Category Archives: nonfiction

2022, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, prose, the no-scape, Watchman's Journal

Watchman’s Journal: Off Shift 23 March 2022

It’s easy to get accustomed to never being sure whether you’re asleep or awake.

I’m in the first week of a new jobby — the swing-shift watch on the Belle of Louisville. I’m there so the day watch and the night watch get a two day weekend, which means my schedule flips mid-week. Monday and Tuesday I’m on 4pm to midnight. That means I got off work at midnight this morning (Wednesday). I go back to work at midnight tonight (technically Thursday) and work the overnight (midnight to 8am) Thursday and Friday. Then I work Sunday 8-4 and start all over again.

The guy that’s been training me has been talking the job up a lot. There’s not a lot to the actual job, though I am going to try and learn as much about the boats, the wharf, and everything in between, that I can. Like my job as a Lot Dog, I’m not carrying any ambition with me. I’m just there to Do The Thing. And since The Thing is walking around and marking off time with plenty of time in between to sit and commune with the dirty sacred river, read, and write, I intend to Do The Thing well. Watch has a lot in common with being a Lot Dog. The only difference is that maybe, if I’m lucky, I’ll turn into a Wharf Dog.

Only time will tell.

I admit to being a bit of a river stalker. I’ve applied for this job no less than 6 times this year. I applied two or three times last year. I’ve been talking myself into and out of applying for this job for about five years now. At one point I was worried I couldn’t physically handle the work, but somewhere between the early days of a the pandemic and being a Lot Dog — which meant standing on my feet sometimes for 10 to 12 hours a day — my tendency to worry about what I can and can’t do has been burned away. What has replaced it is something I hesitate to call determination. I’ve always been determined in my own way. This is something else. It’s more akin to Urge. Urge is how I describe the Thing That Makes Me Write. Urge. A human is a perpetual motion machine. Sometimes it gets broken but that doesn’t remove function, just ability. I am a perpetual motion machine. I am Urge. At this point, my ability to do or not to do no longer matters. I will until I can’t. I will write until I can’t. I will Do The Thing until I can’t. Motivations matter less than the motion.

I ascribe motivations mostly to explain Urge to people in more concrete terms. Concrete abstractions. These ascriptions are the absolute truth. I have bills. I have happy obligations to my wife and our shared life. I’m trying to be a good father to my adult daughter and a good papaw to my granddaughter. That is truth. But it’s a description added on afterwards, like a book review.

The guy training me talks up the job a lot because he wants to make sure I’ll stay. Swing shift is hard. I knew that when I told Captain Nick I wanted the job. Being a Lot Dog shook my regular sleep routine loose. Now I sleep when I can and I make sure I get enough. Luckily I don’t need more than 6 hours to feel rested. It’s entirely possible that since the lines between sleeping and waking were erased somewhere along with my worrying that my my body simply takes rest when it needs it. A mind free to wander is always at rest, maybe. I like to think of this dream as my life but my lives that I say are my dreams feel real too. I make sure to spend more time here than in the other ones.

This morning I apologized to my wife because I wish it could all be easier. I turned 49 this year. Many of my age contemporaries, some younger even, are looking at retirement. I’ve started a new job, a new education. Same old Urge, though. I’m lucky in that my wife knows me well enough to know that Urge is as much in service to her and to us as it is to me… and I to Urge. All the lines merge and erase like waking and dreaming.

In 12 hours I’ll report in from the wharf. It will be a poem. They are all poems. This is too.

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2022, Day Book, essay, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature, readings

Day Book: 3 March 22

“A cicada taught a young dove, saying with a laugh…” – Chuang Tzu


When I was 10 I saw a legion of 17-year cicadas fly against the wall-sized window of a car dealership in Southern Indiana. If hitting the glass didn’t kill them the first time, they just kept flying towards it.

I think about this whenever Amanda and I talk about living in Capitalism.

At this point, it’s not even about learning something, being shown something. We know. At this point, it’s just being hammered by the same truth over and over. The spiritual equivalent of a cicada’s life. Brief. Seasonal. Forward. Learned but not wise.

The problem isn’t the big glass window. The problem isn’t that we’re cicadas.

The problem is we’re doves. Laughing cicadas have nothing to teach.

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end note, essay, lot dogs, Louisville Stories, nonfiction, Ohio River Valley Literature

lot dogs 1-13 / end note

I cling to words as a matter of faith. It’s a word that gets abused alot: faith. But I’m increasingly unable to find another word to describe the act that is adequately connotated and contextualized. I cling to it the way a carpenter clings to their tools, the way a baby clings to their parents. I cling.

Life is an absurd business. My latest gig, working the gate at Churchill Downs as a lot dog, highlighted some of that absurdity. The Downs is a giant coughing economic engine run, literally, on horse power. That engine, like all engines, burn up resources and do nothing but create endless motion, driven by Men who care nothing about who and what they run over. Back in the September Meet I worked inside once or twice, right up next to the track. On a day when the track was sloppy from rain I watched a horse fall not far from the finishing post. The thorobred fell like a tired concertina. But it still got up, jockeyless, trying to finish the race. The animal was led into a trailer where I later heard it was put down.

If you’ve never seen a horse keep running in spite of a broken leg you don’t understand what nobility of spirit actually means.

They don’t put the horse down on the track anymore. Too many cameras. Too much bad press. No one want to know how the sausage is made. They just want the feast and their fancy fucking hats.

I worked outside the wall. The pay was better and the people were more honest… which is to say, more distilled. Inside the walls, the gentility is fake. There’s an aristocratic “Upstairs, Downstairs” feel to everything. Many people who work inside the wall think they’re better than us lot dogs. They buy into the class structure and act like if they step and fetch properly that they will be invited to sup.

They never are. We aren’t either.

That isn’t to say that there aren’t people who appreciate the work we do. There are some genuine humans there, trying to work and support families. Genuine working people with kind and open hearts. People brought us coffee. And donuts. The previous five sentences are a prayer of thanks for the angels that walk the Earth. And I am always grateful for the reminder that they exist, even in the dark machinations running off the world.

In the past my writing has suffered when I work. And truth be told, I’d rather be writing and reading and wandering around than being on the job. But as a matter of survival, I cling to words. I write from a place that disappears. Each moment evaporates into another and I write. I generally chose a language economy that’s stripped bare because when one has to no choice but to splice life down to the moment, there’s no time for reflecton. Maybe that’s what the pure existentialists have wrong. They look at the long march of time as a giant slide instead of a seemingly endless series of connected moments that grow from the previous and feed the next. And it is in the those vanishing moments, absurd and experiential, that I write. And when I can take a longer moment, I write longer.

Because there are always enough words. And always enough to write about.

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