Morning calls. The stretch of the rubber band strains a bit tighter from where it’s anchored by a nail in the board way back at the dawn of man. It comes my way across all that has occurred before now, only to end up wrapped, tight as a fiddle string, around this cup of coffee I’m pouring myself here in the early kitchen.
In my own way, I try to makes sense of another day, another one of these impossible sets of hours and rules and payments. I cook my oatmeal in the microwave and feed the dogs, give ’em water, take them out to the yard so they can do their thing. In a minute or two they’ll be barking to come back in. I always thought dogs were kind of tough animals but mine aren’t. It’s disappointing, to be honest. They want the couch and the heat and the endless assurances that come with being jobless and penniless and dumb as hell. They don’t like the outdoors unless they are running at top speed away from me and my family, towards a world that would kill them fast if given half a chance. Ha. They mostly seem brain damaged and goofy, like a couple of fat babies abandoned behind a 7-Eleven.
I haul them out into the dark rain slapping on the stones out back and I know they’ll be barking to come in just as soon as they do their lonesome business.
I guess I love them but it appears to be more complicated than that, too.
The neighbors are awake early in the morning. Out in the starless dark they start their cars and pickups. I see their silhouettes in their yards, their minty dashboard glows. Looking out the back window I scrub some dishes and make out the outlines of the Tibetan prayer flags I have tied to the maple tree. They’re slapping hard in the wind. I bought them on Amazon but I don’t even know why really. I don’t know anything about Tibet/ and if I’m being truthful, I don’t really care all that much. I’m sure Tibet is epic and the people are all simmering with mystical mountain magic, but whatever. I’m far from all that; I don’t believe I’ve probably ever even laid eyes on a Tibetan person. And if I did, well, they kept it to themselves.
These flags are a some kind of unofficial statement for people like me/ Americans who have lost their goddamn minds stabbing in the dark to be decent/ trying to survive week to week across year after year after year of systemic duress. I ought to be praying for me is what I ought to be doing, sir. I think in some ways my lefty flags are supposed to hint at this unspoken truth that reveals that me and my family are more humanistic than a lot of other people. I paid like $17 to appear to be more socially advanced. But a lot of my neighbors probably just think I’m gay. Or lost.
The sandwiches in the fridge are mostly ham/ shaved ham because Piper likes that kind the best, although he hardly packs his lunch anymore. He eats what they give him at the elementary school. It’s the standard stuff. Nuggets. Quesadillas. Chef salads.
I finger the sandwiches as I get ready to put together lunch bags. This is right after I let the dogs back in. They leave muddy paw prints all over the dilapidated kitchen floor; their nails clatter on the fake wood as they scramble like marauders hellbent on the notion that today might be the day that someone left something wonderful in their slobbery dishes. But there’s never anything there. I never toss them a bit of ham or a couple pieces of bacon because my experience is that if they wolf down a half a bologna sandwich or a couple shreds of rotisserie chicken, a few hours later, one of them is blowing wet turds all over the living room rug or something. I swear. That’s how they roll. They want everything but they can’t handle anything. I want to blame the internet somehow, like I do with any shortcomings my kids might exhibit, but it’s a harder sell. How do I pinpoint the connection? How did social media fry my dog’s brains and bodies the same way it did for all of the humans? I’m not sure. I just know it’s probably at least partially true somehow.
On the table, I let the Ziploced sandwiches fall in a heap, all four of them, as I take a sec to remember my own chef salad days. I didn’t see this coming but I guess the vision of a shred of ham pressing its pig nose up agains the plastic sandwich baggie here this morning has triggered a memory. People my age probably recall it. Maybe other generations too? I hope so. It’s worth tasting it again in your mind. So much of life is hard. But chef salads were easy as hell. They represent something odd and random about a childhood I strive to recollect in my own stream-of-conscious way.
Iceberg hunks and inch long flecks of turkey and ham.
The meat was gelatinous in the 1970s.
If you scrutinized it underneath the cafeteria halogens you could always see how it had been processed and pressed and congealed and combined with things/ with water and fat maybe? With clear Jell-O? Like the school lunch hamburgers that appeared pock-marked and cratered exactly like you were standing on the moon when you held it up to your raw eye, the chef salad was a fairytale kingdom all its own: slivers of death knocked down in their embattled tracks/ the neon orange of a Thousand Island dressing/ candy sweet/ old lady bold/ like eggs and relish. Unbeknownst to my third grade buddies who mostly sang songs of vomit and puke when it was what they were served: I rejoiced in my chef salads back then: the massive air-conditioner sized deep metallic trays shooting light sparks/ the illuminated finger painting of all of that chopped food swirled together. That active lava dressing crept out over the landscape, bombarding the forests and the valleys and the hills.
Why am I remembering this?
So much has happened to me/ so many travels and heartaches and paychecks/ so many trout sipping at flies but ignoring mine/ so many songs/ so many tender kisses/ so many superlust’d electric ones. All of my dreams up until now. The cars I have known, come and gone, junked beyond all existence now. What becomes of our youngest versions? What folded crevice in the Earth do the young kids we used to be stumble into, never to be seen or heard from again? Out crawl these other people cast as us. Our aging faces. The bags beneath my droopy dog eyes. I have seen so much/ forgotten way more than I cling to/ and yet I have no control over any of it, it would seem.
Most of our past/ yours/ mine/ it lurks beneath the impenetrable surface of all this dark water. In some back cove of a massive lake battered by winds and sunshine, by the endless ragings of nature over time, I sit hunched over in my deerskin canoe. Look at me barely awake after another sleepless modern night. See me there glaring blankly at the cold blood black reservoir. The smeared reflections smashing the rippling surface only to come across- of all the things I have run into- this overturned work of art. This shocking collection of pastel shreds. This ripped bag of confetti. The drifting strands of chef salad floating scattered big and quiet like a plane crash.
Amazon, for what its worth, says: The five colors represent the five elements and the five pure lights: Blue for Sky, White for Air, Red for Fire, Green for Water and Yellow for Earth respectively. I like all that; I can get behind the natural world shit. But at the same time, between me and you, I buy these massive thick plastic containers of laundry soap because the powder stuff in the more ‘Earth-friendly’ box sucks dog dick. I tried using it but I kept finding big scabs of unmelted detergent sticking to T-shirts and blankets. Fuck that, I said after a while. I’ve heard that a lot of these plastic laundry soap jugs end up bobbing around the ocean. I’ve heard of ten mile-long islands made of nothing but Gain and Tide containers. It’s a nightmare. But that said, I tried. I really did. But I already have a weird look about me out in public. The last thing I need is to be hammering around Walmart or Sheetz with a fish filet-sized 3D soap scar on the back of my hoodie.
Look, I bet you $20 there are no Tibetan people flying Pennsylvania flags or Dale Earnhardt flags anywhere in the Himalayas. I bet they maybe fly a little local football club’s flag and maybe a Jack Skellington flag, (because that son of a bitch is just about everywhere these days), but aside from that, they fly their own prayer flags and that’s it. They can’t be bothered to be trying to pin their 10,000 year old hard-ass raw egg wolf hat alpine unity onto some white American suburbanites kindness matters garden flag or whatever. They know better. Even out there in the highlands of an ancient landscape they know better than to start signing up for total bullshit.
I look at the flags out there tied to a branch of the old tree on one end and my rusting charcoal grill on the other and I sigh out loud.
Upstairs the kids are still fast asleep in their beds. Arle too. I can see the dogs barking in predawn silence out in the rain. The windows in this place are soundproof. As if it was a real selling point to make sure that whoever lived here in the future knew they were going to be protected from the cries coming from the woods. Or the shrieks from the trees. From any kids playing out in the church parking lot. Or from the watered-down creatures chained up like captives over by the trampoline no one uses anymore.
I used to think I was on my way to enlightenment.
Now I think I’m bloaty from Zoloft.
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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.
