"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.

»»  read more

"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."

»»  read more

"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.

»»  read more

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.

»»  read more