Sunday Morning Coming Down

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Can you start a piece with an interlude?  Well I will:  That pseudo-song call and response piece of dung called “Home” by Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros is playing on the radio at work and it is so very awful!  That bit in the middle when they talk to each other…I just ground my molars to shards and my left eye just shot across the store.  I voiced my displeasure and the boys started laughing.  They said they were surprised it only took 30 seconds.  Shame on them for being tolerant of this auditory tripe.  

It’s slow here this time of year and I’m quite jumpy.  Music is powerfully mood-altering to me.  If it were just me in here there would be only Jazz and Reggae and maybe Johnny Cash when he did those cover albums as an old timer with that quivering old voice that was forged in a crucible of tobacco, pills, booze, and the kind of desperate longing that only a sinner of the worst kind can know.  That sort of man has hated himself for so long that the years and the “mud and the blood and the booze” have erased the memory of the original reason for that self-loathing so that all he is left with is a broken soul and a bone-soaking darkness that is never more than a half-smile away.  A man like that can never truly smile because he knows that the smile is held captive by a terrible spiritual malignancy.  He can never be reconciled because he doesn’t remember what it is that needs to be reconciled.  And so he is left to God’s mercy in the end and until that day he takes a wife like June and sings epic poetry and if he is lucky he stays away from booze and dope.  Jesus, this is me!  So it’s Cash for camaraderie, Jazz and Reggae to sooth the jerky nerves.  Sunday Morning Sidewalk.  Sunday Morning coming down…reality barging its way back into your life after you’ve done your best to run and hide and hide and hide and your mind lies raw in a pool of horror...or terror…sometimes it’s hard to tell the difference...but there is one. 

I quit drinking this year.  I haven’t done drugs for many years.  Booze was always the best for me…and the worst.  I can remember the rush, the euphoria, the acceptance.  I remember the anticipation of drinking.  I remember lying to myself about how much I would drink that night…or day.  I have derailed so many trains in my time I can scarcely believe I’m alive.  Never a daily drinker…just a drinker of vast quantities.  Ten beers would be chump change for me.  How the hell can I function around these people with only ten?  I need the walls to close in.  I need the blurry, fuzzy vortex of noise to be close enough to rub my cheeks.  The din of two hundred voices all stirred up together and swirled around and around until they are an indistinguishable boozy noise blanket.  And I wrap myself up in it and it all looks homogenous and I can pick out whichever one is least threatening and touch it.  Colors and sounds and fragmented memories of shapes of wooden floors and glasses and shirt colors and bar-rails.  That dark brownish-burgundy color of fake leather and cheap pool table felt.  

The dry mouth and twitchy sleep of 4AM and that awful breathless time lapse between the dissipation of the BAC and the onset of the hangover.  There is a period of time when there is perfect, painless clarity (or at least perceived perfect sobriety) at that point.  Chemicals being processed—eliminated…some new chemicals shoving in to fuck with your eyes and your stomach and, worst of all, your mind.  The vertigo and the acute anxiety and depression dance around sickeningly and taunt you and all you want to do is sit under the warm shower and know that it’s hot and sunny outside and maybe it will be until you feel better.  If you’re going to be hung over, do it in Summer.  Winter is worst for that sort of thing.  The grey skies are just a tombstone over your emotional grave and there is not a damn thing you can do about it but embrace the dread or drink again.  And you probably will…for twenty or thirty years until you Allow yourself to realize how pathetic it all is.  Until Sunday Morning Comes Down for good.  You pray for Sunday morning…the one that Johnny sang about.  He didn’t sing about it in a literal sense.  He sang about it metaphorically and that is what most people miss.  I missed it the first hundred or so times I ever heard that song but I get it now.  Sunday morning is God’s presentation of grace and maybe redemption to you.  Even when you think you are the worst person in the world at the time.  The smell of the chicken frying, the laughing little girl playing, even the cleanest dirty shirt.  Those things all point to something new and brilliant and maybe soul-cleansing.

But not everyone is ready for that just yet.  It takes that man whose heart has been frozen for so long that even the slightest whisper of love or even concern from another person ignites some ferocious longing deep inside his soul.  And I do mean ferocious.  That kind of longing functions as both a fire to melt the frozen heart and a protective monster to guard what it has thawed.  It is a built in Mother Bear…or maybe it is God working through us and we only think it is a thing we create.  Those who Believe tackle this question every day on some level.  It’s a tough one.  I have beaten that question back into the darkness so many times I can’t believe it still pursues me.  I simultaneously love the longing and hate it with everything I can muster.  You see, it shakes up my belief paradigm and makes me very uncomfortable while also allowing me a faint glimpse of something better and beautiful!  But I am comfortable in the dark stasis of this person I’ve created.  There is no work to be done here.  It is anesthesia.  Pure, numb apathy.  Not bad and not good.  Nothing.  Some people think that is what hell is.  But then that piercing light shoots through a crack in the ice and blasts you in the eye and you see something familiar.  You have no idea what it is, though you can see it quite clearly.  All you know is that it is familiar and warm and I’m not sure what the other thing is but it’s some sort of happiness.  Either happiness or peace I think.  

But as I was saying…not everyone is ready for that just yet.  For some people, you just have to reach down to the bottom of the well to where you think you’ll find your own damned redemption and you don’t need anyone’s help Goddammit!  And that’s what is so confusing.  You will find water down there but a man dug that well and that water probably filtered up through the bedrock from miles away.  There is nothing special about that.  It’s just plain physical processes.  Rain falls and soaks in and gravity pulls it down to the depths and heat pushes it back up.  Dinosaurs die and rot and turn into oil and diamonds.  Birds are not magic…they are aerodynamic and use their wings and thermal updrafts to fly.  But we all continue to look for the Answer in those things.  Four leaf clovers and fire and rockets and elementary particles…the Higgs Boson.  We observed all these things and we even created computers that can beat Garry Kasparov at chess.  We will continue to advance our manipulation of the observable world.  Will there be a point at which we know so much that we cross a threshold where God is plausibly deniable to everyone alive?  I doubt it.  Because I think we have all seen that beam of light every now and then and it still makes us wonder.  We still get precious glimpses of that thing which is so familiar yet so unrecognizable.  Johnny and I have something in common there.  We both sat at the bottom of the well for a long LONG time just clawing away deeper and deeper because we were sure we could find ourselves if we just dug another few inches.  He got tired and went on one last bender and woke up one Sunday morning and the sun hit him in the face and he started to climb out.