ryanjtrimble

[ryanjtrimble]

Up In Tobacco Smoke

Too lazy to read? Press play to listen to the author’s reading of this post.

Joplin and I walked along Mill Creek Drive where the road bridges the creek. Cottonwoods shaded the street while their fluffy pods held like snow to the rocky berms and roadside weeds. A rusty Ford with oversized and tattered tires rolled by. Its tailpipe blew aery black smoke in short percussive bursts. I saw in the darkened cab the outline of a mustache, the brim of a hat. And out of the open window came flying a smoldering cigarette.

Joplin ran over to the smoking filter, pinched it between his thumb and forefinger, and inspecting it briefly as if to ensure he sucked the right end, took a drag. He carefully passed the butt to me as I approached and I took a drag, too. I tasted what seemed to be remnants of that driver’s humid breath and his truck’s stale exhaust. I can only assume now that Joplin must’ve wanted to sample what his mother was drawn to. She smoked cigarettes, later died from some smoking-related illness. We passed that cigarette back and forth until its ember began to burn the cellulose filter. Cotton tufts drifted like tiny tumbleweeds. The asphalt radiated under a mean Southwestern sun. Joplin blew out a hit. The smoke hung and twisted in the sunlight, and he studied it there, as if holding a negative up to an overhead lamp, looking for an answer or sign.

I was ten years old.

Nearly all first encounters with nature’s psychoactive gifts unfold in this way—unconsciously, slowly, as though pulled by some unbearable curiosity, willed by some unseen force. As though Nature wants us to know her. We discover through these encounters previously unfelt parts of ourselves. Not necessarily mystical, but nonetheless mystifying.

People have been smoking tobacco for 8000 years—since before Jesus walked, before geezers penned the Old Testament, before written history became a thing. The custom originated about the same time that brewing and drinking beer did, though here on the American continent. American Indians rolled tobacco leaf into cigars and stuffed it into pipes. Shamans used tobacco to treat afflicted tribesmen by blowing smoke over a patient’s body and face for hours, a ritual that facilitated quick trips to the unconscious realm and left both shaman and patient stoned to the core. The smoke, they believed, carried ill spirits out of the body. Or if illness was due to the loss of soul, another possibility, smoking was said to open that pathway to the spirit world where one could retrieve it.

Tobacco is biphasic; it produces both stimulating and depressing effects. It can instantly kill a person in high doses, but it’s metabolized quickly so this rarely happens. This is one reason Natives value it. It doesn’t require the commitment that other psychoactive plants do, like, say, ayahuasca or peyote.

When European raiders first moored their ships in America, Natives introduced them to tobacco, hoping they would appreciate its physical and spiritual effects. But Europeans weren’t interested in what they saw as savage metaphysics. Their interest in botany was from the beginning enterprising. Plants of the New World held, above all, economic promise. So they adopted the practice of smoking tobacco, but forwent the ritual. Tobacco soon became America’s first crop. It was promoted as a panacea to children and adults. As world trade routes opened, tobacco became the world’s first luxury commodity—before chocolate, coffee, tea, and sugar. Today, tobacco is the most profitable crop for at least half a dozen countries, including America—generating per acre twice the revenue of coffee and ten times that of staple food crops. This, in part, thanks to subsidization. Worldwide, tobacco is more profitable to farm than rice, soybeans, wheat and sugarcane, but less profitable than coca, poppy, cannabis, and grapes, otherwise known as cocaine, opium, weed and wine. Three cheers for prohibition!

I wouldn’t smoke again until I was 15. Walking along the dirt road that once paralleled the Murdock Canal, I smoked until I reached the orchards. Then I smoked some more, where I could hide from the eyes of parents and neighbors. I was with Tony, a fiery adolescent with a scrappy grin and longish hair. He bopped on the balls of his feet when he walked, which made him appear both confident and ungrounded, free but unhinged. We smoked Camels. Or Marlboros. It couldn’t have been anything else. The two brands ran the most successful advertising campaigns then, and fledgling smokers debated their qualities the way rednecks debate Fords and Chevys.

There weren’t qualities worth debating, however, despite our imaginings. It wasn’t the “Turkish & Domestic Blend” of Camel Filters that lured us, nor was it the promise of a “Class A” cigarette inside a pack of Marlboros. No, we were seduced by the promise of individuality, freedom, and sex appeal. Smoking, we believed, would make us cool like Joe Camel, hard like The Marlboro Man. It didn’t matter what was inside those cigarettes, but what was inside us. Smoking was how we told the world where we stood. Or so the advertisers made us believe.

My fifteen-year-old curiosity soon became an unconscious pack-a-day habit. The men I worked construction with dubbed me “Lil Smoker.” I didn’t smoke cigarettes for long, though, as I stopped enjoying them, and at the age of eighteen I quit, without difficulty. Tobacco, by the way, is about as addictive as morning coffee. That story about it being as addictive as heroin is untrue.

Nevertheless, I soon found abstinence lackluster. In my twenties, as I further entertained mind-altering substances, I’d often find myself intoxicated and tempted by tobacco’s mystique. So I experimented with chewing tobacco (from Skoal to Levi Garrett) and cheap cigars (from Backwoods to Swisher Sweets) and snuff (from Pöschl to Gawith), but always I’d abandon the affair after a few weeks. Then, in 2015, while road tripping through the Pacific Northwest, I opted for the complete Kerouacian adventure and stopped at a service station to buy a pack of Zig Zags and a pouch of Bali Shag. For the remainder of my trip I rolled stogies while steering my Jeep with one knee down Oregon’s byways, and I studied smoke against the sunlight when I exhaled.

I discovered on this trip that hand-rolled tobacco is superior to boxed cigarettes—in terms of flavor, ritual, and aesthetics. Piqued by this discovery, I began searching tobacconists for less adulterated forms of the plant and straighter means of consuming it. One day, I asked a clerk at a smoke shop if I might inspect a briar pipe. I’d always been fascinated with pipes, used them for various purposes, built them in high school shop, but I’d never hefted nor smoked from a proper tobacco unit. Without thinking, I put the pipe to my lips to test it out. That’s when the clerk informed me I was buying that pipe, and she pointed to an index card taped to the glass case adjacent to my waist, which read, “You put a pipe in your mouth, you buy it.” Disgruntled, I handed over forty dollars, then ten more for some samples of pipe tobacco, and left.

Did you know there are American, Danish, and Oriental pipe tobaccos? There are Virginia, Maryland, and Burley tobaccos, Latakia, Perique, and Turkish. These vary not only in kind, but also in how they are cultivated, cured, and cut. Different strains produce different flavors, as do different curing and cutting methods. Some are fire-cured, some air-cured. Some are cased and coated with flavorings of rum, vanilla, chocolate or licorice—called Cavendish tobaccos—while others are straight. Some are cube cut, while others are plug cut, ribbon cut, sliced or flaked. Proper curing and cutting takes weeks, and all these tobaccos from around the world are blended in various ways to highlight unique notes within the smoke. When you add to this all the ways a pipe can influence flavor—through material, construction, age, size and shape—you get endless possibilities for smoking pleasure.

For two years I carried a pipe and a tin of tobacco. I smoked at coffeehouses, bars, parties and patios, or while reading, writing, walking or riding my bike, as in the style of Mark Twain. This was no literary accoutrement, though, but a genuine love affair with an aged plant. Friends and strangers, intrigued by the pipe, solicited tokes; I obliged, at first happily and then begrudgingly. A man’s pipe, in time, becomes a deeply personal effect, and is sure to become an heirloom. And his tobaccos become friends. I settled in time on two favored leaves: a golden straight Virginia with a citrus and grassy tang, and a Syrian latakia with a nutmeg piquant. One for the morning, one for the eve. And for the hours in between I sampled a rotating range of strains, which I stored and still store in Mason jars on my bookcase, including a Navajo blend laced with lavender, sage, and fennel.

It was while smoking pipes that I first began to feel “good” about my tobacco use. Of course, snuff and cigarettes produce a pleasure, but one that, for me, was always tainted with worry over health effects. Puffing the pipe, however, is a guiltless pleasure, for one does not inhale pipe smoke—never mind that puffing might incur the need to have your lip or larynx excised with a scalpel. And I still smoke my pipes—but only when I weary of cigars.

During the past year I’ve smoked two hundred different cigars, in order to get better acquainted with them. It’s been an expensive endeavor, one that has required I temporarily set aside all other hobbies that require funding. But I’ve no compunction. I have noted in journals my impressions and rating of each cigar; I’ve read of their origins and watched documentaries; I’ve cycled through ever larger humidors, settling on a secondhand American made box that I customized with Spanish and Eastern red cedars. I now keep in it a stock of various cigars filled, bound, and wrapped with tobaccos from Nicaragua, Dominican Republic, Honduras, Brazil, Cameroon, Indonesia and the United States. And I know what I like. Aging Room F59, Camacho Connecticut, My Father The Judge, Oliva Serie V Melanio—all outstanding cigars. But Padron is my porridge. The 1964 Anniversary, natural. It’s like an extension of me, colored and sized as it is, resembling my browned and aging fingers, and it tastes like it was made for my palate. It feels good to find your lovechild after three decades of searching.

I love tobacco for the solitude it affords me. In the mornings I crank a small handle affixed to ceramic burrs. The burrs pulverize roasted coffee beans. The pulverized beans fall into a glass jar. I then steep the bean grains with water from a hot kettle and pour the blackened brew into a small mug. With a maduro in one hand and a cup o’ joe in the other, I step out to my suburban stoop, alone, and make love to my chemicals. Or in the afternoon I’ll walk along concrete to a city park, circle the grass fields for an hour while smoke encircles my thoughts. Or I’ll bike or hike a mountain trail or desert flat with a cigar in my shirt pocket, like a pig in a blanket, and when I’ve sufficiently exerted myself I’ll stop, put my ass on a rock or portable chair, ignite the stogie with a Bic lighter, and listen to the trees and shrubs talk. And come dusk or dark I’ll excuse myself from crowded house and worldly care and set out wandering dim streets. Nothing like a good ritual to put you face-to-face with the examined self.

I love tobacco for its sociability. Once or twice a week I’ll sit for an hour with strangers on the veranda at Juice n’ Java. We come for the same reasons: for time alone, time to commune. Time to smoke. Discussions of politics, art, religion, literature, film, sex and money arise, as if invoked by the nimbus exhalations. No topic is off limits. We are strangers, but we are friends, as much as or more of a community than any Mormon ward. Like the ‘50s Beats, the existentialists, we discuss our broodings and scratch notes. If the coffeehouse is quiet, I’ll call a friend of five or fifteen or thirty years and we’ll meet and light a match and pour some Scotch and laugh at the pain of living. A dangerous affair.

It’s true, tobacco can kill you. But just because we fear death doesn’t mean we should do everything in our power to avoid it. Such behavior is neurotic. Red meat, refined sugar, iodized salt, modern highways, corporate jobs, falling trees and stray bullets can also kill you. Hell, drink too much water and you can die of poisoning. Fact is, one day you will die. And unless you’re one of those rare humans who has the temerity to off yourself, you don’t know when or how your day will come. So until it does, you might as well enjoy yourself. Tobacco, smoked properly, is one simple way to do so. To avoid it for its risks is cowardly. To reject it on religious grounds is ignorant. To subsidize its cultivation while taxing its consumption is immoral. And to adulterate it is disrespectful. But smoking the tobie alone or with a friend elevates the spirit.

This might all be the vain imaginations of an addicted mind, though. Dependency, after all, underscores the entirety of tobacco’s history—at least that’s what the historians say. Like my fifteen-year-old self once savored the flavor of Marlboro Reds, which today I’d say is akin to burnt pubic hair, my middle-aged self savors hints of clove, coffee, cedar and nuts in my pipe tobaccos and cigars. Flavors aside, let’s not discount nicotine’s mysterious effect on the brain, nor the act of smoking’s influence on the soul. Maybe I’m entranced now not by the promise of individuality and freedom, but wisdom, understanding, and peace. Perhaps advertisers have evoked all these images, and nicotine carries them forward. Or maybe this is all part of reclaiming ritual. Maybe there IS wisdom in puffing a plant, slowly, once a day or thrice a week, solo or with a mate, and stopping for a spell. If that kills me, so be it. Burn me when I’m dead, as an effigy to the plant, and peer into the plumes as they rise against the light. Maybe you’ll find an answer or a sign.

[ryanjtrimble]

The Man Who Quit Money—And Religion

The other day I drove to the bank and closed my one and only credit account.

Before arriving, I fantasized about how the interaction might go, suspecting the bank representative would ask why I was closing the account, to which I would launch into a lecture about the evils of credit.

But when the loan officer pushed an affidavit toward me, I merely drew a line through the provided blank.

"I am closing my account because __________________."

The loan officer looked at the document. "There's no reason you're closing the account?" she asked, eyeing me narrowly.

"I just don't want credit," I replied.

I figured she wouldn't understand. When I've tried to converse with friends and family about the illusion of money—IRAs and 401(k)s, taxes, loans, dividends, Wall Street and the corporate ladder, minimum wage and medical benefits, interest, usury, exploitation and the downright deceit of the American Dream—they chortle as if I were a madman. To get is to gain, they seem to believe, and our economic system with its monetary tentacles affords greater getting. How could that be wrong?

That's how the song goes, after all, played in every pop lyric, commercial jingle, and Steve Jobsian story of success. Our economic substructure is so contextual to our way of living that most are unaware it even exists. So, on second thought, it's not belief folks exhibit, but obliviousness. Fish are the last to know of the water in which they swim.

The account I closed was insignificant—a secured line of credit for $500, backed by my own savings. I opened it a year ago when I realized how anxious my wife is to buy a home, which in our case necessitates a mortgage. We had lost a home to foreclosure in 2012 and because the punitive years had passed we supposedly were eligible again for three bedrooms and a picket fence. But after applying for a mortgage and getting declined—a fact I'm grateful for—I decided I would build my credit with a small secured line.

My stomach turned as I completed the paperwork. Use my money to fund a credit line that the bank will allow me to spend with interest so I can build real credit and eventually become eligible to go into real debt? Those are, in essence, the terms of secured credit. Oh boy! What an opportunity!

I imagined big bankers sniggering while unzipping their pants. "Show us you love us, Mr. Trimble, then we'll think about patting you on the head." I'd get off my knees to find my wallet or soul missing, probably both.

So I kept my mouth shut when that lowly loan officer sought my reasons for closing the account. She, like the rest of us, a fish in water. Trying to tell her the water is bad would've been akin to feeding Neo the red pill. Or I might've offended her with a pornographic account of what it means to get bent over. Either way, it would've been a poor beginning to a pleasant Friday.

The woman snatched the document, punched a few keys on a computer, and that was that. Credit no more. I felt satisfied, almost smug, believing my action agitated her.

I was inspired to close the account after reading The Man Who Quit Money, a biography of one Daniel Suelo, a Coloradan ascetic—or vagabum, as he calls himself—written by Mark Sundeen.

Suelo lived "totally without cents" from autumn of 2000 to spring of 2016, when he began caring for his aging parents. He explains on his blog: "For 15 years I didn't use or accept money or conscious barter—nor did I take food stamps or other government dole. My philosophy has been to use only what is freely given or discarded and what is already present and already running."

At the heart of Suelo's life—and at the heart of the book about him—is a struggle for spiritual integrity, and money is the singular obstacle that prevents this achievement.

Raised in a fundamentalist Christian home, Suelo detected early on a disconnect between what his Christian community professed to believe and how it lived, which he couldn't ignore. He once rebuked a woman for rolling into church wearing a fur coat, and armed with Bible verses he repeatedly challenged the faith and behavior of his parents and community members. Yet always he was met with incredulity and resistance. Who is this young bedraggled contrarian, to call us out?

To follow his spiritual yearnings, Suelo had to cut his fundamentalist roots. Throughout his college years and into his thirties he explored philosophy and mysticism, and he invested himself wholeheartedly in humanitarian causes, working at homeless shelters, farming and food cooperatives, even the Peace Corps. But always he came away dismayed by the omnipresent dollar. In every church and charity, nonprofit or nunnery, he encountered spiritual teachings twisted to suit a purpose. Every good cause held in common some business objective, which tainted human connection and hindered access to the Divine.

Finally, in 2000, seeing no alternative, Suelo placed his life savings in a phone booth, all $34 of it, walked away and began to live.

While reading of Suelo I thought of my Mormon upbringing in Utah. Though the Mormon elders propagandize Joe Smith's invention as mainstream, it is fundamentalist at the core, if not in its adherence to the canon, then in its dogmatism. And on any given Sunday in Utah, you can watch women in sexy skirts tiptoe in and out of church houses in their knockoff Jimmy Choos, lips effulgent and red. They arrive in SUVs with baller rims. And the men, dressed like multilevel marketing execs, check the time on garish timepieces. Once a month they profess before a congregation their undying love for the Lord's gospel and saving grace. They also spin a narrative that suggests looking beautiful is about self-care and cleanliness, that cleanliness is next to godliness. They say God rewards the righteous with spiritual and material blessings. Visions of sugarplums dance in their heads.

"No one can serve two masters. Either you will hate the one and love the other, or you will be devoted to the one and despise the other. You cannot serve both God and money," Jesus is believed to have declared. Yet good Christians everywhere continually build up this house-of-cards kingdom, ever chasing mammon.

"By their fruits ye shall know them."

I get it. There was a time in my life when I purloined piles of money and enjoyed a sense of superiority at my worldly success, embracing the American way. I didn't know it then, but I saw my ornaments of house, car, and clothing as proof of my value to society, evidence of my smarts and righteousness. Blessings from God. Every Sunday I laid up treasures in heaven, then laid up treasures in the bank every other day. And because my Christian-American-Mormon culture normalized such behavior, I saw no hypocrisy. I gloried in my credit score, believing it granted me access to the big boys' club. I could acquire almost anything I wanted with a swipe of a magnetic strip or a signature and a credit check.

Today I consider a credit check akin to an unsolicited rectal examination. And to seek an honest way of life, meandering and unmapped as it is, I had to forsake religion, just as Suelo had to.

Some say early Christians decried money and power because they didn't have any. Impoverished and weak, they were unable to physically express their feelings of inferiority, jealousy, and hatred against the strong and noble class, so they spawned a myth that flipped the meaning of social identifiers. Humble, poor, and weak they revalued as good, while prideful, rich, and strong they revalued as bad. They even moralized the terms, employing shame as their weapon. Not only was wealth and strength bad, but to have either was sinful.

But the rise of Protestantism, democracy, capitalism, and industrialism spread wealth across Christian nations—and temptation. So a new myth emerged, and it says righteous living equates to worldly comfort. This narrative infected Christendom only a couple of centuries ago. God knows Jesus didn't spin the self-serving fable. He was ascetic, forsaking the world and preaching the same, just as all iconic sages have done—Buddha, Mohammed, Socrates.

As philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer explains:

The New Testament declares [Old Testament] Law to have failed, frees man from its dominion, and in its stead preaches the kingdom of grace, to be won by faith, love of neighbor and entire sacrifice of self. This is the path of redemption from the evil of the world. The spirit of the New Testament is undoubtedly asceticism, however your protestants and rationalists may twist it to suit their purpose.

The love of money may be the root of all evil, contributing to corporate expansionism, consumerism, wage slavery, wilderness wastelands, alienation and decadence, but the Christians who first pointed this out can't seem to help their lusty selves. And rather than adhere to their ideological roots, they amended them. "God rewards the righteous," they say. "Live in the world, but not of it."

Just the tip.

For how can money be evil when it's so plentiful, so delicious, so necessary not for living but existing? No credit score, no character or credibility. No bank account, you don't count. Redemption from the world's evil comes not by forsaking it, but by embracing it, for he who has much suffers little; the new redemption is not life eternal, but life aplenty. Hashtag blessed. And the bank account is the shibboleth to social acceptability. "That no man might buy or sell, save he that had the mark, or the name of the beast, or the number of his name." The mark of slavery. Admit you don't have one and you are eyed suspiciously, considered an untrustworthy rogue, a conspiracy theorist, a madman, a freeloading free spirit. Like Daniel Suelo.

The modern-day marriage of money and morality—this Christiancorporatocracy—has intoxicated the world's would-be saints, put them under the ether. They are, by their own professed standards, sinners, bound for... ahem, the grave.

"Come hither; I will shew unto thee the … great whore that sitteth upon many waters, with whom the kings of the earth have committed fornication, and the inhabitants of the earth have been made drunk with the wine of her fornication."

God, am I a bigot? Why should I attack religious notions and their incongruities? A sense of justice, I suppose. Resentment. It's true, I resent institutionalized power, exploitative myths, mental hijacking, self-deception and intellectual dishonesty. We are monetarily rich, morally poor. We shouldn't pretend otherwise.

But what really prompted this essay is this: I recommended the book about Suelo to a few friends, rich religious folk. They asked how he did it, how this man "quit" money, to which I replied, "He scavenged, foraged, planted and cultivated, worked freely, accepted freely, lived in caves—" screeech!

"What! Lived in caves?" they exclaimed.

Yes, Daniel Suelo lived in caves.

They scoffed at my book recommendation, dismissed it as ludicrous, went back to shopping on Amazon.

Utah, the Beehive State, home of the überindustrious, where citizens toil away for the Queen Bee, the Kingpin, the Blue Book, the Graven Image in the Sky, the Golden Moroni, the Godly Greenback, the Mouthpiece of the Lord in the Holy of Holies, the Promised Neverland, the Vanity of Vanities. For Chrissake!

Son of God, born in a manger, reborn in a cave.

In short, Daniel Suelo has moral courage, a kind of integrity, and those who decry his lifestyle while claiming to worship Jesus Christ do not. I thought I'd do them the solid of pointing this out.

I know, I know, "Forgive them, for they know not what they do." And forgive I do. It's not the people I detest, but the ideas.

Maybe some can chase or sell labor for dollars without encumbering their spiritual development or souring their self-respect, but I can't seem to. I side with Daniel Suelo. That's why I closed my measly credit account. I might not have the temerity to abandon money entirely, but I'm determined to never again grovel before usurers.

Are wealth and integrity mutually exclusive? I don't think so. Then again, it depends on your definition of "wealth." It depends, as Jesus exclaimed, on where your heart lies. Maybe there is a way to live honestly without living in a cave. I'm reminded of Yeats, who said with regard to eking out a living, "One has to give something of oneself to the devil that one may live." That seems true. But I would add: do not give something of oneself to that devil-god of pews, pulpits, and preachers' lips, for in order to overcome the world, you must first overcome the institutions and ideologies that promise deliverance from it.

[ryanjtrimble]

No Access

The following article appeared this month in Unvæl, a journal of art. Issue 1 is currently available and includes 5x7 printed artwork from Ryan Muirhead, Ashley Callaghan, and Michael Ash Smith.

Last year while in a small tourist town I stopped at a thrift store. I looked for some boots, tried on some hats, and bought a pristine '70s tweed suit. I also browsed the books, and with each title that struck me I thumbed to a random page and read a sentence or two, the way seekers of signs often do with the Bible. One book in particular, Adventures in Contentment, nabbed my attention with its unassuming cover and oxymoronic title. I looked inside and discovered a facsimiled typewriter font, suggesting a reprint. I checked the publication date; 1906. Then I fanned the pages and landed on a line that stuck: "I felt that profound curiosity which everyone of us feels every day of his life to know something of the inner impulses which stir his nearest neighbor."

This, I think, will become the final aim of all our technological efforts—to know the inner impulses of our neighbors. Not know as in understand or appreciate or empathize, but know as in live. It won't be enough for us to improve virtual reality or develop androids to talk to and have sex with. It won't be enough to digitally preserve our psyches so they can later be uploaded into artificial bodies. It won't be enough for us to develop an elixir for DNA deterioration so we can live forever. No, why settle for immortality or simulation when the multiplicity of being is on the horizon? Living forever, after all, isn't nearly as enticing as living anew over and over again. We'll devise recursive rebirth. We'll set up the whole scheme so that with each new life the memory of the old is erased, until some final drawing of the curtain reveals the memory of a million billion lives lived, a deluge of total recall. And that will be the payoff, when one is finally free to bask in the ecstasy and terror of seeing and knowing all at once and forever.

Until then, we'll consume and make art. We'll live vicariously in every way possible because it isn't enough to live one life. We need to get inside the shoes and skin of others, and out of our own. The way Ryan Muirhead does.

I first met Ryan on a stoop in 2009. He sat effeminately, knees pulled up to his chest, ankles crossed, arms wrapped around shins, one hand clasping one wrist. This was before he was Instafamous, before he globetrotted, speaking at audiences of seasoned photographers seeking more depth. I didn't recognize in him then artistic aptitude or uncompromising vision. But then, I wouldn't have. Mostly I saw an awkward flannel-wearing longhair whose scratchy voice seemed always one note from breaking, like a dam holding back hurt.

A couple years later, after getting to know Ryan and following his work on Facebook, I messaged him, "I love your work! Absolutely amazing!"

"Thank you," he replied.

Ryan didn't need to hear this. He was by this time hooked on photography. He'd also by this time been encouraged if not lauded by his art professors, and his social media following was steadily growing. He starred on an episode of a web-based photography show called FRAMED, which garnered positive reviews. Kodak had reached out to him. Ryan's portraits possessed a quality that drew people in. He photographed friends, peers, and family, but mostly young, beautiful women, some of whom were aspiring models. With Ryan, they were able to tease out their creative impulses, just as he was able to with them. As a result, his photos often felt like records of young love. And they were in that he was documenting, at least on some level, youthful infatuation with art, creativity, and world-as-oyster rippled with youthful uncertainty. All of this played out on social media, which to this day serves as Ryan's gallery and journal. His everyday posts were at once witty, playful, confident, but also concerned and idealistic, much like any Millennial's. But his photos were emotional, and this was his calling card. This was what always yielded clamor on social media. People obsessed over the emotion Ryan was able to convey photographically. And like all publicity, it fed on itself. Comments became shares became likes became comments. Interviews, sponsorships, and speaking engagements followed. Ryan, it appeared, was fast approaching that apogee of Americanism, that promised panacea for discontent: fame and fortune from following a passion.

Then something shifted. Not in his trajectory but in his expressiveness. Ryan's social media posts went from lighthearted and droll to darkly personal. He included with his photos melodramatic lyrics from songs by favorite bands The Used and Daughter. His portraits of young females opened up into something more cavernous and acute. One could see in them wilting flowers, freshly-penetrated hymen, nostalgia for virginity, and lament for impurity. In some instances, they looked like nothing more nor less than a post-coitus record, a document of defloration. This sentiment made some viewers decidedly uncomfortable, even critical of Ryan and his work, accusing him of making porn, which only further buoyed his reputation.

I sensed Ryan was exploring in his work more than sex and beauty, and in early 2014 I interviewed him for a personal blog. I began by asking Ryan why he hadn't directed his talent into something more lucrative, like commercial or wedding work. He replied, "When I started shooting, I was miserable. I was suicidal. I hated everything about my life." This opened the door to into Ryan's depression, but also into the romantic narrative he had for it: art saved me. The post went viral, amassing 200,000 reads on the blog and republication across multiple websites.

That was nearly four years ago. Today, Ryan is a successful working artist. He doesn't sell Lightroom presets or solutions to freelancing challenges or technical tips; he supports himself from print sales and speaking engagements, plus the little he gets from a recently launched Patreon account. He calls Portland, Oregon, home—the place he ran to from Utah—but he travels several times a year. He's been to Canada, Scotland, Italy, Spain, Australia, Belgium, the Canary Islands, and back and forth across the States, getting paid to speak. In each locale, he tells his story, with his shoes off, then he photographs a model or two in front of his audiences. And he's achieved all this primarily through posting his photos on Instagram and Facebook. Sounds dreamy, right?

"If I had a button to stop existing, I'd probably use it," Ryan says.

Ryan spends nine hours a day on his phone, incessantly checking Instagram, which he wishes he could stop. When he can curtail his social media use, he disappears into StarCraft for hours on end, a fact he isn't proud of. And this escapism has increased in recent years. He shoots less than he'd like to, but he also has little inclination to. "I have no determination, no willpower," he says. "I work really hard out of desperation, not out of aspiration. That's all that moves me. That's my work to me. I feel an existential horror that I can't drop for five minutes even when on a beach on the best day of my life, but I can drop it in moments of creation when I get overwhelmed with the beauty of something." That beauty in creation is losing potency for Ryan. The savior he'd thought he found in art is letting him down. "I assumed I would get to the answer," he says, "I assumed I would get to inner peace, and I didn't even get close."

~~~

When I solicited Ryan for that 2014 interview, I wanted total access. I wanted to connect, not just observe and listen. The intimacy that Ryan seeks with his subjects, I'd sought with him, for how can one properly depict another, make them a character in some artistic representation, without first getting entwined?

I was disappointed. Ryan, for all his magnetism, was not engaging. Despite our having known each other as acquaintances for years, despite our having once shared Christmas dinner, there was little reciprocity. No doubt, I was unprofessional, even boyish, in my interviewing; he was uncongenial. If the conversation drifted even subtly away from Ryan and his work, I detected impatience. The artist-as-friend-and-mentor I'd sought did not yield, at least not how I'd wanted.

Following the online success of our interview, Ryan reached out to me and said he had more to say, that he wanted to do a follow-up interview. I was reluctant, given that I hadn't initially gained the closeness I'd wanted. I feared that Ryan saw in me an opportunity to further expand his persona. I didn't want to oblige him of this desire, nor did I want to exploit it. At the same time, I saw in Ryan a complex character on which I believed I could tell a story of fidelity to the Ideal, and a willing subject at that. I hinted as much to him, and he made efforts to bring me into his world. We talked on a few occasions, and he invited me to dinner and drinks with him and his closest friends, but nothing fruited. Whether right or not, I felt I couldn't properly reveal a subject without getting involved. Ryan, it seemed, did not want to get involved. He wanted to be studied.

And not just by me. When I spent time with Ryan and his artist friends, I saw what resembled more a group of acolytes and leader than old college pals. The conversation invariably drifted around Ryan and his interests, with Ryan generally seated at the head or middle of whatever dinner table we happened to be seated at. One evening, in a seemingly innocent play, everyone participated in shining lights on Ryan and photographing him. The scene resembled The Last Supper, Ryan as Jesus. Their online interactions, too, resembled less sincere conversation than public endorsements of one another. Ryan's friends would tag and praise him online, and he'd occasionally return the public foreplay, sharing or praising his comrades' work. What you're now reading was prompted by Ryan. He suggested I write the piece to accompany his featured work in Unvæl. "It doesn't have to be anything flattering," he said.

Since that request, we've talked at length on a couple of occasions, even hung out. When hanging out, he'll often check his phone mid-conversation, without warning, without apology. In groups of three or more, he'll drift into his phone for minutes on end or wander off, especially if and when the conversation slips from his domain. During one phone conversation, Ryan explained to me that he has no interest in other people, except those who make exceptional artwork. Even then, he wants only to get inside their heads to understand their commitment and process, try to employ that in his own work. "If you got what you wanted," I asked, "would you any longer have interest in that person?"

"No," he said.

"I'm heartbroken I'm not a rock star," Ryan told me over the phone. He likes speaking before his audiences, dislikes engaging with them. Seminars offer him opportunity to perform, just as his Instagram feed does, which is what he really enjoys. He wants a million social media followers, wants to be celebrated in death, wants to be the fly on the wall at his own funeral so he can bask in the eulogies. This last point, which we discussed on my patio, gets Ryan giddy and glassy-eyed, aroused. The eulogies would be particularly poignant in the case of a tragic death, we agree, which can't really happen past the age of 40. If suicide offers Ryan an escape from the throes of being, something he's openly contemplated, it also offers him the opportunity to be memorialized. Ryan identifies with, even hesitatingly compares himself to Western society's notable tortured artists who took life into their own hands—Vincent Van Gogh, Kurt Cobain, David Foster Wallace. Then, when the conversation moves from him and his imagined encomium, he deflates and talks again of feeling empty.

The messages and emails from fans are no consolation. Since going public with his depression and the palliative effects of making art, throngs have lettered Ryan, disclosing their own unbearable moods and states of mind. In Ryan, they've found a patron saint, a man who despite the pain of existing has found cause to go on. To which Ryan says, "The emotional adulation has become distressing. People write all that time and say, 'Your work had an impact on me not killing myself.' And now I'm like, 'Joke's on you. In five years, it doesn't work anymore.'" But, for now, he keeps hitting those like buttons on Instagram and Facebook, encouraging his fans who have undertaken art in search of meaning and reprieve. Deep down, however, his feelings run contrary. "I made all this work out of pain and not wanting to be here, which gave hope to others who have pain and don't want to be here, which gave hope to me. And now I've realized it doesn't work, and I don't want to share it. That's the darkness: I don't want people to feel encouraged or inspired by my art."

The relationship with young beauties, too, is lackluster. Arguably, Ryan's portraits of women are unequaled in depicting vulnerability, delicacy, darkness and intimacy. But it ends there. He's openly said on social media that the remnants of his upbringing in Utah's sexually repressive culture get channeled into his work. He didn't experience his first kiss until twenty-six. When I ask him of this sexual tension, he replies, "It's always been there." From the beginning, Ryan has wanted to shoot the kind of women he doesn't date or have sex with. Through the lens, he's able to explore those he might otherwise never see in the nude, never get close to, never tell what to do, never elicit such coy surrender and willing obedience from.

That's not to say he hasn't had opportunity for sex, though. In such enthralling moments of creation, desires flare. Ryan's subjects have on occasion solicited him, but he's shunned their advances in the moment, foregoing sexual intimacy in favor of creative friction. He'd rather not trade one pleasure for the other, he explains. By sublimating his biological drive, by denying himself the forbidden fruit, he can prolong that headspace of reprieve, longer attend to the Ideal. He foregoes tactile connection with an actual beauty for cognitive connection to that imagined Beauty. A true martyr. And what's more romantic than that?

~~~

David Foster Wallace, one of Ryan's artistic paragons, demonstrates in his short story The Depressed Person that depression invariably looks like narcissism. The story, which is just nine pages, plummets readers into the internal struggle of the wearyingly self-conscious Depressed Person. Readers are subjected to the Depressed Person's ceaseless and sorrowful moping over every aspect of her life, worry over how the moping is perceived, fear that nobody cares, frustration that no one can empathize with her angst, and lament for the fact that only her therapist will listen, whom she must pay to do so. Wallace shows how horrifying the inability to get out of one's own head can be. The story of self-absorption is all-consuming. And it's nauseating. Wallace seems intent on sickening the reader if only to show that depression is socially unacceptable. It's a condition that sends potential helpmates running rather than reaching. The irony, or tragedy, is that the Depressed Person wants desperately to be attended to, understood, cradled. Of course, for the non-depressed person, the cure for such plight, trite though it may be, is gratitude and human connection. But these are the very things the Depressed Person cannot muster. For some, this raises a curious question: is self-obsession the cause or consequence of loneliness and psychological terror? For the depressed person, the question invokes tailspin.

Such questions plague Ryan. He says, "The number one thing I'm confronting is the realization that you have to adopt a belief system to propel yourself forward, and I can't. I can't amass a framework and be like, 'That's the one.'" He expresses as much on social media, which only further solidifies the narrative regarding him: brutally honest tortured artist teaches humanity. But then he wonders whether that's his motive, to reinforce a flattering story. He considers his social media posts honest but also performative, and he worries over whether he's become too theatrical, too caught up in his own show. He knows what to articulate to interviewers. Martyrs have always prostrated themselves on the altar of truth, and their exchange is glory. Has Ryan adopted this role in hopes of the payoff, or does there exist some artist archetype, some particular psyche that plays out in few humans? "Either I'm insane, or crazy, or lying," Ryan says. "I'm such a different person when alone, and nobody knows."

Maybe the pain derives from sensitivity. When Ryan and I have occasion to hang out, which is barely seldom, we'll often drive through a Del Taco for a bean burrito and fries. He'll lean toward my window from the passenger side and ask the drive-thru attendant how he or she is doing. He'll then thank the attendant profusely, hand him a few dollars as a tip. A friend of Ryan's says it was Ryan who took him in during his divorce, gave him a place to stay. "One night," the friend recounts, "I broke down and he just listened to me for hours." When I asked a workshop attendee what she thought of Ryan's presentation, she answers, "He focuses on the human, not the photograph." His subjects concur. One model explains it was Ryan who helped her overcome her concerns of objectification inherent in the modeling industry. She explains how Ryan involved her in the creative process, made the affair collaborative and about connection rather than some desired outcome. She says, "I'm creating something too, and with Ryan it always feels like that." For my own experience, Ryan always pays for Uber, covers the cost of gas or bean burritos, and shares his Scotch. He is also one of two paying contributors to my blog, and has been for nearly a year.

But the beauty of Ryan is his genius. I'm reluctant to say this because firstly I'm no qualified judge, secondly there's nothing concrete to point to, thirdly I don't want to reinforce a vain and burdensome trope. What is genius? Here's what I think. I've worked with insightful businessmen who with acumen amassed millions of dollars, but none was genius. I've known popular leaders of organizations and groups, able to bring people together around a cause with uncanny ease, but none was genius. I've worked with prolific artists who turn out salable work over and over again, who demonstrate volumes of knowledge, and who express it unqualifiedly, but none is genius. In hindsight, I've known and been relatively close to two people who, from my view, embodied that attribute "genius." One, an odd and articulate reader of people, an extremely intelligent man interested in biology, shot himself in his 20s. The other, a man with a prodigious and quirky memory, also extremely intelligent, is only able to prevent himself from doing the same by imbibing 300mg of ketamine a day. I'm not saying that a suicidal tendency is the marker of genius. The common denominator, if there is one, is what I can only describe as a tic. Genius seems to be an unsettling behavioral trait not conducive to categorization or description, but that relates to a way of processing information and seeing the world. There's the clear and disconcerting sense that the genius is smart not because of what he knows, but how he knows. Interacting with a genius is like playing poker with someone who can count and memorize cards. Genius is a subtle misfire, an arrhythmia of cognition, some biological anomaly or otherwise misappropriation of nature that results in a kind of twisted energy expressed in human form. It's off, but only subtly so, fruiting a complex and sometimes off-putting person that provokes us, and, if we're lucky, reveals that which we might never see, or what we might otherwise willfully ignore. Ryan, for all his murkiness, has through his art and being shown me a kind of living I might've otherwise never known.

Take all this with a grain of salt, though. This is no more a portrait of Ryan than his photographs are of his subjects. It's clear in Ryan's images that he is documenting something other than people. To view one is to think not of the person in the frame, but the one who composed it and where he's coming from. Perhaps this is Ryan's genius on display: he shows with eerie accuracy what it feels like to be him, or human, or at least that's how we imagine it. In the end, however, it's impossible to know. Ryan can't access the beautiful people he would like to, I can't access the artist I would like to, and none of us can access the Doorway we've set on the horizon for ourselves. Alas, if there is no access, there is no escape. So we keep on making art.

[ryanjtrimble]

On the Value of Missed Shots

A friend or a photographer, I don't remember who, once told me, "Don't worry about the shots you miss. Those are the shots that stay with you forever."

This is true.

When I was in high school there was a used tire shop on Lehi's State Street called Victor's. I think it's still there, though now remodeled. Back then it was a dilapidated white shoebox of a building on a gravel lot and teenage hippies and stoners would go there when they needed new rubber on their early-model Subies and Hondas and VW buses.

There was joy in going to Victor's, even though it sucked having to remedy a car that had failed a safety inspection or gone flat in Provo Canyon. Going to Victor's meant you were growing up. You cashed a hundred-dollar check from your after-school job, convinced your friends to throw in another $15 a piece, and then scuttled into the tarnished garage to learn about tire sizes and tread patterns and expected mileage. And there amid stacks of black rubber and hissing compressors and ratcheting wrenches you'd negotiate with the honcho, a gruff and taut man that was at least part Latino, maybe full, and who resembled Randy Macho Man Savage. His hair hung down his back, and he chain-smoked cigarettes, spoke in hoarse staccato. Often he wore tank tops, and he never removed a pair of impenetrable blade sunglasses that adhered to his brow like the visor of motorcycle helmet.

I can't recall the honcho's name now. It might've been Victor, or it might've been Tito. Whatever it was or is, it had a certain gangster ring to my seventeen-year-old Utah County ears. In any case, I remember standing with Victor on the banks of that gravel lot and settling the details of shoeing my car with new gently-used rubber, mano a mano. Victor took each customer as he or she came, which was reassuring, and, for me, evoked a kind of self-confidence I didn't actually possess. The feeling was sublime.

But here's what I remember most about Victor's Tires. One day I'd gone there with a girlfriend to help her get her car sorted. After swapping her tires, Victor beckoned us into his office to settle up. The office was long and rectangular. Shoddy aluminum blinds draped over west-facing windows. At one end of the room was a metal desk, the kind you see in machine shops or schools and government buildings. Corners of papers and manila folders poked out of its drawers, slopped over its edges. My friend and I stood at the other end of the corridor-like office while Victor sat at the desk and filled out a receipt with a Bic pen. It was late in the day and sunlight was seeping through the cracks in the blinds. Victor held a lighted cigarette in his teeth while he wrote, his black sunglasses still affixed to his face despite the dimness, and smoke purled lazily in the room, which the sunlight illuminated like milky threads of cosmos.

The scene enveloped me. I saw in my mind a photograph of incomparable mystique, a decisive moment, as Cartier-Bresson calls it, a space in time where man and nature combusted into a picture of inexplicable beauty. And I didn't have my camera. So I stood in awe, whispered to my friend, asked if she saw it too. Then Victor stood and the impression vanished, as though a ghost had left the room.

The shots you miss stay with you forever.

I once took a road trip through Oregon, traveling the Pacific Coast Highway from Port Orford north toward Portland. One afternoon, while driving through those towering pines riven by the 101, I saw a dirt turnoff that ran deep into the woods. Next to that turnoff stood a mailbox. As I approached at 50 miles per hour, I saw a young girl, maybe five or six, bounce on the balls of her bare feet down the dirt road and up to the box. She stood on her toes, opened the door, and peered inside as though she'd just found grandma's jewelry chest. She wore a white sundress, which flitted eastward in a coastal gale. Her untamed hair, too, as bright and iridescent as the flesh of a blood orange, flickered in the wind. There on tiptoes, with one hand on the mailbox door and the other reaching into the abyss, a chasm of sunlight lit her up like a meteor on a movie screen.

My camera was in the backseat and I tried to hit the brakes, but it was too late. I saw in the shadows of that forest all the omnipresence of God concentrated into a single frame, and in a second it flashed. I rolled past the scene, gawking, and the tiny fireball went dancing up the unpaved and shaded driveway, parcel in hand.

The shots you miss stay with you forever.

Sometimes, however, in order not to miss the moment, you must forego the shot. A couple years ago I solicited an old man of his time, for I believed time alone with this man would prove illuminating. He is, after all, a poet of 50 years, an educator, a father and husband, a performer, a gadfly and veritable Socrates, a true and living philosopher. Months passed before he agreed. We'd bump at the coffeehouse and I'd remind him of my interest, which was, roughly, to shadow and profile him. I left out the part about wanting to steal his wisdom and test it in life. He finally ceded not because of pressure, but because he needed photographic services. That was a year ago. We've spent hours together since, and I always approach time with him journalistically.

I recently visited the man at his home and before approaching his door I flung my camera over my shoulder and turned on my audio recorder. Forty-five minutes later I clicked the recorder off, set my camera down. And wouldn't you know that's when the conversation and the light turned interesting? The man and I stood in his garage, afternoon autumn sunshine leaking into the open space, and he stood there reflecting on his art, leaning on the broom he'd just used to sweep up the mess we'd made. (We'd been cutting sheetrock in order to fix a plumbing leak.) I wanted to make a photo, but refrained because lurching for my camera would've derailed the ensuing moment. Instead, I watched, noting the man's long and thick fingernails, the strands of white in his beard, the way his suspenders squeezed the sides of his belly, and the words he spoke. He said to me, when I asked him whether he ever doubts his creative impulses, questions his poiesis, "No. I take it as a given."

As a gift.

The shots you choose not to take stay with you forever, too.

You don't have to do photography to see and remember such images; you don't have to miss or forego a frame for it to stick. The heart alone makes snapshots, does so without warning or intention, and records them indelibly on the soul. Each of us has a few dozen or thousand floating around the psyche, occasionally replaying. A tickle or tremor arises when they do. I'm told that upon dying they play in succession and in full, across closed eyelids, like a film. Perhaps this is why photographs are considered memento mori, reminders that we die. One has to wonder whether images captured in the heart alone will outlive the body, as our feeble prints will do. And if they do, where do they go?

I've often thought about reconstructing those missed shots, about duplicating snapshots made by the heart. I could hire models, scout locations or return to them, same time of year, same time of day. I could use fans and reflectors to mimic weather conditions and lighting. I'd have my camera ready, light meter dialed in, extra rolls of film in my pocket. The image, of course, would be a lie, but only in the sense that a novel is a lie. Every story, after all, tells a truth. And every story, actual or not, is fabricated, posited by the one who tells it. So why not reconstruct these missed shots, tell the story? Alas, I'm made alive not by the photographing but by the seeing. The former serves the latter, not the other way around. I'd rather find in the world existing examples of the story I want to tell and be a witness, rather than fashion the story from scratch. Besides, it's difficult to construct a good lie.

Nearly everybody has a camera these days, and their cameras are more technically capable than those of yesteryear. They're quick, work in the dark, completely automated. One could document his entire life with a cellphone camera if inclined. But in the end, he'd still miss something. Life, after all, is little more than missed shots. A person can take only one path, and in choosing it he negates every other possible path. He must watch the infinitude of potential living go by for the sheer fact he can't be in two places at once, can't go back in time, can't know then what he knows now, can't capture what he might've by missing or foregoing or forgetting to document life, make the shot. For every time you point the lens, you lose what you might've felt or known had you not.

[ryanjtrimble]

Salty Mouth Shows Offers Utahans a Unique Community Experience

Reading time: 5 minutes

In an old mechanic’s shop in Provo, Utah, Zack Green of Nashville croons over and over into a microphone, “In love there are no arrivals, in love there are no goodbyes.” Yellow plywood lines the shop. It looks like flaky gold under the dangling bistro lights. The space is threadbare, but the atmosphere ethereal. A hundred people are in the cavernous room, seated in secondhand folding chairs and wooden benches and brocade lounges and recliners. They listen intently, sway to the music. Green sings for Americana quintet Birdtalker, and the band is headlining the first official production by Salty Mouth Shows, a Utah venue that promises to spontaneously combust when moved by the spirit for intimate community gatherings. “In love there are no arrivals, in love there are no goodbyes.”

But there are beginnings, and for Salty Mouth Shows it began like this.

Joshua James, Jake Buntjer, and Nate Draschil have for the past several years savored music and community throughout Utah. From rooftop concerts to band battles to art galas, the three have not only basked in the warmth of a spreading cultural flame, they’ve contributed to it.

James, of American Fork, is an acclaimed singer-songwriter who, when not touring nationally, continues to play impromptu backyard gatherings. He’s also a producer, and he’s helped illumine the talent of Utah musicians Timmy The Teeth, Desert Noises, The Aces, and others. Buntjer, of Springville, is a sculptor and founder of The Boxcar Studios, a Provo community events center, atelier, coffeehouse, and barbershop. Draschil, of Orem, has spent the past seven years ensuring that the Rooftop Concert Series is the elevating experience Utahans hope for when they descend on Provo’s Center Street the first Friday of each summer month. The trio, you might say, is anxiously engaged in a good cause. Yet despite their existing workload, the three friends can’t stop dreaming. And about a year ago they began discussing how they might further fuel the community fire.

Last October, James and wife Emma wanted to throw a cozy backyard soirée. This marked an opportune moment, James realized, so he, Buntjer, and Draschil went to work. They dubbed the gathering The Harvest Dinner, invited 35 guests, as well as a band to take to a tiny stage. James’ garden supplied a cornucopia of food, and Fresh Melissa Chappell prepared it. What ensued was a magical evening of good conversation, high spirits, and delicious music. The afterglow from that evening, all agree, persisted for days.

“It wasn’t about putting on a rock or folk or singer-songwriter show,” James says. “It was about bringing common-minded people together and rejoicing in the unknown of being alive.”

Rejoicing in humanity and community underscores Salty Mouth’s aim, and the success of that Harvest Dinner led the hosts to believe the experience could be replicated. But they wanted subsequent iterations to be original and organic, to unroll similarly. So when the trio learned in early July that Birdtalker would be touring from Colorado to Idaho, they made a phone call, convinced the band to detour through Provo, and began spreading word via Instagram and Facebook. Friends and acquaintances came together to modify The Boxcar Studios, design flyers, and create an Eventbrite page. Local folk ensemble Hollering Pines signed on, as did Fresh Melissa again. Seven days later, a community gathering materialized on a sultry summer night in an undercooled workshop. Sparks flew.

So what did it feel like, sitting on a folding chair next to a Salt Lake City couple who shared their drink while a hundred-some-odd folk listened to a band of Tennesseans croon and strike chords?

Possibility. Like we can do this, that our efforts aren’t in vain, that they matter even, that they make a difference, small though it may be.

Draschill says that Salty Mouth is, at the core, “about creating an opportunity where people can come together and have their hearts opened up. Not just be shoulder to shoulder, but face to face.”

Buntjer explains that he and his cohorts have been inspired and fed by their artistic progenitors and that they want to fan the flame so to speak, carry the torch, pass it on. “As people get together during these events and see that it’s working,” he says, “they then take their own passion, their own craft, and try other things. Then we can go experience that. This is our version of the next step in life. It’s what we want with life, what we want from culture and community.”

Salty Mouth exemplifies a broader cultural shift in The Beehive State. Over the past decade, as secularism has spread and access to information increased, hordes have migrated away from Mormonism, which has previously been the arbiter of culture in Utah. Millennials, especially, have joined the exodus, and in the absence of a prescribed Weltanschauung they've sought to fill their cups with art, music, food, and togetherness. Salty Mouth’s engaged trio is no exception. Ever do commoners and nonconformists beget counterculture—the truest expression of nonviolent protest.

Hence “Salty Mouth.” For the salt of the earth has always given lip. It turns the other cheek not in submission but defiance, and its defiance invariably bears a beauty mark. And how can it not, for defiance of the prevailing way looks exactly like allegiance to one’s own way.

After the show, folks enjoyed collations from Fresh Melissa. They huddled in clusters as their conversations melded into a low hum. Bottles clinked. A baby raccoon crawled across the laps of partygoers. Yes, a baby raccoon. The air and heads were abuzz.

Mark Smith of Hollering Pines called the venue “unique,” while Birdtalker stood as much in awe of us as we did of them; with a circuit of mostly raucous bars, they aren’t accustomed to a captive audience seated under celestial lighting.

It remains to be seen, though, whether Salty Mouth can continually reach its romantic ideals. Can it remain a community experience rather than a consumer experience? In our material world, souls are starved for genuine community, and when we find it we often falter toward engagement through a monetary transaction or digital interface. If Salty Mouth should ignite the fire it wishes to, it risks becoming a commodity rather than a community. If it doesn't, then those few who regularly stoke the effort end up singing only to each other.

Maybe that's the point.

Whatever happens with Salty Mouth in the end, one thing is certain: it began in love. And in love there are no arrivals. In love there are no goodbyes.

Oh, as for the next show... it'll happen when it happens. And if you know, you know.

[ryanjtrimble]

I Met A Toad

I went camping and the moon was full and when it reached in the sky to eleven o’clock I abandoned my fire and walked. The San Rafael River gargled like the sound of a thousand thrushes in the distance. The desert sand glistened.

I walked alone and smoked until I thought I saw a butterfly of the white, quarter-sized kind that hop from clover to clover in public parks and dandelion fields. And I thought, “No way. That can’t be a butterfly.” And I wondered why butterflies do not play in the dark. And then a flutter or hop again caught moonlight and captured my attention and my unconscious said, “It’s a toad.” And I shone a flashlight and looked and saw a toad.

I watched him under my light, watched his pupils dilate and constrict as I washed the beam back and forth. I watched his silvery skin expand and fall in a subtle breathing motion. Then I hesitated, and touched him. I don’t know why I call it him. He seemed to like it, my touch that is. In fact, if toads could purr I’m sure this one would’ve eked out a pleasant growl. I picked him up, fearing he would jump, and to my surprise and satisfaction he burrowed himself into the palm of my hand as though he’d discovered a pocket of warm mud. I felt tiny webbed feet knead against my wrinkled life-line. I wrapped my thumb over him, gently like, as though he were a sparrow, stroked him once behind the eyes, and together we walked under full moonlight. I felt the coolness of his skin, and I wondered what it must be like for an amphibian who has spent his life more or less belly down in the dirt and mud, traveling at a sloth’s pace, to now be four feet above terra firma, in the grips of a sweating creature, moving at the stroll of humankind, roughly three miles per hour. He had that same look on his face that I suspect I did when I took my first hot air balloon ride.

By the time we arrived back at camp, Mr. Toad was perched along my long sleeve about the elbow, peering into the dark, as if navigating from the mast of a ship. I imagined that he would be a forever companion, eat the ants in my camp the way a cat does mice. So I set him down near a swarming pile of burgundy thoraxes and wandered into the brush to piss. When I returned I looked down and saw no toad. I felt used, as though a one-night stand had just ran out the back door. The ants still swarmed. But then I noticed an unnatural mark in the soil, a deviation, so I shone my light and there I saw two black eyes embedded in nodes, protruding from the body of a thing nestled in the sand grains. “Ah. You’re right,” I said. “Bedtime.” I flicked the beam up and away before clicking it off, and briefly I glimpsed a pupil burst like a black firework, spread like spilled oil.

[ryanjtrimble]

The Boxcar Kids

Reading time: 10 minutes

A new gang of artists, armed with gall and heart and tools from Harbor Freight, threatens to diversify Provo, Utah, with fine art, artisan coffee, haircuts, tattoos, and community events. They’ve taken over the tired midcentury building located at 156 West 500 South and have turned it into a parlor of sorts, a source of golden light and autumnal galas and monthly Drink and Draws with nude models. They call the place The Boxcar Studios.

The Boxcar Studios opened twelve months ago, unofficially. Jake Buntjer—father, photographer, found art sculptor, and now community organizer—founded Boxcar when he acquired the building on a bargain lease. Inspired by Corey Fox, owner of Velour and godfather to Utah Valley’s music scene, Buntjer set out to create a marketplace and community for fine artists and their patrons. “I knew in my gut,” says Buntjer, “if I could acquire this space, if I could create the opportunity for myself and then share it with other people, that we could hook dreams. And if I hooked a dream with somebody and they hooked with me, then we could hook more dreams together and create an ecosystem that benefitted everybody.” Boxcar has since endured on Buntjer’s vision, enlisting artists’ faith and gumption and gristle from volunteers. On any given day at the Boxcar, Millennials and Gen-Xers can be found rewiring electrical circuitry, plumbing new pipes, nailing up reclaimed boards, or painting walls. On weekends you’ll find art shows, musical performances, mingles, and costume parties. This February you can attend a private carnival for $50, which includes live music by Timmy the Teeth, premium cocktails, fire dancers, contortionists, stilt walkers, and whatever shenanigans might ensue in such an environment. In recent months, Boxcar has hosted Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s gatherings, providing a free space for friends and community members to gather for drink and food.

Seven artist studios flank the rear of the Boxcar, while three shops comprise the storefront—Revolución Barbershop & Co., Man in the Moon Mercantile & Reclamation, and Rugged Grounds, a coffeehouse. Azure paint adorns the building’s face, corrugated steel roofing runs down its west side. Out front, on a crumbly sidewalk, a wooden sign beckons folks inside, where they are apt to meet Jeremiah “Pete” Hansen behind the glass counters of the Mercantile.

Pete is lean and blond, wears a newsboy cap. A reassuring Paul Newman-like smile springs easily and frequently across his face, erasing the worry that traces his temples and brow. Pete’s background is in the restaurant and construction industries and his first love is culinary arts, but the vagaries of life have sent him meandering. He got to know the Boxcar while patching its roof one day, working odd jobs. It didn’t take long for the unheated and leaky building—combined with Buntjer’s vision—to seduce Pete, like an empty frontier. He soon began regularly working and hanging around the Boxcar, volunteering his time. Now he mans the entry point five days a week.

What inspires a grown man to abandon a recurring paycheck for some impossible opportunity, to take a chance on art and community?

“The short story?” says Pete, “I grew up in a big-ass family, the seventh of nine kids. Always shared a room. Married young, always shared a house. Got divorced, didn’t know what the fuck. Got remarried, tried to make that work. Didn’t work out. I don’t know how to be alone. I don’t know who I am. I don’t know what 'me' is. So why not?”   Besides, he adds, "I can reinvent myself, I can be whoever I want. And reality is what?”

Reality does seem to twist and morph inside the Boxcar. The Mercantile, for example, is bedecked with green soda bottles, burlap bags, clackety typewriters, trilobites, brass belt buckles, wired spectacles, fraying leather jackets, false teeth, and black-and-white postcards. Drunken Sailor Radio plays on Pandora. A gray housecat named Toby toes about, purrs. There’s a velour chaise lounge, a yellow Tonka truck, a stuffed piranha, bat, and boar’s head, one sheep skull covered in turquoise, and a brocade sofa in the colors of The Mystery Machine—sea green and aqua. In the evenings, bistro lighting colors the timbered room copper and gold. In the mornings, the large south-facing shop window is platinum white, a portal back to a world of concrete and cubicles, where the pathway is known. But inside the Boxcar, possibility wafts around like an invisible river, and there’s the sense that, if lucky, you can hitch and ride the flow.

Next door, inside Revolución Barbershop & Co., California natives E’Sau and Lizzy Negrete cut and buzz hair. Actually, Lizzy quietly works the counter, swiping cards, taking money, smiling at the conversations that ricochet around the shop. E’Sau wields the scissors, clipping hair with jabs and hooks, while she dances around each customer. Rectangular black-rimmed glasses accent her round face. She talks in loud, quick gestures, her tattooed arms unfurling in all directions. Old liquor bottles—Jack Daniels, Don Julio, Jim Beam—fitted with spray nozzles, line a shelf below a mirror. E’Sau’s been cutting hair for 24 years.

“I’m the oldest of fourteen kids,” she says, “and I have ten brothers. My mom bought me a pair of clippers from K-Mart one day, when I was 13. I’ve been cutting hair since.”

Being the eldest, E’Sau spent most of her life taking care of younger siblings. “I never got to know who I really am until I moved away,” she says. Until she came to Provo.

And until Revolución, she’s always barbered from home. Having an actual shop, for the Negretes, is a dream come true. To see it through, E’Sau provides the chutzpah, Lizzy provides pragmatic oversight, encouraging her rebellious partner to play by the rules and file for all the appropriate licenses.

To the other side of Mercantile lies Rugged Grounds, set to open for business this February. Partners Skyler Saenz and Sadie Crowley, with help from friends, have renovated the old tax and payroll office entirely with reclaimed materials, from the paneled walls to the stainless counters to the modified sawhorse tables. They plan to sell traditional espresso and coffee, but will also offer kombucha, pour-overs, and cold-brew. The two blow kisses to each other from across the room, hug when they collide in the kitchen area. They both are young and attractive, and their endearments give off an intoxicating air of youthful promise, but without naivety. What they have seems solid, rugged, adding charm to the already quaint quarters.

“I’ve thought about doing something like this forever,” says Sadie. “Since I was pre-teen. And Skylar thought about it forever, too.”

Skyler confirms this. “Big dream on a whim,” he says.

When Boxcar hosts a gathering, the three storefront shops come alive. Doorways connect the structural trio like tunnels between funhouse rooms. The Negrete’s Latino community descends on the brightly lit barbershop en force, showing this gringo what familial relationships should look like—the generous hugs and fearless laughter. Ceviche and tequila abound. In the dimly lit Rugged Grounds and Mercantile, the scent of dried fruits and cocoa drifts between the chatter of Provo’s curious and outcast, who flock to the Boxcar on such evenings. Espresso and soymilk swirl inside paper cups, mimicking déjà vu.

After coffee and conversation—or during or before, there are no rules—guests mingle their way up a flight of creaky stairs, northward through Buntjer’s own atelier, and back down a set of creaky stairs into the industrial tail of the Boxcar. Depending on the evening, a band plays on a makeshift stage or art hangs from the rafters—photographs, paintings, mixed-media installations. The artists in residence open their doors and answer questions about their work.

Painter and illustrator Chase Henson rents a studio. Pencils, brushes, and tubes of paint litter his space. A while back he was studying aviation mechanics, following his father’s footsteps, but an internship opened his eyes. Chase realized mechanics wasn’t for him, so he altered course and earned a degree in art. Around the same time he abandoned the religion of his upbringing, became fascinated with religion in general, and in particular Hinduism. He now portrays its mythologies and gods in his paintings, metamorphosed in various ways. Of the Boxcar he says, “This place saved my artistic life.” Chase recently lost a tattooing apprenticeship and was ready to forsake the starving artist’s way. Boxcar, with its burgeoning community and forthcoming tattoo shop, represents a second chance.

Artists desperately need second chances in Provo. With a pious religious base and a politically conservative worldview that spiders through its suburban sprawl, the third largest city in Utah feels more like the set of The Donna Reed Show than an actual metropolis. Culture is something primarily emitted via Mormondom. Artists who have succeeded in Provo tend to paint portraits of Jesus Christ or depict dead Mormon prophets, Mormon temples, scenes from the Book of Mormon, and so on. Photographers succeed by snapping happy and glistening pics of Utah’s scenery. So making Hindu-inspired paintings that connote mysticism (Chase Henson) or honest photos of naked men (Trevor Christensen) or found art sculptures that hint of death and magic (Jake Buntjer) or photos that color youth and playfulness with loneliness and nostalgia (Lyndi Bone) or mixed media that decry industrialism and corporatism (Kelly Larsen) is a labor of love and uphill battle. But the Boxcar has enabled this motley crew to concentrate their artistic efforts, and they are puncturing cultural barriers, pushing through.

The crew is more interested in building than in tearing down, however. Buntjer’s vision of Boxcar is inclusive. Despite being an ex-Mormon and divorcee—marks that Mormondom customarily frowns upon, even shames—Buntjer doesn’t want to alienate members of the dominant culture. He in fact sees Provo’s homogeneity as artistic promise—a clean page on which to score a new song. He wants to give back to the community that shaped him by sprouting a culture that it can one day appreciate. And if that day doesn’t come, well, he and the other misfits will have each other and whatever they make of themselves through art. “I just want the community,” Buntjer says. “I want church.”

The community is coming together, and maybe the “church” is too. Boxcar is akin to a clubhouse for adults, a chapel, a place of play and spiritual replenishing. Sometimes in the late hours, usually between one and four a.m., when the night is taut and black and all that remains of the crowds is echoing whispers, three or four or six overgrown youth will circle within the gold light, among the stuffed beasts and skeletal fragments and vintage tools, and share wine or whiskey or whatever alcohol can be found hiding in a dilapidated desk drawer. The stars turn overhead. Those gathered begin to skip and leapfrog their words, so that they end up communicating more through vibes and frequencies than actual language. Psychologists call this “flow,” except they’ve yet to study it in conversational contexts. To a stranger or latecomer, it would sound like gibberish. In truth, it’s a deeper form of communication than everyday chatter, something that occurs at the level of the soul, and often regards matters of the same—what it is or isn’t, how to attain it or express or channel it. The details of these revelries are often forgotten by morning, but lingering impressions remain—footprints on each being’s nucleus, pictographs of the night tattooed onto vital organs. Of these clubhouse sessions, Pete says, “They happen when they need to.” You can’t buy tickets. No money required.

The beasts and skeletons and tools belong to Buntjer. His studio is where the Boxcar’s more serious and subdued meetings occur. His also radiates the greatest amount of magic. Whereas the other studios feel like studios, splotched with paint, flung with framed illustrations and photos, Buntjer’s studio is part shop of horrors, part dreamland, part American Pickers collective. There are leather and felt hats, fur coats, and twenty-one pairs of rusty pliers. There are hammers, saws, tapes, an old tequila bottle filled with purple goop. Block letters on a beam read: MISTER PAUPER. There are springs, wires, cloths, razor blades, dressmaking torsos in wicker, iron, and plastic, and over twenty-five doll heads, many with their eyes plucked out. A horse bust sits blindfolded in one corner. There are canvas bags, model ships, birdhouses, dusty jewelry boxes, a wall of brass curiosities. Buntjer reimages the refuse when he sculpts, which involves grinding, cutting, stitching, tying, wiring, hammering, gluing, and dreaming. The floor creaks. Light streaks through its cracks. A stuffed desert bighorn sheep stands in the center of the room. Above it drapes a large white flag bearing a red X, as if to suggest: this is the place.

Buntjer, with his pointy beard and heeled boots, resembles a satyr. Fitting for a mythmaker. Between overseeing Boxcar’s operations, sculpting, shooting photos, pitching art shows, and directing art for a new theatre in Provo, Buntjer works sometimes eighteen hours in a day. He is in the Boxcar’s tail, the storefront, and out back unloading his Jeep all at once, planning, directing, organizing. Sculpting. Sometimes following a Boxcar event, which represents the climax of a month’s work, he retires to his studio, the hearth of Boxcar, on a burgundy sectional next to the desert bighorn, for a clubhouse session. For church. But even as he unwinds, a vision visibly turns in his head, one he has expressed a hundred times in a hundred different ways, but that always resounds the same:

“I knew in my gut if I could acquire this space, if I could create the opportunity for myself and then share it with other people, that we could hook dreams. And if I hooked a dream with somebody and they hooked with me, then we could hook more dreams together and create an ecosystem that benefitted everybody. Then maybe everybody could be a little more creative, a little more real, a little more daring, a little more risky, because they were connected to other people doing the same thing. It’s a family.”

A family of foolhardy misfits, a chest of coupled dreams. Without them, Boxcar is just an old building. But, for now, it feels like a train car being pulled toward some remarkable, enchanting place. And I, for one, am aboard, if only to see what's at the next stop.

A version of this story was originally published February, 2017, at Utah Stories.

[ryanjtrimble]

Street-Sweeping Street Dweller

Frank was laid off two years ago because, as his employer told him, he’s a “dinosaur.”

He used to work in shipping and receiving, now he sweeps gutters and sidewalks along storefronts, shovels snow. He does this voluntarily, hoping a manager or shop owner will notice. They usually do, and when they do they kick him a fiver. Frank figures he earns roughly fourteen cents an hour, which he strictly uses for nicotine, his one daily necessity. Once every few weeks he splurges on meth. As for food, he finds what he needs from the dumpsters, often fresh and sealed.

Frank is owed a pension, but he can’t get it. Payroll won’t dispense it unless Frank has both an address and a bank account, but he can’t get either of those without the money. Catch-22.

“This store is good to me,” he says, speaking of the Watchtower Cafe, where he is sweeping out front. “I get way down in the cracks.” The cracks are full of cigarette butts. Frank sees one that still has some tobacco in it. He picks it up and lights it. The sidewalk is broken and old, sturdy and presentable—thanks to Frank.

Much like Frank.

Being reliable and presentable is important to getting work, Frank explains. He has always tried to demonstrate to those that would hire him that he knows how to work hard. He used to line up with Mexicans in the mornings, and he’d frequently get picked by someone in need of laborers. That all changed, however, when Frank began wearing necklaces and bracelets, artful trinkets he’d found on the street. He was teased for being gay, though he isn’t. Now when the trucks roll around looking for laborers, Frank is left standing there with his black brothers. But he isn’t going to change who he is, refrain from expressing himself in whatever limited way he can, in order to appease those who would judge him solely on appearances. Hell, his trinkets are his only form of self-expression. His tank top hails from a dumpster, and his pants, well, Frank stole those from a sleeping woman. They are insulated. His shoes, though mismatched, were made in China. They cover his feet, but if it were up to Frank he’d wear something made in and by his community.

Today, instead of standing curbside, waiting to be ignored, Frank picks a curb and goes to work. With his broom. Often he is still ignored.

His college degree doesn't help much. Frank studied communications, had dreams of DJing. He knows everything about sports, can ramble off stats. But he can’t tell you what happened yesterday, because of the drugs. He mostly lives clean today, but his memory remains faulty. “See, I’ve already forgotten your name,” he teases.

While talking of the youth who die daily on the streets from overdoses, the deaths you don’t hear about on the news, Frank weeps briefly. The springtime air dries his tears. He explains that he shows his emotions openly, something his mother taught him to do, and he’ll never apologize for doing so. This, he presumes, is another reason why some judge him gay. “I was raised by women,” he says. Coincidentally, Frank shares his birthday with International Women’s Day. He turned 57 on March 8th, and he is happy to share the day. In fact, he basks in the coincidence, in whatever it might signify.

On March 7th, Frank flew a sign for the first time since going homeless. He'll never fly a sign again, he says. He didn't get a dollar, and even if he had it wouldn't have bought back the self-respect he'd given up.

Frank has tried the homeless shelter, too, but he can't bear it. He can't bear to see the children there. He can't bear the innocence and sunlight dancing in their eyes while they wrestle and play. He can't bear to see them amidst the needles entering veins, the scattered feces, the men slowly dying on bunks. The paradox is too much, the life swirling betwixt the death, the unraveling of supposed opposites. The coexisting forces.

It’s just too much, Frank laments. Born into that world, he knows which force has the best chance of winning in the end. He sighs, bows his head, holds close his weathered broom and broken cigarette.

[ryanjtrimble]

Why Drug Addicts Should Get High On The Pink Cloud

Reading time: 7 minutes

When a drug addict gets clean he experiences a whole new high. This is convenient, given that the addict’s primary reason for not getting clean is fear of sobriety, for sobriety means facing life alone, without some emotionally numbing, mind-altering agent. But should the addict be lucky and determined enough to get clean, should he persist and overcome his fear of sobriety, he gets lifted on something he never thought he would: life.

Sobriety, as it turns out, is a high all its own, and it’s more exhilarating than all the previous highs the junkie has experienced. Ask him, when he’s four weeks sober, and he’ll tell you—despite being jobless, spouseless, penniless, and half toothless without a dental plan—that this new high is better than the high that follows 50 CCs of heroin or a dime-sized crack rock. This new high, which results from regained sensitivity toward life, is commonly called the Pink Cloud.

In recovery culture the Pink Cloud is considered a blessing and a curse. It’s a nice ride, sure, but it’s also as wily and deceptive as ole Screwtape. Old-timers and freshmen of sober living all warn the newcomer: beware of the Pink Cloud. 

Why? What are the effects of a Pink Cloud high?

Well, there is faith and determination. Optimism. Resolve. Budding self-confidence. Honest introspection. Increased sensitivity to beauty and ugliness. A willingness to take risks, the kind that propel a soul upward instead of spiral him downward. A desire to create, to learn, to work. These are some of the symptoms of the Pink Cloud, the side effects, if you will. And it is precisely these effects that the sapling of sober living is told to be wary of. Misplaced confidence, ultimately, is the danger of the Pink Cloud.

When I got clean after a ten-year affair with opiates and pills and cocaine, the Pink Cloud rolled in and while high as a kite I made several life-changing decisions. I decided, in the midst of having to find work and transportation and a dwelling for my family, that I would go to college and study philosophy, become a photographer and writer, and forge a career that aligned with my near-forgotten interests. Pipe dreams, these were, for a thirty-five-year-old with a makeshift high school diploma, criminal record, and proclivity for running from difficulty. That’s what I was told, anyway.

I attended AA and 12-Step meetings of various sorts in those days, and I repeatedly saw sponsors and old-timers reprove the freshly sober for wallowing in the Pink Cloud. They implied, with few words, that the Pink Cloud alters perceptions in the same way a tab of LSD does: it renders the world blissful. But, like LSD, the trip is to be survived, not sustained. “This isn’t reality,” went the narrative. “You’re fucking high, but you’re going to sober up soon. You’re wafting in a cloud of sugary cotton candy, floating in a plush pink Cadillac, looking down on the world through rose-colored aviators, and smiling as though your favorite deity has guaranteed you access to pearlescent gates. But this cloud will evaporate and you’ll fall hard should you not voluntarily climb off now. Don’t dream or dare, for life will cut you down. And because failure feels acute after riding the Pink Cloud, you’ll try to escape on the skirt of some intravenous poison, some tonic that promises transcendence, some cocktail of powders and pills. You’ll again pick up the bottle or needle. You’ll be right back where you were.”

I chose to ignore this story, and I stopped going to AA altogether. I didn’t care to hear messages of “Be responsible. Don’t ruffle feathers. Play it safe.” I’d heeded similar messages for far too long, and to my mind that’s what led to my addiction in the first place. Recovery, they say, is about learning to be honest with oneself. For me, honesty meant, and still means, ignoring messages that contradict that quiet tune of the heart.

So I chose, instead, to saddle the Pink Cloud and ride it. I determined to follow every inclination that came to me while high on it. And when I was low, which was often while navigating the aftermath of my riotous decade, I held tight those visions I had glimpsed while in the clouds, visions which said: you can become who you want to be, but you must go boldly.

The Pink Cloud narrative in AA encourages the opposite. It tells the addict to be timid and cautious, to view the world as a set of mousetraps. Bold or risky moves can set these traps off and ensnare the addict. Thus AA recommends that the addict find a safe and comfortable routine, so that he can focus on his recovery and avoid relapse.

But the safe and comfortable path is still fraught with danger. Most addicts possess at least one of two personality traits, both of which are linked to addictive behavior: sensation-seeking and impulsivity. Like any predilection, these must be expressed rather than subdued. The addict must learn, if he is to recover, that his dispositions are not character flaws, as the Pink Cloud narrative suggests, but rather are positive qualities, best loosed via healthy outlets. It is when a person attempts to subjugate himself, in an effort to comply with some outside narrative, that warts and boils spring from his soul—often in the form of addictions. The sensation-seeking addict, especially, must resist the urge to squeeze himself into a box that others have marked "safe."

I’m not arguing that AA and the 12 Steps are harmful or ineffective. I might not be alive had I not embraced Step 1. I am arguing, however, that the thoughts and feelings one has while on the Pink Cloud should not be discounted. Is it dangerous to act on impulses that arise while zipping around on a cumulonimbus ride? Absolutely. But fortune favors the bold, and nature loves courage. The greater danger lies in ignoring the soul, for it sings loudest and truest when, having been in hell, it breaks free.

So, am I still on the Cloud? It’s hard to say. It’s been five years since I climbed aboard. I got that degree in philosophy, my photography has hung in local galleries, and various publications have featured my writing. The pay has been negligible, but the journey is rewarding. I like to believe I’m still high, and I do my damnedest to act on the irrational impulses that spark while my head is in the clouds. But I also sometimes want to veer into oncoming traffic. I get irritable and discontent and depressed, and I want to numb myself when I do. Today, though, a bike ride and a beer suffice. And I'm not sure I see the last five years as progress. Mostly I feel like I'm wandering, always wondering where the fuck this road goes, loving the trip and loathing it too. But wafting in the Pink Cloud while in early recovery helped me to develop habits that carry me through, habits I don’t think I would have developed had I listened to the “Beware of the Pink Cloud” narrative. Had I internalized that fable I’d still be hopping telemarketing floors, looking for golden Glengarry leads, chasing greenbacks, never reflecting on my inevitable death. I wouldn’t have picked up creative hobbies that have no practical application, hobbies that tickle my neurons every time I indulge them. I wouldn’t have burdened myself with the stress of college while working full time and supporting a family, or acquired a love for books. I wouldn’t have dreamed of hiking and biking mountains after all those trips to the ER with crack-induced chest pain and jaw numbness. But I’ve done and continue to do these things, because, maybe, I’m on a Pink Cloud.

It comes down to this: If a person is bold enough to ignore those messages about the dangers of drugs and come out alive on the other side, then he or she is bold enough to ignore messages about the dangers of dreaming and taking risks. Let’s be honest—since that’s what recovery is about—an addict needs to get high. And he’s not going to do that by taking the middle road. Instead, he must saddle the Pink Cloud, or bareback it if necessary, and ride it wherever it takes him, sunset or storm.

[ryanjtrimble]

The Rules of Photography

When I was about six or seven I lived in Price, Utah. My cousins lived in Spring Glen, on the edge of Helper, Utah. The three towns lie within a few miles of each other.

On weekends, my family would pile into a '78 Chevy Caprice and drive seven miles to my cousins'. Our parents would chit chat in the living room, while we kids would run around the park across the street, in the dark, yelling names and numbers, grabbing each other, sprinting through nearby fields.

Night games.

Sometimes, on a morning following a sleep over, we'd "walk into town", as we called it, toward Helper. We'd buy a bag of Coffee Nips from the small convenience store. Then we'd suck those coffee candies as we walked home, kicking along the gravel, each of us smiling with one cheek plumper than the other. But better than those candies was the knowledge that even if we weren't old enough to drink coffee, we could savor it, against our parents' wishes.

A few months ago I visited Helper, Utah. I walked and bicycled around, talked with people, made photos. I saw some old film photographs on display in a Main Street window. Attached was a name and number, so I called it. Later that day I met Jason Huntzinger. He works at the Western Mining and Railroad Museum. He also teaches photography at USU Eastern.

We later connected on Facebook. A few weeks ago he invited me to come speak to his class about my street portraits, or whatever. I drive down tonight, weather permitting. So here I am, 3 a.m., poring over old photos, trying to figure what I might tell another person about photography that's meaningful.

It began, for me, in the 8th grade with a pinhole camera made from an old Quaker Oatmeal can. My friend Woody took photography with me. I made a photo of him, and I still have it. He died about five years ago, from an accidental drug overdose. I still think of him when certain songs come on the radio, the ones we used to dance like idiots to.

So the first thing I'm gonna tell those students, I guess, is: your photos will outlive you.

Can you live with that?

Tonight, I look at an image recorded on a piece of film less than 1.5"x.75" in size, floored that it's here 27 years later, though my friend is not.

I have a photo of my grandmother, too. And for the first time in my life I see my father in her face. It must've been necessary for him to reach the age of 70 for the resemblance to come clear. She was in her 80s when I snapped her sitting quietly in our front room, in the afternoon sunlight.

Then I stopped.

I didn't make any photographs for four years. I spent my time raising hell and using drugs. But when I returned to high school at 17, and to photography, I had perspective. I wanted to say something with photos. I remember, around that same time, driving in the car with my mom, telling her how I'd found this appreciation for jazz, which she didn't understand, and I'd said the music showed the "beauty of sadness." I remember using those words, thinking that. It was the first time I recall appreciating this paradox—that there's something exquisite about ache channeled creatively.

I came across this image, shot that year, of an abandoned house that used to sit at the mouth of Provo Canyon. My friends and I used to sneak into it and, well...

The city tore it down eventually, but not before I photographed it.

One of my friends who often accompanied me to this abandoned home shot himself a few years ago. I wish I knew why. I think of him when I hear certain songs, travel down roads we used to walk together.

Then I stopped.

After high school, I didn't make another creative photograph for 18 years. I got busy raising hell, or growing up, or something like that. To this day, my formal training consists of those 8th grade and junior year photo classes. But I know my photos will outlive me, not in their significance necessarily, but materially. These flimsy strips of tape, these records of light, will persist. And one day, maybe, they will remind my kith and kin that I do not.

So I guess there are two things I plan to tell those photography students: Your photos will outlive you.

And never stop.

[ryanjtrimble]

Tobacco Is A Friend

Steve used to take a leaf of newspaper and a strip of cedar bark and roll them into a cigarette that was just perfect for a seven-year-old: adults smelled what they believed was campfire.

So Steve and his brothers puffed stogies in the woods and felt like men. They felt as free as the smoke that wafted through the forest, moving around obstacles like water, like Bruce Lee.

Steve’s dad smoked the real stuff, though—Prince Albert pipe tobacco. He’d sit in front of the TV, drink coffee, and pull rich, white smoke into his lungs.

Being a wily seven-year-old, Steve would go in and drop next to his dad, make something up about needing a break from playing. Then he’d watch as his father would roll a cigarette. Inevitably, the old man would set the smoke down before lighting it, to sip from his mug.

That’s when Steve would snatch the rollie and stuff it in his shirt pocket. His father would roll another one, as though he had no recollection of his previous actions, and another, and another.

Over the course of an hour or so, Steve would pocket a bundle of hand-rolled cigarettes to share with his compadres, then he’d jet off to the woods to smoke.

But before he hit the door, his father would yelp, “Aye, where you goin’?”

“Out to play,” Steve would say.

“What about them cigarettes?” came the reply.

~~~

Steve is in his 50s today and suffers from emphysema. When he walks, his #heart beats hard and erratically. He pushes a grocery cart. It’s weighted with sacks of rocks on one side to keep it from tipping. Clothing and blankets billow over its edges.

Steve never learned to read or write, and hasn’t been able to get a job since his 30s when his cataracts first set in. He’s been living on the #streets since.

Just before Thanksgiving, he spent two days pushing his cart two blocks (takes long when you can't breath) so he could be near the Chuckarama and collect some handouts. When he’d received about five or six doggy bags, he took the afternoon to push his cart down a block. There he setup a tent behind a chainlink fence, between a shed and warehouse.

He crawled inside, lit a cigarette, and burned a hole in the tent.

It rained all night and snowed the next day.

[ryanjtrimble]

What Happened When I Quit Drinking

Last month I overdid it with a bottle of scotch, drank the whole thing in an evening. It was a memorable if not regretful experience, and it caused me to pull back from drinking altogether. Since then, my dreams have been like visions, full of ideas and messages.

Recently I dreamt that this earthly experience is a simulation. Something showed me the programming and explained that it was once considered revolutionary programming because each byte of code contains the entirety of the code itself. This, the source explained, accounts for why we can never pin down anything essential in life. This is why all our intuitions buckle and crumble right when we’re on the cusp of backing them with what we think will become irrefutable concepts or laws. This is the program coming face to face with its own design.

When we search for purpose in our hearts, we are the numeral 1 staring into the infinite pool of the 0. When we gaze at the stars, telescope into some nebular dust, and believe we see suns and worlds growing, we’re in fact peering up our own assholes and into the backs of our retinas. We’re watching ourselves watch ourselves watch ourselves watch. Hence the kaleidoscoping stardust, the melting dawns, the breakdown between macro and micro, the elusiveness of absolutes. Cyclicality. Black holes. Umbilical cords. Inverted mountaintops on ocean floors.

I suppose that saying we’re in a simulation isn’t new or interesting. There was The Matrix. And Baudrillard.

When people say that God has put us on earth to experience mortality, they might as well say (and maybe they mean to say) that we’re in a simulation.

THIS IS A TEST. THIS IS ONLY A TEST.

Maybe my dream was one of semantics.

It isn’t new also to say that the part is in the whole and the whole is in the part. Sages have been saying this for millennia. “You are not a drop in the ocean. You are the entire ocean in a drop.”

But the dreams have given me material—fodder to mold, cud to chew—and I don’t read too much into them. There wasn’t, to be more accurate, a “something” that showed me anything. Nothing was explained. Rather, all was understood, felt, went foggy when I woke up.

[ryanjtrimble]

Blue For Winter

I like winter not for its opportunities for recreating in the snow, but for its isolating effects. I like the solitude.

I like how the sluggish air and white billows muffle the world. I like that in a good storm or on a dank evening I can see only a few hundred yards, in optimal conditions a few hundred feet.

This winter I’ve acquired the habit of going out for a walk in the evenings. I leave my home sometime between 11 p.m. and 1 a.m. and will stroll for thirty or forty-five or ninety minutes, depending on where my nose takes me. I take with me fine tobacco, an old camera, keys, and a lighter.

I don’t have a set route, and often I don’t see anything extraordinary. Sometimes I’ll notice a chainlink fence and how the snowflakes catch its oxidized surface, stack up loosely to a maximum height of about a pinky’s width. I’ll notice a dog bark from a side yard.

Sometimes I’ll stop and stare at a crooked tree for awhile, contemplate why I feel drawn to it. Nearly all trees are crooked and alive, so why is this one alluring? I’ll consider photographing it, but ultimately refrain from doing so because I can’t compose the image to exclude the old Ford Taurus with a hanging bumper, the dilapidated basketball hoop, or the wire that droops between two leaning poles. I’ll notice the silver that runs up and down the wet streets in shards, the slosh of car tires rolling the next block over. I once noticed a fire hydrant, there, all alone in the snow. I notice the homes that appear awkward, as though the ground has shifted beneath them. I once saw a man in black, smoking, walking.

When I go out I wear a bluish wool overcoat, boots, and a hat. I like the overcoat because it feels like a blanket with buttons and because I bought it secondhand for $17. I won’t deny that I also take pleasure in the possibility that some people might find it odd, here in this lifestyle state, in these neighborhoods of sporty gear. I usually walk directly in the street since there isn’t much traffic, and I get the sense that passersby glare with intrigue at this overcoated man, smoking a pipe, carrying something large and black. A pervert, perhaps. A murderer.

Some nights I leave my wallet home, so as to remain nameless. I don’t wish to remain nameless because I intend to commit any crimes, but because it adds to the isolating, comforting effect. Who am I without my ID, a bank card, or whatever meaning can be deduced from my wallet itself? It’s cut from the belly of an alligator. Surely if I were hit by a car, stopped by an officer, the ID, tucked in my wallet, is what they’d want to discover first. Leaving that little piece of plastic home, with its letters and coordinates, its hologram of authenticity, feels dangerous. And I like that. Nothing to verify whether I truly exist.

When I return home I remove my coat, my sweater, my hat, and I go into the kitchen and wash my hands with a soap that smells slightly cinnamon. I dislike the smell of cinnamon, but it’s there. I wash because although the tobacco, to me, tastes like oak and hickory and vanilla and dried apricots, I’m told it doesn’t smell as such in its lingering, burnt form, never mind what it signifies—a disregard for health, poor example to my children, my slow and eventual death. This latter fact, I remind my wife, the one who abhors the smell, is true regardless of my hobbies.

I boil a kettle of water and pour it over lavender and chamomile. I wait five minutes. Then I bring the mug to my nose before tasting, listen to the dark.

[ryanjtrimble]

Inside Heroin Addiction and Homelessness in Salt Lake City

Reading time: 20 minutes

If a lighthouse were planted on Lookout Peak above Salt Lake City, you could trace the lambency of its beacon in a southwestern direction down the mountainside, across the polished spires of the Mormon temple, through the glass façade of Vivint Arena, and finally into the Block, where the light would disperse and settle like falling snow. 

The Block is the gathering place for many of Salt Lake City’s homeless. It’s an ambiguous space, named by its denizens, where the train and bus stations, Rescue Mission, Catholic Community Services, and Salt Lake Community Shelter all converge. Impoverished vagrants and addicts and alcoholics flow into the Block and eddy there, swirling through doors and bunk beds and food lines until they can nab a life preserver or paddle to safety. It’s an island of sorts, a welcome harbor to those lost at sea. Yet to land there is to be marooned, and, for many, escaping means swimming against torrential tides.

Twenty-seven-year old Jeremy drifted in seven months ago.

~~~

I met Jeremy on a sunny November afternoon, plodding down a littered street on the fringes of the Block. I picked on Jeremy, I suppose, because of his physical structure. Unlike many occupants on the Block, whose atoms convulse and spasm, Jeremy’s energies vibrate harmoniously and dance in quietude; the cloud that hangs over him is a welcoming gray. So when I saw a man leap from the passenger side of a pickup and approach him, I, too, trotted over.

“Do you know where I can get some black?” I asked.

“That’s where we’re going right now,” Jeremy said, referring to himself and the man from the truck.

“Mind if I tag along?”

“Nope.”

Black is the street word for heroin in Salt Lake City. Skag, dope, and smack are bygone terms. Black is less ugly and more to the point. So too is white for cocaine, and cris for crystal meth. Dealers on the Block pace street corners and whisper at passersby, “Black, white, cris,” to let potential customers know they are dealing the drugs, or are running for someone who is.

Jeremy’s not a dealer, though. Nor is he a runner. Jeremy, like many addicts on the Block, is a hustler. That means he runs when he has to, or shoplifts and swaps the rewards thereof, or upcharges suburbanites like me until he’s earned enough dough for his daily fix, which for Jeremy is between twenty and thirty bucks.

I grabbed my backpack from my van and followed Jeremy and the other customer around a corner, catching up to them as they approached a light rail stop.

“Where are we going?” I asked.

Jeremy explained that he would peer through the train’s windows as it approached. If the right man were aboard, we would hop on and make the transaction.

And that’s exactly what we did.

In the back of the train, a white man with thinning hair and reddish beard sat alone. Black sunglasses steadied his gaze. He was dressed corporate casual, wearing a white shirt and camel sport coat. This new kind of runner (as opposed to the traditional twenty-something-year-old Mexican male) represents dealers’ latest effort to avoid police detection. I handed Jeremy twenty dollars, and he disappeared for 30 seconds, huddling near the man. A half-dozen other tramps followed, moving in one by one like hyenas stealing a bite of meat off a wildebeest.

Two minutes later we were at the next stop. A crop of addicts, now with dope in their pockets, spilled off the train. Back on the street, Jeremy handed me a balloon.

At $10 a pop, a balloon—or B for short—carries one-tenth to two-tenths of a gram of your favored drug. Once sold in tiny water balloons—hence the name—ten-spots now come packaged in a small patch of garbage bag that has been folded over, twisted like a loaf of bread, tied off, and double layered. To keep things orderly, heroin comes in black plastic, cocaine in white plastic. Each knotted bag is about the size of a pencil eraser, and opening one, if you’ve acquired the taste, is better than peeling back the gold foil of a mini peanut butter cup on Christmas morning.

I inspected the balloon. A scent of ether and Febreze wafted into my nostrils and sent tingles down my dendrites. My eyes flicked a bit, wanting to roll up in my head as in orgasm. Balloons always smell of the mixture of pungent heroin, acidic cocaine, and scented garbage bags, all of which signals what is about to come. I shook off the trance; I wasn’t hunting a heroin high. I overpaid for that balloon because I wanted access, and that’s when I broke it to Jeremy.

I said, in not as few words, that I once had been addicted to heroin myself, and that I now wanted entry to the life again but without having to descend the lonely road. I then asked Jeremy if he would open himself up and show me around the Block. He hesitated, naturally. But he didn’t throw punches or run from me, so we walked and talked for 30 minutes before settling roadside in the late-day sunlight.

Jeremy began using opiates at fourteen. One time he got clean for a few months, but a Lortab veered him onto his current path. He was working construction at the time, and suffering back pain. His mother, presumably wanting to relieve his ache, gave him the pill. It took four or five months to get addicted again, Jeremy explained, but he knew exactly where he was headed.

As Jeremy spoke he barely made eye contact with me. He alternately looked into the ground or distance. His Adonis hair curled out from beneath his beanie, framing his high cheekbones and pellucid eyes. The winter sun glinted here and there in his dark beard, which grows thickest along his chin and jawline, accentuating gaunt cheeks. Jeremy is at once bedraggled and clean; it’s clear he lives on the streets, and it’s clear he looks after himself. There is in his demeanor both boyhood sincerity and the marring scars of manhood. This, I tell myself, is why I was drawn to him from across the street.

Jeremy has two baby daughters with his high-school sweetheart, whom he makes it a point to call his wife, though they’ve never officially married. She’s clean today, but during their courtship she and Jeremy shared almost every first: tobacco, alcohol, weed, heroin, meth. The needle. They know each other that thoroughly, and that’s why Jeremy believes it’ll never work. Yet despite this apparent acceptance of tragedy, Jeremy claims to be in complete control of his fate. He says that his parents’ meth addiction in his youth has nothing to do with where he’s at today, that he could have done anything with his life, gone to Harvard had he wanted. On the surface, this admission looks like true integrity. Indeed, the first step toward recovery is to own one’s choices. But it’s hard not to wonder whether this might be a refusal to acknowledge reality, a white-knuckled effort to bend the world to that diehard American narrative that says willpower and heart can and do overcome all obstacles. If this is the case, Jeremy is a man who is roughly fourteen inside and carrying this broken world on his shoulders, believing that he broke it.

I watched as Jeremy took the dab of tar heroin from a balloon, pulled a syringe from his pocket (called a point on the street), and removed the small cap from the syringe’s plunger. He dropped the heroin in the cap, and added a tad of water. Then he used the thumbpiece on the plunger to mash the heroin inside the cap, to dissolve it in the water. (This method of liquefying heroin, Jeremy explained, is called cold-cooking; lighter and spoon not required.) After the dope dissolved, Jeremy tore a piece of cotton from his hoodie, hooked it on his point, and drew up the brown liquid. He performed this ritual with grace and agility. I thought about turning my head for what came next—partly out of respect for such plaintive worship, partly out of fear for what demons might be invoked in me—but I looked on. Jeremy straightened his left arm, stretched and clenched his fingers a bit as though trying on a glove, then made a fist, causing the veins in his hand to bulge. With his right hand he stuck the needle into the back of his left, drew it back slightly, then plunged down.

A warm and frothy ocean rose up in my blood. Its gentle heat washed over me in soft tidal waves. I drifted, half of me in the rip current, half of me on the floor of the sea. This fluid sensation kneaded my mind and body, lapped at my frayed edges with easy caress. The world stilled. I breathed in. Jeremy backed the needle out, then licked the tip of his pointer finger to dab the drop of blood from his relaxing hand. His eyelids creaked down, touched, then came back up halfway, eyes fixed on the nowhere. I breathed out, lit a post-coitus cigarette, and inhaled it with relief. I hadn’t anticipated the vicarious buzz.

Some drugs change people noticeably, but heroin isn’t one of them. The eyes rolling back, the nodding off—that happens. But only in large or sudden doses, and not as often as most addicts would like. It’s more common for people on heroin—or any opiate, for that matter—to behave like everyone else. They can drive, work, do math. In the long run, it’s not the heroin that destroys a user (so long as he or she doesn’t overdose), but the chasing it. The need for heroin, once its hooks are in, exceeds all other needs and wants. And it’s this preoccupation, this obsession that incurs neglect and ruins lives. But the physical and psychological effects of heroin, used moderately, are often imperceptible.

Heroin doesn’t induce hallucinations or erratic behavior. It calms. As a narcotic, it dulls the senses, working as a protective blanket against life’s sharp edges and pains. Its side effects effervesce subtly, shrouding the personality, so that the user can walk and talk like anyone, but with subdued vitality. Yet perhaps in the same way life’s pains can’t penetrate that diaphanous barrier, so too can’t friends and family. That’s what I noticed when Jeremy shot up, anyway. The good-looking, intelligent young man still sat before me, but his charisma had withered. He continued to speak and move, and I could see and hear him, but I couldn’t feel him, at least not in the way I could prior to his dosing. Heroin, it seems, isolates the user regardless of whose presence he is in. It’s a reverse invisible cloak: you see me, but I’m not really here.

Jeremy stood and said he had to go. Then he rode off on a silver bicycle. But not before he agreed to talk further. He said he’d be around.

~~~

A week passed and I didn’t see Jeremy. I wondered whether he had escaped the gravity of the Block. He had said on our previous visit that he had a plan for getting out of there, and expected to do so within two weeks. At the time, I chalked this up to unfounded optimism. Addicts often intend to get straight in the same way overweight people intend to start diets. I had almost given up on seeing Jeremy again when one night, just after dark, in a heavy rain, I turned and there he was. He was watching me, a hood pulled over his head, as if waiting for me to notice him.

“What are you doing?” he asked.

“Looking for you,” I think I replied.

Jeremy was in a new mood. He told the friend he was with that he’d catch up later, and he and I walked down a clammy sidewalk, huddling against the rain.

“At first, I wasn’t too sure, but with everything going on I want people to know,” Jeremy said, referring to our conversations.

The “everything going on” was aggressive policing. Jeremy had spent the previous week in jail, which is why I hadn’t been able to find him. It was his first time going to jail, and for possession with intent to distribute. He had been running for the Hondos (a street name for the Honduran dealers who dominate drug trade on the Block) in order to earn his daily fix, and the police nabbed him before he could swallow the balloons he was carrying. While in jail, he saw five Hondos get booked. This increased police activity spooked Jeremy, made him rethink his situation. “My very first time going to jail,” he said, “and my very last. I’m not going back.”

Yet here he was on the street, still running around looking for drugs. Jeremy could’ve leveraged that jail time as clean time, gone home with a clearer head having endured the worst of withdrawals, and focused on recovery. He says his mom would welcome him anytime. And addicts often use jail time to spring into sobriety, so why not Jeremy?

Before I could ask this, Jeremy had to get high. I could see he was in early withdrawals—anxious, twitchy—but I wasn’t prepared to follow him around in the rain looking for a B, so I did a dubious deed: I offered him the balloon I had bought the previous week. I suspected it would come to this—that I would give someone heroin in exchange for their time. Besides, I hate seeing a man in withdrawal, no matter how well he handles it. Jeremy, for the record, handles it better than anyone I’ve seen.

We made it back to my van, climbed in, and cranked the heater. Lamplight from the street glistened on the rain-soaked windows. Jeremy loaded a syringe, I cracked a beer.

Asking a man why he’s addicted to heroin is a bit like asking him why he fell in a love with a woman he can’t stand. The reasons are myriad and often inaccessible. Perhaps there are no reasons at all. But that old narrative that says abuse or depression or mental illness or depravity is the source of addiction is not as universal as we’ve been taught to believe. Jeremy, in particular, illustrates the ambiguities of addiction, saying on one hand “I don’t want the next generation to go through what I’ve gone through.” But when pressed about what he’s gone through, he replies, “I don’t blame anyone.” Then he recounts what sounds like a typical though difficult working-class upbringing. He grew up in Sandy in a nice suburban home, his parents divorced when he was five, forcing his mom to work two jobs, and his brothers were rarely around. And though he knows today that his parents used drugs, he never saw them do so. Jeremy grew up latchkey style, in other words, but he wasn’t abused. In short, he didn’t intend to go down this road, the same way the Mormon mother of four with a house on the east bench and a husband who drives an Audi doesn’t intend to get addicted to Adderall and Xanax. Addiction, like God, is no respecter of persons.

There is, of course, the chance that I didn’t earn Jeremy’s trust sufficiently, or that I failed to inquire deep enough, and that underneath his rugged self-responsibility lies a series of childhood traumas. Or it could be that there are other causes. A cursory Google search of “heroin use in Salt Lake City” yields a grip of articles that cite increased trafficking, gangs, and homelessness as the culprits of SLC’s staggering heroin addiction rates. Officers and politicians, when queried, point fingers outwardly and talk about cracking down and cleaning up. But Jeremy suggests something else.

“There are so many good people down here that don’t deserve to be down here,” he says. “And the reason they’re down here, honestly, is because they have some of the most brilliant minds. I believe society is afraid. The government is afraid of these super smart people that don’t fall into line. They’re people that choose to do it their way, they’re free-minded. You know, there’s a certain way society wants you to be, and that’s to have a job, have a wife, have kids. In Utah it’s go to church, get married in the temple. Like, you have to follow this system. I compare it to a motherboard of a computer: every little piece to a computer makes it function a certain way, and everybody that’s following the rules is a right piece to the computer. But we are perceived to be the virus. We are the toss-out.”

“Because you’ll fuck with the system?” I asked.

“Mmhmm. We interrupt the regular flow, the traditional life.”

“What does this flow serve?”

“The flow serves the people that are already benefitting from it. So, Future Generation, unless you’re born into the families that are already benefitting, you’re just a sheep. You’re just one of their sheep that they can shave and make money off of. All you do is produce the wool that warms their families.”

It’s easy to dismiss Jeremy’s lament as juvenile quibbling or conspiracy theorizing or an effort to rationalize unsavory behavior. But to do so is to overlook trends in heroin addiction, what sparked those trends, and how we as a nation are responding to them.

Most people today are familiar with the story that goes something like this: Doctor prescribes OxyContin to upstanding regular Joe or Jane. Regular Joe/Jane gets addicted. Doctor cancels prescription or patient loses means of paying for it. Patient then hits the black market for pills, supports habit for a time, but ultimately resorts to that cheaper street alternative: heroin. Upstanding citizen becomes a “junkie.”

This is only the middle of the story, though. There is also a prelude, and a tragic denouement. 

Since 2000, heroin use rates have doubled to quadrupled across the country. By all accounts, this is due to the OxyContin boom, which took root in the late 1990s. Purdue Pharma, maker of OxyContin, aggressively marketed the drug as a non-addictive painkiller. During this same period, the federal government pushed an initiative that required doctors to treat pain as a major component of overall health and wellbeing. The combination of these efforts allowed Purdue to rake in over $1bn from OxyContin sales inside five years. But the drug quickly became notorious due to skyrocketing overdose rates and media attention. It also became that much more desirable. By 2005, every American had heard of OxyContin, like Nike or Coca-Cola.

America was well aware of its opiate epidemic by this time. Lawmakers and law enforcers were already scrambling for solutions. But so, too, were pharmaceutical companies. In the early aughts, Reckitt Benckiser promised to save America’s addicted middle class with a new drug called Suboxone. The drug was said to eliminate withdrawals and curb cravings. It was also said to be non-addictive. And because doctors could prescribe it, addicts wouldn’t have to stand in line at treatment clinics for daily doses of methadone. Suboxone was supposed to curtail the Oxy-turned-heroin plague. Within months, however, 8mg pills of Suboxone were selling for $25 on the street. Addiction and overdoses followed.

That’s not to say Suboxone—or methadone for that matter—can’t help. It can—for those who can afford it. By the time an addict seeks treatment he is, in many cases, at or near rock bottom. He’s unlikely to have a job or insurance, so instead of going to a doctor he might try one of Utah’s recovery clinics and pay roughly $100 per week for methadone, or $150 per week for Suboxone. This doesn’t sound expensive—and isn’t compared to the $30,000 per month recovery resorts that finance treatment, whose billboards litter Utah’s byways, or even compared to a full-blown heroin habit—but the streets don’t require you to pay a week at a time. At $150 per week, or $600 per month, a Suboxone treatment program is as expensive as rent or groceries or a car payment and gas. And for all the hope it offers, it carries similar risks to heroin in terms of addiction potential, withdrawal, and overdose. Still, aside from going cold turkey, a horrendous feat, Suboxone might be an addict’s best option for getting clean.

Given this context, it’s easier to see why Jeremy criticizes society. Our heroin epidemic emerged with Big Pharma selling a cure for pain, and the people who became addicted to that cure are now told they can end their misery if they will only buy a new cure for pain. Perhaps this is one feature of “the system” that Jeremy alluded to. Yet for all his discontent, Jeremy still aspires to a drug-free, regular life. “I know what I want to do, and that’s to help all these good people,” he says. “I want to serve the people the way I’ve been served while living down here. I could show them that you can get out.”

Fifteen minutes after shooting up, Jeremy’s nose began to bleed. He said hypertension. Although he looks healthy, it’s likely that Jeremy has deprived his body for months, eating and sleeping and drinking only when doing so doesn’t interfere with getting or using drugs. When he shifts in his seat or sits cross-legged, bony legs reveal themselves behind his sweatpants. We decided to eat street tacos. The rain let up.

Jeremy and I slept in the van that night, parked near an abandoned building. He took the front seat, reclining it, and I took the bed in back. It was more like he passed out than fell asleep, though. He never even took his shoes off. The heroin, undoubtedly, is partly to blame. He had said it was damn good. But lying there, Jeremy also looked exhausted, like a man who for the first time in days had food in his belly, drugs in his blood, and worry out of mind. I threw him a blanket, and turned out the light.

We awoke the next morning to cool and clear skies. Cottony clouds drifted along the Wasatch Range. The sunlight was both wintry and warm. Jeremy agreed to let me accompany him around the Block, so I could observe him work on getting his daily fix. But not before getting coffee, I suggested. As I pulled into a drive-thru coffeehouse, I asked Jeremy if he wanted a cup. He looked at me, in a puppy dog way, opened his mouth and stuttered, “No, thank you.” Jeremy wanted that cup of coffee, I could tell. Coffee, after a night of good sleep, and on a chill morning, is one of life’s most simple and sublime pleasures. Nonetheless, he declined it. It was in that brief interlude that Jeremy told me what kind of man he is, or what kind of man he wants to be, anyway. Had Jeremy had money in his pocket, he would’ve accepted the brew, or paid for it himself. But because he didn’t, the coffee signified a handout, and taking it would’ve meant an abuse of generosity, or a slip toward dependency. Of course, I didn’t see the gesture this way, but it sure seemed Jeremy did.

What does a shoplifting heroin addict know about integrity or self-reliance? Truth be told, Jeremy’s integrity appears to be a source of both pride and pain. He bears it religiously. He doesn’t cash in on his mom’s standing invitation to come home because he knows she disapproves of his drug use. Jeremy could attempt to hide his habit, but he refuses to betray his mother’s trust or exploit her concern. He won’t go home until he is clean, and until he believes he can remain clean. While in jail he didn’t solicit family or friends for the same reason. “I never once asked anybody to bail me out or bring me money,” he said. “I was there because I did something that they told me not to do, and I don’t feel like they should have to pay for my mistakes. That’s on me. I’m an adult. It’s my time.”

Back down on the Block the hustle was brewing. People were rousing out of the tents and blankets that speckle the grassy median west of Rio Grande Street, which is the heart of the Block. Some folks zigzagged back and forth, from crowd to crowd, corner to corner, walking quietly but quickly, whispering and plotting, making deals. Others lied in the sunshine, smoking on cigarettes and spice joints and meth pipes. Street life has tarnished everyone’s attire to a blackish brown, so that they all seem to be wearing the same basic garb. This drab appearance serves as a marker; it let’s Block inhabitants know who is one of them, and who isn’t. Outsiders are as unmistakable as American tourists are to port cities on Mexico’s coastline, and they represent the same thing: money.

I know this because I was solicited several times, despite my efforts to appear shabby. My secondhand clothing and unwashed hair and apathetic stare were unconvincing apparently. I would reply, when asked what I needed, “Nothing. I’m good.” Solicitors then responded with a confused look or a “Then what the fuck are you doing here?”

“Hanging out,” I would say.

Because I was. I had tried to keep up with Jeremy as he hustled, but gave up when he hadn’t brokered a deal after an hour. I felt my presence was hindering his progress, so I sat on a large rock and watched and talked with people, checking in with Jeremy every hour or so when he would reappear.

For years I’ve observed from a distance the confluence of addicts and homeless on downtown SLC’s western edge. And, driving or walking by, I’ve sensed a kind of madness and lethargy in the culture there. It’s hard to make sense of this way of life, peering on as an outsider, as a working citizen or so-called normal person. It appears, from this vantage point, that those on the Block are lost, have veered off course, that they’re living life wrong. But after going inside the community, I feel quite differently. There’s a soothing and intoxicating immediacy on the Block, a closeness to life, a way of being that feels real and raw and honest that I was ignorant to before. The Block is at once shut out from the world and protected from it. It’s an island for sure, an Atlantis, a paradise as much as a marooning rock. And though many of its inhabitants talk of feeling trapped, just as many talk of being free. They talk of life with an air of hard-earned insight, like men and women who once were slaves but that have fought and won release.

After four hours of watching the morning market, I decided to leave. I gave up on reconnecting with Jeremy. He had become myopic in his hunt for heroin, diligent even, helping his friends and cohorts with their needs. I did manage, however, before leaving, to encourage him to visit his mom on Thanksgiving. He half reflected on the suggestion, nodding and shrugging at the same time. Then I drove off, out into the sea of society. I was jarred by all the people buzzing to and fro, marching in and out of shops and buildings like obedient soldiers, staring into tiny screens as if into a starry Universe. So this is what it means to be normal and well adjusted, I wondered to myself. Out there, we seem to believe, behind the next door or pixel, in the next new gadget or vacation or promotion, in the next success or relationship—in the next fix—lies the cure for pain.

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This story also published at Utah Stories.

[ryanjtrimble]

A Meditation On Giving Up

(Reading time: 9 minutes, 1800 words)

I have a friend who built a marketing company then sold it for a few million dollars. He’s a thin, long man, with bright lips that squeeze his green eyes into sparkling slits. The sun has bronzed his hair and skin. He sold his company because, as he put it, “I have problems with marketing ethics, and being at a computer all day estranges you.” Today he runs a meditation clinic. For free.

So I attended on a Wednesday afternoon, and for twenty minutes I tried to hold one thought in my mind: essence.[1]

I wasn’t focusing on the word "essence," but this particular idea of essence, as a kind of substance that inheres in everything, the substratum of existence. The embryo of “this.” Soul. The thing I feel toward.

Now, you might call this a mystical notion of essence. In fact, most modern philosophers say that essence isn’t a “thing” at all; it’s a feature of language. They believe we have confused a linguistic placeholder as some metaphysical extant. In the words of A.J. Ayer, metaphysicians have been "duped by grammar."

Psychologists also reject the idea that essences are metaphysical. Cognitive psychologist Paul Bloom suggests we "have a default assumption that things, people and events have invisible essences that make them what they are." In short, for the psychologist, our belief in essences doesn't result from language, it’s simply how we cognize; we’re born to think this way.

Psychologists and philosophers can have their way. I’m not religious about my notion of essence. It’s just an idea that brings me pleasure, a story I tell myself. And the moral of the story is “What if?”

So I sat, trying to keep my mind locked on this invisible concept (which is probably far too complex a thing to meditate on, but I like a challenge), and after twenty minutes I ate a raisin, because my guru friend, who was guiding the meditation, told me to do so. He also instructed me to pay attention.

I noticed, for the first time while eating a raisin, more than the taste of sugar and the scent of something like tobacco. I tasted not only the grape, but also the water that fed the grape, and the sun that cured it. I tongued every wrinkle of that dead piece of fruit, and all I tasted was life.

Then I smiled, opened my eyes, and exhaled.

I can’t say much about meditation or Zen Buddhism—despite following Sam Harris’s blog, despite having taken Philosophy of Buddhism 400R, despite noticing across the Interwebs what seems to be a Millennial exodus away from Christianity toward an American version of Eastern spirituality—but I can tell you this: concentrating on one idea for 20 minutes is not unlike smoking a joint. It brings personal insight, wider awareness, and psychological homeostasis. (If any of you diehard meditators are offended by this comparison, go meditate and chill. Or smoke a joint. Or both.)

What’s interesting, though, is that I didn’t gain any insight into this idea of essences—the thing I was concentrating on—no, quite the opposite. I gained insight into practical matters, namely, the things I resist. And the insight was this: stop resisting.

This isn't a profound realization by any means (I've seen at least a dozen memes kicking around the web in recent months that read "resist nothing"). But it's a profound feeling when you get a passing taste of it. And, for me, the taste is always passing, because my default mode is to attempt to control the world.

In a recent post I bemoaned the corporate life, social media, and the conflict I feel over my desire to "make it" as a writer. Meditation revealed these areas of my life as sources of conflict, but did so in an indirect way; the insights came in the calm wake after I opened my eyes. It was during this chill interlude that I came to see these aspects of my life not as hurdles, but as simply that—aspects of my life. Features of existence. And seeing them in that light gave me a new outlook on how to navigate them: with gratitude. For a moment I breathed lighter, saw clearer, felt stronger.

Now, I wish I could tell you that I've since taken up daily meditation. Given the dividends, that would be the obvious thing to do. But in the morning, the first most suitable time to meditate, I'm lured by a warm bath and a cup of green tea. Or I'm distracted by email, or tempted by what new Facebook likes I've acquired overnight, as if I could make bank deposits with them. Or I'll manage to read and write for a spell, or stretch out in my boxers on a blue yoga mat. But after that I'm aching to get out the door. And in the evening, the second most suitable time to meditate, I want to write and read, and listen to music, and pedal the streets in search of a story or a shot; I want to taste my dinner and take my children to the park; I want to argue and have sex with my wife; I want to waste time on the back porch, alone, with a beer and a dream in my head. And I do, right up until my body unfolds, belly up, on my knock-off Tempurpedic mattress. So another day goes by wherein I fail to meditate.

But just because I haven't meditated in the pure sense of the word doesn't mean I haven't meditated on the lesson I learned in those twenty short minutes. (I'm sure at this point Zen practitioners are balking at my suggesting that I learned something of meditation in twenty minutes. And they should. My experience doesn't even qualify as initiatory. But I'ma continue this train of thought anyway.) And here's what I've been meditating on: How can accepting the unsavory aspects of my life help me overcome them? I mean, in order to conquer those less favorable features of life don't we need to resist them? Even fight them? What does it look like to "resist nothing" when it comes to global warming, homelessness, and gross consumerism? How does resistancelessness work in the case of racism, sexism, or any of those -isms that aim for a right but leave an aftermath of wrong?

I'm not gonna attempt to answer these questions, because I don't know whether we're best to approach these problems in the style of Muhammad Ali or Mahatma Gandhi. What I'm interested in though, intrigued by, even fractured by, is the seeming paradox of conquest through surrender.

~~~

When I was about nine I remember visiting my grandmother and seeing on her shelf a cheap ceramic knickknack—two hands pressed together in prayer—with the inscription:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

At the time the quote registered nothing. It seemed a vain and meaningless utterance, which tends to be the destiny of any oft-chanted or ritualized profundity.

Years later, when I was hurting for release from heroin addiction, I walked into an assembly hall or church of sorts and sat on a folding chair. And there amidst the flannel shirts and missing teeth and cups of coffee I read from a poster, in unison with two dozen other ragged souls, the 12 steps of AA, the first being, "We admitted that we were powerless over our addiction."

I walked out.

"What a bunch of bullshit," I thought to myself. "How can I conquer anything that I profess to be powerless against?" Years later, with police and creditors hunting me, my wife one foot out the door with our children in arms, I returned to those rooms, because I felt I had no other choice. And this time I didn't try to make sense of it all. I just sat and listened.

Ironically, at the close of those meetings, us junkies would circle up hand-in-hand and recite what is commonly called the Serenity Prayer:

"God, grant me the serenity to accept the things I cannot change, courage to change the things I can, and the wisdom to know the difference."

Now, I'm not a believer in god, and I didn't stick with AA. In fact, I'd stutter if you asked me to cite any of the steps beyond Step 1. But I stayed long enough to come to believe, to know, there are aspects of life I'm powerless against. So I let go, and somehow I fell into sobriety.

Meditating that day reminded me of this relationship between courage and acceptance, and it exposed how I've been mustering a less effective kind of courage, a fighting kind. I've been looking at the world with disdain, and I've felt tied up as a result. Now, instead of hating the world, I'm working on my perspective. Oddly, that feels like courage and acceptance at the same time. But can I maintain this approach?

Today I savor the Serenity Prayer. It has taken on new and deeper meaning, which tends to be the destiny of any oft-chanted or ritualized profundity. I reflect on it as a close-but-not-quite guiding principle. (I also tend to see every guiding principle as close but not quite, because that seems to be how the world works; it doesn't conform to absolutes.) And though the Prayer loosely guides my way of being, I'm still angry with the world. Only now I'm trying to respond to my anger differently.

Some folks warn of a day of doom, when the earth will be purged with fire. From my view, though, the world is already burning. Every day that we drive our congested freeways, cast a vote, finance a dream, or seek permission, we pour on fuel, endorsing our corruption and folly from any and every side. Part of me wants to run away, to cower from the seething heat, become the mountain hermit or street bum. Part of me wants to bucket our evaporating water onto the flames, rage and fight, like those engaged in a good cause. And part of me, what I consider to be the best part of me, wants to dance on the hot coals, make art and love, while my body is slowly sifted into smoke and ash.

That's the kind of courage I'm struggling for. That's the kind of acceptance, the kind of giving in, I want to exemplify. But I'm not sure whether any amount of wisdom will help me distinguish the two, which is why I say the Serenity Prayer is close, but not quite. Maybe, if I would just discipline myself to sit and meditate, I could make sense of this paradox. Maybe, given enough time, I will one day have the courage to fight more graciously, surrender more supinely.

It is suggested that nascent meditators try to focus on one thing rather than clear their mind of all thought, as this is easier yet still effective.

[ryanjtrimble]

Natural Light, Single-Paned Glass

I met Willy while riding my bike on a rural road in central Utah. A thorn had flattened my tire and, after making a couple calls with unpromising results, I set out walking. Willy was 200 feet from me, so I encountered him soon enough. He was clipping a tree with an extended pruner that resembled long but awkward scissors.

“Hey, how’s it going?” I yelled.

“Huh?” Willy lowered his pruners, turned his head, and squinted through bulletproof-thick glasses.

“Hey, I got a flat tire on my bike. I’m wondering if you have a pump,” I called out, already walking toward him.

It didn’t matter whether Willy had a pump. I was gonna meet him anyway. I had determined that the moment I saw him. The flat was merely an effective conversation starter, an excuse to interrupt a man pruning a tree in his front yard on a Sunday afternoon. Had I encountered a woman reading a book or a man returning from church or a family barbecuing, however, I wouldn’t have engaged. Willy shone with that alluring hue that emerges only after life has polished away all that polish we apply to ourselves, and that’s what drew me in.

“Oh, yeah? I’ll get you fixed up! Come on back,” Willy cried. Then he turned, taking multiple steps to do so, and began walking at a good speed toward a shed behind his house, his heels scuffing the cement with each step.

The shed was as large as a two-car garage, made of ragged wood and cinderblock, and lighted beautifully due to two large single-paned glass windows. There wasn’t much inside—some tools and pipefittings that lay in hanging bins along one wall, a wooden worktable—and everything was caked in a dust from, I guessed, the 1950s. It was a grimy dust, more like residue, so that when I inspected some oddity my fingers became chalky and gritty. Free from this dust, however, was a bright red push lawnmower. Willy recently purchased it, after thugs broke into his shed and stole his riding mower. He’d kill them, he said, if he ever discovered who they are.

I tried to explain to Willy that my tires require a unique air chuck—due to their having a Presta valve—and that I doubted he had one. But he couldn’t hear me over the already growling compressor. I yelled a couple more times and he caught on, unplugged the machine. He then scrambled through his decades-old plumbing parts—Willy was a pipefitter in his working days—as if faced with an emergency, stammering, “I’m sure I’ve got something that’ll work.”

When I assured Willy he didn’t have the tool and that it was ok, he relaxed. I showed him my phone. “See, someone got my message. They’re gonna pick me up. What’s your address?”

While waiting for my rescue, Willy and I stood in the shed and talked, sometimes facing each other, starry dust particles drifting between us, sometimes facing away from each other. We wandered around a bit, each of us fiddling with a decrepit tool or pipefitting or two, as though hefting iron and dust might draw out the right thought or unravel the mystery behind autumn afternoon sunlight. Our voices ran along the walls and across the cement floor in rusty tones.

“Where’s your family,” I asked.

“Everyone has died,” Willy replied, soberly. 

Willy meant what he said, I could tell. He lamented seeing so much death, muttered something about war, then went on to explain that his 21-year-old daughter, his baby, had been killed just two months previous. Hit by a truck. A couple guys were racing on the freeway, one clipped her bumper and sent her flying. “I’ll kill them,” Willy said, “if I ever find out who they are.” His voice shivered as he spoke, but never broke. His eyes filled, and just as quickly dried again. No tears fell.

Willy knows death, it seems, intimately. He didn’t brag about not being afraid of it, nor did he curse it for the pain it’s inflicted on him. It was more like he bowed his head toward death, both in reverence and in defeat. Had death come for Willy in that moment, in that matchbox garage, I suspect he wouldn’t have shuddered. Nor would he have succumbed without a terrible fight.

Inside Willy’s home, where we eventually wandered, chicken was frying in an old cast-iron pan, the kind with the government-green bottom. Willy had set the burner on low before heading out to prune. He forked a wing from the crackling oil, placed it on a paper towel, wrapped it lightly and handed it to me. We walked into the living room, passing a table strewn with prescription pill bottles—presumably for Willy's heart, which has seven stents in it—and a south-facing window that revealed stalks of blue and burgundy corn clicking in the autumn wind. Willy harvested seeds from a Navajo cave years ago and has since cultivated the grain.

“I live like a hobo,” Willy said, clearing a place for me on a threadbare loveseat. He wasn’t apologizing, though, or trying to assuage embarrassment. It was more a statement of cold fact, like he had observed for the first time his own living arrangement. He then clicked off the TV and sat in a recliner next to a small end table that held scraps of paper, a pencil. A large intricate woodcarving stood beyond the TV. Medals and trinkets and wallet-sized photos dangled from it. Two American flags and a black-and-white photo of Willy’s deceased wife hung on the wall. Somewhere between stories of having been born in a tent and hunting and killing food in the hills of Utah, Willy stood and neared the photo on the wall. His eyes again pooled and drained without shedding tears.

Willy fought in four wars—in Cambodia, in Laos, in other places I don’t recall. He enlisted at 17, fraudulently. He's never missed a day of work in his life, a fact he is proud of. He loves his flags, and hates Utah. Said he wants to sell his home and leave, find a place that’s quiet, without shitty neighbors. Oh, they aren’t so bad, he guesses. But Willy also despises the men who knock his door weekly, asking him to sell. Willy’s home was built in 1921 and developers are now eager to urbanize his street. His home is primed for destruction, in their eyes, and Willy’s not interested. He refuses to escape Utah if doing so might benefit spurious businesspersons.

As the sun was setting and the evening cooled, Willy and I drank Natural Light, compliments of Willy. The living room walls faded to a soft grey. I noticed, through his dime store shirt, that Willy, in spite of his 81 years, is strapping through the chest and shoulders and neck. His eyes, which I glimpsed here and there behind his glasses, are sad and kind and hard and clear, like handcrafted marbles, or the guileless pupils of a doe.

Willy apologized for having talked so much, as I finally descended his front porch. He confessed that solitude makes it nearly impossible not to do so when an ear is present. Still, he felt it was bad manners and assured me he’d converse better next time. I waved my hand, in the manner of suggesting nonsense. Then Willy stood in the doorway a moment, one calloused hand on the doorknob, the other on the molding, hat and glasses teetering on his head, and the day’s last light followed him inside and clung to him before he closed the door.

[ryanjtrimble]

How Jon Olschewski Followed the Music

(Reading time: 4 minutes)

Five years ago, avid gardener and blues musician Jon Olschewski was waiting tables, buying guitars and amps with his tips, and playing parties, campouts, and gigs with his band Stonefed. Quietly he wondered whether he could make a living as a musician. He found out when a disagreement with his employer forced his hand: Olschewski had to get to work or go hungry. He's been playing bars and parks throughout the Intermountain West with Stonefed ever since. A working musician.

Olschewski grew up going to park concerts and bluegrass festivals, but never had thoughts of performing. In high school he was a chess geek and champion of Grand County High. He also spent a lot of time shooting pool. He became a quasi-hustler, raking in thirty to forty bucks a night, and he was enjoying himself. Wasn't really looking for much more.

One night while playing the tables, Olschewski met a musician named James Johnson. They ended up at a house party later that evening where Johnson performed his song "Bomb In A Box." The way Olschewski describes it, it was a defining moment. "James's song affected me spiritually. It changed the course of me life," he says. "I wanted the ability to make people feel what I felt."

That's when Olschewski began playing guitar more seriously, learning standard folk and rock tunes on his acoustic. Still, his commitment to music waxed and waned over the years. His guitar playing took a back seat when the '90s rave scene hit, inspiring him to get a Technics 1200 table and start spinning. Then one morning, while listening to Keith Richards wail a solo, Olschewski decided to pick up guitar again. He sold the old acoustic and nabbed a better model.

From then on, Olschewski carried his guitar everywhere. He started playing regularly with bassist Dave Mealy and percussionist Ed Stone. Childhood friend and guitarist Jasper Groff later joined the group, rounding out the ensemble. Stonefed has been running strong now for 16 years. "It's about music, but it's also about this journey with friends," Olschewski says.

Today, the guys are veterans of the Utah jam band scene. And while Olschewski handles much of the band's practical affairs, he hasn't lost sight of his love for music. "I wrote a song two days ago. I cracked out on Amy Winehouse, and that inspired a new tune for me."

For Olschewski, Stonefed is still about music and community, about trying to fulfill that dream that Johnson first inspired. He explains, "Music is a shared from of art. It's one thing to play a song and enjoy it, but it's a whole other thing when you perform in front of an audience. I can watch how others are responding. There's a transfer of energy. You can play a guiding role for the greater good through a song."

And that's all Olschewski ever wanted to do. Ever since he heard that live tune as a teenage boy at some house party back in the '90s.