https://diamondste.in Reflecting on a Dying Man Sun, 13 Oct 2019 19:48:53 +0000 https://diamondste.in en https://diamondste.in/Homepage Sat, 12 Oct 2019 02:58:10 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Homepage <img width="3300" height="3300" width_o="3300" height_o="3300" data-src="https://freight.cargo.site/t/original/i/196f8cc812ca01d8977d8722f1e694f673d68845bfd3935efa31057f87cc9f0f/1px-transparency.png" data-mid="52609004" border="0" src="https://freight.cargo.site/w/1000/i/196f8cc812ca01d8977d8722f1e694f673d68845bfd3935efa31057f87cc9f0f/1px-transparency.png" /> https://diamondste.in/INDEX Sun, 13 Oct 2019 18:03:24 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/INDEX Reflecting on a Dying Man Since the BeginningSomeday You’ll Have This Too.Chemical ValleyChemical Valley (Lyrics)Antique StoresSchool Town Cinema2nd Floor StudioChasing CopsRumors of CrimeThe MountaineerCold to Touch https://diamondste.in/Information Sat, 12 Oct 2019 02:58:13 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Information In the summer of 2013, my father was diagnosed with a disease that began a steady and inevitable decline to his deathbed. A few years later, he called to tell me that he might have six months left. So I drove from Los Angeles to the Appalachian town where I was raised, and spent the fall and early winter watching death happen all around me. To my father, my home, and a region of America crippled with a poisoned economy. Reflecting on a Dying Man isn’t about death as much as it is about my emotional and intellectual experience of those six months and immediately after. Each song is an attempt to mark a chapter in the timeline that cumulatively conveys some indescribable revelation about growth and atrophy. Some of it was dark. Some of it was beautiful. Some of it was neither. Some of it didn’t really feel like anything at all. And in its entirety, it all still fails to articulate it. I will write about this for the rest of my life. https://diamondste.in/Since-the-Beginning-2 Sat, 12 Oct 2019 02:58:11 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Since-the-Beginning-2 Reflecting on a Dying Man by Diamondstein I couldn’t sleep in the haunted hotel, with the bathroom mirror as my view from the bed, and the lone wicker chair purposelessly stationed under the television near the window. All of it felt out of rhythm, but so did I, which is why I decided to stay in a place with a storied history when I passed through Flagstaff. Some online reviews talked about old movie stars who may have stayed in their room once. Some talked about how chairs moved in the night unprovoked. Some people just needed a decent bed to sleep on and liked the decor. I needed something to set me up emotionally for the trip East to see my father. I was going to see someone gradually fade away, his body change from inactivity, his skin and muscle and virility melt into the hospice bed, and I didn’t know what it would feel like, so I decided to stay in a haunted hotel, half-hoping something might unsettle me and&nbsp; jumpstart the process. I could imagine it, and understand what happens to a dying body on a physical level, but I just didn’t know what it would feel like. I wanted to, but I just couldn’t. No one can.&nbsp; I embraced the restlessness, and focussed on what I might say or do if I did see a ghost. Then I tried to sleep with the lights on. https://diamondste.in/Someday-You-ll-Have-This-Too Sat, 12 Oct 2019 02:58:11 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Someday-You-ll-Have-This-Too Reflecting on a Dying Man by DiamondsteinOne day, a few years before my father started noticing his left leg was no longer moving with the dexterity of a healthy man, my mother went to the town pharmacy to pick up his Celexa. I was almost 20 at the time, spending the summer reading existentialist texts and working 40 hours a week as a landscaper for the wealthiest people in Parkersburg, West Virginia. I didn’t know my father was on antidepressants, but he’d spent most of his life worrying about changes in energy politics, and how the world’s moral compass might destroy his livelihood as an engineer in a coal powered electrical plant. Retrospectively, depression was a given. “Why is dad taking antidepressants?” I asked my mother, thinking back to signs that my father may have been skipping dinner to visit a psychiatrist. Nothing came to mind. “It’s just his depression.” She said. “Someday, you’ll have it too.” She said. Flippant and disposable, it seemed at that moment my mother was speaking to me as an equal, as an adult, yet not privy to the atrophy of adulthood. Have what too? Clinical depression? Or just a prescription to address the feelings of dissatisfaction that my family hid from me for most of my life? And why wouldn’t I worry about it? Because it’s familial? Should I feel a sense of oneness with my father because we’d all be stricken with disease eventually? While our lives may differ in interests and expectations, maybe we were connected by our shared relationship with whatever it was my mom was running out to the pharmacy for. Or rather, the reason for it. https://diamondste.in/Chemical-Valley Sat, 12 Oct 2019 02:58:12 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Chemical-Valley Reflecting on a Dying Man by Diamondstein There’s a small valley at the bottom of the steep hill as you enter North Lake. It’s the reason that in the winter, on certain snowy afternoons, the school bus had to drop the children off at the top, and we walked what seemed like miles to our homes in the neighborhood. In that valley, there’s a creek which leads to a shallow pool of murky water. It always seemed like sewage to us, though it may not have been. I was a bully back then, and threw my best friend’s bike in that water, punishing him for being unable to defend himself. We played in the old pipe that connected one side of the valley to the other. We stepped on stones and logs to avoid the water, but taunted each other to dip our shoes into what we assumed was filth. I learned that my friend’s parents were getting divorced in that pipe, changing the dynamic of our friendship forever. My healthy home was a constant reminder of his broken family. Our friendship was a reminder of his stagnation, and so it ended. One day in December, I came down that hill to find a family wading in the water, their van&nbsp; upside-down in the muck. It wasn’t a snowstorm, but it was snowing enough to pad the sound of the already quiet country road. I asked if I could help but there was little I could do. I remember the man, and maybe his wife and children, but I don’t recall doing much to make his life easier in that water. Maybe they had already called the emergency crews, or maybe they were self-sustained and didn’t need any more help than they had between them. I had never seen these people before and didn’t tell my parents what I saw, for reasons that I can’t explain. The next day, the family and the van were gone, and no one I knew could tell me what happened. Gradually the water dried up in that valley. The creek was replaced with weeds. The tunnel lost its purpose. And I grew too old to play there anymore. All of my childhood summers spent dodging that putrid water now feels like it was&nbsp; replaced with that family in the winter, watching as their van slowly sunk further into the muck. https://diamondste.in/Antique-Stores Sun, 13 Oct 2019 19:47:28 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Antique-Stores Reflecting on a Dying Man by DiamondsteinBy now my father couldn’t walk, so he’d gotten an expensive new wheelchair that could move better than he could, even during the first two years of his disease. He’d sit and explore places in the neighborhood that he never would have had he still been able to use his legs, seeing parts of Parkersburg that he’d probably deemed too dangerous before he’d gotten a diagnosis that made danger seem negligible at best. He and I decided to go into town, a short walk for me down to Main Street Parkersburg. The small stretch was lined with antique stores, filled with the detritus from old family estates that lined the Ohio River. He always loved antiques, but like many things held dear by the contemplative man, could never really explain to me why, no matter how many times I asked. I’d venture to assume it was the same reason I now do - seeing the meaninglessness of something, once the person who originally owned it isn’t around to explain its meaning. At one antique store in particular, which simultaneously functioned as the local art&nbsp; gallery of Parkersburg, we decided to go to the top floor, where they stored everything from Christmas ornaments to unsold heirlooms. We weren’t allowed there, but no one was going to stop a man in the kind of wheelchair you get when all of your money is going to an unstoppable disease. We went up together, then we split apart, exploring the space individually. I watched as my father relished in his own rebellion, trying to soak up every observation he could, while he still could. Everything he chose to look at, he looked at with sincere intention, down to the dust on the window sill. I found a pen in my pocket and carved his name into a wood beam. I said that he’d live forever. Then, we walked home. https://diamondste.in/School-Town-Cinema Sun, 13 Oct 2019 19:47:41 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/School-Town-Cinema Reflecting on a Dying Man by DiamondsteinAcross from the courthouse, there was an old movie theater which played the kinds of films that college kids who travel abroad to Paris might see. They, and me; a taste of urbanity that I could only find almost an hour from my driveway, and the closest to urbanity it came was a Coldstone creamery adjacent to some art films that took place in Manhattan. That’s the same Coldstone where my old college friend Lara worked in our summers away from campus. The autumn my dad was dying, she broke her back in three places during a terrible skiing accident. She used to give me rides to college, and I would sleep in the back of her car. She introduced me to Aphex Twin’s Ambient Works ‘85-92 one summer night in a Brooklyn apartment. I slept in her bed and she asked to hold me, but I was too intimidated to embrace her back, as ‘Tha’ bled through the cracked door to another room. Now, all I think about when I pass that Coldstone on the way to the old movie theater is Lara’s shattered bones, and if she’ll be ok after she’s healed. And when I hear ‘Tha’, and ‘Pulsewidth’, and ‘Green Calx’, I wonder if anyone will be able hold her the way she held me, without pain or insecurity from a body that doesn’t look the way it’s supposed to anymore, ever again. https://diamondste.in/2nd-Floor-Studio Sun, 13 Oct 2019 19:48:24 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/2nd-Floor-Studio Reflecting on a Dying Man by DiamondsteinOn Wednesdays I mow the widow’s lawn across the street. Evidently she has a lawnmower left by her late husband, but we don’t think it’s worth trying to find, so we just bring our own. A short hill and a well-paved road separate the two properties, so it really isn’t too much hassle, particularly compared to mowing the lawn itself. I don’t know when her husband died, but my parents make it seem like it was before they moved in. She was the first widower on the block, followed by the man beside her. My mom will probably be the next, so she takes care of the other two either out of empathy, or self-preservation. The man is fine, he explores the neighborhood and tends to his garden. He walks my dog for exercise, and complains to my mom about people who park on the wrong side of the street. But the woman drinks too much, thinks about her dead husband, then suicide. My mom says that she tries often, a repeating cycle of ambulance lights that I see from my room. The local paramedics can tell when she’s seriously in danger, and when she just wants company. A few nights ago, the ambulance came and kept its lights on, illuminating my small studio with red and blue flickers. I watched, afraid of what I might see coming out of the doorway. Paramedics sauntered in without urgency, and returned without a gurney. And so I mow, worried of what I might see if I look at her window, but I still do. Every Wednesday. I want to see her staring back at me, maybe to give a simple nod of gratitude that the woman with the sick husband across the street sends her son to care for her well-being. Or maybe the woman in the window will scoff, like the overgrown lawn is a sentimental attribute of her late husband. I guess I just want to know that she is alive in there, physically and spiritually, but she never comes to the window. And might never even know that her lawn is clean before it becomes overgrown again. https://diamondste.in/Chasing-Cops Sun, 13 Oct 2019 19:48:53 +0000 Reflecting on a Dying Man https://diamondste.in/Chasing-Cops Reflecting on a Dying Man by DiamondsteinThe old pool hall sat at the line dividing social classes in the city. The side closest to the high school had lightly manicured lawns, joggers, and a thin veil of presumed safety. Only a few blocks away, the houses started to look different, tattered, with a perpetual glow in the windows shining through a thin layer of cigarette smoke. Children played in the street as their mothers and fathers breathed in through an oxygen tank, permanently stapled to rocking chairs in the living room. One day, I saw a home completely burned down, with a seared fish tank and a few inches of dirty water. There were kids toys littered around the room, all in various states of cinder. I would walk there at night, remove my headphones and listen for footsteps or rustling bushes. One night, I started listening to the local police scanner on my walks, curious if I’d recognize any of the addresses called out through the radio voice. Then, I’d listen on drives around town at night. Eventually I started going where the police would go, sometimes getting there first. I’d park a block or so away and watch as the police walked into each of these houses like they’d been there before, casually and comfortably. Through the open door, I could see glimpses of the backstory behind the people sitting on the porches during the day. I could see a little more of what the fish tank might have looked like before. Then I heard a dispatch call was for an address I didn’t know. An old strip club I’d passed a thousand times in my childhood marked the turn towards the destination, up a long unpaved road hidden behind trees. At the end, a group of 7 or 8 trailer homes all gathered in a sort of impromptu cul-de-sac. Again I arrived before the police, but unlike the other places I’d been, this had people waiting outside for someone to help. And I was not that person. I was just a spectator to the tragedy. I was a brief moment of relief that quickly turned into another source of disappointment and confusion. Panicked, desperate eyes looked in my direction as I quickly changed my course. I was wrong to go there. Two police cars and an ambulance arrived as I retreated. In my rearview mirror, the police rushed instead of walked, and the ambulance opened its backdoors.