Into the treeeees...

Plus, Kevin Barry, Bret Easton Ellis & Alina Pleskova

There’s nothing like eating breakfast with a dozen total strangers for a few days to wake you up to how weird you are.

I was staying in Sacramento, at a mid-range hotel on the outskirts of the city, which is only about twenty minutes from Davis, where my daughter goes to school. I was in town to visit Annie for a few days, something I haven’t done before. I’d dropped her off a few times but never spent more than a day or two in town, mainly because Annie was either living in a dorm or the kind of shitty off-campus apartment that feels like a right-of-passage for college students.

But I need to back up. On my way from Capitola, where I was last week, to Sacramento, I stopped off at the Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park to look at the Redwoods.

When I mentioned to the guy who was giving me a tattoo last week—nice guy, great artist, check him out—he urged me to visit the park after I told him I’d never seen an actual Redwood tree before.

So I did. When I asked the park ranger who took my $10 where I should go, he told me to check out the grove of old-growth Sequoias. “That’s why we’re here,” he said, somewhat cryptically, or at least it would seem that way if not for his quasi-reverent tone. Everyone I spoke with at the park, from the rangers to the volunteers, to the lady at the visitor center had the same awe-struck demeanor.

I parked my car and the sign at the entrance explained that the Redwood Grove was a one mile loop that encircled a stand of trees that were among the oldest in the park. I entered the grove and immediately felt… different. It was dark and quiet and the air was redolent with a smell that felt woodsy but also unfamiliar. “Wow,” I thought. “Wow.”

My thoughts did not get much more complicated than that as I walked the loop and stupidly took pictures that could never hope to capture the majesty of the redwoods. I might as well have been chiseling an image into a rock. That’s how insufficient the camera felt. I eventually put it away. If you’ve seen these trees, you know. If you haven’t, go see them.

Henry Cowell Redwoods State Park

I drove on to Sacramento. I had finished listening to Kevin Barry’s City of Bohane on the way to Capitola. It’s a great fucking book that I can’t believe hasn’t been made into a movie. Barry reads the novel, which is no small part of the pleasure to be had listening to this savage and brutal tale of warring factions in a dystopian west of Ireland. It’s The Banshees of Inisherin meets The Gangs of New York.

I immediately started up Bret Easton Ellis’s The Shards, a high school serial killer novel that many have called Less Than Zero meets American Psycho. That either excites you or it makes you roll your eyes a little bit. I had been told by someone that it’s “kind of punk,” which it isn’t, but there are enough weird intersections between LA serial killers and early LA punk that it caught my interest. From rumors that the Night Crawler was in the crowd at a Black Flag show in downtown LA to the murder of a woman who was a regular at the Masque who was killed by the Hillside Stranglers, it was a dangerous time to be a punk. Here’s an excerpt from Alice Bag’s Violence Girl:

On November 23rd, Jane King was abducted off of Hollywood Boulevard, yet another victim of the Hillside Strangler. Jane’s murder struck closer to home. She was a good friend of the Berlin Brats’ Rick Wilder and an occasional guest at The Masque. Her murder sent shock waves through the punk community.

The real reason I was excited to read The Shards is the way Ellis centers himself in the narrative. The protagonist is a high school student named Brett who is working on a novel called Less Than Zero. I was really intrigued by how he uses what I’ll clunky call his source material because I’m doing something similar in my new novel project about a punk rock zinester (guess who) who gets swept up in a dark mystery about a musician who disappeared in the desert 30 years ago.

The Shards is dark, grisly, borderline pornographic, and utterly mesmerizing. It’s also 23 hours long and accompanied me on my many journeys back and forth between Sacramento and Davis, which brought back uneasy memories of last year’s stabbings by a deranged killer in Davis. I’m completely obsessed with The Shards but it’s not something I wanted to start my day with.

For that I turned to Alina Pleskova’s poetry collection Toska while I ate my complimentary breakfast at the hotel each morning. Even though it was parents’ weekend, I was the only one who wasn’t glued to their phone or arguing with their spouse or shoveling down unhealthy amounts of sausage of dubious quality.

Toska is a book about dislocation. Being in one place—physical, emotional, sexual—while longing for another.

Desire doesn't aspire
to anything other than itself--

I don't miss so-&-so,
just being seen in that way,

just having an unholy place
to rest, set all this down

I don’t have the book in front of me or I’d provide more examples of its casual ferocity. It’s like an exotic animal that lulls you into complacency and then sinks its fangs into you: Surprise, I was born for this!

Ruth Madievsky recommended Toska to me, for which I’m grateful, but a funny thing happened. While reading these poems, which are not nature poems, I kept thinking of the Redwoods and the way they made me feel. Eventually, I gave up and wrote a poem about the trees. Kind of basic, but fine. I got it out of my system. Then, the next day, it happened again. Better than writing poems about a serial killer, I guess.

Complimentary breakfast with Alina Pleskova’s Toska

The highlight of the trip, of course, was spending time with Annie. We went out to dinner. We went to the farmer’s market. We went to a library sale. She let me take her shopping in Sacramento. I hung out at the coffee shop where she works and tried not to be too much of a dad.

Annie is starting her third year of college and is at the point where she’s got the lay of the land and has figured out what it means to be a college student. She’s settled on a major: Economics with an emphasis on Poverty & Inequality, and is taking classes from professors she admires. She’s working two part-time jobs, one of which is tutoring Economics students in lower-division classes. She was accepted for an internship next quarter and will be working in some capacity for (or at) the state capitol. At the risk of turning this into an Xmas letter, I’m incredibly proud of her.

It was also a strangely eventful trip. I interviewed the California Poet Laureate for the Los Angeles Times. We saw Killers of the Flower Moon and we went to see the Circle Jerks and the Descendents at The Ace of Spades in Sacramento. Does it get better than that? I don’t think it does.

Circle Jerks and The Descendents at The Ace of Spades, The Ace of Spades in Sacramento

Sorry, Ian
Is it possible to write
a decent poem
about a California Redwood
after an hour’s stroll
in the old growth forest
and a ten-minute discussion
with an enraptured volunteer?
I don’t ask the actual poet
with the laureateship,
squinting into the sun
as he considers an answer
to my question about his duties.
There is more passion
in his voice when he talks
about the Bad Brains,
Idles, or Ian MacKaye.
I have spent more than half my life
listening to these artists but
if I had to choose
between saving a single Redwood
and “Pay to Cum,” two trees
and Joy as an Act of Resistance,
this forest and the entire Discord catalog,
I know exactly what I’d do.

Another poem about the Redwoods
We used to believe we could
tell the age of a Redwood tree
by counting its rings after we killed it.
Now we know that Redwoods
don’t grow every year.
There are times when they are alive
but fail to thrive, which is
the most human thing ever.
I think of the years I lost
to blended whiskey,
filling out time sheets,
and the New York Knicks,
a form of self-harm
if you want to get down to it.
Or the years I ran afoul
of the Uniform Code
of Military Justice, the State
of California, and the IRS.
The years of broken promises,
stillborn resolutions, failures
to appear. Yet here I am,
writing this poem
in the lobby of a mid-size hotel
on the outskirts of the capitol.
Maybe I can be a Redwood, too.

Thanks for reading and see you next week when I’m announcing a sale on signed books with free shipping to anywhere in the U.S. Get your X-mas lists ready…

If you’re new-ish here and you liked this newsletter you might also like my new novel Make It Stop, or the paperback edition of Corporate Rock Sucks: The Rise & Fall of SST Records, or my book with Bad Religion, or my book with Keith Morris. Message from the Underworld comes out every Wednesday and is always available for free, but paid subscribers also get Orca Alert! every Sunday. It’s a weekly round-up of links about art, culture, and science you may have missed while trying to avoid the shitty news about [gestures at everything].