Tag Archives: economy

2026, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, prose

The Fireman Reads Finnegan’s Wake: My end of the season, a dream of October and November, the squirrel and blue jay square off

What else could you possibly want?

My last cruise of the season was October 31st, 2026. As I write this, it’s Tuesday, November 3rd. Tomorrow is the day for my long anticipated (left) hip replacement surgery. Today is election day. These dates and details are signifiers of time passing in what seems to be a linear fashion. Before I sat down to write this, I was upstairs making a peanut butter and jam sandwich, watching a drama unfold on the bird feeder our housemate set up in the back yard next to the porch. 

It’s a simple feeder: a flat platform for bird seed and one for a shallow water bowl that hangs on a shepherd’s crook hook. It’s near that large holly tree that is too large and needs to be trimmed significantly down. One of the local squirrels has taken to basically treating the bird seat like an All-You-Can-Eat Buffet, and a blue jay that takes up winter residence somewhere in the large holly tree that’s too large and needs to be cut down or on the back porch were having a loud discussion about which of them had rights to the bird seed. The blue jay, in the manner of nearly all blue jays, was vociferous in the assertion of its rights. The squirrel, confident in the manner of all critters sitting on top riches rightly acquired or not, appropriately shared or not, continued to eat his fill, occasionally looking at the blue jay and its aggressive squawkings as if slightly amused by the distraction. 

Are you not entertained? Are you not already sustained? Is it not enough that you can watch me feasting? What else could you possibly want? This is me imagining what the squirrel might be saying between cheekfuls to the blue jay. There was a time when the Gyspi, the old merled dog, could keep the commuting squirrels at bay; when she was a puppy her vertical leap was five feet and, being a herding and hunting dog, would pull down low flying birds and squirrels leaping from off ramp to on ramp along the interyard network of tree limbs. Sometimes in the middle and late summer they would stop through and treat our garden like a fill up station, and Gypsi would, for the sport and sheer joy of it, which also benefitted us and our garden haul, to take down at least one squirrel a year. This was enough to remind them the rest stop on our property was closed. 

In this precise moment of this precise season, it’s difficult for me to walk without my stick, even in the house

We got slack with the garden and Gypsi is nearly 14 years old; still spry for an old dog, but not as inclined to jump five feet for sport and for joy. Me working on the boat and Amanda out trying to help homeless folks get and keep housing in an increasingly calloused world, in a city bent on gentrification and short money solutions made keeping up the garden a challenge, and for a while we had access to locally farmed vegetables, which was alright. That’s the old American dream, that echo of what used to be the middle class, that notion that if you’re too busy or purple-thumbed to grow a proper garden then you can at least, help financially support small family farms. Damned right. Because that’s what you do when you work odd hours and have a little more money than time. 

But the currents change and this season, as my Amanda calls it, is one in which there is slightly more time than there is money. And our housemate, who is retired, is a solid gardener and so that’s what he does when he feels like it.  After my surgery and recovery, I’ll be able to get out there and help with the garden more of the house repairs that need to be done. In this precise moment of this precise season, it’s difficult for me to walk without my stick, even in the house. The surgeon has ordered me off the NSAID painkillers that work prior to the surgery.  I also had to go get my piercings removed yesterday. 

Calm down! I only have some very vanilla earrings. Five of them. One of them is from the day my second divorce was final. The others are memory markers of years on the river, particularly taking the Mayor Andrew Broaddus Up the river north to South Point for shipyard and my first winter watch and my first trip upriver on the Steamer Belle of Louisville to Gallipolis for shipyard. Tonight we’ll make some last minute preparations. I’m already preparing by getting some Literally indie Literary  podcast episodes loaded and ready to drop while I’m recovering and reaching out to folks I want to talk to on the podcast after the first of the year. I’ve got a few books to read once the initial post-surgical pain meds haze is past, and a manuscript of river stories I plan on editing and expanding. We’ll see how much of that actually gets done, but I do like to plan activities. I figure that tackling Finnegan’s Wake in the wake of a post-surgical haze might be a good mindset for a book that is unreliably narrated, arguably without plot, arguably without actual characters, and what some consider one of the greatest books of literature in the western canon. It could also be utter gutter snipe. It could also be both. One must be open to such things, since the same has been said of Melville’s  Moby Dick. 

And when it comes to absolute gutter snipe, I can think of no place better to end than with an admonition to vote. Not because your views are expressly represented, but because somewhere there’s a  fat squirrel of a human gobbling up all the bird seed and looking at you, wondering why you’re not happy for them. Are you not?

The fireman reads

[Originally published 11.3.26]

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2026, LiL Book Review, Ohio River Valley Literature, Working Class Literature

It Ain’t Broke? Dan Denton’s The Seven Stages of Middle-Class Life: An American Fable. Roadside Press. 2026

 

Order / Buy Dan’s Book Here

 

“You know they say the best way to get over someone is to get under someone else,” one of his union car worker coworker buddies said, and he said that he had heard that and they talked about women some more, and drank more beer and lost the third game but probably won in the fun column still.” (86)

 

Dan Denton’s new book is the sort of manual new hires at any factory job should get on the first day of their first shift, except that HR would never let it happen because they worry no one would stay on the line. If you’ve not had the blue collar work experience, reading Dan Denton is a good way to start beginning to understand what your parents’ and grandparents’ generations went through to make sure you had a life involving the brand name Kraft macaroni and cheese. 

Our protagonist is unnamed. We see him get a job because his father had a job in the same car factory. There’s this story going around, a story that’s mostly true, about the mobility of the modern American workforce and about how most people change careers something like eight times in their lives. There’s an actual statistic about that. The problem with statistics is that they hardly ever tell the whole story. And another part of the story is that if you grow up in a factory town, if in fact there is a factory town to still grow up in, chances are good that multiple generations of your family have worked there.  It’s not nepotism, per say. Well, it is. But the term “nepo baby” only applies to the children of the rich and famous, not to the kids of blue collar fathers and mothers who work long shifts six days a week to get two weeks vacation a year and Sundays off because factory towns are also sometimes church towns. 

Dan Denton’s new book is the sort of manual new hires at any factory job should get on the first day of their first shift, except that HR would never let it happen because they worry no one would stay on the line

As the novel unfolds and our protagonist moves through the years, we find that a lot happens even when it looks like nothing at all is happening. Like the fish he goes to the lake to catch and release, most of his life is under the surface. That’s not to say we get any didactic meditations, grand social theories not-so-cleverly masked as fiction. Denton’s style here is bare-boned and descriptive. Conversations are punctuations on thoughts and feelings the other characters understand but don’t express. 

The true beauty of Denton’s novel is that it doesn’t try. It doesn’t have to try. Through our nameless protagonist, we read about the changes in work culture, in generational diaspora, and in relationships. He’s just moving through the world, working his way to retirement, and finding his way to something like happy that looks very different from the happy that was sold to him when he first got his union card. This book is neither an indictment nor is an anthem of the blue collar backbone that still holds this broken economy together. This book is an unapologetic exploration of what happens everyday to people who aren’t counted, aren’t considered, and aren’t respected enough to even be included in the statistical data set.

 

– Mick Parsons

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2026, Autumn, essay, Ohio River Valley Literature, Poet's Life, river life

The River Possum meditates on the meaning of the dragonfly, the last mayfly of the season, and the grasshopper

of seasons and currents and the road and the congregation of the river

“[N]o matter how often I return to the river for work, connection, solace, and baptism, I will have to also push myself out into the world.” 

– from “The River Possum meditates on the life of that perfect pipe wrench for a particular use” October 6th, 2026

 

3D printed animals on my car dash: two different turtles and a possum.

Part of the zoo I drive with: a possum from Robert and Crystal, a tired turtle from , Fiona, and a shy turtle from my daughter. Because the tired turtle looked lonely. (She’s adorably sweet and soft-hearted, just like her dad. Heh.)

En masse mayflies are a nuisance; but this was the last one of the season and I let him have his day, like I get to have mine.

The last few nights on the river have been damn near picturesque. It’s a funny thing, really. No matter how much or often I look at the river from outside the starboard deck window by the firebox or off the fantail checking the wheel during a trip, or out one of the rear windows from the engine room, I don’t ever get tired of the view. The sunsets look like Autumn sunsets now, and the evening air is cool enough to need a jacket.  I don’t take as many pictures as I used to, but that’s mostly because I want to remember these moments for myself; I carve them into my memory the way someone makes a woodblock print. Sometimes I catch small moments and things that people tend to miss or tend to overlook. I found a dead dragonfly the other day. Well, it was almost dead. I think I saw its final wing shudder. It was standing on the wharf next to the Belle like it was standing guard. I didn’t have my phone with me, so I asked Jonah, one of the deckhands, to come over and take a picture for me. He’s one who appreciates the little oddities and didn’t even blink when I asked him to take a picture of a dead bug.

During that same trip, I found a single mayfly in the firebox; and I was a little surprised to find it still alive. I let it alone, except to move it off the bulkhead and onto the chunk of coal Kevin, one of the other engineering assistants, brought in to show the kids who have never seen coal in real life. The mayfly was not amused and eventually hopped down onto the work desk there on the starboard side. En masse mayflies are a nuisance; but this was the last one of the season and I let him have his day, like I get to have mine. 

I found a dead dragonfly the other day. Well, it was almost dead. I think I saw it’s final wing shudder. It was standing on the wharf next to the Belle like it was standing guard.

The Odd Librarian in My Head Chimes in

People whose opinions matter to me tell me that being on the river, working on a now 112 year old memory machine, has been good for my writing. They’re not wrong. Being on the road is good for my writing, too, but in a different way. And I think being at home is good for my writing too, if only because at some point a poet must reflect; and reflecting on anything is difficult to do en medias res, in the middle of things.  There’s something about being part of the congregation of the river that places a body both in motion and in a particular point in time and space. It’s sort of a pat statement to refer to the Belle of Louisville as “living history,” but the odd librarian in my head, that annoying linguistic precisionist, finds it lacking. I’ve stated it before, probably somewhere in one of these missives, but I’ll state it again. History is dead. The living part is what you learn, and the argument could be made that, in these, the falling days of Babylon, that history is doubly dead. Triple even. But that is probably too scary and depressing a thought, so we’ll leave it here. For now. 

More from the Odd Librarian in My Head

I’ve had to learn to accept what comes. This isn’t an easy lesson for me. I’ve never been one to simply accept anything. And it’s important to point out, and it will probably need repeating, that acceptance and capitulation are not the same thing. Accepting what comes means knowing the current and understanding what to do; it means smelling the rain, or the snow, or the lack thereof. Acceptance is about seeing the moment. But it does not necessarily mean staying in that moment. Moments shift. Seasons shift. Capitulation means surrendering to a moment and putting it in amber, the way people sometimes do to dead dragonflies. Capitulation is stagnant water with so little oxygen left that the fish asphyxiate for the absence. Acceptance means knowing you need to find fresh water, or die. 

It’s taken me a surprisingly long time and too many hard lessons to understand the difference. 

The other day when I got in my car to go to the river, I was rolling down the passenger side window for the cross breeze when I saw a grasshopper. It popped up on the ledge and then up on the edge of the window. I watched it for half a beat and gently suggested it head on out, I had to go work. Believe it or not, I’m not adverse to killing bugs. But it depends on the bug. Hornet, mud daubers, biting ants: yes. I even leave mosquitoes alone as long as they leave me alone. I’ll squash a cockroach without giving it a second thought, and except for the mud daubers, I generally say something like, “Be a Buddha.” We need all the help we can get. Grasshoppers, though, are cool. And sometimes they sing. This one, a bright green one, didn’t sing. But if I’m lucky, maybe I’ll hear him one evening sitting on the back porch.

The final mayfly of the season

 

[originally published: https://eymick.substack.com/p/the-river-possum-meditates-on-the-700] 

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