Seasonal Catch-Up Post

Where hath the year gone? And why haven’t I been blogging about Dixiana (or anything)?

Answers await. But first, a little story about today, 10/23.

During a fall 1989 season punctuated by bicoastal natural disasters—first Hurricane Hugo here in the Southeast, and the Loma Prieta Earthquake in the San Francisco Bay Area a few weeks later—my closest friends and I went to see the Grateful Dead play about an hour away in Charlotte. 

And what a night, at least for me personally. This would be the closest I’d seen them, a hard-ticket intimate experience, more than raging the upper level or standing packed on a stadium football field. Stoked? Psyched? You bet.

Looking back and listening now, it’s a pretty average show, which in 1989 remains quite listenable indeed. But a vivid personal moment from mid-first set is what makes this night, only one out of hundreds of Dead shows, resonate with clarity:

As I stood before my musical heroes and basked in their legendary if largely ordinary onstage presence, I experienced a heightened sense of reality. It had been a tough time in my life. Two years before, I had been involved in a tragedy, the psychic reverberations of which persist and echo to this minute. I’d landed on my feet, however, and finished college, gotten a job in my field, had settled into a new life with a love and a circle of friends that would also continue into this present moment.

However I may have seemed, and I suspect it was mostly ‘myself,’ whatever that means, I felt confused, lost, uncertain, shaking inside with PTSD. I’d dreamed big—writing and directing movies; becoming a journalist, an author, a writer of some sort—but it all felt far away.

I had lost a little of the fire. I had begun to accept this fact.

Sure, I’d written screenplays and made a 16mm film, but I wasn’t close to packing my bags to head out to the coast. Nor was I going to New York, another dream. I still talked it all up. But somewhere inside, I knew the old dreams were dead. Don’t ask me how. I just knew. My life was to be here, and here it remains.

What would I make of this life ‘here’ in South Carolina? That would be my question. It wasn’t about location, however. The ‘here’ was about the interior landscape. Wherever you go, there you are, as I had heard courtesy Buckaroo Banzai, and you can’t move away from the problems inside your own head. 

Jenn, yours truly, and filmmaking cohort Robert Thomas, c. Fall 1987

I doubt much of this in the moment was as as psychologically granular and specific as this reminisce permits. Inchoate yearning, however, might have likely sufficed to describe my condition.

The moment arrived: After a mid-set ‘Bertha’ that caused attendees to gyrate with joyful abandon, the band launched into a Dylan classic, ‘When I Paint My Masterpiece.’ After touring with the Bard of Bleecker Street a few years before, Bob Weir had begun dropping in a first-set cover, what we had come to call ‘the Dylan slot.’

I loved the tune, and with my blood pumping, I focused in on Weir, and the end of the middle stanza struck me like a thunderclap:

Someday, everything’s gonna be sweet like a rhapsody

When I paint my masterpiece

In this poetic concept dwelled the answer I sought. Life was good—I was still alive, for one—but it didn’t feel like a rhapsody.

How to proceed? I couldn’t bring anyone back from the dead, and deep down I already knew, at 24, that I wouldn’t go on the trajectory I’d long planned to become a Hollywood sensation. No—a hometown boy. That was to be the play. I would become a great Southern novelist, as I’d imagined as a high school student in love with books before all else. And one day, I would write my own Great American Novel, and it would be my statement, which I could do from anywhere, including Right Here and Now.

My masterpiece? Sure. Whatever.

I went back to work that next Monday in my office and reflected upon all this. I started keeping a journal. I began a vocabulary notebook. I tried my hand at short stories, without success or even completion. And while it would be another eleven more years before I sat down to become a writer in earnest, I did begin chipping away at this difficult task almost from the moment I walked out of the Charlotte Coliseum that faraway night with my loved ones at my side. And I never stopped dreaming.

Today, October 23, 2019, is thirty years later. And as that singular moment seems to have prophesied, I continued to work with slow and often subtle diligence toward the long-held goal that began to coalesce in my mind as a troubled young man three decades ago, prostrate before shaggy, slouching rock stars long past their own prime, and the composition of (most of) their own masterpieces. This year my moment finally arrived, with the three-novel series Dixiana representing an apotheosis of form I sought to achieve. That always seemed too far away. And yet, someday finally arrived.

There’s the 10/23 story. Thanks yet again to writing, the Grateful Dead and my loving wife and friends for saving my life. They did and do on a daily basis.

So, why no triumphal blogging about it all? Frankly, I simply haven’t had much else to say about the work all summer this year. Everything I have to say is in the books, as well the other novels already completed and coming out over the next couple of years. Spent. Out of words. Sorry; not sorry. I achieved my dream, but it left me a little burned out. I’ll have to try to do better at blogging. God knows I have plenty to say, if not always the energy to get it into the digital aether.

The McCallisters outside a 2012 writer’s conference.

Here’s the real news in this post: Now that I’ve scratched my long-held fiction itch? I’ve moved onto poetry. More on this soon, including news about my first poem coming into print, and nominated for a prize as well. I don’t know if my work represents anyone else’s idea of a masterpiece, but with a queue of books awaiting publication, a hopper brimming with interesting poems and lots of entrepreneurial ideas for the future, my life indeed tastes sweet—yeah, perhaps even rhapsodically so.