I have a treadmill in my basement. Ok, if you must know, it’s a Peloton treadmill. Can we move on now? It is pretty fabulous though. My father would have loved one. Although, maybe it’s a little too hi-falootin? Too many features. The music & the scenery. I think, like me, he would not listen to the music. Because like me, he would hate it. This is my journal entry so I can say things like: Pop Music is for the Birds or Billie Eilish is Shitty. I probably shouldn’t though. Because I don’t wanna get into a whole thing here. & who cares? & I do like some pop music. Nothing is absolute except perhaps the Eilish statement. But I try to avoid remarks about taste. I really do. Because it derails things. It sends us spinning into irrelevant directions. I couldn’t care less what kind of music you listen to or what your politics are or what god you pray to. It matters not. & the fires of mediocrity ever burn.

I get the feeling that I am writing for my life. I get the feeling that I am running for my life. No kidding. It seems so severe to say such a thing. Even, I’m sure you are thinking, pretentious &, frankly, a little dramatic. But right now in the calm & serenity of my kitchen with the Carnival of the Animals (The Swan) playing & the whoosh of insane traffic on Glenford Wittenberg Road reminding me how dangerous the world is I have Michael Chabon & Moonglow to bring me around. To calm me down. He is telling me to write it down, like he writes it down, because it helps. It must help him. It most certainly is helping me. Because even when sitting I can’t stop my legs from tensing up & cramping. In part due to the fourteen & change miles I ran yesterday & the rest I can accredit to the Delgado Men & perhaps even the Kearns Men, though for some reason I feel no kinship to them. Maybe it is my mild strain of misogyny that gives all credit to the male side of my ancestry? That it is only the dark ghosts of my father’s family that inhabit me. But in fact the male side of my mother’s family, fuck it, my mother’s family, are equally at work here… this only being revealed to me now as I write.

Running Journal Entry #1

Recently I was asked, hypothetically, if an asteroid was headed toward the earth & I had an ideal cocktail of narcotics & alcohol to enjoy for my final days, what would it be? I knew the answer immediately. I didn’t even have to think. I know the answer now the way one knows, in their heart, they way they feel about, say, the existence of God or who they are going to vote for in the next presidential election or what their favourite song is. I spoke the answer without hesitation, but as I was revealing it I began to feel reticent & as I looked around the room I realized I did not want to share, although I did, what I wanted with these, at best, friendly strangers, & knew, at the end of it, that they now knew something about me, as I did, that was wholly unpleasant & brought on a silence filled with looking away & nervous laughter.

I left Nashville in blinding rain. The sky completely closed off & forbidden. On each side of the road, cars twisted & bent from slamming into another unexpectedly. Going too fast. Following too close. The thought persisted that the rain would let up. Soon I would see the sky.

Nashville, TN

This is what my life is like & I bring it with me. Cormac McCarthy’s The Orchard Keeper. A Winged Victory for the Sullen & I am looking up the word: coruscant. I am enamored w McCarthy: Through the leaves of the hardwoods he could see the zinc-colored roof of the church faintly coruscant and a patch of boarded siding weathered the paper-gray of a waspnest. I pull into East Nashville & park in the parking lot of The Turnip Truck & go inside where I find things I am familiar with & put them in a basket & happily pay for them. The  check-out woman calls me honey & baby & tells me her children won’t eat McDonalds & she is proud of them. I am proud of them too.

My wife hates landscapes & long books.

I imagine her rewritten as a dark-eyed junco

In the snow under the shadow of a large spruce,

Her wing extended harbouring a solitary fledgeling,

Which is unusual, thin legs of weeds & grass dangle

From the point of her exquisite & delicate beak.

Daily routine in the Catskills:

Check the WIFI connection.

Duck & dodge The American Beech,

Musclewood & Birch eventually blown down,

Besieged in barrage of ice & wind.

Electricity comes & goes

& there is a waiting that occurs

That is central to the heart

Of insignificance & distraction.

The white table glows in the room

& on the table there is a camera:

A Hasselblad from Gothenburg,

Sweden, blessed w The Gota Alv,

Best known for industry & trade,

& served as model & inspiration for

The Pony Express snaking its way

From St. Joseph, Missouri

Through Olef Bergstrom’s Nebraska

to Sacramento, California

Where I drove a 1974 Volvo

Into the ground…

I’ve been @ The London Motel for three days

In the corner room that looks out over Freeway 99

& I see-saw from window to peephole

To see who is wandering by out on the street.

An Endless Parade of Motherfuckers

In the words of Michael Chabon

Who was writing about Berkeley

Which isn’t far from here but might as well be…

My daughter was four when we were attacked

By wasps in the front yard of our house

in Upstate New York

Where we weathered the early years of her life,

The Pandemic & my father’s death.

I slam the fifty down above the left corner pocket of the black Dynamo right in the face of the guy drawing back to take a shot. “Fifty bucks for next. Here’s another twenty says you miss that shot.”

Quinn leans like a dark totem in the corner. She is slumped over & smoking & the smoke is everywhere all around her. She has on the wobbly table in front of her: Empties. Shot glasses & pint glasses. She is holding a pint in the hand that isn’t stove-piping the Pall Mall & it’s half full & she lifts it to her tortured lips & downs it & slams it back to the table scattering ashes from the heap of butts in the ashtray.

Here’s how it is w fathers: Even after you have treated them like absolute shit & they, in turn, have been pretty hard on you & generally been someone you don’t like too much, they show up @ the ICU & wait in the waiting room looking worried as hell. They might even cry if you or anyone else was around to see it. Maybe they do anyway.

Not long after my mother died, she began to visit me frequently. There are many common misconceptions when it comes to, & pardon me for using this term, “paranormal activity” & one of them is ghosts, spectres, wraiths, phantoms & what-have-you only visit @ night. Or they arrive, when they do, w some cryptic message, some mystery for us to solve, some wrong to be righted. My experience has been a little different…

Every time I think back on it…everything was a mess.

I was born @ Saint Agnes Hospital, August 2nd, 1969…

We drove out through the dust…