Within Our Divide

The Divisiveness of Unity and a familiar phallacy

Hey there, saucier!

Everything may seem like a shit-show from the get-go when we jump into the tsunami of information on this New Year’s Day, and while we may not have bought the ticket, given to us then perhaps when our wills whip in wanting, we’re going to take the ride for we all are connected, whether we like it or not

“I am half-redneck,” I told my mother once She was not enthused She was offended, as she replied, “We did not raise you that way!” Yes, the first and last time I said it to her, and I find myself seldom using exclamation points in my head to end most phrases when I remember what my mother said My wife, my mother and I gathered around a dining room table, almost assured food and lots of wine down our gullets by then; probably more flippant than I should have been, but it’s true: I’m half-redneck My dad had already retreated to his room in the basement to avoid any conflict and be in his own world—smart man To subsume to her rendition of me to keep peace that evening defined me after a pause with no rebuttals possible, but at least “I’m half-redneck” hovered in the air for a moment, even though my mother seldom held her breath for me, which I miss

My dad taught me regularly: it doesn’t matter what you do for a living, as long as you do enough to get by on your own with the help of family and friends and I will be your friend, but it would help if you are really into dirt bikes Money’s importance waxed and waned growing up from my perspective, though my mom’s bourgeoise trait, which she inherited from her mother, crept into conversations and when possible her way of life—class seemed important and unimportant, and never sure which would be chosen in each moment Me? I think money and class are stupid

But I’m still half red-neck, ‘cause I grew up in a place, McMudhole, where if you didn’t get out, you got stuck, just like most small towns in the 80s across these States where the majority of a towns livelihood depends on light industrial, farming, livestock and depleting Nature—a blue collar town mostly, but with a small Christian college and a technology company now gone I am still stuck there, even though I live a full day’s drive away, done with travel and done with my best to fake fitting in to make a living; now in a place beyond redneck, more hillbilly than anything else, and we take care of each other, but best to be white here without an accent; that’ll help People often kind here, even the curmudgeons, almost always considerate, from the ill bathed redneck-hippie-hermit with a joint in his mouth all the time to the white supremacist who’s got a thing for property and borders and no trespassing signs every 20ft; we’re quiet here except for a creek, log trucks, feller bunchers, wolves and coyotes, small arms fire and an occasional lost hunter; free away from a world gone wrong when seldom true or right, and a way to make it true for all of us here, even if we seldom talk about our freedom in a way that matters most

My folks told me more than a 1,000 times: “The devil works with idle hands,” seemingly not acknowledging my hands were seldom idle in a house in the woods where God and Satan weren’t real as I always got into something, and still do; I think they feared my deviance and how it might overtake me

Even though I read a lot, steeped in punk’s defiance and heard everything, I left the woods for the Army, naive to a larger world and its wants and needs to feed its institutions, its rules and Christian expectations, the world where women’s liberation didn’t happen, and to be brown set up roadblocks within a person and our public—I thought when I left home the vast majority of our society accepted and supported we were all equal and free, inequality and slavery history, and those who didn’t believe and support equality were few and far between—I mean, you had to respect most laws or get squashed, but I didn’t know the laws to separate, divide, corrupt and control were not written, but spoken and upheld in shadows and amongst kin, friends and congregates, which holds significant sway in most peoples’ lives in the States, then and now

This place we now live gets as close to Anarchy as one can get in these States, when the sheriff takes 40 minutes to get to us; if you get hurt bad, your neighbor is the one who saves your ass, which leaves us all living with a simple rule: don’t piss off your neighbors too much or you might get shot or left to bleed out or both

With my life now lived 33 years rurally and 25 years in cities, the divide between city and country, centuries old now, created me, born into it and out of it, a part of me with my life stretched along its borders and boundaries Strikingly, living this far out from society, to live even in a small town would wound me now; I don’t think with so many rules and so much manufactured etiquette to uphold the pride and prejudices of any community of any magnitude, while low for city folk even with their anonymity, all seems overbearing and anti-life to me now

As I moved back to a city decades ago, a small city I left before when people would still say ‘hello’ on the street, people didn’t say ‘hello’ the 2nd time around and an anonymous life with several of life’s whippings across my back brought me to a life I have lived as much the same way as I do now: 1. To experience life and jump into the abyss when it doesn’t look like death or madness awaits 2. Do my best to survive so I can feel and think as much as possible before I die 3. Best to give everyone the space and freedom to be themselves 4. Avoid the Roosters

I was a daughter’s son once and long ago loved fuckery the most, though I have learned since: life happens, we happen, and to follow through on what happens, even if it is nothing Which is not to write the divide ain’t as deep as our animosity towards one another, just as deep, and it always has been and will be since I can remember and can imagine: blue collar vs white collar, farmer vs corporate vampire, artist vs artist, conservative vs liberal, government vs anarchist, communist vs capitalist, clean vs loaded, carnivore vs herbivore, monotheistic vs polytheistic—identity defines most communities, like builds on like, unlike gets shafted until they get out—it’s not their place—or to belong we must live within our walls, the only place for freedom, where we can be ourselves, because our cultural history reeks of repression, where most of our depravity and addictions allowed only behind closed doors unless it’s brands, business, wealth and power, as only God or Satan can guide our actions, and only God can judge us, but we will judge each other everyday until the last of our days on this earth

We live simply here, so others may simply live

“It’s a simple life, but it ain’t easy” —old school off-grid neighbors above us on our hill

“Cherish the Dull Moments” —our mantra here Beyond the Gravel Road, which we came up with the summer after our first year here in the deep woods

A place we make for identity to stay together and survive, and for a few a place to control, not all of us controllable though, but always there’s enough who give their power to someone else, ‘cause most of us have mouths to feed and a family tree

Power a place we make for an individual, a family, a group, a community, even for the powerless and those between

In another way: Our divides in our lives create a life we feel we can control, separated out seemingly from uncontrollable lives, even our own Who may control us in a place of power but ourselves, through a self-created divide in our identity grown from a place, real or imagined, made

Last winter I found myself at Walmart coming into the health and beauty section just past the pharmacy with a rickety, wheel-shakingly-loud cart past a small group of semi-hippie black kids talking and laughing When I passed them and crossed an aisle I saw a prim and proper well-heeled woman with coiffured hair in the middle of the cross aisle, so I wheeled around the sales stack in the middle of the big aisle selling some wintry cold remedy to watch the prim woman’s face when she came out of the cross-aisle and saw the early 20s kids I was giddy with possibility Sure as shit though, aghast and then fear and then disgust ran across her face in less than a half-second like an old silent horror movie only in color I guffawed into a laugh loud enough the kids stopped talking to stare at me, and the lady looked at me laughing at her, then away, and then she did an everything-is-normal-but-that-laughing-guy-scares-me thing, though pretty sure her will only sought escape from the health and beauty section and those kids and me (no, the kids didn’t see her face like I did, but knew my derisional laugh was directed at her)

“‘Power to the people,’ we chant Announcing to ourselves we are powerless” — a line from long ago

“You can’t change The World,

you can only

change your world

And that’s why we killed Christ” —a stanza from long ago

Divided by space and time here, where the banks still have vacuum tube for drive-up deposits and their teller and people call each other and write checks at stores, where the Elk’s Club thrives selling cheap booze and food to its members, where most gather in one of the 19 churches in town on Saturday or Sunday, which doesn’t include all the churches and congregations outside of town, and the few of us left go grocery shopping ‘cause it’s quiet in the stores Most speak freely of their hatred for the westside of Washington, no matter most here make poor or lower middle class incomes with a debt ceiling decided by those who will loan them money, and the Westside Rulers make all the rules to keep us down, take our tax money and give it to the Illegals and turn our kids trans, or bi or gay, because that’s what makes us different from them, and so we go into the hole at the bottom of our divide where we all wallow in our mire of an identity to keep our selves together and drive on through a life

We should ask why we create these divides when we’re all connected, where what you do affects everything between you and I, even if we’re thousands of miles away from each other and perhaps even in a different day; in this moment we are together, and life is one moment made of a million moments all of us experience now, alive and aware, yet we can’t be aware of everyone in our each other, the tree nearest you isn’t the tree nearest me, the squirrel you fed yesterday isn’t the squirrel I fed today, yet here we share a squirrel, even if imagined, the squirrel we share is real in this moment and perhaps as long we remember our squirrel

My thoughts return continually to a sociopath when thinking about the divide between our identities, a chameleon whose identity seems malleable, maybe even liquid to fit a form they’ve taken on to survive But my thought which follows thinks their core self hidden away, kept contained and unseen, though I wonder if their self’s identity could be rigid or does it stay liquid too, reformed as needed to portray an outward identity which may need to vary, too

Maybe Buddhist monks train themselves to be sociopaths Or maybe, better yet, enlightenment equals madness, devoid of self, where one’s identity peels itself away completely as a life slips into the Void We’ll never know until madness or death takes us into another oblivion

What more can I ask of you, saucier, then to realize our divisions and delve into them as you can We built them and cherish them; they make us who we are and it’s funny for us to think about our selves within our self, as I am a dramatic personae drummed up by a lunatic and placed in his divides to give them sounds and silences which ring in a polyphonic register at their best or dip into a muddled mudhole at their worst

Keep on keepin’ on into and through the divisiveness of our unity and we’ll be alright; what makes us human and inhumane and the emotional upheaval we create to mark our boundaries, to define what we believe right from what we believe wrong, even though we’re doing both, because to name right is to know wrong (a singular thought that’s been drooling all over this missive as I write to you)

Stay saucy and frank!

Your muddled, mischievous, clawing-out-of-mudholes-along-boundaries miscreant,

Frank Sauce

(Writer’s Note: “You can’t type in whatever you want and then out it comes as you envision it. It takes skill. It’s not magic,” I told my wife yesterday when we were talking about using AI in Photoshop. “You have to know what you’re doing.” I can hear an authoritarian cadence of my voice in my head as I type it and can only imagine what it sounds like coming out of my mouth—what a bunch of shit. Anyway, the thing is: writing is not magic and is magic—a gift of a language, particular and shared.

This missive’s brutality brutalized me. It came to me: writing is an excoriation of bodies and their life and death, and it kills me to peel the skin away and with rough hands write our meat and organs and bones, while keeping our souls alive, needing to give attention to every sinew and space between each synapse or fiber which makes us.

This Freak Thought got the attention I would typically give only to poetry and through this my “Dross” document, where all I write and cut out resides, got many, many new paragraphs from this missive.

I wrote and edited the rhythms of my soul out and then back into this again and again, whipped up sometimes like a hurricane or a dirt devil in a fallow field; each moment writing away rather than into and within. Every sound and silence now mirrored, reflected into a purity of language along borders and divides we’ve created which I can perceive or sense; all the others unnamed in darkness or another dimension still, at least from me.

In this New Year’s Day or another day, depending on your day’s or night’s duties and obligations and chores, many will posit their will into a division of a life, for something new or better in themselves or their lot in life, and that’s alright. Charles Olson once wrote in his “Maximus” poem: “Nothing changes, but the will to change” and as much as I would like to write he’s wrong, he’s also right. We might find ourselves bombed out of a building, covered in rubble and dust, our children dead next to us, and against our will what we know of life destroyed by madmen, but we still have inside what we had, how we see, how we feel hasn’t changed, but will our cores self made change drastically or imperceptibly or something in between? This we cannot know truly until it happens, but we can imagine and know with certainty how we would be affected.

This missive to you is the best I can do within our divisive unity.

“Love thy neighbor, even if it ends in divorce” - a line from long ago, too)