The Art of Fetching Water

Carry two gallons of spring water

across the meadows.

Breathe deeply.

Heady air, cold hands.

Laboring breath.

Holy breath.

Black mountains wrap their arms around.

Twilight in the heavenly holler;

sleeping grey trunks of trees.

Focus mind meditation.

The pond is the mirrored mask of the skies.

Rippling water.

Two birds

take wing and fly.

You are here.

I don’t know if there is any rhyme or reason to it. It starts in the gut, rises up into the chest, surrounds the heart and presses against the rib cage straining to be free. It cannot escape so you choke it back down and try to find some purchase to pull yourself through. Everything fails. Social anxiety. Please don’t engage me. I don’t want you to see the darkness inside me. I am ashamed of the storm clouds in my belfry. These purple machinations of madness are for me and me alone. I am haunted by the past, dreadful of the future, spinning daisy chains in my mind of oh how I wish my world could be. I need to be loved and I need to love. For the past 10 years it seems I’ve fallen all over myself to push away anyone who has had the misfortune of trying to love me. There is a poison inside, a thick black tar of self-pity and fear, an adolescent mind in the body of a full grown man. Self-loathing is second nature to me, isolation my defense, solitude my crutch. In the deep cold of a star-struck night I feel connected for a few moments. I see the universe rotating overhead, planets shining, a bright white moon superimposed against a sea of blackened purple space and time.

“You think too much.”

“You are too sensitive.”

“You are too needy.”

If it weren’t for my little furry family of dogs I think I should have expired. Truth be told, it’s money matters, a brooding, self-centered sense of entitlement, a bitterness. I’ve got so much ugliness in my craw to release, so much phlegm and rotten dogma. I’ve knelt and prayed for hours on end for women I once loved, for them to be happy, for them to find some joy, love and peace in their lives. Almost without exception these prayers have been answered. And I am happy for them. I am happy they’ve found someone to share their lives with. But inside I am so very small and I think, “But what about me, God? Can’t I have someone too? Can’t I love someone and allow myself to be loved by them?”

I have slept alone for years. I wake alone; make coffee alone, soldier through weekends alone, holidays and years pile up like slabs of ice on the bank of some lost creek. At times I make peace with my loneliness, take pride in it. Other times I am filled to overflowing with sadness and longing. I stuff it down, way down, further now, be spirited away self-pity. Damn you covetous heart! It’s easier to allow yourself to turn to stone. It’s easier to turn again and again inside oneself. It’s easier to block out the world, to lay fresh mortar in the cracks of the wall. I am bitter over my career, what it’s taken from me. Nights, weekends, holidays…year after year, decade after decade serving smiling families and nuzzling couples. After the shift you go home to leftovers and an empty house. It’s madness. It’s untenable. And now I’m in this place, this place that is supposed to be my home, my motherland and I feel as ostracized, incomplete and unloved as ever before. There are moments of peace sure, ephemeral time-ticks of non-polarity, of oneness with my station and fellows, but they are few and far between. The standard is melancholy, not just a surface affliction but a deep, abiding sadness that has been extant since childhood and that I believe I was probably born with, a dis-ease with the human condition.

I really have no right to bemoan my lack of female companionship. I have reaped what I have sown. I have been reckless, thoughtless, unforgiving, cruel and merciless. Ask anyone who has had the misfortune of trying to love me. So many wonderful women have crossed my path. I’ve taken their love, balled it up in my hands and tossed it aside. By rights I DESERVE to be alone. I deserve the pain. Never mind that my cruelty and insensitivity were born from childhood traumas out of my control. One must grow and evolve, throw back the security blankets that once served so well. These blankets have grown so comfortable even as they are slowly suffocating me. I am so lucky to live in this place, lucky my grandfather purchased this land and that my parents kept it. I’ve not known what the hell I’ve been doing here. I had no real plan. Just move up here and figure it out later. I’m glad I didn’t know how I would be affected. I’m glad I didn’t allow the fear of the unknown to dissuade me. As fortunate as I am for the right to live here on this land there is so much for me to do to continue living here and I often feel overwhelmed. There have been many challenges and I feel I’ve risen to them. As one problem is solved a hundred more arise in its place. I am very far out of my comfort zone and of course, this was one of the chief reasons for making the move in the first place.

At night I step outside as if onto the surface of the moon. The only electric light I can see is that of a satellite in the sky that beams down television programs to dishes across the countryside. There are no other lights visible save for the lamplight creeping out of the windows of my house. When the moon is out and bright the mountains and fields and streams glitter in the lunar light. The mountains are dark and lovely against the heavens. Constellations make their ways across the universal sea. I stand on my two human legs, vapor from my breath rising hot from my face into the cold ether.

Sometimes the only answer you will hear is “You are here.”

“You are here. The rest is up to you.”

Hollow Man

God I can’t wait to get back home. I miss the grey-trunked trees, the primeval forest, the barren mountainsides, the cold earth littered with dry, dead leaves, the nothingness of the stark, star-studded night sky, the silence of the hills, the yawning emptiness. The quiet loneliness of the land reflects my own sadness back at me. The river winds its millennial path through the valleys, slipping over rocks and washing memory and emotion away with its cold clear waters. I need the emptiness; the soft, caressing touch of the invisible ether soothes my soul. The cold hard ground comforts me. The dead weather surrounds me and comforts me in my solitude and introspection. I need the crisp, clean air, the hushed stillness of desolation, the absence of any sort of love or care. These things fill my hollow husk of a heart. These things bring me what might be described as a kind of joy and peace. There are no judgments there, no reprisals, no longing or ambition. There is only the vacuum of space and time. I am aware that my heart is turning to stone. I am aware that I receive no love because I give no love. I am broken and I don’t care. And the mute mountains don’t care either. We were made for each other. I am the silent grey mountain and the silent grey mountain is me.

Bats!

The other night I was driving home from work. It was a bit foggy but not as bad as I had seen it before. The day was warm and the early evening saw brief, violent thunderstorms whose showers were now slowly, eerily rising up from the river valleys and blanketing entire watersheds in thick, dense, ethereal white wisps of fog. So I’m totally zoning out on the landscape all John Muir-style and shit while I’m driving along, around the turns, decelerate here, and speed up there for the long, slow climb out of Dunns into Camp Creek. I’m listening to tunes and keeping a sharp eye out for deer which gather in this valley by the hundreds at night. Then all of the sudden, out of the smoke and fog, a motherfucking bat smacks into my windshield, bounces up over the cab of the truck and disappears into the darkness. It happened in slow-motion; or rather my mind seems to have captured it that way. I saw him when he was about six feet from the windshield, shrouded in smoke and the fractured cones of headlight. His wings were spread as if he was trying to put on the brakes. The light from the truck shown through a pale grey scrim of tissue-thin fabric framed in the most beautiful black wing structure. The body was black as was his head. As the slow-motion frames click on his wings begin to flap wildly, click, click, I can see his face, click, click, his beady little blind eyes and his black head, click, click, his mouth gaping wide still filling his belly with insects…click, click, ...THUMP! He tumbles over the truck and into the darkness never to be seen or heard from again.

Several nights later I am at home, sleeping out on the screened-in porch when I have to get up to pee. I do this like a veteran somnambulist. I draw back the covers, slide my legs to the edge of the bed and drape them over, search with my feet until they find solid, unobstructed purchase on the floor. My eyes have not yet opened. With my feet firmly planted on the floor I then assume a sitting up position at the edge of the bed. Now I open my eyes, not open really, more like pryingly crease my lids so that the tiniest sliver of light makes it through. I am seeing my back porch through a forest of eyelash. Noting the floor is clear I stumble onto my feet and then gangle forward in a monster of Frankenstein manner, up the step, into the house, across the creaking pine floorboards, the moonlight casting on the boards and lighting my way, hands outstretched and probably mumbling to myself I awkwardly bumble along until I reach a threshold. A doorway! Hooray! I grasp it with both arms reassuringly and push my way through.

(Now just to pause for a moment and consider the quantities of urine that must have been pressing against my bladder to cause me to (semi) awaken, leave the Holy Sacred Warmth and Comfort of The Worshipful Bed and journey off into the night in hopes of relief.)

Through the doorway I shift my body to the left and lumber through an open sliding-glass doorway out onto the wooden deck. I’m multi-tasking now. As I lurch the last few steps I fish out my penis and ready it for draining. At last! I find a comfortable stance on the edge of the porch and just let it rip, full bore wide open high pressure fire hosing going down. I’m already beginning to feel the relief. I begin to smile, kinda laugh a little. Now I’m really getting into it, swaying back and forth with my hands on my hips, listening to the puddle form on the ground below when all of the sudden out of fucking nowhere this motherfucking crazy-ass bat dive bombs the shit out of me and gets all Kenneth Shuler up on top of my head. Somehow (the startling fright I guess) my valve immediately shut off as I 1. Screamed outloud. 2. Started waving my arms all around like a lunatic. 3. Lost my balance and ate shit onto the deck floor in my boxer shorts. I was pretty much asleep during this whole thing, up until the moment I hit the dirt and found myself wounded, on the ground, outside, at night, with my dick hanging out. In a matter of seconds my pack of dogs had me surrounded and was investigating the scene; barking loudly and charging fearlessly out into the front yard to attack. Three stayed behind and guarded me with cold noses and wet tongues. I gathered myself up, pulled myself together and stood up. I felt soreness and dull pain coming from my left knee and looked down to see a nice two inch gash cut across my kneecap and blood running down my shin and calf. Being somewhat used to this kind of thing I just said fuck it and got back in bed and went to sleep.

So if you ever see me waving my arms around wildly and muttering incoherently about “the god damn bats” you’ll know I’m being totally fucking serious.

Reckoning

It is mid-day and it is dark and ominous. Friday night I was sitting in the mountain house having dinner with my sister and a couple of friends. It had been hot as hell all day and we were sweltering inside the house while eating but no one seemed to mind too much. All of the sudden, literally out of nowhere, the wind picked up outside and began blowing HARD. The temperature immediately dropped about 20-30 degrees, the sun disappeared and the air was filled with a wild and frantic energy. The electric lights began to flicker on and off before finally deciding on “off.” We lit a candle and continued our dinner, just went right on with our evening. My friends went home and my sister retired to the cabin. I spent the night on my fold-out sofa on the screened in porch. It cooled down so much during the night I had to get up in my sleep and find more blankets. When the sun came up in the morning I shed the blankets as the light shone on my skin and I began to sweat.

When I left the farm to go see about work and my food at Mountain Creek the reality of the storm that seemed nothing more than an anomaly became apparent. Trees were knocked down everywhere, power lines dangling, branches snapped like twigs….and there was the eerie, ominous silence in which we have now became engulfed. I got into town and was startled by the long lines of cars at the gasoline pumps. The temperature kept rising and rising and the day was spent in a surreal mindscape of damage and ruin. The heartwarming aspect to all of this is how people behaved. People were patient and kind with one another, even in the gas pump lines, there was no cutting, no honking of horns, no yelling or bitching, just calm as if there was nothing out of the ordinary.

I wonder if this is how it will be when it all really goes down and goes down for good. We won’t know it’s for good at the time. We’ll think it’s just a matter of time before order is restored. But when it really happens order will not be restored, the power won’t return. We will be left to fend for ourselves. The small community I live in will survive. These are country people with country ways. Sustainability isn’t just a catch-word or a trend to these people; it is a way of life. Hell yesterday farmers were out cutting and bailing hay just as they would have been doing anyway. There was a slight air of panic in the towns from tourists coming off the interstate but the local people, for all their flaws and faults, were non-plussed and I found myself happy and proud that I was among them. My two years living in the cabin has prepared me for moments like this. All the trappings of civilization fall away and you find yourself surrounded by the silence of the real. I gave up TV over two months ago. I use the internet sparingly, a bit at work and a bit at a coffee shop in town. I can now live without these things without going mad. They don’t matter. What matters is the cool air at night, the feeding and watering of my dogs, the checking in on my neighbors and family.

I’ve long known there will be a reckoning…a reckoning we will see and experience in our lifetime, a reckoning that will make things worse before they get better. Storms come and go through time, it ain’t nothing new. But when a combination of events takes place, it will change. I don’t know if we are headed for a new dark age or not. I don’t know how it will all play out but I do know that our current civilization cannot continue on the path it is on without dire consequences. Our leaders are still completely blind to the truth. We are meant to believe that if the “economy” just gets better, things can go back to “normal.” Well, I’ve been alive for forty years now and I can tell you that there has been nothing normal about the past four decades. Our economy is a lie, it assumes continued growth. On a tiny planet among the stars there is only so much space, so many resources…it is up to the earth itself to shake off our beehive madness. Whether or not this is a conscious act of the planet or just a matter of cause and effect is irrelevant. We have grown beyond our means and it is beginning to show. We need a time-out. We need to pause and reflect. If we won’t do it on our own the earth will do it for us. It will knock down our towers and silence our televisions. It will remind us of the preciousness of clean water and healthy food. It will learn us to be kind to our neighbors, to look out for one another, to finally realize we can’t do this alone. Our addiction to fossil fuels and a way of life that is beyond our means will be broken sooner or later. There is a reckoning in this wind.

SPYCOGA cont...

In other moments I am serene as a Buddha, calm as a Hindu cow, light and free as that dancing plastic bag in American Beauty. Multi-colored butterflies flirt around my skull, the waning light at sunset streams through the forest and into my eyes, the bright golden spears of light fracture into an infinite kaleidoscopic pattern of rainbows. This is real. This is not the fantasy world I live in, the one we all live in. This is the winking of the earth, a nihilistic nudge from our Maker. Moments like this I am conscious of my breath, conscious of the weight of my bones and muscle being held down onto the earth by gravity’s pull, conscious of my organs pulsing inside my body, aware of the steady beating of my heart within my chest, the thump thump thump thump that meters out the beat of my life, cognizant of the wind caressing my skin, conscious of everything around me and inside me, conscious of the moon and stars and planets circling, the universe of which we all are part and no one is separate. This lie of separateness is the plague of humanity, this cosmic con that there is anything to lose or anything to gain when we are all husks of dust glinting in the breeze. This comforts me. Death comforts me. I do not long for death but the irrefutable truth of death is difficult to not admire. I can’t wait for the veil to be lifted on this world. I know there is a loving, benevolent force to the universe. If I didn’t I would become a criminal.

Some places you can only go alone.

Some places you can only go alone. No one can go with you. You have to go by yourself. Does anyone out there know what the hell is going on? Or are most of my brothers and sisters as confused as me. I’ve just been making it up as I go along. When I was younger I used to blame others for my troubles. Now I blame myself. Neither is healthy. My troubles? Manic depression. Alcoholism. My brain churns and churns. It burns and burns. I try to lock onto something for a while but then it gets used up and I’m on to the next for a new fix. It started with toys when I was a little kid as best I can remember. My parents spoiled me with toys. I became a collector. I had to have every single Star Wars figure that was available (even the ones only available for a limited time on the backs of cereal boxes.) And I did have them all. This was back in the early 1980’s, before Return of the Jedi, when the only figures they had was from the first two movies. For the first film’s figure set I needed a Jawa. My mother and I scoured the drug stores, department stores and toy stores looking for a Jawa but couldn’t find one. Late in the summer, before I started first grade in the fall, my mom and dad took us on vacation to Daytona Beach and Disney World. At a mall somewhere in between we finally found the Jawa action figure. I was ecstatic. I couldn’t wait to get home and tell my friends. I had a good friend that was a fanatical collector like me and mom kindly bought him a Jawa too. The next figure I obsessed over was the medical droid B1B from The Empire Strikes Back. Again my collection was nearly complete; I had Luke, Han and Leia in Hoth gear. I had all the bounty hunters. I had the play sets to reenact my favorite scenes from the film. But B1B eluded me. My mother and I searched high and low but he was nowhere to be found. How was I to replay the scenes where the droid rehabilitates Luke, first by monitoring him in the hyperthermia tank, then later by reconstructing his hand after Darth Vader sliced it off with his red light saber? I felt I would never know until one day, when out of nowhere, I stumbled upon a B1B on the last row of cards on the rack I flipped through. It was a Super X drug store in Beckley, WV. I’ll never forget that moment.

This may seem like just a random observation of the curious behavior of a small child but it really speaks to something deeper in me. I chase. I capture. Then I move on. It is a sick cycle. I am the perfect consumer I was raised to be; I am never satisfied. I wish I could say that some 32 years later I have changed. But that just simply isn’t true. I moved on from Star Wars figures eventually, first to GI Joes, then to BMX bikes and then to skateboarding. I took all of it in, ate it up then moved on. My next fix became girls, then drugs and alcohol. I’ve been addicted to and obsessed over just about everything I’ve ever been interested in. When I started cooking professionally this trait brought me rewards. But the overall effect of such a tangled up mind is to be restless, irritable and discontent. Whatever it takes to not deal with what’s going on inside, the darkness in me that refuses the light.

My soul craves balance, harmony. But almost everything in how I’ve chosen to live my life rejects these ideas. For some reason I have to have things off-kilter for me to feel right. Remember the character of Ricky Bobby’s daddy in Talladega Nights? I’m just like him sadly. I get itchy when things seem to be going too well. I gotta throw a wrench in there somewhere and get everything going all good and haywire to sleep well at night. Time after time after time I’ve done this. Torpedoed any meaningful chance I might have at happiness with something or someone by getting the jitters and having that gnawing urgency to split, to bail, to tune out, shut down and blow off. The scars on my body attest to a strong tendency towards self-destruction. I’ve cut myself, burned myself, and drank myself into endless stupors thousands upon thousands of times. There have been times when I have made peace with the madness. This pretty much means that I just gave into it and let it do whatever it wanted with me. This led to blackout episodes coming to in strange places with no recollection of evenings prior. This led to 100 mile an hour car chases high on crystal meth. This led to waking up in my truck with a loaded gun in my lap and empty casings on the seat. I went to AA. I finally got sober and off of drugs, but the madness? The madness is here for keeps. It isn’t going anywhere. I have to learn to live with it. That’s what I’ve tried to do all along; to learn to live in this world and not go full crazy. It’s a tall mountain when you look at it. The history of the world, the history of people, where I fit into all of this… It’s hard not to feel irrelevant. It’s hard to go back up that mountain once you’ve come down. The sides are steep and rocky. There are deep thickets of briars and thorns. The rain won’t let up and the wind shakes the trees and scatters leaves over the path. Then the metaphor becomes belabored as fuck…

There was a boy in my dream last night. He was a tiny little blonde-haired thing, maybe about two years old. People were looking for him. He only appeared after everyone else was gone. He didn’t know I was there. I tricked him. I hid behind an old oak tree and spied on him. He came out of the ether and for a few frames he appeared in the sunlight, his white skin glowing in the rays. When I stepped out from behind the tree and called to him he vanished. No one would believe me that I saw him. They thought I was lying. I wasn’t lying. I saw him. I could go there now and he would appear for me. But that wouldn’t prove anything. He would only appear for me and no one else. Apparently he lived in a little broken down shack. I went inside once. Inside was an old worn out mattress, empty bottles and cans on the floor, sunlight streaming in cracked panes of glass.

There’s no glamor in madness. It’s not like in the movies. There’s nothing heroic about it. It feels like there is an invisible cage around your head, a birdcage that fits perfectly around the contours of the bones of your face and skull, the bars are hard as iron, like some twisted metaphysical metallurgy. Thoughts bounce around inside the cage and cause it to rattle. That’s you, walking around your days and nights in an invisible cage of rattling iron. Of course the cage can’t be seen. To all appearances you look normal. There is nothing that signifies this man is in a self-made prison. You have to look closer. People don’t want to; look closer that is. Most people are not interested in your pain when your pain is all that has ever interested in me. Everything else is window dressing and a bunch of pomp and circumstance. In my private thoughts alone I shatter store front windows with my mind, bend street lamps to the pavement, drop traffic lights into the crosswalk, crumble buildings, black the sky, set fire to the trees and houses…turn this beautiful place into the hell scape that is the inside of my skull staring back at me.

Black Web

Some days it feels as if you’re just trying to keep all the puzzle pieces together in your mind. Yea, some days it feels just like that. You can’t see the forest for the trees and all that shit. There’s a hamster wheel in your head and the demon’s got it spinnin’. Why is it that sometimes the hardest fucking thing in the world to do is sit still and just be? You think you have to have it all figured out. You think you should be here or there in your life. You feel displaced, out of sync, too far gone and floating untethered through the atmosphere into outer space. People try to help you. People try to get involved. But you push them away. You push them away as if you are being greedy with your misery, forgetting that God put you here to help others and thereby help yourself. You are too entwined in your own circuitry for that though. You tell yourself that when this or that happens…THEN you will reach out and be social. But those things come and go and still you resist. It’s a black web of paralyzing goo that seeps over your soul and tries to block out the light.

You feel like you are pushing yourself farther and farther out into the unknown and it frightens you. You dread the thought of failure, can’t wrap your head around the thought of success. You want to break through the impasse but the comfort of your pain inhibits you. You listen to others speak. You hear their voices but everything is muffled. You feel like you are experiencing the world through a wall of fuzz that only you can see and feel. You forget the answer is empathy and compassion. You find yourself the subject of idle rumors. You scratch your head at the words and actions of some of your brethren. They seem to act like a gaggle of hens rather than men. So and so did this or that. So and so didn’t do this or that. Words and hearsay pile up in stinking slabs in your consciousness. This isn’t what you wanted, this pettiness. The small-mindedness and narrowness pushes you further away, causes you to insulate yourself even more. You reach out sometimes but you can tell everybody thinks you’re different. You’re not really from around here. Maybe you don’t belong. But you do belong. This is your land too. This is your place. This is your time. And you know that when you’ve had enough you will surrender it all to the Master, the Grand Architect. Will you Lord? Will you help me keep this puzzle together? Will you hold the pieces in place? Is this bedrock I’m standing on or just shifting sand? Please tell me. I need to know.

Spring

The season starts in the earth, creeps slowly and magically through roots, rises up in tiny tendrils from the cold ground. The tilt is upon us now. Bright, soft, yellow rays of sunlight cast sideways across the land, shadows deep. The lay of the land begins to appear as an emerald carpet in the lengthening days. Insects are the first to awaken from their winter slumber and with them the return of the birds, frogs, lizards and many other creatures to activity. The sounds of spring are the whooshes of wind, the rumblings of thunder, rain splashing down and water running in gurgling creeks down mountainsides, the whistling of the frogs, the chirping songs of birds, and the far off whine of a lawnmower in the distance. Slowly and almost imperceptibly life rises up from the ground and into the air. Evidence of this can be seen in the soft light green tinged tree branches, the striking yellow hawthorn bushes, bright white blooms on pear trees, and the tiny purple and blue wildflowers cast like confetti in fields.