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Throat Punch Essays

Meet Me in the Pinecone Scars

May 20, 2022

The mind can go in a thousand directions, but on this beautiful path, I walk in peace. With each step, the wind blows. With each step, a flower blooms.

- Thich Nhat Hanh

My hair still smells like Lebanon bologna, like the sweet smoke from the fire Arle made me last night. She put the seasoned split pieces of dead tree on a bed of her messed-up art and lit the whole damn thing and the fire came swiftly, with no trepidation whatsoever. I had been in our room, melting somewhat inside from the long day and the recent full moon and all the things all the time.

Do you ever get that way?

I wonder if you do.

As I peered down through the blinds and leered out into the yard for signs or some kind of visual pull, I saw the kids playing with sticks, slapping each other’s ass and running and squealing as if now was all that mattered.

My heart felt weak and strong at once. Up and down.

I get so confused from the thoughts and the sadness.

Do you know that feeling?

Maybe not.

Secretly, I hope that you do.

What I did is this: I ran hard from my habit move/ from crawling into bed, tired from work, sore bones an excuse to lay my burden down. When I give in to the pull, face in the cool afternoon pillow, life draining out of me and I want to be saved, I get to hearing the laughing outside, all muted and distant like it’s not for me. Like I’m not invited. Like it was never anyone’s intention to bathe me in that kind of light. And so I won a little win because I went away from laying down and giving in like I often have to do.

It hurts further down than words can explain. No warning. No nothing. Just: here. Have a bit of this, son. Have a bit of these collapsing skies in the middle of the live long day.

I felt the thing coming. Sea monster shadow and the rising water. I texted Arle with one eye locked on the yard between a couple of busted venetian slats.

Can you make that fire?

I waited; word bubbles; she was responding.

I already did. :)

That’s what she wrote. It made me happy. She always has my back. That’s everything, I guess. And still: I dredge the bottom/ spend seasons wandering down in the deep dark mud/ like some exiled bottom feeder running from life.

Like some blind fat sucker fish watching for a worm/ searching for a home.

_____

Anxiety is a twisted rush for me, a candy bolt of drugs/ coke-y lightning in my veins. I’m putty in its hands and I never recognized it all my life until the therapist helped me verify some stuff. The anxiety comes from parts deep within. Part fat kid self-consciousness/ part being chased down and smacked across the face/ part nights backstage when there was only three people in the bar but we still had to go out there, to save ourselves in the face of all the hating the world in the world.

Why weren’t there more? Why wasn’t I more?

From the abandonment, whole sections of my consciousness were sliced off like kebab. Women who wanted out unexpectedly. Band members who wanted out because it was too hard for them. A dad who wanted out early on in the game for reasons, I know now, that I will never understand. Mercy would wrap me in her loving arms were someone able to tell me why. But no one can tell you why these things happen, you know?

I’m not special, mind you. I’m no special case of pure country blues, man. I’m just like all the rest. American Fool. Penn Street Jedi. Standing in the shower/ singing Wonderwall to myself/ pretending it’s the Titanic, the cold sea crashing in.

I wrestle, man. I fight back.

Some days from the moment I wake up until I lay it all down again.

Tired, I get. Worn out. Frustrated.

Why me? What did I do wrong?

I am sorry.

I don’t understand any of this.

_____

In isolated coves of all this living, you see pirates crawl out from the ethereal ship paintings hung crooked on the walls of certain yesterdays. Their rum blood eyes twinkle in old twilight and they seem almost at peace with your strange presence in the fleeting moments of utter silence… right before they slit your belly wide open. Long after I begin to forget the laughing and the morning coffee and the parents in the same kitchen in the same world as me / long after I recall the twist of my father’s wedding ring on his rough worked finger or the new baby crying in the crib down the hall: I end up recalling only the sound of my own guts slapping down hard on the saloon floor.

Persplat.

Palamp.

Pakoosh.

Living, breathing, simply existing in the world and being some kind of part/playing some kind of role, it has this weird way of making up for lost time. Respites come in the form of love. They are the moments we have to recognize, I have to recognize, if I’m ever gonna make it through until the end.

_____

Arle makes the fire at my request and then- after I hit the downstairs and level into a few kids/ take away a phone and a Nintendo Switch for what I promise will be days (but it will only be hours) for never cleaning up/ for Dorito bags on the floor and the spinning feeling I get when I feel so ignored by the ones I love most. Well, I stumble out the back door, scatter myself across the unfinished rock patio (work-in-progress), move straight down the beaten dirt trail past the trampoline on one side and the lush spring grass with the never-ending dog shits on the other as I make my way to the smoke she made me rising in wisps, floating gently away from the Walmart fire pit, up into the above on this cool May evening breeze I claim as my own.

I put on the Bluetooth speaker and I hitch it to my phone. I look up Clifford Brown. My man, Clifford Brown. I’ll play him and his horn. Then I sit down in my Adirondack just as my phone dies.

Because it is an old piece of shit.

Because everything sucks when I tell myself it does.

____

Tomorrow, at around 9 in the morning, in the parking lot of the place where I will meet with the nurse practitioner to talk about the possibility of starting up some meds again but before I set eyes on her for the first time, or her me, I will drink from my scuzzy travel mug: coffee with milk: and I will be scared like I always am but don’t admit it.

It is in the fear though, anymore at least, that I recognize the small nobility or whatever we can call it that does indeed live on down inside me. The spark. The glint of sun on the plastic Diet Coke bottle on the far side of the lot. Shining like a lighthouse. Calling curious eyes, curious hearts to come closer to see what it is.

Yeah, it’s just a Diet Coke bottle. Again.

But one of these times it won’t be. One of these times it will be a diamond the size of a dead baby squirrel. With money guts popping up out of its wide open mouth. Her little baby diamond teeth framed around a fat baby diamond heart, like some ancient apple in some feast pig’s mouth.

Or not. I know.

I know.

I’ll drink my coffee though and I will twitch the rearview to make sure there’s nothing caught in my teeth/ toothpick it if there is. Smile in the mirror. My best smile. Fat kid face. It hurts to see my own reflection anymore and that’s anxiety for you and that’s why I’m here.

Maybe I should rip the goddamn mirror off and bring it into the clinic with me. Bring it in and explain to the lady at the desk that I’m uninsured and I’m paying on my own with the money I have set aside to change my life maybe. I hope.

And this? Oh this is my rearview mirror so I can show the nurse practitioner what happens when I stare into it. How my heart runs wild. How my bloods tries to leave my plane, rise up out of me, leave me empty.

I get so sad, you see, lady.

I get so truly sad and nervous and lost in the strangest things.

I can’t wear any of my clothes because they all fit me so wrong.

I can’t go down into the city because I can’t catch my breath for joy.

I can’t talk to the old heads anymore because the wounds are so insatiably deep, lady.

Once, they cut and cut and cut/ kept hacking away/ kept holding hands with one another like witches/ spitting their strange burning spit down into my open wounds and, even now, how it hurts, I’m telling you.

The lady at the desk looking at me with no expression at all. She’s tired from her own bullshit life. She’s tired from all the sad stories people dump on her like paint from a can.

I’m a grown man, I tell her as I wave my car mirror around and fight back some tears I’ve been holding in for a while now. Poor son of a bitch. Me. Her. All of us.

I’m a grown-ass man and I know it, Madam! I ought to be thinking about grilling up some steaks later tonight, huh? I ought to be thinking about popping open a cold one/ an IPA!/ getting that good old country buzz up in my head/ that lemony swarm of flies tickling my throat with tang and ho mama it feels good to lay it all down in the evening, don’t it?

Drag a hunk of drippy steak down through some dijon.

Down through a little A1, motherfucker.

You know!

Right??

I know you know!

_____

Then I will take a deep sigh back into my lungs and open the car door and walk out into the sunshine or maybe the rain, I just don’t know. I will step out into it regardless. Not brave or courageous. No platitudes, please. I’m not an example or an inspiration. I’m a desperate man. I am a battered, tired, exhausted man desperate to be the person I know I can be.

Dude. I want to smile in the sunshine and not feel like peeling my own skin off as a sacrifice to the people on the next beach towel down.

I want to wake up in the morning and not care what the day holds.

I want to move freely again, with kids all around me, with Arle watching and grinning, proud as shit.

I want to touch the green summer grass and not be electrocuted by my own brain.

_____

_____

Look.

Listen.

Fall in line if you want to give me advice or tell me that I should be grateful for what I have. Fall in line if you want to tell me that I am a lucky man. Fall in line if you want to let me know that I should play some concerts, that that will help me.

Write some songs.

Play some concerts.

Play some songs.

Do some concerts.

Fall in line if you want to tell me that people love me and that it will be okay. I understand. I appreciate it. I really do.

But, you know… Fall in line, I guess. It’s like, I can’t hear anything right now. I can only hear the kids over on the trampoline. I am closing my eyes and bathing in the everything smoke and their ramrod chatter: it’s all I hear.

In real truth, I love when you tell me things and I need you to say them. But most of the time the weight of the planets in the pack on my back/ it’s just so much. Maybe you understand that?

If not/ you’re probably rolling your eyes.

Oh well.

_____

Moving across the lot, chances are I will feel very alone. That is how so much of living with anxiety and depression ends up feeling like for me. It feels like watching the older kids in the backseat on the drive to school. The disconnect is more than I can bear. It’s more than any of us deserve. It hurts and yet everything seems changeable/ fixable/ just over there. Just out of reach. Find the words. Touch the stars. I watch the kids in the rearview and I long to know what they see. What they hear in the earbuds for sure, but also what they see as they watch the world slip by with sleepy morning eyes/ ready-for-summer gazes out across the farm fields and strip mall lots.

How do they see the crows chasing the blackbird?

How do they feel when they pass the old baseball field by the Sheetz?

What do they think of when we slam hard by the park where I once pretended I was a shark, chasing them all over the wood chips, me: dad: hiding beneath the colorful slides and catwalks and tubes and humming the Jaws music and then popping out with a growl and trying to grab them down into the water below.

Even when I have been so radically surrounded by old demons/ drowning in self-loathing and quite sure I was just a stand-in for the real me: even then: I would play at the park with them and try and connect with them and try to get them to see me as someone they love so much that anything else, any other ending than the one way down the road, would be virtually impossible.

Out across the parking lot, walking in my work clothes, in my grass-stained boots, so brown and green and Earthy and fine. Wondering if they understand, the kids, I mean, or if anyone does at all. Arle does, I think. At least she understands what I am trying to do; I don’t know if she can picture it though; I don’t know what other people believe about me, the reality of my promise/ the set-up of my plans. I have been tricky, haven’t I?

But jesus: watch me walking in my sunshine work stuff.

Beautiful bastard. Prose poem jackass. Firewood smoke ghost.

_____

To think too much is a disease. - Fyodor Dostoyevsky

_____

How to write all this down. I don’t know. Cross your fingers for me? What have you got to lose? The ease with which life slips by staggers me sometimes. I find myself riddled and paralyzed with some sort of mid-life crisis. I get to thinking I’m some kind of trash beef slung up on the meathook. Too tough. Too old. But still living. And still watching, still wondering.

I close my eyes and I can see a better version of me staring back at me. Back across the parking lot. Across the hoods of all these hot sunbaked cars. Across the afternoon blacktop and the sparkling glass and the Diet Coke bottles shining from the distant junk tree corners. Hot plastic bottles filled with ancient druggy piss.

I guess I’m afraid. Hell, I know I am. Walking through the front door of that clinic tomorrow (yesterday by the time you read this): I have no idea what comes next. But you know what? I’m going.

And check it out.

My hair is gonna smell like something sweet and wild.

Like burning forests of the mountain west.

Like country smoke tang/ like good gentle May ashing up into the sky.

And that nurse practitioner? She’s going to whiff it right away. My bubbling springs of existence. My wide-eyed Old Spice. My life force leaking all over the room.

She’ll probably say it to herself too.

This fucking guy smells like a campfire.

As the door shuts behind me.

Here I am.

Hello, Mr Bielanko, come on in.

I’ll smile/ sit down quick without waiting for the invite.

There’ll be the pause of us breathing/ two people sizing each other up across the arena sand.

Gladiators posturing.

Trucks out on the main drag.

The kids in their classrooms and summer coming on.

I grin like a crazy person, sunshine smashing down all over the spider plant over by the windowsill. Easy now, I tell myself; I can hear my own heartbeats; I can taste my own blood. I stare down at my own arms all covered in my pinecone scars, my everyday headstones from weed whacking and getting spit on by the wok: gentle tiny tough guys hanging off me like skyscraper window washers daydreaming buckets of beer/ daydreaming piping hot roasted chickens and well drunk ladies dancing upon their little rickety tables.

Good morning, I announce.

And we’re off.

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Hey there. May is National Mental Health Month in the US, so I have been wanting to tell you that I hope you’re okay. And that if you are not okay, well, you are not alone. I write sometimes about my own personal struggles in hopes that other people can find solace- and maybe even inspiration- in them. In May. In June. In July. Forever. .

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On that note/ thank you for reading this FREE Thunder Pie piece. If you like my writing, please become a subscriber. Supporting smalltime writers like me automatically makes you cooler than people who don’t. It’s scientifically proven.

You know, I found my little place in this world and it’s here/ down here in all this writing/back here in this tiny back alley where I can make an honest buck creating something original. That has to stand for something. Look around you today. You know what I’m saying? All this Thunder Pie has to stand for something.

So thanks for even considering me and my humble ass art.

Love,

Serge

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