Sturgill Simpson Blues

Let's take this down to the core of the matter.  Sturgill Simpson is a phenomenal singer songwriter who started to release music in his mid 30's after spending years working in regular jobs.  His wife saw his malaise and downward worldview, and told him to pursue his dream of making music.  Now, after merely four years, he is appearing on stages across the country and playing to thousands after the release of his incredible third album A Sailor's Guide to Earth.  You can read all about him here.

What does this have to do with me?  Well, I am now a stay at home dad, recently unemployed from a job that absolutely sucked the life out of me.  I am renovating a bathroom, and next a bedroom.  I do the laundry, dishes, housework, and take care of our kids while my wife follows her career path.  I am starting back at college in January.  But mostly, I am able to write.  I am able to sit down and work on my novel.  Like late last night, after not being able to sleep, I added 1200 words at 1:12 AM. 

Sometimes life gets in the way of what you really want to do.  Trust me, I am hustling to make a bit of extra money freelancing and doing some yard work and things for neighbors and friends.  But, as a soon to be 37 year old, it is incredibly rewarding to have the ability to do something I love. 

As Ferris Bueller said, "Life moves pretty fast.  If you don't stop and look around for a minute... you could miss it."

Grace, Too-Excerpt

Below you will find a few poems from a collection I am putting together entitled Grace, Too.  Enjoy:

Poem for David Foster Wallace

I was sitting in the

Green lawn chair

You despise

With a Winston

Burning bright on my lip

And I thought about

What that meant

What he said

And why he chose

Blankness

When he had beauty

Pouring off of the

Tips of his fingers

Sad is a slight word

But fills me up

When I remember

Hanged men

 

Referring to the Last Time

Cold coffee waiting unrushed

as the day becomes wrecked evening.

The brief encounter was actually longer

                then the time allowed.

I clutched your lips with severity and

                cried your name in hopes of reverence returned.

                                *

Nothing came

                Nothing saw

                                No yellowed teeth

                                 bared like savages

                                 left untamed.

                                *

And yet, I’m hopeful,

                despite forever becoming only today,

for now, temporary.

                *

And your new blazing eyes

and your gaped mouth utters

fear as water.

Trickling at first, then rushing, then

falling away.

 

Rise and Shine and Dawdle

Mirrored image to placate

the warm weather dawn

in all its sanguine suffering.

 

The day opens as

the piano hammers fall

on the middle C.

And I dwell in mindful solitude

this morning among

the dimly lit ember.

                *

                Nothing to fear.

                                Nothing to doubt.

Without any loss of the numbered door.

                *

Breath

and

heavy lettered sounds

echoing off the parlor door.

 

Guessing Again

I share a cigarette with negativity.

Warm heat in the lungs, piercing,

grasping to air sacs last remembered

                in the December breeze when all was lost.

Merely not victorious, and heart bleeding

                like a crucifix.

I cannot know the why or the when,

                angrily ignorant like Dylan’s Mr. Jones.

                *

What did you say about that?

The cried feral depravity.

The open sored utterance

                unto me.

Respite from the dew addled dawn

                and awake to arriving.

 

Desire This

Existing on a shallow plain

                with no more aching for the lost pages,

I turn for a stargazer

lost among the furtive night.

Faulty headed yet emboldened by the

                free moon hung meekly

                *

Stories written under her

                become a hindrance to burial

                *

I sit anew atop the rusted chair and

breathe the air of gifts

                again and again.

So grateful of the remedy,

creating a gauze of lethargy and

                it’s growing twin apathy.

And I somehow can’t reconcile the

                growing necessity of it all.

                *

I read the book of pride.

Wrecked among the guilty,

                laughing aloud,

requiring a definition to compulsion.

 

The Long Wait-Excerpt

Below you will find an excerpt of my work in progress novel entitled The Long Wait or the Norco-Camel Ride. Enjoy and comments are welcome, but please keep in mind that this is a work in progress. 

T

he water ran out of the faucet.  Wait….that’s not right. The water seemed to fall out of the faucet as if being drawn out by barely more than gravity.  I was fascinated by this for a while.  I stared as the water slowed to a small, icicle like stream flowing straight into the bowl of a spoon that was covered in cereal residue from the previous morning.  The sink was always seemingly full of dishes.  The dishwasher sat quietly disconnected and non-functioning a couple of feet away, serving as nothing more than counter space.  Even though I had every right to call the owner of the apartment for repair, I simply didn’t care to do so.  Why bother him?  I pay my rent and it covers my gas and electric and water.  Plus doing dishes once a week gave me a sense of accomplishment.

 

I am literally dumbfounded by the icicle like water, just falling out of the barely open tap.  Gravity overwhelming the oxygen and hydrogen molecules.  And I stare.

 

I grab a pill to relieve the seeming never ending headache that befalls me.  A searing ache that radiates behind my left temple.  The pill is yellow and oblong. Its markings are clear but I am absolutely indifferent towards them. I stare at the bottle trying to contemplate how many more there are; how much longer can this go on? I reach into the oversized orange container and remove my muse. At least that's what I would like to believe, but inside myself it's simply a drug that wraps my head in a gauzy sheet, where nothing is distorted but is different nonetheless. 

 

The tap water has a strange plastic aftertaste from recently changing the faucet to a newer, more contemporary style. Actually, the old one was nearly calcified to non-usage and needed to be changed. I grab a small, red plastic cup from the cupboard above my left shoulder and fill it with just a few ounces of the plasticish mix of hydrogen and oxygen. The pill in my left hand, cradled between my lower knuckles and the pads of my palm. The cup held lightly in my right. I lift the left to my mouth and immediately follow it with the right to avoid the bitter aftertaste of the hydrocodone acetaminophen[1] and swallow the water and the pill.

 

Why should I feel bad? Why should my mind wonder about abuse? I take the little life saver as prescribed by my neurologist, a professional who has been to college longer than I would ever want to. 

 

But my God! How wonderful the addiction is. I could never know this without having went without for a couple of days. Hiding the ravages of withdrawals from your boss, and friends and family is not the easiest thing to do. Your eyes itch, your legs are crawling with invisible ants. You can't stand still but you don't want to move. You can't sleep eat or fuck. Life becomes a short series of miseries that you have to endure as your body adjusts to something it has had in it for over a year. Prescribed by our finest. I smile as I dump the remaining water down the drain and head to the couch to have a cigarette.  Camel[2]....grown in North Carolina and filled with Black Death. But incredibly delicious. Of course the cigarette is only a minor figure in this dance, but an important one. Its smoke provides and extra layer of calmness to my frazzled system.

 

The drug doesn't hit me until 30 to 45 minutes after ingestion, depending on the contents of my stomach. But I know when it does. My head gets heavy in the best way. My mind slows to a manageable pace. And most importantly, the nagging sharpness in my left temple subsides. Or the neurotransmitters that are sending the impulses to my brain to indicate pain are dulled and slowed making it seem like the pain is dulling. 

 

As soon as I feel the effects I immediately run to take another, but that's a fool's game. That's how you run out of your prescription before you can refill it. Us smart addicts know a little self-control.  We know the rush is worth riding out instead of compounding it with more.  The couch brought a semblance of comfort.  My legs ached for no apparent reason.  I glanced at the table tucked between the couch and the loveseat.  The stack of books I was reading currently stared back at me.  Great books, modern marvels of literature.  My own book couldn’t stand up to these masters….Pynchon, Wallace, Gaddis, Barth etc.  My book was a tragedy of my own making that somehow people seemed to enjoy.  Not best seller enjoyed, but enough that it actually got a second printing.

 

 

I peer at the faux vintage clock hanging high on the wall. Its Roman numerals tell me it's ten till eleven: not very late for a younger man, but in my middle age it's late enough. Work calls tomorrow, and sleep is needed. But I wish to enjoy the feeling running through me. To utilize the drug’s effects to some sort of benefit to myself.

 

Instead I fall asleep ten minutes later....

 

I awake and stare in the half lit room to gather myself.  The large faux vintage clock says its 1:34, or thereabouts.  I’ve never been able to gather specific time from the clock, but it certainly looks interesting in a vague fashionable way.  The sleep in my eyes is wiped clean by my right hand and I then proceed to shake the nagging numbness out of my left hand as I had positioned it underneath me while I slept.  The tingle is fascinating and short lived. 

 

After somehow managing to lay down when I had fallen asleep, I swing my legs back beneath me into a sitting positon and reach for my pack of Camels.  It’s funny how addiction works; my mouth is remarkably dry, my bladder is full yet the first thing I do upon sitting up is reach for a cigarette.  And I light it with my free gas station lighter of sub-Bic quality. 

 

It is then that I trundle to the bathroom to relieve myself.  Upon completion I stare into the mirror.  My eyes glisten with the remnants of the drug, and are shot with blood from my minutes of sleep.  My face is prematurely wrinkled, and I could clearly use a shave.  I can even spot a few gray hairs peeking through the morass of my chin on the left hand side, which compliments said wrinkles and my receding hairline quite well.  No chance of me passing for a young man anymore.  I amuse myself for a moment by allowing the Camel to dangle from my lips as if I was Humphrey Bogart, or some other long lost movie star.  I give my best “cool” stare back at myself, before smiling begrudgingly. 

 

In the early morning hours, the apartment lies silent.  Though I must say living alone means there’s not an abundance of extraneous noise anyhow, but the stillness that permeates the morning is palpable with the lack of traffic on the street below, without the chatter and rustle of the neighborhood children, without the many far off sirens signaling crime or emergency in some other part of the city.  In about 4 or 5 hours, people will begin to wake and go to jobs they most likely hate, and children will go to school to be taught mostly by dead eyed, underpaid teachers.  But now….now it’s quiet.

 

I stick my finished Camel into the lonely can of Coke sitting on the end table, and head to the minutely small kitchen to gather a new pill.  I stop suddenly in my tracks.  Why am I doing this?  It’s been a mere two and a half hours since the last one.  It’s 2:07 in the morning.  I am already tired from my preemptive nap earlier, and I certainly won’t be doing anything productive at this time of night.  It won’t help me write more, nor does it encourage in depth reading of one of the five novels currently sitting on the end table. 

 

This is addiction, in its subtlest form.  Mindlessly heading to the kitchen, reaching into the cabinet, unscrewing the top of the bottle and swallowing the pill; all because your body wants it.  And you don’t even realize it.  It’s tragic, in a way.  To be so thoughtless about something so powerful that you are putting into your body.  And with that, I light a Camel and place myself back on the couch to stare at nothing.  I shut the lamp off and lay down, watching the controlled fire at the end of paper wrapped tobacco burn slowly as I inhale.  I smoke half of the cigarette, put it out in the lonely soda can and drift back off to sleep.

---

[1] Commonly referred as Norco, Vicodin, etc.  Depends on the dosage of Hydrocodone in the pill, versus the dosage of acetaminophen.  This dosage was 10-325.

[2] I have tried every type of cigarette at least once.  I always come back to Camel brand Filtered cigarettes.  Though Lucky Strike non filters were usually a favorite of mine, you could never find them fresh.  And trust me on this, you never would want to smoke a stale cigarette.