Autobiography

I remember watching the darkness in my bedroom when I was small, hypnotized by the grey-pink flecks that seemed to dance in the air while I waited for sleep. One night I climbed out of bed to tell my parents that I saw fairies in the corner of the ceiling. I still remember the disappointment when they told me it was just a trick of the eyes.

Eventually, I learned those shimmering dots are the natural interplay of light rays, retinal fluid, and optical cones. But part of me prefers to believe they are pieces of darkness, the living material of the night. Science shouldn’t explain everything.

Some habits come strange and die hard. I still watch the sparkles in the gloom, the rods and motes that flicker just beyond my vision. Although I no longer believe there’s magic among the edges of the ceiling, I still gaze at the high corners of the room whenever I feel overwhelmed, half-expecting to find an answer there. Maybe someday I’ll become an old man who searches for god in forgotten spaces with cobwebs and patchy paint jobs.

Andy Stott – Dark Details

Passed Me By | Modern Love, 2011 | More

A chugging soundtrack for the midnight hour.

Today is Mother’s Day. There are still so many emotions that I will not or cannot unlock. I planted some tomato seeds in a small pot on my windowsill. This seemed like a decent way to remember the days I spent by her side drinking sun tea while she “played in the dirt,” as she liked to say. When I was little, she forced me to run errands by myself to make sure I didn’t develop her anxieties, her bouts with agoraphobia. She loved to watch sailboats. Whenever she saw a motorboat, she’d crinkle her nose and call it a ‘stinkpotter’. I remember the way she’d stand in the kitchen and say she wasn’t just going to turn over a new leaf but a whole tree.

This is dedicated to everyone who has lost their mothers. I try to find solace in these instructions from Epictetus: do not say something is lost, only that it is returned.

Five years ago today, I attended a funeral for my grandmother in the same church where she was baptized in 1918. “Her life was coherent,” said the priest. I did not know her as well as I would have liked, but I know she was tradition personified, a west side Polish Catholic who served Saturday night dinners of kielbasa and fried smelt. She had a succession of Scottish terriers, each named Mitsy. I think she left off at Mitsy V, maybe VI.

She had the same house with the same furniture arrangement for seventy years. I recently came across a snapshot of my mother and her brothers in 1959 and I recognized all of the furniture. The only thing that changed in the house was the television screen. On the back, my grandmother had written a note in pristine cursive: “The smudge is on the film, not the wall of my living room.”

My life is not coherent. I crave motion and flux, and I cannot tell if this reflects inner discomfort or a kind of ease with the world.

Lately I find myself asking, “What’s the most comforting thing I know?” Last night I remembered the Electrifying Mojo.

His voice rumbled through Detroit’s airwaves from the 1970s into the 1990s as he announced b-sides from Parliament, Kraftwerk, Devo, and Cybotron, priming the pump for today’s music. He is a man without biographical detail but his fingerprints are everywhere. He is a concept that requires a definite article: The.

The Electrifying Mojo is a ghost, never photographed yet his spirit runs through almost everything we hear. Each night, he opened his show with a question: Will the members of the Midnight Funk Association please rise?

And the theme from Star Wars would play.

I want you to show some solidarity tonight. If you’re in your car, flash your lights. If you’re sitting on the porch, blink your porch light. And if you’re in bed, then dance on your back. In Technicolor.

He was the first deejay to put Prince on the air. He rocked a twenty-minute version of “Flashlight.” He interrupted songs with social commentary from his “mental machine.” I stayed awake into the small hours with my hear cupped to the speaker, hunched over my cassette player and riding the pause/record buttons to make mixtapes culled from his show.

120-minute Maxell cassettes were best for this.

Every night he signed off with the same message, delivered in a baritone with a grin around the edges.

Whenever you feel like you’re nearing the end of your rope, don’t slide off. Tie a knot. Keep hanging. Keep remembering that ain’t nobody bad like you.

I was fourteen years old.

When I got my driver’s license, I would sneak out and drive down Woodward Avenue into the city.

If you’re in your car...

A white Cadillac in the opposite lane flashed its lights, and I did the same in my beat-to-shit Pontiac. Two strangers responding to a voice on the radio, drawing the city into a brotherhood of sound and light.

The Electrifying Mojo made me a night owl.

Cybotron - Alleys Of Your Mind

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One of the formative songs that the Electrifying Mojo played. Forty years later, you can still see the steam rising from the street. Read more about Mojo here and you can hear his voice here.

I used to be so shy. There was a time when I would count how many words I said each day. At night I logged the number into a notebook. Sixteen. Twenty-three. Anything in the thirties was a good day.

This new season of self-isolation brings those quiet adolescent days to mind. The ambient chitchat among strangers has fallen silent because we’re told to stay home. No more talk about the weather at the café or mumbled apologies as we jostle through a crowded train. No more meetings, events, or dinners with unfamiliar faces where I would try to say clever things. All of that feels distant and silly now. Nobody needs my advice and I hold no fascinating opinions. Still, I don’t hope these quiet days don’t last too long.

We gather in the park because there’s no place else to go. Because we need to see the sky. We keep our distance and nod at one another, more aware of each other’s presence than before. Looking up, I see the first signs of spring and I remember reading something from Spinoza that said god lives in the trees.

These days I feel better with the television news playing in the background, even though it’s nothing but nonstop dread and pharmaceutical advertisements. I want mainstream information, the sense of something shared. I find comfort in the illusion of bodies across the nation gathered before the same broadcast rather than privately scrolling through the algorithmically tailored hysteria and moralizing of the internet.

Today I bought a few pieces of lumber from the hardware store, dredged my toolbox from the closet, and spent the afternoon sawing, sanding, and varnishing. I needed to work with my hands. To be reminded that I can make something that takes up space and serves a need. I built a small table to collect the overflow from my desk.

Perhaps I’m turning into my father and grandfather, men who retreated into their garages to build wooden vases and boxes in times of distress. So many half-finished widgets littered their workbenches after they died, their function and intentions unknown. I thought about them both as I worked, wondering what they would make of these pandemic days.

After I finished building my table, I found the pawn my father carved five years ago to replace the one we’d lost from our set. We fell into the habit of playing chess each night at the hospital while we waited for his new lung. He whittled it quickly and I can still see the blade coming dangerously close to his oxygen tubes. This pawn is one of my most cherished possessions, and I set it on my new table tonight, a small gesture of the communion I crave.

Flying Saucer Attack – Instrumental Wish

From Distance | Domino, 1994 | Spotify

One of the songs I’ve played the most over the past two decades. And more than ever these days.

One of the finest things I own is a lamp with a stern brass pirate, one hand on his hip and the other gripping a sword. This pirate is a landmark in my mind, a mythic figure who haunts my first memories. For decades he stood on a spindly desk in my grandfather’s basement that smelled of spider poison and Saginaw Bay. I was afraid to look at it when I was small, perhaps sensing it was a relic from a different world, unable to imagine it would one day become part of mine.

My grandfather inherited the lamp from Queenie and Hazel, his spinster aunts. They say Hazel bought it at a Detroit pawn shop in the early 1900s, but nobody knows for sure. They said a lot of things about Queenie and Hazel. They said the sisters hopped a fence and walked across a military airstrip in Kalamazoo, determined to register as nurses in World War I. They said that a man tried to kiss Hazel, and Queenie grabbed her rifle and chased him down the street. She even fires off a couple of shots in some versions of the tale. I only know Queenie and Hazel from their images scattered in attic boxes, their faces unseen on glass Kodachrome slides. For me, this lamp is where they live.

The pirate watched over my grandfather’s spindly desk for decades, switched on when he went downstairs to putter in his woodshop, where he produced his vases, bookends, and chests. When he moved to a retirement home, most of his belongings were sold. But he brought his lamp with him.

To make it easier for residents to locate their rooms in the endless corridors of look-alike doors, the nursing staff encouraged each patient to place a memento on a little shelf mounted next to each door. Plastic flowers, birthday cards, family snapshots, and woodland figurines lined the halls because it’s easier to recall a photograph of your grandchild than room 27B. My grandfather placed this lamp outside his door, where it threatened the tiny shelf with its brass weight. The pirate looked as if he might murder the neighbor’s ceramic kitten. Some of the residents complained. When he asked my opinion, I told him I loved his lamp. “Me too,” he said. “I think it classes up the place.”

He taped my name beneath the lamp before he died. Today it sits on my desk, and although I still see the stern pirate that frightened me as a child, I see many other things as well.

Crossing the 45th parallel always gives me a thrill. Whenever I see the green federal sign that marks the occasion, I instinctively hit the brakes and snap a photo that comes out blurry and gets deleted. The 45th parallel is the halfway point between the equator and the North Pole, and you can feel the geography shift when you see all that big pine and cold water. I’ve often crossed this line while speeding towards Michigan’s upper peninsula on an empty road in the dark.

Lake Superior frightened me when I was small. My parents enjoyed camping along its shore on long weekends, and I’d doze on the sticky pleather backseat of our Pontiac while we drove from Detroit to Marquette. I remember squirming in my pup tent, unable to sleep with that mysterious lake sitting out there in the night like it was waiting for something. In second grade, we studied the Great Lakes and read a pamphlet that described Lake Superior as the deepest and coldest of the five lakes: Scientists have not yet reached the bottom of Lake Superior, and they do not know what lives there. I studied that sentence until it became a hymn, and I’d lie awake chanting it in my head while thinking about what might live in all that uncharted space.

There’s enough water in Lake Superior to submerge all of the Americas. Its southern edge is known as “the Graveyard of the Great Lakes” due to a cascade of shipwrecks. On July 30, 1985, Jeffrey Val Klump became the first person to reach the bottom of Lake Superior at 1333 feet. This must have occurred after I read that pamphlet. Over the years, I’ve made my peace with Lake Superior. Antarctica scares me today. My head goes swimmy if I look at it for too long on a map. All that blank land feels like leaping off a rooftop. Maybe this is why I’m drawn to signs that clearly position me on the planet: the 45th parallel, the Continental Divide, and my telephone’s pulsing blue dot that accompanies me wherever I go.

Birthday. Maybe it’s an auspicious one: it’s the first time in over 900 years—since 11/11/1111—that the date reads both ways, no matter how you format it. And it’s the 33rd day of the year with 333 more to go. I’d like to believe in numerical patterns and cosmic signs, but I do not feel particularly auspicious today. My beard is going grey and I’m losing track of my age. Sometimes I think I’m a year or two older than I am. Maybe this is nature’s way of softening the blow.

Time and things and plans are always falling through the cracks. Coffee and nicotine gum fuel my days. Perhaps one day it will be tea and licorice. Then rainwater. Then nothing at all. “Restriction can be a discipline to break habits,” says the artist Robert Irwin. “But it need not be a final state, and it’s no state of grace.” Maybe I’m just a gentle nudge away from buying a pack of Camels, some slight shift in the light. Because I miss smoking. The ritual of fire and ash, its irreplaceable rhythms and moments of solitude. Instead, I went for an ugly little run, my body all jiggle and creak. I wonder if, deep down, each of us carries a fantasy of one day becoming an ascetic or a mystic, some hardwired notion of stripping our lives bare and praying in the gloom.

I’m old enough to know one thing: I’m damned lucky to be here today, healthy and sober for seven years and more or less functioning in this world that has struck so many down. I do not believe in much, but I’m beginning to believe in grace.

Irwin quote from Seeing Is Forgetting the Name of the Thing One Sees.

I’m starting this new decade—and this journal—by revisiting the places where the last one began. Strange how a chunk of time takes shape in the mind, those first arbitrary encounters that define a sense of a place or tint a season. When Candy and I arrived in Helsinki ten years ago, deep snow covered the city. We checked into a hotel in an industrial area by the sea, and I remember smoking a cigarette in the subzero wind while watching the lights of freighters on the horizon. I thought we were at the edge of the earth. I remember the two of us navigating the icy cobblestones of an unfamiliar country, hunting for someplace to eat. We found an empty restaurant that was still open, a rustic place with a buffet of reindeer, herring, and mushrooms. A sign on the window said Ravintola.

When we told people we enjoyed eating at Ravintola, they gave us puzzled looks. A few days later, we worked up the courage to figure out the public transit system. As we rode the tram across the city, we saw the word Ravintola again and again. We saw it painted on windows. We saw it on billboards. We saw it in neon lights. Oh they have so many locations, we thought. And wow, they also serve Chinese. Then came that uniquely vivid realization of being an idiot: Ravintola is the Finnish word for restaurant. We’d told people we enjoyed eating at restaurant.

As the years passed, our wintry meal at Ravintola became burnished into the stories we told about our year in Helsinki. Returning ten years later, we wanted to see if it still squared with our memories of a warm refuge from the storm with a kindly old proprietor cooking traditional food. When we found the restaurant, it was smaller than we’d remembered, as most things are when you return. And it wasn’t sitting alone in a snowfield like an oasis. It was in the middle of a nondescript block of shops and there wasn’t any snow this January because we live in a new climate now. Our waiter was a hip young man with tattoos. French and German tourists filled the tables. But the reindeer was still there and so were we.

Springwater – I Will Return

Polydor, 1971 | More info

After my mother died, my father spent his days wandering through discount department stores, fixated on tracking down the correct size, exact model, or shade of color for something he thought he needed, usually a household item for the little apartment he rented after selling the house. Non-slip adhesives for the bathtub shaped like starfish. Mechanical pencils. A childlike table for his car keys that required hours spent cursing over a tiny wrench. He carried a small notepad in the back pocket of his khakis, diligently making lists with items like living room lampshade needs repair and oil bathroom door hinges and eggs are good for protein.

My father died four years ago today. Lately I’ve been thinking about his quiet notepads. They feel like a balm against these days when everything seems to be happening at once. Institutional decay. Angry weather. Homegrown terror. The energies of war. I click and scroll even though I know it’s trashing my mind, all of this information commingling with fury and performance. Our screens have mangled the decent impulse to bear witness.

I try to see the world through my father’s eyes, his sense that everything looked like science fiction: people dressed like children and swerving into one another while staring at little handheld pieces of glass. He didn’t understand how the world had become so interlinked, how all of its information could live on a screen. It felt like an optical illusion, a cheap bit of sleight-of-hand. Information was supposed to be earned through experience, through a combination of tough luck and scribbling into your notepad. Information required effort and my father craved the human contact required to get it. The sales clerks would check their stock and make calls to other locations for a linen drum lampshade or a pair of loafers with tassels. He’d eventually find the item but he would not purchase it, deciding he didn’t need it after all.

Datacide – Flashback Signal

from Flowerhead | Asphodel/Rather Interesting, 1995 | More info

A nearly perfect ambient album, Flowerhead has been a reliable sleepy-time companion since its release twenty-something years ago. Atom Heart and Tetsuo Inoue’s collaboration merges the organic with the electric, yielding a blurry soundtrack for nostalgia. The whole album just sounds right, as if you’d heard it before, back when you were four or five.