Feet

My mother’s feet are plagued with bunions, a result of years of squeezing her feet into high heels and feeling negative about it. My father’s feet are two different sizes, and his legs two different lengths, so he’s always a little off kilter. My sister had large feet for a long time, or so my mother seemed to think. My brother’s feet are tiny, like the rest of him, except for his head. My dog’s feet are black and wide and flat, and we call them paws. My feet have scars and discoloration from bike accidents. My feet also have toes attached to them, which are short and underdeveloped.

My father’s feet weren’t always different sizes, same with his legs. They got that way after years of misuse. And my mother’s bunions used to exist only as nightmares. Demons that she saw on her mother’s feet, determined not to follow in those footsteps. And my sister’s feet aren’t so big anymore, though her collection of shoes has grown. My brother’s feet are still tiny, but he’s also 12. Apparently the soles of my feet are smooth, like sand.

Soon all of our feet will become useless.

The Village Club

I really don’t remember any of this all too well, except that the room was painfully white and disguised as a cottage, but when I was like ten, my mother enrolled my sister and me in an etiquette course at the Village Club, which is like a country club except without the golf or pool and caters primarily to older women. The Club now offers an extensive curriculum on bridge, including two six-session sections at the beginner, intermediate, and supervised levels. I think ‘supervised’ just mean advanced, I’m really not sure.  There’s also a few supplementary, more specialized classes (Conventions & More; Defense Wins the Game!; Bid, Play, Defend & Discuss; Beyond Conventions; and Brush Up On Your Basics) available to players that feel they’ve come to grips with the basics of the game. They must really get to the heart of bridge and fine tune the player’s skills, or get them in touch with the heart of the cards or their inner Life Master. Who knows. The purely instructional classes are taught by Life Master Bonnie Ward, while the more analytic-slash-specialized courses are taught by Silver Life Master Judy Hocker and Gold Life Master Gail Hanson, whose biographical statement ends with the quote “There is no bridge without fun and no fun without bridge.”

I’ve never played bridge. My family raised me on euchre and gin rummy and it shows in my bias against bridge. When I read those names with their titles and see all the classes the Club offers and all the time they invest into it, I can’t help but in some way view the whole thing as some kind of strange cult of older women playing cards and practicing perfect etiquette under the indivisible light of an infinite number of bright white rooms disguised as cottages. I have no idea if the Club held bridge classes when I was a fledgling gentleman in that etiquette seminar. I’m sure I wanted nothing to do with the Club’s extracurriculars after that. Like I said, I don’t really remember.

The Club is a hot-spot for those women’s daughters to host baby showers and wedding receptions. My dad says the only reason we were ever members is because my grandparents (mother’s parents) were. The whole thing has a real family vibe to it. We must have dropped our membership around 2007. I really don’t remember. I never noticed that we stopped going, nor was I informed when it (apparently) happened. We would go there for dinner or Sunday brunch toward the end of each year’s membership period in order to meet the yearly spending minimum.

I remember wearing sweaters to the Club often. A sweater can hide a disheveled, wrinkled dress shirt underneath its fuzziness. Of course, if the Club people have the heat turned all the way up to like 85 degrees and we opt to eat upstairs at the barroom because the wait is predictably long on a Sunday evening in February when all the air is frozen and people are scrambling to spend just beyond the yearly minimum so they don’t have to, down the road, pay for food they never order and its even hotter in the barroom than the downstairs dining room because, you know, heat rises and then I’ll spend the whole ordeal debating whether I should tough it out with the sweater or swallow my pride and just take the damn thing off because it’s too steamy and who really cares if my shirt is wrinkled, it’s not like I got some degree or even a certificate from that etiquette class that I now have to live up to. They probably don’t even remember me.

Sunset from above

I let myself drift into sleep, almost. I lean my head back and allow myself to fall in rhythm with the humming undercurrent of the drone of the engines, or maybe it's the wind rushing past the plane, redirecting its flow as the mass of aluminum and flesh glides forward. The pockets of light, warm chatter of a few pairs of people seems distant, and they feel more like whispers, or a lullaby. In my moment of hypnosis, I see my mind falling backwards through my seat and the fuselage, into night sky. The clouds are like their own city. A city of dreams. Life above this city reveals a crimson horizon, one that fades with much more patience and fire than the standard terrestrial sunset. This moment feels eternal. I could remain here forever, suspended in the fresh sky, separate from the world below, protected by the moon and its lunar gleam.

I snap back out of this hypnotized state and regain control as an observer of this vessel. The man next to me was reading The Brothers Karamazov, while the man next to him has his Kindle. Both are now drowned in their slumber, seduced by the airplane's siren song that nearly took me. When the pilot's voice mumbles that the time is now for people to use their electronic devices, an urgent and long awaited rummaging builds throughout the plane. The sleeping passengers wake up, and rub their eyes in search of a clearer picture of reality.


I'm flying Delta, the airline that provides its passengers with those classic cookies traditionally dipped in coffee. When the flight attendant, a proper man in his late thirties with a well manicured beard reaches me, I request my usual snack/drink combination: orange juice - from concentrate, no ice - and that good ol' cookie. I decided on these two choices when I started flying regularly between New Orleans and Detroit a couple years ago. I feel a bit slighted and confused when my neighbor - Karamazov - gets a full can of Canada Dry, while I only get a cup of my drink. Because we're flying to Detroit, I would expect Delta to carry Vernor's, and I consider it rather criminal that they don't (nothing against Canada - I'm on good terms with the Habs and I think I speak for most of my native land in saying that we maintain a healthy, open relationship with our neighboring nation) I realize, in that moment, that I'm flying someplace fortunate enough to have maintained a tight enough hold on its local pop, and that the national sphere has refrained from consuming it. I consider it a success in the preservation of regional integrity.

I assume that most, but not all, of the passengers on this flight are landing in Michigan, for Michigan. I'm sure at least twelve or so people are using DTW to connect to another flight, and that their time there will be short. DTW, Detroit's international airport, will serve as a pit stop for them, an in-between state for their true destination. Is DTW even a real place for them? A few, I'm certain, will rush head-first to their next flight, with their wheeled baggage in tow, and won't take a moment to realize where they are, or that they simply are somewhere. They won't know that the area they occupy exists and is a portal to a larger, magnificent world, the same way their portal will connect them to New York, or Denver. Those with a few hours between planes might treat it like just another shopping mall, an opportunity to accumulate souvenirs from their visit to Michigan, while others may just settle in at one of the bars and linger. I am willing to forgive the way they will treat the airport, the place. I understand they are only trying to get one flight closer to home.

I mix the cookies and orange juice in my mouth and finish my snack with force. I wait for the flight attendant to swing back around and collect my trash. I don't want to leave it, that would be rude. I lean my head back once more, this time with intention - a quick nap before landing - and fall back into the night sky, where the once-crimson horizon is now enveloped in the blue oblivion.

Dwelling Points

Well done! You’ve discovered the first of many puns and/or/perhaps associations hidden within the two words Weldon and Ryckman. They must be hidden because the only apparent meaning behind Weldon is a hill with a well. So maybe I’m a bottom dweller, forever biding my time. And I do dwell, but I often times swell as well.

Ryck means jerk/snatch/pull/tug in Swedish. As in, I ryck’d my hand back and forth and made jelly. Or I ryck’d from the bottom of my well, deep in the earth. I rearranged a few symbols and found ayr. My dwelling swelled into a cyclone and propelled me skyward. into the stratospheric, thinly sliced, shaved. Aquarius is an air sign, after all. Two-two groundhogs’ day, so why not have my head in the clouds? There’re enough groundhogs in the earth as it is.

Still, I do what I can to lower myself to dwell, I end up jerking up and down, unable to settle--though I do dwell, don’t get me wrong. I dwell in circles in cycles in cyclones. Like the time my passenger critiqued my driving, or lack thereof. I missed the easy money, the wide open opportunity for my assimilation into the stream of traffic. No more missed opportunities. And so I dwelt for a moment. I lingered, like I linger on the aforementioned traumatic experiences. A clinger.

Or rather I dwelled, welding the two opposing forces into one mental brain space. Up and Down. Over and out. Earth and Wind. We’re told to sleep with one eye always open in case intertexuality strikes. To be bitextual. But I’ve found freedom only exists to those who do not actively seek it, for they are not bound by any quest. I am determined, however, to find meaning--to create meaning--but i only know the letters and the tethers, they bind me and wind me and lie to me and we, we try we fly we argue we are. What’s that? Energy can neither be created nor destroyed? Only transformed? So, then, must I take these seemingly unintelligible ideas and create some iota of truth? Have I not done that already? I thought the race ended at the finish line, with a welder and an elder. Aw elders, don’t cry. The youth are only growing westless, any farther west and we’re far east. Feast, then, and don’t dwell. Dwelling only leads to madness. And below madness billows boiling wells and lower and lower and lovver and and. back in my well, to dwell and smell and shell, because, historically speaking, Weldon and Sheldon seem to be interchangeable, from a certain point of view.

Table Talk

I had never seen such shameless, community-ridden obsession. People carried trays stacked upon trays of impatiens, marigolds, pansies, petunias and whatever else you can get at the most overblown farmer’s market you’ll ever see. How I lived here for eighteen years and never realized the absurdity of my daily life now blows my mind, but it’s something that can only be realized now, as I am but a visitor to this place. Painfully manicured lawns and multi-thousand dollar sprinkling systems and yearly paint jobs on peeling cupola’s and god awful dinner plates that hang from the wall that bear no sentimental value to their owner’s, who couldn’t reproduce their image if you offered them a gift certificate to Speedway or Nordstrom--this is what drove me to insanity and what drove me out of Birmingham, Michigan.


Garage sales here are an ordeal--hell, everything here is an ordeal. Whatever event my family hosts follows a stringent and always broken formula for success reached through purgatory: time for preparations requires no less than five times the length of the suggested event (a four hour wedding shower demands at least 20 hours of prep time, and exactly 18 of those hours must take place in the 24 hours leading up to the party), and the event must feign the appearance of luxury, supplying cheap wine and Smirnoff and bottles of Labatt Blue in hand-painted and monogrammed glasses.


What cheap bastards live in the Midwest, and why then, is it noted for its prosperity? Why is Speedway always 4 or 5 cents cheaper per gallon, but more importantly why does everyone know that? Why is the main street that links downtown Detroit to the suburbs of Ferndale, Royal oak, and Birmingham lined with businesses whose storefront i image is burned into the back of my retinas, yet i have never been in? Why are stores organized by the product they sell (all the mattress stores are on the same block; same with the home theater warehouses) Why are there so many fucking stores? And on the opposite side of the street there’s a cemetery a mile wide and who the fuck knows how deep? I see the same guy sitting at the same grave every week, more dead than the lover he mourns, and he’s the only person I ever see in there. 


Maybe he's the only human person here. The only person capable of finding something to care about that is real. Or maybe he's just holding onto the memory of a world that used to be real. It's sad. Not only do the fucking people obsess over television, and have parties worshiping the idols they project onto their walls, but the fucking parents work for the TV company. It’s all so wrong. Kids here will buy ecstasy, but they don’t even have a reason to eat it. How can anyone retain sanity in this creative void? Its different from places like Nebraska or North Dakota, because those places are supposed to be boring--in fact they pride themselves on it. This is supposed to be better. Better than what?

After the Gold Rush

The air smells of burning leaves and burning wallets. The town feels like two models--a miniature--with a newer model built inside an antique, like the elaborate workings of a Lionel train master who devotes their basement to a web of railroad tracks and miniature shacks, with fake moss creeping up the side of a paper machete mountain ridge and a town built around a train depot.

It’s all one big attempt to refurbish past prosperity and find some sense of nostalgia. Houses built by withering sticks and tin siding climb outward from the main road and the faint sound of a stout, aged woman losing her last nickels at the slots echoes through the foothills of the mountains that I am not prepared to pass. This used to be a mining town, and in that time it was known as the Richest Square Mile on Earth; now it favors a more conventional form of gambling. Casinos line the main road, though they forgo the bright lights and sounds of the desert oasis of Vegas in favor of a more rustic approach. A mile and a half ago I passed through the more extroverted and subsequently more successful casino haven Black Hawk; this town lives in its shadow.

Both cities bloomed at their inception during the mining rush of the late 1850’s, bringing well over ten thousand eager, foolish gold-seekers--all gamblers in their own right. Their population retreated ever since, never returning to the glory they knew at birth and currently hovers around a collective 600 today. They continue to attract gamblers of a different kind and accept the donations of travelling drunks and honeymooners on their way to the more luxurious Vail.

Dostal Alley, Easy Street and Famous Bonanza--these are products of an underwhelming experiment of the early 90’s, when Colorado attempted to reinvent the town as a caricature of its former self, forbidding people from building houses of any style other than the traditional brick houses of its mining days and create a new angle on chance that drew greedy men there in the first place.

I stop for a soda at Annie Oakley’s Emporium, but I’m a quarter short. Oh well, I could always get a few Owl Cigars, whose building reads ‘still only 5 cents’ in my rearview mirror as I leave the city, soon to be forgotten amongst the peaks and valleys of the jagged, rocky mountains.

Why I Write

I write because Patrick McDunn, my senile high school English teacher who didn't even know my name told me I could. 'You use the right words,' he said, and I often question whether that's a semi-legitimate
reason for doing anything or if I'm wasting my time magnifying the scope and meaning of my life with words like 'self-discovery' and 'transformation.'

But in ways that is exactly why. It's all an effort to get closer to the truth of myself or to make some precise, profound realization, which has been biding its time beneath a trap door in my mind's labyrinth until it decides to reveal itself to me. When I don't write, I end up vocalizing all the obsessive compulsive thoughts that belong on the page to no audience except myself, ignorant of the fact that strangers observe, eavesdrop, or stare. Writing gives me free therapy sessions, whenever I want them (I don't claim to be insane--that would be an injustice to the truly insane--but I was once advised by a professional to investigate Stockholm Syndrome. Don't ask). Yet I still find myself grasping onto my training wheels with a death grip, terrified at what might happen should I fully devote myself to the craft.

I write to retain some sanity within myself, and perhaps because of this my writing is still very scattered, unfocused. It consists of scribbled notes of potentially pertinent information and lists of words and titles and ideas. Ideas which, at their conception, had every intention to follow through with the promise they captured in the moment, yet were thrown into a box with a litter of similar moments and shoved in the cobweb friendly area of my brain. I want to write in order to make sense of the cyclonic chaos and create something worth reading.