"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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