Previously: I thought about a friend from back home …“Hey, we’re going to move, you know” … “Will you come visit me in Denver?” … “There’s a storm coming?” … “Shit, Ernest, what does it look like? … I never visited. Never wrote. Never called. Never talked to Ernest again.
Take it from the top:
fernweh (fern-way) n.
1. An ache for distant places
2. Being homesick for anywhere but home
Alert: there are some slurs used below. I don’t use them lightly, I use them because they are heavy. They are bad words and they bring up bad feelings. Bad feelings, like all feelings, are meant to be felt, honestly and fully, no more and no less.
I left Belmont and went back to my apartment. I made a turkey sandwich and grabbed a beer from the fridge. I sat for a few minutes in silence, but a few minutes was all could handle, a few minutes was all it took for my head to turn into a jumbled mess of ugly thoughts and vivid memories.
A vivid memory is a terrible thing. There’s no rest. I remember things that happened when I was four. Not only remember, but feel, experience. I’ll be sitting at home, or riding the bus, or I’ll be in the middle of a slow day at work and I’ll remember getting lost in the tall grass behind our house. I’ll feel the grass against my face and arms, I’ll see it towering over me and the world will sound like swishing and my heart will start racing and the panic will build up in my throat and quicken my breathing. Or I’ll remember my dad telling me my mom died. The feel of the baseball in my hand that day, the seams under my fingers, the way my arm dropped when he came around the side of the house. I see him look the wrong way at first, as if it was dark or as if there was a crowd and it was hard to find me among all those people. I see he’s wearing house slippers so I know that not only is something wrong, something is tragic. And I’ll know I’m on the bus or in the store, but the memory is right there with me, like it’s all happening at the same time. There’s no distance, and it’s not getting better.
So, when I’m home, I turn on the radio or the television and try to fill my head with empty things. Celebrity gossip. Shows about food. There’s always the risk as I flip through channels that I’ll stumble on something truly awful, like one of the many reality shows featuring grandstanding Southerners reveling in their ignorance, that will hit too close to home and dredge up one of the dozens of racist jokes that I can’t purge from my mind.
Q: Why do niggers keep chickens in their front yard?
A: To teach their kids how to walk!
These are the jokes you tell yourself, America, when you think no one else is listening.
I took a chance on this day and started flipping. A man dressed only in overalls, sporting a robust, parted afro, and sunglasses was being interviewed by a man in a white robe, white turban, and also sunglasses on Channel 19 local cable access. I put down the remote and sat up a little straighter. The man in overalls talked about the importance of being open to multiple paths but then, through trial and error, through practice, through the orientation of one’s inner self to the “magnetic magnificent pull of the universe”, eventually adhering to the “architect” of one specific path and following said architect for the remainder of one’s spiritual journey. Said the host throughout the interview, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.”
Who were these guys? Where did they live? How could I meet him? Did they have a favorite place for brunch? Was there any chance I might run into them as I meandered about the city? If I met them, should I introduce myself? What would we talk about? I’d pummel them with questions. They were so unlike anything in Logan County, Oklahoma. I was about to start writing down a list a questions to keep in my pocket should I ever see them in person, when the dude in overalls started a diatribe against the “sissified, womanized devil-queers” who were “spoiling the fruits of Ra”. Said the host again, “Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay.”
Thought One: I was gawking at two grandstanding Chicagoans reveling in their own ignorance. Somewhere, in another part of the city, a young, over-educated Black man has a head full of thoughts that he can’t get rid of no matter how he tries.
Thought Two: How old is this show, anyways? The hair, the sunglasses, the font on the graphics, the production values in general, all pointed to sometime between 1972 and 1977. Maybe this first aired on the day I was born. Maybe I have that connection, however thin, with these two men and this conversation. What would that mean?
Nothing, of course it would mean nothing.
How many things happened on the day I was born? How many conversations? And am I connected to them all in some mystical way? Of course not, unless I am, in which case how can I keep sitting in this apartment? How can I not go out into the world trying to meet every- one and anyone who might have done anything on the day I was born or who might have done anything on a day on which I did something? The world is drenched in meaning and now my mind is swelling and my heart is bursting and then I remember the chicken jokes and devil-queer discourse and the world is drowning in ignorance. How can I stay in my apartment when there is so much I could and should be doing? The world changes one conversation at a time, right? But I’ve had a world’s worth of conversations with people committed to ignorance, enamored of incorrect information, proud of being flat-out wrong. They see it as rock-and-roll rebellion; school’s out forever and they ain’t going back and learnin’ no more faggoty facts.
Thought Three: Black Chicago-style ignorance and white Oklahoma-style ignorance are not the same. Black Chicago-style ignorance produces shows for local cable access channels, white Oklahoma-style ignorance writes legislation in the halls of Congress.
Thought Four: It’s a goddamn shame so much ignorance is smuggled into the world disguised as religion. I like religion, for the most part. I like religious people. I even go to church sometimes, much to Ana’s confusion and dismay. I like church. I don’t know if I believe in God, but I like the buildings, the pews, the hymnals, the hymns, the prayers, all that — it’s steady. I only wish it had about 60% more fuck you to it because secular ignorance is almost as insufferable as religious ignorance. But Jackson, the church is so patriarchal and oppressive and hypocritical and reactionary. Fuck you, so is the American Restaurant Association you fucking foodie dick. So is fucking Apple and Google and America and capitalism. You want radical? How about you get together with people with whom you have fuck-all in common and spend at least an hour doing something that is, by design, completely unproductive? Nobody making no money for nobody. That’s fucking rebellion! I don’t know if I believe in God, but I believe in such a collective, deliberate, sacred waste of time. Yes, the church sucks, but so does everything. The United States sucks, but I still put stamps on letters. I don’t believe in America but the Grand Canyon is still some shit. Being Christian means I’m bound to bound to James Imhofe — well, I’m bound to my asshole, but that doesn’t mean I deny my entire body. Plus, Johnny Cash: Christian. Plus I believe all that shit about love, even if it means I have to love assholes like James Imhofe.
This guy in one of my English classes wrote in one of his essays, in all lowercase, the insufferable prick, “i don’t believe in god but also on god and under god and above god and around god and betwixt god and between god and behind god and before god and through god and at god and after god and i don’t think there is a god and i think you are god and your dog is god and that bag of corn chips nearly empty and crumbled on the table is god and the corn chips and the crumbs are also god.”
The world is full of dicks like this, dicks who went on to work for Bank of America or hedge funds named Maximus. Dicks who made the decisions that almost wrecked the world. When the rest of us complained, dicks like this said, Why do you even bother speaking to us? We won because we know how the world really works. We said lovely shit in college to get balls deep in all those artsy chicks with the pierced nipples. And it worked. Later, we said lovely shit to get balls deep in the economy and it worked and now we can blow our loads when and where we want to. Go ahead, please, tell us how we should live. If you need us, we’ll be in our large homes in Lincoln Park, or maybe the Gold Coast, or perhaps on the beach in Cabo, where the sun always shines, and we are always warm and well fed.
But I’m sure they are very enlightened and spiritual and therefore so much better than someone who magnifies a Lord who promises to scatter the proud, bring down the powerful, lift up the lowly, and fill the hungry with good things.
Thought Five: Wait a minute, that dude with the afro and the overalls who forty years ago was lamenting the state of the fruits of Ra? That’s Belmont!
Thank you for reading. Next week starts like this:
It was going to be a long four hours until Erie, and what did I expect when we got there?
Then there is a road called “Fangboner” and that’s a funny name, for sure.