Everyday I think about stupid shit. That’s true freedom right there. I get up in the morning and I pull myself together. Shorts, T-shirt, socks, work boots. Right Guard. Crest. Unibrow. Neck beard. Then I kiss people goodbye if there are any around, say so-long, head out into the world.
My commute is a straight shot along one road. There is one lane going west and there is one heading east. I go west to make money, I go east to go home. On the road I drift from thought to thought, from idea to memory, from memory to fear, and then back around again to some new avenue. Often I return to a song in my head. Sometimes I land back on a face from the past. Someone I once laughed with or sweated alongside. Someone I once talked to about stuff. Now they are gone. Not dead yet, but dead enough for me, I guess.
Birds swoop across the road. Last minute crows on a roadkill are so unafraid of me. They challenge my Honda. They let me know that I annoy them with my bullshit passing over this possum. The crows have been sucking on this poor bastard’s guts all morning. That is also, as far as I can tell, a form of real time liberty.
Sometimes I listen to a podcast on my small bluetooth speaker. I jam it between the windshield and the dashboard and it sort of wedges into a locked place. If I slam the brakes I guess it would probably take my face off. Time will tell.
I listen to this one NY Times podcast a lot. The Daily. It’s good. Half hour half-deep dives into current events. The host is a pro. The guests are all Times staffers and they know how to podcast talk. The edits slip by unnoticed. It’s the real deal.
I listened the other day as I was driving west to a recap of this little sort of rebellion invasion that a guy from a private Russian army threw together last weekend. The whole story is baked. Basically, this private army general took his thousands of troops and turned on his mother country and drove towards Moscow with, what appears to have been, very real intentions of causing some shit. Something about it is off though. Mostly because the dude that was in charge of the thing called it before they even hit the city limits. And also the fact that he is still alive. But I think he won’t be alive too long. The Russian government don’t play. They poison you. They come after you and they get you if they want to.
That kind of thing probably goes on here in America too, but we are a bit too busy to notice it. Rebellions are happening all the time, if you think about it. Kids down at the elementary school with AR-15s. Disgruntled warehouse workers shooting up the place. White cops beating the snot out of innocent black people. Karens all up in your iPhone face/ neck veins bulging/ spittle caking on your screen.
They hold back for as long as they can.
But then they unzip themselves out of that tight hot skin, and step into the light.
“FUCK YOU, N****R!,” they belt.
And then we are invaded.
And then we go to work.
To be a United States citizen or resident or whatever, these days, is confusing. You may think — after my intro up there — that I am about to launch into a liberal tirade and that would be fair to guess that. But I’m not.
Sorry.
I’m not.
Why? Because the elements of my caffeinated drive to work, the tired shreds of my commute back home, they all sing the song better than I can write it. You just have to come up with your own version. You just have to start seeing yourself from above yourself in order to understand what it really does mean to be an American. Because you are it, hoss. Me. You. Us. Them.
The frothing-at-the-mouth right wing crew. The hoity-toity libs. The black kids with their pants falling down on purpose. The wannabe Irish whites hating a kid for the pants he wears. The Chinese grocer. The Japanese professor. The flaming gay DJ. The cross-gendered, mealy mouthed child of God who rides the bus with your kid. Your perfect son or daughter. Your perfect college-bound little secret creep.
Everyone who is an American is bleeding from the mouth because we never shut up.
North Korean people shut up. They never talk the kind of shit we talk. They are all poor and hopeless for the big stuff and each day is a simple set of hours in which they try to survive within the walls of a sky that holds them in. Barbed wire and bean shoots and barefoot walking and black vans slow rolling through the village. The only car for weeks.
I am too tired to complain anymore.
I’m just going to go over here, crack a Sierra Nevada, lean up against this telephone pole under this milky way of Netflix and Hulu racing across the sky and watch the fireworks.
Thousands of dollars worth. I don’t even know who is setting them off. I’m pretty sure that it’s the half-Amish guy up the road from us. He has a tattered Confederate flag dangling from his house. His house is for sale. He is obviously not ‘staging’ it.
But free fireworks, you know?
Who cares where they come from?
I dig Civil War soldier history and I love digging into Ancestry, unearthing me and Arle’s way back American roots. I pride myself on having been all over this country just to play rock-n-roll, a distinctly American music, for people who identify as real American citizens. I have watched the Texas dust come ripping across the plains towards the highway, colliding with the band van I was driving. I have seen all the Great Lakes from the driver’s seat and I have crossed us over the Golden Gate Bridge and the Memphis-Arkansas Bridge and a trillion other small bridges over rivers and cricks and bays and swamps. I have no doubt driven over the bones of missing people. I have — no doubt — going 75mph on a sweltering Mississippi summer highway — passed within a few hundred yards of so many slaves in their unmarked graves.
I have slept under the shade of trees deep in the wild heart of Wyoming.
I have walked out into the predawn parking lot of an Arizona Super 8, heard the strange beautiful desert birds singing.
I have seen dead bodies on the shoulder, cars flipped over.
I have watched long haul truckers waddle back to their rigs with styrofoam take-out containers of bbq ribs and onion rings.
I have been drunk in all the big towns and I have wandered plenty of small ones looking for a place to sit. By myself. For just a little while.
Now: white, middle-aged, working class, and saddled down with responsibilities that far outweigh my potential, I am landlocked in the Appalachians that present as a dream. Rolling upwards from the edge of town, they are as wild as they come/ as old as the hills, I guess you could say. They have seen so many people come and go. So many Americans get born and then die.
They only ever watch. They remain strong and they shrink slowly towards the ground and they offer no commentary unless you climb up on them. At which point you are asking for it. Rattlesnake rattlesnake copperhead road.
But even then, the mountains rarely do you wrong. They just let you and your girlfriend/ or you and your husband/ or you and your mess of kids climb all over their skin/ all over their veins. They push a lone doe out from the lush green ferns just for you. Just so you can see it, whisper at the kids to shut up and look. These ancient hills, older than any American flag or democratic principals, they don’t give a gleaming fuck what the so-called ‘founding fathers’ meant when they were talking about militias and all that shit.
The cragged magic serenity is all they’ve ever manufactured.
And they give it away for free.
Except where there are purple spray paint blotches on the tree trunks by the trout stream through the narrows. Here in Pennsylvania, that means Private Property. So guess what?
You can fuck right off.
Another man owns this beauty.
And he doesn’t want you to see it.
Which is also a very, very American thing to do.
My Pop-Pop was a Navy man in the war. Caldwell Jenkins ‘Murph’ ‘Sonny’ McClure. Two nicknames. How the hell do you earn two nicknames? I never even got one.
He was on the USS Idaho in the Pacific Ocean. Radar man. He told me that kamikazes slammed into his boat. Between me and you: that’s something I’ve never even bothered to check. As interesting as it may be, it’s not the Civil War. I pay more attention to my 3x Great Grandfather’s army life because he was at Gettysburg, even though I never met the man, know almost nothing about him.
My Pop-Pop loved me a lot and he was a good man in a lot of ways but he was also an American asshole who was very mean to his wife. My Mom-Mom was a very special human. She was carved out of a certain type of kindness I have never really known again. I’m sure a lot of it was my paradigm. I was a kid. I was hungry. I liked cold cans of generic soda and fried meat. I liked the safety of familiar faces, the same old voices I’d always known. Her presence was so powerful to me, but I didn’t know it at the time.
I remember twisting her spoon ring on her finger as she lay dying in the hospital bed. I was a 19-year-old stoner then. I had long hair and a hillbilly beard even though I lived in the Philly suburbs. She was 66 years old, a Navy vet herself, but so much more than that. I spun her ring and talked quietly to her and she heard me and I understood that. Her whole body was bird-shot with breast cancer.
She died later that evening.
I was smoking a bong in my friend’s garage when I got the call.
All of it stands beside me still/ as if it is just happening now. Again and again, our past haunts us by reminding us of simplistic things that refuse to go. The roast beef dinners. The Eagles on the shitty TV. The blizzard outside. The sense of being young and alive and bored and excited and sad and going into the small over-lit bathroom in my grandparents house where my Pop-Pop left a turd in the bowl.
I shouldn’t recall these things. I have forgotten so much more.
But I close my eyes and I am transported back to a time when I was still young, so things were simpler. It makes me feel as if the past was somehow better. That America before now was a gentler more understanding place to be than it is now. I gloss over the atrocities my Pop-Pop rained down on Mom-Mom. I skip over the violence I knew and the alcoholism and the MIA Dad and all of that.
It is our human way, you see.
To create an America that was better than it was. For no real reason at all, I guess. Just so we can bitch about today. Just because getting older and driving to work, it all kind of sucks compared to long ago.
Nostalgia is distinctly American, PeePaw.
It is also toxic as hell, old man.
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Serge Bielanko lives in small-town Pennsylvania with an amazing wife who’s out of his league and a passel of exceptional kids who still love him even when he’s a lot. Every week, he shares his thoughts on life, relationships, parenting, baseball, music, mental health, the Civil War and whatever else is rattling around his noggin. Once in a blue Muskie Moon, he backs away from the computer, straps on a guitar and plays some rock ’n’ roll with his brother Dave and their bandmates in Marah.
