Out Of Freakin' Control

Out Of Freakin' Control

12.29.05 (2:16 am)   [edit]
You can't always get what you want...but sometimes you almost do...Steve Morse is a fucking hellbastard...stuck in the mud with those dead ancestor blues again...stories about dead people no one else gives two fucks about...progress marches on...so, IS she really going out with him, Mr. Jackson?...fuck control...


Got up early for the weird work day. Due to my toilet visit just before lunch, I wasn't around for the quick meeting which resulted in me having a half day at work. The rest of the week is fine, there's going to be far less of us and we'll have plenty to do (two different projects this week) but this is going to play hell with next week's check. I'm still behind on bills I thought I would catch up on this month, I STILL haven't got Indiana plates on the car and the Ohio tags are invalid at the end of the week, I've made an appointment with a psychaitrist about my medication that will cost too much just to show up to, and fuck knows how much other stuff I havne't considered yet. Oh yeah, I knocked a filling out of my back right top tooth last night. LOTS of Ibuprofen today.

But the good news is that I MIGHT be teaching guitar again within the next two weeks. I zipped down to Decatur Township (southwest corner fo the county) after work last night to look for land records since i've REALLY been wanting to do some genealogy and have had almost no time for it. I didn't get what I wanted (every county has some different bullshit process of how they handle their records and which closet with which leopard guarding it to put the files in that YOU want to read) but I saw a guitar shop just off High School Rd. off Highway 67 (more on that later) and went back.

We hit it off great. He's into Keneally, Bill Monroe, and Yngwie. Good mix. Cool guy. Needs a teacher, has a big waiting list. He can only give me two nights with his space limitations, which means I can only take on so many students since I can't quit the temp job without at least 35 students, so I'll be doing this part-time. Ten or twelve students. A couple mro eif I can work out a shift change with the warehouse. Ten students is $100 a week in five hours. Uh, I don't think I feel like arguing. It's not my ideal gig at all, I'm still pissed about not getting the 60 students down in Greenwood this summer (which you can't tell when I'm rambling about it for five minutes at a time, which I did to two people today) but fuck it, it's extra money and might be a doorway into something else.

I am not so much into "divine intervention" theories these days, but I do think that people can create certain energies which can bring certain results. Maybe not what you want, but the way it lines up can be shocking. That I found this place (and more on the place itself in just a minute) while looking for soemthing else entirely says SOMETHING. I don't know what. I don't think Uncle Jesus is looking out for me. I don't buy that horseshit any more. But I have been more determined this week to make things happen, and things are happening. I hope. I've been burned on a few teraching gigs in the past couple years, so I won't believe this one until I'm actually sitting in a sterile studio with some little snotty bastard and a cheap guitar asking me how to play some third-rate alterno-metal riff, but I do think it will happen this time. I fucking hope so.

By the way, i'm listening to California Screamin', a live album by the Dixie Dregs. I could have SEEN these shows this was recorded at. I was in L.A. back in '99. My first opportunity there tanked and I left for Indiana the same night Dweezil Zappa came up and played Peaches En Regalia with them, and he and Keneally talked to each other for the first time in yearsbbackstage afterwards. I could have BEEN there. Mike told me to come. And I was flying over the desert listening to Nonkertompf. Well, that's not a bad deal. I don't know if you know this, but The Dixie Dregs are gods, and Steve Morse is a fucking hellbastard of a gee-tar picker and if you don't own any of their albums, you SUCK. Just thought you might like to know, kiddies.

Since I had more time than i'd planned on this afternoon, I made another run for genealogy in Decatur Township. The Indiana State Library downtown is a GREAT place, mroe so than I had even begun to realize the first time I was there a couple months ago, and I had a GREAT time. A very cute thin blonde librarian-geek girl (I( mean this all in the best possible way, and had a flash of a Bill Hicks reference go through my head - "Pink Librarians" IS a great porn title) went out of her way to dig up some maps for me.

I did some online census research, going through census records, which confirmed some very good hunches I had. I tried the microfilm of maps used by the fire department in 1930. They were great, but it would take DAYS to find what I wanted to in the mindset I was in. Buzzing like all hell. Super-uber-focused. Doesn't happen often. but when it does, I cna only go in one direction, and I have to move QUICKLY. I can't explain if any other way. I hate the way my brain works, but I'm learning to live with it.

She came by and I said, "These maps are fabulous and I'm thrilled you found them, but my ADD is going haywire and I'd need seven cups of coffee to make it through this stuff without my head exploding." So she graciously went back to looking for more stuff.

I found what I needed. Nailed the motherfuekers down. I've got a very excellent (though I'm finding some errors) map book of Indianapolis and surrounding areas from last year. Twenty dollars, and it's saved my ass a lot fo tiems since moving here. I pulled out a pencil and compared it to the plat map from 1889. wnet apeshit. I can't believe this! I know where this shti is at! I've BEEN THERE!!!! HOLY FUCK! I know where my great-great-great-great-g randmother LIVED! And her sister! And others in the family! They're right there! THERE! On the map in front of me! I can see their house from here!

The money I was losing didn't seem to matter. I was high. The best blast of brain chemicals I've had since sitting with Katie in that Mexican place in Rising Sun on Monday, just having my little girl's love while we ate lunch. I can't wait to share these things with her when she's old enough to really grab onto it.

Take a little trip back with Father Doug-esias...

Esther Furnas was born in 1799 in Newberry, South Carolina, near Bush River. The Quakers at Bush River underwent a huge migration in the first ten years of the nineteenth century, mostly moving to southwestern Ohio. Esther's father Robert moved the family near Waynesville and the Little Miami River in 1804Robert was a prominent member of the local Quaker community. He and a friend boughbt the land on which the Ceaser's Creek Monthly Meeting was built, where the cemetery still rests with the remains of him and his wife Hannah. His son Seth built a log cabin that is now part of the Pioneer Village at the state park, along with the meetinghouse.

Esther married Daniel Mills there in 1820. I've walked through the clearing where the church once stood, so far off from a main road you wouldn't know it was there if you weren't looking for it. I imagined her here, and wondered what lead her and so many of her family west to the indianapolis area.

Daniel died young, after the birth of their children Hannah and David. Esther returned to Ceasar's Creek (the site of at least two partially written short stories I've been working on, and a place where I've felt seeimgnly otherworldly energy that I can't begin to describe) and married Jesse Conner. The hot librarian's name is Jessie too, by the way. Any Rick Springfield jokes will bring curses of death upon you, you fuckers.

Jesse and Esther Conner moved back to Indiana, and attended the Fairfield Monthly Meeting just south of Plainfield, southwest of indianapolis. A beutiful church and cemetery still stands there. A large number of Esther's family and closely related other familes moved to this area as well, and the roads are often named after Quaker familes such as Milhouse, Mendenhall, Furnas, Mills, etc. The "Quaker highway" runs out of Plainfield towards I-70, and when you hit the light at Stafford Road, you can see the office of a certain temp agency.

Esther's son from her first marriage - David - moved west to Iowa, settling near the Quaker town of Earlham in Madison County. Home of John Wayne and some bridges you might have heard of. His sister Hannah stayed near her mother their whole lives. Hannah married a man named James Pruitt, who, after her death, moved throughout Indiana and eventually Iowa, for a time being a member of the Quaker church on Deer Creek just south of Marion, Indiana, next to the woods where , over ninety years later, his great-great-great grandson played in long before he knew or wrote any of this shit.

Esther's second husband also died young. She married again, this time to William Kenworthy. Her second cousin, also born in South Carolina. Indiana farmers fucking their cousins. I'm getting use to my heritage. I have to. I know of at least four of these damn marriages. but hey, it's the 1800s. Nobody but family for miles. Somebody needs to make kids to work those fields. Gotta fuck SOMEBODY, right? Besides, you should see a couple of MY cousins. Damn,,,

William had children from a previous marriage as well. William and Esther lived on the north side of Decatur Township, near Valley Mills. William's son Robert lived there as well and owned the property when the 1889 plat map was drawn. his sons lived there as well. The property was in the family at least as early as 1866 and as late as 1930.

I went there today.

Going down I-70 heading west towards Hendricks County and Plainfield, the indianapolis International Airport is on your right. After you see the FedEx building, wave to the control tower after it - my gggg-grandmother used to eat oatmeal with the other Quakers right where those 747s are flying over.

To your left before that towere, you'll see the other land they owned. But there's no real way of telling it apart from the rest. The houses are all gone now. There's nothing but trees and overgrown grass on these abandoned lots. A field here and there. Mostly nothing.

I whipped around the Six Points exit and found myself on Thompson Rd. I live just north of Thompson Rd. on the opposite end of the county. It runs east-west and cuts off and picks back up a few times, so I cna't make a straight drive there. But it ends at a barricade just before hitting I-70 (even though my 2005 mpa book claims that it runs parallel to the highway for a minute before hitting Bridgeport Rd. It doesn't. Those roads are gone now. I was told today that Thompson was cut off there less than two years ago and that the Six Points exit has been open since aroudnt eh time I drove right past this place on my way out west in March.

It's fucking depressing out there. No houses. Empty lots all around. You can see the trees they planted. Obviously next to invisible homes, torn down and now on property owned but not used by the airport.

Heading east toward highway 67 (and Decatur Rd. where I worked for a day when I first came here with the temp agency) you come to Scott Rd., which doens't have a sign. Or anyone living on it. Actually, there is a sign. It says "No Dumping." It SHOULD read "Go ahead, eat the fucking apple, you snake-loving, leaf-wearing cunt." Hang a sign, ask for the exact opposite results. I saw chairs, tires, fuck knows what else on the side of this dead road.

It makes a turn left then right (hang a left, hang a right, Kenworthy Manor) and veers right and goes parallel to I-70 while...shit...I was looking at the fucking map and....it's fucking DIRT! No, it's MUD! It's...oh mama, can this really be the end? To be stuck in this fucking mudhole with those Dead Ancestor Blues again?

I dug a hole with my tires trying to get out for about three minutes. I turned the engine off. The brain chemicals were still set on "stun", aimed squarely towards my goal. Fuck the car. I've done stupider shit than this before. Focus. Control. A year ago I'd been violently digging in the mud with my bare hands screaming to the cars on I 70 to get off my land, you damn kids! Fucking mental, over-reacting.

Not this time, bitch. I've got my work boots on and I'm goin' for a walk in the brown stuff, baby.

I walked through the shit, looking out onto the highway covering part of this ancestor's former property, the wire fence to my left. The barren waste to the right. An airport weather station up ahead.

The property lines are still visible. There's an empty field clearly showing where the neighbors where. Esther and William lived where there's a muddy path, a lot of overgorwn grass, some old trees, and...nothing. Not a scrap of legacy left. An empty shell of my past with things that Condoleeza Rice could never dream of being used to bring down buildings flying overhead. Hey cunt. They brought down THESE buildings years ago.

Back to the car. In what must have been their front yard (the grass is shorter there) lies more scrap metal thrown aside by asshole locals. The pieces of a Rudd Furnace sit on land once occupied by...a Furnas. Holy fucking Christ on a crutch...

I was waiting for the dad from Six Feet Under to come walking out of the weeds. "So, drove your car into the mud, didn'tcha, dumbass? Hey, Esther says hi. It's getting crowded up there in Heaven. Too bad YOU won't be around, sinner-boy. Enjoy those old Amboy Dukes records for me, 'k?"

I feel like Nate Fisher a lot sometimes.

I got the car out in less than two minutes. Had to do some fancy wheel/accelorator work to pull it off. I've had worse. Only a flesh wound.

It was goddamn creepy. I'm sitting here on the opposite side of the county waiting for ghosts to walk through my door. An ugly place, trampled by the unloving, unfeeling boot of progress. Cast aside. Esther's daughter Hannah gave birth to a girl named Rebecca, who moved to Lafayette after marrying a nice boy named David Muston from Westfield, where I'll be helping a stony friend move back to in a couple nights. They moved to Lafayette and had twins. The boy died at birth. The daughter, Emma, was a "mean ol' biddy" (according to her grandson I met for the first time two years ago) and her son Zora was an alcoholic rotten bastard, at least according to his first wife, my grandmother.

It was a terribly depressing place. Cold. Empty. Desolate. Light rain fell from the gray sky. Death and disease seemed to hang in the air. But...but...

It was beautiful. It was...home?

No. Not home. Not mine. But a part of me. The family that makes me fucking crazy, that made me want to get the fuck out of Indiana in the first place. They're everywhere. I keep running into their corpses on the street, in the libraries and courthouses. And on the back roads of forgotten communities. These people made it posisble for me to exist. I'd probably not like most of them. They'd likely be completely baffled by my ass. Doesn't matter. I owe them my life. The least I can do is visit every once in a while. They're fucking dead, so they don't give two shits (Excuse me, Garcia, my great-great-great-great-g reat-nephew is up there roaming around and I've gotta go say hi to the little prick. Yeah, I know, I'm a fucking skeleton. What's yer point, asshole?) but *I* need it. I don't know what the fuck I'm searching for, but it's out there in these desolate forgotten places that you'd never know a goddamn thing about if I wasn't wasting your time with it right now. Why are you reading this shit? Go get some good oral sex. What kind of time do you have on your hands anyway?

I stopped at the only house on that part of Thompson Road, which turns out to be some kind of farm equipment business in a house. I talked to an intensely beautiful, delicate yet business-like blonde girl who has lived in Decatur Township her whole 28 years. She knows and went to school with several Kenworthys. She knows the name Furnas and asked me if I knew the road of that name nearby. I did. Her cousin knows their family history and she too has a lot of Quaker ancestors. She's probably my tenth cousin or something. So of course, I'm going to jerk off all over myself later, because my cousin is fuckin' HOT.

Yeah, I'm a redneck too. Might as well just be honest with myself. If you've ever spit a cigarette butt out of your mouth through the car window while backing out of a mud-filled road while wanting to fuck your relatives, you MIGHT be a redneck.

I drove back to the highway. If you ever get off at the Kentucky Ave/Highway 67 exit on the southwest corner of I-465, pay attention to the scenery. My family used to live there.

Esther's sister Hannah married Abner Mills. The week I moved here, I went off to Decatur Township (knowing almost NONE of the shit I've just written, and this was only six or seven months ago) for a temp job. I was turned away since they had too many people. I went back up 67 towards the beltway and stopped for breakfast at Denny's. in 1889, Abner Mills lived there.

Next to him to the south was J.W. Furnas. I don't know how he's related yet, but he is. Mr. Furnas (and his brother Allen) were members of the indiana State Legislature in the latter part of the 1800s. J.W.'s land now has a major highway cutting across it. A BP is on one side. A strip mall with a Karma Records and a Subway is on the other, at the corner of Kentucky and High School Rd. If I'm reading the plat map right, I'll be teaching guitar in two weeks at a place where I can throw a rock across the street and hit J. W. Furnas's former land.

I found these kind of bizarre coincidences back in Waynesville, Ohio. Half an hour from where I lived with my daughter, where these people lived before moving to Indiana.

There's a reason for all this. I dont' know what it is. I almost don't even care. The trip is so fucking fun it almost doesn't matter.

Some people into genealogy are content to fuck around online (despite the fact that the Internet - astounding resource though it is - still has nowhere NEAR all the info you can find in the back rooms of libraries and courthouses in the back holes of this great nation's towns and cities) or maybe do a little mor ebeyond that, only really collecting the outlines. the names and dates. The place names. A couple documents. Construct a tree.

It's the core of this all-engrossing hobby I've only been obsessed with for a few years, but it's not the MEAT of it. Not for me, anyway.

I like to stand in muddy ruins and look out across the horizon and wonder what they saw. Wonder what brought them here. What they did with their day-to-day lives. How'd they'd react if they knew what has become of their homes. I'm no Luddite. I'm all for progress. But does it have to be so fucking UGLY? Apparantly so. Our evolution has come to this. Destruction, abandonment, alienation. We're wasting ourselves, you fuckers. We're capable of more than this. Here I am believing in the great untapped potential of the human race if we'd just pull our heads out of our assholes, and *I'M* the cynical one because I think we suck at forging our priorities. Fuck you. YOU motherfuckers are the cynical ones, because you'd just as soon walk all over your own past without a single look back as you would to build another goddamn mall that NOBODY NEEDS. Have your fucking malls. but for Christ's sake, don't just throw shit aside to rot and expect everyone else to take your cash-grabbing shit seriously. Have some goddamn respect for what came before, you scarecrow people. I've got quite some message for you. If we don't start living well, we're all gonna wind up scarecrow people too. Some bird (I think he's from England and not a pear tree) tweeted that in my ear recently. But it's all just apples and oranges. Or oranges and lemons. Or something.

------------------------- ------------------

Had a nice talk with Sheryl tonight, and I feel I can now loosen up about what I was being vague with the other night. I met Sheryl's boyfriend Monday night. I worked through the standard jealousy bullshit months ago (OK, most of it, it doesn't quite go away for anyone TOO soon, does it?) but I drove home a trying not to become a total wreck because I had to watch my daughter interact with him and it hurt like fuck.

But I do not and have not ever questioned Sheryl's ability to take care of our daughter. That is NOT a problem. I tell Katie often that she has the best mommy in the world and that's not a lie. We've got our differences, but we certainly are united in one thing, and that's in making sure our daughter grows up as healthy and happy as possible.

I just have to deal with very uncomfortable emotions that I know have little true basis, but they're there anyway because...well, fuck. how can they NOT be? I'm very powerless five or six days out of my daughter's week. And I've made it that way myself. I've taken a very fucking twisted path this year, and have ended up two hours away, barely able to survive financially, and the simple act of seeing my daughter once a week is killing my bank account, all because I saw a slim chance to make something work up here that I still don't know will actually work or not. I had to do it for me, because as stupid and full of self-important shit as it might sound to you, I'd be dead otherwise. I'm not saying I was right, or even remotely sane. But I HAD to come here back in May or lose my goddamn mind completely. I was sucking down a pint of very evil shit every night and hoping to be run over by large trucks while singing jaunty songs about death. I was an idiot, but I had no other way of dealing with shit at the time. Ya know what? I don't regret a minute of it. I got some good writing out of it, and I think I'm a better musician for it, and - even though it nearly left her without a daddy at all - I think I've become a better father for it. I drink very little now, less than I have since before all this began. I might even be able to quit entirely. It seems very attainable. I'm NOT going to become my grandfather, and if I do, I'm digging his emphysema-ridden ass out of that grave in Lafayette and killing him all over again. I hate that sonofabitch for what he did to my mother, and I'm not about to repeat that with my girl. I'm NOT running away, goddammit. He told my cousin Wally (who I never knew until recently and lived with my grandfather longer than Mom or Grandma did) that "I can't go back there. She hates me." Fucking coward. Your KIDS didn't hate you. But they sure came to love you a hell of a lot less, because you were GONE. I've spent four fucking years digging up your back history, and every goddamn one of your ancestors were better than you, you fucking swine. These people sailed the ocean for a new life, and left those new homes for another one as part of a protest of what they saw as injustice - slavery of their fellow human beings. They helped build America west of the original colonies, building whole towns that still bear huge marks from their influence. They built schools (including the first schools for black kids) and retirement homes and were key players in the Underground Railroad. They stood for peace in a way that most religious people in this country have forgotten, they were decades ahead of the curve on women's rights, racial issues, gay issues, and countless other progressive causes. Some of your mother's family did everything from serve on the Indiana state legislature, to become a governor of Nebraksa, start a nationwide ice cream company, and be the first passenger on an airplane flight with the Wright Brothers.

You were an abusive alcoholic shitstain who ran away from your wife and kids and never looked back. FUCK you. You aren't the genetic link I choose to hold onto, you fuck. If not for the things Mom told me about the few good times she had with you, I'd have pissed on your grave when I finally found it.




But I'm paying for these decisions. Moving away from her. I don't regret the choice. I do have to play coach to myself every goddamn hour of every goddamn day because I know I need to be here, but I know I need to be THERE. Not living with them. That door is closed. For the better. Sheryl and I are happier now. I need to be away from what was for me a very over-comfortable (and therefore destructive) environment, she needs to be away from my ridiculously high-maitenance horseshit. It's of no use to detail the things I still feel that will only hurt her if I write them here. What matters (or should) to me is MY shit. She can take care of herself and is quite capable of it. I was a wretched excuse for a husband, but all I can do now is slowly fix myself (and it happens VERY slowly, goddammit) and try not to think too much about stuff that she surely doesn't want to have to think about either.

She's an incredible mother. She did her damndest to help me through five very painfui, torturous years that I still can't quite believe I put us all through. It should have been over a long time before that. But maybe not. I had the chance to get much closer to my daughter than most fathers are able to, and while I still feel like I owe her far more than I'm currently giving in this fucked-up situation I've put myself a hundred miles away, I know my little girl is in the best place she can be. I know she's taken care of and more beyond that.

And I want them to be happy. It's what really tore me up Monday night, because, there was NOTHING WRONG with the picture I saw. I just wasn't part of it. That hurt like hell. The woman who once loved me in her home with her friend, who oddly enough seems to have more than a couple things in common with me (I drive to Cincinnati from Indianapolis to see my child, he does the opposite drive to see his) and...who the fuck am I to question any of this?

I just want my girl to be happy. And I want to be with her more often. And I want to be here. And I want to be there. And I want to be...fuck, I loved that desert...FUCK. Goddamn fucking FUCK it all anyway.

I told myself I was giving myself a year to get my shit together here or I'd be moving back when the lease is up in June. But I'm not so sure now, even after all this.

A year isn't long enough. Not for me. I'm slow as shit. I've barely begun to have my shit together in ANY way here. And it won't happen in another six months. Some things have to change come June or I'll certainly be having to give up this apartment I like so much for some cheaper shithole, but I'm willing to take the chance. I HAVE to. I lived too goddamn comfortably for too goddamn long and it fucked me up and made me soft. It nearly killed whatever creative impulse I carry inside me, whatever THAT shit might be worth.

And I only have myself to hold responsible and now deal with.

I just wrote a really difficult paragraph and had to erase it all. But Sheryl, I'm glad you're doing what you need to do to be happy. And I know you'll take care of Katie. But I have to feel some things right now that aren't a lot of fun, because I don't get to be the part of our girl's life I once was and wouldn't be able to even if I'd stayed down there close to you guys. You know I need to do this, I know you need to do for yourself. I want us all to be happy. We all deserve it.

Fucking hell. I really miss Katie right now.

I'm too tired and sad/happy/whothefucksknow s to go back and edit this shit. You all have a great night.

Love,
Dougie