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.