Sublime eclectic mayhem. That’s been my playlist project and musical life, one that begins with The Muppet Movie soundtrack and later involves performing hymns, death metal, surf, and bluegrass. I’ve played in theaters, tents, and basements, for multi-stage festivals and squirrel rodeos. I’ve written and recorded music for The Drunken Odyssey. Sublime eclectic mayhem. A warning and a welcome for joyous noise, for those navigating what Beckett called “this bitch of an earth.”

The Story Inside

In school, we were asked what we wanted to become
and we answered “Teacher!” or “Mommy!” while stranger
inclinations hung inside like the wet underwear out back.
We were ashamed of the clothes closest to us. I probably smiled
and said “policeman,” but yearned to haunt the stories,
the old houses, the graveyards. If I had said “ghost” what future

was I cursing myself to? Ghosts rarely alter the future;
they are whispers of the past. How could I become 
a Jedi or another archetype whose story was the story
of us all? I wanted to see in bull’s-eyes and carry strangers
from a burning world. My heroes were never far from a monster’s smile,
so I also wanted the atomic heart and armored back  

of Godzilla. Even if my imagination took me back
to the West, where I could ride wild horses into a future
ripped open like a stained-glass horizon, I’d still spend miles
in swamps and mausoleums, more Poe than Gunsmoke. To become
an outlaw might be nice, a cthulu-cowboy nicer: the stranger
in an even stranger land. I realized I still wanted the ghost story.

But aren’t we all haunting or haunted no matter the story?
Like Kahlo, every mirror cracked like her fractured back,
painting blood outside the body, the self itself a stranger.
Her pain let me understand my own and she let me want a future
tied to the images created by hand and by thoughts like birds becoming
hearts melting in the snow of memory and lost smiles.

But then, I borrowed someone else’s answer, the smile
of someone else’s happiness and was told not to want a child’s story:
dreams and stuffed bears and board games become
cobwebbed and damp and dust and going back
to get them seems impossible, because it’s all future, future,
future. The neighbors are now no more than strangers.

And I find sometimes that there is nothing stranger
than the time between camera flashes, between smiles
that tell one story and the story inside. My imagined future,
regardless of what I told my teachers, is like the story
unread and waiting all the way at the back
of the anthology. The truth we have is what we become.

In old photos, I see a stranger who shares my story.
I had to learn to return the smile, to give back
a certain grace to a past smiling at the future presently becoming.

Between the Camera Flashes

Listen on Tidal. Listen on Spotify.

1. “Finale: The Magic Store” – The Muppets
2. “Heroes and Villains” – The Beach Boys
3. “Renunciation” – Secret Chiefs 3
4. “The Big Ship” – Brian Eno
5. “Reich: Electric Counterpoint: I. Fast” – David Chalmin, Bryce Dessner 
6. “Plain Gold Ring” – Nina Simone
7. “Pennies from Hell” – Marc Ribot
8. “Angels and Demons at Play” – Sun Ra and His Arkestra
9. “Knocks Me Off My Feet” – Stevie Wonder
10. “Icing Sugar” – The Cure
11. “Swan Lake” – Public Image Ltd.
12. “Moanin’” – Charles Mingus
13. “Cool Water” – Hank Williams
14. “The Pink Room” – Angelo Badalamenti

Stephen McClurg (Episode 473) composes and improvises in Serenity Dagger, The Abdomen, and other projects. Along with session work for mid-Alabama singer/songwriters, he frequently collaborates with musicians across the state adding bass, guitar, and synths to friends’ recordings. He currently writes reviews for Horror DNA and is the substitute low end wrangler for Mobile-based punk rock band Future Hate. You can find out more about his work here.