The Fargo Kantrowitz'z Literary Campsite

My brother rocked. I mean, my brother rocked like nobody else’s brother rocked.  When he was 22, he filled Wembley.  That’s when he was with Moxy Priestess.  Kids now don’t remember Moxy Priestess all that much, but everybody around here knows that at least they were famous. Stadium rock famous.  I grew up with that music with Jed around.  Zeppelin, Rush, Black Sabbath, Uriah Heep, April Wine, Blackfoot. All that shit.  But Jed was the best.  I don’t care. I’ll say it.  Van Halen opened for him in ’79  for God’s sake.
The Priestess played for four years and that’s all.  Jed was lead guitar and sometimes he sang backup if they needed him to, but they didn’t ask him much because, like I said, Jed rocked on the guitar and they didn’t want to interrupt him.  He was easily as good as Stevie Vai, comparable to Eddie.  Jed worshiped guys like Clapton and Page.  He got to play with Page, eventually, and I saw him on a T.V. show talking about it and he sounded excited like a little kid, and you didn’t get that much from Jed, because he was all grown up by that time, sticking the needle into his arm everyday.
The last we heard from Jed was March 11, 1990. He was high on dope.  I remember it was March because everybody was putting up green all over town in the businesses, and when my mom screamed over the phone at Jed that he was banished from the house, she used that very word “banished,” I noticed that my mom had on a green pin of a shamrock, and I thought to myself how that word didn’t sound very happy like a shamrock was supposed to be.  My mom never talked about Jed after that.  All she ever said about that phone call was that he was on drugs and she left it at that.  But over the years of not hearing from Jed, I could tell she hurt inside.  I noticed this more and more as I got older.
I don’t know what happened to Jed.  I imagine he became one of those people you see in those tragic futuristic movies with oil on their faces huddled together over some street grate spewing off steam, or sitting in sewage tunnels waiting to die unless they get another hit of crack or smack soon.  Simply put, we lost him, he fell off the earth just like Lady Diana.
Now, I work at the same market that Jed used to.  I remember that short story we had to read in high school by John Updike about a kid who quits working at the market after the manager kicks these girls out of the store for wearing bikinis.  Not a chance for me.  I need the money.  I’ve got something to do. I’ve got a plan.

Like I said, everybody in my town of Millsville, a name not quite thought out but typical of the mind set of the people in my town: bland, boring, given by people who couldn’t even think to just call the damned town Mills, everybody at least knows Jed was famous.  But who are we?  Millsville, Tennessee.  Population 14,782 according to the sign leading into town that was last changed as far as I can remember never.  I think we’re over 20 now easy.  People grow up and move away.  Our town is getting bigger.  Nobody cares anymore, really, that Jed was famous.  I mean, where do old rockers go?  Probably hell.  It doesn’t matter.  It takes a lot to be remembered as a rocker because music changes so much, even rock, and people don’t want to give away their age by claiming an allegiance to an old band.  Suddenly it’s like you’ve got to love Rage Against the Machine or Garbage or, you know, new bands, to be cool, but even these bands are going down.  There are very few supergroups.  Rockers generally end up playing Vegas eventually.  Ludicrously, they do everything they can from actually greasing back their balding heads and putting on lavender suede suits.  Elvis wasn’t stupid.  He knew he was going down so he went all the way while he was alive so nobody could ever say he would have ended up a schlep.  He chose to be a schlep first and say fuck’em.
Anyway, like I said, I don’t know what happened to Jed.  I’ve got no real problems here in Millsville.  Got a job, got no brother, but that’s no problem unless I think about it.  I try not to. But when I do, I wonder about the nature of problems in general, I mean, is a problem a problem when there is no proof that the subject of the problem is even alive?  Yeah, it is.  It’s the same old thing as the MIA’s in Vietnam.  Jed’s MIA and that’s a problem.
The market’s a problem only because it sucks.  You check through people and ask them if they need plastic or paper.  You give out so much plastic and paper that you wonder how long it can last.  This shit’s got to run out eventually I figure, but I give it away anyway.  “Paper or plastic, ma’am?”  “Paper, please.”  But wouldn’t you rather save a tree today? But I don’t ever say it.  Hell no she wouldn’t.  “Paper, please.”
Why don’t they just get smaller garbage cans and put the plastic in their cans?  Come to think of it, why don’t they just shove the garbage cans, the plastic, and the paper bags right on up their too well-to-do asses and give us all a break?  In case you can’t tell, I make $5.75 per hour.  Sometimes I take home old chicken from the deli at night and have even been known to throw in a polish sausage on the sly under the eyes of co-conspirators.
It’s an awkward feeling that I possess when I take a little bit of food from my protectors, but thinking about it now, and relating it in this way as I am, I feel that if management could listen, only listen to my thoughts, I would have only this choice morsel of wisdom to relate: Fuck You.
I’m a member of the club of losers in this world.  I, for one, a newly conscious member of my station in life, holding this knowledge close, have obtained by it a certain freedom that will allow me to detach myself from the masters of the world if their veritable and, according to themselves, non-existent thumbs ever proceed to descend from on high.
I am a master dodger, an artist truly, a playwright, musicals.  I write musicals.  I never told you this, but I do.  So I am not unarmed, you see.
Well, so far you know this: I live in Millsville and I write musicals.  My brother Jed is dead or so we think, everybody but me. But that’s the standard line.  No body has been found.  My life is a joke with nobody left to laugh at it, and I am much too young to feel this way.  I have been improperly received, conceived, and laughed at by the world who doesn’t generally take kindly to people with mouths like mine.  I shoot my wad through a pen, and at the end of it all is a splatter of hope that maybe, just maybe, Jed isn’t dead. But even then, that is something of a shot idea.  Beat.  That is, without hope.  I just can’t stop wondering what happened to my brother.
My friends laugh at me, but I’ve decided that I’m going to look for Jed.  I’ve got a few hunches as to where he might be. I figure he’s in New York because Jed always gravitated toward the big time and New York has got the big time everything.  So he’s in New York, I figure.  They got the best crack houses there.

Chapter 1

I can’t say my family didn’t love me, they did. But it was too much of a love that it impinged on what I thought should be my basic freedoms in this world, namely the right to say whatever the fuck I want. That’s not something most people take kindly to anymore. They want you to have that feedom, but if you exercise it, just don’t do it around them. They’ ve got that right, too. Only problem is that there are so many of them out there, and I’ve got such a big mouth even though most people think I’m pretty shy, that we never get along. It’s sad. It’s like Teardrop.
Teardrop was my mule. Died of old age about three years ago happy, but not always, because I did something really stupid. I lost him in a poker game because I thought that’s what somebody with a mule does. I was stoned and had been fighting with Moxy because she felt like a cowboy and is really this Jewish girl from New Jersey. Down in town, I was playing cards with Jay and Frank. I rode Teardrop into town just for a hoot. Teardrop was a strong mule, but we did walk a lot of the way. The guys thought he was a cool little mule and so did I. He was happy. I kept carrots for him and sugar cubes and apple cores. He dug ’em all. But then Jay gets out a jay and we smoke it up and suddenly, I think to myself how Teardrop is my best friend and then, instead of knowing it, believing it, I think of it in betting terms, and I’m just about out of money… when this guy says, “Throw in Teardrop.”

Throw in Teardrop. An amazing conception ultimately, but I didn’t know it then. Back then, when I was still smoking and drinking a little because I was weaning myself off heroin, I didn’t know better. I didn’t know, either, that a mule could hold the secret not only to muledom, but pretty much to whatever secret anybody would ever feel worthy of holding. You remember that story by Christ, I think it was, he said that he who does good unto the least of these, pointing around at the old and sick does unto me. And that’s what Teardrop was. He was truly the least of these and when I lost after that quick nod of my head, when this guy Jay thought it would be cool to own a mule named Teardrop, I recognized the least of these in my mule and didn’t want to see him go. You know what I mean? You’ve got to know what I mean.
Anyway, I lost Teardrop that day, and he went to live with Jay down in the town. Jay fixed lawnmowers in his lawnmower shop. He lived in the back by his lawnmowers and that’s where Teardrop went to live because it turns out Jay used to have a horse that he kept in a pen back there, but he didn’t have a horse no more, didn’t want one because a horse is for a kid to ride, and, well, his wife left him as was only right since, after all, Jay liked to do a lot of smoking, drinking and gambling. So his vices weren’t all bad. They got him Teardrop anyway, unless you want to consider my side of the story, that is, it took Teardrop from me. But that mule is dead now anyhow.

I got myself a little girl. Yeah, I know, what’s a jerk like me doing with a little girl. I haven’t even been near the mountains for years. Not hardly. Always lived in a town. I moved here a few years ago from New Jersey where me and Moxy had lived for a long time, too long a time. I grew up down the hill in Millsville. Moxy is Helen. She’s my wife. I was on heroin for over ten years and she took care of me. A few years ago I’m sitting around detoxing finally after so long doing smack and my brother Albert comes to Fort Lee where I had been living with Moxy. Minnie wasn’t around yet. That’s my daughter. She’s five going on forty. And Albert comes to Fort Lee looking for me. Albert is one of a kind. I remember when he was a kid I was over talking to this sweet little girl I was hot for at the skating rink, I always took my brother on Friday nights, who else was going to do it? And I look up and I see Albert, had to be about seven, skating around the roller rink with his little friend Stevie and then this monster comes up behind him, about my age, and rolls over my little brother and doesn’t even stop. Just laughs. So I skate over there past my brother whose being taken care of and have a little chat with our friend the gorilla. He disagreed as well that hurting my brother was a good idea. Albert, he looked up to me back then so much he finally rescued me.
Sitting in a Dunkin Donuts while me and Moxy sit in her car outside and me wondering if I should go the hell in because by then I was too ashamed to think about what I’d done to my family, my brother, and my mama back in Tennessee. Well, I go in, finally, but only after Albert comes out. I can’t go in. He starts crying, happy as all hell to see me, and we go back in to sit down. The girl from Dunkin Donuts comes around and tells me that he’s a good boy, that he’s a good boy like she loves him or something and then next thing I know he pops me in the eye real hard and I literally black out. Moxy picks me up and Albert is gone.

So since then I got my brother back. Me and Moxy drove to Millsville, waiting a few days to let Albert get back which turned out to be by bus. Albert was still a little cold to me, but I could see the same Albert there staring at me while I hugged my mama and I myself began to cry. He was bouncing some papers on his leg as we all sat there drinking coffee at the kitchen table. Then he hands me the papers. It says “Petals. A Rock Scenario.” Turns out all those marijuana jam sessions that I had in my room when I truly hated the world and everybody in it was a sort of schooling for my little brother who would sit in on the sessions and listen. Albert turned out to be somebody who wrote rock operas and sitting there with Petals on his lap, him looking so nervous, I thought to myself that whatever it is in his hand that he wants me to see I’ll see, and whatever it is that this little man who listened to me wants me to do, I’ll do. So he gives me the rock opera “Petals. A Rock Scenario” and it’s about the death of Princess Diana. This kid took the whole story of the death of Princess Diana and turned it into a musical, a rock musical, but he had no music. He came looking for me, looking all the hell over New York City, thinking I was a busted up heroin junkie living in the gutter. He walked in to Harlem crack houses and talked to people who I knew. That’s says you go pretty far to get what you want. He knows Slit, for god’s sake, a guy I plied with money, but who was the biggest liar I’d ever met except about his quality of heroin. Slit had some of the best. He was of course connected to The Lady. The Lady was no lady to say the least. She was as mean as they come. A certifiable nymphomaniac. Did me a couple of times till I got to know better. I know that’s a strange thing for a man to say, but it’s true. Albert met her. Once again, for someone who would talk to The Lady to find me, you gotta hand it to him. So I took on Petals.
But that doesn’t mean that my life ends. I am in the process of straightening things out and if I occasionally lose a mule due to the stupidity of a marijuana high then I will die knowing that I, like everybody else under God’s blue sky, is a complete and utter idiot, and that pain comes. Pain comes, but it doesn’t burden us more than we can handle. We always make it because there are people like Albert out there guided by some sort of angel and if we think we’re the angels, we’re wrong. The angels are the angels and they know who they are. They’re out there.

But the point here is this. Jay didn’t keep that mule for long. Teardrop loved me I hate to say and I don’t live all that close to town, in fact, when me and Moxy moved back home she knew we’d have to live on Anna Belle Mountain. So we did, and within the year we had a dozen chickens, a pig, a cow and a mule. The following year we had Minnie. A little baby, Minnie. A girl. We had Albert and my mama down there in town not far from where Jay still lives and my mule did only briefly. We had the supermarket, me, I had the supermarket back. I used to work there. Then Albert got a job and he’s still there. He’s funny. He complains about his job like he’s a columnist for the New Yorker. His literary work hero is John Updike for writing a story about an asshole manager kicking out a couple of babes who wanted to buy something in their bikinis. He’s assistant produce manager now. He hates it still. He’ll never accept it. He’s written four rock operas, but none like this tribute that I’m doing the music for about the Princess Diana. I don’t know. At first I thought my brother had gone a little bit crazy or a little bit queer for wanting to write about a princess, but then I looked at the play. My brother is a first rate writer. His only problem is that he hasn’t been discovered. My mama, she paints pictures, and he had her paint a picture of Princess Diana with folded hands and angels and burning orange sunsets behind her like she’s beautiful but very much dead. Maybe this whole concept of accepting death isn’t popular for a very good reason.
But I’m not quitting on my brother because my brother never quit on me. I never would have gone home or if I had it would have been several years later. I’d become a bit of a coward hiding out there in Fort Lee. Our band had been over for years because the heroin became a better ride. Helen never took that stuff and she stood by me all those years. Actually, we separated for awhile. She couldn’t take it. That’s when I went to New York. Albert was right anyway about where I might go if I was a down and out junkie. I headed straight to New York City. It’s also where Moxy found me. I’d go downtown sometimes even though I lived up in the 200s. Walked right by me. Our eyes met on the street and we just hugged. I was saving my hit for later and had just taken some other things, a few lines, a few bowls. Pretty stoned, but I was still looking for a drink. I’m not an alcoholic though. What I mean was I was looking for a place to sit down and have a drink so I could listen to some good music. I’m a rock guitarist.

Moxy Priestess is a band that I believe was every bit as good as anything the 1970s produced. In 1978 we opened for Rush in Ontario, Canada. I was written up in the newspapers as being Jimmy Page-like. I eventually played with Jimmy three years later, just after Zeppelin broke up. I was 18 in 1978. At 21, I hadn’t talked to my family for four years. Albert was about eight when I left the house at 17 to run away to Nashville where I was kicked out of so many clubs it stopped being funny because back then they didn’t mess with rock and roll at all like they do now. I am a country boy who doesn’t do country. Mel Tillis never graced my eight track if you know what I mean. My dad played a lot of Dylan. Nah, Jimmy Page. With Jimmy I was born. Then came Jimi and that sealed it. Name them then, the ones that you would think my heroes were, and I couldn’t think of nothing but playing as good as these guys or playing with these guys someday, and I did: Clapton, Lifeson, Morse, Beck, Van Halen, the list goes on and on.
Yeah. So this mule, Teardrop, he chews his way out of the weakest part of the fence and he starts walking. Anna Belle Mountain is a little over ten miles away and we live on the top of it up a dirt road that travels beside a sheer fall. If you’re stoned and willing to allow the beast to actually carry you at times, as mules can, then you can make it into Millsville in two three hours. That’s what I did. Took a bongload and went to town. Where I live, well, it’s not the best place to live if you’re afraid of heights or you can’t afford a four wheel drive. We’re about five miles up. Somehow though, Teardrop gets to the mountain unseen, but he doesn’t know anything about roads, Teardrop, he doesn’t think like we do. He just knows that on top of a mountain somewhere is me and Moxy and the baby Minnie, that’s all.

Some days I’ll just think about it. When he finally came into the yard he was bleeding profusely on all four of his legs. He had a gash in his side a foot long. He was wet and caked with mud. There was nothing about him that wasn’t wrong. Even his eyes looked hollow and jelly-like, like he’d seen too many ghosts. Teardrop never took the road, but later we found tracks. He went right up the back side of the mountain and didn’t once stop going up. Nobody knows exactly what happened to him, but I can imagine and I do sometimes and I miss him. He died a few years ago real peacefully. Me and Moxy and Minnie and Albert and even my mama dug a big whole for him and put him right on the side of the mountain that he climbed up so valiantly to get home again, to get to us.

9 Turle: But I thought that you were supposed to think. Listle: No, you thought you were supposed to think. The thing was not to have to think. Turle: No, the thing was to think, to think, to think! Listle: I’ll never convince you. Turle: It’s not like you need to convince me of anything. It just occurred to me that when we no longer are asked to think then that is precisely when we must think, sort of like a burp over a period of thought that if we don’t burp over then we stay in the same place, someimes for generations. If we don’t think past those moments when all thought tells us that we are not supposed to think then we stay stashed away inside of some unthinking moment, a moment so blended in with the colors of our day that we have no sense of the difference between us and them and therefore no sense between what is right and wrong. (Listle takes out his tweezers and begins to tweeze dead skin off of his thumb) Listle: But that is precisely the point I’m trying to make! When we don’t think we allow ourselves to become one with our universe! When we look around us and see, say, that tree over there, then we are one with that tree. We don’t put anything between ourselves and that tree and therefore we need not contemplate the existence of that tree nor the existence of ourselves looking to the existence of that tree to validate our own existence! Turle: But we never pop our head out of anything and look around to see beyond this moment of sitting and seeing that tree over there either! If that tree happened to be a dead car, burnt beyond recognition, we would not be able to see ourselves rising up out of our state of being, calling the city and having them remove the car so that we may enjoy our sit on these nice park benches undhindered by such visual pollution. No, we would simply sit here uncomfortably, to some extent, but not really knowing why because we can no longer tell a beautiful thing from an ugly thing. We have lost our power of discernment. Listle: And you say that is where commercialism has destroyed us? Thurle: Yes! Exactly…! (To be continued). Albert’s play “Two Men Sit on a Park Bench”

5

This is tape number one of the Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite. Fargo here. Well, it seems that the people here in Millsville ain’t quite caught on to the Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite yet. I guess it’s pretty hard when you got this first show and it’s on the internet no less. Well, maybe someday I’ll be on the radio, too. I’m a performer. Just past 40. A guy who used to rock, but turned it all in so that he could have some good, ol’ fashion lovin’. That would be Moxy. Some of you locals and even non-locals know Moxy. Former lead singer of Moxy Priestess. A girl so proud and strong and beautiful that we had no choice but to name the entire band after her.  It was actually Rose’s idea and me and Ken just shook our heads yeah. We understood the Moxy Priestess energy and Rose appreciated having someone to supply it while she concocted her magical spells for the synths.  Kenneth was the drummer most of the time. He didn’t like doing nothing more than drum. He had a wall of guitars at his apartment in L.A. that was so huge that I almost, well, I almost shit.  He’s a master finger picker, something or other, guitar player and my yowling could never stand a chance even though I was the one who got famous for playing the guitar and he didn’t. Keith was our bassist. Keith’s dead now.    The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite Number 1.

6

Well, thank you for listening to that song. Don’t Fight. I wrote that on stage in Memphis when I thought I was going to die. I had a dream that day and something woke me up. I was being strangled by a serpent and I could no longer breathe. A kid ran up on stage and started trying to get me out of it, but I wasn’t coming out of it. I think my heart was stopping and that kid come up and start beating me until my memory sparked up and I remembered that I really should try and live. It’s hard when you live a life like I’ve lived.   The Fargo Kantrowitz’z Literary Campsite. Number 1.

7
I never thought I’d leave Jed. But I did. I had to. I had no choice but to leave him. He wouldn’t get off that stuff. Any woman would have left him and I did and I stand by it today. But then he got off the stuff and I stood by him always, but when he went back on for awhile, I left. I said goodbye, Jed, and walked out the door. A woman’s got to do that. A woman’s got to be able to say to the world “Fuck You.” At least once she does and I did when I said it to Jed. Not many people get a good Moxy Priestess “Fuck You,” but Jed did, and he heard it and saw it and regretted it immediately. He knew what he’d lost right away and I didn’t care. I just walked on out the door. These boots, you know…     Moxy

8
Dear Millsville School District,
I had an idea that might help your teachers out a little bit. Why not hire what I call “Specialized Teachers” to come in and take over a teacher’s class on Fridays? The teacher could pay 12 dollars and the school district could pay 8 dollars for each class that the specialized teacher teaches. In this way the teacher, who often feels she or he does not make enough money, could get a “raise” without having to have a raise. Fridays can be free to do all of their preparation and grading. Fridays would be like a mini-vacation because they wouldn’t have to deal with a bunch of kids who don’t want to be there and are becoming more and more uppity these days.
I just thought that this would be a good idea. You could make a list of professionals who would like to make the extra money, writers, artists, true scientists and philosophers, etc. and teachers could sign up for that true “guest” teacher. Just think of all of the creative people that the kids could be exposed to. Perhaps this exposure could lead them to an understanding of what the subject is about and why it matters at all. I strongly feel that this knowledge is lacking today in our public school system since teachers are so overtaxed and underpaid that they can barely feel the pleasure in their subject matters much at all anymore.
I sincerely hope that you would, at least, discuss the matter at a board meeting.

Sincerely,

Albert Jones        Albert

I thought that if I wrote the best story ever written then I would become immortal.

Kierney: and you believed this?

Kantor: Oh yes. I believed that if I wrote a story that was of a notion immemorial then I too would be saved the hatchet man behind me even as we speak or so it is in my daily and worst of nightmares.

Kierney: I didn’t know.

Kantor: Yes.

Kierney: Getting back to Petals.

Kantor: Yes.

Kierney: You said that you believed that you would go to heaven in a literal sense because you believed that you were made of spiritual stuff. Please describe what you mean by this word “stuff.”

Kantor: I sometimes look back at what I’ve said and the way that I’ve said these things and I wonder why the people didn’t hoot and holler me out of town for being a complete bore. But I guess that maybe this whole thing is about living longer and feeling better by living right, eating right, exercising, playing. Everything. So I realize that the world is real. It is real. My new email address is smthngns Somethingness!

Kierney: Somethingness.

Kantor: Somethingness. It’s something to have found something that will let me know that I may live in peace. A peace is allowing all of God’s children to live under the fruit of their desires. We have a duty to every child in the world. As we do have the same duty for our elders.

Kierney: That’s what you mean by Somethingess.

Kantor: Family, basically.

June 1865
Gave away that other diary to Jedediah. Don’t know why he wanted it. Was too much in it for me to keep it with me. Now that I’m on the road it doesn’t make a lot of sense to have two of them. So I keep this one now. Been sitting waiting for this sunset for about an hour. It’s been two weeks since I had a drink and my head finally feels good again. Every drink I was taking was a shovel ful of dirt coming out of my own grave. Every drink made me forget Mary and Annabelle and gave me all sorts of reasons for keeping on, but when I wasn’t drinking I forgot every single last reason and all I found I really wanted to do was kill myself. That’s the way the drink works for some people.
I’m sitting in a little place I don’t know the name of not far from the city of Los Angeles. I notice a lot the way that water comes in on the shore. There’s nothing more beautiful I think then the way those water curls boom one after the other when that sunset is just about going down. I never seen sunsets in Tennessee like I seen them here. They’re orange, orange, red, more orange and a little bit of blue.  And then they’re just gone, but they leave the clouds on fire and that’s a good sight until the stars come out and I get cold. Usually by then I got a fire going, but sometimes I wait until the last ray, I mean, that last little shimmer or glow is all gone because I want to see the night in a pure way when it’s just begun because the middle of it gets scary sometimes and cold, especially without the bottle with me any more. And the end of it I’m usually asleep for. No my favorite part of the night is just the beginning of it when I know I’m not supposed to be asleep but right where I am only. Also, this is where a little of the sadness comes in and I close my eyes to it and pray a little bit and that always makes me feel a little better, when I envision Mary again the way that she was when we were kids so beautiful wearing her white dress on Sunday mornings and my daddy telling me now that was a beutiful girl, that if I didn’t marry her someday I’d be a fool. So I did. Now the question remains: was I a fool? I still don’t think so. What’s the point of living if you’re not going to chase down a dream so obvious as Mary was. Her smile and the way that she held my hand and the way she would get distracted by flowers or a bird and then tell me stories about everything she sees, about trees and the people who live in the forests, about flowers and about how a man named Narcissus was so vain that he became one, and about the Goddess of Love named Venus who was married to a man who made her diamonds and beautiful jewels, but who loved a man who raged in war, and about Cupid and how he fell in love with a girl named Psyche and Cupid’s mama, Venus, didn’t like her so she made her do all sorts of things to earn his love. There were so many stories and they all come back to me now. How Mary could talk. And then Annabelle, well, and then Annabelle. That’s all needs be said. For now…

There are questions concerning Thy Soul’s Immensity that I just can’t answer because to do so would be to push the boundaries of where I want to go in my life. Everything we author has a possibility of final purpose. To follow these lengths to the point of obsessing on them is to sell yourself short. The final resting place aside, authors must resist the urge to disappear into their works forever. In some ways, an author must hold on to himself and steady himself or herself. The author must allow that a character may have inhabited some part of their being, but that the sad parts do not need to be literalized by that function of the mind that addresses how much adrenaline we feel in a course of a day. We need not live our lives in the parallels that we had discovered in fiction. We must release ourselves from the bonds of perfection and lapse gracefully into the mysterioso of grand Life. For this reason I proclaim that there is an end to Thy Soul’s Immensity and leave it at that.

Needing to know beyond what knowledge,
needing not me,
lays down like rags before me
I feel again instead of see.

Having always seen, always supposedly known,
knowledge anew tells me I’ve not but been tethered
to a big brown ball lowing groans and smoking,
rounding the linelessness of what-might-be illumination,
sun gowned, maybe, real perhaps, or just mimicking
the word beyond the word where the word supposedly lay

at which destination I cannot see anyway so I don’t
instead deeming it right to feel only
watching not watching while the gazeless codes enrich me,
and feed my blindness something of something
at least to the point of wanting hence feeling.

so I smile at the absurdity of longing
to know the meaning of to know

Back in 90 I was quite the spitfire. I had more red blood cells churning in my veins than just about anybody else in the world I think. They’ve gotten over that trip. Heroin use has been replaced by other things. You don’t read much about it anymore, thank God. It nearly killed me. Took me away from the love of my life more than once. Being almost eighty I’ve got a lot of time to reminisce. My wife Helen lays beside me. I think she’s asleep. Yeah, she’s asleep. So I’ve taken to writing in this journal to try to explain my life to myself. It’s not an easy thing to do. After my career as a rock and roll star in the late 80s and early 90s of the last century I did a lot of things that can’t quite constitute living in the way that most people constitute living. I spent a lot of time running from my demons. There are a lot of reasons for these demons, one in particular that I’m sure that I’ll get to by the time this journal is finished, maybe in the next one, but I’m in no hurry. I’ve got a lifetime to remember a lifetime.
I just got in a little discussion with my wife over which was the best show we ever played. I was telling her that it had to be Memphis Tennessee because of this dream I had on stage just before this ghost of my past attacked me on stage. This is a long story that I’d rather not go into right here, but it has to do with that thing I was talking about that I ‘m sure I’ll get to, the reason for my demons. I was telling Moxy that this Memphis show was the best one and she couldn’t stomach it because of what that kid did to me on stage to me. She rescued me on that one. She put her stiletto heal through that kid’s neck. Almost killed him. She didn’t like thinking about that so I didn’t push it. I don’t push bad things on my Helen to think about anymore. She’s earned the right not to have to think about the bad in this world. She prefers to think about the good, the way the grandkids come over and help her can and make pies on Sundays. The bike rides, one of which we’re going on tomorrow with Minnie, Bob and the kids. Albert and Gia might even come along. I’ll call them in the morning. Albert’s my brother. Gia is his wife. I forgot what I was going to write about. I’m getting old…fell asleep. Times up for this project. Sleep.

There is no telling about the mountains. There is no poetry for the explanation that I can think of, any poetry that I learned came to me in the form of music. Explanations were musical explanations. Words were for direction, music was for understanding. That’s because my daddy was a musician. He never made it, but he played around. Bluegrass mostly, Dylan, the Stones, anything that rocked. He always wore his cowboy hat when he played. People looked at him and wondered what he was. Everybody around Millsville where I grew u listened to country music, and my daddy did too, but he was changing in front of everybody’s eyes, introducing the town to folk, Dylan, anybody who was getting plugged in. He had little patience with people who didn’t recognize the validity of the new music coming out of the world of the late sixties; Hendrix, The Who. My father rocked.

But my father realized that rock and roll is for the elect and the few to prosper from. He became a plumber and I believe he was a happy man. He always seemed to be smiling. He loved me a lot and my brother Albert. He loved our mother a lot, was always grabbing her, playing with her, making her squeel and run away from him in playful ways. It was a good thing to grow up seeing, how my parents were in love with each other. You didn’t see that a lot back then, not now either. It was a good thing.
I remember the mountains. The last day of my life with my father was spent in the mountains of tennessee. We’d spent a week fishing and camping together. My father was teaching me how to play the guitar. That week was filled with fishing and campfires filled with song and guitar playing. He was teaching me rock, too. He was teaching me chords and how to hold the thing and all that, but he was teaching me that it was an instrument that liked to be handled, liked to be controlled. He held it like a man would handle a wrench, but when he tweeked it it would always be with a manly gentleness that I saw was a victory of something like soul over mechanism. I learned that a lot even when I had giant Marshall amps around me, it wasn’t necessarily how loud I could get, but what I could do to people’s souls during the manipulation of that power. If I couldn’t imagine myself playing there at the trickling stream then there was little point in playing. Everybody out there in that audience was looking for something like soul that maybe had been lost to them somehow, maybe that day, maybe that week, maybe forever. I needed to find the soul that music reaches to reel it in for them. When I found it in myself I then had a responsiblity to sculpt it so that people realize it’s not a rought stone, but a beautiful, cool, clear diamond with all of the answers to everything soulless in their lives.
That was my job. All I had to do was go through the moment, follow the contours of the light which was really sound and make it all the way through. Like running through a wall of fire or jumping through a rainbow, that’s pretty poetic to describe the way that I always felt I should play my guitar. I not only had a vision, I had a purpose in pursuing that vision. My purpose was to reunite others with their souls. What I was really trying to do was reunite myself with my own soul. Turns out I could only do that on stage. The less I was on stage and the more I got into heroin the less I was able to do it in a real way for myself. Eventually I fell off the face of the earth. My world had fallen apart. I’d lost Moxy to the drug. I almost lost my life, but something saved me. It was just like my daddy told me could happen when I was a kid, the day before we went back into town and before going home went in for some pie where my daddy got into an argument defending a woman and got shot. He said that when you think that you’ve lost your soul that maybe that’s when you have the best chance of getting it back. It’s then that Jesus watches over you the most. He said that maybe a bird will come down and sit on my shoulder and tell me what to do. Well, frankly, that came true to some degree. I actually found a hawk that allowed me to look into my own soul across many lonely campfire nights when I was running to something, well, running to a magic chair, but I’m getting ahead of myself. What I’m trying to say is that I almost lost my soul and my daddy had warned me that there was always hope for the man who had lost his soul. Came a point in my life where I started searching again for my soul, after losing everything in the world dear to me. I had no choice. And you know what? I found it.