fabulist

Christmas has always been a sort of gonzo season, when reason flies out the window for most Americans, and we do our level best to be the perfect enablers for our whining, pathetic, entitled youngsters. In my own feckless youth, the Sears Wishbook would be thumped out onto the table at a family meal with the instructions that we mark our quarry and remember our rationality, and we were one of those families where a hundred dollar gift was a once-in-five-years sort of thing, not an expectation. Back then, 'round 1977 or so, we'd wear down that catalog until it was a feathery stack of dog-eared corners, with items marked, crossed-out, revisited, emphasized with happy faces and exclamation marks, and Christmas morning was joyous, all pajamas and rampaging desire danced out under slowly descending clouds of shredded wrapping paper.

For me, it was always ruined, in some measure, by my astonishing ability to get my toy unwrapped, explored, paraded around the room, and either broken or dismantled in what seemed like a single blur of activity, so I am pictured in hysterical tears in most of our holiday morning photos for a decade, generally holding up a toy missing a leg or other major piece.

Still, there was this month of anticipation, and our home was the best place in the world to anticipate Christmas. I grew up in an actual log cabin, a relatively modest two hundred year-old farmhouse in Scaggsville, Maryland with foot-thick walls, exposed in our family room to reveal enormous hand-hewn logs and mortar chinking bristling with horse hair. We always had a real, and usually live, tree that filled the house with the glorious pine perfume of the season, as a plastic or aluminum tree was so far out of the realm of decency to my parents that one was never even suggested. We decorated outside with a single large wreath of real pine cut from one of our trees, mounted on a large plywood circle my father had cut, and lit with white lights, and would sometimes light the two small pines in the front as well.

Inside, we lit the tree with those big colored bulbs that ran so hot that they sort of baked the tree, releasing even more of that unbearably gorgeous scent, and it was hung with a mixture of our own handmade ornaments, the ornaments from my mother's childhood tree, and an otherwise chaotic mish-mash of decorations, to be topped with our gold foil angel with a real porcelain head, who stood waiting on our old Victorian pump organ until the night of Christmas Eve, when she'd fly to the top of the tree under her own steam, at least if you took my parents' word for it.

My mother took Advent seriously, and we had had a proper wreath and she would studiously enforce the weekly tradition of a short reading and lighting of the next candle on the wreath. We'd hit the date on the Advent calendar each morning at breakfast, too, invariably fighting over who got to open the next little cardboard window on the calendar.

All was not idyllic, of course. There's something to the season that brings up feelings of inadequacy and of being incomplete, and there was an undercurrent of that, too, at times. There were family spats, and frustrations about why we couldn't get wildly expensive gifts like some of the other kids in our school that neatly highlighted what we didn't know then, which was that we really didn't have that much money, with so much going into starting the family's fledgling business and paying the mortgage on a house that cost an astonishing twenty thousand dollars.

My mother, I think, was most sensitive to all this, and she was the most strident critic of the commercialization of the holiday. It hadn't been this way in her youth, she'd maintain, and it was getting worse by the year. We all knew it, sort of, in that way that you see a train rumbling down the tracks and know exactly how little you can do to stop it or change its course. We were different, though, and knew it.

What can you do, right?

"You know," my mother said, brightly, at dinner one night well in advance of Christmas. "I was thinking that we should have a wooden Christmas this year."

Three sets of utensils clinked on plates. My father kept eating.

"What?" asked my sister.

"I was thinking we should go back and have a Christmas like they used to, where everyone made gifts for each other and it was a real holiday, like in the olden days."

Three throats tightened. My father took a sip of tea, searched out and removed a bit of thickened sauce that had made it onto a loop of his handlebar mustache, and my sister spoke up.

"Wait, you mean we're all going get wooden toys? That sort of thing?"

"I don't want a wooden toy," I added, stepping in to voice my horror. "What am I going to do? Just pull a little wooden duck around by a string or something?"

"I just think it would be nice if we got back to basics on Christmas, since it's such a special day," my mother said, and we all just goggled, because she'd clearly finally gone completely insane.

We didn't have a wooden Christmas that year. That year, I got what I still regard as the best present I ever received, an Lloyd's combination clock radio and cassette recorder with which I discovered the joy of radio drama, the pleasure of recording The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy radio series so I could memorize and rehearse every single moment of it for five years, the solace of going to sleep with Brian Eno's Discreet Music playing, and the occasional thrill of waking to "Good Morning," by the Beatles. I've gotten other wonderful gifts since, but that year, well—

It became a sort of mean joke at my mother's expense, the wooden Christmas. She raised the subject a few more times in earnest, then ended up sulking about it for a few years after that. We, of course, found it to be great fun over the years, laughing over anything so preposterous, so stomach-churningly outrageous as forcing kids to accept lousy wooden presents made by hand.

What horrible lives we'd have led.

The only thing is, well, it's not quite so funny anymore. I'm not ten anymore, and this year—this year in which the country I thought I knew really started to go bug nuts, with tea parties and rage and panic and endless, unfathomable stupidity, calmed with the opium surge of singing contests on television and the unlimited cultural mania over dumb women with spray-on tans doing dumb things and cheap electronics from China and...well, this is the fucking year for me.

I've had it. This is when wooden Christmas happens.

See, I'm not a Christian anymore, and it's been thirteen years since I stopped being a middle-class (by birth, not income, alas) white guy with a degree in poetry dabbling in eastern religion and realized that I was, in fact, an actual taoist, albeit one practicing a home-grown flavor of the philosophy that would almost certainly evoke a smirk in the Chinese observer. I don't believe in a historical Jesus, I don't believe in Him as the son of God, I don't believe that what we say happened on Christmas actually happened. It's not my holiday anymore, except by familial and cultural convention.

When all the old celebrants of the day in my family either died or moved with their jobs and families to places elsewhere, and when the old house in Timonium where we'd celebrate the second half of Christmas with my lovely aunt and uncle and my cousins and my grandmother and step-grandfather finally went away, leaving a void, I lost interest in the day.

For years, I had a tree. Later, running late, I started decorating the vacuum cleaner, and I've done that, off and on, for a decade, feeling linguistically smug about the social commentary hidden in what I call "the vacuum of Christmas," but I've missed the celebration and the joy of it. I get together with my mother, my sister, and my nieces, but it's lost most of that magic for me. Thanksgiving was always my true center anyway, with my beloved annual drive to Georgia, the magical family homestead there, and all my wonderful family, so who needs it, right?

I've reached that annoying age when I start to find out, more and more, that my parents were right. I worry sometimes that I'm just getting crankier and more conservative, and that I'm on the verge of obnoxiously declaring myself a libertarian and affirming all those little nagging rake-shaking doubts about the world of the future, but I think it's actually possible that my mother had it right on this one.

This is the year for a wooden Christmas.

I'd already narrowed it down, telling friends and family to please, please not get me anything, because I'm tired of stuff. I'm swimming in stuff, drowning in stuff, stomping around in a rage because I have nowhere to put all this goddamned stuff and it's falling off shelves and tripping me.

Don't get me stuff, please.

I'd narrowed it down to my nieces and nephew, setting a rule that Christmas is for children, but even that, well, I just reduced to gift cards. Gift cards to a bookstore, mind you, but gift cards, given because I feel like society makes it obligatory, unless I want to cross the Rubicon and become the cranky old duff I sound like a lot of the time.

This year feels different. It feels desperate, like those neighborhood parents back in my day who really hated Christmas, and hated their lives, and hated their failures, and hated the choices they'd made, but damn it if we all aren't going to be HAPPY this year. Just spike up the eggnog a bit and shut the hell up, okay?

If you don't shop, the economy will crash.

There's just this ugly, panicked thing out there, this monstrous mutant of the Christmas Spirit™ on the loose, metastasizing like a glittery, green plastic wad of cancer, and you can't turn on the TV, you can't go to a department store, and you just can't set foot in the media-saturated cultural landscape without being washed over by the whole thing, by the whole clownish grinning hypercolored sparkling LED-struing inflated novelty Santa bursting out of an inflatable novelty chimney giggling magical wonderland maniacal desolation of it.

For me, it should be academic. I'm not a Christian anymore. I'm Christian-adjacent, and I've seen and known many people for whom the faith produces wonderful change and magnificent humility, but I don't need it.

This year, though, I've had it. I've had it with the gloss and the empowerment of endless entitled whining from all the little kids who've been genetically mutated into the shock troops of corporate sales forces, their little dye-reddened cry holes yapping out orders to the adult world, lest they unleash the ruinous forces of disappointment. I've had it with Best Buy's CEO claiming that he feels "terrible" to force his employees to shelve their Thanksgiving nights to go in and open those wretched stores at midnight so that wage slaves can march in and fist fight over chattering dolls because nothing else will do, MOMMY. I've had it with packaged cheer, bottled Christmas tree scent to spray on lousy plastic trees, cutesy Christmas cookies stamped out by machines in the billions.

I could let it all go, and be that guy.

I've been that guy for a decade. No skin off my nose.

I could also clean up my table saw and make something. I can sew, I can knit, I can make things. I am the kind of man Thoreau wanted me to be, largely because I read Thoreau and made it so. The thing is, I like to make things and give them away. I like to celebrate, even when it's not my holiday. I like to cook and bake and prepare fine meals.

This year, I think, may be the right time for that wooden Christmas.

The old log house is gone, in the hands of people who I hope treasure it at least half as much as I did. All my uncles are gone, and my grandparents, as well. My father last picked a crumb out of his mustache fourteen years ago.

The country where I grew up is gone, too, gone away into divisions of Red and Blue, with us and against us, I'm right and you're wrong and everyone's just dug in and set to fight.

Like someone watching a train, I can't put my hand out and stop the juggernaut, but I sure as hell can step off the tracks, find my own way, and share what I learn in the process. When I was a kid, it was all about the anticipation, and the desire, the way it burned and the way is made me feel like my whole life would change if I just got the right thing. Sometimes it was true, and my clock radio with a cassette recorder changed things, and my Commodore 64 with a Datasette changed things, but mostly, the gifts are just more details in the day.

If I think back on how it was, I don't miss and often don't even remember the presents I got, unless I managed to break them in some spectacular way. I think back and I remember my family, all of us, back when all those wonderful people were still with us. I remember the drive across Baltimore and running across the lawn of my aunt and uncle's house, and I remember sitting on the hearth talking, and fleeing when their old Dalmatian would break wind. I remember playing in the gully behind the house with my cousins, and having long conversations with my aunt's mother, who I flattered shamelessly and who flattered me in return by speaking with me with the same attention and reverence she would accord another adult.

The gifts were always just the excuse to let us feel special, but you never know that when you're young and you still believe that what television tells you is real, and that what your friends tell you is real, and what the internet and the billboards and the itchy underlying buzz of insatiable need says is real. Christmas is the gonzo season for Americans, and lots of other Westerners, but it's only as real as we make it.

If I had my way, Black Friday would be the day for everyone else that it is for me.

This year, I'm going down early to Georgia. I'll pack my tiny red roadster like a piece of luggage, check the oil and clean my windows, have a lovely two-day drive down my favorite road in the world, Route 301 from Maryland to Sylvania, Georgia, and I'm going to unpack in the back bedroom of the house down there, charge up my netbook, and sit on the porch swing writing and watching the cars go by. I'll be out in the back with the roller harvesting windfall pecans, and I may drive into Savannah for an afternoon. I'll prepare the congealed salads, set up the tables, brine and cook the turkey, polish all the good silver, and otherwise work my fingers to the bone in the best possible way.

At midnight on Black Friday, I will be asleep. At eight AM on Black Friday I will be asleep. Around nine, I'll get up, convene in the kitchen with all my Georgia cousins who I only see twice a year, and we'll assemble some kind of breakfast from the mountains of leftovers, and eat scrambled eggs, venison, pecan pie, turkey, cranberry sauce, congealed salad, dried apple cake, snowflake rolls, cereal, and whatever else is there, and talk and talk and talk and tell stories and share our adventures and just be there, right there, in that moment, far from the crowds clamoring for one stupid piece of plastic crap after another.

Come December 1st, I'm going to start putting together the details of the best wooden Christmas ever, but before then, I will be damned if anything's going to stop me from telling my cousins lurid stories about the street people I meet at work. 'Round noon, I'm going to lock myself in the big bathroom with a book, fill that enormous seven foot clawfoot tub with scalding hot water right up to the rim, and float there, reading, until I'm one big pink raisin.

The way most people live mystifies me, but I was very lucky. I can't stop a rolling train, but I can share my own story, and point out that giving your children a wooden Christmas will be hell for about thirty years, but they'll get over it, and find that they've been living better all along because of what's behind that absurd suggestion.

Maybe there's another way.

And I'm here to tell you it ain't half bad.

I will, on occasion, wax romantic on the delights of the manual typewriter, and my feelings on those marvelous devices remain steadfast. I'm a child of the computer, an aging teen in the age where these machines and the web they spin just keeps getting larger and better and opening into new worlds, and an adult who savors the sweet potential of interconnection that the highest technology allows us, and yet—

The internet calls us, distracts us, lulls us into functional abeyance as we listlessly paddle down the endless streams and by-ways as we wonder about something that tickles the curiosity, then draws us deeper in, and deeper in, and deeper in until we've forgotten what we set out to accomplish. For a writer, in particular, this can be a compelling trap. We start out strong, beating words into submission, then wonder about a word or a fact or something else, and step outside our work to check the consensus, and then we're lost in the wash, dazed and digital, and the hours pick up speed and leave us behind.

The typewriter is a splendid focusing tool, because it can't pick up four strong bars of unlimited information, and, in the manual varieties that I most adore, doesn't hum, doesn't get hot, and doesn't occasionally fail to save my work. It's just there, just an interpreter of crystallizing dreams, and it's the tool with which virtually all the most accomplished novels in our language were realized. At the same time, typewriters are a dwindling resource, with the last manufacturer of manual typewriters finally shutting down their production lines, and they fall prey to facile self-taught craftspersons, who cut them to pieces to make cheap jewelry for literary dilettantes and hangers-on. It's a true shame, but one that won't be recognized until long after it's too late.

The Alphasmart 3000, on the other hand, is a refugee of a more recent era, an almost laughably limited machine that stores about a hundred pages in eight files selected with dedicated keys, revealing your writing through a digital letterbox of four lines of forty characters each. It has no apps, no distinct software or capacity for installing any, and can't connect to the internet, retrieve email, or browse anything beyond those fixed eight files. Even the means by which it connects to a computer is idiosyncratic—one either plugs a USB cable from the 3000 to one's host computer or uses a now quite rare infrared connection, fires up a word processor on the host computer, and presses a key on the 3000 to send the contents of the currently open file to the host computer by simulating a keyboard typing the file in. Seriously.

You plug it in, tell it to go, and it dutifully types your work into the computer to which it's attached. That's it. There's no communications software, no hardware specific plug-ins, widgets, or drivers, just clever hardware that tells the host computer that a keyboard is attached. A more sophisticated user might call it absurd, a clunky workaround, but it's designed to be robust, and it is robust.

It's also physically robust, because the original Alphasmart and Alphasmart 2000, which evolved into the 3000, the somewhat awkward mid-level Dana, and the current Neo, was designed for children, and reflects their wild, destructive nature with sturdy, simplified construction. I've demonstrated mine with enough waist-level drops onto a variety of surfaces to have smashed far more sophisticated machines, and it doesn't show a mark from the effort. It's been frozen and broiled, sitting in the trunk of my car as my be-anywhere writing machine, and it's still here, still stalwart. The slightly dated translucent blue-green plastic of the case seems almost surreally impervious to anything but a targeted assault.

It runs on standard AA batteries, and runs nearly forever at that—I wrote the bulk of the book manuscript I'm currently editing in fits and starts on my 3000, watching the battery indicator stay stubbornly in one place because of its odd operating mode where it's really only consuming power when keys are being pressed. I've carried it with me on cross-country trains, on planes, on the bus, at work and at play, writing whenever there's a free moment of clarity, and it just works. It just works, which is more than can be said for more sophisticated machines sold to us as perfect do-it-all multi-tools, and it just does one thing, and does it very well.

The keys aren't the most satisfying, and my single longstanding complaint about the 3000 is that the spacebar needs a firm tap in a direction perpendicular to the keybed and will stick if struck near the edges, but they work, and in the last seven years, I haven't worn them out. The display isn't backlit, so you have to use it in lighting conditions comparable to the conditions in which one would read a book, and there's no font—just a 1980-vintage 5x7 dot matrix character against LCD grey. None of these flaws do more than cause an occasional and fleeing wrinkle at the bridge of my nose, and for the price, the 3000 is a bargain. I carry it everywhere, never worrying about the risks of losing a thousand dollar (or more) laptop, and if I leave it in the trunk of my car for months, a backup for those moments when inspiration strikes, it's always alive when I dig it out and fire it up.

When the Dana came out, I picked up one of those as well, and while the keyboard on the Dana is absolutely fantastic, the screen's not quite as nice, and the stylus-based interface (the Dana is essentially a Palm device) and attendant complexity of having multiple apps and files and storage media (with a dependance on using the Palm software to move data in and out) disturbs the simple surface tension of the original 3000 enough that it's never gotten as much use. The newer Neo model, which looks for all the world like a hybrid of the 3000 and the Dana, with the 3000's simplicity and the Dana's lovely keyboard, would likely be an even more perfect companion, though I can't speak to its virtues, having never found myself needing more than my old reliable 3000.

Brand new, the Neo is $169 at the time of this writing, which is a bargain for a latter-day manual typewriter with all the attendant virtues of being able to directly dump one's writing to a full-featured computer for editing, and used 3000s go for as little as $20 on ebay or Amazon, with the Neo running about $75 or thereabouts.

As a tool, they are unmatched. Simple, robust, long-lived, and economical, I can't think of anything remotely comparable in this day and age, and if you're the kind of writer I am, who's a little too prone to the easy surrender to distraction, I can't recommend them highly enough.

In my latest push to finish manuscripts, get motivated, and otherwise get back out there in the public eye, I've been diversifying my online presence. I've got a new story sketchbook blog, The Blue Star Lounge, which I'm going to syndicate here so it's where you'll find some, but not all, of the content I post on LJ. I've added a facebook "fan" page, where I'll be doing short updates and news items, and a Twitter account where I'll do whatever the hell you can do in one sentence. More to come, but this is a start.

I was a kid who never quite fit into the world, and as a consequence, I knew that sensation of the incoming flood far too well, when you knew it was coming, the rush and roar and heat of it, when all you can do is surrender, because the dam's already burst, and it's just a matter of time before you're swept away.

"Mr. Wall," said Mrs. Marcellus, a particularly cruel and thoughtless first grade teacher in my school, "Am I to take it that we're going to be blessed with another of your fine performances?"

I was standing there, humiliated, having been dressed down for slipping ahead in my reader in front of the whole class, and the jeering, giggling, lurching masses of those ugly, awful grins of twenty kids who also failed to understand a thing about how I worked, and who I was meant to be in this world, were hot enough to feel like the late afternoon sun in a Maryland summer.

I stood, and burned in the glare.

"No, I am not," I said, jutting my jaw out defiantly, and proved myself wrong almost immediately, dissolving into the choking gales of desperate tears.

"Well here we go," said my horrid teacher, rolling her jaundiced eyes. "Bring on those big fat crocodile tears, Joseph, and show the whole class what a great big baby you can be."

Even then, even lost in a moment where I felt like I was the only one of me there'd ever be, and the only one who'd ever know, I knew she was wrong.

In my household, my father cried. My father cried, and cried over things as simple and overt as the lilting, tragic melodies of Prokofiev's Lieutenant Kijé suite, and he was a strong, limitless man who shared those tears easily, and shared why we cry, too.

"Son, if you listen right here," he said, counting out the measures as we sat in front of a pair of tweed Advent speakers, "this part is about the romance of a man who never existed, but if you listen to the way the composer wrote the music, he carries us along, so we feel what we're meant to feel."

"If it's a romance, why does it sound sad?"

"It's Russian. Russian music always sounds a little sad."

"But if he's in love, why is it sad?"

"There's sadness in everything, Joe-B. Sometimes you can be happier than you've ever been and still feel a little sad. Sometimes, you can feel sad because something is so beautiful it's just too much to bear."

"Things can be like that?" I asked. It was all a mystery to me.

"You'll know better when you've seen more of the world."

He was right, of course. I have seen so much more, and it's easier to make me cry than ever. These days, though, when I reflect on the running commentary of a foolish, mean-spirited teacher, I feel sad, too, but for her.

"How long shall we expect to enjoy these great big gales of tears, Mr. Wall? The entire class is waiting for your interruption to end, so that we can continue on the assigned lesson in our readers."

"You big baby," whispered the nearest, meanest kid, with a snicker, and even then, I knew that I was anything but. I'd seen my father cry in his headphones, silently conducting his Kijé , and there was no one stronger in the world, no one smarter, no onebetter. Even then, even when I was just a kid, I knew who I was, even if I couldn't explain how I got that way.

When my niece was coming up, my sister once commented, finding that she was crying frequently, how like me she was. "She's just...tuned in, like you always were," she said, and I nodded.

"An eleven, yep."

It's my own little code for that sort of hair trigger heart, being the kind of person who's always turned up past the ten on the easy feeling scale.

Of course, I didn't always want it. When it was a movie day, on those special days, I always sort of wanted them to run Pete's Dragon for the hundredth time, rather than spool up my favorite film, The Red Balloon, a film I loved so much I never wanted to see it again, because it was just so playful, and magical, and terribly, terribly hard when it took the turns that were most familiar to me.

The film would chatter along in the projector and I'd recognize the familiar streets of a Parisian neighborhood that no longer exists, and barely did even then, and I'd feel that electric static of familiar twinges up my spine, because I loved that film, loved that boy, loved those streets, loved that balloon, and I knew what would happen, because it always happened.

I'd see myself as a quiet French boy, see myself finding the balloon, find myself in the kind of chaste love with the balloon, and the chase, the charging, terrifying chase, and the moment when the bad kids stoned the balloon, finishing it off with a stamping foot, and all the air would leave the room. I'd sob very, very quietly, a skill you learn when you cry easily, and try to look away, but then...well, then, all the balloons in Paris would come flying, and it was too much to bear, too beautiful and sad and wonderful and everything, and I'd desperately wave to the teacher to ask to be excused to use the lavatory, because if I opened my mouth—

If all the balloons in Paris came to me, why would that be sad?

You just don't understand such things until you've seen the world. Sometimes the things that make you cry the hardest, even when you've seen them again and again, are the ones that most remind you that life is a kind of glorious agony, where nothing is either good or bad, but some impossible mixture of things. I cry when the dogs die, when love's not enough, when I see myself up there, living out some parallel of my own life, even though it's all just a story, told for the purpose of entertainment and enlightenment.

It's all just a story, so why am I crying?

It was just so confusing. Sitting in a movie theater in the city, with my parents flanking me, I watched 2001: A Space Odyssey, annoyed by the damned mimes in ape costumes, enraptured by the futuristic space station and the moon and the giant space ship, so lovingly rendered, and when Dave Bowman pulled the little glass blocks out of Hal's brain, accompanied by that steadily slowing monologue, I caught myself at it again. Distracted by the baffling remainder of the film, I wiped my tears and sat through it, until the lights came up in the theater.

"Dad? Did Hal die?"

"I think so, though it's hard to know what happened in that movie."

"That was sad, but I don't know why I was sad because Hal was mean."

"It's sad when any thinking being dies, Joe," my father said, and he was right.

"Why was the computer mean?"

"I can't say."

Still, when I sing "Daisy," I tend to slow down at the end.

I took a decade off, though, after my father died, because I'd cried enough, and I watched movies that didn't take me to those places. I can say with some certainty that I have probably seen Romy and Michele's High School Reunion more frequently than the film's editors. Sometimes you just don't want to be sad anymore, and there's a world out there dedicated to dampening those lonesome feelings so you won't have to hurt. There's always Ernest Goes To Camp, Ernest Goes To Jail, and Ernest Scared Stupid, and hell, didn't I watch enough depressing subtitled French films in the nineties? Can't I just escape it all for a moment?

Until you fall in love with someone who's lost someone, and who wears it on their sleeve as raw and open as a wound, and then it all comes flooding back, the rush and roar and heat of it, and you find that you've finally grown up enough that it's not unbearable, the other side of that boundary between life and death, love and loss, and kindness and cruelty. You sit in a packed theater with the guy who opened the floodgates, even as you feel, deep down, that it's almost over, both in the film and there, in the world, watching Ennis and Jack and thinking, "why the fuck did I have to see this movie with him, of all the fucking people in the world?"

"Jack, I swear," Ennis says, smoothing out the shirt that's wrapped around Jack's shirt in the closet in his trailer, and you sob, audibly, and go completely salt-blind as the tears come, knowing that the guy next to you is crying over someone else, someone who came before you and who you'll never be, and that's how things are, being grown up in a complex, impossible world.

Here comes eleven, you think, and it's not so bad now that you're a grown, middle-aged man. Here comes eleven. How lucky am I to know this feeling? How lucky to know this world.

In the mercury lamp glare of the parking lot to the movie theater, you don't say a word, but even though you know it's all just a fantasy, you half expect to see all the balloons in Paris coming your way, to carry you away from it all, and let out a laugh that's not entirely a laugh.

"What?"

"Nothing. Thought I saw all the balloons in Paris for a second."

He rolls his eyes. You find the car, and your taillights disappear in the night, where the credits ought to be, if life were really like that.

If only.

---

© 2011 Joe Belknap Wall

I had a pair of handsome but heartbreakingly narrow shoes to return to a retailer, so I saddled up The Beastly Conveyance, strapped the package to the seat, and spent an enjoyable ten minutes fruitlessly leaping on the kickstart lever until it reached that state of stable discontent I refer to as The Thunderous Cacophony. On the throbbing, jagged, uncertain wave of The Thunderous Cacophony, I roared up the street, screamed out onto the minor highway, lurched into the gas station, and took off for UPS in a cloud of blue smoke and pandemonium.

I'm feeling somewhat more comfortable with The Beastly Conveyance and its insistence on affecting a mortifying cloud of musky swagger with every move and gesture, as subtle a presence on the road as one might cultivate on the sidewalk by allowing penis and scrotum to dangle gloriously from one's fly at all times, but it's best in modest portions served as fresh and bloody as a well-turned prime rib. Nevertheless, when the mood's right, there is a certain appeal.

"Go 'round for another strafing run, mate?" asks the throaty crackle from the rust-pitted pipes.

Sure, I think, and tuck in my knees to make the deep bend onto the highway. I'm still a bit uncertain on the machine, and after last week's urban cut and run on the Vespa, I can't forget that this is a very large, very heavy, and very, very old contraption, with brakes moved by rusty metal rods instead of sensible hydraulics. I lean in, and the weight of the thing is clear, but it's surefooted at the same time, so I rally myself to manifest a bit of trust in the endeavour and throw a bit of extra fuel into the effort.

On the highway, I can meet and beat the cars at their game, if I choose, though I hardly do. The appeal of racing up  the superslab in full obeisance to The Thunderous Cacophony is lost on me, with the sensory thrill of the wind tearing at the finer hairs on my corpus wearing thin as that pull turns to a yank, and then to a repetitive, unwelcome caress. My riding mate, Old Bean, is more of that ilk, a genial and battle-trained survivor of the New Jersey Turnpike hurricane, but it'll take me some convincing to ever truly enjoy that exhausting pursuit.

Worse still, at a certain speed, it becomes horribly obvious to me that it is not just my shirt flapping in the gale.

In my own particular way, I am a lifelong subject of the glories of two-wheeled transit, but I prefer my pleasures in smaller portions, like creamy sips of Irish coffee or a fine stemmed glass of Lillet after an elegant meal, meant to savor more than to swill.

On this ride, though, I'm taking a palliative, a consolation rendered on the road, for that moment, just a day prior, when my attempt to find an altogether more appropriate stablemate for The Beastly Conveyance in the form of a civilized and almost dispassionate R60/5 ended with the definitive counteroffer from some tiresome hipster drawn to the quirky, campy style of the old boxers. It is no matter, in the long scheme of things, but it's a bit more bitter seasoning to a bitter season, and so I twist the throttle hard, overtake a lumbering monstrosity of Milwaukee chrome, and duck off the highway again for the rolling green ways around the reservoir.

The Beastly Conveyance is not happy; crackling, popping, and otherwise demonstrating a piquant dissatisfaction with my lack of urgency, but I am the master and the Beast is the ass that bears me on this brief sojourn before the sun destroys the day. We roll together, up and over the cresting hills, down into the dips and valleys, where the water below sparkles like champagne, and through the endless, embracing green woods.

"It's a good run, mate! I can almost see the cliffs of Dover looming over the Channel!"

I haven't the heart to place a hand on the worn burgundy steel of the tank and explain that, well, the Germans won the war after all, decades later, when all The Thunderous Cacophony from our old Lionheart went silent, replaced by Continental efficiency, oft-lamented lost marques, and deserted factories in lifeless towns. For now, though the Beast is shaking the meat from my bones like a chicken boiled into complete surrender, we're going to carry on—my late father's Triumph, this swiftly warming morning, and me.

"I just worry about you on that thing," say the people who care about me, and I know the risks, and manage the dangers, but the far worse of all of those threats is the one that's killing us all—the disconnection from this mighty, wild, and unkempt world.

I pull into to the penultimate light on the way home, and faces turn to me, because the rumbling shout of The Thunderous Cacophony shall not be ignored, not for a moment, and though they are more comfortable, cooler, more composed, and almost certainly less unsettled than I am at that instant, they are penitents to the deadness that's destroying the world. Think smaller, be safer, dream sensible, artificial dreams, and all will be well with us, and overhead, the stars are fading into the jaundiced yellow skies at night, lost in the glare of the cancerous suburban sprawl.Dropped from my black Spitfire to my funeral barge.
Give me one kiss in apple-blossom.
Give me one wish, and I'd be wassailing
In the orchard, my English rose,I turn off the lights, lock the door, and the sun's already starting its incessant burning, and I'm hoping to dream a few sensible, artificial dreams today in spite of my better instincts, and wonder who'll bring me home.

The screwdriver is buzzing in my hand.

As I'm extracting the worn-out brass screw at the bottom of this door hinge,
applying just enough pressure to force the blade to engage
with the distant memory of the pattern left in the screw,
I am already favoring my other arm, which hurts for no reason at all,
and the electric hum of something starting to fail is spreading.

It starts in the palm as a delicate itch, like a beetle walking there,
and becomes the patter of falling rain,
then a rush,
then a roar.

I am old enough to remember television static,
back in the days when nothingness meant exactly that—
a roaring snowstorm of prickly light and the sound of flat nothing,
lighting up the room with a cool blue-white light.

"I was watching that," my father says,
only stirring when I reach out to switch off the set
and silence the empty rush of noise.
 
In those days, I'd laugh. Ridiculous,
to hang onto such a thing,
to hang onto nothingness.

Still, I knew the static well, from when a friend explained
how you could find your way to sleep in all that noise.

"It's simple," she said. "You let the static fall out of the set,

just let it start to pour through the screen
and fill up the room."

You let it fill up the room, wherever you happen to be
when sleep abandons you,
and you let it rise like a tide against the rocks.

You let it rise, feeling the cool, empty sensation of emptiness
that tickles the fine hairs on the legs and forearms,
let it rise till it's rippling around your nose and mouth,
until you're under, breathing it in,
breathing it out.

The patterns go away, the shapes, the colors, the unlimited
collections of aimless, consuming thoughts,
the unanswered questions, the unfinished arguments,
the unresolved loves and losses and uncertainties,
and you dissolve into the static,
into sleep.

The screwdriver in my hand is buzzing,
then it's my palm, then my fingertips, then a sensation
that climbs my forearm, and I can carry on or stop,
and there is so much more work to do.
There is so much more work to do.

The screwdriver clatters to the floor and I curse,
leaning into the doorframe to rub the life back into my arm.

In the worst of it, I have been resilient, adaptable,
and strong as an ox,
lifting things that make nearby eyes widen, just a bit,
to see what I can do.

Even now, I could rear up in rage
and kick that door right off its hinges,
rousing my strength where it lies,
and I'm beaten by a single worn-out screw
and the fuzzy wash of nerves firing at random.

It's just so tedious, this increasing awareness
of being on the other side of a long, long slope,
where it's all just going to get harder, and fuzzier,
and more difficult by the day.

The static rises in the lowlands where I used to play,
an unstoppable flood clawing at the coastline,
and I pick up my screwdriver and run for other high points,
because I'm not ready to sleep just yet.

If I was to die right now, right here, on this cool, lush, green summer morning,
just crumpling slowly and folding up sideways under the clothesline tree,
scattering a handful of clothespins and one wet sock,
one wet pair of boxer shorts, and one wet washcloth,
this might just turn out all right.

If I was to wake up here, but elsewhere, still under the clothesline tree,
I would get up, shake the grass and dust off of my one wet sock,
my one wet pair of boxer shorts, and my one wet washcloth,
gather up my clothespins, and carry on with my work.

The birds would carry on singing,
even though I know that they are not singing, at least
not as I do, nor as badly as I do,
but rather, they are crying out for attention, for territory, and for sex.

The traffic would carry on, over on the next street,
in an endless chain of other people going to other places.

The cicadas would carry on, that sharp, coppery buzz

I get that this is a fantasia, just as I get that all the balloons in Paris aren't going to come and carry me away from a world of bullies, and yet, it really does capture a certain feeling that dog people, by which I mean incorrigible, incurable, stuck-right-in-it dog people like me know only too well.

When my dog Rose, my faithful companion of fourteen years, was on the floor at my feet, paddling in a whole body seizure that left her still, not breathing as I pressed my ear to her chest and cried like I have not cried over another person in my life, only to stir to life again for another moment, I said I'd never do it again. I'd never go through another full lifespan of a creature like that. It was a beautiful sunny morning, and she perked up from the seizure while my ex ran for his car, and we sat on the porch together and watched the traffic going by until it was time for me to scoop her up and carry her out to the car so we could race to the vet.

When she arched back in my lap and started paddling again as the scenery flew by, I said I'd never do it again. I'll never do this again. It's just too much. With the next revival, I slung her in my arms and leapt out of the car, crossing miles with the longest strides I've ever made, and I rushed in, through the office, calling for help which came from people who'd known her as long as I have, and we sat her on the stainless surface in an exam room and watched her stir again, struggling to sit up.

My ex and I came back together over years of separate lives, just for the moment, just there, to make the hardest decision one can make, and she sat up and watched us, and nothing was ever going to be right again. How do you tell someone to kill your friend, even when it's the only thing left?

The poison came and the breath went and went and went and went away forever.

I can't ever do this again.

When things really fell apart, when the family business crashed and the money went and everybody just seemed to die all at once, she was there. She'd wake up in the night, when I'd stagger out of bed, mumbling nonsense and sleepwalking in that curious, helpless sort of dance I do when things get really bad. I'd stumble out of bed, in a clumsy simulation of life, dress, and roam the house, chasing away the demons, and she'd stay at my side, watching out, shepherding my unconscious self throughout the night. When I'd wake myself up in the midst of some fruitless lower-brain ritual of trying to solve problems insoluble by my waking self, she'd be there, standing by, waiting.

Everything was noticed. Every noise, every movement, every activity. You'd find her at the window, eyes narrowed, standing by—waiting. Her breed was a sturdy, irascible lot, with genes combined through careful husbandry to produce a perfect machine for the protection of Chinese princesses, and here I was, the worst Chinese princess of them all, but you can't really pick your assignments.

I can't ever do this again.

Every dog was a taunt, a reminder.

Sure, you're lean and strong and amazing now, but I know where it's all going to end.

Fortunately, my willpower and my penchant for self-deception are powerful. I lasted five months. In five months, I did not sleep through a single night, cursing the fact that I'd never thought to set up a recorder to capture the symphony of snoring that an absurdly wrinkled snout can generate. You get so dependent on cacophony as a sedative that you can't help but feel its absence as a yawning, impossible void. The sleepwalker returned, and I'd find the house rearranged every morning. I started listlessly browsing the rescue sites, finding a face here or there, framed in preposterous ears, that just speaks, but I wasn't going to do anything, because I couldn't.

Even now, one of the clearest memories I have is of Rose, and that razor thin division in my history where she was breathing, and strong, and there, and when she wasn't anymore. I think of all the moments when she kept me company, put up with my ravings, and patiently followed me around the house through the night, to see me into the next day, and it's just why I'm here, writing this down, as a dog person.

"Dog," I said, standing in a parking lot in suburban Rockville with my quarry on a borrowed leash, wearing the little bandanna around her neck that they make the dogs wear at adoption fairs because it makes them 72% more lovable, "I am aware that you're going to break my heart in fourteen or fifteen years, so you owe me big time now, okay?"

Dog, as she was known on that day, as I refused to call her "Tammy," the shelter name she'd picked up in South Carolina, just sort of sniffed around, not fully invested in the notion of being my friend, because she'd been locked in a too-small crate and starved down to thirteen pounds for her whole puppyhood and knew big pink monkey people to be mean, complicated creatures. I dug a knuckle into her ridiculous radar dish ear and she made that little sound that Rose used to make when I'd dig a knuckle into her ridiculous backwards Dorito African Violet leaf ear, and that was just fine.

I will be 56 when I have to go through it all again, if statistics hold. Dog #2, following a year later, probably won't make it quite so long, as he's an older gentleman. With luck, I'll be wiser then, armed with poetry and history and all the things that make us so much more with every passing year, and this time, it won't catch me unaware or in the depths of denial.

These dogs save me every day, rushing to the door when I come home from another endless, frustrating day, and I can't help but laugh when Daisy jumps on me with some random object in her mouth, showing me the amazing thing she's found, or feel the tension in my head and heart subside when Lou, the smallest beagle in the world, leaps nearly to my chin, over and over, baying a full-throated hunting howl that's as a high and exuberant as a Japanese pop song played on a piccolo, despite his oversized dignity and gentlemanly bearing.

These damn dogs will never fend off a mugger, catch a burglar, or come up with a cure for cancer, but they save me from the storms and hazes of doubt and rage and hopelessness that catch me when I'm wandering down the daily dead-end lanes. When I'm most unsure of whether I'm up to the task of being human, when I've spent a day on the phone, unraveling one bureaucratic mess after another, wondering if I'm as smart as I think I am, or when I think that I'm destined to settle into a self-imposed hermit existence, comfortable with nothing more than my happy routines, they beg to differ.

I clump up the front steps, dig out my keys, step through the door, and they are waiting to tell me that I am, right there and right then, the single most important person in the entire world.

One day, they will each break my heart, but they earn the right to do so, in the way that dogs do, by rewriting the fabric of space and time with something as simple as the inscrutable mathematics of a well-timed tip of the head, and so it all goes on, day after day, as it should.

I get this fantasia, as sentimental, imprecise, and overwrought as it may be, because I am a dog person, now and forever—incorrigible, incurable, and stuck-right-in-it. Mine won't flip a car, but they can still carry me away from the worst of things, just when I need it most, and so I can't watch this video with a critical eye, because it touches my history, sparking the fuses like grey tendrils tangled in my head that set the old fireworks blazing.

We're a mess, we dog people, but that's okay.

I've not been sleeping well, managing to fall asleep as soon as I get home, then waking at midnight for hours of dead air before I get back to sleep. Work's busy, times are a bother, and there's just too much to do. Last night, though, I almost made it.

Lou's a persistent, but highly specific, sleeper. He hops up into the futon, leaping a whole body length to get his stubby little legs up there, then roams and circles, making his little oink oink oink grunting monologue as he digs and searches for that perfectly zen spot, his absurd, velvet ears a ragged blur in the air. Finally, he'll find a spot, dig at it, then circle several times to let the tricolor pudding of fur settle into that just-so niche in the bedlinens like a puddle after a beagle rain. Usually, it's all quiet from there.

I squeezed him out like the pit of a grape, he charged out, jumped on me, then went looking for a new ditch in which to lie, finding that ideal point where the snoring started in under a minute.

Me, however—I've been awake ever since, as goes the noble tradition.

Daisy came nosing in, with that little tentative whine that I believe is dog for "breakfast? breakfast now?" but I'm not having it.

"Little girl, it's hours before that time. Just get up here."

I hold up the edge of the blanket, she steps up and into the fabric cave, and it's just a moment before she, too, is deep in sleep.

Everyone but me. Damn dogs.

 It's been something of a saga, the old ruin on the hillside. I've spent fifteen years fixing, refixing, stabilizing, demolishing, salvaging, and otherwise working at trying to make the enormous 24x24 foot cabin on a West Virginia mountainside that my father bought as a refuge from his own busy life. I've had minor setbacks, little leaks, thefts, and workarounds, and big ones, like losing my connection to the power lines (and, with that, my water, as the well pump needs heavy power) and the most recent one, where I came in to find that the wind had torn off half the roofing over the winter, soaked the interior, and otherwise made the place uninhabitable. It's filled with small animals, huge spiders, and ubiquitous wasps, and is flaming hot all summer and unheatable in the winter.

I've been accumulating materials as I could afford them to renovate the place, but it's just too much. It's literally five times as much space as I need, as the throngs of visiting associates never materialized (partly because the place is admittedly not much fun unless you're outside), and I don't have the budget, the truck, or the access my father had when this was his rural fever dream.

Last year, I started rethinking. I inventoried the materials I'd accumulated, did mountains of research, and dusted off my drawing board. As it turned out, I'd accumulated about half the materials I'd need to do a cursory renovation on the cabin, but more than enough to build a fresh one in a tiny house mode. Sometimes, given a choice between the endless, impossible project and the reset button, you gotta reach for the reset.

The Blue Moon, as it's known in the area, is setting. It was my father's dream, or one of them, but it's too much for me. Mine's considerably more modest, and within reach now.
The New Moon isn't big enough for a family. It's going to be 8x10 feet on the ground, sitting on 4x6 skids on concrete piers floating on tamped gravel (with an upgrade path to a better  foundation when I have the time and money). Twelve feet tall, with a generous sleeping loft, and a steeply pitched roof with no penetrations and a foot of overhang on all sides. Camp kitchenette with a 2 burner propane stove, big ice chest, sink fed by 2 seven gallon jugs I can refill in town. Propane heater for now, Sardine marine wood stove when I can afford it. Fourteen windows,  vents in the floor and at the gables to move hot air out. T1-11 siding for now, cedar when I can afford it. Small solar system for lights, amp for iPod with car speakers built into the walls, charger for netbook and phone, couple fans to keep the air moving. Little diner booth for working, eating, hanging out, converts to bed at night. If I add a hammock over that, it'll sleep 4, with one more in a sleeping bag on the floor. Water collection from the roof into a buried cistern for washing water (with a DIY Berkey filter to make drinking water). New super-tight outhouse up the hill that's cozy, clean, stinkless, and spiderproof. Well-maintained typewriter for writing, fresh ribbon, ream of paper.

All night, trains rumbling through. All day, reading, swimming, hiking, writing, breathing. I'm daring myself to fail at this, really, but I don't aim to do so. I've got all I need, but for the time and the last few materials. It means doing little else for the rest of the year, but after that, there's somewhere to go. I've always been a daydreamer, and sometimes I do what I mean to do. 
The Blue Moon will get a new roof, a little tidying, and will go on to being the biggest shed an 8x10 house ever had. Maybe I'll keep a canoe in there.