An Index for Continuance
lest auld acquaintance be forgot
I. Tiny Coffee, Ten-hour Sleeps;
a. Back in November, during a particularly busy day at a service job I no longer hold, I had a heart palpitation. I get them fairly often and they’re usually not a big deal. I have a congenital heart defect and am highly anxious, generally, so these little cardiac hiccups as I experience them can often be chalked up to some manifestation of a mental state, rather than evidence of an actual physical issue. But this palpitation lasted a lot longer, nearly a full minute, and made me lightheaded while talking on the phone with a customer who was looking for a particular bottle of wine.
b. I really like coffee, finding it to be a useful and enjoyable ally in my ongoing battle with procrastination and time, and other than a cardiologist’s one big recommendation to “never do cocaine” have been more or less cleared to let it rip. Minutes before this particularly terrifying palpitation occurred on this particular busy day, convinced of imminent death as stars crowded my vision, I had quickly consumed sixteen ounces of very strong cold brew.
c. We know who is to blame here. I recollect an old friend’s tweet from some years ago that I always retained for some reason, which said something along the lines of “all coffees should be eight ounces and cost one dollar” and decide that this seems foundational enough for a strategy.
d. Since November I have consumed coffee exclusively in eight-ounce increments. Aside from experiencing fewer palpitations and heart-related anxieties, I have been noticeably more hydrated, less irritable, and not as crashy during this period. I do not nap. I can suddenly sleep for ten hours. These may or may not be connected, since I also made a doctor’s appointment that confirmed I wasn’t about to die.
e. Shoutout to the staff at Phoenix Coffee on Lee Rd, from whom you may order a “tiny coffee” to share in this singular off-menu experience.
II. Easy Exercise, Good Shoes;
a. In the summer I was running, but the prospect of working up to that level of exertion feels impossible right now. Add the fact that the sun has come out approximately twice in Cleveland so far this year and, temperatures aside, the syrup of time getting sticky and thick, soon the power one could glean from running turns inside out to a horrible vacuum of shame and malaise. I am soft. Is self-loathing exercise? It certainly takes work.
b. There’s an essay I like by Isaac Fitzgerald about walking 20,000 steps a day during the pandemic. I can’t touch that, and while I do live in a pretty walkable area here, Cleveland is not New York. All the same, I do love walking, and find it to be a soothing and generative tool for focus and ideation. Most of the bones of this essay were formulated while walking around the neighborhood drinking a tiny coffee, for example.
c. Now is maybe the time to say that I have no clue what works for anyone, let alone everyone, and wouldn’t pretend. In fact I would despise nothing more than to be prescriptive. But then I think, on the other hand, what if I was someone else, and then I happened to be reading this right now and it was exactly what I needed to hear, and maybe it would work for me. Who knows.
b. 2. A mostly irrelevant side note is that Isaac was my childhood babysitter for a short time before my parents got divorced, in the small rural Massachusetts town where we both lived. All I really remember was that he was hilarious and cool. An older kid who knew about heavy metal and had friends who wore combat boots and black nail polish and ate ice cream cones while looking absolutely murderous outside our quaint country store. It’s funny to see us both doing things related to writing and books, albeit in different ways, at very different levels (Isaac is extremely successful), but one could wonder if being from that nook in Central Massachusetts has anything to do with it. We don’t keep in touch, but the Facebook comment he left on the first album review I published in 2015 made me feel like maybe I could do something with this writing thing. Something to try being open to.
b. 3. Also, in the essay, he says he takes these 20,000 steps in a pair of Vans. Vans! Excuse me? This man has shins of cast iron. I recently had to stop wearing Vans abruptly, my shoes of choice since teenhood for the subtle (?) way they seemed to signal “might play in a band” with “maybe used to skate once”, because my knees and ankles were being ground into dust. I’ve recently made the switch to some classic Adidas gazelles, which, in addition to offering much better arch support, can also give off kind of a Beastie Boys vibe when paired with the right cut of pant.
e. I ordered a seven-foot Olympic barbell on the internet, which I lift without any weights attached while watching movies in the living room. I use two light kettlebells and a foam roller. I made some half-deep post about this practice recently on Instagram and how it signals I am slowly becoming my father. My mother responded in protest. I bought some whey protein at Trader Joe’s. I keep telling Meghan, my wife, that I’m gonna get so swole. The only place to store the barbell is on its side along a wall in our dining room behind some of her big framed photographs.
III. Music, The Dead, The Living;
a. This is never not the case.
b. To clarify, I don’t mean The Grateful Dead, or their post-Jerry manifestation Dead & Co., whom my uncle took me to see at the Worcester DCU Center in 2017. He picked me up in his work van, Creed blasting on the stereo, and we shared a joint and some very large Coors Lights while watching a crowd pay attention and respond to a band in a way that I had never seen before. I’d gone into this experience highly skeptical, but came away with a surprising and newfound respect for a subculture that I’d openly derided. It was nice that he wanted to hang out with me.
c. Like many folks, I’ve also found myself unexpectedly impacted by the recently-announced death of Daniel Dumile, whose stage name was MF Doom. There’s not a lot I can say here, because I only really took the time to explore his catalog in depth following the news of his passing, and there’s a part of me that struggles with how to have an appreciation for hip-hop that doesn’t feel somehow colonial. But listening to Dumile these past weeks has been like finding a missing piece in my understanding of both music and literature. In music, a key link between artists I was already paying attention to, like Del and Earl Sweatshirt and Run The Jewels and Danny Brown. And in literature, this great sense of possibility. Of what language can do and be. What is enabled by play. What draws us in equal measure toward both and through both. That music and language are each other.
d. Another piece is this tweet from Joyelle McSweeney, re OutKasts’s “Bombs Over Baghdad” as an influence on her work, a waypoint in locating an aesthetic. Her book, Toxicon & Arachne, has been a similar kind of influence for me. All “energy, speed, momentum,” etc. Something I hold in mind when I also wonder if I should be pushing harder. With lyrical touches I’d resisted because they seemed like such an affect of the dead, or some deflationary poetic signaling a deficiency of imagination if not over-reliance on the tired forms of conquerors. Not that they’re not, sometimes, but on the contrary too, obviously, these quick linkages and sonic associations can be a special kind of tunnel, rhyme and meter some chisels or flashlights or something. I understand this just a little bit better now.
d. 2. Early in How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America, Kiese Laymon writes about ATLiens and Aquemini ’s influence on his understanding of art, possibility, futurism, and where he’s from. I read this essay at 5:41 in the morning sometime during the first week of 2021, after making coffee while listening to MF Doom, and then decide my new year’s resolution: listen to more OutKast.
e. I was similarly, mirroringly, affected by David Berman earlier in the year. His work in Pavement and the Silver Jews had been a presence in my musical and aesthetic lexicon already, but only solidified as foundation once I heard Purple Mountains. Released after his death in 2019, that eponymous band-album along with Silver Jews’ entire catalog became the soundtrack for all my long drives to work and classes on the different campuses in the NEOMFA. Berman’s book, Actual Air, is another piece I only recently got into place. Like with Dumile, that I was only moved to do so after he had left the world shames me on some spiritual and molecular level. There’s this double ghost that follows, the gone thing and the relationship that wasn’t.
f. Two writers (poets) I also didn’t read until after they died this year: Jean Valentine and Diane di Prima. Something follows me.
f. 2. To the living ones, though (Joyelle McSweeney, Jon Conley, DT McCrea, Noor Hindi, Kevin Latimer, Caryl Pagel, Hilary Plum, Mary Biddinger, Zach Savich, Kam Hilliard, Blueberry Morningsnow, CA Conrad, Kazim Ali, Ali Black, Leyna Bohning, Oliver Baez-Bendorf, Leila Chatti, Jos Charles, Alen Hamza, Shelley Feller, Danez Smith, Lauren Shapiro, Jericho Brown, Emmalea Russo, Hannah Brooks-Motl, Brian Blanchfield, Kaveh Akbar, Marc Rahe, Ross Gay, Roxane Gay, Isaac Fitzgerald, Shoshana Zuboff, Lesle Lewis, Sarah Minor, Tommy Mira Y Lopez, Kiese Laymon, Lindsay Turner, Catherine Wing, Mathias Svalina, Conor Bracken, Dan Boehl, J. David, Jason Harris, Elizabeth Kolenda, Franny Choi, Hanif Abdurraqib, Ben Roylance, Eric Walgren, Paul Mangus, Amber Taliancich, Stephen Goodrow, Xan Schwartz, Johnny Cook, Penelope Jeanne Gosh, Klae Bainter, Angelo Maneage, Brittany Helmick, Carrie George, Jacob Stovall, Robert Moore, Jordan McNeil, Joshua Harmon, Ilya Kaminsky, Nico Walker, Steve Reese, Anne Lesley Selcer, Caren Beilin, Elisa Gabbert, Michelle Taransky, Sara Deniz Akant, Erika Meitner, Philip Sorenson, Juliana Spahr, Farid Matuk, Douglas Kearney, Mary Ruefle, Philip Metres), thank you.
f. 2. ii. This is the order I thought of you in.
f. 2. iii. To all the dead ones too.
f. 3. There are more I am forgetting.
Cleveland Lakefront Nature Preserve
IV. The Internet, Response;
a. It felt like a weird move to finally make a Twitter account in September of 2020, and most of what I do or say there would definitely make more sense if it happened ten years ago (just like my poems, heyooo) but I think it’s actually not that important.
b. What ultimately is important is correspondence, or, more acutely, response. This loose relationship with time which I’ve had the luxury of developing, since quitting my other job, a luxury obviously not everyone affords, comes with the luxury of also being able to luxuriate in a stupid email. Our responses to each other are one of the only things we can control.
c. When a friend sends me a piece of writing I make a conscious effort to spend too long crafting a response to it. How can this be taken, or the shape of it replicated, in(to) other areas of life? And if not in the form of time, what about material?
a. 2. To wit, some journals and presses which I am extra glad to have made the acquaintance of this year, with (im)material assistance from the aforementioned medium: Grieveland, Hobart/HAD, X-R-A-Y, Peach Mag, Wax Nine, Futurepoem, Cobra Milk, Big Lucks, Territory, SELFFUCK, @tuffpoems, Flypaper, Game Over Books, Neutral Spaces.
a. 3. I think now (always) is the time for new presses and journals, to do the things that you might as well do. To get to be in a world where they are there also. I know I want to.
a. 2. ii. There are more I am forgetting.
V. Quarantine Haircuts, Obsolete Technology;
a. In April, reasoning that I would not be going to a barber anytime soon, I buzzed all my hair off and shaved with an actual razor. I looked like a weird baby. My coworkers, with the addition of my mask, described this look as more serial killer than infant. If this was true, it was not in likeness to a cinematic killer but something much closer to the real kind. The pasty, maladjusted, scary fluorescent loser kind.
b. But by year’s end the killer look had grown out to a pubescent skater boi shag, and as I was newly freed from any public-facing work, Meghan gave me a mullet. I’m not athletic or cool enough for this to be some kind of cheeky throwback, and I can’t ice skate for shit, let alone handle a puck, so if it’s permissible I would like to think of this absurd haircut in homage to a type of post-apocalyptic, wasteland-roaming George Miller ensemble. Without the tan, of course, because, you know, Cleveland. But I really do think it has a place in the world of videoconferencing. Business in front.
c. In the video game I have been playing on our obsolete Xbox console from the early 2000s, I am working to save a desiccated post-Earth from being overtaken by a bloodthirsty hypercapitalist with a sewn-on face. Many of the non-player characters wear what appear to be N95 masks.
b. 2. I hope not to be prescriptive, still, but I do want to encourage anyone on the fence about this sort of thing to just go ahead and do it. One only gets so many opportunities. And collectively, if we all acted together, we could really shift the whole “business casual” paradigm for the better.
c. 2. I also can’t recommend highly enough the warm ambient embrace one feels in the envelopment of decrepit entertainment electronics that can’t be connected to the internet. The previews to Mrs. Doubtfire, Matilda, and Dumb & Dumber on VHS alone are well worth the expense, storage, and all the dust. If enough of us get into it, maybe we can start a kind of underground Blockbuster. I’ve got the Connery 007 boxset, the original Star Wars trilogy, all the Robin Williams and Jim Carrey hits, a bunch of Christmas classics, and I’m down to circulate. Looking for Harry and the Hendersons, Wayne’s World, The Coneheads, and Major Payne. Hit me up.
VI. Elastic Time, Codex of Honorable Mentions;
a. Essays. I think it’s time, as always. For overthinking the project and having the thinking be the project. Maybe even a little navel gazing too, because things really do get caught in there. What I mean is trying to have a healthier relationship with one’s own point of view.
b. Cooking. And specifically projects that take too long. Like making stock from scratch or soda bread or enchiladas. I missed the whole pandemic bread-baking thing, so I’m a poser, but any protracted act of forming cheap ingredients into something that’d be a lot more expensive in a restaurant is worthwhile.
c. Others. Now is emphatically the time for others. There are simple ways we can support each other that don’t require the machinations of capitalism. Every thing is connected, but we can loose ourselves by choosing to navigate existing systems in ways that don’t replicate their harm. These choices can take the form of direct monetary contributions, mutual aid in the funding sense, obviously. Of labor. Material. Consider all possible forms of correspondence and response.
d. When I was an undergrad in Zach Savich’s intro poetry workshop, part of our final project was to write an essay titled “Poetry Teaches Me How To Live”. I’m sure my essay was terrible, but I have thought a lot about that assignment and what has been teaching me how to live. You can replace poetry with just about anything, as a way of figuring certain things out, but I think I’ve come to the assignment’s real conclusion. That anything that doesn’t teach you how to live probably does not deserve a place in your life.
Zach Peckham is a writer and musician from Massachusetts who quit his marketing job to study poetry in Ohio. His work has appeared or is forthcoming in jubilat, The Lowell Son, Happiness Pony, @tuffpoems, Barnhouse Journal, Poetry Northwest, and on the Academy of American Poets website. He is a candidate in the NEOMFA where he works at the Cleveland State University Poetry Center.