the voices that we hear.

The police tackled the man, who shrieked like a wounded dog yelping at a nail in his paw. He didn't fall to the ground, but rather crumbled, collapsed to the hospital's linoleum floor like a kindergartner's block tower. Once he was on the ground, one officer put his hand to his holstered taser while four others grabbed the man's arms and legs and picked him up.

He begged to be let down, and was told that he could walk himself if he would only calm down. "I will," he muttered, and the two officers carrying his feet lowered his bottom half to the floor. At this point, he pushed up with this feet like he was trying to jump to the ceiling, at which point the now-unburdened officers caught his calves, midair, and held him horizontal. He sprawled and he caterwauled as they carried him away on a makeshift gurney of his own limbs.

They tried to use the extra-wide revolving door, but the man arched his back and starfished his appendages, jamming feet against the windows and triggering the stop. He kept kicking and punching and screaming—"I work for God all day and all night/you have no idea who I really am/get your goddamn hands off of me/ please dear God will one of you help me/God in Heaven save me"—but they finally got him outside before they put him on the ground, stomach-side-down, handcuffed him, hoisted him into the back of a patrol car, and took him who-knows-where.

At the conclusion of my first night of volunteering in the hospital lobby, I walked out to the parking lot, brushing gently through the crowd forming on the sidewalk, climbed into my car, and drove home.

I can still hear him screaming.

———————————

Katie and I saw Silver Linings Playbook back in December, just a few weeks after I moved back to Utah. Her husband doesn't watch R-rated movies—WHAT A NERD, AMIRIGHT—so we travailed to the crappy theater in Millcreek, the only one showing it, and enjoyed a gargantuan bucket of kettle corn (seriously, it was probably built to carry ice melt) while watching Crazy People Fall In Love.

We got in a car accident that night. It wasn't too bad—a dented axle and a hubcap that went flying like an olympic discus—but it shook me up. I'm naturally prone to anxiety, but the movie had set me up like a tee-ball stand, and slamming into that elevated curb, mid-snowstorm, sent me over the edge.

As we'd left the theater, Katie asked me if I was okay. She's known me since junior high, and she was semiwilling audience to all sorts of my teenage melodramatics. But maybe even just by a change in my step, a lurch in my gait, let her know that something was amiss, and she was right.

If you'd seen the flick, you've seen the parts where Bradley Cooper's character experiences a dramatic combination of panic attacks, flashbacks, and delusions that culminate in intense re-livings of traumatic past experiences, perhaps amplified by his own imbalances.

I've had those.

Really.

Okay, maybe not to that extent, but I've heard voices. I've experienced sensations that were not based in reality. I've seen, heard, and felt things that weren't there, and I don't mean spiritual experiences or some kind of existential revelation—this was a straight-up visit to BananasTown. These times shook me precisely because nothing is more terrifying than not being able to trust yourself.

I'm still prone to bouts of occasional illogical upset at the hands of hypothetical conspiracy—although, as a close friend put it to me, it's not paranoia if there's precedent—but I'm almost 100% past these things. Sporadic relapses into darkness plague days and nights (dreams, mostly) and not only underline existing issues as Matters of Life and Death, but create nightmares wholecloth from problem-less situations. Imagine a negotiator so persuasive that they convince you that you only have one arm, despite being able to see your arm right there, attached to your torso, its hand giving a thumbs-down to whatever fictional crap this part of you is shoving in its face.

You can only resist for so long, really, at which point you start to hear the voices.

It's been different people, and always in a harsher voice than has ever really been spoken—a disappointed parent, a regret-filled ex-girlfriend, a boss who can't believe they waited this long to throw you out the second floor window. And that's the thing—they're fictional. These are templates that your dumb, broken brain takes from existing folks and builds into nightmarish scarecrows that shatter your faith and destroy your peace and laugh the whole time they're doing so. You know that you did your best, you know that you did right by them, and you know that you worked your hindquarters off, but the all-powerful brain thinks otherwise, and it lets you know.

You can't shake it. You can't appeal to logic when your brain, YOUR CENTRAL IF NOT ONLY CENTER OF LOGIC, is insisting on something that isn't true. Prayer, deduction, etc. are completely helpless in the face of such overwhelming, self-induced cognitive despair, and there's nothing. that. you. can. do. about. it.

So you do your best. Understanding that your brain is broken helps, so you make do. You dunk your head into Spider-Man comics, Prince albums, Steinbeck novels, and Cassavetes movies while doing your absolute damndest to ignore that part of you, the chunk of your mind that's telling you how dangerous everything and everyone is and how they're all out to get you, and you push it down like a water wing at the public pool and hope that it takes at least seconds to resurface.

——————————

I watched that man shriek and holler that someone help him, and a part of me shook, knowing that I was perhaps only a misfired synapse away from such a debilitating condition. I'm not a violent man by any stretch—I'm a Quaker, for God's sake, and I have to read books about how to be assertive—but good grief, there's nothing like seeing a man lose complete control to remind you of how tenuous yours was.

What chemicals in my brain appear in milliliters and allow me to be calm in the face of confusion and dismay? What about the people who've never had anything but a smile on their face—what're their serotonin levels? And the folks with an unshakeable belief in a loving, omnipotent, omniscient God who goes out of His/Her/Its way to comfort and unforsake(?) them...what do they do on dark nights of the soul in which the world proves alien and their minds fare no better?

This is how it works. And this is what is inescapable.

I can't even write this without help. I'm currently about four glasses into a bottle of red wine because this is all too much to process without a foggy cloak of tannins hovering over my shoulders. It's not a matter of alcohol, either—nine times out of ten I'll just take a jog and watch cartoons—but there's a vulnerability necessary to these discussions, one that can't really be arrived at without intense therapy and/or 26-proof grape juice.

So that's where we're at, I guess. I saw a guy freak the shit out and go crazy, but what does that mean?

I guess it means that, in a slightly different world, where I was held as a child two minutes less than I was in this world, if I'd been given an additional gram of sugar in my infant diet, if I'd whatever whatever whatever, whatever whatever whatever "Whatever, WHATEVER!" whatever—then maybe I'd be that guy, cowering in fear at the back of a headrest in a Salt Lake Police Department cruiser in front of a children's hospital where all I wanted to do was get some help.

That's what the security guard said he was there for, after all: he was a paranoid schizophrenic, a guy in his mid-40s, who thought he'd ended up at the nextdoor college teaching hospital, but who stumbled into the nearby children's hospital. I don't begrudge the police officers and security guards, either—if children are directly involved, my civil liberties bullshit flies out the window like a deranged sparrow trapped indoors—they just did their jobs, and were as gentle as could be with a man flailing like a party favor whistle.

But this part of me can't escape thinking how terrifying it is not to be able to trust what you see, hear, feel.

And it may sound like ridiculous tripe, but all I want is for that guy to calm down long enough for someone to put their arms around him, whisper a "sshhhhhh" into his good ear, and pray with him for the ghosts to go away long enough to feel the warmth about his shoulders and the cheek against his neck.

"There's been an accident."

AUTHOR'S NOTE: I've never written about music like this before, but I wanted to try. This is my all-time favorite song, so I figured it'd be fitting to start with it. Hope you get something out of this.

Appreciate you reading.

—————————————

Listen:



Ignore the little nightingale flourishes at the beginning and wait for that piano. The synth in the background hover on that big ol' G, letting the ivories dance around it like a maypole. Arpeggiated major triad jumps stands boldly in front, standing strong in the low-key cacophony of bells and whistles, but then becomes its own darker self the second time, with that D going to an Eb and making the whole chord into a flinch. The back-and-forth continues the whole time, with the bass meandering between the low and the high, see-sawing between the first note we hear and one of the last we'd expect to. You hear it in the bass, lumbering frost giant-like across the lower register, something impending. Will this be an act of creation, or an act of destruction? Is this a sunrise or a mushroom cloud?

Ain't no light summer rainshower: we're bracing for a hailstorm.

This is a song that you can listen to with headphones and still feel it in your chest. Those snare rim clicks come in like dark clouds—close your eyes and see drummer Bobby Macintyre, tapping the side of the drum, biting his tongue until he can unleash the doubles and triples just past the horizon and fast approaching. You stare into the setting sun of the ooohs, the ahhhs, the string section that drips across the rhythm like it was coming down a rain gutter.

That's when Greg Dulli starts to sing.

"Daylight is creeping,
I feel it burn my face
I don't sleep here no more
so my shadow walks in place of me."

So we're off by twelve hours: it's not bright turning dark, it's dark turning bright. This push and pull is the running theme of everything Dulli's done. Things start night-black, anything good concealed within a block of ice, but when morning comes—as it always will—the ice melts away, water dripping like tears down cheeks to reveal what was there the whole time, what we hoped was there, what we knew was there, within arms' reach and holding out for us.

The ooohs and ahhhs don't stop, and they shouldn't. This is a Greek chorus. No matter what Dulli's protagonist believes or sings—which aren't necessarily the same, since his narrators are about as reliable as a Ford Escort—he's not alone, and the voices will follow him through his whole journey.

"Like candy,
your eyes sweetly
roll out of control."

Ah. There's the "your." There's where she comes in.

"Like the singer,
alive,
but just barely holding on."

So he's barely holding on.

And then he lets go.

That final dissonant note at the top of the triad may rise a half-step, but everything else—the groove, the stable pulse, the very ground beneath their feet—crumbles. And when he gets to "far away/where you run/when it all became undone," we don't recognize the distance between them: we see the earthquake throwing their footholds up and down, refusing to sit still.

But that groove, that groove. It's dissipated, dissolved, a sugar cube in gasoline, and the song throws its hands in the air and loses its cool. The beats come hard now, punctuated punches with dust explosions like two chalkboard erasers crashing into each other again and again, just off standard rhythm, buhhh, buhhh, buh BUHHHH BUHHHH, buh BUHHHH, [repeat]. Left hooks and right crosses are let loose and you didn't have your gloves up and they catch you and cut your tissue paper eyes and bruise your bubble wrap cheeks and crush your cauliflower ears.

And here are the consequences:

"You'll be dust,
and realize
that you were taken for a ride

but still you call that number
until you're crawling under
them stones,
assorted jones,
and all alone."

The waves come crashing, relentless, and just when it's time to give up, right when the air gives out, there's a reprieve.

"I'm alive:
it kinda took me by surprise."

He's not the only one. It takes us by surprise, too; after the uppercut onslaught of the percussion, when the rug's pulled out from us, there's a quiet. We're back to the original feel, complete with the residual comfort of rim clicks and the string section cocoon.

But we're torn from it:

"but every time I look away
there's no light,
there's no sentry at the gate."

Maybe the sentry—sentries?—is who's been ooohing and ahhhing, part of a phalanx of soft-spoken guards shooting violin lines across the like crossbow bolts and nicking with each draw.

And now he repeats himself. This is what he wants us to know. The vocal line goes higher this time; he's already dipped his hand in the water, and now it's time to strike at the clouds. He stretches out as high as he can, volume increasing with pitch, throwing a chain to our ears and dragging us uphill with him.

The voice begins to crack—"all became undone/you'll be dust, re-a-lize," etc.—as the cool facade follows suit.

But between the peaks and valleys we see what's really on his mind:

"but still you call that number
until you're crawling under,
until you're crawling under,
until you're crawling under
them stones,
assorted jones,
and picked-over bones."

Listen to that "call that number" and that first "you're crawling under." These aren't just accusations, they're pleadings. This person calling this number? The one who's dust and who's been taken for a ride? The repeated pattern—this is the second time we're hearing this, so who knows how many more times it's come before—is driving him to his literal breaking point, and his voice, the only thing of his we have, is shattering under the strain.

And notice the difference between the otherwise identical lines: "crawling under" is repeated twice. He's not just telling her she's going lower, like he did before—she's going lower, and lower, and lower still. And what's she descending beneath? It's not just the rocks on the path or the assembled addictions she's hosting—it's a corpse.

But he's finally out of breath. He'll never hit these highs again—the few remaining vocal lines aren't just repeats, but also don't even approach what's come before—but we knew that already, didn't we? No surprises left. Felix's bag of tricks is at last empty, turned over, and only dust mites—there's that dust again—come out, falling like feathers.

A semblance of composure is regained, though, and he tries to take us back to where we started:

"Daylight is creeping,
I feel it burn my face
I don't sleep here no more
So my shadow walks in place of me."

Listen, though: there's no energy. He's wiped out. Fight or flight, and he picked both, leaving only his shadow. But once that daylight arrives, the shadow's gone, too, and the whole thing will just disappear.

Which is what happens with the song, really; it just sort of...stops. It doesn't so much "stop" as it does "evaporate," the remnants leaving speakers and turning to waves, then dripping to clouds, forming into drops, falling into mud, and leaving its tracks in our footsteps.

—————————————

I don't know what this song is really about. I'm sure there's a real meaning behind it—there always is, and it's almost certainly a woman—but the ambiguity of this is what draws me in, I think. Why is his face burning? Where is it that he's not sleeping?

But it's the second "when you call that number" that makes the hairs on my neck stand up and scream for attention. He hits that note—good grief, that note—and there's enough power behind it to light up the Hoover Dam. Other singers dissipate at the top of their range, but Dulli just turns from sledgehammer to a scalpel, and it cuts deep. No one I've ever heard can match his vulnerability, and that's what always gets to me: every song is him stripping down, showing us his scars, and refusing to let us turn away.

I haven't been writing much lately—not just on this blog, but in general—and I think it's because I've only recently become terrified of vulnerability. The last six months have bred an awful lot of changes. I went from rural New Mexico/minimal human interaction/no relationships/a dog to urban Utah/consistent human interaction/a girlfriend/no dog literally overnight, and it's been HARD. Everything has been flip-turned upside-down and I might be holding steady, but man oh man, it hasn't been easy.

So whenever I need to remember that the only good writing, the only things worth reading, are naked and bare to the universe while insisting to take on all comers, I listen to this song and remember what that connection can be like—should be like—and I try to act accordingly.

This was long, and I appreciate you reading, so I want to share with you my secret for happiness:

Give until you don't have anything in you,
until you swear you're empty

but then look to your right
at who's decided your hand is worth holding,
give it three squeezes,
and thank the God who you hope exists
for what's fallen onto your couch and into your heart.

————————————

Thank you for reading. Spay and neuter your pets.

go ahead and call the cops/you don't meet nice girls in coffee shops.

with my skin and teeth.

There was a used bookstore about four blocks from my apartment in Colorado. Having few acquaintances and fewer friends, I'd rummage through the racks like it was a singles bar, raising eyebrows at titles, smiling at imagined winks from tattered covers and yellowed pages.

I'm not someone who has "types" of anything—not romantic partners, not taste in film/music/literature, etc., but it took little time to note the consistency between titles with the famous (infamous, if you're my wallet) Penguin Classics spine.

They look like this:

These aren't specifically my books, of course—Baudelaire? come on, dear reader, pull your head out of your ass—but my bookshelves are lined with these black bricks like they I was building a castle. In a corner of my (relatively) new apartment in downtown Salt Lake City, Melville, Amis, Steinbeck, and others sit side-by-side, bringing their continuity to my literary home storage and a sense of collection among the ribald riff-raff that most of my shelves contain.

I'd spy these spines with a collector's eye, trudging through tripe and sorting through scraps to find gold bars among copper, the kind of books that would look good on a shelf and in my brain. I devoured them like cotton candy and had the fingers to prove it, sticky with black ink and a self-defeating desire—need?—to consume them all. My every-other-nightly visits to a dimly lit corner booth at Tony's Sports Bar found me accompanied by gorgeous covers and corrugated pages. I occasionally found myself wondering if I was being flirted with by denizens of the establishment, half-drunk women asking what I was reading when what they really seemed to be wondering if, literally, I came there often.

I did come there often, though, and although it was a fair question, I had no interest in answering. None of these real people seemed to be as interesting to me as the fictional ones between the onyx covers I held between calloused fingertips.

But Colorado was sad. So I left, went to a small horse town in New Mexico for a year, and found that nothing had changed. I still ached for stories, real or imagined, and I spent far too much money and just barely too much time trying to summon them, letting conjurers at far-away, long-ago typewriters do my dirty work while I held vise-tight to their coattails, letting hours get whisked away like fall leaves from autumn oaks as I looked into the distance, hoping that I'd one day be a part of something worth writing about.

And right now, back in Utah, years later, I'm sitting on a couch in a sparsely furnished apartment, watching you cook up a presentation about arachnoid cysts for your class tomorrow, and wondering what powerful, mystical stranger I incidentally gave a dollar to in order to have received the bizarrely fortunate gypsy curse of being a part of this thing into which we've stumbled.

I know that this sappy shit is a pretty staunch left turn from the pensive, I-just-really-like-books-but-am-also-sorta-melancholy thing, but you have to know: when we were at dinner tonight, when we got the hot chocolate, when you received your first true exposure to Louis CK, and when you showed me pictures of brain tumors and annotated them accordingly, it pushed so many things out of my mind that the transition from self-aware essay to saccharine love letter isn't really all that surprising to me.

Because that's what you somehow, click-clack-click-clacking away at that keyboard and writing about cranial bases and incidentally discovered asymptomatic maladies, consistently do:

wipe away these inconsequential narratives that my dumb brain constantly throws to the forefront like a neon marquee, but not before replacing them with a reality that manages to surpass anything caught between any covers that aren't laying on a queen-sized bed.

and in this corner:

I've never been much of a fighter.

I've seen enough contention and watched words cut enough throats
that I eventually found myself built for flight,
like some bird whose instincts
are to empty his claws,
spread his wings,
and take to the sky,
and soak in the aftermath from a distance.

I think that's what brought me to boxing.
This was conflict made simple:

there was me
there was him
there were rules
and the better man won.

but weariness built a cocoon around me,
and the default became lowered dukes,
leaving my eyes exposed to right hooks
and my heart open to body blows.

I guess nothing felt worth fighting for,
and I convinced myself that only vague notions of "integrity"
meant a goddamn thing,
so I saved my resources,
conserving energy and counting blessings.

but now
somehow
things are different
and there's something I'm willing to fight for

let this be a reminder to myself:

remember:
kick and scream and fight with tooth and claw
because this world is built on beautiful things

and you'll be goddamned before someone tries to destroy that.

so put up your gloves, son:
protect those eyes,
take deep breaths,
and don't forget who shows up
six out of seven nights a week
to tend to your wounds
and send you back into that ring.

one more thing:

the only difference between a lover and a fighter
is who comes home to an empty bed.

vroom vroom.

The bed in the hotel came adorned with two pillows, a firm one and a soft one, tucked between flat sheets. "If she was here," I thought, "I wonder which pillow she'd want."

And the warmest I've been all day is realizing that I already know.

-------------------------------------

This is the second time I've been stranded in Cuba, NM. The first time was Christmas Eve of 2011, heading home after having lived a month in Albuquerque. I didn't know anyone, I had moved out to make a fresh start, and the only sense of continuity I had was provided by my car, which literally began to seep smoke from the steering column. Hitch and I spent the evening in the Frontier Motel, watching Braveheart on cable and wondering if we'd ever make it out of this world alive.

Tonight was different. I was riding my motorcycle back to Utah from Corrales, and I hit an unsuspecting cold front that turned my fingertips black and my language blue. Even under leather gloves and within wool lining, my digits began to approach necrotic, so I stopped here, only an hour-and-a-half outside of Albuquerque, and I'm so, so, so tired.

And this is it for me and New Mexico. Picking up Queen Gorgo was the last remaining physical task to be performed in the Land of Enchantment, and it's over—well, it'll be over tomorrow once I cross state lines, but the point remains: it's over. Katie called to check on me, and she asked me how I felt about my year here. I told her that I think it left me no better off, but no worse off: whatever it may have taken from me, it replaced in identical quantities.

But now I'm looking at the four walls of mother-of-toilet-seat wood paneling in this $35/night motel, and I'm reminded of the differences between then, my first trip from New Mexico, and now, my last trip leaving there.

Then, I was fighting for air in the undertow of A Fresh Start that never quite found purchase. But now, I'm just trying to make it home to you.

Ties are cut here. I have friends, of course, and was able to see a few of them today. I'll surely be back here someday—might take you with me, actually, as the sun setting against the Sandias looks like it's been watercolored—but for now, things need attending to, and I'm no longer a house divided.

This is all bullshit, obviously. These introspective, kitchen-sink blatherings that always manage to find me in romantically cheap motel rooms isn't really worth much, and that's not self-deprecation, it's just journalism. But what does matter is that I'm coming home tomorrow, and it'd take herds of wild horses and moved mountains to keep me from crossing those state lines.

I've spend so much time going from things. But now, when I think about being with you, waking up with our limbs intertwined like alternating red and white stripes on a candy cane:

and I'm grateful that I get to go to something.

So brace yourself:

I'm bringing you all of the snuggles.

room at the inn.

it's late February
and I saw the men on ladders
taking down Christmas lights down,
pulling strands from clumps like tufts of cotton candy,
Latin pop blaring from rolled-down van windows.

I was walking down beneath these canopies,
sipping coffee and watching my breath,
the holidays being dismantled before my very eyes,
and I thought back to where I was last Christmas.

I was so tired of movement.
my face was sunburned from my own rolled-down windows,
clicking odometers and rumble-stripped roads
but you gave me a place to rest:

and as I fell asleep,
my head on your shoulder,
while you squeezed my hand
and kissed my forehead

and I thought

"Huh.
So this is how it feels.

...seems like they under-exaggerated."