jawn /jôn/ noun – (chiefly in the greater Philadelphia metropolitan area) used to refer to a thing, place, person, or event that one need not or cannot give a specific name to. Jawn is a neutral, all-purpose noun used to reference any person, place, situation, or object. In casual conversation, it takes the place of the word ‘thing’.
Example: “Have you seen the TV controller jawn?”
jawn one.
We went on a hike last Sunday, me and Arle. We hadn’t done many hikes lately. There are endless reasons and excuses I can come up with for that, but they’re mostly ridiculous. I even tried to turn this hike into a Sunday morning lingering in bed instead, but it didn’t work out. Arle was taking me on my word that I’d given her a day or two before. So there we were/ slow-rolling up the mountain side/ me heaving like a coal train/ wheezing/ creeping/ dying to release the track and drift backwards into sweet lazy oblivion. But I was ecstatic a half hour in. The cool cobalt sky, the leafless trees, a trail new to us and only a few minutes from our home/ it all reminded me of being alive while I’m still being alive. Nature’s presence is personal if you want it. Her abilities are supreme and healing. And she could, if she wanted, kill you with snakes or falling limbs or lightning or an epic flood come roaring up over the ridge from an underground ocean we all somehow missed. In the tiny babbling spring-fed trickles, I gather all the intel I need to wander down off the wild slope, mosey back into this valley circus.
jawn two.
In the recent Bob Dylan flick A Complete Unknown, there’s a scene where a young Bob and his date Sylvie are out for Chinese food and discussing a film they’d just seen. Sylvie, an obvious intellectual, talks passionately about how she feels that the film’s ending revealed how the main character wants to find a better life for herself. To which Dylan points out (and I paraphrase), “Not better… different.” It’s a seductive couple of words that I’ve been carrying around with me these past few days since Henry and Arle and I watched the movie together this past Saturday night. Better is almost always somehow different. But different isn’t always seen as better. And anyhow, which is more valuable in the long run of all this living? Most of us would choose better if given the option, but maybe different is where it’s at. Could be Dylan was on to something, huh? I mean, he is Bob Dylan after all. So, could it be that this young poet far from home was saying that better doesn’t actually exist. And that only something different can make all the difference in your world.
jawn three.
I had a cough. Not so bad in the day, but like a lot of coughs, it got worse at night. So one evening I took some NyQuil to help me avoid the turmoil, get some sleep. Like most nights, I’d had a little red wine, but I wasn’t worried honestly. I knew it wouldn’t be a romantic perishing if I died in my sleep from cheap Rioja and Dollar Tree cough meds, but whatever. You don’t always get to write your own damn script, you know. Anyways, seconds after I shot the stuff down, laying there in bed, eyes fixed on our ceiling, I felt the lazurite spreading through my chest. It was art in a way/ me a drone/ an eagle/ a cloud looking down on my capillary Appalachia. Calming thunderstorm drug rolling out across my land, I sensed deep comfort, a casting off of my livelong day. It was sublime. Heavenly. I’d say transcendent even, if allowed. I slept hard and deep that night and so the next night I took more Nyquil at bedtime. And then the next night and the next one after that as well. I finally stopped when Arle noticed that I was hitting the cough meds nightly. I know they aren’t meant to be abused like that, so I gave it up after maybe a week. It was a brief, half-assed addiction if there ever was one. But I really miss it. I really miss my vast summer darkness, and all that peddling false dusk.
jawn four.
Night Watch, the 2024 novel from Jayne Anne Phillips, is making me want to climb in bed early so I can digest a little more before I pass out. The book won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction so that’s a vote of confidence right there, I’d say, if you’re out there looking for that kind of thing. I’m not sure that’s how I ran into it, but who cares. It has a lot to do with the American Civil War, so I preordered the paperback a long time ago, enchanted by whatever summary I must have read, but still hating on hardbacks (as is my right). There are passages within the novel that deeply move me on multiple levels. And by move I mean a gamut, man. Like some sentences stop me breathless in my tracks while others make me furious with envy, to the point of quitting for the night as some kind of idiotic protest against things I love so much that I wish I could do it but I can’t so fuck you, Ms Iowa Writer’s Workshop bitch. The next day, though, I land back in her words, thinking about the story as I drive the kids to school/ imagining the 1860s of her novel/ holding in my hands the very raindrops she writes of/ her masterful long ago times. I want it so bad before bed now. Like good fucking or beautiful NyQuil, I want this book before I sleep. Need it maybe, even. Crave it with a madness clopping down my road.
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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.
