And Not A Sole For Miles

Breakfast with Grandma

I found my grandma standing in front of my open refrigerator door one morning, a gallon of milk tipped all the way back, guzzling it fast and not spilling a drop. It’s funny that that’s the thing that struck me most at the time, how she was just chugging this gallon of milk without losing any. My grandma had died going on ten years before, so you’d think seeing her there at all would be itself the big shocker that morning, but no, at least not at first.

When she was done with the milk she tossed the empty jug over her shoulder and started in on the eggs. It was Sunday morning; I go grocery shopping on Saturdays. She picked a good time to stop by if she was hungry. She ate each of the dozen eggs in one bite, shell and all, and tossed the carton over her shoulder. It landed next to the milk jug, in a little pile she was making, along with an emptied styrofoam tray of ground beef, an emptied jar of jam, and a wrapper for a brick of medium cheddar cheese. I have to imagine it took her some time to chew through all the cheese, it was a new one.

I didn’t say anything to her, and she didn’t notice me. I went back to my bedroom and paced around, forgetting for the moment that I’d long since kicked the nail biting habit. I didn’t believe it was really my grandma. My eyes told me it was my grandma, she had my grandma’s skin, my grandma’s hair, she wore my grandma’s clothes, her shoes, her pearls, her perfume. But some other sense, one I can’t name, was screaming at me with at least as much certainty that this was not my grandma, that my grandma was dead and even if she wasn’t, the thing in my kitchen wasn’t her. I’d gotten up that morning to find a spider in my kitchen the size of my dead grandmother, far too big to put outside without touching it, far too big to smash. When it was done with my fridge and my pantry, what would it eat next?

My phone was charging on my nightstand. My wallet was there with it, which was lucky since I normally keep it in a dish on the counter in the kitchen. I took them both and cut a hole in my bedroom window screen with the nail file end of a pair of clippers from my headboard. I jumped out the window. I guess this isn’t my house anymore, I thought. Surprisingly, I didn’t feel much of any way about leaving my house behind with nothing but the clothes on my back, my phone, and my wallet. I was a little irked about the groceries, since I’d just gone to the trouble of getting them. My car though… there was no way to get to the keys without going through the kitchen. I left it behind. It hurt, it really hurt to leave the car behind like that, like I was leaving a friend behind, or no, not a friend, a pet. Someone who needed me. And after a few days of walking everywhere, it hurt a lot more.

Against You

No matter how fast you run, or how far, the sky’s still above you, watching. A gentle breeze cools the sweat on your forehead: that’s surveillance. The dew collecting on your shoes is reporting your whereabouts at this very moment. The rays of golden sunlight burn you and you alone. Blades of grass lash you and the leaves in the trees are snapping jaws. The world turns against you.

Cigarette Paper

I ran my fingers along the surface of her skin gently, careful to touch but not press. The feeling was that of real skin. Her skin. So much so I got carried away. I applied too much pressure. A flame rippled out from my palm. It burned through her like through a cigarette paper. She curled and twisted and lifted off the bed. Bright light, a wisp of smoke, and then it was over. I gasped, and my gasp scattered her ashes around the room, so that if you looked you wouldn’t have seen she was there.

The 25 Bus

It was a clear, warm, summer morning. Jim was doubled over at the bus stop catching his breath. His alarm hadn’t gone off—or he had turned it off in his sleep—so to make his bus he had to rush out the door and run all the way. Now he wasn’t sure, had he missed the bus, or was it coming any minute? He took out his phone to check the time, but—shit!—in his hurry he’d left it back at home.

Five and then ten minutes passed, or at least what Jim thought was ten minutes, and still the 25 bus didn’t come round the bend. It’d be another hour before the next one. Might as well go home, Jim thought. Call into work and tell them he’d be late. But just as he was about to leave, the 25 came toddling into view. Jim was relieved for a moment, and then not: There was something wrong with the bus. It was crawling down the road, limping, dragging itself. A broken-down bus wouldn’t get him to work on time, wouldn’t get him anywhere, so before it had even reached his stop Jim had given up on it and was headed back home.

The bus’s engine suddenly roared and it billowed a cloud of black exhaust and lurched forward, jumping the curb, flattening the bus stop sign—the one Jim had just been standing by—and running down the embankment along the highway. After a moment of stunned inaction, Jim followed the bus, running down the embankment muttering, “Oh shit, oh shit, oh shit”, as he went. The bus was still running, the engine still roaring and the exhaust still belching black smoke, but its tires were only spinning in place and digging into the earth now. A fir tree at the bottom of the hill had caught the bus and was holding it in place.

Jim couldn’t see inside the bus, the windows were tinted. He approached several times to try to pry open the doors, but the bus was growling and trembling like a wounded animal, and Jim was scared back. Eventually he did get hands on the door, but he couldn’t pull it open. Water was trickling out of the seams. His hands were left wet, and they smelled, a strange smell, like the ocean, and vinegar, and road kill that’s been left too long and popped.

Unable to do anything to help, Jim stepped back and could only watch. If he’d had his phone then he would’ve called for help, but he didn’t have his phone. Maybe he could flag down a car. He tromped back up the embankment. He looked up and down the street, but there wasn’t a single car. It’d been quite that morning, he recalled. He would’ve noticed if the streets were deserted, wouldn’t he?

Back down the hill, the bus started coughing and choking, and then it shuddered and died. The doors flung open and the water emptied out. The windows, it turned out, weren’t tinted, the bus was just filled with water so murky it looked black— or would a bus full of clean water look just as black? In any event the water that had filled the bus wasn’t clean. Seaweed spilled out with it, and sea stars, driftwood, barnacles… and body parts, human body parts, gooey and partially dissolved. The smell coming out with the water didn’t have the undertones of acidity or brine like the little bit Jim had gotten on his arms. Even from several yards away and up on the sidewalk, Jim started gagging on the smell of death and decomposition almost as soon as the doors were opened.

And still not a car to be seen, until, at last, limping round the bend, came the 25 bus—another 25 bus—with windows tinted black, and water trickling from every seam.

Punk Spirit

Punk is an aesthetic, a form of music, a style of dress, but it’s also a spirit, a spirit in two parts. It isn’t concerned with how things are supposed to be done. It doesn’t ask for anything. It doesn’t owe anyone. It does things its own way. That’s the first thing. Consequences aren’t important. There’s nothing worth compromising yourself for. That’s the beginning of punk spirit.

Well the park bench, door, and sleeping in the rain / Little kids sitting in the shooting gallery / Set yourself up from innocence to misery / Well this is what you want, not the way of what they fucking say. —Tim Armstrong of Rancid in the song “1998”, from the album “Life Won’t Wait”

There are consequences. You’ll never be on anyone’s short list, or long list. You’ll never get a record contract. You’ll never have a big budget, or any budget. After you’re dead, no one will do a retrospective of your work, no one will make a documentary about your life, your name won’t be used as an adjective. You’ll always need a day job. You’ll die in obscurity, and you’ll stay there.

These things might not turn out to be true—nothing's certain about the future—but you have to believe they will. You can be happy about it, or unhappy about it, but you have to believe it, and you have to persist.

I had nothing, I had nothing to lose, and all that I was doing I was doing straight, always driven by the motto, “Either this way or no way.” —Blixa Bargeld in the 2008 TV show “Mein Leben”, viewable on youtube, translated by Google and corrected by me

Pig-headedness is only half of it. The other half is solidarity with the other punks, the other people taking their own way and taking it to the end.

Further, ever since ancient times, the skeptical Indra, Lord of Heaven, has come to test the intentions of practitioners, as has Mara the Tempter come to disturb and obstruct the practitioner’s training in the Way. All instances of this have occurred when someone has not let go of hopes for fame and gain. When great compassion is deep within you, and your wish to spiritually aid sentient beings everywhere is well seasoned, there are no such obstructions. —Eihei Dōgen in “Keisei Sanshoku” of his “Shōbōgenzō” as translated by Hubert Nearman

this is important.

Daily Mirror, London, March 9, 1939

Novice Wizard

Harry Potter’s a lie. Magic doesn’t require wands, and there aren’t different sorts of magic, and it doesn’t have any rules. Magic is simply commanding reality, saying the sky is red, and then it’s red, or that the river is ice, and then it’s ice, or that the young woman manning the tacky little hat shop is an old woman, and then she’s an old woman. It’s as simple as that, if you have magic, and impossible of you don’t.

Here we have a novice wizard. “Don’t lock the door”, his dad had said, because his dad didn’t have the key to get back in. But our novice wizard saw in this an opportunity to develop his magic, so he locked the door and shut it. If his magic was strong enough he would just tell the door to open, and the door would be open.

His magic wasn’t strong enough. Now his dad was angry with him. It was hot outside, and boring, and they were already late for lunch before they got locked out of the house. But these are small things. If our wizard is ever to develop his magic, then he has to lock doors that he has no key to, over and over again, until he finds his magic. And if he never does, then he’s found that he lacks magic, which is almost as good, for it’s a much better thing to find by trying that you have no magic than it is to never find—by never trying—that you do.

My Shoes

My shoes have holes in them, one in each, where the calluses on the balls of my feet wear on my soles. They still look pretty nice though, and they’re comfortable, as long as it isn’t wet outside. I plan on keeping them. I hate shopping for shoes. I hate that someone can pry money out of me just because I have feet. It’s like my feet don’t belong to me, like I’m just renting them from Vans. And it takes forever to pick a pair, and they never feel as good as my old pair, and they always look too crisp—not till after a few weeks do new shoes start to look normal—and the whole time I’m picking them, I’m thinking, “What’s wrong with the ones I’ve got on now?”, and it’s a good question.

So I’ve decided not to buy shoes anymore. I’m going to wear these ones out. I’m going to beat the ever-loving shit out of them. I’ll patch the holes in their soles, and the next ones, and the ones after those. If they rip, or if they pop a seam, I’ll mend them. By the time I’m through with my shoes, there won’t be a single original stitch of canvas or scrap of rubber left in them, all that’ll have been turned over forty, fifty times. I’m going to put a half billion steps on these shoes. They’ll be nothing when I’m done with them, unrecognizable. I’m going to exhaust my shoes completely. I have to. They’re the only shoes I’m ever going to have.

On the Surface of the Sky

A damp, soggy, gray and sunless afternoon, typical for November. And on this typical day we find three friends, middle schoolers, killing time in their typical way, meandering down the train tracks and staying out of sight while they do things they’re afraid to be caught doing. In this case they’re smoking cigarettes. Joseph—everyone but his friends call him Joe—had snuck four cigarettes from his dad’s pack. Once he and the others were far enough down the tracks, Joseph would take one out of his pocket, light it, take a puff, and pass it to one of the others, like it was a joint. It would make its rounds while the three complained about school, teachers, parents, younger siblings— except for Virginia, who did have a younger brother but didn’t see him, and who didn’t live with her parents, but with an aunt and uncle. When the first cigarette was gone, they’d light the next and do the same with it. After two cigarettes, none of them would really want to smoke a third, but they’d all pressure each other into it. The fourth cigarette would be lit, but never would anyone take a drag off it; they’d take turns holding it for as long as they could stomach being so close to the smoke.

Things had been getting awkward between the three of them. Joseph could sense that something had changed, but couldn’t put his finger on it and didn’t want to bring it up. What he was noticing was that Virginia and Josh—the third one—had become boyfriend and girlfriend, but for the time being were keeping it secret. They talked on the phone for hours each night, sent each other pictures back and forth, exchanged meaningful looks around their friends, and sometimes they even went down the tracks, just the two of them.

They walked for a while and were far out of sight from anyone, but Joseph wasn’t yet comfortable. Josh grew impatient, but he didn’t say anything. But then, a miracle. It was Virginia who spotted it, a six-pack of beer, unopened and unsullied, lying in the gravel by the track. It was a great and wondrous find, but it also meant they’d have to go further still down the tracks. This six-pack could be a trap, Joseph argued, left by the cops to catch underage drinkers, or it could belong to a bum who was off in the brush taking a watery shit, or who knows what. Everyone agreed to go further down the tracks. Josh took up the responsibility of carrying the beer, which he wrapped in his coat to hide, and the three of them pressed on, abuzz with excitement.

They walked further down the tracks then they had ever before, and as they went the railway grew more and more poorly maintained, with broken and misaligned tracks, and trees encroaching on either side. The woods got thicker and darker and the path they followed, with the trees walling them in, got to feeling more like a cave. Virginia and Josh were getting afraid, and they were saying things like, “We have just as far to go back as we’ve come”, but Joseph was excited, and he wanted to go further and to see what was at the end of the line. It got to the point that they had to duck and weave to get through brambles laced across the tracks, and now Josh was even direct enough to shout—at Joseph, but plausibly at the thorns—“This is stupid!” But they all went through, and together they emerged into a clearing.

Here was a second, dreadful miracle. In the clearing was a Boeing 747, stood on its nose. Maybe it was touching the ground, or maybe it hovered an inch above it. Maybe it was resting on the tip of a blade of grass. In any event, there it stood, pointing straight up and down, motionless and without a sound. Josh and Virginia immediately ran away, Josh dropping his jacket as he fled, and the cans he was concealing in it burst open, spraying jets of beer. He and Virginia dashed through the brambles and got cuts all over, but they didn’t care. As they ran, they didn’t question if Joseph was running with them. They ran without stopping until they reached the place they’d found the beer. They stopped to catch their breath, and it was only then that they noticed Joseph was gone. “He must’ve run through the woods”, Josh said.

But unlike Josh and Virginia, Joseph didn’t run. He was transfixed by the sight, and couldn’t tear himself away. There were people inside the plane, and they didn’t all tumble down to the nose. They sat in their seats, and walked down the isle, just as if nothing was out of the ordinary. Their down was a different down than Joseph’s. He watched them through the windows, watched them killing time on their computers, or watching movies, or reading books. He watched them getting little drinks, making little trips to the bathroom, adjusting their light and their air. Joseph wondered where they were flying to, and he wondered what they saw through the windows, looking out instead of in. Then they all seemed startled, like there’d been a bump, and then another one. Turbulence, though, from the outside the plane was standing as still as ever. The turbulence got bad. The people got scared. Then all at once they shifted, like when a cook tosses some hash into the air from a skillet and catches it. But still, on the outside, the plane remained absolutely motionless. Joseph could see that their bodies had flown ten or twelve feet in a fraction of a second, and he could see them slam into the walls, ceiling, and floor of the cabin, and he knew that it was all terribly violent, but from outside it was so quiet and so still, so that it didn’t feel violent.

The wing nearest Joseph came off in a ball of fire and streaked upward, disappearing into the clouds. People came flying out with it, and followed. Some were on fire. Then, suddenly, the plane… the people… it was all rubble, bits and scraps and flaming chunks scattering and flying— or falling— or trailing into the sky. Then, nothing. Not a trace of the plane remained. It was strewn about up there somewhere.

Joseph took out one of his dad’s cigarettes, smoked it by himself, and threw up.

Money

“There’s just nothing like the thrill of performing— all the people cheering, all the fans. That’s what keeps me coming back”, she answered, lying. She hated performing and always had. That was her mom’s thing, not hers. But she was on yet another comeback tour, not for the thrill of it, but because she needed money, just like anyone else.