February 17, 2023 | Read Online

Hurt.

Metaphors I've unearthed digging through the dirt.

Cole Schafer
February 17, 2023

The Short Story...

I recently had the honor of collaborating with a director named Luke Jaden on a visual poetry short starring Jimmie Fails (who you might recognize from A24's critically-acclaimed film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco).

The soundtrack for the short is my cover of Hurt by Nine Inch Nails. I couldn't be prouder of both it and the film.

The Whole Story...

In the winters, particularly in the months of January and February, I find it difficult to leave my home.

The sky remains an ominous grey you'd sooner expect to see in Nosferatu than Nashville, Tennessee and while the temperatures don't plummet to nearly the same depths as Chicago's––a city I called home for the better part of a year––they're as contrary as a Siamese.

Because of this, much of my writing during the winter months is done within the comfort of my own home. I'll rise after a good seven hours of sleep––normally around 8:30 a.m. because I don't usually get to bed until an hour or so after midnight––and I'll take the first 30-minutes of my day "tidying up" before sitting down at my writing desk at 9 a.m.

Growing up, my mother was militant about us keeping our rooms in near perfect order with the focal point of this orderliness being our beds. In the mornings before school, we were expected to make our beds and not half-ass them. Sheets were to be tucked. Covers, slicked. Pillows, fluffed.

This habit of making my bed has stuck with me well into adulthood. Starting my day without making my bed feels akin to me running a marathon without properly tying my shoes. It's just something I will not do (despite me recognizing the practice has become something of an OCD).

Once my bed is sitting as pretty as a piece of origami, I'll brush my teeth while I let June outside to use the restroom.

While she takes her morning shit, I fetch her a bowl of dog food. Right now, it's said to be a mix of masticated buffalo and sweet potato but it looks more like rabbit droppings versus anything remotely resembling either.

I place the bowl next to her pillow in my writing room along with several bones for her to choose from after her meal––June goes through bones like Pamela Anderson does men––and while she wolfs down her breakfast, I crack open a squatty bottle of Stumptown cold brew, prop open my ancient MacBook Air that's as noisy as a 1980 Dodge Power Wagon and fire up my little space heater no bigger than a gopher, that spits hot hair onto my bare feet like a dragon with a serious foot fetish.

I know that last sentence was a hell of a lot to take in––and I do apologize for my lack of brevity––so I'm going to stop typing for a moment so you have the chance to read it again.

Save for sharing a slow Saturday morning with Kace, this to me is heaven on Earth. There's no place I'd rather be.

In a past life, I wasn't a tiger or a bear or a wolf. I wasn't some beautiful, ferocious predator that assholes like myself like to get tattooed to their arms. I was a beast of burden. I was a horse or a mule or an ox that derived his meaning from his labor.

Kace, on the other hand, is like a lioness. She will do a great deal of living in between her creative periods––gathering up inspiration like bees do honey––and then with an intensity and speed that'd make a rattlesnake tremble, she will go in for the kill, producing a beautiful body of work in the blink of an eye.

It's awing to watch, as I sit in my field and I graze.

My hard-hat approach to work is all I've ever known. If I couldn't write––which many would argue I can't––I would be a laborer of some kind.

When I was still trying to make it as a writer––this was six or seven years back––I would take odd jobs to make ends meet. Sometimes, this was tearing out carpet for carpenters to have a clean canvas to work their craft upon. Other times, this was landscaping.

I remember one afternoon I was warring with a bed of ivy that had become so violently intertwined that boring my way through it felt like sawing though chainlink fence.

It was the end of fall in Southern Indiana and the air was a wet cold that worked its way into your bones like a sadness that's impossible to shake.

As I was chopping away at these despicable vines, my spade struck something hard in the dirt that sent shivers up the shovel's shaft.

Curious, I dug around the hardness with my spade, pried and then unearthed a mud clump the size of a softball.

I took off my gloves and began thumbing away the dirt until I realized what I was holding was a stone. When I flipped the stone over, I saw that its underbelly was clad in quartz ranging in color from salty white to gunmetal grey to the amber color you see preserving ancient mosquitos.

After hosing the stone down and admiring it for a couple of minutes as my hands grew numb, I placed it in the passenger seat of my truck and then, I got back to work.

I still have that rock. It's constantly changing locations around my home. Some days its on my bookshelf. Other days its on my night stand. Today, it's on my writing desk.

Recently, I covered one of my favorite songs of all time: Hurt by Nine Inch Nails.

Fate would have it that right around the time it was being finished a director by the name of Luke Jaden wrote me about handling the soundtrack for a short film he was working on starring Jimmie Fails (you might have seen him in A24's critically-acclaimed film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco).

It's the proudest I've been of a creative project in some time and as I hold it in my hands now, it reminds me of that stone.

Anyway, I hope you enjoy it.

I better get back to work.

By Cole Schafer.

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