Afterimage

You and I, we've known the feeling

of stumbling across black and depthless woods

towards where a fire still churns listless smoke

into a pallid, dusky sky, 

chairs left empty moments before,

some tipped over as if in sudden flight.

Or, the lasting sense of disturbance

after all the players have left 

the baseball field,

and the last machine having towed its burden 

of shattered wreckage from

the cold nightmare of the highway accident. 

A bare intuition that something has happened

just moments before your graceless intrusion, 

now left haunted and lingering in

currents of force at the unsettled margins. 

This is what Burlington feels like in November.

Early October In Burlington

Gold-washed autumn has descended these hills 

like some conjured bit of wicked magic, 

stilling the green-wreathed leaves in their festive sway

to send them sailing to a colder soil;

they gather littered in storm drains and 

at the edges of driveways,

crisp and crackling.

Night-dark steals in a little earlier than before,

and the highways clear of all vacation traffic

as if an alarm has sounded somewhere,

indicating swift retreat.

These later hours stay tinged by woodsmoke and rust,

curling through the parted curtains

of upstairs bedrooms, 

as the earth slumps away from the sun. 

Old Songs Revisited

Autumn is a time when a dangerous emotion tends to sneak and coil into my musings: nostalgia, that old seductive euphemism for loss and regret. Maybe it's the quality of the slanting yellow light, the sudden chill in the air and the scent of woodsmoke in the evenings. Fall is such a wistful season.

Digging through boxes still left unpacked with Denny this past weekend, I discovered some very embarrassing early attempts at song-craft, visions of teenaged cliched angst too awful and humiliating to be reprinted here. Tonight though, on a break from recording new material for my full-time project, I found myself playing some other songs of a more recent vintage, folk songs I had written for prior bands, and myself, at the turn of this last decade. Many of them are admittedly just as awful as the fifth-grade radio-metal imitations, and in hindsight I find myself very glad to be expressing myself instead through instrumental music, poetry, and photography/film these days.

Five years is a long time, and though I'm still young, I find my singing voice (which I've never cared for in the least) has changed quite a bit since these songs were written. Gone is much of the Oberstian whining, replaced with a hoarse, huskier tone. I suppose this reflects everything that has changed in the past five years of my life. These songs are lived-in in a way they weren't before, as fresh, painful gashes. And the lyrics are just too personal to share on an Internet blog, or anywhere.

When I moved to Raleigh in 2008, in the wake of an aborted college career and an emotionally turbulent relationship, I was adrift and an outsider. Looking back on the lyrics of these songs, they're confrontational and angry in a way that shocks and saddens me now. I didn't realize as a vitriolic, outspoken twenty-four year old that all that seething was masking some serious fear, a serious sense of isolation. These songs pine nakedly for a Boone that was even then vanishing, for a love that was never the right combination of personalities to last, for a youth that was as impermanent as late spring snowfall and just as tempestuous. These songs lash out at everyone around me at the time, at a new town that didn't feel like home and where I didn't feel accepted, and at my own mistakes. I didn't realize that I was the one cutting myself off, retreating on my own terms, withdrawing from the world.

Having found a partner and a love again, seeing more success than frustration at last with music, all that fear and rage seem very foreign to me. These are bitter, unpleasant songs, lyrics that poured out of me like automatic writing, that I didn't analyze for content at the time but which now speak pretty deeply to who I was circa 2008-2010. I simply hadn't remotely figured out who I was yet.

The process continues, of course.

-----

A final thought - something strange occurred to me driving back late to Burlington from elsewhere last night. This city shuts down quite dramatically at 5PM on weeknights; the traffic lights downtown turn to flashers and the streets empty as if by some wicked magic. I came to this conclusion:

Burlington is a part-time apocalypse.

ZC

10:37 PM, June 12th

On Burlington summer evenings

the darkness seeps in by degrees,

a silently falling veil

erasing the blue from neighborhood skies

to carve the night black,

the backyard trees bathed in the halogens

of rusted streetlights,

both etched like skeletons in the vast gloom.

This is a dark so deep

that it changes all perception,

doubles and redoubles distances

like a funhouse mirror,

conjuring unimaginable distortions.

Tiny lightning-bug beacons

stitch their invisible thread

between the stalks of stubborn timothy

by the worn back steps,

while the heat drips down from the air

like a wavering ghost of last week's rain.

Washing Dishes In The Vast Night

Our house here in Burlington is a continuing revelation to me, a simple wonder slowly unraveling with the passing seasons. The rambling, strange design of this 1910 folly offers unending surprises and tiny, mysterious secrets to pry open. We moved here for the space; Denny wanted a larger kitchen than we had in Hillsborough, and I wanted room for recording in a more atmospheric setting, something imbued with cobwebs and a little dusty age. I had known the area from past visits (good friends attended college nearby), but the house was what drew me in, a towering old relic bound with aging gray siding and burgundy shutters, wrapped with an endless porch and skirted by an expansive, sprawling yard.

There's much to love about our large but modest home. Details leap into focus for me even as I type this post. The tarnished squares of faded white where pictures once hung on the walls, the elegant curve the staircase takes in its final steps descending into the darkness of the foyer, are all frequent reminders of the grace in past generations of residential architecture. Upstairs, the original hardwood floor is burnished and scarred, and downstairs, beautifully-carved designs in the door-frames and moldings remain, geometric shapes in white. The rooms are populated with brightly-reflecting French doors and a series of crumbling brick fireplaces, and in the yard stand three magnificent oaks withering with age.

The house is in a working-class neighborhood in Burlington, and it's admittedly not in anything but livable shape. Affordability was as much a factor as space. But where some would merely scoff at the peeling paint of the back stairs or the cracking, splintered porch-boards out front, or would roll their alarmed eyes at the corroded bathtub or the sloped warping linoleum of the kitchen floor, I find the same tarnished beauty I see in all of Burlington. This decayed manse suits me well, at least for now, until we inevitably flee to the solitude of the woods again someday, having tired of 'city' life downtown. For now, we've made this place our own, a rickety battlement against the rising tide of sprawl around the state. By clinging to our history and tenderly caring for it, we preserve it it alive and whole. 

"Ever since I have been so involved

In loving the feeling of keeping a small house warm and clean,

I'm not always aware that there are stars above stars

Just above that ceiling.

Or that the rain gushing throws the trash into the street,

Or that the wind in dark parking lots, at this moment,

Holds a leaf to the fence.

I sort of remember the world, but my small house is glowing.

A car playing music drives past the window

While I'm washing dishes in the vast night."

                                              -Mount Eerie, "Small House"

In The Missing Hours Of An Absent Spring...

Spring has fled from us here in Burlington, or more accurately, spring was never here to begin with. The season's simply missing from our collective experience of 2013, a blacked-out section of a classified report or an abductee's period of missing, haunted time. Winter's raw chill dissolved in a single medium-length fade into the sticky, sweltering fragrance of summer sprung early, of the lingering traces of last night's cookouts on the tepid breeze, of barely-open windows in old houses and the green, bursting fervor of plant life growing wildly. Here in Burlington, the air grows heavy and languid, a solid object to swim through, bleeding into the car like a flood while you're helplessly marooned in city traffic. The heat shimmers in its wave-like, electric haze from the power stations and the tarmac highway surfaces, lends a dream-lit quality to those void-like spaces behind the abandoned, collapsing mills, the littered vacant lots. I expect that in a similar blink, all of this will be entombed in gray autumn once more, but for now we watch the reflections of lights dance across our watermarked ceilings and try to stay cool. Half of town seems to be on vacation already, a mass evacuation though it's only May.

Last night, I took a long walk with a friend who's recent personal crises greatly required the company. He lives in Graham, the smaller but much more affluent neighboring city to Burlington and a shadow image of what this place might've been, had different choices been made. As I paced in the liquid heat through sturdy brick-ranch neighborhoods, past neatly-trimmed lawns, I realized how very distant Graham seemed from Burlington, more in a matter of stark degrees than the sum of the very few miles between them. Burlington is still unlike anywhere else I've ever been. The closest approximation I can consider, strangely, is Los Angeles. While the two cities of course couldn't be more different than, well, winter and summer, only in LA have I also felt that surreal, edge-of-the-world quality found in such abundance in central Alamance County. The difference is here, we're on the edge of nothing. We're simply quarantined, isolated. To paraphrase Jeffrey Eugenides, we're mapped by what surrounds us. The rest of the Triangle and the Triad both seem like far-off stars glimpsed from the cold surface of a dying planet. As I've said before (in interviews for the band mostly), the surface of Burlington is a thin shell covering something stranger and much more elemental beneath, a mood that's been described by some of my visiting friends as "Lynchian". You'll turn a corner here and know you've crossed that border, that threshold, and I've realized that this 'Other Burlington' has informed so much of my musical and film work that it's becoming a defining aspect of my experiences here. Denny, escaping into the placid environs of Chapel Hill for work each day, is less acclimated to Burlington's quaintly unusual atmosphere. This is a 'thin place' in every sense of the word. Sometimes you can see behind the veil here, and sometimes it's only the faintest negative glimpsed, a double exposure in warped glass.

In summer, the furious eruption of green in this city, with its cornucopia of oaks and maples, tends to hide what seems more evident in the frozen months, with the trees black and bare and the grass dead in the lots behind the railroad rights of way and in the yards of the boarded-up Victorian mansions. But one glance at the history of this place, from the heyday of the Burlington Coffin Company, to the bizarre goings-on in the monster-cursed myths of Goat Island, to the serial killer Blanche Taylor Moore and her sweet, subtle poisonings, and it's readily apparent that things are a bit different here. There's multiple levels of perception to Burlington, all of them unusual. One can miss the subtleties, or choose to overlook them in the name of more logical rationale, but you can't deny that the mood here is odd, to say the least. Underneath Burlington's mask of an ordinary Southern town are the deepest fathoms.

So, am I simply investing something unique where only another dying North Carolina mill town exists, as would be expected of any artistic nature? I don't think so. Simply, nowhere else I've known has precisely felt like this, and in a way, that's why Burlington has come to feel so much like home even in just the two busy years we've spent here. You see, I've always been the caretaker. I've been here for years, without knowing it. It existed as a shade in my mind that had yet to be lifted, and I was always fated to come here. My music's destiny, my own destiny, lies within the eerie borders of this forgotten little city. I am sure unlocking its myriad secrets will prove fascinating all throughout the years to come.