Alaska Quarterly Review 28

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Disquiet
Contact food truck map
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eBook Club
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Alaska Quarterly Review 28
The Cost of Living
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Josh MacIvor-Andersen
Instead, food truck map I'm watching Tool's Maynard Keenan on YouTube's center screen, a live performance of "Undertow" from 1994, his shirtless torso bending and rippling, a kind of drunken crash test dummy with killer abs. He's wearing sweatpants, food truck map is both mohawked and mulleted, and three and a half minutes in, he looks like he is being periodically shocked by a powerful battery. His voice defies his stature, defies nature, booms perfect and dark and unforgettable out of such a hunched over, jittery, awkward little man.
But then there is Kim Walker-Smith in the "suggested for you" queue on the right side of the screen, eye-level with that madman. Walker-Smith is one of the forces behind Jesus Culture, a praise and worship band out of Redding, California, whose music is anthemic God-shouting where every song builds and builds into a kind of worshipful hysteria, at times entirely improvisational, and Kim Walker-Smith stands on stage with her eyes closed and arms outstretched and there's not a doubt in her mind, I'll bet, that the music is rising directly to the ears of the living God of the universe, who has the hairs of her head numbered, who rocketed through the cosmos to land here and save and heal and live in the hearts of his followers.
Yet this is where I've landed. All those Sundays. food truck map All those Bible lessons. Then those zig-zagging, off-kilter adolescent years where nothing quite made sense except anger and music and a little LSD. Or maybe a lot.
My grandfather, just shy of a century, turned to ash after a long battle with cancer. The baby growing in my wife's belly—a tiny developing respiratory system, just ten weeks gestating—goes into the ground. And now news of the quiet, brilliant student who sat on the edge of my small writing class, found dead in her campus apartment due to "complications with depression."
Tonight all I could manage is slumping behind a desk and starting a conversation with YouTube. Inviting  the voices, beginning food truck map the exchange. Maynard food truck map and Kim have arrived singing their different choruses, and we're all here now in this tiny office overlooking Second Street, wondering who will have the next word. And perhaps the last.
I first heard Tool when I worked third shift at a traditional European-style bakery in Nashville. One of the bosses, Pat, was a heavyset headbanger with an angry heart. He scored us a stereo system food truck map loud enough to saturate the entire warehouse with music, and then we all fought for airtime. I leaned toward the Grateful Dead, but Pat usually had his way. I would be busy rearranging loaves of sourdough to the oven's hotspots, singing off-key to "Uncle food truck map John's Band" only to hear Jerry Garcia's voice suddenly go silent, and within seconds, this murky throbbing baseline and kick drum, a shotgun blast of screeching guitar, and then Maynard's unforgettable timbre, which is both whispery and earsplitting.
Pat would explode from the office where the CD console lived and begin stomping around the warehouse, singing along and jabbing his meaty fingers at all the bench workers. It was like he was trying to speak to us through the lyrics. I think he considered it a management style:
I had gotten right with God after a long hiatus, a kind of conversion, and was trying to make sense of my recovered faith, which felt like an awkward, ill-fitted suit. I kept adjusting my necktie. Pat would put on the Tool songs most antagonistic toward God (they are numerous), turning them up loud, and I would try and keep to myself at the ovens, disappear in the heat and steam and flour-dusted air. 
We will scatter Grandpa at the top of Superstition Mountain outside of Phoenix, Arizona. But first we need to coordinate the family's schedule. We'll get as atmospherically high as we can, and I imagine the air current will be pretty strong up there. I imagine his ashes going the way of that wind, although I've heard ashes rarely scatter right. Too drifty. Too clingy.   
We'll do our best. Grandpa Marv was ninety-seven. My wife and I were able to fly out just in time to introduce him to his great grandson, who wasn't even freaked out by all the machines or Grandpa's mottled, cancerous skin. I, on the other hand, was a wreck, and had to keep darting from his hospital room to weep in the corridor.
We flew back home with a camera full of digital photos and a few weeks later got the news