Dear Wes.
Hi again.
I just turned 28. I wrote a song called 28 with a sweater and a cup of tea.
Still no fame (that I know of) which is sort of good because I cleared the ol’ 27 hump with little damage.
But in fact it’s not true. There has been plenty of damage. A junkyard full of it. I tend to fib because I have a bad memory. But here are some true concrete checkable facts. A list in fact that I keep to help me fend off memory gaps:
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My mom died from brain cancer two days before I turned 21. She was diagnosed a few days before her 50th birthday. To add to the coincidence, her favorite Beatle was George Harrison and it just so happens that the quiet Beatle and I share a birthday. February 25th. Too much coincidence?
Well, completely in an unrelated way, February 25th, 1336 was the stage for a horrific and bizarre event. In Pilenai, rather than be taken captive by the invading teutonic knights, 4,000 defenders took their own lives. Before their final act, the inhabitants burned their possessions and set the castle ablaze. When the flames subsided, the knights were baffled to see the men, women, and children, suicided to death.
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My mother and I listened to California Dreamin in her van together after school, running errands around Ohio suburbs. I learned how to play drums in that van, kicking the floor boards. It was as cool green, sort of a hunters green. Now it’s black, sitting in a concrete backyard without a drivers side window. Dry rot, filthy in the California sunshine.
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It was a frozen night, no snow in the forecast though. For the normal rush hour shave in the morning types, the ones who fell asleep and woke up with the late show and the morning traffic report on sunny 95, nothing was amiss, the next morning they were greeted with the faintest dusting of snow, unannounced, and probably unnoticed. That night my grandmother’s watch froze the exact moment my mother died.
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I was born exactly at sunrise under a full moon in a blizzard. The nurses called me the golden bear. I was originally left handed but kept smearing the lead on the page in an orange kindergarden classroom… so, by the prompting of a strict teacher, began to write with the other hand. Although, as I fact check my own birthday story it turns out I wasn’t born under a full moon after all. The full moon lit up the night of the February 17th, 1984.
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The black hole in my mother’s crown chakra was a glioblastoma, the same type of tumor that killed the surgeon’s mother.
I thought about including a picture here.
The surgeon couldn’t hold himself together when he gave us the diagnosis. This doesn’t mean he fell apart. It was just sort of a wet masculine mess. Four Men in a room sobbing while trying not to.
—
I’m avoiding thinking on these facts. I’m not good at that sort of thing. Theres no good way to say these it’s with language. I need to write quick. I can’t bring myself to write anything too long, but the shorts tend to accumulate.
My mother died. My mom died. How do I say it? Which is appropriate?… Nevermind.
Now that those things are in their allotted space, I can move on to more speculative news.
So Wes, in speculative news… on this birthday, I’m huge in France
WES(T)—“Why France?”
Actually, this is another lie. I would like to think that somehow the french intelligentsia have been secretly monitoring my blogs, even the abandoned ones, since I was sixteen. Following me like british punks followed the Pixies, subsequently inventing the mosh pit. The French underground have been performing my fictions, or my suggestions, for years. I like to think that I’ve been the main force in the whole Tiqqun, Claire Fontaine scene, but probably not, Just commentary, regretfully so.
WES—“I don’t think I follow, what about your character, do you write about character?”
Duck spoiling in front of you.
Fact is I don’t have much character. Just lots of settings and moods. I could go on a tear about how character, narrative arc and all that bull-slop is just a solution, and we need more problems, not solutions. Solutions, albeit seductive, are also reductive, totalitarian even, a fascist tendency to be sure.
I don’t blame you though, I think you’re movies are perfect for what they are. happy solutions.
WES—go west.
Why not east? France soon?
This is a happy accident. Supposedly, at 28, my frontal lobe (not a dirty joke)… is fully developed. At this very moment. I’ve grown a rogue neural cluster which is broadcasting directly into the jet stream. Evidently San Diego and Tarnac are atmospherically matched, right in the sweet spot. And speaking of synchronicity, there is a moon/jupiter/venus alignment tonight that’s supposed to be stupid good.
It’s all coming together. this is the peak. From here on out- the great skidding decline… I’m an all around cosmic oddity wes. a real shit show.
It’s about what makes us weep. The molecular emotions. The little accumulations. All those repeated rememberings… placeholders. But this isn’t really to YOU. It’s addressed to the closest other you. Evaporating the reality of our brief encounter to a black hole, representational void, where I dump everything… I want to be forgotten.
Wes, first I was beer drinking and editing the original version of this letter. Now i’m slowing down, in the sunshine I forget to miss people.
Anyway—
Lets get a drink Wes, I’m feeling peculiar, quite fucking peculiar, like light pollution opening to the black expanse of the Pacific.
brett
