My One Word for 2012: David Bowie

I wrote a letter to David Bowie tonight. He's been on my mind. He's actually been in my dreams, too, or something like that. Apparently in the early morning hours of New Year's Eve I sat up in bed, started out a window that opened to the dark Atlantic pushing against a Carolina shore under a waxing moon, and called out "David Bowie" and then fell back into a hard sleep. When she told me about it in the morning it felt familiar and also somewhat embarrassing. As if my dreamwalking David Bowie astral projection mystic visioning secret was out. I didn't remember dreaming about him, so I don't know if I was calling to him or answering him, if I saw him or was seeking him, but I sort of remember it happening all the same.

Our brains are so weird.

So one week later, tonight, I told him I love him, and that my love letter was long overdue. One week overdue in one sense, decades in another. I told him that's how it's been for me lately. Overdue. Radio delay. I'm feeling the whole of my life about a few weeks after it happens. I don't feel in a fog, just in time lag. Laggy like when the Internet slows down. On delay like when you jump too many time zones and give up trying to do the math in your head of where you've been plus/minus where you are going and you don't know whether it's night or day at any of those places but you hope someone will be awake when you try to call them, when you need to hear a real voice. You sort of hope it will be nighttime for you but morning for them, so you can talk and then fall asleep happy, knowing they are going about their day. But then you remember you sort of hope you are actually on your way home, to the same time zone after all. I can feel David Bowie nodding; he's been around, he knows what I mean.

I sent him a photo of me from when I first fell in love with him. Talk about time travel. I assured him that in most ways, I'm happier now. We've been together a long time, David Bowie and me, so maybe that's one of the New Year's messages he wanted to convey to me. I told him the idea, the perfect image, of him and Freddie Mercury working together to compose Under Pressure, was going to be my one word for 2012. Imagine the two of them together. Fierce brilliance. The charged baseline. Creative differences, it apparently wasn't easy. And then perfection. The result was perfection. I played the song again tonight after yet another soul-killing GOP debate. Finding love and passion as an answer to broken politics, we'll need this anthem this year. I've needed it for a long, long time. I thanked David for it. I told him I didn't even want to talk about Vanilla Ice. Unless he needed to.

There are a lot of good reasons not to sleep alone. A small one is to find out if David Bowie has been visiting you in the early morning hours. I told David Bowie I hoped he and Iman share a bed more nights than not. I imagine they live by an ocean some of the year, don't you? That their bed is near a window that looks out over serious moonlight. I told him I hope they are happy in 2012. I told him thanks for dropping by, and that I intend to be happy in 2012. Very, very happy.

Visiting Rowan Oak

I wanted something from Faulkner's house. I wanted something like you do when a grandfather is buried, when you leave a lover for what you know is the last time even if she does not, when you walk through the woods or a graveyard at the beginning of winter. A shirt, a stone. Something.

Circling the outside of Rowan Oak, I claimed a spot. A large patio where the setting sun was giving up, and I said, "this is where I would be." Inside the house, in the dining room that opened to the veranda, the placard said Faulkner often wrote outside, in that very place. For a second that was good enough, that we saw something the same way, we had this understanding, William and I, and it moved from the page, his pages, to his porch, and I got him. I was sure of it. I got him, and that made all the words real.

I had traveled to Mississippi with three other writers, and as we wandered I wasn't really sure if everyone was engaged with this minute of this stop, but our eyes and cameras were open and we ran other narratives, we prowled paths and ran our hands over screen doors and looked at the artifacts and holy relics gathered. The fetish of a bourbon bottle. His own leather boots. This desk, this bed.

That's what I saw. They are bound to have seen other things.

I've done enough things together with enough writers to know that this particular shared experience, filtered through each writer's curving cortex and gaping places and quilted projections, would make its way onto the Internet (or wouldn't) in layers of story--different posts, photos shared, Tweets and updates, all of it rock solid, not any of it wholly blood true, most of it connected at the base like wildly flinging and jamming typewriter keys but all of it sprung loose, too. Separate and knitted together, linked and overlapped, and somewhere in what isn't seen when linking from place to place is another story altogether. It occurred to me that these layers of voices and narratives and time slips and captures and secrets withheld, awareness/lack of awareness and all of it, all of that, is what Faulkner, and Joyce and Stein for that matter, and the others--it's what they were doing with their stream of consciousness experiments. How you graft your words into each other but you never, ever get it all tied up in a bow, years later you learn the real story of you & the other one, if that's what you can call it, there isn't a sensible timeline to anything, how you put it all together way after the fact and your personal version is based on relative patience and paste, bias and blinders, irrational love.

This is story. There are layers and different voices. The only true thing is you can only barely trust each narrator, each only fans some of the cards in front of you. She doesn't even know about the others. She's stuffed some in a bottle where it wicks beer alongside scraps of peeled label. Some fell from the car, flew out the window and we didn't even see it happen. Some will fall from her shirt as it is lifted past her head and off of her arms--music was playing, that must have been how they found their way there. She plays the cards close to her chest. A delta blues riff is laid down and she plays them as they lay.

It isn't always your story to tell.

What if the whole trip was a version of As I Lay Dying and I worried it was a dream, that I was still reading, just reading, always reading? Any road trip could be, I guess, damn you Faulkner, you smug bastard with your riding boots and your house that despite having a name is now falling apart--it's all falling apart--and your utter lack of concern with what we could understand on first read. Still, you knew it: we are moved forward by our missions and small hungers and lack. We are moved forward by the will of a woman who isn't even there. We are willing to re-read. That woman isn't even there yet her voice demands a chapter of its own. She is a fish. She is a fish caught on a line yesterday, gasping for air, and what now? Is your net big enough and is the weave fine enough to take what you find, is this thesomething: the shirt, the stone, the takeaway?

We tell stories as we go. We tell the past while we wear this new day out. We tentatively offer that there might/maybe/will be a tomorrow and it's for sure it will be so sunny you will smile. Or it might rain, hard against the tin roof, and you will laugh. Once upon a time, there was foreshadowing. Foreshadows falls from every cedar tree, tea leaves collect at the bottom of every wine glass. I want to always stay, I want to go home, I want to roll a new piece of paper through this old machine.

I'm reminded how Faulkner fought with Hemingway. They dismissed each other; it got ugly. Fighting words.

Things happen, the car hits train track and something important, a part of the whole, is MIA and a sound that concerns us all is born, thumping in the rear like a casket; earlier we got lost looking for pancakes. Pancakes! Prowling dirt shack streets knocking on thin windows looking for pancakes and the GPS saysrecalculating. How is that even possible? It is funny, darkly, inexplicably funny, we die laughing, we absolutely die laughing, and as we lay dying something wants to burn down a barn just to be free, and someone runs through the fire to pull out a save.

I found something at Rowan Oak. Something good and exactly what was unexpected. I found boot leather pushed against wallpaper. I found a 64 and that is my number. I found peeling window panes, the thick impressions of a broken "e" key against parchment, and a haunted garden. Later I found something quite a bit like a stone except it's also like salt, time and cedar. It's a word against my mouth. I'm just not sure what it will say.

##

Thank you Schmutzie, Jett and Laurie for an amazing trip to Mississippi.

Mississippi Delta Pilgrimage

You know I love a pilgrimage. When the seed casing feels too tight, it needs to be soaked in a hard rain and it needs to be scratched, given a cut against what won't give way.  One way to do this is a road trip built for touching gravestones, stomping on the grounds of the greats, drinking their water and palming plant cuttings from their homes hoping for a little timetravel sweet skin grafting.

Pilgrimage as a journey inviting propagation. Why not?

I'm in the Mississippi Delta. Birthplace of jook joint blues. Crossroads, I'm smack in the middle of the crossroads, and this very moment I'm headed to where Robert Johnson pushes up dirty riffs from below his last square of land. Tennessee Williams soaked in his bath in Clarksdale, Mississippi for how many hours, mercy, and that's the starting point on the map this morning. Then after that,  Faulkner's home is down the highway in Oxford.

We're juking tonight. Tomorrow, there's more.

I'm soaking it up.

I'm thinking of you, too, especially if you are writing and shooting and making music and posting your stuff online for me. Or if you are wanting to. Or if you're just happy, so happy like I am, that people do.

Hey, if you want a postcard, tell me your address confidentially here. Update: Sold out, in the mail, we're headed home.

Purge and Forgive

Every Sunday I try to fill up this sorry old Goodwill tote with stuff that needs to leave my house Monday morning. That's the gig. I've been doing in for months now, and I'm really not sure where the stuff is still coming from.  I'm digging deeper I guess. This week the evenings are cooler, so I plucked hoodies thinking the hoodie-less might appreciate a cheap hoodie buy.  My family is not hoodie-deprived. In fact we are apparently great fans of the hoodie, or somehow our growing light has been undetected and we are an unharnessed hoodie breeding ground. Either way, I'm happy to share the love of the hat-sweatshirt combo meal.

Also, books. Because here's something I never would have thought I'd ever possibly feel about books: so many of them, I just don't need. Once you go digital, easily replaced books lose their appeal. I never thought I'd say this. I've hauled shelves of books with me to every home, shouldering bursting boxes full of them up and downstairs, hoarding them in piles like water and bags of rice for the end of times.

I suppose now that I'm becoming less primal about my books I need to also drop my Hopworth Books v. Friends Doctrine to be congruent, and it might even be time to forgive an old friend from a two decade old grudge. It's a hard one to let go of, however, mostly because of my genius abilities in the grudge-shouldering department.

My friend Brian was in the despair-stricken lows of a possible break-up with his beautiful, compulsive liar of a boyfriend. Brian survived a precarious "Should I Stay or Should I Go" two-week tenderloin from my ill-begotten living room couch.  Just about the time it seemed as though it might be a comfortable arrangement, I woke early one morning to the sound of a strange kitchen or roofing disaster, only to find Brian lost his way when looking for the toilet, was trying balancing his weight by pressing one hand against the shaky folding bookshelf in my hallway while leaning into the longest. loudest, drunken-sleepwalking piss I have ever seen an adult man, woman or animal take.

Have you ever dropped a paperback in the bathtub, think for a moment it can be saved, only to watch it bloom into a Godzilla as it dries before your eyes? Multiply that by 30 or so, stir in a bottle of the deer spray hunters use to attract big bucks and you have the sad state of the trashbag he filled later that day and took to the street. My first copy of Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. A signed Carolyn Forché. I loved Brian but that was damn near unforgivable.

Until now, I guess. I guess it's time, because the books he ruined, had they survived, would have been taken to Goodwill tomorrow. Well, probably not the Forché. But still. Books, whatever. They're just paper and dust. Put them in the blue tote. Bygones!

DST, Yeah You Know Me

The worst thing about Daylight Saving Time is that it was instituted at the turn of the century by Anglo governments, and that means it is devoid of the fantastic superstitious rituals and psychic rewards that fucking with time should afford us.  We have no legends about spirits we entered in limbo when we sprang forward; we have no special candles to burn or poems to incant to call back our fall-back hour.  We've got no elves or mammals to anthropomorphize. We've got no sexy-garter imperatives. We don't even have steampunk power stories of time rapture or dinosaurs in heliocrafts or whatnot.

This DST thing is sorry-story bullshit.

We should sew tight the bottoms of our swimsuits and leave them on the line to be filled with what we've lost since finding eggs on Easter morning. We should wear costumes and meet in alleys to kiss stranger after stranger until the odd hour has passed. We should travel back in time and hold a wronged beloved's face in our hands and say we're sorry, so so sorry for all we lacked. We could sit in treehouse nests built for this hour/dance in circles or squares/ scour each other for ticks and moles/make fires to signal the aliens/stand in running water waiting for a vision/lick mushrooms until we're at first absorption = we should do something, this hour pooling at our heads while we sleep, it's the hour.

 Taken/given hours. We should at least get presents.

Right now, rolling your clocks back has all of the same zero-level dervishness of waiting in line at Kmart for your layaway window air conditioner, finally paid off in October. Great, this is annoying, huh, what was I thinking, why is everything so hard, well this is a good thing to have, whatever. And then there will be a week of people complaining that their children are confused about when to wake up. Which, yes. But we don't want hothouse flower children who can't travel between time zones, do we?

In fact, for the children, we probably need to do this DST thing more often. If we aren't going to have special parties and the promises of ghost visits or opening time portals, then why are we limiting ourselves to doing this twice a year, with all the perfect, annoying math of that?  Let's fuck with time at random.  Let's let the LOTTO ball people tell us how many hours we win or lose each Saturday night with a Powerball draw.  That could keep it interesting. Spin the big wheel, Pat. Wake me up, Vanna. Tell me how many vowels I've got left.

Light a candle, make out for an hour, look for ghosts dancing in between the shadows of the numerals of your clock as your roll the hour back. Happy DST, babies!