Eight American Anthems for Nobody
1.
The truth is I don’t want to be writing this but feel compelled on account of waking up to my dog retching for several hours into the first morning of the new year, fireworks even still slapping our scabrous plaster walls.
Is this a celebration? I find that hard to believe given the desperate energy at work in America.
All the pickups now are oversized, and the flavors erupt in a medical tint on the tongue as sunlight bruises the kitchen cabinets, early morning, relief of another day not yet begun.
And yet—where do I take it, and with what expression on my face? All along I’d been missing the point but knew only that something was missing. It’s not love without action, just speech without love.
The child sleeps in the other room, enmeshed already in an idea of who she is that’s entirely imagined and reinforced at every turn.
These are the days we’ve identified as the ones we must push through on our way to some bright ocean over the cliff. But is that true—did we make it up, or did someone else make it up for us?
I know you’re tempted to run, in the vain hope you don’t contain the entirety of your problems just inside the quarter-inch crust of your skull.
There’s something more to be said about that perhaps, but this is not it.
2.
I found all this time could not be arranged, after all. The bets we make with ourselves pay off, or don’t, and in the end are forgotten by everyone we know and everyone they know, and even the memory of everyone we know is forgotten. Which is not to say it doesn’t matter, because of course it does right now, but to latch on so fiercely we feel our skin might shred does little good for anyone.
So why can’t I feel it under my feet: the concrete or wood laminate or pavement? Look at the rage, the racing thoughts, distracted by my own mind imagining itself—hologram in a bell-shaped cloud.
The package arrives and arrives and arrives. The microwave beeps out the oatmeal. My own hands slice up garlic as olive oil snaps in the pan.
I don’t know what more can be said, or should be. We’ve nearly lost now the notion of universal principles, bedrock of civilization, handed over to score points on the road to corporate feudalism.
Am I being serious here? Of course I am, I reply, so close my sour breath fogs the bathroom mirror.
3.
Surrounded by steam and stainless steel in the dish pit all summer, Frisch’s Big Boy and Burger King combo at a turnpike rest stop west of Cleveland. I was just a temporary dish boy among the regular adults, all broken, smelling of grease and sweat, each a manager or assistant manager, on their feet seven days a week—caught in the serious business of the working poor.
Have we so narrowly defined freedom now as to include nothing more than the expression of individual preferences? An expressive feudalism marked by class lines hardening into caste? I see it and fear it, touching my hand to the brick facade of a Chase bank in my hometown, the memory 20 years old.
Now all I do is prepare to prepare, perpetual gap year marked by indigestion and the saying and doing of things I viscerally understand to be wrong. What used to torment me I’m now resigned to in exchange for food and rent.
And so I bring it to you here—it’s your problem now, yours.
No, the truth is I wake up bewildered every day. Victories are short-lived and their memory oppressive. If you take five minutes today in silence, you’ll know what I mean.
Nothing easier or more ruinous than holding fast to delusions, even as they’re nipped at every edge by saltwater. We all come from the ocean, or so we’re told. Perhaps why we seek its vanishing stillness in the dark, bottomless waters within.
4.
The stain-pattered mirror affixed to the wall in my bathroom is perhaps the only place I can look without seeing myself, eclipsed by decades of narration orbiting an imaginary core that falls away upon inspection. But this can’t be discussed, not really, just pointed to, though admittedly my eyes only lock onto the extended finger.
Is it cruel to exhaust myself with details I have so little use for? Making the case for whatever I’m currently obsessed with as though there’s final truth to be found there—echo location in an oil stain suffocating the Gulf.
“A serious but hardly credible charge,” reads the final, 1-sentence report on my life, written in longhand beneath my collarbones the moment I was born. I’ll admit here I never took calculus, as though that’s something worthwhile to admit while in line at the grocery store, and to you, a stranger standing behind me, alarmed by the admission.
The real problem is we own nothing and we control nothing, not even ourselves. It’s not just a mindset, though it’s also that. The abstract demons come for us now, conjured into the Corporations that devour the fields and oceans as they pulverize our labor and intellect into the powder that powers the machine.
Fingers gripped across my bicep and I wake with a start to realize the grip is my own—rain still coming down, eight hours in and eight more to go. Streetlight glances off the picture frame on my dresser as a garbage truck shudders toward the onramp.
Little to do now but press on—not forward, as that word grants the illusion of progress where none is deserved. Look in the fridge: those are my apples and mushrooms and yogurt. Cracked coffee mug on a table. Video of blue crabs scrambling across wet sand.
What brought us here? What brought us here is you.
5.
In the meantime, the roots are thin and easily pulled. My ‘must-haves’ blink as though on a game show where I’m both host and participant. Socialism, I think, what is it?
The expressway obliterates what it intends to serve—a shadow play too dark to be comical. The math is clear and can only be obscured for so long.
Ah, but listen to me ramble on, ignoring your real need for silence even as you ignore it yourself, playing footsie with internet cynics to fill every gap that would otherwise force reflection. Well, that’s okay, which is to say it’s not really okay, but that I do it, too.
It’s finally cold here in California. No, not cold, but I’m on my bike again and the canyon wind bites into my bright-red knuckles, still dark out, daylight-savings time be damned.
Perhaps the feelings are right but the facts are wrong.
I have only myself as a reference point, in search of ultimate truth and bagels and convenient parking and a narrow band of acceptable weather, centered somehow in all of reality—foundation of every delusion. Because you also exist, or so I’m told to assume, and to you who is reading this it is I who also exist—strange imposition on you.
These days are days no matter how we choose to upset them with particulars. My nose, for example, and the kiss of the steering wheel as the front end of the Sebring wrapped the utility pole.
Like you, I have memories that go nowhere, clips from another age, another time, me but not-me in an alternate universe on the near side of the void.
6.
Yet it’s hard to recognize history as it occurs, depending so much as it does on the willingness of people to hold it alive in their bones, who have their own bodies to deal with and all the problems that brings.
So what do we do now that the cinderblock is our default mode of existence?
I stand on my tiptoes on a fence at the top of the hill, corner of Edgemont and Grape, but accomplish little more than losing my balance.
It’s the everyday things—turn of the doorknob, heat from the bottom of the ceramic bowl, the grass needing mowed yet again. And that’s only because they’re the only things that are, I shout to you across the street while shading my eyes from the afternoon sun, and you vanish quick as you can out of sight.
The frontier is this moment, I’m sorry to say. Like I almost forgot to tell you I watched two owls touch talons over the canyon two nights ago. If more can be said, or needs to be, here’s hoping you can supply it.
7.
All this to say nothing. And to say it again and again. I feel how I feel, and how I exist in the world relies heavily on managing exactly that. “You are not your thoughts,” etc etc. And it’s true. But then, what am I?
TEMPORARY SHELTER printed in all caps across a banner festooning the warehouse facade downtown.
Perhaps what I’m saying is that the measurements flow forth regardless of how we attempt to capture them in our cupped palms. As rainwater overruns the gutter, a miniature waterfall threatens the lawn into mud. Oh well, is not the answer, not exactly.
It’s not patience we’re lacking, but stillness. Letting the quiet soften the hard angles until we become so confused not even the dog makes sense anymore, asleep on the couch, sharp but oblivious, heavy but small.
We identified the growth, we removed it, and still. Yes, and still.
8.
Not that it matters, but I’m heavily invested in a personal narrative, the same as you, pulling tangential facts and subjective errors together into something comprehensive but wrong in a spectacular sense.
There is no big reveal coming in the end, just a wave that aggravates outward from each figurative step I take no matter what I’m doing. In line, God forbid, at CVS, or watching the neighbor undress, as I’ve done, or sitting in traffic, a participant of traffic, as we all are in our private transportation systems, wasting personal wealth as well as the incalculable wealth of the land, now paved over and rotten.
Blue sweatshirt in the back of my closet, oversized and twenty-years old. So many pairs of pants it’s embarrassing. But this is my small corner of the universe and I work hard to keep it well lit, surrounded as I am by darkness without depth on a hair trigger to crush in and erase even the memory of the memory of it all as music is just noise to the animals that can’t order the notes.