Sun and Fog Wrestled

Things That Might Make Mark Happy or Are at Least Worth Trying

2011-12-10T07:01:00.000-08:00

1. Polenta cooked with chicken broth, prosciutto or bacon, parmesan, and plenty of red pepper. And eat with good steak and kale or collard greens, also cooked with butter and a bit of bacon until they caramelize a little bit.
2. Drink with Rogue Yellow Snow Ale or whatever IPA is bigger, pinier, and has more yeasty goodness floating around in it that I don't know about.
3. Feed also children in like manner, minus the ale. Instruct children to inquire about your childhood. Tell the happy stories and stories of near-death. And stories of being caught up into other people's stupidity and desperation, and imply that this sort of thing, although clearly not to be tried in the modern childhood, and you mean it, seriously, almost always ends well.
4. Listen to J Roddy Walston and the Business.
5. Listen to the Black Keys.
6. Listen to Neko Case's last two albums, the ones where she begins to talk to animals and restore the image of the Goddess. Talk to animals yourself.
7. You are now ready to read Leslie Marmon Silko's Ceremony. You really have to wonder a lot about the nature of Betonie's particular ceremony and of ceremonies in general. And you have to think about the way you map the universe onto your own geomorphology, climate, plants and animals.
8. Take a look at Eduardo Galeano's Memory of Fire trilogy.
9. Take more photos. I like your photos.
10. Watch "Le Quattro Volte". You were right about "Life in a Day". It's sort Human Truth Lite. But I still loved it, or like medium loved it.
11. Get outside and walk. It makes you feel better.
12. Buy beef bones, veal ideally, read the section on beef stock in Anthony Bourdain's Les Halles Cookbook. Make your own stock. The house is so chilly anyway, you might as well cook something. Salt to taste. Mmm, yum.
12. Maintain low-level, non-draining contact with a broad circle of people who help you think and feel. Be careful not to listen yourself to exhaustion.
13. Consider going back through bits and pieces of serious theology to see if it makes more sense now that you can sort through things, bring them into your own focus. You're not an angry reactive punk anymore: there are compensations.
14. Notice the center of your desires and the edges.
15. Get hugs. Give them, yes, but also get them. Feel them. No words or meaning, just hugs.
16. Consider writing the story of a ritual, or the story of how a ritual came to be and how it ordered the experience that called it up. Do experience and ritual shape each other? Is that just obvious?
17. I love you, friend.

Latest Outrages Against the Canons of Fashion and Good Sense

2011-02-08T19:08:00.001-08:00

Ebayed, purchased and am presently swaddled in an enormous old shearling coat. Emma says, "Janis Joplin. Or, no, who's that English guy who froze at the north pole?" Beard is enormous and blonde with a big streak of white down the middle. Eyes increasingly crinkled, distant, indifferent, registering irritation and humor at wrong moments. Black cowboy boots with crazy Maori-Mex stitching make me about 6'7". The phrase "get-up" might come to mind. "Costume." "Assemblage." Excessive. Outlandish. I'm starting to resemble myself. Keep adding layers.

Touch off palpable alarm and mirth upon entering Trader Joe's. Talk with skinny jeans scraggly beard guy about cloudy olive oil, how it will clear up at room temperature, whether this is a room, what the temperature might be, the increased greenness of the oil when cloudy, the weirdness and beauty of olive oil. To the no-longer-refrigerated hand-whatevered flour tortillas, which are totally fucking excellent, which excel my own attempts at tortillas, now aborted. Draw looks of amusement and horrified quasi-admiration from a woman. Buy six bags of tortillas because sometimes they're out, because they're so dern good when coated with oil and crisped on cast iron skillet on stove and then doused in butter and cinnamon sugar. Dang.

When Penny, the daughter of a colleague, was four the universe said something to me through her. She turned up at school one day in a faux shearling with enormous tortoise shell Wayfarer's which she refused to take off for the duration of my attempted interrogation. She also wore a leopard print mini-skirt, lime leggings and super sparkly ruby red slippers. Totally awesome. Now that she is five and can tell what goes together we have begun to part ways. But no matter. There was a period of time there when she was my polestar: the distant, twinkling object on which I set my gaze and kept walking. Now I will find my own way.

Praise and Blame

2011-02-05T18:04:00.001-08:00

"Laus et vituperatio"
Geoffrey Hill, from The Triumph of Love

Boating and alcohol and boots you can't break in,
and other things I'd explain if I knew where to begin.
It's true this family is a train wreck
scattered back to the Fall,
but there's no one to blame.
Those are your own footsteps in the hall.
That's all.

Bring misery match sticks,
I'll bring/ catastrophe kindling--
and meet me in the next dry forest--
we'll beat sparks from the same dead horse.
Now you work in the factory
where they make gods and governments
(but you're still not funny)
and angels that say, "No complaining"
and orphans who say, "No complaining."

Thatcher and Reagan. Pete Rose. Gene Simmons. You.
It's maybe okay I had nothing to say.
Who would I have said it to?
You said anger was just fashion, you said
"cowards" you said "liars".
And we were only fifteen but what we saw in the city
looked like real blood, real fires.

Bring misery match sticks,
I'll bring/ catastrophe kindling--
and meet me in the next dry forest--
we'll beat sparks from the same dead horse.
Now I work in the factory where they make
intestines and breastbones. We tune them like radios
to angels that say, "No complaining"
and orphans who say, "No complaining",
and rich men who say, "No complaining",
and junkies who say, "No complaining",
and widows who say, "No complaining".

All Our Bases Are Belong To Us

2011-02-02T21:16:00.000-08:00

My friend tells me I've been working a combination, trying to crack the code. It's true. Ever since Christmas I wake at five am. Chest tense. Mind and heart working the tumblers. "There's got to be a way." Wantu. Sunandfog. Playback theater. A one-man show. The Hidden Life of Human Beings. Surprise Wedding. Triptykos. The Hearth. Slow Club. Love Your Enemy.

Call Beth in San Francisco see if she needs a guy meet with the board and offer them part-time Doug's got an opening on the mountain go to the college and make nice with the brainiac pitch the parenting book find the name of that one guy from the coffee shop last summer who said he did workshops for Monsanto send an email to Trent's hedge fund operator keep building the website find the email of the author who bought the Nicoise salad send the left over writing from the youth book to Martin in London meet with the pastor from West Virginia push for a meeting with the Blackberry guy demand Frank and Andy invite you to Phoenix get Girl and Bear to the historical society.

Don't forget to work the present means: men's retreat in Minneapolis, Church of God in Orlando, Lutheran family workers in Kansas City, Presbyterian teenagers in Dallas, a Valentine's fundraiser....

Then last night Joseph sits at the counter and says, "All our bases are belong to us."

"What? What did you say?"

"All our bases are belong to us."

I looked at him. "What does that mean?"

"There's this Japanese action movie dubbed in English. At one point this one guys says to the other guy, 'All our bases are belong to us.' It's like some messed up translation." Joseph heads back downstairs to his computer programming. I wash the dishes but I can't stop repeating out loud, "All our bases are belong to us." It just makes me so damn happy and centered and releases the knot in my chest: "All our bases are belong to us."

Again, last night I can't sleep. Working the tumblers. Working the tumblers. I repeat the mantra about our bases and who they belong to until I fall asleep.

This morning an artist friend sent me an email with subject: Gentlemen Storyteller. His name was Jay. It was a 17 minute clip from ninety-nine percent dot com. I watched as the elderly gentlemen explained how he'd been hired by NASA to tell their story for their 50th anniversary. He spent a year listening and reading and talking to people. Now he had a story to tell. He began to tell the story. Ten seconds into his story I felt the tumblers fall: Cherry. Cherry. Cherry. "This is it!" I yelled. "What?" My wife called downstairs from the kitchen. "What did you say?"

I called upstairs. "It's clicked. I found the combination!" I ran upstairs my chest exploding like fireworks. "What is it?" Jill asked. "I figured it out." My heart opening, opening, opening into a beautiful unknown. I look at Jill and smile, "All our bases are belong to us. All our bases are belong to us."

In Praise of Restaurants

2011-01-22T20:34:00.000-08:00

At the bottom of the hill I live on, there's this restaurant/bar called The Falls. I love the place, even though it's still imperfect. It's the place I most often go when I want to drink coffee or beer 'out'.

The hill is really one side of the valley that opens onto Baltimore city and eventually onto the Harbor of Baltimore. From the continental perspective, it's the spent end of the vast, rolling coastal plain that you descend onto when you climb down out of the Blue Ridge heading east. The Falls is where you end up, by one route or another, if you are immigrating from Appalachia, looking for factory work, fleeing the shift and final collapse of the economy that supported household farming through 20,000 years of settlement culture. You sell the dirt and head up the Blue Ridge, across the swaying backbone of Georgia, the Carolinas, Tennessee and the Virginias, you cross the rivers and horse pastures of Western Maryland, noting how curiously well the grass still thrives over Antietam, Harper's Ferry, Gettysburg. You pick your way along country highways, the meanderings of which seem to have forgotten whatever historical logic first trod them into being, until with Baltimore in the distance you travel the last sleeping suburban Main Streets and the growing disorienting swarms of wallboard mansions. Finally you come to modest old neighborhoods inhabited by the hand-to-mouth middle class, teetering above the collapsed industrial dead zones of Baltimore City. Welcome.

Finally, you peer down Sulgrave Avenue, over the last several million years of eroded time, and there at the bottom is Jones Falls. Falls is a regional word for 'river', and Jones Falls is the river that Baltimore used to power its mills, choked into a coma, and then built a highway over so as not to have to think about it. And curiously, most of the beautiful buildings along Jones Falls, under the roar of Jones Falls Expressway, are old stone and brick mill buildings that are a hundred times better able to shelter actual human warmth than the mansions you've climbed down past to stand here, at the bottom of Sulgrave, in the neighborhood of Mount Washington, in front of The Falls restaurant.

The Falls is not housed in one of these beautiful old mill buildings, but it squats near the warmth of the last one, near the expressway, the lightrail tracks and Jones Falls. God, I really hate the racket from the expressway, but there is some deep principle of gravity that draws us all to this intersection--me and the river, the highway, the edge of the neighborhood. I'll happily sit out in the heat and roar on a summer morning and scribble just for the pleasure of being near this sense of gravity. Even though it feels poisoned in some ways.

The Falls opened about two years ago in a storefront that for years had a Korean grocery with nearly nothing on the shelves. There was then a struggling and failed deli. The corned beef was awesome; the lighting was death. The place was just too big, inorganic somehow, yucky. You ate the too-expensive corned beef and fled, wishing them well but unable to stay. When the place closed it was depressing because, while there are several other restaurants in the same little part of Mount Washington Village, there was no place for people from the neighborhood, really. We have expensive taste but no money. Mount Washington Tavern is an expensive sports bar with bad beer that attracts aggressive young professionals on the prowl. Ethel & Ramone's does often-good Cajun fusion but it's expensive and dark. I don't really know why I don't like it there. Their gumbo is excellent and I've had a couple great evenings eating late on their front sidewalk on warm summer nights. The crepe place next door to E&R can be a great place to take one of the girls to talk and eat snails but I don't like the fussy little tables. Everything is like doll furniture that got sent through a bigulator, including the food, sort of.

The Falls always has nine beers on tap, often really interesting and beautiful, often local. Always an IPA, and always a stout or porter. The the food is only adequate but they make a good burger and there's also more interesting stuff if you want to try, and there's always veggie stuff if you're with a veggie, which I really appreciate. But what makes it part of the landscape to me is the restlessness of the owners, the way they've gradually made a restaurant that fits the weird L-shaped space, found lighting that drew the room towards its centers, filled in corners with bottles of whiskey and tequila, glasses of various shapes, drawn the eyes up with clay busts, with paintings and photos, books. And the wait staff and bartenders are smart and polite in a very human way. None of the particular decisions is all that important in itself, although the beer is crucial and the lighting was deathly and bad bread is really sort of literally depressing. What makes the place work is something else.

Luca Turin has called perfume "the most portable form of intelligence," which reframed some of my thinking about art. That is, art--for me, anyway--is defined in part by intelligence. All kinds, obviously. If something is artful or elegant it is in some way just right, fitting. And when something is fitting in an unexpected way, there is the delightful pop of discovery, that clicking in the brain when a new synaptic pathway switches on. And something that continues to grow with those sorts of clicks and shifts is alive and enlivening. To know a restaurant as a form of intelligence, to be around for some of the attempts to make it fit the place: these are, in the modest scale of an ordinary life, great pleasures.

The Falls is slowly becoming a place where they know the food and drink that they serve. They have chosen it mindfully and they eat and drink it themselves with real pleasure. They stand around and taste and speculate over the relative quality of the new charcuterie platter. They understand the pleasure of drinking good beer, and there I don't have to feel self-conscious about noticing and sometimes talking about the layers of sensation and flavor. It is becoming a place where a person who wishes to locate himself or herself in the senses can attempt to do so with some of the resources and types of thinking required to do that. No small thing.

The continent is behind you. The Falls is just down there, at the bottom of Sulgrave Avenue.

Call and Response - the Folkways of the Urban Bicycle Commuter

2010-12-05T19:56:00.000-08:00

Before a man is going to push his boulder up the hill there are a few questions he must answer. So too did I have to answer some questions before I got going: first, "Am I strong enough?"; second, "Can I keep the bicycle in good working condition?"; third, "Can I be safe, pushing this boulder?"

I take this third more seriously now than I did when I was a bicycle messenger in D.C. one summer in college. I shudder to think of the things I did then: riding one way the wrong way down one-way streets in rush hour. Being willing to do almost anything to avoid stepping down of the bike - cutting across busy intersections at crazy angles, veering up onto the sidewalk heedless of (even rejoicing in) the stricken looks on the pedestrian faces.

I am a materially different person these days. Old and fat. A father. Winner of bread. It would not do to die or be maimed or suffer the dependent and deranged state of the traumatically brain injured. That of course could still happen, but meanwhile I will try to do my bit not to raise the odds. One of my goals, after all, is to get healthier.

That was not the only kind of safety to consider. The neighborhoods through which I would ride are the stuff of white-flight nightmares: abandoned row-houses, arrests on the street, poverty, suspicion, and violence. Or so I imagined. The fact is that the intra-urban interstate I commuted along in my car conveniently circumvented most of these neighborhoods, and I know of them mostly by rumor. So, to "do this safely" is coded language. Coded for me and for others who ask about my riding in the City: first they clearly think of how narrow and congested many of the City's street's are, and then they almost inevitably ask, "Wait, how do you ride home? What route do you take? What neighborhoods do you ride through?" So, I thought about that, too.

What I mostly thought was that this plan would not work if I were to ride, guarded and paranoid, can of mace or other milky defense mechanism clutched in one hand, down the hill and up. I did not want to spend an hour and a half a day afraid. So I took the opposite tack. I decided to say hello to folks as I went along: embrace the whole thing. The advantage of a bicycle is that you are going slowly enough (especially at first, and especially uphill on the way home) that you can call out and there is enough time for a response.

So that's what I did; what I do. On days when the weather is not too heinous (storming so I can't see, or blowing a tornado watch's worth of headwinds my way), I try to say hello to most folks I see. I try not to be obnoxious about it - if someone's not making eye contact, is on the phone or whatever, I leave them alone, but otherwise I throw a "Mornin", "Evenin", or "How you doin?" their way. Almost all of the people I interact with to and from work are African American. Probably two-thirds of them respond to the call, but here's the thing: not one of them has been rude or hostile or paranoid. Everyone who responds has been nice, and I get all kinds of responses back: "Hey", "Why hello, how are you?", "'Sup?", "Be safe", "What's goin on, big man?", "Mornin", "Evenin", "Hey, Brother", endless variations in the various accents telling of lifelong city residency, immigration from the Carolinas or other points south, or New York or Philly. I had a conversation with one guy in a car at the end of the summer about the importance of hydration - he had just come from working out and I was nodding my head to the music coming through his open windows. He told me to make sure I got enough water because it was hot and it was important for my health.

Occasionally the call comes from the pedestrians, and not from me - one young man was waiting for a bus, listing to headphones and nodding his head in time to the music. I was going slowly up the hill, not pushing too hard, so I also started nodding, which brought his exuberant call of "My nigga wid a bike!", to which I could only smile and keep pedaling. I had never been anyone's nigga wid a bike before. Pretty great, really. Another man called out "Hey I keep seeing you!" - pleased - and I gave my response.

Occasionally - usually at night - I might get a long stare, and once, from a kid who looked like he was about ten, a real eyefuck and chinthrust, and a call, "You police?" I just laughed. He asked once again on another night but I just shook my head and kept riding. His assumption has left me pondering, but I'll write about that later. Once a young man in a car waited till I was abreast of him and blew his horn - I jumped, and all the guys in his car laughed, but it was not malicious and I was willing to be the object of fun. Another guy rode his scooter by me going my way, honking tonically, laughing like a madman, but again he didn't bother me (and the sudden honk from the loud car horn is much more effective than the long blare of a slowly approaching scooter anyway).

Overall these interactions with the people along my route have been the most gratifying, most unlooked-for and wonderful part of my experience. That there is such a pleasant interaction between strangers of different backgrounds in this City just feels very good to me, better than the weight loss and sticking it to Big Oil. I do not fool myself that there is more to these interactions than there are. After all, folks are mostly just being polite. But the fact is that I don't think the white folks would be as polite to unknown black folks coming through their neighborhoods. If I ride through a white neighborhood and say "Hey" I often do not get any response. And so I am grateful for the people who are polite and warm to me, because it makes my life easier in a small but very important way.

My favorite call and response? I was leaving work, exhausted one evening and frazzled from the day. If I leave too late, the ride home is a little jangly and there is no flow, no rhythm to the ride. This was the worst so far - my rear view mirror that clips onto my glasses had worked itself loose a few blocks from where I work. I reached up with one hand to adjust it, but then I saw a car coming around the corner in front of me: no big deal but without thinking I grabbed the front brake, lost control of the bike and went down, landing painfully on my left thigh. I pulled my bike to the far side of the street to check out my pager, on which I had landed and my bike, and to finally get the mirror situated. Across the street and behind me there had been a group of kids - five or six of them, about eight or nine years old on average, probably. These kids live right there, in the projects, in lives that that tend to be steeped in drugs and violence. (These lives I know a little more about because of the toll of this kind of life on the mental health of the residents in the community. One young man told my colleague, who kept telling him to take his meds at dinnertime every day, "You keep telling me to take my meds at dinnertime, but I live in the ghetto, and I don't know what this 'dinnertime' is, we don't have dinner....") So, right after I went down, one girl started cackling at the top of her lungs: "He fell! Oh, my God, he fell! HAHAHAHAAHA, did you see that, heeee fffffeeeeeeelllllllll". I flushed with quick anger and humiliation, but the obvious glee that she was taking in my downfall was infectious, and after about a second and a half I found myself smiling ruefully. It was dusk so it was a little hard to see, and I wasn't interested in facing my mocker, so I just kept checking the bike. Then, the call came, from one of the older boys in the group: "Hey, are you OK?" And my response: "Yeah, thanks, I'm just embarrassed." And I got on my bike and rode off. That the boy would reach across the gulf and ask me, an old white guy from the suburbs, if I was OK, when he had nothing to gain but just because it was a common, decent thing to do, has been by far my favorite moment, born of my clumsiness and his willingness to ignore the class and race differences dividing us.

I have a couple of friends who have been punched while riding their bikes or scooters. I don't know whether that will happen to me, and if it does how my answer to the question of whether I can do this safely will change. For now the answer to the third question I asked myself before setting out to become a bicycle commuter - the question of safety - has been answered, at least for the moment, but in a way that is more nuanced than was the original question. How safe is it to depend on foreign oil? To get fat? To ignore the struggles of poor neighborhoods and remain fundamentally ignorant of the lives of those who surround us? I feel less afraid, less isolated, less weak than I did when I started, and I am grateful. For now that is more than enough.

This Roma Girl

2010-12-04T10:50:00.000-08:00

What was it like? When you're a filmmaker you're always late for someplace else when the real shot shows up. There's never enough money or time. It's cold or it's hot; I'm late; no one will hold still or they won't keep doing what they were just doing that was actually interesting, and then something shows up in shit light or smiles at me, right there, and I don't see it because the film is already about something else.

The girl was about 12. Or maybe older and just small. There was food there and everything but all the people were small and hard, and looked older than they were, although I had no way of knowing how old they were. But even the children looked old. Not old with time but stamped with age to which time only needed to be added. The Roma aren't like the Czechs who age into good-humored cynics, or the Americans who age into surprised children. There always seems to be some chance that an American might escape mortality. On film they mostly look busy or surprised.

The gypsy camp was an ugly maze and I was late and lost. Men kept hitting on me, asking if I would take them home to America. I live in London, I said. Take me to London they said. And then this one little girl. She had very dark eyes, and it struck me enough to check what I was seeing without the camera. Although when it's bright like that the world disappears for a moment anyway when your eye leaves the camera. But it was impossible to see anything but shy darkness in her eyes. I mean their invisibility was palpable. And I couldn't look away. You can see how the shot wobbles. There.

And then I realized that we had surprised each other--my rush and her tears--she was weeping. They were all dusty, and the tears left channels of girlish skin down one cheek that spread to one side of her Roman nose as she wiped her face with her knuckles. We were hurrying away from each other the whole time but we did this dance, which I mostly got on film. She was hurrying back to conceal her tears, and I was hurrying to be wrong about what my film was about.

'Are you crying? Why are you crying?'
She looked away and looked back which was a kind of answer. I think she meant that I wouldn't understand, or that's what I imagined. On the film, she looks away and when she looks back she has decided that her eyes will be less opaque. She looks into the lens and the autofocus flickers and then she is gone again.
'Why are you crying?' I ask, and she shrugs. And then, "What is your name?"
'What is your name?" she says, and her voice is small, only the voice of girl, although very husky.
'Pavla.' And then, 'What is your name.' Now coaxing, which she likes, and smiles.
'Pavla?'
'What's wrong?' again. And she looked at me blackly and answered in some language I assume was Roma. I couldn't understand, of course. I speak English and Czech and some Russian but no Roma, of course, if that's what it was.
She said whatever it was again, looking at me as though it were impossible to say it in any other language.
She shrugged and--although it doesn't seem to show up on the screen--through the lens her face was a child's face and her eyes were green.

Romans in Sturdy Denim

2010-11-13T10:49:00.001-08:00

Marketing is mostly bunkum. Politics is mostly marketing, at least during an election season. And if you are interested in the invisible substrate of our collective assumptions--many of which we individually doubt--then nearly everything is political. So how is it that even if we don't see the world the way that we are told Joe the Plumber sees it, we still feel limited in some way by what Joe will supposedly swallow? Fictitious weathervanes of public opinion. Was it ever thus? At any rate, advertising, mythologizing, self-narration, romancing, bullying, pep-talking, vogueing, bunkum--these are sister muses. Especially in an age as persuaded by the rhetoric of images as our own.

V recently commented on my feeling located vis a vis all this American stuff. And the troof of course is that I'm no more located than him. We have equal rights to America, and similar scruples about the ethics of authenticy, about the misappropriation of images by marketers. And maybe a similar body memory of the sting when we're reminded that we might be wearing plaid or whatever, we might be out in the same heat working for the same shit wage, but we're still college boys. I spent a summer in California heat moving scrap metal and used car batteries that had accumulated for years in the inferno of the narrow alley between two corrogated metal warehouses. Coming in overheated and with my clothes coming to pieces from the battery acid, and the old guys who worked there year around just laughed at me, never allowed me the honor of being one of them, even insofar as I was doing a job even they weren't willing to do because I had to have the money. And I suppose even so I wasn't one of them. But why, exactly?

Their suspicion is not without cause, of course. Think of the "Tea Party" "movement" with its familiar Reagan era rhetoric of an evangelical Christian national founding and a monolithic set of "American values". This is a fantasy of the American past. Americans have always been deeply divided; the Union was always tenuous; our present sea to shining sea thing would have been unthinkable to anyone at the Constitutional Convention. If you don't believe me, o Koch brothers, read the handsome two volume Library of America record of the proceedings. Interesting and scary stuff.

And the Tea Partiers are not alone in their more or less deliberate revisions of the past. Both sides do it. We all do it. "Revisionism", though,--and the quotation marks are buzzing like flies, here, as they always do around this fecund poop--is just one way of slinging it. How about "reinvention"? How about "self-interested reinvention"? How about "interested but historically responsible reinvention as one important mode of problem solving"? How about that?

Levi's and L.L. Bean have both recently taken an interest in their own past. And in the case of Levi's in particular, their past has real significance as an image of what is worth repeating in the American past. This despite a history of exploiting other peoples' ideas and labor and distorting their own history in various ways. Levi's hired an in-house historian, Lynn Downey, in 1989, and the brand has wheeled out variations on old designs, some of them very good, and made their archives available to the public. The fact remains that you can buy two pairs of sturdy denim jeans, which Levi's actually does make, and they will, with reasonable care, get you through several years of multi-purpose use. The popularity of such practical clothing, and the fact that in the West at any rate, you can wear them most places without being discourteous to your hosts, says something good--to my mind, anyway--about one aspect of our national values. It's a strange brand of populism that is so fearful about manipulations of the market by "socialism" but shows no interest in manipulations of the market by corporations. It is also perhaps a strange brand of populism that characterizes the poor as subject to a kind of hereditary illness, and seems--in its public rhetoric, anyway-- to have a hard time imagining that the poor could share the pleasures of work. Work clothes made of sturdy denim that show the line of the body, allow free movement and are reinforced at stress points with steel rivets? That's not a bad start for a populist platform.

Of course it's marketing for Levi's, and they have no particular scruples about where populism ends and bullshit begins. Their ads are beautiful lifestyle marketing, like so much marketing. But look at this recent ad--short film, really--and this one which uses what is probably a wax cylinder recording of Whitman deliberately reciting four lines of 'America', his voice holding you so close to the four-beat rhythms of the lines that you feel his hairy chest, the cross-tie scratchings of the cylinder clipping through camera frames like a train.

I hate business writing, so bold-face-emphatic and easy-to-summarize, but I recently heard this thing that might actually be true: "A leaders hire A people; B leaders hire C people." So who are you willing to invite into your self-interested reinventions with you? How much of their voice and vision will you let in? Do they get to speak, or will you merely take a couple names in vain? Is this Levis' ad marketing--speech--that dares to enter the room with something truly anarchic and physical? Something like American Eros? To me it is.

IKNOWYOUHATEMEBABYBUTDON'TBREAKTHENEEDLE

2010-11-07T14:14:00.001-08:00

When George W. Bush posited that "thee hater freedoms, thee hater wayalife," my greatest fear was that a bunch of American religious radicals would combine with religious radicals in other parts of the world and that they would collectively take aim at the mid-tempo alt-country rocker, which is the freak flag of guys like me, and is the only vessel fit to enskull the mythy conscience of my race, narrowly defined in the 19th C sense which guys like me know what that means.

The idea as I understand it is this: if a given song could not be discussed in a conference session entitled The Dust Bowl and the Radicalization of the American Folk Ballad: From Dust to Grit or Is the Answer Still "Blowin' in the Wind"?, then the songwriter must keep revising. And if, in mid-discussion no one raises an index finger, pad up, to the dropped conference room ceiling and mentions Springsteen in half-ironic reverence or reverential irony, then keep revising--(note bene: prolly needs cars). And these conferences really are worth something, a lot maybe. When Pete Seeger, who really was pretty fucking courageous, sits all knees and elbows and chin and bangoneck across from Hugh Hefner and has a televised conversation about the history and implications of playing an African instrument at a groovy televised sexual liberation party with bunny ears and cotton tails and Hef is really listening and asking groovy perceptive questions, then something good is happening. This really happened and I suspect it could not, now.

And I like all this stuff, truly, but it smacks of tourism.

(Why is it that we need to keep coming back to poverty in order to say anything smart about democracy. I think we do.)

But so. A couplethree weeks ago I went on a whim to see a local(-based) band called J. Roddy Walston and the Business. I'd heard a couple songs on the radio and I liked. Reminded me of a sort of cross between early Cheap Trick and Dr. Professor Longhair. Boogie-woogie piano and mic-assaulting caterwauling a la Aerosmith or James Brown or Bon Scott. And I'd been listening to and writing (Gawd hep me), yes, mid-tempo alt-country rockers for so long. In fact I graduated to them from G-major artmurmur poetgurgles that I wroted in the dry well of my soul. I do my best, really I do. But I'm really not sure that the message of rock and roll is :be here now", John Lennon having made the ultimate sacrifice notwithstanding.

This is a little bit interesting: the opening act was this guy who looked really good in blue jeans and wrote mid-tempo alt-country rockers and who it was real easy to tell rode his wallet in his front pocket and made a big point of being intimate good friends with the next opener, Shooter Jennings. Now Shooter Jennings is the more photocerebral--and somewhat shrunk as if abandoned in the parking lot of a Sunglass Hut in a steady drizzle--son of Waylon Jennings. And he wroted an album demanding that the O be returned to "country" and has pursued this whole plan of wearing country duds but more beat up (cf. 'poverty, fake') and being photographed in psychedelic colored lighting from arty angles. But his latest plan involves a concept album co-written and dramatically narrated by Bangor, Maine's own Stephen King about the last era-closing broadcast of an independent rock and roll radio station before the Total Take-Over of a Rock and Roll Hating (because duh) Totalitarian Regime that curiously resembles Abercrombie & Fitch except without those louver blinds. So Shooter strapped on one of them Madonna mics (even less plausible in a tiny club in Baltimore) and straddled a little crotch-level keyboard with also a guitar dangling from him and counseled us rockingly to abjure our conformist ways. He had one of those guitar players with girl-long hair who can't be fucking serious but who maybe is. And the thing is, Shooter just screamed and kept screaming, hitting some serious notes with complete and desperate conviction. And the guitar player just shredded scales and doubled big notes with power chords until I sort of stopped smiling and began to think, fuck, these boys mean it. They're goofy but that's not the issue.

And this has gotten so long because I don't even know what to say about J Roddy Walston and the Business. It was they who were the second opener. But what they really opened. Was my heart. (I mean it.) J Roddy swung his dirtyblonde ringlets at his (actual upright) piano and pounded and pounded and screamed out the sum total of all Anglo-African horror and longing, and spattered us with the cumulative effluvia and sifted gold of all patient river deltas. It was just blues and only rock and roll but Professor Longhair was there with magnolia breath, and I saw Jerry Lee Lewis with his half-kidnapped brides, Blind Willie Johnson testifying in oil-skid feathers like a pigeon, Dylan or maybe Jehovah in a prayer shawl of lightbulbs and hubcaps. And when I walked out ears ringing as if the room still hung ringing around me, there were thunderheads blowing in, and the storm smelled like rust and like honeysuckle and like the sea, and it descended in black tatters over the harbor and Fort McHenry until the last of summer broke in sheets of rain.

Io Sono L'Amore Orange Preoccupation Pumpkin Pie

2010-11-07T07:12:00.001-08:00

Zest of one orange in the crust
2 cups squashed up roasted pumpkin
1 1/2 cups of half & half
4 oblong chicken eggs
1/8 t each of allspice, nutmeg, clove & cayenne
(Nota bene: as you add the cayenne, briefly imagine one daughter saying that she just likes pumpkin pie regular, and another daughter asking why do things have to get different, and then put in)
1 t of ground ginger.
Then in the whipped cream: ground fresh ginger, crystalized ginger cut up real small, the zest of another orange, powdered shug, and a passing afterthought of vanilla. (Things are getting less precise by this point.)

Serve with Belgian ale or a squinch of whiskey or do what you think best.

Enemies and Friends, Updates

2010-11-06T15:32:00.000-07:00

Enemies

Deer

The Internet

God

Former Enemies Now Listed as Friends

Tobacco

Romance Novels

My Penis

Io Sono L'Amore

2010-11-05T14:06:00.001-07:00

I am confused and a little embarrassed by the responses to "Io Sono L'Amore". Even the people who praise this movie are embarrassed by it. The Manchester Guardian is careful to slobber on Tilda Swinton's Wellies before tut-tutting without eye contact through another 9 paragraphs. Even Manohla Dargis from the NY Times, whom one would think could get this sort of film because she's really hot, is careful to mention that she's familiar with the whole art-film-as-bodice-ripper thing, and that if she wept a bit it was just that damn gorgeous but literate molar twanging away. Ah, yes--the senses. We took a class in those at Fillintheblankfordbridge.

Even Anthony Lane, who seems almost unembarrassable, begins by separating himself from those who may have just wholeheartedly loved it. First line of his review: "The best sex you will get all year, if that’s what you crave in your moviegoing, is between Tilda Swinton and a prawn." Funny, sort of, but also through-away for someone like Lane, and mostly useful as a kind of Purell for sincerity.

Part of what all this makes me wonder is. Well, first of all it makes me wonder if I'm an emptyheaded goof. And it's partly the frequency with which that question comes up that leads to my other, also perennial, question: Is a certain sort of sensual knowingness actually an innoculation against the senses? Because in my experience if you open yourself to the senses they will fuck you up (that lovely mulled wine phrase). We all have our stories, and it's hard to tell them because they are specifically beyond words. They're about how we come to remember that something is beyond words, about how a single full sensory experience can mobilize years of thinking.

"Io Sono L'Amore" is about that. It's also about the growing and preparation and eating of food, about various shades of saturated orange, about the way that gorgeous interiors come to have the appearance of a real world and ensnare us, and about the difference between bodies when they are owned and bodies when they are royal. It gives itself to certain excesses. But I think what embarrasses people is that the camera lingers on the textures of things in the way that the senses actually linger. Before we drag them back to the task "at hand". So many tasks never so much as civilly greet the hand. (I love that cloth also has "hand".)

And but love. It is a pagan eye that ranges from the grasshopper on a tendril to the spires of the Duomo di Milano, and finds oranges and reds everywhere--Swinton's hair, upholstery fabric, flecks of light on skin and on clay, spices and fruits--everywhere shades of orange. And when Swinton makes her final appearance, or disappearance, pumpkin orange and a gold that seems to trap light spread from the saffron wool rug that marks her sudden absence to illuminate the memory of everything you've seen for the last two hours. Please see this.

Instructions for the Build-Your-America Kit (The final project for my Constructing America course)

2010-10-17T19:21:00.001-07:00

You're going to assemble your own kit. Sources include everything ever done, said, written or made that seems to you in some meaningful sense American. You'll need a problem to work on, a collection of sources that offer possible solutions, and finally you'll propose a solution to your problem through a work of your own that draws on your sources and also includes your own best shot at an answer.

1. A persistent grudge or great hope to guide you. As you go through a day or leaf through a newspaper, what bothers you? What do you characteristically rant about or dream and plan about? Work on that.

2. Your own anthology of texts and test cases.

Once you begin to have a sense of what your area might be, begin to look around and see what has been tried before. If you're interested in American experiments in communal living, you might want to read about the Quakers, the Oneida Community, child-rearing customs among the Plains Indians, etc. If you're interested in vernacular architecture you might want to read about barn raisings, or Frank Lloyd Wright's Fallingwater House, or the connections between Navajo adobe dwellings and modern passive solar rammed-earth houses. If you're interested in American forms of feminism you might be interested in reading about Puritan female healers, Mormon female priests, and the Seneca Falls Declaration. If you're interested in American health care, I really have no idea, but the school and the city are full of people who know stuff.

So many more things have been attempted on this continent than one could be aware of. Before you conclude that American music is only rock and country, check out shape note singing, the hammer dulcimer, and Ogalala chant. Become an expert on things in your chosen area that no one has ever heard of. Begin to gather a shelf of books, clippings, web links, diagrams, artifacts, recordings--whatever seems helpful. Begin to keep notes about what possibilities they suggest. These are your working materials. We'll ask to see them so we can talk with you about them.

3. Now make something that seems like a sort of answer to your problem or question or hope. What we will want you to present will certainly need to include historically grounded writing of your own, but might also include other sorts of work if it seems demonstrably connected to your research. We will want an essay but we might also be sold on the need for making songs, a barn, a health care plan, etc.

You'll have lots of opportunities to try out parts of your thinking with people in the class. For now, just dig in and start gathering and thinking.

How I Survived Depression One Summer

2010-10-06T16:24:00.000-07:00

One summer my friend Kirk came out to visit. We grew up together and had maintained our friendship despite living on opposite coasts. For years we had talked of taking a trip together, finally the opportunity came, and Kirk flew out west. The night that he arrived we took out maps, talked about sites to see in San Francisco, and read guide books about the California coast. As we talked he soon noticed I was distant and uninterested.

“What’s going on?” He asked.

“I don’t know. I'm bored. I’m tired. I actually don’t care what we do.” Kirk looked at me a moment then shrugged his shoulders, “Alright, no plan. Tomorrow we drive.” The next morning we loaded the car, “Let’s head north, back toward the Siskiyous,” Kirk said, referring to the mountains where we grew up. I had no opinion.

I drove as Kirk took out a CD, “Listen to this,” he instructed. He put in the Basement Tapes, Bob Dylan and the Band working with ancient American folk tunes. He rolled down the windows and turned up the music. “Listen to this stuff…murderers, lovers, hobos, moonshiners, drug addicts…they’re singing about America. The one we live in but don’t talk about.”

I listened as we drove across the dry farm fields of the Central Valley. The day was heating up, we rolled the windows down. “We need beer and tacos,” Kirk announced and then directed me to a stand he knew just outside of U.C. Davis. There were coyotes painted on the windows with students, homeless men, and suburban mom’s standing in line. “Go get some of that salsa,” he told me. “The orange stuff.” I did as I was told, found a table and sat down. Kirk returned with grilled shrimp, carnitas, and a plate of corn tortillas. “I’m going to get beer. You want one?”

“I’m driving.”

“So what, we’ll wait it out. This is medicine.”

Kirk returned and stuffed sliced limes down the golden bottle necks. “Try the habeneros. They’re hot as hell. You know that peppers release oxcitosin in your brain? It’s the same thing as runner’s high. Here get some more of this on you shrimp, but don’t touch it or you’ll burn your fingers.” He smiled and drank half his beer in one lift. I ate and drank mechanically, my mind empty, my mouth burning. We went out and dozed beside a patio table, our faces toward the sun, then headed north into the mountains.

Kirk lowered the window to breath the air steamed with pine sap, forest loam, and lake algea, “Listen to this music!” The vocals muffled, the microphone far from Dylan’s mouth. The drums heavy and slow. “You hear that tempo!” Kirk yelled to the trees, the passing cars, over the motor, over the radio and the air brakes, “That’s hump tempo, brother. Hump tempo!”

We saw signs to the Trinity wilderness, “Turn here.” Kirk pointed. We left the interstate and took the highway along the Salmon river. The mountains were steep and soon the sun was buried by the trees, leaving the sky propane blue. We wound along the river until a yellow bulb appeared, screwed to a wooden sign that read “Carl’s Fishing Cabin’s.” We woke the manager and paid for a night stay.

“Any place we can get some food?” I asked.

“Nope,” the manager said, half-turned toward bed. “I got a bag of pretzels.”

We paid two bucks for the pretzels, and Kirk found an orange in his back pack and quartered it. We set kitchen chairs in a clearing behind the cabins and looked up at the moonless night.

“I’m going to read something to you. Wait here. Kirk went indoors and came out with a night table. He rummaged inside then returned with a handful of candlesticks which he placed in a series of coffee cups and juice glasses. He lit the tilting candles, pulled a chair into their glow and opened a book. “This is Whitman. Now listen. Just feel the rhythm of this thing.”

We had no food for dinner, no plan for the next day, no television, or cell phone connection for distraction, so I sat outside and watched the stars spin and listened to Whitman mourn:

Sing on, sing on you gray-brown bird,

Sing from the swamps, the recesses, pour your chant from the bushes,

Limitless out of the dusk, out of the cedars and pines.

Sing on dearest brother, warble your reedy song,

Loud human song, with the voice of uttermost woe.

O liquid and free and tender!

O wild and loose to my soul—O wondrous singer,

I listened to Whitman’s song, felt his grief rhythms, breathed the warm night scent of the cedars and pines, pulled a blanket up to my neck, and quietly fell asleep.

The next morning we discovered the manager rented inflatable kayaks. We put on shorts and suntan lotion. We found two smashed peanut-butter granola bars in the trunk for breakfast. We filled water bottles, rented boats, life jackets, and paddles and had the manager shuttle us up river.

The day was bright and the river refreshingly cool and white. For the morning hours we stayed quiet, each of us navigating the rapids beneath the August sun, but towards the early afternoon the river skirt spread wide and heavy and eventually we found our kayaks spinning gently in an eddy shaded by young willow trees. Our skin burned red, our bodies tired from paddling, our stomachs empty, we each lay back in our kayaks and fell asleep. It was a half hour, maybe longer, before we rose and paddled the final half-mile to the fishing cabins while Kirk gave me his thoughts, "Buddhism is ancient psychology. They got a system to freedom. All we got is stories. Abraham trying to kill his son. Noah drunk and naked, sleeping with his daughters. That woman who puts a tent stake through a guys head. You see? We're just stories you and me. That's all we got." We pulled our kayaks up the river bank, returned them to the manager, and headed out on the highway mad with hunger.

As we drove out I remembered a restaurant my sister had once worked at. It was run by an Italian, a woman named Madelena from the island of Sardinia. The story was that Madelena was a celebrated five star chef in San Francisco. She married a wealthy, retired stockbroker and they built a vacation home up in Dunsmuir, a poor mountain town along the headwaters of the Sacramento River. After a couple of years, the marriage ended and Madelena kept the house in Dunsmuir, bought the abandoned train depot in town and turned it into a restaurant. From September through May she served dinner two nights a week, Friday and Saturday.

“That’s where we’re going.” Kirk announced. Once we got in cell range I called information and they put me through to Madelena’s. “We have one table at 9:00pm.”

“We’ll take it.” I told them.

We drove north, into the winding Siskiyous and came into Dunsmuir around 8 pm. We found the small depot and waited outside. The building was freshly painted--yellow marigold with blood red trim. Alongside the building was a large herb garden that smelled of marjoram and rosemary. We waited hungry and dehydrated. Finally our hour came and we took our seats. Madelena cooked in the middle of the room, surrounded by a wooden counter-top that came just below her shoulders. She wore a white summer dress with a white apron, her black hair pulled back with a bright red bandana. She was in her mid-50’s, and was startlingly beautiful, like a middle-aged Sofia Loren, dark hair, her eyes large and fierce, her skin browned by the sun. She worked confidently among the fry pans, and steaming pots, barking quick orders to her sue chef. She served the food on white plates then slammed her hand on the counter, causing the wait staff to leave their tasks to deliver the food fresh from the fire.

We were the last to be seated and as we perused the menu the restaurant began to empty out. The sight and smell of food made me delirious and I found myself breaking out in lust as I read descriptions of sliced tomatoes, avocadoes, salmon and swordfish. We made our selections, ordered a bottle of Chianti and waited. The appetizers arrived first. Two tender half moons of avocado filled with tiny squares of mozzarella, dressed in basil leaves, sliced cherry tomatoes, spring green chunks of avocado, all dressed in olive oil and balsamic vinegar. It was exquisite. Soft and rich, the food melted in our mouths. I looked at Kirk and watched his eyes fill with tears. The waiter brought warm slices of pugliese, little plates of Sicilian olives covered in light green oil and sea salt. We dipped the warm crusted bread, ate the dark olives and drank our Chianti and began to laugh with a childlike pleasure at the taste of good food, the pleasure of hunger answered.

The salads arrived, crisp palms of endive covered in paper ribbons of parmesan cheese. Then plates of fresh green beans, crisp and sugary, pan-fired with toasted walnuts. Slowly, sacramentaly, we ate the green beans, now both of us silent, wiping tears from our faces. The smoky walnuts, the sweet green stems, it was like eating summer itself.

Then came the main course. Halibut grilled, covered in toasted fennel seeds. ribeye steak cooked in green peppercorns and olive oil. Warm summer vegetables, crook neck and zucchini. I remember my first taste of the fish she had prepared. It was like eating God, eating love, it was like tasting food for the first time. Through tears I said to my friend, “This is communion! No one can eat this and not feel one with God.”

The restaurant almost empty, emboldened by the wine, we began to cry out, “Madelana we worship you!” “Madelena, you are breaking our hearts!” “Madelena, you must come home with us!” We motherless men ate and drank and called to Madelena, our cook, our lover, our mother, the divine feminine incarnate. But Madelena, not unaware of her powers and the effect they had on men, ignored our cries of praise. She did not acknowledge us, nor the three or four men who lingered at her counter. Instead she stayed busy at her art, her large eyes attentive to her handiwork, her red lips even, without expression.

We ate and laughed and cried and shared our plates until Kirk pushed himself back from the table, and looked at me. I returned his smile, my senses awake, my heart alive, my head full of wonder. Kirk looked at me, and loved me, and called out into the half empty room, “More wine! More wine ! My friend is himself again. My friend has returned!”

I laughed, suddenly hearing the truth in his words. I had been lost, disconnected, stuck someplace within myself, outside of myself. Overwork, repressed feelings, overthinking, I had become detached, distant, stuck. But the movement of the river, the sun burning on my skin, the fasting from food, the smell of the woods, the throbbing music, the poetry of grief, the woman with ancient beauty, the culinary love-making, the care of a good friend had brought me home to myself.

Without thought, I stood upon my chair and called to Madelena. “Madelena you have healed me!” I raised my glass to her and she gave me a small smile and a quick nod.

The waiter returned with our check, we were now the only patrons left in the room. “But we’re still hungry,” I protested. “We’ve traveled far, the night is young, we’re not ready to leave.”

“I’m sorry,” he replied, “but the kitchen is closed.”

“That’s not possible,” I protested.

“Don’t you see,” Kirk interrupted. “We are two pilgrim souls. We alone can appreciate her gifts.”

The young waiter looked confused and embarrassed. “Let me talk to her.” We clinked our glasses and waited, in full confidence, that she could not turn away such devotion.

The waiter returned, “She wants to know what you want from her.”

“What we want?” I shouted, my heart now burning within. “We want her to feed us. We want everything! All of it! Until we are satisfied.” I stood and looked past the waiter, I looked at Madelena standing at the center of the room. “We want everything, the whole meal, repeated. The appetizers, the bread, the salads, the vegetables, the main courses, everything, everything, everything, all over again.”

At this my friend rose immediately to his feet. “Yes, yes! Exactly! Whatever the price! All of it!” We stood and watched and waited while Madelena studied us without expression. It was nearing eleven at night, the front door was locked, the tables had been cleared and set for the next day. We waited in confidence, with full hearts, with my desires returned and intact, we waited.

Then slowly, her face broke open, she looked at us, felt our hearts and smiled and said, “Sit down.”

“Hurray!” We shouted, like boys on a playground. We sat, our table was wiped clean, fresh napkins and silverware were placed in front of us, a new candle was lit and brought to our table, with new glassware, a fresh bottle of wine. We sat and we ate, slowly, gratefully, until long after midnight we ate and laughed and cried at the flavors and talked of past love, broken dreams, and sorrows. We ate and Kirk quoted poetry to Madelena, we drank and sang songs to Madelena. And later, as she ushered us out the front door, she kissed our cheeks goodnight and we walked across the street and found a room and slept the deep sleep of full-hearted men.

We slept until noon then awoke, refreshed, without hangovers or heaviness, and began the drive home. “Do you want breakfast?” Kirk asked. “Yes.” I told him, “I want pancakes and eggs, bacon, dark coffee and a beautiful waitress.”

“My friend is back.” Kirk smiled. And we headed for home.

Driving the Baby-Sitter

2010-10-02T06:40:00.002-07:00

He drove the mini-van through the stonewall streets of suburban Wellesley. She sat shotgun, shoulders tense but otherwise her demeanor was more like an anthropologist that an actual babysitter. At a stop sign they sat for a minute, blinded in the slow rhythm of passing headlights. He tried to see her face in the shadows and beams; her face was all shadows and beams.

She read somewhere--some novel that fell into her flickering attention during the chemo--that adults gradually lose their faces. The responsive and unselfconscious face that children have hardens into a shiny mask. That made some sense. He seemed all gauzed over with care and a kind of eager safeness, but still nice. And still sort of like a kid, or maybe it was only the studied appearance of vulnerability, although she wanted it to be real. He was trying to see her partly-collapsed face without looking.

And then they were driving along one of the last stone walls and the turn at the swing set was familiar and they were talking about her next surgery and the waiting and rehab. And she said that she was done with being afraid of death. That if she died that was okay but that life was so good, so so good, and she was done with being afraid to be corny.

He seemed to be thinking about how to respond, and then only pressed his lips together in place of a smile and they pulled up to her parents' untouched lawn. She was used to this, to the look of faces trying to see her face, and it didn't bother her anymore. She wanted to see their faces, too, and maybe it wasn't so different. For just a moment his face was his real face, and she had to get out of the car.

Ill Wind....

2010-09-09T18:37:00.000-07:00

The last two days have been especially windy, blowing hard and seemingly in my face, no matter which direction I ride. The wind tests my mettle: the landscape does not change, so the obstacles of hill and turn are relatively constant. The traffic changes but on my route is usually not bad the whole way (touch wood, etc.), and besides, the traffic is just people doing what I'm doing - trying to get somewhere. But the wind is both natural, and I cannot help think, capricious, changeable, and cruel, seeking to thwart my homeward aim. So narcissistic. So vain. I probably think this wind is about me. Ridiculous, right? Well, I thought so, but then tonight I was going easily up a gentle hill near the park and the wind suddenly started up again, pushing me back, but this time on the wind came the smell of freshly frying fish and chips from Hip Hop Fish and Chicken, and Man, does it smell good. I'm huffing and sweating against the wind, now contending with this visceral tugging sensation in my gut. So distracting. An ill wind blowing me no good, indeed.... I get around the corner and suddenly the smell and the wind die down, and I'm no longer being tested, punished. I become expansive, say Hey to folks as I ride by, and find myself smiling a little.

Life has its ups and downs....

2010-09-05T18:41:00.000-07:00

My rock has two wheels, but every (work) day I roll it down the hill and back up again. Which, OK, is the opposite of what Sisyphus was required to do, but the idea seems to fit well enough. Sisyphus was a right bastard - greedy, murderous, and too clever for his own good - but a hero to some nonetheless. He was punished for hubris, made to roll a boulder up a hill every day only to watch it roll down that hill at the end of every day.

So. Late June, and the minivan dies. Or rather it needs $5000 worth of repairs, which is just about the value of this vehicle at the time (since it looks like it's been rolled down the hill a few too many times its own self). British Petroleum are busy pumping toxic dispersants on top of 5 million gallons of oil in the Gulf of Mexico. My baseline emotional state at the time can best be described as impotent rage. Zeus, I tend to think, was peeing himself with laughter.

A radio report describes the change in our energy usage from oil in the 70s to coal now and the fact that really in order to reduce dependence on foreign oil we must reduce the amount of gasoline we use. How much we drive. My wife suggests we go down to one car. Our eldest is off to college in the fall, so we will be down one in the headcount, so why not?

My rage arcs up like the 4th of July fireworks we can see over the ridge. How can we do this? It will be so inconvenient, tiresome, tiring, dangerous. Difficult. But, like the fireworks, the rage is gone quickly and leaves only a strange calm.

Because, if I bike to work, I will be feel like I'm fucking BP the way it is fucking the Gulf. I will be exercising frequently, a habit that has failed to re-materialize after a recent hiatus. I will be doing something to reduce our dependence on foreign oil, since George the Chimp's YeeeHawww foreign policy seems to have made things consistently worse over Where The Oil Is. Hubris? We voted for the Chimp then didn't understand why we were loathed everywhere; we deregulated everything and are impotent to stop the collapse of financial markets, the defiling of the wetlands. On and on.

So that is why I find myself rolling my rock down the hill and pushing it back up nearly every work day. I tell my demoralized patients about Sisyphus with some regularity, about Camus' view of him as a hero, doing what he has to and Camus seeing the fulfillment in the work. The boulder is heavy but it is not hard to imagine Sisyphus noticing things on the way up and the way down - a new flower springing up, a new thought, the view from the top, however brief. I will try to pause in my boulder-rolling and jot down a few observations. I will try to temper the impotent rage, or at least channel it more effectively, and I will try not to say, "Who's laughing now, Zeus?"

Because that would be hubris.

Porn Star Names, Workable or Not

2010-08-16T16:48:00.000-07:00

I was just informed that scrunchies have been inducing fashion despair in your better class of girls for, like, ever. Didn't know, and now I have that sort of post-car accident feeling of being hit by waves of the reality of the grim nearness of disaster. Because the fact is that if I had gotten a bald spot on my crown I would probably have grown a ponytail and held it back with a scrunchy.

The second thing is that we have a channel on our no-cable setup that plays bad movies continuously. It's called THIS. I don't know why. You would think that if you watched THIS you would find out the pun or catch phrase that THIS is meant to call instantly to the viewer's mind. As far as I know, there's nothing like that. It's just THIS.

But so if you want to watch TV and don't have much time, it's a pretty good option. You can walk in, turn on THIS, watch two circa-1972-AfroAmericans being blacksploited in bell bottoms with vertical stripes and groovy vests with no shirts underneath, and big moustaches, watch them go after each other by kicking kungfu style very near the edge of a tall urban building. That is maybe in a slum, probably. And one of them has a Zulu spear that he bends his knees a lot and thrusts out at the other guy and the spear flexes and wobbles at the furthest point of the thrust where he holds it for a minute so you can see his tricepts and the spear wobbles and the feathers near the tip fly about in the urban breeze with a tribal jauntiness that goes great, weirdly, with the bell bottoms. And you can imagine the evasive capering of the spearee well enough to need no assistance from yours truly.

Anyway, my real point is that I was just watching the opening credits of "Raiders of the Seven Seas" (1953), a title suggesting a degree of organization and follow-through that you would expect from a newly anointed Superpower. Sheesh: all seven? It has Lon Chaney Jr., Donna Reed, and someone named Yvonne Wood. So this all comes around to porn star names, as so often. But in this case the pieces don't quite fit together, if you'll pardon. That is, if it's Yvonne Wood (which it is) then she doesn't really have wood to deliver. And the whole near-medical bravura of the porn idiom is immediately punctured for your thinking viewer. And if it's Ivan Wood then he's saying right up front that he wants wood, when it is his job to deliver it. So on the one hand this would seem to be a movie about uncommonly competent and organized pirates: no starry-eyed rabblement, no casual hobbyists, no flighty chargers off on some impulsive tear with the oven left on.

But no sooner have you begun to enjoy the possibilities, amid the glow of the opening credits, of Yvonne Wood as a really workable porn star name, than you're disappointed by the suspicion that, for reasons too complex to twig all at once, it doesn't quite work. Like right after you break into Jello that has actually formed in the little bowl, and maybe been covered with prophylactic cellophane. Pure potential energy. And then--unalterably--absence: absolute nevermind: the uninterrogatable goneness of the utter, unrenewable, glossy plane. It was going to get mixed up in your stomach, anyway, but that's the sort of consolation unavailable to the cognoscenti. Jello is always eaten in a state of close-but-no-Kewpie-doll heaviness that is almost a metacliche. A cliche about a cliche. And maybe it would be possible to punch out the other side of this heaviness. But that would require giving up on perfection in this world. The movie gets five stars out of ten from IMDB. It's pretty good.

Perfume Review: Terre d'Hermes

2010-08-09T18:49:00.000-07:00

We've known each other for years, Terry and me. He was best man at my wedding, and right afterwards my wife pointed out that he smells like rotten oranges. No way, I says, what do you mean rotten oranges? Swear to God, she says. Well. So after the honeymoon I see Terry at work and go up to him, you know, to catch up or whatever. And he gives me this big hug, right? And for the first time I smelled it. The top of his head smells like warm stones like since we were kids, but sure enough wafting up from his armpits there's this rotten orange smell. Not real strong or nothing but once you notice that a guy smells like rotten oranges you just kind of can't let loose of it, you know? And I don't know if this is like some Yoko Ono, ESP, woman influence thing. Because I can't figure how come I didn't notice it before. And now I find myself compulsively walking by his cubicle, especially on warm days, like how you can't stop smelling your hand sometimes after you've been chopping garlic or whatever.
And then recently the dreams start. There's a stone throne at the end of this long, low underground chamber, right? And Brenda, my wife, right? she's being forced forward, towards the throne, by this group of small but very strong and serious oranges. Or I think they're oranges, maybe they're like tangerines or something. It's dark. But they smell like oranges. Or like the armpits of oranges. I know this sounds crazy but just listen. And the oranges have this strange, serious, sort of angry, reverent look on their faces, and their eyes are glued on the throne. And Brenda is struggling and looking scared and disgusted but also kind of fascinated. Almost like she wants them to drag her over to the throne. And then I look and sitting on the throne is Terry. Friggin Terry that I've known since 6th grade, only now he's on this throne with these servants that are oranges. Or tangerines, maybe. And did I say they were in long robes?, the citrus I mean. What do you think it means, Doc? I'm not crazy or nothing, am I?

Some Stuff I've Been Reading: The Build-your-own-America Kit Redux

2010-07-14T10:30:00.001-07:00

When I go back to Greil Marcus’s Invisible Republic: Bob Dylan’s Basement Tapes now, looking for a brief sentence that sums up the book, I realize how much I’ve invented my own version. Or maybe I have a clearer idea of what the book is about than Marcus could have. He only wrote it. The book centers around Bob Dylan and The Band and the extraordinarily jumble of tunes and fragments they recorded at an ad hoc studio in Woodstock, New York, during the summer and fall of 1967. Marcus attempts a sort of excavation of the images in the songs—the murder ballads and flood laments, twisted novelty songs and stomped-through blues standards— to figure out where Dylan might have come across them and what they might say about the way that Dylan was thinking about America at that moment.

But what comes out of a reading of the book is the sense that one could build one’s own America. That America is not merely something given at birth but something that changes over one’s lifetime and to which one might contribute. Or more than that, in Marcus’s chapter on Harry Smith’s construction of The Anthology of American Folk Music you get the sense that you could assemble your own America out of the hundred possible versions and all the spare parts, that the American past is a vast sourcebook of images, sounds, ideas, events and decisions, any of which might be an important clue about how to live. I was used to the idea that there is a black America and a white America, a rich America and poor America, red and blue, urban and rural, East and South and West.

But what Marcus shows is that Harry Smith assembled his six disc anthology in such a way as to rework those categories. Smith presents the American past as an odd and uncomfortable jumble of images, black and white performers presented side by side, unified not by race or class but by the basic occasions and themes of American life. He calls the three sets of tracks (two discs for each) “Ballads”, “Social Music”, and “Songs”. Smith’s anthology privileges the grotesque and the tendencies towards tall tales in American music, and invites you to think not about ethnicity or even genre but about ways of inhabiting the American imagination. I would have denied that there might be such a thing as an American imagination before reading Invisible Republic and then going back and spending several months with the Harry Smith anthology. Now “the American imagination” seems to me a useful and optimistic phrase. Of course one can, and should, go beyond national boundaries in exploring and constructing one’s world. But for most of us, the things that have formed our assumptions, desires and sensibilities are American, and so the American past is as much a sort of cultural genetic record as it is a warehouse of spare parts.

But the phrase “American imagination” seems optimistic for a couple of reasons that have to do with much of the rest of my reading of the last year. One has to do with something that Ralph Ellison says in his 1970 essay, “What America Would Be Like Without Blacks”. “Despite his racial difference and social status, something indisputably American about Negroes not only raised doubts about the white man's value system but aroused the troubling suspicion that whatever else the true American is, he is also somehow black… Without the presence of Negro American style, our jokes, our tall tales, even our sports would be lacking in the sudden turns, the shocks, the swift changes of pace.” This seems true to me. I know that my gait can be distinguished from an Englishman’s at 100 yards: I’ve had it done. I resented it in my Anglophile youth. Then for many years my loose-hipped American stride just seemed a flat fact, like the fact of the slight twist in my spine. It now seems to suggest the openness of human nature.

That is, America really is a mishmash of ethnicities and regional peculiarities. Salad bowl seems not quite right: burrito, maybe. But it also seems true in my experience that, although we may not be converging towards a single ethnicity, Americans mostly share certain elements of a recognizable national sensibility. If we are all, despite our other differences, “also somehow black,” then there must be something about our literature, music and political process that actually shapes us. The working definition of ‘identity’ in America must have to do as much with acquired culture as with received culture. We can work our way towards each other, or towards a fuller version of ourselves, by working with the sourcebook of the American tradition.

Here’s why this matters to me. The circumstances of my childhood presented me—maybe this is true of most of us?—with a number of seemingly unbreachable barriers between myself and the people and traditions around me. I was raised during formative years by a middle class and relatively lettered family in poor, rural Tennessee town called Copperhill. My father was a white collar worker in a mining concern that essentially was the local economy and that almost entirely imported its management from the world outside of Appalachia. Further, this mining concern had a history of union/management conflict that went back nearly a hundred years. Even before that the people who worked in the mines, often at great personal risk and physical expense, were locals; the people who directed the mining and grew wealthy from it were, from the earliest days of industrial production, outsiders. The outside world, for all its promise and importance, was deeply suspect. I was raised up on the weird doubleness of a culture that at once sorts people into definite categories and sends them to the same schools, that at once prizes and disdains wealth and culture. And although it’s not as if I had that much of either, in the context of a town in which many children’s parents were on welfare and functionally illiterate, the marks of relative wealth and culture were ubiquitous in me like a sort of ostentatious over-grooming. My speech, dress, bearing, sense of the seemly and unseemly, sense of the importance of seemliness—all this betrayed me as a foreigner with every gesture.

My response to this was to wear my foreignness with as much defiance and panache as I could muster. And as I reflect on this now, the two—defiance and panache—are very much at odds. I’m sure no one was fooled. At any rate, I played up my odd, invented foreignness, and it suited me in a way. I went to the English and Irish traditions looking for cues about how to think and be, became enamored of the young Yeats, the English Romantics, the tweed jacket, the pentameter line. And everything American, including the flag, reminded me of my quasi-exile in this country that I grew to hate for excluding me. But of course it also formed me. It’s the problem of the anti-Semitic Jew, the misogynist woman, the racist African-American. I’m sure this dissonance isn’t peculiar to America. There must be some self-suspicion and self-loathing wherever there is both social division and the hope of crossing through it. But America makes this sense of being alienated from what is right in front of you common and binding to an unusual degree. The reason is in the word “America”. The country is called The United States of America but we actually use the word “American” to mean something different than “of or relating to the United States.” To be American in some way is something exalted and ideal. At any moment the actual United States only approximates to the ideal of being American. As a boy I was an American without feeling in the slightest American.

But Ellison helps, especially when seen through Dylan as seen through Marcus. Ellison suggests that whatever we are, whether we recognize it or not, we are formed in our sensibility by each other. And Dylan’s growth as a musician suggests that we can participate in our own formation, build our own America and coin our own way of living it. Dylan’s restless movement beyond the walls around his Jewish and mid-Western heritage into the broad, muddy, polyglot, multi-ethnic American voice—itself restlessly moving between high and low culture, between sacred and profane—becomes a kind of self-revision.

Maybe it’s also through Invisible Republic that I see the three big novels that I’ve read lately. Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man, Philip Roth’s American Pastoral, and Peter Matthiessen’s Shadow Country all make an argument about the extent to which it’s possible to make one’s own America, either in one’s own existential imagination or in one’s external world. Because I’m still reading and thinking through Shadow Country, I’ll start with that.

The central figure of the novel is a farmer and sometime desperado, Edgar A. Watson. His own identity and place in the culture are problematic because he is among the large group of Southern whites who grew up with the grand legend of the antebellum South, the difficult present reality of belonging to an ethnic group that had outlived its economy, and a cabal of Northern whites and freed slaves as the ostensible cause. As Edgar grows up he loses his father to drink and racial vigilantism (his father’s own), his mother to fantasies of the past, his sister to the psychological toll of domestic violence, a black half brother to lynching, his inheritance to debt, his public honor to rumor, and finally his heritage to exile. Watson finds himself forced to flee a corrupt law and reinvent himself again and again, each time with different materials to hand. The central events of the narrative begin when Watson, aged 36 and several times a fugitive, arrives in southern Florida and begins to establish himself.

But actually this is not where the novel begins. The first of its three sections is a series of first-hand accounts of Watson’s life, beginning with the time in Florida when he was already seen as a tyrant and murderer. The second follows one of Watson's sons through an attempt to clear him of much of his rumored brutality, and ends with this son's conclusion that although his father's crimes are greatly exaggerated, they are too great to warrant defense. They are also too entangled in the great history of Southern violence to be told with anything like a moral lesson. There is none.

So while the narrative circles around E.A. Watson the whole time, we arguably never see the man. Ain't that the way of it? The structure of the novel suggests that Matthiessen’s real subject is not so much Watson’s life as the question of why various people think it happened and what various people think it means for the present. By the time Watson is gunned down by a group of locals, most of them his neighbors and associates, the reader is pretty sure that vigilantism is in fact the only possible way deal with people like him. The answer to violence really is violence? Well, no, but the understanding required to reach acceptance may be beyond all but the best of us. In a book that reminds me more accurately and uncomfortably than anything I’ve perhaps ever read of the air of violence of my Tennessee childhood, violence finally comes to seem both piteous and completely human.

Both Watson’s brutality, and the violence finally required to stop him, seem to come out of the same gravitational force of historical violence. This violence first seeks land and and wealth, and then finds its sturdy, enduring orbit around race, class and region, and finally becomes so much a part of every thought and gesture that it is nearly invisible. But then before you show up in Copperhill, Tennessee today and assert such a thing, first you ought to be sure it’s worth fighting about. The mutual hatreds that kept me from my classmates in grade school continue to sweep our worlds farther apart. But that hatred was false: it had to do with our heritage and not ourselves. And with deliberate and soulful effort heritage can be reworked.

Girl and Bear Part 5

2010-05-24T12:00:00.000-07:00

Grace sat on the rag rug, in the dark log cabin, and stared at the fire, picturing the glowing coals as sunlit peaches.

“Eat your dinner,” her father interrupted. She reached down and lifted a coin of buttered potato into her mouth. “Grace, that creature could’ve killed you?”

Grace tried to find words, but her mouth wouldn’t release them. The bear had spoken to her. It was not pretend. It wasn’t a dream or a game. She could still feel his words against her ear: Help me. It was as real as the heat from the fire burning in the belly of the black stove. Help me.

They sat with the sound of the creaking fire between them until her father stood from the rocking chair, exhaled and said, “Well, I’m just glad you’re alright.” His voice calmed, he reached down and rested his hand on her head. Grace closed her eyes, grateful for the gentle weight, “I’m just glad that bear took a liking to you.” Grace turned her eyes to see his face soften, “You need to take care of yourself, Grace. My heart can’t afford another loss. It just can’t.” Grace loosened at the warmth in his voice. He reached down and picked her up and she let her body go limp against his chest. She dropped her cheek against his shoulder, closed her eyes, and was at the edge of dreams by the time he set her in bed.

***

It was her heart that stirred her awake; her heart shaking with hope at the sound of a woman’s voice in the front room. It took a few minutes of listening before her ears could hear and her mind understand that the voice of the woman was not her mother. It was the pastor’s wife. With disappointed she opened her ears and listened.

“Jonathan says his brother needs a hand and he knows you’re a good worker. He figures in six months you could cover your losses and start over.”

Silence. She pictured her father’s eyes searching the floor.

“Listen, Harley dear. Listen to me. I heard what happened at the park last week.” The pastor’s wife spoke with a gentleness rarely heard in the house. “Harley. The girl needs a mother. We’d be happy to take her in. She’d be closer to town, she’d see other children. We’d take good care of her until you return. I think it might be good for her to get out of this dark hollow for awhile.”

Grace waited, her chest tightly breathing. How could her father leave her? How could he make her an orphan like that? She waited for him to tell the pastor’s wife to go home. She waited until her heart dropped, dropped into a pool of tears at his one response, “Alright.”

***

The first thing that Grace noticed as she entered the pastor’s house was the light. The pastor’s house was full of light from the tall bay windows, to the electric lamps wired along the entryway. All this light turned the front room into a morning garden of wallpapered roses. Everything glowed with morning sun--the laced cloth on the dining room table, the sheen on the mahogany bookshelf, the bluewater vase on the entry table, the beveled glass on the china cabinet—everything skipping with sparkles.

The pastor’s wife closed the front door. “Well, here you are dear. Now don’t look so downcast. It’s only for a few months. You'll take Sarah's old room upstairs, across from the boys. I placed some of her old dresses in the closet. You’re free to wear anything that fits.”

“Thank you, ma’am.”

“Now, you call me Mother while you’re in this house. That’s what everyone calls me, the boys, the Reverend, even the neighbors. You don’t need to be formal. Mother. Alright?” Her voice was warm and sweet and her hands smelled of lavender.

“Alright.”

“Good. Now up to your room while I fix supper.” The pastor’s wife leaned down and hugged Grace against her bosom which was warm and soft like a sponge. She kissed her forehead then stood and stroked the back of her hair. Grace stayed still at the touch, her body suddenly hungry for affection.

“Alright, now,” the pastor’s wife said while patting her head. “up you go.”

Grace walked up the oak stairs, her hand caressing the varnished banister. The bedroom was almost as large as her father’s house. She stepped inside and looked around--a bed so tall and full of feathers that it seemed to float above the floor. A window with lace curtains. A flowered carpet. A real nightstand with a miniature stained glass lamp just like a tiny chapel, with a golden pull chain that caused the glass to glow inside. There was a cedar box filled with two china dolls, their doll-sized wardrobe folded neatly beneath them; a little desk with a feathered pen and glass ink blotter. There was a white brick fireplace in the corner, the kindling stacked and ready, with a reading chair and a tiny stand of books.

The wallpapered closet was full of pressed dresses including a fur-lined coat, that felt as soft as rabbit ears. The closet floor was covered in neatly paired shoes, lace up boots, and polished Sunday shoes.

Gracie closed the closet door, then walked over and quietly shut the bedroom door. This was her room. Her very own room. She lay back on the clean pillows that smelled of rose-pedals and soap and let her heart spill over in wonder. The heaviness of her abandonment suddenly lifted and she spread her arms across the quilted bedcover, then hugged herself tight, and smiled.

With Every Steamboat Like a Hymn

2010-05-11T15:07:00.000-07:00

Josh Ritter show last night in Baltimore. Really amazing. His band has gotten even bigger--huge swinging grooves swelling up under what are essentially folk songs. And he now has so many songs, so many words to know, and just stands at the mic and pours them out in torrents. It's an experience of being near the Source, and you leave looking at things--especially clouds and trees and wind--as more news from the Source. Everything comes out and takes shape for a while.

Looking around the audience, thinking about who I saw in DC last year. There are now young finance guys chatting about old-school video games they can now get as iphone apps, and there are more teen girls with their palms held to the lights. A few hungry swimmers like me, of course looking reverent and studious. And more than a few shining faces waiting for lines that are close to motherlanguage for them, although they might not think of it that way--faces that wait and then sit in the sweet downbeat of a moment, and maybe look thoughtful for a second and then let the next phrase and the next take them to places they've forgotten again.

Band Names My Sons Are Considering

2010-04-16T09:35:00.000-07:00

Grasswhistle
Alkali
The Enormous Radio
Guargum
Small Ships
Walking Paper Puppets
The Uncrackable Egg
Shoebox Guitar
Parental ESP

The Dream of Portalena (As Told by Grace to her Father)

2010-03-27T10:39:00.001-07:00

March 26, 2010

I was wearing a dress I got for Christmas, but I wanted to wear boy clothes, so I dressed up as a boy farmer. All the girls thought I was a real boy so they wanted to follow me. They wanted to follow me because I was playing a game in Portalena. It wasn’t really a game it was just this group called Portalena. What people had to do was walk up to a random person and play “Head-to-Head Sky Diver.” In the game you had to talk or battle. If you talk you have to think of something really fast. The girls followed me because they wanted to play the talking game. I first talked with a girl who fell in love with someone. She talked for a really long time.

My costume had vampire teeth. A farmer boy with vampire teeth. One girl wanted to play “Head-to-Head Sky Diver.” The game can be dangerous. You can get stabbed or hurt, really, really hurt. You have to go up to a really high rock. There’s these balloons that can make you float, but you have to take off this thing that makes you float before you pass the balloon. But you can fall, and you have to dodge these rocks that can kill you.

In the dream, I always got smashed. I didn’t get smashed, but I almost got smashed, and I always win. It’s a really fun game, but it’s always harsh.

So, I played the game with the girls. Then the girls left, and I kept trying to find a robber who got loose. Intentionally, you can’t get someone. I never actually found her.

The police caught the robber eventually. They caught her in a crazy store. The crazy store was a free place where people could do whatever they want—they can rip anything apart, they can eat whatever they want, they can jump or talk however they want. That’s where the police found the robber.

The robber was just talking to a person, a person who didn’t know she was a robber. The man didn’t know because he was blind. The police came up from behind her, she didn’t see them coming. They came up from the other side where she wasn’t looking and grabbed her.

Eventually there’s this giant map where you can go to places. One of the scariest things was that I was in early Portalena and I fell into this hole, this was actually part of the game, but it was filled with spiders. There was this giant spider, it was a person dressed up as a spider, the person wouldn’t actually attack you, they just followed you.

So I jumped up and went out of the hole, and the spider didn’t follow me. I kept walking and I found Nate. Nate is one of my friends. He isn’t exactly my friend, but he’s famous, he’s famous because his dad makes comics of him. He kept following me wherever I went. That’s how we became friends.

Then, there was this giant shark in the water and I saw a Hang-Wa. A Hang-Wa is a different type of Indian. The difference is that a Hang-Wa doesn’t live in a place, they live in a type of house. A Hang-Wa wears different types of clothes than an Indian. The Hang-Wa gave me medicine. He gave me medicine because the shark, this special type of shark didn’t bite. Instead this type of shark gave out a kind of poison. The Hang-Wa gave me medicine because the shark had poisoned me.

Suddenly, the Hang-Wa started to speak. He said, “Aricho Hang-Wa!” This meant, “Welcome to our country.” This country was called “Tales.” And in this country there was a certain time machine. And so if you got a time machine you would have to go to a second level. You go to a different place every time. So I got in the time machine and went to the second level and I met an old grandma. [Don’t write this down because any grandma wouldn’t like to read this…they wouldn’t like being called an “old grandma.”]

The old grandma gave me something. She gave me a silver coin. And that silver coin, she said, was one of the most powerful coins in the whole world. It could grant you anything. It would help you when you meet a person who has sorrows. The coin would help them with all the things that they’re sad about.

Eventually, I found a little flower. A very sad flower. The flower was starting to wilt. So I gave it a toaster. The magic coin granted a toaster. Suddenly the toaster popped out something. It was something that no one could ever get. It was the most fantastic thing in the world. It was another flower! How sweet. Another, tiny flower. And that flower became friends with the sad flower, and the flower began to be happy.

Then I met a Portalena rock star. Her hair is blue mixed in with purple. Her shirt is red. Her vest is black. She has brown pants. She wears eye-liner. She held a rainbow guitar. She put on a show for me. After the show she talked to me. She asked me what kind of song I wanted her to do and what kind of thing I would want her to do. I asked if I could sleep over at her house. She said, “Yes.”

Her house had all these pictures of all of her fans and there was all of these guitars and candles and all these people kept coming over and there were velvet curtains and it was wonderful. We slept in bunk beds.

Then I woke up.

Excerpts From An Email Sent to My Supervisor Concerning A Meeting With A Spiritual Teacher

2010-02-18T14:34:00.000-08:00

Extremely purple. Purple dress, purple sun hat, purple shawl, with a crystal necklace as big as your fist. It was everything I could do to not run screaming, "God help me!" We sat. She took out her book and handed it to me. The foreword is by Dr. Joyce Brothers.

There are celebrity endorsements. There is a gold award sticker on the lower right corner. It is a literary award I do not recognize.

She knows Desmond Tutu. Desmond Tutu has written the forewords to her next three books. These books remain unwritten.

She had a medical injury, lost the ability to walk and was housebound for 8 years. She disappeared from public life. She had a miraculous healing. A woman saw her energy paths then used her "glowing" hands to heal her. "It was like she had LED lights embedded in her palms. We only get a Seer like that once every thousand years. I was lucky to have met her. Of course, there is no luck." The Seer happened to be eating at the same restaurant. "This is not a coincidence."

Now upright she is preparing to re-enter "the world." She had a series of dreams about me. She is supposed to meet with me. That is what the meaning of the dreams. She says she knows how to help people in hell. She says she knows how to cultivate compassion in others. I did not know what to make of her. She spent a lot of time staring at me with an intentional "spiritual" gaze. She closed her eyes a lot and fell into silences...I felt like she was trying to show me her magic powers. I am immune to magic powers.

She understands all the energy meridians and has seen them glowing on people. She ordered double bacon on her Cobb salad. She told me stories of hanging out with Tutu. She drank beer with her salad. She touched my hand and tried to stare into my eyes while I chewed my hamburger. I intentionally allowed the ketchup and onions to drip from my mouth. I am not in the practice of returning spiritual gazes. She told me a baby at the next table was very attracted to her. She implied that the baby noticed her "energy," and was naturally attracted. When the baby crawled toward our table I made faces at the baby, causing the baby to come to me. I then gave her a look that said, "Now who has the baby power." She was impressed by this. I think she took it as a sign.

She says she is working with mathematicians to create formulas for grace, for example: "The grace you give to others is the grace you allow yourself. That is a mathematical truth."

The waiter asked to meet with her after lunch to talk about his divorce. She spent thirty minutes telling me her theory of resentment and how to heal it. The points of the teaching spell R.E.A.P. I hung a piece of lettuce from my beard while she told me the teaching. I did this to ward off her spell. It worked.

She told me her daughter died at a young age, caused by the arrogance of doctors. She told me she feels resentment 15 times a day and now heals it within minutes each time it arises. She told me it's like knowing how to drive home.

She told me she once watched Desmond go from hatred to compassion in 30 seconds.

She wants to meet with Frank. I want Frank to meet with her...particularly during a time when I am not available.

I don't know what to make of any of this. I am sending the lunch check to you for reimbursement.

Some Possible Tarot Cards

2010-02-09T12:57:00.000-08:00

The Bibliomancer
The Totally Awesome Boots
The Trained Bear
Last Chance for Gas
What is Unprovable
The Abandoned Well
Leonard Nimoy
The Ad Man
The Personal Best
The Non-Apology
A Familiar Snowflake
Fatigue
The Indelible Yen
The Man with a Theory
The False Memory
The Stutterer
The Distance Swimmer
Competence
Love as an Adjective
Lady Lazarus
The Map of Sand
Awakened by Touch
Smile Lines
Rye Whiskey
The Personal Shopper
The Mount of Olives
Who Would Notice?
The Doormat
Gotcher Nose
The Toe Ring
The Hep Cat
He Was Always Kind to Me
The Three-Legged Mutt
The Smell of Spring
The Ugly Poet
The Bullet Lodged Near the Heart
The Trivial Mistake
Say It!
Those Bastards
It Would Probably Be a Good Idea
The Charlatan
Calloused Hands
Ease

Girl and the Bear Part 4

2010-02-04T09:12:00.000-08:00

One night, before mother had left them, a bear had come to their cabin. She remembered hearing her father yelling and the sound of breaking branches. Her mother had screamed, “Harley! Harley what is it!” Mother had pulled Grace into bed and flung a blanket over their heads. “Is it robbers?” She had asked, terrified. Her mother just held her tight and shook her head, “I don’t know…but I can’t take this much longer.” Later it quieted and her father had come in, lit the lamp, and then laughed at the two of them, clinging to each other beneath the blankets. “Boo!” he yelled, slapping his hands on the bed. They both screamed then her mother just fell apart--she wept at Grace's side with hair and hands twisted across her eyes. Her father looked pained when he pulled the blanket back, “It was just a bear dear. A harmless black bear. It was just as frightened as you.”

***

“Howdy,” a man in a green cap and matching green coat sauntered up from the park store. “How are you two this morning?”

“Fine,” her father replied. “We came to see the bear.”“Good for you! Did you camp here last night?”

“No, we’re local. Just over in Wagner creek.”

“Okay, then.” The man replied within genuine warmth, then kneeling beside Grace he said, “You ever seen a real bear?” Grace shook her head. “Well, whaddya think?”

Grace shrugged her shoulders. “He seems sad.”

The man laughed, “Sad? Naw! This bear’s as happy as can be. He gets plenty of food, lots of treats, and lots of admirers. No. I’d say this is the happiest bear you’ll ever meet.” The man winked at her father, patted her on the head, then stood up and left her to her own thoughts. “So. Wagner creek? You got fruit trees?”

She listened for a moment while her father told the story of the peaches he’d brought from Ohio and the damage they suffered and the difficult winter. Soon her attention turned back to the bear who was now on all four legs and turned so that its brown eyes met hers. She looked and noticed a thick shackle around one of its hind legs. The black iron band had worn the hair just above the bear’s ankle exposing a halo of smooth, pink, skin--like a human being. She looked up, and again the bear met her eyes and she felt immediately that the ranger was lying. This bear was sad. Deeply sad. She looked and looked and the bear looked back until both girl and bear were caught in each other’s gaze--Grace jumped when her father tapped her on the shoulder.

“Grace, we’re going over to look at a map. You want to come with me?” Grace shook her head. “Alright then. Don’t cross that rope line.” Her father reached into his pocket and pulled out the golden pear. “Here. Go ahead and eat this. I’ll be back in a moment.” Grace took the pear and held it up to her mouth. It smelled like leather and clover. She remembered the fall, when her father would bring home pears and her mother would bake them with butter and cinnamon.

She pressed the pear to her mouth when she suddenly noticed the bear standing, standing on its hind legs, standing with a front leg held out. For a timeless moment the bear stood, and the girl stood, looking at one another--the bear with its front leg outstretched, the girl with the pear to her lips, frozen in wonder at the upright beast. They stood and stared and stood and stared, each as silent as the pines. Then, without thinking, Grace stepped passed the rope, walked slowly toward the wild animal, and carefully set the pear onto its sharp, outstretched paw. The bear took the gift, lifted it to its mouth, and swallowed it with one wet swallow. It descended to four legs then stretched its big black snout until it reached Grace’s ear. Grace felt a hot billow of air across her cheek and then heard--heard in the deepest of voices, “Help me.”

Grace stepped back and looked at the large head, the fanged mouth, the redwood eyes, her whole body burning with wonder. There was a scream. A woman was screaming and pointing from somewhere in the trees, “Help! Help!” Grace looked intently at the woman trying to see what was troubling her, when she suddenly heard her father cry out in fear, “Grace! Grace! Get away from there! Run! Run!” A large rock flew through the air and struck the bear’s shoulder with a dull thud. The bear’s head jerked back, it bared its teeth and growled at the park ranger who now stood waving his arms, shouting for the bear’s attention at the roped perimeter. Then Grace felt her father’s arms knock violently against her waist as she was pulled from the ground. There were two men and a group of boys running toward them, rocks and sticks in their hands as her father scampered beneath the rope barrier. She heard the bear’s chain rattle taught as it pulled toward the human beings, growling and swinging its arms in helpless anger.

Song about Making a Flag, Part of the Refrain of Which is Lifted from an Unfinished Sailor's Song in Moby-Dick

2010-01-23T09:08:00.000-08:00

I wanted to make me a flag from the first row of wagons,
to make me a flag from the line of a keel.
I cut Jefferson stars and started to hang them
in the dark of a night I thought we'd never fill.

So good night and farewell, ye sweet Tennessee ladies,
good night and farewell, ye sweet ladies of Maine.
We must do what we want while we can
so when morning comes down
we can do what we must once again.

But I made me a flag from the streaked cheeks of children,
I made me a flag from the welts off a slave,
I made stars from the eyes of the dead and the nights
of the men that killed them made thread black as the grave.

So good night and farewell...

Pour me a drink of the distance and silence
you find at first light on American roads.
Sit with me a while, 'cause this love and this violence
I cannot understand them and they're all I know.

My grandfather he made a flag out of Westward,
my father he made him a flag out of Stone,
and I don't have a flag, but I would leave my daughters
stars and stripes broad and bright enough to make a home.

So goodnight and farewell, ye sweet Tennessee ladies,
good night and farewell, ye sweet ladies of Maine.
We must do what we want while we can
so when morning comes down
we can do what we must once again.

Why All This Travelling?

2010-01-15T20:14:00.001-08:00

My father-in-law has a colleague of many years named Kai Woehler, a German immigrant who came to the States in the early 60's and began to teach physics for the U.S. Navy in Monterey, California. He had been one of the last students of Heisenberg, and fallen heir to Heisenberg's dream of a unified field theory--which if I get it, is at once an understanding of the most fundamental particles (movements?) of Being and something like the meaning of Being. Something that you could point to and in some sense say, that's the gist of it, right there. Woehler is also a traveler to remote, dangerous places--through the Taklamakan Desert along the Silk Road, to Svalbard, to the Skeleton Coast in Namibia. The impulse to find the basic particle of Being--he himself capitalizes It--and the impulse to travel to places that are nearly unreachable and that mark the end of something, that cannot be gone beyond, seem related somehow. So, busy life. And he has lunch with my father-in-law, whom I adore, on the third Thursday of the month, I think it is.

Now presumably, if you saw the smallest possible particle it wouldn't look like much. The point, in fact, is to edge as near as possible to nothing, to approach the instant of Becoming. And maybe you would see how the finger print of Being is scrimshawed, how the iris and the vocal chords are tuned to the particular pitch of something unrepeatable. But there is a logical problem, or at least a sticking point, with looking for meaning in matter. Even the most fundamental stuff is just stuff, even if it is the stuff we're made of. There is a question for me of whether it's the answer or the question that we worship at the shrine of philosophy or science. I think I know the answer but I don't like it. I think maybe, looking at the fundamental particle or movement, what you would see, if you were a cosmologist and a searcher, would be as much as anything the road approaching this particle. The effort and tedium and longing, the dead ends at which beloved friends and revered elders had gotten stuck, the luck of arriving alive.

Lunch may hold as much transcendental meaning as anything else. Kai Woehler and my father-in-law were once discussing the moment of death. They were trying to imagine the fear and pain of death, and considering whether the moment of death were somehow the best seat in the House of Being or just the Edge of the Dumpster. And Kai said confidently that he would take his chances with the pain and disappointment, that he wanted no anaesthetics. That in some sense this was the great adventure and he wanted to arrive at the much anticipated destination with a clear head. I like this. Of course, again, it's just death. Not logically any more the source of religious meaning than my first cup of coffee this morning. And yet I suspect that somehow the end of my first cup of coffee, the firstness of the cup itself even, has to do with death. That death is the end towards which all Being and all consciousness of Being moves. And likewise, I can't help believing--even as I lose belief in nearly everything else--that the basic patterns of Being are the basic patterns of consciousness: planning and doing, waiting and missing, longing and relinquishment.

I need to think about death again. Not this time as the end of personality and personal accomplishments, of being seen and loved. Or, okay, maybe a bit. But more than that, I need to know whether I can believe that death is good. Walt Whitman, after seeing plenty of it in the Civil War hospitals of Washington D.C., summoned his clearest voice and called to it, sang to it:

Come, lovely and soothing Death,
Undulate round the world, serenely arriving, arriving,
In the day, in the night, to all, to each,
Sooner or later, delicate Death.

Prais’d be the fathomless universe,
For life and joy, and for objects and knowledge curious;
And for love, sweet love—But praise! praise! praise!
For the sure-enwinding arms of cool-enfolding Death.

Dark Mother, always gliding near, with soft feet,
Have none chanted for thee a chant of fullest welcome?

Then I chant it for thee—I glorify thee above all;
I bring thee a song that when thou must indeed come, come unfalteringly.

It is easy in dark, exhausted moods to--theoretically--welcome ones own death. It costs no more than the welcoming of other ultimates--Love or God or even Independent Wealth. Ones own death, or the thought of it anyway, wipes the board clean. Unless one has the bigness of heart to imagine leaving other people behind, leaving behind a world that continues to need and break. But the occasion of this hymn to death was the disastrous, faith-shaking loss of Lincoln, two years into an endless war that was killing not only brothers but belief. For Whitman, Lincoln was "the sweetest, wisest soul of all my days and lands," as he says at the close of "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd," his consideration of Lincoln's death and of his body's long recessional by train across the country back to the earth of Illinois.

So I'm wondering whether death is good, and I don't even know how to ask yet. But I'm thinking that in all sorts of ways that I'm only starting to see, mine is an American life. That is, I'm deeply situated in this land and this history, this particular love and violence. And so in some way mine will be an American death. And even the great American hymn of death, Whitman's great discursive twilit talk of death-longing, is a road story--a movie in which it feels like something worthwhile or real happens because of the sheer fact of movement towards a destination. Or is it just movement through the swamps and plains of the land? Or even awareness of the land spreading out around you? And if you're a Westerner then you have to add to catalog of the land deserts, forests and mountains, and the ever-present fact of distance, and the Pacific beyond them all. Clearly the land is itself a story. I get to be in it until I die and then, even, I suppose, all my tendencies will carry on in the land. It's after 4AM now, and I'm ending this not because I've gotten anywhere but just because I'm grateful to be tired. I'm going to practice believing that death is good.

Reasons to Keep the Barbie Dream House Packaging

2010-01-15T19:16:00.001-08:00

It's 9:30 AM and the girls are still asleep. This has required years of work. They all drink coffee now, too. Again, on the MBA model this is my work. I have cultivated a workplace culture where the girls can think outside the box, effectively add value, etc. I go downstairs to make coffee. The cat, who is terrified to eat without company, is psyched to see me. I put water on to boil and we go to the bathroom so the cat can eat. Because I did this to the cat, somehow, I think. She peers uncertainly up at the top of the counter for several seconds, rearranging her undercarriage for the 40 inch spring. The little dance she does is unnerving. Or maybe it's just for my benefit? This is the only time she appears to have little cat feet. She arrives, scrambling slightly beyond her apex, hunkers there crunching. The kibble is eerie. Have I communicated this idea to the cat? I'm not full-on afraid of any foods, except maybe figs, now that JZ explained about the horrific life cycle of the fig wasp.

10:53. Hilde staggers out in her wildly mismatched underwear, abbreviated (the underwear) to the point of terseness. Laconic. I'll make her coffee for the silence.

There are two basic versions of the Barbie Dream House, and if you don't correctly identify the one you bought--or, as is more likely, the one you were given before you could choose--you may be living your life totally wrong and wondering why you don't feel completely located, successful and at peace. If you own the Romantic Aufhebung Barbie Dream House set-up, then yes you will have to constantly sum up and transcend all your earlier works. Your life will indeed need to unfold in some way that looks both monumental and organic, and you will require both heroic individuality and very deep communion with fellow RABDH Laborers. But the people at Mattel are no fools, and neither are they Sadists (although Google 'de Sade Dream House' for a good, if unnerving little chuckle). Your Barbie is hypersensitive to taste and touch. USE the amenities. One small representative example. Your Dream House is equipped with a large claw foot tub, which during the summer months, when surfing mainly replaces bathing, can be converted into a cannabis planter. But also take baths in it. You've got the sea, the sun, the wind, and endless amenities and small creature comforts. You'll also find all the scaffolding you'll need to erect the huge, cloudy forms that will express and guide your Soul, and keep you on the verge of transports and hysterics most of the time. The Romantic Aufhebung RV is a nuisance to park but really a load of fun. Get out, see stuff.

But there is some chance that you have Han Shan Barbie, as there was some chaos with the shipping department in the mid-Sixties that has regrettably had long term implications for a small number of Laborers. If you are frequently transcending your previous work and making handsome use of the RABDH amenities and you still do not feel completely located, successful and at peace, please find Ken and examine the small of his back. If he has a small tattoo that says either Big Stick or Pickup, and if you have repeatedly noticed his absence during parties only to find him huddled next to the convertible shivering and looking dreamily at the sky, then you should stop calling him 'Ken'. You probably have the Cold Mountain Barbie Dream House. The CMBDH is a totally different cup of tea.

Don't panic. Mattel has PDF files of the major Taoist literature available, and they'll even send out a representative if needed (although they smell odd and frighten children). The main thing you need to know if you have the CMBDH is that it actually is a dream, and should not be regarded as a set of objective facts. Learn to look at it in soft focus until your Dream House begins to resemble a cave with foliage hanging across the entrance. Allow rain and wind free access. Build a fire in the living room and keep it stoked up pretty good for a couple weeks. Squat more. So important, so important.

There are also a small number of Soviet Era Dream Houses still in circulation.

The Witness

2010-01-15T11:33:00.000-08:00

He’s never going to get in shape. The Pilate's DVD is gummed over in dust. The elliptical next to his bed is falling over, the dislocated arms covered in laundry. The sea kayak he bought last Christmas is beached alongside the house, never launched, with veins of black fungus creeping across its yellow belly. How does he not see this?

This morning he’s rolling out his new mountain bike to ride along the commuter path that winds through our neighborhood. It’s a mountain bike--with recycled rubber handles and high impact shocks and knobby tires! A mountain bike to ride along a flat, cement biking path. Ridiculous! Look, look how his beer gut stretches the neon windbreaker, look at the expensive sunglasses, the obnoxious padded bike shorts and…look, look! He’s adjusting his padded shorts! Look at him glancing around to see if anyone’s watching! So stupid. He never thinks to look behind him, into the windows of his own house, and notice his own mortified son. What an idiot. Why must I be the witness?

He says all I do is play Xbox. He doesn’t even know what I do. He won’t let me drink soda or eat chips. “It’s bad for your body!” How does he know? He says we’re not buying paper towels to help the environment. Then when my sister spills something he grabs a shirt from the laundry to wipe it up. Now all my shirts have juice stains. That’s not going to save the earth, Dad. We’re not saving the earth. Like when mom got sick and he told us we were changing our diet and we couldn’t buy doughnuts, or anything with sugar, or white flour, and he stopped using his cell phone. She died anyway. And we still eat rotten stinking kale and fish oil gummy bears and bran--lots of dirt flavored bran. For what?

Last year, after I showed him the website that measures the melting ice caps, the one with the drowning polar bears video, you know what he did? He went out and got the Obama “hope” sticker. He stuck it to my bedroom mirror without asking. He tells me I need to stop focusing on the “negative.” He tells me, “It’s a new day!” He says Obama is going to save the bears and stop the ice caps from melting. He doesn’t get it. Obama is just a dad, like him, and his kids probably see him sneaking around the White House, smoking his secret cigarettes and think, “the poor sap.”

A few months ago Dad got all excited about the Nobel prize. “See?” he said. “Didn’t I tell you? He’s going to make things better. The whole world knows it’s true.” I was fooled for a minute, but then I asked him, “What do you mean ‘going to?’”

“Well,” Dad gave that same far away smile that my sister used to make when she crapped her diaper, “Well, the prize is because they know he is going to do good things.” Can you believe it? Going to do? I went out of my mind, “You don’t give a trophy to a team that’s going to win the World Series! Because sometimes they don’t. Their pitcher breaks his arm or their best player gets caught using drugs, and they lose. They lose Dad. And you shouldn’t have given the team the award because it got everyone’s hopes up and you just made it worse.”

But still he watches the news and calls me in every time there’s some sappy story of some school having a “car-free day.” He thinks it will inspire me to watch all these other middle school students walking to school with grinning faces that say, “We’re fixing the world!” He doesn’t even realize that I’ve been to “car-free” days and I know that half those kids are going to get rides home or to soccer practice and then that night their stupid father is going to forget something and drive across town to the grocery store and it’s all just so pathetic.

Why does everyone want to pretend? Like nobody even talks about the war in Iraq, but Connor’s dad is still in Iraq or Afghanistan or wherever, and every morning he wears that sad American flag pin that his dad gave him and it makes me want to just hit him because he doesn’t even realize how stupid he looks. Wearing that flag is like showing off your burn scar from the time you put your hand on the stove, even though your mom told you a hundred times to be careful. Does he have any idea how exhausting it is to see that pin?

After the election Connor was all smiley and told me Obama was going to send his dad home. I said, “Good for you!” in kind of a snotty way, but I actually was kind of glad for him, because we used to be best friends, but of course he was wrong and his dad is still gone and I heard his mother say he might have to stay two more years, and now Connor pretty much doesn’t do anything anymore. He just sits and stares at the whiteboard and eats alone and gets yelled at by Mrs. Hotchkins to pay attention.

Dad says I make myself depressed. I’m not depressed, I tell him, I’m tired. I’m tired of pretending that things are going to get better. Like when mom got sick and dad made us get rid of all the plastic cups and Tupperware and we couldn’t eat real hamburgers. I hated all that, but Dad said it would make Mom better and so I didn’t complain and I actually felt good every time we ate the crappy food, because I thought it was helping. But after awhile I could tell that Mom was getting worse, and even though everyone was lying to me and telling me that my prayers were making a difference I knew it was all shit and that everyone was just too scared to say it.

So I asked her one night when she was sitting alone in the kitchen, “You aren’t getting better.” And her chest went flat and she just said, “No, I’m not.” And then I said, “You’re going to die.” And she looked right at me and cried. She cried without making any noise and said to me, “Yes, I am.” And then she hugged me, and I cried and tried not to make any noise, and my body went as weak as a beanie baby. Then she held me out so I could see her face and said, “Now let’s make the best of it.” And we walked out of the house without telling Dad, and left my sister alone playing with her polar bear, and went and got real hamburgers, and greasy French fries, and these huge-ounce cokes, and laughed a little bit.

That’s what I want. That’s what I want for dad. I just wish Obama would come on the television smoking a big fat cigarette. And I wish he would just look in the television, look at my father, and tell him, “I’m sorry folks. I really am sorry, but we’re all going to die. The polar bears, the owls, the Africans, the kids, the whole earth. The car free day isn’t helping. And the recycling is not helping. And the electric cars, well, it turns out they just make things worse…the extra battery acid and all that. And the Arabs and Jews, well I’ve been there, met with all of them, and I gotta tell you, it’s a huge fucking mess. Just a huge, fucking, knotted up mess. I’m sorry. I really am. There’s nothing I can do. I’m sending the prize back to Oslo. Sorry for blowing smoke up your ass.”

And then I want dad to just turn the damn thing off and just cry and let his snot run down over his mouth like I did at the funeral, and I want him to just yell and moan and smash his fist into the wall like some guys do when their girlfriends break up. And I just want him to go ape-shit until he scares the shit out of me and my sister and the whole neighborhood. I think if he did that I wouldn’t hate him so much. And when he finally got tired, I’d ask him to take us out and get steak sandwiches. At the same place mom and I went. And if he wasn’t sure if we should, I’d say, “Dad, when the earth floods I don’t want to be eating bean curds. I want real food Dad, and real Coke.”

And I think maybe he’d finally get it. He’d finally understand that when the first waves of the ocean start to breach the continent and come down our street and push through our door like New Orleans, I don’t want to be exercising or recycling or staring at my “hope” sticker. I want to be playing Xbox. Playing Xbox with Conner, just like we used to do when I first got that Star Wars game, before Mom died and Connor’s dad was shipped off. And it would be like it used to be, when we played for a whole day and ate chips and drank pop and got so far into it that we got mind fog where it felt real and we’re yelling at each other to “Watch out!” And it feels like all the Rebel forces are supporting us and we’re looking out for each other and our comrades’ voices don’t seem computer generated, but feel real and we’re trying to save the last hold-out of human beings, and together we’re blasting the white storm troopers and their mechanical droids.

That’s what I want. That’s how I want it to end. After all the bears are dead and the ocean is pouring over the tiles in our kitchen, creeping over the carpet, rising and covering our feet--but we don’t care because in our mind we‘re fighting the Empire, shooting and blasting and backing each other up, yelling “Reload!” even though the whole situation is hopeless. And my dad would sit next to us and drink beer without hiding it. He’d sit next to us with my sister on his lap eating chips or cookies or whatever she wanted. My dad and sister would sit and stare at the screen, and cheer us on, cheer Conner and me across the frozen tundra, through the waves of Imperial soldiers, on that faraway planet from the second movie, the one with endless glaciers and fields of frozen snow.

Beauty Where I Want Her

2010-01-09T11:07:00.001-08:00

I've got Beauty where I want her but I think that every time.
If it's warrantied or monogrammed or framed it isn't mine.
When they reason closely in the stern, cry the distance from the bow:
it's not so easy breezy that way for them to see you, now.

You were wild, you were a bit too much. I couldn't get enough.
You were everything I loved about the things I could not love.
I dropped other destinations to get to you somehow.
It's not so easy breezy, it is, for you to please me now?

You said 'give a 20 to the gypsy, though she'll still just tell you what she will.
It may feel strange to pay to be deceived. Give her the 20, still.'
You said, 'You don't mind being lied to, if you can choose by whom and how.'
It's not so easy breezy, baby, to believe you now.

So I studied to tell your tarot cards, but I could never say for sure.
You said anything with hearts or swords or staves could not be yours.
So I made you your own tarot deck with stuff even gypsies don't allow
and it seems to work well but I can't tell a damned thing about you now.

My compass spins less frantically out here beyond the light.
Now that I cannot see it I feel sure it works alright,
although if I'm to be honest I trust the stars more anyhow.
It's not so easy breezy this way to deceive me now.

I've got Beauty where I want her but I still might take a dive
so the corpse is undisturbed and self-possessed when you arrive,
with the door key in its pocket and the floor plan on its brow.
And I hope it's easy breezy that way for you to read me now.

Girl and Bear Continued

2010-01-06T13:12:00.000-08:00

They sat and watched the ducks until the ducks lost interest and returned to their nests. Then, unexpectedly, her father rose, wrapped her coat tightly around her, then cradled her in his arms and began to walk. It had been years since her father had held her like this, and even though she was six years old--too old to be cradled, it felt so warm in her father’s arms that she didn’t mind if people saw her being held like a baby. He looked down under his wide felt hat and smiled, and she smiled back and felt that something strange was taking place. She had been so sad for so long and it had been such a heavy sadness, like her heart covered in winter clouds, that she had forgotten what it was like to be happy or to play or to laugh. But now, on this morning, with the sun just cresting over a canopy of golden leaves, it felt like something was lifting, and it felt good to smile.

They spotted a quiver of fish along the creek and watched a woodpecker knocking against a sugar pine. Her father made two tiny schooners out of sticks and oak leaves and they raced them down the mill creek then tried to sink them with rocks. They came to a cluster of sycamores and suddenly father ran toward her and yelled, “You’d better run or I’ll eat you up.” It was so strange to see her father running that Gracie stayed still staring, until her father was almost upon her. She noticed the sparkle in his eye and let out a playful scream and ran out from beneath her heavy coat and hid behind the nearest tree. Her father slowed and stomped his big feet and said, “I’m a hungry grizzly bear and I eat little girls for breakfast.” Gracie felt deliciously terrified and quickly scanned the hillside for cover. She waited while her father thumped and growled, and then quickly darted uphill into a bushel of rhododendrons.

Her father soon followed, panting up the hill. He carefully reached within the dark green leaves and swept his hand back and forth, while Gracie crouched quiet and still, both hands covering her mouth. His arm finally withdrew and the park became very quiet. Gracie waited. And Gracie waited. It occurred to her that her father may have wandered off and left her. She stood and stepped from the bushes, when all of a sudden there was a loud growl and Gracie felt two hands grip her waist. Her father jerked her from the ground, turned her upside down, nuzzled his warm beard into her neck and growled.

“I’ve got you little girl. I’ve got you.” Gracie laughed and screamed at the brackish beard , but the father bear just placed her over his shoulders, like a sack of flour, and carried her down the bank singing, “I’ve got me a Gracie breakfast, a very fine Gracie breakfast….”

When they came to the edge of the dirt road that wound along the park, a black sedan puttered by and two boys in the back seat hung their heads out the window pointing and laughing. “Grrrr!” replied her father, and the boys quickly withdrew their heads while their mother shouted from the front passenger window, “Shame on you!”

The father laughed and sat down in the grass placing Gracie at his side. She wrapped her arms around his side and placed her cheek against his arm and for the first time that she could remember, it felt natural to be so affectionate. The father curled his arm around his daughter and drew her in close. He tilted his head toward her and said, “Things need to change Gracie. Things need to change. I know we both miss her…but, well, she’s not coming back and we’ve got to go on and make a different kind of life. We need….we need to be” He paused, trying to find the word. “We need to be happier.” He reached down and lifted his daughter’s chin. She looked up at him and nodded. She wanted to be happy.

They sat quiet for awhile, basking in the late morning glow of the autumn trees until the moment passed and he lifted her up to her feet. “Now,” he said, brushing off his backside, “let’s go find the real bear.” She held his hand and they walked up the park, leaving her mother’s jacket somewhere on the ground.

As they walked to the north end of the park they passed a sign that read, “Auto Camping.” Just past the sign the dirt road widened and the girl suddenly noticed the many cars parked within the trees. Most had canvas tents stretched along their sides with wooden packing boxes, and morning campfires weaving thin ribbons of smoke into the pine and cedar branches. She could hear children chasing one another and smelled bacon from all directions. Her father pointed to a wooden bridge. “That’s where we cross.” They walked the bridge over the creek and passed two women carrying cloth covered baskets, their hair loose and wiry. Then, in a clearing she spotted something in the shadow of a large cedar tree. It was a strange man. A sad man. Sitting in the dirt, his head dropped to his chest, his shoulders soft and rounded. Without taking her eyes away she whispered, “Daddy, who’s that?”

“That’s him. That’s who we came to see. That’s the bear.” She refocused her eyes, and then she saw it, the hands and feet were long, the head was like a boulder. She noticed the ears stood pointed and wide atop the rounded skull. It was a bear. Her father stopped and read a white painted sign with red lettering: “Danger. This bear is a wild animal. Do not feed. Do not touch. Do not pass the marked perimeter.” Her father set her down at the edge of a surprisingly thin rope staked in a circle around the bear and his tree. How could this rope protect anyone from a wild animal? Gracie wondered. She stood and placed her hands on the rope, tentatively, and took a good look at the wild beast. She had never been this close to a bear before. It looked more strange than dangerous.

Snow and Grief

2010-01-05T12:15:00.000-08:00

A few years ago my three year old daughter and I were playing in the front yard. It had snowed the night before and the world was new. She laughed stepping in my footprints. She jumped down on her stomach and licked the flavorless ice cream. It was early in the morning and the roads were unplowed, icy and vacant. A delivery truck broke the silence and lumbered cautiously down our street. The driver was young, his head pushed over the steering wheel, straining to see the road. Grace stood next to me and watched the large animal creep across the ice. Then from stereo right we heard the high pitched whir of a Volkswagen. Chained with confidence, it ran up hill unhindered by the glassy blacktop. The truck driver was startled by the yellow VW and locked his brakes until the truck, like a speared elephant, keeled sideways, and slid slow and wounded toward our parked station wagon. Helpless, the driver frantically turned the wheel while the bumper dragged its wide overbite along the driver-side door. Gracie, standing next to me, reached for my leg. When the truck came to a stop she asked, “What happened Daddy?”

“The truck slipped.”

“Oh,” she replied, uncertain what to feel.

The driver stepped out from the truck. His face was shrouded in remorse. “I’m sorry,” he called eagerly over the idling engine. He went back inside and shut off the engine, then rolled the passenger window down and called out a second time, “I’m so sorry.” He shuffled through the glove box, then walked gingerly, respectfully, with long high steps across our snow covered lawn. He said to me, “They sent me out, but I should’ve just turned back. I shouldn’t have been driving in this weather.” He was a large man and his scuffed work boots left deep impressions in the snow. I felt sorry for the guy and said to him, “It’s O.K. It’s an old car.” He stood a few yards away, keeping a polite but awkward distance. He looked down and noticed Grace for the first time then shook his head mournfully. Still gazing at my daughter he said to himself, “They’ll put me back in the warehouse for sure now.”

I didn’t know what to say. Gracie was quiet, taking in the stranger’s face. Without turning her head she pulled on my pant leg to be lifted up. I reached down and hoisted her up with one arm. She gently laid her fluffy, pink jacketed body across my chest, pushed her cold nose against my neck. It took me a moment before I noticed her crying. Worried, I held her out so I could look her over, see if there was an injury. “Gracie? Did you get hurt?” She shook her head. “I’m just sad,” she said sadly. And then I realized what was happening. She was crying the tears of Chad the delivery truck driver. The driver who had spent five years working in a cold warehouse and now, having suffered his second accident, would be forced to go back to the warehouse job he’d spent five years hoping to leave.

Van Helsing on America

2009-12-20T06:48:00.000-08:00

This totally hurt my dang feelings until I realized it wasn't directed at me. It's from Bram Stoker (a filthy Mick, and therefore in self-loathing flight from the colonizing British whoremother even as he ran towards the fetid hum of her foul breath)'s 1897 novel Dracula. A novel about a sort of highly cultivated savage making his way from a world of primal aristocracy to a world of manners and money. And this, for Van Helsing (whose small below-sea-level country is colonially post-coital, now given over to the harnessing of wind power and the cultivation of tulips, and who can almost think straight about savages again as a consequence) is how to understand such an untamed human creature--not with scholarship or, strictly speaking, reason, but with big bangs of instinctive insight, with intuitive leaps that threaten violence to the mind of a sane and cultivated queenservant. Even to think about such a creature requires the civilized mind to transgress itself--to enter a new sort of death, an old kind of chaos.

What does this tell us? Not much? no! The Count's child-thought see nothing; therefore he speak so free. Your man-thought see nothing; my manthought see nothing, till just now. No! But there comes another word from some one who speak without thought because she, too, know not what it mean—what it might mean. Just as there are elements which rest, yet when in nature's course they move on their way and they touch, then pouf! and there comes a flash of light, heaven wide, that blind and kill and destroy some; but that show up all earth below for leagues and leagues. Is it not so?

Shoot boy, don't nothing but steers and pouf!'s come out of Dublin, and I don't see no horns on you. This is Stoker looking at England looking at Ireland, even as Ireland is beginning to lose interest in this game, seeking new forms of poverty and servitude in the next parish West. And not just that, of course--also seeking freedom and possibility. That, too. We reinvent ourselves as a form of address. Some of us seeking terms of rapprochement with the departed, some of us speaking the outline of something that still forms on the Western horizon.

Gonna have to build your own America, boy. I backed over the old one in my hearse.

Yellow Fever

2009-12-16T09:23:00.000-08:00

I awoke at seven to the sound of my sons pounding their way downstairs. I lay in bed and realized I didn't have it this morning. I needed a sick day. I waited for someone to tell me to get the hell out of bed and do my job, but no one came in. I waited for an hour knowing families need breakfast and wives need a morning fire and boys need lunches packed and rides to school. I knew these things. I know these things. But I just didn't have it this morning.

At eight-thirty, twenty minutes before the mad race to school, Joseph slammed the bathroom door which caused the doors at each end of my bedroom to swing open. It was cold out there. Jill walked by one doorway while instructing the boys to pack their bags. I called out to no one, to everyone, "I have yellow fever. I think I have yellow fever." I heard the boys "humph" at the breakfast table. I waited for some kind of concern, some kind of response. Nothing. I yelled, "Heat! I need heat! I have yellow fever." But the word 'heat' sounded more like, "Heeeeeeet. I need heeeeet."

Gracie ran to my bedroom doorway and like a bleating goat cried into the room, "Heeeeet! Heeeet!"

"Gracie," I said slowly. "Tell mom I have yellow fever." Gracie scampered away. I waited. Then Noah walked by and I said, "I won't be here when you return Noah. I have yellow fever."
Noah looked in and while putting on his jacket said, "O.K. Dad. See ya." Like it was no big deal to say goodbye to his dying father. And this cheered me up. I thought, this is how I'd like people to talk to me on my deathbed--breezy, off-the-cuff, "See ya." "Take it easy." "Catch ya latter." No tears and wailing and heavy conversations thick with foreshadowing. How much easier it will be for me to die if folks send me off like I'm taking an afternoon walk. "See ya."

So I got out of bed and put on my jeans and belt and tucked in my t-shirt. I walked into the kitchen and asked Jill, "What are the symptoms of yellow fever?" Jill was busy. She was wrapping sandwiches and the boys were eager for her to finish. "You don't have yellow fever," my son Joseph said as a matter of fact.

"Just tell me the symptoms." I said.

"No." Jill said without looking at me. "I'm not telling you."

"Why?" I asked. "Why won't you tell me. I can handle it. Just tell me."

Noah looked over at me, "Dad. Dad, don't tuck in your shirt. You look ridiculous. Especially with that belt. Dad. Dad, un-tuck your shirt."

"But my stomach is cold." I explained. "I need to keep my shirt tucked-in to keep my stomach warm. I think that's one of the symptoms."

"Dad, you don't have yellow fever." Joseph said with even greater confidence.

I continued to look at my wife. "Just tell me the symptoms Jill. Tell me."

Jill sighed a deep tired sigh. "I'm not going to tell you."

"Why not?" I asked, suddenly worried. "Why won't you tell me?"

Jill stopped her activity, turned and looked at me, which caused the boys to turn and look at me. Jill said calmly, "Tell me your symptoms."

I scanned my body, "My feet are cold.....my back is kind of sore. I feel like, I have that feeling like I need coffee. And....and...I think I'm feeling kind of down, you know...sad."

"O.K." Jill said with some gentleness, "O.K. I know what you have. You're turning forty-three. It's not yellow fever. You're turning forty-three. You need to put on some slippers, make a cup of coffee, and stand next to the stove. That's what you need." The boys stared at me. Jill gave me her maternal look. We all waited for a moment.

"But why won't you tell me the symptoms of yellow fever?" I asked.

Jill turned abruptly, the boys lifted their packs. "Come on Dad. We're late." I put on my jacket and boots and snow hat and drove the kids to school.

The Girl and The Bear Continued

2009-12-11T13:01:00.000-08:00

The highway into town was strangely barren, and then she remembered it was Saturday and quite early for travelers. In the three mile walk they saw only one vehicle, a truck, most likely headed to California, loaded with pears. She watched the truck pass with its neat wooden crates and wished for a pot hole that would kick one of those treasure boxes loose and rain golden pears down into her lap.

They entered the town just as the shop keepers were arriving. Some glanced warily at the man with the mule, and the girl in the oversized coat. Others smiled and offered a cheery, “Good morning!” She smelled bread from the bakery and took a deep draw, hoping to taste it on her tongue. As they passed the café she saw a man and a woman eating hot dishes and she wished her father would slow in hopes that they might see the hungry girl and invite her in. There was a Model A pickup parked by the square and she studied it to see if it was the one her father sold. As they headed past the feed store she noticed the Harry and David truck parked with a young man in leather boots and tweed pants, re-working the straps of the canvas tarp. As they passed, the man smiled and addressed the girl, “Well, good morning young lady.” He reached over and scratched the mule’s ears.

“Good morning.” She said quietly.

“I used to ride a mule like this when I was your age.” He stretched out his other hand and began rubbing both ears. The mule’s eyes went half shut in pleasure. “You must feel like a princess riding up there like that.” The young man winked at the father. The girl looked down, uncertain how to respond. “Well I have a royal gift for a young princess like you.” The young man reached under the tarp and pulled out a golden pear, one of the Royal Rivieras her father used to pick when he worked in the orchards. She looked at her father to see if he approved. He nodded, and she quickly snatched the pear from the young man’s hand and hid it under her jacket.

“Thank the man.” Her father whispered. Without looking up she turned and said, “Thank you.” The young man leaned in close. “Certainly, young lady. Now you let that mule have the core when you’re finished. Even mules need a treat now and then.” The young man patted the mule’s head, adjusted his suspenders, tipped his hat to her father, then jumped into the cab and started away.

They walked behind the store fronts and her father tied the mule strap to a young alder. The mule turned from the girl and began to forage among a cluster of choke cherries. The father hoisted the girl to the ground, took the pear from her hand, and dropped it into his jacket pocket. “We’ll save that for later,” he told her. She felt hot tears gathering from the loss, but her father noticed and quickly explained. “Hold on darling. I’m going to get you something else for breakfast. We’ll have that pear for dessert. Now you wait right here.”

The father walked across the alley and tapped gently on the back door of the bakery. A square headed man in a white apron opened the door. Her father spoke in a low voice. The man looked at the father, looked over at the girl, then left the door open and disappeared into the store. A minute later he returned smiling with a greased paper bag, rolled tight at the top. Her father took the bag with two hands, made sounds of appreciation, tipped his hat, and then walked across the dirt alley to the girl waiting by the mule.

The father knelt by his daughter, opened the bag, and looked inside. “Now let’s see,” he said pondering the contents, “Oh yes.” He reached inside and took out a round bun with slice of sugared apple baked right into the top. “Try this one.” The girl couldn’t believe her eyes. She hadn’t had such a pastry since her mother had disappeared. She took the sugared bun and without thinking, licked the crystal topping, which made her father laugh. The girl looked up startled; she hadn’t seen her father laugh in a long time. The girl smiled and licked the bun again. “Gracie, you are your mother’s daughter. That’s for sure.”

Her father took out two bread rolls and dropped them in the large overcoat pocket beside the pear. He rolled up the remaining contents of the paper bag and tucked them into the mule pack. “Come on, Gracie. Let’s walk the park.” She pulled her arms from the sleeves and wrapped her mother’s coat around her shoulders. She looked and noticed the hem hung below her knees. She kept one hand by her chest holding the edges of the jacket at her neckline while her other hand held the apple pastry safe within. The father reached down and took an empty coat sleeve and they crossed the road toward the city park. They stepped the damp wide lawn full of tiny yellow dandelions and headed toward a bench made of river rock at the edge of a duck pond. She looked across the mirrored water and noticed a cluster of birds hunkered down beneath a Japanese maple, planted like a giant’s delicate umbrella.

“What are we doing, Daddy?” the girl asked, her mouth full of warm apple filling. “We’re going to see the bear,” he replied while taking a roll from his pocket and holding up to his nose. The girl looked up. She had overheard kids at school talking about a captured bear, but she never knew it was real. She looked around to see if there was a bear walking around the town. “When your mother and I first came to Oregon, before you were born, we stopped and walked this park. We sat at this pond and fed crusts to the ducks. We walked and talked the whole day.”

Gracie never heard her father speak of her mother. Even when she asked he just shook his head and stayed quiet. She wanted to hear more, but didn’t know if he’d quit talking. “Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“Can we do everything you and mother did that day?” He stopped and examined her face. Grace noticed his eyes were holding tears. “Yes dear. Yes. That’s exactly what we’re going to do.” He turned and pointed at a bench by the pond. “We’ll start there. That bench. That’s where we had lunch and fed ducks.” They walked to the edge of the pond and sat on a bench made of river rock. Gracie squinted her eyes and tried to see back in time. She tried to see her mother and father sitting on this same bench and wondered what they looked like. Did they smile? Were they laughing? Did they sit close, or at a distance? She tried to concentrate, but she could hardly remember what her mother looked like. They sat down and the ducks took notice and paddled over.

“Daddy?”

“Yes.”

“What did you and mother talk about when you ‘talked the whole day?’” Her father broke off a piece of his roll and threw it in the water, then handed a small piece to Gracie. The ducks quickly congregated around the floating bread and soon they were quacking and snapping at one another. Gracie didn’t want to throw her piece to the ducks. She wanted to eat it. Her father could see what she was thinking, reached into his pocket, and took out a braided roll and placed it in her lap. Gracie smiled and then threw her little piece at a brown-speckled female floating off to the side of the quacking males.

“Let’s see. We talked about a lot of things. We talked about our new life here. We talked about growing peaches and building a house. Mostly, we talked about you.”

“You talked about me?” Gracie could feel her chest beating warm and fast. She wanted to hear her mother’s words. “Yes. Your mother was carrying you, of course we didn’t know it was you, but we both were hoping for a girl. We talked about names and decided if you were a girl we’d name you Gracie, after my mother. We tried to imagine what you’d look like, what color of hair, what kind of eyes…you know, that sort of thing.” Gracie sat still. She wanted him to keep talking. She had forgotten about the cold, she was completely wrapped in her father’s words. Her mother had sat on this very bench and thought of her! Now here she was doing the same thing in reverse, trying to imagine her mother—her voice, her hair, her smell.

Stefana's Native Earth Comes to Find Her

2009-12-05T10:12:00.000-08:00

Erþe toc of erþe, erþe wyþ woh

Odd to come around a corner and be confronted by the face of Andrei Codrescu peering up at you with intense and game skepticism. And, more often than not, met with the VOICE. Codrescu has been at the school where I teach for two days, speaking and wandering the halls, waiting for his speaking sessions to begin. He was lovely, patient, and studiously sane-- only occasionally reminding us that he retains the prerogative to make wild pronouncements and to answer the questions we ought to have asked rather than the ones we did ask.

He made the case in a number of ways that language has as much to do with how you hold your body as it does with words. You can understand every word that someone is saying and fail to answer the real question, or conversely understand very little and come right to the nub by watching as they speak. I went to my doctor this week to have a neck injury checked out. She called back the next day to reassure me that my MRI showed no evidence of a stroke. A stroke? says I. Um, nice--what about my neck? Somehow we weren't talking. And yet the oscillating rhythms inside the MRI tube made me euphoric even through waves of claustrophobia. Made me feel cared for, grokked. Dr. Ghafoor, competent as she is, not at all. I prefer the great womb of the Machine Mother.

Codrescu lives with ghosts speaking several languages from the wreckage of several cities, including Baltimore. Lots of talk of speaking across borders of language and culture and history, always darkness and light in his tone. We ate Afghan food on Wednesday night, the day after the announcement that the U.S. will be sending 30,000 more troops to Afghanistan to make more ghosts. The wine was Portuguese and pleasantly viscous, Turkish coffee. We started talking about Jim Carroll's song, "People Who Died," and then about that poetic form of listing the dead, invented by whom? Ginsberg? the prophet Isaiah, maybe? perhaps Death Itself? And then about Alice Notley's wonderful haunted book, The Descent of Alette, in which a woman is trapped beneath the surface of a desolate city and beset by ghosts and demons as she attempts to find and confront the source of the evil. It is a book about ghosts, Codrescu, says. First her husband Ted Berrigan died and then, quickly, a new young husband whom she married a year later. His talk is a tower of Babel of names, gifted people who appeared, who appear, for an incandescent moment and then were gone, are gone.

Thursday morning he spoke to a group of students, ostensibility on The Writing Life, but somehow none of us could let go of the topic of immigration and flight, the odds parts of oneself that are lost and replaced by refugees. He is, as it turns out, Jewish, and was bought from the Soviet government by the state of Israel for around $2000 U.S. The school where I teach is full of these stories, full of the children of the Jewish diaspora, and of the half-remembered places and languages they carry with them.

He mostly found his way through the morning by taking questions. When did he start to dream in English? Is thought prior to language? A very quiet, dark girl asked him from near the front, when you return to Romania, do you feel alien? Dark hair across half her face, her eyes moving tentatively between Codrescu's eyes and her own hands. He raised his eyebrows for a moment, took a half-step toward her, and began to answer to her in Romanian. And she spoke back in Romanian.

Stefana was adopted from a Romanian orphanage at the age of six, which I had never known, and which Andrei had no way of knowing. It was her mouth when she talked, he said. The needs of our divided and immigrant nation require us to understate the imprint of place and ethnicity, but our mouths keep the shape in which they were first held--keep this shape across oceans, continents, decades, even generations. The shape can even survive the death of hope and love. I walked past Stefana in the hall yesterday and wondered what that moment meant to her. Was it a moment of being found by something that she thought she had lost? Like losing your glasses and finding them, after an infuriating search, on your nose. Or yet another moment of her strangeness confirmed? Or did the ghost of that moment just enter the room where her other ghosts mill around speaking in tongues? And how do I hold my mouth when I ask her?

Entries from Day One of Last Summer's Greensprings Retreat

2009-12-02T17:13:00.000-08:00

--There is a sugar pine behind the work shed, behind the trucks and rusting shuttle vans, behind the decaying mill house where the caretaker's son kept catalogs of women's lingerie. I carried a Mexican blanket, folded it beneath the cracked bark of the sugar pine and lay down. I lay down and read Nikos, his pilgrimage on Mt. Athos, his masculine yearning for God, for purpose, for a worthy adversary. I placed a soft, rotting log beneath my head and slept. I dreamt of a gash across my chest, three inches in length. In the dream I squeezed it and thick, paste-like, flesh came out. Dross. The dross around my heart.

--At the prayer I met Frank. We embraced in silence, old friend that he is.

--We were called to find a sacred moment and return to it. Many images came, but they fell away like tired relics. My soul did not want to travel further than last December--the family retreat in Carpenteria, the soft beach, the oil derricks, the sky bruised purple, soft as plums. I felt the pleasure of my family, happily warrened in our yellow tin condo. I sat in this memory, in this prayer, and felt the call to rest, to trust. It is the call from God, from reality, that never ceases: "Trust. Rest. Wait. Let life overtake you."

--I retreated to my car, the gluttonous Ford Explorer, forest green. I sat in it as I've seen homeless men sit in their cars--all their possessions spread across the back seat. I sat and ate my turkey sandwich: sourdough bread, cheddar cheese, the pickle surprise--it was as sacred as Christ's body. I sat waiting. Homeless.

--The chicken's are back. Beautiful. Grace would appreciate them. Her favorite book, Extraordinary Chickens. Grace appreciates the wonderfully absurd. There is one here, an Aztec King. Black and golden, it's headdress fanned in all directions.

--The teachers, my friends, are soft and precious. It takes some restraint to keep from barking profanities (though I know this too would be met with gentle appreciation). I wish for fewer words, less precision, less purple, more desert sand and rock. Stark. More stark.

--I napped in the Explorer and dreamed of Mt. Athos. The Grecian light. I want to see the light, the sunlight on the monasteries, the Greek sun on white walls. I want to drink coffee with black grounds stirring at the bottom. I want to see olive, laurel, and cypress trees backed by the Mediterranean blue.

--The mountain is cold today. Shrouded in clouds visiting from the ocean. All retreats should take place on the sea. The sea is as close as I can get to God incarnate. There is no sea here so God has sent the coastal fog, the grey clouds heavy with salt water. It is a blessing, given in response to our yearning.

--A few weeks ago I found myself crying in a dream. I had lost something, something dear to me. It was lost and could not be retrieved. I stood on a dirt road and wept. I awoke in the middle of the night and my chest, my chest was heavy with grief.

Girl and Bear Continued

2009-11-30T14:24:00.000-08:00

It was her father who had taken her to see the bear, a year after her mother had disappeared, leaving only a sliver of packing paper that read, “Gone back.” It was a stone-white morning, before the birds began to stir, when she woke and saw her father sitting in the corner, watching her with his red rimmed eyes. “You look like your mother,” was the first words he spoke. Then, “Come. Let’s see the bear.” The girl sat up without speaking and studied the room--the stove dark, the larder empty, the fiddle strings torn from their pegs. “Alright,” she answered, in the flat tone she shared with her father.

The girl pulled on her boots, though they were stiff and crimped her toes. She shivered to the creek and scrubbed her face with water that burned like snow. She hurried back to the cabin, though it was as cold as the outdoors, and took the wooden comb with the missing teeth and quietly brushed her tired hair, just as her mother had done, then strung it back from her face without a mirror to fix it. It was October, and the days had been warm, but the cabin was tucked in the thin canyon above Wagner creek where it remained covered in shadows long into the afternoon. Her winter coat was too small for traveling so she opened the trunk, without asking, lifted her mother’s heavy coat, and wrapped herself inside like an Indian girl.

Outside her father prepared the mule with leather satchels on the haunches, a folded army blanket for a saddle, and a braided strap for pulling. The girl came and stood by his side without speaking. When all was fixed, he set her on the blanket, just below the neck, and placed the knotted mane in her hands. He paused and took in her mother’s jacket, then lifted the dark oily strap, and led the quiet beast along Wagner creek, toward the highway. The girl knew not to speak, but after awhile her ache could no longer stay quiet, “I’m hungry,” she said, and then stiffened, uncertain if her father would turn angry. But he was too tired for anger and with weary eyes he said, “I know, dear. I know.”

Down the road they traveled, their thoughts soothed by the mule’s heavy feet. They came out from the trees and walked the dirt road between orchards. Halfway to town, father spied a patch of blackberries at the edge of a pasture. “Wait here,” he instructed, then carefully climbed the stone wall and walked between a handful of sleepy cows with smoking nostrils, until he reached a tumbleweed of vines. She waited while the mule nipped at the roadside clover, her stomach crying for food. To keep warm she rubbed her legs against the animal’s bristly belly and buried her fingers deep within the mane.

Her father returned just as the sun began to glow behind the Siskiyous. He opened his hands and gently offered a palm’s worth of red and purple speckled berries. “They’re past season, but it’s something. At least until we get to town.” She lifted them carefully into her own hand, and as the mule began to walk, she placed the berries one at a time into her mouth. Some were bitter, others washed out, but the last one was perfectly sweet and she rolled it with her tongue until it fell open.

Rondo Unleashes a World of Hurt on His So Called "Buddies"

2009-11-14T11:37:00.000-08:00

Rondo’s tallywacker was still smarts from the nip of the pekingese. He gingered himself into the broken circle of homeless men, allowing the queerness of their predicament to grow unchecked. It was Coco who first tried to broker the distance, offering up the Hamms he’d been nursing, but Rondo wasn’t having any of it. He backhanded Coco at the elbow and the luke warm libation took flight.

“Jesus, Coco!” he punctured the silence. “Jesus H. Coco. I don't even know where to begin.” Rondo paced aside the truck stop dumpster like a dog gone mad until he finally ascended the crate box, beside the fire barrel, and commenced to dole out the expected come uppings.

“Buddies?! Buddies for life? Isn’t that what you said Wolfgang? Well, where the hell are my buddies now? Where are they Shep? Wang-she? Calypso? I am so sorely—I see that smile Shep and I've got half a mind to shank you right now!" Rondo waited for the buddies to collect their composure.

"As I said, I am sorely disappointed. God gives a male one secret pleasure. One solitary digit of comfort. Though the whole body betray the man, the Lord provides one faithful Ebenezer, a staff of pride that might be raised in times of joy and times of sorrow. An honest man might expect that when he proffers a commitment of fellowship, swears an allegiance of friendship, treaties—in good faith I remind you—with men akin to his own situation, congregates his affections and entrusts them to his companions under a promise of 'buddyhood'—that man might expect his brothers in arms, his spiritual intimates, to vault all obstacles. Most particularly when that man is in perilous danger of losing the holy sepulchre of his own existence, his spiritual gift, his visible sign of the Father’s heralded love.

But no! The faithful soul who trusts in the treaty of buddyhood is a tragic figure indeed. That's what you've reduced me to my buddies. A dime store tragedy. The man who stands before you is bereft of all faith in a beneficent deity, a man hallowed empty by the cowardice of a people he once claimed as kin.

Shep! For Godssake Shep, you sheepdip! Can’t you set your Norwegian snuff aside for a hare’s whisker? Is it too much trouble to lend an ear to a fellow soul cast upon the capriciousness of human friendship? And you, Wolfgang! I’m ashamed to say, I dappled my eyes a time or two when you spoke of the blitzkrieg of remorse that raked your childhood. My heart reached out to you my Germanic friend. But now I count it a point of shame. No more Wolfgang. No more shall you feel the comfort of Rondo's loyal heart.

Sure, I was in need of coin--like any man in my situation. The nightclubs no longer desirous of the pluck and strum of an Alabama banjo. And sure, I was grateful Wang-she, when you told me of the potential to earn a few dollars at the Sweet Dreams Rest Home holiday festival. So I went, and I played my gift like the lil' drummer boy before the baby God incarnate. I caressed them to tap and sway to Alabamy Bound, and When That Midnight Choo Choo Leaves for Alabam', and Alabama Jubilee, and then finished her off with Old Folks at Home (in Alabama).

Then, as you all are well aware, the bitty with the white snowflake pekingese stood and let that cattail of a dog run and take hold of my John Thomas with a vengefulness that I've only seen in my darkest visions of Hades. The dog hung their, mind you, while the bitty, and the nurses, and my so called 'buddies' stood agog." Rondo went silent and looked down at his bruised jewels.

"We thought you'd handle him yourself Rondo," Chauncey mumbled.

"What did you say Chauncey? Did you say handle! Handle! Goddamn you Chauncey, to Satan's lair. In case you haven't noticed Chauncey, I'm a professional.--course you got no idea what that means, so I'll enlighten you: When you're playing Old Folks at Home (in Alabama) and your comin' round home to the final lick, you don't stop to wrastle a pekingese. You finish whatchya started! Why? Because that's what the public expects. Because that's what a P-R-O fessional does. But that's not what a buddy does Chauncey. Hell no. A B-U-uddy, upon seeing his companion distressed, lends a hand, reaches out and removes the offending mutt. Displaces it from his friend's Yankee noodle. What other meaning could you possible interpret from our Saviour's admonition to 'Love thy neighbor?'

I guess that was too much to expect. I played my tune. I turned the corner toward Alabamy. I finished what I started and let the pekingese dig is damnable fangs into my manhood, and swing his furry headed body in a most hateful tempo. There I stood. Playing my last licks. With a pain that only Christ Our Lord can contemplate."

Rondo stepped down from the blue plastic crate. "Well it's over. Yes sir, it's over. I am no longer anyone's buddy. I return to my selfhood from which I'm quite familiar, thank you. I enter the citadel of my own soul, no less lonely then when I first journeyed forth from the womb--hope in mankind being my only loss." Rondo picked up his canteen and took a long swallow of his own urine mixed with Grey Goose vodka. He gave the buddy circle a final look, "I guess what I'm trying to say is: Screw you guys."

He turned, lifted his banjo case, then ran, into a dark field of forget-me-nots.

The Girl and the Bear

2009-11-14T07:14:00.000-08:00

There was a girl in a cabin who would lie on the floor and think of the bear. She would lie under the wool blanket on the red fir planks with her mother’s quilt and a flat brown pillow and she would think of the bear, on the ground, in the lamp-lit park, shackled to a tree. The girl lay on the floor because she had no bed, and she lay in the dark because there was no light, no electricity, no matches to strike. Dark and still, her father asleep, she lay thinking and feeling and remembering the bear, all alone, beneath the moon.

Matt, Leah, Twins, Fontanelle, Cigarette, Elbow

2009-10-23T12:03:00.000-07:00

On the lam from Colonial America, the MLA and Lisa, Matt

found himself in a room with somebody's maps and forgotten lines and Leah.

Sound-fade: contented sigh over shot of shrieking twins—

the boy, Gabriel, slams his fontanelle

on my kitchen floor. Matt heads for a cigarette,

through spilled formula and fresh blood and an elbow.

And whose, you will ask, is the elbow?

If you figure it out, please tell Matt.

Having finished his cigarette,

he’s back, all smiles, hails Leah,

who is still dabbing a near-ruptured fontanelle,

still comforting her begrimed and roaring twins.

And without comfort herself. I thought they were twins

when first I met them—Leah bending an elbow

with the booziest of our boypoet friends, tendril fontanelles

and spinning bonnets blooming on her rosebud lips, as Matt

looked besottedly up at her, his only Leah,

his second chance, and lit his umpteenth cigarette.

I woke in the morning to a desolation of stubbed cigarettes

and couples and friends tumbled like twins

in the womb of their headachey dreams. And Leah

made breakfast and then, steering me by the elbow

to a room where sat the man himself, said that Matt

had grown unrecognizably dark. Ah, such a fontanelle

is fragile hope, and love is a fontanelle—

so exposed while growing together—or again it's a cigarette,

newly lit and soon stubbed out. And Matt

sat dark with having stubbed Lisa. How shame twins

love, how love and burden entwine and hang heavy from your elbow.

He and I nodded and looked across at Leah:

girlishly blond, astute and womanly-wise Leah,

who knew Milton and knew what a fontanelle

was already, and could tell her ass from her elbow

in matters of love, and was not adverse to cigarettes

or good Guiness, and was willing to bear Matt twins.

She smiled like clear water, and we looked back across at Matt.

Back in the kitchen, my admiring gaze holds Matt and Leah,

the stout twins and their fucking fontanelles.

Matt lights a cigarette, and I pick at my elbow.

Not Tonight: Anti-Erotica To Keep You Out of the Mood

2009-10-13T14:25:00.000-07:00

Beneath the Denny’s grease traps the two heavyset women leaned into one another until their sweaty brows touched and the stiff hairs from their nostrils intertwined, like squid tentacles on a plate of boiled spinach.
_____

The surgeon began to have second thoughts about the mixed species transplant he had performed on himself. At first, the thought of replacing his penis with a live banana slug had filled him with an exhilarating sense of completeness. Now that it was a reality, he began to harbor doubts—the constant slime trails on the underside of his corduroys, the late night leaf feedings, and now this burning, foaming, mucus filling his swimsuit. He high-stepped from the salty ocean, ran into his beachfront condominium, and quickly dipped his slug-genital in a glass of cold milk. He sat on the linoleum floor and watched the frightened black eyes as his “penug” stretched its tiny puse face, struggling to breathe. He reached down and gently caressed its slimy head, “There, there little buddy. There, there. Daddy’s gonna make it all better.” Suddenly all the doubt and uncertainty was lifted and the surgeon realized he would make mollusk love to himself that very afternoon.
_____

When their mouths finally parted, she looked down and noticed her tiny feathers of flaking skin were now dangling from the herpes boils at the corner of his mouth, and she knew, just as she’d always known, that this was true love.
_____

Some of the nurses speculated that the two men with Alzheimer’s were unaware of their actions, but the young gay nurse had seen their hand-holding and knew that Earl and Mortimer were finally coming out of the closet. That night, as the rest of the orderlies drank coffee in the lounge, the male nurse gently removed the catheter from Earl’s penis and attached it to Mortimer’s. Then, while the two men looked on, the nurse detached the colostomy bag from Mortimer’s side and, after a small incision, inserted Mortimer’s tube into Earl’s colon. The nurse beamed, “There. Now you two are truly a couple.”
“I can’t find my cows!” Earl called out.
“I’m late for work,” Mortimer whimpered, “they’re going to fire me.”

"We die of too much life."

2009-10-06T12:34:00.000-07:00

This is an actual memory, I think. It seems completely real, anyway. I am looking over the side of my father's small motor boat. His gold(-painted) watch sinks away from me into the water, crystal face up and fish-tailing its shoulders deeper with each clear moment. The watch is the only thing that catches light and the only thing that marks distance into the great light-and-depths-swallowing, eddying greenblueclear of the ocean. It falls for much longer than I would have thought possible, marking off seconds of depth, bearing sunlight, oddly clear and still in the way it occupies its receding. As if seeing is not, after all, a function of distance but a function of light and focus. I reach farther over the side of the boat, into the water, and trouble the surface with my fingers, because something about this seeing has become too much.

There is this incredulous moment just after you cut yourself and just before the cut begins to well up with blood, or just after you've misjudged the roadway and just before you collide with the guardrail, when the always-present, neatly chatty potential for (at least minor) disaster hangs dumbly open. And the natural desire is to try to reknit the clean slice of the sudden aberration by not believing that what has just happened has really just happened. That it's now good and finally and irrevocably done: become what they call "a fact". This moment when fear and regret and hope and resignation and total attention find themselves, for a moment, having exactly the same thought. This moment is so deliciously vivid that almost no one would revisit it ever again if they could help it. And almost everyone longs for it in spite of themselves, at least a little bit.

Last night I hardly slept, and when I was sleeping I was actually turning certain images from Moby-Dick over and over in the upper waters of my mind, at that depth where things are beginning to get dark but where slender receding illumination is so oddly vivid. I kept having this image of an enormous dark whale rising soundlessly towards me out of the blackness of the ocean. And in the dream I was terrified and totally absorbed. But I kept thinking that the depths were not foreign to me and that it would be silly and maybe also dangerous to look away. And then I kept waking up and thinking of my dad's fake gold watch falling the other way. I thought something like this, only without words, but more as a feeling that I should do something about it: The ocean is unfathomably deep, its depth is composed of fathoms, no one of which--no dozen of which, no hundred of which?--resists the eye. The ocean would swallow your gaze if the mind didn't know to teach the eye the trick of iconic seeing: see not what cannot be understood; instead, see a flat black surface, see the image we have rehearsed.

There is something falling through the ocean, a gold becoming green and then blue and then the all-color, black. There is something rising out of the depths of the ocean, finding outline and light and then words, and--too quickly--polite words, rehearsed, inert words. But the place where they cross paths, you can see that place, and that's somehow where joy comes from. Joy would swallow your gaze.

Starting Over

2009-10-05T13:47:00.000-07:00

One time we made a boat.

I woke up in the rail yard on a floral quilt pulled from a Motel 8, my brain swollen thick, my chest anchored in silt and shame. I sat up to relieve my sore hip and the sun skipped off the Bacardi Gold and struck my eyes blind. I raised my hand, picked up the half empty bottle and hurled it with a powerful self-hatred. I had never been to the abandoned rail yard and yet the place was familiar—the disorientation, the head full of tears, the dull repetition of failure. I stood, buckled my jeans, and spotted the freeway duplex where I’d once dropped Wantu. I stepped through the weeds and junkyard earth, climbed the bank, and knocked.

He came to the door grinning in his orange winter vest. I inquired about the bird and he pointed to the overpass. I narrowed my eyes and saw a flutter of grey just beyond the railroad cars, alighting in the narrow space between concrete supports. I asked, uncertain, if I could come in. He turned and walked, leaving the door wide. I followed him through the bare gypsum hallway into a dining room with red brick linoleum, a pinewood children’s table, two pine children’s chairs, and a chain link chandelier with pentagons of plastic amber. He sat in a chair that fit him and poured chocolate milk into two tarnished baby cups. I sat into the other seat, my oversized body squatting like some kind of obscenity. He slid a silver cup. I held it and deciphered the engraving: Julia Margaret Campbell 5-23-52. We thank God for you this day!

I emptied the tepid chocolate and suddenly lost all purpose. What was I doing? Why had I come here? What did I want? I blushed, feeling lost in my being, when Wantu said, “You want to build a boat?” I stared at him not knowing how to react. He stared back. “Sure,” I shrugged. He stood and we walked downstairs through a darkened garage that smelled of burnt leaves and orange peels and headed through a hand-cut doorway out to a field of star thistle, glittering glass, neat stacks of railroad ties, and wrappers fluttering like racing flags. We followed a thin rabbit trail down to a creek I never noticed before, a creek with clumps of cattails and wild willow branches growing thick along the level bank. The water was thin and sickly, clotted with plastic bottles, a clump of faded panties, a leg of jeans, submerged shopping bags, and other signs of the careless human beast.

We stepped like cranes until we came to a clearing bordered with tilting oaks and clusters of washed-out foxtails. He pointed to a log--a clean, skinned, beeswax trunk--sitting in a nest of its own golden shavings. “It’s cedar,” he said with pleasure. Once he said it, I tuned my senses and noticed the warm fragrance. It was like breathing a mother’s prayer, and it gave me a sudden urge to surrender tears. I walked over and placed my hand on the primitive vessel. The boat was seven or eight feet in length, shaped more like a bathtub then a canoe, it’s edges heavy and thick, the inside pounded like a copper kettle, the heartwood as red as sunset.

Behind me, Wantu stood sticks within an ashen circle of stones. He gestured to the oaks and I walked over and collected the dried branches. He made a cone of kindling then placed a ball of dried grass at its center and lit it with a cheap yellow lighter. The grey branches were soon aflame and Wantu walked back along the trail returning with chunks of splintered ties. He placed the tarred wood on the kindling until the fire turned tall and blue and smoke billowed thick like a steam engine. Wantu stood back and smiled. We then walked to the water’s edge where he showed me an aluminum stock pot, the lip as tall as Wantu’s waist. We filled it halfway and then I waddled it back to the fire where Wantu helped me position it on a platform of cement blocks until its bottom was wrapped in flames. Then Wantu gathered stones as big as cantaloupes and dropped them into the pot. I looked at him questioningly.

“To soften the wood,” he said and pointed to the boat. He stood and waited for me to piece it together.

“We pour this into the boat…,” I started. He nodded. “Then we dig out the wood?” I continued. He held up the sharp rock and smiled.

“Ah-ha!,” I grinned, grateful for a plan.

We sat and waited for the water to boil. Wantu pulled out two dimestore, corncob pipes from his vest. They were new with tiny stickers on the stem that read “Made in Taiwan.” He pulled out a red foil bag and poured a mixture into each bowl. I looked closely in my bowl and noticed what looked like dried apple, splinters of cinnamon, and clove spikes. Wantu handed me the plastic lighter. I lit the concoction and took a hard draw. It burned my tongue, bit my throat, and fumigated all the oxygen from my lungs. I stood reflexively and began to cough. “What the hell is this?” I sputtered. Wantu, pipe stem clamped at the edge of his mouth, looked at me, eyebrows raised with concern. He reached out and handed me the foil bag. The red package had an ornamented pine tree and read: Christmas Seasons’ Old World Mulled Wine.” “Wantu, this isn’t tobacco! This isn’t for smoking,” I admonished him. “This is for wine. At Christmas time.”
“But I like Christmas,” he said apologetically. I was stunned.

“You like Christmas? Fine. It doesn't mean you have to smoke it." Wantu looked down. “You are right. This is terrible,” he shook his head with a pained look. And then, for no reason at all, I started to laugh. And then Wantu looked up at me and laughed. We laughed and looked at one another and before I knew it, I had started over again.

I Resign from the Theism Club

2009-09-13T10:40:00.000-07:00

I'm reading the not-very-good but really sort of compelling book Fight Club. (I know. Most of what I learn seems to come from books, both negative and positive lessons. This even though I'm around people almost all the time. Could this mean something?) And so on page 140 someone says to the main character, who at this point has some fundamental misunderstandings about who he is, "What you have to understand, is your father was your model for God."

Now of course I've heard this before but this time it's caught me off guard. My dad was remote, angry and disapproving, uncomprehending and disappointed, unpredictable and almost only present when he was either furious and abusive or fatuous and drunk. There was absolutely no pleasing the guy. That's my God. I have been puzzled at my inability to close my eyes, back when I really tried to do this sort of thing, and imagine myself in the arms of God. That's not my God; It wasn't a huggy God. It did It's best to be nurturing, or sometimes It did, but the basic work of being all-knowing and all-powerful left It frazzled and irritable.

There's more to the future of my theology, I guess, sort of. I could find spare parts and build another God, maybe a really good one. But I don't think It would be all that compelling to me. Nope, my God was really big and angry and disapproving and It worked out great for me for a long time. I could build another one but it would be sort of like an Amazonian rainforest dweller going to elaborate lengths to build a can opener.

So I quit.

Nared and Filfin Contemplate the Mind of God

2009-09-09T11:48:00.001-07:00

Filfin: I don’t understand why he won’t tell us the plan. What’s the point of secrecy? Is he afraid we won’t follow the plan? Or maybe we’ll disagree and subvert the plan? I mean, the way Baby tells it, we couldn’t change the plan even if we wanted to, so why not just tell us the plan so at least we don’t have all this uncertainty.
Nared: I know what you mean. Like our lips being sewn shut. What is the point of that? Why not let our mouths work free?
Filfin: Exactly. I’ve got two teeth hanging out, for no practical purpose. I mean, even if I wanted to bite something, or tear at a wrapper, I can’t do it. They’re sewn back into my lips. Why not just leave them in my mouth? Why bother to give me two teeth and then prevent me from making use of them? It’s like God’s trying to be cruel.
Nared: Don’t say that. You know that’s not true.
Filfin: The truth is Nared, I don’t know. I know Baby is always quoting that rabbit book and saying “love makes us real” and “real is something that happens to you…” and other things like that. Can I be honest? I have no idea what Baby’s talking about. Have you ever read the book? The Velveteen Rabbits or whatever it’s called? For two days I poured over that book. Let me tell you Nared, I felt nothing, nothing but nausea--the burn pile, the sick boy, the Nursery Fairy, the tattered rabbit--Baby thinks it should give me some kind of comfort, but to tell you the truth, I just had more questions. Like why does the boy get all working parts? Why isn’t his mouth sewn shut? Why are some of the characters made without hind legs or at the mercy of some winding key? And why do the loved ones get to become real? I mean, why is that supposed to make me feel better? He’s a soft rabbit for Chrissake! Of course he’s loved! Is it Mechanical Mouse’s fault that he’s made of cold metal? None of it makes any sense.
Nared: Yea, I know.
Filfin: Why is the boy’s love the only thing that counts? Why isn't the boy, Bobby or whoever, why isn't he thrown on the burn pile for not being loved by Car or Boat? And really, Nared, when the Nursery Fairy comes in and makes the rabbit real, I mean, didn’t you find that forced? I just found that completely unrealistic, I practically blushed with embarrassment. There’s no mention of Nursery Fairy anywhere in the story, and then all of a sudden in the final chapter, just when the story feels like we’re getting down to the hard core truth, here comes Nursery Fairy to take away the painful absurdity and make everything come out alright. I’ll bet you anything that Nursery Fairy wasn’t in the original text. I’ll bet someone added that in to keep the terror at bay.
Nared: Yea. I know. It didn’t do much for me either. I guess I just don’t get the question the book is trying to answer. Like when Nursery Fairy says, “You were only real to the boy, now you shall be real to everyone!” Baby is always quoting that line to me like it’s supposed to give me hope or something, but I always think, Wait a minute, wasn’t Velvee real to Car and Boat and Mechanical Mouse? Who says he was only real to the boy? I mean, does Baby believe God has ordained some kind of hierarchy of beings where those who don’t have sewn mouths, or dangling button eyes--those who are born with greater symmetry and a free range of motion--have greater worth? Is that the “God’s plan” that Baby is always talking about? I mean, if it is, then I guess I’m not interested.
Filfin: So you think there’s no plan?
Nared: Well…Well, I know it doesn’t make any sense, but you see this long arm of mine? The one long arm pointing upward in a kind of celebratory manor? Well, I’ve always felt that I have this one long arm for a purpose. I mean, I know the girl laughs at it sometimes, but I have this feeling, this deep feeling, that one day there will be this situation where a creature with one long arm and one short arm is going to be needed, needed in some important way, and it will make sense, and I will feel my purpose and I will understand a little of what God is thinking. You know what I mean? It doesn’t erase any of my questions, it’s just a feeling I have about my one long arm, a feeling that this arm is not a cause for ridicule but a sign that there is a greater mind at work. That probably sounds ridiculous to you…
Filfin: No, no. I know what you’re talking about. I’ve often felt that way about these appendages on my head.
Nared: You mean your horns?
Filfin: They’re not horns really. I used to think they were horns until I felt Rhino’s horn. His is hard and sharp. Good for defending or attacking something. Mine are completely soft, impotent really. I don’t think anyone could really classify them as horns. At one point I thought they might be ears, you know, some kind of special hearing devices that could pick up some kind of special sound or signal that other’s can’t perceive.
Nared: So they’re ears?
Filfin: I have no idea really. They could be. Maybe one day I’ll hear something through them, something no one else notices…I don’t know. I guess it’s possible. Or maybe they serve some other function. I don’t know. And that’s the pain of it all. I too have times when I feel that I’m made for some deep purpose…but, mostly there’s just this pain. A kind of shame really, at who I am, how I’m perceived, a deep self-loathing at my crooked arms, the head appendages, the soft pink rump. I would like to feel this “real love” that Baby speaks of…but most days I just feel like shit. Really Nared. I wake up, I see myself in the mirror, and I just feel worthless, and I just wish I could get five minutes with God or the Nursery Fairy or some kind of Higher Power and say to them, Please. Please. Tell me the plan. For God’s sake, just tell me the plan. I won’t tell anyone. I won’t try and mess it up. If it’s the burn pile for me, O.K. I can accept that. Even welcome it. I just want to know.

A Sacrament

2009-09-06T16:15:00.000-07:00

A bridge across the Susquehanna is not a sacrament, and neither is a highway with Amish buggies to slow your way into Lancaster, PA. Got directions at dusk from a very old young woman missing her front teeth, she paused a long while from putting her baby in his carseat to puzzle out the way to Water Street. Last light on dark 19th C brick is not a sacrament, falling night is not a sacrament, and neither is a cat stuck on a steep slate rowhouse roof, even if it's stuck there until somebody lets it back in.

Waiting for the band to come on is not a sacrament. An accordion under one arm and four beers in the other hand is not a sacrament. An accordion is not, a Guild hollow-body six string is not, the worn scar below the f-hole is not a sacrament, and the singer's reluctance to speak or make eye contact is not a sacrament. Nothing is consecrated by a three-step sway aloft on a boozy waltz, and nothing changes when the singer closes his eyes and his brother leans into him for the chorus, because singing to the punched tin ceiling that shines two stories above an audience passing round a bottle of Maker's Mark is not a sacrament. Stomping out a waltz is not, certain people touching each other who otherwise never touch because your heart is too good for this town is not a sacrament. The sound of too much sound is not a sacrament, when it's like holding your ear to the ocean and you're pretty sure you're hearing the world's highest octaves for the last time, it is not a sacrament how imaginary harmonics become indistinguishable from actual harmonies. Sweat and fatigue late at night with the presence of other bodies moving and the smell of beer is not a sacrament. It is not a sacrament when the Maker's Mark comes by again now almost gone and sloshing golden hot and dark in your throat and your heart is too good for this town could be nearly anyone. Your booted heel stomping onetwothree, onetwothree against the floorboards is not a sacrament although it could almost be a voice and the voice could almost be a tall man with hair in his face thinking your heart is too good. Gratitude is not a sacrament, loneliness is not a sacrament, silence is not a sacrament, and neither is a bridge across the Susquehanna.

Jack Shellac and the Vegan Vow

2009-09-01T20:12:00.000-07:00

Jack Shellac woke unusually late and tried to recall the face of the werewolf hunkered down in the corner of his dream. He lay eyes closed, fully awake, seeking to re-enter the night’s images. He noticed the carnal hunger in the dark of his belly and felt a kind of clarity he hadn’t known in months. He let the hunger spread, clearing the myths and fantasies that cloaked his will, until he was left with the plain truth: he would break the vegan vow he’d made the previous summer. He knew now he'd lived half starved because of the smell of patchouli on a young woman’s pits.

She’d picked him out of a crowd of drunk vagabonds, lechers really, standing at the edge of a makeshift concert--three young men in cutoffs, hemp leis, beaded dreadlocks, playing a hacked version of Marley through a row of tissue box amps wired to a car battery. They stood on an oil-stained rug, Pakistani he figured, stood on it like it was an elevated stage. They spun and swung their matted locks, raised and swaggered their axes, lurched at the half-dozen dancers like they were head-lining in Kingston. The dancers, forest hippies—dirty hair, brown dusty skin, brown clothes--danced half-naked, lines of sweat streaking light across their faces. Jack and the drunks from the river bank stood at the creek bank, unmoved, like free-range cattle. Jack had no feeling at the appearance of this spontaneous gathering, his ears working, outlining the mathematics of the beat.

He didn’t know when or why the young woman with the nocturnal eyes came to him. He couldn’t recall whether his embarrassment at her made-up name (Morning Glory) was in reaction to her obvious need or from some sense of propriety his parents had tucked into his bones. What he did recall was the way she whispered, “I can heal you,” and the smell, the alluring scent of un-bathed female, like peaches split open on the ground. She told him it was patchouli and lifted her arm so he could smell it. When he bent toward her, she kissed his dry crown and beckoned, “Come with me. I’m going to heal you.”

He took her hand and walked. The sharp smell of ponderosa pine cleared the Wild Turkey from his eyes and he looked at her soft shoulder blades and realized he was looking at a gift. This was just like Mother Nature. How many nights had he begged and pleaded with her for a sign? He’d fasted, sang to her in the sacred woods, gave up every man-made pleasure, and yet she’d remained full of silence. And then now, now that he’d cursed her, called her a lying whore, threw Oscar Meyer wrappers in her rivers, carved his name in redwoods, shat and pissed on squirrel nuts and molehills, gave himself over to rye and sugar water, now she turns to him and gives him Morning Glory? A doe of a girl, with warmth in her eyes, and rose lips.

She was a gift. Maybe the last gift of female attention he would know on this planet, and his knotted heart went slack with gratefulness. She walked him into a clearing that smelled of charcoal and summer urine, and then to a set of safety-orange camping mats, duck-taped into a hobo’s California king. She laid him down on that foam mat at the base of an oak tree and he looked up at the branches tied with dream catchers, tiny Tibetan bells, and satchels of lavender. He choked, in shock really, at the cold ball of silver studded through her soft pink tongue, then lifted his cheek to catch the strands of beads that hung from her ears and neck, felt them brush across his flat face like summer rain. He lifted his hands, touched her oily hair, pulled at the dark dreds, noticed his fingers wanted to play her, find the melody, pluck out some kind of African blues.

She fancied herself a healer, though he knew she was an L.A. refugee--no place, no people, only head-shop rumors--and yet, she did resurrect the warrior, the old spear straight and sharp, which was a kind of supernatural surprise. He gave himself over, and felt the death ache separate from his body and head for the junipers where it hovered, watching, waiting, like a sick animal.

In the morning he woke with her visage dark against the early light. Her services complete, she gave final instructions, “You need to stop eating meat. It’s blocking your energy. Your third and fifth chakras have almost completely stopped functioning.” He sensed she was referring to his heart and maybe his groin and told her he thought he’d done alright last night. She smiled at him, told him he did fine in a way that let him know it was a one-time service. “You’re gonna have to take care of yourself now. You should go vegan. And no more booze. Buddha said that.”
“Buddha said no booze?”
“I think so. It was either him or Laura Schlessinger.”
He lay back, smiled at the feel of his spent body, then made a vow to become a new man.

Darśana, Leonard Cohen and Levon Helm

2009-08-18T13:15:00.000-07:00

I recently got to see two of the great aging bearers of the (North) American tradition of words and music. And see is about right because in both cases I didn't get to hear much of them. I may have told you that Magdalen got a migraine within a few minutes of getting our chairs set up and hunkering down for the Leonard Cohen show in the rain. We got to hear "Dance Me to the End of Love" and then "Take This Waltz" as we headed for the exit, Magdalen weaving limply on my arm and the rain beginning to fall in sheets on those unlucky ones who weren't under the pavilion. I was surprised how little it mattered to me, actually, and how almost proud I was to be outside the feast. The main thing was I got to see the man. He was dressed in a black, wool Italian suit. Jowly and thin as he was he carried himself with great strength and flexibility and even power. As we walked past, he knelt on one knee and held his finger to his lips, dropping nearly to the bottom of his gravelly range to whisper across the night, "Take this waltz./ It's yours now,/ It's all that there is."

For Hindus, enlightenment can be conveyed by seeing a great master or by seeing the divine in a person. It's called, apparently, and not in Roman letters, darśana. And these two experiences helped make sense of it for me. I was oddly grateful to see Leonard Cohen, and his image on stage has taught me something about how one holds oneself when one is a pilgrim but finds oneself in the black Italian suit of a cabaret singer. And how one holds oneself when one is a sensualist whose body is aging and failing. Stretch, bend, invite the body to continue finding postures for the eternally youthful, eternally restless soul--these postures must change as the body changes, they will be abbreviated, more cautious, but they can work just as well as the postures of the young body, confounded as it is with so much energy and so little decisiveness or knowledge or stillness.

And then this past Sunday I got to see Levon Helm. He came on stage with a young forty-year-old's thick head of white hair but the stooped shoulders and wiry, slightly bandy-legged gait of a much older man than I'd expected to see. His singing voice is strained and scraped but normally very strong, or at least very determined. He sat at the drums, suddenly full of strength and succinct skill, counted off the 9-piece band and lit into "Tennessee Jed". Only after Helm had pounded away at four songs did the guitarist, Larry Campbell, who had been singing lead so far, allow as how we would have noticed that "Levon hasn't been doing much singing today." None, in fact. There was no vocal mic anywhere near him, because his doctor had forbidden him from singing. Helm didn't even talk in the course of the show, including at the end when he walked back and forth at the front of the stage touching the hands of maybe a hundred people in turn, while his bandmates and the stage hands looked on, seeming puzzled and maybe a bit put out. Everybody wanted to touch him. All the younger performers mentioned him as they played their sets. We all felt the significance of being near him.

And at the end of the show nobody seemed bothered that he hadn't sung. We had gotten to watch him, his obvious physical pleasure as his wonderful band played these songs that are his but also belong already to the American tradition. The songs and the feel of his drumming under his voice are all now a part of the lineage, they are more than just a man or the work or the voice of a man. If someone is playing "The Weight" in the next room, you can feel Levon Helm's presence coming through the wall to you--that restless sweet talk on the snare as his drums leave space for the chorus to catch up to the beat. It's what Frost said about how the "sound of sense" of a well-formed sentence can be heard just as clearly from the next room. I mainly felt grateful to be in his presence. And his presence is actually more proof than I needed of his existence. The sight of him showed me that I already knew him quite well. I can feel his existence every time I cop the descending baseline, the one that weaves hillbilly-wise down to the truth of the chorus, and that I recently took my turn stealing from him. Twice; in two recent songs. Thanks for giving me something to steal--honorably and goddamn well for good--from you, Master.

I'm taking both your waltzes, and I hope that someone will take them from me.

To One's Self

2009-08-10T05:52:00.000-07:00

Dear Self,
I was going to say that I know what you must be thinking but that really isn't true. I don't know how you view my pattern of bragging and mythologizing and then, for long periods, ignoring you. I really couldn't say if I've ever seen you clearly. I don't know what kind of attention and support you might need. Would you be just as happy to live in complete obscurity? Do you have ambitions? Are you lonely?Is there something that you need?

I've mainly seen you as a fire, sometimes as a useful fire, often as a dangerous or perplexing fire. I get very frustrated with you because just when it seems pretty clearly like the main thing is to control your hunger for everything, you get very dim and I worry that there isn't enough energy in you to keep me alive. Which is it? Or do I have this whole image wrong? I thought you were supposed to serve me; I guess I thought you were me. So what are you?

I now think that the part of me that is talking to you, maybe still trying to bargain with you, is sort of what can be seen in the visible spectrum. That what I would call me at any particular time is a function of how the eyes work and how I am focusing my attention. It changes over time, it always has some particular project or it falls into despondency, it is not still unless something overwhelms it, stuns it. This thing that is talking to You, is it You? Do you accept it as part of Yourself? I recognize the insistence and the prim method of this voice so well. God, it would rather be right in some narrow way than be with what is real. But it's made that way, made to do work, and it's really pretty efficient. Maybe I need to let it off the hook, clean it off in the evening like a gardening tool and lean it in some cool, dim place for the night? Except I don't know how to do that: it's always hungry. I would say I am always hungry, restless, watching. So would you come and be with me if I put the shrill voice away?

I began by approaching you and already I'm thinking about my own care again. But this whole thing is so circular, this whole question of how to manage alone, of how to care for us without any outside attention or stage. I really don't know if I believe it's possible.

All I can think to do is try to see you clearly and listen to you as I would listen to anyone else. Weirdly, your desires are really easy for me to dismiss as illusions. But maybe when you say you want things, even dumb shallow stuff, it means that you really want them. To go outside, to drink coffee, to talk with a friend, to pick up the guitar and make a D chord. I'll try to listen to you very literally. We need to start preparing, or maybe it's just me who does, for when the fantasies of greatness and importance have gone and the physical mojo is a useful, elegant reading lamp and no longer a spot light. I don't even want to plan for this, or think about it.

And it would help if you would try to be mundane, try to use your words. I do know, and I'll try to remember, that you aren't made of words and that words don't describe all of you. There's this image of you as a sort of primordial valley where you exist in an indefinite, inexhaustible form before you rise into the light and take shape become part of the discrete processes of the language world and the mechanical world. I'll try to think of you there and regard your peace and great lambent energy as mine. But I don't know if I can understand you without words.
Love, K

Myles Murphy and the Build-Your-Own-America Kit

2009-08-09T05:34:00.000-07:00

When I was in my early twenties a towering and ambiguous friend sent me a peculiar present. Three 90 minute cassette tapes recorded front and back, more than four hours of original music. Titles were recorded on the folded up paper inserts but outside that, partly visible from the outside of the case, there was also a large geometric pattern done in water colors and cut into three parts with 1/3 included in each case. And the most amazing part was the box. The cassettes were--entombed? enshrined? installed?--in a triangular cardboard box that sat upright like a pyramid, painted all over with trippy neo-Navajo designs in red and black and green.

And on the tapes were these brilliant meandering songs, mostly fragments of legends about odd characters. Dan the Pharmacist Fan, Elvis whom everybody loves, the Thunderbird. But also there was ambient sound, bird song, car engines, the sounds of things being found or knocked over or thrown together, rattlings and shudderings and quaverings of all kinds, the equivalent of thinking aloud. The vocals were not only sung but also moaned, whined, slurped bits of odd dialogue read in hysterical voices from all distances, from around corners, through improbable substances. Sent to me on my birthday. The whole thing was a token of grudging respect, or a capitulation to the need to be understood, much more than it had anything to do with affection. Or at least with personal affection. I was something of a second or third-string recipient but was finally deemed the most likely to understand the music.

I think maybe I do. But it took years for me to be able to listen to it as a whole thing. Partly because the sound quality is very bad but as much because of the heterogeneous, meandering quality of it. It kept needling me, more or less night and day, with its prickly brilliance, its oblique self-importance, its heedless facticity. Myles had made this music and given it physical form as well and now it irreducibly and essentially Was. It contained not only music but Facts of all sorts, pleasant and unpleasant. It is a shrine to omnivorous Americanness. And I now think I see why it was such an affront to me at the time. At a time when I was very self-protective and assembling my own fantasy version of the world, The Box accepted and held out to me everything: drugs, homelessness and insanity, bravado, self-destructiveness, restlessness. Cruelty as well as tenderness, tedium as well as wit, discord and melody, huge raw civic conscience and the anger that arises in those who have it, pettiness and charity.

So I played the first of these tapes as my daughter Emma and I drove down to the Smithsonian American Art Museum this morning to walk through another brilliant and heterogeneous version of America. I turned Dolby on and off, fiddled with bass and treble, gave her synopses, repeated good lines, trying to make it clear. I wheeled her past the faces of John Brown and Joseph Smith, the redwhite&blue collage with Obama's hopeful face, busts of Lincoln and Jackson, WPA cityscapes, weathervanes and walking sticks, statesmen and madmen and prophetesses and kept women, Sodomites, saints, suicides and dandies. All the parts have to be there. And arriving back home I see that my room is another version of the Build-Your-Own-America Kit, and my heart yet another.

A Scene from Old Weird America

2009-08-03T11:29:00.000-07:00

I took the boys to church yesterday. After opening hymns, the call to worship, and a reading from Exodus there was "special music" listed in the bulletin. Our town's former chief of police walked up front--bare footed, wearing Bermuda shorts and a Hawaiian shirt opened up to reveal a necklace of wooden beads. Now, it should be said that when this man was chief of police the rest of the force despised him and he was basically forced out because the sergeants beneath him said they had no confidence in him. Why? The story they sited was an incident where a robber ran into a house and took a woman hostage. The police surrounded the house and then called the chief. When the chief showed he took off his uniform, put on civilian clothes, handed over his weapons and walked inside the house to talk to the frightened fugitive. An hour later, the chief walked out with the woman and the robber. Apparently, this act was totally against protocol and the rest of the force resented him for it.

At church the ex-chief stood in front of the congregants with palms open, turned outward. His wife sat next to the piano with a middle-eastern hand drum, the pianist (the town mechanic) began to pound out an island melody and sing out in Hawaiian. Immediately, the fifty-something ex-chief began to do a hula--hips moving side-to-side, arms and hands rolling like the waves of the ocean. Smiling broadly, the Chief stepped toward the congregation, holding his hands over his heart and then opening them wide in a gesture of welcome. He made signs of the sun and moon, boats paddling on the ocean, skies opening up, fish jumping, birds crossing the sky. At one point the chief cupped his own heart and then held it out for all of us to see. The movements were so lovely and vulnerable that if the chief had been a young woman we all would've fallen in love with him. But the chief is a white man with a balding head, a hairy paunch, and tattered mustache and so the dance, at first, was simply odd and startling.

In the front pew, the chief’s teenage, autistic son, who normally fidgets and whispers and counts fingers sat mesmerized watching his dancing father. I too sat mesmerized--at times with horror, at times with restrained, snot-blowing laughter at the strange audacity of this guy dancing a hula in church...but the more the man danced, so honest and full of heart...well, I noticed a strange joy, a joy that burned off the shame that often shrouds my interior. I wondered, once again, about the many fears and prejudices that hem me in. Why are they there? What's the evolutionary explanation?

After church, when I asked my sons what they thought of the dancing chief, they smiled and said, “that was cool,” and I could see they meant it. I recalled this past fourth of July when these two middle school boys ran from our house to meet their friends on a terrace at the local college, to hear a salsa band play. I remembered them scanning the clusters of people, then excitedly rushing over and grabbing the hands of their dance partners, making their way to the dance floor, eager to try out their new Latin steps, while fireworks sprayed the black sky.

Some Stuff About Home and T-Shirts

2009-08-02T16:40:00.000-07:00

Man, I wish there had been food for you. Leaving for a trip is always stressful, as much as I don't believe in that word, and I didn't do anything about leaving food.
I'm back at this desk looking at that ugly tree blocking out much of the world up against that house that blocks out much of the rest of it from here, and I realize how much of my mind is controlled by that tree. Some sort of scraggly cypress that doesn't belong here and has a vine climbing up it and strangling it. Impossible to ignore. Clear incitement to leave this desk and mobilize.
I had a dream this morning in which I met Patti Smith and she seemed to recognize me and gave me a big hug. We walked around a sort of industrial building by a rural highway, talking comfortably and in detail about things I don't recall. It seemed very normal but I was also intensely grateful for the warmth and the recognition. I told her how I saw her once in City Lights Books in San Francisco and how I was embarrassed to bother her, and about how I just smiled and bowed and turned away. She didn't remember of course but said that oh I should have come over and spoken.
America is very much on my mind, my need to regard America not as a finished thing but as scattered parts of a Make Your Own America kit that I'm working on. The girls and I stopped for ice cream in Lewisburg, PA this afternoon as we made our way back down to Baltimore from Rochester. It was a muggy Sunday afternoon and the place was swamped with post-church Americans and non-post-church Americans, so that nearly everybody was wearing either an unbuttoned dress shirt or a t-shirt with an image of the American flag on it. One said, "Tattered Glory, 2008." Not sure what that meant. Another said, "The Best Things in Life Are Free." That I get, although I wondered if the shirt's owner and I could have a real conversation about what it meant without both of us getting all embarrassed and reactive and tongue-tied and dumb. We all stood there sweating sea water and amniotic fluid, thinking about our horse in the race, waiting for our ice cream, rehearsing our orders. The ice cream was really good.
The mountainous parts of PA and NY are gorgeous, and this morning as we drove down a mist lay in the low areas which always makes the hollows look deeper, the peaks look more distant, higher. Beautiful and deep, so much beyond what you can see.
Stopping in these places reminds me so much of the earthiness and suspicion of the people I grew up with, and of how I love them and hate them. Of course there is no them, exactly, but there sort of is when they're in groups.
I'm going to go out tomorrow and buy a t-shirt with an American flag. Serious. And maybe I'll write "The Old, Weird America" across it. That phrase, half from Kenneth Rexroth and half from Griel Marcus, has been so much on my mind.
I think of Bob Dylan saying that he was born a looong way from home and he's been trying to get back ever since. Exactly right. So it's good to drive, even to the wrong place, good to see things, even if you hate some of them, good to be challenged with the raw fact of what exists, maybe especially t-shirts with American flags. American Fags: feels like that's the team I got drafted by long ago and I'm gradually coming to see the backwards logic of it. A fag and a Jew, I am, in the long, woman-hungry body of an American Southerner from California.

A Morning at the Wulf's House: Birds Come and Save Me

2009-07-28T08:42:00.000-07:00

We needed to know if what he said about there being no food in the cupboards was true; after the search we no longer questioned his other instructions. I stood in his room and tried to imagine what it was like to be him and I realized that his interior landscape was much wider than mine and that I was grateful for his friendship. Noah walked in trance-like and took the guitar and mandolin--his only greeting, "Geez Dad, there's a lot of picks." Within minutes the downstairs was filled with the Tennessee Waltz. Later, when Joseph awoke and ambled outdoors I said "Good morning," then pointed to the tire swing, "look what I made for you." Joseph smiled and thanked me with genuine gratitude because he knew I was lying but also knew that I would've made him that swing if he had asked me to.

Gracie and I jumped on the trampoline--first as rabbits, then as monster and trickster, then as dad and daughter, but suddenly the feel was not right and Gracie went inside for a moment then opened the door and said, "Mom talked me into coming back out." We lay on our backs and looked at the broken tree branch and then looked at the cat playing dead and then tried to bounce on our backs. When we went inside for water Jill said to me, "I saw you watching me shoot baskets the other day." Once again, I realized that Jill has all of my numbers and I went to her and kissed her and when our lips parted she breathed on me and it was like driving through a field of blackberries and I wanted to crawl down her throat and rest my head on the dark clumps within her lungs and then she pouted and said, "Everywhere we go there is coffee. There is always coffee." And this made me think of coffee. And so I went to the freezer, as instructed, and took out the yogurt container and plied the lid and smelled the frozen beans and it made me happy to be an addict. I made the coffee, as instructed, and then greeted Benjamin at the back door and watched him feed the dog and stared at his pony tail and wondered about the comfort that his long hair provides.

I walked upstairs and Gracie followed and we stood in each of the girls rooms and looked and Gracie said, "I wish I lived in a girl house," and I felt sad for her and when I saw a cluster of feathers in Maggie's room I sang her a song about cardinals and blue jays and yellow finches coming to save a little girl and she sang the spontaneous chorus with me, "birds come and save me, birds come and save me" and this was about the one millionth time that Gracie has broken my heart.

What I Want to Say to the Waitress in the Montreal Cafe

2009-07-20T07:22:00.000-07:00

It's your crooked teeth that makes you desireable.
I know your friends suggest orthodontia.
They're jealous.
Your blue quarried eyes and
moonglow skin--
your marbled beauty is admired,
never touched.
But when you smile
your heart becomes visible,
like a dying star
that attracts a lover
to whisper
his secret grief.

What I Remember of My Sons' Recollection of their Math Teacher's Mountain Biking Years

2009-06-11T09:40:00.000-07:00

His racing name was "The Kid." They don't know why--heighth? Lack of facial hair? They have no idea. They think he was young when he raced. There was some guy named "Red Elk." He was just a regular white guy but he had a red afro and wore terry cloth headbands. Red Elk was a real character. It should be known that The Kid once beat Lance Armstrong. Don't expect to find this fact on the internet because Lance will never admit it and there were no reporters. But it happened. No one could beat The Kid in Colorado. The Kid treated the mountains of Colorado like it was his personal playground. That's why Lance couldn't win. The race was in Colorado.

It takes about two minutes to change a blown inner tube. Most guys change two tubes per race. Not so for Red Elk. Red Elk wore pre-inflated tubes around his neck when he rode. Not fully inflated, but just enough to carry across your chest like an archer's bow; probably about half inflated. He also carried CO2 cartridges in his pockets. You really shouldn't carry CO2 cartridges in your pockets, especially in a mountain bike race in Colorado. But that's just the kind of thing Red Elk did. Red Elk had no concern for personal safety. When Red Elk blew a tire he would simply replace it with the half inflated tire and then connect a CO2 cartridge. No pumping. You see? That gave Red Elk a two minute advantage over the other racers. But none of this mattered to The Kid. The Kid beat Red Elk every time. Especially in Colorado. Actually, it wouldn't have mattered if Red Elk didn't change any tires, he had no chance and he knew he had no chance, but every race he'd look at The Kid and say, "Today's the day kid, today's the day." But it was never the day. The boys can't emphasize enough The Kid's home field advantage in Colorado. It was ridiculous.

One time The Kid showed up to the starting line and he hadn't finished his coffee. It was a really good coffee. He didn't usually get this kind of coffee. The race started but The Kid just couldn't toss that coffee on the ground, because it was a special type that was really rare. So he had to finish that coffee. If he had a thermos he would've saved the coffee but he left his thermos in the truck. So he sat at the starting line and finished his coffee. He started the race like five minutes behind the rest of the racers but he still won. It was only by a minute or two, but he still beat everyone. When he passed Red Elk, Red Elk threw one of his half-inflated tubes at him. It was just a joke, but it ended up going over The Kid's helmet and blinding him for a few seconds on a really dangerous gravel hill. Red Elk didn't know it would blind The Kid. Red Elk was actually really good friends with The Kid. He didn't mind that The Kid won every single race. One time The Kid was in Istanbul and he stayed at a downtown hotel for three days, as he was chekcing out he ran into Red Elk. Red Elk had been at the hotel next door for the exact same three days and they never knew it. They were both totally blown away. They were both in Istanbul, staying right next to each other, and never saw each other. Not even once. They were totally surprised. It was The Kid who noticed Red Elk. Red Elk was just walking by carrying a backpack. He only saw him from behind, but The Kid knew immediately. It was the red afro. You don't see many of those. Anyways, when Red Elk threw the half-inflated tire, The Kid had to ride blind for a few seconds. Most guys would've hit a tree, but this was in Colorado--The Kid could've rode the whole course blind. That's how well he knew the Colorado trails.

They pause and wonder why people would spend money traveling to Colorado, back in those days, when they knew they had no chance against The Kid. Not even Lance Armstrong (though he'd never admit to it) and you won't find it on the internet, but it's true. They swear to God it's true. The Kid told them himself and he's a math teacher. And math never lies.

In Preparation For Releasing My Father's Ashes

2009-06-10T12:51:00.000-07:00

Early summer and the front yard’s overgrown.
The light falls spotted through the black walnut leaves.
“We are all like the grass,”
the scriptures sing again and again,
“Here today and tomorrow thrown into the oven.”
Green grass, shot through
with mysterious,
unending,
green.
The passage,
like your absence,
is familiar and dreamlike;
hard to follow while lying on my back
smoking this cigar,
blowing circles
to the June sky.
Grass or sun,
cigars or human beings,
all memory is made from burning.

Five summers AWOL.
I still see your mischievous smile,
your helpless tears.
Your life now a story,
a picture book,
a fable,
an inspiration--
dependent on the teller.
“All stories are untrue,” you once told an audience,
knowing full well that stories are all we have of the truth.
This is my story:
We loved each other as best we could.

With your hands
I gather the cut blades,
pour the grey diesel,
drop the wet stained tobacco,
then stand
vigil
while the red rolling waves spray
foxtails like fireworks.
I stir
and rake
and stir.
Still I see
green never burns.

My Real Story Is Not a Real Story

2009-05-25T06:36:00.001-07:00

Last night I sat on the front porch and watched the day fade until the magnolia leaves were outlined against the sky with perfect clarity. It's a saucer magnolia. Very cool, slightly oblong leaves with that succinctly hooked point. The magnolia is always reminding you that while it is not a large tree it is a three-dimensional tree. Maybe this is the secret of its survival. No matter how far you walk away or go up on tiptoes to see a leaf from the side. The fleshy leaves hold themselves scooped and curved along the spine; the whole growth habit of the thing is unruly. Even from a quarter mile away you see rebellious runners and odd splashes of white. The magnolia is also a terrible planner: it blooms too early. I actually couldn't write about this while it was blooming because the whole thing makes me nervous. I was afraid to jinx it by pointing out that once again it (she? he?) was completely covered in these dirty-white blossoms maybe three weeks too early, maybe three weeks before the last frost date. And way too profusely: what's the point, magnolia? Half that many blossoms, properly white, would overwhelm even the most indifferent shit-gazing or cellphone-bound dogwalker. So many blossoms that the tree seems in danger of capsizing, and flung violently into bloom on those odd little shoots that are themselves flung two feet beyond what the architect intended or the engineer approved. The blossoms wait much longer than you would think to fully bloom. In this pose that suggests some extreme sport for hand models and glove factory inspectors. They stay that way for two weeks, collecting dust and snow and blemishes before they have even bloomed. As I write this I am dismayed again at the profligacy of the whole thing. As if a troupe of acrobats walked for miles into a forest, found a single ancient beer can and concluded that they must walk much further. And only upon finding the point equidistant from aesthetisizing eyes in all directions does one of them step up on a fallen magnolia twig, and the others climb silently over eachothers' shoulders into an organic, unnameable shape. And the last one finds a place on the outermost branch of the pelleton, where viewed from the ground against the gentle swaying of the rest of the troupe, he looks to be falling, or maybe about to drift upwards, but is actually holding perfectly still.

The Torture Game

2009-04-23T22:37:00.000-07:00

“Who wants to be on the torture list?”

The seven year old girl in a strawberry stained dress and white sweat pants promenades around the noon foursquare game. Her arms outstretched she holds a sheet of yellow construction paper with a list of names written in primitive red crayon.

“Who wants to be on the torture list?” She singsongs her invitation over the sounds of the foursquare boys who shout at the game like racetrack gamblers.

“What happens if you’re on the torture list?” I ask the four foot interrogator and her two friends when they pass by. “It means you’re bad,” scowls the girl with the list, whose knit cap weighs heavy over her eyes. “And we carry you to our torture room and we torture you,” adds the dark-haired assistant. Curious I ask them to describe the activities within the torture room. They pause, look at one another sheepishly, then realize they haven’t thought that far ahead. The leader shrugs her shoulders in embarrassment, grabs the sleeves of her friends and pulls them along while frowning at me, “Let’s get away from him!”

During the week that I serve as volunteer recess monitor at my sons’ school I watch these girls and their friends engage in the torture game. The game is disturbing—the list of names, the mock torture room hidden within a circle of shrubs, the kids carried away while giggling and shouting “Don’t torture me!” The victims laid on the rain soaked ground while the girls march in a circle pointing and shouting, “You are bad. You are very bad.”

The paid teachers and parents monitoring the lunch recess react differently to the torture game. One mother confronts the girls and in abstract phrases like “This is inappropriate play” tries to communicate the dehumanizing nature of their game and suggests the girls run over to the jungle gym. With flat expressions the three friends nod their heads obediently and then carefully wait until the mother moves to the other side of the playground before resuming their covert operations. Other parents who notice the game shrug their shoulders and shake their heads. “I guess they’re trying to make sense of it,” one father suggests and then half mumbles, “I guess we all are.”

In the same way that children have difficulty imagining a world without cell phones or mp3 players, the images and language of torture is now part of the landscape of life within which young people are being formed. Whether photographs of snarling dogs lurching at the throats of shirtless men and naked bodies attached to electric wires or radio newscasters debating the merits of “simulated drowning,” children now take for granted that their country inflicts cruelty and pain on other human beings.

In the Imperial County Jail, behind a two-inch Plexiglas wall stands 76 year old Father Louis Vitale in an orange jumpsuit. He has a large, slightly goofy grin. His white, half-moon hair sticks up like he’s rubbed it with a balloon. After the guards unlock his shackles, he waves at my friend Frank and me then sits down, lifting a heavy black phone up to each ear, “Welcome to the Imperial jail!” he shouts.

Franciscan Louis Vitale is in the third month of a five month sentence. In November of 2006, he and Jesuit Stephen Kelly attempted to deliver a letter opposing the teaching of torture techniques at Fort Huachuca, Arizona--headquarters of US Army Intelligence and the training center for military interrogators. The priests were arrested as they knelt in prayer halfway up the driveway at the army base. I drove out to the Imperial jail, just ninety minutes east of San Diego because I too, like the children at my son’s school, am trying to absorb the reality that ours is a nation that inflicts cruel and inhuman punishment on other human beings.

Sitting across from Father Louis I ask why he’s willing to be jailed for this issue. “Hearing that this country is engaging in torture just hit me in the gut. It should hit everyone in the gut. That’s where I feel God, in my gut. I just had to do something. I think if I didn’t, I’d just get depressed.” He leans forward toward the glass and pauses to look me in the eye then adds, “this isn’t just about the victims, this is about the people who have to inflict the suffering as well.” He tells me about Alyssa Peterson, a young US Army interpreter who trained at Ft. Huachuca. She was sent as part of the interrogation team to one of the US prisons in Iraq. After just two sessions in the cages, she committed suicide. “This has got to stop,” Father Louis later writes from his prison cell, “Not just because of what it’s doing to the victims, but because of what it’s doing to the souls of the men and women in our military.”

What’s most striking about Father Vitale is his demeanor. Torture is a serious issue and obviously Vitale is responding with his life, and yet his demeanor is light, he smiles and laughs easily, there’s little animosity in his voice toward the military commanders or Bush administration officials who have authorized and advocated for torture. In conversing with him I notice how often he tries to see things through the perspective of those who carried out these crimes, “I can see myself in their shoes, I used to be in the military, I shared many of their viewpoints at one time…” he tells me. When I ask him how he’s able to keep from getting bitter and angry, how he avoids demonizing those who have placed him in prison he smiles and says, “Well I like people. I’ve always liked people. I’ve never met anyone that I wanted dead. I’ve never met a person that I wanted to see in hell or anything like that. I’ve always liked people.”

And there it was. The key to holding the sorrow of our country’s engagement in cruel and inhuman practices. The way to resist and root out our involvement in torture, war and perpetual violence. You have to like people. You have to value people above ideology or structures, you have to value human beings, even those who have done terrible things, above politics or patriotism. You have to remember the perspective from the great religions, that each of us, every one of us, harbors a little piece of holiness within. And that everyone, even the most criminal among us, should be treated with a basic dignity.

To be liked is much more powerful then to be loved. To love is often an obligation, a commandment, an expectation. How many times have I listened to adult friends tell me of neglectful and abusive parents but then end their comments with “But I know they loved me.” If given a choice I would much rather be liked then loved. This is the genius of Father Vitale…he likes people, he likes the person who is being tortured as well as the military commander inflicting the punishment. When you like people more than ideas, you can’t stand to see them harmed, the reality of torture hits you in the gut, shocks your conscience, and you have to do something, you have to make it stop.

This past Sunday as I sat in church I noticed the girl from the torture game sitting in the pew in front of me. She wore a light floral dress and held a chocolate candy bar. During the hymns she stood up on the pew, then turned and like a wild badger frowned and flashed her brown smeared teeth at me. This was a post-Easter service and so we were singing and smiling and celebrating the enduring life of Jesus that was able to absorb and transcend the fear, hatred, and violence that lives within the human creatures. And I wondered if the girl in front of me connected the hymns, the stories of Jesus and his suffering on the cross to the dark and shadow torture game that she likes to play. Despite the children’s sermons and Sunday school classes, my suspicion is that this little girl will continue to struggle to understand the reality that human beings, human beings from her country, systematically and secretly inflict pain on other people.

Meanwhile I look at the little girl and her smeared chocolate face. Just like at school her eyebrows are furrowed, her eyes narrowed and serious. While the congregation sings joyful hymns the ring leader of the torture game keeps her back to the altar and scrunches her face at me. I lower my hymnal and take this girl in. I match her eyes. I think of Father Louis Vitale. I think of his smiling face and remember his parting words, “Don’t feel sorry for me, I’m a blessed man, I’m following my gut!” And then I look at the little girl and I realize…I like her.

My Daughter's Rabbit: A Play in One Act [notes and opening scene]

2009-04-22T13:03:00.000-07:00

Notes to Director:

[1. The difficulty in communicating the power of this work lies in making the facial features of the Rabbit character visible. This issue might be addressed through video projection, intimate seating, or having the action of the play pause from time to time while "Rabbit" moves to the edge of the stage allowing the audience to perceive Rabbit's emotive features. Once registered, Rabbit then returns to his mark and the drama resumes.

2. Regarding the part of Rabbit, it is best played by an actor no larger than 18 inches in height. The actor should be flexible and nimble with quick reflexes. A background in Mime Corporal is also helpful to the part. Rabbit needs to embody a range of emotional expression including: terror, nervous terror, cautious terror, nocturnal terror, terrified shock, confused or misplaced terror, terrifying rage, wistful terror, curious terror, and lust. Unlike most children's plays that resort to oversized masks and stuffed costumes, it is best for the facial features of the Rabbit character to be visible. The actor should be sans costume, painted in the black and white patches of a traditional Dutch bunny, with a simple cotton tail above the buttocks and some sort of elongated ears attached to the side of the head.

3. Note the use of a video screen placed above the stage. Much like background music in cinema, this screen is used to display words and images that cue the audience to the emotional meaning within the scene.]

Setting: Present day. A town in rural Oregon whose economy depends on the rise and fall of the biomass industry.

Staging: A pellet stove glows orange on stage left. A leather couch with visible teeth marks on the four legs sits facing the television set in the center of the room. There are also claw and teeth marks on the television stand, the wood paneling, and every other prop within two feet of the floor. The electrical cords for the television, lamp, playstation game are all taped two feet above the floor, out of Rabbit's reach. A small kitchen sits stage right.

Characters:

Rabbit
Daughter [Five years old]
Father

[As the scene opens, Daughter is watching a public television show entitled, "Baby Animals." Father is absorbed in preparing his morning coffee. The portable rabbit cage sits center stage, its water bottle empty and wrenched sideways, the feed trough filled with wood chips and rabbit droppings. There is a partly chewed Kleenex box in the cage. Rabbit sits in his cage facing the audience with a look of uncertain, unfocused, terror.]

Screen display: "Guantanamo"

Father: [While carefully filling coffee grinder] Shouldn't you let the bunny out? I don't think he's been out of his cage in two days.

[Father grinds the coffee. The electric whir startles Rabbit sending him to scramble for safety within his four by two foot cage. Rabbit kicks up wood chips, black rabbit droppings, and bits of chewed cardboard in search of shelter.]

[The grinder stops.]

Father: [Glancing at Daughter]: Sweetie? Shouldn't you spend time with your rabbit? Rabbits need attention to feel loved.

Screen display: "We all need petting."

[Daughter stands, eyes still directed at television screen, walks over and unlatches cage door. Rabbit, startled by the sound of the latch, frantically attempts to dig through plastic cage floor. Daughter returns to couch. Rabbit eventually stops digging, nervously peeks out of cage. Meanwhile, father opens dishwasher door, removes coffee cup]

Water, Wind, and Smoke: The Lover Draws Near

2009-04-15T22:31:00.000-07:00

(Nikos Kazantzakis 1883-1957)

Tonight the wind blows cold across the Siskiyou Mountains. The air is merciless, full of ice and minerals, filtered clean by snow, rock, and frozen fir trees. It's supposed to be spring. Once again I have planted too early. The peas, mesculin ( chicory, chervil, cress, dandelion, sorrel mustard greens) will be black with frostbite by morning.

Five days ago I was in Lubbock, stuck in a hot windstorm that rattled the windows in the airport. The air full of grit, the sun a brown butter stain. I spent an afternoon watching a farmer fold his field, trying to keep the topsoil hidden. By the time I flew out it was too late to make my connection. I found an airport hotel in San Francisco. The next morning I woke early, opened the sliding glass door, and crossed the cigarette strewn patio, the highway and airport parking lots to get to the edge of the bay. Then it came over me: the smell of the ocean! Even the gray clayed corner of the bay that sits still beside the SFO runway, even this emptied body of water is full of dreams. I sat on a bench, my eyes shaking at the sunrise until I finally closed them and just breathed in the sweat, the salt and water, the primordial sperm and egg, the musk from God and Mother Earth screwing. I called Jill and vomited longing all over the wireless phone. "I need to live by the ocean. Who can keep their soul without the ocean?" The waves, the beach, the churning blue and what it brings. It is more than a symbol. It is the motherlode.

But here, miles from the sea, where the Cascades and Siskiyous bang shoulders, the air is cold, stone polished, sharp enough to sliver your lungs. Still, I stood outside tonight and breathed the silver air and watched the sun burrow itself into these same rough mountains, until the sky went deep black and purple and my ears fell from my head and shattered.

Now it's late. The wife and kids are in bed, sick with chest colds and fever. I have built a fire and sit reading Kazantzakis, my dead father's pipe burning between my teeth. I love my inheritance: the dark smell of the tobacco, the burning leaves in this tiny wooden bowl. The smoke is heavy and weaves a dark, fragrant ribbon through my beard. My book, printed in 1961, lies under the glowing pipe and now smells like the cedars of Lebanon, or the wise men's camels, rank with the incense of God.

Listen with me by this fire for a moment while I read you a passage, eyes red from smoking at this late hour. Listen to Nikos, to Nikos Kazantzakis and his longing. See if he doesn't describe the ocean Kirk-- the bay in San Francisco, the orange fire in this stove, the soft ash from my father's pipe blanketing my beard:

One night as I was passing through the Turkish quarter, I heard a woman singing an oriental amane' in a voice full of woefully convulsive passion. The sound was somber, raucous, very deep; it issued from the woman's loins and filled the night with despair and plaintive melancholy. Finding it impossible to proceed, I halted and listened, my head thrown back
against the wall. I could not catch my breath. My suffocating soul, unable any longer to fit within its cage of clay, was hanging from my scalp and weighing whether or not to flee. No, the singer's female breast was not being convulsed by love, not by that total mystery the coupling of a man with a woman...It was being convulsed by a cry, a command to break our
prison bars of morality, shame, and hope, and to give ourselves over to, lose ourselves in, become one with, the fearful, enticing Lover who lies in wait in the darkness and whom we call God. Listening to the woman's woefully convulsive song on that night, I felt that love, death, and God were one and the same.

Some Stuff about Being Sorted by Density

2009-04-12T05:30:00.000-07:00

"Natural man receiveth not the things of the Spirit."

All this suspicion of natural impulses that I was raised with. Or those were the maternal voices. Really makes it hard to think when you suppose that to be carnally minded is death. So your meat and your mind are totally different? When what you feel-think must be totally different from what you submit-think, how are you supposed to learn-think at all, except from books of revelation?

In the case of poor souls such as myself, so eager for virtue and indoctrination, the mind/ass dynamic as taught by George Clinton ("free your mind and your ass will follow") has to be reversed: if your mind is to be free your ass must be freed first. Maybe Funkadelic sort of knew they had it wrong. Their substance of choice in 1970 while they were making that album was acid not Derrida.

I am walking along a beach on the California Central Coast. The Flesh of the Central Coast range rises steeply above me, the enormous bay on which I am a dot stretches so far to north and south that my eye cannot make sense of the scale. Just really far. Attempts to calculate the distances make my inner ear freak out, make the world seem tilt and pitch. I look down instead and find my range by the parallel lines of debris: seaweed, different colored gravel and sand, bits of shells with the occasional intact survivor, logs half-buried in sand or upended and flying plastic grocery bags from their broken limbs. The Spirit is blowing in off the Pacific. Some sort of perfect churning machine pushes waves across thousands of miles of open ocean. They hit the steep California continental shelf at about knee-height, they tuck up their feet and scoot a quarter mile across the sand and rock, breathing rafts of seaweed and discarded shells, gathering speed. And then they choose a moment, and for a second or two seconds they stand upright, and somebody sees this or else nobody does. And then some other stuff happens. But the water doesn't have much invested in this sort of question because it's not really the water that does this, anyway. What you're actually seeing is a pattern that has traveled thousands of miles, and before that the pattern came from someplace else.

I am walking along the beach and have begun to be interested in this certain kind of small and impossibly fragile purple shell. Not made for this element, hard to pick up without breaking. It's like any other gathering where you assume that you're the odd one and then you begin to notice people's uncomfortable or lopsided expressions, how much oddness there really is, and you get a little more comfortable. First I walk back and forth looking for these things, searching toward the waves and then skipping away as each exhausted breaker fans across the sand. The water draws me in, the wind pushes me away. A vast breathing that fills the entire bay, composed of a series of tiny scurrying responses to the breathing, composed of something else, composed of something even smaller and more intricate. After a bit, I begin to notice that the purple shells have been deposited about 20 yards from the receding tide, before the darker gravel, after the finest sand, sorted by density. So now I walk 20 yards from the skittering water, another parallel line, a moving and supposedly sentient and supposedly free line. To my ocean side, flat water thins to spilled marbles of foam and sinks into the sand. To my mountain side, the fog is burning off as if the sky were being raised. The wind now blows me sideways, I lean into it for balance, looking for purple shells that I can't really pick up. Without thinking about it, I know that I feel really good. For the moment, the ocean has sorted me.

Two Guys in a Coffee Shop Talking About Stravinsky

2009-04-07T16:14:00.000-07:00

[What I overheard this morning in the Key of C Coffee Shop]

Elderly Guy with Glasses: It used to be that everyone loved Stravinsky. What they didn't realize is that what they were responding to was the silence of the Russian Orthodox Church.

[He gestures toward a table next to mine. They set coffee cups down and sit.]

Elderly Guy with Long White Hair and Black Wool Skull Cap: When I was a boy my mother took me to the Easter service at Saint Nicholas, a Russian Orthodox church in Brooklyn. I remember this one point in the service; they blew out the candles, turn out the lights, and we all stood in the dark, in silence. Then the priest whispers: "Wisdom." [Pause] "Wisdom." He then walks around lighting candles and this wall of red--blood red with gold faces...

Guy Smiling With Wire Rimmed Glasses: Icons.

Man With Long White Beard Matching His Hair: Yes. These icons--the mother of God, the crucified Jesus, the saints, the infant, the martyers-- are all suddenly visable, looking at us...with that face of....

The One Who Is Listening: Wisdom.

The One Who Is Remembering: Well, yes. Yes. Knowing. Faces that know something.

Half Bald Guy with the Glasses: This is what Stravinsky was formed in. These ideas. This presence. This mystery and sense of holy wisdom. This is what informed his music. This is where his music comes from. Standing before icons, singing hymns. That mixture of music and silence was in his bones.

Elderly Guy With Cap And No Socks Leaning Back In Chair: It was also what he was pushing against. He was cosmopolitan you know. I don't think he went to church as an adult. He was trying to overcome his background, push against the religion of his youth. What formed him was also what limited him...at least in his mind.

[The two men nod heads. Lift their coffee cups to their dry, quivering lips]

Man with Glasses Whose Beige Pants Are Worn At The Cuffs: Now of course, its all Beethoven.

Man With White Billowy Shirt and Native American Vest With Black Trim that Matches Skull Cap: Yes. This mixture of classical and pop music....a mess.

The Four-Eyed Man: [Leans forward] No wisdom.

The Long Hair: [Swinging arms wildly] No one practices. No sustained interest. No discovery of what makes something great.

Man With The Poor Eyesight: We should demand our students become members of the Russian Orthodox Church. Then they'd have something to play against! [Pounds fist on table]

The Man in Exotic Fabrics: [Points at conversation partner] Ha!

Living with Robert Bolaño

2009-04-04T06:42:00.000-07:00

For the last two months I have been reading Roberto Bolaño. Anything I say about him will be wrong, will feel like some sort of betrayal or failure to understand what it is that I am so grateful for when I read his novels. And this will be not least because I don't know what I am so grateful for. I think this sense that what is so good in Bolaño is precisely what is hard to convey might be related to how, when a good friend says that he would like to pick up the check, it feels best to accept his generosity without much thanks. The best response to generosity is low-key, and easeful gratitude. I like to think that would please him. And I hope that when his essays are translated perhaps he will have said something on this subject: why do his novels, which at no point presume to explain to the reader what is true, have me so interested in the word true. A word I had hoped to outgrow.

Bolaño was born in Santiago in April, 1953; his family moved to Mexico City when he was 15. And here things get hazy. The hugeness and energy of Mexico City, the weirdly metastasizing quality of Mexican politics and literary ideology, the newness of the urban slang, all seem to have exhilarated him. He returned to Chile in 1973 to support the new socialist regime of Salvador Allende, and was briefly imprisoned by Pinochet after the coup. He died of liver failure in 2003, after a long illness caused, according to series of articles informed by other articles because of an early addiction to herion. His wife and a close friend have separately confirmed that he ingested many substances but denied that heroin was one of them. In various articles and interviews with people who knew him at various times in his wanderings through Latin America and southern Europe, it is possible to find denials of almost all the facts of Bolaño's biography.

Part of this problem about the facts of his life must be because he came to attention so quickly, and was almost immediately gone. He wrote nearly all of his enormous body of work in a startling dash during his last 10 years. And so the highway has not yet been built that will soon carry news of his life and thought back and forth between his moments and his official biography as it comes to take a permanent shape. Part of the problem is that so much of his work remains untranslated. And part of the problem is his own apparent lack of concern with telling things the same way more than once. His own accounts of his life in speeches and interviews follow a logic of momentary connections that is similar to the narrative logic of his novels. He becomes interested in an object, in an idea or a book or a moment or a condition, and away he goes. Winning the 11th Rómulo Gallegos Prize for The Savage Detectives reminds him of his childhood dyslexia, of wearing a soccer jersey with "11" and so forth.

But let’s return to don Rómulo before we get into Jarry and note a few strange signs along the way. I have just won the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. Number 11. I used to play with the number 11 on my shirt. This, to you, will most likely seem a coincidence, but it leaves me trembling. Number 11, who couldn’t tell left from right and thus confused Caracas with Bogotá, has just won (and I use this parenthetical to once again thank the jury for this distinction, in particular Ángeles Mastretta) the eleventh Rómulo Gallegos Prize. What would don Rómulo think of this? The other day, talking on the phone, Pere Gimferrer, who is a great poet and on top of that knows everything and has read everything, told me that there are two commemorative plaques in Barcelona marking houses where don Rómulo used to live. According to Gimferrer (although he wouldn’t put his hand in the fire over the particulars), the great Venezuelan writer started writing Canaima in one of these houses.
The truth is that I believe 99.9 percent of the things Gimferrer says to the letter, so, as Gimferrer was talking (one of the houses with the plaques was not a house but a bench, which posits a series of doubts; for instance, if don Rómulo, during his stay in Barcelona—and I say “stay” and not “exile” because a Latin American is never exiled in Spain—had worked on a bench or if the bench later came to install itself in the novelist’s house)… As I was saying, while the Catalan poet was speaking, I got to thinking about my now-distant (though no less exhausting for it, especially in my memory) ambles through the Eixample district, and I saw myself there again, bouncing around in 1977, 1978, maybe 1982, and suddenly I thought I saw a street at sunset, near Muntaner, and I saw a number, the number 11, and then I walked a little further, and there was the plaque. That’s what I saw, in my mind.

The connections are synaptic as often as temporal or spacial. His sentences revise themselves as they go. The habit of thought that you enter into when you spend days reading Bolaño is that the memory is a vast and interesting city to be wandered in, to be searched for good places to sit, to be eavesdropped upon, to be mined for threads and connections of all kinds. But especially ones that have to do with people, their beauty and goodness and indifference, their desires and orderliness and stray impulses. That events are to be treated the same way, as if anything might be significant or anything might be insignificant. Bolaño chronicles all these things with an even hand, scrupulous about detail and respectful of the ways that events tail off into silence.

The Limitations of Shame Theory in Regard to Wantu

2009-03-30T21:55:00.000-07:00

How could he be ashamed?

Shame was unrecognizable to Wantu. Like telling a man to feel his womb; it could only be imagined. There was no self-hatred in Wantu, no inner-critic. As far as the voice of self-hatred, Wantu was an interior mute.

And how could you call him humble? Humility was not a virtue for Wantu--it was the only possible existence. Without shame there could be no off-setting grandiosity, no self-inflation. There was only Wantu. Wantu and his pigeon. Or, more accurately, pigeon and his Wantu.

Some Stuff about Art and Making a World

2009-03-24T09:28:00.000-07:00

Walking in the dark outside a party one summer night sometime in college, I fell suddenly under the spell of some song they were playing inside, not even a good song I think. There was the smell of dirt and magnolia, the thought of reading to be done, the feeling of my feet on the cement walkway, but nothing was as compelling, nothing was as much the center of things as the song. And then just as suddenly I remember feeling sad and angry that nothing that could happen inside the party could be as good as the feeling of the song, the not very good song. It was during a time when almost nothing presented itself to me as a given, almost everything provoked me to wonder what was necessarily so, what might be different if I were born into different circumstances or if I had the will to change myself, to expand myself. I didn't go in. And I will feel a bit suspicious of my reader if she does not mentally chide me or at least roll her eyes at my preciousness and fatalism. A different person might have made no connection between the music and the party, or might have understood the music as the promise of something wonderful waiting inside. I walked away. I was raised to keep watch at the boundaries between art and life.
Which has not served me entirely well.

But often, and maybe this is reason to be suspicious of people like me, I'm just talking to hear how things sound. Or to hear what sounds it's possible to make. So there is this other way that art works that has become as important to me as how art makes claims about the world. Art teaches you how to use your senses and how to frame things, how to see completely particular things among the infinite field of things. Or maybe it's just one thing and it's just hard to see that from the midst of it?

My eldest daughter is a junior is high school and so our mailbox is littered each day with fantastical glossy pamphlets from colleges. They're really good fun to leaf through, fold out, spin around, search for stickers and graphs and typographical sleight-of-hand. And we're right to be suspicious of them, even though they have the courtesy to show up explicitly as propaganda, unlike so much propaganda. Many of the shots in these pamphlets of kids discussing French feminism under a beech tree were taken right after other kids walked by with "Beavers" written on the butts of their sweatpants. Dumpsters just out of the frame to the right and a bank of deafening heat pumps just out of the frame to the left. Ah, well.

But so the other day I was driving to a dental checkup up a highway built over Jones Falls River, the main waterway through Baltimore. Past new apartment construction made of imaginary materials and an enormous, perfectly rectangular cinder block storage facility that can't be more than thirty feet from the highway. And the wind was whistling in the driver's side window that doesn't quite roll up. But it was foggy and near-Spring, the new grass at the shoulders and median shading into the darker green of the trees and vines I was driving past, and I had the sense of gradually ascending a land mass that slopes up from the Chesapeake Bay, Pennsylvania hanging green and misty above me as I climbed. And a highway sign tipped into view, and as I mounted a long, arcing corner the sign, which is suspended over the highway, focused the vague glare of what sun there was into a third completely distinct green--that highway sign green--and it was beautiful. And I don't know if this is a good thing but I think I found it beautiful only because watching movies has taught me to accept the world in frames. Only because of the way Michelangelo Antonioni's lens, in the midst of all the deliberately self-distracting day trips, and all the sad and irritating characters who populate L'Avventura, is transfixed only by the Mediterranean breeze in Monica Vitti's hair.

Wantu and the Pigeon

2009-03-21T20:16:00.000-07:00

It is not Wantu alone who causes the bowels to quiver. Yes, he is unusual, even bizarre. At first, moving at the periphery, he is often mistaken for a child or "little person," but he lacks the energy and ease of a child and his odd, diminutive stature is without the odd proportions, the wobbly gate, the starched eyes of dwarfs. It takes a closer gaze before one realizes the lined forehead, the mouse-haired mustache, the wizened eyes, the sagging paunch common to middle-aged men. It is only then that you might feel an interior shiver, the kind of startled awareness one experiences when encountering the non-categorical. And it takes awhile, some sifting through the mental databanks, the medical trivia, the barroom tales before one finds the word, the symbol for the reality before you. For Wantu is a halfling, a man in miniature.

Even when this unusual creature is fully received, it is not Wantu himself that creates a shudder of alertness. There is an unwritten protocol when we, the seemingly able-bodied, encounter the disfigured—we become friendly. We smile. We offer a chair. We're eager for small talk. We demure, as if the misshapen creature contains royal blood. I suppose the reason is two-fold: though each of us is as self-centered and greed-driven as the basest Wall-Street trader, nevertheless, our interior reporting is much more generous. We tell ourselves we are one of the good eggs, kinder than most. When encountering such a clear opportunity to assure ourselves of our angelic nature, we feel compelled to play the part of the charitable. Secondly, some remnant of the ancient religion still lives within our spine, incanting the Gods’ demand for sacrifice and suffering: a lamb burned, an enemy’s heart eaten, a virgin thrown from the mountain. In the presence of Wantu there is a genuine gratitude that rises up from us, a relief that we have not been chosen to carry the necessary curse, the scourge of being unusual.

Yet it is not Wantu’s pint-sized anatomy nor his tiny mustache nor Native-American cheekbones that causes the deep discomfort in those he encounters. It is the pigeon. The pigeon at Wantu’s side. The pigeon with the oil sheen neck and empty gaze. The pigeon who has been to the center of the turning world and found it utterly empty, and not as Buddha intended. It is this pigeon that causes you to hoist your children. This pigeon who causes the sphincter to clench. It is this pigeon who exists without name nor lineage.

As Kingfishers Catch Fire

2009-03-21T06:54:00.000-07:00

We are undergoing the long resentful adolescence of spring. The Sun is psyched, it wants to take the car and go. It hasn't grown the part of its brain that can foresee disaster, and so every morning--most, anyway--we get up and have to fight the argument that all we need is shorts and sandals, and we calmly explain to Sun that it's a good idea it just wouldn't work in practice, for maybe a while yet. How long? Sun wants to know. We'll tell you when.

Cold is still making the rules for at least another month. In the morning Sun bursts into the room with a joy and enthusiasm that I'm not really man enough to accept at face value. My ideal version of me would remove the cheapass slat blinds from the east-facing windows in the bedroom, do Sun Salutes to the dawn, oxygen-crazed light streaming through my closed lids. When the kids leave. The magnolia is ready to burst into bloom. It is as boisterous, as insanely excessive and as disarmingly vulgar in its innocence as my teenage daughters. And the blossoms are waxy, fleshy, tropical things. A bit of a freeze and they go all corpsewhitebrown. Nature's apparent lack of a viable plan is shocking. I think of Clinton's hopeful, goofy phrase from his second inaugural address: "Forcing the Spring." I must remember that because I was genuinely moved. Serious, it's cold today.

Beauty has to catch me off guard like a toddler bursting into the love lair or often I can't quite see it. I need it to arrive chubby, grotesque, dangly, pied, wizened, flat-faced, broke. Downstairs my daughters are making crepes and blasting The Proclaimers, who are playing this unworkable Chicago blues thing with total commitment. I want to hate it but they (The Proclaimers) are from Auchtermuchty, Fife, Scotland, and the council area of Fife is located between the Firth of Tay and the Firth of Forth, and Auchtermuchty translates as "Field of Boars." These are my people.

For a couple days I have been resisting the sun. I'm blue, I have a cold or it has me. And I think the reason I've been staying inside for the most part is that everything else in the world is participating in spring. Or it isn't even as civic minded as that makes it sound. It's not like everything in nature is giving 110% for the team, or putting on a brave face or holding up some other social virtue. Here's how Hopkins says it:

Each mortal thing does one thing and the same:
Deals out that being indoors each one dwells:
Selves -- goes itself: myself it speaks and spells,
Crying What I do is me: for that I came.

And then the next bit is about how the likeness of God exalts humanity above nature, about how we express not just ourselves but Christ. But I don't even need that much. I just want to be a proper kingfisher.

Is My Soul Romanian?

2009-03-20T12:27:00.000-07:00

Dear Kirk,

The Ipod chose "Cine Are Fata Mare" by Dona Dumitru Siminica this morning. Siminica with the suave mustache, the falsetto voice over gypsy accordian and violin. I have no idea what he's singing about. Something melancholic, something troubled, some kind of Romanian blues. I hear this music and my soul shifts within me. How can this be? I'm not Romanian. I have no nostalgia for this music and yet the plucked strings and wailing voice make me long for a time I never lived.

Soul: It's time we go to Bucharest. Drink wine with grandfather. Wine pressed by the feet of our gypsy cousins.

Me: How many times must I remind you that we have no grandfather in Bucharest, nor peasant cousins. Why must you live in dreams?

Soul: Listen to this music. Listen to your lust for blood roots. Now tell me who talks in dreams.

--Mark

Biscuits

2009-03-15T21:36:00.000-07:00

Dear Kirk,

The wife made biscuits. Buttermilk, flour, butter, salt. She gave them to me right off the parchment paper with blackberry jam. I ate her biscuits and it was almost as good as sex. Almost. I will try and test this comparison tonight.

--Mark

Whisper Spring

2009-03-15T18:38:00.000-07:00

Dear Kirk,

I think we both notice that now at mid-life we linger over moments of beauty, moments of grace, moments that satisfy, moments we both need to hold and encourage, moments when the longing finds rest. Like yesterday when the sun broke through, the clouds dispersed, and the daughter wanted a park. We walked transfigured by the bright smell of spring into fawn princess and her friendly giant. We followed the creek past the melting ice of the outdoor rink toward the sound of children delirious with colored bars, rope castles, and plastic rocks. Seeing the bearded man with his stringless guitar we smiled then climbed the bank to the playground. "Swings!" she cried and so swings it was. She sat opposite the other children and I pushed her from the front, first by the soles of her feet, then by holding her waist and hoisting her up over my head. She closed her eyes, dropped her head back and let her curly hair drag in the dirt. I stepped to the side and as she swung past I whispered in her ear, "Spring." She laughed and said, "Say it again. Say 'spring' again." And so I did.

--Mark

Sun and Fog Wrestled

2009-03-13T11:18:00.000-07:00

The HVAC system of the building buzzes with tense energy. You notice when it gets quiet that these spaces are full of this anesthetic hum, that it's the pitch to which all the rooms and hallways are tuned, and that it keeps you a little edgy and drugged. Not terribly irritating but irritating enough. Not that there's anything wrong with being indoors; I like buildings. Right now it's joined from beneath by the low hum of something stirring, rousing itself. In about half an hour I'll begin a ten-day vacation. Time for coffee and reading, to walk and stare at stuff, slow time with people I love, to meander and learn things by accident. And outside it's March.

Every year Spring makes me crazy. I'm full of this loooonging but if it's for anything in particular I can't imagine what. Love? Or movement--the longing to go, to get on a plane for anyplace and land and walk along something, keep walking. Or for talk, maybe. Maybe the rest of the world would feel calmer if I could say whatever it is that keeps humming in me?

But. So. This blog.

Mark and I have been friends since 8th grade. I was the new kid at a small school, and lonely--although I don't remember being lonely--and I think my mom got Mark's mom to invite me to spend the night. I assume I was not entirely hateful company but I don't think I began my career as Mark's friend as entirely welcome company. Nevertheless he did welcome me. And over many years now he has been my friend, and taught me about friendship and about life, often unintentionally, I'm guessing. But really the conversation we keep having is mainly stoked by questions like what the hell is going on around here? what's the next thing? what am I for?

The answers to these questions seem to show up on an as-needed basis. And pretty indirectly. As if you asked the Heavens what the hell is going on here? And then it turns out that mild italian sausage is on sale, and that's sort of interesting, and now that's what's for dinner, and the question about what the hell gets displaced by variations on pasta sauce recipes.

Or better. Sometimes moments show up and entirely claim you. You see something beautiful, something that seems like the perfect words for what you couldn't say. Like the answer to the question you weren't wise enough to ask. Something that seems to act out enormous forces. As if, as you sat on a hillside above Santa Rosa flicking dew off the grass, sun and fog wrestled below you, slowly and vastly, and for a few moments you knew that their wrestling was the same as the wrestling inside you.