BAD MEMORIES

Anthology of Suffering and Cautionary Tale against Nietszchean Deceptions

Below is a rough anthology. It is comprised of several true events and visceral bleedings onto paper.

There is a through line between them all in the form of a kind of demonic temptation that many could misconstrue for God.

Some of these temptations are outright, and some of them are from a voice disguised as the next step for the European man.

Most of them appear to be the same sentient spirit that whispered into Nietzsche’s ear.

Enjoy?

---

Good morning.

I’ve woken up somewhat disoriented after working late, due to my alarm clock not waking me up at the normal time of 5am, and I’m awakened to a memory tied to an album by Black Rebel Motorcycle Club from five years ago.

In 2018, New Year’s Day Arrived while I was behind the bar of a whiskey saloon-like establishment with ambitions of moving to San Francisco, slinging drinks in the city at night to pay for my training to become a professional fighter during the day both while preparing to be baptized in the Orthodox Church. And when 18 years of praying, fighting, and laboring would come to an end, I would either be a dead man or a monk. I wore these ambitions with a smile.

This album was released that same month, in January of 2018.

I first heard this band while organizing the basement of this cocktail bar I worked for in the South Bay Area March of 2018. I had been given an operation manager’s role in the mornings which included receiving orders and perfecting the ergonomics of our standard operating procedures in preparation to be offered a general manager role which I ultimately declined.

Their hit single, “Beat the Devil’s Tattoo” came on my Spotify radio for the London/Nashville-based power duo, the Kills, and I was instantly sucked into their sound. After several finger taps worth of research, I found out their latest album had come out two months prior.

I then found out that they’re from San Francisco with a tour coming to the legendary Fillmore in May of that year.

The band became somewhat of an obsession for me.

This convergence of punk, roadhouse, folk, psychedelic rock, blues, and gospel was unlike anything I had ever heard before in that it was distinctly San Franciscan, old Californian, and Americana all at once.

They seemed to capture a zeitgeist, a spirit that I had known and felt inherently but many have forgotten.

I listened through all of their albums with the exception of this latest one titled, “Wrong Creatures.”

One morning, I found out that my bar was buying the closed restaurant next door, and I had to clear out 50 beer kegs up a staircase. This was routine for me in my role for next door, and after the owner and I did our usual song and dance of him insisting I use a dolly and me insisting I thrive from hard labor, I once again had my way.

My pulling strength from strongman training granted me an ability to carry kegs up and downstairs without fail.

I listened to this album while carrying these kegs out of the basement up the stars going up to a back patio to a see light emerging closer and closer with each step.

I tried taking picture of a light to capture the exact way it presented itself, but it simply wouldn’t come out. It was the same light I had seen once in my childhood and once in my coming of age in the United Kingdom.

Running parallel to this visual and physical dynamic, my ears were elsewhere, entranced in this album not necessarily from how good it is, but from the somber, melancholic, and “suspended in animation” effect from “Calling Them All Away,” the short-lived feel good party in “Little Thing Gone Wild,” the bewildering blaze from “Circus Bazooko,” and the funeral-like setting of the final two tracks in “Carried From the Start,” and “All Rise.”

I was transported and removed from the real world and into what Trent Reznor has described as “the background world.”

Suddenly the funeral-like ending felt internalized and inevitable for myself, and I felt as if I was amidst a beautiful decline that I would need to claw and climb out of in order to escape.

Suddenly, a course of events was set for my past to flood into the present.

On May 23rd, 2018, I went to the concert at the Fillmore, the most storied venue in San Francisco.

Their opener was a power duo from Los Angeles called “Restavrant,” and they were capable of summoning an energy far more powerful than the sum of their two parts. Their authentic “devil may care,” multi-zeitgeist rage was so alluring, I had almost forgotten I was there to see BRMC in the first place.

But then the quiet in temperament trio took the stage and performed a 30 song set with their smash hits, songs from the new album, a cover of Hank Williams’s “Cool Water,” and a rendition of Edgar Allen Poe’s “Annabel Lee.”

This masterclass, this greatest spectacle of authentic performance I had ever seen was twice interrupted with speeches declaring their love for San Francisco.

Robert Levon Been reminisced:

“We were standing right there as teenagers when we saw Nine Inch Nails, right there when we saw PJ Harvey, and right there when we saw the Jesus & Mary chain. We came growing up to see good music, like hopefully all of you are doing right now. This place is magic.”

I was awestruck.

My adoration for my home grew tenfold, as I felt so a part of it.

I couldn’t allow myself to let the moment and the feeling end.

So I went to North Beach to get dinner and drinks at 15 Romolo at the Basque Hotel at the end of the show, as I had been offered a job there after a successful “stage.” It was and still is my favorite bar on the planet Earth, and my love affair with it was as instant as my love affair with BRMC was.

Dark Wood, dim lights, Basque heritage.

My dream was coming true.

Working, living, and fighting in the city I love, the city that raised me.

Exchanging head kicks in the morning.

Making martinis at night in an environment where my thoughts grew more intense and my writing flourished from resisting the decadence that surrounded me.

Praying in the cathedral I had heard so much about but had yet to visit.

Living upstairs in the Basque Hotel itself where Basque immigrants had lived over 100 years ago, while bleeding on paper after bleeding on ring canvas.

And when the time to go pro would come, I would stop all this bartending nonsense and fight until I was 40 or 42 and either die or join a monastery.

I was in furious bliss.

But inexplicably, the next morning, I felt different, and not for the better.

I was being kicked out of my house despite my landlady originally telling me I had until December before she sold the house to go to a retirement home near her grandchildren.

Truth be told, a slimy realtor had whispered in her ear enough times to get her to change her mind for the sake of the market.

I was packing my things where I had grown so much to move in with my good friend and coworker from the bar.

That summer descended quickly into darkness when I had pursued the wrong woman, had my job at 15 Romolo revoked due to the person whose place I was promised not moving to Italy after all, and had been deceived away from the Church.

And come September, after an ill-advised return to England to see the wrong womanfor my birthday, I worked 100 hours a week for ten weeks to move to New York City.

I arrived in Brooklyn to stay in a hostel, out of shape, having not trained for six weeks, sleepless from my lack of time hours not allocated to work, transportation, or planning the move, and thrusted into a frantic job search to establish my roots in my father’s hometown of New York City.

My advice for a job search given to me by my former mentors was to drink in bars I liked and strike up conversations with bartenders until someone offer me a job. Of course, New York City bars were only slow enough to talk to the bartenders from 3pm to 6pm and from 2am-4am. This gave me many late nights of drinking and spending with no fruits to show for it and a neglect of my strength quickly diminishing.

My job did not emerge from liquid crusades but from the good, old-fashioned internet job application that saw me take my “rite of passage, shitty first job in New York,” at a corporate hellhole on Wall Street that couldn’t decide if it was the 90s, the 30s, or the 2010s.

And so came a familiar ritual.

“We have kegs.”

“I’ll get em.”

“They’re downstairs, so you should probably use a dolly.”

“Oh please.”

*Snap.*

Something whispered, “you stopped being that guy a long time ago now pal.”

Four days later, I was on a couch in Brooklyn, alone on Christmas, with a freshly injured lower back, a shattered soul, a mind too stubborn to die and too clouded to live, just barely carrying on from a new flirtation with spite and a scrounging for a semblance of honor.

The clock struck 2019, and despite my best efforts, my cynicism grew with a wave of despondency that followed.

I was in an out of dark, late night bars in Brooklyn and one night, I rode the subway across the river to Lower Manhattan. Tribeca, all three parts of the Village and Hell’s Kitchen were being roamed while listening through this album once again.

A man longing for the future he lost out West, thinking there was some kind of sentient spirit that would tie him to a new destiny.

Unfortunately, a spirit did emerge, and it preached the most alluring descent into madness to the man who had forgotten his God and savored solitude:

A BAD MEMORY

I sat in a bar in Brooklyn.

A cursed, wretched place. 

Sinking into a glass of rye, darkness shrouding my eyes. 

I wore a half smile, a bleak kind of a grimace. 

Too stubborn to die, too clouded to live. 

Embracing the belly of the behemoth. 

A haunt following me every place I went. 

“Look at that man sitting in the corner.” 

“Look at that man sitting alone at the bar.” 

Black boots, black jacket, black garb. 

“What is it you’re writing?”

“I had to come and speak to you.” 

What made these people think I wanted to take part? 

What made these people think I wanted to opt into humanity?

What made these people think I didn’t want to disappear into the crowd, sitting in plain sight. 

“I can be whatever you want me to be, just don’t ask me to actually speak.”

I see something within this fray that everyone seems to desire out-maneuvering. 

No, I want to stand still. 

There’s a thread somewhere in here I want to pull on. 

Now, I don’t have to exist.

I had no friends and family in New York City aside from the friendly acquaintances I had made in industry bars in Manhattan, and the silence of loneliness allowed me to hear something call out to me from within the fray of the city.

The white noise slowly and gently muted.

A quiet hum emerged from beneath the subways and above the spires.

A silver voice whispered to me:

“Walk alone.”

“Rise from your brokenness alone.”

“Take a step above the common man.”

“You see these people gazing on you like you’re something else. Something stranger. Something better.”

“Give them this wonder.”

“You must align your separations from them, align the separations of appearance and demeanor with the ones of consumption and the ones of action.”

“Become a god.”

“I know the willpower you’re capable of, and you know of what I speak of. Shatter your cuffs, break your chains.”

“Stay in this city, stay in this greatest place to hide in plain sight.”

“Be seen when you must be seen, and be nowhere and no one when you desire.”

“Their expectations are null and void, and all the ones that remain are your own.”

I had quit my first job for a promise from another one through another contact I had made through the Dead Rabbit Grocery and Grog. The Edition Hotel in Times Square was opening three bars within its confines, and the potential role at stake there was a clear, high tip pool, a 401k, and a $15 per hour rate that was hard to come by in New York at the time. The rate combined with the projected tipping pool would put me well over a six figure income and grant me a foundation for this “overman rise.”

What I was not promised by my contact was a clear start date, but she did say I would have to start immediately or be moved on from. No two week notice from my current job would be considered.

While New York has reached an unspoken consensus on a slight distortion on general morality, something about this did not sit right with me, and to not lose out on this potential leap ahead, I preemptively quit my job in preparation for an offer.

Despite the immediacy in my contact’s tone regarding this opportunity, the call did not come as soon as expected, and my sublet at that time was running out.

My funds were limited, and one last three week sublet in Broadway Triangle, Brooklyn across the street from the projects would be the shelter of my last hurrah.

Fasting was mandatory, as all I could afford was ritz crackers from the bodega downstairs, with the exception of the occasional cheapest purchase at shake shack and $1 pizza slices.

February is New York’s coldest month, and only the cold could wake me from the ever-intensifying stupor of hunger that distorts one’s perception of how they’re being presented. The politely concerned stares of people I knew behind the bar at the Dead Rabbit, the Lost Lady, Featherweight, and the Charleston told me all I needed to know about the toll the hunger was taking on me. My speech became crazed, and my muscle grew scarce.

I would spend one day walking from Williamsburg to Manhattan to hunt for work without the cost of the subway ticket, and I would spend the other resting in bed.

I was granted a brief victory in employment in a Japanese bar close to where I heard the aforementioned silver voice.

I had a batch of resumes in my hands one of my Manhattan excursions, and I stopped to stare at this place, while my headphones blurted out:

“Time is running out. I don’t know what I’m waiting for.”

“I think this keeps happening over and over again.”

In some ways, it was an offering from that silver voice.

“Here is what you covet. That place of stillness and silence. No one will question your nature here. Let’s see your eyes darken a bit more.”

It was an offering in that same spot where he reached out to me: a place to be autonomous in every bad sense of the word. It was a way to be on the payroll to plant a seed for something presented as great, but in reality, this was a dark seed.

On the way out the door to my second training shift, I stepped on a nail in the stairwell.

Sidelined again.

I took this as a blessing of sorts.

My last hurrah resumed. The clock kept on ticking once again.

After three days of recuperation, I walked to the Edition Hotel in Time Square to hold myself together as best as I could and follow up on my application, and after three days of silence, I was two days from my sublet ending.

I walked through Midtown Manhattan with a shape emerging in my mind. I felt I had sprinted down the wrong path, but somehow, I was back to center. I was on a correct orientation once again, and despite New York being the wrong path, it had become the right one. I wasn’t sprinting in a straight line, but on one that wrapped around back to center like one half of an infinity symbol.

The remains of my savings, all $300 of it went to a one way plane ticket back to San Francisco through Denver.

In Denver, the email finally came for a job interview at the Edition Hotel.

I took this as a confirmation to stay the hell away from New York and its Faustian offer.

I laid in my bed in the guest room of a dear friend, checking in with my soul, still truly broken.

I didn’t leave San Francisco again for another three years until it was clear that it was time for me to go.

In December of 2021, I had returned to the Orthodox Christian Faith, and since stepping out of Holy Virgin Cathedral for the first time, I felt a notion that God wanted me elsewhere.

My target was Austin, Texas, and on three consecutive Sunday bartending shifts before my move, I received three visitors attempting to dissuade me from the Faith and from my move.

The first two were men, one of whom I knew, the other, a stranger, were both very clearly human.

The third viscerally presented itself as something else.

He came in with a horizontally striped shirt, a wide brimmed hat, skinny jeans, and oxford shoes.

“Well look at you, my goodness can you bartend."

“Thank you.”

“Are you looking for work? I’m hiring right now for a place in North Beach.”

“Im not really looking for new work at the moment.”

“I bet I could pay you way more than this place.”

“I’m actually very happy here, thank you.'“

“Is that right?”

“Yes, and I’m truth be told, I’m moving to Austin in a week.”

“Oh well I know tons of people in Austin, I could make you a star down there.”

“Maybe you could. Is there something you want to drink?”

“Surprise me.”

“Any particular spirit?”

“The Holy Spirit.”

“Well how about you pick an alcoholic spirit for this cocktail.”

“Bourbon.”

“You got it.”

“Are you a believer?”

“In Christ? Yes, I am a Christian.”

“Have you ever prayed to God for something and had it not work out?”

“Yes.”

I saw his eyes widen, and his mouth looked like it was on the verge of salivating.

“But then I realized God gave me something better instead, and truth be told, he always does.”

“Oh…yes of course. Well He always does doesn’t He!”

“He most certainly does.”

“It’s funny I was shopping on Wayfair, and look what I stumbled upon.”

The man showed me a picture of an icon of Christ with the eyes blacked out, and these eyes matched his own.

“Well isn’t that just a miracle?”

“It sure is.”

“And what drink have you made me?”

“It’s an old fashioned with a split base of eagle rare and johnny drum, demerara syrup, tobacco bitters, and sarsaparilla bitters.”

“Well it sure is delicious.”

After taking my break, I came back to find that he had closed his tab and ordered a glass of wine. After five minutes had passed, my coworker informed me he had left the bar with the wine glass in hand.

I ran after him around the corner and circled him to come face to face.

“I need that glass back sir.”

“Then take it.”

I snatched the glass from his hands before he smiled, began maniacally laughing, and walked away into the core of downtown Oakland.

A day prior, with some spiritual guidance, I had concluded that I made some kind of unspoken agreement with some kind of spirit of the crossroads at the Black Rebel Motorcycle Club show almost four years prior. It felt freeing, and I found the timing of this man’s arrival and offers peculiar at best.

Three months later on Pascha, I returned to 15 Romolo with the woman who would become my wife, and saw that after that agreement was severed, the place felt lighter:

---

I still can’t describe this literal corner of the world. 

Once Faustian in every negative and euphoric sense of the word. 

Ghosts in abundance, an illusion of the eternal was encountered. 

It was all at once, Western, European, and alien. 

I put my pickaxe down and leaned it against the wall where the slope and the street met. 

I carried four bottles of sherry to the cellar. 

I smoked inside, as if it were that time again. 

1998
2018
1898
1918

How enchanting the painting I was wedged into that felt as if I finally came home, while the barmen who knew me briefly gazed upon me as if I was somewhere on the other side of the wall that couldn’t be found in the room next door. 

Ingest your poison you fool.

Sob in your mourning of the era that never was, and cut to your bones with the heels of your boots that cut the floor of the Fillmore. 

Bleed in every way.

The red dye catches the eye.

Don’t bleed in the ice. 

“We’ve got to fight boys, we’ve got to fight.”

Give me an opponent in every breath. 

I’ll fight myself if I have to.

Unless, I’m here, this time with true company.

“Baby, this, this right here is a museum.”

“This is a museum, of what I’ve conquered after all this time.”

“It is only finished now that you are here.”

“Now we can sit and see it for what it is.”

“This place used to be the home of war and ecstasy, confusion and poetry, violence and grace.”

And I was the only one who could see it. 

“Baby, now that you’re here, this is my living room.”

“This place is mine.”

The sober man owns the house of poison.

---

And I thought that was it. No spirit of the crossroads to plague me any longer, and being in front of the house of my heritage that I love, it was confirmed to be true.

Yet eight months later, in Chicago I encountered that same spirit I encountered in New York.

“Feel this crowd.”

“Gaze upon these spires.”

“Rise above the common man through a madness that only you could know.”

“Imagine here you are, at peace with your God, and you feel this raging, surging spirit overpower your God and rupture the course of existence. You would find it hard to believe your God then wouldn’t you?"

But that Nietszchean spirit was all too recognizable after all I had been through in returning to my God. Illusions no longer seduced me.

And read any bit of Nietszche, you will find a searching similar to Evola, for a highest divinity centralized in Europe. There is a lashing out at all boxes, all potential through-line forces: sensualists being too stupid, stoics being too rational, nationalists being too simplistic, and Christians being too “foreign.”

His madness at first glance seemed to be of his own doing, but his voice speaks of knowing an external force telling him everything he wanted to hear not of ideas that emerged from solitude and logic.

This spirit has come for America, successfully taken New York, and continually battles for the soul of Chicago.

Humble service to God, or Nietzschean madness are the only options for America in the past and the only options for America now.

This is the same for each of its citizens.

It’s been almost five and half years since that concert laced with an unspoken agreement, and it’s been five since my injury in New York.

I’m physically healed now, and I'm at a point where I can say I’ve bIed all that blood away.

If this can serve as any kind of lesson to you it is to test the spirits that speak to you.

God does not lead us down paths of assured spiritual decay.

Do not listen to your feelings, as they will betray you.

It is only in communion with God where we can receive discernment and clarity of purpose.

Some of you may adore the feeling of being dazzled.

Some of you may enjoy the ecstasy of haunting.

I know I did.

Pray to God.

Plant your feet on bedrock, and let the storm dance around you, deepening your Faith.

Don’t make the same mistakes I made.