Tag / lost

by Josef Alton

4 am

A limit has never been an external concept for me, rather a limit is dependent upon a range of subjective factors contingent on how far I want to press the line between rationality and irrationality. Losing control reminds me of my youth, perhaps because I never had it, or I never knew what to do with it when it was on my lap. It is odd, now that I’m more or less a stable adult, how hard it is to watch some of my students lose control.

It’s remarkable how exceptional I think I am when it comes to navigating dangerous territory. This has nothing to do with my treatment of others, rather how I want to live without hands. When I was faced with a student the other day who did not want to live, and who’s silence proved their point, the blending of the rational and irrational terrified me, and I had this overwhelming feeling that I needed to take over the controls and plunge us into the deep and dark waters of timelessness. I’ve learned that forgetting time makes it easier to be. But to be handless in a submarine…

That they wanted to only talk to me fed my ego, yet left me an imposter. Who really am I to help? I, the one who has been broken and repaired so many times that my identity is plural. I, the one of many masks, both civilized and contrived. We, both the I of my self talk and the me, the listener inside.

“Do not die, I swear to you, do not die because tragedy will become a friend and you will learn how to harden. It will become old hat, but be warned, you will miss the intensity of youth.”

To be ridged like scar tissue and ask of my students to be mailable as water is a form of self-talk long gone from my internal set of tools and a concept I use to obfuscate the truth that I have no answers to make this world make sense. It is worth living long enough to realize this is a comedy.

“Do not die, live! Live, because you’re almost at the best part, the part that will split your consciousness into water and oil.”

Shake up your mind, and for better or worse, watch your heavy memories shape your actions as you stand by, powerless to subvert your unconscious behavior. The best you can do is keep your eyes open and watch them rise, to collect at the top and unify into one imperfect self who deserves to be.

Sometimes it is better to stay awake in the dead of night.

by Josef Alton

Burt and Me: The Fear of Bunny Weasel and the Harpsichord

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The anti-depressants are making me fat and I’m not even happy. They work, kind of, because I’m not sad either. I’m in an emotional fugue state, where my inner self sits slumped in a wheel chair beside the hotel window of a theme park. For now, we will call my inner self Burt Kalstrom and he’s not enjoying the view because he cannot participate.

 

Burt wants an adversary and a theme song, to taste his bacon and eggs in the morning, to feel appreciation and other novel emotions. He wants to feel jazz music, instead of vibing with the banal strokes of rococo court music being played on the harpsichord down the hallway by a zoomorphic shadow named Bunny Weasel.

 

Burt has an idea for a comic strip. Spaghetti Jim and Whirls, two cowboy hot dogs trying to evade being cooked. Their arch nemesis are the Dos Chorizos who want to poke them before tying them onto a grill. Spaghetti Jim and Whirls’ love interest is Bacon and Legs, she’s a pairs of greasy bacon strips set perpendicular on top of a pair of fishnet stocking cladded legs, garters and all. They usually see her in the desert as a mirage. At the end of each comic strip they end up getting cooked. Boiled, grilled, smoked, baked, sous vide, there are so many ways to die a hotdog death. It’s grotesque.

 

Burt deserves a fighting chance to be happy without the weight gain. To actually feel the sun on his face. To shut the lid on the harpsichord and tell Bunny Weasel to take a hike, but he can’t wake up. Outside, in the theme park, people are dying from plague. They are marching on the streets demanding a better park experience for all. Some are driving cars into people, and some are sitting in their yards on lawn chairs with automatic rifles and hand grenades. Some are still ignoring what’s happening and are trying to get in as many rides as they can before the sun sets. The park chair says everything is fine.

 

Unable to move, Burt watches and waits to feel moved by it all, for the collective comedy of human experience to bring him to tears, but he just slobbers a little. He knows if he goes off of his meds the theme park will be his, but he’ll grow bored of it and destroy it within days. At least he’ll be skinny, he thinks, but the cost-benefit analysis still doesn’t weigh in his favor. Bunny weasel has a terrible high-pitched giggle and it echoes down the hallway.

 

Lithium.

by Josef Alton

Sunsets Over Troubles Immemorable

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My dad’s a vet. Vietnam. He graduated high school, took off to Iowa for the corn harvest, and ran with the carnivals selling postcards and knickknacks until one day outside of Baton Rouge he got a phone call from grandma telling her only son his draft notice came in the mail. His boss, Pennant Red, said to him, “Son, get your ass back to Seattle and sign up for the Army so you can go through Basic and pick what you want to do. Otherwise, you’re good as dead.” Lucky for dad, between Pennant Red, Little Joe, and Big Cowboy and Little Cowboy, there were enough war veterans working the carnival circuit to give my father the best advice to save his neck.

 

For him, not going wasn’t an option. Not because he agreed with the war, but because it didn’t seem like the right thing to do. So he went to Vietnam and felt wrong about it the whole time— and when he got back was told he was wrong for being a soldier and for going. He told me he was convinced his plane home was going to crash and sweated the whole ride home. He got off the plane at Sea-Tac Airport and went to the bathroom to take a leak. The bathroom was strewn with abandoned army suits. Dad refused to take his off, not because he agreed with the war, or even because he respected the army, but because he couldn’t disrespect those other soldiers who didn’t make it home.

 

He waited all night for a cab, but no one would pick him up in his green suit; so he called his dad, and Grandpa picked him up.

 

Settling back into American life was difficult. He told me he was really interested in a girl, but she told him one evening over a beer, “I just wouldn’t have gone.” That’s what she said, “I just wouldn’t have gone.” He disappeared for a few years after that but came out the other end. We are all thankful that he did. Some in our family didn’t.

 

Grandma told me, my Great Uncle, Ken died during WWII in Alaska. Ken was her favorite brother. I asked my dad, when I got old enough, how Ken died. Dad said, “He was stationed on a tiny island in the Aleutian Island chain and thought the war had ended and was forgotten. He ended his life with his service weapon and was found days later.” With Grandma, painful things were always masked in understatements.

 

She said her younger brother was a very sensitive boy, but brave. He began to leave the farm at six-years-old to work the railroads and would come back with money for the family. I think Dad reminded her of Ken. When I asked her what she thought of dad going to war, she said, “We took a road trip back to Iowa one summer when the kids were young and your dad insisted that he always got to a campsite before sunset so that he could lay on top of the car and watch the sunset slip behind a mountain, cast its rays over a cliff, or set a cornfield on fire.” She paused and stared into her past and then qualified her story, “A boy like that isn’t meant for war,” she said. “And, that’s the thing.”

 

Fighting hurts us all.

by Josef Alton

Snippets—On Character

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There’s this recurring character who appears in my stories. He’s not of one fixed identity; she can be another. Together, they build and destroy, damage and revive memories under a chain-linked arbor of narrative. I’ve called him Simon, her name has been Mary. They’ve both meant the same to me: an undisturbed arc of life after death.

by Josef Alton

Snippets—A lost and found poem of a buried hour

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We could bloom into green hours. We could smile every time the green hour arrives. We could watch green hours burn the sky. We could watch King Kong descend the hills among the fog. Watch the bush tumble behind his heals. Watch green ignite the red carpet leading to the Church. And there, there exists loving grandparents and Saturday markets and the feeling that this is how it’s supposed to be. On the way back visit a ghost town of old things adorned with wide windows ribbed with paper-thin windows. Harbor Street made us old like black-and-white reel, but also young like artists: inspired tangible blasts of ink to coat the therebetween with parted clouds soaked in sun-spray. Like infinite infants and how they track mud on granite windowsills.

We could just drive forever and never stop. I never wanted to stop because I knew that was it, so I drove until I couldn’t. I swear I would have driven to Alaska or back to New York, but I stopped at Denny’s, and then Denny’s again until I couldn’t, I just couldn’t anymore.

But no matter because we have the mansion in the nothingness that kept me dreaming of all the hidden history absorbed in the South Island’s naked creases of green and river rock aprons.

Making pizza until always, because it’s too good to never say no to. Talking about Fitzgerald, and Kerouac, and Hemingway. Reminiscing about ages we missed and the present we aspired to wrangle. Of ideals and future lands.

Never of the unsaid. Of anxiety. Of self-loathing. Of insecurities to do with loving. Of barely coping alone. Of sadness. Of guilt. Of the barriers surrounding accepting the love you think you deserve. Of sameness. Of entropy. Of the next attempt after you.