So many ways to die on stage

Kenji Endo, urgent care, recursive hats, overheard stories

For years I was certain that Leonard Cohen’s “Famous Blue Raincoat” was the greatest song ever written, but now I know it’s “Curry Rice” by Kenji Endo. I first heard it as part of a Japanese Folk compilation (“Even A Tree Can Shed Tears” which…settle down). Curry Rice got spun a few dozen times, and while it leans on some classic classic rock chords (D, A, B, Bm, then build off the fourth’s minor [F#m] for the chorus), it still had this extra vibration behind it I couldn’t quite place. I spent time googling the lyrics but found nothing outside description and references to songs about food. The translated lyrics were (duh) in the album liner notes.

That’s 93 words, 10 of them are “curry rice”, and it’s a universe, time and place, culminating with Yukio Mishima’s ritual seppuku. So it’s refractory, tied to some simple parallelisms (cutting the finger, cutting open the stomach), the sweet and the spicy and a Japanese cat. And then, not wanting to just be an NPR music critic and only talk about the lyrics, there’s a lot of intensity in the chord progression – it adds, rather than accompanies. There’s more than there seems.

Anyway, I’ve spent my entire winter holiday sick with tonsillitis. The urgent care doctor loaded me up with amoxicillin, and suggested I relieve my pain with sour candies, which is the most Eastern European advice I’ve ever heard, and I’m from Northern Illinois. I’m wondering if this is what it means to be 50: That even a routine infection like tonsillitis might turn septic without professional care. Really puts a damper on my plans to be a High Quality Old Dad for the next 20-30 years. The Algonquin Round Table called these second-act problems.

I got into poetry because I can’t write narrative very well. I was so enraptured by some of the 50s-era short story masters, I couldn’t get past classic modernist story structures, even as much post-modernism as I read. Autofiction is appealing, since it provides more leeway for weirdness, and it solves my biggest problem: putting hats on hats. That’s a super common comedy thing, where when you indulge in the tendency to add one more turn or layer of complexity to a joke, killing the joke. My solution to that tendency was also to get into poetry, since in poems, you can pile on 10 hats and who gives a shit, it’s poetry, you can’t fail at that.

Hat on a hat on a hat on a hat. I’m so happy someone sells these.

Instead, I love an overheard story. Here’s one of my favorites:

“My dad thinks HR is the greatest, most important job there is. He’s always sending me job listings for HR. [Friend] and I were joking about it at [Event] and laughing a lot and this receptionist kept shushing us. She was wearing the shortest skirt – a skirt so short I wouldn’t wear it, and I’m Mexican! And she wasn’t young, she was like 60. Someone should report her to HR.”

To my mind, this is autofiction. Not “autobiographical fiction”, but “fiction that has the more oblique connections of real life”. All the weird stuff that doesn’t belong in a polished piece of literary fiction or – god help us – hard scifi. All the stuff my mom includes when she tells a story, just in case it’s relevant.

“It was beautiful, not a cloud in the sky. You don’t usually get those days in Chicago the way you do in North Dakota. I almost slipped on some wet leaves because the Zimmermans never rake their lawn. You can see that all the wet leaves come from their lawn. But that’s when we found out your father had prostate cancer. A bump in the road, we called it.”

The way my mom tells stories is the reason I read all 6 of those Knausgård books.

Anyway, dying of sepsis because I live alone and was too stubborn to go to urgent care strikes me as a very stupid way to end my autofiction. I’ve lost eight pounds due to the extreme pain of swallowing, so instead I’ll get out in the world again and this will happen.

Zachary Schomburg, from “Fjords, Vol. 1”