You Can Always Go Home Again

“Can’t stop the spirits when they need you…this life is more than just a read-through”—RHCP “Can’t Stop”

I suppose i’m stubborn as the idea was to re-haul this week’s post entirely as per events moving as they do during the course of a week and here in the south in the winter by the Alabama border the light is harsher somehow, the fields browned, and some tree are shorn of leaves and declare their personality better. In fact having driven past this cluster many times over 20 years i became transfixed for first time by the distinctive rows of pecans and mostly as i’d never really “seen” it before. I miss a ton of shit for someone who actually DOES try to pay attention but ever since the ride a few years ago along Mobile Bay pushing up into Tuscaloosa from the Black Belt farm country, through Tupelo then across river at Muscle Shoals up into Shiloh and leaving some but not all personal baggage behind finally, gaining confidence and unwittingly forming a cocoon from which would unfold new plans but encased in old dreams. Airing out Black Beauty the orphan bike these past months having stood neglected on lawn and her rattling cylinders coughing up fur-balls as she took to the road with the same stop and start enthusiasm as the dog being called to the truck for an outing, this is all essential to emotional well-being.

Similar to taking the young dog to a lake the other day— boundaries are intuited and caution thrown to wind like seed as he has been finding lately a surprising full-throated if almost querulous experimental bark at night when aroused by a possum or racoon loitering about and at the lake i watched him flail

around with furious ungainly splashy paddles as he risked the deeper water for first time to fetch a ball and defying gravity as he has now learned to scramble up finally into folded backseats of pick-up. He loves going places. I feared him sinking like a stone in that clear water where the bream were clearly visible in pairings of delicate shadows and i was fully prepared to empty pockets of phone, wallet in case i needed to dive in after him. Speaking of rescues this happened the other night here basically in my dooryard:

Every ambulance in town (i counted at least 4) and double that many squad cars all with lights flashing blocking my truck but i had enough cigarettes for the evening and all on account of my youthful neighbors’ toddler who had temporarily choked on some mashed potatoes and turned red for a few minutes but she was fine even before the father covered the few blocks in a sprint down to the fire station at the end of our road just as a precaution. In those instances you don’t pester the authorities with questions and none seemed likely to offer any answers but he told me the story in the morning as our dogs began their daily hi-jinx chasing each other around like horny teenagers.

Huron talks to me in the morning and if like today its not even 4 AM and his nose is brushing mine and i feel lazy and ignore his yawning which turns plaintive when he has a need and they are varied and go back to sleep and then i know i’ll find he has peed on the floor by the door. And he has. That i can deal with. Whining for no reason now thats another thing entirely and i believe neither of us feels comfortable with that sort of cumbersome behaviour. So this is the stuff i’d experimented with half tongue in cheek i guess before all the mayhem.

There was no pressure now or need to impress others. The freedom from that was crucial. Music and books, films whatever resonated in the natural world and made flesh of dreams and he idly wondered if he needed anyone else these days and the days were no longer endless ridges framed on horizon, these days, and with an intimate to accentuate or otherwise stir up old insecurities was it worth it? even if he had it to lose and at this late date the jury still out on that and this liminal connection was different not made purely of stardust or hope but from something he hadn’t parsed and yet from others before and it had always been spun from more prurient fabric, the wanton peripheral physical ache and for validation beyond just release via touch and mutual longing and because thats how he sensed he was alive. Maybe a romantic partner would lead him astray from the pursuit of greatness which is defined by most if generous as wish to make best of talent, resources and rise above self-imposed limitations, triggering again the crippling self-conscious demons of the past where events and faces blurred together and sometimes appeared as might the sudden perception of tangle of water moccasins writhing coiled together discreet but deadly on the sandy bottom of an otherwise unobtrusive copper colored creek, shaded by the innocent green of sweet gum and live oak and magnolia trees. Maybe the temptation to explain it all again would unspool the tenuous self determination as it had with the libertine woman so many years ago, the first consummation of all the build up over a spring and summer and she was the one who made the salient observation at the very start of that passionate disaster a planned tryst to start it all her two young kids napping in soft humidity of late summer Vermont afternoon upstairs in that old country place she and the father of the youngest were renovating and they lay together skin damp and naked and quiet with throat choking expenditure of repressed lust and gratifying compatibility even if there was faint guilt of betrayal but there are usually extenuating circumstances. She being the more mature worldly in respect to responsibility and the harsher realities observed and as they were deep in it now and unapologetic as that is what the flesh and blood when acting in conjunction with a higher power than the mind’s feeble reasoning will assert, she glanced around in the mellow afternoon light her contours and warmth already somehow comfortingly familiar and parts to be considered sacred almost even when he hated her later and she certainly despised him “I wish we never had to leave this room,” and that was a prophecy he came back to over and over again turning in his mind like a single gold coin salvaged from the wreckage of a once proud Spanish Galleon. Regret is its own particular addiction.

If not careful this is what this introspective almost gluttonous embrace of vulnerability might do: reveal him as charlatan, pretender plagiarising the greatness of others by daring to think he could resemble them and that came with the same shock as a splash of icy river water administered with trembling palm in the heat of a July afternoon on a trout stream overhung with shade too and after covering it with searching casts and for untold minutes hours lost in his own world and in that universe where he lived in greatness at moments when the fly probed the precise holding spot of a fish and the spell was broken simultaneously by a minor explosion of surface water and urgent response of rod tip and the quivering urgency of life fighting for life underneath in the shadowed cool water and THAT was the turmoil he had always carried inside himself as well he thought and no one here in the anonymous dark of all these years of mornings alone but not lonely, in those wee small hours no one bore witness but himself…

Oddly enough i wrote this last part before discovering one of the most interesting conversations i have seen on this platform yet and here i will share it here as i must have with notes already and highly recommend for its utter fascination and addictive nature of intellectual and emotional depth. admit to being more concerned with referring things i like on here than polishing my own stuff which exists for its own sake partly in order to lend credibility to pointing towards deeper more coherent stuff. Our enthusiasms bind us together is i guess the point and sometimes mine get ahead of me. Food for thought.

Wow. they are

Ben Wakefield

and

Unfixed

. The video is astounding and i must admit i could relate to his electric guitar heads poking up in background as they both play off each other ideas like jazz musicians. Unbelievable and so soothing. Enjoy.

I imagine next week i’ll try to come up with a less scattered summary of what will be a year on substack (and i may wanna delete some of those earlier posts but why bother? they are what they are) which has been no small pleasure and sorry not to have provided much in way to read for

Amy

who is valiantly recouping from hip surgery and remains initial gratifying proof of substantive humans on here and of what positive reinforcements and in her case tough love can provide via this platform to vagrant souls like me. xo