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Chuck's writing

Essay for Hammock & Riceboy Sleeps


The following was written at the request of Hammock. It's the story of how their album, Maybe They Will Sing For Us Tommorow, came to be. Images from the album are by Riceboy Sleeps. They have been cropped.

Some things happen, it seems, just because they should. Until August of 2007, Hammock had never given a live performance, even after releasing four critically acclaimed recordings. Similarly, Riceboy Sleeps, after several years of making their own beautiful artworks, had not ever taken them outside their hometown of Reykjavik, Iceland. As if by fairytale fate, these two projects appeared together one evening in a little town in central Arkansas and the result was a wonderful thing, beautifully powerful and transcending expectations.

I live in a loft in downtown Hot Springs about four blocks from Josh Varnedore's Gallery 801, which housed the Riceboy Sleeps exhibit. Once it was decided that I'd host the after party, I had the idea of asking Hammock to play (I knew they loved Sigur Ros), so I emailed Marc. Not known for superfluous communiqués, he replied by saying he'd talk to Andrew and get back to me. Here's what I didn't know: they'd never given a live performance. I had unwittingly asked Hammock to make their world live premier inside my apartment.
 

There was something else I didn't know. A short time before this Hammock had received an email from none other than Jónsi Birgisson – the Sigur Ros singer/guitarist who's half of Riceboy Sleeps – telling them that he loved their music. The timing was perfect. When Josh called Jónsi and Alex to pitch the idea of Hammock playing at the party they loved it, and when Marc and Andrew found out that Jónsi and Alex wanted them to play they couldn't say no. We had a show.

But this request triggered a series of earthshaking events inside the Hammock galaxy. They'd never played live, so how would it be done? The Hammock sound is a huge sonic cathedral, meticulously crafted, layer on layer, a marvelous architecture. How many cellos, how many singers, how many guitarists would it take to build the Hammock cathedral in an actual space-time environment? This seemed to be most problematic. There was no budget, there was little room, there was a short time. It seemed like a great idea that might not happen.

But then a solution: Marc and Andrew would strip Hammock down to its irreducible minimum – the two of them, with only their instruments and pedal boards – and they'd write new material just for the occasion. But what would it sound like? More importantly, would it sound like Hammock? Well, nobody knew; it had never been done.


My plan was to keep the party private, open only to a guest list – not to be snobbish but because space was limited – but that wasn't to be. When Jónsi and Alex arrived a crowd of people had gathered outside. Jónsi asked me if we could "let all the people come in." I imagined a sea of humanity. Jónsi could tell I was balking and he smiled and said they didn't like private things and wanted everyone to be included. His kind eyes softened my heart and I gave the okay to open the doors. A long line of people began to file down my block-long hallway.

Thomas Petillo, the photographer who creates the Hammock album covers, was snapping free Polaroid portraits for anyone who wanted one. I had a buffet of food in the dining room and people were grazing there. The halls were full of people looking at art. I wondered how all these people would react to Hammock. It was a party, after all. All this time we were playing William Basinski's Disintegration Loops to set a mood.

Marc was already on the record as nervous in several major magazines that had done advance stories about the event, and I knew his nervousness was coming from more than one source: Hammock had never played live; they were playing new music no one had ever heard; they were playing in a 14' x 18' room – about the size of a small garage – during a party; and they were playing for Jónsi Birgisson of Sigur Ros, the man responsible for some of the most powerfully moving live music made in the world during the post-rock era. It was a lot of pressure.


There was no introduction, Marc and Andrew just walked in and sat down. The room shimmered in red light and they sat in front of a shrine they'd built that included pieces of art and burning candles and incense. The space was full of people, on the floor, against the walls, out into the hall. Marc picked up a Strat and Andrew bent forward and activated a loop from his pedal board that sent the first sound into the row of speakers that lined the back wall, then turned to his keyboard. What followed is hard to talk about. As the volume came up, a virtually tangible peace settled over the place. It wasn't the Hammock of Raising Your Voice... Trying to Stop an Echo – there were no beats, no singing – it was Hammock reduced to an essence, a core. It was music that reminded me more of Arvo Pärt's Te Diem than of any post-rock work. It was slowly unfolding, it came in waves; it was warm. It felt really good.

I've never seen an audience so transfixed by music. No one spoke, no one moved. Lovers held one another, people sat with closed eyes, some gazed intently at Marc and Andrew who sat like two old Zen masters, nearly motionless, making a huge ocean of sound. The music was unmistakably Hammock, but it was a mature Hammock, a spiritual Hammock; it was Hammock sitting beneath their bodhi tree, touching one finger to the ground.

I watched Jónsi and Alex. They knew the performance was a gift to them. Seeing their faces, their eyes, the slowly forming smiles on their lips, I knew they loved it. It was what we wanted, that their party would be something memorable, a piece of their own hearts given back to them. It was definitely working.


Later I went outside and stood in the street where a crowd of people was gathered and I noticed the same spirit had taken hold there. An unusual calm had descended on a section of downtown Hot Springs. I was very aware that something important was happening in my east room.

Those of us who were there to hear Hammock on that auspicious night know we witnessed a moment of birth. All I can say is "thanks" to Jónsi, Alex, Marc and Andrew for bringing their beautiful and important work to Hot Springs, and to Josh for making it happen. My hope is that people all over the world will experience it like we did here. It's work full of love and beauty, openness and wonder, and I think these are things our world needs right now.

Chuck Dodson


To visit a new webpage posted by Hammock about this project click here.

Essay: A Revised History of Jazz Piano

The following are excerpts from a work in progress.

    My relationship with Art Tatum began on a Christmas Day in Arkansas, years ago when I was still in high school. Under the tree that morning, wrapped in ribbons and bows, was a stack of vinyl albums, all recordings of this man Tatum playing the piano. I was sixteen or seventeen then and the piano had been the most important object in my life since about the age of four when my mother, a fine piano teacher, had assumed the holy calling of making me into a musician. By the Tatum Christmas I was already playing professionally and was quite taken by the idea of becoming the best piano-player in the world. After hearing the first Art Tatum record, I was inspired like never before; I was inspired to stop playing the piano.     
    What? To stop? Look, hearing a great pianist always made me want to work harder. Anytime I heard somebody play something I couldn’t play I’d head straight to the piano and not get up until I could play it as well or better. But this was different; hearing Tatum for the first time was an experience bordering on the paranormal; it just couldn’t be real. At first I thought I was hearing at least two great pianists playing at the same time. When I realized it was only the solitary Art Tatum – blind in one eye and half-blind in the other, largely self-taught and plagued by fluctuating weight and a drinking problem – I felt a sudden illness in my belly. His playing was beyond what I thought was possible. I saw that I had no choice but to abandon my quest to be the best pianist in the world. Tatum deflated me, overwhelmed me, upset me. Art Tatum crushed my dream.

    *     *     *    

    What was so great about Tatum? Well, any one of his several rare abilities was enough to put him in the history books – the incredible speed and dexterity of his runs, the brilliant imagination behind his chord progressions, the stunning independence between his two hands, the staggering fluency of his left hand, the startling originality of virtually everything he did, the fact that he could play better drunk than anyone else could sober – but all these amazements taken together made him into a god-musician who stood head and shoulders above any other pianist; there was really no one to compare him to.
    He combined styles: his left hand might be playing boogie woogie while his right hand played a pop song embellished with Baroque ornaments; a stately parlor piece would suddenly erupt into a blistering Harlem stride; he could play the blues with the finesse of a Chopin waltz. Only classical artists had ever played the piano so well, but their harmonies and improvisations were simple compared to Tatum’s new inventions. The critic Scott Yanow has written that Tatum was harmonically thirty years ahead of his time.

    *     *     *

    When, about twenty years later, someone told me a man named Walter Norris had been called "the Art Tatum of the '90s" by a writer in the Los Angeles Times, I was skeptical, to say the least. First of all, I'd never heard of a piano-player named Walter Norris and it seemed very unlikely that some unknown musician was as great as Tatum. Secondly, you get numb to Tatum comparisons after a while, not unlike Elvis sightings. After checking out so many of these piano-players who are allegedly as good as Tatum and realizing that none of them are really as good as Tatum, you stop taking the claims seriously. But I found out that Norris was, like myself, a native Arkansan – though he hadn’t lived in the state for over forty years – and that he had grown up less than an hour from where I was then living. It so happened that Norris was returning to our home state to be honored by a jazz organization and would give two concerts. I decided to go hear him play and see for myself if there was any truth to the Tatum comparisons.

    *     *     * 

    Thelonious Monk, widely regarded as the founding pianist of the bebop movement, built a style that flew in the face of everything that made Art Tatum great. In the place of Tatum’s densely stacked harmonies, Monk formed chords using the fewest notes possible; in the place of Tatum’s smooth and effortless technique, Monk often played in ragged stops and starts, as if to make the piano cough and stutter, as if he himself was having a seizure; in the place of Tatum’s two-handed exhibitions of masterful dexterity, Monk would many times play with only one finger, picking at keys like a chicken eats grain from off the ground. Watching Tatum play gave you the idea that the entire song was fully formed ahead of time and that he was presenting it like a turkey on a platter; watching Monk play gave you the impression that notes were spontaneously popping into his head one after another in a series of divine yet somewhat random revelations. These two great musicians, so far apart in their styles and musical philosophies, probably more than any others, shaped the musical world of the young jazz pianist named Walter Norris.     *     *     * 

    Perhaps the thing that says the most about the playing of the Norris of the 1950s is that young saxophonist Ornette Coleman asked him to play on his first album. It might be hard for people today to realize just how out-of-the-box Coleman’s music was. His playing was so unusual for that time, so unlike what other musicians were doing, that audiences would exit the club in droves when he played. His music was thought to be strange, dissonant and, to some, even unmusical. Norris rehearsed two and three times a week for five months with Coleman and three other musicians – trumpeter Don Cherry, bassist Don Payne, and drummer Billy Higgins – for recording sessions that happened in February and March of 1958. Now here’s the rub: after the album – The Music of Ornette Coleman: Something Else!!!! – was released, Coleman realized that his music would work better without a piano, so he dropped the instrument from his group and went on to great success with a quartet featuring sax and trumpet paired with bass and drums. Young Ornette Coleman would also go on to be considered one of the leading innovators of twentieth century music, and would eventually be given the MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant, a Guggenheim grant, the Dorothy and Lillian Gish Prize, an induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Grammy Lifetime Achievement Award, and a Pulitzer Prize. Young Walter Norris, on the other hand, had to deal with the fall-out from a recording session that didn’t do his career much good; his appearance on Ornette Coleman’s debut recording left a definite if largely unspoken impression on the jazz world that Norris had not quite fit in on this important recording and had thereby missed his chance to make a positive contribution when jazz history had come calling.   

    The fact is that Walter’s performance had nothing to do with Ornette Coleman’s decision to eliminate the piano from his band. “Ornette has a way of kind of bending the intonation,” Norris explained decades later, which clashed with the piano and its well-tempered tuning. Norris agreed with Coleman’s decision to perform without a piano, “not because of the piano-player but because of the instrument.” There’s an obvious truth here, lurking much like an elephant in the room of jazz lore, and I‘ve not ever heard it mentioned by a critic or by a fan in a chat room: of all the pianists on the west coast, Ornette Coleman thought Walter Norris had the best chance of fitting into his style of jazz.

[above added September 10, 2007]


12/19/07 A couple of nights ago I had a dream in which I was trying to convince John Coltrane to start a small indie label with me. He and I would get together and I'd passionately explain how it would work, how we would find and develop artists, how we'd promote and sell the music. He wasn't completely against the idea but definitely needed motivation.

1/31/07 Vision 47: I see all the people on the earth walking down a highway. The highway is their journey through life. It's quite a sight, this seemingly endless caravan of walking humanity. I see that large numbers of people tend to follow behind certain key figures. For example, here comes Miles Davis with a group of people walking behind him. His entourage is tiny compared to the huge mass of people who were walking behind some minister who passed earlier. Still, Miles had a much larger crowd than Albert Ayler.

7/9/03 Some astrologers say we're moving into the Age of Aquarius after a couple of thousand years under the sign of Pisces. Pisces the fish, the water sign, the deep, flowing, liquid and soulish, Pisces the intuitive, the addicted. The water of Pisces washed religion up on our shore and it's still there, bleaching in the sunlight like a dead fish, stinking, ugly, annoying. At least half the people in the world are out so far in the water that they've lost their balance, lost their foothold, they're addicted to alcohol or drugs or work or sex or sports or something.

The universe is old and the stars that effect planets don't easily give up their power, they don't just step to the left so the next Age can move in (stars are more selfish than we know), and Pisces is holding on to all of us, making Aquarius wait. And so we fight each other, like Pisces fights Aquarius, like Jews fight Arabs, like Christianity fights Islam, pushing the other out of the way so we can be the one in control.

The astrologers say Aquarius might bring healing to Earth, if it isn't too late, if we aren't too far out in the waters of religion or addiction to power. An interesting side note is in the first chapter of The Book of Genesis. The spirit, or wind, blew at a time when darkness was upon the face of the deep and the wind was able to divide the water from the dry land. This was the beginning of the first day, and it was good. Aquarius is an air sign.

(Photo by Gil Poe)


12/24/05 i had a dream that i was at a party and all the guests were my friends and enemies but i didn't know who was who and so i had the option of leaving the party in order to escape awkward confrontations or staying there and trying my luck. i stayed and began talking to this one and then that one and another one and soon discovered that all the people i spoke to were very friendly and seemed glad to see me. this confused me since i knew inside myself that my enemies were there as well as my friends. surely i must have encountered at least a few of my enemies by now, i thought. but everyone was so happy and festive and i was beginning to feel at ease and was actually having a great time. after a couple of hours of mingling, moving from group to group, having some nice one-on-one conversations, i noticed a very curious thing: it seemed to me that the faces of the guests were beginning to resemble one another. i mean to say that each person's face was changing form and that all the people at the party were coming to have the same face. whether male or female, young or old, regardless of their race or personality or body type, everyone was mysteriously receiving a new face and each face was identical to all the others. i was terrified at first and so it was a few moments before i thought to find a mirror and see if my face was also changing. i managed to get into a bathroom and close the door. when i looked in the mirror i was relieved to find that my face hadn't changed at all. i leaned against the wall in the solitude of the bathroom and pondered this strange, disturbing experience. was i hallucinating? had i been drugged? was i losing my mind? was i ill? could this really be happening? after a while i thought i should leave the bathroon and see if all the faces still looked the same. when i went back out into the party i was absolutely amazed to find that each individual had become a tiny floating bubble filled with what appeared to be cotton. the bubbles were very small, no larger than the size of a tennis ball, and were transparent so that each had the look of a floating cottonball. i stood at the entrance to the main room where most of the guests were assembled, probably thirty feet across, and watched all the cotton-filled bubbles floating beautifully in mid-air, some slowly rising, some slowly falling, some seeming not to move much at all. i was awe-struck and could only stand there like a frozen man and watch this incredible spectacle. soon i thought, why am i not changed into a cotton-filled bubble? why am i the only one here still in original form? just as i had those thoughts a voice sounded from the hallway behind me. i spun around quickly and saw a woman standing about fifteen feet away. she was very beautiful with dark hair and dark eyes and wore a sexy black dress. one hand held a martini, the other was cocked on her hip and she had a sly smile on her lips that suggested she was mischievious and playful. i realized i had no idea what she had just said. i said, i'm sorry, what did you just say? but she only increased her smile and began to move toward me slowly, purposefully, looking intently into my eyes. i stood with my back to the room of floating cotton-filled balls and watched this beautiful woman approaching. i realized that my hands were sweating and my heartbeat had accelerated and i was quite uncomfortable. my thoughts began to race as she came within two or three feet of me. thoughts to run away, to scream, to begin babbling, to fly up into the air, to disappear, to become giant-sized all shot through my mind. as she came very near to me and her free hand began to reach for my arm i couldn't stand it any longer and i turned myself into a bubble filled with cotton and with a nervous burst of energy floated out into the big room amid the other cotton-filled bubbles. from my hiding place i could see her in the hallway laughing, taking a sip of her martini, then turning to walk away into the darkness. i was safe. i bobbed in the air and waited for my heart-rate to return to normal. the company of the others seemed to soothe me, though i knew many of them were my enemies.

11/30/05 i knew a young woman named jasmyn who was sad and always saying she needed love. i told her love would come but she wouldn't believe me. i said that love always comes at just the right time and she reminded me that i was an agnostic and shouldn't make such a statement. i wondered why she was so cynical. time passed. then one day she wrote to say she had married a good man, the first child was on the way, and she was so happy. i sat reading her email, never having had a wife or child, wondering what it must be like. this has happened many times in my life.

Short poems:


i.

I'm the monkey
you're the cookie
we're the jar
I let you go

ii.

standing in a sidewalk doorway
cold day
bag down by your foot
looking left toward the northwest
grey chest
all the ages in your features
every world inside your eyes
your hair was singing

iii.

barcelona seems to sit down on the sea to spain's east wing
below the french due west of roma north from africa

iv.

she was real
he was imaginary
they were together (nowhere)

children don't exist
angels don't sing
and they can't fly (anymore)

v.

day comes after night
so do I have to hate you
before I love you?

night comes after day
so must every good and true thing
be lost at least once?

vi.

she was like a bird who said

I won't come down
no matter how much my wings hurt

so she kept flying around until she disappeared

vii.

dear lord
please give me a woman
who excites me
as much as the annual library book sale


The Girl & The Spider -- a short story

A spider walked slowly across the long measure of linen, stopped to think about how to proceed, then stepped off onto the soft skin over her belly and kept walking until the slope of her neck became very steep. The spider decided not to climb and made a slight detour to the right, soon coming to the place where her brown hair was. This was better because the strands were close enough together to be a bridge to the top of her head.
But she woke up just then, rubbed one eye, and decided, unlike most mornings, to get out of bed right away instead of going back to sleep or dreaming half awake, and so she and the spider stood up and went to the bathroom together, a horse and a rider.
She sat on the toilet and began to think. The spider was also thinking. She thought about the night before and remembered the ones who had been with her: three friends -- one she loved very much, one she thought she might like more if she had a chance, and one who made her sad. The spider's thoughts were of weights and measures.
Next she thought about the day ahead and what she'd do. Days off made her happy because she was more of a little girl and less of a responsible woman, meaning she could do more of what she wanted to do and less of what someone else expected her to. The spider was being very still, only breathing in and out, and blinking.
She remembered bills that were late, people she should call, dry cleaning to pick up, library books to return. She reaffirmed in her mind a committment from yesterday to go to the park and run at least four miles. The spider, no longer able to see the window where he'd entered this new world, took note of the artificial lighting.
When she stood up, she looked at herself in the mirror but failed to see the spider because she looked first at her own eyes, then was drawn toward a crease running across her cheek, made by the pillow. She wrinkled her nose and left the bathroom and walked down the short hallway to the kitchen where she made coffee and watched her little pink tv every morning. She pondered the fact that she'd been getting up as early on off days as on work days. This was a recent change. She figured it meant she was growing up, becoming more of an adult. The spider was very happy to be back in natural light and instinctually flexed a leg.
She made her coffee and selected the biscotti of the day (hazelnut) and changed the channel from CNN to Matt and Katie, who were sitting with a man who was trying to convince us to forgive our parents. This made her decide she would call her mom later. The spider began to crave movement and started designing, mentally, a mechanism that could reach one of these new windows.
Just then the phone rang and she saw it was her mother beating her to the punch. Her first thought was that her mother was calling because she'd felt her thinking about her. She answered and said:
"You called because I was thinking about calling you!"
Her mom said she was calling early to catch her before she went out to remind her to bring the book about dreams and drop it off so she could start reading it. They'd talked about dreams forever, but recently her mom had had three dreams in a week about Ireland. No one in their family had ever been to Ireland or had any Irish blood, but she felt so at home there in her dreams, as if Ireland was her long lost homeland. She'd also been in love with an Irishman in the dreams, but she'd kept that part to herself.
"I will, but you have to take me with you if you decide to go to Ireland. That'd be so cool."
When her hand went out to set the phone on the table, the spider allowed for the shift by bracing two legs against a firm sprout of hair. But, in the next moment, her hand went quickly to her head. The spider experienced the approaching mass like a human might experience a huge asteroid coming to collide with the Earth: a darkening of the sky, a sudden compression of the atmosphere, an immediate surge of chemicals in the body, triggered by the appearance of doom. The hand landed about an inch and a half from the center of the spider's petrified body, dangerously near the fore legs. Even slight contact could've destroyed the legs, and a direct hit could've been fatal. But she missed completely, and pressed her fingertips against her head, as if to push out certain thoughts, then withdrew back down to the handle of her coffee cup. The spider was shaken and tried not to tumble, since some of her hairs were still moving.
She ate her biscotti, refilled her cup, then went to her computer desk which was in the bedroom that originally housed her ex-roommate Heather, who had moved out to live with Ryan. Heather had left over two months ago and the time between then and now had been a financial test to determine whether her new job would allow her to live alone. So far, she was barely making it. Though she kept it just below the horizon of conscious thought, another test was whether or not she also might meet someone she could live with.
The spider looked at the new room and was somewhat displeased with the blinds that were closed over the window, obstructing the natural light. Given time, webs could be made that could raise the blinds and let in more light. The problem would be creating enough leverage to lift the blinds. Spiders were strong, relative to their size, but their weight is so small compared to the weight of a full set of blinds that to raise the blinds from a fully extended position would take more spiders than it was reasonable to consider assembling, especially since spiders don't work well together. Though neither of them knew it, this is a trait they shared: she and the spider both preferred to work alone.
She checked her email. The one that stood out was from her ex-boyfriend Damon, who now lived far, far away, literally on the other side of the Earth. They had parted with anger and resentment because a) he cheated on her, and b) she loved him very, very much. He was sorry (he said) and he wanted her back (he said) but some door had closed tightly inside her the moment she knew he'd been with someone else, locking out any chance of a clear, pure love between them. She knew it was wrong to close her heart and not forgive, but she also knew it was impossible to keep her heart open at a time like that and that to not forgive was her only defense.
The spider was beginning to move now. Why wait? The movement of her body had become predictable (spiders have an uncanny knack for processing fractal-hard amounts of information to come up with data so out there it's savant-like. They're the freaky geniuses among creatures, and so our spider was, if we can say it this way, getting bored).
The spider began walking toward the light, having already the genesis of a blueprint in mind that would allow a means of transport from this moving platform to what appeared to be a firm structure (the window) and, more importantly, a structure more suited for healthy living, meaning that it offered access to natural light and, therefore, the probability of something to eat. The spider made it down the back of her head on a beautiful pathway of brown hair with faint blond highlights, then stood for a moment to calculate the best way to get down the steep grade ahead.
While this was happening on her back, she'd begun to read Damon's email which contained his first attempt since he'd left town almost four months ago to tell her he loved her, he missed her, he was sorry he hurt her, and he didn't want to live another day without her. This made her feel a rush of emotionally confusing thoughts and feelings that shook her so much her body jerked itself up from the chair and stomped out of the computer room, went across the hall, and entered the bathroom, throwing off her clothes as she went, and reached into the shower and turned on the water. All this, of course, threw the spider's world into absolute chaos.
Darkness had descended most unnaturally on the world, causing the entire landscape to disappear, making sounds distant and dull, leaving the air musty and dense. This was life under the shirt on the bathroom floor beside the shower. The water sounds, the soft sobbing of a girl, the plastic noise of containers, the odd rustle of the nylon curtain, all filtered through the mesh weave of fabric like the torturous sounds played into the spare cells of some prisoners of war. How to get out of here? Where's the light? What couldn't have been known to anyone was how close to disaster we'd come when the shirt had been unbuttoned and pulled from the shoulders and let drop to the floor -- all of this taking no more than two or three seconds -- with spider only about five steps down from the spot where her hair ended (her hair wasn't that long). Spider's trip had been cancelled due to bad weather, you might say, grounded in a city where there were no friends or relatives to visit, no business interests, no appealing attractions. The prison analogy was appropriate.
In the shower, she cried. She was still angry at Damon, she knew she loved him. How do these things work? How do we live with people we love so desperately? Why do they always hurt us? Why can't we be stronger and just move on to some better place where we're happy and life's rosy and we're like children again who sit on the grass and look up at clouds passing by and think how beautiful life is?
The spider was pacing the distance from one end of the shirt prison to the other, not a very large cell, looking for a way to get out.
From some other chamber of her mind, better memories came, like times she and Damon would stay in bed all day looking at each other, telling their life stories, touching each other, making crazy promises about the future, then trying to say deep things that only some mystical eastern guru could think of, then holding each other so tight everything else in the universe would go away. Those were probably the best times of her life.
There seemed to be no way out. Spiders don't think in terms of time, so there was no thought of: "am I trapped in here forever.....", because forever would never occur to a spider. What does occur is strictly intuitive, like "am I in danger?" (don't seem to be), "where do I go from here?" (well, there seems to be nowhere to go), and "is there something to eat" (no). In this way, spiders are extremely practical.
She held her head under the water with her eyes closed, her hands gripping her hair on both sides of her head by her ears, and for a small moment of time it seemed as if she was hidden in a place where no one could find her and no one could hurt her. Nonetheless, she was hurting and afraid. She shuddered and held herself and let herself cry.
The spider was still again, not knowing exactly what to do next. Then the loudest of all the noises in the environment ceased abruptly (she turned off the shower). The spider waited to see what would happen next.
She pulled open the shower curtain, took a towel, and put it on her face. She wasn't crying anymore, as if coming out of the shower made it necessary to pull herself together for the general public. She even thought to herself: "Here I go, as usual, repressing everything." But then she thought: "No, I'm really not. This is hard, really hard, but.....ok, this is really, really hard." The spider kept waiting.
Sometimes we don't know to expect the next blow. Even if we did, we might not have any way to get ourselves ready for it. In those cases, it may be a good thing that we're blindsided. Sure, in some difficult situations life does give us a choice -- we can choose to be strong and responsible, to work hard to make some positive thing happen out of our mess (which is great, because we grow from doing that and feel good about ourselves), or else we can fuck it all up and then have only ourselves to blame (but that's not all bad either, because at least we know we did it the way we did it. Whatever).
She stepped out of the shower and her foot, carrying the weight of her enitire body, came down on the spider so suddenly and completely that there was no opportunity for pain, for fear, for anything at all. There was only a partial darkness instantly becoming an eternal darkness, a forever introducing itself to one who'd never been able to imagine forever.
She dried off and went to her bedroom to dress. She remembered the dream book. That day she picked up her dry cleaning, returned the library books, paid all her bills, and had lunch with her mother without saying anything about Damon's email (her mom never liked Damon). As the day went on she felt better. She decided she could make it without a roommate. She rented two movies and bought a bottle of wine before going home because she thought it would be a good move to do something nice for herself.
Back home, after she ate dinner, on the way to her bedroom to change clothes and watch the movies on her bed, she stopped by the bathroom and picked up the clothes she'd left on the floor that morning and put them in the hamper. She didn't see the spider's body, but as she dropped the clothes into the hamper she decided in her heart that she'd never go back to Damon.

--August 11, 2004

All contents copyright 2005 by Chuck Dodson. All rights reserved.

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