...hungry like the wolf...
...the ballad of footeastman [part one]...
“The foot feels the foot when it feels the ground.”
-Buddha-
“If you want to go east, don't go west.”
-Ramakrishna-
When I was in high school I made my first improvised ballad with a couple of friends. We called ourselves 200 year old wolf pussy because it upset my mom. She had bought me the book of Snaps, a square 100 page comedy book filled with insults. Tracy Morgan had the best one which was “Your Mother Smells So Bad She Smells like 200 Year Old Wolf Pussy”. This day and age the smell of 200 year old wolf orifice would probably be the only musk that a billionaire couldn’t afford.
The name of my first ballad was Margo. I was a poor piano player playing even worse than that. At the time I was obsessed with how the worse you made things, the better they seemed to turn out. Examples of this phenomenon are the Disney young adult film classic Midnight Madness, or every second of the movie Theodore Rex.
In a world seeking the very best burger available at a McDonald’s, perhaps it is the sandwiches we dumpster dive that taste the best. Is there a difference between either palate? In a moment of terrible fake singing with a friend in my basement, the name Margo came out ,and I felt what love for someone I would never know felt like.
I kissed my first ghost.
The further you get from your truth the closer you can get to someone else’s. I continued playing music poorly from my teens into my more than teens until at some point people accepted the poor music I made with the same type of sincerity reserved for anything other than my music. I had been playing my saxophone with the mouthpiece upside down for all 3 years before someone corrected me. I learned to unplay music in minneapolis living rooms filled with 20 year olds who seemed to be aged 40 because I was aged 18.
You are no bigger asshole than when you are self-accepted young, because at no other point in your life do you wear infantility as a gold medal. I would have worn a bib and a bottle without irony if I wasn’t too busy trying to figure out how to hide the smallest amount of weed I borrowed from a future trucker friend next to a handmade clay dildo I hid into a sock beneath my baseball card collection in my closet.
I didn’t have a door on my room in high school because my parents thought I might kill myself (or them). I found my privacy the way any doorless human does, by being caught with my pants down in awkward situations around people they wish hadn’t seen them this way. There are only so many times a man can be caught half naked in teenage coitus by his direct bloodline before he conditions himself to an anesthetized state of constant embarrassed awkwardness.
Sex is not love when you are a teenager. It is dairy queen, if only dairy queen were a strip show and you had unlimited frosty coupons. To that end, being caught having sex in front of your family is either the first step to joining the C.I.A. or an excuse as to why you keep watching Saved By The Bell : The New Years. I never thought I would think the world could use more doors, but here I am.
I won a drawing contest in grade school, having drawn my mom a plate of two dimensional bacon and eggs. It was artistic enough to get me, her and my aunt invited to a hotel breakfast in downtown Cincinnati. The Philadelphia singing sensation that is known as BoyzIIMen showed up to the hotel lobby and my mom and aunt had me stand in line for 2 hours to wait and get their signatures. I had them sign a deck of football player cards because that was all I had in my backpack. Somewhere deep in my closet I have a vintage linebacker rookie card that says “I’ll Make Love To You”.
Life as a boy, becoming a man, listening to BoyzIIMen, as though one day he might become one, is confusing.
I played viola in my grade school orchestra. Initially I had chosen that instrument because no one else would. As much as I wanted to be a rockstar and play guitar and drums, I didn’t have the patience to be guitar playing drummer number 45 at the Junior High School. My decision proved fruitful as I found myself in a band with young nerdy beautiful dorks like me. I got to pretend all summer long that I would learn the theme to Last of The Mohicans and become a young Daniel Day Lewis. That year all the cicadas in town gave birth to themselves and left their rotting corpses piled across the grass. The summer scent was slowly cooking death skin and I couldn’t walk a step without a crackling crunching sound accompanying my gait.
The reality of grade school viola practice is endless hours staring at the bowtied-tiny-stache of a man who teaches you proper finger placement. He tasks you to play greensleeves 40 times a week. You wonder if he wears the mustache because he likes the look, or if it is because he has lip problems. You stare your 11 year old self in the mirror and dream that one day you will have pubes. Then you move from one midwestern suburb to another midwestern suburb and remember that stranger kids don’t appreciate wooden string instruments.
In an effort to cut your bully me scale from 96.3 to 74.2 you quit instruments and pretend that you skateboard. If you are lucky, one of the the girls who erases blood scars into her arms will passive aggressively flirt with you until you see them and their alcoholic mother on Sally Jesse Raphael’s talk show a couple years later in the “My Child won’t Stop Dressing like Slutty Rainbow Brite” episode.
Everyone at school will wonder if she tye-dyes her pubes.
Your parents aren’t happy. You can barely make it a month where the mid evening doesn’t become the hateful din of two middle aged shit bats banging their loathing off one another. You stare at your doorlessness and choose one of five vhs tapes to pretend you to sleep as you gain a backpacker’s appreciation for the hard meditative rest of laying neck forked on the tough flat ground of your bedroom. The best VHS tapes you have are re-recorded onto 3 times, collecting R-Rated films from decades of cable subscriptions your dad paid for to avoid you after his nights working on the marketing processed snack art.
The dreams of you at 8 are the dreams you have again at 88.
It is hard to know when the door you opened opened the door you walk through now.
When my saxophone embouchure was finally corrected, I had the sheepish dickishness to pretend that I had played my sax wrong for years on purpose. I played it right wrong. I played it right wrong for 60 shows until my bandmates got tired of my mediocrity and demanded I take a real lesson and improve.
My first sax lesson was to find the letter D and play it, and only it, for an hour straight. My next sax lesson was to play the harmonica instead. I then took my lack of knowledge and taught music to a bored class of 17 year olds on the southwest side of Chicago. When I say teach I mean I brought buckets and harmonicas and we spent an afternoon realizing none of us were talented musically.
They all graduated on time.
No one is born good at love. I believe in nature and nurture but also nee-ature and no-ature. I don’t see how any of us space babies could truly understand love in a lovelike sense at birth. We are born with fear. We exit the 200 year old wolf pussy and enter the world afraid and uncertain of what just happened. We scream and we cry and covered in blood we psychically ask for the tubes that connect us to our mothers to be cut. And with a snap it is done.
The adults who produce these rituals are obsessed with the idea they made you and that they will get to figure out exactly who you might be. They see you blanketed with a face full of smegma and say what a cute little astronaut you are going to be. But we are all just a wine night splatter painting attempted by some stoned drunk post grad hoping their art school debt pays off into a Chihuly internship.
And so with that, the glass of life blows.
WORDS TO CHEW ON:
"The further you get from your truth the closer you can get to someone else’s."
"I never thought I would think the world could use more doors but here I am." hahaha yes