Thanks to Brief Wilderness for publishing. Direct link

https://briefwilderness.com/2025/07/19/everything-was-noise-and-splinters-by-gregory-ormson/

Growing up, I didn’t think I was fat or stupid even though my mother said I was. She didn’t say it all the time, just enough that it registered; but I didn’t feel the full weight of ridicule until I wrote a poem when I was 16 and showed it to her. It was the first, but last time that ever happened. She laughed, “What are you trying to be now a poet?”

Thud.

End of career.

My reaction formation over the years, powered by anger and ancestral strength, drove me to slog through my educational path, one bachelor’s degree and three graduate degrees. I know, crazy, right? Was I ever, in Wayne Dyer’s words, pulling my own strings? I don’t know, but I was determined that nobody would ever again call me stupid.

My father was the kinder, more naïve parent who romanticized his Norwegian heritage; my mother romanticized nothing. But my dad worked most of the time and was something of a phantom, so I grew up thinking that men were kind phantoms.

I had a career and family and then became a phantom too. But as a kid I was loud, always around, and not so kind. Caught between a mix of occasional romanticism and regular criticism, I was grinding through my teen years with one foot on the brake and one foot on the gas, adrift and wanting relief.

In high school, I was not much of a student, but my ears were alert to everything. In the loud hallways, I was listening, and my brain quickly analyzed the cacophony and put it in patterns.

I stepped like a drummer’s step, with attitude, and everyone left me alone. I counted on one hand the number of times anyone said something important. Glaring at teachers from my desk, I watched their lips move, but I only heard the cadence and the rhythm of rain falling outside the window.

I lived to hit baseballs or drums; and on weekends, I looked forward to playing in bars with my band. Alert and unafraid of people, I saw through the drinkers’ performances, and I hated how alcohol turned people sitting at the bar, including my parents, into something they were not.

I thought, there must be something wrong with me, why am I so angry when everyone else is so happy? I didn’t know at the time, but this was the vital lie of adulthood; they weren’t as happy as they seemed, but alcohol was working. In time, it worked on me too.

I looked for something I could pound and keep me out of trouble. It was the drum, and when I heard their beat and felt their percussive wind, I loved them. I loved poetry too and realized the beat of drums and poetry spoke to my body and my soul. I began to write in beats and rhythms as much as words and yes dear reader I kept it, thud, to myself.

When I made a connection between drumstick and pencil, I realized there was a literary heartbeat down in there next to Rock ’n’ roll music. I liked rock because it had power, and the radio brought Rock ’n’ roll into my home and my car.

Rock ’n’ roll was jangling my brain and the brains of everyone I knew. A friend once showed me his 45 yes 45 of the Rolling Stones’ “Jumping Jack Flash.” He’d played it to the point where the polished black vinyl record had turned milky white. Rock ’n’ roll took flight when rock music recordings were loaded onto a spaceship traveling into far galaxies, it was meant to throw the aliens a friendly earworm so they would discover in some distant light year the glory of Elvis, Janis, Bowie, and “Jumping Jack Flash,” along with the classics in Johann Sebastian Bach, Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and others.

In my hometown, kids were turning up the car radio and aggravating adults with Rock ’n’ roll. To satiate young people and quench their thirst for rock music my town opened a teen music venue called “The Shire,” a large brick building near downtown, the repurposed First Methodist Church. When the church closed, it was another sign that the times were a changin’.

Rock ’n’ roll took over marking time and rattling the stained glass windows as teens gathered to build a new congregation. On Saturday nights, they stood where the Methodists used to sit in pews and were spellbound by slinky musicians with green guitars and stacked Marshall amplifiers set to loud. Packing in on Saturday nights, some adults objected and called it the Abomination of Desolation; but the kids were looking for a different kind of revelation and they were evidence to the old guard that something new was blowing in the wind.

We stood, they sat; they drank the blood of Jesus, we drank beer in the parking lot; they were silent, we were loud; their music was soft, meditative, plaintive sounds of organ and chant; we were loud grunge guitars and Zildjian cymbals smashing the cosmos with a new language. The music was like napalm going straight to teenagers’ loins.

Gazing up where the eucharistic table had served the body and blood of Christ to penitents, we watched Rock ’n’ roll mutants, and they became our heroes. Most had long hair and torn T shirts like the guitar players bending low, giving the business to their Fenders and Gibsons. Behind them, drummers in muscle shirts sweated and pounded their cymbals and silver flake drums into submission.

When I turned 18, David Bowie’s “All the Young Dudes” was released by Mott the Hoople and hit number 37 on the US Billboard Hot 100. Mick Jagger and the Stones were telling me to get off their cloud, and it was cool with me because my cloud had drifted over to the Bowie pantheon where I measured music by beats on the Ziggy clock. If a song couldn’t do in 30 seconds what “Suffragette City” did, I’d take Jagger’s advice and get off that cloud.

At the State Fair, I stood rapt and attentive to amateur but highly amped versions of songs by Led Zeppelin. Rock ’n’ roll was a blizzard of harpoons in raw energy, driving me with dreams of unlimited possibility where even lead could fly.

We were the amped up youth, free to go anywhere and live any way we wanted. After all, the young dudes on stage were doing it and since I was a young dude, I could too, or I thought so before time corralled the wild horses and turned us into adults with mortgages, debts, and families.

Terrible drums and spider guitars became my Biblical variants and the rock drummers’ chalice became my communion. I could have easily fallen into a whiskey barrel like Keith Moon or John Bonham and let the single malt take me out, but I had a conscience that kept me levelheaded even if I was edgy and angry. Drums helped.

At 15, I bought my first set with money I’d earned from mowing lawns and carrying groceries. After work at the grocery store, I put records on the stereo and turned it as loud as it went. I pounded my drums in the basement to sonic epiphanies and memorized the patterns in rock and roll’s tom strikes, snare rim shots, and high hat footwork. The drums’ symbol making, sexy language lured me in and scorched me with the mysterious. I absorbed it and noted drummers walked on cloven feet and wore tie dye shirts, peace symbols, sandals, and beads.

Students at the university in Menomonie grew beards and didn’t cut their hair, none of them looked like my father, crew cut, white shirt, and maroon bow tie. Even before The Clash, Rock ’n’ roll music was pitching ammunition for rebellion. Teens stopped listening to parents, police, and teachers, but that damn conscience worked on me. I watched laser beams blasting out of drummers’ eyes, but I didn’t fall into their whiskey barrel.

Teaching myself to slash wire brushes over the snare drum’s batter head, I raised the bristly liquid swish of jazz and mashed drumsticks on the metal rims, sending wood splinters into the air looking like a helicopter blade flying detached and away from the helicopter. Nightly news covered protests over the Vietnam War, helicopter blade slap and tracers from rockets looked and sounded like my drumming with splinters flying and in clash of sound, fury, and brokenness.

Below the waist, where drummers and teenagers ache, I stomped my red metal flaked Ludwig double bass set and flooded the world in a tsunami wave of Zildjian cymbals and heavy drumsticks. Crouched behind my double bass lived a Gremlin, a wet Gizmo, shape shifting into a whirling dervish of arms and emotion.

When driving, I tapped rhythms on the steering wheel while following the cracked center line to songs far and wide; dashboard, steering wheel, my brothers, and the school cafeteria tables were vehicles to other places. I followed my knuckles to get there and the bullies left me alone.

My teenage language was formed by skins and sticks and everything morphed into verbs called hit or punch. My aggression would have made me a good fighting soldier, but I had a conscience and like the world around me, we were all in transition. I didn’t think I could dutifully trot the war path or follow the military’s rigid law. Muhammad Ali rejected fighting for the US in Vietnam and he had his reasons. Ali was quoted as saying, “No Viet Cong ever called me nigger.”

Unsure how or when it happened, my soul steered me to Wordsworth. His “Intimations of Immortality” brought larger answers and relief from fighting with my parents and worrying about Vietnam and the draft.

Our birth is but a sleep and a forgetting
the Soul that rises with us, our life’s Star,
hath had elsewhere its setting
and cometh from afar.

Wordsworth led me to surmise, that’s it, the reason I feel out of step. I’ve come from afar. Daydreams from afar accompanied me to the basement after dinner and there I punished my parents by pounding my drums as hard and loud as possible. They sat on the orange living room couch directly above me and attempted to read the newspaper while I rocked their socks off from below.

After an hour, a sweaty teenager with fire in his eyes came upstairs. They glanced up, then turned back to peer at headlines in the Eau Claire Leader. I imagined them reading about my death in the paper and I believed they’d have been both sad and relieved at the same time. Shortly, I would take my terrible drums to college and they would have their relief.

Today, I’d apologize to my parents and bandmates. I’d tell them it wasn’t their fault I was a boiling volcano. I lived to smash cymbal and snare as their loud retorts distracted me from self recrimination. Secretly, I prepped to burn down my house or any house and I had a match, but I also had a conscience and it kept me from turning everything into lava. I was, in the words of a James Taylor song, “a churning urn of burning funk.”

I started another band and we were no good, but we were loud, 18, and full of belief. Our lead singer had a superpower that triumphed over bad talent and that was a simple brass key to fit the front door of his grandmother’s remote cabin in the woods, on a hill, above the Red Cedar River in North Menomonie.

After high school basketball games, our classmates trudged through the woods to party at the cabin. We called it “The Northern Shire,” our spinoff from the repurposed First Methodist Church in town. We couldn’t legally buy beer, but one classmate had an older sister dating a guy that could.

On Friday afternoons, he bought several cases of cheap brew and buried them in the snow. We all gave him a buck and that was that. When our friends arrived after the Friday night basketball game, they grabbed frozen beers from the snowbank and stepped inside. Danger was hidden and buried in snow for 18 year old Wisconsin teens, like the mines buried and waiting for us in the jungles of Vietnam.

The black stove was red and boiling when the class of 1972 arrived at the Northern Shire and my classmates danced in stocking hats and sweaters as ice melted from their boots. I pounded drums in the cabin’s cramped living room, removing layers down to my T shirt as steam rose from my sweaty back. Pounding drums, I watched my brown beer bottle vibrate on the wood burning stovetop next to me. The golden Buckhorn Beer thawed, bubbled, and rose up over the long neck, dripping onto the stovetop.

When our version of “Bad Moon Rising” ended, the hiiiisssssss from boiling beer on the black metal stovetop meant the party was on and the seeds of alcoholism took root in the Northern Shire.

When Grandma M’s cabin started rocking on its round pine logs, I thought it would slide off and roll downhill like a wayward toboggan into the river. I imagined my parents on the orange couch reading a front page headline in Saturday morning’s edition of the Eau Claire Leader, “20 Menomonie High School Seniors Drown in the Red Cedar River.”

My conscience speaks again and I’d like to apologize and tell my bandmates it wasn’t their fault I was a boiling volcano. In a way, I was nothing but a reflection of the culture . . .

everything was
noise and splinters
going thud, thud, thud
until I found a door to subtle thud.

My intellectual curiosity and energy led me to the poetry of Walt Whitman, who slogged through the battlefield in another time of great American strife and division. There, he praised the power of drums to overdub the cries of human suffering. The beats rang in my ears 2, and 3, and 3 then 3 again. “Mind not / the old man / beseeching / the young man /

. . . so strong you thump (four beats) O terrible drums (five beats), so loud you bugles blow” (six beats). The tension kept building and as I thumped my angst into drums, poems danced in my head and began teaching me the art of subtle thud as drumsticks flailed in my hands and rebellion stirred in my soul.

In the days when it didn’t matter if you were good or bad, I started a new band with some guys that fit the bill of what mattered, they had equipment. We were musical and intellectual hacks, I couldn’t read a paradiddle diddle on the chart or decipher James Joyce, but I had a car and owned terrible drums, read immortal poems, and my band got a little better.

When not drumming or hitting baseballs or brothers, I read immortal poems. My love for poetry taught me to listen, subtle, and interpret the meter of literature, drum chart, scriptural variants, and the culture’s shaking foundations.

The language in literature and music were an answer to the Vietnam War, the war with my parents, cultural wars, and the war within. Interpreting poems and drums, my soul found ways to interpret what was happening, it stripped me bare while revealing the runes of a dynamic language that had landed in me and turned me into a walking symbol (cymbal) and myth.

In Return to the Source, a novel of India, Lanza del Vasto captured the glorious reach of this thumping. “The finest and most complete instrument they have is the drum. It is the voice of all speech, the AUM of all hymns, the foundation of all music. The drum is the bond between the musician’s voice and his [sic] body, between his body and the music to which it gives the earthly consistency of the steps it raises.” In time, my drumbeats raised an earthly consistency and taught me that if I drummed in anger, I would walk in anger.

When a large oak tree with a base over three feet toppled over at my family’s cabin in Wisconsin’s north woods, I saw a drum arriving at my doorstep. The wood was two inches thick and in many ways it was heavy. I grabbed my Husqvarna chainsaw and dug out the rotted insides as a bald eagle screeched and soared in circles above me.

I named it the Wood Duck Drum. It had come to me from afar, connected me to time and place, and watered the fertile ground of my story. That drum and I were meant for ceremony and wooing, for earthly and other worldly steps, for subtle and smashmouth.

Years later, following my father’s battle with cancer, I struck the Wood Duck Drum 61 times at the cemetery, once for each of the years he lived. On each of my strikes, the clergyman’s face drew tight and my grandmother shuddered. The stern Lutheran pastor didn’t look at me, but neither did he stop my rhythmic commemoration as I slammed my palm into the skin of a deer my father had shot and aimed my pounding grief toward the heavens. The sturdy oak drum rang out, rattling both the ground and the mourners.

In the drum’s round wooing, an earthly consistency has marked the steps I’ve raised as an avatar for the reverb nation in basements and bars, garages and camps, rivers and lakes, dance halls, school rooms, picnic grounds, stages, ceremonial grounds, yoga classes, drum circles, Irish bars, sweat lodges, and graveyards.

“The drum, the drum / Macbeth doth come.” Shakespeare’s Early Modern English alarum stuck a perfect two and four beat in drumming and footsteps, two beats, two beats, four beats. Drums are, as del Vasto wrote, “the AUM between the musician’s body and the music to which it gives the earthly consistency of the steps it raises.”

Symbols that marked these steps surround me now, a book on Vietnam, a half dozen drums, a variety of stringed instruments, and a host of memories. I drum occasionally and count my steps in lyrics borrowed from Leonard Cohen. “Year by year, month by month, day by day, thought by thought.” Cohen’s lyrics, delivered in perfect rhythm, offer four couplets in a scintillating three beat sequence gripping the time from year down to thought.

I believe the beat which I’ve walked, round and inclusive, year by year, month by month, day by day, and thought by thought, will accompany me forward until the time my inner drum strikes a final note and the rhythmic beating of my heart ceases its knuckled thumping.

Perhaps on that day, somewhere between a remote cabin in the north and the burial ground where I drummed for my father, someone will kneel in the gatherin’ round and conduct a wooing on a rounded, mystic drum. I commend them (you) to thump a strong, tribal, grave and glorious beat. You will let it be heard, won’t you?

And you will drum grave and glorious
won’t you?
And beat your terrible drum
won’t you?
To the music which it gives
the earthly consistency of
the steps it raises
year by year
month by month
day by day
thought by thought
thump by thump
Thud by thud.

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Gregory Ormson is the author of Yoga Song, Rochak Press 2022; and Lantern Audiobook, 2023. Midwest Intimations was his winning longform lyric essay in Eastern Iowa Review’s nonfiction contest (2017). He was awarded Indiana Review’s 13-word story contest prize (2015). His writing has garnered Honorable Mention and Finalist positions in contests by: Bellingham Review, The Rigel Nonfiction Writing Contest, The Watson Desert Writing Contest, and New Millenium. His work is published in Cut Bank, Quarterly West, The Portland Review, Seventh Quarry (Wales), and others.

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