Viva Last Blues

I've always had this blackness in me. Even as a wee moppet like my own wee moppet, I think it was there, lying in wait. I feel it there still, buried deep and dormant.

I have lived and died and cursed my blackened soul. But I was always there standing when the time came; always there and paid before my bills came due. Then one night, THP, Spud and I went to see Will Oldham at the Corner and I swear that music was so sweet and sublimely sad and I had collected twisted, cloying sorrows in my body for so long that part way through the gig, something in me broke and all that sorrow engulfed me.

When the pain in my back got too bad to bear from standing, I would squat for a minute or two to rest it - just long enough for relief, not long enough to draw the attention of bouncers looking for signs of conspicuous inebriation. That night I went down for a minute and didn't really get back up for years.

But it was THP who died of it. We were leaning on each other before that; two drunks staggering home through the starless night. Then I stepped out from under him and while I knelt on the beer-soaked carpet of the Corner, unable or unwilling to pull myself up, he fell hard. In reality, that was later, of course, because deaths of that sort are always slow and are never amenable to neat metaphor or convenient cliche.

But in that very moment, I succumbed and something vicious began. I closed my eyes and went into the blackness with Will Oldham in my ears and Spud's hand on my head and through ties of love and inter-dependence; through trailing guts painfully knotted and entwined, I dragged the others along behind.

Ridiculous diagnoses followed, one after another, when “the blackness has her”, would have sufficed. Crazy cures – chemicals and electricity and endless stupid questions that I could never hope to answer even if I had the strength to look outside myself and speak. Ignorant presumption of cause and effect; the blind leading the blackened and charred. Sear my soul and send me back to die slow instead of fast.