A Mass of Coiled Snakes

Grief as collateral damage of aging

Oct 01, 2024

Photo of the Pedernales by Randy von Liski Creative Commons license

I went swimming once with my friend Harry in the Pedernales River. It’s not pronounced like that if you’re from Fort Worth, like Harry is. It’s pronounced PER duh NAHL es. Anyway, I don’t go swimming and I certainly am not from Fort Worth, so this was unusual.

What was also unusual was the 5 foot long, grossly fat snake that stared at us dimly as we walked into the water.

I, nervously, said “What the hell is that?”

Harry said, “it’s a Cottonmouth.”

I may not be from Fort Worth, I’m from Coon Rapids, Minnesota, originally. And even folks from Coon Rapids, Minnesota, know that a Cottonmouth is a goddamn poisonous snake.

“Should we be in the water with it?” I asked, probably tremulously, I don’t really remember the adverb. I mostly remember the snake.

“They’re fine. Just don’t get close to it. They’re only a problem if you find a nest of them. Big ball of snakes all wrapped together.”

And with that, I walked to the edge of the water, found a rock to sit on, and spent the afternoon not swimming in the PER duh NAHL es.

Kris Kristofferson’s passing has me thinking a lot about grief. Grief is the collateral damage of aging.

I put out a tribute record to Kristofferson on my label, Jackpine Social Club, in 2001. It was called Don’t Let The Bastards Get You Down. I got a bunch of my favorite artists - John Doe, Jon Langford, Tom Verlaine, et al - to cover Kris’s songs.

In so doing, I met Kris a few times. I was and am a huge fan. He was always charming. That voice. He left me a voicemail once and we played it over and over again, loving how he felt the need to clarify, “Kris… uh, Kristofferson,” like we wouldn’t know that voice from the first.

I heard that Kris had passed driving back from Memphis. I heard from my old friend Burl Gilyard, who had turned me on to Kristofferson in the first place. I immediately teared up, which was weird, because I’d just gone through the tragic, horrible suicide of one of my closest friends since childhood. I hadn’t broken down yet over that.

I have three friends who died in the past few years. Actually, I had a lot of friends who died in the past few years. It’s that age.

But these three really rattled me, and I have a hard time wrapping my head around the profound anger I feel that shrouds or blocks any access I have to grief.

Matt Harris was also known as Hurricane Harris. That was because hanging with him could turn into a whirlwind. A multi-day whirlwind. One of those multi-days where you stay up all night talking and drinking and doing the kind of drugs that help you stay up all night and at 6 am he tells you his mom is in the other room and she’s about to get up. He had neglected to say this earlier.

And so here comes his mom, holding a tray of chocolates filled with various types of booze, which we gobbled. “What are you knuckleheads up to?” she asked. Matt gives me a sideways glance and we say “We’ve just been talking all night.”

And then she takes us to breakfast where we have bloody marys and bacon and wind up shooting pool at yet another bar later in the day.

Sleep wasn’t that important in a Hurricane.

But Matt was also a prodigious musician, a bass player, arranger, producer, songwriter, vocalist, who played in a band I put out on my label called Oranger, and who also spent 10 years in the great power pop group The Posies and who played with our close friend Ian Moore in the Lossy Coils.

Drinking killed Matt.

The drinking was getting sloppy. No, Matt was getting sloppy. Making up stories. You couldn’t tell if he knew they were made up or if he’d dreamt them in a drunken stupor and manifested them in his mind as true.

He was calling me at odd hours, like 1am, wanting to talk about Doctor Who episodes and movies, but he was repeating himself and the sharp tack that had been his brain was dulled.

When he posted on Facebook, “Lost my phone, don’t worry, I’ll find it,” I knew something was wrong, just by the tone of that line, the carelessness, signaling you couldn’t even reach him if you tried, the sense he’d given up. I called our mutual friend Jim who was also in Palm Springs, and asked him to do a wellness check. By the time they found Matt he was unconscious on the floor, he’d taken a fall and cracked his skull.

He was drinking handles of Vodka. His dad Zeek said Matt was living his last days. They had tried to get him into recovery. Matt refused.

He died later that week.

They were able to donate his eyes and kidney to folks who needed them. I didn’t know a kidney could still be functional after the damage he’d done, but I guess nobody was going to get that liver.

I’m so angry at Matt, still.

Ed Ackerson was a mentor and good friend from as far back as college in Minneapolis. We worked together at Positively Fourth Street. Ed was in bands, like the 27 Various, and on guitar occasionally in the Mighty Mofos.

Ed and I’d been close, sometimes very close. When I lived in Minneapolis we spent a lot of time together, drinking beer and talking about records and he presided over those conversations with village elder energy, even though he was only a few years older than me.

When I moved to San Francisco his band Polara would come through on tour, with the Wallflowers, or with Garbage, they were on Interscope and had garnered a fantastic record deal which had enabled Ed to build his recording studio and home, Flowers.

As I rattled around the music business, and started to know folks, Ed and I reconnected and I helped him set up his old label, Susstones, and we did some work together, like putting together a show at the John Anson Ford Amphitheater, where Polara did a live score for the silent Fall of the House of Usher.

I helped out with Susstones as much as I could, but I was also deep in my cups much of the time, and trying to do too much. We drifted apart, although I’d call Ed or he’d call me once in a while, and we’d say “Why don’t we talk more often?” At one point Ed said “You’re one of my best friends, I don’t know why we don’t talk a lot more.” I loved that he said that. The village elder had descended to treat me as an equal.

But then I saw pictures of Ed on Facebook. He looked extraordinarily skinny. I’d seen him in Minneapolis a year ago and he said he’d gone completely sober and lost weight. But this was severe.

I called him finally and asked. “You’re the 17^th person who knows,” he said. He’d been keeping the news close to the chest. “I have pancreatic cancer.”

After he told me this a friend called and said, “Oh thank god you finally know.”

I was so angry I’d been left in the dark as he’d been struggling through this. I know it’s an intensely private thing, and it was consuming him, literally, from the inside. He, and his wife Ashley, and their daughter Annika.

But the anger about being unimportant enough (in my own head, now, this is all in my own head) to be called into service. That still rankles me. It shouldn’t, I know. I drank myself into a stupor at Ed’s memorial.

Doug Jones.

My best man. One of my closest friends since adolescence. We met in high school. Lived together on and off for years, both in Minneapolis and in San Francisco. We drove together to San Francisco with a GEO Metro towed behind the slowest Budget Rental Truck they could find. A miniature schnauzer puppy named Estro between us.

Doug was the one I’d call if I saw a particularly awful movie, or heard a new song that sounded like Superchunk or Guided by Voices enough to remark.

Doug sent me a DVD of Birdemic twice, urging me to watch the utterly hilarious horror/romance/environmental thriller made with $10,000 and some cheap CGI vultures.

Doug didn’t drink, so we made an unusual pair, him sober and quietly observing my antics with a smirk.

Doug got married to a lovely woman named Paula. They moved to the East Coast and started a family, with a precocious son, Wylie. Doug worked in film non-profits, film festivals and the like. Doug was always more comfortable talking about movies than anything else. If I hazarded a guess, I’d say he was a bit on the spectrum. He visited me in Austin and fell asleep while my friend Jesse was talking about music. Just closed his eyes and went out.

But with me, Doug and I would talk forever. Doug with his Dr Pepper and peanut butter sandwiches.

One night returning from a show, late at night, he was in an accident that killed Paula. Two years later, Doug took his own life.

I still haven’t cried about Doug. I can’t wrap my head around it. I drank myself into a stupor at his memorial.

“When Kristofferson goes you’re gonna be a mess,” Doug always said. Doug was the one who had to take work off when Jimmy Stewart died, such was his deeply felt attachment to movies and our favorite actors.

He was the one who called every bartender we knew to tell me Frank Sinatra was dead.

He got it on the first try. I was at Shotwell Bar.

Well Doug. You beat Kris to the punch.

It would be easy to say that grief is that mass of coiled snakes.

It’s not. It’s an adder, stealthy and instantaneous. It’s a cottonmouth, and it takes its time grinding the poison into you. It’s a rattler, but no it’s not, a rattler warns you first.

Grief is a small, intense, pulling thing, a sharp divot, a dull pain. It’s a missing limb. It’s a phantom. I wish it was like a coiled mass of snakes. But it’s a surprise every time, and it doesn’t get duller, only more distant, moving away on the horizon

I think often of people that have left, usually when I hear a familiar sound in a new song, or read about a movie adaptation of a lost novel, a dumb comic only we knew about together.

And I think every time about who I want to call or text or send a note, that they are the only ones who will understand. They are the only ones who will receive the message. The signal that burns down the nerve to an appendage that’s no longer there.

Somewhere under the embroiled mass of escape drinking, sublimated depression, fear and good old Minnesotan stoicism, lies the unraveling of the grief.

It’s up to me to uncoil those snakes. Not drinking helps. Anti-depressants? They keep the rumination at bay, but they also put an amorphous wall between you and the catharsis. I sleep better, at least.

But remember the phrase “purpose” from the description of this newsletter?

Finding career and purpose after 50.

I know this piece hasn’t had much to share about finding a job. But it is about purpose. And about getting older.

I don’t know what my purpose is. But I damn well know it’s not to drink myself to death. And I damn well know it’s not to follow in the footsteps of my lost friends who had a choice about it. I hope I don’t get cancer, but that’s mostly in someone else’s hands.

Is this piece really about something? Or is this just me, writing in my diary? Christ knows I needed to put those words down.

So I’ll keep unraveling those coiled snakes. Looking for a real purpose. I suppose this writing has a purpose. That’s probably good enough for this morning, October 1, 2024.