the puppet

How to get to new york, part twenty-three

No one goes through life in a straight line. Six directions at once, usually. Pulled, pushed, prodded, poked in all directions. By what? Whom? Saw someone at work at a four-top idling in its convo, waiting for their food, with his phone out—$66k in checking—canoodling it like the most precious of life-rafts.

And all I can think is what a life changing amount of money that’d be! Maybe… When guy’s not looking… Hmm… Aaa nvm… Still don’t know, though, what anyone could do for work worth more than 40k annually… except maybe teaching public school… This is why we can’t have nice things… in this essay, I will—

Only hours earlier a mustachio’d man flaunting his substack growth to a friend trying desperately to read her Stephen King hardcover in peace kept looking over my way until I stood to leave, eyes down, and he stood up, sauntered over, opened the door. I yelped, a bit and he said “there goes briffin glue?” in a strange tone—a question?—to which I said yes um nice to meet you goodbye.

Caught up between all sorts of fronts between pressures, atmospheric and metaphysical, I had a terrible headache all day: the kind I get when the weather finally and fatefully drops—barometric pressure something something—and both my sinuses start hissing slightly, the sound of decompression, like my face’s about to explode somehow. Like, wouldn’t you know it, who comes dribbling down the lane but the harlem globetrotters, spinning and doing flips and dunking on me repeatedly while I’m just here trtying to massage the bridge of my poor nose. Smh. Didn’t stop me from buying the puppet, though. A muppet-style puppet, perhaps from a performance of Avenue Q. Looks something like me. I found it at a thrift store on Milwaukee Avneue. Maybe a bad call, buying the thing. Only $3, though. Easy enough costume for halloween—I can be a father and this… my son.

Okay so maybe I shouldn’t have bought the puppet. I’ve had fun putting it in various poses around the apartment for my roommate to come home from work but since buying the damn thing, I’ve begun to have terrible nightmares. Almost definitely the puppet’s cursed. But what’s new, really? Not like I wasn’t cursed before. And this being (um) spooky season, I figured I would sit nice and comfortable with the curse. See what starts floating around the apartment, what kind of ghost’s attached to this thing. I don’t mind bad dreams too terribly, just so long as they don’t happen twice. There’s nothing worse than a nightmare you can’t quite shake. Thankfully the puppet dreams have been one-shots, but one of them’s stuck with me… Shortly after wrapping up band practice on Monday… Gut full of tavern-style pizza and a pint of high life… I went to sleep and dreamt of a family of rabbits.

The leaves have finally left. Yellowed. Bronze days. So there was a family of rabbits. Once there was a family of rabbits. Once upon a tiiime. They lived in a big red house in the country. The windows looked out on sun-gold meadows, where they might drum up some food or grub—turnips, wild carrots, the like,—or on Windows XP landscapes blaring green and blue under a sicilian sun. There were no curtains, no window blinds. The light from outside came right in. And so the family of rabbits dressed well. Suave even. Three-piece suits (with pocket-watches, naturally), elaborate gowns. Alcott books on the shelves. Many rabbit-daughters, one or two hare-sons. Pots and pans hanging over a candlelit counter. Cabbage boiling on the gas stove. Among firewood and antiques, wood shelves, filled with preserves, veggies, pickled beets, etc., creaked and threatened to collapse but only ever filled with cobwebs. Pitterpattering socked rabbit paws on hardwood. A soft scurrying in the walls or the ceilings, sometimes. Mousetraps with swiss in the hard to reach corners. But… a door ajar… on the third floor… Quaint dreams careening into something sour like a rubber neck twisting too far to watch the car crash happen in slow motion, pulling eyes and ears into the gravity of the moment, eye reflecting, catching the shrapnel… The problem with dreams is they have their own logic. Whatever piano music was being played in the rabbit-parlor below has stopped. And ominously opening, creaking on the bolts, the door to this bedroom on the third floor careens softly. The camera pans in. Something gasping for breath. Behind the bed, under the window frame—a bright clear day—something shivering, quivering bloody—

And I threw myself out of the dream—ah oo no—into an upright sit, put on the lamp above my bed, and there: on the floor: splayed out on the carpet: ofc, the puppet.

It may not have been entirely the puppet’s doing. After Wednesday’s show, after unloading the drums back into the practice space at ~12:12am, a great deflation came over me. Having played music live now for just under 3 years, I’m well familiar with my cycle of post-performance blues. It’s a hard lesson realizing art won’t save you. You wake up the next day the same person. Nothing’s changed.

Playing music live is wonderful and worth the time, naturally, but performing a 40 minute set somehow feels like 2 or 3 minutes in the moment and after it’s done, you’re left in the wake of the experience to wonder where on earth the time went. And that’s where I sat on Thursday morning, finishing Minkowski’s Lived Time and rereading his description of the élan vital.

The future lives us as we’re becoming into it. It’s a back and forth. We’re coming its way, and there’s some part of us, not so different from an essential organ, that unconsciously reaches around into the future for footholds to grow. Gather these moments for what? To finally! Transform them! Into goldshadowed memories! From which I can come and go but never return! Small islands separated by oceans of forgettings (so many forgotten exclamation points!) where words fail and colors fade and concepts simplify into ambient caricature! Ah! The past! Memory! What a perfect idea to drive us crazy from the inside-out. There’s enough room in this dome o mine (enough room in this country! enough room in this century!) to forget. There’s a retirement community in all of us.

Past movements linger in their rippling. Sometimes when I read I zone out for a paragraph and think of my friends or family and once I return to the text it feels almost as though my friends or family has been in the book the whole time, along with my thoughts and feelings and love for them. The loneliness of memory enters here, reminds the remembrancer that they’re not there anymore, they’re all alone now, living inside a memory that no longer exists.

But we don’t decide or build our lives consciously-or as consciously as that. We’re puppeted by this and that, the past and the future, the earth and the air and the circumstances. We didn’t decide to be here, to write this, maybe even to read this. We are relocated, moved, changed abruptly, forces beyond ourselves working through us understand through us what’s around us. There is a time in everyone’s life when they become aware of that pesky, primary consequence of being alive. Did that first recognition of death spark something in our heads? like a candle lit from afar, filling in the gaps that came suddenly before our peewee little minds all suddenly aflame and reeling from the thought that one day we won’t be… and gosh… neither will our parents… and (oh shit) neither will the dog… What do you mean, there’s nothing after this? But then, before you know it, there’s a bald ukranian man at the restaurant ready to put in a food order. He says nothing at all but reveals his left palm with a tattoo of a hamburger in its center, giving a sly look like what do you think?

-gbe