I Write To You of Ghosts

Today, we begin with a story of an end.

It is May 3, 2013, my 23^rd birthday, and from this porch, I'm in conversation with a ghost.

To the right of me is an empty chair. To left of me, is the house I live in now.

This is a track-home house in an suburb of Sacramento called Folsom. I grew up in this house, or more, I spent the latter years of my youth here.

First with my mother then, my father joining later in a different house.

I returned here after the unsuccessful stint of an independent post-graduate career—a fate I attempted to avoid. Yet, six months with two part-time jobs (independent movie theater and Macy's), a journalism gig that never paid, a growing debt, and an expensive room in some renovated tool shed had led me to a jaded pessimism and depression that no one should have at the age of twenty-two.

So here I write on the porch of this house. I write from the very house that represents something more than a present dilemma, an existential metaphor, or paradigmatic modern fate. I write here because I believe it is the perfect moment for the optimistic narrative that I hold in foresight. I am here with a ghost, with my past, and I swear there is ink in my lungs.

On the porch it is my belief that I am at the runway. I am at zero, the precipice, with a leveled head, eyes focussed and scanning, hands ample, ready, and free, on my toes, well hydrated and well rested, a new persuasion of wind at my back, the road ready to rise to my every step, and the sun never in my eyes. The world opening like the palm of a hand. Eyes awaking for the first time. The first laugh in a crib.

What a place to begin: where it all started: the vessel of history: the porch for understanding.

So I write to you of ghosts. Or one in particular.

Yet before I can begin I must let you know a few things, before I can conjure him, I must recover the bones.

My mother moved to Folsom in 1995. I know this for certain because I was five years old. I know I was five cause it is my belief, that my sister had just turned four and she is almost a year younger than me.

Now, there might be some of you readers who are raising a finger proudly, laughing triumphantly, and saying, “I knew he was lying!” To those of you who are under the impression that I hadn't moved to Folsom till my teenage years, well, you are partially correct.

See, my father still remained in Rescue, the first house, till the age of thirteen. I know that because a sister of mine was just about six, though they say he was a boy. But those details don't matter much now, I saw him run into the screen door and faint.

If you are mistaken, I do apologize, but it's time to get over it. These things are gone and past, the silent assertions and decisive trends are beyond us now. They are with history spinning its own yarn. All windmills and sawmills and watermills.

Originally, as in my origin, I was from a small Gold Rush town near the city of Hangtown. Well, Hangtown is an alternative name to Placerville, California. It is a name that continues because lynched from some shuttered building, somewhere on the southern end of what is figuratively a main street, is a mannequin. The plastic effigy remains in place of a history known to Placerville, a history that assigns Placerville as the first capital of the state, of conjectural administrative authority, before the honor was given to Martinez.

Hangtown is a name derived from a specific occurrence when regular citizens took matter into their own hands. A story that punctuates with three hanging bandits...

Around a harsh winter in 1951, when supplies could not reach remote locations, the few years of peace, dignity, honor and civil equality in the province devolved into rampant murder and crimes. Law and punishment executed, not by those of practice, but of the ordinary people. Those convicted of crimes deemed worthy of death—for stealing primarily, but many of other 'judgement calls'—were either hung or disfigured (such as removing ears in reported cases). Culprits were hung in the town square.

The danger waxed when a group of Australian gangsters called the Sydney Ducks joined the scene. The Sydney Ducks were a group of individuals, primarily of Irish decent, who were sentenced by the queen of England to the terrible consequence of Australia.

Irish are not keen to heat someone must have supposed.

Imagine that decision by the British aristocracy. There is the Queen feeding her lean hounds impoverished babies and jawing through her upturned nose and plastic mouth, “How do we both rid of the Irish and punish them equally?” Three men in tuxedoes, crossed eyes, and dull wits stare at her blankly--probably Scottish. She cannot decide where the criminals must go, “We must extricate the filth, flush them out!” One tuxedoed slave nods and his head falls off, one desiccates and withers away from his last drop of sweat, and the queen shoots the third.

The Irish in question is watching the scene and purports, “Well, you certainly should not banish me to an island that is essentially all sand, like one terrible long beach, or an island so far from you that I will not be able to properly remember your majesty's existence, or an island that will have the best economy in the world a century in the future. You certainly should not send me there. That is perhaps the worst option. Please as long as it isn't something like Australia.”

The Queen can rest her hand on her chin so she does so looking up, to make it seem like she can ponder, she then asks, “Do they have snakes?”

The Irish man throws has hands dramatically at her, falls to his knees, and proclaims, “Oh! For the love of God I forgot about those wicked creatures! Their sinful, syphilitic glare! The temptress of mortality! Foul demon! Vile Serpent!”

Clapping her hands, grinning, and laughing the autocrat, like the clever girl she is, sentences the Irish man and all others that will follow him, “Take him and the rest to Australia! Where they shall live until they die!”

I guess that could be exactly what happened. True fact. Good Story.

I never wanted a crumpet and tea in the desert. If I was hungry enough, maybe. Though, I think an Irish man would rather continue to starve in hell than receive a crumpet and tea from the queen.

Back to real history: the Irish cast-aways, the duck brigade from the British penal colonies of Australia, moved to the base of San Francisco's telegraph hill, originally called “Sydney Town, or Barbary Coast” and were blamed for San Francisco's calamitous fire in 1849. These gangsters formed a community of sailors, longshoremen, teamsters, wheelwrights, shipwrights, bartenders, saloon keepers, washerwomen, domestic servants, and dressmakers.

Because of the ducks, vigilantes usurped political power from the corrupt or incompetent officials in the city, conducted secret trials, lynchings, and deportations, which effectively decimated the Sydney Ducks, unofficially decimating my history lesson.

Now, If I told you I was from Hangtown. See, I was partially honest. And let me tell you why: Rescue is from the same district as Placerville. It resides in Placerville county. As does Cameron Park, though, I have never said I am from Cameron Park, for if you knew of Cameron Park, you knew of Rescue.

Albeit judgement, Rescue is a fascinating adjunct of the Gold Rush community. Rescue is interesting because I lived behind the cocaine kingpin of Placerville county. Yes, I recall days in which the Kingpin's german shepherd would break through the fence and play/flirt/practice with our australian shepherd Rocky. I would crack the venetian curtain staring nervously at their play. After seconds of watching their behavior, the spectating was over by a force only recognizable as my father's grasp. He would say, “Don't give Rocky any reason to be protective.” I couldn't rescue her, and she didn't want to be rescued. Perhaps I wanted to be rescued from the anxiety of losing her? Who is protecting who, and why do we feel the need to do so when the situation does not call for it? Oh, the chaos of fear. The vicious cycle. Rescue me from myself, myself will rescue me.

Back-to-the-matter, Rescue is, in fact, named Rescue because it was the base-camp for the rescuers of the Donner Party. For those of you who may not know the Donner party, or who slept through middle school history, the Donner Party was a group of settlers who were caught in a blizzard, and under their desperate and tragic circumstance they resorted to cannibalizing their deceased. Rescue was the recovery camp for these circumstantial cannibals. Which will be the title of my next punk album.

There I lived, a prelude of baseball cards, model trains, and airplanes.

Then Folsom. A place that seems reluctant to capitalize on any Johnny Cash references. What a waste.

It is time, the ghost I planned to conjure came back to me out of his annoyance to my straying, ambling history lessons. Mnemosyne, the mother of muses, is tired by the weight, she can lift the clouded veil no longer. Art and memory must remain swirling infinitely beneath.

…

From the porch, I look before me at a yard that once moved. Now it is still. Bringing gentle sorrow and easy melancholy I search for the most important thing in the garden. Things hanging need not be rescued, things too late are right on time.

It is spring and growth is abundant. Profusions of green mask the shadow's hint of a passing.

For the absence of a dear friend and memory is the reason I write today.

Just yesterday, I told my mother that I had started a blog that was the essence of hip: the porches of the world and their stories. I could tell she thought the idea amusingly absurd and charmingly worthless, but she kept that to herself. I told her that much of the reason that I began this project was to build upon the impoverished economy of my qualifications and experience for jobs. I could sequester some of the time I should be applying for more low-wage positions so I can boost my marketable self.

It was then her eyes began to water. She looked at me and said, “You can do me one thing son. You can write a story about Conner.”

I said I would. Yet, I didn't know how. This how I tried:

Sitting on this porch here I said I was trying to conjure you, I said I was speaking to a ghost, but there are complex reasons and excuses to why I strategically avoided you. Reasons I am not aware of yet. Reasons I cannot gather, shape or sculpt even though, or if, I have all the ability to do so. So I write you a book of excuses.

I go in searching, with a flashlight without batteries, I go in trying to rob something from myself. I am reaching in the dark attempting to rescue something that can't be rescued nor wants to be. A memory, a garnishment to describe you or make you manifest in a place you can never be. It is a neurotic state, I acknowledge that. The mere fact that this discussion is happening is a ludicrous production, a whack attempt.

What could I say? What I would say is that I watched you in your last days, limping and scanning the flowers in new bloom in the very garden I sit in now, honey bees, bumble bees and humming birds humming around you. You were in your own particular sanctuary. It was a visible sublimity, an oasis of pure organic neutrality. A place of nondescript, yet one I'll focus the rest of my life describing. Trying to narrow in on the question. To clarify the silence. What I can say is a question. One I asked and cannot repeat again, and to repeat always. The echo of a cry soaring over the planes of our page.

It seems things that are gentle only were. They become hard because things that are gentle belong to you, and you were and are no more.

Yet, just now when I conjure you, I feel the gentleness of memory.

You are in the wind today. A northerly wind. Never in California do I remember a northerly wind. 

And somehow, just now, I just feel the wind for the first time, I had not noticed it today. 

Perhaps it just passed through. And how great that it is northerly. How awake my senses are, I feel each individual strand of hair subject to it. That one on my thigh. That one in my ear. There is a scent so subtle of ash, of old bark now ember. The perfumes of trees and flowers from another garden have transported in this wind. Uncommon aromatics, from a fence that I never cross. I swore I saw a new color.

The borders vanish and I recall your need for impulsive rebellion. Yet how habitual your exercise. One day you ran into the car head-first because vision was not a component of your freedom. You had articulated your freedom to the insanity of the moment. Your passage was given and you went blindly. You ran into the car and returned, tail tucked between your legs.

I recall the passion and loyalty in your eyes. The untempered, purity of your love. A balanced equation of need and supply. 

What you had to take was what you had to offer. 

In the kitchen you'd stare, make defiant moves to sit near by me, or my sister, or my mother, despite the consequence of those actions. That might be the very lesson. The very lesson that leads me to the moment of your passing.

I recall my mothers eyes as she sat in the chair and stared at me. The gradual tides of tears welling in her eyes and she spoke. As she told me of your last lunge out, upward to the sky. Your last leap and attempt at escape. Just after the poison had reached your veins. You lunged out in a rebellion and fell back into the executors arms. You could no longer eat. The cancer had conquered you completely. Limping you couldn't stomach the food; scared you'd stare back looking for us to rescue you, but we couldn't. You hung there in the suspension of your fate. 

You didn't want to go. You had the one's you loved around you, you had those who you cared for, you had your items in their place. You had the garden to attend, your friends and your family to protect. You had not wanted to go when you had to.

I avoided you ghost because I am imprisoned by the gentleness of your memory. I make no references to you for reasons I do not know. Why must all the gentle leave?

Now in the garden before me, on the porch of the house where I grew up, you are everything moving. The leaves and the blades of grass, the ripples of the water in puddles and the birdbath, the trunks of the trees swaying and the movements of light shifting in the glass. Everything is wagging and I see staring at me thousands of eyes, the eyes of the Sydney Ducks, the effigies of the criminals in Hangtown, the Donner Party, all my college friends, sailors, longshoremen, teamsters, wheelwrights, shipwrights, bartenders, saloon keepers, washerwomen, domestic servants, dressmakers, the employers who fired and hired me, Johnny Cash, the miners and forty niners, the british queen and her headless servants, my father, mother, and sister all staring at me.

The wind is at my back and animating the world before me, history is staring me right in the eyes and the ghosts have surrounded me. All windmills and sawmills and watermills. Turn before me, stirring dust, smoke and steam.

I am trapped and suddenly something wild and animal has conquered my veins, the ink in my lungs permeates my veins, I find an opening in the gate and I run for it.

Blindly sprinting in my cloud, my legs become your paws, my skin becomes yellow fur, I'm on all fours and running fast.

Then slam!

Curtains are opening, the pen rises, a pin-point of light dilates, and three hanging bandits...

Today, we begin with a story of an end.

It is May 3, 2013, my 23^rd birthday, and from this porch, I'm in conversation with a ghost.

To the right of me is an empty chair. To left of me, is the house I live in now.

This is a track-home house in an suburb of Sacramento called Folsom. I grew up in this house, or more, I spent the latter years of my youth here.

First with my mother then, my father joining later in a different house.

I returned here after the unsuccessful stint of an independent post-graduate career—a fate I attempted to avoid. Yet, six months with two part-time jobs (independent movie theater and Macy's), a journalism gig that never paid, a growing debt, and an expensive room in some renovated tool shed had led me to a jaded pessimism and depression that no one should have at the age of twenty-two.

So here I write on the porch of this house. I write from the very house that represents something more than a present dilemma, an existential metaphor, or paradigmatic modern fate. I write here because I believe it is the perfect moment for the optimistic narrative that I hold in foresight. I am here with a ghost, with my past, and I swear there is ink in my lungs.

On the porch it is my belief that I am at the runway. I am at zero, the precipice, with a leveled head, eyes focussed and scanning, hands ample, ready, and free, on my toes, well hydrated and well rested, a new persuasion of wind at my back, the road ready to rise to my every step, and the sun never in my eyes. The world opening like the palm of a hand. Eyes awaking for the first time. The first laugh in a crib.

What a place to begin: where it all started: the vessel of history: the porch for understanding.

So I write to you of ghosts. Or one in particular.