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’.
jawn one.
My hair in the front is thinning out pretty fast. I look in the mirror, see my scalp at times; it’s yet another surreal reminder that I am dying. I’m determined not to give much of a damn about it but I suspect that is easier said than done. It’s just that I don’t want to be one of those guys whose head looks Frankenstein’d with hair plugs or shoe polish or whatever. Fuck that. Losing my hair in my 50’s seems fair enough/ honestly. I mean, I’ve outlived a lot of guys born right alongside me. I’ve dodged the same sorts of deaths that claimed many other fellows. Fate took some of them long before they ever got to be where I am now. Thinning hair seems to me a toll I ought to pay willingly. Dumb looking hair/ unsexy man scalp moon mountain sun burnt George Costanza bowling ball. I don’t care what anybody thinks or says. Whatever this is: I’ve earned it.
jawn two.
Speaking of the Lady in Black, death moves at her own pace, of course, slow rolling along on the backs of shadows/ trash truck clinger on the bumpers of all those grinding long lost days gone by. The real time poetry of passing time is tough to appreciate mostly because our brains are the asshole of organs. They lie outright to us, make us think that everything is fine/ that there’s a lot of time left and what will we do with it all, you know? Our wildly complex human minds have over-adapted to the blinking neon of our impending demises by bewitching us into thinking about just about anything else. Car payments, college football, politics on Facebook: dumb shit that invades our thoughts without mercy. That’s uncool when the truth of the matter is probably that yesterday my hair was lush and my skin was tight and now everything is slipping off my bones because it wants to be on the ground. My smile/ my memories/ all my selfish foolish plans/ they’re all trying to leap out of me/ desperate to slip back into the soul of a planet rather than this shell of a man. Look at me now! I’m a burning apartment above some midtown tavern, happy hour smoke rolling out of my face, Last call on my lips. But hey, I’ll fight it ‘til I can’t no more. It’s savage and epic, this strange ride back down. Most people seem hellbent on never addressing their own deathy shit but I think that’s kind of lame. I tell myself that I don’t want to miss anything. You can weep bittersweet at a lot of endings in this life, I say, but you’ll never taste tears like the ones that woke you up. But I talk a lot of shit too, I guess. So maybe just figure it out for yourself.
jawn three.
There are two duck mamas using our yard for their nesting this spring. One is out by the big maple, tucked back behind some rotting lumber I once imagined as a bench. The other is over on the south side of the house. She picked a clump of dried brush I left there back in the fall when I was cleaning out the flower beds. Neither duck will move off the nest even if you get right up on top of them. I only know this because I stumbled upon each of them when I was busy doing other stuff. I met the dark eyes of each separately/ their flat blank gazes offering up no fear, no questions, no threats or compromise at all. Both times I encountered each mama for the first time, I found myself impressed by their courage and alarmed at their stubborn stick-to-it-ness. If I were a big dog loose in the neighborhood, neither duck would stand a chance. The intrinsic wild mallards are born with around here sometimes seems watered down to me. I’m not judging them, it’s just the way things are. We have a lot of ducks that call Millheim home. More than most towns I’m sure. And the cozy feelings these mamas seem to have when they basically pick the first sad ass stack of abandoned twigs they find each spring in order to carry on their species, it all seems a bit unthought out, in my opinion. But what do I know? Nature sent these ladies here. So we will see to it that they enjoy their stay, same as we do every year when spring brings the maternity ward to our humble home.
jawn four.
As I’m writing here in my bedroom today, I just took a little coffee break and noticed that a buddy of mine had sent me a heartwarming link revealing that Steve Earle has just been made a member of the Grand Ole Opry. If you don’t know much abut country music or the Opry, let me just say that this is one of the pinnacle honors for anyone who has ever played a country song in their lives. It’s also a hallowed institution that has been staggeringly strange and fickle at times when it came to who they allowed to be a part of the official family and… more often than not… who they outright refused. So yeah. Goddamn. Steve Earle being invited wasn’t something I ever saw coming. He just never really played the game the same way that they did. But whatever. What’s done is done now and I just teared up and now my heart is racing as I type here. I’m not even sure why. I’m years removed from the times when me and my brother and our band moved in the same circles as Steve. But I know our time together was magic, to me at least. Besides being an actual real life musical hero of mine from the time I was a teenager, me and Dave getting to know and travel with Steve Earle was the kind of thing most up-and-coming songwriters or guitar players or whatever, they’d give a goddamn pick-hand pinky to be able to do it even just for a night or two… But I got to do it way more than that. And I got to keep all my digits too. Hell, me and Steve, I’d watch him from the dark sides of stages/ eat with him at a hundred different tables/ bum him smokes/ laugh at his jokes/ hug him goodbye when he was taking off/ or we were. Point is, I have never been around anyone in my life before who was invited to become a member of the Grand Ole Opry. But now I can say I have. And what’s most important about any of this is the fact that it’s him. Steve Earle. One of the most extraordinary songwriters and performers who has ever walked the fucking Earth. He was really, really good to our band/ so indescribably instrumental in moving us forward in a magical way that no one else could have ever done. I mean, there’s only one Steve Earle and there will never ever be another and his stamp of approval was worth fifty zillion pounds of gold to some dumbass kids from Philly. You know, Hank Williams never got his invite to be a member of the Opry. That always pissed me off. But now Steve Earle did, so they got it half right at least.
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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.
