noblelake-blog

[noblelake-blog]

Trump and the people

The fireworks started around midnight on the west coast, they were probably the most depressing fireworks I’ve ever listened to in my life. I hadn’t seen any Trump signs around the ‘hood but it wasn’t too shocking. This stretch of deep Southeast Portland backing up to Powell Butte is in the old school white working class vein of town, though it’s had a thrush of new blood in the last decade, as the few remaining communities of color have been pushed out this way. I sat at my kitchen table feeling like a bad acid trip was coming on. I was about to turn 40, and my 20 year old self would probably have been surprised that something like this had taken so long. I remember sitting around with a bunch of degenerate punk clowns in Austin watching the returns the night Bush “won” in 2000, and feeling the same kind of despair while my girlfriend and I consoled each other in ‘04. But beyond that, it had felt for a long time that a country rapidly overrun by oligarchs was gonna run itself off the cliff sooner or later. Now that it’s done, I feel utterly alone and terrified a lot of the time. I don’t know if that’s a valid reaction or not. It is certainly one of fear, and that fear is by no means ungrounded. I write this not so much the 20 year old anarchist who went to anti-globalization protests but a self-employed carpenter father and partner of a teacher. Working people, raising our child with the same working class values our parents instilled in us: do your best, and take care of each other.

  I had to think of the time, 8 years before, when I rode my bike drunk on a warm November night in Brooklyn, fist pumping anyone I saw on Myrtle Ave and yelling “Obama!” on my way to a victory celebration with a bunch of friends. The restaurant was run by a lesbian couple, it was a diverse crowd, and the sense of elation I felt that night was potent. I’ll never forget the way I felt when the president elect verbally reached out to queer community, it seemed so strange to hear that from the man who would be president, the first black president, so improbable and unstoppable at once. And it was stranger still because I hadn’t even voted for him. I had voted in the first presidential election of my lifetime in ‘04, although I was old enough to have voted in the two previous ones, solely out of sheer terror at the prospect of another Bush term. When Obama came onto the scene, I liked him, but perhaps it was the way in which so many of my friends had become involved in elevating him to such a high stature that they weren’t able to see that much of his politics were firmly rooted in neoliberalism and, even if he were able to embrace his more progressive tendencies, he would certainly be hamstrung by the political establishment, more so because he is black. I did not vote for him or anyone in that election, but I was three sheets to the wind a fair amount in those days, and I couldn’t remember if I had updated my registration since I moved to New York. It was the last presidential election I would ditch, I voted happily for Obama in 2012, even though by then the dream was dead and the Tea Party racists were half unhinged over a black man trying to tell them what to do with their health insurance. I voted for him partly because I felt a little ashamed of not voting for him in ‘08, and partly because I hate stiff rich white guys like Mitt Romney as much as most Americans.

  But Donald Trump is no Mitt Romney. The now famous picture of the two of them dining together may speak to their shared cartoonish robber baron natures, but the similarities end there. Mitt Romney is the stuffed shirt blue blood with the weird religion, Donald Trump is the macho TV star whose antagonism has been saturating the market of our daily lives for two generations now, his kind of sales pitch is safe as milk to a lot of us. The picture of the two of them is terrifying, his dominance of Romney broadcast so viciously.

It’s no coincidence that he came out of the same 80’s culture that made guys like Vince McMahon rich and famous, his antics are right out of the WWE playbook. Trump is the classic heel, in wrestling terms the villain you love to hate, the guy who doesn’t mind fighting dirty to get the job done. In the working class neighborhood in Baltimore I grew up in, more kids idolized Rowdy Roddy Piper, the heel, than Hulk Hogan. To draw further comparisons between Trump and the Hot Rod would do a disservice to the memory of the latter, but Trump is indeed cunning in his abilities. His racism is well documented going back to the 80’s, as is his treatment of women and outright powerlust, but it was not within his grasp to become a politician, for that he would have to wait until 8 years of living under a black president had created such an apocalyptic mindset in the voters of white America that he was able to seize his opportunity. And he held fast.

  Count me among those who believed that his candidacy would fizzle after the initial blast of profane assaults, but once his momentum gathered I felt like we were in for it. I was canvassing neighborhoods for Bernie Sanders but I knew he was never going to be given a serious look by the Democratic establishment. White folks in our neighborhood who were for Trump would give lip service to Bernie, and that kind of sentiment fueled the idea that he might be the only one who could beat him. We’ll never know how that would have turned out, unfortunately. But one thing that’s clear is that the Trump phenomenon is a vindication of the power modern media domination, and, to put a finer point to it, mind control. The Apprentice gave rise to its titular character’s aura of invincibility. Here we have the lavish billionaire, the picture of wealth and power, thronged by beautiful elites and backed by ominous music, dangling the sword over outstretched necks of would be sycophants, buoyed by the immense drama of those two famous words…..

  And in the end that’s all it took. The rich and middle class Republicans by and large fell behind him like we all knew they would, but much ink has been spilled in these last months about the rest of his voting block, those poor racist white people, and how could they be so stupid to vote for someone who so obviously doesn’t give a shit about them? Did they feel wounded and left behind by 8 years of a “reverse” racist-in-chief, or were they simply sick to death of the status quo and willing to vote for the flamboyant playboy because he at least doesn’t seem like such a phony? I suspect it’s more than a little of both, and more than a lot of decades of misinformation and subterfuge clouding the waters for working people of all colors, leaving the talk shows and comment threads with nothing but vitriol and bad analysis. Given the alternative of a candidate like Sanders, would people see that his brand of populism gave some beef to the airy promises Trump made to bring back manufacturing, or would people just see him as a far out Jewish commie? If Hillary Clinton had not been Hillary Clinton and instead been a woman more in the mold of Elizabeth Warren, would poor white folks have given her more of a shot, or is the horrid sexism she endured a true barometer the attitudes towards women among the working class?

  And then there is the whole issue of the term itself. Working class. Working poor. White working class. Blue collar. While there are fairly clear indicators of where we all fall on this ladder based on income, the past few generations have indeed muddied the usage of the term in a variety of ways. One’s upbringing and exposure to media and education may preclude them to a different outlook than those they share an income bracket with. As a child of college educated socialists I certainly viewed politics through a different lens than an old carpenter I once worked with, who thought that global warming was a hoax to sell more textbooks and hated Hillary Clinton not on the basis of her corporate, imperialist worldview but because she had the gall to be an assertive first lady instead of “knowing her place”. And there are certainly those who argue that the working class doesn’t even really exist any more; in the same way that people talk about the vanishing middle class, the attacks on unions have all but eviscerated the ability of working people to organize for their mutual benefit, to the point where working poor is perhaps the only appropriate term.

  I am working poor. I live paycheck to paycheck and I was raised by a single mother who lived that way too. Under President Obama, I had health insurance, medicaid for sure but it was enough to get me to the dentist every once in awhile. I also had hope. Not hope in the utopian sense that was broadcast large back in 2008 but hope in a more cautious, realist sense. I have long understood that I was born into the later stages of a cancer. We are abusing the earth at an alarming rate, and the world cannot hold up under the excesses of capitalism for very much longer. I do believe that, for all of his drone strikes and fracking advances, President Obama understood this too. I felt some measure of comfort in the thought that at least he could pilot the sinking ship of neoliberalism with some care and perhaps mercy. For the next four years, I will abandon that hope as he hands the wheel over to a narcissist lunatic. But I will most certainly not give up.

    This Friday they will be installing the madman at the White House, and the following day, thousands will march on Washington to demand that their voices be heard above clamour of those who would normalize the denigration of women, the dehumanization of immigrants, and the destruction of resources for poor people the world over. In the coming years some of us may have to make difficult choices about putting our own privilege on the line to help stem the tide of abuse that will undoubtedly fall hardest upon our more vulnerable brothers and sisters. I was raised to think these kinds of actions can not only make a difference, but can be what makes us human. I can only hope that I will be able to find the courage and determination to see that through.

-JS

[noblelake-blog]

Animals and Plants

When my mom died, I was in the grip of the thing, and all that it does to people. It did not help that in every other realm of my life shit was also going down, and in such a way that the thing was absolute. Chicago was in its full mid-July lather and all that could save me was the sheer pleasure of the lake, the warm sensuality of her at night as I walked down alone. The day it really hit that she was almost gone it was Jeff Buckley on the radio driving along her shore, I drove through a sheet of tears before I hit Roosevelt.

We were moving to Oregon at the end of summer, or maybe to the Bay Area to be closer to my mom, who by that point was being shuttled from hospitals to nursing care facilities from Oakland to Alameda. She was holding on but could hardly communicate, having never recovered from the brain tumor that took her down in her two-room place a couple hundred miles north in Boonville.

My brother and I would take turns flying out from Baltimore and Chicago to spend a few days at her bedside. The guilt I felt every time I had to leave was unbearable, as she had no other relations in the area and only a few friends up north. It was absolutely the hardest thing me and my brother had ever been through, and it seems to me one of the most rotten ways a child can lose their mother.

I got to the nursing facility as soon as I got off the plane, and sat down at her bedside and waited for her to wake up. She never did, and I left that night knowing the worst was coming at some point the next day. I ate Pho from a Vietnamese place that night and I will never forget the warm, comforting power of the broth and the noodles, the nourishment infusing my bones to steel me against what was coming. The pig that provided its meat and the cow its broth were both important components that night, I had never felt the connection to its source quite like I did with that meal.

My partner arrived late that night, and she was with me the next morning when they removed the breathing tube and we said goodbye. I took the hand of the woman who brought me into this world and held it to my face as her skin turned yellow and the last gasp left her body. And I wept and moaned with my arms around her in those moments after the breath, until I was able to stand. My brother flew out the next day with his girlfriend and I put my arm around him as the two of us stood in the basement of the hospital and said goodbye to her flesh.

We drove to Mendocino that day to meet our cousin and look for a spot to scatter her ashes. It was here that she said she wanted us to take her, my mother was a gardener all her life, and she loved the wildflowers that sweep over the ragged cliffs at that beautiful spot where the land crashes into the pacific. We all saw the hummingbird there, my mother’s favorite bird, hesitating for a few moments as we looked into her, through her and into the sea.

                                                                       I had decided to quit drinking a few weeks before she died, and I can now only wonder if, had I not taken that step prior, would I have gone under for good? Three years have passed and I am still sober, although the months and years after were not easy for me or my family. I have learned that grief is so hard to bargain with that I was a monster at times when possessed by it. Then my dog of seventeen years died, and something electrical happened in my mind, a pathway opened or a nervous circuit finally fused. Zeya had been a great lady her whole life, she travelled with me all over the country, and I’m sure she saved my life a couple of times. It had been getting harder to watch her demise, and one day after cleaning her shit off of her and the floor she slept on I looked at her, and she let me know then she was ready.  A woman came to the house to give her the shot, and in the most comforting way possible told me “You know, she IS about 600 years old”. When the narcotics hit I was holding her close, much like my mom, and I’ll always remember the way her old bones went slack as she gave a sigh and let her tail wag once, then she was gone.

The next day I was working downtown on a storefront remodel and I was loading tools out to my truck through the vestibule. I walked past a pigeon a few times before it occurred to me that I should stop. It was the same kind of feeling I had with the hummingbird in California only this time far more certain, I felt sure that this was  Zeya saying goodbye. What I took from it that day and have ever since is that animals are always trying to tell us something, and perhaps there is in certain moments a reflection of our deepest needs, manifested to us when we are there to receive them, or attempt to disabuse ourselves from the boundaries of our language.

It is through these moments of being available to the mysteries of the universe that I am able to reject the fear of death that was the thing driving me all of those months, those hard worn years. Every goddamn day on earth is pure terror when you think about it, and the more the culture of humanity gets swallowed by the machinery of progress the easier it is for that fear to take hold, and breed a host of anxiety within us all. For those of us thrust into war and on the business end of empire, death and anxiety are far less abstract, and I cannot begin to understand the philosophical and religious bargains that must be struck with the thing in order to survive on those most visceral of its terms. 

For myself, I have learned this spring what a tonic the dirt can be upon a worried soul, I have had moments most profound pulling weeds in my garden in East Portland. I will tap into the box that holds my dogs’ ashes every so often and cast some of her in with the tomatoes. I let my mom loose on the Mendocino coastline, but I can feel her presence every time I’m out here, especially around dusk as my daughter is filling up the watering can…..

[noblelake-blog]

For Guy Clark

My mom used to tell me that Phil Ochs, the Canadian protest singer, was my real father. She made occasional mention of some sort of fling that they may have had in the 70’s, sometime around when she met my father. Of course she was joking, and the circumstances surrounding her liaisons with Mr Ochs may or may not have been partial or complete bullshit, but I used to entertain the thought that it was at least possible, that in some way I was shaped by a sordid affair with a tortured, alcoholic poet and was therefore destined for greatness, or grandiose self destruction, or some combination of the two.

It turns out I was not particularly taken with Phil Ochs’ music. And even though my mom didn’t really go in for ‘70’s Nashville outlaw country, as I grew older I would often entertain the thought “What if Guy Clark was my real dad?” There he is, on the scene in Heartworn Highways, cigarette hanging from his mouth as he’s cutting a bone saddle for a friend’s guitar, his young son coming in to say goodnight, as he and his wife Susanna settle in for a duskily lit Christmas Eve pick around with a bunch of old friends and copious amounts of wine and whiskey. Maybe not the best parenting by today’s standards, but there is something so seemingly idyllic about those scenes, so natural and clear you can hear the crickets blend right in with clink of the glasses and the thrum of the singing. A seminal piece of filmmaking, to be sure, but there’s something about Guy Clark’s mojo that seems to steal every scene, as if he were the one that all of the songs and stories ultimately flowed through, the old timer and the itinerant preacher. I was probably around 23 when I first heard of him, I think I was hanging out with some greasy travelling punks in North Carolina when one of them remarked that I shared a passing resemblance to him. When I shot back with a blank stare and “Who’s guy clark?” his friend only deadpanned “Should I hit him or should you?”

It was around that time that I started writing songs, inspired in no small part by Guy and Townes Van Zandt, and since Townes was dead by then I always held a small hope to one day have a drink with Guy and trade some songs. I never got to have that drink-I quit drinking 3 years ago, and Guy Clark died yesterday after a ten year battle with lymphoma. I found out from the internet while I was sitting in a port-a-pot on a construction site, and it’s telling that I was listening to the local country station all day at work and not a word was spoken of the man’s passing. I’m sure after all the obligatory Twitter shout outs by some big names country music will go right back the forgetting about folks like him, and most of his contemporaries, until all of them are dead and gone and we’re left with an aging Brad Paisley or Dirks Bentley to bear the standard of good old arena rock country.

When I got home I got to cleaning the kitchen and put on The Dark, a beautiful, lowdown and dusty record that Guy cut in 2002. The arrangements are sparse, the timbres are deep and woody and the harmonies clear and bright. It’s a downright morbid affair, just about every song is a meditation on death in some form, from the primal ruminations of “Mud” to “Bag of Bones”reflections on the aging body, to the tender refrain of “Magnolia Wind”, in which I always presumed he was singing to his wife and longtime partner, Susanna. “I’d rather not walk through the garden again,” he sings in the chorus, “If I can’t catch your scent on a Magnolia wind.” I’ve grieved the ending of relationships and the loss of loved ones listening to those words, this album in particular has always been one I would turn to the hardest on the dark days. By the time the title track came on I was there, a little choked up and rubbing my hand slowly over the bottom of a cast iron skillet, thinking about my mom standing in the kitchen when I was a kid, a memory frozen in prosaic beauty the likes of which Guy captured like lightning bugs, flashing warm and soft in a mason jar…..

And that’s the thing about Guy Clark. Most of the critics seem to agree that Townes Van Zandt was the better poet, but I’d wager that Guy could come by the joy de vivre in a song cleaner than Townes did, the latter’s formidable wordcraft notwithstanding. Even in his cheesier material there is usually a line or two in there that will stop you dead in your tracks. It’s his eye more than anything that takes you there. “The thing about writing songs is,” he once said, “everything is songwriting. All you have to do is remember.” Yes indeed. Every dead dog, lost love and drunken joyride you ever took. Farewell, Guy Clark. The world is a meaner place without you in it.