Jim Cork Burning (download)

Heads down, ears plugged, still working.

***

I’ve spent the last two months savoring Joan Didion’s Slouching Towards Bethlehem, a fantastic collection of essays pre-dating 1968.  The majority of the book deals with Didion’s experiences in California.  At this stage in my life, I’ve experienced enough of California that I, quite simply, want in, in on anyone’s working out their faith in the Golden State with fear and appropriate trembling.

So, I read “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream” (click here to read), the book’s first essay, in a coffee shop one unbearably bright morning in early July, and it struck me like an arrow.  It made me feel shaky; in fact, I’m not sure I did much with the remainder of that day apart from processing what I had read.  I found myself on Casey Mackenzie’s balcony later that night with a guitar, documenting the subtle depth charge that the piece had set off in me.

(Artists have spent entire careers deciphering and decoding the dark, dismal things that happen under the surface of suburban life.  From Blue Velvet to “Mad Men” to Arcade Fire, there’s a certain twisted charm and allure to the unseen deeds that perfectly “happy” people do.  It’s like a knot tied in a string that’s buried under several layers of dried mud and sediment;  in order to get that long and lasting look at the knot that we so richly covet, we’ve got some digging to do.)

***

Dreamers of the golden dream
Sailing on forbidden seas
Words are so uninteresting
Don’t kiss me; it will trigger things

The conversations we replay
To catch the hints in what we say
The houses we find ourselves in
The games that end when we begin to live

I swear I’m getting out of here
Oh someone drag me out of here

Servant to the matriarch
Sleeping in a burning car
Lovers of the lovable
Respond to the incredible

Blood is thick with medicine
And I am chasing smoke again
Humming some new mystery
Alive inside the history of us

I swear I’m getting out of here
Oh someone drag me out of here

Create in me a grateful heart
Forge it out of twine and tar
Take the dark unusable
And make it something beautiful

And make me something beautiful
And make me something beautiful
And make me something beautiful
And make me something beautiful

***

I think for me, part of what makes documenting this sort of hidden suburban discontent so appealing is that Amy and I have recently become part of suburbia, and it’s a strange feeling.  Strange in that I never, in a million years, thought owning a house was a plausible idea, much less a possible one.  And now, after several months of hand-wringing and document-signing, we find ourselves possibly surrounded by hundreds of tiny little hidden nightmares.

I should probably mention here that there seems to be no such luck in finding, and documenting, any deep, affluent dismay in our own lives;  sometimes I forget to help Amy fold laundry.  She will, in turn, leave sharply-worded notes where I can see them.  I’m afraid that’s as dark as it gets for us.

***

It was Sam Hernandez who graciously reminded me this morning that it had been a while since my last post, and it is to Sam Hernandez, whose fierce intellect and unrivaled stoicism I envy, that I dedicate this post.