memorial day is coming up in a few hours. memorial day means a lot of things to a lot of people. the neighborhood pool is opening up down near my dad’s in Alexandria. someone will pay attention to the Indianapolis 500. many hot dogs and much watermelon will be eaten. the summer unofficially arrives. and on monday, mom will drive around Indiana and visit the family graves.

I’ve been recently writing a lot about my mother and driving around, separately. and now I’m about to join the two. what kind of complex is this? lord only knows.

but really, those two subjects were the common denominators on my memorial days while growing up. every memorial day, mom would take my sister and I to the church cemetery in Lake County on Monday morning, usually with our grandmother in tow, and we would inevitably arrive late for the blessing that the parish priest would perform over the headstones.

this wasn’t unusual, as we arrived late to church under any and all circumstances. I was an altar boy for … at least five years? and I have no idea what happens during the first fifteen minutes of service. really, no kidding. I’d always sidle in late.

but I digress. the church cemetery is on Ridge Road in Calumet Township, and if you don’t slow down and look for the sign you’ll go right past it. the family plot hangs right above the road. no doubt it wasn’t that busy when it was picked out back in the day, but despite the busy four-lane thoroughfare, it is a pretty spot.

so once there, we would fall into the back of the crowd following the priest through the graves. it is an ethnic church, and an ethnic cemetery – the markers read like a Ukrainian phone book. in this crowd following the priest with incense and choir books would inevitably be half a dozen of our relatives, with whom we would mingle once the service broke up. it would be hot. and my sister and I would weigh down the average age by about twenty years.

then mom would turn to the family headstones — or assign one of us — to clean them up and water any nearby plants. over the years a lot of family has come and gone, so there’s a lot of graves, and cleaning them all would take a lot of trips to the water pump. but once done, one of our cousins would do the same again, because she would have brought a watering can too and what the hell, why not? and then we’d all break for the cars that brought us there, and we would drive down Ridge Road into Griffith, past a Taco Bell outpost that helped inform my opinion of that fast food chain, to a restaurant called Jedi Garden.

I don’t know if Jedi Garden is still there, but I was always fascinated by it when we lived nearby in Griffith in the early nineties. when I was ten, I assumed it was Star Wars-affiliated, or boasted a Star Wars motif. we never chanced to go there until years later — visiting the nearby cemetery on memorial days — but when we did, I discovered that it had nothing to do with a galaxy far, far away. it was just a Greek-owned restaurant; the kind of place where you can order anything under the sun, where there will be local business advertisements on the paper placemats and where there will be a pie case near the register.

that’s fine. I love those restaurants.

so then we’d pile back into our cars, and split for other responsibilities and appointments. more often than not, this was our chariot:

and we’d go to the next cemetery, which I think is called Calumet Park and is on Garfield Street way down in Merillville. but there is no immediate way to get there. there are lots of lights and turns, and a running tour of suburban Lake County, Indiana on a federal holiday.

mom doesn’t drive fast. she doesn’t have the constitution for that bullshit, and for the most part, I agree. the stress that comes with navigating crowded streets just a little bit faster than usual isn’t worth it. as such, cruising down to the next cemetery were kinda leisurely affairs. it’s not like you get to the bottom of anything during these drives, like there were any great philosophical debates. but they were, I think, moments of content. those graves were always there. they’re there right now. the sun was always shining. the incense the priest carried was always potent. Jedi Garden was always busy. I could count on this trip.

Calumet Park is a big-ass cemetery, large enough that you can’t easily see the borders from its center. it has a man-made pond, a mausoleum, and well-mantained asphalt drives. when you enter on memorial day, the staff will have set up a prominade of large American flags, and at the gate there will be teenagers handing out maps and a brief schedule of services at the cemetery chapel.

mom – or whoever was driving – would inevitably get lost for a minute in the tiny maze of roads, before coming around an easy curve and finding the landmark, the water pump, that says grandma and grandpa Drozda are buried nearby.

grandma and grandpa Drozda died in late 1950s and early 60s, respectively, and did not head up as congealed a family unit as the other side of the tree did. as such, these are the only two markers to find, and they take a little bit of time to locate. they are small, lay flat on the ground, and are packed in among many other headstones.

we would clean the markers. we would linger for five minutes. we’d comment on the heat. then we’d climb back into the car, and head for home.

I imagine that’s where I would be buried, out there with my ass hanging out into the traffic on Ridge Road. I don’t mean to be morbid, and I certainly don’t plan on it happening any time soon. but should I be unfortunate enough to step in front of a bus, that is where they will plant me.

and that’s okay, I won’t be around to complain about it. as far as I’m concerned you could preserve me, put my husk in a museum and use me as an explanation to generations of schoolchildren of how homo sapiens lived in the mid-Atlantic in the early millenium. ”once a week, the American bachelor would hunt and gather at a Safeway. to save his resources he would use a club card.”

but in any case, leave me a marker somewhere. it’s not the bones we’re visiting, but it’s the markers we’re cleaning, the symbols of decades of relationships, of trust, friendship, love, family, and of the shitty human emotions too, of anger, of prejudices. they are symbols of all the shit that makes us who we are. people hug headstones. have you ever seen that? when they do, they are hugging everything about that person. that’s how I read it, anyway.

yes, anyway. happy memorial day. it’s gonna be a hot one. visit your family, if you can, wherever they’re interred. and if you can’t, take a moment, pour a sip out on the concrete, and call the family that you’ve got with you now. we all got a place with someone somewhere, even if we’re far removed from it now. it’s gonna be a good summer.

the following morning, as the uneaten half of last night’s pizza turned to stale cardboard in the fridge, Larry went digging for double-a batteries. every home has a junk drawer; Larry referred to his as “where Jimmy Hoffa was buried,” a familiar joke he had shared with his wife.

where Jimmy Hoffa was buried held: napkins, matches, candle stubs, loose change, spare keys to the car parked out at Food Lion. post-it pads. but no batteries.

so Larry walked the house, looking around, hoping to jar loose an idea. from the kitchen he took the door out into the garage and pulled the lightbulb chain above his cluttered work bench. he tried its drawer. among the loose nuts and bolts were, bingo, two double-a batteries. also in there: allen wrenches, a 5/16 bolt piece, stray nails. and a Walkman with stock headphones plugged into it. Larry dug out the Walkman.

it was black plastic, spotted with white. Larry had painted the garage last summer. he had a whole stack of tapes he went through. he opened the Walkman, pulled out the tape. ”Dire Straits, Brothers in Arms,” he read.

Larry put the tape back in the Walkman, snapped it shut, fit on the headphones and pressed play with an index finger. nothing happened. no batteries, so he added the two he had just found. he tried the Walkman again. the tape fired up, halfway through Walk of Life. Larry didn’t move until the song was over, just stood in place and looked out through the dirty glass of the window above the work bench. into his back yard. it was a sunny day in early spring.

and that was how Larry started listening to music again.

it’s pretty spectacular. six or seven four-pair teams of horses, thundering around a huge Roman-circus set. chariots flipping. stunt men dragging. dummies getting stampeded. it must have been pretty wild to see this in the theatre. I glanced at the Wikipedia page on the movie, and they spent a goddamn fortune in money and effort to put this scene together. Jesus. Charlton Heston and company are just running roughshod over everything.

I’m glad I hit the audio/visual section up at the library last week, because I have gone through a lot of DVDs today. I skipped work again, laid up with a back ache. and yeah, that’s a thing; the back ache is a legitimate -ache. I ranted about this earlier, and that got me far.

but believe me, it’s no joke. so much is it not, in fact, that I’d even say that every day free of back pain is a goddamn gift.

pain is not easy to remember, Mar said to me tonight. while that might not be true for everyone, it is for me. a couple of years ago my right ankle went completely to jelly for about a week; I now give it no special treatment. a decade ago I was fitted with non-permanent crowns on my front two teeth; I still don’t floss nearly as much as I should. I have recurring back pain and enflamed it yesterday on a run; only two weeks since the physical therapist said I could jog again. I pushed it, and I knew better, and I pushed it anyway. all of that moaning I did six weeks ago was completely out of my mind.

and now here we are.

yes. here I am, laid out in an awkward position on the couch again. lots of uncomfortable positions these days. brought on by too much reaching, too little forethought. at some point, I’m gonna have to own up to my mistakes and learn from them. because I won’t sleep well tonight. this ache throbs.

so I’ll tell you this much, ol’ buddy: I’m not doing this again.

Rangers v Capitals, game seven from Madison Square Garden. the Caps beat the Boston Bruins in seven in their last series, and now they’ve got the number-one seed on its home ice, and I know nothing about hockey save the Stanley Cup playoffs are always entertaining, and the Caps being a game away from the conference finals is enough to get me to stream game seven online on the other busted-ass laptop that I own. it’s through a website with an .eu fix. it’s buggy as hell, and regularly brings the broadcast in via Sweden — at least I think they’re speaking Swedish … or some sort of Scandinavian nonsense. yeah, that’s right, nonsense.

but tonight’s broadcast is brought to you by CBC, and that means lots of Tim Horton’s ads, Hockey Night in Canada, and yes, Coach’s Corner. most of what I know of Don Cherry comes from a Propagandhi song that describes him a war-mongering, nationalist nutjob. and whiel I can’t speak to that, he’s a pretty strange lookin’ son of a bitch regardless. I guess dressing like a carnival barker is his thing. and hey, everybody needs a thing.

tomorrow is mother’s day. is that supposed to be capitalized? probably. but I’m not going back, we’ve come too far. I’m going to remember to call my mom tomorrow morning. I just talked to her tonight, and she had just walked in from the community garden, where she puts in work during her free time. but maybe calling it work isn’t the right description …

my mom is a master gardener. she is self taught. the way she approaches gardens has always made me think she must’ve been a great student – she has a perennial flower garden in the front yard of the house in Indiana, and in it she knows what will bloom when. she’s figured it out as she went along, over decades of seasons. I guess that’s passion. but she would describe it with a term: fake it ’til you make it.

she plays it loose with that term. but mom applied this term to her role as a consumer while I was growing up. my GI Joes were off-brand, for instance. but I particularly remember her answer to my whine about the glaring absence of fruit roll-ups from my diet. there was pressing need of them, I argued. pressing. Philip Davis’ mom bought them, and we didn’t, and that was bullshit. I was probably about six.

“here,” she said, digging into one of our lunch bags at the kitchen counter. she unpacked a sandwich, lifted out a thin circle of Oscar Meyer balogna. folded it into a loose wrap. “baloney roll-up.”

I was aghast. the memory has stuck.

on the phone tonight, mom said grandma wasn’t feeling well due to a cold, and as such they might bail on Cracker Barrel tomorrow. when I was in grade school Cracker Barrel, on minor holidays, was our family’s equivalent of the ol’ meeting house. grandma loved that place, and that love has held up; on mother’s day, grandma calls the shots, and grandma will often call for Cracker Barrel. bookies across the midwest know this.

so it sucks she’s under the weather. grandma has earned lunch at Cracker Barrel a couple thousand times over. she has put in 91 years, and a good chunk of what were supposed to be her golden ones were spent hauling water for my dumb ass. making dinner every night. doing all of the laundry. helping keep the lights on with her Social Security check. so when I fuck up — which seems to happen a lot these days — it’s not lost on me that someone put a serious, sober effort into getting me here. I owe them a lot.

so grandma and mom — I might not get to the moon. but I am gonna try.

Washington is a busy place. even now it’s impressing this truth upon me — a police siren, for instance, just went down the street a block over at full blast at 11:40 pm.

and now back to silence. tomorrow morning the blocks between here and my office will be flush with people and traffic, but if you time it right, if you cut out in the evening for a cruise — and this cruise I speak of, there is an art to it – you can push aside the reality that is DC’s high population density and familiarize yourself with Wasington’s streetscape, with the way it’s laid out, how it’s connected, all without the hassle of noise. no traffic, no horns. everything very zen.

these rides don’t necessarily lead anywhere save to open and rolling conversation. there is usually only a vague goal: to the car wash. to buy a Snapple. to Taco Bell. but the details don’t matter. to hell with them. because sometimes when reality piles up on me, when I’m stumped as to what to do with myself, what the next move will be and when everything feels a litle hopeless, these expeditions serve as a personal lodestar … or maybe as an anchor of sorts. I’m not sure which is the better metaphor.

“and we’re off,” my brother deadpanned as I slouched into the passenger seat. “who knows where this will lead?” hell if I knew then that it would be a 7-Eleven near Takoma Park. but really, it didn’t matter. because truth is, it’s never hopeless. it just takes a little bit of clarity to recognize that, on occasion.

even when you’re not. and I am not cool, this is fact. for instance, while writing this I puzzled over how to correctly punctuate “rock n roll.” and what’s more, today I bought socks at Target.

I went to Target to buy socks. I compared prices. I came up with: ankle cut, Hanes. they came in a plastic bag. and on the way out I swung by the electronics department to look for five-dollar DVDs. purchased: “Highlander.”

now that’s some mundane, keep-your-motor-running bullshit. but it’s called being alive; you gotta keep yourself clothed. and I always need goddamn socks. I swear, the washer/dryer combo downstairs takes one in tribute from each load.

but anyway, when you’re buying socks at Target, digging through bags of Fruit of the Loom undergarments, no one is checking you out, wondering about the enticing mystery you’ve built around yourself. what you’re doing later. but while I drove over there, I was listening to the Black Keys — this song – at about 90 decibels. with the windows down, a ratty baseball hat pulled down low at an unnecessary angle, five miles under the speed limit. cruisin’. yeah, I was headed out to buy socks. and while doing so I was gassy, and I had back pain, and bed head, and no one was looking. but thanks to rock n roll, I felt cool as shit doing it. cool as hell, even.

this isn’t an invalid, somebody-call-the-fire-department kind of problem. I mean, I can get up, move around. and cabin fever will move your ass — yesterday I even got up and walked to both the post office and then to the local insufferable coffee shop before looping on back home through Ledroit Park. but by the time I made it back I was literally dragging a leg.

back pain will put you in a bad mood. while lurching down a forlone and trafficky stretch of Florida Avenue, I fantasized about ordering a small coffee, hearing the ridiculous price, and then righteously telling the barista off. “$4.50? fuck that, fuck this place, and fuck you.” I’d pour the drink out on the floor. glare at an unemployed twentysomething with an iPad and an expensive haircut. shamble outside.

but it wasn’t, it was $2.20. and fuck it, I paid it. “shitty coffee,” I mumbled to no one as I lurched down the street. this is what passes for taking a stand these days.

normally I could go back and remember whether or not I had described my back pain before, but I’ve been writing so infrequently that it’s probably a safe bet that I haven’t. so a quick recap: my back, or the small of my back, has bothered me for a while now. very tense muscles make it painful to sit for too long. and that’s a problem because I work in an office and am on my ass in front of a computer for hours on end. so yes, that’s right, I’m developing back pain. this is how they’ll put me out to pasture.

one day in December I woke up, rolled out of bed and realized that I had aggrevated this pain in some way. so I dragged myself to a walk-in clinic, and then a week later to my physician’s, and then to a physical therapist that my doctor recommended. and that guy worked wonders, he helped me correct my posture (or, at least acknowledge that it’s awful) and showed me how to strengthen the weaker muscles in my back. this in turn has helped my running. a stronger back equals a stronger abdomen, and a strong abdomen makes it easier to run – you aren’t as hunched over, and the core of your body does less laboring.

but, apparently, I’ve been slipping on the posture and exercising. because I woke up on Monday morning and — to use a phrase I’ve been leaning on to describe this sensation — it felt like I’d been kicked by a mule. this is probably an insult to hillbillies and animal handlers everywhere, as mules kick hard. but my back, goddamn. it really hurt. hurts still.

as such, I’m not much good at work right now, because I can’t focus while sitting. standing for a long period of  time eventually calls up this throbbing pain too, so I can’t stand at my desk. and laying out for an extended period just makes you feel like a slovenly asshole … and even moreso when you’re in a communal work room. people stepping over you to get to the copier, rolling their eyes at the overgrown child lolling about on the grey carpet.

I can’t keep doing this. this, this presently, but also this desk job. I like my job, but this function doesn’t work – my body is actively rejecting it. I’m closing in on 30, and I have back pain from a fucking desk job. so something must be done; some fix must be found. becasue I’ve been on my couch in my apartment for … well, we’re closing in on day three. and it just sucks, man. being laid out just sucks.

legit.

I took in some speed chess in Dupont Circle today. two older gentlemen, one with a Russian accent and the other with one I couldn’t place — some sort of central- or eastern-European something — and they were cursing at each other and slapping the timer with gusto. gave the scene an offbeat staccato. 
these games would move quick, and near the end they’d search for their captured queens and then grasp them tightly in their hands and hold them close to their chests. chess is both pastime and freakout passion for these dudes.

so here’s a little sample dialogue:

mister mystery accent: “I’m kicking your ass because I learned the end game from Tom Murphy in the 80s, while you did not!”
the Russian guy who had a funny way of emphasizing his words: “shut the fuck up!”

I was enthralled.
at the chess boards in Dupont Circle, you get all comers. winos, street folks. quite a few grown men wearing sweatpants. today, at least, one American Indian. and a lot of sharks, because they’re all playing for money. and while I like Dupont quite a bit, this section of the park is a nice respite from the expensive neighborhood surroundings. expensive bars, expensive book stores, expensive coffee shops.
so I’m gonna have to find a way to get in on this. there’s a pretty simple way to do that, I know: bring five bucks. but I’ll have to step my game up before I start throwing cash in the ring, because if you didn’t know this already, I’m awful at chess. god awful. and who’s got five bucks to just throw around? you, moneybags?

it does, however, provide one of the few glimpses you would get into what rural Kazakhstan looked like 75 years ago – to a member of the Scottish gentry, at least. as such it’s a pretty intereting read, and though I’m not too far in yet I’m told it covers this guy’s eventual enlistment in the British army after the outbreak of world war dos, his campaigns in the north African desert and then his experiences fighting alongside Yugoslav partisans. so goddamn. he stayed busy.

and that shit makes you feel really lazy. and it nudges me toward wanderlust. good ol’ wanderlust is a wonderful thing. it moves me from my ass, from my couch and television and social media. and though it has to get pretty strong to drag me out the door, those few moments when it has are the ones that I retreat to when I imagine my romanticized concept of personal freedom.

this wave hasn’t crested yet. and maybe it’s just the nice weather. but according to this book, this haughty Scottish asshole made it all the way to Almaty, Kazakhstan, in 1937, examining every Soviet hick he came across along the way. and if he can do that then by god I could too.

…. in the general sense, of course. I’m not planning to strike out for Kazakhstan tomorrow to sneer at the locals. but I’m not getting any younger, and Central Asia – or the great American midwest, or the gulf coast, or the pacific northwest – isn’t getting any closer. gas prices be damned. road trips beckon. life exists outside of DC.