Todd Camack @ tumblr.

I’ve been accessing a part of me that’s kind of sad, kind of dark. And I don’t like it. I’m a natural jokester. I deal with grief, with most any problem, by joking my way through it. I celebrate good times and good fortune in the same way. So the gloom- I don’t wear it well. It’s discomforting and I want to quickly backstep and obfuscate it. But it’s there, a part of me, too. Just as much as anything else, the laughter and warmth.

I discovered how rewarding being a smartass could be ‘round 4th Grade. Accidentally, I suspect. In class. What was said in either direction - between my teacher and myself - has been lost to time. What I do know is that the exchange got laughs. From my fellow students and my teacher. It was the beginning of a wonderful career of peer adulation, scowls from faculty, and detention slips that lasted through my graduation from high school. In spite of rough, depressive spots I was dragged through through my adolescence, the “class clown” in me prevailed, always eventually helping me overcome whatever emotional/social downturn I’d experience during that period. In hindsight, contemporaries are split when describing me; those who’d never gotten that close to me remember me as a quiet, dour-looking misfit, while those with whom I’d achieved a good tightness recall someone with a quick or ever-present smile who always managed to pass that smile on to others with wit and good nature. I don’t know if I’m either of those guys. I’m probably somewhere in the middle. Probably always was. Anyway, the point of bringing all this up was to bring it up to myself, primarily. To remind myself that I’m about something beyond the dreary. To push myself toward that side of me. For a change.

It’s not easy. Sometimes shit comes up that colors a person’s outlook darker than it should be. Gotta try to make your own sun when it gets dreary, though. Or you’ll never see the fucking sun again. True story.

I’m on a nostalgia kick. I’m probably always on a nostalgia kick. I adore the days gone by, you know? The ones I’ve known and never knew. Recalling things through that patina one does when high value is placed on certain memories, recalling them as one thinks they should be remembered rather than exactly how they were. And attaching high value to the times one wishes had been within his or her lifetime and late-enough within that lifetime to enjoy.

I got away from a bit of that, a few years ago, when Facebook came along and I was able to reunite with a number of friends from various eras of my lifetime. These reunions were overwhelmingly positive. But they kind of destroyed the fantasy I’d enjoyed for so many years of the old days, just by introducing me to the reality of each of these people, of their personalities, bringing them out of our childhood into the present. I’d loved the times we’d shared as kids, but for so long, my memories of those times were populated by souls in arrested development. Now there were adults in their places, adults with adult lives and adult fortunes and troubles and the children these people once were, they just sort of vanished. And with them, the patina around my memories. And… As the beauty of fantasy erodes… I just had memories. Which were good… But real. Not that what I’d previously remembered wasn’t… It was just that a certain “magic” about those memories had departed when past finally collided with present and those children I’d known so long before - children who, over the years, maintained personalities that I, as a child, had seen in them through my own eyes and mind - were suddenly adults. With true personalities. Personalities that had developed over time and were shaped by it and by what they’d experienced within it. No longer the fantasy characters I had no choice but remembering as that’s who and what I perceived them to be as the child I was when we’d last been parts of each other’s lives.

We were now adults. With adult lives. We got to know each other, some of us, as we’d become. As we did so, the world I remembered as ours as children tipped and fell away, leaving me with relationships belonging more to the present than the past. And as some of these people became ill and passed away, that old world of memory disappeared, leaving recollections of us in a different time and place, but that time was gone and that place was a cold shell and those of us who remained, we- Or… I. I didn’t belong in that universe. Their universe. The one that included them all. As they grew up and developed into people. As they embarked upon their lives. As they might’ve shared details of those lives. My life went into another direction. Became part of another universe. In which I shared my life with the lives of others also parts of that universe. While daydreaming of my childhood in the former. Seeing it through such a pretty haze that it made any life I could live outside of it pale. While sometimes overlooking the beauty of my actual existence, my life as it truly was.

I’ve been experiencing the first time in awhile the memories of certain eras of my life, of its past and the warmth their memories bring. Sometimes, too, their chill. I need them. To help me to understand where I’m at, where I’m going. Too long spent within them, though, and I’m lost. Living in a cartoon. Used to immersing myself in a fantasy world populated by “souls” I kept with me for decades, letting their personalities live as they would if not develop, I found that world empty. Everyone had moved away. Grown up. Started careers and families. Some had died.

I smile. Nod. It’s okay. It’s like I’ve been released from a prison of sorts, allowed my freedom after all this time.

I continue to reminisce. To enjoy things out of time. Out of place. I just can’t live there, anymore. I don’t need to. I needn’t hide from my life through a period of my past in that period, any longer. If I ever did. I have too much to lose.

So. I’m allowed objectivity. Comment. A few moments of shut-eyed glee while considering my next topic. Then it’s on to the next thing.

Always a “next” thing. “Next” operating forward rather than behind.

Not always a perfect fit for nostalgia, this, but necessary for bearing. And for wits.

America was, in parts, as maybe Woodie Guthrie or Jack Kerouac had left it, yet, into my childhood in the 1970s, clutching to life in the nation’s western and southwestern outback, across networks of old, ragged two-lane highways straddled by little communities of archaic build, their homes and businesses constructed of warping, worn woodwork, crumbling brick and falling stone, marked by old signage of faded paint, often representing defunct companies over and in front of establishments no longer open for business. Shuttered gas stations and closed-up diners and run-down motels along roads that had seen busier days but came to see hardly any traffic at all but that of locals and the assorted lost motorist off a distant freeway or the tourist out to discover America but with some idea of it beyond what it actually ever was, stopping to gawk in mock wonder - if mockingly at all or in wonder at all - at some old homestead or mound of refuse or old-timer sunning himself in boredom against the frame of a post office or what had once been a post office, snatching cameras out of their pockets or bags to laughingly snap photos of these attractions or - but rarely - doing so with the respect one gives to the dying. That manner of reverence. Because what they witnessed, though clawing at life, was more a shadow of it than an example of it, life, and - as it slipped away - it would be gone as the decade turned. As the last of the great, uncompleted coast-to-coast interstate highways were completed, finally bypassing the countryside in its entirety, severing the rural from the urban forever, as American pop culture no longer had to be tied along itself from Atlantic to Pacific metropoli through Guthrie’s America or Kerouac’s but for strategically-placed homogeneous fuel stops and chain restaurants with drive-through service. Even the passenger trains stopped running. The nation traversing itself via airline, making journeys in hours that had once taken days or weeks to complete, transforming that great adventure of youth many of us once enjoyed - or endured, depending - of travel to a long commute. And though many still elected to make that grand road trip, it’s soul had changed. As ours had. We were no longer communing with America as we traveled through it but seeing its bones in a museum. Sometimes against out will. Because of missed flights or having to make the rent instead of being able to buy that ticked. So we drove. Or rode along as passengers. Passing through ghost towns and through points of interest long-ago turned to ruin beyond what had made them interesting in the first place. Stopping, now and then, to photograph the oddity of it all. Rather than to remember what it was all about, what had brought it all about. And why. And why it went away. And how.

It clung to life in the ’70s as the freeways grew nearer to completion, as older generations gave way to the young. Clinging as the elders did. To days and ways of lives gone by. You could still find it - and them - with hardly an effort, back then. You could live among them. You could know that America. As inflation threw the dollar’s power into the dirt, as AM radio was transforming from backbone to back burner. But while what had come before was still alive, out there. Somewhere. In the stories parents and grandparents told, in the presence of their idols who remained to entertain them. Unable to keep up with the times but unwilling to, anyway, thus preserving something of their days for a generation after the one following their own. And it called out to us. To some of us. “America’s still around, kids… Come out and see!” And we did. We marveled at it. At the things and the people, there, and how they lived. And the best of us - with the worst of us - declared it passé and helped tear it down and bury it. Its importance, its purpose, it’s industry. It’s history. Buried not in earth but time. Dragging its natives who survived kicking and cursing into our time.

Now we think it’s “quaint”. Stylish. The style of it. The rustic quality of it. The rust of it. Worn, twisted wood and rusted iron. Painted signage whose paint has faded over ages of exposure to the elements, rough-hewn architecture of old influencing the current ideas of the trendy.

“This shit must’ve come from somewhere… I wanna find that place!”

So we take to the road, this generation. Those behind us. To discover - to recover - the dead we buried. Finding that we never actually killed it. What hadn’t died off on its own. But we changed it. Into some kind of zombified version of itself. Something to be made fun of, to be feared. Filthy and backward. Fueled by methamphetamine and unforgivably xenophobic, staring at - snarling at - any outsider happening along. Waving a flag that represents ideals it doesn’t and can’t understand. Waving it atop the rubble of what had once adorned family photo albums and picture postcards. While what was left standing for whatever reason after the new world had closed itself off from it falls apart and is left in disrepair. Lacking the acumen and ability to care for itself. Lacking industry to maintain itself. We found this place - and we left it, again. Fast. After doing our best to bring the new world into it, to inoculate it from the damage we’d already done unto it, and failing. Leaving behind vacant storefronts and vacant lots and empty homes and pastures left to grow weeds. Powerless gas pumps stand vigilant over quiet streets, cars once the pride of their owners rest upon rotting tires in forgotten backyards, their shattered windows and windshields glinting sunlight into the eyes of passersby who aren’t there. While, a block or two away, an old man rests on a bench in front of what may have once been a shop of some kind. A barbershop. With its pole featuring flaking red, white, and blue paint spun around it.

A brand-new SUV pulls up to the curb at the decaying sidewalk in front of the old feller. A guy within - a grinning twenty-something - rolls down the front passenger’s-side window. “Hey, old-timer! What’s this place’s story?”

“Huh?”

“What’s this place’s story? What’s the purpose of this town?”

The old man chuckled at the youth’s question before standing up and hobbling away up the street.

Writing after a long hiatus isn’t much different from taking a shit after a long period of constipation. Eventually, everything comes out at once. Everything. It’s not pretty, it doesn’t feel good. Never listen to those who say, “It’ll make you feel better.” It won’t. It’ll make you feel like you’ve just ass-raped yourself in reverse. And somehow, everything that comes out of your ass will be attached to something in your head. So, with that last push that sends every ounce of feces from you, some mass of thought great or small will be pulled out with it until you’re done, leaving you with a messed-up pile of crazy that even your closest loved ones will look cross-eyed at, then you. Before carefully back-stepping away. Probably to tell everyone on Facebook about it.

I showed all kinds of nuts, yesterday. A cacophony of painful stuff I was working out for myself. In some way, it did help, getting it all out of my brain and onto paper. Or screen. Whatever. In that it’s no longer poking at the backs of my eyeballs or trying to force itself out through my fingers or mouth or wherever issues can position themselves to be heard. As much of a mess as all of it was to articulate, it’s done with. I’m ready, now, to get onto the next thing.

I was about to start writing about the next thing… Until I realized I had a few more ounces of crazy to shake off my leg.

I’m a sentimental fool - with an emphasis on “fool”. I recall the past and make a nest for myself, there, among the memories that comfort me, living amongst people long-dead in some way imaginable, each one. As am I, living through the avatar of a boy since grown and moved beyond them and the world they shared with me. Even the geography, the places within it, have changed beyond my familiarization with them or they no longer exist. That is part of life. Of existing. That, sooner or later, whatever lives shall no longer exist. Even as I write this, I discover that my favorite baseball cap is torn at the brim. A hat I’ve had for years, given to me by a friend I doubt I’ll ever see again. The hat, the friend - they’ve become one in my mind. The tear in the fabric of the object equals a tear in the fabric of the friendship, in the friend, and a reminder that we’ve each moved on in our lives and though we parted ways well, our places in each other’s lives are no more. And it pisses me off. That I was that reckless. With the one object I have that represents - tangibly represents - my departed friend. Departed in space and time but not existence. Still, he’s gone from my life and me from his and that’s, in its way, death.

Maybe I’ve always known the day would come. When I lost the hat. Or it was destroyed. I always worried that I was putting it in harm’s way, somehow. I suppose that it became my pal in absentia in effigy. Like the people we care about, we can’t always treat the items in our lives as if wrapped protectively and secured from the elements for all time. Things wear. Things are damaged. Destroyed and lost. I remind myself that the guy who gave me the hat is alive and well, elsewhere. And maybe this little catastrophe came right when I needed it to, as I battle with myself over passages and ancient history and I comfort myself from present hardships by slipping into my past. Which is something I’ve done for a good portion of my life: living within a representation of life rather than living it. Not quite accepting that anything outside of the present isn’t reality. It’s life in effigy. Unnatural. But a lot of us do it. I’ve done it for longer than I care to admit. Some of it facilitated by a terrific memory that doesn’t know when it’s time to give itself a break. There are times when I honestly think I’m back then. Whenever “then” is. Dependent upon the situation, the people involved, the place I’m connecting with. You will come along, looking exactly as I remember you, but aged, and we’ll talk a bit - and the incredible realization will hit that we’ve not seen each other for ages. When we’d just spent time together earlier in the day. In my head. Living our past lives over and over together. Interacting as we’d always done. Twenty… Thirty… Forty years of life together, manufactured out of just a few. Without effort; it just happens like that, spun together in the mind. Looped over and over. I look into the mirror and often wonder, “Who is that old man, there?”. Because I’ve been somewhere else. And I can’t quickly reconcile - if I can manage it at all - the dichotomy of the “then” and “now”. At least in some way. An old crush with a house full of children, a family of her own. Being 18 with being 44. A baseball cap with the person who’d given it to me.

When I was younger, I went through a bad time. Retreating to the past was the best way I could escape it, then. It didn’t cost money, it was available on demand. Part of me remained where my memories left it. Even as things got better for me, I was always kind of stuck “back there”. Then, as I grew older, I realized that I’d stuck myself back in those latter days of good fortune, as well. I would go back whenever things got rough, whenever tears came and I needed a laugh, whenever I needed fun, whenever I needed to be held and told that everything would be okay.

I made a habit of memorializing those days and the people in them by setting aside things they’d given to me. Letters, cards, other objects. A Jack O’Lantern, one year, that I kept in a shoebox for a decade-and-a-half, desiccating among old National Geographics in my den. Concert and airline tickets. I’m like a pack rat of mementos. Ironically, I was better at taking care of those mementos than my relationships with the actual people they represented. I vowed years ago to change that; I’m still a work-in-progress. Some friendships have been salvaged or are being salvaged… Others are- I don’t know. What I do know is that they should’ve never become exchanged for icons. Not even icon images of memory. Especially not those. Most of my loved ones have aged well, but my image of them pervades my “here and now” rather than them. As they are. At least sometimes. Young girls frolicking at the pool rather than middle-aged women trying to clean the shit stains out of their husbands’ underwear with a toothbrush. We will all be there. On one side of that story or the other. Young men in their prime, now hobbling about with canes or walkers, beer gut proudly displayed. We will be there, too. If we’re not there, already. But at this point, I’m just babbling. Wanting and needing to acknowledge the importance of accepting all that space that’s supposed to be in the middle of all that time. Spent in the present, growing and learning. Building. All of it missed while looking backward. In the rear-view mirror. Or hanging from it. Like a class key.

Well, shit. Maybe I can mend the cap with some black thread. I might be able to do it. Not a complete loss. I like that hat.

I used to live in this two-laned, crackly neon-lit world that smelled like grease pits and cigarettes that spoke a language of its own made up of slot machine bells and clanking beer glasses and hazy laughter, its soundtrack a jukebox full of Johnny Cash 45s and the “Bubblegum” pop of its day. And the odd folk tune.

“Where have all the flowers gone? Long time passin’… Where have all the flowers gone? So long, ago…”

A black & white TV was bracketed to the corner of the wall above the bar, showing flickering images of men golfing.

Nearby, balls on a pool table clicked against each other and the bells of a jerking pinball machine dinged to its master as its score reels clacked as they rolled in advance, its lights blinking in the man’s face.

The aroma of the joint’s pizza oven joined the smoky atmosphere, both filling every room in the place.

I hated the smoke. Cigarettes. As I do now. But almost everybody else smoked, back then - even the kids. The older ones, anyway. Rough kids. With slits for eyes and bowed arms at their sides put on for show to show that they meant business. I was an infant; I didn’t have a chance against kids like that. I was small and kids like that prey on the weakest. Somehow, I survived. Stoic, evidently - but, in reality, terrified. I stood my ground and impressed a few of them enough to fall under a kind of protective state. When I was just taking it all in and nothing more. Little more. As I got older, I learned to play the game, learned to affect airs of bravery that both aggravated and endeared, I imagine. Depending on the kid I stood before. One, the other, or a combination of the two. Anyhow, I got to move among most of these guys and did so without harm. Although not without fear. Even if I pretended unto them that I had none. I think they knew. That was the whole point of my inclusion, most likely. They knew I was scared to death of them but stood my ground anyway. Tough boys, all about trouble. And I stood with them. Until I could get away. Excuse myself while keeping face, maybe, and get away. Past the cash register counter where, beneath, boxes of candy bars of unknown age were displayed behind glass and out through the swinging doors, where the crispness of the twilight air would slap me in the face and the noise from the passing traffic, too, and the sounds from the joint within - now behind me - came still loudly but muffled and that familiar grease pit scent would catch my nostrils and the blinking lightbulbs and crackling neon from the sign above my head and I’d shove my hands in my jacket pockets and - putting my head down - make my way quickly across the street and on to home.

Off the main drag, many of the streets were dirt. The last of the day’s light had begun to fade an hour or so before and was now a thin ribbon of reddish-orange enrobed in purple across the mountains ringing the western edge of town. Each house I passed on the way to my own gave off familiar evening scents of dinner cooking or laundry being dried as purple light overcame the rest and it was overcome itself by evening’s darkening around it. Somebody’s TV was blaring. Then the next house came up and it was the same but another station. The next house was quieter, but the one after that exuded “Rock & Roll” from evidently huge speakers. And then a block of relative silence. A barking dog. An old pickup ricketting by, then a cross street, where a muscle car sped loudly past. There were no sounds of children playing; they’d all gone in for the night.

Ahead was the lot on which my grandparents’ doublewide trailer once sat. Years before. Before we’d left town and left the town after that. I’d returned - with one of my sisters - to live with our mother because I’d missed Nevada. I’d held a special love for it all my life. Because of its two-laned, dirty, neon, slot machine belled beauty. Ignoring its beer can litter, its smoke, its lack of urbanity. I loved the desert and its sagebrush. The characters living within it. My ancestry, there. Although nearly all of my extended family had moved along. To California. Iowa. The Rockies, the Pacific Northwest - even abroad. I’d petitioned my mother to take me back with her from my auntie’s in San Diego were I lived not because of any love for my wayward mother nor hatred for my aunt but because and only because I’d had spent part of that past summer in Tonopah, there, and needed to go back. Not wanted, but needed. I’d dreamed of going back every night, dreamed of the town, the desert, children I’d gone to preschool with and had never forgotten. San Diego was beautiful. But I wasn’t in love with it. I longed for the “Old West”, run-down-past-its-prime feel of what I’d just experienced while on the road with my family. I longed to revisit lost memories and the people and places within them. The sights, sounds… The feel of them. Their scent. Their taste. It was the girl who won my heart over the prettier one because the latter lacked character. Charm. The charisma of the former. I was in love.

My grandparent’s old lot sat carved in the slope of the hill below the town’s Baptist church. It had changed. An outbuilding swapped-out for another… Another trailer, of course. Newer, fancier. And the property was fenced-in. Adjacent was the tree-shrouded alley - trees now bare because of the season - that ran to the south, bordered by abandoned homes and sheds from the town’s silver-mining heyday and a worn, unpainted picket fence that ran along the property of the home at the south end of the alley on the left. To the right was an old stone home in which the lady who owned our house just behind it lived. I turned in and strode up the hill and turned into our drive and went inside, through the front mud porch.

There was a bright yellow end table, there, my grandmother had painted years ago. I recalled the night she’d decided to do that. The odor of the paint as soon as she’d pried open its can. She’d spread newspaper across the kitchen to avoid dripping on the linoleum, there. I remembered marveling at the shade of yellow she’d picked: a bright, shiny, almost “road sign” shade of yellow that really didn’t match anything and certainly didn’t belong indoors in my opinion, but she liked it and that’s all that mattered, I guess.

These little houses seemed built without a plan, each of them. Maybe added to as their owners deemed necessary over the course of their lives, their families’ needs. Odd floorplans, rooms put in off other rooms without evident reason, plain while nearby rooms were decked-out in carpet and tedious woodwork, long kitchens and bathrooms located through and at the end of byzantine lengths of hallway, along which several doors to the outside were cut into the walls. A second mud porch, off a disused chicken coop. Windows everywhere in some places, completely lacking at other sides of the house. And one heat source - small and hardly able to heat the room in which it was located, let alone circulate hot air from itself into the house’s furthest reaches.

In the wee hours of the night, I would creep out of bed and into the kitchen, where our furnace was installed, and sit in the small crook between it and the corner of the room for warmth and to think about things.

Odd as this little house was, I found it emotionally warm and remember it fondly. But those memories come from a time before my mother broke down and had to be taken to a hospital for a few weeks, coming back with her fiancé a completely different woman, full of anger and hatred and more the woman my grandmother hadn’t wanted me nor my sister around than the woman I’d grown fond of the previous summer, quietly sweet and a somewhat tragic character, someone who needed me, perhaps. As much as I wanted to need her.

She asked me where I’d been. Without anger, without concern.

I’d made it home as she was getting ready to put dinner on the table.

It was Spaghettios. With buttered bread on the side. And milk to drink.

I sat down and began to greedily shovel food into my mouth.

“You eat like your Uncle Joe did, when he was in the Army,” she calmly observed.

I asked if there was any more. She told me there was and spooned a second helping onto my plate.

The two eldest of my younger sisters in the house plodded along, pushing their spoons around their plates with little desire to finish their initial helping.

The baby sat in a high chair off the other end of the table.

Another sister had gone to live with her dad the year before.

When I was born, my mother had given me over to her parents to raise. She then divorced my dad, remarried, had a daughter, then split with her second husband. She reunited with my dad and a few months later, another sister was born. The story she tells - almost while chuckling - is that one of the nurses at the hospital where she was giving birth to my second sister jokingly offered to take the baby. To which our mother said, “Go ahead!” Or something close. And when she came home, she gave up that little girl to our grandparents, too, electing to keep the elder sister only. She remarried, had another daughter. The two of us living with our grandparents weren’t allowed much contact with the two living with our mother - this being our mother’s directive. Even when the woman got into trouble and had to be bailed out and brought home to live in a spare room of the house.

We lived with our grandparents until my grandmother died of cancer, then went to San Diego with our mother’s sister. Until I made a lot of noise about wanting to go back to Nevada. To our mother’s, who’d recently given birth to another daughter. And there we are.

After dinner, I went outside to look at the stars, at the lamp-lit windows from all the houses along and up and down the hillside, and I tried seeking out bats flying about, which ended unsuccessfully before I’d decided it was too cold to remain outdoors.

My mother had baked a kind of cake from a mix that was popular, back then; it included an oven-safe pan that you mixed the packet and whatever else - egg, milk, whatever - in before baking and, when done, there was a packet of frosting to spread on top. She’d baked one of those and called me into the kitchen for a piece that she’d cut out of its ready-to-go pan. My sisters were still picking at their dinner.

“Did you want more milk?” my mother asked. “With your cake?”

I told her I did and she poured a small glass and handed it to me and I scarfed down the cake and gulped the milk and left for the living room to watch TV.

That was an evening.

Our mother’s fiancé had gotten bunk beds for us to sleep in, putting them in the weird little room off the main one. I picked the top bunk.

The second-eldest sister had her own bed across the room.

In the middle of the night, I could hear my mom weeping. Every night. One night of it, I fell asleep having been hearing all that weeping and pissed the bed at some point, crawling out of the top bunk to sit by the little furnace in the kitchen to warm up and dry out.

She had her breakdown not long after. As she came in through the door after coming back from some hospital in Reno, I jumped up to greet her - but she shouted me off.

“This is all your fault!” Screaming at me how I’d wrecked her life for just having been born.

I rode my bike down into town. To watch the traffic go by. From either direction. Passenger cars, freight trucks, buses… Catching their exhaust in my nose, listening to their beeping horns and to their engines gunning, their tires grinding across the asphalt. The old hangout was closed. Shut down. I watched people coming and going from other places, to other places, rushing across the street or trying to avoid walking or running into me and my bike, there, on the sidewalk.

“Get out of my way!” an angry face spat. I didn’t know who it was - it was just angry. Like it’s existence was all about being out there, being angry. At me or anyone. At random. A random purpose to be angry. To hurt.

I pedaled to the back of a nearby restaurant, just to be near the grease pit. To take in that greasy odor. Squeezing my eyes shut, sending myself into another place and time, when I’d felt like life was something to break like a beautiful, wild horse rather than something that might actually break me. Broken beyond what a horse like that might do if I screwed up. If I came up short.