In a small suburb north of Salt Lake City, west of the train tracks and the freeway, a mile or so from an oil refinery, there is a neighborhood of homes decked in pale pastel vinyl siding, two-story structures with steeply pitched roofs to slough off heavy snow in hard winters. The neighborhood was built in mere months by crews of specialized construction workers moving from plot to plot, from the ground up—foundation to sub-floor to framing to rocking to shingles to paint, carpet, and drapes. My family had moved from an adjacent neighborhood to Boise the summer before, but while we lived there I remember the land differently. It was where, at 11, I had my first job in a pumpkin patch owned by the Patch’s, and for $25/week I worked the field every afternoon scissoring vines with heavy duty pruners, chucking pumpkins into neat rows before hefting the orange squashes from the ground to an older kid who launched the pumpkins into the back of a panel truck where other younger kids caught and carefully placed them, ready to be shipped. We worked in shifts of 10 or so until the sun went down. And then I went home and did or didn’t do my school work, but thought about what I might buy with the $25 I would make for the twenty hours of labor I put in for the week.
*
I keep a piece of obsidian on a shelf above my couch that I snatched from the Three Sisters Wilderness in the Cascade Range just outside of Bend, Oregon. It’s glossy and black and even now as I rub my fingers over the uneven surface of the glassy piece it feels inimitably smooth. From what I call the backside of the rock, the sharp, jagged edges look like uneven state lines carved out by a twisting river. This little place, this little shape I hold has its own volcanic history and I wonder what would have come of it had I not pocketed the piece on a hike.
Once, a Boise friend of mine stowed back from the region multiple large chunks of the jet-black glass and years after we stopped skateboarding together, after we stopped doing drugs together, after his marriage and home purchase, before his first child, we sat in his front yard and clapped two pieces of the old igneous rocks together until razor-sharp blades spun onto our feet, into his grass. We took up the pieces and worked the delicate tools over our skin. I drew open the flesh on the meaty part of my thumb, slow and precise, and palmed up my hand toward my old friend as a bead of blood slinked toward the tip of my middle finger.
*
I only attempted to play Cowboys and Indians a few times in my life. Todd Smith, my neighbor across the street wanted to play after he received a chintzy bow-and-arrow set as a gift. Naturally, he wanted to be the Indian. And as cool as I thought Indians were—their mystery and myth, glossy, black hair, and their inherent communicability with the land—I recognized the game, even then, as something children were supposed to play more than I wanted to actually pick sides and perform fake murders. Each of us knew the narrative and I had no interest in pew-pewing my finger-gun while Todd clumsily slung arrows that I could easily dodge. Maybe this was a game more fit for a city kid, someone who wouldn’t eventually conflate living in the West with isolation, fallow land, and a stoic gaze of quiet admiration pressed to the west toward a sinking bronze sun after a long day of hard work—I didn’t know what to call it then, but these images circulated in my imagination and, I suppose, shaped what the West, where I was from, was or could have been. I never wanted to play at being Western. I just thought, even before I ever touched or saw a horse in person, that I was a cowboy, that I was Western.
Learn a trade, my father told me in high school, because when all of it goes to shit (my word), buildings still need be built. So before I finished grade school I knew how to plant and tend a garden, keep up a lawn, install sprinklers, prune a tree, frame a wall, mix concrete, haudy brick, push a broom, handle a shovel, swing a hammer, change a car’s oil, tires, filters, plugs and cables, fix leaky sinks and toilets with their filthy wax gaskets—I knew the use of tools and I could work. And that meant I could survive by any means necessary.
*
Mormons are an industrious people. The state seal of Utah features a beehive, the insect noted for its communal lifestyle and rich, round house of honey, a symbol of productivity and collectivism. I was raised Mormon, from the Beehive State. Between 1958 and 1980, nearly 2,500 Mormon meetinghouses were built in the United States. Almost all of these structures were erected out of only 23 building plans, at a rate of nearly 114 a year, a sluggish pace compared to the current rate of one-a-day. The 23 different plans were divided into three subcategories: rural, suburban, and urban, based on population and allotted space. This “Standard Plan” architecture proliferated in the 1960s when the demand for drafts of meetinghouses couldn’t meet the rate of migrating Mormons. The Church has purportedly purchased land in every county in America, all 3,143. If the Church built a meeting house in every county at a very modest 100‘x400‘, not including parking lots or landscaping, the structures alone would consume 125,720,000 square feet, 2,886 acres, 2,774 football fields.
My father built our childhood home, a red brick rambler on a quarter-acre lot, based on the designs he borrowed, took, from his brother-in-law. My dad and his brothers bolted frame to foundation, hammered sheetrock to frame, detailed cabinets and crown to the identical nooks of a structure erected less than two miles away. A window to my aunt and uncle’s master bedroom, was the window in my childhood bedroom where I was often sent when my temper flared, where I would angrily stare out at the last hum of daylight through a window filmed over with a patina of rain and sprinkler water concealing, hiding, me inside. Glaze hiding gaze hiding light hiding out.
*
Before bipeds had any known name for various tools, for exacting their usefulness into language, the Oldowan, some 2.6 million years ago, used hunks of fist-sized rocks as tools for pounding, striking, knapping against other rocks such as quartz, obsidian or flint, any stone that, when chipped, might flake out an edge. It’s likely that they used the knives to slice through tough animal hides to the edible flesh. The stone that made the knife might have also been used to break the animal’s bones, reveal the thick, crimson marrow rich in protein and nutrients—marrow that strengthened their immune, cardiovascular and renal systems; marrow that improved memory, sleep, mood, perception and comprehension, and honed the instinct-conscious centers of the brain.
My Boise friend, Josh, and I took to shaping segments of obsidian into thin, dangerous slices—tools for which we had no use. The slim rock wasn’t as durable as the jackknife I kept on my hip, and it wasn’t as practical to carry. But we weren’t consumed with the labor to be performed with this object. For us, the tool was fun, and creating the crude instrument was entertainment. Our work was our play, and while I used razor-sharp tools to shape wood into cabinets, banisters, archways, and armoires, in my free time I was still obsessed with the edge.
I get possessed when I work. Tools and utility, movement and momentum consume me, and I’ll forget to eat. I work and I starve, and I get so incredibly hungry I can’t imagine ever feeding again, ever again being sated. I get sorry and depressed when I’m hungry, and I’m certain I’ll never be fully gratified, fulfilled. And then I eat. I eat quickly and furiously, with no regard for those around me. I eat until I’m too full, and I sit still, numbed and quiet, unable to imagine ever being hungry. How short my memory of longing—how brief my remembrance of loss.
*
After graduating high school, I took a job as a waiter 300 miles away from my parent’s home in Boise back to Salt Lake City. I was 18 and looking to leave. I could tell you about that restaurant, but you have eaten out, you know the scene. Work in the restaurant is not all that important. What’s important is that every restaurant, bar, pub, grille, or café keeps behind the patrons’ partition—the back of the house—a collective identity or disposition that shadows the forced smiles and polite greeting you receive at the table. Each establishment is slightly unique, but a restaurant constant is the insatiable draw of servers to complaining. Servers hate children and have little patience for the elderly. Food modifications are sacrilege. A table is always too fat, too cheap, takes up too much space, too specific, too long-winded, or too quiet. No matter the money, it can always be better. If it’s busy, servers prefer it slower. If it’s slow, servers speculate the reasons for the slogging shift, the location of the people, then finally note, always around the corner, the assurance of an impending rush—hidden ripples of peevish hearsay. And behind the complaining there are drugs and drunks to no limit.
A while back, in order to supplement my meager teaching salary, I took a job tending bar at a local joint. On a Friday night one of the bartenders, let’s call him Brian, called me to the back bar at the stroke of midnight to ring in his birthday. We ducked behind the bar and shot two ounces of black beer. I thought the non-spirit-shooting-ceremony odd, but Brian was excitable. Then we kept drinking through our shift and through the night. And when the cold sun called out cobalt blue and cut through the bible-black predawn, we stumbled through an alleyway to a bar that opened at 6:00 am where Brian opened a tab and quickly shot four shots of scotch. I put him in my truck to take him home, to nurse him. Before we got to my place he got violent in the truck, punched my arms and chest. At my place, I managed to lock him out of my house, in the front yard, and considered calling the police—an odd impulse for me as I considered sketching out my night’s events as some reasonable explanation to the cops. With my thumb on 9-1-1/Send, Brian jumped in through my front window and crashed the glass as blood red gashes on his chest and arms bled onto my couch and carpet.
I called the cops.
Later, he bought me a new couch, replacing the suede Craigslist freebee with the $300, uncomfortable, pleather monster that now rests beneath sturdy-looking shelves that now hold cacti in pots, my collection of rocks, and a smooth black piece of volcanic glass. He also gave me a $200 bottle of Johnny Walker Blue, which I exchanged at a big chain liquor store for four bottles of good bourbon.
After my semester started, I left the bar under seedy and nefarious circumstances—drunk on the job. And that day I went home and slept on the rug on my living room floor that weeks earlier I’d scrubbed clean of Brian’s blood. Some work, some tool, is indistinguishable from violence, from a weapon.
*
The reality of any job, any work, is the accompanying discomfort that work will cause, no matter how much you love your job. There are psychological anxieties, like how, when I proofread patents for a very prestigious law firm, despite my exceptional accuracy and efficiency, I felt that at any moment I would be fired. I had no reason to feel that way, but nevertheless did. In that office I didn’t feel qualified to complete the task at which I was thriving. I stacked packets of freshly proofed patents, unable to relax or perform a satisfying amount of work. I never felt that way when I built cabinets, though. Perhaps because I could show a boss, a foreman, a client what exactly it was I had been doing for the last eight hours. I could show them banisters, mantels, solid front doors, arches, countertops, cabinets, and crown. But I could also display three-inch splinters in my palms. Fingertips nicked, cracked and bloodied. Hands jagged and calloused, my boss’s hand missing a few digits. Or when tiling, with grout ever-crammed in every crevice of exposed skin. Or working the grill in a kitchen where burns and long, deep, clean cuts are customary. A cow can crush you if she stumbles in a headlock. A chainsaw can chew through your person. An axe can reveal hidden crimson anatomies that few of us have any real desire to see. I have a map of scars and calloused skin, dents, bruises, and crooked, healed bones. I also have remnants of memory, impressions of guilt, that direct my reflections like a map, but I can’t place a finger to my flesh and show you. Something like waiting tables, where there is always the post-shift pressing need of easy drugs and abundant alcohol, and guilt and indifference and on— Everything I’ve produced, it seems, comes with injury and personal harm.
I have all my fingers and limbs intact, and I have physical scars. But while my flesh was healing, I was making other, more detrimental practices of consumption, habits of my labors I regarded as a condition of the work.
*
I have only ever lived in the West, and most of that time has been in Utah. I moved from Salt Lake City to Boise, Idaho, to Logan, Utah, to Salt Lake City to Logan to Salt Lake to Tucson, Arizona. I’m a Westerner, and in all of its mythology and space, I identify with the West similarly to someone who was raised on Long Island is a New Yorker. This means something, this ascription of Westerner, and all of its endorsing attributes. I want to be what it means to be independent, to work hard, to be able to handle my own affairs. I call myself a rugged individualist, but try to say it tongue-in-cheek as I know the negative connotations that come with that title. I hate the West’s capitalist impulses, the misunderstanding of land rights and the willingness for Western state governments to exploit the landscape as a bargaining tool, a thing wielded and manipulated as though those who live in the West fashioned and own the space. I dislike the people in the West who outwardly express their insatiable greed of space. But I am one of those people, my spaces just have different shapes.
It was me who lit out on a wagon train to settle the wild earth. I raised crops and fenced off large plots of land. I feared the introduction of commerce and imminent approach of technology. I resisted growth that wasn’t grown by me and my own. I committed travesties to the land, and, today, I welcome nuclear incinerators near my hometown, sprawl cities through basin and range, I pull myself up by my bootstraps and ostracize those of different creed and color, shape and wage. I have in me all the insistence of isolation and hate and loathe my forbearers used to tread long, deep grooves in the earth with the clunky wooden wheels of a handcart. All the resentment they felt at being run out of every city between upstate New York and the Great Salt Lake.
I was raised Mormon, but never knew how to believe, everyone in my life just did. But I knew when I lifted my head from those baptismal waters at age 8 and still the same recalcitrant, angry child emerged, that it was all bullshit. I didn’t feel the Holy Ghost. I didn’t have that guiding spirit with me after a dip in that blessed Jacuzzi. Later, after I lost yet another lover to my own selfishness and isolation, alcohol and insatiable appetite, a friend would tell me: You can take the boy out of the religion, but you can’t take the religion out of the boy. I think he may be right. As much as I’ve manipulated and abused relationships and substances, I’ve held that every disgusting practice I’ve endorsed over the years has been a decision to remove myself from a past I’m ashamed to have laced into the lattices of my DNA. As landscape and moral rectitude is and was a tool of my people, so were my self-abuse, isolation, and alcohol tools to battle an upbringing I associated with willing ignorance and the quiet, unrealized angst that religion insists is a condition of lacking faith, curable with blessings and prayer.
*
After I met a poet shooting pool in a bar, after we dated long distance, after she half-moved in with me, after I watched her cat while she toured her first book, after she funded our summer in Prague, Spain, and Ireland with NEA money, after we dated for another year in Logan, Utah where I drank my way through a thesis, after she won the Amy Lowell Traveling Fellowship, after I deferred enrollment to another graduate degree then sold my car to pay for preparations to travel the world again, after we prepared for another trip to Peru, Argentina, Uruguay, Paris, Germany, Croatia, and Ireland, after I left for a weekend trip to say goodbye to my friends, after she found the email I left open on my massive computer hulked on the dining table professing my love and infidelity to another woman, after the fighting, the drinking, and the attempt to be civil while we packed her Toyota Camry towing a small U-Haul bound for D.C., after she left after we didn’t say goodbye, I found a flier in an artisan bakery for a position on a dairy farm milking cows and making farmstead cheese, $150/week, lodging provided. I moved in six days later.
*
Tools fix things. They repair, restore, mend, align, bend, settle, arrange, darn, patch, preserve, prepare, sift, slice, dice, measure, cut, heal, suture, guard, gash, sprinkle, and dash. At least this is what I thought. I love tools. I keep a dull pocketknife with me at all times, next to a pen in my front right pocket. I still believe these two tools can fix nearly anything I come across in the simple, labor-light academic life I now live. But a tool is just a paperweight without its user. A crudely shaped immovable object of cunning design with the express intent of a handler. All the tools I have want to use are nothing without the cinched grip and stiff wrist of my person. I am one who fixes, the tool is the go-between.
In this consideration, labor is a tool I use as well. I use labor to fix things while I fix things. I seek out hard work to be useful when I feel of no use. When the pen in my pocket fails to produce, I go for my knife. I want to chop wood. I want to dig trenches. I want again to haudy brick, to plant a garden, to overturn dark soil and, in the winter, fight snowmelt with sandbags, keep the frigid water from slipping through the sandy loam. If I’m not working, I’m not well, and I’m rarely not well when I’m working. Labor is the tool I use to fix something I don’t know how to make unbroken.
*
The Rockhill Creamery is a small, five-acre dairy farm in Richmond, Utah, 15 miles north of Logan and four miles south of the Idaho state line. There is one high school and no grocery store, a building with the word BANK embossed in white on the blush structure that is not a bank. One liquor store, one gas station, and one diner where old farmers belly-up on Saturdays to make statements at each other, tell two-sentence stories, and never ask questions.
The farm is gravel roads connecting an old grain elevator—now recognized by the historical society, the adjacent grain bin is not—a home, a hay barn, a calf barn, my former studio apartment with a down-sloping seven-foot ceiling, the milk house, and the upper and lower pasture where at any given time 12-15 Brown Swiss chomp on thick grass and groan and moo into the brisk canyon breeze that twinkles the thin leaves of the wind-breaking poplars while above them turkey vultures ride high the afternoon thermals before the sun breaks behind the western peaks of the Wellsville Range. I moved in and smoked a pipe to move toward quitting cigarettes, and I quit drinking to quit drinking a fifth before the sun went down.
In the evenings I sat in a wooden swing in front of the granary and re-read books I’d forgotten I loved. I awoke before dawn and fed the calves just as they echoed out their young voices through the calf barn. Then I’d milk the six cows we milked for cheese. On Monday and Thursday I made cheese with Jen, one of the owners, in the pristine Cheese Lab that Jen’s partner of 20+ years, Pete, built, tiled, and grouted himself. Jen and I listened to loud folk music and talked about food, about books, about family, about getting old, being young, and other work on the farm that need be done.
At night, after the second milking, I often joined Pete in his garage where he was always fixing his motorcycle, welding and repairing some crude steel gadget. Or we watched motorcycle videos on Youtube. The summer before I arrived, while I was visiting another lover in Salt Lake City, Pete sold his horse and bought a motorcycle to cut through the mountains around Logan and Richmond. Even when Pete wasn’t working he was working hard at playing. And that is why I went to the farm. To work. To, perhaps, relearn a nontoxic notion of respite.
*
I was an angry child. I had an immense temper. And I demonstrated it in the most profoundly impolite ways. I broke holes through walls. I thrust dull knives through locked doors where my siblings hid on the other side. I stabbed my sister in the thigh with a fork because she tried to bamboozle me into washing the dishes when it was my turn to dry. I threw rocks at cars. I was a fledgling vandal. An underdeveloped arsonist. Once, when I was nine, during the summer when both of my parents were at work and I was politely doing my weekday chores, I stuffed the distal phalange of the ring finger on my left hand into the back of a folded-sheet-metal handle of a dustpan. I let the tool dangle from my digit while I one-hand swept the concrete floor of the unfinished basement of my rambler home. Maybe curiosity, maybe angst, maybe something deeper caused me to turn the dustpan palm up, grip the handle with my right hand, and thrust my finger down into the exposed attenuating groove of the sharp folded sheet metal, splitting my flesh to the bone. I screamed bloody murder and bled all over the smooth concrete floor. My sister ran into the room and slowly slid my finger from the slot. Then called my dad. He raced home while I stood bawling in the driveway with my hand above my heart, blood creeping down my forearm, while I motherfucked every one of my neighbors who drove by in horrified awe. My dad said I screamed all the way to the ER, until the doctor plunged a needle into the wound and flooded my finger full of a local anesthetic. After that, I watched the doctor fold back the flap of skin and reveal the bone-white bone where I had cut a deep groove. I saw the interior of my own formal structure, where there was no marrow, no substance. Only density and depth, and the doctor chuckled when I asked him if I could look closer: I guess we’re done with the tears then, huh?
*
On the farm I was equipped with the most rudimentary of tools with which to work. Aside from milking—the auto-milker with rubber claw and pressurized tubes, which I consider a machine, not a tool—I was mostly limited to pitchfork, shovel, and axe. I chopped wood for outdoor fires we rarely had because a fire in -35 degree windstorms isn’t sensible, and I shoveled shit in the corral where we kept the cows overnight during -35 degree windstorms and on nice days while the girls waited in the pasture to empty their udders. And I fed the calves and heifers twice a day with tinefuls of hay.
I cornered the shit in the corral and every other day Pete brought the tractor down to dump the shit over a wall into a massive trough where we stored the mess until spring when a rancher came with a semi and spreader to haul truckload after truckload out to his nearby farm to toss over his fallow earth. I shoveled alone. I gloved my hands in kidskin and scraped the smooth and broken concrete in the same direction, the same pattern, every day. I was sober and angry and thought the basic work good for my disposition, maybe good for my character.
I began each session with a deep breath and a question: To what end? I didn’t know what the question meant, I didn’t know to whom, or what, it was directed. I thought of school, of writing, of reading, of what it meant to be meaningful. I thought about The Poet, about other past lovers whose lives I felt that I only took from, from whom I only consumed. I spoke in simple, stupid phrases and became self-conscious of their simplicity and tried, at times, to re-think my understanding of Baudrillard, Foucault, Derrida, Sontag, and Butler. I thought that if I thought harder, bigger thoughts there would be some meaning there, but that was perhaps the simplest and stupidest thought I had.
One day, while I was motherfucking myself, deep in regret, and unable to understand my own insatiability, Pete walked up on me having an intricate and nuanced call-and-response conversation with myself.
Who are you talking to?
Me?
Who else?
Myself.
He laughed, Goddamn.
Then told me we’d have to quartermilk Elsa again that night because she still had a high cell count for mastitis that morning. He shook his head, smiling, and walked away.
*
Pete and Jen met while working at the Harold Journal, the one rag in Cache Valley hugely biased toward the Mormon right. Pete was the photo editor and Jen worked the wire. She was ten years older than him and each of them was recovering from painful divorces. After a few years, Pete’s ego and his frustration forced him to quit the Journal and he tried numerous professions of labor: a small engine mechanic out of his garage, he tried raising calves, 150 at a time, and, finally, he decided to make cheese. He had a little money from Apple stocks he sold before the split, something like thirty grand. He knows the amount the sell would have been after the split, on the higher side of 500 grand, but that’s a subject you only hear recalled once in your time on the farm. So he took the money and built the cheese lab, built an aging room, built a milk room, and he designed and crafted everything himself.
Jen thought Pete crazy and fell deeply in love with that craziness. He was hardnosed and opinionated and she was passive, conversational, and understanding. They complimented each other nicely but seemed to be marred by their first marriages enough to 1) never get married themselves, and 2) never have children. In a way, the farm was their children, but Pete would rub his calloused hands through his 53-year-old, stark white hair to hear me say that. Jen might be more affectionate toward the idea, but as the division of labor goes, she makes and sells the cheese, and Pete deals with the cows, the land, and the structures. Between them, I know this: Owning a large plot of land in the West is a series of unfinished tasks.
I want you to know who they are, if only from this simple description, because I want you to know that I love them. They are important beyond my consideration, and I take every opportunity to tell their story to anyone who will listen. They take good care of their land, of their animals. They don’t pasteurize, use hormones or fertilizer. They rarely hire out work because Pete is capable. They have wonderful friends because Jen is warm, kind, and checks Pete’s ego. Their collective expression is endearing because it is honest, it is curt because there are only so many hours, and they have used the natural space on which they work to, in their words, create their own reality.
*
I went to the farm because it was the most convenient opportunity for housing and work in a moment of the utmost necessity. I was foolish enough to prescribe to some brief moment of fatalism. I was certain I would go to the farm and dry out from over a decade of hard drinking and drug use. I believed in big, life-changing moments and the reciprocity of good intentions behind foul actions. I was as stupid as I ever was, fueled by the misguided confidence engendered in strong spirits. But I did sober up, at least for a while.
I chopped wood and cursed the logs for their sturdy knots and obduracy. I shoveled muck and called it my counselor. I took bus rides to buy groceries. I fell in love with animals other than my dog. I memorized new landscapes and I felt connected to the earth and its workings—from water to grass to mouth to teat to cheese. There was production and I was the tool. I was a small thing the world used to make good, to make better. And out of that feeling my old practices insisted that I was deserved. And so I walked the mile north on the thoroughfare to the liquor store and bought a bottle of bourbon and drank the medicine in small doses, then larger doses. Back to familiarity.
We kept friendships and relations on the farm on schedule, because everything on a farm is on a schedule. So every other Tuesday night we had Pool Night, alternating at Pete and Jen’s place on the farm and Larry’s place across the two-acre lot to the east. Five or six of us were always in attendance and I always showed up late because I had to milk on Tuesday nights. So, to match the joviality upon arrival, I kept a flask with me while I shoveled shit, cleaned udders, recorded gallons of milk by weight, and scrubbed the milkhouse and the stainless steel buckets and pumps. Silently sipping while I trudged through the cow pie pasture in the dark, up to the neighbor’s place for pool and more drink.
Larry’s pool table was red felt and sensuous, a cabaret landscape under a canopy of dim light. He called the room his Man Cave but didn’t know how to match the aesthetic to the title’s crude consideration of leisure. I did something that night, and I don’t remember what, but not because of the alcohol. I said things. I joked. I was curt and curseful. I imagine I was poignant with my jocundity and found humor in the vulnerabilities of others. I don’t know. I might have simply been a dick.
The group disbanded quickly and back at the farm Pete attended to some task in the hay barn like a man possessed. I carried a PBR and followed him like a duckling as he never made eye contact. I asked him if he was mad at me and the rest of the conversation went something like this:
—You don’t listen to people. You never shut the fuck up. And you can be downright mean. You have to have fucking Asperger’s or something. I mean, I get it. People thought I was goddamn retarded when I was young because I always spoke my mind, but you’re a man. You should fucking know better.
—What do you mean?
And each of us welled with tears.
—You don’t know when to quit. You just keep going and going. You keep pushing people. We have spent a lot of years building these friendships and you’re not going to ruin them by being an asshole.
He berated me and I came by it honest. I know I apologized and that I felt regret. I know Pete said, I like you, man, but…And I know I wanted something back. Not that night, but I wanted back a decade of bad training, of serving my own ego with liquor and convincing myself I was right because I could argue I wasn’t wrong. I could see faults in others, and point them out, and so I did, but failed to turn that lens on myself. And I wanted all those mornings back when I felt guilt or shame and fixed against those feelings with the tool I knew best, alcohol.
I wanted never to offend Pete, to need Pete to defend me. And that sentiment, after only a couple months on the farm, became another category of regret.
*
I’m sitting at my desk, thumbing that chunk of obsidian, thinking about what tool this object might have become, might still become, considering a journey I’m soon to drive almost 1,000 miles north back to the farm where I know Jen will bake a new recipe for my arrival and Pete will offer me beer in a leather koozie, where Jen will tell me she loves me and misses me, where Pete will mention to the new farm hand that I am the archetype to live up to, and that will be his way of telling me he loves me and misses me. I will go back to Salt Lake City to friends who have abided me for so many years because of their generosity and forgiveness. And I will eat Thanksgiving dinner with my Mormon parents who after all these years are none the wiser to my proclivities of self-destruction, depression, anxiety, and angst, who, if they did know everything, would no doubt pray for me.
I’m still that angry child trying to surgically remove some deleterious part of my identity. I’ve replaced heavy drinking and drugs with working out, modest celebrations, and an active drive to quiet some frequency that vibrates within me, in a spectrum I only register as depression and angst. So I’ve stopped saying yes to every debauched departure from confronting the inception of my own ire. But there is no reconciliation for the ways in which I’ve hurt and tooled those I have claimed to love. Beyond their forgiveness there has been me, drinking and doing it wrong, unable to change because I didn’t really want to. I can control, repair, the drinking and the drugs, but I can’t mend those bodies I’ve displaced with my confused notions of labor, identity, and entitlement. And so now I call out a new apostrophic mantra as I pace the silt desert sand of my backyard with a crude scoop and shovel, gathering my dog’s shit:
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.
I’m sorry.