"We are alive in amazing times"

(quote: Mos Def, video: Umi Says)


I haven't posted in a minute. The last three weeks this significant transition from whatever my life was about then to whatever it's about now. I graduated, wore a cap and gown and sat twiddling thumbs while a thousand people I don't know got hype and shook hands with University presidents and listened as Bethine Church recounted her crazy life. My 'rents were here for it, and my brother, and I partied it up a bit. . . but it was anticlimactic. The first time you go through college there is this recognition that you've kept pace with the ideal, that you've invested in your future or somesuch and like a 13-year old Jewish boy you are now some variant of an adult. But when you've got your second undergraduate degree for something that will not, under any circumstances, help you make more money, secure your finances, or move up the corporate ladder. . .well, it's difficult for your UAW dad to really understand your motives. But they did their best, and whatever the case I'm now fully qualified to work at Barnes & Noble, correct your grammar, and drop obscure quotes in conversation. There is some satisfaction in that I did at least one thing I said I was going to. . . even if grad school plans did not work out, even if I am now not going to Turkey, or anywhere else for that matter. Whatever slack I've allowed to build in my stilted attempt at adventure I did show up to class, I did write the papers, and I did read the texts. I leave Boise State with a 3.92, a stack of solid references, 15-20 short stories written, perhaps 100 books read, dozens of friends made, and more questions than answers. That last one is the important one I think, I have really learned no tidbit that I will be able to retain for the rest of my life. But I know where to look now, I know who else has asked these questions, I know methods of inquiry. Whatever the case, my booknerd credentials are now impeccable and I admit I'm marginally satisfied.

Almost immediately after graduation ish ended, and my parents went back to Michigan, I started preparing for the Sasquatch! Music Festival at the Gorge. Me and something like 10 or 11 friends of mine packed up vehicles and spent four nights out in god's own country seeing amazing live acts, killing brain cells, losing sleep, getting sun burns, not drinking enough water, and laughing to crack our ribs. This was perhaps the most fun I've had since moving to Boise. Thanks to my friends for making room for me in the caravan. This was the first year that I didn't spend at least a minute moping about missing DEMF. The dance tent, molly, Mos Def, Girl Talk, and everyone in Rows 26-30 made up for it. Good times kids, well worth it. I'd document it more, but I don't know that I could relate the epiphany I had lying there on that hillside listening to whoeveritwas, witnessing the immensity of the earth and realizing that this is the happiness with which we must be satisfied. The thinking person will never be happy at all times, but our best chance to grasp it occasionally is to pay attention, to enjoy good company, to let the beauty of things sometimes wash over you as you lay prostrate and humble. I don't know if anyone saw it, but I figured out a big artistic puzzle that has been subcutaneous and throbbing now for months. And laying there sweating in a crowd of thousands, a genuine, involuntary smile came over my face. And for something like thirty seconds I was invincible and immemorial and at peace.

Today commenced a very different order of intellectual discipline for me. I'm used to half-assing my way through schoolwork with very highly-ordered deadlines and intimidating quantities of uselessness to slog through in order to find the shreds of value deep in that swamp. But now I'm free from all of that, and the point is to write as much (and here I should emphasis the importance of quality over quantity AND emphasize that I believe that quality can only come with quantity. The craft is in the revision) as I possibly can between now and this time next year. Or, scratch that, between now and when I finally succumb to cirrhosis. Whatever the case, I've now established some pretty solid guidelines for myself and today was a test run on a reasonable amount of work for a day off. In an hour or two I'm going to go to bed. . .and I'll fall asleep immediately because today I worked my ass off. Six to seven hours on the keyboard, or hunched over a dirty manuscript with a pen, or with my nose in a book . . .if only I could do this everyday.

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Been selfish once or twice, I had to learn how to sacrifice

(quote: Cee-Lo Green, video: Persistence Hunt of the Male Kudu)





I just had my last classroom experience for the foreseeable future. I grumbled through it, bearing the last fluttering whimsies of my professor, I scribbled a haiku in the margins of my notes. I bent my ear for hints toward the final exam I'm writing over the next week. When it was over I walked out of the room without a word to anyone. Not wanting anything to disturb that last lonely hustle home. It's been a long dig. Eight years of school, upward of sixty classes passed, perhaps 2,000 actual attendances, two degrees as different from each other as one can get. Whatever paid my rent, this has been my job for as long as my job has mattered. And there's some perspective now: the Engineering gig was an obvious bid for money. Harried by parents and the environment I grew up in, I wanted financial independence. And I sought it. The English gig was more desperate. I thought I needed the institution to articulate the insights I've been wrestling with for years. I thought being forced to read, I would be forced to read what I needed to. I thought that studying literature was the same as writing it. And bygod I wanted to write it. And between my workshops where I plied the craft as intently as I could muster, I came across interesting ideas. I learned a lot about where to look, the people that were asking the same questions I was too mealy-mouthed to ask myself, what words can mean. But it felt like a distraction in many ways. Studying in vectors that I only needed parts of, stealing time from my own wanderings. The thing I learned about myself in college is that I am an autodidact. A disproportionate amount of the knowledge I have that genuinely interests me has been self-taught. The influences on my writing are essentially all writers that I found on my own. And sitting in that class today, realizing as people gushed about how much they liked William Dean Howells, all I thought about was my plan for the next year. The research I'm ecstatic about, the big writing project that grows more solid every day, the half dozen other small projects I will finally have time to see through. I sighed, a big long sigh while the bubble-sheets came around to review our course, So glad it's over. Almost as glad as I am that I did it.

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I've been reading interviews in The Paris Review the last few days. Norman Mailer, Kerouac, Burgess, Nabokov (who is kind of a dick it turns out), Huxley, etc etc. These may be the best writer interviews I've ever read. Long enough to matter, incisive and productive in getting the writers to talk about the process. They show revised manuscript pages so you can see how the 'genius' writer hacks away at his work. The writers talk about how they work, how many hours a day, what time of day, by what method marks are made on paper, what stimulants or relaxants they prefer, their thoughts on the canon. All of this tragically uninteresting to nonwriters I should think. But I could read this stuff all day. So interesting to see little tiny things that I also do in their description of writing. Not stylistically or actually within the work, I mean habits and superstitions and compulsions. When they talk it seems familiar. Someone buy me a subscription, pretty please?


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Anyone who's been in my apartment knows I live in squalor more or less. One raggedy couch, a cushion on the floor where I work on a wobbly desk, typing on the missing keys of a battered MacBook, looking through cracks in the screen. A lot of that is going to remain, but I'm about to enter a period of strict discipline. The goal to write 20-30 hours a week until I buy a plane ticket or have an aneurysm. So, I'm finally capitulating to comfort: Reorganizing furniture, buying a massive dinosaur of a keyboard (an IBM M Type for supreme clackiness, whiskey-resistance, self-defense), plugging in a huge new LCD monitor so I can actually see what I'm writing. I'm going to bask in the consumerist endorphins while they last.

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