Liked This Week.
Watching a bunch of clips of Ozzy Osbourne take the stage for the last time ever in his native Birmingham, I found it all moving and awesome. Ozzy was the real deal/ a manic ultra-talented working-class rocker who chased so many demons but made millions happy along the way. Rock-n-roll was many things while it lasted. And one of those things was Ozzy.
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Oasis are back together for the first time in 16 years and although I have no plans or desire to be in one of the many super crowded stadiums they will be filling the rest of this year, I will say this. They are one of my favorite bands ever and I am so fucking happy that they are pulling this off. Well, so far anyway. It isn’t easy for two brothers like those two to capture the magic one more time. Most bands will never ever live it again, believe me. But onstage in Cardiff, Wales on the Fourth of July, they sounded astounding. Especially Liam, whose voice seems exactly like it did 30 years ago.
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I’m tucking this in the middle here just so I don’t seem like a mad, opportunistic plugger or whatever, but I have to tell you that my wife, Arle, wrote a piece on her Substack, Letter to You, this week that really blew me away. The Grass Will Win is a must read, I’m telling you. It’s compassionately heady and it drips with the sweat of being alive even in the wake of real death. Here’s a bit of what she wrote.
“And yet, despite it all, the good, the bad and the ugly, I know this, too: if we disappeared tomorrow, the world would recover and move on without us. The grasses would rise. The air would clear. In a hundred years, the vines would climb over our cities like it was always theirs. We are fleeting. Temporary. But not meaningless.
Whatever spark lives in us, whatever watches from behind our eyes, it doesn’t flinch. It endures. It is older than our history and less impressed with our monuments. I don’t know what it is. But I feel it. Especially in moments like that funeral, when grief and heat and history collide.”
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I took Henry to his first high school football practice last Sunday evening. Here’s something I wrote in the wake of it.
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Lightning bugs have really exploded to life in our backyard this summer. It’s a special treat to take the dogs out for their end-of -the-night whazz and see a zillion flying lanterns flickering on and off. Summer’s majesty, indeed.
***ORIGINAL SERGE BIELANKO ART***
So check it out. I have been making some serious art this summer and I would love for you to own some. These pieces are all one-of-a-kind and I’m super proud of each of them. I spend a lot of time creating every art piece I make/ countless hours delving into possibilities and rerouting directions! If you have any questions at all please just reach out to me. And I can also do custom commissions too!
Ramones (big box): $300 plus shipping
The Cure: $245 plus shipping
Marvin Gaye: $225 plus shipping
“All these old farts, slagging us off - they'll be dead and buried by the time we start getting senile and shitting in our pants. And we can remember all their shit tunes. 'I've Got My Mind Set On You', 'When We Was Fab'. The quicker they fucking go, the better for everyone. Anyway, John and Ringo were The Beatles. Isn't It A Pity? It will be when I meet George Harrison. I'm gonna stand on his head and play golf. I'm gonna do me Roy Castle impersonation on his head. So who wants a fight? Any old fart who's allowed out of the rest home wants a fight with me, yeah? After I've had me steak and kidney pie, I'll be ready. Do you want it? Any of you senile bastards want a ruck? I'll meet you in the pub, six o'clock. Yeah, it's unlikely, you never know, they might turn up. Whoof! I'll do the lot of them. That should be the headline: 'I'll do the lot of you.' I had a dream where I drop-kicked him in the throat, George, and smashed McCartney from here to Jupiter and back. He didn't have his seatbelt on. My name is disturbance. I love the music. I played the game. Thought I wasn't bothered. Then I thought - I do want it. Keith, Mick and any other old bag who decides to get out of bed in the morning to slag us off. Dirty old nipple. Sweaty old mushroom. I wanna meet you in the middle of Primrose Hill. Thursday afternoon, 12 o'clock, on the green. They say they got misquoted. I won't be misquoted. The main thing we're talking about here is this: any dick who wants it, regardless of what time or day or what shoes I've got on. Anyone who wants a rumble will get it because the man is mad for it and that's the end of it. I don't like fighting but you've not been slagged off like me. And there'll be no big chaps around, man. Just me and me dick, man. And I'll hit him with me knob. I've said I wanted to chill, but I've got loads of knobs picking on me anyway, so I might as well say - 'Let's have it!"
-Liam Gallagher, Esquire, 1998.
bye.
I stand in full solidarity with your boredom jawn, haha! Being bored as a kid was/ is really so important. It forges the daydreamers and storytellers and artists and wanderers. It fosters independence and critical thinking and it can connect you with other kids in spontaneous, unstructured ways that build social muscles and a sense of belonging. Kids need boredom sometimes. It bums me out to think of kids missing out.
I concur with Arle on the boredom jawn. You brought me back to sometime between 8 and 11 years old. Remembering how even a lovely, perfect summer day could feel like a draaaaag at that age if there was nothing in particular to do; no pick-up ballgame or hanging around drinking bottles of Hoffman cola. Nothing to do but be with yourself, in your own head. Imagination blowing full speed. That dried mud with the cracks in it looks like something that maybe the dinosaurs saw. Maybe I can find a dinosaur egg in the field behind our house. What’s that bug? It’s kinda cool, but it’s also kinda scary. That busted water heater in the lot would be a cool lifeboat. Hope there aren’t any rats hiding under it. As Lou observed, “Those were different times…” Hell yeah, they were. Thanks for taking me back, my man. Have a good week.