"I want you to know that I'm deeply interested in what people remember"

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Jeffrey Archer's Advice for Writers)

I think I could live in Norway. Or Scandinavia anyway. Finland or Sweden is fine too. Mountains and snow and cold and surreal long days in the summer and weird churches built when the Vikings mellowed out. And no concern for meddling in the world though Norway has more money than they know what to do with. Content to have what one has and share it if someone needs. Ever since I read Hunger I've wanted to starve in the streets of Oslo. Write in rooms I'm not welcome in. Admire statues from a history I've never heard. Disappear up there at the top of the world.


Going to Michigan in a few weeks to tap into this annual lovefest that my tribe has there out in the woods. I missed it last year, recovering PTO and funds from my trip to Africa. It will be a fragmented group, and there are new children around, and people have all new jobs and romantic interests and dispositions. My friend since kindergarten will be there, and our crux was almost a decade ago and he doesn't understand me anymore but I love him to death. And homeboy from Boston will be there and he and I will immediately get into the shit and both learn something. And hopefully Alyssa makes it so we can catch up instantaneously like we always do, and after an hour nod at each other and know. And Anton Belia will be there and I'll try to drink some sense into him. Neal who I spent those days out in the desert with and can't help but smile at. Dan and Beth who seem like the best parents anyone could hope to have. Sidharth Sakuj who I can't wait to smoke and watch a sunset with.

I'm going to spend some time with my parents too. My dad talks a lot about how he wishes he lived near his boys, getting sentimental and reflective somehow in his retirement. You have to listen to what people say, and then know there's something underneath it. And I'm going to spend some time in my city and try to soak up that urgency I felt when I lived there. I need to do some research for this piece I'm working on, but I also just need to get my soul realigned. I've gone all clean and conservative and naive out here in the mountains.



I'm reading this story at the downtown Java on Friday. 5pm. I haven't really read much out loud like this. Looking forward to it. There's bars nearby and it's a friday, I have my work cut out for me.

"I think they're lying to you"

(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)


I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.

This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.


Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.

"Of course you see me . . .there's cameras everywhere"

(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)

For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else


I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.

--

Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.

--
Speaking of writing, I have a spanking new version of The Greatest Parachute Jumper in the History of Aerospace.

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

(quote: Cormac McCarthy, video: Sasquatch! 2009 [some friends of mine appear])


You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.


The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.



I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

(quote: Bukowski, video: Alice)


The other day I had this glorious bike wreck. I'd spent all night downtown buying rounds, in transit via my good friend's 'garbage' bike. And I did shots and paid covers and danced for three minutes at least, remembering my quote of the week. And then on my lonely pedal back I was so drunk I lost it. One of these landscaping rocks we use in the west to remind the citydwellers where they be at. At full tilt with that moment in my head where you think 'oh shit' and the camera zooms in and out like Adam West Batman is changing scenes. And I flew through the air maybe eight feet and landed on a damp pile of dirt like god's own drunk. The bike was destroyed, unridable, and I hiked it up on my unfazed shoulders dialing drunk friends on my phone. In the long morning next's hangover there was nothing left to do about it but laugh. And I laughed walking through the cemetery rain.

I haven't been posting as many blogs lately because I have been writing my joyous brains out And now I understand how much school obstructed the occurrence of real writing. Even when I tried to write there was always the huzz of anxiety . . .that some book needed to be read, some paper written. And now it's gone and I wake up earlier than you even want to hear and write for an hour and then bicycle to work and keep as dissociated as I can for 8 hours and come home and write another two or three. Or four. And then the weekend.

The weekend. The best thing the Man ever kicked down to us. There's no such thing as the American Dream, but whatever withered intention of it remains lives between Friday at 5pm and Sunday at midnight. And maybe if they let us work four days a week instead of five without risking bankruptcy by chest cold, the yeomen and -women could all have jobs even with less money to scrape by with. That extra day to read something, to work in your shop, to record a song, to make sure the TV is raising your kid alright.

Happiness comes and goes. And when you're up like that you might be best enjoying the sunshine and knocking it off with the questions. We're all addled now living in this alien camp and when it doesn't suit us we call it depression or ADD. And though no man on the street can even talk sense about the world leaving us behind, we think if our children get bored they must be lunatics, and if we don't want to get out of bed on some loveless, jobless morning we must be out of our goddamned minds. No one gets a say on the place they're born into, and I'm done judging this one except to say that I don't think my brain works the way that Web 2.0, or the Democratic Party, or marketing research says that it should. We're supposed to feel things, as hard as we try to contain all of that mess to television. And so when you do feel something, you're not alone. We're all hiding it, because that's what we think we're supposed to do. Unless you're happy, ecstatically happy, then you just have to be comfortable with people thinking you're high.

"We are alive in amazing times"

(quote: Mos Def, video: Umi Says)


I haven't posted in a minute. The last three weeks this significant transition from whatever my life was about then to whatever it's about now. I graduated, wore a cap and gown and sat twiddling thumbs while a thousand people I don't know got hype and shook hands with University presidents and listened as Bethine Church recounted her crazy life. My 'rents were here for it, and my brother, and I partied it up a bit. . . but it was anticlimactic. The first time you go through college there is this recognition that you've kept pace with the ideal, that you've invested in your future or somesuch and like a 13-year old Jewish boy you are now some variant of an adult. But when you've got your second undergraduate degree for something that will not, under any circumstances, help you make more money, secure your finances, or move up the corporate ladder. . .well, it's difficult for your UAW dad to really understand your motives. But they did their best, and whatever the case I'm now fully qualified to work at Barnes & Noble, correct your grammar, and drop obscure quotes in conversation. There is some satisfaction in that I did at least one thing I said I was going to. . . even if grad school plans did not work out, even if I am now not going to Turkey, or anywhere else for that matter. Whatever slack I've allowed to build in my stilted attempt at adventure I did show up to class, I did write the papers, and I did read the texts. I leave Boise State with a 3.92, a stack of solid references, 15-20 short stories written, perhaps 100 books read, dozens of friends made, and more questions than answers. That last one is the important one I think, I have really learned no tidbit that I will be able to retain for the rest of my life. But I know where to look now, I know who else has asked these questions, I know methods of inquiry. Whatever the case, my booknerd credentials are now impeccable and I admit I'm marginally satisfied.

Almost immediately after graduation ish ended, and my parents went back to Michigan, I started preparing for the Sasquatch! Music Festival at the Gorge. Me and something like 10 or 11 friends of mine packed up vehicles and spent four nights out in god's own country seeing amazing live acts, killing brain cells, losing sleep, getting sun burns, not drinking enough water, and laughing to crack our ribs. This was perhaps the most fun I've had since moving to Boise. Thanks to my friends for making room for me in the caravan. This was the first year that I didn't spend at least a minute moping about missing DEMF. The dance tent, molly, Mos Def, Girl Talk, and everyone in Rows 26-30 made up for it. Good times kids, well worth it. I'd document it more, but I don't know that I could relate the epiphany I had lying there on that hillside listening to whoeveritwas, witnessing the immensity of the earth and realizing that this is the happiness with which we must be satisfied. The thinking person will never be happy at all times, but our best chance to grasp it occasionally is to pay attention, to enjoy good company, to let the beauty of things sometimes wash over you as you lay prostrate and humble. I don't know if anyone saw it, but I figured out a big artistic puzzle that has been subcutaneous and throbbing now for months. And laying there sweating in a crowd of thousands, a genuine, involuntary smile came over my face. And for something like thirty seconds I was invincible and immemorial and at peace.

Today commenced a very different order of intellectual discipline for me. I'm used to half-assing my way through schoolwork with very highly-ordered deadlines and intimidating quantities of uselessness to slog through in order to find the shreds of value deep in that swamp. But now I'm free from all of that, and the point is to write as much (and here I should emphasis the importance of quality over quantity AND emphasize that I believe that quality can only come with quantity. The craft is in the revision) as I possibly can between now and this time next year. Or, scratch that, between now and when I finally succumb to cirrhosis. Whatever the case, I've now established some pretty solid guidelines for myself and today was a test run on a reasonable amount of work for a day off. In an hour or two I'm going to go to bed. . .and I'll fall asleep immediately because today I worked my ass off. Six to seven hours on the keyboard, or hunched over a dirty manuscript with a pen, or with my nose in a book . . .if only I could do this everyday.

Been selfish once or twice, I had to learn how to sacrifice

(quote: Cee-Lo Green, video: Persistence Hunt of the Male Kudu)





I just had my last classroom experience for the foreseeable future. I grumbled through it, bearing the last fluttering whimsies of my professor, I scribbled a haiku in the margins of my notes. I bent my ear for hints toward the final exam I'm writing over the next week. When it was over I walked out of the room without a word to anyone. Not wanting anything to disturb that last lonely hustle home. It's been a long dig. Eight years of school, upward of sixty classes passed, perhaps 2,000 actual attendances, two degrees as different from each other as one can get. Whatever paid my rent, this has been my job for as long as my job has mattered. And there's some perspective now: the Engineering gig was an obvious bid for money. Harried by parents and the environment I grew up in, I wanted financial independence. And I sought it. The English gig was more desperate. I thought I needed the institution to articulate the insights I've been wrestling with for years. I thought being forced to read, I would be forced to read what I needed to. I thought that studying literature was the same as writing it. And bygod I wanted to write it. And between my workshops where I plied the craft as intently as I could muster, I came across interesting ideas. I learned a lot about where to look, the people that were asking the same questions I was too mealy-mouthed to ask myself, what words can mean. But it felt like a distraction in many ways. Studying in vectors that I only needed parts of, stealing time from my own wanderings. The thing I learned about myself in college is that I am an autodidact. A disproportionate amount of the knowledge I have that genuinely interests me has been self-taught. The influences on my writing are essentially all writers that I found on my own. And sitting in that class today, realizing as people gushed about how much they liked William Dean Howells, all I thought about was my plan for the next year. The research I'm ecstatic about, the big writing project that grows more solid every day, the half dozen other small projects I will finally have time to see through. I sighed, a big long sigh while the bubble-sheets came around to review our course, So glad it's over. Almost as glad as I am that I did it.

+
I've been reading interviews in The Paris Review the last few days. Norman Mailer, Kerouac, Burgess, Nabokov (who is kind of a dick it turns out), Huxley, etc etc. These may be the best writer interviews I've ever read. Long enough to matter, incisive and productive in getting the writers to talk about the process. They show revised manuscript pages so you can see how the 'genius' writer hacks away at his work. The writers talk about how they work, how many hours a day, what time of day, by what method marks are made on paper, what stimulants or relaxants they prefer, their thoughts on the canon. All of this tragically uninteresting to nonwriters I should think. But I could read this stuff all day. So interesting to see little tiny things that I also do in their description of writing. Not stylistically or actually within the work, I mean habits and superstitions and compulsions. When they talk it seems familiar. Someone buy me a subscription, pretty please?


+
Anyone who's been in my apartment knows I live in squalor more or less. One raggedy couch, a cushion on the floor where I work on a wobbly desk, typing on the missing keys of a battered MacBook, looking through cracks in the screen. A lot of that is going to remain, but I'm about to enter a period of strict discipline. The goal to write 20-30 hours a week until I buy a plane ticket or have an aneurysm. So, I'm finally capitulating to comfort: Reorganizing furniture, buying a massive dinosaur of a keyboard (an IBM M Type for supreme clackiness, whiskey-resistance, self-defense), plugging in a huge new LCD monitor so I can actually see what I'm writing. I'm going to bask in the consumerist endorphins while they last.

"For smart n####s it's hard to do nothing"

(Quote: Wale, Video: Nietszche-3 Metamorpheses)

I made a very heavy decision today. Plan B to graduate school was some sort of international escapade. The Mookfish came out here briefly and I was enchanted with the idea of losing myself out in the world. I wanted, and have wanted, and still do want craziness; seeing things so few from my square have seen; obliterate my language and perspective; believe in all new dogmas for just long enough to understand and discard them; see from many sides this addled machine we've created, the world. But, I've had goals for this year ahead of me, and I've slept over them long lonely nights, and saw them written out on the horizon from the peaks of equatorial volcanos, and wrote them on my whiteboard so long ago they can't be erased. And so . . .I'm staying in Boise. I'm staying in Boise and staying in my contemptuous job, because it is the best arrangement for me to write. Boise is the easiest place for me to conduct the research I need to really dig into my novel. It is now just scattered pages, missing some glowing factoid in the center that I can only erect by immersing myself in data for awhile. And Boise is the easiest place for me to finalize my short story collection and prepare for self-publication. And it is the easiest way for me to start a vigorous submission campaign to various journals and outlets. It is the easiest place for all of these things because it requires no energy from me. A move means up to two months lost time in preparation and unpacking and troubadouring and settling. And whatever I do I must work . . .here I can make a substantial amount of money with the monastic life I live and will only enforce more stringently. And that is part 2 of the new plan. Working part-time. THe absolute minimum required of me to recieve benefits, which works out to one fewer day of work each week. I will reapply to grad school, and this extended period of work will allow me to be unemployed for the entirety of next summer. This will be the least amount of time responsible to school or work that I have had since I was 15 years old.

So . . .this isn't a decision that I am intoxicated with. But I feel free now. The decision made. The course set. And all of it, finally, arranged to maximize my time at the keyboard.

I posted the above video because its logic has been long interred in my subconscious. A conversation with my brother recently resurrected it, and in the hours since its been swirling. Reading Nietszche at an age where it could do more damage than drugs, I read these words and vaguely understood them. And then marched out into life thinking my short servitude was already over. Raging out at the mores lion-hearted. But, Nietsztche's point is not to lash out and destroy what's been built around you. Not until you are ready at least. First is the long apprenticeship with burden in the desert. The camel phase. The willingness to be oppressed by whatever systems and theses are in place. And only in that conditioning, that battering load, do you really become strong enough to carve out your own space. To destroy so that you can truly create. My ego had me convinced that I had put up with enough, that I was in a position to start making demands. I realize now that is not the case. I have no qualms with further suffering.

"create and complete"

(quote: Mark Borchardt video: Intro to American Movie)


Received the last, surprising rejection from Boise State and now will definitely not be attending graduate school in the fall. Still sort of reeling from all that. The absurdity of being "so close and yet so far", that weird exchange of e-mails, getting the news amidst a data entry marathon that had me looking for the appropriate excel tab to paste my disappointment into. There was no real plan for this. And now there are options to be weighed, an examination of priorities, a re-evaluation of what I require to be comfortable. And there are certainly things that can happen with a little will, ranging from fatherly advice to naked recklessness. But when I'm trying to sleep the only thing that seems important is that I make more time for writing. Make the most time for writing. Finals season has me all manic and dramatic and shivery, but in the coming weeks I need to figure out what of many options is most conducive to me writing this big project I've just started to chip away on.

I got a year older the other day. The birthday sort of indistinct from the rest of the week. Long day of work, studying, running errands, going to sleep tired and waking up the next morning the same. I used to have anxiety about getting older. Feeling at 16 or 20 that I was enjoying life as it was, and getting older could only ruin it. And I still get anxious over wasted moments, amplified at landmarks such as birthdays. But I like getting older, mostly. Every day I'm getting closer to myself, getting perspective on all those things I've gone through. Feeling more experienced and capable. Feeling more accomplished and attuned. Feeling a touch more patient and kind. Really starting to see people for who they are, perpetually shrugging of the categories I was trained to think in. Experiencing ever more art in music and film and narrative and design. Evolving in what I see out there in the world, almost giggling when I read something I wrote a long time ago. Or getting shivers when I read the line next to it. The last ten years, if nothing else, have wrought a scattered corpus of words. All stacked up there on my shelves. The bulk of my meagre sentimentalities.
On that note, something I wrote to myself five years ago today: "Go ahead and list for me the dozen reasons you're disgruntled, and start with the things you can change . . ." And something from a year later: "Rilke says that in order to be a writer you must first decide or uncover is you 'must' be a writer. Would you just as soon die as permanently discontinue writing?" . . . kids, ha.



So I don't pay attention to the news anymore, and every time I turn on the radio I hear nothing but how the economy is collapsing, and how we'll all be crushed by some tumbling spire. I just want to note: you'll be ok. I'm not saying you'll be happy or comfortable or things will be easy. That's never the case. But you will be alright. And for people in my age group . . . this is the sort of experience we need. Every great generation has its struggle, the thing that gives its people their wisdom, the thing that makes us draw new lines and say 'never again', the thing that helps us understand ourselves and inspires the great works of art. I'm still pessimistic. I still think we have a long way to go, and I still think in a hundred years we might be doomed. But let's approach it with some equanimity, some reserve, some appreciation, and a willingness to change. To revert if that is what's necessary. To give up things. To want new things.

"You know I can't do that. You know that"

(quote: DrunkO, video: a talk on Albertu Camus's notion of The Absurd)

Last night I pedaled to the other side of town for a party. It was in a shared backyard, the year's first bonfire and keg event with all the contemporary trappings. And I had good conversations and drank, and reconciled, and many of the transient drinking friends I've come to have in Boise showed up. Late, late in the night I'm sitting back inside. Chatting with this person or that, done drinking really but still in no condition to do anything but talk. And then Drunko shows up. He's this neighbor kid that no one really knows, but of course all are invited and while he's gregarious at first, something seems not quite right. And then he disappears and reappears with a half-gallon of JD, the bottle frosted and cold. And I sit in the chair, and surrounded by people who don't seem to notice, I watch DrunkO chug his whisky. Three gulps, four gulps, five, six. . .All told perhaps 7 or 8 shots of whisky without a breath.

And in moments he's gone from overfriendly to arguing with the host. About god knows what. And then he's in the backyard and those of us in the house sort of look at each other. And then someone comes in and says: "hey man, homeboy is out there swinging on people." We file into the backyard and DrunkO is on the ground, screaming at some dude there standing by the fire. And I coax DrunkO to go out into the front-yard. There is already a cut on his face where his face struck a rock, or a piece of wood, or the keg as he fell. And the small group in the yard laughs at him. He screams at them not to laugh, tells them he will destroy them, that he's so goddamn sick of this shit. And I tell him he has to go, that we can't have this here. That he's drunk and no one knows what he's talking about. And he looks at me, not seeing me as part of that collective enemy yet, and he says "you know I can't do that". Like I know his biography, the contents of his soul, the shit he has endured and cannot bear to go through again.

I haven't touched him with any violence, just a friendly intimidation, a voice like I'm taking care of him, but he must submit. And in the front-yard he seems as though he'll simply wander into his house and sleep it off. And the party starts to reform itself. I was too intoxicated to recall every detail, who all was in the front yard, how long it took him too freak out. But within seconds he was kicking the line of cars in front of the houses, pounding on the hoods with both fists like a gorilla desperate to escape. And I hustle back out and put my hands on him to make him stop. And he swings at me. And I grab him, pin his left arm to his head in a deathgrip, drive him into the ground under my weight. For a few moments, the people definitely collecting around us now, I talk to him. Tell him he has to chill out and go home, that he's making a huge mistake. And he says he will go home, crying now, calling out those bastards in the backyard for their bastardery. And when I let him go and we both stand, he starts to punch me again. And we repeat, my voice growing impatient. And we repeat again. Until we've finally wrestled our way onto his concrete porch and as he stands up he starts to punch the nearest person. I grab his arms, he falls to his knees. And that's when they started to punch him. Some kid I never met before, punching like a fighter, lands who knows how many blows to his face. The first couple at least while I'm holding DrunkO's arms. And I let go, and I try to push away this usurper. I get a punch square in the hand that is now swollen and stiff. And I try to pick DrunkO up and get him into his house. And he tells me "I can't . . he beat the shit out of me" and then I see the blood on the concrete. So much goddamn blood. And then someone else runs up and starts punching him, and I push him off. But there's maybe three kids I don't know working him over now, and I can't stop them. DrunkO lays on the concrete, rolling in his own blood, crying, invalid, wrecked.

I'm shaking. Because I wanted so badly for this kid to be the only one among us all responsible for violence. I felt like the work I did to restrain him was in the interests of safety and defusing the circumstances. And then they had to beat the shit out of him, and me holding the poor dreck's arms for the first hard hits. I stood in the yard looking at him, everyone mostly silent now. Yells to call the police, people telling DrunkO that the cops are on the way. My new friend Tyler saying to me: "hey man, let's go to the gas station and buy cigarettes".

We walk to the Stinker, adrenaline and booze in my blood making me light-headed, painless, emotional but not sentimental, rather charged with being in the present. And we buy cigarettes and come out of the Stinker and two cop cars have arrived at the house. We can see them from the parking lot. And so we walk the neighborhood streets, 3am at the earliest now. Having a smoke, watching the fire trucks show up, more cop cars. And we walk until everything dissolves and tell our various police stories. A seemingly endless list of legal altercations between the two of us, feeling respirated like some sort of moonlit outlaws,going to the late-night pizzeria to swap cop stories with the kid making pizzas there. We all seem to have them. Sneaking a joint three blocks from the house watching the last cop retreat. And then we go back, having been away for an hour, close to two. Everyone is still up. The kid that pummeled DrunkO is in the kitchen, and it slowly dawns on me that only Tyler, DrunkO, myself, and this little piece of shit that couldn't help himself know the story. No one seems to know how he got his face bashed in, and the retard with the boner for hurting people doesn't respond to his friend when he asks "how did he get all bloody?". The police took DrunkO to the hospital, and I imagine that this morning was the worst morning of his entire life. We sat around drinking the man's whisky, all room-temperature now, until 5am. Wondering just what in the hell all of that meant. I've never seen anyone lose their mind from alcohol like that, and I've been drinking as a hobby for well-nigh a decade now. I think we all have some inner conflict, some rift between who we want to be, who we are, how the world sees us. And we mostly trudge along with this burden precariously atop our shoulders, silent in gritted teeth thinking we're the only ones that suffer. No solace for freak-outs amongst your peer-group. No airing of existential grievance or tolerance for sensitivity. No aegis for expressing the absurd, because no one wants to hear it. And I think DrunkO is just a sad, sad man. He drank like that to impress us, to show himself as some kind of rockstar Viking in the bacchanal. And we didn't even blink. I imagine how much that must have burned in him, wanting us to see him. Us only laughing. Some of us resolved to take our shots at him because he's an easy target. Some of us no better than him, worse even because at least DrunkO demonstrated some humanity . . .as fragmented and polluted and chaotic as it is. We laughed at him. We drank his whisky. I washed his blood off my hands in the morning, out of my pants this afternoon.

"There is no dream"

(quote: Neutral Milk Hotel, video: Krishnamurti Discipline)

I've begun to take action towards moving to Turkey. The plan being to live and teach in Istanbul from roughly August of this year until July of the next. Following that, I will make another attempt to gain entry into MFA programs. The overall failure of the graduate school try stunned me for a a few weeks. It's easy to think that this lack of validation is the best measure thus far of my own abilities. But this is art. It doesn't work that way. It can only be done with no fear of consequences or failure, with an irrational belief that your work is good and that it will only improve. And to write with the discipline and stimulus I need, new surroundings and daily demands are a must.

But the decision to go to Turkey is motivated by many things. I am dissatisfied in my job and all the possible jobs related to it. I have purposely stumbled onto a time in my life with virtually no responsibilities. I have always wanted to spend enough time in a foreign land to be a citizen of it, to meet its people as an equal, to learn the language, to not merely observe but participate in its culture, to break the narrow views placed on me at birth. I am in love with the world. It's so tremendously big and so much different than you'll come to understand it through television. So beautiful that you can only look at it in small pieces. For all my nihilism and misanthropy and doomsaying, I love this place and hope to soak up as much of it as I can. And do my best to interpret this experience in words as I go. I've dedicated myself to narrative. And this isn't simply reading and writing, narratives are the things we live too. The story of people on this place and at this time, the story of your life starting at the moment you saw first light to the moment you see last. And just thinking of these billions of stories as they interweave and conflict and gyrate and come together and split apart, thinking of that hulking place just outside my window, a great human novel in constant motion that can never and should never be written . . .it's enough to keep me awake at night.


Also. The mookfish is coming out, for the foreseeable future. We will have a time.

'The Writer is a Spiritual Anarchist'

(quote: Saroyan, video: Bukowski Dinosauria, We

The question comes to me now that it's real . . .what relation does the artist have to their parents? Some of us have bohemian 'rents that once tried their own hand in some art or at the very least hold up creativity as something with which to measure other things by. And some parents likely view it as an empty pursuit by which no access to the good life or happiness is granted. My parents are nowhere in this continuum. They barely listen to music, my mother reading glorified romance novels, my father reading nothing at all. They do not watch films, but popcorn movies with whatever actors they prefer. The production of even these instances of art are so mysterious to them that the thing they watch may as well have been dropped from the sky. And yet, I'm trying to include them as much as I can in my circumstances re: graduate school. And somewhere in these last few months it occurred to them that I am writing. A lot. And they wanted to see something.
So . . .after they bugged me over the course of several of our weekly phone calls, I relented and decided to send them something. I thought over a half-dozen short stories that may be suitable. This one discarded for all the drugs done in it, that one put aside because the protagonist is too close to my father, a third overlooked because it would simply be too damn weird for them to ever look at me the same. And I settled on this one as it seemed the most neutral. And even it has vomit, and alcoholism, and swearing, and a man's pubic hair catching fire. They called me today after having read it, and said: "thanks', 'it looks good', 'are all those countries real countries? or did you come up with some of them?'. Now, I don't expect them to provide incisive critique. But I don't know how to talk to them about writing, it is so far removed from their world that I might as well discuss my love for some forgotten tribal rite. And yet I came from them. Somehow.


---------


A fellow student that I've had workshop classes with has been published in a contest wherein this work also competed. She has not been published before and in almost all cases I would be happy for her success despite my slim envy. But the nature of her work, and the small success it has been granted, disturbs me. See, in my inability to get things published or gain acceptance into most of the schools to which I've applied, I've suggested as one of my disadvantages the content of my stories. I've identified a continuity in the themes and characters and plot and perspective and aesthetic of the work that gains traction. And it is not what I do. I've told people that what is looked at as good in 2009 is work that is memoirish, sentimental, banal, depicting love as it has existed on television lo these many years. Work that when it strays from reality, wanders into magical realism and thus calms the chaos and confusion of living in the modern world. Magical realism is a cop-out, a boiling down, a superstitious response to those things not understood. And my fellow student's work is all of these things. I won't go further into detail about the work itself, but when I read it in class I recall thinking and noting that "this, this in front of me, is the opposite of what I want to write". Further, it is done badly. Sloppily, with cliched details, mortified progresion, warmed-over nostalgia.

And, as counterpoint, what I try to write is what I think needs to be done, in this moment, in narrative. A sort of NeoNaturalism in that the characters, like us, are bound to lives they cannot control by forces of nature. And that the predominate element of that nature, in a postsurvivalist world, is the environment created by our own culture. And further, that the environment does not have absolute control over our fate, but that for our constraints to be surpassed we must be willing to accept the greatest risks. Death and its metaphors are the gamble one must tolerate to become something other than circuitry exposed to the weather. And I try to document this alienating environment we occupy, present characters with circumstances at the furthest edge of confusion and possibility and reconciliation. It is not science fiction, but the leveraging of the unusual to suggest how very little sense we can make of this nature that shapes us, and that we fight against, and that we try, riddled with anxiety and doubt, to understand. In this milieu there is no room for hokey magic to resolve complications, there is only the paucity of explanation and the unsettling discomfort of feeling alone and perturbed when everyone else seems calm and aligned. It may not be the materials that everyone chooses, but they are honest ones and they come from a life I have led that has been fraught with uncertainty and nervousness and frustration and ceaseless inquiry to little avail but temporary contentment. I do not traffic in memoirs, because no person can truly understand another and to fictionalize such an account is as if to say that the writer has feared to live the life they depict, and wishes for some other reality that is not true. So. Fuck your memoirs, unless they be your real life. And fuck sentimentality unless you've loved and lost it and accepted it and your scars will not heal. I have some that still raise pink and shiny from my skin. And fuck magic, go to religion if you wish the world to make sense.

" . . .and indeed all was vanity and grasping at the wind."

(quote: Ecclesiastes 2:11, video: Ecclesiastes Chapter 7)

Amidst many pages of scattered myth and deliberate metaphor and contradictions and the senselessly sanctioned and sacralized, Ecclesiastes is an existential lamentation. In this book there is no immortality after death, no promises of heaven to sate the ache of your drudgery, and no threats of hell to brand you in your misdeeds. You simply live for some period of time, and then die. And the fear of death emerges from the notion that this brief spasm will be all you have of experience: "Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God." That is, supplanting God with Nature, we are not meant to live in some expectancy of the afterwards. We are to enjoy this thing, and to find labor that feeds our soul.

Further on in the book, Solomon (or whoever wrote this, it isn't historically certain) finds a logic of meaning within the works of man (all of which are relegated to "vanity and grasping at the wind") that he builds out of aphorisms. "For a dream comes through much activity, and a fool's voice is known by his many words". The ideal dream itself is not named, simply what follies to avoid in its pursuit. He identifies things we know to be true about ourselves: "He who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver; nor he who loves abundance, with increase. This is also vanity." God here does not come into the equation. This statements of inerrant truth go on and on. I've read Ecclesiastes three times in as many days, and I can only relate it to Buddhism. But a cynical and hopeless Buddhism, one without proportionate consequence and balance, and without immortality.



I recently read an interview with William Faulkner. I find his attitude towards writing gratifyingly aligned with my own. No claims for parity in talent, of course, but he like me believes in the primacy of the work. Of the sole prioritization of turning thoughts into text. Believes that in the devotion, there is no good and evil:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely
ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes
him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness,
all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother,
he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any
number of old ladies.

This is not something that will be perfected by dalliance. The thing that must be written can only be written under the desperate urgency to write it, the possession by some image that will not die until it has been perfectly depicted, the character that will not cease its pleading until it occupies space outside yourself.

Faulkner talks too about things that relate to the academic pursuit of writing. MFA programs did not exist in his time, yet he calls into question the usefulness of institutions in the path to creation. Nothing good comes from taking money from an institution, he says, and those interested in learning technique might find bricklaying or surgery more fulfilling. There is no learning to write, and this holds true for everything difficult, everything that requires self-sacrifice, there is only the doing it and finding the most direct route from one's imagination to their work. Trial and error ad infinitum, and the binding of a book no gesture that it's truly been completed in its perfect form. We all always approach perfection haphazardly, asymptotically, in awe. And yet all that is needed to engage in this thing is a pen and a pad, no security financial or otherwise, no comfort or appeasement will do the work. It is all on one's shoulders. And this is one part that appeals to me. The abstraction of art places the entire practice outside of human frailties, demands a superhuman convergence of impulse and memory and patience and sensitivity. And it is done by one person, however cobbled from the works of others, it is wrought by one set of hands alone.

I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Alan Moore's advice to young artists)

For a minute there I was a nihilist. I came to a philsophical conclusion that I shirked away from telling people because it sounds so bleak and inhumane. The crux is this: that we can never achieve social stability or equality or sustainable prosperity or peace or freedom if our population continues to grow. The thesis, generally, being that a confluence of phenomenon (including but not limited to the Tragedy of the Commons, False Consciousness, the quantitative/psychological constraints of human interaction [i.e. how many people your brain will allow you to know/trust/etc], and a sheer logistical impossibility) strongly suggest that a group as large as, for instance, the United States, could never accomplish utopia. That is, there is no model for governance with a system this large that provides for satisfaction to all of its participants.

First, the Tragedy of the Commons is an observation that self-interest will cause users of a shared resource to abuse their privilege to that resource. In Hardin's original essay he spoke of common grazing areas in a village, but the best way to understand this (I am a transportation engineer after all) is to think of how commercial vehicles (big trucks) operate on our highways. Large, multi-axle trucks do virtually all of the damage to the publicly-funded (i.e. 'common') road system. They do pay higher use fees (above and beyond driver's licenses, fuel tax, etc for passenger cars), and yet without close supervision it would be in commercial vehicle operators' best interest to run the heaviest loads they could at top speed. Human beings cheat to get ahead, they use resources disproportionally, they leave things worse than they found them.

Now, this problem is mitigated in small communities. The home, for example, has many common areas and goods. And they are generally respected because of the authority of the household (complete) and the familiarity between the members. And it could work in a neighborhood, perhaps, where everyone knows each other somewhat intimately and their lives are crushed into shape by their public identity. But expand the numbers of the community to some threshold and people stop giving a shit. This number likely has some connection to the group-sizes that we spent much of our mental development in. Australopithecus hung out in very small groups. A few families. Even allow for a thousand and it might work. But,we live in a country of 300million, in a world of 6billion plus. We are not wired to give a shit about any of these people. The fact that we do is actually sort of weird.

Logistical impossibility doesn't have a link because I haven't heard of anyone who has done a great deal of work on it. The idea is that even in a purely-executed Communist state there would be no way to equitably distribute resources. The same amount cannot be put in each cup, because the things used to fill them are not distributed equally. Arizona does not have the water to survive, but if they are to use the water of some place else how can that water-bearing land be thought to have the carrying capacity of both places? Especially when we humans grow so densely and rapaciously. And live for so long. But further than the efficiency of moving resources around, there is a certain chaos in the economy of ideas when the numbers get this high. anarchists can conspire, religions can procreate, language can vary . . .and in the end you get smaller political communities. These subcommunities distrust each other, formulate nonsensical rivalries. Shun those of the other tribe. Anyway . . .I have many more thoughts on this that I'm going to discuss further in an upcoming blog on Terminalism (this is a name I've given to a philosophy that amalgamates Marxism, Darwinism, aspects of Existentialism, and Absurdism)

'The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.'

(quote: William Saroyan , video: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues)

Yesterday I recieved notice that I have been accepted to the MFA program at The New School University in New York City. Of the programs I applied to, this one was for me the most interesting, exciting, and attractive. The school is enmeshed with the writing community of NYC and the emphasis is heavily on writing. In the last semester you do not attend class. You simply write and talk about your writing with your advisor. This program in particular looks to provide the greatest degree of freedom. I can truly thrive in this environment.

And it came about as late as it could. I was beginning to get a bit whiny and dejected. 10+ rejections had shown up in my various mailboxes. Copies of the manuscripts I sent sat glowing in the corner, heckling me with their inconsistencies and chunkiness and shortcomings. I began to make plans to move to Istanbul for a year, intending to apply again. Creeping hints of failure assembled in this little pile of quality, off-white stationary. The familiar artistic questions emerge, enlarge, take on a severity they never had. The time-stamped question of "did I do that right?" stretches out over the last three years. And you think for just a moment that you went at it all wrong. That the way to do this wasn't simply working your ass off. It wasn't losing sleep to catch those last drunken thoughts as you drifted into the kaliedoscope. It wasn't soaking yourself with narrative, with exuberance and depression and anxiety. It was something you didn't get. And as a writer you shouldn't have nudged that line, or advocated the tribal philosophy that I did in that work. Expectation was to be honored. And then came the believing in the work and thinking, like Saroyan: "One of us is obviously mistaken". But this acceptance is that slightest of validations, that noteeth smile given by someone you respect. It feels like a punctuation in these long few years, like when I wake up tomorrow morning I can take a deep breath and look around without feeling as though time is wasting.

Moving to New York City is part of the American mythos. Children from the Midwest go alienated in the sterility and shrug off their lineage and descend into it. For the artist, the thing is rite-of-passage and crucible. A place so vast and chaotic any end-result is possible. You may emerge at the other end differently named, battered by a whole new arrangement of affectations and illnesses and habits. New York City is the surreal tragicomedy writ large. So, while I doubt I will spend the rest of my life there, going there is this instinctive pilgrimage. It is a visionquest.

My good friend Dale Eisinger will be attending CUNY for Journalism during the same period I would be attending the New School. This is one of those coincidences that make people believe in god. If I could take any one thing from Boise when I leave, it would be this young man. I look forward to the whole mess we shall shortly find ourselves in.