Road Hazards

As we're leaving the church, my friend says his truck is in the shop after another crash. Last time his son took a winter curve past the coefficient of friction. What this time, I wonder. I hadn't yet noticed the change in him. He says, a deer. I recall another deer that he and I watched run into the side of my car. It wrecked a fender. Tore off a mirror. Rolled across the hood. Then ran into the woods. My surprise turned to anger, but that faded fast. I was unchanged by the thing, restored with a shake of my head and a smile. A body shop replaced the fenders and side mirror. I recall that as we stand in the church vestibule and my friend says again, a deer. He says, at seventy miles per hour it appeared from the darkness. No time for brakes, he says. I see an explosion of flesh and fur against steel and glass. I cringe thinking of the flesh and bone inside the truck. His wife's head concussed on the dash. His arm burned by the airbag. He says, she's different. I see now that he is too. We look at the carpet, the cold walls of the church. I see him through the unfocused lens of memory and wonder if we ever really heal or just change according to some plan. There's no going back. At best, we go on. His truck, in the shop under fluorescent light may be restored, perhaps good as new. We leave the church, go out into the diffused, grey morning sunlight. The shop in which perhaps our bodies are restored. Our frames aligned. Our engines tuned so we again move down the road at speed. I shake my friend's hand. Say goodbye. Get in my car and turn the key. Soon I'm back on the highway, fingers tight on the wheel, eyes searching ahead for the hazards we have no hope of avoiding, wishing for some guide past all that waits in the woods to cross the paths we are traveling at far too much speed.

Imitations

At my therapist's office stands a desk made to look like fine furniture. Gustav Stickley's ghost is big around these parts. His factory still stands in a suburb nearby. Over a hundred years later, it houses a library instead of furniture and woodworkers. I'm carrying a book borrowed from that library. A slim collection of poetry I'm too anxious right now to read. The book is pure craft and rhythm. I am something else entirely. Stickley furniture is beautiful. Form, function, artistry, grace. Stickley pieces weren't made to look like anything else. They were exactly what they were built to be. Originals. The desk at my therapist's office, well, that's a pale imitation in every sense. A disappointment. I set the book of poems on its surface and open the top drawer. Inside, I find the Allen wrench and instruction booklet used to assemble it from whatever cardboard box in which it shipped. The instructions in English, Spanish, and maybe Japanese. I close the drawer, a flimsy thing, and consider a peek beneath the desktop where crude hardware and Phillips head screws have surely replaced craft. Instead, I go into the bathroom and close the door. A mirror shows my reflection, a flat imitation of a face crafted over half a century, resolved now in doubt. I stare, resisting the urge to reach into the reflection and comfort the man there, knowing I'll come up short, my hand pressed against cold glass, the distance between what I look like and what I wish terribly confirmed. Outside the bathroom door, the imitation desk, the poems I can't read, the appointment with my therapist perhaps to discuss what is and is not real.

The Year In Records

I like records. A lot. Listening to records beats streaming. The analog sound isn't quantitatively superior to digital, but I listen better to a record than to a stream. Put an album on and I'm there, really there, for the duration.

I picked up thirty-seven albums this year, mostly used, but a few are brand new pressings of brand new albums. Here's the 2019 rundown:

I've listened to Genesis since seventh grade and have almost completed the collection with Wind & Wuthering, Trespass, ...And Then There Were Three, Swelled And Spent (a bootleg of the The Lamb), Three Sides Live (Import) and Phil Collins' solo album, Face Value which works better as a whole record instead of individual songs.

My favorite albums in middle school were Supertramp's Even In The Quietest Moments... and Crime Of The Century, perfect examples of eighties pop. You don't get much better than "Fools Overture." Just handling these albums feels like the best kind of time travel.

I bought Steely Dan's Gold to have a vinyl copy "FM (No Static At All)" and "Babylon Sisters" on an album better than the one on which it originally appeared.

In high school, I avoided Bruce Springsteen because he was too popular, but I got over that and this year bought Nebraska, Greetings From Asbury Park, N.J., Darkness On The Edge Of Town, and the brand new Western Stars which, to my ear, is one of his best.

I didn't even know that Lou Reed's New York, one of the best rock and roll albums ever, came out on vinyl, but there it was in the bin. You bet I snagged it.

I grabbed some oldies too. Paul McCartney's Tug Of War (which isn't all that old), Glen Campbell's Greatest Hits (which my wife forbids playing in her presence), Stevie Wonder's Innervisions and Randy Newman's eponymous first album (both brilliant though very differently so).

There aren't many better songwriters than Sufjan Stevens, Neko Case, and The Decemberists. Illinois, Fox Confessor Brings The Flood, and The Hazards Of Love represent some of their best work.

I can't get enough of old jazz like Getz/Gilberto #2, Vince Guaraldi Trio's Jazz Impressions Of Black Orpheus, Art Blakey And The Jazz Messengers_, and Cannonball Adderly's, Something' Else. I'm especially devoted to the Dave Brubeck Quartet and Paul Desmond, so I picked up the Quartet's _Time In, Brandenburg Gate: Revisited, Jazz Impressions Of The U.S.A., and Desmond's Bossa Antigua and First Place Again.

Jazz fusion such as Jean-Luc Ponty's Aurora, Andy Summers & Robert Fripp's I Advance Masked, and Al Di Meola's Casino reminds me of record shopping at Spectrum and Desert Shore on the Syracuse University Hill back before I could drive. That Centro bus ride home felt endless with new records in hand.

Brand new jazz this year included The Bad Plus' Activate Infinity and the absolutely spectacular Finding Gabriel by Brad Mehldau. Nonesuch released Mehldau's best solo piano performanceLive In Tokyo on vinyl and sent me a sampler album too. Sweet.

A pretty good year for records, but then, any analog year is pretty good. On to 2020!

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Without intending to buy any more records in 2019, on December 30, at Barnes & Noble I found The Decemberists' I'll Be Your Girl for fifty-percent off. I couldn't pass that up and so now it's thirty-eight albums for the year. That's one better than thirty-seven, in case you hadn't noticed.

Ghost Writer

The Least Supernatural Superhero of all!

I wonder if the creators of Ghost Rider were thinking of ghost writers and just got carried away. Probably not, but that would be a great origin story.

This week a friend asked me to look at a sales pitch they'd written for their new venture. They expected an edit, a touch-up, but I did a heavy rewrite, seeing what it needed and knowing they wanted it done rather than to me teaching them how to fix it. I did the rewrite and sent it back. When my friend thanked me, I said it was my pleasure and explained my strange affinity for ghost writing.

That same day a colleague asked me to review a piece they had written for one of our bosses, a technical document with legal ramifications that my colleague had written well and exhaustively. I thought about condensing it down to a page or two, but again, my colleague doesn't want writing instruction or the destruction of their writing, so I created a summary, in my colleagues language and tone, to attach to the report. They liked that and the boss will be grateful for the brevity of the summary and the ability to refer if needed to the thorough report.

Later this week I made a presentation about the community center in which I have my office. It's anonymous writing showing the organization instead of the writer. Pretty much the opposite of what I do here which is all too much about me.

(I'm reminded of a Clarkson chemistry teacher who told my class, "you'd have an ego too if you were as good as me." I like that line a little too much.)

Ghost writing is a practice in humility, empathy, and compassion. It deemphasizes the self. And it turns out that ghost writing is most of what I do in revising my own work.

Last night I typed yesterday's Morning Pages. The process was ghost writing because by evening I had made of myself a different person than I was that morning. I felt compassion for the morning writer and was delicate with his feelings as I deleted sections and transformed his piece. I worried about changing the direction he'd chosen but trusted I was doing right by him, the piece, the process, and the audience.

In that piece I said writing is and isn't magic. Ghost writing is the same. The handwritten draft was nearly 1,200 words. Typed, it was 1,061, many of which had not appeared in the handwriting. Then I revised to make it shorter. Two and a half passes later it was 867 words, each pass done by the ghost writer I had become by evening by separating the words on the page from my self and hearing them as an audience might.

Writing manuals mark a division between writer and editor, but I like thinking of it as neophyte and ghost writer. The neophyte has passion and but lacks the skill to translate the passion to artful words on a page. The ghost writer has those skills and works to disappear, to make it seem as if the neophyte wrote every word in the final draft. The ghost writer feels devotion to the neophyte and to the craft.

In this way the writing, the writer, and the ghost writer are all transformed for the better. It's no flaming skull and burning motorcycle, and Nicholas Cage is unlikely to play me in the movie, but as origin stories go, it's not bad. It needs maybe a touch of revision. I'll get on that.