I always wanted to write stories...
... so now I'll just go ahead and do it.
Jeez these big stentorian headings yelling at me are really something else. Substack is being hella aggressive.
The title and heading are basically what’s gonna happen here. I’ll try and post at least a couple of pages worth of something I think is good once or twice a week, and hopefully someone else thinks its good and shows someone else, and on and on, and before you know it will have a regular Jim Henson’s funeral Just One Person chorus.
You should watch that[1] you know, all two odd hours of it. Or I guess you don’t have to but the image taken from the aforementioned song is a performance beginning around the two hour and eleven minute mark. It’s heart breaking, its hearkening in passion. The original meaning of passion the Latin origin, patiens, suffering… a phonic cognate to our patience. Is it suffering to wait? Does it depend on what we’re waiting for, wanting toward? Where’s Lacan? Where’s Heidegger?
See you might could say my head is like an episode of Family Guy for cutaway gags, but it isn’t anything funny that we cut to. Just profound introspection…
… or that isn’t right, I’m examining the outside world… extrospection?
I have a memory from when I was quite young. I caught a roly-poly, a pillbug in an empty jam jar.
I mean they aren’t exactly hard to catch. They curl into that ball and you can roll them right in.
I didn’t realize I was exhibiting a mild convergence to Cobain’s Sappy at the time, but I made for the crawling wood louse a little home in there, some dirt, some grass, a twig, a leaf. I was careful not to cover him with that familiar material however. I knew better than that.
I went to show the neighbor boy my prize, my inversion of Steven’s Tennessean hilltop monolith in glass, a ‘slovenly wilderness’[3] of my own creation contained therein, and discovered on his porch a group of unfamiliar people. Relatives to the single mother that was raising that boy. To that end, it was a man that saw first what it was that I had, and he asked me what it was, and I told him.
“Well I think you had better let it go.”
Now, I was precocious beyond knowing not to smother my new pet in detritus (even though that’s what they eat, and he might have been able to escape such a prison by a means similar to Spike in the first Land Before Time). I was also salient enough in contradiction of my years to know, just cuz some adult was talkin’, dat didn’t mean I nec’ssarily had’tuh listen to ‘im.
“Why should I do that?”
“Because that’s not where it belongs. He’s a wild animal.”
“He’s just a bug though. Look, I got him some stuff for his environment.”
(I think I was like five at this time, and it was my belief that knowing the word ‘environment’ should be impressive enough to appease this guy, who if I remember correctly, I was perceiving of as just some old bully)
“But that’s not his home. Would you like it to be taken from your home?”
I wasn’t alone with this guy. The neighbor boy’s mother was there, she was familiar to me, as well as at least one another woman and man, if I recall correctly (this was over thirty years ago) One of the other women murmured something at the man to the effect of getting him to stop interrogating me about my dumb jar with a single bug in it. That’s a pretty threatening question for some strange man to ask you at that age after all, even if there were witnesses. He dismissed the woman without turning back to her, he told her he was teaching me something, and held up his hand.
“He’s alone in there isn’t he?”
“Yes".
“How would you like it to be alone?”
It would have been June or July in Chicagoland then. The warm wet air of that summer time city was drifting of that evening a lens for the rosy setting sun, the sun’s royal garlands of stringing purple orange clouds, the fireflies supplementing their substitute starlight for we wayward urbanites, the cicada song a counter chorus to the shimmering noise of the leaves in the wind, of the cars passing by in the settling evening.
“I wouldn’t like it.”
“How is it that you should do something to him you wouldn’t like done to you?”
I looked away from the man.
I look away from him in my mind now too. I don’t think what he had intended to teach me was to be ashamed of what I had done, but I let the bug go and I dumped the jar out with it. I felt bad that I might have put the creature through some period of pain. Felt a kidnapper, but it was a free again, as wild things are supposed to be, as was also told to me by that man I never saw again and never knew the name of so it cannot be recalled today.
Ok that was some introspection… I think? I dunno did that go anywhere? Did anyone learn anything? I at least managed to shoehorn in a reference to that deconstructionist analysis from Wallace Stevens.
Not everything I write on this page is going to read like that. I mean, I also coulda told a story related to that household about the one time I was walking between my place and theirs and the the neighbor mother was getting undressed in the window when I happened to look up to see-
But that’s a whole different kind of a genre, and I think I managed to generate a more somber and reflective mood, which might be the place I want to wrap up on and say, you should read that Steven’s poem, and think about what it means for a child to believe he could have turned that Tennessee (Illinois in this instance but who’s counting?) wilderness back around and folded it into the jar. You should watch that Memorial and you should listen to Sappy too.
I want to make some real art here, and maybe get people to look at some real art too… and maybe make some fart jokes or finish some stories about when I saw’d some big tiddies in the window (Beavis says, Boi-yoi-yoi-yoing) as a little kid like in that one movie where they’re looking from the treehouse…
What the hell was that? Stand By Me?
I wanna make something genuine at the very least.
Alright, goodnight.
[1] Jim Henson’s Memorial Service. The Jim Henson Memorial, 2015.
[2] Tikkanen, Amy. “Wood Louse.” Encyclopædia Britannica. Accessed March 18, 2025. https://www.britannica.com/animal/wood-louse.
[3] Stevens, Wallace. “Anecdote of the Jar.” Poem. In Poetry. Chicago, Illinois, 1919. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/issue/70402/october-1919#toc.