"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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