I fell asleep on New Year’s Eve and missed the flip of the clock. I woke up and immediately thought of Agent Dale Cooper’s question at the end of Twin Peaks: The Return: “What year is this?” I’ve been feeling nostalgic and welcomed the flippant thought of being plucked from this timeline and put somewhere else entirely different. Like most, I am relieved for 2020 to end. Though, I’m not sure it matters that the years change. Sure, it feels like we are getting a fresh start, but it won’t take long for us to realize the same struggles continue. I’ve always thought of the United States as latently fascist, and the past presidential election has shown me that in America, fascism is dangerously close to becoming manifest. Over the past four years, violent groups of Trump supporters have become more and more confident. A co-worker of mine, who has been the lone Trump supporter at work, recently claimed to be a Proud Boy. I guess he didn’t expect the break room to erupt in laughter when he announced this. I don’t think he expected the barrage of criticisms either. I have no sympathy for him. Since the election, he no longer speaks his politics publicly. As many of my co-workers let him know, people who voted for Trump are saying that racism, sexism, and xenophobia don’t matter. It’s disparaging that half of the country feels this way.
I have several plans for the new year. The most important is to write more. I only wrote one poem in 2020, and it’s debatable if I’m even finished with that. It’s not shocking how much being a full-time “essential” worker can drain you of your vitality. Years ago, on a lark, I read William Shatner’s biography Up Till Now and he wrote something that spoke to me. It was about how privileged he was to have the time and energy to make art:
“Given the freedom to create, everybody is creative. All of us have an innate, instinctive desire to change our environment, to put our original stamp on this world, to tell a story never told before. I’m absolutely thrilled at the moment of creativity – when suddenly I’ve synthesized my experiences, reality, and my imagination into something entirely new. But most people are too busy working on survival to find the opportunity to create. Fortunately, I’ve been freed by reputation, by the economics of success, and by emotional contentment to turn my ideas into reality. I’ve discovered that the more freedom I have to be creative, the more creative I become.”
In late August, I visited my hometown of Portland, and the plane leaving New York was nearly empty. It felt uncomfortable traveling during the pandemic as if I was committing some kind of sin. On my way to the Portland Art Museum to see the Mount Saint Helens exhibit, I walked through Portland’s South Park Blocks and was horrified that I was the only one there wearing a mask. I spent most of my time in Portland cleaning out my storage unit. I got rid of more than half of my books and shipped the rest to New York in sixteen boxes. In my friend Nova’s backyard, I had a bonfire where I disposed of old zines and chapbooks, and other possessions I no longer wanted. I didn’t feel guilty about burning the past. Instead, I felt a sense of relief. There was an unusual pleasure seeing old paintings of mine from college go up in smoke. In the morning, Nova and I laughed about how much ash was left in the fire pit. Over the past eight years, I’ve been trying to limit how many possessions I own, and this experience seems like the climax of that drive.
During this cleansing process, I discovered many keepsakes that I’d forgotten about. One of those was my uncle Randy’s manuscript of poetry and prose One Room on Earth. It was given to me by Portland poet Dennis McBride when I was a teenager. Randy was a paraplegic and passed away when I was a kid. I don’t exactly know what his illness was. His body was twisted and, despite his kind demeanor, it frightened me. I didn’t get to know him well, but I remember him being the lone voice of reason in our screwed-up family. Reading over his manuscript as an adult, I can see a kinship with him as a writer and a seeker. There was one passage that I connected with and would have liked to talk to him about. It was in a piece he wrote called “Deep Space Dream,” where he has a mystical dream while in a near-death state:
“In the dream I was hovering in a kind of vertical spirit body above a highway intersection near a college I was attending. I hovered a few moments and then was suddenly in deep space surrounded by galaxies. I was in a circle with twelve other entities who existed as I existed. Our conversation was telepathic and instantaneous, occurring at once and not one sentence at a time. We were there to determine the answer to some great question. There were two possible answers which were mutually exclusive, meaning they were opposite in nature and only one could be true. The answer was unsettling: both answers were true.”
While emptying my storage, I also discovered a number of my old chapbooks and zines. Nova scanned them for me and they are now available to download on my website. Considering how little I’ve written this year, I’m glad that I was this productive in my youth. I’m really fond of my fiction chapbook Freels Comes Alive, and both issues of my surrealist zine Black Giraffe. Though, in my opinion, my poetry chapbook I Cut My Throat seems out of place in my oeuvres.
Since I last wrote, there have been a number of deaths. Beat poet Diane di Prima, who I saw read when I lived in the Bay Area, passed away. Poet Lewis Warsh, who I saw read when I first moved to New York, passed away. Actress Daria Nicoladi, who co-wrote Suspiria with Dario Argento, passed away. By chance, on the day she died, I was watching Mario Bava’s Shock, a film she starred in. Most importantly, for me, is the closing of the Saturn Bar. From the first time I walked through the door at the Saturn Bar, which I lived next to in New Orleans, I immediately felt comfortable, like I'd been there before in another life. With that door closing, the city of New Orleans has lost some of its magic.
One video-based highlight from the past few months is comedian Tom Green’s Youtube series Travels with Charley. The series takes its name from Steinbeck’s book and consists of Green traveling in a van around the southwestern United States. The episodes are short and minimalist. Green, traveling without a crew and only his dog Charley, stop at ancient Pueblo sites, explore ghost towns, and hunt for natural rock formations.
Another highlight I found while browsing the Criterion Channel. It’s a documentary about Portland poet Walt Curtis called The Peckerneck Poet. I met Curtis a few times when I was a teenage poet looking for mentors. He was known as the poet laureate of the streets. Curtis always seemed to have a libido-driven personality and this documentary captures that spirit. There’s a constant monologue happening about human genitalia. I enjoyed listening to him, a gay man, talk about the female genitalia and his fear of being castrated by it. There seems to be a connection being made by Curtis between logging and castration, as he once lost his finger at a sawmill. Trees are phallic, and Oregon is “where the boys have hard-ons like Douglas Fir trees.” I loved watching Curtis drive around Oregon City and Portland, finding public places to read his poems. And I enjoyed hearing cowboys and bathroom dwellers alike take offense to the perversity of his words.
Lastly, I had a dream about the house I grew up in that I found rather moving. In the dream, my parents were still alive and when renovating the backyard they discovered an entire living-space beneath the house. There were windows that extended down below the back porch and into the dirt. My father couldn’t figure out how to get in. Somehow he did though, I assume by breaking one of the windows. Inside, the space had furniture from the seventies or eighties. There was a bedroom in the back and another room next to it that I never entered. The bedroom was completely white and fluorescent bright. Inside it was a bed and a weird photo holder that had many photos from my childhood and up into my thirties. Finding these photos disturbed me. Who lived down here? Obviously, they had abandoned it long ago. I kept thinking there must have been a secret door that went out to the sewer or street, but instead, I found a different entrance. There was a door that went to a strange mechanical passage, full of electric wire, pipes, and steam. I walked through that passage to another passage. This one had a slanted path and one part of it had a bunch of small televisions built into the wall and two seats with helmets on them. The helmets had hoses that extended to the ceiling. The televisions were on, but only showing static. I walked by the seats, to a door that had a glass panel on it and a curtain. I could see the sun on the other side and the backyard. But as I opened the door and walked into the backyard I noticed that the door was completely camouflaged when closed from the outside. There was no way to detect it was there.
Books I’ve been reading:
Philip Lamantia - Preserving Fire
Harold Norse - Memoirs of a Bastard Angel
Diane Di Prima - Revolutionary Letters
Lewis Warsh - Out of the Question
What I’ve been listening to on the subway:
The Vandals - Peace Thru Vandalism
Raymond Cass - The Ghost Orchid: An Introduction to EVP
The Platters - The Platters
Rowland S. Howard - Teenage Snuff Film
Nico - Camera Obscura
Movies I’ve been watching:
The Night of the Virgin (Roberto San Sebastián, 2016)
Don’t Torture a Duckling (Lucio Fulci, 1972)
One Dark Night (Tom McLoughlin, 1983)
The Unknown (Tod Browning, 1927)
The Whip and The Body (Mario Bava, 1963)
Postscript:
I would like to apologize to anyone who got an email from Substack. I was contemplating switching from Tiny Letter to Substack, and I think a group email was inadvertently sent out by Substack.