Drowning in summer

Goddamn, it’s hot.

Indiana summers. Hot, sticky, white. Daylight savings time makes the relief of evening feel like it will never come. I thought of Indiana summers when I wrote a line in a poem a long time ago: heart like asphalt, glinting in the summer, spots of white gum, boiling, seeping tar, out of cracks, trapping aphids. I remember recesses in grade school, the melting tar on the blacktop sticking to my sneakers. Everything looks scorched. The trees even look yellow. The sky is a nebular haze, so bright you can barely look at it.

I sit in my apartment sweating through my shirt. I could run a cold bath, but I don’t. This is summer. It’s about the suffering laziness, the anticipation of night, the simple luxury of sitting on my roof, looking at stars, the motorcycles tearing up the street, the drunks stumbling out of the bars, talking to my neighbors across the balconies. It’s about cheap wine, long walks around the empty streets in the orange sodium light, watching fireflies over the soy bean fields, heat lightening in the distance, the old men sitting in front of coffee shops talking about the heat, the desperate drives to the river, the primitive sensation of wearing a thick coating of sweat, dampness from the humid air, smears of dead mosquitoes and dirt.

The Midwest is a place you can only love through a distinctive nostalgia, a lifetime of smells and memories and sites that make days like this reminiscent of some better day years ago. I smell the familiar ammonia from corn fields, the hot smell of cars and I think of riding my bike in my hometown, eating watermelon, catching crickets. What would those memories be without this wretched, miserable heat? How amazing would the wind on my bike have felt and how delicious would those first, perfect watermelons of my childhood have tasted anywhere more temperate? Not very.

I really like moss

Everyday when I come home from work I do basically the same thing. I feed my cat, eat some yogurt, take my pants off so I can walk around in my underwear for a while, and go take care of the container garden on my balcony. Sometimes I do the latter in my underwear. It was only in the last few days I realized I don't do it because it's a chore. The colors, the smell of the soil, the excitement when a dahlia blooms or I see my green bean shoot has started climbing up the pole... I know that everything around me is alive and thriving and I am a part of it. it doesn’t really matter that it’s twenty square feet on the third floor and not a sprawling garden in the country. It’s mine and its bliss.

The last week or so I’ve come home and made a little container planter or a terrarium to put around my apartment. It’s almost a mindless act, a subconscious need for little patches of energy to disperse. Today I took the washcloths out of the box that sits on my toilet and filled it with Irish moss (which isn't true moss, I know) and a little purple sweet potato vine. As I was doing this, I started thinking about Zen gardens and Japanese flower arrangements and why people do such things. I have always been preoccupied with the space I live in. I have always liked beautiful objects. I like decorating, refinishing furniture, arranging things to be just so. I roll my towels instead of fold them. Why? I live alone. I don’t have regular company. I do it for me. What purpose does it serve? Why I am I compelled to do these things when no one sees them? My constant questioning bordered on guilt—does it make me materialistic? Do I need “things” to make me happy?

It occurred to me then, as I nestled little white river stones between the moss and sweet potato vine, that my conflict might be largely cultural. It is a very American way of thinking to believe that creating a space, making a home is done for the sake of others. We decorate our homes with the idea that others will see it, approve, judge us positively, envy us, which to imitate us. I don’t think there’s necessarily anything wrong with this. But there seems to be a very pervasive mentality that this is the only reason to care about your living space, that our space has no effect on us psychologically or spiritually. One of the reason I have always struggled with being an artist is that I have always asked myself “Why am I painting this?” Other artists I’ve known don’t seem to need to find a practical reason for what they do. They can justify their desire to do what they do with lots of esoteric abstractions and bull shit. I’ve read lots of artists’ statements and most of them are full of esoteric abstractions and bull shit. For example, “my paintings explore the relationship between authority and form” or “my work investigates the conceptual reality of eidetic precedents in art.” Really? And who the hell ever really says over tea, “By the way, isn’t it great that the artist so-and-so finally figured out the relationship between authority and form? It’s about time someone did! This world needed it.” I’ve never been able to come up with much justification, bull shit or not, for what I create or why I create it.

In the end, there isn't a damn reason. I just like to do it. And it makes me happy.

God hates holidays and doesn't want you to have any

When I was a kid, Easter meant three things: chocolate, church and getting to wear a pretty dress. Usually my mom would make biscuits and gravy for breakfast and I would eye my Easter basket, dying to unwrap the phosphorescent pink wrapping and gorge myself on jellybeans. Alas, I would always have to wait until after church. After a longwinded sermon about “what Easter is really about,” I could finally get down to business. I could tear into my basket full of coloring books and stuffed bunnies and chocolate Cadbury eggs. If Easter was really JUST about Jesus, he had plenty of opportunities to prove it, but I never saw any religious effigies in the cream filling. When I was really young, my mom would hide plastic eggs in the yard for me and my friends to hunt. We would, of course, always dye real ones. Even now, the smell of white vinegar evokes the same nostalgia as Christmas cookies. And yes, I would go see the Easter bunny when he came to the mall.

What do bunnies and colored eggs have to do with the resurrection of Christ? Absolutely nothing. It seems to me that God must hate holidays and not want Christians to have any, because every time they invent one, it seems like the damn Pagans already got to it first. That is because Easter originated in Babylon, eggs and bunnies and all.

Bab•y•lon

–noun

1. an ancient city of SW Asia, on the Euphrates River, famed for its magnificence and culture: capital of Babylonia and later of the Chaldean empire.

2. any rich and magnificent city believed to be a place of excessive luxury and wickedness.

Bab•y•lon•ian

-adjective

1. describing anything unspeakably evil, ungodly and pagan, including Cadbury eggs, Christmas trees, Harry Potter and possibly even kittens and cupcakes (research pending).

Now, I know what you’re thinking. After all, I went to Christian school—for nine years! Babylonians, according to my memory, were all prostitutes and thieves (every last one of them!)– shouldn’t they have celebrated their holidays with bloody sacrifices or raping virgins? (You know, like the Israelites.) Am I to believe that they celebrated their goddess with bunnies?? It all just doesn’t make sense. Maybe we should have kept femacentric religion around. Then again, if America were a pagan country, we might be celebrating the 4th of July with cute animals and chocolate instead of explosives.

If you really care about the Pagan roots of Easter, twisted and poorly researched by some raving Evangelical nut, just go to Google. Really, there are literally thousands of people who are DYING to tell you how evil holidays are. Easter's heritage, like all holidays, is a conglomeration of different cultural practices that have been exchanged and adjusted over many generations. It is usually traced back to the Anglo Saxon goddess Eostre, a feast for whom was had in the spring (celebrated with hares and eggs). Obviously spring is a time that has represented fertility and life as long as people have been on the planet. Almost every culture in history has a tradition of some sort of fertility celebration (except Christian who prefer their births to be of virgin conception), almost exclusively occurring in the spring. The Babylonian goddess Ishtar was a goddess who is believed to an evolution of Hathor and Isis. Her tradition is that every year at the end of the lunar cycle an egg would fall from the sky near the Euphrates river and she would be reborn. The person who found her egg would be bestowed with a special gift. Hence, the beginning of Easter eggs. Supposedly there’s more to do with Ishtar regarding her connection to rabbits, ham and even hot cross buns, but I don’t really care enough to waste time doing the research to find out. Ironically, the first council of Nicea of the Roman Catholic church decided to establish Easter according to the lunar calendar at the vernal equinox. They also (ironically) scandalize the Ishtar tradition for claiming to have a virgin birth. Damn it, are you as confused as I am?

So as you can see, Easter is a pagan holiday. That’s all there is to it. It’s as pagan as a maypole dance, pagan as dancing naked under the full moon and burning sage and sipping a toasty stinging nettles infusion whilst jotting incantations in your handmade Book of Shadows.

I don’t consider myself a pagan but I can certainly appreciate their contribution to the creation of the sacred and mystical Cadbury egg. And really, what is it with Christians getting so uppity about holidays with "pagan" roots. Everything pre-Christian was pagan. That means dinosaurs are pagan! Pagan dinosaurs! It boggles the mind.

The Church has an extensive history of stealing pagan holidays and then getting pissed off about them being pagan. If they want a non pagan holiday so bad, maybe they should start making chocolate Messiahs and selling them at Wal Mart. I mean, clearly chocolate is the primary reason anyone even cares about holidays anyway. Until there is a chocolate pope or cream-filled Pat Roberts that I can gnaw the head off of, I will continue to support Easter in all of it's pagan glory.

Some Tasty Jam

When someone says “I have free tickets to see Megadeth. Want to go?” how can you possibly refuse? My friend Tim had interviewed their opener, Testament, for the local paper and they gave him a pass to come and review the show. Though Tim is mild mannered and kind of hipster geeky--the type that wears button downs and only drinks microbrew beer--his real dream is to be a metal rocker. He told me, with a bit of a titter, how when he was fifteen, he almost got a Megadeth tattoo but the wait was too long and since he had a curfew, he just ended up going home. He still secretly thinks about this Megadeth tattoo.


“Do you think I would have ever gotten laid with a Megadeth tattoo?”
“Not by the type of women you’d want to get laid by.”

Seeing Megadeth, for Tim, would pretty much be the best moment of his life. I felt honored to be offered the chance to share a moment that would rival his baptism and college graduation. I also am always up for a freak show—I mean, cultural experience—even though I don't have any particular taste for eighties hair metal. I like bands like The Decemberists and Sade and sometimes, when I'm feeling really hardcore, a little Smashing Pumpkins. I also only drink microbrew beer.

On the drive down, while relaying to each other our mutual excitement, Tim turned to me and said, "Yeah, actually, I don't know if you knew but I'm in a band."
"Really?"
"Yeah. We just don't really play shows anymore."
"So you're a cover band or you write your own stuff?"
"We write our own stuff."
"That's cool. What kind of stuff?"
"Oh. I don't know. I've been writing a lot lately. Like lately we've been working on a song I wrote called Sea Hag."
Eruptive laughter from me followed this statement. "Sea Hag? Like two words? Sea and Hag?"
"Yeah. Sea Hag. It's probably gonna be our hit. Seeeeeaa Haggg! Seeeaaa Haaaaaggggggggg!"

I was thinking someday I might be talented enough to write something where that would be as funny to other people second hand as it was to me. Maybe I'll write a story one day about a hipster journalist who secretly wants to be a death metal singer but is afraid if he tells anyone, all of his friends who go to local rock shows and smoke hand rolled cigarettes and drink PBR will abandon him and he will have no friends because all of the other people who like death metal are hiding in their houses doing crystal meth. Except me. I guess I would still be his friend.

Anyway, since neither of us are very metal, we had to really try to look the part. I wore black and lots of eyeliner. Tim wore a ridiculous leather biker jacket and some beat up black cowboy boots. It made up for all the Halloweens of my adult life that I haven't dressed up for. In the end, we could never rival the real metal folk who had such impossible-to-replicate treasures as enormous white puffy sneakers and tight, faded black jeans and rocker perms and studded leather halter tops. It was just too authentic because they had actually been wearing these exact articles of clothing since Megadeth formed several millinia ago.

I never knew what it what it meant to people to go to a metal concert. As I stood in line to purchase a Megadeth flask - which I just felt I needed to own - I listened to a married couple in their forties, both wearing matching Megadeth t shirts, talk about how they were spending the last sixty dollars to their names on Megadeth belt buckles. I suppose you could interpret this as sad, but the feverish ecstasy with which they turned over those crisp twenty dollar bills was that of a pious man tithing to God. I had to envy them. There is nothing I believe in as much as these people believe in the metal.

And yet, soon I, too, was believing in the metal - head nodding and arms raised in worship like I was back in the Evangelical church. Maybe, I thought, this is where the Evangelicals got it from. I’m pretty sure that I saw some nice, Christian-looking housewives who could have only been former metalheads that had snuck out for the night to relive their mosh days. The pew and pulpit version of church is dying because who wouldn’t want to go to a church that’s kind of like a metal concert?

To the left are some impassioned Christian youth experiencing something called "jam worship" at a church. To the right are people living the metal as captured by my cellphone. I'm confused... didn't they use to think this stuff was Satanic? I mean, all the old people at Megadeth looked pretty tired by eleven o'clock. Probably because things like metal stop being fun when Christians start thinking it's cool.

After five eight dollar whiskey and diets each, we called it a night. Since both of us were really just posers with respectable jobs to be at in the morning, we had to pass on the optional add-on experiences like the communal joint and jumping off the balcony. It was disappointing that we couldn’t stay long enough to wake up naked behind a dumpster like real metalheads, but he was technically on the clock. I crawled into the front seat of his Honda Civic and fell asleep to some acoustic folky crap he had on his Ipod and we drove back to reality.