Blog

Fifteen

Micah — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 19:39:36 +0000

If there is to be a seedy underbelly of Yellow Springs, it might as well be Keith’s Alley.

Beside the truncated cinderblock of my west wall lies a strip of asphalt that services the employee and delivery entrances of a downtown not yet destroyed by the grinding forces of modernity: a street unacknowledged by global positioning systems, Google, and Poor Will’s Almanac.

On any given day the complacent reek of diesel exhaust blows up from the festering tailpipes of passing trucks -- delivering the fruit of America's wholesome breadbasket to the shops below. Also, the tear of skateboard wheels against loosely grained blacktop and the blatantly staged lines of pornicators in their search for authentic titillation against the many murals that adorn the walls of my own (private) suburban canyon.

This very evening I saw a pack of boys assault, seemingly, one of their own. They beat him to the ground and kicked him furiously. Fifteen seconds of his life were beaten out of him there on highway 68. Count them with me if you will.

The boys then dispersed, like the fairy dust painted on my face by a child who will never know hunger. I cleaned my house in anticipation of a high class-broad. I loaded my pistol. I mopped the floor with a towel.

This then is the substance of my days.

On Death

Micah — Tue, 28 Jul 2009 18:29:39 +0000

I do not fear death. Rather, I regret the loss of the ordinary quantities of life – the never-read headlines, the coffee never made, and the sex that, for this reason or that reason, was never had. I do not regret the mountains never climbed and the fires never fought – I will have seen the view from peaks yet higher and extinguished flames more threateningly virile. I miss, in perfect prediction of hindsight, the small and mundane, repeatedly forgettable, joys of living.

The Way Back Home

Micah — Fri, 05 Jun 2009 19:57:02 +0000

Each year in Ashland, Oregon, as the day’s length begins to grow usefully longer and the purple Dreck grows thick on the hills, the town is treated to a tender self-indulgence. Seniors from Ashland High School, wrapped in red and white march in procession and take their places in the park’s band shell to be honored by their community and graduate into adulthood (or whatever).

To be honest, I remember the practice on the morning of my graduation better than the ceremony it rehearsed. We walked, two by two, over the road and down the path, through the administrators, idle onlookers, and rows of empty chairs to the stage and were seated – a great mass of nerves, and hope, and potential, and hangover, and innocence.

By evening we had scrubbed and slept and scrubbed again, donned our gowns and caps, and gathered once more in the park called Lithia -- called so for the lithium-rich water piped in from out of town to the mineral-stained drinking fountains therein. At the time I took it for granted, and, perhaps, still do, that we walked in the front of the line. Connor and I had been close for better than half our lives by that time, and it seemed fitting to me for us to lead our peers to whatever comes after high school. Pompous and childishly arrogant as I was then, I still feel a sense of pride to think of it.

Last night in Yellow Springs, Ohio, where I currently live, the seniors of Yellow Springs High School graduated. I know this because of the accounts I have been hearing all day from coworkers about the jubilance of town – the smiling kids everywhere and the proud parents. I don’t know their traditions here in Yellow Springs, but I’m sure they have them and that many of the characters in their story are akin to those in ours.

Hearing about the prospect of graduation I looked at the sun-laden deciduous trees casting shade outside the window of my office. I remember those first days after high school and the sense of relief and joy and pride that I felt. Recalling that time, only five years ago, I am caught by a bittersweet longing to return to those days. The clichés adults have been repeating around me my whole life seem to be more dully true each day. Perhaps youth is the ability to believe, stolidly and brazenly and stubbornly, that this reality will never apply to you.

Not that I am unhappy with my life today. Over the past five years I have traveled countless roads and met many found and lost souls. I have made friends and enemies and lost touch with most of them. I finally broke a bone and thought seriously about the possibility of God. I fell into the jaws of love and was gnawed on, choked on, and spit out to the dust of a New Mexican road. I have also broken hearts. I’ve written songs and won elections and gone mudding in a four-by-four pickup truck. All these jewels of memory collected in my jewel-box mind.

Yet, still, there is some tug, some longing, for a return to those days. I tried once, to return, only to find that the image in my mind’s eye more brilliant than that perception of my optic nerve, and I ran back to Ohio. To the snow and strip malls and my old bitterness. I’m growing here, for now, and the bitterness is fading.

In a song I wrote called The Way Back Home, the chorus lyrics read, “All this time, and all these roads, well, it gets harder and harder to know, the way back home.” Now that I have tried, and failed, to find the home of my cryogenically perfect memory, I find that I spend more time thinking about the lyrics that come in the end of that same song, “It takes a little time to come back down, ‘cause I been young, and I been proud. And I seen the East, and I seen the West, I seen enough to know I aint seen it all yet.”

What I /did/ say

Micah — Tue, 26 May 2009 17:57:46 +0000

As any Antiochian who ever spent a winter term in Yellow Springs among the red brick and gray mortar of our Transient Mode Home knows, sometimes it’s hard to conceive of a time when the sun will shine again. The cold winds blows. The snow falls. The ice grows like formed glass on the skeletal branches of deciduous giants, and the low, monotonous sky shows no mercy.

As late March melts into April and the ground thaws, mud cakes the bottoms of shoes and tracks through the halls of buildings. Antiochians defiantly try to persuade the thermometer higher by wearing T-shirts when the little red line indicates that the temperature has crept above 45 degrees. Perhaps they succeed. When the first pioneering tree buds or blades of green grass emerge to gambol in the face of frosts certain to come once again, we make note and cheer them on despite the plain futility of their attempt.

Once spring begins in earnest, however, there is no stopping the torrent of growth that transforms the bleak grays and whites of Buckeye winter to the Eden of Ohio in late spring. All at once, it seems, the village comes alive with new growth and the fat waterleaves shade the newly bearded ground.

By the time that Antiochians gather to celebrate the graduation of a new generation of our family to take the next steps on their path, the sun shines on an emerald paradise – the grandeur of which is made all the more spectacular by the winter that preceded it. There is a sense of satisfaction, of triumph, of a challenge met and an obstacle overcome.

Today is one such day here in Yellow Springs. The smell of cut grass is everywhere and the sun shines bright from a cobalt sky. And, though we have not yet concluded the struggle for our Independent Antioch College, on the eve of our victory, our campus awaits with open arms.

At the Swimming Pool

Micah — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 20:30:49 +0000

The cold rain spat down in defiance of the spring’s plea for moderation. All day, off and on, the storm clouds overhead had broken and marshaled, broken and marshaled. Five o’clock rolled around and I waited for a relatively less-damp moment, cleaned my coffee cup, locked the door of the office and trudged home.

It is my custom on Tuesdays to dawn goggles and swim trunks and take laps until the women in red, and blue, and pink pool-caps and their brawny leader evict me from my lane – liberating the pool water for aerobics. Not that I have a grievance with these rainbow-headed ladies. They have, in their years, won, by right of inertia, the power to demand what they will – if only someone would listen.

This Tuesday I drove the eight or so miles down to the Xenia, Ohio, YMCA and got ready to swim. The men’s locker-room at the Y is set up so that, in order to get to the pool room, one must walk through a bathroom, a shower room, and up a flight of stairs before finally throwing open the heavy metal door that grants access to the blue and white tiles of the pool-room floor and, ultimately, the pool itself.

Immediately upon entering the pool room I became aware of the high and acrid smell of urine as sound crashes down over me in the cavernous enclosure. The pool was filled with kids that looked to range in age from eight to twelve. I jumped right in and began to swim my laps, initially repeating the mantra “piss is sterile.”

When I swim I usually alternate between breast stroke and freestyle. This means alternate waves of sound and light that crash over and over again as my head dips and emerges from the surface of the water. In fact, this alternation is one of the things that I love most about swimming – there is a meditative quality that distracts part of my mind from the physical effort of pulling myself through the water.

The little boys shriek as they try to force each other under the surface. The girls dive below their surface – the arch of their trajectory reminiscent of dolphins.

About halfway through my laps, a great fat man climbed down the steps into the pool. Once he was in the water he removed his shirt; revealinga mountainously harry middle and back. He swam alongside me for a few laps but always sprinted ahead at the end as if trying to win a race. I was annoyed - strokes became more aggressive. Who was this man to contemplate competition with me? Did he seriously think he could sustain his pace? He would grip the side of the pool and wait for me to reach the end before continuing. After six or seven sprinted laps he lingered in the deep end just under the diving board and took gulping breaths until aerobicsladies made us all leave.

I showered off and went to my locker to change back into my clothes. The man's locker was just a few doors down from mine. He looked to be in his late twenties or early thirties. I glared at him.

As I was pulling on my shirt I heard a nasally voice, thickly laden with the twang of northern Kansas and southern Ohio. It came from the direction of the man with the hairy back and, as I brought my mind to focus, I realized that he was talking to me.

“I used’ta have hair like yours,” he said. “Thicker n’ yours even.” As he spoke I realized that he kept his hair short to cover the fact that he was balding. “Moma said it’d happen to me n’ sure enough...” he trailed off.

I grunted something about how that’s the way it goes sometimes or other and he pressed on.

“Lost my job at the plant,” he said. “they're lettin’ us go cause there aint the money to pay us no more. What you been doin’?” he asked as I pulled on my shoos.

I lied and said that I was looking for work – ashamed of my stable job, my full head of hair, my college degree and my earlier need to compete with him. He was out of a job and trying to figure his life out. He was reaching out to me and something in his voice seemed to ask for an answer. “How can I make it better? How can I overcome the grindingly oppressive facts of unemployment, obesity, and the premature arrival of middle-age?” I had no answer to give him.

My Darling in the Dawn

Micah — Wed, 01 Apr 2009 20:51:03 +0000

This morning, as the spring dawn drifts through the trees outside our kitchen window, my darling’s fingers scout the circumference of a citrus. They move, seemingly by their own volition, as she looks on from behind her lovely, large, dark-brown eyes. Her hands are small and, when she reaches out for my touch on a walk, her fidgety digits inevitably come to rest wrapped around one of my fingers – the full embrace of my palm being awkwardly too large for her capacity. She sits wrapped, as she almost always does when at home, in a pink-and-white blanket though she fervently denies any suggestion that she is one of “those women” who are perpetually seeking shelter against the cold. My darling’s feet, which emerge from the angle where the blanket has fallen, are encased in comfortably tattered slippers -- the toes of which have given way to the forces of time and pressure where the insulation shows through the taxed fabric. She eats her grapefruit as her eyes, so dark I can only rarely make out the pupils, watch me move about the kitchen.

The love we share has grown up from improbable foundations to a healthy sapling. I try to recall the moment when I came to rely on her – to need her – but the effort is futile. In this moment she is my darling in the dawn and that seems to obscure the distinctions between past and future and alleviate the grinding weight of my ambition.

I fry bacon. I make coffee. I leave for work.

Equinox

Micah — Fri, 20 Mar 2009 15:24:05 +0000

All day in the office I have been hearing noises about the “Equinox.” It’s not the first time that such mutterings have floated across my ears but today I decided to take an interest in the talk. I began by assessing my knowledge on the subject: None. After consulting Wikipedia on the topic at hand I feel mehhh on the issue. Hopefully it gets better from here.