Go Ahead, Break My Neck

nonfiction tale of a town run

I am stopped at a stop sign across from the skatepark waiting to turn right at a crosswalk in town. There are children walking in packs from the elementary school down the way. One leads all on her own. She is wearing a backpack and it looks heavy. It’s not sagging and doesn’t seem to be slowing her down, but I can see the heaviness in her small, stoic face. There are big things she’s carrying around in that backpack, things that are bigger than she can understand. I feel sad looking at her and I can’t tell if it’s because of my thoughts or hers. I think she thinks this walk will never end. Maybe she thinks she’ll never get home. Maybe it’s because she knows what’s waiting at home and I don’t. Maybe she doesn’t want to get home. Maybe she knows she’ll have to do this walk every day for the rest of her life. This empty space between school and home is too big and unknown. She walks slowly with purpose, I can see her brain overheating.

The skatepark has been under construction all fall, and it looks to be finally finished, just in time to get covered in snow and ice for all the kids who have nothing else but that skatepark. Those kids are figuring it out too. Maybe they stopped there on their way home one day so they could figure it out better, change up the route, try to learn something new. Maybe that little girl might stop there one day, maybe the boards the older kids ride on are actually secrets on wheels. Maybe every ollie puts a crack in the secret, and they all get that much closer to figuring it all out together.

I pass a church that has a magnetic sign out front and there is some generic saying on it. This church used to always put a humourous take on the sign, the kind of thing that would make me chuckle and think, “these ones seem alright.” But I guess their sign guy moved on, or maybe life beat him down. Maybe God’s just not feeling funny anymore.

Next, I went to Wal-Mart because I’m an idiot and I like to make myself miserable. When I left I had to pee so bad I didn’t think I would make it to the next stop. There’s a big grass field out west of the parking lot and if it was dark out I would have walked out aways and just gone there. For convenience, but mostly because it’s important to pee outside whenever you have the opportunity.

I held it for long enough that I imagined there would have been a point in human history where we didn’t know the horrible sensation of holding it. The world would have been shitty in a different way back then, but that part would have been alright. People would’ve just turned to the side and peed the moment the urge arose. Glorious. I went to Safeway for raspberries and breakfast sausage cause our boy is eating like a bear preparing for hibernation. Grocery store bathrooms make me feel degenerate. I went next door to the liquor store and grabbed some beer, then I got in the truck and listened to Medicine For Horses by Viagra Boys. Love that band, hate their name. I turned it up as loud as it would go. I knew then why that little girl’s backpack was so heavy. She was carrying around her parent’s spinal fluid in mason jars. If my windows hadn’t been rolled up when I saw her I’m sure I would have heard them clanging together with each step she took.

I wondered if it was actually a common practice to have a horse stomp you on the head as a reliable method for suicide in the Old West. If I’ve learned one thing from westerns, it’s that you’ve got to save your ammunition at all costs, so it’s certainly possible. Though, if you’re checking out early your extra bullets won’t do you much good anyway. Old habits, I guess.

Kiss my wife, tell her I love her

Tell her she was the only thing

That made me stop thinkin’ ‘bout

The plains of North America

The Great Plains of North America

I text my wife in the parking lot. I tell her I’m on my way home, I’ve got all the things we need. She texts back right away. She’s getting dinner ready, she tried to put on a hockey game, but all the five o’clock games are blacked out in our region, we have to wait for seven o’clock when the Flames play. I think of telling her that she should just put on a basketball game if she wants something on in the background. I think the Raptors are playing. But I don’t. Because I have no patience for basketball anymore. She has better things to think about than me telling her that the NBA stopped meaning much for me back in ‘07 after the Suns were playing the Spurs in the Western Conference Final and Robert Horry chucked Steve Nash into the score table at half court and busted his face open. Or maybe it had already been bust open from an earlier game. Either way, Steve Nash got cleaned up and came back and played to the end cause that’s what you’re supposed to do. Never got his ring though. I loved the game back then, but now I’m old enough that I get cranky when I hear about load management and witness uncalled travels.

I stopped watching right then and I stayed the same and the game kept evolving. Cause everything evolves. And I guess sometimes evolution looks awfully similar to devolution. Especially games that people take too seriously and are completely right to do so. It’s all we really have. Sometimes the game evolves into an entirely different thing altogether, left only with cellular memories of its past self. And sometimes the game evolves to a point where the cells stop their dance just long enough to think, “fuck, we took a wrong turn. Now we’re too far gone.” Then the evolution’s purpose is only to accelerate towards extinction. Cut the loss, beauty is temporary here and lasts forever somewhere we can’t see.

When it’s up to me, the only TV that our boy watches is hockey, baseball, Tiny Desk Concerts, and KEXP sessions. I believe this makes me some kind of evolved meathead. I believe he will learn most of what he needs to know from this because they are all beautiful things, and they will show him people engaging with all of their hearts in beautiful things. Though, I feel conflicted because we can’t watch these beautiful things take place without some greedy fuck needing to make a buck off of our need for beauty. The first time I ever turned on the TV in front of him and an ad started playing, I turned to him and said, “This is a commercial buddy, they’re made by the Devil.” Bunny heard from the kitchen and said that I can’t teach him stuff like that. But I’m probably going to keep teaching him things like that. I’m probably going to keep teaching him things like that because the only things I can confidently teach him with absolute certainty are these:

1. If I get to the end of this whole thing with a sense of humour intact I believe I’ll have done just fine.

2. Mom was right that God and the Devil are real, but they both are completely different than she said they would be.

Watching these things will help aid future conversations, I think. Things like people can do beautiful things and still be shitty people. You gotta figure out what to do with that. It doesn’t get easier. Like see that guy who just won that faceoff? He likes to drive drunk in crowded places and then ask cops if they know who he is. He’s got a couple DUIs to prove it. I don’t know what fun term you have for DUIs where you live, but here we call them deweys. Yup that’s right buddy, three guys on this team have deweys, it’s kind of their thing I guess. Oh ya, this folk musician that is making my eyes well up? Yup, he abandoned his family to make the most incredible album you or I have ever heard. And that piece of art has done something good for us, so that’s worth something. But I bet his kid couldn’t give a fiddler’s fuck about that record. They give us something to aspire to but also remind us that they’re just normal shitty people. Some of them are good, some are bad. Most of them are normal and good and bad. So don’t put them on too high of a pedestal, no matter what they’ve accomplished. They’re the same as us, we’re the same as them. Because we know people with deweys. We know plenty of people with deweys. We know people who have abandoned their families too. We know ‘em all too well. And some of ‘em can sing like a bastard, or skate like a bastard, and some are just bastards.

So I get home and tell him about my day and all the things and people that I saw and I teach him all about this stuff and we sit on the floor and watch TV and the devil talks to us. And we watch people strike out the side and we know that the devil is talking to them too. And I keep my eyes open and my heart open so I can take it all in, and maybe I’ll be able to distill it down into a useful dosage for him. A heartier batch of fluid for him to carry around when we’re all dead. That part is God. That stuff coursing through you. Pay attention, but don’t think about it too much. It’s all getting in there one way or another. All the time. No matter how little we understand it. No matter how gross or shitty or evil it is. No matter if our only language for it is batting averages and cosmic melodies.

So I’m headed home from town trying to drive into the sunset at four thirty. The sun sneaks away fast like it’s embarrassed it’s been caught out at all. By the time I turn off the highway, the world is black and I think I might be able to catch a glimpse of what was there before that fire in the sky started burning. But I can’t do that because there are windmills on the horizon line. They flash red every three seconds in unison with each other in the darkness. I used to be able to stare off and imagine what lay over there, out there where the earth arcs away - what the churches might look like and whether or not their children look sad with heavy backpacks. I would imagine God and the Devil making silly plans. I imagine horses and crushed skulls and a man with greasy hands counting bills. But now I can’t see what’s over there, because these goddam windmills are flashing their goddamn red lights at me and forever doesn’t exist anymore. Because that’s the end right there. See that red flashing line? That’s where it ends.

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