We got a letter from the electric company saying we used more electricity than almost anyone else last month. My initial response was anger, American-style. I was ready to lash out at these beasts for calling us out on something I had no idea about. But then, I became exhausted rather quickly, as I do these days, from trying to get my dander up. I mean, who would I call to complain? And what the hell would I even say? These are the kind of questions that hobble me mid-stride any more. The juice/ as vital as it was in the formation of an angry young man gonna change the world/ has receded, hoss. There’s not as much backslap left in these old hands, in these twisted-up bargain-barrel undersized country hams.
I used to pop my brother in the face for looking at me wrong. He used to pull my hair and punch my scalp because the long summer days were restless and poisoned with beautiful boredom.
But time often dilutes the fever pitch, you know? Only a handful of people maintain their youthful spirit. Johnny Rotten is one, I guess, but/ yeah. You know what Im saying. It doesn’t age well. The vintage musty snarling of old punks isn’t money in the bank anymore. It’s awkward and cringey. I hate that and it isn’t right but look here. It is so. And that’s the thing. I wanted to stand up for myself against the oversized electric company. I wanted to hold them accountable for making me blush from being antagonized by multi-colored power charts.
It must be the washer and dryer, I muttered to myself. We have too many fucking dirty clothes with all these goddamn filthy people living here.
But after that, I felt my brief rising blood slipping back down again. It had barely got me biting my lip when it backed off, left me standing there in the kitchen, holding that stupid letter, feeling like a tired fool.
I made a fist to smash the table, but it crumbled into dust before my very eyes.
I saw the dogs looking at me then, embarrassed and ashamed: Like they expected more from the guy who has plenty of hooting and hollering to offer up at them when they ‘accidentally’ let a deuce drop over by the coffee table.
Motherfuckers.
What do they know about being mindful?
What do they even know about giving up disguised as Zen?
Arle cleaned my car for me on Father’s Day. It’s a tradition for her to do that and it’s one that means a lot to me. She does it up with a bag full of paper towels and sprays and scents. Ever since we met, that certain Sunday rolls around in June and my 2011 Royal Blue Pearl Honda falls into her hands. God. Poor lass. It’s like being handed the keys of a gravely traumatized World War I ambulance and told to get rid of all the ghosts… with Windex and Piney Wipes.
She manages though. She drives it somewhere else to do the job too. I used to think this was because she was using the vacuums at the car wash or whatever but lately I’ve been thinking it’s probably because she doesn’t want to ruin my Father’s Day by bawling in front of me as she attempts to conjure pleasant scents and views from the guts of a filthy tomb. I appreciate all of it though, trust me.
I’d never go that distance for my own car anymore.
Even though we have been together through so much/ I am tired. Down dusty mountain roads and up big city streets/ to the shores of the ocean and to the banks of the creek/ to Gettysburg and to Harrisburg and to Paris over the sea! (Okay, not Paris. That’s obviously some carried-away bullshit)… but we have run some miles together, me and this old car. But what of it? What’s left now? The sweet smell of radiator failure? The clickety-clunkery of a declining head gasket? And where?! And when, for gods sake?! When will she die on me!? Will I be in traffic? Will I be at a red light?!
Fuck.
It’s all so overwhelming if you allow it. If you pay attention to the details and you keep a clean ride and you are always on each oil change (I am, actually), then what is the end game? A nice soft landing one of these days? Will the car let me down easy/ leave me 10,000 bucks all rubber band’d in the glove box/ so I can transition seamlessly from her splayed-out gut shot carcass to the next gleaming four-cylinder new-used chapter of my life?
Hell no.
There will be trouble when she goes and that’s that. I won’t have time for playing Long May You Run welling up like some sensitive middle-aged sad sack of bacon fat! I will be car-less one day soon with zero money in the bank and no savings to throw down on the table in the dealership like I’m supposed to.
Arle cleans my car and it looks so good, smells so sharp, like pineapple chunks dipped in a liquid tenner.
Her heart is pure and her intentions are too. This alone is balm for the weary soul, man. You see, I know the car has served me so well. But I don’t want to say goodbye. And I know I will have to and I know I want to be angry at the idea of it all. I want to thrash out at the losing of a thing/ at the fear I will inherit in its place. I want to punch myself in the goddamn face for not having a plan to get into the next car.
Regular people have that, don’t they?
I want to smash my bathroom mirror with my fist/ scream at the broken reflection/ curse the ridiculousness of my younger brain! I want to curse the band I ran away to play in, like running away to join the circus, when I should have been building a career, making some investments in my future, and figuring my shit out.
But I don’t.
I hide it all inside the best I can, even though it comes leaking out of me from all sides like some Walmart bag, hung from a branch and filled with pudding, that you blast with a shotgun. The poor desperate anxious side of me is a son-of-a-bitch, let me tell you. Even when I try to see it all as poetry, you know? Even as I try to see everything playing out now as some kind of twisted true American poetry about chasing your dreams and rock ’n’ roll and once upon a time we flew so high, I still end up, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep.
I look at Arle in the pale moonlight then.
She works hard watching old people, making them feel alive and worthy as they fade from this world.
And she works hard doing the same goddamn thing for me too.
The kids see stuff, I guess. They aren’t dumb. They figure things out on their own here and there, just like kids do. My therapist is sliding scale but she’s also kind and eager to help me. She reminded me not long ago that kids brains aren’t fully formed yet. Like: stone cold, dude: their BRAINS aren’t done growing. This brought me a lot of comfort, hearing her say that and realizing it’s true. The kids are still so alive, so in it. And yet they are also just starting out. Just barely out the gates that are long behind me now.
This isn’t exactly sadness, I don’t think. Knowing that your kids might sometimes sense and detect your financial shortcomings or your psychological challenges, there’s a strange lovely poetry to that, isn’t there?
Vibrations come through the bedroom walls at night when you are young. The verses of the house’s day hum like a fridge motor, mixing it up with the feeds coming off the rest of the living spread out in other rooms. Young children tend to hold the live long afternoon and evening in the palms of their minds as they drift off, their eyes flitting like they do, trying so hard to beat sleep back but sleep is coming and it wins. Somewhere in that precious wind-down then, they come face to face with the grown ups of their time just past. They hear their voices again/ hold their tones, be them gentle or cruel, be them hurtful or hurt/ and they manage/ somehow/ to sort through that stuff the very best they can. It often leaves them confused and struggling to make sense of things they simply cannot understand. In the worst cases- and its more often than we’d like to admit- the hot coals of a simple day in the life of any average kid between, say, 4 and 10- they scar the skin of the tiny hands that hold them. The kid cannot maintain the fires of the older persons. The kid cannot allow the pain to seep into their soft skin. And so they dump it, down into the darkness of a void inside, where it hangs out until it becomes tired and bored, one day, so that it shows up as fresh mental anguish that the kid, now grown, has no clue about.
Teenagers too, they deal with these things, but it’s different by then. They lie there in the quiet landing of the house in the evening and they look stoically out the window at the skylines in the distance and they sense the calling of the far off lights/ the better lanes/ the superior bedrooms in an electrified world. The simple longing to escape is a teenager’s biological response, I’m sure now, to all of the moments they have lived through and felt deep down and wanted to help with or change or crush or lift but how can any kid ever do any of that when they are so young and crushable themselves? Some kids, some teenagers, they have more money and maybe more advantages on the surface of things but in the end I’m thinking they are all pretty much the same here in America.
They want to outrun the beasts slashing at the heels of their parents.
They want to save their younger siblings and they want to save the older blood too.
Love/ streaking through their systems with the force of bullet trains/ is impossible for them to even get a glance at let alone comprehend. The lusts of their biology smash into their brains and their hearts and lord knows what a shit show that all is. A wonderful magical shit show of a mess, a teenager’s average evening mind is.
But time will tell. Pains and echos and remembered looks and learned behaviors and their gut feelings up against the weight of the world, it will all lead them to me and you, more or less, someday before long. Which, you know, is scary as fuck. But also, deliciously poetic, if you try and see it like I do.
Before you spend too much time searching for deeper meaning in the things all around you you have to know a trick or two of the trade. First off, you need to make up your own rules. When it comes to self discovery and the poetry of life and convincing yourself that you are enough and all that jazz, make no mistake about it: there are a ton of people out there ready to sell you books and teas and gummies and T-shirts with sayings on them and new songs and old songs and private virtual consultations and magic crystals they bought wholesale from Temu all designed to convince you that no matter what you wish, no matter what you pray/ no matter what you need/ or desire/ or long for or fantasize about or think you deserve/ there is a thing that you can pay them for that which will bring it all to you, more or less, if you want it bad enough.
It isn’t true, of course. The only bona fide way that you guys, all you layman intellectuals and all you average decent commoners, can connect yourself into the grid that lights up the High Poets of Everyday Bullshit, is to hear me when I tell you these two things.
Okay?
You trust me?
You know I’m solid, if nothing else. Sure, sure, I might have been hit upside the head with the crazy bat once upon a time, but I know you know me better than that. I’m hoping you know I’m your homie. Your brother. Your Thunder Pie Substack Blog Boy Five Dollar Bill on the Ground, am I right?
Right. Okay. Here we go then.
In order to find touching poetic meaning in the basic greasy nooks and crannies of your mundane existence all you have to do is stop thinking about the world or your neighbors or the boss or this shithead town you live in and just start seeing a woods, dark and vast, with a cottage in it, and that’s YOUR PLACE, and look at all these people who love you even though they’re a colossal pain in your tits and remember, above all, soon you will die.
Soon you will be dead.
Gone.
Kaput.
Lights out.
Goodbye.
I can see you still! So can you see me?
Oh no.
You can’t see me?!
Oh no.
You can’t see me, can you?
Can you hear me?!
Hello??!!
No?
No.
Oh no.
To read the rest of this essay and more from Serge Bielanko, subscribe to his Substack feed HERE.
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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.
