Clay Matthews |
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Silverback Sexy Back Sweeping up my hair after my wife cuts it because I don’t trust many people with my looks, I look out the basement door to where the sun does something with the field, there’s not much I can say about this, just at this moment I’m glad the neighbors haven’t yet mowed. My head is a house and my hair a yard and my body a kingdom, he says. I’ve never seen a kingdom so all I have is the legend to draw on. And draw over. I was sitting at one of the many yuppie restaurants the other day, drinking a beer and eating fried onions and watching two kids in a booth next to mine coloring on the paper that they give kids to color on in places like these. I’m not sure if crayons and alcohol are a good idea, but it’s something to draw the parents in, so that they can eat one moment of one meal in peace. Once my friend and I were kicked out of a bar for writing obscenities with chalk on the wall. We were drunk, and I don’t even know where the chalk came from, only that Logan wrote in giant words (cursive): Clay has smelly balls. I shouldn’t even mention this, it’s embarrassing, for all parties involved. But we were younger and in love with being younger. Now I look at my hair going out the door, and the broom, and a few slivers of white. You just wake up one day and it’s happened: you’re older and you know it. Granted I’m not old in comparison to most, but in comparison to me I’ve been around longer than I ever really predicted. I always thought I’d go out in some hellish blaze of glory, guns slinging, pills and booze, face-down in the chest of a beautiful woman, twenty-five. But I’ve made it past the hump period, I’ve outgrown my high auto insurance. As I’m writing this my father is at a school in Texas learning how to become an insurance adjustor. There are so many things I’d like to adjust, even if only slightly. Dad’s had probably at least twenty careers, and in many ways I love him for this. Grey-bearded and reckless. The perpetual mid-life crisis. It’s all crisis, from the moment we enter to the moment we eat one last pudding laced with antibiotics and Valium, and let it all go forever. But there will be haircuts, many (god willing), between now and then. And homes and friends and cars but hopefully nothing too red or too fast. Or, maybe, and why the hell not. There’s just one life to live. So I take the writing on the wall, and read what it says, and claim it, every word. Yea, I am named, and I am of the flesh. And like many other animals I am taking on another shade, slowly transforming into one colorful excuse for a big brash bike with flames on the tank, and enough chrome to take it all in. * & Garden Outside the motors of one mower after another kept calling me out of whatever intentions I had to let the grass in the front yard go one being grass as that wild old getup that never stops growing. Needless to say I needed a haircut, too. It was life down the street as one giant Caterpillar and then another took turns demolishing the space between point A and point B. I knew a dog once to sleep in the bucket of a backhoe and never know any better. I guess there’s nothing much better to know. And I have not been sleeping well at all it is the heat of the summer or the echo of an engine over and over and when I close my eyes I see a thousand different things I see my friend Jimmy sometimes I see an oil pan I see these other faces I do not know and teeth on a tray beside a pile of dirty screws. I’ve spent the first part of my life trying to avoid the mechanics of mechanics and this the second part of my life trying to wear overalls with a straight face. And relatively I know nothing, except that my life is as divisible as anything else. Relatively, I think, I’ve got relatives all over the place who are laughing. And I keep thinking about lawnmowers but I can’t figure out why exactly it must have something to do with metaphor but I’m speaking of things at the literal level I’m talking about losing fingers and slinging rocks and mulching or bagging or canning the whole escapade of self-reliance and hiring some lawn care specialists to take care of the dirty work. But it is the dirty work I cherish these days be it for nostalgia of the years gone by when I was that lawn boy or be it because that kid in Can’t Buy Me Love was a lawn boy or be it because I simply get so bored sometimes that the only thing that keeps me going is having a nice yard. And just like that movie fashioned after that song by the Beatles after which I am fashioning myself sometimes (or maybe not) I like to think you can’t buy love, or if not love you can’t buy the do-it-yourself projects even when they are disasters. Because life is most like life around these disasters, big or small, when working becomes a motion to cling to while the yard and house and home slowly start to look like something out of a magazine, or if not a magazine then at least some dream, another fiction that begins and ends as one page turns into the next. |
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