Magpie Tales 136: Escaping The Deep End

 
Flying Down, 2006, by David Salle, via Magpie Tales

Rainer sucked in a lungful of bluish smoke, sighing it out through his nostrils as he rocked on his heels outside the gallery. The cigarette tip glowed like a tiny baleful eye, illuminating his reflection in the gallery glass. His reflection overlaid the poster he was eyeing, the rumples of his clothes giving texture where there was none. Sunken eyeballs, weed-whacker hair and sallow flesh looking ghastly in the sodden oyster light of a hangover Sunday morning. He belched quietly. The backwash in his throat a mixture of gin, diner eggs and something like regret which failed to fade no matter how hard he swallowed.

His head ached. His eyes twitched slowly in their sockets, lead balls in syrup. The mish-mash of images, the riot of color seemed to set up a resonance in his chest and belly. They fluttered in odd syncopation. The stirring in his groin caught him off guard. What the hell? he thought.

He found himself staring again at her ass. Slow realization trickled into his sludgy consciousness. It was her. Her. Again.

"Goddamnit, Morgan, leave me be. You with the look!" Rainer barked at the glass. Shame coursed through his mind, causing him to shiver. Six years, and she still yanked his chains. He rubbed a throbbing temple with a shaking hand. He knew she was still there, red hair and green eyes and that ass, Oh my god her body, those curves, face buried in her hair, hands desperate to pull off her sweater, JesusH she smelled like the ocean, she's a selkie come to drag me out to sea, again and again...

Rainer staggered back from the glass, the warm drops coursing down his cheeks mixing with the cindery rain that began to fall. He wiped his face with a dirty cuff. The bottle in his coat pocket slapped against his sunken chest. He looked down, mildly surprised, and pulled it out. Two fingers of gin sloshed around inside. Rainer swore he heard her voice in the beads of liquor rolling down the sides. His breathing stopped momentarily as he stared at the bottle, then back to the woman on the poster. Back and forth, a sluggish metronome. His trance was broken by a man approaching from down the sidewalk. He had a leash wrapped around his wrist, at the end of which an eager Irish setter strained forward, finding something interesting in Rainer standing there.

Rainer stood up a little straighter, pushing his hat back on his head. He tried to look jaunty as he saluted the dog and owner with the gin bottle. The setter sniffed at him with that goofy look all dim but happy dogs seem to have; the owner eyed Rainer suspiciously and barely nodded in return. He pulled hard, yanking the dog away in such a manner as to suggest they were not really trying to hurry away from the well-dressed hobo muttering into a shop window.

Rainer watched them walk away. The bottle was wavering under his nose, and the urge to open it was so strong his knees came close to buckling. Eyes watering, nose running, he turned back to the poster. He could not tear his eyes away from her face, her hair, her bottom. A loud sob burbled out of his mouth. He stepped back again, raising the bottle in a shaking fist. He drew it back, and flung it as hard as he could at the plate glass window, shouting "Leave me be, damn you!"

To his utter shock, the window burst into a million little pieces. The noise was like a rifle shot combined with the cracking of a bell. The shrieking of the alarm galvanized Rainer into action. He took off running as fast as his trembling legs would carry him, heading for home. Wheezing, coughing, and crying, he kept thinking that maybe, this time, today would be the first day of the rest of his life.

I Don't Want to Do This Alone

And when that fog horn blows I will be coming home
And when the fog horn blows I want to hear it
I don't have to fear it

The wind blows hard outside, snow powder swirling around the eaves and across the porch.  There is no music tonight, a conscious decision to take a breather, let the gray matter cool off.  In the gaps between gusts, the rasp of leaves and ice strikes up the band with the tick and murmur of the radiators.  I knew this would happen, helped along by a finger of Bushmills Black Bush, and I give myself up to the music playing in my head.

And I want to rock your gypsy soul
Just like way back in the days of old
And magnificently we will flow into the mystic

I get it, Van.  I really do.  I mouth the words as I can remember hearing them on the radio and live by other people, and it puts another crack in the stone of my heart.  A duet needs two, and there is only me.

Lyrics from "Into the Mystic" by Van Morrison.  In case you really did not know.

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P.S.: In a nice turn of events, I was published in Indie Ink today!  Please visit and drop some love!

Sound and (Re)Vision

It's been a strange week here in the militantly bucolic Republic of Gumbostan.  A veritable seesaw of angst and elation, laced with a soupçon of contentedness, topped off with a small schmear of being completely in the middle of everything.  The crowning moment was the Mexican standoff in my backyard, between two cats and the rotund groundhog that lives under my shed.  The cats were crouched in the flowerbeds, triangulating on the shed.  The groundhog hardly dared to show his face.  It was so surreal I decided they deserved a toast in the form of a wee dram of Scotland's finest.*

Later, I decided to try a little experiment and turn off all noise-making devices.  More accurately, I turned off the noise-making portions of the devices.  This act of rebellion included the streaming audio on my trusty laptop**, which many of you may know is akin to taking away the cell phone from a securities trader.  I don't often do this.  Silence is something that I want and fear in equal measure.  Without aural input, I am too often forced to face up to the noise in my head.


As anyone who has been there can tell you, the noise in my head sometimes ain't pretty.


Tonight I felt the pull.  I was listening to the radio for a while but something clicked over and I was seized by a sudden desire for quiet.  It must have been the end result of excess input, where the desire for sonic rest overwhelmed my fear of listening to the "freq" in my head.  So off with the radio.  I picked up a book***, some cushions and headed put onto the porch to sit and exercise my eyeballs.


The weather here has been great this week, and today was the best yet.  I know some of my bloggy friends****  have been dealing with rain of Biblical ferocity, so I have been extra thankful that it has been so sunny and comfortable here just outside of Mobtown.  And the a/c is off tonight!  Extra special in the land of wet-hot-towel-around-the-face summer days.


Out on the porch, I sat and read my book, quietly, not unlike Ferdinand***** and his flowers.  The breeze was blowing and it was almost completely serene.  It was then I noticed more of the sounds I normally don't hear because I'm so busy listening to the radio or TV.  Crickets.  Birds.  Leaves brushing on leaves.  The faint sounds of traffic from nearby streets, which really were more soothing than annoying.


Later, inside the house, with the windows open,  I made a pot of tea.  The act itself was very Zen, charged with a 'wabi sabi' vibe running through it.  The simple acts of filling the pot with water and getting out the teabags (it was for a big pot of iced tea) had their own simple and unique sounds.  I especially enjoyed the dry crackle of the paper surrounding the tea bags.  It sounded just loud enough against the low hiss of the gas flame on the stove and the crickets outside.  It sounded like just what I needed.


So as I let the glass go empty, cocking an ear to the wind outside my window,  I felt my mind empty as well.  Not empty as in my brains fell out; empty as in cares and concerns, stresses and worries, thoughts collapsing under their own weight in such a huge pile, they drained away.

"The thirty spokes unite in the one center; but it is on the empty space for the axle that the use of the wheel depends. Clay is fashioned into vessels; but it is on their empty hollowness that their use depends. The door and windows are cut out from the walls to form an apartment; but it is on the empty space that its use depends. Therefore, whatever has being is profitable, but what does not have being can be put to use."  (From the Tao Te Ching by Lao Tzu, as translated by James Legge.)

This came back to me, in that moment of crumpling the tea bag papers in my hand.  The rasp, the crunch, the dry slither of the material on my fingers.  I tossed the ball of paper across the kitchen, aiming for the trashcan.  Watching it arc into the container, I knew in that instant, even of only for an instant, I had achieved peace of mind.

It was beautiful.

*In this case, represented by the Isle of Skye's gift to humanity, 10-year old Talisker.  C'est bon, c'est tout!  And to my friend Rich, he who bestowed upon me a generous gift in the form of 10-year old Laphroaig:  Just a little comparison tasting, to keep myself calibrated. Cheers!
**Surprisingly, the jonesin' isn't that bad.  I only shake...a little.

***"How to Read a French Fry" by Russ Parsons.  A good read, but it made me hungry. 
****Janie, Stiletto, here's hoping you weathered the storms! 
*****Ferdinand the Bull is probably my favorite childhood book, EVAH.  I have a copy that I read to Wee Lass almost every weekend she is with me, and sometimes she reads it to me.  I am blessed. 

Whisky In the Glass

I've a strong feeling it was drinking whisky what made me realize in part, that I was growing up. Good, hearty whisky, in a glass just made for my hand.

I don't mean the little nips like I used to take out of the decanter my parents had, the one that looked like an old fashioned fire wagon and sat on the end table we used to have in the living room. The bottle was beveled glass, and green-gold in color. It had all the little knobblies on the sides that just screamed 'classy'; classy for the mid-seventies, I guess. The bottle was where the coach would be, and the glasses sat in a little rack that I think was supposed to represent the horses. The whisky? Well, the whisky may have been complete shit, I wouldn't know because, well, how much of an expert on whisky can an eleven-year old boy be? All I know is, that we kids weren't supposed to drink it, so naturally that's what I did. I stole a swig every now and then when the 'rents were elsewhere, sucked it right out of the nozzle on the top, I did. Then coughed and gasped my way back to the bedroom wondering why in the world would anyone drink the stuff.

Yet, I never swore I'd never do it again.

And it wasn't the clandestine drinking I did as a teenager, swigging off a bottle of swiped by a friend, and huddled down between the cars in the school parking lot so no one would see us. Or while perched on the rustic throne of a picnic table at a local playground. Or sitting in the scrub woods of some nearby waste ground we used to use as a bike track. Jim Beam or Jack Daniels was the order of the day, because after all, they were the Dipstick of Masculinity when it came to a bunch of slightly misguided young males with more free time than common sense. You were The Shit if you could chug a few swallows of 'Jack Black' without coughing or puking.

I coughed once or twice, but never puked. I suppose that makes me The Sort-of-Shit. Nah, maybe just a dipstick, who once again wondered why anyone drank the stuff.

There was a gap of many years, ironically enough starting when I went off to college, that I didn't drink whisky. Beer was the order of the day, most days. The occasional shot of tequila found its way to my gullet, but not very often. Then one day about ten years ago, it got all up in my snoot that I like scotch. So I tried it, and found out that it was, most likely, what I had sipped so long ago (when I wasn't supposed to do). I was still trying to understand the attraction. The biting smokiness, the sting of the alcohol, the fumes that sometimes made me cough and shudder. There were some I sampled that only politeness and academic interest kept me from immediately spitting right back out. Additionally I had paid, sometimes a bit steeply, for the 'privilege' and did not want to waste it.

There was this evening where I was sitting at my desk at home, reading and listening to music, feet up. On the desk was a bottle of single-malt scotch that I had received as a gift. I was feeling quite 'old school' with my pour of a finger-and-a-half, and thinking myself quite fine. "Down the hatch!" and the shades of my past grinned in anticipation of the cough and shudder...

...but that didn't happen. Instead, I came to know that I was, whether I liked it or not, a 'grown-up'. I liked it, with nary a grimace or shiver.

In that swallow, I tasted the sting and the smoke, the sweetness and the bite. As it swirled in my mouth and warmed my gullet I realized I liked the prickliness of the whisky. I liked that it wasn't really that easy to drink it, if you expected it to be soft and accommodating. I liked that you have to treat it with respect, and even then it can sometimes reach up out of the glass and smack you. It was a drink that you had to accept on its own terms, good and bad, if you wanted to get full enjoyment out of it. Then came the epiphany. 

Holding that glass, feeling the warmth and the tickle of fumes in my throat, I realized that this acceptance of the thing on its own terms, to get the enjoyment? Well, that right there is a description of life. Life. 

I have gotten better at accepting life on its own terms, the joy and the bitterness, the salve and the sting. It dawned on me, finally, that embracing the contradictions instead of fighting them leads to a fuller and more satisfying experience. 

Not unlike a wee dram of whisky now and again, enjoyed in quiet contemplation. It means I'm growing up.

A question, dear readers: What was your grown-up epiphany?

Pensive, with Rain...

The weight of the day falls heavy, and we all seek relief...

So happy to just be home. Time to sit down with the tools o' the trade. The radio was blaring out the Allman Brothers' "One Way Out" (the live version) from Eat A Peach...it was just what the doctor ordered on this, a rainy day of the soul.

Join me, won't you? I have an extra glass or two...

Water of (gasp!) Life

Doing my best Hemingway imitation (minus the firearms), I am feeling whisky-ish tonight. The Wee Lass is in bed and asleep, The Spouse is catching up on ER via TiVo, and I have a few minutes to kill before I (drum roll, please) FOLD THE LAUNDRY.

Wooo. I am living of the f***in' edge. Still, such domestic obligations give me the opportunity to indulge in one of my vices as an adult. Ten minutes to go on the ol' Kenmore is just enough time to sip a glass of Scotland's finest while twirling around in my desk chair.

Ah, the life of the artiste.

I have on my desk two bottles, one empty and one just over half-full. No, they didn't get that way today. It was a concentrated effort of weeks. It would have been today if I hadn't been out pumpkin and apple picking with the Pearl O' my Heart. Plus grocery shopping.

The empty bottle is (was?) Macallan 12 year old single malt. The other bottle is 15 year old Macallan. One I got for Christmas, the other I got for Father's Day. I am, as you probably said to yourself, a fortunate man. If I get a bottle of 16 year old Lagavulin this year, I will have hit the Trifecta!

Single malt scotch was the stuff I hated as a younger man, could not conceive of why anyone would want to put it in their mouth. Rum or bourbon or Irish whiskey was the hard tipple of choice, on the rare occasions I strayed from beer. But somewhere along the line, I grew up (I think) and started wondering just what in the hell happened to me. 'Once in a lifetime...' indeed. The next thing I knew, I found myself sitting at the bar at the White Horse Tavern in Newport, Rhode Island, a glass of Laphraoig in my hand, and the bartender watching me with a grin, expecting me to spit out the amber liquid at any second. I very nearly did. Somewhere in that mouthful of whisky, though, I unknowingly transformed into an adult. It took a few more years for me to realize it.

So sitting here, listening to the buttons scrape the dryer basket, I wiggle my toes and spin the chair. One last swallow of The Macallan makes it way to my gullet, the fumes rise up into my nose. I don't cough anymore, or at least, not very often. The chair slowly spins to a halt. The dizziness continues from the influx of Scotland's gift to civilization in my veins. Considering that Scotch originated in a country with a reputation for dark, misty winters, I understand the appeal. I think I know why it is made and why the Scots would drink it.

I won't be shearing sheep or scything oats tonight, for sure; but with a wee dram in my belly, folding laundry really isn't bad at all.






Father's Day, 2008.