Daniel Johnston
BY HANNAH MATHESON
sang that whole summer, said since junior high
when he lost his mind he’s been trying
to make sense out of scrambled eggs
and I, high school punk, late-stage nerd
perfumed by an overactive limbic
system, pledged fealty to melancholy,
nodded damn straight, like
I’d ever had to know anything
in my life. The drive to dogsitting
felt like a secret: the eggshell horizon
leaking albumen of weak-knuckled light,
an orange suffocation, the old lab
wheezing around those June mornings.
I don’t know how to explain this —
how when I look back at those months
everything was steamed dogshit,
bleaching grass, night buffering into
daybreak, the headache of waking,
watching Friday Night Lights
until my eyes closed against their will,
Matt Saracen’s cheekbones, my sweaty thighs
splayed on beige pleather, the stereo, never
getting out of bed, the stereo, Daniel Johnston
on the stereo saying I have to live
these songs forever. That old lab,
I’d hardly let him pee before I’d go
again, and I couldn’t stand it —
his arthritic vigil at the door when I arrived,
his ecstatic drool, then his panting as
I walked out, the asthma of being left.
Is it ok to tell you this? Sometimes
I thought sadness would kill me.
You know, don’t you? The nausea
of dawn. The not-dead-yet
man’s song playing as you leave
the thing too lonely to love.
