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"Voted Unlikely to Suceed . . .

. . .coz my class was full of naysayers, cheaters and thieves."



Finally found an agreeable way to host PDFs, so here is the final story I submitted for class. It's based in Detroit, has a little bit of people I know in it. I realized writing about the city, or at least constructing narrative within it, is difficult. It's more suited to impressionist poetry and the like. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's hundreds of times better than the first draft. To be sure.

I've got draft versions of three other stories that I'll be taking with me on sojourns over the next couple weeks. Try to wrangle them into something unembarrassing. Cormac McCarthy has changed my perceptions on writing. Working to reverse what David Foster Wallace has done. Non-overlapping magisteria perhaps. I learned to revise this semester, at the very least. Learned that there is something that appeals to the thanatos in permanently deleting things I agonized over bringing into creation.

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12/13

My semester is essentially over. This marks the approximate halfway point of the whole Boise, get another degree business. And I now feel innured this institution a bit. I know people here now, and have allowed myself to be absorbed into the culture of the program much more then during the engineering gig. My fiction writing workshop was a bit disappointing . . .just wasn't all that pleased with the things I wrote. And not that encouraged by the classroom environment. The connection between the two is tenuous though. My 20th Century British Fiction course was a bit illuminating, owing to the prowess and demands of the professor. But my classmates were mostly disengaged. . .

It feels absolutely bizarre to be at the halfway point of this place. When I moved out here it felt like an epoch rolling out in front me. Immeasurable to my impatience. Yawning across vital years of my life. But the pressing things been good-god I'm still learning about everything. Swirling up latent entrepreneurialism. Pounding out words in volumes I once aspired to. Gradually revealing some primal discipline. And so I can't possibly imagine where any of this will lead to, like driving at it all with lowered shoulders and hoping you end up somewhere marked success. And I don't recognize anywhere or anything.

That feeling that you're getting old. Like some arrangement of chairs and intentions makes you realize "god damn I'm an adult" and it is not what anyone told you it was. It's daunting but not scary, it does not require perfection, it does not utterly destroy you if you slip. Risk is the most valuable part of life. Hard work is worth it because it makes you good at things, and being good at something is tremendously rewarding. Genuine experience is all that matters. Dahh . . .all the chinese fortune slips I want to write for these kids . . .

Reading Baudrillard between the melange smoke and gangsta rap and flipping ones and zeroes in SimBoise . . .the consumer as progammable and blind. A system of objects erecting itself into crude symbols of the abstract. The real world existing in everything that is not said. "The festival of supply and demand whose effervescence can provide the illusion of culture".

Somehow I feel like going to Olduvai Gorge is a pilgrimage that exceeds the scope and "spiritual" value of visiting the Hajj by orders of magnitude . . .

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Hip-hop. History. Hilarity.

2007 was a great year for hip-hop. Jay-Z has released what will be known as the penultimate classic of pusher-rap, a narrative concept album that reflects the full spectrum of emotion and tragedy. Rhythms that seem diegetic to the world as inscribed. Aesop Rock back to form, impressionist and tweaked, the place he's created now folding the scattered past in with the crumbling future. Pharaohe Monch back from exile, veterate yet hungry. OneBelo with "R.E.B.I.R.T.H., still absorbing this one. Talib Kweli. El-P. etc etc

I'm reading a book called "A Continent for the Taking" about African history. Most of it recent, but also discussing the pre-slave-trade state of things. I don't mean to blame the white man for everything, none of us alive can change the past. But we literally tore Africa apart. The British Empire fought west African empires for nearly a century before they submitted. History only becomes real to me when I know details. And I don't have the time I wish I did to collect them.

My wallet was stolen from under my nose. The gentlemen that swiped it immediately went to McDonald's and spent over $200 on my credit card. And rented a DVD from a Redbox DVD vending machine. Whiskey-tango-foxtrot. Hamburgers? I'm not liable for any of these charges, and this will be nothing more than a hassle. But I couldn't have come up with a better "spending spree" for the morons of 'merikuh to go on.

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Fatherhood. Forlorn. Foam.

My father has a difficult time understanding things that have not come to him as a product of television or the narrow tableau of corporate hierarchy that he has been witness to. Thus, when I told him that I plan to eject myself from the world of engineering (a 'good' career as it makes a reasonable amount of money) and into the impoverished world of the humanities he not only generally disapproved of the idea, it barely even registered in his frontal lobe. And yet now, when I tell him that I am at the half-way point of completing this set of hoops towards another degree he is jazzed and motivational. Tells me "that's great" for perhaps the first time in my life. Maybe he's just getting soft with retirement.

All the people I love or might have loved are spread across the earth. Leeching their essence into the ground so that a billion years from now there will be some trace evidence of their existence. I miss them every day. The amazing girl I left in the hood who is now as tough as anyone I know. The mook out there on the edge; born to roam. My Fellow Traveler poised to slap the scientific establishment upside the head. The raven-haired expat, daring the world to not move when she leans into it. . . .A dozen other people I want to share drinks and photos with even when I'm 40 and no longer worth a damn.

I read a thread on ask.metafilter about a guy that reminds me of me. He is reasonably successful in his career, is intelligent (at least he can compose a paragraph) and once a week he likes to get obliterated at the bar and absolutely lose control. Each time he drinks like this he ends up somewhere strange or he gets in some vague legal trouble or he . . . you know the deal. His girlfriend claims that she will break up with him if he doesn't seek help. Everyone on the thread exhorted him to go to AA and get himself cleaned up. Reading the thread, all I could think about what was getting unbelievably drunk. Like a mythical, existential drunkenness in which the hangover is so extreme that waking up on some stranger's floor is akin to being born anew.

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Aphasia, Apophenia, Alacrity

My secretary seriously referred to me as a "growing boy" in reference to the sprawling Thanksgiving dinner that my brother is preparing. Indicating that I can and should be eating multiple servings like a teenager. This was the first thing that has offended me in a long time . . not this presumption that I'm young and healthy and can eat recklessly. This declaration that I am not an adult. My counter is that I'm more of an adult than many twice my age: I know what I want. I'm willing to make sacrifices. I haven't fallen for the social chicanery of television/children/religion/consumption. I'm not afraid to be injured or inconvenienced. I have overcome some palpable shit in my day. I am well-educated. I'm master of my domain. In what ways, exactly, am I not an adult? Hell, I'm the aforementioned secretary's BOSS. Because I haven't had children yet doesn't make me immature, it makes me rational . . .the best reaction is no reaction I suppose . . .

When in the midst of writing or pacing through the increasingly ritualized process of preparing to write, this odd thing happens. I start to form sentences and connections in my head that I would never make otherwise. There is suddenly something poetic about how I fill my water bottle, some metaphor in the way the wooden stairs creak underneath me, the cold night air a reminder of my soft humanity, every instant dredging up some long-forgotten image or sensation. The scratchy resonance of Burial like edgy dawns I never slept for. The ache in my bones from self-destruction now existential, because pain is the proof. The filth of my chamber evidence of some grander futility. And then this natural transition into writing in this mode. The contrivance and fabrication suddenly more honest because it reflects this system of pattern recognition that is firing on all cylinders. God it's a beautiful feeling.

In 40-some days I will be in Africa. Starting in a city dubbed Nairobbery by tourists. A place famed in the western world for pickpockets, violent carjackings, and the drug trade. Reminds me of home. After that I'm climbing Mt. Kilimanjaro with a hand-picked team; starting in equatorial serengeti, tromping through muddy rainforest, hiking parched through alpine desert, and then watching the sunrise at 19,000ft and -20 degrees. Afterwards champagne and local beer in exotic bars and laughing about how nothing and yet everything I've ever done in my life has predicted this. And then a trip out to the birthplace of civilization to see if I can't find some long-dead grandfather's initials carved in an extinct animal's femur. Somehow I think seeing this place will put a great many things in perspective. I'm losing sleep as I think about all the tendrils this trip has telescoping and writhing out from it. I can barely fucking wait, counting individual days like I haven't maybe ever. On top of all that, I miss you.

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Black Friday

Sometimes I'm convinced that the whole planet has gone retarded. Case in point, following Thanksgiving most of the country (except those in retail) have the day off to recuperate from tryptophan overdose, sleep in, spend time with their families, etc etc. For a day just enjoy family and humanity and being. Maybe even go on a little trip with people that you really care about and take some photographs and admire the way the face of the earth changes with the seasons.
But instead we go shopping. American-style Conspicuous consumerism is not a long-standing tradition; it became a part of our culture following WW2 as a way to maintain a sprawling industrial economy that the war effort had required, and was perpetuated by the application of Freudian psychological theory to advertising. So, even amidst record consumer debt
millions that can't really afford it (except via credit cards) will go out and spend billions of dollars on overpriced shit. The bulk of of profits going not to manufacturers but the warehouse/stores that lord over the gimmicky merchandise. I'm not anticapitalist, the market must be free for us to have even a semblance of freedom. I am antistupidity. I'm anti- being herded by corporate-owned media and cattle-prodded with illusory "sales" to think that I absolutely MUST do anything other than eat, drink, breathe, read, sleep, fuck and be intoxicated. Shopping malls and suburban big-box franchises are a trick! You do not need this stuff and the fact that so many people think they do is exactly what They want. This is not conspiracy, this is why advertisement exists.

So seriously. Thanksgiving, fuck shopping. Give thanks. You're still alive. People care about you. Life is tragic and beautiful. There is food to eat. You are capable of forming and managing your own thoughts and motivations. At night there are so many stars that the mind reels. Joe Rogan once said that if we all lived underground and there was only one place you could see stars, EVERYONE would make the pilgrimage. Make love to someone like it is the first and last time. Speak slowly and seriously, when appropriate. Tell bawdy jokes when appropriate. Toast to "all your friends", "to Truth and Beauty", "to the End", "to the laws of physics", "to artistic ecstasy".

Alright. Keep it real

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Everything. Now.

This, a weird week. Barely writing, but revising 30-some pages that will hit this thing soon. Both stressed and confused and certain and at ease. Here finally. As in existing. An acquaintance of mine has proposed something that would radically change my life. He wants to open a swanky training facility, has the money to do it, and wants me to work for him. I could be putting high-powered executives, state senators and athletes through the wringer for a living. Or we could fail miserably. And as enticing as it sounds, I've got other things in my sights. We'll see. Physical exertion has become my church, my hour of transcendence that puts the shadowy rest-of-the-day in the right light.

I've now got a cadre here in Boise. These things take time. Barely remembered names now inviting me for breakfasts and nights out. They know how to party, and they're all good people. I suppose I should have known I would find this. I could always drink and talk and stay out late and get up early and I think I have a way of looking at people that makes them want to know me . . .

I had a dream about the girl last night, wherein there was a stifled reunion with suggestions in the way we rolled our eyes in synch. Kicking our feet in a dusty back parking lot amidst crows and crude assemblages of foreign cars, the sky marbelized above. When I woke up my computer had inexplicably sprung to life with an e-mail from her, and a text message that she too had been dreaming of me.

Our entire experience is fragmented as we attempt to apply consistency to our work and learning and fun and downtime and solitude, because we are one homogeneous person (or are we?). So who are we trying to deceive by making this all flow . . .the brain more like a swirling swarm of starlings than the stilted speaking we all stutter through.

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Just Jumping

The above picture is of a member of the Masai tribe jumping in exultation near Olduvai Gorge, The birthplace of civilization. I want to jump with him. Somehow this communicates to something quite deep within me. In the midst of a celebration or thumping bass in dirty, dark bars or in the face of high-gravity, biographical news I have simply jumped up in the air. As high as I can, many times in a row. Feeling an epiphany giving birth to a wordless yell in my throat. I don't have any reason to think his jump is for anything truly different.

As a writer it's tempting to think or at least pretend that our entire experience can be expressed in words. Even knowing this not to be true, the writerly urge is to try and do it anyway. And so we end up with these massive sprawling works like Infinite Jest and Midnight's Children, beautiful and tragic and sad and grandly encompassing. But not quite everything. Music gets at something as well, something literature cannot touch. The visual arts. Film. All of them overlapping components of a Venn diagram that is our experience and yet can never really contain or transmit it.

I think the great pain of being alive is that our experience is individual. We so dearly want to share these things inside our heads and hearts with people around us and we love those that we feel we can come close to accomplishing this with. And yet we are alone. I will never be able to truly explain what it feels like to wake up next to her, to walk my neighborhood alone late at night, to stand atop a hill and look out over the landscape but really see the sprawling details of my life out there on the horizon and the shadows of buildings.

But I can jump. And it's still not everything. But at least you'll know that I'm alive, despite all this.

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Go to Trade School, You're Fucking Everything Up

Academia is simultaneously stimulating and stifling. Like a beautiful young thing rubbing against you, and then suddenly realizing some impropriety. Much of this may be attributable to the second- or third-tier nature of my institution. Last night we were discussing elements of post-modernity and analyzing Beckett's 'Ping'.
First, 'Ping':
The majority of the class declared frustration bordering on ridicule because this piece has no overt "meaning". A student even asking if Beckett had ever declared the definitive meaning of the work in an interview. I can understand someone not enjoying the piece, or having a difficult time understanding the purpose or subtext to it (I admit I don't fully understand it, that's not the point). However, as a humanities student, and reading this as a part of a lecture that emphasized the notion that "postmodern literature is often not laden with 'meaning' in the way that art that came before". There is no Truth, and no pretension that we can find it". People got mad at it because it didn't do what it expected. For that, Bravo Beckett. What was most interesting about this, from a pedagogical perspective, is that this is the first time the class has become conceptually difficult. This is the first time we're delving into genuine philosophy and everyone is reeling. These people, for the most part, hate to actually have to think. Just give them the answers so they can write their essays in peace.

This leads into the much more interesting occurrence, the one where I really learned something. In discussing the cultural context that we live in now, and which houses and engenders our art we naturally came to the subject of technology and how the dynamism of communication technology in particular affects us. EVERYone nodded along to the assumption that being connected via cellphone and internet is a traumatically negative and alienating experience. That having a cellphone, and listening to an ipod and spending time on the internet somehow degrades our humanity.

At first, it seems like "yes" of course these things separate us and compartmentalize society into a bunch of apathetic individuals. The problem is that it's not wholly true. First of all, all of these people agreeing that somehow society has degraded due to communication technology are not old enough to understand a time when it wasn't around. We're talking about 20-26 year olds. Their entire adulthood occurred in the time of the internet. They're nostalgic for a time they never experienced firsthand and likely never existed. The anecdotal claim that before cellphones people nodded to each other on the street is nonsense, and we don't have anyway to know that this is true. The only place I've been to where people said hello to me on the street was in the 'hood. This is not what you'd expect. Also, belabored was the boogeyman that 'so many' people simply sit at their homes on the internet and don't participate in the real world. Two problems with this: Give me an example (I don't think this figure really exists), and do you really think your immersion in the internet has crippled your ability to communicate with other humans? If anything it makes us better at it. Makes us value the warmth of humanity even more.

A woman said that she thinks people with ipods plugged in all the time as they walk around campus are missing 'things'. I asked her to define "things", which she found impossible. I also asked how experiencing a piece of art during what is essentially a cookie-cutter day (the five minute walk to class is always virtually identical, except for the jams rocking in my earphones) devalues my experience.

Technology, computers, the internet. These are some of the most valuable things in my life. This post is an elucidation of the most pressing thoughts in my mind right now, and I'm able to not only share them, but share them across all geography. I have talked to friends on three continents via instant messenger. Untold numbers of conversations have been enhanced by the ability to quickly reference the factual truth. My exposure to a diversity of art has increased exponentially via the internet.

Technology is not bad inherently. People are weak and afraid of change. The perceived conception of 'normal' comes under attack and we fret and fall over ourselves trying to explain how the grass used to be greener. But also what I learned, again, from this is that undergraduate academia is not a place that fosters and cultivates critical thought. The prof moved on as soon as I started to undermine the conventions. I guess real discourse is still reserved for my basement and the bar and the INTERNET. Everyone simply wants to be told what to think, and academia more or less complies.

And yes, I've made some enemies in class. Hopefully I've made those same people think for two seconds.

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"The City. The City. The City"

When I was a young man . . just getting my first tastes of recreational drugs and staying out late and trying to define myself . . .I wanted to be a hobo. I wanted a hermetic lifestyle in which I could simply live off the land, far-removed from the protuberances and attachments of the semi-urban lifestyle. Write haikus and drink dandelion wine. That sort of thing. There was something about the aesthetic and ascetic of being alone that appealed to me strongly. Under the microscope, this penchant seems to have come from that fact that I was existentially dissatisfied with my surroundings. The triteness of suburbia, the various Freudian and familial love/hates, the herd mentality of high schools, the beauty of art that was so obviously not engendered in the place I lived. I saw no alternatives but giving up on humanity and making communion with some sort of nymph of the woods.

And then I moved to the hood. Fell in love with an entire tribe of the disaffected. Just like me in that they didn't know anyone that was like them. Saw that humanity was not boring, but tragic! Saw that life was not stifling, but demanding. Saw that interactions were not debilitating but exfoliating. And so now I'm in love with You. I'm in love with Your cities. Warts and all.

So the problem. I moved to Boise, Idaho. This is not a city. This is not the gross desperation of humanity exploding out into panicked art, this is not droves of mankind clawing all over each other for love, this is not even a place with a definitive feel (Detroit August feels a certain way even in your room by yourself, the air in NYC is laden with New York vibrations, etc etc). Boise feels like an advertisement for Levitra. Its nice and clean and growing, the children of feckless and atavistic people that have convinced themselves of something. Religious and conservative because they haven't bothered to think about it much. Not that there aren't good people here. I've met some vibrant individuals, but they don't seem to belong here either.

In short, I need a place with soul, with grit, with honesty, a place somehow connected, a place with its own traditions and personality. I need to get the fuck out of here before I become from here.

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Take Me Home

And so on slipstream nights I promised not to promise you anything. Laid in dim fluorescence, begging the landscape I never see anymore to simulate you for nine seconds so I can simply lean back and absorb. Sharpied epitaphs on impermanence and cast glances at each other as through the crack in a door. Let me talk in circles that disorient, and always asked for more. Spread out under astronomy and taunted time to pass incandescent. Caravaned across the desert to sit in parking lots and see each other far from home. Driving through the crude-oil night, explaining why I'm perpetually alone. And for a moment feeling like I wasn't.

I dream now that I'm sleeping in your infinite hair, late for everything, my anxiety obsolescent.

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Short Story

I wrote this in one sitting


Dad comes in, almost ready for work with his untied tie wrapped around his neck and his briefcase firmly in hand, and the children do not break their anxious giggling. They're all in the same room but Mom is by the kitchen counter fiddling with some dishes and taking food out of its container. Dad's got red-rimmed morning eyes behind tiny glasses and in the trapezoid of orange morning light he is too pale.
He drops the briefcase on the table and drags the chair on its back legs with a low screech. As he sits he looks at the children clinically, for just a second. These completely incomprehensible beings that he has created and is slowly losing any sort of control over. When they were babies their list of demands was simple, if random. They could be appeased with things that did not require almost infinite analysis and reference to the current iteration of good parenting. They're now like six and four years old, thereabouts, and have achieved a sort of synergistic capacity for mayhem. The assumption with little kids, and you can see how this has failed in the way Dad reaches down to the kitchen floor to retrieve some toy that looks like a piece of abstract art, is that they are not cognizant of the world around them like an adult. Like if you aren't making eye contact with them then they aren't listening to you. But these kids are laughing, almost shrilly matching the timber of the pre-coffee alarm clock, and Dad knows they operate on their own insatiable kid logic. That they observe things that no one else sees, maybe just because they're shorter, and they can always be counted on to innocuously ask you the most penetrating and unwieldy questions. The six year old boy just the other day asking him what a gay person was, as though there wasn't an encyclopedia behind any conceivable answer. One of them blurts out a distinctly contrived word that sends both of them into hysterics.
Mom comes over now with an armful of food, every member of her little tribe requiring some dietary exception. And the kitchen is so immaculately clean and modern that the mental energy required to maintain it as an idea pulses in her long, smooth neck. You can literally see her heartbeat, whump whump whump, in the brief second that she stands still before sitting down to join them. She's ready for work, completely so you know that she's been up for longer than Dad probably, and impeccably dressed in khaki slacks and a blazer. Perfect collarbones jutting at the opening at the top of her blouse. Dad looks here, briefly, and then receives his bagel from her.
They're both of them relatively young, but there are wrinkles at the corners of their eyes and their cheekbones as they try to smile at each other. All of this has taken less than 10 seconds. The eyes. Both of them with eyes brown and soft and tired and with an anxious patina over them. You suspect that if the right piece of news fell through the skylight and onto the table that one of them would burst into tears.
The nine-year-old girl ceases her laughter immediately. The cereal or muffin or oatmeal that mom has put in front of her will simply not do. And this, of course, is just another part of the conspiracy against her childhood composed of school and homework and church and being nice to Aunt So-and-So. Of course crying is not the optimal strategy here, so she begins to yell, almost like that poor little girl in The Exorcist but of course the content is all different. But with that same growl in the bottom of her voice, a bit histrionic but primal and too Pavlovian to be considered inauthentic.
“I hate raisins!” she yells at Mom. Like this hate is part-and-parcel of her longstanding and traumatic experience with dried grapes.
And Mom's hair practically stands on end. She's got one of those short, encapsulating haircuts that work on some women and you can almost see the very end of each tendril stiffen. She breathes in through partially clamped teeth like this little kid loved raisins not three months ago, and her eyes dart around for some way to handle this delicate situation. Give the kid anything they want and they'll morph into whiney little brats (if they aren't already that at times), but how can they be encouraged if they're never able to determine their tastes? Mom finally shakes her head and takes the plate of Oat Bran with raisins or the raisin muffin or whatever back into the kitchen area for something else. Everything the parents do is rushed, this is a morning before work and over the years they've developed a very efficient schedule so that everything will occur on time.
Dad has no real reaction to the little girl's outrage. He just hopes she doesn't say anything about hating them. They throw that word around to get things, but for grown-ups, you know, hate is a big deal. The word hate can make you feel like you've failed for the rest of your life. It's important to remember how young they are. Dad's work is not dissimilar from Mom's but he's been convinced to think of himself as the provider of the family. In the briefcase he holds portfolios and business cards and Getting Things Done prompts that buoy these disorienting little people up above the morass. Dad's ability to keep his eyes-from crossing amidst the tedium is what will buy these kids used cars in ten years and send them away to college to drink their brains out.


But Dad's got no reaction because the children make almost no sense. Everyday he goes to work, and its not unlike what Mom does but he's a man so he feels like everyday he wades out into the morass is like a battle, and has to idly receive the absurd demands of his higher-ups and has learned over time that they are not interested in his innovative new approaches because they themselves have developed what they think is an airtight system. After a point the whole work thing doesn't require as many neurons as it does wholesome, plain-old “nerves”. A bit of gumption and desperation just to get through the day.
When Mom gets back with something else for the girl to eat, the children fidgeting in concert but sort of above the level of intervention, her and Dad make eye contact. Again the eyes. His red, beady eyes matching hers for a second. And she realizes that he looks just as tired as she is.
And Dad these last few months has been waking up every hour throughout the night in cold sweats. Some kind of psychosomatic fever dream that sets in when the dread of getting up in the morning has finally become a part of your lymph system. And inside his head he is screaming something that doesn't make sense by itself as a word yelled out but in his quickly forgotten dream is the endnote to some kind of collapse. Always in the dream this vague image of supporting some impossible mass above him, with rusty protuberances and loose-leaf documents being blown off and seagulls perched on top picking at rotten things. Sweating with the strain until it crushes him.
But now it seems they will have a relatively serene breakfast. The girl is satisfied with the bowl of cereal her mother has brought her and the boy is distractedly drooling as he watches something on the wall with great intent. Dad and Mom and Sister all bring one spoonful or fingerful of food to their mouth and chew it procedurally.
Suddenly, little Brother asks: “Why do you have to go to work every day?”
And normally he's so infectiously cute you want to watch him roam around in a sunny park all day. But in the morning, all misguidedly energized and crumbs caked to his face, all Mom can do is lean her forehead to her palm in a careful way that will do not disrupt her hair. She's got a top-notch manicure with longish, burgundy fingernails that make it difficult to type. And the kid gets no answer and moves on instantly to scooping out drippy cereal with his bare hand. Mom closes her eyes for a second like she'd been up all night cringing as Dad cold-sweated all over her and in the damp sheets she tried to figure out exactly how much she could tolerate and had to keep raising her limit. And all day she can feel this slime on her, no matter how hard she loofas or how powerfully exfoliating her apricot scrub is. Sitting at her desk at work thinking about Dad waking up with a moan that sounds so little, so infantile it makes her nervous the way the tiny body of her newborns did when they let them sleep in their bed.
Dad's reminiscing about something so distant that it might not have happened, that's how he stares at his breakfast and tries to ignore the briefcase. Like when they had gotten married he had felt so accomplished with the little pot of savings that he had scraped together and the cozy starter-home in the neighborhood with a great housing-cost/quality-of-school-district ratio. And he had even carried her over the threshold that smelled like fresh paint. And because they didn't have a bed yet they made love right there on the new carpet, little clumps of carpet fiber still scattered from when it had been put in. And in their rolling around they almost crushed some little wedding or housewarming gift and she just pushed it out of the way animalistically as he tried to unstrap elements of her dress. He thinks that now she seems disgusted by him, and conflicted by her disgust.
And the doorbell rings and Mom shoots up to her feet exclaiming “school!”. This doorbell being rung by whatever unfortunate mother in the neighborhood was currently in charge of the carpool. And the kids don't hesitate to try and run to the door before Mom can hand them their sacked lunches. Hoping that the boy doesn't think to shove celery stalks up his nose or fling the grapes (this one does like grapes, she thinks) at his classmates. Their days at school only long enough to rile them up and return them home. How some other adult, even a highly trained teacher, can hope to manage thirty-some screaming kids let alone navigate them through a series of exercises and projects, is mind-numbing to think about.
Brother dodges a ritualistic kiss on the forehead and stamps his feet after Sister who is pirouetting and swinging her lunch as they exit. A sign of human sophistication is that when a person leaves the room we realize that they continue to exist. Mom and Dad try to subvert this tendency. They look at each other with an uncertainty, a pause like “are they really gone?” and Mom pulls out a small medicine bottle, one of those translucent orange ones you used to get, and the purple logo flys off of it (you'll need some computer guys to get on this) and takes up the lower half of the screen. “Psoma” in purple, the font textured with the purple fading to lavender on the right edge. Soft and friendly. And the yellow slogan fades in as the sound fades out and Mom and Dad are sharing a glass of orange juice to swallow one down. “To Keep You From Freaking Out” or however it is your selling this damn thing.
I'm telling you. Run this between Hungover Housewives and Who Wants to Torture a Millionaire? and you won't be able to keep this stuff on the shelves.

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What I've Learned from Corporate America and the Polyphonic Spree

This is a bit of a trap. This going to work everyday and letting the concerns of the corporate host I thought I could siphon from affect me psychosomatically. How dare my insomnia's source be the contents of spreadsheets and the goings-on in conference rooms. Of course, if I could satisfy myself with bread and circuses I might not feel outrage at the exploitation, might not feel woodenly hollow at how I spend eight-plus hours each day, might not have this desire to envelope my brain cells in smoke. And the anxiety associated with pretending to care. And I used to balance this nonsense with bachanal, you know? Used to fling myself out into madness because I knew I had the metabolism to still wake up earlier than everyone. Through drug-nausea and nihilism and dread and fatal joy and blatant disregard for gods and masters I could always get my hands to stop trembling and pull things off. And gradually I learned that I could live with nothing but a floor to sleep on and good friends to share drinks with and incendiary books to read and the occasional frenetic typing. Now knowing that I bought into an expectation cultivated to support a lifestyle I resent. The reasonable success and latent career-path potential poising people just like me to have comforts and eat healthy and marry rationally and purchase real estate and attend church in my brand-new car. But I'm fantasizing about hitch-hiking, poring over pictures of Antarctica, writing agreeably, considering homelessness . . . quoted from my journal circa ecstasy ingestion: "who would want to be successful in their bullshit anyway?"

And so last night, on a half whim and free VIP passes, I ran downtown to see the Polyphonic Spree. Twenty-some odd robed maniacs belting out orchestral odes to life in general. A feeling in my chest like humanity is worth all this. Like even if we destroy this place and cut each other's throats there are at least still finite moments where we are beautiful. That even subliminally enslaved, every cell is a masterpiece and every gesticulation a refutation to the truism that there is no meaning. And so Generation Edge is justified in its apathy. Let these bastards destroy it, we never wanted a part of it anyway.

In two months I'm going home. All the way. And I'm going to watch the sunrise over the dawn of man and laugh hysterically that I have ever been worried.

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I'm seeing my second round of seasons here in Boise. I had thought it would take longer than this to become terminally restless, to fall asleep thinking of foreign lands, to feel as though me energies had been sapped. I don't write on this thing much because there is so little occurring in my life. I just finished writing a short-story, the first-draft anyway, and will post it here in the next week or so. I am getting better at that, and I suppose that's of prime importance. I'm reading 50 to a hundred pages a day, on top of homework, work,exercise, existentialist angst etc. I'm jealous of my friends dispersed across continents. I miss getting drunk in the street and yelling at the top of my lungs. I miss glancing with suspicion into my rearview. I miss exceeding expectations. I miss having a reason to stay up late. I miss making love and the infantile, ecstatic sleep that follows. I miss being surrounded by my jerry-rigged family.

When will babylon fall already? When will some whirlwind of disaster precipitate into collapse in all aspects. Peak oil disrupting our teetering financial crisis emboldening fascists already in power obliterating all of our jobs with no agricultural replacement due to catastrophic environmental destruction. And oh yeah, Atlanta is running out of water Whatever will get me out of work I guess. A woman named Naomi Wolf has just written a book called "The End of America" in which she outlines the 10 steps all historical states have taken towards fascism. We have made inroads on all of them: Invoking a terrifying ex/internal enemy, creating a gulag, development of a thug caste, etc etc.

But make no mistake. I'm actually pretty happy. I'm just impatient.

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"I tend to underestimate my average"

And every night, no matter how tired, I walk outside and have a smoke and listen on headphones to some MC bleed out his struggle and biography and look at the sad stars circumspect over my doleful neighborhood. Hope that I can somehow get riled up about life in general. The myriad lights of entanglement reflecting off the slippery backs of leaves and the tenacity of aluminum siding. For several dark and crystalline moments become this solitary impermanent thing and always, always always realize some fragmented -oid about the hole in my chest or the simmering frustration underneath my clothes or the geometric latticework of words on paper. And in all honesty my day is subtle agony, the pins and needles in my legs from straining to pay attention to details, maintain the facade of assimilation or resist the urge to push something off my desk that'll spasm in blown circuitry and end it forever. And just as humbly, the downtime often seems absurd. The dirty square footage of mine a cell monastic and penitentiary, obscene red walls screaming. . .

And subtle encouragements vector in on me from all sides. Like I've either drastically dismissed my abilities or there is some conspiratorial effort within the system to keep me buoyed up. Always followed by the sense that I did not try hard enough, that if I'd really done my best everything I've ever wanted would materialize in my hand like ectoplasm and I, myself, would shatter into stain-glass and be embedded into everything. This Pavlovian urge that I must earn every single inch I'm given, or else be complicit in th e plundering that has proceeded since Cro-magnon first duped Neandertal.

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I believe in you

Further discussions on this whole god thing. The terms which I have accepted as my category (athiest, infidel, whathaveyou)are inherently oppositional, and of course this is a problem. They immediately conjure adversarial emotions, contradiction, elusive semantics and semiotics. So what I DO believe, as opposed to what I DON'T:
That the universe as a 'biological' (and thus inherently a phsyic-al system)has eventually generated us (mankind, and whatever else has achieved what we might call a 'consciousness' that is able to ask existential questions) as a means to understand itself. This statement almost personifies, but I don't believe that there are any intentions at work. Out of the infinite possibilities this place happens to have the particular set of rules that allow our existence and development. I believe that there is not afterlife and instead our 'spiritual value' is not how well we've adhered to abstract (and yet, for the most part, rational) rules, but how well this thing called 'us' has impacted all of existence. By this I don't mean that our individual goals should be 'importance' in the terms of how many people know about us or how much measurable 'success' we have had; rather you might almost think of it as how well you are remembered. We all have distinct influences on our surroundings, our spiritual welfare is how well this has been received by those it has touched and how that influence plays out after you are gone. I believe that any attempt to dehumanize a person or people (by disrespecting the things that make them human, and robbing them of autonomy, and abusing cooperative advantage, and...well, engaging in the things we know to be 'bad') is a travesty (notice how this works with the afterlife=influence mechanism). I believe that the Universe is a daunting and beautiful and mysterious thing, and it brings me to tears to really understand any little aspect of it. I believe that we have a great deal more work to do before we begin to really understand. I believe that language is immeasurably powerful, and that it defines our life. I believe that art is one of the ways in which we can have a meaningful relationship with the universe, and that so are a lot of other things. I believe that genuine human experience is the most valuable thing we do in life; and that we may all define this differently but it always has more to do with accepting than rejecting. I believe that there are no cultural constants or truths or universals. In the end, I believe in people and love people and want to have people in my life. People. It's the most complex phenomenon we might hope to study, and we are literally swimming in it, humanity.

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"I am what I am, and what I am is who I am . . ."

I was engaged in one of those drunken conversations about god last night. Mostly me and this other guy; who I don't know all that well but am starting to think of as a friend. He's a cool guy, but I saw in him this familiar preconception and recoil when I laid the atheist card on the table. There was a sense of condescension when I began my defense by first discussing the flaws of organized religion's theology. Of course, he doesn't believe in that sort of god. He relied on a notion of god as being the same as what I call 'life' or 'nature' and we both agreed that things called 'miracles' do not occur but that everything plays by the rules (the doubt lying in our ignorance of the 'rules'). My point was, why should we call it 'god' necessarily? I think the answer lies in the societal pressure on the atheist in all of us. You can say you believe in god, and thus be covered from any sort of outrage or admonishment, when in fact you don't believe in anything of the sort. Semantics. A linguistic convenience. The problem is that every dictionary definition (how can we settle linguistic confusions? is the dictionary the best way?) refers to god as being a 'being'. A supreme ruler responsible for the origin of life and the universe. If you do not believe in something like a divine, creative intelligence that controls the universe by force of will then you do not believe in god.

It's an untenable position to be counting days until points on the horizon, twiddling my thumbs until the coming week is over and then the next 3 months and then the next 1.5 years and then whatever else is out there becoming increasingly hazy and indistinct. So you just try to seize whatever the hell has fallen into your lap to at least demarcate this present instant as something. Or you melt into widely-available and patronized videos so you can engage in polite conversation. Or you just try to feverishly hurdle things because in all honesty you've never been able to sleep unless you were terminally exhausted. Or you take one night a week and just drink yourself beyond recognition, until the details of the bacchanal run along associative tributaries over the next days smoking and reading and hygiene.


Resin stains on everything. Walking city-wide to find a few square feet to sing praise in or bleed out the last week of disease in. And now every blinking decision arbitration between the 14 people I am to complete this thing called living. Kicking bones and corroding sophistry across the overgrown factory floor, or spilling drinks on patio tables to punctuation . . .conversations about conversations about something I cannot elucidate. Only that the very air I breath seethes increasingly automated, and my fingertips numb to the touch of everything except your skin limned in fluorescence as you sleep.

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There is so much more satisfaction in sacrifice these days. Like, plow through the entire 8 hour yuppie gig (and actually sweating a bit now, mountains of things to do), with an hour of soul-cleansing exertion, and then a few hours of class or reading or writing or all three and then at some point drifting off to sleep in the hum of my computer. It makes the time in which I'm outside of my home/office feel vigorous and rare and seizable. It makes communication with loved ones more vital and enthusiastic. It makes that one night out on the town immensely valuable and tremendous.

Some things I have (re)learned this semester:
School can be painfully socially awkward. I have a colleague who I think has a man-crush on me, or at least wants to be my dear friend. But I can't have a conversation with him. Like a Seinfeld episode but with more raw nerve-endings and body-odor.

No one can really teach you to do this thing. People can suggest what absolutely does not work and give you a sounding board to throw some verbage at; maybe point out a few pitfalls. But then of course those are the things that now become interesting. For example, in a set of "Writing Don'ts" the suggestion is given that we should not write anything with fist/gunfights, car chases, courtrooms (or any other heavily repeated television/movie premise). Now all I want to do is write an episode of Law and Order that is heavily ironic and absurd.

Students' views of their instructor is wholly related to how said professor reacts to the student (in the like/dislike spectrum). We all to this to varying degrees. A talkative (almost chatty) and tolerant professor repeatedly shoots down a student's (see 2 paragraphs up) out-of-context remarks and his response is that she is not open to new ideas. Lest our brains fall out.

I have forgotten thousands and thousands of dollars worth of education. And somehow it is still worth every cent.

The entire world is cliche unless you really look at it, and then its all painfully unique and flawed.


Time is not a ribbon or an arrow or a quantum ball of possibility, but we can perhaps start defining it by what it is not: Time is not love.

But love has a huge time component.

If you commit yourself, honestly, things fall into place. Far from perfectly, but things will absolutely happen.

If you strip a thing of all its supposed universal relevance it somehow then becomes universally relevant.

Time is not really running out, but expanding in all directions. I can sort of feel that for a few seconds as I'm falling asleep.

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Tasers, Taming, Torture

For whatever reason, the recent tasing incident at the University of Florida has raised hackles across the board. Authoritarians and not-so-authoritarians are claiming that the kid's belligerence and rudeness brought the tasing on. That, in effect, the kid deserved to be tasered and possibly more. Analysis of the video shows that the kid, while being an asshole, was neither violent, inciting a riot, or out of control. He did in fact resist arrest, but primarily because THERE WAS NO REASON TO ARREST HIM. Even now we're finding out that he HASN'T BEEN CHARGED with anything except resisting arrest. So, he ran a little bit and threw up his arms, he did this because the fucking pigs had no right to grab him. John Kerry has even noted that he had the situation under control.

Thisis not an isolated incident.

We have gradually, incrementally like a toad in water, slipped under the thumb of authoritarianism. The pigs have somehow convinced us that if we've done nothing wrong then we have nothing to worry about. Simultaneously, it has become almost impossible to protest anything without being arrested, They're passing laws that ban saggy pants, They're monitoring your e-mail,They've taken away Habeas Corpus, They're murdering innocent people in paramilitary drug raids, They're intimidating us. Can't we see this is the opposite of freedom? Can't we see that there is something wrong with police being armed with automatic weapons?

If you've ever had an encounter with a police officer, it is much like getting into an argument with a jarhead except that police officers can legally beat you, drag you over asphalt and make up reasons to arrest you. In my experience with law enforcement (and it has been rather extensive), the individuals that gravitate to this type of work are assholes. Kids that picked on people smaller than them in school, guys that get erections when they push people around, guys with intelligence on par with the lowest rung of Mafia goons. Tell them to beat something up and they will.

This is a disorganized mess, but I am so thoroughly disgusted. A charge of resisting arrest should be worn like a badge of honor. These people only have the authority that our contrived society GRANTS THEM. The entire thing is illusory. The root of the problem is that we have convinced ourselves that these people (dickhead cops, the brainless torturers in Abu Gharaib, et al) are enforcing some sort of actual, concrete law. The truth is they're carrying out the worst element of human nature, and justifying it via the same bullshit we've justified all of the ugliness in the world: that it is our right by god, by law, or by might.

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Driving time-elapsed thru the raining city. My life a proxy strife in the war on everything worthwhile, like the pity of our time together can be stretched out for miles. Tire screeches sing the threnody of our somnambulist synchonicity. Inside each building tremendous appartuses that pull together fragments, a stitched together happiness.

Man, I miss the city sometimes.

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"You Can Tell 'em"

I just finished a short-story. I'm really happy with it.

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"Talk about Labor"

Everything ramping up. 3,500 creative words a week, the winds demand no less. Disillusioned dads in the gymnasium telling me that I'm an animal with audacity in their eyes. Inept kids I run into with the same dream that's bled from my ears since my spine aligned . . .

It's all monastic and joyful suffering from here until someone finally embraces me to a stop . . . an infidel in cathedrals, the clearest of inkblots. I'm from the City that converts cops to crooks and trails blood into the future like a fugitive . . I've got game that no one but Guerillas has got.


Looks like it will be incommunicado; fine with me except the Ecstasy's made me believe in nothing but this second. So sometimes the past feels yawning and empty, my passion spontaneous and breathless. There was a night when I must have made this seem effortless and convinced that my extremities were endless or my life was raveled tight and I'd spun it unreckless.

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"I'm not a hard-ass and I'm not a push-over; I just care about what I do and I expect you to as well"

Classes started yesterday. I know what I'm getting into with my British Fiction class, but my Advanced Fiction Writing Course was a bit more mysterious. The gentleman teaching it is actually a successful writer (though by his own admission he has sold more copies of his book
in Norway than here in the states (we're busy reading Harry Potter and US Magazine). He said a half-dozen-or-so things that really got me motivated (all of these loosely transcripted):

-"As a writer, the way you've been conditioned to read is completely wrong. I will refer to that style of reading as 'The Wrong Way' or 'The Problem'."

-Had sharp criticisms for the tradition of workshop including workshops administered at our University (in response to a detail regarding the Intermediate Class provided by a classmate: "that's total bullshit")

-"There is a market for books. Anyone who says literature is dead isn't paying attention."

-"You get a B if you turn everything in. You get an A if you deserve it. most of you will get B's or fail."

-"Most people say they want to write. I assume you're here because you aren't them."

-"In your response to the readings, don't say you like it or don't like it. A story is not a piece of cake."

etc, etc



Additionally:
I'm going to climb Kilimanjaro in January. The tallest mountain in Africa. One of the most 'prominent' mountains in the world (defined by how much rock is actually exposed. Kilimanjaro rises out of the flat serengeti like a metaphor for the ascent of man.) The excitement and relevance and biography of this event is pretty hard to measure. It teeters on a reunion that means more to me with every approaching second. The inclusion of new party-members each has its importance as well: a journey across the globe with my brother (the first Kellys to travel the world other than for the purposes of killing Viet Cong), an adventure with my boss/friend that will push us past the point of no return in some ways. The hope that this begins an annual tradition of unlikely adventures; casting the rest of the solar cycle in a sort of transient and anticipatory light. The Motherland. I predict a Guerilla touching every continent by the end of the decade.



Also. Aesop Rock released a new album. I won't claim its the best thing ever. But its better than anything he's done since Labor Days.

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"Take Me Home"

I can't write poetry anymore. For the twelve millionth time in my life I stare at a yawning universe of blank paper and find no godly imperative to populate it with the spindly architecture of stunted lines or microscopic stills of the burning panoramas of my dreams. I can't wend some cohesive thread through a complex of emotional truths and somehow remain unscathed by sentimentality or moments of weakness. And yet, try to square this with the literal combustion in my ribcage; my current iteration brimming with "how I really feel about things" and a spectral honesty that I once-only-and-still-best muster quite late at night.

And so instead I try to orchestrate grand fictional schemes, like throw everyone into the fire and burn off their weakness and challenge them to duels with themselves and narcotize their epiphanies and strand them someplace. But this is always what I've done best: shoot from the hip with swagger and sentience, scatter my suffering asymmetrically so you can feel your teeth clack, bang my head against bulldozers, press my back up flat against walls so the impact is not absorbed but shatters my limbs like ceramic. . . Anxiety my lacquer and laxative and language.

You've magnetized me, so the iron in my blood stands at attention and erects abstract sculpture signifying the innumerable times I thought the my Life was over.

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"This ain't a time when the usual is suitable"

Had a discussion(sun-burned and malnourished but happy, right) as I weaved someone else's car across the lonelier parts of Nevada, post culmination and bearing of witness and drinks in Kerouac's bar, about what sort of inorganic and tractable career-path a writer should take. See, the danger is that one can invest their life's-blood and -savings into learning from some wizened and self-appointed guru of the art, only to find that every other organism with a penchant for typing has learned the same litany of bullet-points and things worth crying over. So the system has its trends and its priorities and its gradually (d)evolving traditions and bright lights and chamber music. Like anything, it regrettably rewards the well-done-within-the expected and falters trying to assimilate the new. Contemporary writing, as exemplified in the MFA or academic system, has tremendous strengths in particular areas. It is sensitive to what picky, elitist readers (read: people who want to write) want: that is a piece's awkwardness is covered up, the theme or point or reason to bother is shrouded in generalities and lacquered for easy consumption, the characters have quaint flaws but are in-the-end good people, the emotions are appealed to in a 'pleasing' manner, complications in diction or experimentation in grammar are seen as over-thought and smart-assed, everyone falls in love and it is either requited or refused, etc etc.

My plan is to dive into this homogenizing malaise and try to somehow keep in mind declarations and poetry I once screamed into a figurative megaphone. Try to remember that art is supposed to somehow matter. Try to keep in mind that the world is mind-numbingly complex and tortuously unfair and interminably unpredictable and suspenseful. So right now, I am working on two stories: one involves an involuntary yuppie's existential anuerysm and the subsequent fleeing into the desert, fiery crash and smoking of jimson weed with the last alien (as in alienated) to escape his company whilst they both try to not die or think about life. There's no crying or subtly inadequate epiphanies, no feel good rounding out where "at least he got _____", there's love and relationships but there's no simple resolutions. I don't want to say what it is, because maybe its terrible. The other thing I'm working on is a story that begins during the contentious speech of a Kwame-like figure, promising the world to a teeming mass of the poor, uneducated and drug addicted as Progress behind him literally collapses. The story than simply meanders out into the crowd with no fixed protagonist. I'm not saying I know how to do this. . . .but I consider the material that I've been exposed to as "paramount contemporary writing", the products of MFA programs and the literary journal institution and all of its trappings, and I think that there isn't going to be anyone that can teach me what I need to learn.

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"I love this old hip-hop shit, man"

So, if you've talked to me much or ridden around in my car, you probably know how much I love hip-hop. I'm the equivalent of a Star Wars geek: I know album release dates, real names of MCs, who has worked together, general religio-political philosophies of major MCs, the origin and meaning of obscure terms like "5% Nation", "8 Million Stories", "Overstanding", etc etc. I cannot really trace the pathology that has led me to love this music or to somehow identify with it (though I have tried), but it actually means quite a bit to me. I could expound a great deal, and plan to once I have graduated from the Rock the Bells festival this weekend:




I'm so excited I think I just peed in my pants a little bit.

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Perseid, Pacing, Pulse

There's something about astronomy that alleviates me of the suffering of being alive. Suffering in the Buddhist sense, in that every step we make through our lives is guided by desires and attachments that can do nothing but cause us pain in the end. And somehow under that starry sky, meteors blazing and feeling the time drain away from my futile attempts, I come to the conclusion that I'm not really afraid of anything. That I will tell You anything if You ask. And I've only lied once, but my hand was forced.

And I used to think, so naively, that I had some understanding of what the meaning of life was. Or that it would be possible to distill 20-some-odd years of drug-addled, infuriated and stunted experience into some kind of liturgical and comprehensive Truth. The only thing I know is that, whatever our aims, we must be willing to risk and endure pain and curl up child-like in corners begging the empty sky for forgiveness. And I feel like I am coming up to the point at which every aspect of my life is fair game; everything a potential sacrifice so that I can really feel alive for a few moments. Sanity, comfort, health, reputation, personal expectations, the razor-wire I've enveloped my heart in . . .all of it gone if I can just really feel something. There's a notion, Nietzschean but also much older, that the penultimate stage of our transcendence is to become a child: once the desert has been crossed, and the dragon slain, we must become history-less, infinitely fascinated, a creature of creation and absorption. Most importantly a naked thing, wide-eyed and fearless.

Mook: some lines because I was afraid to spit them when the mic was figuratively passed:

Fabricate a city from the fragments of our absent astronomics, the streets and structures' spindles the tails of speeding comets. And pretend for just a moment that all this children's screaming's histrionics. And a geologic blink in time the sign we've done nothing since we started.

The last time I saw the stars I stood apart from all of this. And the first time I felt the stars I fell down blind and calmly. And the only time I touched your star I could not wash your eyes off me.

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"Unstable as the dust"

On the airplane reading that time does not exist and understanding that I knew this in the womb. That at some point we all had to pretend that things moved forward in order to square our biology with the world, in order to not implode under the sheer weight of a simultaneous experience. And it hardly matters whether I've known this person for 4 years or for a month; the real meat of our understanding being what we do with the scant, immeasurable moments that we share this space.

And so when you, for even the infinitesimal point it is possible, convince yourself that there is no future and there is no past you can simply focus on the idea that this crystal moment is your entire existence. And I feel like if you could truly do it, meditatively and physiologically delude yourself (but what is the truth?) of the solitary second that is right now, it would feel like instantaneous birth and death. And maybe this means that after long nights of revelry and connection the rheumy ache in every crevice is my body slowly coming back to life.

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"Talk bad about the...[D-town]...and I'll bust you in the fucking mouth"

There is no way to really return. There are carefully designed arrangements that provoke many of the same emotions of those long-ago nights in which we destroyed and rebuilt ourselves. There are intoxicants and a shared sense of music. There are genuine laughs that originate somewhere intangible and echo out amongst the ancient brick and rusting cars.

There is no collective of human beings I feel more comfortable with then my tribe in Detroit. No band of misfits I could possibly be prouder to fit in with. But of course things change, that was the nature of the beast to begin with: a dozen hard-headed kids in eternal flux. From our numbers we have produced beauty and truth, and we have embraced ugliness and pain. We have suffered violence and addiction and heart-break and watched sunrises with the dread that we may have to one day plan for things. And now we are all sort of on some brink . . .some of us allowing ourselves to get too old to resist, others diving in with the ambition to change everything by will alone. Some of us etching our turmoil and joy on the universe with abandon. All of us understanding, profoundly, that we have only this instant in which to connect with ourselves as we wish we were.

I don't bear any gifts on re-entry. The best thing that I can bring back to this junta is that I have somehow grown, and that I am willing to share the nature of my metamorphosis and enjoy the change in Them as if it were my own.

I love this city. If you've never really been there, there is no way you can agree. It is filthy, and dangerous, and at times ugly, and cold, and sparse and difficult. Weakness here, and not physical weakness but weakness of character, is stomped into the pavement. You live by bravado and cynicism, and the contradiction of compassion and callousness. People in Detroit don't give a shit about their 401(k) or their blood pressure or their credit card debt; because they've all seen the end in black and white and crack cocaine and crumbling brick and the panic inherent in gunfire and old black women pleading to you, some stranger, for their life. Where I live now is like an amusement park compared to my spiritual home. Here in Boise we pretend that everyone has a decent job and that God Blesses America and that our fellow-man will always play by the rules. The D is the jungle; and we're all warriors in our own way, and we know that every single second is lived on borrowed time, and we know that if something is worth obtaining in life, it is worth dying for.

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I have had so much genuine emotion in the last year that turned out to be based on some miscommunication or misunderstanding on my part. As though the Sanskrit you all speak carries hidden words and fluctuates in temperament. As though the flare guns you are all firing off are celebration instead of panic and stranded nights in ravines. Fuck words at this point. Either Create or Destroy or Express the inexpressible with your bare hands. All I want to do is write, or fight or fuck; because even misconstrued these things stand on their own.

I don't even recognize mistakes anymore. I over-correct for long-forgiven stumbling over words. I cherry-pick whatever detail titillates or devastates me. I assume the world to be either catastrophe or an idyllic morning after. And when we pour ourselves out we risk dispersion and evaporation, but most importantly we may be drank and absorbed.

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"I enjoy anything that undermines universality"

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Risk

Nothing is set in stone, nor moving unilaterally toward whatever mangled interrelationship I might be capable of. But I feel both comfortable and challenged . . .there was this sensation for just a moment last night . . .

My boss and close friend out here in the mountains has gradually come to the revelation that this thing we call American society is on the brink; and without a radical revision to the way we conduct virtually every aspect of our lives we will soon either adapt or die in a new world we've been ill-prepared for. And to watch him come to this conclusion, one that has lived in my ribcage for years now, is to watch the assumptions of a lifetime dissolve. What about my mortgage and my new house? What about this job that I have slaved away at for decades? What about these objects that I own, that enhance my life? What about democracy? What about the faith in mankind that I've held close to my heart since childhood? It is not that these things are completely cast to the ether, but the understanding that they are little more than illusory has sunk in.


I've held massive contradictions in my life, and still do. I don't mean overt hypocrisies or mis-matches between word and deed. But I've followed uncooperative trajectories, divergent career paths that make my spine creak; currently striving to be both warrior and poet; been the most reliable and capable and yet simultaneously the most drug-addled and rebellious; been the rowdiest introvert and the most reserved party-host; been richer than anyone I know while sleeping on the floor and letting wolf spiders crawl over me; been absolutely broke drinking champagne as though the entire city were my kingdom; retrieved my car from impound in the nick of time to ace university exams . . . the rewards of all of this that I now have an epic to look back upon, and the evidence required to believe that anything is possible.

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"Ask passion for mercy and ...[it'll]...throw you a rope"

I finally feel like the things I came out here to do are happening. I haven't found some throbbing soul beneath the fresh drywall and flourescent crucifix of Boise, but I have an invincible summer within me, you might say. I have time here. Virtually everything I've ever been good at is now at its apex. Constantly self-imposed challenges as though someone were watching over my shoulder. I whined a bit about my lack of comradarie, and found out it was only because I wasn't trying.

I've talked about this before, but I really think that there is one important binary opposition in life. Virtually every other duality that occurs in the daily procession of our life stems from this: FEAR or LOVE . See (acknowledging that I'm not perfect, and moving on) the scurrying mammal in us is conditioned to be afraid. To run from looming shadows as they eclipse us, to retreat to our holes and wait for the panic in the street that must be brimming with danger to die down and go home. We've all assembled our lives, because our history is based on this impulse, to assimilate. To monger in groups is to shed the probability that anguish or pain will touch us. So we buy into things; bunk movies, exploitive fashions, shit politics, ridiculous automobiles, recklessly hacking the real estate system as a lifestyle. Whatever token of participation we can purchase and then immediately retreat to put as much of it between us and everyone else as possible.

But love. An amorous appreciation that we are all really doing this, or really could. That we're all after the same thing and there's simply varying degrees of confusion. And then your folly seems so reasonable, and the collective dream so simple. So hard to believe that we've miturated upon it by systemically deeming whole swaths of people as less valuable than us. Or that we're willing to mechanize our greed into tactical airstrikes to insure that all the above stays put; or better yet continues to swell cancerous.

And the finer detail is that, personally, the attitude of love adds color and optimism and pleasure to virtually everything. As though approaching every choice with the question of which option is from love, and which from fear, automates the most difficult decisions.

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"You may be interested in MFA programs, ours included"

My workshop today went very well. If you have ever had workshop for any creative field, you will know that the process focuses on what aspects need work and thus most comments are focused on 'negatives'. That said, this workshop was interesting because no one unanimously agreed on something that didn't work. Some major gripes by one student were pointed out as strong (if unconventional) writing by another.

The professor, de facto the most important opinion in the class, had a lot of positive comments. After class we talked and he essentially told me that this is what I should be doing if I have the desire and that he would have likely accepted me into their MFA program had he received this story in an application. He also commented that I have a strong chance of getting into good programs around the country.


In his letter (these come with all of his responses, like a grade you might say): "Lastly, I want you to know how much I admired this story."

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"When did mediocrity and banality become a good image for your children?"

There is no home, only places where you've found love. There is no anxiety aside from the paralyzing suspicion that every action is lost in the sheer mathematics of our situation here. There is no end and beginning, time is an illusion crafted by a narrow experience. There are no rules, only primal reactions to uncertainty and fear. There are no exits or capitulation, there is only survival and decision.

My brother and I went out into the mountains this weekend to see if we could bang our bodies against rocks enough to chip off weakness. Twenty miles plus a mile vertical over ankle-breaking rocks, unforgiving rivers, and the previous night's insomnia in just under six hours. No record by any means, but I've got a scar and perhaps a lifelong ache from it.


Thanks for feedback on the story I posted so far; criticism of every sort is helpful. This last month or two has been very productive overall, and I feel like I'm building enough raw material to do something with. I'm getting it workshopped today and will put a little note here as to how it went.

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''coz I been in the lab with a pen and a pad"

So, I haven't been slacking. School has focused my efforts. I wrote
this story over the past week. It will be workshopped next week.

I've actually learned quite a bit in this class. The nuts and bolts of things, the subtle things that one isn't even aware of as they read. How to hide the seams, how to control the image the reader has in their head, how to hint at things and then finally drop them just as the reader is figuring them out, how to explicate emotions with nothing but the way a character cuts against their background.

Anyway, if you get a chance to read the story . . .I'd be psyched.

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Nowhere, man. Nowhere

And sometimes when you can't think of anything to write you just close your eyes and let the latent anxiety and joy trembling in your fingertips find a home out there in the ether. At what point does our language become coherent and instinctual, when do we stop thinking about it? And do you and I really speak the same language, or do we each have our own with overlaps based on familial and geographical relationships, education, tendency towards poetics?

I've done my best over the last half-dozen years to situate myself in the space between independence and isolation. To take control of my domain, my life, my experience. And then once a year my doting parents, their fears and ambitions vast and frigid as tundra, visit and every scaffolding I've arranged is either shoved into a corner or temporarily disassembled. I can smell the fear on them. And they try their hardest to convince me of its validity. Since they've arrived there has been no writing, no exercise, no reading. Just work and then sitting around wringing hands with nothing to talk about and finally me smoking under the covers at midnight so I can sleep for a few hours.

Next Wednesday marks the falling action in the most chaotic month of my life. I've felt the full range of emotion, and the hybridization of various strains I had never imagined. I don't want a reprieve, not necessarily, but 30 free seconds to scribble some lines about it. An hour to lay down and stare at my blank whiteboard for inspiration. A late-night foray out into the neighborhood to collect impressions, indentations, instances of anxiety. Alcohol saturating my cytoplasm.

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NY

As an epilogue to the craziness, I'm starting to decompress. The last few weeks had been anxious ones, the events of the present sort of brooding out over the fields and me holding my breath. But now, I'm in the thick of it, to be sure. I feel as though I've aged a decade in the last month.

Visiting with a great old friend is like visiting with all of the people that made up our tribe. As though we are merely out for an errand and caught up in some misadventure we will soon report to a smoky living room over Mickey's. And we had quite a misadventure. JK and I went to New York for a handful of days, after a stint in Boston. Boston is a beautiful town, really, though we spent most of it hung-over or rampaging through various bar districts with conviction. Night one we drank in the oldest bar in country and wandered around Boston's supposed slum practicing neuroscience. Night two we got kicked out of a decent BBQ as the BAC increased and everything we learned about fun in Detroit was laid bare. Hurdled balconies, thrown cups, melodramatics, more thrown cups and finally we absconded out into the street with pride in our mission, and a cadre of recent Bostonians willing to go anywhere or do nearly anything. Stops at a complete stranger's house to round up more, and out to the bars to get kicked out, drink Guinness, and simulate crack addiction.

A dazed four hour bus into New York with no explanations or entertainment, the subtle sense that this was all some front for the Chinese mob and that kilos of opium or dozens of illegals must be stowed beneath the bus. Finding ourselves from Chinatown to Times Square like the smart-ass kid from Family Circus's as we whirled through substations, mingled with tourists, waved to Angela Lansbury and sides-stepped the politest criminal alive. Finally into our stark hostel, staring down a pre-programmed fanny pack with a terse script and a high-counter. Into our rooms to contemplate location and plans, and then back out into the streets to meet good friend's I haven't seen since I made the leap. We wandered . . Empire State Building, several Perfect Pints, a stroll by twelve million peepshows, a drink in a vampire bar, and a endearing adieu. Down to Greenwich Village to drink as much as possible amongst languages we couldn't understand and several hundred of what I thought were caricatures of sailors on leave. Interesting smells and the dawning realization of how far this empire spans, and how entomological all this slithering around underground and emerging in alien lands drenched in familiar symbols. New York City is itself a caricature of infinity, as Forster would agree.

The next day we spent wandering Central Park, the Most Praiseworthy Natural History Museum. Met some Fellow Travelers at the Hostel and stormed the bar next door while we waited in anticipation for someone's friend to show up. Or something. We stayed up late ranting in staircases until the Fannypack sent us scuttling like cockroaches back to our cramped room.

The next day we accomplished little in the way of sight-seeing: Staten Island Ferry (witness to most of the city skyline), Wall Street, the WTC site, etc etc. In the evening we ran back into friends from the evening before, Australians and Brits, and went out in search of chaos and bass after general swigs of 151. After a few hours of stumbling around and dancing as if it would be our last opportunity for years, we all climbed out a window of the hostel onto a fire escape and watched the sky gradually become morning.

Joe left early. I staggered through New York with a few things left to see. ..

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Something New

I'm going to see if posting this PDF works, this is the story I posted here



NOTE: Clicking the link will take you to another page, where you must then click the grey "download this file"

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Me Gustas Cosas Surreal

Fascinating article about designing circuits and electrical components via evolution. The researcher was able to design a super-efficient array of circuits through many generations of random variation in configuration. He cannot precisely explain how the configuration actually functions, simply that it met his criteria after a few thousand generations.

I had a dream last night that I electively spent weekends in jail because it forced me to write undistracted for hours on end.

My semester is over finally. I got 835 out of a possible 850 in my Literary studies class.I submitted the story below for my final project, it's take-off of the novel Howards End in which a sort-of despised character's past is revisited. It was fun to write and I think came out well:




“Ne Crois Pas Que le Mari Lui Ressemble”
“Dearest Ruth:
My time in Cyprus has been productive. And the purchases I made in real estate years ago have proven wise. This year will be generous to us. I will be returning to you on the 12th, and I eagerly anticipate it
Yours,
Henry Wilcox”

The note would go out tomorrow, and in a week's time Ruth would receive it sitting in her chair and delicately slit the envelope open. She would read what he had written, Henry's desperate plea masked in formality, nod complacently and file it away with the dozens of other brief and formulaic notes he'd sent over the years. But he doubted that a smile would crease her face. The same stoic nature that had attracted him –the way she abhorred the levity of other women he knew-- had grown into a chasm in which he threw meager tokens of his affection. This note, the occasional compliment, a peck in the morning on his way out to business. He threw these tiny things in and wanted them to gather into a heap.
Henry had a silent moment. He didn't stir from the enormous oak desk; he passively looked at the dim painting in front of him. The Lt. Colonel he was now doing business with always ensured that Henry spent the night in the plushest officer's suite available. The coastal property he owned on Cyprus was critically important, and though no allegiant to the British military would admit it, without Henry's land the operations of the Suez would slip further and further from their control. The canal was the carotid artery of Arabia, and his scrap of land was the best place to position the huge guns. The best place to from which to launch ships.
Henry finally stood and picked up the oil lamp. He was unsure what to do with himself. The note was not yet gone, and so the anxiety of unalterable communication cast out to Ruth was not yet tangible. He unfolded it and read it again.
“What can I add to this?” he asked aloud, to the anonymous figure in the painting. To the greasy shadows in the light of the oil lamp. “What can I say?”
Though dark, it was still early. And whenever abroad he had difficulty retiring before necessary. He had some dim sense that he should be out haunting Cyprus, meeting local merchants, finding bombastic investments under a rock. But the island had become a chore. Insolent Turks threatening to steal (though Henry took some pride in that his wits had prevented him from being a victim) in the very way they looked at him. The tiresome boat-ride in choppy Mediterranean waters. The ongoing glad-handing and Scotch distribution to various uniformed officials (God Bless the British Empire but Henry could only respect the privates for their youth and duty, or the generals for their skill and ambition).
Scotch.
Henry stood from the desk and went to the trunk at the foot of his bed. He had hired a Turkish boy to carry it from the boat, and when the boy had finally eased it off of his back and onto the floor of the suite he had quite literally scoffed at Henry's modest tip. What does a Turkish boy need with more than a shilling anyway?
From the trunk he took out a bottle. He had brought an entire case, as was his reputation, to celebrate the closing of a large deal. There remained three bottles to carefully transport back to Britain for the next venture. Henry rarely drank it himself, only when a recipient offered him a snifter, but there was a night to kill. And he knew it would help him sleep.
Henry poured himself a glass. Two fingers as he had seen General Walsh pour the day before. And the first swig brought something not quite comfortable, but at least a pinprick in his throat to remind him of who he was and a slow burning sensation out to his fingertips. Another swig and he realized how weak he was against alcohol, how susceptible. The third, and last in the glass, and the Scotch wrapped its arms around him the way that Ruth never would without some awkward prompt.
He poured another and took it on a pace around the suite. Sniffed it and walked to the window. The base was dark, irreproachably dark. Here and there the occasional flicker of light, some soldier or officer writing a heartfelt letter to his sweetheart, covertly while their bunkmate brushed his teeth. Saying things they would never say in mixed company. He took a drink.
The British Empire had swept into Cyprus years ago and flattened what had been a Cypress grove, or an oak forest, and put up canvas tents and ramshackle facilities. Used the timber to erect the general store over there, the mess hall, Henry's suite. Pushed some Greek farmer, whose family had tended the land since Mycenae, north into the Turkish part of the country. This was one of the Empire's strongholds, Henry thought, from here they could keep an eye on the Ottomans, even the Germans if they were audacious enough to encroach. This place was essential in the destiny of the British Empire.
Why couldn't Ruth see that? He wondered, as he took a drink. Why couldn't she see that he was part of something vastly important. It was something that had always bothered him. She would accept anything he said, but the things that required her enthusiasm always fell short. Why didn't she hail him when he returned to Howards End, embrace him tightly, futilely but gently ask him never to leave again?
Scotch.
The base was dark. He could wander it and breath some sea air, he thought. Go unnoticed. One more glass of Scotch and then he would venture out there, a walk might do him good before he slept.
He put on his topcoat and a hat, eyed himself in the darkened mirror, and stepped out the door. He paused there for a moment, uncomfortable in spontaneity. He nearly turned back, but winced at the thought of his letter to Ruth, his feeble, unrequited reach, staring up at him as he drank another Scotch. The sky was enormous over him the way it never was in London. There was always some row of buildings narrowing the view, pushing the horizon to a smaller and smaller rectangle of sky. And the stars. He looked up for a long moment at the stars and didn't try to explain them. He took in a deep breath of Cypriot air and abruptly sneezed. There was something in the air here that his nose and throat rebelled against.
He started to walk. That was the point after all. There was no plan, but rather than move towards the fringe of the base he gravitated toward its center. There were a few more spots of light there, he could see. An outlay of canvas tents with lamps burning inside; glowing embers silhouetting the activities of soldiers inside. A cramped game of cards here, a young man reading there. All backlit and disconnected; like watching the goings-on within the womb.
There was a pleasure in moving anonymously. No pretense, no shaking hands, no attempts at friendly conversation straining to remember names. No need to puff up one's chest or carefully sit in a chair. No willfully exuding the Wilcox manner, such that whoever sat across the table from him would be intimidated into agreement. Just walking, in the dark. Observing, feeling the slight chill on the back of his hands and the tips of his ears.
After several moments sort of drifting around the base, Henry found himself at the door of the officer's bar. Austere and olive-drab like all the other buildings, a faint jingle of music inside. He wrung his hands briefly, straightened his back, and marched in.
All measures had been taken to simulate the classier establishments back in London. A long brass-railed bar, polished paneled walls, low-hanging lights shrouded in stained glass, a thin mustachioed man in a tie and apron. In the far corner a man in a disheveled officer's uniform plonked away at a piano and took sips of brown liquor. The Empire had nearly three hundred boots on the island, all the grunts designated as stand-by or cheap labor and the commanding officers (the sullen fellow at the piano and his colleagues) providing oversight to various small construction projects. Henry had noted early on in his dealings that the presence there seemed excessive and the men bored. The higher-ups danced around the issue, and seemed to look over their shoulder or out over the sea towards the Ottoman nervously at the faintest mention.
The only officer Henry recognized nodded to the bartender, who waved him in. Another Scotch was necessary. And hopefully a friendly conversation with someone. He sat down next to a thin woman turned to face the back of the bar; she was talking to a youngish, German-looking officer. Or rather listening and interjecting with little affirmatives. The man was on the verge of boasting, Henry thought, and blatantly tried to impress her with military jargon. Henry instantly hated him. Hated the way the young woman twirled her hair or jostled the ice in her drink and beamed at him. He only saw the back of her head, so he couldn't be sure, but her posture suggested some kindling admiration.
The Scotch went down easier now. Henry exchanged a stilted pleasantry with the man that vouched for him, one bleary eye on the woman and the petulant twerp next to her. He willed her to turn and look at him, to give him an instant of her attention. The man prattled on to her incessantly and Henry thought he saw the woman's head bob quickly down in exhaustion. He was putting her to sleep.
Henry ordered another drink, feeling the hand of heart-burn reach up from his stomach and rake its claws on his throat. His motor functions took on a sloppy ease. The bartender made a joke and Henry laughed a bit too hard and pounded the bar once sharply with his fist; like a gavel commanding the world to appreciate that tired bit of humor. That dastardly weasel was still talking to her! Henry thought, aghast.
Finally, the young man broke for the latrine and the woman turned to face the bartender. Henry tried to imagine how he must look, exactly. He was getting on in years, but still fit. His wrinkles looked distinguished and not archaic, if he remembered correctly. And his strong brow and chin was generally considered handsome. . .
“You must be Wilcox,” the woman said. She reached her hand across in a jangle of cheap-looking jewelry. She wore an elegant enough dress, some fashionable shade of green Henry knew, but it was a size too large. It hung on her awkwardly. As did the mislaid string of pearls around her neck.
“I am,” and Henry took her hand. Planted a gentlemanly kiss on the back of it. He looked her solidly in the eyes now. Not unpretty, he thought. Though certainly uncouth. An image of her nude wormed its way into his mind, hinted at in the way the dress draped across the stiff lines of her skeleton, he tried to squash it. “And who might you be?”


* * * *
Jacky. That was her name. Henry remembered it now. She still lay in the bed behind him, softly snoring as morning sunlight began to spill in and Henry sat at the enormous desk with his head in his hands. She was the daughter of one of the lieutenants on the base, on holiday from London. She was impressionable, stupid even (if one neglected courtesy). The entire evening came back to him in stages now. She had introduced herself, and he had complimented her on something arbitrary. And then she asked him to tell her about business. She had leaned over and grasped his forearm when he talked about his business conquests in London and abroad and he had not recoiled. He exaggerated a bit here and there, perhaps nothing outright false, but arranged just so.
He turned and looked at her now. Distinctly less attractive at this hour; her make-up smeared off and crusted on the pillowcase, her eyebrows heavier and ears bigger than he remembered. The luxury of his suite had come up, though he couldn't recall which of them had broached it, and she had looked at him enraptured. And that had been followed by a stumble over the grounds, her lithe arm wrapped in his. He made some comment about the vastness of the sky over Cyprus, and she had cooed at how well he spoke. They barged into the wrong room at first, her hand his trouser pocket. He had gathered his few remaining wits and finally lead her into his suite. Another round of scotch at the table, her begging to hear more and groping his arm like a statue's.
Finally, he succumbed and they fell into his bed. Tangled and struggling to remove clothes. And afterwards she had held him as she fell asleep. Just wrapped both of her arms around him and said: “Henry, you may be the most amazing man I have ever met.”
He wasn't sure what to do now. A sense of dread and confusion mixed with an ungodly headache. He would have to take steps to prevent this from becoming a scandal. Ruth would never know, to be sure, but if publicized to anything beyond speculation business with this arm of the Empire would be untenable. It would be impossible to have a professional lunch, for instance, without snickering or a cloud of gossip over his head. He'd worked so hard to attain a position of respectability and dignity. As straight as an arrow; he had always demanded this of himself. And now?
The letter to Ruth was still on the desk, the corner stained when Jacky spilled her last drink. He picked it up with a thumb and finger, it felt cold and cheap.
“Oh Ruth, what have I done?”

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