Digging In

Day Eight of Thirty Days of Writing

Shawn McDaniel
Jul 21, 2017 · 5 min read
Photo by Shawn McDaniel

It has come to my attention, quite naturally, that I don’t recall things faithfully. In fact, I doctor up mostly everything, albeit unintentionally, but nonetheless I do it. I don’t want to be this way. I don’t want to fantasize about life. I want to live it, and I want to interpret it to the best of my ability. Thus, I shall tell you the honest way.

I left work today early with every intention to kick it with a friend for a little while, to smoke and drink and forget my worries — to no avail. Instead I returned home and proceeded immediately to the bar next door in an effort to have a single beer and write something down. I avoid home. I tell myself I cannot write at home. It is dead silent and cavernous. I am afraid of being at home alone it seems. Not that I fear being in my house, but I am afraid where my thoughts may roam. I went to the bar, bought an IPA and played pinball. I like pinball. I don’t know why. It’s stupid but fun. I time my shots and win and it’s a dumb cyclical game where the ball falls past the plungers no matter how hard I try. I lost miserably. I was furious with how quickly I lost and sat down wanting to smash everything in sight. Fumbling, fuming, scowling, clenching my fist, I wrote and wrote about how much I hated life:

Cement mixer teeth ground into chalk, amethyst blood combos fuck

each session a lesson in futility stupidity

Misers, miscreants, malcontents, miserable Muppets

March march madly moron, a song of misery

Was a sun shining today

A blue blue ocean away

Who hasn’t strayed

Wary on the hot stars

A rayon candy reef

A spiral jetty relief

All the evicted adventures

Mean nothing nothing

To the body body

The fast talks

Hasty departures

carefree memory

Your shunned heart

Your curling lip and numb heart

Your brilliant brown eyes

I want nothing to do with them

Nothing to do nothing

Away away with those

Burning brown ponds

I’m nowhere if not in my head. I can’t see reality without a warm body to distract me. I must be an insect drawn to light and heat, those violent vertices are damned to suck me in. I can’t remember the calm of the eye, only turbulent seas that rage, shredding my sails, leaving tatters behind, torn bedsheets on the clothing line, bloodied, and leading bears to our campsite, ghosts wandering our wake, a hint of the past. Where am I? An eye for an eye on an escape route clear as day.

A smug fortune cookie told me once, in all its smut and irony, after it cast its lucky numbers upon my fading stars and collapsing solar system, that one cannot steal second with a foot on first, leaving me moody of course and crying but who WHO is on second, eh!? You can’t steal second if someone is already there you stupid fucking cookie. Why did I trust you, you evasive seer, you false fortune teller leading me astray? I need to know the truth. I need a two to set my ducks in a row so I can leave behind these eyes that watch me day and night, to became anew, to tell a story never told, maybe a fable, she always agreed with creatures…

The metaphor, the annotated human. Certainly there are bigger fish to catch and bash and gut and fry, everyone seems to forget those middle steps. Everyone needs to dine. That’s when I realized I never quite escaped my head. Maybe I was meant to spend the next years of my life in repent, cleaning the carcasses of deer, picking the brains of bar flies and interpreting the tattoos on the nearest arms. She is inked up with Leatherface and a chainsaw massacre. It covers up a green dragon she says. Just you and me in this cursed room alone where the walls flood with blood and the telephone receiver melts to your mouth hahah no escape now, no exit!

What ghosts have you seen lately? When I was a boy I saw the ghost of my father. He was clutching my hand in a cathedral. Today and every day I see the ghost of my son, full grown and alive, blonde and blue eyed, estranged. His eyes are brown of course, always brown.

After the bar I stagger to the BP for a pack of cigarettes. There are holes dug deep into the ground, surrounded by iron drums. There are children disembarking from a red pick-up truck hauling a trailer filled to the brim, but of what? Bags, cushions, metal parts, junk, trash, I’m not sure what or why. They sprint around the roped off holes. They fly into the story.

I make my way to the next bar. Drink and drink. I sit and smoke and drink. I fall into a conversation about my homeland, about Detroit and Tyree Guyton and Six Mile. K, a writer, a musician, a scrawny young man with fading sideburns and wily hair, is destined to have a son, is enrooted to fatherhood, and is amidst a turbulent and failing relationship and amiss to what should be done. He is patient and hopeful but anything if not distraught. Do not lose hope, I demand of him. It is no longer about what is burning between you. That raging fire and acid rain, those long trenches dug deep for an interminable war. Forget all that. Whatever happens, she is a human being and so are you. Whatever diabolical webs you weave they do not exist outside your mind. Remember that. She is a human being and so are you.

This is all too close to home. But I am drunk and my eyes are warm. Before all this he sang a funny song with lines that rose and fell like short waves, about whisky and worms and who can even tell.

After all I stumble home, nowhere nearer a solution, no happier than when I was born, merely alive, barely. Though the fury has subsided, it’s only a matter of time, an ending lulled, a torpor muted. I’ll close my eyes and tomorrow will come.


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