Tyler Weaver's Blog, page 52

Earworm: DR MARIO

About a mile or so into the daily run, Hirokazu Tanaka’s “Fever” emerges from some primordial NES Classic recess of my brain to propel me forward, onward, one 8-bit foot in front of the other, through late morning buggy traffic and cemeteries and windswept signage and ditches strewn with random letters from aforementioned windswept signage until I’m home and Tanaka’s infectious 4/4 lilt  (oneandtwoandthreerest) recedes again into the same primordial porkchop Nintendo recesses from which it was birthed and I think of it only when I write these words or think about writing these words or think about thinking about …

Calendar Fog

It’s snowing / no, scratch that: it’s foggy, a claustrophobic fog. Either way, I still have to scrape the windshield and this morning, as with every other morning since the Ides, my hand wants it to be 20 March. A short circuit somewhere between head and hand, perhaps, or screen and head? Can’t ascertain any personal significance 20 March may possess though, clearly, my mind will most likely to explode when it actually is 20 March.

(Returning to these daily pieces as a method for unsticking my mind in the midst of this back and forth from caretaker to writer, from selfless to selfish. A new challenge, I suppose.)

Reading: SILAS MARNER, by George Eliot

Fake Plastic Bonsai

(Two weeks later): Fake on down to the stones, to the foundation: plastic pine branches collecting dust over the systems that give my life and my days meaning and structure, systems fragile and systems only somewhat portable: systems that need sustenance, watering – anything less being an abdication / imitation, a hard bench of decorative deskwear, a pale substitute for life and for purpose, a loft atop a cabin with a driveway of fewer and fewer stones where good memories yet to be made fall and writhe and the bad ones sought to escape live again… but perhaps best that I accept the fleeting, momentary former and cease my perpetual watering of the crushing latter and let them fade and wilt, make them a little more plastic, let them collect dust and vanish piece by piece by piece into the nothing that they deserve.

EMPTY / FUMES

“The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you’re empty… But if you accept the reality that you have been given – that you are not in a productive creative period – you free yourself to begin filling up again.”

Anne lamott, “Bird by Bird.”

And so it goes, and so go I.

Status 01MAR2019

Currently: back and forth, to and fro; nightly watch duty to protect outdoor cat food (and bowl) from neighbor raccoon. Not enough mental space to process Twitter, returning to thinking out loud in public here. Reading: SATANTANGO, by László KrasznahorkaiWatching: zilch.Listening: ditto.Playing: ditto.

Waiting: Ambulatory Care and Endoscopy

(Accompanying): Sunday morning, pacing / waiting, waiting / scavenging sterile prints on sterile walls for that last modicum of control stolen upon entry through automatic doors, opening and closing, opening and closing, to the hum of morning’s vacuum while feet bounce and tap to my peripheral left in a darkened room and I’m pacing again, going outside, needing air. Good Housekeeping and Life: Beautiful and magazine-sized pamphlets, visit all we have to offer / temper in check, temper in check / so many people known by the foot tapper, so many known to. From my bag, Ellroy (L.A. CONFIDENTIAL) and The Economist (Slowbalisation and drones); from somewhere, someone whistles Beethoven’s fifth – the cafeteria, maybe (Subway coffee, dark roast, quite good), or maybe one of the hospital walkers / joggers passing through / passing by. The door opens, the fluoresence shines through, the doctor who had had a stroke but his hands still work and that’s all that matters emerges to inform that surgery was a success, normal blood loss, a secondary break found but fixed with the same nuts and bolts and rods and screws as the primary, partial mobility for six weeks. An hour in recovery, more waiting, more waiting, more pacing, more sterile prints on sterile walls, more peripheral tapping feet. Eventually: back to her room for a bit of a rest and my exit through and to automatic doors and lunch, precious lunch, the same lunch as always, as ever, but it’s my lunch, my routine – holding on for dear life / for dear work, to take back a modicum of control that’s little more than a fiction anyhow.

“Centrist Independent”

Though far too early to offer a notion as to the core idea of the 2020 election, my guess is that it will be an election as much about returning the office of the presidency from its current standing as a self-serving huckster’s hobby / protection from indictment to one of dignified public service as it will be about the rebalancing of our systems and institutions (and collective sanity) after the shock (not the surprise) of our electoral college right-wing populist / nationalist / opportunistic immolation (or, as is terrifyingly possible, doubling down on it), a goal that will not be realized by a “centrist independent” – a term as anodyne and milquetoast as the vanity candidate espousing it – billionaire who “love(s) our country” so much that the only option for him is to seek to run it and, in so doing, heighten the risk of running it further into the abyss.

While I derive some comfort in Schultz’s clear tone-deafness and likely – likely – unwillingness to do anything that would put his precious caffeine-delivery legacy in jeopardy and further want to believe that the Malignancy has divested the populace of the myth that a “businessman” is the best person to run the country, I’m not optimistic: leave it to the American people to make ours a choice between sanity and insanity with vainglorious Starbucks fuckery spoiling all of it. 

REMIND ME TOMORROW

In his 1976 essay, “Second Wind,” Václav Havel wrote of the three options facing any artist as they grow: they can repeat themselves, they can languish in the position they have earned in that first iteration of themselves, or, they can “abandon everything proven,” cast aside all perceived expectations and seek a “new and more mature self-definition” that corresponds to their present experience and continued growth.

Few records in recent memory have captured that third option as viscerally Sharon Van Etten’s work here: REMIND ME TOMORROW is at once the welcome return of a singular voice and the announcement that not only has that artist found her “second wind” but that we’re lucky enough to be invited along on the sonic joyride.  

“I wish I could show you how much you’ve grown,” Van Etten sings on “Seventeen”; indeed, REMIND ME TOMORROW is the contemplatively propulsive (or propulsively contemplative) evidence of Van Etten’s own growth and evolution as an artist, nothing less than a living, breathing document of a new becoming, a second wind captured. Essential.

Waiting: Rheumatology

(Accompanying) Reminiscent of a restaurant that’s too big for its own good, brimming with wobbly tables and disgruntled customers waiting on overcooked burgers and burnt bacon. Confusion abounds over iPad check-in; pleather seating throughout, clock stuck at 9:45. Big TV turned loud to Judge Judy; Orange Malignancy inevitably makes appearance if appointment lasts until after 1600, local news, may cause suicidal thoughts or tendencies (a smoking cessation aid, not the local news, really). Not conducive to close reading (ORYX AND CRAKE, currently), even when sitting with eyes averted; siren’s song of Judge Judy. Magazine choices limited and out of easy reach – indeed, I think they may shoot on sight if you try to abscond with one; prefer to read the same arthritis brochure over and again – they may have picked a new font. Kids playing with a toy truck on the nondescript carpet. Water fountain either a trickle or a firehose. Once overheard a guy lamenting that he would never get to play drums again and I still feel awful for him; haven’t seen him since. Judge Judy will tolerate none of your malarkey.

There Once was a Market

Just down the road and behind a John Wayne mural and a stone facade and a BBQ shack adorned with a rusty metal pig or maybe a cow – but probably a pig – was housed that convergence of convenience, character, and improvisation unique to small towns, a Market, The Market, rife with shelves upon shelves upon shelves of the essentials, nothing fancy, gummi butterflies and frogs, cheese balls, bulk spices, and, in spite of chicken breasts remarkable only in the variance of their size, one day gargantuan, the next, McNugget, and homemade BBQ that was a little too watery, one of the finest meat counters anyone could ask for tended to by people who clearly enjoyed their jobs and knew me only as “Runner Guy.” 

But, things, as they are wont to do, changed a couple of years back when a stroke temporarily felled The Market’s mustachioed, heat-packing proprietor/butcher/real estate agent with an apparent aversion to corn starch in his BBQ sauce, and permanently slayed his (rumoured) designs of opening a BBQ restaurant in the downstairs section of the building (formerly home to a sewing machine repair shop); the writing, in retrospect, was on the wall and on John Wayne’s forehead and, indeed, it wouldn’t be long before the writing was on the sign that had, just a day prior, hawked BOGO Chips ‘n’ Dip, “Closing sale: 10% off entire store.”

As the summer weeks wore on, the sale, like the temperature, increased in increments of ten percent until the day of the shuttering if not the acceptance – but at least we still have the Dollar Store, some said; a Dollar Store, which, because of corporate policies dictating their restocking capcities, was quickly depleted of staples and essentials and was staffed by people as dismayed about the vanishing of The Market as I – and it wasn’t long before the auctioneers and their attendant carrion descended to disembowel The Market of its shelving and the meat slicer and even the metal pig or maybe it was a cow but I think it was a pig, to pick at the bones of its character, before the interregnum of vacancy and scuttlebutt – it was going to be, it was going to be, just had to be, surely someone, surely – and then came the surveyors and, as temperatures dropped and winter descended, so too did The Someones, with their little flags and their backhoes and their Bell Store logo-adorned trucks to tranform The Market into nothing but a pile of multi-colored John Wayne bricks and cinder blocks pissed upon with sub-zero water by a blurry someone with a hose, the last flickers of its small-town character extinguished on the half-cocked march towards yet another franchise highway pit stop, a brick and mortar facade possessed of character found only in its decided lack thereof and capacity for rural metastasis.