A Jar of Bugs I’m Holding
Last night, after work, Arle came up through the yard balancing the mushroom pizza box and the hoagie in a bag on top of that. She smiled at me as she passed the dogs. They were barking at her because they were happy she was home. Same as me.
I was on my folding step-ladder thing that I use as a chair sometimes when I’m doing some art stuff out back.
“You want to work on whatever you’re doing for a while?”, she asked me when she was standing there on the back stones. “We can eat upstairs on the bed whenever you’re done?”
With those words a heaving weight was lifted from my shoulders. I had been worried, you see, that this plan of ours/ this beautiful kid-free night plan to get together and watch some pro wrestling docs on the TV while we lay in our t-shirts and shorts and eat pizza and drink alcohol, that it would have to start now. Right when I was trying to fit in some time to be me. To be artsy. To use my mind and my hands and my imagination to create something that I could envision behind my eyes, but that had never existed in the history of the world before.
I smiled up at her as I pushed and dragged my little plastic roller, smoothing out the bubbles on a fresh skim coat of Modge Podge.
“You sure?” I asked her.
“Yep”, she said, as she kicked the back door open with a Van foot.
I could tell she was serious too, because that’s what happens when you are together for years and you fight for equilibrium and you challenge each other to be present in the moment even though you are a totally brain-damaged shell-shocker walking around in a trauma daze half the time. You just sense the air/ let it whisper into your ear/ some old Ghost Mama breathing at you to hush now child.
Later we could spread out on the mattress together, sip our drinks, watch the sad, strange, cocaine-fueled, Shakespearean masterpiece of Jake the Snake Roberts unfold before our eyes as we let the pizza crust crumbs fall down onto the sheet; when the lights went out, it would feel like gravel in the bed; as if we had drizzled broken shards of seashell and shattered specks of glass over our prairie. As if the stars in the very night sky we sleep under had fallen from the hot glue ceiling all around us. And we could feel them rubbing our skin in the middle of our dreams and nightmares.
But for now, I had been given the subtle nod to keep doing what I was doing. Then I touched a tacky surface with my spray-paint fingers and it felt as if I was holding all the kingdoms in a jar. Like bugs. Like lightning bugs with blades of dry summer grass.
Softly Sing Me Out the Room
Once, I wrote songs. I would write them in spurts, as needed. Writing ten songs a day like Ryan Adams or someone was never my thing. I wrote songs mostly because the band needed songs. Sometimes I wrote songs because I needed to write them/ because there was a magnetic tide within me that was inspired by something I’d heard. I was driven to deep periods of longing back then, as stretches of time would unravel all around me and everything would be marked by the songs I had written lately.
Not just the songs, but also the life of them too. It is one thing to write a song that captures just one person’s attention even just one time, but it is another thing to write a song that becomes an ally. A friend, in a way. A sidekick or a soldier next to you. The song, if it lives, and it probably won’t, I’m sorry to say, but if it does: you will find it slashing the heads off of motherfuckers as you storm through the hot, crowded night markets known as little clubs. These are the breeding grounds for something tried and true, I suppose, although don’t look to me to explain it all to you. I never understood it myself. I don’t even know how I ended up on those stages, staring out at 60 people. 104 people. 11 people. 7 people. 18 people. 19 people. People: 22.
But, I do know that it was the songs that were mortar. Without them, the bands are just people standing in the bar. Without the songs: I was naked/ vulnerable/ insecure. Without the songs I felt unloved and ridiculous in this world. Like any inspired creator anywhere, the art is rocks you climb so that you can crawl into the hole in the low sky where all the smells are coming from. The streaky scent of adoration. The copper pinging the metal bottom of a cup made of glory. The smoky collision of drunken kisses in a room with kegs, though fewer and farther between than I had thought they would be, were still fruits that fell off of the songs as they made their way, slower than hell, up towards the sun or the rain or whatever.
When me or you hear one we love, a song I mean, there is something that happens in the universe. For you maybe it’s an Isbell or Wilco song. For my 12-year-old son it’s probably a Tyler, the Creator tune, or a Jimi Hendrix one. For Arle, there’s mewithoutyou and Bright Eyes and Bruce. But at the same time, these are ultra pigeon holes I am forcing people into. They would each fight against that too, same as you would, I hope. Because there are so many songs, too many songs for us to limit our galaxy to walls or property lines or any bullshit like that.
The majesty of all the songs is that someone wrote them and then you or me, we found them, and then we were never quite the same again because of the goosebumps or the fist pumps or the lip getting bit or the realization that the car was gently lifting off of the highway as a song played loudly and the treetops were right by your eyes.
I don’t write songs anymore. It happened naturally. Things change. It’s been a long time since I did it and I don’t have any desire at all to do it again. Maybe that will change too someday. But even if it doesn’t, it’s alright. My songs have faded and other people’s songs have been born and the circle is unbroken as far as that shit goes.
In the final moments of a sizzling loud 7th chord, someone somewhere is emerging from a dark hole opening in the air of some tiny club not even half full. The deafening ripples of sound transfer the song into silence. For a moment there, a young kid stands sweating and breathing heavy, staring up at the stage, looking around him at the people screaming soundlessly.
And somewhere down in the momentary havoc of all that: I will live on and on and on.
When the Fake Gold Chain Turns Green
I keep trying to remember myself at 12 or 13. It goes okay, mostly, but I think we are probably really off when it comes to things like this. Memory is such a fascinating thing, especially when you take it in historical context. We try to pin it as fairly accurate, these memories we have of ourselves. We go ahead and attach them, unabashedly, to the thick velvet robes of time itself, as if we have no doubt that what we recall of ourselves and our narratives/ the way we see all the scenes of our lives playing back on the movie screens in our heads/ as if that is truth. As if our recollections are the solid pillars holding up a universe so someone else’s bullshit doesn’t fuck up the tale of how things really were.
I try to conjure my young kid self back but I have studied enough Civil War history to understand that a couple of decades is a long, long time, man. The veterans who fought in the war, who marched and sweated and puked and hid and shot the faces off of the enemy and pissed in old ladies’ wells in the sweltering summer when the old bats screamed at them that not a single one of their godless asses was to drink even a drop of the cool clear water from down there. The soldiers memories are immensely important to comprehending what happened during that era. Their recollections are the heart of the historiography/ the hot blood of the very tale itself.
Yet, they often differ from one memory to the next. Two soldiers remembering something happening the same way, with the same characters present and the same timeline, etc, it’s often rare. Three soldiers: harder to match it all up still. A thousand soldiers? Ten thousand?
You get my point.
Memory is powerful and necessary. But it is also tricky. Because memory, likely, tends to be wrong. Why? Because our brains are dying from all of this living. The clouds move in. Tiny mountain streams we recall, they go quiet in the middle of the afternoon, only to reappear again, in all of their springtime glory, gushing and spraying us with mist from many years ago. Except that the mist was from a wide river in another place, another time. No streams were nearby. We confuse the two and it is innocent enough, but at the same time, we are lying.
The stream is now the river and we have no idea we are doing that.
Which, if you think about, likely means that everything anyone has ever said or written about anything that has ever happened is not entirely accurate. Yet the depiction of the absolute truth is gone from us forever. It was even in the precise moment after it actually unfolded in real time. Yesterday or a thousand years ago, it doesn’t really matter.
Nothing is entirely true.
At least a little vein of fiction runs through every memory that has ever been revealed.
Contrary to the initial shock of such a broad and heavy notion as all of this might seem though, I humbly submit to you this other way for you to possibly see it. I mean, if you consider the vastness of the phenomenon, you are left with nothing but the phenomenal.
This morning, I’m remembering this gold herringbone rope chain that my mom had gotten me for Christmas. I was 12 and around my neck this thing was flat and solid on my skin. It would shift when I ran, bouncing against my sweaty pores in the late autumn afternoon, as after-school freedom shot me up with pure joy. The chain was a part of my body after a few weeks and it began to offer me a new kind of courage even. With this thing around my neck, I felt invincible/ waving the weaponry of cool for the first time in my young life. The chain was a gift from a mother to her son that played out in the ways of the old medieval tales. My mom knew that by giving me this gold, I would rise up out of the husky beef body I was hiding in and stand tall and proud. I would collect what was mine. I would claim what was mine/ drag it by the hair back to our house/ show it to my mom/ smile and make her proud by treating it kindly like a man was meant to do.
The gold chain was a leash that had been put around my neck by God himself. From such a simple gesture, I was transformed into God’s personal pet. And that gave me boners, dude, as I lip-synched ‘In the Air Tonight’ over and over and over again into the mirror in my bedroom.
Then, one day when I was in the basement in the shower (we had one bathroom/ it was in the basement), I noticed some greenish paint-like liquid on my hand. It was alarming, of course. I jumped out of the shower/ used my hand to wipe the steam off of the medicine cabinet mirror/ and peered into the condensation image of myself to see, for a fleeting second before the steam returned/ that the chain around my neck had turned from gold to the color of grass smears on the knees of my jeans.
What followed, as memory allows, was a reckoning for young Serge Bielanko of Conshohocken. A full accounting of my existence came down, even against my own wishes. I was forced to do it. This new matte green string of moss around my neck would accept nothing less.
It was the first time I truly understood that basically everything is cheap and shitty. And that my heart didn’t matter in the grand scheme of the flow of the universe. In fact, this awakening constituted a first blast of cognition when it comes to true consciousness versus the everyday kind that all the other sheep are pent up in.
I began to question the actual reality of the gold itself. Had it ever even been gold? Was my mom fucking with me? Or did she actually ever tell me it was gold in the first place? I thought she had; I still feel like she did; but why would she have bought me gold? We were poor! We had almost nothing. She would never have lied to me at Christmas about that.
Come to think of it, I can’t even really be certain that I ever even thought it was goddamn gold in the first place. I knew it had come from Plymouth Meeting Mall where all of our gifts came from in the days long before Amazon. That mall was practically made out of fake gold too. It was everywhere. Little wagon carts where high school stoners made $5 an hour selling fake gold crap. Jewelry stores where mustached men who smelled like cologne sold fake gold (or very watered down gold) to people who didn’t want to admit their own fates to themselves. Fuck, they even sprinkled fake gold dust on the chicken at the Chick-Fil-A in that place. People told me that’s how it got that deep seasoned flavor. It wasn’t fucking black pepper and cayenne and powdered onion! It was GOLD! But like: fake gold. Because it was a mall and all.
Anyway. I don’t know what part of my chain was real and what wasn’t. It obviously had no gold in it and nowadays I like that. I like that my Mom bought me a Christmas gift once that was herringbone chain made out of awkward puberty dreams.
So much of what I’m telling you about all of this is probably wrong too. It has to be. It’s simply the way these things go. My memories are mine and they are fading and they are not altogether reliable.
Just like me.
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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.
