Two Blinking Specks Over Town Last Night
A Tale of Love & Mental Health
Out there the world is immense and sudden.
-Jason Molina.
Everyday now, I seem to fall more and more away from feeling like I’m going to understand. It is coming to pass that I’m never going to get it. The world. The people. The endless cosmos spread out over the yards and the towns. Red clay dog shit spread out all over the middle of the summer sidewalk. Sneaker prints perfectly imprinted in the awfulness. Didn’t that person fucking see that lump of shit laying there? It was in the middle of the sidewalk. How do we explain these things/ or anything for that matter? Everything is so much more ridiculous than we wanted to think it could be. All the people are so much more immature than we pretend.
Ah, but time marches on, as they say, and what’s a humbled fellow like me to do? I’ve got to adjust my focuses, I tell myself. I’ve got to reconfigure my chakras, you know? When I turn to the real world, there is arrogance and hot physical heat. When I turn to the online world, there is egotism and empathy I no longer buy. Which is worse for me? Which is best?
Where do I begin? When do I quit? I’ve traveled the world and the seven seas, everybody is looking for something. Look, I have no tattoos on my skin. None.
And think what you want but one thing is for sure. The lack of ink means I’m not following the crowd. It means I’m running from it, homie.
Running like hell.
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Once upon a time, on the banks of my buddy’s bass pond, me and Arle got married. It was five years ago this past week, a sultry evening in the middle of the last summer before Covid-19 came along. I guess I could nail a little innocence to the old totem pole here if I wanted to/ attach that angle that says: we had no idea that the world would change so much so soon for so many. Including us. But I don’t feel the driving need to do it. Our existence, me and Arle, our five kids, it was plowing forward according to fate or luck/ according to soul (if you have it/ most do not). Looking back now, regardless of whether a pandemic came or didn’t, it seems goofy to me to draw that ‘before and after’ line in our love story. But still: it is there anyway. And to be honest, it’s not even remotely close to being the deepest, most intense ‘before and after’ line in our story. That came soon after our wedding when we wrestled our own lives out of the hands of others. People don’t like when you do that. People did not like when I did that. But I did. We did. And it has meant everything.
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At the pond that evening, on the outskirts of this very small country town out here in Central Pennsylvania, thunder clouds dragged across the sky and threatened us. Like any summer night in July, everything might come crashing down at any second. And if it does it will bring natural intensity. Potential calamity, even. But it will not mind you and your little country wedding. Were the bottom to fall out and the clouds collapse from within, we would have had to either ride it out or hide in the barn or head home to try another day.
I suspect, at that point, we would have stood out there on the tempest in the wildest of lightning. That’s how sure and ready we were. Unlike when I was younger, marriage now was not some whimsical vision, some spontaneous act in the name of trying to prove things that can never be proven with impetuous energy. Rather, the act of sanctifying the union itself, if you will, that had been forged over years/ across many fields of glass. What we were- and what we hoped to continue to become- faced many tests up until that moment there on the dried grass on the slow rise hill on the north bank of that half acre-sized watering hole. Which is how love should unfold, I guess. It doesn’t need to be electrified to the point of swept away like drugs. Passion and curiosity are easy to misunderstand, or worse, misappropriate. And so a lot of love stories end up being anything but. They begin to burn up even as the vows are being said. And when you maybe live through something like that, it hurts you or it changes you or it beats you down to this point where you continually blame yourself for all the little things that came and went.
By design, even, there are love stories that were born to die. Tangled tales, you see, carefully curated for the sole purpose of someday being entirely demolished. Killed, some are, by impossible storms wearing delicate blues. I’m not saying that this happened to me. But I am saying that I just wrote that for you to read and ponder as we share this time together.
It was five years ago this past week that I looked into Arle’s eyes and began to understand that sometimes salvation arrives in the form of a subtle sense that trickles through your gut/ shoots out into your blood/ and ultimately floods your heart with a feeling so powerful and real and true that all you can do is stand back/ in awe of yourself/ as you begin to set out across this goddamn burnt out landscape we call life/ holding hands now/ with a person who takes your deepest breaths away.
If you laugh at love and marriage because you suspect that you are above it all: then you are probably a damn fool. And in the end, you’ll prove it, by and by, over and over, no matter what you pretend in public.
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Now it is different. I have my things and they are immense, let me start with that. Trying not to mince words too much, I will tell you that I have some very real and very prominent mental health struggles at times. I’m not saying that to hashtag myself or brand myself in the spirit of the modern TikTok either. Nothing against anyone else talking about this stuff at all. In fact, I salute you. Or most of you anyways. Yet trying to tell your own story without spilling the beans on the miasma you walk around in because you are a polluted city is not only cheap and lame, it’s also diabolically bad for your own personal growth. And by personal growth, I’m talking basic good things that are only now just coming to light in terms of what’s good for us.
Real accountability is legendary, brave, and repairing. Honest accountability is rare as hell and ethically beautiful. True accountability means having to be honest about your own shortcomings, and that is difficult and rare. Well-intentioned accountability revolves around the lost art of being able to point a finger at another, but also at yourself as well. In my experience, people would rather fight across an entire lifetime rather than admit they have been part of the problem all along.
Accountability, the kind that doesn’t belong to canceled celebrities trying to save their careers or whatever, it is the only kind that interests me. It lives in the scrappy woodlots of our untold stories. It is hidden from the world. Everything is, mostly.
It is there though. Accountability. Like a homeless person eating sweet drippy apricots from a can they punctured with a Rambo knife. We can all pretend the woods are simply woods, but that’s bullshit. They are much more than that. There is a galaxy unfolding in there, whether we even know it or not. Something being born back in those shady lanes, whether we ever actually admit it or not.
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Arle has taught me, and continues to teach me, on an everyday basis, that accountability is, in many ways, everything. If you refute it/ pass the buck/ persistently hone your craft so that you never have to be accountable except for small false flags you plant along the way to save face (Look! I DID admit to being hangry sometimes!), then you are practicing one of the worst dark arts imaginable. Just turn your TV on. Walk out into the Facebook arena for just a few minutes, you’ll see what I mean. Human beings are spending more and more of their time and energy finding ways to say: it’s not my fault.
At the same time though, and this is where things get really tricky, we all have to be able to recognize when we are being taken for a ride by people we trusted. It happens more than we think. People who supposedly care about us are often the most likely to spin a long and winding web of abuse against us. Everything from false accusations to gaslighting to exploiting your name to others in an attempt to convince whoever is willing to listen that the ‘other person’ is the awful one who is actually the one doing all the damage around here.
And although it causes immense damage to the pysche of victims, people who have been taught that certain simple statements are gospel and should never ever be questioned, statements like ‘Family is everything’ or ‘Always respect your parents’ or “They are your *insert title here*” among many, are the kinds of people who end up remaining in drastically unhealthy family relationships and marriages and friendships simply because they have been programmed/ totally and completely/ to think that any recognition that something is wrong within the connection simply MUST be shut down in the name of what’s “right”. In the name, if you will, of what we’ve been told all along.
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This shit happened to me.
I share this much because I know how deeply it has traumatized me in the end. I walk around quite damaged by a story I keep inside me.
I was told all across my life that it was my ‘temper’ that was always the problem. People I loved and trusted were able to manipulate me for years and years and years by insisting just that one thing. And I had no clue what was happening. How could I know? How does a grown man understand the inner workings of the minds of others. Their behavior towards me came in the form of persistently pushing their narrative on me, and refuting mine, until a surefire pattern happened.
First: they disallowed my narrative to exist in the court of reality. People who suffer certain mental disorders are very prone to adopt this tactic. Then: when they wore me down, backed me up, and seemingly got their way yet again, I protested with increasingly futile distress. It was always reaction fueled by my own inability to understand why this was happening. And how. I had to ask myself over and over again: How could I always be dismissed as being unreasonable or just plain wrong when I was a pretty intelligent and caring person?!?!
But guess what? As it often turns out with certain kinds of people, this was exactly what they planned all along. You know why? It’s pretty easy to understand once you’ve finally seen the light. After I was backed up to the cliff by the refusal of my own perspectives and my own opinions, I would react in panic with yelling and ‘explosive’ behavior.
This in turn, I would be told, point blank, scared the person who was actually playing me for their own benefit all along.
I had no idea at the time, across years what was going on, but it was emotional abuse.
And it still is.
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I’m no psychologist, of course, so please remember that when I reflect upon things in that light. That said, psychological/ emotional abuse is, I suspect, often carried out by people who likely don’t even know they are doing it. People whose own set of childhood experiences (or whatever happened) had been marinating in their own twisted juices for decades. What sucks the most is the fact that, even unconsciously, all abusers find this pattern to be irresistible over time, to the point that no matter what a victim like me says or does, the abusers walk tall and confident in their own knowledge that all they have to do is push and push, a little here, a little there/ nothing too obvious that others would sense/ a thousand paper cuts over time/ and eventually the ‘angry’ person with the ‘problem’ will eventually feel cornered, confused, and desperate and… ta-dah… react by exhibiting the overt signs of being deeply troubled and upset by things they don’t even really understand.
Then all will be right with the world, you know? Because everyone agrees that overtly upset people are just fucked up in the head, you know?
Am I right?
What I experienced for a long time was gaslighting at its finest. I didn’t know the term back then, and today it gets thrown around, often out of context, but looking back, after years in therapy and pondering, it turned out to be the precise term when I finally ran into it. Others would often capitalize on the fact that I did not have the tools in my toolbox to merely hold my own in a discussion in which people were refusing to consider my feelings at all. So, right on cue, I would become really frustrated. Sadness would blow up in me and I would cave to the lifelong behavior that I learned in childhood from people very close to me.
That behavior was frustration and upset that lead to yelling at times, cursing and telling people to get the fuck out of my house. So, what happens then? If you tell someone to get the fuck out of your house because you’re really brokenhearted that they won’t listen to you and you cannot seem to wrap your head around what to do in order to convince them to at least try, and you end up agitated and in a state of emotional distress, you are simply handling them the “get out of jail free” card. You are handing them the excuse they need to be able to blame you like they did the last time, and the time before that. Look how ‘angry’ of a person you are! Even if 99% of your life is not spent in anger, if you tell someone to get the fuck out of your house, that’s how they view you. That’s how they want others to view you. You have offended them and you have questioned something they don’t want to back away from and they sure as hell don’t want to pull up to the curb of having a good, hard, honest look at themselves.
The other day, my 10-year-old told me that it’s okay to be angry sometimes. I almost cried when I heard him say it. Coming from his beautiful face, it felt like a validation sent from the cosmos. Of course, he has no idea about any of this stuff, nor do I want him to, but sometimes righteousness finds you, taps you on the shoulder and says please don’t back down.
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Nothing was ever in tune. People just blindly grabbed at whatever there was: communism, health foods, zen, surfing, ballet, hypnotism, group encounters, orgies, biking, herbs, Catholicism, weight-lifting, travel, withdrawal, vegetarianism, India, painting, writing, sculpting, composing, conducting, backpacking, yoga, copulating, gambling, drinking, hanging around, frozen yogurt, Beethoven, Back, Buddha, Christ, TM, H, carrot juice, suicide, handmade suits, jet travel, New York City, and then it all evaporated and fell apart. People had to find things to do while waiting to die. I guess it was nice to have a choice.
- Charles Bukowski
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Some sorts would much rather congregate with others who, like them, all point at a scapegoat as the problem. It feels so good to be able to stand with others and say, It’s not me! It’s not us! It’s that motherfucker right there!
It’s like ‘Boogeyman Phenomenon’ always sneaking around the world like a bad kitchen draft. In that one, certain political entities understand that if they continually insist that immigrants (or Jews or Muslims or whoever) are the source of all of your problems, many of you will look at the person standing next to you and see them staring back at you with that lightly raised eyebrow that has long been man’s downfall and before long the two of you will feel united over hating the boogeyman.
Even if the boogeyman you’re now united against never did shit to either of you.
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After Arle and I got married and we began, or continued really, to recognize long installed patterns that were working our attempts at simply living a peaceful regular life as a newly married couple with a blended family, not one person ever asked me why I was upset. It remains unfathomable to me, that painful reality.
Not a single person in my world.
No one wanted to take the time to ask
No one wanted to hear.
And look, even when I have to admit I still had no real clarity of insight, even when I still couldn’t even begin to explain myself, the fact remains, despite all that, one thing that was clear was that I absolutely knew that something was incredibly ‘off’. Something was terribly off about how others were treating me. How they whispered behind my back and congregated together and left me out as they bonded together, blaming me for their own inexcusable behaviors and actions and words.
Grrrr.
In making me their legendary boogeyman, I was left staggered by the sense of abandonment.
I guess, without ever realizing it, abandonment had affected me as a kid. My dad leaving had been something I survived okay, but had never processed at all. No one asked me about it. No one urged me to talk about my feelings. It was the opposite. No one said anything about it at all. He left and that was that. Carry on, boys. Carry on.
But the abandonment that came in the wake of my marriage to Arle hurt me a trillion times more than my dad’s leaving so long ago. Here I was, the same guy, the same person, being forced to choose between my own reality or the one that others I once trusted were heaving at me. I chose me. I chose me and Arle. I don’t regret it either. But being forced to choose has destroyed me in ways that are never coming back.
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Over the years, right across my recent adulthood, the pattern solidified to where even ultra-dysfunctional alcoholics and physical abusers and other officially diagnosed mentally ill people could basically own me simply by doing this.
We do what we want.
We wait for him to break in half.
Then we point our fingers at the one displaying obvious emotional agony.
Then we say we are scared of him.
Then we feel like winners.
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Some accountability from me. Here. Now.
It took me so fucking long, man. It took me most of my life really, to come to terms with what was happening. YES: I was absolutely guilty of being a real over-the-top pain in the ass at times with people I loved. YES: I had anxiety issues that were rooted in my years as a kid. A lot of physical abuse. A dad who abandoned me and my brother at the exact moment when kids need a dad most. Living with chronic alcoholics. Residing with my grandparents for years and watching the mental abuse my grandfather heaved on my grandmother as if it was regular everyday behavior. YES: I was a walking witch’s cauldron of unaddressed voids and towering insecurities. YES: according to many modern psychology fortune cookies, I was probably nowhere near ready to be in a romantic relationship with another human being when I first started in on having them.
YES.YES.YES.YES.YES. I take accountability for my many, many shortcomings. I take responsibility for my innate humanity. Imperfect from birth, I sheepishly (but bravely?) raise my hand when they ask, “Anybody here ever fuck things up at all?”
But ultimately, there was so much more for me to fathom. I had been groomed over a long stretch of time to blame myself/ to take all the burden of every single argument, every strange scenario in which others I trusted were insistent that they were right and I was wrong. In order to survive and maintain certain so-called ‘relationships’ with people I couldn’t imagine breaking up with (family or partners) I had to accept the way things were. In their narrative, I was at fault for everything. No one else, and I mean no one else involved in any of this life-altering situation ever took any accountability for anything.
Never.
Ever.
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How the hell did that happen?
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What brazen/ arrogant/ cruelty it is to deflect onto another with such dedicated energy.
So that just forcing them to play the game itself just bashes their soul away.
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But isn’t that what I’m doing right here?
No. It is not.
I am flawed, but honorable.
I am hurt, but honorable.
I am sad, but honorable.
I am fading, but honorably.
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Validation for me- and for any and all victims of serious mental abuse- lies in the solid light fist bumps from others who both understand and are willing to admit it.
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But hurry, let's entwine ourselves as one, our mouth broken, our soul bitten by love, so time discovers us safely destroyed.
- Federico Garcia Lorca
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Arle helped save me because of the way she recognized, over time, with humble observation and careful listening, what exactly was going down.
She never chose to shake me by the shoulders. She never lost her cool, stared in my eyes, hollered “Wake the fuck up, son. Can’t you see what’s going on here?”
It was never anything like that.
What she did should be recognized here because it alone rescued me from the pattern of abuse. From the start of our relationship two years before our marriage, Arle eye-witnessed the way I was living amongst those close to me. Across months and then years, she noticed, as only fresh eyes could do, who was systematically dragging me down for their own benefit and pinning it all on me. To an outsider suddenly watching from the wings, she understood right away that something was horribly wrong. Over time, it became clearer to her that there was an entire side to the story that wasn’t being heard, addressed, or even recognized. My side.
Of course, there’s bias here, but let me ask something. Without bias leaning towards potential victims of abuse, can we ever help them? I don’t know. I kind of doubt it, actually. So sure, Arle was my girlfriend, and then my wife, so her bias was always slanted in my favor. But those of you who know her or have ever met her, do you think she’s the kind of person whose paradigm and perspective would be obliterated by her own personal bias? I am thinking your answer would be NO based on a plethora of good qualities that she seems to possess without much fanfare.
So my side, she will tell, was a side that was consistently ignored by some of my so-called people. In addition, she also recognized that I was refusing to even consider that I could be someone who wasn’t totally to blame for every single bump in the road that occurred in my world.
So, she told me that I deserved to understand what was maybe really happening. If I had been a participant in severely damaged relationships with people close to me for a long, long time now, then why? How did it come to that? Was it all because I got angry when the patterns kept cycling around and around? Or was I getting angry because it was the only tool I had in my goddamn stunted old tool box? The box I had found under the tree one Christmas morning when I was like 4 years old. A box which had just a couple rudimentary tools in it, the kind they give everyone when they’re handing the basic kit out.
I got a wad of anger.
I got a lump of screaming.
I got a booklet of fistfight tickets and I used them all up by the time I was 15.
I got a corn field full of intense anxiety.
I got addiction chips in my DNA.
And, luckily, somehow, I got a pretty good heart and fairly decent brain.
Without those last two/ and Arle’s nudging me to embrace them after ignoring their possibilities for so long/ all I had was a street gang that I plucked from the alleys of my dysfunctional childhood. I handcuffed myself to them when I was graduating toddler school and that was all I had for decades to come.
My tragedy isn’t anything special. I was guilty as fuck of being an anxiety-riddled intelligent dude who couldn’t figure out why he felt so confused so much of the time in the presence of his so-called people. I lashed out and hollered and freaked out and cut myself with fucking coat hangers because I was so impossibly hurt by what I had come to believe.
I thought everything was my fault.
Just like they wanted me to think. Just like they’d come to insist I oblige.
If that sounds like a conspiracy or some kind of bullshit to you, I get it.
Now you maybe get the slightest idea of just how hard it was to be pulled back from that cliff by a person who saw in me someone worth helping, not destroying. She still holds me tight, not just because she loves me. But because I’m still losing my balance, always about to fall to my death off this cliff where they left me.
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They still refuse any acknowledgement of my experience as truth. There is no sign of them wanting to hear me speak my story. The few times I have tried, the same old thing happens. I am told I was totally wrong. I am told I am the one and only problem. I am told that my ideas and discoveries are nonsense and never considered. Then I feel myself dying inside and they wait for me to explode. But I don’t explode any more. So then they explode. So then I leave, disoriented and sad.
Now: knowing the truth has kinda set me free.
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The most beautiful people we have known are those who have known defeat, known suffering, known struggle, known loss, and have found their way out of the depths. These persons have an appreciation, a sensitivity, and an understanding of life that fills them with compassion, gentleness, and a deep loving concern. Beautiful people do not just happen.
- Elisabeth Kübler-Ross
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Hear, hear.
I write about some of my own personal mental health issues now because I want other people to feel connected. So many of us are exposed to forces we have little to no chance against in this world. Especially as we move forward from a plane of existence where even psychologists and therapists once rolled their eyes as the idea of a man being a victim. Or of a family being toxic.
The world, if it is to work, must constantly check itself. Our daily lives, if they are to ever make any kind of sense, must be rinsed off and examined thoroughly, every damn day, even when that’s hard to do.
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All of the overwhelming heaviness and heaving sadness of the past few years of my life has often overshadowed what should have been all of the real magic that lies beneath. Meeting Arle years ago still surprises me even now. I see in her someone I don’t think I believed actually existed. And by that I mean someone whose sense of emotional justice has led me to begin to understand what a real adult love story can be. She is also someone whose baseline makeup is not as buried under the never-ending rubble of the troubled childhoods and the mostly empty toolboxes that have defined almost everyone I have seemed to find myself related to or attached to for a long time. And look, don’t get me wrong, Arle is no angel. She’s Scottish as fuck and she’s small town quiet and I often think that maybe she is a serial killer, the way she lays there in bed beside me with her eyes fixed on the ceiling, the fans blowing our hair all around, no talk, no words, just this uncertain silence that I have come to understand is a private, stoic part of her that alarms me simply because, in the past, people who were both near me and silent were either very, very angry or very, very drunk or stoned. My wife owns her own set of chipped and rusted tools and she’s maybe missing a few she could probably use. By and large, she is as far from perfect as you and me.
Yet, there is something about her ways that assures me. I recognize strength when I sense it now. Not so long ago, I did not. I believed that mental strength and the desire to be good and kind and all of that was something easily recognizable, which it is not. On the surface of things, many people are beloved by many other people because they get what they need from each other standing there in the ankle-deep shallows of most social situations we find ourselves in. The most masterful and cunning hardcore motherfuckers are the ones who gush and compliment and laugh flirtatiously or so sincerely at all of the things you say when all is seemingly well.
Some people think that if they make you a meal with fancy soups or whatever, then they are a fucking saint.
Some people think that if they can titillate you on a wire, keep you hanging there in a state of constant barely fed desire, then they are so much more ahead of the game than you.
Some people think that by slagging off people who they know, deep down, have more soul than they ever will, they can convince others, one at a time, that someone like me is bad. Or evil. Or hurtful. They can point at me and say that I abandoned them out of cruelty and immaturity when the opposite is true. I have grown so much because of my decision to save myself rather than throw myself to their wolves.
Some people, they will tell themselves that they have never wavered far off the necessary path of survival, even when they are so damaged and ill-intentioned and blue and hurtful and very, very, very motherfucking lost.
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A warning based on actual experience. Out there in all of that relaxed buzzy confidence, the vampire is trying to figure out of it wants to feed on your or not. Mostly you get ignored/ you are way less interesting than you think you are. But that’s a good thing, trust me. The last thing you want is to find yourself adored. Because adoration is the knife flash, dog.
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Arle, my wife, this woman who spends her days by my side as I spend my days by hers, she is my reason for living when I began to believe I had none. Talking about suicide, the idea of it crossing my mind, it’s gotten me hollered at online before by people who have lost loved ones that way. To them: I have no words. It isn’t my place to tell you how to feel just like it sure as hell isn’t your place to ever tell me how to feel either. One thing is for sure though. If you live long enough and get knocked around by people you thought loved you, you will end up questioning your own reality time and time again. You will wonder if it really is all your fault like they say it is. And the moment you decide fully and completely that it is: you have killed yourself. Even if you are still walking the Earth. You killed yourself in the name of love. Except it was never love at all. It was pain.
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Now.
Let me slap your arm here and lift your spirits just a little if I might, because, believe it or not, friend, I like doing that. So here’s some things I want to share with you. I like to laugh a lot. And I really do dig talking to people (some/ not all) over a glass of wine or a cup of coffee/ shooting the shit/ connection through our own shared laughter/ and perhaps maybe even through our collective realization that just about everything in this world that is a human construct is total bullshit.
I take a lot of pride in being able to open myself up genuinely, albeit rarely, so that someone who has earned my respect, or at least given me reason to lay down my appallingly necessary insanity detector (I lay it close/ but I lay it down), might eventually feel as if they are engaging with a fellow human being who is both intelligent and empathetic without giving off too-good-to-be-true vibes or anything like that. It’s what I think I’m most excited about even today when it comes to Arle and me being married. We had to shut down the ship in a lot of ways, steer clear of so many times when we might have had a nice time with others simply because we were still spinning from things that we had experienced even years before. The aftermath of certain heartbreaks in life caused us to have to change a lot. Even if we are still figuring out what that means exactly, I know/ we both do/ that we have changed in accordance to our ability to survive what we’ve known. This is not unusual in life, I don’t think. But still, most of us don’t foresee it. I know I never thought my heart and mind would alter themselves on their own just so I could keep from ending my story prematurely.
Arle is the only one who has asked me about me. No one from my past has reached out and asked the simplest of questions.
What happened, Serge? Tell me your side. Do you know why they haven’t done that? How could your own people not do that? I don’t understand it, but I think I have an idea. See, if they ask that question, then they may have to hear me. And they don’t want to hear me. Because to hear me now might mean they have to back away from the idea that I am so easy to accuse. That I am ‘the angry one’, the Boogie Man. And that I am to blame for everything. I hate that so much. I feel like it is the worst way anyone could ever abandon a loved one.
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Don't bend; don't water it down; don't try to make it logical; don't edit your own soul according to the fashion. Rather, follow your most intense obsessions mercilessly.
- Franz Kafka
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This whole thing here, this writing, it’s because me and Arle have been married for five years this past week. To me, it’s such a thing to celebrate. When you find your one person amidst the chaos of a vast mad world, then it’s as if you have won the most impossible lottery of all time. The odds of it happening are: there are no odds. It’s beyond the possibility of normal statistics. It’s that impossible, that improbable, you see, the likelihood of true love coming down for you or me.
But I think I did. I think Arle hears me and sees me even when I am such a burnt piece of emotional toast. And yes: I still raise my voice and rattle around in my tool box (better after so much therapy) but end up yelling sometimes when I know it isn’t right or cool. It’s so much less than it used to be though. I’m not tied to the endless loop like I was when I was still the old me. The one who believed that family is everything no matter how they treat you, no matter how they fail you.
Being honest in this world, brutally honest about your own self and who you are/ what you represent/ and how you behave behind closed doors, when the world is not watching, and the real you is set loose upon the earth for but one other person to witness and know/ it is/ I suspect/ an impossible task. Even for the diligent writer who yearns to bleed down on to the page, as they say.
I keep trying though. I keep trying to offer glimpses at least of who I am and who I was. Of who I might be someday. Of who I wish I’d been and who I hope I become. Deep down in the basement of my feeble existence, I keep track of myself by opening up here in this way. I write what I can so I can write a little more. Overhead, there hangs the notion that if I lie or stretch the truth, if I steer things too much into my paradigm and away from someone else’s, I run the risk of crossing the line between memoir and fiction. Which keeps me focused. It keeps me true to myself and to you reading along as well. Even if you are one of the people who no longer hear my voice because I took it back. If you are one of those people, you have to think long and hard about my heart here. About my soul, so to speak. Because I am pretty sure that I have a lot of soul. And as far as I can tell, you might not.
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An open letter to AB.
Happy Anniversary to you, Arle Bielanko. I try hard not to exploit us here in this Thunder Pie thing, but sometimes I think I ought to tell you more/ within the forum/ just how much I love you. Just how much you saved me from being killed by my familiars. Just how much I look at you, even on the most stressful, exhausting days when nothing goes right and the money is everywhere but here and two working people are trying to come up with a dinner plan at 6:30 in the evening because they didn’t do the crock pot bullshit or whatever because everything is tiring and everyone is needy and everywhere you look anymore there is someone trying to get one over on you and the kids are in the living room and they are watching the YouTubers curse the bad words as they play their stupid video games and what are we going to do? What can we do, except hold tight to the sides of each other as the whole house shakes with the vibrations of a galaxy that is being bombed and rocked and mined and rollercoaster’d and stolen and given away every second of every day, all while we are still just over here/ by the microwave/ or maybe over by the fridge/ eyes closed/ our elevator falling/ our cables all cut/ down towards another crash where we bottom out into our big old bed/ touch feet after so many miles alone/ prepare to dream ourselves above and beyond all the houses down there with all of the little people doing all of the little things that they do when they are trying to figure out how we got up there because it looks so cool but they can’t even come fucking close except to jump up and down in their backyards or bedrooms as if they could take off and fly up into the night sky like us.
But they can’t.
So I dribble some spit.
And I give them the finger.
And we sail on.
And I love you so much for loving me true.
Hello out there. Thank you for reading. I appreciate you a lot.
Hope everyone is having a fine summer so far.
Serge
Edited by Arle Bielanko. Subscribe here: Letter to You by Arle.
Photos/ Art: SergeB. ArleB.
In case you ever wanna…..
Things I Liked This Week.
Politically speaking, this was a week like few others I can remember. President Biden stepping aside seemed quite honorable to me given the circumstances. The swift gathering of support behind VP Harris made a lot of sense as well, I’d say. I like her and I believe she will be a wonderful President for our country. Fingers crossed. Let’s goooooo.
Arle Bielanko’s black and white photography just keeps getting better and better. Her Visual Diary: Seven contains one of my new favorite photos ever (Kid in the Car Window). Not just from her, but from anyone. You can see it here below and/ or subscribe to her Substack, Letter to You.
One of my favorite songs currently is this bunch of magic.
I took four of our five kids to see Despicable Me 4 this past week. On the way, I had a meltdown of sorts as we ended up behind a dude who was driving his pickup truck and his average size trailer at about 35mph for miles and miles and miles and miles and miles. I thought we were going to miss the flick for no reason at all. There were a hundred cars lined up behind me. I don’t understand this world. So many people who literally have no brain. Driver’s licenses should be much harder to obtain! Anyways, I laughed more than anyone in the theater. I guess it was much-needed.
Me and Arle noticed this sound last night right at dusk out by the fire pit. It was the call of some kind of bird or cricket or tree frog or something. It sounded like summer nights forever/ all our lives. We knew it so well but knew nothing of where it came from. Contrary to the lay of the land these days, I have decided to not pursue the answer. Sometimes an epic sound should remain what it is. A mystery. A comfort. A ghost who knows where you will be most 9pms towards the end of July.
smoke, she is a rising/ fire/ oh, smoke on the horizon
Reading your posts each week is a weekly lesson in survival and healing and hope. Your faith in Arle and in yourself and the world you two have created is a beautiful thing. A gift to each other and to those of us who read your posts. Happy Anniversary to you both & many happy returns of the day.
It’s very clear that you and your bride have brought each other the comfort and healing ‘balm’ of a True North perspective. Rare and beautiful. Northern Lights for each other too. Happy 5 Year milestone !! All the best blessed years ahead.