Tag Archives: nonfiction

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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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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Ohio River Valley Literature, psychogeography, travel

Knack or knacked?

Me, 2013. Louisville, KY. Still not a great picker. And I miss that shirt.

The best way to travel, after all, is to feel, to feel everything in every way, to feel everything excessively, because all things are, in truth, excessive and all reality is an excess, a violence, an extraordinarily vivid hallucination. -Fernando Pessoa

Planning a jaunt for me is a kind of distillation. This isn’t to say that I plan closely, especially when I’m going out alone. The variables are just different when I travel with Amanda, who travels for different reasons than I do and who loves me inspite of my peripatetic soul. I’ve never been able to talk the progeny into a trip with me, which is probably for the best since she, too, embraces travel in a way unique than my own. Traveling on my own, I want to leave space for the unexpected in a way that a lot of people (rightly) consider unsafe. A bit of the knack and more than a bit of serendipity tend to fill in the details of my trips out. The unplanned and unplannable played a role in my last trip out, my failed walk-about along the Mississippi in May of this year.

Originally I’d planned another westward trip, all the way out to the left coast to visit friends, see the Pacific again, and wander the great square states with big sky broken only by the Rockies. I was considering another run at my failed walk. But then it occured to me that I hadn’t spent much time in my own backyard — the Ohio River Valley Basin.

There was a time that I covered the lower part of the valley in my car. This was the mid-1990’s. I was loose in the world more or less, trying to figure out how to live in the world with such an itchy foot. It wasn’t my intention to wander the lower valley. It’s just what I did. From Huntington WV to Ironton and Portsmouth, Seamen, OH, Cincinnati, Maysville, Lexington, KY. I worked just enough and often stayed with friends. I also stayed at my Mom’s when I had my weekend visitations with Stella, which offered the Kid some consistency and helped cover for the fact that I had no clue how to be a practical parent. A few times I tried to stop moving work. Once I moved back out to my hometown and paid rent to sleep on a cot in someone’s laundry room. One of my oldest friends got me that job and the crash pad, actually. I don’t know that I ever really apologized for imploding … as I usually do when I try to go straight and hold job like a productive member of society. Sorry, Bret. I really am. I’m also sorry for being a shitty friend and not keeping in touch.

But this time is different in that I don’t have a car, can’t afford a car, and if I’m being honest, I’m only romantically attached to the idea of having one. This means I’ll be traveling by public transport… which is spotty in a large chunk of the area I’m going to be wandering… on the kindness of friends and strangers (not that I’ve had much luck historically, hitchhiking) and on foot (as little as possible but still a possibility.) I’m open to pretty much all modes of transport and feel like I’ll get around to traveling in pretty much every way there is to travel before I lay down my walking stick and turn into a tree… which I’m not planning on for quite a few years. Longevity and stubbornness are on my side and so is my faith the serenditpitous nature of the universe.

I want to soak into the dirt that made me, follow the river to Cairo, IL, and bounce along the old National Highway. If you’ve read me at all, you know I’m not one for touristy excursions, but there will be some excursions, I hope. Geography is powerful, but maps are man-made collectively accepted delusions. One could even argue that a map is a kind of violence… an “extraordinarily vivid hallucination.” As a matter of fact, that’s what I am arguing. And that’s why I’m going. And that’s why I always come back.

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