“I refuse to have a battle of wits with an unarmed man.”
—Oscar Wilde
Dispatches from an unreliable narrator.
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Notes: An Object at Rest.
I love motels.
In my adult life, I’ve finally graduated to an income bracket that allows me to upgrade my lodging options so I could, if I wanted, hole up in fancier digs, with niceties like a pool, all-you-can-eat breakfast, as many pillows as one feels comfortable requesting, and the holy-of-holies, a hot tub next to the pool, but my heart still stops for these old roadside resting places.I’m on an annual mission, driving three hundred miles to perform for free for twenty minutes at an electronic music festival for an audience of fifteen to twenty people who are mostly the other musicians from the festival, and the drive this time was wearing, with a hour spent navigating the crawling traffic piled up behind a highway accident that the supposedly intelligent machinery behind the map application on my mobile device utterly failed to route me around (in the end, I engineered my own detour and saved a good forty-five minutes). So, despite leaving on time, I lumbered through the swooping byways through Pennsylvania mountains, alerted frequently to watch for deer by signs with a stylized jumping buck over a farcical number of miles that was computed…how, exactly?
I paused at a rest stop where a machine would dispense, for my utility, a gritty horror it labeled a “capuccino” (my options on the machine, announced after I’d paid, as instant or decaf) to me, which I managed to spill all over myself, but I credit it with enough caffeine to keep me alert and alive for the last hour and change where the road fatigue was properly kicking in. I listened to the remainder of the familiar radio drama that had kept me company for a couple hundred miles, and in the last moments, as the credits played, I pulled up into the forecourt of the old motel, laid out in the midcentury style, with a little office at the center of two low, sweeping wings of rooms, each door facing its own parking spot, parked, and and staggered into the office with all my road cramps in concert.
The office smelled of cabbage, which was made all the more clear by the presence of a large glass-fronted refrigerator filled halfway with those large, oblong cabbages you find in an Asian grocery store, and the rustling from the back room announced the hunched older gentleman who shuffled in and quietly answered as I indicated I’d booked and paid online. He had me present my ID, fill out a card with my relevant information, and sign the card and receipt for the four nights I’ll be here, and handed over what I was delighted to find was a proper old-fashioned motel room key on an oversized orange fob, and I headed back to the car to move to the slot in front of room #4.
In cheap motels, one always opens the door for the first time with a little hesitancy, a lottery not enjoyed by my husband, who prefers the dependable security of a room with no potential for surprises, as there will sometimes be a bilious cloud of aging cigarette stink even for a room officially marked as non-smoking, or the scent of mold, mildew, or sewer issues, but this one was a reminder.
I took a deep breath and it was all 1978, that sort of vaguely musty smell of settled air and linens freshly washed a couple weeks prior, and I was happy.
The room is vintage in all the ways I prefer, with old, but not rickety, furniture, painted-over paneling, and a bathroom that is functional and tightly screwed together, and if not for the flat television, the composite flooring in lieu of linoleum or the horror of ancient wall-to-wall carpet, and the spotted lanternfly flitting around the room it might as well be on of the motels I stayed in in my first ventures with a car, nearly forty years ago.
It is a nostalgic moment and I am comfortable with that, with a nice place to stop and stay for a while that brings back family trips in our enormous silver and purple Chevrolet Suburban, where we’d book in late on the road to Georgia, get a big room with a cot, turn the AC up, and turn on the TV, and I’d be home there, in a place that, for the moment, I could pretend was the world I actually lived in.
I love that feeling of settling in, even if I’m only staying in a place for a night, where I put my bags in the drawers in the dresser and line everything up neatly as if I intended to put down roots and live there forever, or just for a brief interval before moving on like a seasoned traveler of the world.
The bed is comfortable, the toilet is bolted firmly to the floor and the seat isn’t loose—the giveaway sign of an innkeeper that has graduated from caring about their work—and the water doesn’t stink of sulfur or fish. The toilet flushes with a peculiar symphony of clicks, hisses, and, at the end of the cycle, a combination of a bell-like sound and a last gloomph, and I am comfortable with that and the sound of the wall-mounted AC fan and the nearby interstate churning away like a fine work of the drone musician’s art. The side street traffic rises and falls, punctuated by the rumbling of trucks, and I note, looking out of the little bathroom window as I’m brushing my teeth and shaking a handful of pills out of the TH slot in my pill minder, that my room backs up to the scenery of a auto repair shop and a camper trailer rental lot. I spit, rinse the sink, slug down four tablets, and switch off the light.
It is just a place that isn’t really a place. I’ll be here for four nights, then leave, and it’s statistically unlikely I’ll ever be in this room again for the remainder of my life, but that doesn’t trouble me like it used to back in 1978, when I was ten and things and places had a life for me like the spirits in animist religions, where every object and place was haunted by little ghosts that I’d only just met, and then had to leave behind. I used to feel a terrible sadness when we’d pack up, load the Suburban, and leave, wanting to gently touch the walls and whisper “Goodbye,” and “You were a very good motel room” before continuing on the family travels, but pragmatism and a long-running pattern of loss makes it easier and easier to say goodbye to such things.
In the interim, this is my home away, at the industrial edge of a Northern town that’s showing its age and its own losses, and between my time spent with others on my same wavelength, I’ll hole up here, organizing the room as if it’s mine, and then head out again, on the trip with a destination that’s not as far away as it used to be, and that is as things always are.
© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall
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To catch a burning breath.
It’s a flashback, these waves on waves of heat, the searing heaviness of the air enough to make me recoil as I step out of the building at the end of my day’s work. In more hapless times, there was no refuge, and my latest skirmish with the mechanical infidelities of my reliable-up-to-lately commuter car left me with the lone option of climbing into a forty-one-year-old black French sedan with no ventilation beyond what blows in, at the speed of transit, through the little flap under the windshield when, and only when, I’m in motion.
Ordinarily, it’s a delight, but the heat saps my will from the moment I step out of my well-conditioned cave, and I have the grim reminder of my younger days when I had so few escapes from such things. So I step out of my building, fighting the urge to hiss like a vampire facing into the burning, trudge to the car, and head for home. The strange thing is that my little car seems to relish this heat, like it’s something to loosen its tired joints and set the petrochemicals flowing, so while I’m sweltering and reaching a nadir of overall desire to engage with the world, my old 2CV is practically giddy, being looser and more responsive than normal, and quicker, too, though that’s a relative term.
I battle my way through the traffic on the highway until I hit the point where I can bail out and make the rest of the trip home on more civilized and slower roads, albeit with untamed hills and valleys that render much of my trip like a roller coaster, where I plunge into the depths with a heavy accelerator so I’ll retain some fraction of the speed limit as I crest the next hill, and I distract myself from the pressure cooker by trying to come up with an exact metaphor for the experience of driving a car designed in the 1930s to get rural French farmers on the road.
It’s easy, when the image comes into focus. As a friend in the fellowship of Citroën enthusiasts says, a 2CV isn’t a car—it’s a creature—and it is my firm faith that this is the true and noble word. It is, and what kind of creature it is varies, but this afternoon, beating a hasty return home through uninhabitable skies, I know.
This car is as close as one can get to driving a beagle. It’s all floppy stubbornness, noisy joy, and often incomprehensible determination. It is a beagle, ears flapping wildly in the stream of overheated air, and it will allow me to guide it, but on its terms, because that is what beagles and forty-one-year-old French cars do. Everything else is just a machine for moving around in the asphalt horror of modern American life, just an appliance with a task and execution so dreadfully, insufferably dull that ever car has to come with an “infotainment” system to stop you from dying of boredom while you’re out getting groceries.
I sing.
I sing in my car, and it’s the aspirational kind, and, because the songs that are easiest to sing at the top of one’s lungs are often the old songs, or the show tunes, or the torch songs that existed before we all collectively decided that singing songs for ourselves was too much work, and too imperfect, and too challenging to our insecurities, but in a car with no radio and my brain stuffed with Ella Fitzgerald, I’m going to eschew all the usual fears and sing.
I’m midway through “Blue Skies,” spit-roasting at a stoplight, when I hear a polite “pip” of a honk from the pink Miata next to me, and I look over.
The driver is a beautiful, burly black lady of a certain age, beaded like a jeweled statue with sweat, in oxblood lipstick with a flawless line penciled in for emphasis, and she peels off a pair of oversized sunglasses and interrupts my aria.
“I don’t think I’ve ever loved you more than I do right now,” she says, brightly and with a broad smile.
I blush. How could I not?
“Oh go on,” I say, starting to set up a little coy quip that I always go back to as a happy comic habit, but she adds something even more enigmatic.
“You don’t know me yet,” she says, “but you’ll know me someday.”
I’m rendered silent, except that I’m smiling hard, in spite of how truly wretched the weather is, but before I can react further, the light changes, her sunglasses go back on, and she darts off, waving as she pulls away.
And that’s the thing—in a country where Citroëns are nonexistent and old ones are even more rare, where you can go a year or two before seeing another one, there’s this notion of being Citroën-famous in your region, where people see you all the time, no more than any other frequently seen conveyance, but they remember seeing you because you just cut an unfamiliar figure on the road. It’s a reminder, really, to repress any impulses you might have to commit a crime, even a small one, because you’ll get caught. There’s a magic, though, in being a vehicle by which someone’s day is briefly brightened with a smile or a chuckle, sometimes accompanied by an upraised phone camera as you end up in someone else’s photo library, and I think it’s why I teeter right at the edge of magical realism some days, where the moments I relate when I arrive home get an eyeroll and a bit of healthy skepticism, but it’s okay.
It’s just me and this beagle against the world, just for a bit, before I have to climb out of my metaphors and return to earth, where utility bills and calendars and chores await, and until then, we are both creatures, fresh out of a fairytale I haven’t finished writing yet, and there’s still a song in my heart, so I pucker up and whistle an extended and imprecise rendition of “Mas Que Nada” until I’m at my driveway and back to my life.
We eat dinner, I clean up, tend to my chickens, and my partner and kid sing together while I tend to the affairs of home life. As we’re all winding down, I step outside, drag the trash can to the street, and a vixen fox standing next to the forsythia about ten feet away suddenly screams one of those piercing vixen fox screams that is so uncannily like the sound of genuine murder that it comically stands one’s hair on end.
I dart in the house, still chuckling, and head for bed and beagle dreams.
© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall
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The promise of wear.
In the blue morning hours before the household is awake, I am here with a new tool.
I picked it up just yesterday, a sleek and slim new machine for writing and making music that replaces the lovely old laptop that was the color of a new penny that I gave to my mother after her own computer reached the age where it continually asked for updates that were no longer forthcoming. I’ve been contentedly working on the more modern laptop issued by my employer, but with security rules tightening after a recent cyberattack, I decided to leave that machine to its intended tasks and be a dreary consumer, chasing the hottest new thing.
It is a new thing, too, something I unpacked on the inauspicious bench seat of my old pickup truck, extracting it from glassine and tissue paper and just looking at it there in the late afternoon sunlight. These things are defiantly the product of a mature design industry, in the same way the early typewriters, as black and glossy as a nineteenth century treadle sewing machine decorated with a threadlike floral pinstriping and a logo in hand-laid gold leaf turned from trend to trend as a once-rare thing to a given, leaving us with the elegant simplicity of a mid-sixties Olivetti portable that stood as a perfect, functional machine for transcription.
It’s a splendid thing, almost, but not quite, black in a turn from my usual taste in things, in part because a manufacturer that once celebrated wild color as the antidote to the tiresome beige of the end of the last century has settled into cynical adulthood and product lines that now echo the grim monotony of the cars we drive in shades long-haul truckers describe as “asphalt,” “cement,” “fog,” and other sad shades of grey, beige, and don’t-stand-out muted versions of vivid colors.
I picked this shade precisely because of all the reviews that expressed concern that it would show fingerprints, marks, scratches, and wear, precisely because I’m not bothered by any of that, and moreso because I love the way well-used tools start to look well-used in the way people who have lived come to look like people who have lived. My brother lent me his old camera after upgrading through several iterations of an evolving technology, and I delight in the way the pristine sheen of its newness has worn away at the edges and corners in his hands as he chased down fantastic photo after fantastic photo. Now it’s my turn, and I’m a part of that object’s history, something to scratch and scuff it and to add to the story it tells even when it’s just sitting on a shelf, waiting for the next outing.
It’s silly, I know, to always be so wrapped up in the idea that things that come to us with the delicious newness of something untouched, like the velvety grey of a new puppy who’s only just met the world, and then go on to show that they, like me, have lived and seen and passed through moment after moment and times that have left a mark, yet, here I am, hands on the keys of something new. I revel in the promise of any new tool, because it lets me feel like it’s the start of something, even though it’s all been the same long, complicated trip through things.
Today is new. Tomorrow will show the brush marks, footprints, wear, tear, and scars.
It’s perfect.
© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall
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The rain comes.
I trudged back to the house from the coop with a few eggs in my basket and noted, as I crunched through the swiftly melting snow, that I could find my characteristic treads with their waffle gridwork marking my trudge ahead of me, mixed through with Daisy’s paw prints that have persisted after her by a couple weeks now, but even then, I could feel the mist turning to flecks and drops of rain, and felt a knot of tension just south of my ribcage.
Soon all this will be gone.
Soon the rain will come and the world will continue turning over, the endless cycle cycling through to the next new moment and the next and the next.
I haven’t been able to pin the shape of how I feel lately except as a color to the world, or maybe a colorlessness. It’s fair, of course, in that the world around us has turned to a river of shit, sent downstream to drown anyone with a soul by a cadre of bullies guffawing at their stunts and hijinks even as the world starts to suffer under their muddy torrent of bad ideas, but it’s not that. I grew up under the pink thumbs of bullying monsters, and watched the waves come and go. It’s only new in its naked obscenity, where the murderous past still had enough remaining life in those crackling burned-out souls for the monsters to hide some of what they are.
It’s not that, other than that’s the color of the background, the steady murky orange of the skies over burning oilfields choking under a worn-out sun.
It’s not that. (more…) -
Behind the curtain.
There’s something so delicious about outgrowing things.
I think we’re meant, or at least well-trained, to lament those moments when the treasured things we valued lose their gold-plating and are revealed to be something lesser than we thought they were. The eternal becomes the merely good for its time, and we have to think about why, exactly, something seemed so amazing to our younger eyes…but this feels less bad for me as I get older in the same way that opening a can of almost textureless factory-made “ravioli” in a sugary orange sauce loses its comfort and becomes more of a moment for a satisfyingly rueful chuckle at how low my standards once were.I’ve been indulging myself with some comfort reads, as well, revisiting old and beloved books for a little of that satisfying feeling one gets from retreading old paths where great stuff lies, and I’ve largely been finding new details tucked into the old like little notes pencilled into the margins of a book that inspires such annotations. It’s a task intentionally not taxing, and a pursuit to wage a proxy war of the thought-out against a stretch of external idiocy, but I find, more and more, that I reveal more than just another strata of narrative in the familiar.
Ringworld, the 1970 science fiction novel by Larry Niven, is a terrible book.
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Figure out who you are…
…and then do it on purpose, in the words of the indelible Dolly Parton. I started writing ages ago, it seems, but was a little wayward in figuring out what I am good at doing, largely because the people doing it already remained just outside of my line of sight, often obscured by the (in my mind) overly vaunted Very Important Novelist and other towering figures of literature. I write because it’s inherent to me, I think, but giving it a name, even belatedly, is a useful thing.
I write, sometimes for my stage act as a combination stand-up autobiographer and house band, sometimes entirely for myself, and sometimes for an imaginary newspaper that would print my occasional columns like a rambling and often profane aspirant to the space Armistead Maupin occupied back in the day, but I’ve been reading E.B. White as a sort of post-election therapy and I’m struck by how much of White’s take on the task of the essayist truly nails my own assortment of flaws and strengths:
The essayist is a self-liberated man, sustained by the childish belief that everything he thinks about, everything that happens to him, is of general interest. He is a fellow who thoroughly enjoys his work, just as people who take bird walks enjoy theirs. Each new excursion of the essayist, each new “attempt,” differs from the last and takes him into new country. This delights him. Only a person who is congenitally self-centered has the effrontery and the stamina to write essays.
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Slower.
There’s a popular thread that makes the rounds with increasing frequency in which we lament our fragmented, jittery, manipulated attention economy and the nervous lives that we get in that realm, and the antidotes tend to go by neat-sounding titles like “the revenge of analog” or “going analog,” all amusingly laid out in detail on means of communication that are clearly digital, like online video, “social” media, and podcasts, among other channels of interpersonal communication that are the realm of the world on this side of the computer revolutions that have brought us here.
I don’t disdain the digital, though—I adore digital things, like digital communication, digital synthesis, digital tools for composing, editing, and distributing new ideas and creative work. Where I land is more that when we feel anxiety about the pace of the world, and the way so much of it gives us less joy than frustration and exploitation. It’s not the digital that gets me—it’s the corporate invasion of our attention and the way these tools have become increasingly enshittified by corporate owners who care for nothing but quick profit and regard the users as data to be mined, and “content creators” (and to be clear, fuck that phrase and every stupid asshole who uses it, regardless of whether they’re the bad guys who invented it or the suckers who took the bait).
We live in an era where we shouldn’t be struggling for time and the energy to be social, and it’s pretty clear how we were tricked into handing over our resources to people who don’t value us in exchange for the pittance of easyish connections and the consequent feeling that we need to be constantly connected, checking in, scrolling through, and engaging, because otherwise we’ll have to face the terrifying prospect of occasionally experiencing silence or a moment where we’re not caught up in the firehose of scroll because we’ve become trained to fear missing out on anything.All of humanity’s problems stem from man’s inability to sit quietly in a room alone.
—Blaise Pascal, Penseés
But we’re not, as yet, forced into this hyperactive world of chattering nonsense, advertising, and techbro-wet-dream doomscrolling bullshit. We can still talk, still meet, still enjoy phone calls, letters, and moments together…or on our own.
So I’m going to move slower, unplug more and more, balancing the benefits of these tools against their costs and consequences, and I’m sure I’ll miss out on a lot of the stuff that the algorithms, beancounters, influencers, and marketing types insist I can’t live a happy modern life without, and you know what? Fuck it.
The people who care know where to find me, whether it’s here on my own site (self-hosted and controlled by me and not some ravening invasive CEO or private equity gestalt. Let’s see where things stand in a month, when we fire up another year in a shaky climate of rampaging assholes, and then a month after that, and after that.
I control my speed, and for now, it’s going to be slow.
Try to keep up.
© 2024 Joe Belknap Wall
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A rare month.
First of all, it was October, a rare month for boys. Not that all months aren’t rare. But there be bad and good, as the pirates say. Take September, a bad month: schoool begins. Consider August, a good month: school hasn’t begun yet. July, well, July’s really fine: there’s no chance in the world for school. June, no doubting it, June’s best of all, for the school doors spring wide and September’s a billion years away.
But you take October, now. School’s been on a month and you’re riding easier in the reins, jogging along. You got time to think of the garbage you’ll dump on old man Prickett’s porch, or the hairy-ape costume you’ll wear to the YMCA the last night of the month. And if it’s around October twentieth and everything smoky-smelling and the sky orange and ash grey at twilight, it seems Hallowe’en will never come in a fall of broomsticks and a soft flap of bedsheets around corners.—Ray Bradbury, from Something Wicked This Way Comes
