russian doll

Our new house is an old house and when we moved in you mentioned offhand that you felt the presence of other histories, other owners that had come before. I didn't notice it at first but gradually I did; it started to feel like our lives in that house were the outer surface of a Russian doll, with six or seven vanished generations clamoring from the inside, sealed hermetic, waiting for their chance.

You show me important things in that offhand way, and gradually I could feel the weight of -- but couldn't see -- other lives from the past couple of centuries in that house. I felt strangely accountable to them, and I wondered what they'd think when I snuck a snack at night, or watched too much TV, or said something curt to you.

Gradually those lives felt more real. Sometimes walking into the kitchen I would hear someone was crying in the heat vent, a mournful cry beyond reserve, beyond despair. Late, the house would fill with incongruous smells, like baking bread, or camphor, or wine that had gone sour. I would get this fast alone sense and feel a need to run upstairs,looking behind me the whole way, and I would lie down as quick as possible, without even taking off my shoes. My dreams came from other eras, and I would wake up mid-thought, in a mind I didn't recognize.

Right when we had our first child something shifted. When we got home from the hospital I could feel them all waiting up for us, like proud relatives. I was nervous, and it helped me sense that things would be alright -- that we would figure it out.

I was excited to tell you I could feel the ghosts in this house all around us, like a greeting party, but you told me it was all imagination and asked me to put on some tea. I said you're probably right. It's been years now and I can't tell if the ghosts are gone or if we just stopped noticing their presence.

rhinoceros

This is going to sound a little weird but the other day when I was cleaning the basement I found the skeleton of a rhinoceros. I'm pretty sure it was a young rhinoceros. I'm not going to lie, when a man reaches a certain age and loses control of his basement and the years go by sluggish but inevitable -- like plus-sized models heralding hand-me-down fall fashion on a cheap and freely available kind of ketamine -- when that man one day can stand it no more and he cleans his basement and unearths the skeleton of a rhinoceros, it gives him pause.

When that day comes a man takes stock.

I'm clear on the fact that cleaning the basement was probably overdue. Most reasonable observers or agencies concerned for the welfare of the young or the population at large would tell you it was. When I told my wife I was finally going to clean the basement (my tone hopeful, my eyes full of romantic spark and pointed vaguely in the direction of her face) she grunted and began softly to cry, which I took to mean that she knew for sure that the cleaning was long overdue and in fact by this point totally insufficient. Then my wife buried her face in her hands and cried less softly and it was five or ten minutes before she could watch TV or text or even drink.

I was determined to clean the basement myself. On TV when a man loses control of his house (or even when he just falls a little behind for a few years) all these TV people basically surprise him at his house in the dead of night and like rape him or punch him in the stomach or face until he cries on camera, then his relatives testify to how impossible and selfish he is until he cries some more, then a therapist asks him why he's crying and while he answers a dozen or so people in ninja costumes break down his door and rape or punch him again and wisk everything that isn't nailed down to the town square for a televised sacrificial bonfire.

You can spare me that, friend. When I make a mess or get a little behind on things I want to handle it myself, even if it takes me a while to get to it. And it isn't like having a clean house is some salve or boon. If your house is perfectly clean you still have to live in it with the same people you lived with before, you just have less stuff now to distract you.

If for some reason it *were* me on TV, I wouldn't be the bozo clutching my privates defensively and blubbering to the camera about my lost years or how I never really knew what a clean house was. I'd have fun with it. There'd be outright sabotage ("oh, I see you found the deadly adders... I'd nearly lost hope"). There would be costumes; I'd spend most but not all of the episode dressed as a chicken, and the rest of it in a bathrobe. There would also be a room prepared for weeks in advance wherein (I would try to convince them) I routinely expressed my heartfelt belief that my urine should be preserved in three liter bottles that had once held Wegman's Diet Root Beer, and that feces is the living expression of God's will and should be smeared liberally onto the faces of all who enter my home.

As I said, when I found the rhinoceros it gave me pause. I consulted with my wife, who spat in my face and kicked me in the balls, which I took to mean that she also had no memory of having a rhinoceros of indeterminate age in our house at any point. But then she got a beer and sat watching ESPN, which I took as a positive sign, a flicker of possibility that "the grill was still hot."

Back downstairs I puzzled over the skeleton. I thought about having a yard sale or hawking it on Craigslist but I remembered, probably from TV, that most of the time that's just an excuse someone makes when they aren't ready to part with their loot.

I thought of working the rhinoceros skeleton into the decor of the basement, making it the focal point of some prehistoric man-cave, but I figured more than likely it would just end up piled under thousands of copies of The Sporting News, exactly as it had been before. I thought of the ninjas and the masked gentleman with the taser and my brother-in-law explaining what a douche I was on national TV. I thought of my children and what they'd say, what their friends would say, what their own future children would say. Most of all I thought of the spirit of the rhinoceros, held bound to earth, lost and alone in a suburban landscape that it never could have chosen for itself.

Then I started breaking down the skeleton into the smallest groupings I could get it into and started piling those in trash bags, and I bagged until my hands bled, and then I bagged some more.

When I got back from the dump my wife was on the porch drinking mojitos. I told her I'd made real progress and asked if she might make me a mojito. She told me to fuck myself and called me by another man's name, which I took to mean make your own mojito.

I did and we sat out on the porch, listening to the summer cars out on the freeway, to the swift and loving passage of time, and I knew it would all be fine.

cenicero

You can setup drums in the basement should be New Jersey's state motto. Including the ellipsis and delivered by the official mascot.

The official mascot is a cartoon goldfinch with half-baked eyes, a full complement of sticks and brushes and a jean jacket with an illegible band patch. The official mascot's name is Max Finch. He's a fun one, at first, a real presence but after a couple days crashing on your couch he starts pawning every non-percussive item in your house to buy newer and better pieces for his kit. And he never remembers your name.

Tonight where we are there are drums in the basement. When I get to the house N. is eating noodles with cheese but discards that process and insists that we go and play.

The ellipsis in the new state motto is less a grammatical cop out, more a promise. The promise that if you move to New Jersey and setup drums in the basement, no evil will befall you and your spirit will loose from its shackles to become one with time. If New Jersey really is in danger of losing its millionaires, let them be replaced by two-year old drummers.

Q: What are drums like?

A: Drums are like horses and ice cream and TV on and noodles and books and Grandpa and friends and soccer balls and footballs and baseball bats and Grandma when it is dark it is time to notice and when it is light it's time to play and there are Mommy and Daddy and people and friends and there is chocolate ice cream play drums.

Max's tattoos:

a) cracked skull with eye sockets beset by hummingbirds;
b) lightning striking a man head-on; the man is stoked;
c) diagrams of drum-mic positioning (7).

What N. lacks at present in formal prowess he makes up for in fire. And in vision. He sees drums as they are, without a preconceived sense of which pieces to play when or in what combination, without an overriding sense of 4/4 guiding him. He is more of an off-road truck than a reliable train, and friends, I tell you, tonight New Jersey is a beautiful state.

my question is what happened to you

everyone else in the wild puzzle i more or less understand; my question of late is what happened to you to make it turn out so this way for you, to make you act as catalyst to so many emotional catastrophes without the slightest mental map of the emotional world yourself. yet all of that was ten or twenty years ago, now when i see you it's like you're a teenager trying on emotions for yourself for the first time.

it isn't that living in the suburbs has been for the best. i have real doubts that that's true. i think it's made us all crazier if anything. it has made me more aware though (particularly with these newly fierce new jersey seasons) that things grow as much as they can and die, that's all they do, it isn't that there's some overarching destiny or logic or transcendence to it, more a dumb blind imperative. the weeds find purchase whereever they can, the grass, the wild flowers all push into every place that allows the faintest glimmer of root. like how on the backdrop of those decades your soul has found a place to quiet down now, to begin some long-delayed reckoning, and in a quasi-patronizing way i'm happy for you.

now i find myself somewhere between you and a completely different person. emotions for me are a bizarre confusion but sometimes i know the names, sometimes i even know that this-is-an-emotion-i'm-feeling. it doesn't prevent that from be a disorienting grid on which i'm more likely to hurt others than not. it just tells me i should know better. maybe my dumb growth will to be more quiet in my failings than you were, to keep them better hidden from the surface of the earth. maybe my achievement will to be a better and more subtle weed in the lives of the people i know.

in death though. maybe that's where we find transcendence, moving from the dull provincial limits of blind individual growth and back into soil and carbon, into the wild dumb flowing pulse of nature. i think stereolab could have convinced me of the joy in that in a song in the 1990s, i don't really know where they sit on the subject today.

negative grand canyon

The day we buried you I sealed myself off in a way, like, with death an eventuality one should regard the world at such-and-such distance.

I don't remember you clearly alive in good form, only that you were a rare conduit, a conveyor of magic and spirit. Naturally cancer targeted you especially. One might argue the opposite view that angels brought you away to heaven. Or that believing in angels or heaven is cheap dualism that makes it easier to give up on the world, believing that the next or some alternate one is better to invest in. The way I picture it, you’d laugh and argue that logic is a poison that shouldn’t be sprayed near this particular discussion.

Those of us you left behind formed a silent pact to never deal with the loss, to allow it to submerge and grow in force and weight. For 25 years none of us dealt with your absence. We agreed that it should make a missing puzzle piece, the undiscussed key to our family’s bizarre and indefensible tendency toward entropy and isolation. That absence grew into a kind of negative Grand Canyon, not a mountain, I mean, but a colossal hole in the ground filled near to overflow with decades of human refuse, dirty laundry, broken toys, empty bottles, old newspapers, a kind of personal landfill, a museum of disappointment, each of us taking up residence on opposite sides, meeting in the center only when obligation overcomes the dull fear of being buried under a glimmering avalanche of detritus.

I visited her grave one morning this fall. I’d brought my son to meet her, and I remembered again the morning I'd said goodbye. I thought she’d like to meet him, that she might want to see the way his eyes catch light. That I knew now that our distance was the wrong choice, that it was the opposite of what she would have recommended.

I don’t know why I didn’t come to see her sooner. I can’t think of an excuse that’s sufficient. I only know that I love and miss her, that there’s still her magic in the world. That I feel her presence in the way these pines change colors, in the rare way light sustains itself through winter, bursting sudden through the branches of roadside trees.

piles of newspapers

A man and a women fall in love, buy a house, and dedicate themselves to filling it with piles of newspapers. "Our love is eternal," says the man. "We need a subscription," agrees the woman.

The secret to not throwing out the paper is that it prevents the day from ending. Whereas before, time might have been a succession of days, one leading to the next, now it should be pictured more as a kind of revolving door. By staying longer in the door, you end up right where you started. Time stops: Nothing can hurt you, nobody dies, and love never ends.

There are marital relations between the man and woman, and they have 2.5 children. When the piles grow too high they carve paths with a hedger. When that becomes unsustainable they pitch a tent in the backyard, sending the half-child into the house on slender missions to find somewhere, anywhere, where a newspaper can be added.

On one such mission the half-child disappears and the marriage of the man and the woman faces its first crisis. It's the man's thought that the game is up; that they must empty the house of newspapers in the desperate hope of finding their beloved half-child. The woman sees his side, but believes that altering the process now would renew the passage of time, thus re-opening their lives to pain, death, and disappointment.

(Or, what's the sense of regaining a half-child, only to see the entire family threatened by the vagaries of chance, desire, and destiny?)

In the backyard camp of the man and the woman a quiet argument rages, while little ones dream Morse code from a brave half-sibling. By dawn a compromise is reached. Cranes remove the roof of the house, and the man and woman find the half-child -- malnourished, scared, and over-read, yes, but very much alive.

The love of the man and woman blossoms and their pile of newspapers grows to tower over the whole neighborhood. A beacon of hope and truth in a decaying, dangerous world.