"The lost eyes of a thawed caveman"

(quote: me; video: Ricky's "Meaning of christmas")

Xmas party season. Everything more or less a persistent hang-over for the last few days. And I have little to no actual responsibilities. My classes ended spectacularly. A great grade and excellent feedback in one class, an epic bar-crawl with the members of my other one. Last night had my xmas party for work, which is always excellent. And then two of my bosses and their wives genuinely wanted to 'hang out" and we went to the bar and listened to music and I talked to them about writing. These guys are saints. I'm bringing in stories for them to read in the next few days. And the conversation served as a glowing preamble to the awkward, bent-ear explanations I'll have to give to extended family next week. quoth a boss: "in the annals of history, how many people have gone from engineering to english?"

The world is different walking through it late at night and waist-deep in winter. Everyone is hid out, in front of their screens. Everything is slick or jagged, and smells older than it is. Blackened snow clinging to everything looking fungal and nefarious in the arc-sodiums. And cars tumble along testing brakes and mingling cigarette-smoke with the vapor of their words. And front lawns broadcast to no-one the christmas mythos and Bosch-like populate themselves with jarring juxtapositions such that Frosty waves to Rudolph and Santa lords over them both disproportionate. And a frazzle-haired romantic that listens to BRMC steps from his 70s-era duster and snaps a pic with his gadget. And at some point I sit at the head of the table and drink the bottom-third of fancy cocktails and forgive people in my head. And when we're back out the doors the cold is treatment of an overdose and I gasp and run and clamber half-up a statue. Cut my hand and it bleeds like eyebrows in bar-room brawls. My own blood on the snow, dilute in the ice.


Reading through Gravity's Rainbow again. I made it 2/3rds of the way through, but lost the plot in Africa. This time around there is a certain cognizance of deliberate density. It's wonderfully complex, the detail rich, and every one of them distinct and well-executed and beautiful. But I think I'm seeing some cracks in Pynchon's methods. An immense and complex narrative that does not pause for stragglers, which has an integrity to it. But the big-picture . . .something is missing there. And reading Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein which I'm loving. But there's also a problem in his rendering, a sort of chaos for its own sake, covering Burrough's territory but trying to maintain lucidity. The images don't hang together like they could. Well, that's only 10 pages in. So who knows. Anyway, I really like both of these books.

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"I want to remember it. I never want to forget it."

(video and quote: Colonel Kurtz-Apocalypse Now)

Civilization is comprised of a network of ideologies. There are religious ideologies, economic ideologies, the ideology of family, the ideology of the military. Each of these is strictly real and material (that is, they manifest in the material world with rituals, institutions, objects, documents, physical inter-relations, etc). There is no escaping ideology without entering a new one. There is an ideology of science and rebellion, of art, of humanism, of philanthropy, of anarchism, of nihilism. You will never be free of ideologies, only incrementally inching into newer and less false ones. Every ideology, beyond being material, is essentially the imaginary relationships of individuals (though this word is now in some ways moot, replace with subjects) to their real conditions of existence. Ideologies emerge, in part, out of long-held misconceptions about the way things are. This misconception becomes an Ideological Apparatus concerned with maintaining its existence and growing arms and legs. And so subtle hierarchies become material discourses on power. Confusion about the universe becomes religion. Misunderstanding of human nature becomes economics. The biological appearance of families becomes the 'nuclear family'. All of these things form a vast, dominant, oppressive force that encourages our conformity, insures our complicity, and convinces us to perpetuate it.

Ok . . .all that thanks to Marx and Althusser. But, I thought this in the stolid quiet of my office at 6am, the world outside my window matte black, if every ideology is based on "imaginary relationships" (even what we think is the truest possible statement is distorted by the limitations of language, even the purest observation is poisoned by our eyes) then certainly, in all ideologies, their will be a day of reckoning. Not only that, but if one patiently observes an ideology in its death throws, he or she will observe what it was about that system that was imaginary, false, a lie. We are currently witnessing a glitch in our economic system. Some think it is simply a setback like the recessions of the 80s or other earlier economic crises. I don't know what the medium-term economic picture might be, and I am certainly no expert. But what I can say, is that in the failures of the current economic arrangement, the lie behind our economic ideology is exposed. Money is not real. It could be, I'm not saying objects have no value and that there is no sound means of acquiring food by providing services. But in America, money is not real. The government pumps numbers into the system, founded on no actual product or material. Banks charge you interest to provide you with electronic numbers that do not exist as anything but imagined agreements. Mortgages are taken out on property, and the debt is sliced into a million pieces like cake. But it is all simply numbers in an electronic system. This is what causes inflation, in all reality. Having more money than value. If things are worth $100 and you divide it 105 ways, you can hardly call each divided unit $1. And yet that is what we do. The moment that we dematerialized money, that we negated raw mathematics, we started the timer on the ultimate failure of the economic ideology.

Likewise, the economic system holds fictitious tenets of human nature. It presumes rationality in all actions. It starts wars and speculates based on the notion that each human unit is identical to the next. It assumes that free markets will flush out the best of the competitive nature deep within each of us and thus actualize us. All of these things are lies. All of them erode the base of the economic system.





I pushed out 10 graduate applications this week. Three 12 hour days of making checklists and sending electronic money and rewriting personal statements and listening to skull-rattling gangsta rap. Sliding that first completed one into the mailbox, I almost heard the click. New human being, new daily bread, new settings on my alarm clock, new skylines, new means of conveyance, new pollution in my lungs, new garbage in my newspaper, new bass in my headphones, new software to write with, new photos to fuck up, new people to alienate and avoid, new dreams at new altitudes, new brands of alcohol. Most importantly: new trade, new 40hours+, new opportunities. The only lesson I can give on this: Remember that what you do for yourself can never be taken from you. Make a plan and hold it glowing in your ribcage like fascists might drag you from your bed pre-dawn. Hold it above everything: carnal desires, food, your health, your happiness, familial obligations, your god, your illnesses and allergies, the law, propriety, comfort, sanity, bills, everything.

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"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings"

(quote: Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian; video: trailer for Synecdoche, New York)


I'm looking forward to xmas in the mitten. Last night I sat in Boise's smokiest bar and read a poem by a friend of mine. He's a Detroiter too, or close enough to count in the MTZ. The image of a figure standing outside a Woodward bar, watching the fleeting past in oil-stained puddles. Nothing can be retrieved or even properly named. And there are absolutely times for nostalgia, as much as I've evaded it. I want to walk across that scarred parking lot behind Jacoby's and feel bitter winter wind. I want my car to spin across the flooded interstate, soaking my tribe in gasoline and overflow. I want to blow my New Year's kazoo from the roof of the Jewish Park Shelton. I want to walk between the arguing deaf in the sharp-edged morning. I want to breathe in the smoke of structure fires, etched against the emulsive sky like the whole city is in my dreams. I want to steal things in a place where property means nothing. I want to chop firewood in the shadow of anonymous wealth wasted. I want to feel nervous and excited and go rigid in the abdomen walking from my car to the place I buy beer. I want to talk to Kazakhs or Albanians through bullet-proof glass. I want heroin addicts to crash their bikes in my driveway. I want ceilings to leak and basements to reek. I want my bars so fucking dark I forget who I came with. I want to look forward to someone driving long distance this weekend to sleep on my floor with me. I want to sit on my porch all day, getting slow drunk listening to psychopaths and making plans to do it all again tomorrow. I want to see the SWAT tank rolling up Trumbull as I stagger stoned gorgeous to a classroom with no windows. I want to make burritos from canned goods with no labels. I want to philosophize until the sun comes up and I'm asleep in the chair alone. I want to come downstairs vibrating with something, and have 8 other opinions on it within minutes. I want to see OneBeLo rock the mic every goddamn weekend. All these things, as clear now as they were then. Whatever the case, in three weeks I'm home. Hopefully I can still keep up.

Saw the above film yesterday. Like every Charlie Kaufman piece, there seem to be waves of appreciation that come on as the time since viewing grows. He is directing for the first time, and I think in some ways his amateur lens shows; but from a story-standpoint it is very unlike anything I have ever really seen. True Theatre of the Absurd. Strangely, the film feels like a week long. And not due to pace, but as a result of the lifetime the film contains. It takes place over the course of at least 30 years (probably more, it's difficult to tell), and the main character (Cardin) seems to have lost his grip on time. This is The World According to Garp gone surreal, the main character being among the saddest figures I've seen in a film. The many love stories of the film are each unique and true and classically rendered. The infinite self-reflexivity of the film's ultimate project is the best argument for the post-modern aesthetic one could ask for. I already like this movie more after writing the above then I did before.


Today, in applying to the University of Minnesota, I had to write 3 additional personal statements. One on my "career plans", one on "diversity", a final one discussing my "self-motivation". The first was brief, simple. The second was mostly about Detroit. I am a white male from the suburbs, yet I think I've gotten my dose of diversity. I appreciated the opportunity to write the essay on self-motivation, I feel I have qualities and accomplishments that a resume can not depict In my two school careers I have consciously avoided most extra-curricular involvement. I have no interest in padding my resume with anything, or spending time that does not feed the revolution in my head. So I'm a member of no organizations, societies, associations. I sit around very few tables and discuss nothing. There will be no greek letters on my tombstone or yours.

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"unfolding below him like a map in one slow silent explosion"

(quote: William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust; video: Warren Ellis on writer's block)

I'm writing my personal statement for applying to grad schools. While trying to understand how I should direct a passage of the essay, I listed writers that I feel influenced by (Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Kenzeburo Oe, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Lethem, Warren Ellis, Zola, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Paul Auster, several others). And then, looking over the list, I realized that none of these have been suggested or read in my fiction workshop courses. At least twelve short-stories*5 semesters of workshop=60 short stories and nary an author that I would want to emulate. This is not a knock on them specifically, they're all obviously accomplished and highly skilled at the craft. I just don't think the aesthetic of contemporary lit., as canonized by the academic creative writing machine, is particularly exciting. Dusty, wistful, soft . . .victimized, eviscerated, cliched.

Apparently Dick Cheney has been indicted for profiting from a corrupted system of private prisons. He was invested in a company called Vanguard that operates Federal Detention centers, and it appears they ran it little different than an organized criminal enterprise would. The whole thing sounds rather thin and silly, considering Cheney's remarkable tendency towards 'evil'. And, most likely, Cheney will worm out of any culpability whether he deserves blame or not. What's most unsettling about this scandal to me, is that Cheney is even involved in prisons to this degree. He shouldn't have any involvement with any corporation other than blind trusts operated by financial managers. And yet he is. He makes money from the saddest part of our society, the most overt denigration and dehumanization we have in this country. And, not just Cheney's involvmenet, but that there are private prisons at all. As government functionaries we need to have individuals interested in the goings-on of the prison system. But the notion that there are huge companies making profit from building cinder-block incubators for violence and alienation . . .the idea that there is some conference every year in some shithole casino where the salesmen for Vanguard or Wackenhut are showing the heads of Dept of Corrections glossy pamphlets of people being caged like farm animals . . .How the fuck do these people sleep? We need prisons, yes, but how can a person pour their cup of coffee in the morning thinking how to sustain more human beings on less and less. Make the food shittier, make the cells a little smaller, make the rec yard smaller, look for extraneous luxuries to take away, look for opportunities for prison-labor profit. And then, when the new business plan is all arranged, maybe they punch their grandmother in the neck and piss on their neighbor's mail. Well, as long as they can figure out how to make money on it.

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"Cross rubicons you filthy children"

(quote: me; video: clip from Bad Boy Bubby {turn your volume up a bit})

A humanist organization has begun putting advertisements on buses that say something along the lines of: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness's sake". As a phrase I find none of that disagreeable. I don't believe in god, and I find our culture and progress diluted by those that practice within organized religions. I believe that religion is a trait adapted for survival in an environment we no longer inhabit, a vestige of a different time, and irrelevant paradigm that refuses to get the fuck out of the way. But this advertisement nonsense is just that. The struggle of ideas is not won with bus advertisements and silly mottos. This campaign will do nothing but embarrass most atheists and further alienate believers. Consider this: if you are an atheist what is the single most personally annoying attribute of religion (we are not talking here about its tendency towards violence and hatred, the stupefying effect it has on children, the reprehensible behavior it is allowed to excuse)? I think we can all agree that it is evangelism. We do not like the word 'god' on our money, we do not want religion forced on us in television or the public square, we do not want the moral compass of the church taking bearings in our halls of justice. Many atheists say that they don't have any problem with people practicing their 'faith' as long as they keep it mostly to themselves. The tacit agreement behind that is that we keep our understanding mostly to ourselves. And yet, here we are. Evangelizing. Giving the fools an argument for what's wrong with us. Occupying, however inaccurate the term, the 'militant' moniker bestowed by Bill O'Reilly and Bill Donohue and Rush Limbaugh. Religion will end. In a few generations it will finally be shrugged off like an ill-fitting coat. That is not to say that we can't push on it with science, or air it out in the appropriate interpersonal conversation, or write about it on our blogs, or create irreligous art. We simply need to hold the same respect for everyone else that we demand they give us. I don't know what the hell this group was thinking.

It all starts to become real when you get your test scores back and your portfolio is 95% done and your letters of recommendation are piling up in their letterhead envelopes and Wayne State has sent most of your transcripts and your boss tells you "there is no point in doing x, you'll be gone in a year". And if I were to gut a deer and read its steaming entrails they would tell me my best chances for acceptance are the University of Oregon, Ohio State, Brooklyn College, and my second alma mater. Next summer, I'm plotting a month-long Retirement Party that will find me hitchhiking and bussing from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco, California. I will sleep on the beach in Coos Bay, in the salted trees of Siuslaw National Park, in the view of Stinson beach, in the parking lot of Mt. Tamalpais State Park. I want to demarcate my departure, dig a deep slash in it that can never be recrossed. I want to think of nothing save how I will eat and where I am going for 30 consecutive nights. There will be only so many instances in a life that allow for such digressions. Each one must be swallowed whole.

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" . . .Like: 'Momma I want to sing'"

(Quote: MF DOOM, Video: Keith O. Special Comment on Prop. 8)

I've come to realize that my political perspective boils down to a theory of what government has authority to do, and where that authority comes from. The government is our agreement on how to operate, a system developed to collectively protect and promote one another's livelihood. As a consequence we have police and fire and health services and educational systems, and as economic cooperation we have roads and business regulations. I don't believe that any government has the authority to impose rules on anything that doesn't substantially effect the agreement. The government cannot tell you you cannot smoke marijuana, or marry someone of your own sex. It also cannot arbitrarily delegate huge sums of your money through deliberate and secretive strategization. It cannot tell you to protect yourself from anything. It cannot tell you where and when to work. It cannot make you change your personality. It cannot meet nonviolence with violence. We need to rethink what it is that our government does in the sphere of our life. Every government that distends our agreement, or degrades our humanity . . .is a usurper and a tyrant. I think of these things in light of two very recent legal anomalies. Pot took one small step towards legalization, and we will watch as the Federalies attempt to crack down on one more complex of nooks and crannies. This slow progress will make the war on drugs more ridiculous with each DEA budget, and more absurd with each $100 ticket that replaces jail time. Proposition 8, in CA, is a different breed. The most "liberal" state in the union rescinded its decision to allow gay marriage. Homosexuals are less free than the rest of us, even in what people think of as our freest state. This 'rule', outside of the bounds of our agreement, is a lie, an impossibility. The materialization of an ideology based to its core on lies and self-deception and pitiful hatred. We do not have the permission, the authority, to decide another's life like this. We do not have the right to take away that which we cannot give. A supporter of Proposition 8 is a fascist and a repulsive artifact of a past that I want nothing to do with.


The past two weeks I've been swimming in a head cold. I sweat in my sleep, I wake up with a broken nose, food is unappetizing. This gets in the way of everything.

I had the best workshop of my short career. This story excited positive comments from the full round of cynics. There is an old man in the class that seemed bewildered and frustrated about it, he spent 5 minutes articulating some dissatisfaction that no one else could follow. Though of course, that happens every week. I plan on putting the story in the above link in my graduate school application package. I'd appreciate any commentary. It is not of the MFA aesthetic, and that may be what I like about it best.

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"Motherfuckers better realize"

(quote: Saul Williams, Coded Language; video: excerpt from V for Vendetta)

Stress. I started this yuppie gig quite capable of leaving the myriad stressors in the cube. But then it expanded. It required of me to travel outside of its 9-5 domain. It seeded me with worry and doubt, an ever-increasing demand on my nervous system and my time. But it is not these qualities of the thing that I would criticize; things worth doing all require their sacrifices. But it isn't worth doing. At the end of each week, I have nothing of my own. My link to the thing I do is severed by my paycheck, my email, address, the institutional supports that girder my productivity. This is no way to spend 40 hours a week.

In between the various lines of work, I'm applying for Grad School. A professor, very unorthodox, sent the letter to me for review. It turns out I'm significantly better at the literary criticism game that I would have ever given myself credit for. If I were to take the aggregate efforts and credit awarded in my Engineering career and place them next to the state of my English career, it does indeed seem I was in the wrong field the entire time.

The linguistic carnival that is the 2008 Campaign is drawing to a close. Looks like Obama is going to win. But I can't help but pay close attention to the absurdity of the discourse. Obama is a "Marxist", "Socialist", "Communist" when he mimics back the tacit subtext of modern capitalism. Sarah Palin is "folksy" because she is an idiot. No one lies, they "prevaricate", "dissemble", "misspeak", are taken "out of context". Obama is a "Muslim", and thus essentially a demon. Michelle Bachmann and certain parts of Virginia are "pro-Amerikuhn". Plans to reduce taxes for everyone but the top are characterized as tax increases on everyone (after all, we can't have Capitalism without False Consciousness). Meeting someone who once planted a bomb is collusion with terrorists. Owning 13 houses is irrelevant, having gone to Harvard is elitist. If we, as voters, fail to see through the mess the media and the candidates (mostly the Republicans) have made and cannot grasp the false Truth they've arranged, we're taking a further step towards rule by the stupid.

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"A path cut 1,500 years ago"

(quote: PJ Harvey, video: The Mindscape of Alan Moore)

I'm in Pocatello, Idaho tonight. Another fervid drive out of my town and into the nether regions of the west. And I drove into the rising sun at 7am completely by myself, half asleep at 90 miles an hour listening to the news on the radio devolve into static. A broadcast pure and unadulterated, no spin or bias or ulterior motives; simply the amplified sound of silence. And then I half-assed a training session in the middle of nowhere, bored yokels resenting the armload of software I'm intended to bring down to them like some cybernetic Prometheus. I drink their weak coffee, I eat their shrink-wrapped donuts, I sweat and go cotton-mouthed for lack of sleep. And then I drive nearly a hundred miles and stop at Idaho's Largest Army Surplus store. Several stolid acres of cast-off woolen garments, wrenches the size of a femur, empty .50 caliber shells, watch caps and socks that carry the scratch of eczema in their every fiber. And then to Pocatello where there's a hotel room on the hill waiting for me. I spoil the afternoon poking my head into used bookstores, and eating at a deli watching the college girls come and go from their classes, drinking coffee and watching youtube videos while the guy next to me talks loudly about Fantasy Football, and I can't will the scenester chick in the striped sweater to turn around and look at me. At first glance, speeding by on the freeway, Pocatello seems generic; the staple arrangement of gas stations, hotels, department stores, chain restaurants. All replicas of towns all over the country as though a helicopter deploys them in one drop as guided by socio-political strategy from on high. But then I go way downtown for dinner . . .fifteen miles or more off the freeway, and the old trainyard, and the leftover hotels sided with faded advertisements for products that no longer exist, the long-bearded shaman throwing cardboard boxes from the loading dock of the Idaho Foodbank into a scuffed garbage bin, the three familiar kids smoking cloves on the stoop of a church that has seen a century. All of it so beautiful, the only thing I can do is sit on a patio and drink a local-brew stout and try to make time stand still.

I took the GRE and scored well enough to keep me on any number of admissions lists. I halfway expected this, but the simple process makes graduate school seem all the more inevitable. I'll be moving from Idaho just in time to miss it all horribly. This is how it goes. And, what I've learned since leaving home is that you can never truly go back. How we feel in a place is a tentative, fragile, temporal melange of experience that depends on so much . . . but most of all our presence. It changes as soon as you leave, as you track pieces of it with you like mud and leave a wake of dead leaves and swirling plastic bags behind you. It all settles again looking nothing like it once did. All the detritus rearranged.

I tend to avoid overt politicization on this thing. Unlike in my real-life where, as you may know, I have virulent, angry opinions on politics. But I have to say: we MUST elect Barack Obama. Not because he will heal all wounds or instantly eradicate the world's problems. Not because his motives are pure and perfectly aligned with our ideals. Not because he wants to regulate that which needs to be regulated and institute a new economic justice. Not because he is black, or the most experienced candidate we could hope for. We need to vote for him because he is better than us. He is, most likely, a better human being overall then most of the people that will read this and certainly a better human being than the person writing it. He is intelligent, (com)passionate, steadfast, and most of all fearless. I can't imagine the fall-out if he loses or, worst of all, the the whole thing is stolen right from under him.

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"The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future"

(quote: Marshall McLuhan)

I added a new story to the Short Story page.

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"The thing is not yet written"

(quote: me, video: PJ Harvey-White Chalk)

As part of the grad school application process, I'm currently studying for the GRE. I find myself using bigger words in conversation. Perhaps only my Marxists and Anarchists will see it, but the discourse, the subtext of the GRE . .the actual words they use to compose questions are oppressive and corroborate the dominant ideology. For example: "Fueds tend to arise in societies that lack centralized government, when public justice is difficult to enforce, private recourse is more brutal." and "However, the devious act of physically pilfering something from a record store is hardly present in the action of pressing a keyboard button from the repose of one's home." and an emphasis on the value of Organic Solidarity as described by Durkheim, and a dozen other subtle reinforcements of pragmatic American thought. Also, in the process of preparing for graduate school applications, I'm struggling to figure out what to submit. I like the things I've written most recently, but there is an inkling that these are not the ideal candidates in form or point or style. They are not MFA stories. I have written those too . . .but in the tail-end of this summer I've changed my game. I don't know which is best to present . . .

Everything is becoming very real. The latent precipitating and becoming the standard-bearer, the ache in my bones. Peeling off skin before it's ready, the musculature and capillaries raw and fresh to the air. I can smell it in my sleep. This move was another remove from what I remember. And now I'm a thousand miles, and one more reversal and negation from home. Nowhere is home. Everywhere is home.

I felt a twinge of fear. Good, resource-holding fear like some diluted perversion of what ancestors felt as the seasons changed. The financial crisis, coupled with lay-offs and money-troubles of those around me, engendered one lonely second where I reconsidered the wisdom of this whole MFA deal. And then radical reversion . . .security is a weakness, comfort is for hospice . . .sometimes we have to go into the cold with no jacket.

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The Woman In My Life

I have this cat, Tiva. She rightly belongs to the City of Detroit and its denizens but she grudgingly came out to Idaho with me. The Mookfish obtained her and named her and raised her, and when he went off to the high seas I became her new full-time human. I never had cats growing up; I thought they were silly and maybe even effeminate. I thought I was suited to having a big, muscly dog to wrestle with and pack up in the car for camping trips. And then I was virtually alone in a new place and so was Tiva. And as lame as it sounds, she's the only real possession I have that it would sadden me to lose. She chatters with me, and yells at me, and gives me a hard-time. She likes to sit in boxes and chew on plastic and chase laser-beams and eat tuna. She likes to fight and lay stretched out in the sun. She likes to pretend she doesn't want my affection, and brushes up against me even as I sit here typing. She likes to rub her glands on the corners of things and purr. When I'm having an anxiety-attack, or a temper tantrum, or a rough go of things she hangs out near me and nudges my hand with her head. When I try to read she stands on the book and arches her back. Anyway . . .today I thought I lost her. She went out the door and vanished in our new neighborhood, full of other cats and dogs and supposedly even foxes and maybe coyotes in that big rubble and weed field a few hundred yards away. I put a Hamm's in the cupholder of my brother's car and idled down the street catching eyes from the white trash and African refugees and displaced Muslims of my neighborhood. I interrogated a tiny feral kitty as to her whereabouts. I climbed fences and slinked around trespassing in backyards. And then, after I'd given up, she sauntered up to the door and meowed through the glass. We always appreciate things most when there is the risk that we've lost them.

In preparation for grad school, I've begun to make the rounds and formally request letters of recommendation. It's SOP for academics I suppose, and all three of these professors probably crank out at least a dozen of them each semester. But I still view it as an incredible favor, one I hope I get to pay forward to some gracious genius ten years from now. Last week, I met with my History of Literary Criticism professor to talk about this. She was enthusiastic about writing my letter. And, because I'm risking the creative route, she asked if she could see some of my work. I e-mailed her a story. Somehow, this is the most self-conscious I have ever been about having someone read. And I'm also very interested to see what she thinks. More than that, though, she has taken it upon herself to contact several people at her alma mater. This is a school I would very much like to go to, and one I'm increasingly thinking I have a good chance to get into. Also, I introduced her to Literary Darwinism and we talked until well after her office hours were open and I suggested things she might want to read. I don't know how often that sort of thing happens.

My brother has been laid off from his shit/great job fabricating computer memory. One of the largest employers in ID is making deep cutbacks. The effects of this will ripple through Boise and touch the real estate industry, the service industry, the tax base . . .probably even me somehow. But it's just a sign of things. American life in a few years time will not look like it does now. There is a great reckoning and balance to come. The more I think about this and consider the factors, the more I realize the primacy of some dirt and rock philosophy that we never should have ignored. "The Truth will always present itself". We've been living on credit, on inflated value, on the sweat of others, in a dreamworld in which everyone deserves to own a house and bear children and fill their gas tank and have surgery. That time is nearing an end. 300 million untenable lives, and the imbalances waiting for us there in the future like some Judge Holden to make things as they should be. I am gainfully employed and insured and guaranteed to make X amount of dollars every two weeks for at least the next year. But I've chosen since graduation day to live below my means. To stow what's left of my income after intoxicants and book purchases and tuition and meager groceries and took pleasure in watching my savings account swell. And in that time I never allowed myself the taste of being well-off. I eat off a George Foreman and out of cans. I drink cheap swill most of the time. I steal music and movies. I pedal nearly everywhere I go. I buy everything second-hand. We call what is going on now a "Housing Crisis" or a "Credit Crisis" or an "Energy Crisis", but what it amounts to is that most of us have been living a lie for a decade plus. The Truth is about to present itself.

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"A light here required a shadow there"

(Video: Terrence McKenna-Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are, quote: Virginia Woolf)

As I get older I see things that will not change for me: I will get angry at small things, I will feel tenderness and try to hide it, I will watch people and note their attributes, I will disdain the authoritative, I will revel in the arts, I will seek science to correct my assumptions, I will suffer and celebrate, I will write. And all these things are what comes closest to your soul, comprise your consciousness, hold the names of your ancestors . . . Almost everything else will change: you will learn new things, and meet new people, and scrape by in new places, and the winds of politics will change, and good times will precede bad, and you will cry and laugh. But the anxiety (in all senses) of what life will be like when we are older can be shouldered and absorbed: You are already who you are. There is no other You waiting for its time to emerge.

I do not believe in writer's block. This is not to say that I have never experienced a dearth of fresh thought; I'm often exhausted, hung-over, stressed, anxious, addled. But I've found that even in the most uninspired evening there is revision to complete, reading to do, dreams to interpret, conversations to have. See, sitting at the word processor is only one component, if the largest, of doing this thing. The processor in the head never, ever stops.
[BTW, updated the Short Stories page so it contains everything legible from the last year or so. I've got another three stories in rough draft that will seep onto that page]

I told my bosses that I will be going to grad school next year, confirmed suspicions I know they had by the way they reacted. There was a relief in it, like when the unnoticed machine in the next room stops whirring and you suddenly hear every detail. I had been holding onto this scrap of dishonesty, grasping it close like I belonged to secret societies and my name on their roster spelled disaster. I let it all out, and not a word to mislead: my current gig was the best I could hope for when I graduated, I have enjoyed getting to know these guys, I am willing to accept whatever possible impact this might have on my 'career'. And then these middle-aged men, married, committed to jobs they neither hate or love, smart and insightful and prosaic, spoke words of encouragement. To them this became something I had to do, they tipped their figurative hats to my dedication and my "balls". They asked to read things that I've been working on. They lamented the day when I would no longer be in the office. Even now, they're considering keeping me on the payroll part time . . .so when I'm eating Ramen in some squalid flat god knows where I can plug into the Internet and make more money then I'm worth to anyone.

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"In vacant places, we will build with new bricks"

(video: Paul Newman [RIP] in Cool Hand Luke; quote: T.S. Eliot)

Great stories end and are punctuated by death or departure. And, too, I think our lives are shaped by how we leave and how we die, as much as they are on how we arrive and are born. For the narrative of your live to be of any value it must be fragmented and broken upon hardships, ensconced and mutated by love, stretched thin and cultivated by your work, and fortified and weaponized by your willingness to allow it to change. I have asked for no easy things in life, and despite my fortune I've brooked no accolades undeserving, swiped no credit under false pretenses, assembled no houses of cards that I did not intend to leave to the inevitable wind. Like the myths of Oceania I've always felt my heritage, one I scrapped together from books and hallucinogens and frustration, was to move continually. Make land, and terraform and plant things and watch seasons change, and then disembark. From one island to the next; absorbing, seeing, taking, leaving, until the waters are untraversable and I have to choose sitting still or dying.

All this year I've been on course for one short-story draft a month. I've made it to October, perfectly on course even with a half-dozen things that were discarded on page 8 and mid-month. But now, I need two polished stones from the wreckage so I can mail it to a dozen schools around the country and cross fingers. So it's edit mode for a few weeks, redlining shit I wrote a year ago before I was who I am. As a writer everything that I did not write within the last 10 minutes feels amateur, inexperienced, naive. But the more I read things, and pick through the 120 pages I've committed as draft over the last year . . .there is this thing like pride glowing in my belly.


Seven hundred billion dollars, like some stultified proof that our money isn't real anyway. And then what does the time it took to earn it mean? In percentages, in appendages, in slack-jawed dawns peeling possessions from their packaging. And who are these people that may take it from you? In namesake, in descendancy, in half-solved puzzling over the taut sky darkening. There is no threshold for success, here. Debates pull teeth like 'existential threat', like war undermines our humanity. No advocating violence, but we've killed since time unreal . . .the philosophical catastrophe is that they've come to think our livelihood is their's.

Everything in flux, all ways. Le the universals splinter, spin me blinking, rattle the rented cage of my dented skull. Let the concrete ache in my sodden bones moan. The scalpel that cut me from the motherly carves out wooden identities and arcs dry lakebeds to rest in while storms gather. Only storms and thoughts gather, people collide and swarm. Water finds home where it is low . . .and I am destined to drown.

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"Because it's hard. "

(Video: El-P "Patriotism", Quote: David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech)

David Foster Wallace hung himself the other day. He was not the most unlikely artist to commit suicide, I will admit. And I do not pretend to judge his decision as an individual. I have never believed that suicide is the "cowards way out". He was neither a coward nor a fool, a weakling nor a solipsist. We cannot sit and declaim what he did as a terrible wrong without the impossible empathy of being inside his head. But, goddamnit Mr. Wallace, you cheated ME. You were 46 and one of a handful of writers I actually looked up to and envied for your prowess. For fuck's sake, even your work that I didn't like changed the way I thought about writing. Call me selfish, but Infinite Jest was not enough. You gypped me. I don't know that I can forgive that.


I'm losing the heart for engineering. I was never the most enthusiastic participant in this trade, but I would mostly grin and bear it. I'm in Suburban LA all this week. Drinking whiskey in a generic room, flipping through channels so fast it's just fuzz and scrolling news about Sarah Palin and advertisements for Cialis. Looking out my window and pretending I smoke cigarettes, pondering the mysteries inside the Tustin blimp hangars 100 feet or miles from my plastic rental car. They must house monsters or documents or the control room for the coming nuclear holocaust. During the day I yell to co-workers that I've found access points to coil, moldy cabling and have a foundling's understanding of how these traffic lights work. They all come into work hilariously post-9am and stay paralyzingly late into the eveing: there is no way to get any LAist into or out of work in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, what I cannot say is how little I care. You cannot be truly compensated for hours or days or nights in your laboratory; there is no equation to rightly convert time to money. I wake up sweating in strange sheets to the sound of the icemaker and fret paranoid over the neurons that have been reassigned during the day; poetry congealed into the arrangement of data, my creative eye poisoned for the sake of seeing plan-sets clearly. The woman riding shotgun rants on the ugliness of corporatization during our mid-afternoon Starbucks break. Santa Ana does not understand irony. This time next year, I will be in grad school, or teaching English to children in India, or working an oil derrick on the frozen sea. One of these.


I called three different people tonight to ease the loneliness of being in a place so strangely populated. My mother did not answer, a kid in Detroit did not answer, a girl I obviously do not understand didn't answer. The simple thing to think is that I could not drum up interest. That people saw my name on the LCD and hit ignore, or caught it a moment later and decided against returning. Or perhaps I'm literally stuck here, the Inland Empire its very own planet with a high-smog atmosphere and godawful exchange rate for cash identical to ours. And then the realization that this is how I feel about every place, simply amplified. I'm a contrarian and understand things based on what about them I hate or am alienated by. And so no place feels like home because it never matches the image in my head (something like this, but with free internet and a weed farm in the backyard) and I'm never satisfied in my relationships because I see right through them to the end. But this anxiety mandates some resolution, at least some comfort in the desire to throw things and kill brain cells. And I've hit upon it, so brutally simple I could have surmised it as a child: there is nothing permanent, and you do not want it to be.

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"The time that you've been afforded."

(Quote: TVOTR, Video: Nietzsche's Last Days)
[I've got a draft of a story here . . .I really don't like the title.]

Moving in coming months. To a one bedroom or studio that I'll furnish with nothing but my floordesk and bedframe and whiteboard and collage and cat. And my only dishes coffee cups and plates handed down to me from a mythic drugsmuggler. All this coincident with being as close to home in Boise as I ever thought I might. No retirement, but the bachelor herd here will be missed. And moving might mean diluting my socialization time, in these 5 unraveling weeks between semesters I've had too much fun to wake up with a clean conscience. I found the Dionysian riot here, it can't always be stopped by force.

I made a friend the other night, and despite her smiles and laughs she was afflicted with depression. To be treated with chemicals. And I said: "On September 4th, 2008 I am really very happy." And I meant it because in the barrage of streetlights and cigarette smoke and declamations of seizure and embrace I truly was. And ignorant of the rising waters and circling helicopters, I stacked up complications and distractions until the Sunday following anxiety bound my arms and legs and I laid fetal listening to the absurdity of Kool Keith thinking nothing was real and everything mattered. I have no time for this.

Each school of literary theory says something. Even when there was no school but one-man philosophers leading us of out caves, things still stand that were said. And even as thought fractured and its pieces grew spines, Structuralism said things, and Marxism said things and the Romantics said things that we can still discuss until you sober up. But, I've come upon the one that hits me hardest. Literary Darwinism is the use of Evolutionary Psychology ("the application of adaptionist logic to the study of the architecture of the mind"-Leda Cosmides) to further understand texts. The field is nascent and fumbling and promising there glistening in its afterbirth. One example is this: a common theme in literature (and in life) is the tension between "selfish" choices (a life of independence, even rebellion) and feelings of brotherhood and concern for one's community or family. In evolutionary biology, we understand that the individual is a survival machine weaponized to replicate the species selfishly. but behaviorally we see altruism as a foundation of society because it is an effective way to survive (cooperation is genetic technology). Selfishness vs. altruism is an ingrained tension that we struggle with our entire life (conservatism vs. liberalism). It only makes sense that great literature should recreate this anxiety. There are other examples. All similarly revealing. Im writing a paper that will partly analyze Heart of Darkness through the means of this criticism.

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Thank You

One of my favorite professors of all time has passed away in a house fire that devastated a neighborhood in southeast Boise. In a matter of five weeks, she changed the way I think about language and thus altered the course of my career and personal philosophy. Her enthusiasm was contagious, her warmth to her students unprecedented, and her teaching abilities nonpareil. Thanks, Professor Ryder, for your dedication and your encouragement, you have had a profound impact on me and many, many other students. I just wish I could have had one more class with you.

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"Write your fucking heart out"

There is some evidence in Evolutionary Psychology that indicates that success breeds success (The Success Cycle) and failure breeds failure (the Maladaptive Cycle). That when we win, we relish the next fight irrespective of talent and capacity. And that when we lose, we tend towards depression and perhaps self-loathing. If true (and the genetic support for this is still murky to me, it has a whiff of group selection) this process led to difference amplification and thus accelerated the developments in men of RHP (Fighting Capacity). What is interesting are the results of repeated failure. We get sad and hopeless and forlorn. Or we get angry. Which do you think is the best strategy to extricate ourselves from the Maladaptive Cycle?


Writing: If I had not had my meagre measure of pain, I could not express it. And if I had lived hermetic and alone I could not name a character or depict expression. And if I had never been in love I could not explain warmth. And if I had never lost it I could not explain the cold. And if I had not screamed my share of rebel yells, you'd have no reason to turn your ear to my calls for philosophical riots or ignoring the rules. And if I had not seen trouble I could not commune with the downtrodden. And if I had not slept joyously after bacchanal and bleary-eyed passion, I could never pound a happy thing into this keyboard. I am a lowercase 'a' artist, these days more than ever, and the only lesson I could ever give to another on it: Be willing to suffer, be reckless at times, be withdrawn at others. Be embarrassed and proud. Be everything, all at once and sleep only to keep from falling down.


Had a saturday of dormant coincidence finding purchase in farewells and the pearlescent pre-dawn after them. Woke up smiling like you'd think I never do if you read this thing. Knowing: You cannot have your name on a dozen rosters and not be noticed by someone, or everyone. And every word you say is inscribed on some ledger, even if the subconscious. I've found a social niche in Boise, or rather a half-dozen of them to poke my head and speak my irreverence in. More and more people to miss with every pined-for weekend. Suddenly, my monklike existence has been dosed by grace like I have been toiling in some medieval cell inscribing bibles by hand, the wind and rain swirling through my window . . . and then one day summer breaks and I notice how many green things have grown at the foot of the monastery's door.

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"Beyond a certain point, there can be no return. This point must be reached."

(video: Cornell West on Real Time, quote: Franz Kafka)

Reading Anarchist political thought and finding nothing there that truly transcends anything. Thus far it leans towards socialism. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" like a spit in the face to the whole manner in which we've survived through this epic. Granted that was written at a time when less was known about the human mind; but we see in all tendrils of evolutionary psychology and game theory and economics and yes even history that this strategy fails. It creates an artificial environment that breeds an undue quantity of cheaters. It is bound to cast itself into vicious tumult that only a fascist can briefly put right. It channels only the most idealistic, and thus the eventually weakest, tendency of human nature. Yes we could feel empathy for some small tribe that churns out a product. But could those we trade with ever be trusted? Casting your lot with those you know, even if admittedly outside your genetic bonfire, is possible and happens frequently. But sweating out everything for far-off strangers on a planet teeming with those you don't know, people you may have no issue with but yet are subject to different cultural pressures than you . . .how can it honestly be thought that people en masse will toil for the livelihood of people they cannot influence? I have more to say on this, but more reading to do first.


Giddy like xmas eve of '93 for grad school. And it's one year, and one year does not feel like the long yawn it once did. I met with a former professor of mine for sage advice; I will not leave any advantage to rivals or the wind. He's convinced me that I will be successful, that I will end up some place. That he reads applications himself and would vote my work into his institution. Nothing firm there to pin the label "success" on, but I've never worked this hard for something that belonged purely to me. And to know the trench I dig is deep and straight, it makes the shovel move faster.



I like the rabble. I like noise and dirt and spiders and waking up so groggy that one's entire life seems punctuated by a fever-dream that you cannot remember. I like to argue and fight and point my finger at god and government for the weirdness they have wreaked, and I like to scream out that they hold no rule over my life. I'll compromise my free will to science, but no god and no master will take it from me. I like to stagger into work on no sleep with the stink of misdeeds still leeching from my pores. I like to rip a hole in the middle of my yuppie day and bleed from it and ache from it for no other reason but that my body will endure. I like to craft rites of passage via bricolage and name my impulses like dogs in heat. I like working long into the night, save one in five when I run the streets and burn through brain cells and am liable to convert your son or daughter to my cult. It's all completely untenable, and that's the point: so is being alive.

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"Who are the children and who the adults?"

( video: Ira Glass on story-telling, quote: Henry Miller "Lime Twigs and Treachery. btw: well over 200 posts now!)

Your children are the problem. It pains me to say that, and it hurts down to my very genes and spine to persecute perhaps the only purpose true in our swirl. Energy, war, terrorism, angst, exploitation . . . these fruits all see their source in too many fucking people. And perhaps we may just escape this terra damnata, but even in that we'll choose who goes and who stays. We'll excise some gleaming class of beings with no more right to liberty than the sons of oil profiteers and hotel heiresses. And who does not meet those thresholds in this long pause will squabble and legislate and recycle their soup tins and petition the gov't to kick down scraps . . .but no one will ever say: "dose the water supply with birth control", or "implant an IVD with every vaccination".

The burned landscape stands charred lodgepole pine as a warning and a relief. From this things can be recovered. And to create, the old must sometimes be destroyed. And the burn is a year or two old, the upstart forest clambering over itself for the new sunlight with deformed little trees and the splayed hands of ferns. I'm city-born and city-bred, but the shadows and rock and water so fierce you can almost hear it screaming your name . . .in it the most profound thought can be examined: no thought at all.

I had an irreal workshop with a new friend last week. He's read a solid fraction of the things I've written over the last year and thinks that this is the best. Following close-critique of the story we meandered into something a bit more philosophical. And I had to wonder how much calculation and generation I have going on subconsciously, he saw things that are clearly there and are tendrils or tributaries of what I want to say; but I have never clearly thought all those thoughts.

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"As well ask men what they think of stone."

In Oregon there's a mushroom thousands of acres big. In reality it's neither one huge organism or millions of separate ones, but a network of function and communication. It knows if you are present, it reroutes the passage of nutrients and information when a node is broken. When conditions are right, a mushroom breaks through the surface like an inconsolable weed and sucks life from its environment. No real point here, other than I really want to stand on it and watch the puke yellow growth thinking and working and practically bubbling with activity out to the horizon.

"Sometimes you just need a two-day bender to clear your head." And of all the laws I've broken, trespassing somehow feels the best. To rework the environment to suit your needs. Not to destroy, but to undercut the very notion that we can own things and cordon them off and hold back. And so at 3am, diving from the high-board and splashing whiskey-laden into the deep-end like a gangly ape I feel both the ecstatic solitude of the village idiot and the swelling outrage of myself ten years ago clawing around for what it needs. I no longer feel that I have to justify my behavior in some teetering matrix of what would be acceptable "if every other person did it", that I only need to explain it to myself and retain consistency. Fix holes in my notions as I find them, and make up for missteps and going too far in the only way I really can.

The thing about love. Every time you've been mired in it and imagine some timeless definition of it . . .it becomes a different animal. And so you, scarred and adorned and maybe even a bit fortified and cautious, see utterly different dollar signs and cartoon hearts over things than your Sim did a decade previous when all the romance you knew was television and the only regrets were in songs.

Somewhere there's a lonely whale navigating the depths looking for his friends and family. To never find them. Cheer up, you're not dead yet.

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"wolves cull themselves"

(video: T4 teaser trailer)

I don't watch much TV. I watch snippets of news and documentaries on the internet and read Al-Jazeera and The Economist, so when my father comes to visit, the gradually senilizing and irrational one, I almost can't believe the things that come out of his mouth. Barack Obama is a closet-Muslim, he's unamerikuhn, he's planning to dismantle the white power structure in toto with a cadre of black preachers and whatever it is they can wield over us. Black English, Black Math, Black Magic. I walk to another room when I heard that the South had the right idea with slavery. I bite my tongue over things I would fistfight another person over. And I'll argue down to the decimal points and dustmites.


I have a small writer's workshop now. We'll meet once a month, like distilling the classroom down to people who give a shit ad transporting the whole thing to the bar so I can pound whiskey while I hear how poorly my month's work has made itself clear. (btw . . I've got something new here). I'm not encircled with friends here. I can go a week without receiving a phone call or text message from a local, I can disappear for an entire weekend without a question. And yet, I've found that somehow my life does treacle out, and when I run into certain kids in certain places, I hear: "what up holmes? I heard you suchandsuched last weekend." And I nod and laugh and think about internet cables strung up under an entire population, littered living rooms listening to pitchfork picks meandering about people one knows, someone here and there tenting their fingers and yawning and voicing some opinion that'll swirl in the hang-over dust and sun and lay used up on the floor.

There's a direct corollary between the sociopolitics of the small town and the behavior of the people there. Some evolutionary knob in our heads tells us that the smaller the community, the more likely we'll have to interact with a static set of malingerers and dotty old women and stalwart homebodies. We play nice with them, and reasonably so. We have a life of reputation to uphold. My transcontinental lifestyle disturbs the setting, living in a capacious ghetto I never had to be straight with anyone but my tribe. Living in Boise I see people everywhere I go. One big, breathing surveillance camera watching itself. Burroughs: "A functioning police state needs no police."

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"there is no remembrance of former things"

(video: The Books-The Lemon of Pink)

Reading The Moral Animal and elucidating all sorts of intuitions about the way we behave. The underpinnings to a male's sexual urges, the different framework guiding a females. The reasons for the approach we choose in all the primal arts of sex and violence and creation. And even in my amateurish understanding of psychology, getting the sense that every theory yet devised about what goes on inside our mind will be explainable by reflecting on the millions of years in which it was forged. I hope its just not idealism on my part that some things will make sense.

This past weekend regrettably ditched a friend and hooliganized every patch of pavement from downtown to the west side to the park with the huge hill in it in the north end. Boise looking meaningful shimmering down there in the desert, lights blinking on and off, irradiating the developed land, giving the kids something to live their lives by. And always cold beer and copious smoke rolling colloidal out of lungs into the atmosphere. And laughing at something unspoken. And I've enjoyed chaos and rebellion and that hypercelebration that leads to what parents might call mistakes. But something went a bit too far. Maybe I'm too old for this, or maybe I'm just not willing to catch hell and sleep a night in jail unless it's something I believe in.

As someone who writes I've at least more than once been asked: "but how do you come up with stuff?". And it's not autobiography, and they are not stories about people I know, and they are not, I don't think, a metaphor for how I feel occupying the lonely planet. I have no idea what anyone's capacity is to wrench a story from the ground or that I am even somewhere in the rightmost sector of it's bell curve. I do know, however, that you have to listen. You have to pay attention. You have to see patterns in everything. You have to dream, hard. You have to make life a rush of experiences and yet space out time to distill it. And then you have to sit down and forget everything.

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division, diligence, depiction

(video: Hip-hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes)

A turbid mixture of plodding along and patiently counting days. Writing the date at the top of the ledger more solemnly on some pages, more frenzied on others. The transilient nature of time spent here like living as nine different people who all hate and love different things. Not multiple personalities, no sharp divides between them, but a haze of cognitive dissonance blurring the edges between each proclivity. To live in some idealized state of Renaissance-personhood, we've got to be able to deactivate whole sectors of our brains, illuminate others that have hibernated and cranked out preconscious reckoning while we've done that other thing. We've got to snuff out the celebration in us to wake up with the alarm clock, and we've got slip into the absurd as we head back home, and we've got to try and enjoy art without destroying it with examination and yet we've got to look at it's pieces if we want anything from it. We've got to revel, rebel, dissimilate . . .in the space between sleep and compensation and capitulation. The only strategy I have is to live in dreams (not ambitions or hopes, but the narrative mess of your sleeping mind), hold onto the strata while you amble through a day. And to figure out just how much banality you can tolerate, and allow for no more. And to occasionally lose yourself in modernizations of old rituals.

The most interesting class, if not ultimately the most beneficial to my academic goals, that I have ever had is going on now. Linguistics this consilient merger of psychology and science and anthropology and human ecology and creation and sociology. I apparently have some latent skill for it, though I don't know whether it is objective or a product of my enthusiasm. The approach is one I talked to myself about in High School listening to english teachers prattle on prescriptively and obsolescent. This language is whatever we say it is. This language is whatever works. A rule that does not help me express myself more clearly or more efficiently or more deeply, is a fetter to be broken.

This won't be news to anyone. But in writing third-person, there is a further categorization of style. There are terms for these, but I don't care what they are: "Transient" delves to some degree into minds of multiple characters and depicts events from somewhere within their perspective, blurring the identification of a singular protagonist and allowing for intrigue, complication, multi-threading. The depiction may be omniscient, but not necessarily. Think Dune. "Focalized" sits the camera within the observational powers of one character as they experience the story. It allows for a high-degree of internalization and runs the mental life of a character in parallel with their actual life. "Objective" is like a play acted. Things simply happen, a protagonist may be identified by how much time they get on the page, or how the reader's response to the character has been manipulated. This approach does not carry with it internalizations. Anyway . . I said all that to say this: I'm trying to write something "Objective". It simultaneously strips literature of one of its great attributes (the ability to illuminate individual perspective) and forces a different interaction with the reader. I can't say anything to devalue any of the three approaches, but there is something timeless (and not neccessarily speaking of a piece's ability to be read across generations, but to exist in a past/futureless void) about this depiction. As though everything is happening in that microsecond before response and reaction, before the concrete becomes the abstract. And yet, the entire thing is entirely made up of its construction; by that I mean, it asymptotically approaches "being what it is". I don't know how to explain that any better.

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"gotta work everyday"

(video: Oprah's interview of Cormac McCarthy pt. 1)

This will be my last full summer in Boise. A fact slowly dawning when I drag myself up creaking from the floor earlier than my body wants to rise. And retrospects to be saved for the proper time, but interaction with fam from past lives has me edgy and forlorn for back east. The work is being put in, the name will get submitted to the proper places, something will certainly happen. And its not as though there is nothing for me here, ingratiated more every drunken night I leave the laboratory, but it will certainly be time to move on as it was time to then.

I went through my room today and threw things out. Ill-fitting clothes, widgets for this purpose and that, a bag of sentimentality that will always burn in my brain. I moved my bed out into the other room and cleared pacing room on the floor. Where that sliver of sunlight comes in now at around 7am, two feet below that space I don't seem to have the heart to occupy anymore. I think we kill brain cells to forget, everything I touch and see in this room saturated with memories some painful enough they serve as their own scar. French words in permanent marker on my desk to remind me of how badly I misstepped. Four vinyl journals for the past 6 years housing all manner of diegetic nonsense, words I don't remember thinking and that I couldn't write again. A knee-high stack of criticism and lonely hours spent. Several hundred books that raised me and put hair on my chest. All these things I keep of course, the rest means nothing. Some synthesis of Bertrand Russell and GG Allin.


Ben Franklin had this thing. He chose to socialize with those he thought would help the revolution. And maybe that explains my being reclusive. I have the greatest peace when I'm with those that are somehow subtly making me a better writer. Challenging notions, invoking jealousy with their own work, showing me some further way to be happy with rien. On Friday I drank too much with someone I hope will trade favors with me in this regard. I gave him some guidance in the gym, and I'm hoping when I'm his student this fall he'll accept nothing but my best. And then tell me why its still shit. Poetry, not fiction, but I've got a grand arrogant thing I want to write that fits right in that niche.

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" . . .got a little crust in my third eye."

(video: William Gibson on writing)

Realizing there aren't 5 people that I don't miss waiting out here in the desert. Like I could carve homunuclus out of hunks of plastic blanched in the sun. And this one has your tattoos, and this one has your scoliosis, this your orange hair, this your sewer's hands, this your piercings, this your meteorite eyes marbled by the heat of their descent. And yes I left. And I'll leave a million times and know a million saints that will bless my path in exchange for whatever discomfort I can provide.

Went to Ohio and communed with one of those above. Drank in a hole where the benches crumble under the intoxication and they'll serve anything as long as it might kill you. And wandered in humidity, me with untold sideways glances. And then a party in a far-flung field that caught me by surprise. Fresh air and fast friends and stories I have nothing with which to contend in the subtle light of citronella candles. And I could have gone on listening and occasionally saying something long into the next day ...which happened and passed quickly no matter how hard I tried.


Hide a secret in the center of a brick hewn from the earth by no hands. I've contributed to the wealth of no man. While my father sleeps I steal anything I can. Kisses from the least of beings, glances that peel everything, and the ammunition that sings my escape plan. There is no evidence, 've interred my whole life in that plaintive land.

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"Policing language is a waste of time"

(video: Network)

After much confusion and bureaucracy and bitching, my explicitly required Intro. to Linguistics course has begun. It's in this contrived glass and drywall nuisance tucked behind the math building, some unholy conglomeration of food vending and study nooks and trendy chairs and tables with locked wheels arranged in a well-researched pattern for optimizing pedagogy. No dismissal of what I'm going to learn there, however. The prof paces back and forth across the front of the room, throwing things up onto the whiteboard ad hoc, relating relevant parables of a life lived spastically, pointing out the skeletons of predecessors who did not take her seriously. The subject matter itself is instantly enthralling, I've studied this thing so circuitously and empty-handed and now to have terms and studies and it is thus far dovetailing nicely with whatever else I think I know about being a human.

Following that I had a further training session in Microstation. Which is one of these tremendously powerful software packages that makes the last several hundred years of engineering seem almost silly. And there are 9 other people in there that are "just like me" . . .coming to this thing on their company's dime so they can return to the cubicle more marketable and talented. And though the time is a sacrifice that is impossible for me to ignore, I'm there doing it and ripping through exercises faster than anyone though I sit there with charged neurotransmitters and the least experience in the room. So . . the point . . .standing around in the lobby waiting for temp. passes and the excitable little man that runs the course to peel himself away from whatever insanely complex project he must be working on, the engineers talk to each other. And, yes, there's talk about our commonalities and overlaps in our respective businesses. But there's something I still can't understand, no matter how often I see it. Actual, genuine interest in landscape architecture and drainage and design standards. Like an alien, I feel.

This weekend I took things right up to that edge called "too far" and woke up with no memory of the drunken stammering and self-aggrandizement that must have esclated and finally plateaued and gradually ebbed into a childish yammering as I fell asleep dreamless. And piecing together what happened, and the relevant outline did emerge sequined with unreliable images and the way light played on things and a few hard-edged words that still cut at the morass, was like relearning to talk or dance in fast forward. Like my brain had been emptied, its contents handled roughly and poured back in. Whatever detritus was added or slurry atomized and lost to the air, there will be this runic punctuation mark there in my memory and experience.

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"The Universe is an Intelligence Test"

(video: "The End of the World Cult")


I thought of eventually working in academia as a reasonable career. Surround myself with words at the very least, receive money for food and rent for talking about things I love. But there is something more to this now. There is weakness in academia, poly-solipsism fragmenting the study of life entire into mutually exclusive shards, resentment and fear staring over those thick black lines into that which you do not study. I think writers should know physics, Engineers should understand color, business majors should read about anthropology. There's no way to really do this in the current system, all the spoils of discipline to the autodidacts, but maybe if someone tried . . .

Last night I had a dream that I was afflicted with Amputee Identity Disorder and while living in a root cellar in Arusha I used hedge clippers to cut off the tip of my thumb and my left pinkie as a whole. There was no pain but a sort of relief, a throbbing dissipated that I didn't even recognize until it was gone. Everything else suddenly more in focus. And then upon awaking, how pleasant to see my hands intact.

Added a "Short Stories" link on the upper-right. That'll be the home for new things as they hit PDF export button. Thanks.

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The Quiet is a Scourge

" 'There's no such thing as life without bloodshed,' [Cormac] McCarthy says philosophically. 'I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.' "
-New York Times, 1992

Reading Blood Meridian and feeling the seismic presence of it under my feet, the reek of it on my skin, the glare of it in my eyes. It reads like something unearthed and discounted by archaeologists because it simply does not square with our impressions. It seems I should be blowing free dust lodged in its binding.


No amount of stalling or excuses gambled with down-turned eyes will hold back the flood of yuppieness. And so for two weeks straight I'm spending my 5-8 shifts in the basement of a complex bigger than any number of data crunchers could ever need, wasting neurons learning software that makes me grind my teeth. And in several weeks I'll get phonecalls requesting assistance with design that'll scatter the dozen decent lines burned in my subconscious by my morning coffee.

Over the weekend I took a shovel to the ground outside our house. Fixing to make my landlord/brother/notochord's house more rentable. And shoulder deep in the clay, the shovel started hitting smooth river rocks laid down before anyone I know was born and waiting there to satirize the rough earth with their shapelessness and stripes. And sweat dripping off my forehead in the spring desert heat. And great clods of terra diaspora heaping up behind me. And wishing that was how I spent some days in lieu of the ostensible nothing they pay me way too much for.

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"I owe much, I have nothing. The rest I leave to the poor."

Memorial Day . . .

(credit. video:some kid on the Internet, audio:Cage-Grand Ol' Party Crash)


I read an article about kids moving to New York and struggling wit dey bills (you can read the first 9 words here, or try to remember your nytimes password). One kid interviewed pirates internet. Another kids makes his own meals, a big thing of rice and beans that he eats for lunch and dinner. Some of them wait to get haircuts until they go back to visit their 'rents in Ohio or whatever (how do they pay for that?). One guy even, if you can believe this, cuts his own hair. I wanted kids eating out of garbage cans and living in sewer pipes and fighting over their 50 square feet with shards of glass. I'm trying to move to NY . . .and their lives sound luxurious after Detroit and Arusha and Blade Runner and eschatological dreams about living in trash heaps.


Going to Vegas tomorrow to sit in on a meeting and take notes and introduce myself to various bureaucrats and the like. Hot, plastic Vegas where nothing is true and everything is permitted. Every time I travel for work now, I wonder: "when do the numbers start not working out. When do we simply say that a plane ticket is not in the budget?" And how long after this is it until we only fly for funerals or weddings or emergency surgeries?

It's strange who you meet when you stay relatively sober and follow up on invitations when you really just want to drive home from work at top-speed and read Transmetropolitan and see if your plants have grown. Still . . during hang-overs (whiskey, crossfit, whatever) I learned how to edit over the last week or so. Turns out you just quit whining, have a smoke and get to work.

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Pastless, Panic, Paternity

Blogger has somehow lost my last two posts. Whatever.

I was tramping a little bit the last two weeks. Traveled to Houston/Austin and met a friend and enjoyed myself much more than I deserve. Managed to find someplace I think I could live happily. Went to Moab to meet up with some kids I haven't seen in far too long. And laughed harder and more honestly than I have in months. Now I'm home and school's over and it's already too hot to go outside. Spent the day in my basement, and in my garage, trying to write but tapping only a trickle.

My recent dreams have been of seeing myself in the mirror with reckless wispy hair falling out of a clammy skull. And teeth mostly missing save charcoal-colored stalactites protruding from beet-red gums that've peeled away to show chaotic tendons and lamprey-mouth decay. Why is this?

If I had a child I'd assign physical challenges like some kind of Tyler Durden with a den and a library. And he'd come into the house some day after his mission climbing trees out in the suburban half-forest with his broken wrist hanging. And in the car ride to the hospital I'd tell him what Nietzsche had to say about hardship.

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Mississippi Drug War Blues

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"I've spoken to God on the mountain . . .
And I've swam in the Irish sea . . .
I ate fire and drank from the Ganges . . .
And I'll beg there for mercy for me"
-Tom Waits

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elegy. empathy. emphasis

I blame Kerouac for this urge, if not my genes. And my father for the fact that I can never sit comfortably, never let that blood pressure simmer. Someone said I was many things but not laidback, regardless I scrutinized that sentence for everything from flirtation to syntax. There is no offswitch for the currents in this conduit. No call-waiting to split space-time and teleconference.

If someone simply read my words they would not know me. And yet trembling beneath each sentence, like things that live in the soil, there I am. And the anxiety vibrating that ink is the same thing that makes my eyes twitch in the shower and on the commute. The same thing I silence with distractions.

The semester is ending and I am now in legit senior standing. One full-timer's semester from being degree'd in English studies. And most of the time I feel privy to no special knowledge, and then my brother (in arms and furnishings and blood and time) asks me to define Post-Modernism and we talk until my paper is late or we both go to sleep so we can push buttons for money in the morning. There is an infinity, yet, of things to learn. I've just spread out into more of it than I had realized.

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"Find yourself" "mired in work"

Finished this tonight. I think I like it and might be putting it in the "for MFA application" pile. If you read it, please let me know what you think.

Also, final rev of One or Two, subtle differences really.

One a month, on pace for a little more than that.

So. Things didn't work out. And I thought it would mess me up. But, I'm happier than I've been in a minute. Blessings in disguise. I'm so much more comfortable with anger than I am with anxiety and uncertainty. Lessons learned: follow your instincts, speak your mind, remember that everything is voluntary.

“Through every moment of pain in this...I will feel blessed.”

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The two proposition, self-cancelling structure

We only let the experts conduct research, design experiments, plumb the depths for new factoids. The remainder are to sit in stiff chairs and take notes, dutifully repeat their interpretations and calculations. In free time, grant the kids rooms to smoke and hypothesize in. Let them there ask their questions and fill their whiteboards and laugh at each other when the whole thing goes surreal. The results of any other approach are a tangle, unreliable, executed with hands trembling in excitement. 've got to demonstrate patience before you can actualize the Flow and let the well-honed subconscious automate the details. And in writing maybe it is the same. Donning a white lab coat now to find out.

I prefer the winter, it seems. 15 hours of daylight is enough to almost drag me out into it. The circumspect sun and the smell of spring things bursting and mountain air inflating corrupted lungs; that is all in my phylogeny. But the cold and the dark: 70,000 years ago this is what we lived in, and this is how we were tested. Bottleneck down to 15 thou-, trim off the weakest limbs, teach the sturdiest boughs how to scrabble through anything.

But then again, its coming the time for ill-advised trips out of the city. Into mountains and deserts and maybe bigger cities with more than one area code. Get to see my boy for the first time in a while, more than that we'll spend some 'quality time' . . .like ID has custody and this visit will be unsupervised.

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Those Who Wait

There's a diatribe about emotional commitment every time my stomach rumbles or my alarm clock raps to me or I've just written a page. And it's not merely distracting oneself to ignore the anxiety of being alive . . .

Discipline is what separates us from beasts. And other things. There is no latent human trait that sparks it, understanding that sweat and effort now brings ecstasy later is too abstract to explain in symbols and color. And the only recourse is to enjoy the stress, find beauty in little sufferings, value personal sacrifices. Understand your weaknesses and demand things from them. Trust this . . I really just want to drink and play video games.

And this colors my dissatisfaction in the grind. There is no way to pour myself into this salt mine. Engineering, in this niche, is interesting but I exert no creativity, I feel no responsibility or accomplishment by pushing myself, there is no pride, and, most, there is no joy in this stress. But I'm good at it. This is my safety net for life. Strange: I could have done this straight out of high school.

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