The High Ate Us

I’m sitting outside on the patio at my fave pub, nursing a wicked whiskey hangover. The bagel and cream cheese from the coffee shop next door and the Nihilist Stout I’m slowly sipping on, however, are both helping. It’s time to go back to only drinking beer and occasional wine with dinner. I’ve done same before, and my body is obviously demanding I do it again. I think I actually only started the whiskey up again because of Seamus, and his cigar bars. Now he has quit all alcohol, for good. And I mean that phrase in all its definitions: for good.

As I muse about this, two motorcycles pull up and park directly in front of me. A circular logo emblazoned on the back of each young man’s leather jacket reads, “Sons Of Silence.” Huh. Weren’t they the ones Seamus said had a contract out on him back in the day?
One of the men, stumbling on the stoop just outside the pub door, messily and briefly makes out with the tousled, rough-looking Gothy chick who had been riding behind him on the bike. With my black and blue hair and my tall, well-softened Doc Martens, I am noticed by them, if only in a small way, drowned out by the din of their performative presence. I turn my face to my Nihilist.

Neither Seamus nor I have posted here all that frequently lately, as I’m sure any readers we may have have noticed. There are a few reasons for that. But also, I’m predicting this blog has reached its natural conclusion, and is probably ending.

One of the reasons for our infrequency (actually probably the main reason), is that Seamus and I are together much more often than what has been normal in our past. Sure, we could do the Bars Of Yore thing (and still might), but we just. Haven’t.

Another reason is that Seamus has quit drinking. Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean there will be no bars for him, or that he couldn’t post non-bar or Bars of Yore posts instead, but. There’s a point at which the two reasons above combine to make this blog not a thing anymore, really.

The third reason we’ve been sparse posters here is that Seamus has been writing a lot lately under his real name. He describes the need for his pen name as a sacred mask of sorts, needed as a strength to begin his writing habit, when we began, and now that he’s writing a book under his real name, he says he no longer needs the pen name. He doesn’t have to rely on it to write. Now me, I never needed the pen name in the same way, but I too am writing more under my own name, so this venue has dropped in priority somewhat. (Also, for me, as any readers of my personal blog know well, my work as an English professor often takes all my writing time and energy.)

So. Is this blog on hiatus? Maybe? Not sure what’s happening with it, and of course a big part of that has to do with Seamus, but I’m writing this post much like the third episode of BBC’s Sherlock, season 4. If it continues, there’s enough open ends that it’ll make sense. If it’s the last episode, there’s enough conclusion there that it works just as well.

This blog will remain here, online, though, because it’s good stuff. Speaking for myself, it’s some of the best writing I’ve ever done. And it’s a story of a Journey. Read through it from the first post and you’ll see what I mean. It’s a narrative about what happens when two mad, intelligent, complicated beings collide in love so hard that their hearts smash together into one.

That’s what the frogs said, anyway. And I believe them.

Can I Kick It?

I mean, who the fuck needs to hear another Tribe Called Quest song in 2017? You haven’t heard enough? You actually need to go to the stereo and put on “Can I Kick It?” one more time? The previous 8,764 times weren’t enough – you needed to hear that jam just once more.

Yeah, I’m in Boulder.

Cradle of my childhood, place of my upbringing, home to my beloved. I’m sitting just now in a coffee shop, trying to write and not really succeeding. At any rate, not succeeding at making any progress on the book, which should be my priority. But right now it’s too difficult. I’m trying to knock down the last couple pages of a brutally challenging chapter on Sartre and I’m realizing I’ve said what I need to say, but that the form somehow calls out for a summation. I’ve always hated summaries, even back in composition 101, which Peony teaches. If I’d written a good essay, the summary was always superfluous. If I’d written a crap essay, the summary was too little, too late. But you’ve got to have it. If it’s not there, nothing reads right. I get it completely. I require it same as anyone. Believe me, there’s plenty of lousy writing and any number of articles that break off in mid-thought. I drives me up a wall, so I respect the need for a good summation. But it’s still the hardest part. I’m allergic to pointless restatement. When I have to wade through it (did I mention that I’m writing about Sartre) I want to crawl out of my skin. But all art has requirements that don’t necessarily match our personal aesthetics.

Observations: The place is packed. Everyone is white, the painfully vanilla hip-hop notwithstanding. A very pretty, Nordic-looking girl at the next tale is somewhat performatively grooving to the music. This album was new when I was her age, but I doubt that she knows that. It’s all exotic black people music to her, and I imagine it all sounds the same. But nothing’s going to rob her of the superficial solidarity of bobbing her expensively coiffed head up and down to 25 year-old rhymes. All good. Not my fucking problem.

Before Peony and I came over here we knocked a couple back at the adjacent pub. I don’t mind that place – it is what it is. It’s a craft brewery in a college town, fully of everyone you’d expect to find there, but the staff is kindly and I’ve been going there, off and on, for decades. Peony and I first reunited there, a year and change back. I have mixed feelings about those memories. Lovely in some sense, and important, but I can’t really separate that experience from all the pain and tearing-down of structures that accompanied it. Nor should it – it’s all part of the experience.

It’s a Saturday, anyway, week before Thanksgiving. Last night Peony met my old Dad for the first time, sort of. They’d been in the same room before, but thirty years back. They met in the full and right context this time, and it was astonishing. The old man relaxed instantly in her presence, becoming loose, clever and charming in a way I’ve seldom seen him. They seemed to have known each other forever, and I felt very blessed and brought home by this.

Strange, that little paragraph. Strange that I have so much more to say about a boring album playing on a coffee shop stereo than I do about the thing that really changed everything. But what else are you dealing with, when you write, but the limits of language? Or maybe just the limits of language in my hands. Maybe I can someday be the kind of writer that would have the right things to say about the extraordinary woman I love meeting the extraordinary father who made me who I am, but I doubt it. More to the point, I’m not sure that I want to be. I’m not sure how much I want to try to make that your business. Maybe I do have those gifts. Maybe I’m just not interested in putting in the work.

A lot has changed this week. A career path I had thought assured has changed, slipped away suddenly. I’ve encountered some music this week, a whole discussion unto itself, that’s changes a great deal of my thinking about that whole branch of art. Peony has met Ol’ Da. I’m realizing that the book is very nearly finished. The end of the year is drawing near. And today, this very day, is the one year anniversary of the beginning of the Exile. One year ago my father was also in town, and my wife had just discovered my infidelity, and I was falling away from myself into a very dark place. Today, I’m alive, which in and of itself is something of a surprise. I’m in a coffee shop filled with obsolete music. Across from me sits Peony, who as of today, one year back, I was sure I’d never see again. In between has passed an ocean of mad changes, which is churning around me still. That language seems melodramatic but it’s accurate. Everything has spun far beyond the everyday and stayed there. I’m there still. We’re there still. My coffee is lukewarm. I’m alive. I know nothing about tomorrow. But I’ll choose it when it gets here.

I’m alive, see. That’s what that means.

The Thinning of the Veil

Halloween. All Hallow’s Eve. Day of the Dead. Samhain, out bestriding the land, wielding his sickle, and the veil between worlds is thin.
Those of us who dwell in darkness normally, those of us who are regularly lunatic, are susceptible to this thinning of the veil between life and death and madness. O, and the full moon was mere days after. I wax along with the moon, so this year the darkness and the blood were nearly in tandem. Speaking of blood:

Halloween high noon, I underwent a primitive pain ritual: a slow-poked tattoo.
It’s a pair of interlocking hearts, almost pentagram-like, from Leonard Cohen’s emblem he named The Order of the Unified Heart. Yes, it’s appropriate for many reasons, and I happened to be able to afford it. So. Magic. I was nervous about how much it was going to hurt, etc.—the one stab at a time thing, but it wasn’t bad. It felt primal, a way to honor the thinning of the veil of the world, and the complete dissolution of the boundary between the hearts of Seamus and me.

It is going to be a Halloween tradition from now on, methinks. There was hardly any blood, actually, if any. Red wine, though, to soothe my nerves and nerve endings. The very beautiful, very young artist (a fellow burlesque dancer) put herself through meditative ritual and smudged with sage before she began. A sacred act all around.

Later, my ability to do makeup superseded a costume. Night of the living dead. That night, I incorporated the ink splatter into the squicky undead look I made for myself with the remnants of my ancient stage makeup kit. See, the ink got all over me, like a goth Pollock piece. Each time the needle was jerked out of my skin, it spattered.

Seamus had his boys that Halloween night, so as I went to one terrible bar to unload my old computer onto the Brit, then, overfed with mediocre pizza, stood at my fave pub chatting with The Scot, Seamus picked up his kids from their trick-or-treating and experienced a dark/lit up nightmare scare. I’ll let him write about that, if he feels like it, but suffice to say it involved his old house, and his second wife. Plunged him into that corner again, with the sharpened stick, though this time he included me there. Took arms against a sea of troubles and was brave.

At the corporate “Irish” bar’n’grill near him, when it was finally our night together, we did a whiskey shot in honor of the Unified Heart. And I was reassured.
The next day (or, the day after), he was open and articulate, at the real Irish bar downtown I used to go to all the time when I was with the Band Of Young Men. We had the traditional Guinness and shot o’Jameson together. While there, Seamus gifted me with more details re: his practical anxiety about including me in his life and his family, and it helped. It was enlightening. Lifted the veil. And I was reassured. I know him well, now, and it’s only getting to be more so; anything separating us dissolving to nothing. That’s what the interlocking hearts mean—that impromptu magic ceremony with the frogs that made our hearts one. Dropping all barriers between us. The ultimate breaking of the rules, saith Seamus. His full quote:
“The shared heart is the true transgression and pagan rite. Tearing down the barrier between self and other is the sacred act that can only take place in dark places, safe from optimism, ‘pure’ reason, and history. It’s the greatest and final act of rebellion.”

Before that, though (the veil of chronological time is thin, here, isn’t it): the day after Halloween, I was having a solo pint, hearing the echoing silence from Seamus, post-scare, and I worried about Exile. Again. But the archer was much more confident than the erstwhile phoenix who overstayed her welcome. And I was reassured, amidst my worry. It’s going to be okay.

I don’t really mean “okay.” I don’t mean that in a blind, or optimistic way. I mean it from a position in which I’m observing reality unfold. Different, this time. No wool over my eyes, now.
I think this, looking back on my week, as I sit in a giant wrought iron throne, with elaborate welded metal art floating at its top. A coffee bar, a good one. Seamus’ throne is like mine, as he faces me across the iron table and writes. I’ve finished my grading so I outline this post and watch him think, and words flow from his brain, and my left ovary pains me and we’re partners. Right now, and this weekend, we are. As though I’ve worn a veil for it. Though I didn’t in my first marriage and I doubt I will for this one, if we indeed decide to have a ceremony in future. I don’t like the faceless bride thing: it’s one of the most woman-as-property-being-sold bits of the traditional wedding ceremony, that isn’t really in fact traditional at all, since it was invented in the 1800s. Too recent to be tradition—not like this old tattoo. Anyway, point is: I prefer to be seen, and see clearly, when undergoing a ritual.

Back when Seamus’ and my relationship was both more dangerous and far less, he gleefully suggested we get married on some future Halloween. Just this past October 30th, though, he mentioned that bad things always happen to him on Halloween. Firings, evictions, bad stuff in general. And so it did, this year. A primal scare. I say it’s because the veil is thin, on Halloween. Life and death. And madness. And blood.

So.
Marrying on Halloween is either a great idea, or a really bad idea.
Maybe I should wear a veil this time then. I’ll definitely get a tattoo.