Mount Storm Park

Mount Storm Park’s first album Through the Dark is now available. We’re starting with a limited run of special, Cincinnati-themed covers available in person or by mail. Album will also be available for download from the Loft Collective website beginning next week! 

Track Listing:

1. Grey Gardens, Brown Houses

2. Clouds and Waves

3. 7 and 7/7ths

4. Swallow Blood

5. Mount Auburn

6. Eminent Domain

7. That Time We Almost Died

8. Girls in Black

9. Ending

Check out “Swallow Blood” above from the album. Want the words to the songs? Remember this site functions as the online album booklet, so there oughta be lyrics around here somewhere…

Update: Physical copies are sold out. If you like what you’re hearing here, though, you can still visit the Loft Co. site and download to yr heart’s content.

There are intense, recurring dreams I keep having. In these dreams, I never left one of the jobs I had in college but somehow continue on for an indeterminate amount of time. Strangely, the time period during which I do the job also varies. Sometimes, it seems to be early in the school’s 200 year history, while other times it is very much present day. Sometimes this changes mid-dream.

The dreams are based in a good amount of reality. For four years I delivered the campus mail at a mid-sized, isolated state university in a quintessential college town. Sometimes on foot, sometimes in a rusty red old death trap of a GMC van with “Frito sucks dick” scrawled on the old brown dash. It wasn’t a bad job, but an odd one which took me to all corners of the school’s academic subterranea.

The most common dream starts with me wandering long, bright white hallways along a myriad of twists and turns. It’s Hughes Hall labs, only even more confusing and expansive than the real ones. These hallways are usually cinder block. The floors are an odd, very old tile of various worn and vintage hues. The ceiling is full of white painted pipes that stretch forever in front of me or bend like snakes around turns. There are strange warnings and incomprehensible equipment occasionally along the way, bright colors and symbols and knobs and gaskets and hoses all speaking to some kind of vaguely dangerous science that could kill you in ways you don’t even understand. Somehow I know I’m a level or two below ground, though how I know this is unclear. I have envelopes or packages in my hand with a room number scrawled on them and nothing else— no return address, no labels, no contents listed. I never know what’s in these parcels.

There are no students in the hallways at all. The only time I see other people is occasionally while delivering my charge, when a nervous-looking, bespectacled face will peer around a corner and grab whatever it is I’ve left. A quick nod or grunt of acknowledgment is the total of our conversation.

It always comes down to my last parcel. Disoriented from so many changes of direction, I find it impossible to locate my last delivery destination. I spend hours wandering nearly identical hallways panicking I will lose my job or worse, never been seen again. The dream ends this way, usually, and is often part of a sequence of similarly themed dreams.

In the next dream, I’m stuck in old, rundown McGuffey Hall, trying to deliver a box that says Caution—Live Butterflies. I actually had to do that once. In the dream, though, I’m wandering McGuffey’s huge, dreary hallways where the decor hasn’t been updated since the early seventies and everything is wood paneled or the color of very old Mercedes or kitschy kitchen appliances you see at scrapyards. It’s February. It’s very cold outside and there’s the eerie howl of wind and ancient heating systems throughout the cavernous, Overlook Hotel-esque walkways.

I let the butterflies out of the box everytime. I try not to but can never help myself. They’re black and orange when they fly out, like some kind of living fire made of spring warmth and living wing pollen that gives allergies you’re glad to have because at least it’s finally warm.

I watch them float off, not really changing anything but maybe hiding somewhere waiting for something and I wonder, in my dream, that is, if I’ll be there when that something calls them out. Again, the dream ends with me being lost in McGuffy among the heater roar and harvest gold and enormous hallways from The Shining. Often I make it up to the top floor rooms, where some equally throwback academics are discussing something I don’t understand about Educational Psychology among dated books and bad carpet.

The final dream in the trilogy involves a new employee I have to train. To my memory she never actually existed but seems very familiar anyway. In this dream I have to show her how to drive my route. However, I have to be with her at all times because she’s had a couple DUIs and doesn’t have a license. Somehow, I let her drive anyway, as I’d never been able to get pulled over in the mailvan for anything in any event and it can’t hurt. If I can speed, drive on the sidewalks, throw things from the van, have drunk coworkers drive the van (these all having actually happened) then surely a little thing like state certification allowing one the privilege of operating a motor vehicle isn’t an issue.

In the dream, I’m giving her directions to the pipes, a place Gerard and I found one time when we didn’t want to work. Gerard, a crazy professor’s kid who walked our routes tagging random things in the hallways with a Sharpie and meeting up with girls on work time to make out, thought the pipes might lead to the steam tunnels we were obsessed with. They didn’t, but we’d go there anyway so Gerard could smoke and we could talk philosophy and girls.

In any event, my unlicensed coworker is driving us to this place because she also thinks it leads to the steam tunnels and she says she wants to get underneath the school. However, we somehow never reach the pipes. Each turn takes us somewhere recognizable and familiar, but never quite to our destination. We circle for a very long time before party girl parks the van in a backlot and admits she just wanted to go to the pipes to make out anyway and we could probably just do that right there. The dream ends with us kissing, full tongue, but me not really paying any attention because I keep worrying about how long it’s taking us to get done with the route and whether we’ll even be able to find our way back or not and asking myself just what the fuck this strange Bermuda Triangle situation is all about anyway. The very last thing is usually a thunderstorm, rain beating down on the roof of the van as the steam on the windows gradually obscures the outside world.

There’s one other dream that happens less frequently. I’m in the school’s formal gardens when I hear singing. It’s night time and I have no business being in the creepily symmetrical, manicured rows of flowers and hedges where the body of Miami’s first president is buried and where a student in the 50’s disappeared completely. The voice is awkward and indeterminate in distance or direction, and sometimes I lose track whether it’s me or the lost student.

 Anything that is almost probable, or probable, or extremely and emphatically probable, is something we can almost know, or as good as know, or extremely and emphatically know— but it is impossible to believe. For the absurd is the object of faith, and the only object that can be believed.

I remember realizing people get old and die, as in everyone, as in me someday, riding through Hamilton in the front seat of my mother’s near-death-itself boxy blue Mercury. I was eleven. It was maybe not the first time I had put the whole mortality thing together, but it’s the one I remember vividly.

It was late spring, misting rain, and quiet except for one of the ancient mixtapes playing on the car’s tape deck. The wetness and dark, heavy green poking out everywhere played counterpoint to the muted brick tones of factories and a sky that looked like a slightly lighter continuation of the city’s concrete.

The city felt closed in, small, like a shabby room with the windows fogged up.

At some point, Pink Floyd’s “Time” came on. During my childhood, my mother vacillated wildly between melodramatic, arty British progressive rock and various heavy metal bands— Motorhead, Sabbath, Molly Hatchet and such. This lack of a consistent, respectable aural foundation explains much in my adult personality, I think. In any event, at this particular time she was in the former, arty mode, so she’d dug out her old Floyd tapes.

And then one day you find/ten years have gone behind you

For just a moment, the lush melancholy I watched pass by through the window— old, sodden houses, overgrown parks, looming canyons of factories surrounding the road— converged with the slow march of the song to create a weight in me I hadn’t really felt before. I pictured myself old, no longer vibrant. I tried to picture myself no longer existing, not being able to picture things.

Shorter of breath/and one day closer to death

“What happens when you die?”

I’m sure I asked my mom this question a lot, as I was a weird, morbid-ass kid. This time, though, she must have been tired or preoccupied or perhaps on a philosophical bent.

“There’s no way to know, sweetie.”

There was silence for minutes, just the wet slicing of the car through standing puddles. The rain picked up, its steady beat on the roof underscoring the quiet, giving it a structure, a heft. The sheets of water made it hard to see out the windows.

“Is there a heaven?”

“Maybe. I’m not sure. You don’t have to worry about it for a long time.”

There was something satisfying about that, right then at least, with the promise of spring sprouting up. There was a whole summer without school stretching endlessly before me and it felt good to hear something other than the same stuff about Jesus or that other, terrifying thing that one of the older kids had told me; that there is nothing when you die, that God doesn’t exist, that you just rot. It seemed comfortable to keep it up in the wet, lush air.

I forgot I would die someday and the question became irrelevant, or its irrelevancy made itself clear again, or whatever happens in the resilient minds of children to make life appear infinite and invincible.

The moment came back to me, though, every so often, its weird, hanging silences echoing. When I got a little older science intrigued me because here, finally, was the real answer to everything, parsed out in logical doses and measured by machines. Then we learned about phrenology and medicinal leeches and eugenics in history and it all got very confusing. Yes, science has the answers, except when it is wrong, and you may go your whole life not knowing that you can’t judge someone’s criminal nature by the bumps on their head or that you can’t have a parasite suck illness out of you. It seemed frustrating and foolish to look for answers about infinity on such shoddy, finite ground.

I thumbed through my parents’ old philosophy text books as a teenager and ran against the question again. Only here, in the words of Kierkegaard, I found some solace in my growing attraction to the unresolved.

Since then, I’ve been in the same neighborhood as death a few times— car accidents, sickness, bicycle mishaps, the passing of friends and family. The old black robbed dude always has more important things to do, though, and just brushes quickly past me on the way to more auspicious targets. I feel when she or he comes for me, it’ll be an after thought, on the way to other errands— picking up the dry cleaning, maybe, or a birthday cake. What happens after that, if anything, I dunno, and that’s best.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

April, 2001

Some of ‘em seem to be out just for the fun of it.

You got the people down at City Hall, they got all these degrees, but they don’t understand a simple phrase. “Enough is enough.”

All Photos by Jimmy Heath.

I think it started with the winds. I know, of course, that it’s absurd. The current state of things has its roots back farther than a span of months, perhaps back decades. Things definitely feel different lately, though, and I only noticed it after the angry ghost of Hurricane Ike kicked the shit out of us.

Liz says that’s the day she heard Lehman Brothers fell. It couldn’t have been the first time we were cognizant of a change, I’m sure. Was it? I didn’t hear anything about the outside world that day because I was at Smith Park.

A group of us, maybe fifteen or so, were celebrating an anniversary of sorts. We observed five years of dicking around playing music together by meeting at an empty park at the dawn of the shitstorm. There was an acoustic guitar passed around and some skateboarding down a dirt hill. The sky was the kind of blueblack it isn’t supposed to be, a three dimensional wave hovering slow motion over us. We stayed, though, maybe because of it all.

The wind started soft, a kind of novelty, and quickly got mean. Trees fell near us. A small child was blown into the pond. Later, one of us swam across, facing the fury of the wind and miniature swells, somehow not drowning. Afterward we convened to the hospital because it was the only place with power and we were hungry. We stayed for hours, sitting at pushed-together tables eating cafeteria food like high school.

Josh and I stayed the longest. By the time we arrived back to 2020 Central Avenue, a fire had been built in the front yard. Someone had pulled their 4x4 within a couple feet of the blaze, punk rock throbbing and scraping from the shitty speakers.

Even in a small, dying city, you forget how dark it can get without streetlights. It all felt lawless— the fire, the night pressing in. The lack of electricity was something you sensed immediately, a change fundamental and terrifying. Angry Ryan sat hunched over the crank flashlight radio we had all talked shit about days before, guarding it jealously perhaps, or maybe just feeling vindicated by the strange twist.


Things got weird quickly. It was that night or the next (they all seem the same now) that Dar’s store next door had a window broken. He arrived with a posse. Together they were a force— a group of Jordanian men speaking hurriedly, angrily in their native tongue, quickly searching the dim building and dim perimeter, taping cardboard over the window, barking orders. I did what he said.

Once, when my car was broken into, Dar had me into his shop.

“Nick,” he said, “if I find out who did that, I will stand on their neck until they expire.”

So I listened when he told me to move my van in front of his window and stand watch in the dark for a while, a makeshift blockade against anyone looking to plunder cell-phones and cell-phone accessories. Later I would drive the van through dark streets with headlights like flashlights in the woods, listening to the menacing thuds and eerie organ drone of Kanye West’s “Swagga Like Us,” looking for strange things and catching more strange, slight whiffs of that lawless feeling.

Middletown has always been a little weird. Blame the lack of steady employment, mental health services, and the supply of drugs (most of the make-shift, household chemical variety) that fill the void of the other two. Things definitely got a lot more interesting in the days following the wind, though. A man rode a high-wheel, old timey bike about town, wearing a handlebar mustache, knickerbockers, a vest, and a distressed newsboy cap. A set of twins stood outside for hours a block down from our house and waved slowly at all the traffic diverted by a fallen tree on Sutphin. A crushed station wagon still pinned under a tree wore a sad “for sale” sign.

I found an orange foreclosure sticker in the street, presumably torn off an abandoned house by the wind. I was only surprised there wasn’t a neon blizzard when the storm came through.

We took showers with a flashlight pointing lens up. We suffered skin problems from the sand driven into every pore by our pondside soiree. It was gritty in my teeth for days. We waited an hour in line at a Schlotzky’s Deli because they had power. They did not, however, have much stock. I got a tortilla shell filled with turkey and onions.

A week-long lack of cell phone reception and internet connection made me feel, rather embarrassingly, like I’d been blown back into the stone age.

Things only somewhat went back to normal when the power came back. By October, a woman had been arrested for chasing children, cursing at police, and urinating on a stranger’s porch, all dressed in a cow costume. I swear I saw her first, stumbling in the middle of Central Avenue, udders swinging, not advertising a damn thing. Later, a sixty-eight year old woman would be arrested for robbing banks. News outlets dubbed her Granny Robber.

Middletown’s police chief shot himself while teaching his child about gun safety. A man was left dead in the middle of the road on my side of town after being shot from a van.

Forbes Magazine declared Middletown one of the country’s ten fastest-dying cities. A fabric slowly unraveling for decades became at some point nothing but some loose strings, a set of roads running through a mostly empty center.


Yes, the current state of things started with the wind. Not in any causal way, but merely in the way eras are made in the mind. Things are loose, disjointed. Up for question. I arrived at work early one morning a while back and a box truck was at the store next door, loading all the stock as the implied presence of the sun faded the empty parking lots grey from black. The next day they peeled the signs from the building while I was cutting the mastheads off unsold newspapers. A morning ritual— I read about the economy, foreclosures, the stock market and the next stimulus bill, then behead the paper.

I was doing this when they came to drain the grease trap one morning. First time in three years, they said. Didn’t know we had one, they said.

The men who cleaned it were from Middletown. They stared at you when you talked and had an abrupt, hateful manner toward everyone, as anyone would if they had to clean layers of stinking fat from a metal box. The whole store smelled as they drained a thousand days of pastry grease hidden under the cafe store room. Three years of what commerce left behind, floating through the air. It was a strange way to think about my time there, like archeological dig layers unearthed or tree rings exposed.

I don’t know how far it will go. Today a man came into the store and told me about his wood-carving business. He got into carving while working on fishing boats, he said. I found myself fascinated, pulled by the elemental nature of it all. “I’ve seen prison inmates carve the Last Supper in a bar of soap with the sharpened end of a plastic toothbrush. It’s a universal skill; you can do it anywhere.” He leaned close as if imparting a secret. “Even now with things the way they are, a man paid $38,000 for us to carve a headboard for himself and his wife. It’s got roses, trellises, and the names of his four kids. It will last forever.”

It sounded like work I’d like to get into.

I’d like more days at the park, too, really, playing guitar under the looming clouds. If they’re going to come, they’re going to come, and there isn’t much to be done about it but to keep on dicking around and doing what matters to you.

Occasionally, I still get whiffs of that lawless, up-for-question feeling, like the order of things is changing. This will probably fade over time and go away. Maybe, though, it won’t. I’m not sure if I’m excited by that or terrified.

It was very late by the time I was tired. After laying awake for a long time thinking about people and being lonesome, I finally fell asleep on the floor in the big main room around three. When I woke up, it was seven something and I wanted to run, to do something real and work-like, so I put my shorts on and went out to the clearing but it was too swampy for running and I had forgotten about that anyway once I saw what it was like. There was an enormous amount of dew everywhere and everything was wet and green and catching the sunlight like it was covered in ice and there was mist rising and the sun was shooting through it like columns holding up the half-opened sky. The weeds in the field looked see-through, like green-tinted glass, and it was as if the land was smoking. I took steps out into the fogginess and it was all around me and I could touch it almost and I realized I was in the middle of this misty cloud and probably couldn’t be seen from where I entered the clearing. I was only a few hundred yards away from forty something people entirely by myself and yet not by myself and I knew they were so close even when I entered the fog alone and couldn’t see them.

That night I got sick from a headache and slept for 10 hours while everyone else drank or played six square and sat in the hot tub. Maybe I had a fever or something but I had weird dreams and in one of them all the people there and all the other people I loved were in the field wandering through that mist and no one could really see each other usually but sometimes you’d graze someone else, maybe, or catch a glimpse of a face. Occasionally people would run into each other full on and hold themselves together for a while. You could call out and somehow the weight of the fog would carry your voice to the person you wanted to talk to and I talked to a lot of people I haven’t really talked to in a very long time, and they were like ghosts but really there, maybe just a step away in the fog or maybe in some other field entirely and you just didn’t know, the fog holding you together and keeping you apart the way it does.

The whole year has felt like some amazing dream and now it’s over. Somewhere in this dream though I dreamt people told me things I had known once but forgotten, or maybe someone whispered new things to me while I was sleeping in that big common room, and now I’m awake and I still remember the dreams and the whispers and can take them with me into real life, these bits of real knowledge imparted on me in the midst of something so beautiful and unreal.

I woke up refreshed that next morning, the morning we were leaving, and feeling like I hadn’t missed anything and like I would know these people all my life, even if our voices took twenty years to find each other or we never spoke again. That morning there was a wind chime on the porch and it was melancholy but not sad, so much, striking its notes alone, heard by everyone to voice a slightly different mood.

And then we left with the morning in separate cars and it was the most ordinary thing. Some of us stopped at a lake and swam and I got sunburned and broke a toe on a rock below the surface and it seemed like life was always this way.

RIP ripper.

They lived alone together, sharing a crumbling mansion in one of the most exclusive parts of America. Aging but somehow bursting with youthful energy, the two were born entertainers turned recluses who wanted more than anything to put on a show for us. There is still something singular about them, but in that singularity something incredibly relatable.

The first time I saw Grey Gardens, I was compelled by the same thing that probably motivates most people to watch it— a kind of morbid curiosity. These women are absolutely crazy and it’s fascinating. Edie and Edith Beale lived in the Hamptons, were first cousins of Jacqueline Kennedy, and had at one point been part of the fabric of upper-crust old money society. By the time of the Maysles brothers’ 1976 documentary, however, they were utter hermits, living in poverty in the enormous estate at 3 West End Road with raccoons, cats, and who knows what else. They do not leave the premises during the entire film, nor is it implied they do off camera. They receive few visitors and seem to correspond very little with the outside.

Their internal realm is fascinating. In dark rooms with peeling paint and crumbling walls, the Beales hold forth like American royalty. Edie dances. Edith sings. They weave elaborate stories and speak in strange shorthand. They have their own extensive history. Here are two women who have created their own world, that outside one of missing husbands and lost suitors completely irrelevant.

As you view the film, Edie and Edith begin to seem progressively less than crazy. It starts when you realize how funny the two are. Their back and forth sniping and witty banter betray a sharp cleverness in both. Through their hilarious exchanges, we’re drawn in, made a part of the family, given privileged information. Any morbid curiosity in madness is long gone, replaced by an outright love for the world of these two tough, witty women.

In the end, after the madness, after the humor, it’s Edie and Edith’s obstinate clutch on their world that keeps me coming back to their story. Without men, without money, despite the threats to condemn their palace, they decided how they would live. It takes only 100 minutes to see these two aren’t crazy, they’re rebels, living in the music and dance and stories they made. It isn’t an easy or happy world, as the film shows, but it’s theirs, and they aren’t going away. They live in a state of defiance.

If only we were all so courageous, no?

You leave a crumbling house in a dying town to “get it together.” To find a real job. To shoot a little straighter so maybe someday someone will want you for a partner, or something. And yes, you leave the memories of your and your friends’ lost loves and old dreams. But if you do it wrong, if you err too much in shooting too straight, you leave a vital part of yourself behind too, and that’s something it’s hard to get back.

There’s something to be said for living in defiance.

Edith: Yeah, everything's good
that you didn't do.

At the time,
you didn't want it.

Edie: I couldn't get away.
Edith: Well, that's the choice.
You can't go back and say--
feel gorgeous right now...
Edie: I couldn't leave.



Edith: and say; ''Oh; why didn't I do this ?''
Edie: I couldn't leave.

Edith: Because you didn't feel then
the way you do now.
Everybody thinks and feels differently
as the years go by; don't they?

Edie: Yeah.
Edith: Yes.

We found a strange place during a summer walk circling aimlessly around the city a couple years ago. We were pushing through brush and trees going up the wrong set of city stairs from the basin downtown to the cliffs uptown and came out somewhere unfamiliar, a place neither of us knew existed sitting there, waiting. Around the hospital parking lot and down a hill, we turned a corner to find empty canyons of tan painted brick and cracked gulch streets. The summer sun was bleeding everywhere in lines and bleaching all and fading it like it was already a memory and it was like the rest of the day, washed out a little and shaking from the heat. Wild growth was poking through cracks and climbing fences.

“It’s like being on some post-apocalyptic movie set.”

The significantly lower elevation insulated the area to traffic noise and the hum of a city closed tight around it. It was wild and quiet and lonesome and for a surreal number of minutes we did not know where we were.

New Bethlehem, aka Glencoe Place, aka The Hole, was built sometime in the fog of Cincinnati’s inexact history. Dates range anywhere between 1870 and 1894. The project’s mastermind is a similarly vague piece of knowledge, though it is agreed the most likely suspect was either Jethro Mitchell or Truman B. Handy…

…the short connecting streets originally had no names, but sometime between 1891 and 1904 they became known as Deronda Court and Secrist Court. After 1904 Secrist Court was changed to Adnored Court (Deronda spelled backwards)…

…Handy developed plans to flood the area with middle and low class residents out of spite. Seemingly, the only benefit of building so many residences in such close proximity is achieving maximum density..

The amazing thing about this city is how many places like this exist, the number of surprises hiding on hills or in deep green pockets no one ever goes to.

...combined with the unique topographical situation of the area creates a one of a kind experience.

Sometimes when I don’t know where I am I come back here.