Aspen Times Weekly book review: ‘Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire’ | AspenTimes.com

Aspen Times Weekly book review: ‘Ahead of the Flaming Front: A Life on Fire’ | AspenTimes.com



Review of my memoir.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad – Powder Puff : JDMathes

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad – Powder Puff : JDMathes

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Easter

Fake grass in baskets. A rainbow’s assortment of colored eggs. Chocolate bunnies and chocolate eggs and chocolate kisses. Lots of chocolate latent with fertility. Peeps in their crusted sugary goodness, but keep in mind as Maddie found out that roasting a peep over a fire can be hazardous, yet pretty as the sugar ignites and pops in wavering flames like electricity. I don’t tell her roasting a peep on a stick reminds me of heretics burning. So much for resurrection.

Here is an essay I wrote about some Easters I knew.

Stay safe, everybody, have a good weekend and spare the peeps the flames.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Birth

April 11, 2000

In the darkened hospital
a baby cries fresh cut
from her mother.
I, new father, whisper
over the girl’s fragile
head. A blessing for her.
“Oh me, Oh Life
of the questions ever
recurring.” Walt Whitman
old man with butterfly eyes.

Old man who gave me answers
to questions I didn’t think
to ask. All those years
I spent masked from the world.
Had I conjured a vision of me
like a mirage out of desert
air? Leaves of grass–

Did I know you? Now I do,
but not until then, the moment
of birth, of awakening. In the blood.
In the heated night air.
The infant girl, blind
as an ancient seer, quiets
in my arms. In the gurgle
and beeps of the emergency room,
I meet myself for the first time.

Soon we’ll come down
the mountains, snow melt
watering flowers in spring.
I will shed the old life,
go back to school.
I need to do it for
her, for me. For the powerful

play. But on her birth day,
we held on in the hospital
where a new born had arrived.
What good amid these indeed.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Pencils

A great crash from Sophia’s room. An avalanche like distant trees toppling in the shock wave ahead of a meteor. I know I should be more diligent or insistent or some other force implying word about the cluttered space known as her room. But I am not in a position to point fingers. In my room teeter stacks of books, papers, drafts, bills, junk mail, envelopes, receipts, empty beer bottles, boxes with their gutted contents spilling out from earlier searches, something that is either an animal pelt or an overgrown slice of pizza, computer stuff and other flotsam. And that’s just my bed. Sophia comes whirling out of her room, sketchbook in one hand a fist full of pencils in the other, asking if I have a particular shade of colored pencil. I do not.

This off peach shade has a name and I do not remember so as to log it here, but to be sure, she needed that one and the sound of a forest being leveled earlier an attempt to find said pencil.

Now I know many artists have particular habits and needs in relation to their surroundings and can be quite specific or the whole project can come to a halt. Ernest Hemingway typed standing up as does Gunter Grass. James Joyce clad in a white coat on his stomach with a blue pencil, Friedrich Schiller let apples rot in his desk, Gustave Mahler retreated to a cabin in the woods, Twain’s writing room, Flannery O’Connor wrote in the same place at the same time and Agatha Christie wrote anywhere she could set her typewriter and on and on. Sophia’s triggering domain a part of her creative process. Lord knows I don’t want to be responsible for stifling creativity.

But now there she stands with a fist full of pencils, and many more scattered in her wake, and none the right color. “I need it” she says. I know as any fine actor who has studied his lines that this is my cue to offer to drive out into the Saturday for this pencil. I also do not want to be the known as the guy who stifled her Off-Shade of Peach Phase anymore than be known as the guy who got in the way of Picasso’s Blue Phase. What one father must do to keep art moving forward and free. Give me colored pencils or give me death. Okay, not death, but maybe a nasty head cold.

I do understand. I myself have become fixated and searched for the one specific thing to help bring my project life. A breath of some detail that I searched for in stacks of books (No not everything is online to call up with a keystroke), looking for that one book in a stack of boxes still prisoner from my moving about the country. That one thing I remember Antoine de Saint Exupery said or a fragment of an obscure poem in a collected work of which I can only remember the cover’s color and on what side of the page the poem was printed. All work ceases and the search becomes the work.

“Thanks,” she says as I put my book down and get up. I find my keys and head down to the local art store and buy a pencil and drive on back. Before I can shut the door behind me she has materialized. A spirit of art. I hand her the pencil and she kisses me on the cheek and disappears into her room/studio/den/chaos.

Well, I think. Ain’t that a peach.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - The Dark Hours

I knock on the door. Rap a tapping tap like some musty raven to wake Sophia so she can get ready and go to school. “Ugggg…” like the not quite so dead discovering she is on the wrong side of the crypt door or sealed up behind a wall. Or worse yet the dead being forced to face the light of day. A curse worse than facing the light of day. Groggy and head filled with webs, I go to make breakfast.

A usual morning of telling her to get out of bed a thousand times and her dragging her way from bedroom to bathroom to bedroom to living room to bathroom to truck and finally off to school with the dragging heels not sparking the winter’s day.

Later when I tell her it’s bedtime, she will tell me no matter when she goes to bed her mind buzzes and spins until the dark hours. She draws, reads, draws, and journals and draws until she falls asleep. I know it is true as I hear her moving around the house in the night.

I consider her plight. I have laid awake hours with my mind not stopping as PM gives away to AM and the click between minutes a span of universes. The mind fires images bam bam bam. A kind of manic skipping and careening from thought to thought like a band of mosquitos at a nudist colony. Nights I’d get up and start writing, trying to channel whatever force filled my mind. I’ve had to get up and leave warm blankets, lovers, and wives to find a pen, crack a laptop, or sit staring into space because not even a canvas can hold my spilling mind. I feel her pain. So I sit on the edge of her bed and tell her how to quell her mind. To go to sleep. To switch off the outside world. Not counting Heffalumps or sheep, but meditating and clearing the mind to bring voices to quietness, to sleep. Listen to her own breath and slow it.

She smiles and says thanks. I shut her door. Shut off the lights in the house, except for the one by my bed. I stretch out after tossing my clothes on the floor in the clutter of the day to day. On the bed I have a notebook with a pen, Patti Smith’s memoir Just Kids, and a bottle of beer on the nightstand. I always go to bed with the intent of sleep, but soon give up on it. I read. I write. I know I have to get up early and know by the afternoon, like all the other afternoons, be barely able to keep my eyes open, but as the evening progresses my eyes will widen as if hit by the beam of a cop’s flashlight.

I wonder at the exhaustion that weighs my body down and the mind that doesn’t stop. I wonder at the sleep that will not come until finally I wake up not knowing when I passed into that other world. Mostly I wonder about my artist girl in the other room who struggles with the nocturnal ramblings of a mind never at rest.

Portrait of an Artist as a SIngle Dad - Sleep Overs

The incoming texts bleep both girls’ phones. Heads down, thumbs dashing off messages. They both look up and ask, “Can we have sleepovers?” At first I am leery. The last multi-girl sleepover entailed me losing at least two years off my life just due to casting spells to reassure youngsters that no witches could get into the house. “No, I have mad magic skills, kiddo, and have established a dome over the house which no witch can breech even while riding a switch.” One fearful youngster asked, “Have you ever killed a witch?”

To which I said, “That is not a question to ask, but no. My magic is soooo powerful that they don’t get close enough.” Relief in a child’s face is like coin of the realm.

I am sure great Diogenes would pass me by with his lamp, but he never hosted a sleepover like this. But that wasn’t all! Dinner and then breakfast and all the snacks consumed could have supported a village in some foreign country like Texas. Damn, but girls can pack away the food. My youngest will say, “I’m not hungry,” and then consume an entire flat of strawberries.

My girls stare. Thumbs hovering over respective phones as if repelled by magnets. “Who?” And then it comes out that they want to go over to someone else’s house and have a sleepover. Each girl to a different house. I pause for 7/11s of a second. Just enough time to visualize me alone in the house for just one night. OMG as the text goes.

I have visions of #BourbonForDinner #PantsoffandWriting #BlastingRachmaninov #RratedMoviesonNetflix. “Yes!” I say, trying to contain my exuberance of being lost, drunk and naked in the dining room eating steak and swilling fine Kentucky spirits as I type out a memoir of misspent youth of trying to do the right thing. If there were a gold medal for artistic debauchery, I’d be trying to win it.

So, “Yay,” they say and the thumbs fly. Thumbs like that could kill a fella. “Yay!” I say in my head so as not to let it out, planning a trip to the supermarket. For my diabolical plan to come together all I’ll need are charcoal, bourbon, steak, and coffee. Shopping list done. So little for such a grand scheme. The Ockham’s Razor of evenings.

But then part of me goes, “When was the last time you went out to a bar?” But no! Alone in the house within earshot of the train’s distant horn like the muse of travelogues and instability. I go back and forth. Bar, home, bar, home. But nothing will get written in the bar and one must keep one’s pants on, but noise and clatter of adults clinking glasses and the faraway laughter like the buzzing of neon lights from which I might create some story, some tale not yet told. Home, bar, home. I really want to write.

But comes the call. Maddie says she and her friend can’t have the sleep over at the other girl’s house, but if it’s okay with me, they can sleepover here. Oh those small twists in the pursuit of creating art. #GiggleBoxes #GirlsDancetoMozart #WritingAnyway #Home.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Girls in the Kitchen

The pot’s about to boil. It’s about to billow steam. The first curls rise from the surface and beads of air cling to the sides of the pot. I am held in that moment where it is too early to drop in the linguine, but too close as to set it down. The sauce is already done and why did I not get the water boiling earlier? I am notorious for getting some things ready ahead of time, while lagging getting some ingredients prepared. You know, trying to get all the garlic out of its little husk and diced as the onions are sauteing and then caramelizing and then getting a little scorched or realizing the coals in the Weber will not even be remotely ready when the potatoes are mashed and the veggies steamed. Ah, dang it anyway. Luckily for me, my girl posse has some shadow of patience and not to mention, will raid the fridge for strawberries in a pinch to ward off the hunger. I am lucky too that my girls do like to cook with me at times. Especially when we are making the World’s Best Guacamole.

They each have their own ways of being in the kitchen and each has the thing they like to do and each has dislikes that are of course in tune with whatever the other likes. They are sisters after all. Maddie is one of the few kids I know who will spend her allowance on fresh fish or octopus and has since she was eight. In fact she told me I needed to learn how to make sushi and she’d chip in on the fish cost. What a kid. Sophia likes to blend spices and herbs and use a mortar and pestle to grind ingredients together. She likes the bold flavors, while her sister likes more subtle flavors. They are each their own artist.

The editor, poet, and awesome friend, Mary Carroll-Hackett once said to me: “Cooking is your other poetry, Writer Man,” and indeed it is.

I never thought about it in terms like that before, but an interesting observation by my former poetry teacher Peter Makuck was that poetry was like spices in good cooking. Balanced, flavorful, and nourishing for the mind and the body.

Food and poetry. The sonnet of spaghetti. The villanelle of venison. The pantoum of parsley. The sestina of seafood. But I digress. So here I am in the kitchen trying to bring it all together. Form, function and the higher calling of art. What greater art can we practice than sustenance? What style or flair do we bring? What balance or unity? Because when it is out of balance, things don’t work out right and I’m not just talking about overflowing the food processor with the juice of chickpeas during Operation Hummus either. Oh no.

I am talking about waiting for that moment when the water bubbles and the linguine is released like a helicopter-rappeller from the skid. Into the heat that is. In the heat of the kitchen. In the heat of the moment. In the heat of creation. In the heat of living like an artist. In the heat of love and life. To keep at it and mindfully practicing it and, with the help of the girls, bring all the ingredients together in a satisfying way before they rebel and seize all the strawberries. The barbarians at the refrigerator door.

But in the end the dinner makes its way to the table. A simple pleasure of flavors, serve hot. Enjoy.

Portrait of an Artist as a Single Dad - Look at the Light!

I awoke. The light streamed slantwise through louvre style blinds across the double bed for one. Groggy and reaching for the iPhone, I knock over the wine glass. It falls and hits the carpet with the thump of a cat paw. At night, I have a glass of wine or a bottle of beer or a cup of bourbon as I process the day and read after I’m done writing. Right now, I’m reading Gunter Grass. Peeling the Onion. About memory and of course complicity in being a part of atrocity. I am a part of atrocity too. I am in a democracy that waged war that we still try and pretend is WWII, but that is another story. I am a part of an atrocity that supported coups and death squads. I am part of an atrocity that colored the world with red, white and blue watercolors and will make you feel like a piece of shit for not supporting it.

I was the loud American. But that is another story.

I am a dad. I am a single dad. I am an artist who schedules 10:00PM to Midnight to write, drink a glass of beer and finally hit the rack with the head a buzzing with words or so exhausted when Friday hits, passes out sitting in the chair because I won’t stop at midnight and push the edges of my own darkness. I am an artist who takes an old film camera into oilfields and will lay on the dirt to get a shot of a ball of cable, a set of broken steps with no house, a pump-jack pumping or stand on the roof of his truck as oil hands stream by wondering what the fuck I’m up to. But that is another story.

I am the guy who woke with light streaming across the bed. Me and a cat. Me and one of my daughters’ cats. I am an artist. I am a single dad. I will arise and knock on bedroom doors. I will arise and wish I could sleep more as I have always been the guy who prefers to stay up for sunrise and wake for sunset. But that is another story. I will rouse girls from sleep. They will mumble go away. They will want me to forget they need to go to school. They will say go away, but bring me a bagel or an English muffin, or pancakes, or a banana and yogurt, or whatever with juice, milk, water. I will bring it and they will eat in bed and then get up. They will dress. They will fuss about with books and backpacks and smart phones. And as I toast or flip or stir or pour, I will write a few lines. I am an artist after all. I am a writer. I will take some minutes in the morning between the prepping the girls for school and me heading off to the oilfields to write a sentence, a paragraph, a scene…

and then look forward to the Ten to Midnight shift.

I will load the girls in the truck. We will back out of the drive way. We will crest the hill overlooking the sunrise over windmills and a town hammered between the mountains and the desert. I will point and say, “Look at that light. Look at that light. It slants the clouds. Look at the texture of those fucking clouds dragging down the sky. Look at the light breaking out and how it burnishes the mountains. It takes hold of everything in the sky and owns it. Look at that darkness between the sky and the land and how it gives us great swathes of beauty.”

I will say, “On his death bed, Goethe’s last words were, ‘I need more light.”

They will say, “Oh Dad is at it again. What with the light and the beauty and what was that poet and Degrees of Gray, and how its transient quality fills in our souls and kisses the divine. Oh Dad, you will make dorks of us all.”

That is the story.