Dispatch from a lightning tree.

| 2025-06-29

You know that feeling, when you visit your old elementary school and can’t get over how small everything looks now? All those little chairs and little desks and painted cinderblock walls and hand-lettered signs everywhere encouraging you to dare to dream, and it all just seems so alien, and the familiarity has faded.

I haven’t posted anything of note on corporate social since March, beyond keeping tabs and checking in on my friends, and despite my multiple unsuccessful attempts to get clear of platforms that exist primarily to make money with us as the labor force, rewarded with a meager pittance for the billions we make for bad people with ugly hearts, this retreat has been easier. It’s been the perfect storm of death and loss and heartbreak this year, and while I’ve received lovely support and affection from an encouragingly large number of people, the modus operandi of Social Media Incorporated has grated on me even more.

That’s the thing—when you step away from a non-place like this non-place is, the machinery of addiction engineering lurches into motion and starts flooding your former social space (even with three blockers running at once) with “sponsored” posts and “suggested people you might like” and “you might find this interesting” posts so that when you poke your head back in, the algorithm turns your visit to your old elementary school into a nightmarish wall of fake nonsense, computer-generated bullshit, and suggestions that are all precisely engineered clickbait to get you engaged with a bunch of blowhards you’ve never met to argue about fluff and stupidity to make enough money to rent out Barcelona for the next prettypretty wedding of celebrity morons.

It’s like stepping into an old gay bar you loved once and finding that they’ve installed seven hundred TV monitors all blaring day-glo who-gives-a-shit at eye level, so you have to step lightly, dodge, and dart just to find a friend in all the chaos, and the grimly funny part of this is that the teenage engineers behind all this repellent techbro plumfuckery actually think this is going to draw you back in.

Where’s the “there” there? Heck, for the 5-10 feeds this site thinks I should be allowed to see that I actually care about, I can always just bookmark each one, and visit them in turn with a direct link, to comment and chat, and that’s more or less what I’m doing these days.

Are we so lonely that we really can’t live without this level of glittering, jittering, seizure-inducing strobing actinic glare of interference, and surrender more control over what we visit in lieu of all the day-to-day human relationships, phone calls, letters, and plain old hanging out with no particular aim we used to do?

So I stepped away for this stretch, feeling bone-deep defeat after losing a dog, a sister, several friends, security for my friends and family, and a functioning democracy in a country that was once seemingly on a path to civilization, and when I pop my head back in, the click-me-now pages are all carefully arranged to present the worst of the world around me.

Oh look—a post about pride observations at our nearby ballpark…and yeah, it’s aimed at every backwoods red state moron who seems to obsessively read posts about Maryland and Baltimore despite having skulked off to somewhere dreadful like Florida or Oklahoma or Indiana to live their “best” lives, who chimes in, as they were programmed to, “Whut about straight pride? When do WE get a day?”

Thing is, I’m not fooled. I know how algorithmic engineering of social engineering works. They put out the lure because they think I’m a sucker, primed to jump in and fight in the same way dumb people respond to each and every call to name a state with no “E” in it, or to demonstrate that they remember dial telephones or gearshifts, or to post their favorite song, book, movie to a fake radio station page out of a kind of pathetic desperation to feel like part of something in the face of the loneliness created by the celebrity megacorporate monsters who just want to help us to “connect,” but I don’t bite the hook.

It’s not easy, but were our social lives ever meant to be easy? Didn’t we once have the stomach for a little work to connect with each other?

Maybe we didn’t. Maybe it was all just small talk, and we were living lives of quiet desperation, cringing at every horrid moment of accidental connection.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal when I would call my best friend up so we could watch Doctor Who, staying on the phone to share our commentary.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal when my friend Allen lived four blocks away and had no telephone, so when I wanted to get together with him, I had to walk over there and knock on the door.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal that we had to remember dozens of telephone numbers or write them down, and that we were annoyed by friends with 9 and 0 in their numbers, because the dialing was so much slower.

Maybe it wasn’t ideal to show up at a local watering hole to see who was around or, annoyingly, wasn’t.

Maybe all that social labor was just an awful thing we endured, and social media came to rescue us, which is why we’re so much happier now?

Are we, though?

Maybe it’s me, but I don’t feel it. I chattered with a friend for a solid hour and change after a show a couple weeks ago, talking FM synthesis and the voltage control issues of a synthesizer we both own while rats darted around the empty parking lot, and it was a revelatory moment, because I’d arrived earlier that afternoon feeling at an absolute nadir, with a pit of who-the-fuck-cares in my gut and a long drive to a distant venue where all I could really think about was to pilot my car in silence while trying to come up with a metaphor for the way I’d been feeling (I arrived at a tree struck by lightning, burned out and hollow, but still looking like a perfectly intact treet), and I drove home feeling more engaged, enjoying music, and thinking of things I’d like to do when I got home.

Maybe it’s me, and just me, and maybe it’s okay that I’ve retreated to smaller online spaces where my friends largely haven’t bothered to seek me out, because the big places just feel like trees struck by lightning, burned out from the inside, still looking intact but dead inside, standing until a strong wind comes.

To be fair, I cut my teeth writing on digital platforms, so I won’t begin to claim the purity of internet-free life.

I was doing it back in 1985 when I still had to dial a BBS on a dial telephone, listen for the eeeeeEEEEEEE, and clap the handset into a pair of rubber cups on a modem that streamed characters about as fast as I could type, and when I was on all the strange Devonian shale medium creatures of the pre-commercial internet, playing with Gopher and Veronica and MUDs and MUSHs and MUSEs and the firestorm cauldrons of USENET, and when Livejournal came around and gave me a place to write serially, a wannabe Armistead Maupin sharing stories an episode at a time, with an audience of enthusiasts and occasional critics. It was such a energetic era for me—full of aspiration, creativity, and major and minor missteps.

The jaundiced eye of the post-human corporate gestalts turned on us once they saw the possibility of exploitation, and offered us easy connection, and lazy ways to interact, and we all just fell in line, and here we are.

And here I am, because I feel like maybe it was unkind to just disappear, but I want more conversations with rats darting around empty parking lots at my feet and while we’re driving aimlessly in search of a new place to eat and when we’re in a room together, face to face, talking about things that matter and things that don’t.

I want to put on little concerts of friends playing unlistenable electronic nonsense and banjo music in my house, and have pot luck dinners, and play board games that are beyond my easy comprehension. I want to ask mechanically sophisticated friends for help fixing my windshield wipers or getting my old shortwave radio to tune more than static again or to teach me how to make waffles I enjoy as much as cheap store brand toaster waffles.

I want to, but I, too, have been trained well, and there’s a lot to untangle in return, and maybe those little desks and little chairs and cinderblock walls with hand-lettered signs everywhere encouraging you to dare to dream aren’t as pretty a scene as the gauzy lens of nostalgia presents, and for now, I still feel burned out on the inside even as I still stand here, still looking plausibly like a tree even though it’s all still too soon and too hard. This is what grief looks like, and it’s okay. Life returns.

We need to reach again—at least I do—else what’s a heaven for?

© 2025 Joe Belknap Wall

To catch a burning breath.

| 2025-06-25

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

 

I’d like to propose a toast.

| 2023-10-02

These things come back like ghosts, faintly but present, and pull the few little threads of regret that have any purchase in my heart. It’s hard to explain that strange little stretch in the middle of the hateful eighties when people like me were dropping like flies while the everyday people in the rest of the world yawned and turned away in between sharing the hilarious jokes about fruits and vegetables and pointing fingers to say “well, didn’t you all bring this on yourselves” at best, and to share their churchy nonsense at worst. Thing is, being in the midst of it as a little half-formed person trying to figure out where he fit, when the people who could have explained any of it were dying by the thousands, was a shocking, traumatic thing that you couldn’t really see from the ground level, and overview would take literal decades.

Fran Lebowitz says that the real tragedy of AIDS wasn’t so much how many artists and creative people we lost, but that we lost a generation of a kind of audience that the world hadn’t seen before, and hasn’t seen since, with a canny understanding of semiotics, camp, and detail forged by a forbidden identity and a long-closed culture just starting to open to something more than just the way things always were.

I remember, once, in the early years of my inexplicable twenty-year career as a frequent operatic extra with the Washington Opera in DC, sitting next to a handsome older fellow quietly singing Sondheim.

“What are you singing?” I asked. I was fourteen or fifteen, I think, and at a makeup mirror next to the gentleman and just on the other side of the row of makeup tables where my father was combing a color into his mustache and waxing the curled end of each handle of the handlebar with a precision that would have pleased Poirot. The guy looked over, half in his foundation and half still patting on the matte tan for the period and class of his character.

(more…)

an excerpt from Scaggsville (work in progress)

| 2023-08-01

SPOKES

The new and as yet unopened interstate was an broad, empty band of fresh pavement that reared up from around a gentle bend and disappeared around another, heading north and south. We followed the freshly-painted lane lines on the family Schwinns, with me buckled into in my child seat on the back of my mother’s bike and my sister marking an invisible wavy line in a continuous slalom through the dashed lines.

“He’s at it again, Cleve,” my mother said, and my father turned back, slowing down just enough to sidle up and reach over to make sure I was still properly strapped in. Their bikes were a matched pair of metallic blue Deluxe Varsity Tourist models with chromed fenders and bulbous headlamps powered by bottle-shaped generators that tipped into the tires a little electricity, and they gleamed in the sun, aromatic with the scent of metal polish and oil.

“I don’t think he can reach, hon,” he said.

“He’s sure trying, though,” she said, and they chuckled at the sight of me hanging off the back of my Mom’s bike, struggling to do myself an injury. I just looked up, furrowing my brow and glaring at my dad, then went back to that irresistible task of self-mutilation.

We breezed southward in close formation, crossing over where the abandoned track of the old Scaggsville Road was cut off by the new pavement, and went as far as the dam before heading for home with the setting sun warm on our backs. The road was raw and perfect, still almost untouched, an empty place that would soon be roaring with traffic.

In the golden light, I grunted and writhed, struggling furiously against the straps on my seat, trying as hard as I could to jam my feet into the spokes.

One day I’ll do it.

I’ll do it.

©2006 Joe Belknap Wall

Unsocial media

| 2021-05-29

The tail end of COVID in my region means my social life can go back to being casual but sophisticated dinner parties, rollicking house concerts, nights at the bijou, and playful country drives in ridiculous old French cars, but even more, it means I can start edging towards the exit of the various manipulative, cynical, and life-diminishing social media platforms we’ve all depended on for the past year.

Here’s to a return to real life—surprisingly, I’ve come to miss it.

[2022 update: Alas, the antivax/antimaskers kept us in it for a while longer, with the Omicron variant heating up and set (supposedly) to peak this month. Still, we have vaccines, quick tests, and smart people to hang out with on small scales while the rest of the crowd gets their act together.]

The Huggy Molly [2020]

| 2021-03-27

The full video of my live stream of an improvised score and off-the-cuff telling of several stories about the anxieties of youth, as originally broadcast on 4 December 2020 via Nick’s International Virtual Garage 2020, an excellent Twitch channel for the work of electronic and electro-acoustic musicians.

If you’re interested in an audio recording of the performance, it’s available on Bandcamp on a choose-your-own-price basis [and I’m content with zero as the price as long as you let people know about it].

Circumstances: The Mallet

| 2021-03-16

I was once “mangled” (by my recounting) whilst unwisely exploring the underside of a push-carousel at a nearby playground, and used that largely imaginary injury to affect a rakish manner with a cane for roughly a year, to my family’s extreme irritation. Of course, it was not so much a proper cane as it was a croquet mallet that I inexplicably carried at all times while struggling to pose with it in a nonchalant manner whenever the potential for glamorous disability arose.

Book

| 2021-02-06

On my shelf, I have a book.

It is a handmade book that I made myself in a workshop hosted by a friend, and it is not a great book, by any means, though, of the two handmade books I have made in my life, it is far better than one I attempted in a class thirty-five or so years prior, when patience and attention to detail were less important for me.

It looks like a book, and feels, in the hand, like a book.

It sits on a table more like a wedge than the lovely foursquare block of materials that a better book would be; the edge binding being a little wider than the number of bound sections of papers, called “signatures,” would justify, but it looks and feels like it has some of the portent of a book, and carries some of the magical feeling a book carries for those who have a visceral sense of the old Arabic proverb that “a book is like a garden carried in the pocket.”

I made it and it sat and rested and waited for what I thought would be the perfect first idea to add to it.

The trouble with portent is that it creates doubt.

But one day, I decided, when I was in one of those cloudy moods where I felt like something was wrong, but I couldn’t identify either what the something or the wrong was, to start writing.

On the first morning, I woke up, rubbed the night out of my eyes, and carefully copied the first chapter of the Taoist book, the Tao Te Ching, onto the fifth page of my book using a fountain pen that I felt conveyed a sense of import to the process. Then, I made a cup of tea and enjoyed a sense of beginning, and of accomplishment.

On the next morning, I woke up, rubbed the night out of my eyes, and felt like my previous penmanship was poor and that I hadn’t properly incorporated the sense of the moment with my handwriting, and I pondered cutting out that first page with a razor blade to start over, but didn’t, for reasons of discipline or some understanding of history that was more clear to me at the age I was when starting out.

I carefully copied the second chapter of the Tao Te Ching into my book with the same pen with a sense of import, after which I made a cup of tea and enjoyed a sense of continuation and contentment.

I did the same the next day, and the next after that, eventually completing the task of transcribing one of the eighty-one chapters of the book on the morning of the eighty-first day, after which I made a cup of tea, fanned through the book, and enjoyed a sense of having started a project, persevered, and reached the inevitable ending.

My handwriting varies throughout. Some days, it’s tight and meticulous, as regular and uniform as I could make it, and others, it’s loose and rangy and rushed, because I’d almost forgotten my task until later in the morning, or because I wasn’t feeling it that day and just wanted to be done.

I’d stopped using only the fountain pen, sometimes because I’d misplaced it and sometimes as rebellion against my need for repetition and the surety of following the same paths over and over. When I made a mistake, I sat with a moment of insecurity and a razor blade, knowing how easily I could excise that day from the record and start over, but I resisted my temptation to do so. Sometimes, I would artfully correct errors with added ink, and sometimes I would just cross things out.

I shelved the book and there it was, hand-stitched binding on display like a museum exhibit of my history.

At some point, I was reminded of a quote by Colin Chapman, the architect of Lotus sports cars, who held the maxim “simplify, then add lightness,” and it was a fitting notion, so I added it to my book. I added quotes by Fred Rogers and Ursula Le Guin and bits from the Bible and Rumi. It occurred to me, too, that if I pasted in things here and there along the way, it would eventually level out the book so that it would lie flat on a table like the lovely foursquare block of materials that a better book would be, and that thought made me feel curiously settled and comfortable, even though I have yet to paste anything in there.

When I die, the book may be found in my things and recognized by someone as a sacred object once loved by a person, and taken up for the residual energy left when someone who’s no longer around leaves behind things that were rare and valuable to them for reasons other than the intrinsic value of the thing as a material object in the world. For a time, it will carry that energy, the slight sense of fizzy carbonation in the air like the happy aftermath of a beloved song that’s just ended, but eventually someone will be picking through a stack of books, sorting out what’s worth keeping and what isn’t, and it’ll just be a notebook full of scrawled notes important to someone they never knew.

They may see that, of all the notes and quotes and copied wisdom in the book, only one sentence is written in pencil, erasable and subject to being worn away just from the process of opening and closing the book over decades, and smile at the bit of ironic humor I enjoyed as I changed my writing implement for that line and considered, just as a joke told to myself, writing it and then erasing it incompletely, but they probably will miss that in the chaos of clearing out an estate or sorting through boxes of unwanted books donated to somewhere that might take them.

It is not impermanence that makes us suffer. What makes us suffer is wanting things to be permanent when they are not.

—Thich Nhat Hanh

I think, often enough, of lines I mean to add to my book, and because it is not near, they come into my head, make a tracery of blue-grey lines in the air the way my grandmother’s menthol cigarettes would fill the room with atmospheric handwriting as she’d tell me stories in her Baltimore rowhouse kitchen, before they’d slowly drift and merge into strata and fade.

Like most books that we look to for deeper meaning, my book is full of contradictions, momentary fixations, and ideas that I breezed past at first, then circled back to revisit, adding little footnotes and ornamentation. 

I haven’t added anything to the book in a while, and I look at it on the shelf and have a little pang of guilt, as though I’m neglecting a living thing, which it, of course, isn’t…not really. It is a handmade book I made myself in a workshop hosted by a friend, filling up with things I’ve read or heard somewhere, bound into a volume that is like everything around me—finite and enclosed by constraints that have been defined largely by what’s happened after its construction, as resistant to a satisfying or informative summation as real stories are, and it’s no different from anything else in that it, too, might just s t o p

©2021 Joe Belknap Wall

The Gerbil Will Bite You

| 2020-08-13

My storytelling life was started by a territorial gerbil and a panicked need to explain why I emerged bloodied from the kindergarten bathroom to hide my shame about surrendering to temptation and ignoring the “DO NOT TOUCH THE GERBIL” sign in large and well-articulated handwriting on the gerbil’s enclosure which, for whatever reason, was stationed there. I stepped out of the tiled bathroom, hoping for anonymity even as my hand left a trail of red punctuation marks on the harvest gold carpet, and was immediately intercepted by the classroom aide, Mrs. Hecker, who asked the fearful question.  

(more…)

The Wrong Hand

| 2020-08-01
2016-07-30

Yesterday, after shopping at Ikea, as I carried a big blue tote bag containing ten LED Par-20 floodlight bulbs for my lighting instruments in the lobby of the little theater I run and one small black picture frame for artist bios for our gallery exhibition away from the cash register, I paused, taking in the scent of cinnamon rolls, then remembered that they seldom live up their their promise, and continued on my way.

A young couple blockaded my escape route, but I was too tired to dart, so I bided my time behind them. As we passed into the gauntlet of sliding doors, the young man slipped back to let me pass, and as I was about to step through the last sliding door, the young lady, on a monologue to her mate, assumed, by position, that I was that gentleman, reached out, and grabbed my hand.

I looked down at my big clumsy meathook inexplicably in the control of a more slender and elegant hand than I am accustomed to holding, then looked up at her with a furrowed brow as she continued her soliloquy, her sharp eyes scanning the large parking lot for their car, then looked back at her mate, whose face was a wry and twisted concentration of I MUST NOT LAUGH.

(more…)