THIS IS A GOOD RECORD. Kris Olsen is a great guitar player and songwriter out of Los Angeles by way of New York and Tallahassee and multiple other stops along the way. He’s been a true and devoted musician from the days when I knew him as a kid back on Long Island way back when. Kris, who then was a stocky, freckled Norwegian kid with a thick bush of yellow hair on his head, always knew music and was into music and was exploring music. He might have been the one who introduced me to the Rolling Stones, but I think I also heard their songs on the radio. He did however show me that Stones compilation Hot Rocks, where all of their silhouettes are superimposed over each other, and he certainly introduced me to Living Colour. He seemed to have an encyclopedic knowledge of bands, personnel, instruments, even composition and arrangements.

He also had a small room for jamming which consisted of his guitar, and amplifier (I think, my memory is a bit hazy here), a drum kit, and a weight training bench, with the March 1989 Playboy centerfold of Latoya Jackson taped to the ceiling (my memory is not so hazy in this regard). To be fair, I think his brother had the Latoya worshipping going on. But, more to the point, it was here, in this little basement room sometime at the eclipse of the Eighties, here, around the time that the Stones were touring Steel Wheels, here, that Kris made the now famous claim that he could play “Jumpin’ Jack Flash.” Then this scruffy Norwegian kid with the brilliant afro picked up his guitar and played something, but it wasn’t quite Flash and then he claimed it was Flash.

To this day, he claims he can play it, and I will not contest this claim, only that I would like to see him do it live.

In the meantime, he developed some serious chops. The guitars on this record are thick and peanut butter chunky, and the breakout riffs and solos are incisive. I am actually surprised. You’ll put on The Future of History and start doing something else and then all of a sudden you will hear some guitar breakout and think, wait, what the fuck was that? Jimmy Page’s kid brother or something? Another one of his lost sons?

All of that electricity shooting around the album cover is no joke: he can play. He’s no longer some spotty kid either, his voice has dropped a few octaves, and he’s a got a resonant Morrison-esque voice that stands on its own, far removed from the sludge of other singers like Eddie Vedder or that guy from Creed. The band itself, which consists of Damian Valentine on bass, Charles Cicirello on guitar, and Lucky Lehrer on drums, (ex-Circle Jerks and Bad Religion) proves itself capable of laying down dependable grooves that allow the guitars and Olsen’s lyrics to roll above. This record is seven tracks and was just released and is worth a listen for all fans of rock music who want to hear something new and enjoyable. I guess “Crackin’ Up” is the debut single here, but I am partial to “Craziest Dream” which chugs away on the back of a catchy riff that brings to mind the best of the classic rock canon and latter-day followers, but made all its own.

Can’t wait to see these guys live someday, especially when they slip Flash into their set, or just hear more.

I USED TO GO for walks with Brynhildr on days just like these. We would ride out into the forests, or meet at night and circle the paths of the old river park. The weather was grim, as November weather is. She mostly spoke. I tried to keep up. She wore the right apparel. I was underdressed. She’s of rather stocky, freckled, Ingrian stock. Inside a lonely lost girl. Like so many. My whole generation consists of such lonely lost girls, girls who went to bed reading themselves bedtime stories in 1982, really painfully yearning for a comfort they never experienced. I never had that problem, but they did. She grew accustomed to the sound of her own voice, Brynhildr. She spoke as much to herself, as she did to me, or rather she just spoke for the sake of expressing herself to the darkness. Also, remember, everything was happening in another language. So I was already at a loss for words. How does one respond to some deep thought about how life is supposed to be in the Estonian language. Noh jah? Then I would get home after these walks with Brynhildr and for a few sparing moments feel her soggy essence seep into my bones like the moisture. There was a meadow there, and some sun, and there was some sex too. I had sex with Brynhildr. I really did. But then something would go wrong. There would be like a fissure or twist in the material, discomfort would set it, mistrust, doubt, a gaping lack of faith. Without even informing her of it, I would start to get angry, desperate messages. “You hate women.” “You don’t trust women.” “You won’t let a woman’s soul in!” She already felt it, you know, without one word dropping from my fingers or lips. How did she know? I have never been able to figure out this radar talent of hers and, honestly, of most others, but it’s there. She already knew everything before I even knew it myself. Telepathy is the medium here. Time went on. Last night, I encountered Dulcinea in a bleak moment. I was just coming down the street and she was out in the dark. By all tailor’s measurements, this is the wrong woman for me, and she herself has expressed zero interest in me, really. She is far too young for me, though now of marriageable age, at least for the prewar period, and my mind doesn’t even dare to venture there. And yet, there is something fluttering, in the wind, like one of those stubborn tree leaves that just won’t give up. I trust her. There is something in her eyes, in the lines of her face, just in the way she looks at me, that is so direct and honest, that just melts away all of the fat and disbelief. I believe in her 100 percent. There is a shared medium there, again, a shared understanding, whatever it is, costumed in a look. It had been a hard, repressed, blocked day. I felt blocked, I couldn’t even find my own voice, couldn’t summon my own fingers to write, couldn’t play music, couldn’t feel. I was like a blind man groping about an unfamiliar room, knocking over rubber plants and paraphernalia. Dulcinea went on her way, and I went on mine, and I started to feel that little voice again, and the little voice was saying, just let me in. And no other, of course. So I did it. I laid down my arms and I let her in. Then things started to flow again. The universe did not go technicolor, balance was not restored, everything did not right itself. All was not suddenly an H-bomb of fluorescent euphoria. Sleep came on though, and deeply, a restorative, loving, rich sleep. Sometimes it feels good to let someone else in.

THE NINTH ARRIVES with the frost, but at least some sunlight, that sweet frosted sunlight, dolce, dulce, the sugary powdered glazed glasuur stuff that drives away these blues. The frost that slays the wet dark, like that goblin-cleaving blade in Tolkien (you know the one). It’s warm in here though. Warmth at the end of that dark damp tunnel. Black, bleak, and blue. Warmth is the way out into the light. But I’ve also come down with a case of sea sailor’s syndrome, meremehe sündroom (in Estonian), a diagnosis of my own invention. It sneaks up on you, rolls in like the San Francisco fog, billowing over the piers and barking sea lions in the harbor waters, clouding the eyes of the harbormaster with shadowy sinister Alcatraz most distant. It swallows up chunks of your soul, bite by bite, like a counter lunch at Vesuvio. It strikes when you have been away too long, too long from the opposite sex. Too long without comfort, compassion, consideration, care. There is nothing aggressive or pent up or demanding about it. It’s a hunger that erodes you away to your core like salty sea air, slowly, slowly over time. That lingering sense of desperation and desire, drawn out like a frost sunrise in November, that sliver of orange white dashed against the horizon after 4 pm. That there is the thing. The only cure is, well, you know what the only cure is. This however is fortified and entrenched and commandeered by bourgeois sentiment. I hate to be so blunt about it, but when the wind is blowing off the harbor, and the horns of the ships sound, and the seals bark and there is more salty air, dampness, and cruel fog around you, when that Pacific chill bites into you, and you draw your coat in tighter and take a back street up through Chinatown, in that piqued instant, there is no romantic overture, no bouquet of flowers, no expensive jewelry, no melodic tune or real estate investment that can do justice to the the mad cravings that run some men down into numbness and silence like broken dogs. But a good espresso or two today, at the café, sunshine through the frosty windows, and fine dialogues with the all-knowing Lioness, shapely, wise, clear-eyed, and lovely. No complaints from me, today, Tuesday. No complaints.

SATURDAY, LITTLE TO REPORT. Dreams were truncated, something about trying to assemble a rapid Covid-19 testing kit properly, with some foggy interludes in Finland again with all of those lookalike bearded lumberjack worker types (Finland haunts my psyche), and then being at a country house by a lake where both Brynhildr and the mother of my children were present at the same table. Brynhildr is, as you can imagine, quite set, quite voluptuous, quite strapping, quite terrifying. There was some slight tension there, you know. The women in my orbit make no bones about having the men they like when they like them, and as many of them as they like, but there is always that territorial aspect about who controls whom, or who can make him do her bidding when. That was the tension in that dream. Sometimes I think the whole of my existence is at mercy to the acrobatics of women’s hormonal sunburst cycles and fraught moon tides. The whole ride of life, from bloody birth to the last orgasmic gasp. There is no escaping this cruel and desperate fate. Like the Beatles, I run from crowds of screaming fan girls wetting themselves, fist fighting and crying, crushing in the roofs of getaway cars, trying to cut off a lock of my hair. I hide myself in the venue basement, or around the corner, but there is just no escaping the sturm und drang of the feminine mystique. Which begs the question, do I bring anything myself to the equation, or am I just an innocent bystander? Is there give and take or just pull, pull, and more pull? There is a really splendid sun-kissed euphoria to the act of lovemaking, as it’s called, to be taken in, and then … well, and then what? Memories, memories. In the summer, I dreamt of this feat in the forests with Brynhildr and some kind of spider or other insect took a few bites out of me. My undercarriage was swollen for days. Everything was double the usual size. How do I get myself into these things? Why can’t I say no? November light outside now. There is often so little light on these days that there is no way to qualify the days or the time or the night. It’s just one long tapestry of gray. You can do anything in November, sleep until 2 pm, work until 2 am. It’s part of the general disorientation. Dark inky octopus black. The black is thick and all around you. You can’t see your own hands. That’s how thick the November dark is. It makes one dream of summer lake swimming and lovemaking in the forests. Even if you have to suffer through a few insect bites.

I DON’T KNOW much about my grandfathers. Or rather, I know probably a lot of things about them, but I don’t know much about the experience of being around my grandfathers, especially when they were younger because all of the people who were around them when they were young are dead. My father’s father was born in 1916. That was during the First World War. And my mother’s father was born in 1923. That was during Prohibition. Their children have varying memories of them, and like most things, people don’t bother to talk about the dead. There is no great circle around the fires where memories are fondly recalled, perhaps with some teachable moment baked in. In the case of my maternal grandfather, Frank, there is a good reason for this: he died tragically at the age of 44 of a heart attack, creating a hole or wound in the family. In the case of my paternal grandfather, Jerry, the reason is just that we don’t gather, period, except maybe at funerals, and so there are few moments to share or impart any memories. But I do know that circa 1960, my father’s father, Jerry, that sly rascal, would bring home a pizza and watch Sea Hunt starring Lloyd Bridges as retired Navy diver Mike Nelson, with my father. I can imagine those rainy nights, the music on the car radio, the hot pizza lifted from the box, the black-and-white television. I say Jerry was a sly rascal, because when I was a boy Jerry, now an old man who walked with a cane, would hide bags of coins in his office and then tell me to find them. If I found the money stash, I was allowed to keep it and Jerry would give me one of those heavy grandpa hugs, where they slap you on the back several times as if you are choking. That Jerry, he had tricks up his sleeves. I know that Jerry would take my youngest uncle to see Jimmy the Cricket sometimes, a local bookie, who had a lawn ornament store as a front for his betting business. I’m rather fond of these tales of my grandfather, stealing around in his car, heading to the bookie to bet on the ponies and then checking the paper the next morning to see what his winnings might be. I did also find a newspaper clipping years ago from 1947 regarding my maternal grandfather Frank’s older brother, Vinny, who was arrested for racketeering with three other Long Island men. This filled me with strange pride. See, the men of my family had no respect for law and order. My mother’s father doesn’t seem to have been the gambling type. He had an artistic inclination and worked for a company that sold print machines. To make some extra money, he would help clients with their print orders. On the weekend, he would make a visit to the stationary store to pick up the Sunday paper. Then he would pop into the bakery for donuts or rolls. At night, he would be up late while everyone slept, doing paperwork on his typewriter, listening to West Side Story or the Everly Brothers on his record player. These kinds of details I love: what music people were listening to. Supposedly my grandfather Jerry used to love James Brown. I can imagine them simultaneously, one listening to “Maria” from West Side Story and tinkering with a typewriter at night, and the other listening to “Night Train” and navigating the back streets in his car, pizza on the passenger side seat, wondering if that big bet would pay off. Maybe it would. Maybe his pick would be the big winner in tomorrow’s race. And that’s really how those stories end for now, with the sound of typing and “Night Train.” “Miami, Florida. Atlanta, Georgia. Raleigh, North Carolina.” The horns blaring. That’s how those stories end.

• 

• 

• 

THERE IS A SMALL CHURCH in Viljandi painted white and blue. It has a glinting gold cross that one can see from far away. For me, this sacred place has always provided a taste of the Orient, with walls engulfed in hefty boughs of red-orange pihlakad or mountain ash in autumn. I imagine that on a hot summer day, one might find peacocks and other exotic birds of the East behind its gates. The gates protect the church from outsiders, as does a sturdy wood door. I know this because I went there on Sunday to attend mass. When I arrived at the door, I could hear them praying inside.

The reason I returned was because I saw two old friends one morning at the café. These are long-time converts to the Orthodox faith. Our youngest is their goddaughter. I was taken into the church when she was Christened years ago, which was a special time for me, because I got to choose my given name as my church name, after the revered 2nd century Greek saint, Ioustinos. As such, I am one of a few people who can be said to have chosen their own name.

These pilgrims had just attended an Orthodox Christian wedding at the church, they said, where the bride had the crown placed on her head and was serenaded with song. I have been to a church wedding before and I have enjoyed it. Of course they appeared at the moment that I happened to be denouncing Christianity to a friend. “Because if you translate these words literally,” I was saying, “Christianity starts to sound like some sort of vampire cult. Drink my blood, eat my body? This is like cannibalism!” My friend mostly agreed. “And what about these angels? Who thought that up, and who thought that was more believable than Poseidon ruling the seas or Zeus taking the form of a swan?” 

Obviously, I had plummeted out of the faith. What did we even believe in before Christianity? I wondered aloud that day. That was a good question. I had read that the Baltic Finns, for example, believed that the world was attached to the heavens through the branches of a tree of life, and that the constellations were leaves on this tree. There was also the erotic fresco unearthed recently at Pompeii, the one that depicted Leda, the Queen of Sparta, who had intercourse with Zeus, who had taken the form of a swan and produced triplets. Something about the archaeologists’ brush dusting away volcanic ash from the fresco resonated. That buried under all these centuries of Christian ash was another set of beliefs, one with stories just as compelling. But these are not the kinds of thoughts you impart to good Christian friends, who are kind and who believe. Their saintly appearance let me know that Christianity was not going to let me off so easily with my tree of life and Greek gods. They told me of the wedding at the church and I told them how I liked that church.

“But this church, do you ever go inside of it?” one of my friends asked me.

“I did go in,” I said. “Once.”

“How was it?”

“It was cold. The church is heated by a wood furnace. And there the priest stood in his black robe, his beard flowing, tending to the furnace, with the sounds of the firewood crackling.” 

My friends liked this story, but it left me feeling cold indeed. Was it time to go back? The question began to haunt me.

Then one day soon after, I decided to go for a walk. It happened to be the autumn equinox, a weird, hazy day, and I was walking by that same church when two young women came down the street. I immediately noticed one of the women was very beautiful. She had eastern blue eyes, what the Estonians call piilusilm, and hair that dangled around her like lush branches. 

I only looked at her for a second, and then, when she passed, she looked back at me. As I said, it was a strange day, and I noticed then that she was all dressed in blue, the same blue of the church. She was dressed in the church colors and was standing in front of the church! Who was this woman? I hoped that she was not a high school student. That would be depressing. No, she seemed too mature. Who really knew? These occurrences happened every day now, and it made no sense to hang on to them one way or the other. Still, I liked that moment. I liked the way she looked at me. I felt that I could lie with her for all eternity in some kind of paradise full of gold crosses, peacocks, and that strong church incense from the East. Some kind of new life seemed to rise up and out of that moment, fresh buds blooming into yellow flowers blossoming into the wildest tree of life. Was it God’s love? Or had the mighty Zeus felt especially charitable that day?

Whatever it was, it felt wonderful.

LAST NIGHT, I had something like a panic attack. I was on the couch when it overwhelmed me. It’s a mix of anxiety and dread. I am not sure why the mind likes to replay a greatest hits of the most difficult moments of one’s life. All of those wounds, wounds I can never openly discuss with anyone, really. The tendency of well-wishing listeners is to brush away the concerns of others. People like to say, “That is the past,” as if that means something. If you are still troubled by something that happened in the past, a terse statement like, “That’s all history” doesn’t really help much. The fact is, some people are traumatized. Be it by a real, physical accident, or, let’s say, uncontrollable changes wrought by the merciless gods, some things just don’t sit right inside of us, some things haunt us, some things fill us with dread, despair, anxiety, and panic. So the key here is not to ignore the panic or trauma, but to accept that it is now part of your life, and to live with it and live through it. The same way a knee or shoulder injured years ago in a game can still ache from time to time, one’s traumas or anxieties or pains can lurk and manifest themselves, sometimes sharply, painfully, for a small amount of time. Maybe it’s an evening, or a couple of days. Usually they subside, but you can’t just write it off as “but that all happened so long ago.” It’s a white-gray day here in Viljandi. Lots of late October mist and fog. I think I lived through yesterday’s panic though. My ship righted itself and sailed on. What a nightmare, for sure. For those of you who have never felt this, I never want you to know how it feels. Stay secure under your warmest blankets. Tell yourself there’s no need for worry. It was all just yesterday.

I WAS STARTING TO get used to solitary confinement. I saw very few people: only my daughter and some people walking by the windows. Watching people walk by was of interest, because I wondered where are they walking to, and why do they even bother doing anything? What propels people forward? Are their minds like little magnets, radiating the next destination or coordinates, telling them that there is a reason they have to go there. “I must throw out the trash.” “I must take the car for inspection.” “Someone needs to give me a book.” This sort of mosaic of self-perpetuating behavior is then lumped under an umbrella called “life.” I have this kind of skewed perspective, because my life was more or less a bed, and a shower, a toilet, a plate with some food on it. My thought processes didn’t really exist, or were not happening on a continuum. I made the most of an online app to have food delivered to me through this. But I was glad to go to the shop. Sadly, my friend Gunna was not in the apteek as I passed by. I like Gunna. She only has to smile to me and I feel better. I keep little people around in my own trajectories like these, people I hang onto in a way, safe people, people who lift my spirits and Gunna is one of them. They were doing an inventory in there, and the apothecary was closed for the day. At the shopping center, all went well, except that I had to listen to really bad pop songs. One of them I have heard many times. There is a repetitive piano figure and some man sort of whines over it. I can’t remember one lyric from the song. There are a lot of rough characters in Viljandi. I don’t understand how people can drink and smoke and fight themselves to infinity and back and still manage to make it through a day. I saw some of these characters in a parking lot. Thanks to doctor’s orders, I kept a very safe distance. When I came out of the shop, I saw a local folk musician was advertising a performance called “accordion meditation.” I thought, of all the weird ideas I had during my illness, I would have never linked accordion music and meditation. There was something unique about that. Damp, gray weather here, reminding me of Cork, Ireland, many years ago. The pool halls and the beer halls and the broken faces in the toilets. It’s a tough life in Ireland and it’s a tough life in Estonia. It’s just a tough life.

MORNING LIGHT, SUNLIGHT. Sunlight comes through my window. I slept so deeply and so soundly that I was certain that I had slept half the day. But when I summoned the strength to grasp my phone and read the time, it said it was still just 8.51. Our homes here are still heated by wood furnaces. There is no turning of knobs, pushing of buttons. Fortunately, last night, I discovered a whole stash of dry firewood in a chest next to the fireplace, filled with old newspapers too. This meant that I did not have to go outside. It was very damp at night. In the morning, it dropped below freezing, and turned all the moisture to frost. In the morning, I did go outside. The light and air felt good on my face. The town felt somehow reassuring. It reminds me of a maritime ferry town. Unfortunately though there is just a lake here, and there is no reassuring blast of ferry horn to announce departures and arrivals, or especially thick fog. There is something liberating about living seaside, and something arresting about being landlocked. I shouldn’t despair. In my dream, I went back to my university with my friend Raoul and his mother, who looked like the actress Sally Field. I developed some kind of crush on Sally Field in the dream, which I suppressed, because one is not supposed to be attracted to his friend’s grandmotherly mother. Nii ei tohi. We wandered the halls of the university, but everything had changed, and only the basic layout of the place remained. “It must have been nice to go here,” Sally Field said, and I agreed, except that it didn’t really look like the place I had attended, and none of the people who were once here remained. All of that had been reupholstered, as it were. There was more dreamblur. Trying to escape from a woman who kept pursuing me, and a Japanese psychologist who was waiting for me in his office, but I never managed to get there. Instead, on the way to the office, someone asked me about a classmate of mine, called Buddy (really, in real life) and I commenced to tell the tale of prom night, and how we all went out to the Hamptons and got furiously drunk, and that the last time I had seen Buddy, he was sitting beside a swimming pool the following morning, drinking some bottled water, cool and hungover. That really was the last time I saw him, or heard of him. Like many classmates, other than some postgraduate sightings, Buddy vanished. And that is the way it should be.