3/23/25
Some things I noticed include a hesitancy to write in pen - not for the permanence of it but because it bleeds through to the back of the page; my soft bated breath heroically resisting the howling winds at the lookout on Skyline Drive - not knowing enough to declare independence from my habits but meaning to every time cigarette smoke dries up my throat so I can’t breathe right the rest of the day - instead choosing to smoke only at night for the quick amnesia; I’m forgiven and gratified come morning - and my lungs are a yellow-stained hallway in the lobby of a motel somewhere far away where I throw open the windows and my bags on the bed and open my arms wide and shout Home, Sweet Home! for all the parking lot to hear it.
I noticed inspiration spikes and pitfalls and spikes in pitfalls. Should I leap right over or in or gently lower myself down? Playing the tape in my car (it was a perfect record of Richmond and DC, the nights with Ted and Grace, Jake, Anna, Jay but I only learned their names saying heart-felt goodbyes on the patio in a light rain) so I must have made a choice one way or another. Ted invited me to Spain. We talked about dreams and adventures and couldn’t admit we were in one. You just can’t admit that.
I made plans by doing nothing. Watch it fall into place and give up entirely. I noticed how beautiful the whole thing is and fell in love with everyone again, if it wasn’t obvious.
Did you know Jim, the guy selling Möney’s merch is friends with Fontanez, and Salt too? He was an old Yarga-head, of course, just like Fontanez was young in Hartford and I might be young too but it sure doesn’t feel like it. I feel like a piece of tape holding up a hand-drawn show flyer by the mantle in VSC from 2014. I can feel a blurry face see me wilting and reach up to rub me real hard back into place. Back straight and really stickin’ now, unnamed heads outside to rejoin the decades old mingle of leather jackets, pins and punk memorabilia. I might switch places with a piece of brown glass poking out from under the stairs, or maybe one of the hundreds of cigarette butts in the concrete receptacle; flipped on its side and expanded it becomes a hollow, pitch-black cylinder stretching two miles to the other side of the mountain. Just a couple yards in Paw Paw tunnel I could only see my feet in a little puddle, and the infrequent but comforting drip of runoff tracing the hard, loose shale to rejoin the Chesapeake & Ohio Canal. The stream is nearly still, silent, and out of sight. I took a few more steps then ran back to the door-shaped light - deep breath of relief in the open sky, I crushed my can and headed back to the campsite.
Later, half-asleep in my car I learned to tell the time by the angle of moonlight on the little pond at Greg’s farm, Shenandoah, Virginia:
there was a tornado warning in the valley that night and Greg said, “Keep an eye to the sky, not much of a shelter in my barn but you ought to be okay. Mountains protect us here pretty good,” which they did. They protected, served, and inspired. They created that funnel of wind I was talking about, that harsh whip in my face leaning over the edge. They created a boulder-cradle which rocked me to sleep like a parent loves a baby;
I was all three. Now adolescent eating cherry pie in Rudy’s Diner we asked the waitress what’s happening in town. She said, “In Shenandoah, don’t blink and you’ll miss everything.”
We blinked and missed it all anyway as the scenery shifted to Lina’s place, a cozy little farm where a great white Pyrenees bear-dog named Aspen led us to a soft patch of grass to rest our heads that night. We set up camp, Aspen tagging along, maintaining that calm, graceful air of an experienced farm dog. Grateful for the company, we pet and played with and tackled that dog till the sun stooped below the mountains and we sped off to Charlottesville again. It was “Curtis on Tour” at UVA’s Old Cabell Hall - a round chamber with wide, open ceilings and a golden organ adorning the walls - with the legendary Jason Vieaux on guitar and Robert Díaz on viola, alongside two unnamed women in matching red dress to round out the quartet. A replica of Raphael’s “School of Athens” dominated the theater’s back wall. Zach pointed out Pythagoras and Socrates. I counted 17 slack-jawed sleepers in the crowd of old and balding dignitaries getting their hit for the evening during the second movement of Paganini’s “Quartet in A minor.” Before the piece Díaz explained everything & I have to be honest, it ruined my night. See my double-standards? A writer is a con-man, don’t forget it.
Hesitancy put aside, it was time to get active. “Let’s go ride the mini truck,” Jack said with certainty. If there’s one person in the world I can trust with my life to rip through Washington’s every stop sign while I’m bouncing around in the pickup - it’s Jack. And he floored it, I mean really pushed that tiny truck through the winding black streets and the empty ownerless fields and the empty manicured fields behind lit-up empty mansions - and away from all that, once more in the dark tunnel of night and into the star-shaped passageway,
right through to eternity.