Depths of Field Songtext
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I acknowledge begrudgingly the exact placement of the phenomena of which I speak may confound some people. It requires a certain separation, a reorientation of the senses that might make some people squeamish by subverting assumptions which these people may not have even recognized the existence of. But I must betray, I not only derive this sniff of satisfaction as a byproduct of my mission, but therein lies its distinct urgency: I aim not to change minds, but change each mind's sense of locating itself within a temporary and spatial cosmos by pointing out a simple fact. Selective focus has always been and remains to be the beauty of the world. Any true sense of scale, ratio, or self awareness in proportion to the rumored limitless, simultaneous fields of earthboundedness would paralyze anyone. Anything resembling anonymous audit with oneself, even slightly erred to the inevitable perspective of the middle, such accounts, distorts the true collectively agreed-upon world to specifically fit the focus of that individual. The filing systems of the mind require sloppy sorting. Some may imagine their skulls' cabbage stew baggage as ordered, and thus it may appear to itself as so. But such an ambition is the depth of confusion; our sense of our self itself depends on this jumbled system and the distinct blind spot it creates in each individual regarding him or her self. Without the ability to select one's focus, to move between relative scales of self-awareness, one could never recognize beauty, and it would be in the terms of that one as if beauty did not exist. It would not matter at what level one's focus stuck. Bliss and boredom would blur if one could not shuttle between them as unique states of awareness. Of course, many would argue that the beauty of the world, and the terrors too, for that matter, are external, and that selective focus only allows us to choose to see these or not and judge them as we each see fit. I do not imply beauty is not in the vastness to match anyone's wonder or the details of each smallest unit of division. This assumption may suit one fine in life's more crowded hours, but the quiet hours always return, and it is in these hours that such a design fails to account for the complexity of all the holographic dioramas we inhabit.
Take, for example, the case of the young boy forced out to the pitcher's mound by circumstance alone on a sun-drenched Saturday afternoon many springtimes ago; the exquisite humiliation. The boy contributes well enough to his team, hits consistently, ho-hum enough to bat at the top of the order, and gets around the bases good when he gets on, but he plays center field. The kid is not a pitcher. But on this day, a rare number of absences has imposed this role upon him. Through the sixth inning the boy's shadow stretched longer across the outfield, and the opposition hits through its order. The coach possibly regrets choosing not to forfeit upon arrival.
The field was the centerpiece of the park district's newly-rehabbed complex, which was itself the hub of all local politics and culture. It stood closest to the newly expanded parking lot and stood straight below the concession stand. Hot dogs and yellow nachos, headache blue ice or ice cream treats, a panorama of candy bars, and syrupy fountain sodas kept everyone sauntering back to the small trailer. And next to the trailer was the playground: chains to climb and slides of various styles and sizes, wooden platforms of different heights, wrapped in rubber as open to potential as whatever stunts a boy may invent.
Games played here were framed in a way those played on the other fields were not. One of the other fields was down a curved path, not even immediately visible from afar, from the concession stand or playground. The other field was across the street, in the other direction from the social flow of traffic. It was this field alone that demanded attention of all present for any game. The other fields took a special effort to get to. This was the stomach shocker of the community. Each team played maybe three games a year on this centerpiece field, these were the games with an audience that extended beyond parents. On a Saturday, families would hang out all afternoon, the older boys heroic in their dirt-stained jerseys, the younger ones chasing each other in clicking cleats. If their game was in the morning, they'd stay for hours beyond, each family casually scattering and reassembling along, to the quiet ebb and flow of the game in the background. If their game was later afternoon, or even under the lights, they'd come out hours early to sit and watch and chatter, soak in the whole scene, staring down that day's opponents as they arrive.
Six different schools all came under the umbrella of this park district. Each school had its own hierarchies, but the park district hierarchy transcended them all. The boy, who may be in comfortably enough with the upper crust of the hierarchy of his own school, in a sort of contract of silent tolerance, would never know these boys' friends in the other schools. His presence around his own school's representatives to this pubescent illuminati would not be permitted when they entered the company of these other schools' representatives. It was here at the park only that he would ever see these boys from the other schools. They all seemed so mysterious and important, so put-together, the coolest ones always with the least to say, occasionally deigned to confer with the other representatives in hushed tones. Was it here they decided to each perm the back of their hair? How exactly to peg what cut of jeans? Could such espionage take place like that, right out in the open? This year-round all-star team blossomed each spring. Inclusion was predicated on none of the seemingly obvious attributes of athleticism or attractiveness, and certainly not smarts. Only assuming a place granted one a place. Confidence of inclusion granted one inclusion, because this confidence was the hardest possible requirement to counterfeit. It was here the boy came to distrust the secret handshakes of the world, understanding them all to be a matter of breeding. For even the parents seemed like celebrities; they were to be watched; impossible, really, to not watch. But they were not to be interacted with, the Nancy Reagan and Nancy Sinatra mothers, put together just so, whether strutting or under blankets in the bleachers. They would all lean in close, proud to out-humble each other.
"What a terrible shame it is they're still living in that car!"
"What a shame it is the park district lets them keep that car parked here."
"But how nice of the park district to let the boys play even thought they smell so..."
Their husbands, the coaches, were variations of impeccable manliness, the manliness of having a family you can provide for, and the manliness of allowing that family to recede into the background. The affairs were obvious to the children, who had no such disadvantage of self-delusion as the betrayed sucker spouses must have had. Flirting registered on an intuitive level to the boys. There was no need to intellectualize this mother biting her bottom lip each time the coach spoke to her. There was no mistaking: she was the mother the coach would seek out to speak to. He, performative in his smallest mannerisms, even standing still--he with his hand put on his hip, or a shift of his weight, each with an exaggerated sense of gravity, and she with a flip of her hair and her eyelids half-lowered, initiated whatever boy standing nearby pretending not to watch, in on the secret language of potential friction.
The park even had a far parameter of woods to supply lab hours for the boys to test their physical hypotheses. The creek to fingerbang near cut through the trees; its shallow rush stifled any moans if any such clumsy act that it could ever be called seduction as much as grab might induce that most pleasurable ache of manual union as its fallout. To the creek and back became a parade route. Somehow the mothers never knew or they didn't care. But the boys would sit on the benches or the swings or the logs that outlined the borders of the woodchips and rubberscape and get more quiet than they ever had known themselves to be capable of, slurping hard on a sour apple jolly rancher, the spit in ones mouth increasing quickly as its thirst doubles over on itself, hands sticky from wiping sticky chins. A couple from behind in the distance off along the side of the parking lot eventually has to cross over the left field fence behind center field to get to the woods. Every Friday and Saturday as the lights came on at dusk, that week's couplings established or confirmed through the afternoon would make this trek. It was as if up on a screen how they would have to reemerge from the woods minutes later began at centerfield, this time facing the stands. Across to left field and along the side of the parking lot they would return to the group with their new worldviews of satiated hormones or hurt feelings.
Take, for example, the case of the young boy forced out to the pitcher's mound by circumstance alone on a sun-drenched Saturday afternoon many springtimes ago; the exquisite humiliation. The boy contributes well enough to his team, hits consistently, ho-hum enough to bat at the top of the order, and gets around the bases good when he gets on, but he plays center field. The kid is not a pitcher. But on this day, a rare number of absences has imposed this role upon him. Through the sixth inning the boy's shadow stretched longer across the outfield, and the opposition hits through its order. The coach possibly regrets choosing not to forfeit upon arrival.
The field was the centerpiece of the park district's newly-rehabbed complex, which was itself the hub of all local politics and culture. It stood closest to the newly expanded parking lot and stood straight below the concession stand. Hot dogs and yellow nachos, headache blue ice or ice cream treats, a panorama of candy bars, and syrupy fountain sodas kept everyone sauntering back to the small trailer. And next to the trailer was the playground: chains to climb and slides of various styles and sizes, wooden platforms of different heights, wrapped in rubber as open to potential as whatever stunts a boy may invent.
Games played here were framed in a way those played on the other fields were not. One of the other fields was down a curved path, not even immediately visible from afar, from the concession stand or playground. The other field was across the street, in the other direction from the social flow of traffic. It was this field alone that demanded attention of all present for any game. The other fields took a special effort to get to. This was the stomach shocker of the community. Each team played maybe three games a year on this centerpiece field, these were the games with an audience that extended beyond parents. On a Saturday, families would hang out all afternoon, the older boys heroic in their dirt-stained jerseys, the younger ones chasing each other in clicking cleats. If their game was in the morning, they'd stay for hours beyond, each family casually scattering and reassembling along, to the quiet ebb and flow of the game in the background. If their game was later afternoon, or even under the lights, they'd come out hours early to sit and watch and chatter, soak in the whole scene, staring down that day's opponents as they arrive.
Six different schools all came under the umbrella of this park district. Each school had its own hierarchies, but the park district hierarchy transcended them all. The boy, who may be in comfortably enough with the upper crust of the hierarchy of his own school, in a sort of contract of silent tolerance, would never know these boys' friends in the other schools. His presence around his own school's representatives to this pubescent illuminati would not be permitted when they entered the company of these other schools' representatives. It was here at the park only that he would ever see these boys from the other schools. They all seemed so mysterious and important, so put-together, the coolest ones always with the least to say, occasionally deigned to confer with the other representatives in hushed tones. Was it here they decided to each perm the back of their hair? How exactly to peg what cut of jeans? Could such espionage take place like that, right out in the open? This year-round all-star team blossomed each spring. Inclusion was predicated on none of the seemingly obvious attributes of athleticism or attractiveness, and certainly not smarts. Only assuming a place granted one a place. Confidence of inclusion granted one inclusion, because this confidence was the hardest possible requirement to counterfeit. It was here the boy came to distrust the secret handshakes of the world, understanding them all to be a matter of breeding. For even the parents seemed like celebrities; they were to be watched; impossible, really, to not watch. But they were not to be interacted with, the Nancy Reagan and Nancy Sinatra mothers, put together just so, whether strutting or under blankets in the bleachers. They would all lean in close, proud to out-humble each other.
"What a terrible shame it is they're still living in that car!"
"What a shame it is the park district lets them keep that car parked here."
"But how nice of the park district to let the boys play even thought they smell so..."
Their husbands, the coaches, were variations of impeccable manliness, the manliness of having a family you can provide for, and the manliness of allowing that family to recede into the background. The affairs were obvious to the children, who had no such disadvantage of self-delusion as the betrayed sucker spouses must have had. Flirting registered on an intuitive level to the boys. There was no need to intellectualize this mother biting her bottom lip each time the coach spoke to her. There was no mistaking: she was the mother the coach would seek out to speak to. He, performative in his smallest mannerisms, even standing still--he with his hand put on his hip, or a shift of his weight, each with an exaggerated sense of gravity, and she with a flip of her hair and her eyelids half-lowered, initiated whatever boy standing nearby pretending not to watch, in on the secret language of potential friction.
The park even had a far parameter of woods to supply lab hours for the boys to test their physical hypotheses. The creek to fingerbang near cut through the trees; its shallow rush stifled any moans if any such clumsy act that it could ever be called seduction as much as grab might induce that most pleasurable ache of manual union as its fallout. To the creek and back became a parade route. Somehow the mothers never knew or they didn't care. But the boys would sit on the benches or the swings or the logs that outlined the borders of the woodchips and rubberscape and get more quiet than they ever had known themselves to be capable of, slurping hard on a sour apple jolly rancher, the spit in ones mouth increasing quickly as its thirst doubles over on itself, hands sticky from wiping sticky chins. A couple from behind in the distance off along the side of the parking lot eventually has to cross over the left field fence behind center field to get to the woods. Every Friday and Saturday as the lights came on at dusk, that week's couplings established or confirmed through the afternoon would make this trek. It was as if up on a screen how they would have to reemerge from the woods minutes later began at centerfield, this time facing the stands. Across to left field and along the side of the parking lot they would return to the group with their new worldviews of satiated hormones or hurt feelings.
One fourth of July, the boy now out their on the mound, saw the girl he imagined at that time he'd probably end up marrying. The fireworks had ended, and the field's lights reflected off the sulfur clouds near the ground. The fog drowned and slowly swallowed families as mothers reached for the hands of their toddlers and the more quick-thinking of the kids the boy's own age took the opportunity to slip off toward each other. The boy thought he saw the girl for a second between drifts of smoke, then assumed she had only been an apparition, before quickly conceding it would not be strange at all for her to be there, and, yes, that must be her. The boy's mother coughed exaggeratedly, panicking at her spontaneous blindness, suggesting the family ought to just wait it out and let the crowds pass and smoke dissipate. The boy's dad, laughing at what the mother perceived as danger, harkened forward, and with a quick step banged his shin into a metal bench. Shooting straight through him, and up out the top of his head, through the cursed holiday night sky above Chicagoland, exploding in ejaculatory patriotism, looking down on the Midwest and now all of America, in a sulfur fog dense enough to cover all the colors of all the flags, and all the fires, and now as the Great Wall is seen from space and the oceans each have unique shape, his pain became the cosmos.
The mother recognized the girl through fog, and the boy's bones grew brittle with embarrassment. At first, it must have been embarrassing for her to recognize the girl at all, but then to call out, "Girl's Name! Girl's Name! Hey, Boy's Name, look, isn't that Girl's Name over there?" especially with someone's stupid little sister in tow. The boy grabbed his mother by the arm and tried to cut back against the flow of the crowd deeper into what intention he could read in the smoke, and he grabbed his dad too. But instead, hellos were exchanged. The boy pretended to not know her or at least not to notice her or be impressed by her presence. She was with a friend, not her parents, and they giggled together as boys formed. His embarrassment inflated by the fog and the lights, the crowd's constant pass shuffling him a step back, then forth. She was lost quickly by the fog, and the father hustled everyone quickly to the car.
"That's your girlfriend?"
"No."
"They went rollerskating together, mom."
"So."
And Dad ends the conversation, "She looks like your mother."
All this, the whole world the boy knew to exist was there on the mound with him that afternoon, and his arm got tired, and his pitches got sloppy. Having walked the bases full, he hit a batter on the back and walked in a run. His teammates quit jeering him from the field and instead appealed to the coach to take him out.
The coach was a good man. He had coached the boy another year, too, and although they didn't really hit it off in any sort of active way, they were both pleased at the beginning of the season to end up together again. The coach was silly compared to the other coaches, all the others with their strong jaws and winning edges. Even his name was silly: "Mr. Pepper." He even worked selling pickles. He was more round than any of the other coaches in the league and made his shape more apparent by insisting on always dressing in uniform to match the boys. His uniform always stretched in one spot and untucked in another. His left side of his head, over his ear, he grew out long enough to comb over the top of his shining crown to reach the other ear. Harold had a fine attitude for a coach, stressing the boys enjoy themselves more than winning. And through the inning he looked scared, he paced his dugout, but he never seemed scared of losing. Ignoring the grumbles of the rest of his team, he seemed miserable for what this kid on the mound must be going through. He tried to give encouraging "you can do it!" type fists and never suggested any wavering of solidarity. The clenched fists of encouragement from the coach settled the kid's stomach for a second.
"Take a deep breath, just relax," the coach yelled out to the mound, and the kid took a step back and readjusted his hat on his head. He did take a deep breath, and it felt very satisfying to do so. He wondered if maybe he hadn't breathed in half an hour. He looked around. There's mom, dad. He stepped back and put the outside of his right foot against the rubber. He breathed deep again, and everything melted away but the catcher's open glove. He hit the batter on the elbow, bringing in another run, and the opposition's parents stopped laughing and began to yell at him and boo. He struck out the team's star to get the inning's first out.
This kid, Jeffrey, was an all-star every year, and really the kid felt so ashamed to even have to pitch to him. He hated to be so bold and break the code of interacting at all with him. He paused between each pitch, trying to project an apology with body language, but the batter refused to recognize his efforts. He had long, golden hair and ran gracefully with the long strides of a deer. He always seemed more of a dramatist than an athlete to the boy, so he was actually not surprised at the spectacle Jeffrey made of striking out. Before the first pitch was thrown, Jeffrey appealed to the ump: "Get him outta here, he's dangerous!" The ump looked over to Harold Pepper, who clapped his hand and offered encouragement.
"Let's go, boys, let's turn this around here!"
Jeffrey jumped out of the batter's box as soon as each pitch left the kid's fingertips, diving dramatically to the dirt. When he wouldn't sit down after his third wild swing, the parents cheered and applauded. "Thata boy, Jeffrey, you don't need that!" The coach of the other team called, ?time out,? and approached Coach Pepper. Everyone knew the appeal, and he used exaggerated body language to display what a gentleman he was being about it. Pepper stared at his feet as he listened. There was a pause, a moment no one could know what might potentially happen in. Then finally, still concentrating on his toes, without raising his head, pursing his lips to imply stoic expressionlessness, Pepper shook his head, no. The other coach at this point lost his cool, waving his arms and raising his voice.
?You're making this your fault, now, Harold! You understand that?"
Harold Pepper did not look up. He rocked back and forth a bit on the balls of his feet, shrugged and inhaled deeply. He held his breath a second, looked up at the other coach with a cocked head and squinted eye. He exaggerated his shrug to reiterate his position, and the other coach turned, and threw his hands in the air to the stands before walking back to the dugout. The other team's parents booed. Pepper started clapping again and shouted encouragement making eye contact with the pitcher. The pitcher threw his hands up in the air in disgust, too, when Pepper called his name. "Hey!" Snapping back to attention, the boy looked at Pepper. "You can do this, c'mon, get us outta this!"
As the boy set his foot back against the rubber, he realized both sides of the bleachers were booing. The first tear popped out far from his face. It surprised him so that he wasn't exactly sure what had happened. He stood up tall and stretched his back without bending his legs. He breathed deeply and slowly again, but the catcher's glove began to blur in heat. He stepped off the rubber, breathed deep with his head down. He put the ball in his mitt and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and got back to his task quickly, as if he may have gotten away with his moment of stealth as if he just acted casually and moved more efficiently. He considered this whole afternoon never would have happened, as it had, if he had only known to economize his movements. He need only move with more efficiency; it's all very simple, really. There is the catcher's glove; all he need do is deliver this orb now in his hand to that location. His shoulder burned, but it was okay. The hiss of the crowd drifted away. The catcher's mitt. He gagged and then crumbled.
He stayed on his feet, but felt his internal organs folding over on themselves. He threw his head back, the low, clouded dusk sky blurring into a hot white noise, and he let out a long, slow moan, without shame or apprehension. This valve's releasing silenced the stands. Everyone hushed, watching his slightest movements, his Adam's apple and his belly, trying to resolve the sight of that small boy, and the sound now hanging over the field. He knew the sound was coming from him, but he could not distinguish himself as any more accountable for it than any one cloud he watched now. Each one blended into the next like cotton stretched over fading Easter eggs. He thought consciously of his tears as connected to the cloud somehow, and he himself as simply a barrier, one of the numberless, unnamable lot of potentialities lying between an endless circle of clouds and tears.
"Yes," he thought, "of course this is the sound the sky would make."
To those in the stands, it seemed more the resulting harmonic of steel icebergs forcing past each other, the growl of the surface removed, leaving only the low howl of big friction. It hung above them all longer than any one exhale could be sustained. Almost appearing as an ascending parachute, it faded in a manner that suggested not that it had been present and now ceased to be, so much as it had flown over and now receded into the distance. The boy seemed relieved to have let it go, but still stood stunned upon returning to his present scenario. His shame intensified, he looked up at the stands, each particular acquaintance now implicated as potentially willing to be just one more in a mob. Exhausted, he held his head up, and now settled into a mellow weeping.
Pepper broke the silence. First he took a couple steps. After a couple steps, he began to wave his hands in large, loose patterns that seemed to imply no discernable direction or meaning. He was out on the field now, halfway to the mound. "Time! Time," he called while keeping his head down. The infield cheered, and Pepper yelled at only his own son playing second base, "you hush!" The scolded boy rolled his eyes and kicked at the dirt. Both sides of the stands cheered. "Shucks, I thought they were just going to give us the game!" the boy standing on first base called out to no one in particular.
The boy on second got in on it. "That's alright; it was getting boring just walking around the bases!"
"Put him out of his misery!" called out a parent from the other team.
He had found a small sonic opening to wedge his jeer into, so it could be heard discernibly, and Pepper stopped, turned and looked up into the bleachers to try to make out who said it. The parent responded to his look of disappointment with a renewed roaring laughter. Both sides applauded. Before Pepper could turn to return to his mission, a new stomachache rose up in his gut under the dull ache already present. The boy's father had stood up in the stands. "This could get ugly," Pepper thought, "but no big deal." Pepper put his hands on his hips. And his gaze refocused to that of the stands.
For the first time in an hour, people turned from the pitcher's mound, and now watched the boy's father as he stepped over the bleachers in front of him, making his way to the dugout. As he stepped straight over the head of one woman, his knee knocked into the side of the head of the woman next to her. He had befriended the husbands of both women casually five years ago, when their boys all first started school together, and he had always been polite enough to each of them. Now he didn't seem to notice as one yelled at him, while the other hit him on the arm. He kept his balance by grabbing the head of one man from behind and ploughed through, pulling his hair and twisting his neck as he climbed over him. Everyone shouted at him to sit down, and he grumbled back at them all, responding to the one collective voice, "Fuck you!"
He needed an extra clumsy little hop for his last step and fell against the back fence of the dugout to catch himself. Pepper called his name and took a step back towards him. He paused and looked, then moved toward the dugout entrance. Another father, the last possible one to do so, stood up to block the dugout. That man must have felt like he'd gotten the emergency exit seat on a plane, and could not believe he would find himself called on a situation to live up to the responsibility. The men stood chest to chest, looking into each others' eyes. The stands fell silent again. "Just hold on here, okay, let's think about this." And his response came in flared nostrils, a heaving chest, and squinted eyes. He sat down and got out of the way, and the audience booed him. He then spun around waving his arms to do his own little demonstration shouting down a mob.
Kicking his way past bats and batting helmets through the dugout, the father never turned around to respond to the jeers and appeals. The boy for a quick second felt relieved of the burden of being the focus of so many disappointed eyes before he realized he was now heading into the heretofore unforeseen worst of the situation. He saw his mom excusing herself quickly parallel toward the end of her row in the bleachers. Pepper jogged half a dozen steps quickly back to the dugout and blocked the entrance to the field. The men paused in the entrance, neither knowing how they'd found themselves here in the entrance, staring each other down. They had known each other some years. They each looked down on the other, but maintained polite, if curt, interactions. This pause itself was all Pepper could hope for. This dredge, it would have to be, sustain this pause.
But the pause, the confusion of self-awareness and self-consciousness it imposed upon the father, redoubled his intensity. He wanted to jump into what he was doing especially because he did not know what he was doing, especially because his behavior was disgusting the other parents. So when Pepper blew it and bookended the moment by uttering anything at all, quietly, a name, he pushed.
Out on a farm, to be the oldest son, with three sisters ahead of you, makes for a conflicted sense of entitlement and confinement. Certain burdens, the castration of the pigs, the maintenance of the machines, might garner privileges in theory, but it took a puffed-up performative effort to make the sisters acknowledge, ?Okay, little man, all that running around makes you a man now.? Who wouldn't have learned young to drink and wrestle? Who wouldn't have run far fast? There's the queer priest pinching your ass and demanding strange tests of physical endurance and some private after practice. And there's your dad, who'd hit you with a rusty chain if you confided with any detail that the priest made you feel funny. So fuck it. You run. You work the grayscale of rape through college. You work it feeling it home, you work it shouting down the disease of home. You whoop and shout, most importantly, whooping and shouting and anyone in any situation who looks at you sideways is a stuck-up cunt who just makes you want to whoop and shout more. You've seen the false piety, the self-righteousness, the sincere, and the falsely kind. Having seen it, you can now see through it. But eventually, despite no conscious effort on your part, you've somehow designed the same life around you as a young man alone in a big city. Your crudity has been maintained, saved at any expense.
But those who fail to recognize this bawdiness as the true and final sign of humility and those who fail to recognize humility as the ultimate virtue, to strive great lengths and take great pride in realizing, have somehow caught up with and surrounded you again. To be ribald may be a shortcut to humility, requiring less discipline than the long way around, but the intention still is true, and it is this intention your new young bride has failed to recognize. Her manners demand less whooping, less shouting. She may not even speak up for herself and instead say it all in a cockeyed smile. That just makes it worse. The boys your sons have turned out to be?spoiled little girls who don't appreciate you or your work. They don't understand why you have to be gone all the time earning money for them to burn through. Their toys don't allow them to appreciate any one of them. Their piles of toys don't allow them to appreciate any one toy. You'll play catch, you'll take them skiing a week each winter, teach them wide turns, and sit in silence on the chairlift, looking out over the trees below. You'll sit poolside, careful not to get your cigarette wet. After a hike across a rickety bridge by the cabin, you'll rent a week each winter. You'll teach them how to throw, you'll throw them under your legs and snap them back and up into the air, dancing to Chuck Barry in your socks on a slippery kitchen tile. You'll tolerate their friends, even if this one's a sissy, and cheer on their hobbies, even if this one makes sissies. You'll coach their teams at times, not because it was something you were suited to do, but you will do it. Baseball, basketball, football. You will suffer the other coaches and their sons, the gravity with which they approach even their attempts at being cool or casual. You will explain, milking pussies. The clumsiness of all attempts at camaraderie you cannot explain. You will be a great chief of the Indian guys and wear a feather and make silly Indian crafts and lead silly prayers. When your boy mistakes a toboggan run for a poorly designed slide in the woods and scoots himself slowly down on it, you will throw him over your knee and remove a hundred splinters from his tender butt, holding a cigarette in your mouth, and not missing a beat of your conversation with the men sitting in a circle on the lower bunks. You'll take your boys to the bar with you, driving home from the games on weekend afternoons. You'll disguise the drives as anything but ?let's go to the club.? You'll hand them kiddy cocktails and quarters to last a minute at most on the arcade games. You'll turn to the card game, you'll leave them to sit at the fish tank; they'll study the colors and constant patternless motion, wonder at the silence of the fish, find the patterns in the water and trace them back to small motors. They'll smell the fish food, worry with deep sincerity how it is a fish can eat itself to death. They'd study the diver at the bottom of the pool and the buried plastic treasure he's eternally on the cusp of retrieving, study the bubbles. They'd suffer over the fish's aloof stare. ?Can't it respond in any way to my giant smile up against its world's glass wall? And when it reaches the end of its world, maybe it sees only its own reflection.? This is where the boy learned to be quiet for long periods of time. These afternoons, as the widow accomples her sidekick, never sure what to do, always just watching, blowing everything he tried until he figured out, the trick is in not trying. So maybe it's the same kind of self-preservation that floods the body with blind shock after a car accident, or when one slices a finger open and peeks in deep before they even think not to.
But the boy would never know what happened after seeing his dad push Harold Pepper down on the field that day. He stood on the mound, saw his mom running down the aisle toward the dugout, heard the screams of every shade of protest. Maybe the game ended at that moment. Maybe all that afternoon's games were called, all the adults had to look at themselves again, a little more closely through the perspective of this man, running out to the field, who decided the whole design was too disgusting to go on with for the day. Maybe someone else ended up pitching. Maybe the field was flooded with parents worried for their sons about being, and all the fathers rumbled, as all the mothers swept up their children. The boy would never know what happened, because he left somehow immediately, ascension or dissolution. A long walk to the car with his parents through hissing and staring strangers staying out of their way. It doesn't matter. On the drive home, at home, and later returning to the team, don't matter.
When this man dies, the boy, now a man himself, with his own wife, and his own drinking, potentially problematic as it begins to shake itself awake from whatever molecular cave in him it had lain slumbering, dormant, the fathering will die youngish and suddenly. Sixty-one. Not young, but young to die. He just fell over in his pajamas in his kitchen, while throwing some ice in a tumbler early one evening. Such a death caused he himself no more pain than it indulged anyone else in even a moment's notice to settle any accounts of any throat-swelling variety. No ambiguous motives would ever get their explanation. No memories of any emotional shading would be granted any validation, by so much as an acknowledgment: "I was in this place that you were too, and yes, such and such a thing did happen, and it's in this manner that I recall it." Only the transference of what the son must assume to be humiliation on the father's part, if the dust and gas he might now occupy in the vicinity of his ashes, left to lay on the mother's staircase for almost a year now, could articulate. Is it an invisible cloud, or a web, or a net, or a cluster of energy, if I may flatten any verb's potential into a noun that makes the father's form now.
Across time backwards as perceived from the boy-that's-now-a-man's perspective of assumed forward momentum, understanding bubbles up. Such a process of energy transferal, at least Eucharistic, more so implies the whisper of the secrets of intersection hidden behind a gory corpse each Easter remembrance. It is not, after all, not a history of Christ being drawn and quartered that history naturally selected. For a developed sense of selective focus will not only set its single selective scale towards wonder, and kick its feet up on the desk self-satisfied. This more subtle acquirement must necessarily recognize its own active role in flipping the switches between unique perspectives from which to view any given situation. It may seem the democratization of perspectives, implied by the Internet, would help scatter each one's sense of self, but I fear this is not the case. To have so many channels to flip between now and to have an accessible collective conscious via the shared brain of the Internet may, in fact, actually confirm one's sense of individuality. The dominant self-cannibalizing power depends on this sense of survival. For to be offered limitlessness, and for separation from that limitlessness, to be implied over and over subtly, but continuously from the various designs of consumer culture, only reinforces individualism, instead of connection to that limitlessness. The necessary estrangement of having things constantly tried to be sold to you being "I am lacking, and I didn't even know it." Consuming becomes the means of participation, but never feels complete. The mode reiterates the world as to be separate from us, to be watched, but impossible to interact in. As we are made to believe ourselves, each just a spectator, the diversity of perspectives we are offered, flattened into a single "otherness" in relation to how we identify the point from which we are watching: self. The father, striking out of the world to defend his son, for example, while the son knew himself to be in the wrong, can now be seen by the son from the father's perspective. And this is the gift death gives the living.
The mother recognized the girl through fog, and the boy's bones grew brittle with embarrassment. At first, it must have been embarrassing for her to recognize the girl at all, but then to call out, "Girl's Name! Girl's Name! Hey, Boy's Name, look, isn't that Girl's Name over there?" especially with someone's stupid little sister in tow. The boy grabbed his mother by the arm and tried to cut back against the flow of the crowd deeper into what intention he could read in the smoke, and he grabbed his dad too. But instead, hellos were exchanged. The boy pretended to not know her or at least not to notice her or be impressed by her presence. She was with a friend, not her parents, and they giggled together as boys formed. His embarrassment inflated by the fog and the lights, the crowd's constant pass shuffling him a step back, then forth. She was lost quickly by the fog, and the father hustled everyone quickly to the car.
"That's your girlfriend?"
"No."
"They went rollerskating together, mom."
"So."
And Dad ends the conversation, "She looks like your mother."
All this, the whole world the boy knew to exist was there on the mound with him that afternoon, and his arm got tired, and his pitches got sloppy. Having walked the bases full, he hit a batter on the back and walked in a run. His teammates quit jeering him from the field and instead appealed to the coach to take him out.
The coach was a good man. He had coached the boy another year, too, and although they didn't really hit it off in any sort of active way, they were both pleased at the beginning of the season to end up together again. The coach was silly compared to the other coaches, all the others with their strong jaws and winning edges. Even his name was silly: "Mr. Pepper." He even worked selling pickles. He was more round than any of the other coaches in the league and made his shape more apparent by insisting on always dressing in uniform to match the boys. His uniform always stretched in one spot and untucked in another. His left side of his head, over his ear, he grew out long enough to comb over the top of his shining crown to reach the other ear. Harold had a fine attitude for a coach, stressing the boys enjoy themselves more than winning. And through the inning he looked scared, he paced his dugout, but he never seemed scared of losing. Ignoring the grumbles of the rest of his team, he seemed miserable for what this kid on the mound must be going through. He tried to give encouraging "you can do it!" type fists and never suggested any wavering of solidarity. The clenched fists of encouragement from the coach settled the kid's stomach for a second.
"Take a deep breath, just relax," the coach yelled out to the mound, and the kid took a step back and readjusted his hat on his head. He did take a deep breath, and it felt very satisfying to do so. He wondered if maybe he hadn't breathed in half an hour. He looked around. There's mom, dad. He stepped back and put the outside of his right foot against the rubber. He breathed deep again, and everything melted away but the catcher's open glove. He hit the batter on the elbow, bringing in another run, and the opposition's parents stopped laughing and began to yell at him and boo. He struck out the team's star to get the inning's first out.
This kid, Jeffrey, was an all-star every year, and really the kid felt so ashamed to even have to pitch to him. He hated to be so bold and break the code of interacting at all with him. He paused between each pitch, trying to project an apology with body language, but the batter refused to recognize his efforts. He had long, golden hair and ran gracefully with the long strides of a deer. He always seemed more of a dramatist than an athlete to the boy, so he was actually not surprised at the spectacle Jeffrey made of striking out. Before the first pitch was thrown, Jeffrey appealed to the ump: "Get him outta here, he's dangerous!" The ump looked over to Harold Pepper, who clapped his hand and offered encouragement.
"Let's go, boys, let's turn this around here!"
Jeffrey jumped out of the batter's box as soon as each pitch left the kid's fingertips, diving dramatically to the dirt. When he wouldn't sit down after his third wild swing, the parents cheered and applauded. "Thata boy, Jeffrey, you don't need that!" The coach of the other team called, ?time out,? and approached Coach Pepper. Everyone knew the appeal, and he used exaggerated body language to display what a gentleman he was being about it. Pepper stared at his feet as he listened. There was a pause, a moment no one could know what might potentially happen in. Then finally, still concentrating on his toes, without raising his head, pursing his lips to imply stoic expressionlessness, Pepper shook his head, no. The other coach at this point lost his cool, waving his arms and raising his voice.
?You're making this your fault, now, Harold! You understand that?"
Harold Pepper did not look up. He rocked back and forth a bit on the balls of his feet, shrugged and inhaled deeply. He held his breath a second, looked up at the other coach with a cocked head and squinted eye. He exaggerated his shrug to reiterate his position, and the other coach turned, and threw his hands in the air to the stands before walking back to the dugout. The other team's parents booed. Pepper started clapping again and shouted encouragement making eye contact with the pitcher. The pitcher threw his hands up in the air in disgust, too, when Pepper called his name. "Hey!" Snapping back to attention, the boy looked at Pepper. "You can do this, c'mon, get us outta this!"
As the boy set his foot back against the rubber, he realized both sides of the bleachers were booing. The first tear popped out far from his face. It surprised him so that he wasn't exactly sure what had happened. He stood up tall and stretched his back without bending his legs. He breathed deeply and slowly again, but the catcher's glove began to blur in heat. He stepped off the rubber, breathed deep with his head down. He put the ball in his mitt and wiped his eyes with the back of his hand and got back to his task quickly, as if he may have gotten away with his moment of stealth as if he just acted casually and moved more efficiently. He considered this whole afternoon never would have happened, as it had, if he had only known to economize his movements. He need only move with more efficiency; it's all very simple, really. There is the catcher's glove; all he need do is deliver this orb now in his hand to that location. His shoulder burned, but it was okay. The hiss of the crowd drifted away. The catcher's mitt. He gagged and then crumbled.
He stayed on his feet, but felt his internal organs folding over on themselves. He threw his head back, the low, clouded dusk sky blurring into a hot white noise, and he let out a long, slow moan, without shame or apprehension. This valve's releasing silenced the stands. Everyone hushed, watching his slightest movements, his Adam's apple and his belly, trying to resolve the sight of that small boy, and the sound now hanging over the field. He knew the sound was coming from him, but he could not distinguish himself as any more accountable for it than any one cloud he watched now. Each one blended into the next like cotton stretched over fading Easter eggs. He thought consciously of his tears as connected to the cloud somehow, and he himself as simply a barrier, one of the numberless, unnamable lot of potentialities lying between an endless circle of clouds and tears.
"Yes," he thought, "of course this is the sound the sky would make."
To those in the stands, it seemed more the resulting harmonic of steel icebergs forcing past each other, the growl of the surface removed, leaving only the low howl of big friction. It hung above them all longer than any one exhale could be sustained. Almost appearing as an ascending parachute, it faded in a manner that suggested not that it had been present and now ceased to be, so much as it had flown over and now receded into the distance. The boy seemed relieved to have let it go, but still stood stunned upon returning to his present scenario. His shame intensified, he looked up at the stands, each particular acquaintance now implicated as potentially willing to be just one more in a mob. Exhausted, he held his head up, and now settled into a mellow weeping.
Pepper broke the silence. First he took a couple steps. After a couple steps, he began to wave his hands in large, loose patterns that seemed to imply no discernable direction or meaning. He was out on the field now, halfway to the mound. "Time! Time," he called while keeping his head down. The infield cheered, and Pepper yelled at only his own son playing second base, "you hush!" The scolded boy rolled his eyes and kicked at the dirt. Both sides of the stands cheered. "Shucks, I thought they were just going to give us the game!" the boy standing on first base called out to no one in particular.
The boy on second got in on it. "That's alright; it was getting boring just walking around the bases!"
"Put him out of his misery!" called out a parent from the other team.
He had found a small sonic opening to wedge his jeer into, so it could be heard discernibly, and Pepper stopped, turned and looked up into the bleachers to try to make out who said it. The parent responded to his look of disappointment with a renewed roaring laughter. Both sides applauded. Before Pepper could turn to return to his mission, a new stomachache rose up in his gut under the dull ache already present. The boy's father had stood up in the stands. "This could get ugly," Pepper thought, "but no big deal." Pepper put his hands on his hips. And his gaze refocused to that of the stands.
For the first time in an hour, people turned from the pitcher's mound, and now watched the boy's father as he stepped over the bleachers in front of him, making his way to the dugout. As he stepped straight over the head of one woman, his knee knocked into the side of the head of the woman next to her. He had befriended the husbands of both women casually five years ago, when their boys all first started school together, and he had always been polite enough to each of them. Now he didn't seem to notice as one yelled at him, while the other hit him on the arm. He kept his balance by grabbing the head of one man from behind and ploughed through, pulling his hair and twisting his neck as he climbed over him. Everyone shouted at him to sit down, and he grumbled back at them all, responding to the one collective voice, "Fuck you!"
He needed an extra clumsy little hop for his last step and fell against the back fence of the dugout to catch himself. Pepper called his name and took a step back towards him. He paused and looked, then moved toward the dugout entrance. Another father, the last possible one to do so, stood up to block the dugout. That man must have felt like he'd gotten the emergency exit seat on a plane, and could not believe he would find himself called on a situation to live up to the responsibility. The men stood chest to chest, looking into each others' eyes. The stands fell silent again. "Just hold on here, okay, let's think about this." And his response came in flared nostrils, a heaving chest, and squinted eyes. He sat down and got out of the way, and the audience booed him. He then spun around waving his arms to do his own little demonstration shouting down a mob.
Kicking his way past bats and batting helmets through the dugout, the father never turned around to respond to the jeers and appeals. The boy for a quick second felt relieved of the burden of being the focus of so many disappointed eyes before he realized he was now heading into the heretofore unforeseen worst of the situation. He saw his mom excusing herself quickly parallel toward the end of her row in the bleachers. Pepper jogged half a dozen steps quickly back to the dugout and blocked the entrance to the field. The men paused in the entrance, neither knowing how they'd found themselves here in the entrance, staring each other down. They had known each other some years. They each looked down on the other, but maintained polite, if curt, interactions. This pause itself was all Pepper could hope for. This dredge, it would have to be, sustain this pause.
But the pause, the confusion of self-awareness and self-consciousness it imposed upon the father, redoubled his intensity. He wanted to jump into what he was doing especially because he did not know what he was doing, especially because his behavior was disgusting the other parents. So when Pepper blew it and bookended the moment by uttering anything at all, quietly, a name, he pushed.
Out on a farm, to be the oldest son, with three sisters ahead of you, makes for a conflicted sense of entitlement and confinement. Certain burdens, the castration of the pigs, the maintenance of the machines, might garner privileges in theory, but it took a puffed-up performative effort to make the sisters acknowledge, ?Okay, little man, all that running around makes you a man now.? Who wouldn't have learned young to drink and wrestle? Who wouldn't have run far fast? There's the queer priest pinching your ass and demanding strange tests of physical endurance and some private after practice. And there's your dad, who'd hit you with a rusty chain if you confided with any detail that the priest made you feel funny. So fuck it. You run. You work the grayscale of rape through college. You work it feeling it home, you work it shouting down the disease of home. You whoop and shout, most importantly, whooping and shouting and anyone in any situation who looks at you sideways is a stuck-up cunt who just makes you want to whoop and shout more. You've seen the false piety, the self-righteousness, the sincere, and the falsely kind. Having seen it, you can now see through it. But eventually, despite no conscious effort on your part, you've somehow designed the same life around you as a young man alone in a big city. Your crudity has been maintained, saved at any expense.
But those who fail to recognize this bawdiness as the true and final sign of humility and those who fail to recognize humility as the ultimate virtue, to strive great lengths and take great pride in realizing, have somehow caught up with and surrounded you again. To be ribald may be a shortcut to humility, requiring less discipline than the long way around, but the intention still is true, and it is this intention your new young bride has failed to recognize. Her manners demand less whooping, less shouting. She may not even speak up for herself and instead say it all in a cockeyed smile. That just makes it worse. The boys your sons have turned out to be?spoiled little girls who don't appreciate you or your work. They don't understand why you have to be gone all the time earning money for them to burn through. Their toys don't allow them to appreciate any one of them. Their piles of toys don't allow them to appreciate any one toy. You'll play catch, you'll take them skiing a week each winter, teach them wide turns, and sit in silence on the chairlift, looking out over the trees below. You'll sit poolside, careful not to get your cigarette wet. After a hike across a rickety bridge by the cabin, you'll rent a week each winter. You'll teach them how to throw, you'll throw them under your legs and snap them back and up into the air, dancing to Chuck Barry in your socks on a slippery kitchen tile. You'll tolerate their friends, even if this one's a sissy, and cheer on their hobbies, even if this one makes sissies. You'll coach their teams at times, not because it was something you were suited to do, but you will do it. Baseball, basketball, football. You will suffer the other coaches and their sons, the gravity with which they approach even their attempts at being cool or casual. You will explain, milking pussies. The clumsiness of all attempts at camaraderie you cannot explain. You will be a great chief of the Indian guys and wear a feather and make silly Indian crafts and lead silly prayers. When your boy mistakes a toboggan run for a poorly designed slide in the woods and scoots himself slowly down on it, you will throw him over your knee and remove a hundred splinters from his tender butt, holding a cigarette in your mouth, and not missing a beat of your conversation with the men sitting in a circle on the lower bunks. You'll take your boys to the bar with you, driving home from the games on weekend afternoons. You'll disguise the drives as anything but ?let's go to the club.? You'll hand them kiddy cocktails and quarters to last a minute at most on the arcade games. You'll turn to the card game, you'll leave them to sit at the fish tank; they'll study the colors and constant patternless motion, wonder at the silence of the fish, find the patterns in the water and trace them back to small motors. They'll smell the fish food, worry with deep sincerity how it is a fish can eat itself to death. They'd study the diver at the bottom of the pool and the buried plastic treasure he's eternally on the cusp of retrieving, study the bubbles. They'd suffer over the fish's aloof stare. ?Can't it respond in any way to my giant smile up against its world's glass wall? And when it reaches the end of its world, maybe it sees only its own reflection.? This is where the boy learned to be quiet for long periods of time. These afternoons, as the widow accomples her sidekick, never sure what to do, always just watching, blowing everything he tried until he figured out, the trick is in not trying. So maybe it's the same kind of self-preservation that floods the body with blind shock after a car accident, or when one slices a finger open and peeks in deep before they even think not to.
But the boy would never know what happened after seeing his dad push Harold Pepper down on the field that day. He stood on the mound, saw his mom running down the aisle toward the dugout, heard the screams of every shade of protest. Maybe the game ended at that moment. Maybe all that afternoon's games were called, all the adults had to look at themselves again, a little more closely through the perspective of this man, running out to the field, who decided the whole design was too disgusting to go on with for the day. Maybe someone else ended up pitching. Maybe the field was flooded with parents worried for their sons about being, and all the fathers rumbled, as all the mothers swept up their children. The boy would never know what happened, because he left somehow immediately, ascension or dissolution. A long walk to the car with his parents through hissing and staring strangers staying out of their way. It doesn't matter. On the drive home, at home, and later returning to the team, don't matter.
When this man dies, the boy, now a man himself, with his own wife, and his own drinking, potentially problematic as it begins to shake itself awake from whatever molecular cave in him it had lain slumbering, dormant, the fathering will die youngish and suddenly. Sixty-one. Not young, but young to die. He just fell over in his pajamas in his kitchen, while throwing some ice in a tumbler early one evening. Such a death caused he himself no more pain than it indulged anyone else in even a moment's notice to settle any accounts of any throat-swelling variety. No ambiguous motives would ever get their explanation. No memories of any emotional shading would be granted any validation, by so much as an acknowledgment: "I was in this place that you were too, and yes, such and such a thing did happen, and it's in this manner that I recall it." Only the transference of what the son must assume to be humiliation on the father's part, if the dust and gas he might now occupy in the vicinity of his ashes, left to lay on the mother's staircase for almost a year now, could articulate. Is it an invisible cloud, or a web, or a net, or a cluster of energy, if I may flatten any verb's potential into a noun that makes the father's form now.
Across time backwards as perceived from the boy-that's-now-a-man's perspective of assumed forward momentum, understanding bubbles up. Such a process of energy transferal, at least Eucharistic, more so implies the whisper of the secrets of intersection hidden behind a gory corpse each Easter remembrance. It is not, after all, not a history of Christ being drawn and quartered that history naturally selected. For a developed sense of selective focus will not only set its single selective scale towards wonder, and kick its feet up on the desk self-satisfied. This more subtle acquirement must necessarily recognize its own active role in flipping the switches between unique perspectives from which to view any given situation. It may seem the democratization of perspectives, implied by the Internet, would help scatter each one's sense of self, but I fear this is not the case. To have so many channels to flip between now and to have an accessible collective conscious via the shared brain of the Internet may, in fact, actually confirm one's sense of individuality. The dominant self-cannibalizing power depends on this sense of survival. For to be offered limitlessness, and for separation from that limitlessness, to be implied over and over subtly, but continuously from the various designs of consumer culture, only reinforces individualism, instead of connection to that limitlessness. The necessary estrangement of having things constantly tried to be sold to you being "I am lacking, and I didn't even know it." Consuming becomes the means of participation, but never feels complete. The mode reiterates the world as to be separate from us, to be watched, but impossible to interact in. As we are made to believe ourselves, each just a spectator, the diversity of perspectives we are offered, flattened into a single "otherness" in relation to how we identify the point from which we are watching: self. The father, striking out of the world to defend his son, for example, while the son knew himself to be in the wrong, can now be seen by the son from the father's perspective. And this is the gift death gives the living.
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