Category Archives: nonfiction

/versation, 2024, aesthetic, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, poetry, the no-scape

no escape [on the Ohio River Valley Gothic]

2 February 2024 / 0010 hrs

No matter what I’ve told myself over the years, I’ve always been steeped in this kind of Gothic. A childhood in the rust belt around folding farms and closing steel Mills, all just a few degrees separated from day-to-day existence… but close enough that I had a front seat to the sort of geographic necrophilia that happens in the country.

I can never quite meditate it out of my bones.

The Gothic that makes for good television is a more urbane kind a Gothic that lacks that determinism. It’s a Gothic without determinism. It languishes and chokes like the endless summers and New Orleans. Undying, but never quite replenished. Strangled.

This Gothic that infects me, this Ohio River Valley Gothic, is imbued with that determinism. It means you know where you are and hang the fuck on, no matter what. Grit your God damn teeth, spit and keep moving. There’s no escape from pain. What escape exists is only temporary and comes with a hefty price. Better to grit and hang on.

The Southern Gothic languishes in the past. the Midwest Gothic is all hard and deterministic, ike the high desert winters. But the Ohio River Valley Gothic waxes in wanes. It ebbs and flows. It both languishes and is bone and sinew built with determinism. This is what the river brings, deposits like high water mud and driftwoodbone and garbage from up river. It rides in on cross currents.

—

no escaping the massive corn fields
etched into the imagination. 

we take turns playing scarecrow
as the water rises, biding time

in the company of grackles.
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2024, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, river life, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

Swing Shift Watch: The Time Between

This is the transition hours. She’s.next to me, askeep. I’m dressed for work and drinking coffee, waiting for the first of my two overnight watches for the week. We had a nice supper together.: bow tie pasta with roasted tomato, pesto, and sweet Italian sausage. One of those suppers that was so good, we talked about it an hour after, along with ways to make it even better or change it up a bit. This is what we do.

An old standard from classic BBC TV is playing on the TV: As Time Goes By. I’ve been watching this show for years. I first watched it on PBS when I was a kid. Saturday nights . The Red Green Show, As Time Goes By, Keeping Up Appearances, Have You Been Served?, Waiting on God, Last of the Summer Wine. I introduced Amanda to these shows after we got togther. I never get tired of them. I don’t know why. I’m not what you’d call an Anglophile. But there’s something comforting about them.

She’s sleeping hard. It’s been a long week for her, and it’s only Wednesday. Me getting back to work on the wharf after my hip replacement surgery has been an adjustment for both of us. She likes having me around, and I like being around, though I do get antsy if I stay around the house too long. I don’t light out on the road anymore, so I pour that into work, into the river.

On Swing Shift, we only sleep at the same time 2 nights a week. This makes the time between that much more important.

I’ve got about an hour left before I need to finishing puttering around and leave for work. The weather is warmer, but wet. From the weather reports I’ve read, I expect more thick fog and then rain after 4 in the morning. I pay attention to weather forecasts and river forecasts, even when I’m not working. Work didn’t make me this way, being on the road did. The weather and river patterns give me something to obsess over. It’s a sort of passive obsessiveness, always running in the background.

I’ll leave soon trying not to wake her up, and disturb the dogs as little as possible. She’s deep into one of her complicated dreams. I’m going to head out to mine soon enough.

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2023, incomplete memoir, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, the no-scape, Working Class Literature

A recovery update: 4 weeks to the day

Some of my post-surgery recovery reading: the new memoir from Werner Herzog.

Trying to keep busy is awful. Waiting is the worst. You’d think I’d have all this time to write, and generally, the amount of writing I do corresponds to the amount of time I have.

But I also tend to write better when I’m on the move… or at least in motion. At work. On the road. In between. Something. I feel a little stuck in my head. All the words tumbling uncontrolled like a high water crest rolling downriver towards a broken dam.

Waiting is unnatural for me, in the same way that being this stationary is unnatural. People are sometimes surprised to learn that my natural state is in motion, since I’m on the tubby side. But the human body is a machine made to function best in motion. At least this works towards some advantage with my PT.

Amanda got home from work yesterday, exhausted from the Good Work of the World. She fell like a lightning struck oak on her side of the bed face first — not even bothering to remove her purse or hoodie. To her credit we still managed to get out of the house. We went to Lowes yesterday to buy a new toilet seat because the old one cracked, and no one likes getting bit on the butt. I was very little help in the replacement process, but I did enjoy the outing. Scratch that. I NEEDED the outing and she, rockstar that she is, tolerated my lousy mood.

Maybe there’s truth to the stories of hardware stores’ rejuvenative powers?

We also at dinner at Kashmir, our favorite Indian restaurant. The saag paneer was amazing, if not a little spicier than normal.

The couple in the booth behind us reeked of an odor that I call “redneck headshop”… that powdery, floral combination incense that very white midwesterners associate with Far Eastern Enlightenment. [NAMASTE Y’ALL!] Even a little chokes the oxygen out of the room like the incense used during High Ceremony Catholic Mass. It didn’t take away from the food, though, or the amazing company.

Which is to say: thank you, Amanda, for being so amazing. I don’t deserve you. Then again, you knew what you were getting into… ❤️

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