Ex Nihilo

Terminal Blog Entry

2010-08-15T13:20:00.003-04:00

I've maintained this blog since sometime in 2006. My life has changed dramatically in that time, and I've decided to take my online presence in a different direction. If you are still interested in following my thoughts/words, for some reason, please redirect yourself to bradkellyesque.tumblr.com. Thanks so much

"Didn't I tell you not to be satisfied with the veil of this world?"

2010-04-26T22:13:00.003-04:00

[quote: Rumi ; vidoe: Losing Religion to the Amazonian Piraha Tribe]

Visited Austin. Good times, good people. I'll fit right in there and quickly get monastic. Peter out and then rejuvenate myself. Blame the humdrum for fits and starts. Go slightly insane and jabber with neighbors. But here we go, time to warm-up the crane-neck and get real lonely. I move down in August, school starts toward the end of the month. I'll be on buses, airplanes, floors, and couches for most of the time between now and then.

--
It's hard to write now. Transition time. All those relationships that came together of their own accord start pulling apart--ever so slightly. In four years, you start to talk like people and feel homely-comfort in food-once-unusual. You've got short-cuts and old girlfriends and a memory of the last time you stood in thousands of spots. I want that Family Circus dotted-line to show up holographic in aerial photos.

--
There have been a dearth of updates on the book. It is in the hands of the printer now, and thus hopefully coming soon. More details to follow.

"The important thing is not to be cured, but to live with one's ailments."

2010-03-29T22:38:00.004-04:00

(quote: Abbe Galiani, video: 'Robert McKee' from Adaptation)

Going to not New Orleans now, but the University of Texas where I've been offered a Michener Fellowship . This was unquestionably my favorite program upon application, but its reputation for extreme selectivity kept me from hoping too hard. There are many virtues to the academic program itself, including an opportunity to study screenwriting, but from pragmatism I'm stoked about the stipend. I will not have to work for three years. It's all a kid could ask for, and I can't wait to get working intensively. Full days of writing, like those I could barely wring out of weekends, laid end-to-end.

----

I'm waiting for a backlash. And I'm starting to think that Irony has been our generation's sole defense against taking all this technology too seriously. All facebooked out and craving anonymity, a few kids that are already born will have enough. And it won't just be crust-punks and Luddites, but broad swaths of people who just don't care to plug in all their gadgets.

----

Don't watch the news. You're not surrounded by crazy people. There are some. Mostly on the television itself. And you're still more likely to die from a flamed-out furnace or a distracted teenager wielding vehicular homicide than shot in the brain by some wild-eyed sniper or blown to bits by post-modern kamikazes. Just laugh for a minute at the hypocrisy and the misunderstanding, the clarity of things when you're disengaged. And then giggle at the thought of utopia. . .People do not want to be free.

"I wanted the whole world or nothing"

2010-03-13T21:20:00.003-05:00

(quote: Bukowski; video: 'lil Wayne-La, La, La)

I've been accepted to attend the MFA program at the University of New Orleans in the Fall. This after several rejections and a wait-list at the University of Texas. There's been a whole set of penciled-in plans waiting for this, coiled up waiting to be sprung. . .so now it's 2.5 more months of work, the new tradition of Sasquatch, a month-long escapade through Turkey, Albania, Croatia, perhaps Italy, the Czech Republic, Spain. I've been out of school a year now, and I can scarcely summarize those months between. Only a montage of beer cans and books and rubbing my forehead in consternation, the glow of the screen, the smell of ink on airplanes, napping off the grindstone week, a few of those times when you're at the bar or on some friendly couch and the light and the collective BAC are perfect and you can genuinely tilt your head back and cackle.

--
There's bound to be good times, and those less good. And in the murk it's easy to become distrustful and vacant-eyed and an inch smaller than your skin. Now's the up-time though, and if you don't let yourself feel the ecstasy than you were a fool to feel its opposite.

--
What I was thinking about whilst paying to park:

When we were fresh out of the forests, planting the first maize and trading the first beads, all this capitalism made sense. It was an imperfect but simple means of distributing the value to be had by working the natural world. This was before the printing press, before programmatic government, hedge funds, ________-industrial complexes. And then we slipped out of that world, gradually inching into an inorganic technological sphere. The industrialized world is one big city now, one could travel around the globe on commercial flights and never leave the airport--it would be like one horrifying trip to the mall, with bizarre ethnic districts and periodic, uncomfortable naps. The natural world we once inhabited has become a space administered and owned by corporations and government. In the age of post-survivalism, everything is owned. And because everything is property (where government control of land, for example, can stand-in for commercial ownership), the time-tested value of capitalism becomes perverted. Where once food, durable goods, and raw materials were the only items up for exchange--now everything is. Everything has an abstract and quantifiable value that can be traded for other things. Ideas have become commodified, sex, health and disease, kindness (in the service industry, each smile you give has an estimable dollar value). Time itself has been commodified (I certainly didn't decide to work from 8-5). . . .No solutions or grand philosophical statement. . .I just find it interesting.

"That terrible mood of depression of whether it's any good or not is what is known as The Artist's Reward"

2010-02-03T23:31:00.003-05:00

(quote: Hemingway; video: David Lynch on Ideas)

Last week, I finished the content of Under Fluorescent Light and I've basically spent the days since drinking Glenfiddich and playing SimCity. The book is a collection of short stories. I struggle to describe them beyond that, other than to say that I've tried to make the reader uncomfortable, to make he or she laugh ambivalently, to lose the distinction between the hard-edges of life and the blurry logic of dreams. The work has been referred to as science fiction by several people, but if it is then it is a strain of the genre that has not existed until now. Much thanks to my friends Dale Eisinger (for writing an introduction, typesetting the work, and consoling my nerves on several drunken nights), TWag (for the innumerable hours he's spent pointing out the weaknesses in earlier drafts), and Tyler Bowling (for lending his eyes and hands to the cover design). There is a publishing lag of at least six weeks before hard-copies will be available.

All the grooves are well-worn now, and I can't seem to extract even the most palsied happiness from the mundanity leaking in under the door. No hobbies, no romance, no mendacious comforts. All the things I was supposed to do appear to me now as symptoms for some kind of communicable brain-disease that can only be vaccinated by good books, mood-altering chemicals, hypnagogia, and a discipline for the abstract. A philosophy without consequence is no philosophy at all.

Boise's got hooks in me now. If an offer comes down from academia, I'm in the wind . . .but now I'll miss a whole gang of people that tolerate my habits and do not laugh when I dance and break my heart with their earnest eyes. All part of the plan, supposedly, but there is no plan and I can't predict the state of things six months from now. I can barely see past winter.

"It means what it says"

2010-01-28T00:14:00.002-05:00

(quote: Samuel Beckett , Video: Trailer for Vice's Travel Guide to Liberia)

Traveling more for work these days. Long pre-dawn drives. And it's almost worth it to see the sun come up over flat southern Idaho while you race toward it at 92 mph and ambient electronica is beamed into your gleaming rental car from space. And it's almost worth it to stand out in the ice and listen to semis go farting by and fumble with numb fingers for tools or buttons on the keyboard. And it's almost worth it to drive around weird old railroad towns bumping Jay Electronica and looking for a place to smoke. And it's almost worth it to be the strange man alone in a booth that you would have pondered endlessly as a child. Worth it to overhear a conversation at the bar and note that the overweight middle-aged women with real estate agent poise and her broken-English boyfriend are talking about the same things that you've uttered in recent weeks: "Oaxaca is a fun word to say","It seems like everyone has read Three Cups of Tea but me",and "after the winter solstice, it only gets better." Worth it when you hear a woman say she's from Michigan and it takes a few moments before you realize that matters--not that I forget.
Spending tonight in Pocatello, Idaho where the prettiest girl in town walks into bars with the only guy that tried. And the railroad could have never imagined what the freeway would do for business. And men who own tire stores are famous. And others with weeding rings foist themselves upon hotel-bar-comedy nights and try to find the humor in losing their job. Rolling in at dusk you can watch the sun set orange on the rock factory's plume.

The book is really close. Behind schedule, but for mostly good reasons. April? Somewheres around then after the 'other-than-actual-writing' dust settles.

"But maybe the scorpion, not wanting to be saved, had stung itself to death

2010-01-16T00:12:00.003-05:00

(quote: Malcolm Lowry Under the Volcano , video: Aesop Rock and magOwl Bazooka Beard)

It's a chicken and egg scenario. Do I do these things because I am a writer, or do I write because I do these things? Despite the lack of updates on this blog, 2009 was my most productive and critical period of writing thus far. I moved to Idaho with the express intent that I would learn how to write, only this summer has that decision begun to bear fruit. But the chicken and egg: I watch people. I pay a lot of attention to the people passing me by. I study them when I'm sitting in bars and restaurants, waiting in line, grocery shopping, pumping gas, filing onto airplanes, pedaling by on the Green Belt. There was a time when I liked to craft intricate back-stories about these people that I paid attention to. And then eventually, now, I try to summarize them the best I can and presume one hidden thing about them. If that man is divorced, how does it affect the way he glances at his watch. If her baby's father left her, what does it feel like to check the stroller in as luggage. If he went to prison, how does it feel to drink that beer, or pay for it, or talk to the pretty girl next to him. And the snippets of conversation you hear are the best. "Don't touch my records or my cowboy boots" , "forty hours no sleep, but that's how SEALs train so whatever. You know this new guy doesn't know jackshit about the siding business" , or in a silent room: 'Did you say something about smoking a cigarette?' But do I do this because I write, or do I write because I do this?

---
I'm basically done applying to graduate school. An arduous, exacting task. Any assumption about my chances engenders some notion of objectivity to the process. All I know is that I came within a hairsbreadth last year (four waitlists, one Faustian offer), and my work this year is better in virtually all respects. Previously, I submitted a clunky story about a cult surrounding conjoined twins with blue skin, and a bleak piece about a girl mercy-killing her junky boyfriend. I love these stories, but when you break it down like that it's hard to see them getting noticed at all. The stories this time around are clearer, the language more potent, the ideas imaginative and well-handled. They are not perfect or great, but they're an order of magnitude beyond what I submitted in January of 2009. Twelve applications out there right now, learn-ed eyes about to read this shit and give a thumbs up or down. It's like a protracted slow-motion version of those almost forgotten days of football. Mentally steeling yourself to plunge your vulnerability into hostile territory. Succeeding on the sharpness of your instincts, your ability to adapt, and a desire that births an obnoxious willingness.

--

Sometimes you can't trust good days because they undermine the promises you made early Monday morning when you were caffeine-less and misanthropic and things didn't go according to plan. At least on those stressed afternoons there's a certain pure negativity that you can almost hold in your hands. In those moments you know so clearly what you ought to do and start thinking about how much money you have in the bank and what the going rate is on eBay for all of life's trappings. Some poor soul must want these things I have.

"The time for your labor has been granted"

2009-11-08T02:57:00.004-05:00

(quote: Jorge Luis Borges, Video: Mike Tyson - Beyond the Glory [I suggest watching the full hour])

I've developed a fascination with Iron Mike Tyson. I recall that, as a child, I never saw a complete fight but rather the occasional highlight reel of his fist dissociating the skullstuff of various other men that seemed nearly as big and intimidating as him. He was something of a mythological figure, a punch so powerful that it could be used as a unit of measurement. And of course I was always peripherally aware of his craziness. Watching his interviews and documentaries about him, though, a more complex picture emerges and I can't help but think of him as anecdote for how alienating and strange our world has become. Mike Tyson was, in fact, a brutal and violent individual. Yet that's what we wanted from him. Like all of our celebrities who cross a certain threshold of recognition, we enjoyed watching him fall. But consider what Mike Tyson might have been had he been alive a thousand years ago. While a failure at being a complete human being, Tyson marked an apex of human ability. In the physical realm, the man is/was simply unfuckwithable. His ability to fight was one aspect of this, but the greatest contributor was how his mind works. In physical conflict he brought all of his emotion to bear. And in the lead-up to these bouts he worked as hard as any person at any pursuit. He could have been a king, or at least a celebrated warrior. He is a man perfectly designed for battle. And say what you will about violence, it has been a constant throughout human history. Those that are capable of it in its highest form have always had an upperhand, and Tyson was capable of humiliating even individuals of this echelon. But there were no rewards for him, because this isn't 500 BC. And in the modern era, even a man that could hold his ground against a legion of enemies can be taken down by collective greed. Mike Tyson became the notorious felon he did because his tremendous abilities (and the mindset that MUST accompany it) are ill-adapted to this crazy world we've constructed. So we gave him way too much money when he was a kid, and those interested in his marketability surrounded him with women and drugs and the most exotic of luxuries. And those he put his trust in ultimately bent his skill for their own sinister ends. Mike Tyson is a monster that we created, in many ways. A tragic, absurd hero who, despite his ferocity, could not overcome himself and never recognized the wolves at the door.

--

It has been six months since I've been out of school. In that time I've spent nearly 600 hours writing, editing, reading for craft, outlining, brainstorming, staying up until the wee hours to perfect every word. And there are times when I'm exhausted, worn out on whatever the week's project is, frustrated, lonely. . . but the fact remains that I've improved by an order of magnitude. From a fumbling idiot to a stony-eyed amateur. So much further to go.

--

When you were a child, what did you expect? How did you think it would feel to be 20-something? To wait for 30? Did you always presume the grown-ups knew some secret you didn't? Or did you, at some point, realize that everyone was as confused and inexperienced as you? Did you assume that you would fall in love easily and for the long-run? Did you suppose that there would be lonely days? Did you recognize how much bullshit you'd have to slog through to enjoy even a few minutes of your day? How did you measure success and at what point did it become important? Where did all of these habits come from? What was the most exciting prospect for the future that you eventually had to cast aside?

If it was easy, everyone would do it rather than going around telling you their ideas and saying how they could be a writer if they had the time.

2009-11-02T23:06:00.002-05:00

(quote: Arthur Jolly; video: If You're Going to Try from Bukowski's Factotum[NSFW])

November is NaNoWriMO. And as I traffic in words, and talk to people about it, and gravitate to the literary side of the Internet I've been hearing a great deal. People commenting on their idea, on what their schedule will be like, on 'Tips for Motivation'. And if a person wants to give it a whirl, more power to them. But one will never learn to write this way. Writing fiction is not a correspondence course, it is not a discrete series of steps that can be marched through like rehab or learning a piece of software. Coming in dry to a solid month of writing will turn up nothing but a lot of poor writing. There may be pages of brilliance, sure, but the project makes the solemn mistake of isolating writing from one's life. To be any good at this at all, you need to read a tremendous amount. You need to write even more. You need to watch the world around you with the singular purpose of seeking meaning in every little twitch and flitter. You have to go all the way.

I don't mean that one mustn't give it an exploratory shot. Writing is a beautiful, transformative experience. NaNoWriMO is simply not the way to go about it. It cheapens the novel into a Web 2.0, self-esteem generation marketing campaign. It perpetuates the notion that any jackass can pound out a novel; that it is not a hard-learned art like music or painting. But worst of all, it's useless for learning to write. Unless, of course, it's immediately followed by National Edit Your Novel Year. Dabblers should instead write a short story, or even a vignette. Edit it five times. Show it to a friend. Edit it another five times. Leave it alone for awhile as you read incessantly. Edit it a few more times. Learn, actually, how to turn an idea into a story. Learn what your style is. Learn what makes a character pop, or a line of dialogue fall flat. Learn how to construct a story so that a line of causality and emotion runs through it. Learn how to defamiliarize the world. OR waste a month typing something you'll never look at again, because December isn't assigned to writing. It's the holidays or shopping season or whatever, and January is no good because it's cold. And then there's school, and then spring break, summer, and on and on until NaNoWriMo comes around again. . . Write a bit, by all means. But stay off of bandwagons, they're bereft of ideas anyway.

--

January 1, 2010 is the print date for my short-story collection. Physical copies will be available shortly after that.

"Pay no attention to Caesar. Caesar doesn't have the slightest idea what's really going on."

2009-10-26T22:55:00.003-04:00

(quote: Kurt Vonnegut - Cat's Cradle, video: Shit Just Got Real)

According to Philip Roth, in 25 years the novel will dwindle to a cult artifact. The novel is faced with a technological deficit in competition with film and readily consumable media. The number he gives is arbitrary, but one could argue that the novel is already dusty. But, I don't buy that our cultural evolution will be so clear-headed as to plow headlong into technological dissociation. What if, at some point in a coming generation there is a backlash. Corporate, electronic media finally coalesces into one gyrating, self-referential advertisement. A sobering reduction in disposable income, and a multitude of childhoods shaped by near-poverty, and there's fertile ground for resentment of anything handed down from on high. A recognition of the consumption cycle encouraged by everything you own with a screen. And so maybe, for a second, it will be cool to read again. To pick up a novel written by some starving rascal who refuses to sell you something.

--

Whenever I hear Prozac I think of Sylvia Plath, and ADD Kerouac. Think of what Neal Cassady's teachers must have said in parent-teacher conference. Or what Kafka's father thought about his sullen, serious boy. I worry that mental illness, the vaguer forms of it not outright schizophrenia or psychosis, is a net cast too wide. We've deemed too many quirks obstinate distractions. And in the quantitative progression of medicine we've outlined a de facto understanding of 'normal'. The biggest influence on this taxonomy has been how well-adjusted a particular psyche is. How well a person can get through their day, focus on their job, appear seamlessly productive. But the environment we're to be adjusted to is not one we are born to understand. I expect children to be reckless and imaginative and flailing about. And when they grow up I'm not surprised they sometimes feel empty dragging themselves through the monotone. Or have anxiety attacks standing in line for groceries. Or weep for their long-gone spirituality when Disney animates a lovable predator.

--

I sat outside for a long time today and listened to the leaves skitter across the concrete, the hush of defoliating limbs in the wind.

"Had the fangs of Genghis Khan, had the heart of Gunga Dinn"

2009-10-18T23:39:00.002-04:00

(quote: Aesop Rock , video: Tinariwen)

Started the MFA application process again. Time-consuming and tedious and detail-oriented--just like the gruntwork of editing, so I don't even leave my chair. Some different schools this time: UofNew Mexico, Washington University (St. Louis), Louisiana State, among others. Figurative pushpins in the map, and now that the years move disturbingly fast the whole thing seems moments away. Makes my restless blood itch, wakes up the travel bug that I keep sleepy with an occasional furtive plane out of town. But now a trip to Istanbul may be in the works. An entire raucous team from Detroit currently plans on touching down there sometime next May, burning a swath from the Blue Mosque to the old Soviet Bloc. And with school that fall, I'll have an entire summer to fritter away as I please. I'm going to sleep under some goddamn stars.

--

So the LHC may be trying to destroy itself from the future. Or God may be interfering with our attempts to peel back the curtains. Or scientists from the future may be reaching back through the Higgs Boson to prevent us from doing some foolish. Or it could be that there are things that cannot be measured no matter what. The path to comprehension destroyed by understanding. Numerous future attempts will prove the notion wrong or eerily hint at it ad infinitum.

--

To find something, buy a second version of it and wait for them to ferret each other out. To hide something, put it in the last place you looked. To never find it again, put it into something that moves and try to track it with your mind as it zig-zags across town and down rivers and arches over wastelands in the belly of planes. Disappears somewhere out there in the regurgitation before you ever see it again. To leave something for a loved one, conceal in seed pods and plant along the road you don't yet walk. To give to the dead, make a million copies of something theirs and burn the original (to an enemy, the opposite).

"Let me repeat: none of this has any real meaning"

2009-09-25T22:08:00.004-04:00

(quote: Camus; video: WTF arrest at G20 in Pittsburgh)

In some ways the current political climate has stoked an interesting conversation. Interesting as sort of a DFWesque parody of political dialogue. The invocation of the word 'Socialism' has been ringing out, and I think even the most media-paralyzed would have to ponder over that term for a moment. In many cases aligning it with evil intent or totalitarianism or whathaveyou, but only peripherally aware of what the ideas actually mean. Likewise, the presumed antipodes of 'Capitalism' is going through a similar semi-conscious examination. Michael Moore's new film is called "Capitalism: A Love Story" and he claims that he'll show the evils of our economic system, many of the teabaggers' sandwich boards praise capitalism in the same triumvirate as Glenn Beck and Jesus, even my old man has started to question whether profit margins are a blameless motivation. But, of course, the whole argument is more heat than light. We're not processing the information in anything approaching a comprehensive manner. The war of ideas is based on emotional anecdotes and carefully presented numbers. The pragmatic compromise that we're currently going for is ignored and we reduce ourselves to Socialists and Capitalists. Just as so many of ua have reduced ourselves to Democrats or Republicans, heathens or teetotallers , godless scum or good Christians.

--

I gave my brother The Myth of Sisyphus by Albert Camus for his birthday. And reading back through some of it while I waited for the alst possible day to mail it, I thought again about this idea of Absurdism that has become second-nature to me since I first read it. See, Absurdism is an acceptance of the inadequacy of existence to explain itself. It places man at the nexus of a well-nigh unanswerable proposition: Is the universe illegible? Or is there nothing written there? Or is it dream stuff, fluid and mutable and activated only by consciousness. To be an Absurdist is to be a small-a anarchist. To retain something of a well-read scoff at all authoritative gestures, all illustrations of utopia, all comprehensive definition. To recognize the value of charity as an appeasement to our alienated conscience with an understanding that perhaps nothing can really be helped To live with the notion that mankind can not be improved, because each effort to make us less violent or more compassionate or more aware is to simultaneously tame us, make us more prone to external controls, compromise our integrity and validity and identity. To confront the Absurd is to hold on to contradictory ideas and live in a state of anxious dissonance. To both love and hate, to be a heroic misanthrope, a free-wheeling tyrant, a humble sage, a clear-headed psychonaut, a free-loading pillar of sciety, an anal retenteive bodhisattva. It is to accept nothing as statuesque face and embrace life as an asymptotic approach to a wider and more truuthful self-delusion.

--

I originally planned to have my book in shape by Thanksgiving. And I was right on track. I've decided to postpone it for a month and attempt to have all of my ts crossed by Xmas. This a result of deciding to replace 1/12th of the book with another piece that's only in it's second or third revision, a realization of the problematic nature of typesetting/design, a spurious perfectionism that has infected me like a childhood disease I was never inoculated for. No worries though. I'm working hard, and it will see the light of day in due time.

"You are either going to have to find some other way to live or some other place in the world to do it in."

2009-09-13T03:06:00.001-04:00

(quote: Cormac McCarthy Child of God, video: The Good Consumer)

Read an entire book today lethargic and hung-over from the usual Friday night. Perpetual second guessing and trying to remember my diction and exuberance from those last few hours sitting on a northend back-stoop and carrying on like I, in fact, know something about things. The book I read (the one quoted here) is by one of my favorite writers, and I'm guessing that it is probably a masterful work; however, 3 solid months of painstakingly editing my own corpus has rendered me incapable of simply enjoying a text. Maybe I've lost that capacity for good. And here is how it goes: I cringe at overwrought lines, I doubt plausibility even amongst stark irrealism, I re-encounter my editor's insightful and oft-cited remark: 'I know what you're trying to say, but for a moment it seems like something else has happened'. No narrative seems tightly woven enough for me, or appropriately displaced, or line-by-line subtle and elegant enough. This happened reading Middlesex last week as well, when I saw District 9 a week prior, when I read Tony Doerr's 'Shell Collector' stories the week before that. I suppose this tendency to find fault was always there (I'm a writer after all, and a competitive mfer. A subconscious aversion to calling something 'good' because of what it means for my own work), but the intensity of it now suggests a rewiring of my brain. To write is to be a critic, to be a critic (it seems) may to be insufferably cynical.

I used to have dreams about the world ending. Or a romanticized and savage survival in the aftermath. Despite the anxiety this suggests, it seemed to put me at ease. The world appears as a continuous downward tumble into chaos even as it becomes more ordered and surveyed. Imagining it at its terminus feels like a sudden, jerking return to something resembling the way we truly want to live. But those dreams have stopped. Replaced with scenarios in the margins, living off the land or on the outskirts of a very real and living society. Guilty of small crimes-in-name-only. Clean slate with no worries about anything except the next few minutes. Gazing off at the horizon while admitting things to people I never would in real life. I don't put stock in dreams as having predictive power, and I think that if there are symbols written in them that they are obvious and require no more decoding than a television show. But there is something to them. They give pattern to the subconscious procession that's happening always, and shifts in their motifs may very well indicate fundamental changes in the way I'm seeing things and living them while awake.

I haven't been posting in this as much in the last couple weeks. Wrote about half-a-dozen things that still reside in draft form somewhere in the cloud. But some of these thoughts are hard to put out there: a post about how I'm no longer going to vote in national elections/on national issues, a summary of a surreal night in Denver that I can't seem to get right, a broad attack on Obama's lecture to schoolchildren. . .The more time that goes on, the more I feel my perspective is at odds with just about everything. And the more productive it seems to simply let them gestate before offering them up to the randomness of the internet. I may be beginning to think that discussing these things, whether you call them philosophy or use some other signifier, may be better in person. So the conversation can flow in an irrational, heat-seeking manner. So the idea can be tested immediately by the incisive and the lubricated.

"You are brave, son, and I'm proud of you. But life is easier for cowards"

2009-08-20T22:45:00.003-04:00

[quote: William Vollmann ; video: Bukowski's The Man With the Beautiful Eyes]

I'm getting used to these departures. Either I leave or they leave, and the map gradually becomes scattered pushpins, and circuitous routes of waiting debauchery and thrift-store couches across this makeshift homeland. Our generation, more than any other, is poised to make the wind our home.

My good friend Dale is in New York City now, going to school to be one of our finest journalists. I try to forget that it was nearly my next stop on this pilgrimage. That if I'd done things slightly different, the two us would be, right now, drunk on some nocturnal rooftop making promises at the wedge of moon we can make out between skyscrapers. Carving out some niche in the lurching mythology of that city fantastic. I suppose I simply have a different desert, a disparate mirage teasing me through the skips and the trudge.

I learned things from young Eisinger. I learned secrets about this city I now inhabit; I learned the value of art, and how you can make it the sole aegis of your life; I learned that the world belongs to those with a tolerance for risk; I learned that naivete is simply a lack of awareness and it can be remedied a thousand ways; I learned that in our weakness is where we hide what is vulnerable and beautiful in us; I learned that vision has no time for the world; I learned the stupidity of half-measures; relearned the wisdom of excess. I remembered that, like Kerouac, the only ones for me are the mad ones. And again my tribe is populated by those that might do anything, those that rebel by celebrating, by snickering at the controls. And I learned things about writing, Dale being perhaps the single most versed individual of my work, its strongest advocate and its most incisive critic. Every piece I cobble together has some fragment of him in it, and I daresay it always will.

Those still in the city of trees lament him leaving, to a point. Dale owned this place, as much as he wanted sometimes not to. But he's got something pretty major going on, and how could we possibly expect him to sit still? But he'll be missed: through him I met so many of the people that I now consider friends here and I had virtually all of the balls-out, cackling nights I've had in Boise. I'll miss occasionally waking up on his couch, I'll miss narrowly escaping intervention by the authorities, and flying around town on our bikes, the unpredictability and intellectual rigor of our conversations, I'll miss the various capers I probably shouldn't mention. Good times, bro. Hope to see you before long.

"A ram chased my friend in a dream"

2009-08-20T21:57:00.005-04:00

(quote: Detroit graffitio, video: Tobacco ft. Aesop Rock - Dirt)

Tried to keep some tabs on the gamut over the last week. Utterly failed: overwhelmed. That initial flinch at seeing Michigan more scarred than last time, more self-possessed, more chaotic. My parents hunkered down waiting for the wave of violence and despair promised by the local news. Northern Michigan gradually abandoning like the eventual crash is some slow gangrene. Hiking out to the pristine dunecoast of Lake Michigan, like some metaphoric backdrop for a scene in which sand represents the discomfort of freedom. The year's shiniest day picked as though from a hat. Nothing but laughing and drinking and talking and building fires and tromping through the woods for days. I missed You this year, you should come for the next one.

A day of rest after slap-happy driving home on virtually no sleep, a sweaty mosquito-harried hike with our trash and our fuzziness. Breakfast in a diner decorated like a commercial for Dwight Eisenhower. Michigan construction barrels in every nook and cranny, slow-poke retirees in their pick-ups for miles. Back in the city, a glimpse of a community garden flourishing within earshot of 8 Mile.

The next day meeting up with one of the people I'd hoped would make New Detroitland (a surprise early return from the jungles of Bolivia) filling out the entire roster of the Commonwealth house from way back when. Driving crosstown to wander through the Packard Plant; maybe 14 city-blocks of obsolescence. In two hours covering almost none of it. So much history, but you walk it best as some kind of sculpture. A billion cubic feet. Materials: rust-rotted machinery, leaden glass in splintering frames, coxial cable festooned like vines, trucks teetering in fourth floor windows, concrete shafts gangly with broken elevators, solariums knee-deep in a generation's trash, a cot in the middle of floor soiled with whatever and decorated with fresh flower petals, patient pillars waiting and waiting, wood gone to dirt with dandelions unfurling, tires and boats and bicycles and cinderblocks and toys. And on and on and on. Trying to describe it in 500 words like putting Infinite Jest on the head of a pin.

The trip ending like it always ends when you go home, in one way or another. A little push in this direction, a little pull backwards in that one, farewell embraces befitting, a little Gonzo exit, and enough sleep and memories built up in my head to put me to sleep for the rest of the day. Waking up at a burrito table six hours later, pulling through my gambles by the skin of my teeth, thinking all of it may have been a dream. I miss all of my Detroit people, the ones I saw and the ones I didn't get to. When you leave, these relationships are supposed to diminish; but mine seem to have only condensed themselves into smaller and denser packages.

"There is no salvation in becoming adapted to a world which is crazy"

2009-07-28T22:56:00.005-04:00

[quote: Henry Miller, video: Doug Stanhope - Excessin Moderation]

So the thing has a new format . . .which might abruptly change again soon. I'm not an expert at this, and I'm lazy. But I realized my blog was the ugliest webpage I visit, so something's got to give I suppose.

--
Since I graduated, I've been spending 5 out of 7 nights and most of the weekend by myself. Really trying to get something done right now and enjoying it, so no lament. But, on the growing list of lessons learned in solitude is a big fat one: learn to enjoy the memory instead of missing the thing. Also, have a pet and talk to it. Have your favorite drank on hand once in awhile. Have tiny elements of routine but recognize when they don't work anymore. Own a lot of music and put it on random once in a while. Remember to eat. Sing a bit. Get some sleep. Just use the goddamn air conditioning. Have landmarks on your calendar that you look forward to, plan to have something in particular done by then. Don't miss the really important, biographical shit. It's really been fantastic, but I realized the other day that I have an inside joke with myself. I'm not sure what that means.

--

I figured out how to sidestep cliche. See, by focusing on some aspect of the cliche (in my case, I'm working on a piece with an amnesic in a supporting role) and making it as realistic as possible, beneath the simplification and convenience the cliche wields as a notion, you make it new. You subvert the cliche, almost make a commentary in it's usage. So, for instance, Amnesia is a widespread trope in narrative (after I had my basic idea, I accidentally came across two books and one film with amnesics). IN researching how amnesia actually operates, I found that it has not, to my knowledge, been shown for what it is. In movies and books it almost always appears as a loss of memory starting at the moment of brain injury. However, most commonly appears in real-life as both a loss of access to previous experiential/declarative memory and an inability to create new long-term memories.This has interesting side-effects: 'muscle memory' is retained and can be learned, a memory function called priming works surprisingly without experiential memory of the thing being primed, cognitive skills (problem-solving, playing music) often remain. Most intriguing to me is that the amnesic is able to remember sequence of events for as long as they remain highly engaged in processing ongoing causality (i.e. when they're in the 'zone' they can remember back to the beginning of the 'zone').
Anyway. It seems such a rich ground for narrative, so many aspects of it grow plots.

--

under remodel

2009-07-28T01:10:00.001-04:00

sorry if things look a little weird for awhile

"I work till this here little flat line closes the curtains"

2009-07-19T21:52:00.003-04:00

(quote: Aesop Rock, video: finale speech from Generation Kill)

I climbed Thompson Peak yesterday. A sweaty foray out of the lab, all anxiety about the hours away from the word processor ameliorated in the things I relearned. 14 miles across scree and up hills and picking my way across icefields with pointy rocks in my hands so I don't slip to my death. Jumping from boulder to boulder at altitudes that remind me how weak my lungs are. Fending off the hot sun with willpower. Drinking blue water from enormous puddles where the snowmelt collects. Aches in my knees so pure, movement so stiff by the summit that I can feel by swollen tendons creak. And clambering up and over that last rock to look down on everything. Like the roof of the tallest building in the city, looking down on creation with all its perfections and its coincidences. At the summit there's a little metal box that has been bolted there to the rock since the 1960s. Notebooks full of jottings, a pack of rolling papers, a tiny empty bottle of Crown Royal. On the first page of one these someone has written an ode to a loved one that died on that mountain. The author returns every year on the anniversary to pay respects and write some tear-jerking update as to how her memory has survived. A more fitting tombstone than one you'll find in any cemetery.

--

Ancillary to this workshop I've been involved in I've been reading much of the fiction that's been published in The New Yorker for the last six weeks or so. This is the premier American publication to feature short works of fiction. Supposed luminaries such as Lorrie Moore and Tim Gatreux and Johnathan Franzen. The works all have in common a vast lack in imagination. Nothing worth noting happens, ordinary people going through somewhat ordinary things. My own impatient and stultified life strikes me as more moving and interesting than any passage from any of these. But despite my disdain, the whole thing is encouraging. There is so much room in literature: for fiction more interesting, more memorable, more urgent. Line-by-line more engaging and carefully wrought and mindful. Thematically more relevant to this weird world we find ourselves in. No disrespect to anyone that shares my craft, but I'm afraid modern American fiction is completely insubstantial (DFW RIP). We'll only be allowed to bitch and moan about depleted readership when we've written the next "On the Road", the next "Grapes of Wrath", the next "Blood Meridian". Writers, it's time to step your game up. The world is passing you by and you're pondering the rusty undercarriage as it scrapes off your dead skin.

"La tierra vive ahora tranquilizando su interrogatorio"

2009-07-12T02:09:00.004-04:00

(quote: Pablo Neruda, video: The Pied Piper of Hutzovina

Dreamt of Africa while in Vegas and woke up to look out my hotel window at its exact opposite. A weary, misplaced feeling. Spent the night before drinking Jameson's in a casino bar with the pachinko sounds of Pavlovian triggers chinkboingbanking around me and I could take in fourteen different kinds of ESPN. Thinking that as we become a service culture, kindness becomes a commodity. And the artifice of it becomes profitable. Try to appreciate your fellow man when you know that. Driving Las Vegas Blvd with a tallboy of Colt .45 in the cupholder because sometimes the best drink is an ironic one. Traffic jammed amongst the construction of new leering casinos like the whole country is not biting its nails at its short-term prospects. The lights of Vegas famous, sure, but each one of them is an advertisement. The entire city an experiential commercial for itself. Back in the casino watching people tote their new luggage to their hotel room with their addled children, weaving between the drink girls in their soft-porn costumes. The median age staggering, and old men and woman with their walkers and their tracheotomy-control devices poking their fingers at video screens. The hotel I stayed in unexpectedly posh and enormous and glinty. And I guess I don't do well with grandiosity because the shinier things are the more I feel has been wasted, and I cringe seeing retirement funds roll into slot machines just as I balk at the Hummers in the parking lot and roll my eyes at twelve billion lights. It makes me admire religion, in the old days of grand devotional art and architecture those people at least created their monuments to something they believed in. True or not, the things they made in that vein were full of passion and meaning. And in turn they came out beautiful and touching. Our current iteration builds monstrosities with high ROI . . . Mandalay Bay glistens in its grease, the lion in front of MGM Grand weighs more than everything I will ever own and it looks like the boredom of an untalented child. In the morning I drove out into the desert, it starts to gradually get beautiful.

--

Heavily researching Artificial Intelligence and Memory. Ostensibly for the purpose of understanding a character/plotline of this big writing project I'm working on, but also because I'm fascinated by it. I suppose that's how it works. Putting the two together makes me doubt the Singularity.
There's a theory being somewhat scoffed at (but not disproved by any means) that the human brain makes computations that fit into the mysterious depths of Godel's Incompleteness Theorem. And further, that the brain accomplishes this by the manipulations of and shifts in the quantum state of nanoscale elements within the neuron. I don't understand this on a deep-level, and I suppose it doesn't undermine the notion that we can make an artificial brain. Hopefully someone can straighten me out on this.

Also . . .did you know that the ability to remember nonsense words is a strong indicator of intelligence? Lots of probably uninteresting reasons as to why.
--

"I want you to know that I'm deeply interested in what people remember"

2009-07-07T23:30:00.006-04:00

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Jeffrey Archer's Advice for Writers)

I think I could live in Norway. Or Scandinavia anyway. Finland or Sweden is fine too. Mountains and snow and cold and surreal long days in the summer and weird churches built when the Vikings mellowed out. And no concern for meddling in the world though Norway has more money than they know what to do with. Content to have what one has and share it if someone needs. Ever since I read Hunger I've wanted to starve in the streets of Oslo. Write in rooms I'm not welcome in. Admire statues from a history I've never heard. Disappear up there at the top of the world.

Going to Michigan in a few weeks to tap into this annual lovefest that my tribe has there out in the woods. I missed it last year, recovering PTO and funds from my trip to Africa. It will be a fragmented group, and there are new children around, and people have all new jobs and romantic interests and dispositions. My friend since kindergarten will be there, and our crux was almost a decade ago and he doesn't understand me anymore but I love him to death. And homeboy from Boston will be there and he and I will immediately get into the shit and both learn something. And hopefully Alyssa makes it so we can catch up instantaneously like we always do, and after an hour nod at each other and know. And Anton Belia will be there and I'll try to drink some sense into him. Neal who I spent those days out in the desert with and can't help but smile at. Dan and Beth who seem like the best parents anyone could hope to have. Sidharth Sakuj who I can't wait to smoke and watch a sunset with.

I'm going to spend some time with my parents too. My dad talks a lot about how he wishes he lived near his boys, getting sentimental and reflective somehow in his retirement. You have to listen to what people say, and then know there's something underneath it. And I'm going to spend some time in my city and try to soak up that urgency I felt when I lived there. I need to do some research for this piece I'm working on, but I also just need to get my soul realigned. I've gone all clean and conservative and naive out here in the mountains.

I'm reading this story at the downtown Java on Friday. 5pm. I haven't really read much out loud like this. Looking forward to it. There's bars nearby and it's a friday, I have my work cut out for me.

"I think they're lying to you"

2009-06-28T00:49:00.004-04:00

(quote: ATTN , video: snippet of a Cornel West interview)

I think the significance of an era grows in the years following. And I think that in 2009 we can start to see how this one sneaking out the door will be written in history. We'll look back on it as the time when technology really started to make us insane, extra-dimensional, and frenetic. And it will be remembered for violence in all hemispheres, just as each decade before it, but now we watch our craziness together in real-time and have to think about it and wonder what we can do before, alas, we realize nothing. And again we were fooled by hucksters and greedheads, and we'll never beat them because they work harder than us. And we remained enamored with silly contrivances and bad food and economic imbalances and ourselves, because that is all part of who we are. But there's a place for everything now, like there wasn't before, and our outliers and freaks and special people all get room on the crowded internet to seek their brethren. This is the year at which we might look back and see the beginning of technological saturation, not an end to further development of course, but a time when our telecommunications mojo became our over-arching human religion. How we came to solve problems and cause them.

This year is something biographical for me as well. I gained honorable discharge from another university, and having no classroom in the fall I'm poised to write more than I ever have in my life. This last month like 3 of my previous best combined. And I learned more about how to do it than in any class I could ever take. And if I could wrangle one piece of advice for a creative person, it would be 'work your ass off'. It will be so worth it.

Had a workshop for this story. Really good response and a worthwhile conversation about its problematic ending. The piece was filled with a few small experiments, techniques I had never really tried. One of these was an attempt to present expository information in as interesting a way as I could muster. Expository writing has always been problematic for me. It's a question of aesthetics more than anything, what is the perfect degree of information required for the story to have its effect? Clinical rehashing of past events is an overdose, it turns the work into some brief essay on a topic, makes the events impersonal and strategic-seeming. And flashbacks that are non-diegetic to the scene, segregated from the timeline, almost never work. They are clunky and out-sized and intrusive. But the information needs to be presented. And I think the only way to get it into the narrative without boring the reader to tears is to remember that everything is made up of narrative elements. 'It is stories all the way down'. More information can be packaged into sub-stories than a listing of details, and by conveying details through these smaller stories there are greater opportunities for characterization and development of an emotional disposition in the characters toward their circumstances. Anyway, interesting problem in the art of fiction.

"Of course you see me . . .there's cameras everywhere"

2009-06-22T23:43:00.005-04:00

(quote: Cage, video: Robert Sapolsky's Class Day Lecture 2009)

For anyone in corporate environs, remember that they can't eat you. Today I got screamed down to by this fascist underachiever because I'd stumbled upon her fuck-up. And she wrote an e-mail to my boss calling me "arrogant" and my move "uncalled for". She is some weighty entity in the department of purchasing for our biggest client, and I spent all day hoping that everyone else would see the absurdity in it that I did. But the important thing is that I've come to a point where I can't muster concern. And I feel sad for people that need to attack ad hominem to feel valuable somehow. If she had ever created a piece of art in her life (and I'm not saying she should be an artist) she would understand that there is nothing so petty as small dominations, that there's little important outside of how well we treat each other, that no one ever really wins an argument. So, she can have her ignorance and frustration, and she can get up in arms and yell about something she doesn't understand . . .but she can't escape this little tyranny of hers and with each passing day she'll crawl an inch deeper into her bunker, and mount more guns for cutting down passersby. But some day she'll wonder why no one loves her, and she'll say that it is somehow the fault of everyone else

I'm the last person you want raising a kid. But, the admin in our office has this son. They've been long-hauling it through this incredibly messy divorce and he's going to be a senior in high-school and at least one end of the tug-of-war is pulling petty entitlements that end up encroaching on him. The poor kid's got no freedom. And this is his first summer with a car and a job, and that battered Hyundai ought to be burning up McDonald's wages and it's driver should be making one bad decision per night. Not felonies mind you, but something that his mother wouldn't advise. But his dad won't let him have the car when he's at His house, and reluctantly as his mother might try to push him out into the world it's difficult when he spends every weekend playing family with a step-mother he hates. Our admin asks me for advice and I preface everything I say with the same thing I began this with, and I try to say something reasonable. All the while remembering what that age was like for me. And I have to say that I was reckless and up-late and going to bonfires and learning to be myself in a world I now supervised. I made bad decisions that had consequences and rode in the backs of police cars and snuck in after curfew and there was a party if the folks were gone. I tried to live it up. But I made good decisions too. And I came out the other end of it battered and a bit wiser and enriched. Most of all I learned how to take risks, because I tested them and either failed or succeeded. So, I'm not sure if I could give any advice to my co-worker, but I think I could muster some for her kid.

--

Writers have a reputation for drinking. There are theories about this, how they set their own schedules or how they don't have the same kinds of responsibilities as others. Both of these are bunk, though they might help. I have neither of these luxuries, I work all week and hit the keyboard at 6pm every night after. Yet, I drink my fair share. And have for a long time. On my mother's yard stick, probably too much. There must be other reasons. There is maybe some slightly higher sensitivity in creative types, one that gives itself to anxiety and joy (the twin advocates of whiskey and beer), and there is maybe a desired dissociation from the myriad failures and tedium of perfectionism. In the last few weeks, however, I've become convinced that a writer mostly drinks so that they can maintain the absurdity that they are in fact writing. That they spend hour after hour sprinkling dust into the void. It is not unlike when in a movie theatre you watch two hours of imagination and buy every line, but this suspension does not end and it runs on booze.

"Between the wish and the thing the world lies waiting."

2009-06-13T22:52:00.003-04:00

(quote: Cormac McCarthy, video: Sasquatch! 2009 [some friends of mine appear])

You know a person is a hermit because they talk about their cat, animals that matriculate to their backyard, queer things they've noticed about neighbors. They carry very little gossip around with them, not out of strict disinterest but ignorance. They have inside jokes with an audience of one. They name things in their depopulated world, assign superfluous superstition to things to mystify what is otherwise routine. I'm gradually drifting that way and have been. My brain is being rewired to run on silence and the detritus of my third-eye. The extrovert that I was for my formative years waits for my free night of the week. It doesn't even tap its feet anymore, it has learned that its time will come. I've taken to saying lately that I enjoy getting older. That when people groan about their birthday they should be grateful, for each day that passes is a day in which they are more themselves. And maybe it doesn't work that way ubiquitously but I find that as I'm getting up there in years I am gaining some scant wisdom, a longer fuse, a realignment of my self-consciousness from paralytic to snide content.

The Observer Effect my metaphor for everything now. I've been researching the means by which we measure personality, a desperate urge for one of the characters in the long-form book I'm working on now, and it seems many of the methods involve self-reporting. The individual taking them knows they're answering questions intended to gauge their empathy quotient, or systemization style, or Autism Spectrum score, or Briggs-Meyer profile. And even if consciously every answer is honest, the fact that one is reporting on themselves introduces such margins of error as to undermine any credibility. Taking the test the second time is like not taking it at all. The basic unit of our personality is the individual choice, no matter how small, and even in the act of answering one simple question we are further defining ourselves. The measurement appeals to ideals and envies and disappointments. And in coming to further understand this, and realizing that my character would need to reach this same conclusion, it occurred to me that narrative is the only real personality test. Stories qualitatively define aspects of an individual, this function perhaps their primary value in the post-Survivalist world. And they are scalable: even your top drunken anecdote says something meaningful about the person you are. At the opposite end of the spectrum, a well-researched biography may be the best technology we could concoct to model the testee's brain. Fiction on the other hand designates archetypes, filling them in with conditioning that could only happen in the setting's environment, forcing decisions on them in unique arrays and documenting the results.

I've been studiously editing a couple short stories (and just finishing up a first draft and a finalish one of two pieces that comprise nearly sixty pages) and feeling the process become more careful and open-ended. I concern myself less with getting a few pages edited than I do spending a couple solid hours at it, whatever the results. And so I read a paragraph three times, or four, and change a comma or add an article or delete one. Or the whole paragraph goes out the window in favor of a new one. Recently a friend sent me a copy of a book self-published by a guy I know from years ago. A guy I'm happy has survived. It was a cool moment to open that envelope and read that first page. I haven't got to all of it yet, and can say little about the content so far. But there was a glaring typo on the first page that made me cringe. My anxiety over the typo (not in this blog so much, but in fiction) keeps me up at night, and I almost imagine them as I read. I plan to self-publish a book later this year, a collection of short stories, and I'm phobic about the misspelled word, or the poorly chosen comma. And yet the process seems interminable, like picking through weeds for broken glass.

"We are here to laugh at the odds and live our lives so well that Death will tremble to take us."

2009-06-09T00:07:00.002-04:00

(quote: Bukowski, video: Alice)

The other day I had this glorious bike wreck. I'd spent all night downtown buying rounds, in transit via my good friend's 'garbage' bike. And I did shots and paid covers and danced for three minutes at least, remembering my quote of the week. And then on my lonely pedal back I was so drunk I lost it. One of these landscaping rocks we use in the west to remind the citydwellers where they be at. At full tilt with that moment in my head where you think 'oh shit' and the camera zooms in and out like Adam West Batman is changing scenes. And I flew through the air maybe eight feet and landed on a damp pile of dirt like god's own drunk. The bike was destroyed, unridable, and I hiked it up on my unfazed shoulders dialing drunk friends on my phone. In the long morning next's hangover there was nothing left to do about it but laugh. And I laughed walking through the cemetery rain.

I haven't been posting as many blogs lately because I have been writing my joyous brains out And now I understand how much school obstructed the occurrence of real writing. Even when I tried to write there was always the huzz of anxiety . . .that some book needed to be read, some paper written. And now it's gone and I wake up earlier than you even want to hear and write for an hour and then bicycle to work and keep as dissociated as I can for 8 hours and come home and write another two or three. Or four. And then the weekend.

The weekend. The best thing the Man ever kicked down to us. There's no such thing as the American Dream, but whatever withered intention of it remains lives between Friday at 5pm and Sunday at midnight. And maybe if they let us work four days a week instead of five without risking bankruptcy by chest cold, the yeomen and -women could all have jobs even with less money to scrape by with. That extra day to read something, to work in your shop, to record a song, to make sure the TV is raising your kid alright.

Happiness comes and goes. And when you're up like that you might be best enjoying the sunshine and knocking it off with the questions. We're all addled now living in this alien camp and when it doesn't suit us we call it depression or ADD. And though no man on the street can even talk sense about the world leaving us behind, we think if our children get bored they must be lunatics, and if we don't want to get out of bed on some loveless, jobless morning we must be out of our goddamned minds. No one gets a say on the place they're born into, and I'm done judging this one except to say that I don't think my brain works the way that Web 2.0, or the Democratic Party, or marketing research says that it should. We're supposed to feel things, as hard as we try to contain all of that mess to television. And so when you do feel something, you're not alone. We're all hiding it, because that's what we think we're supposed to do. Unless you're happy, ecstatically happy, then you just have to be comfortable with people thinking you're high.

"We are alive in amazing times"

2009-05-27T22:32:00.003-04:00

(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.

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

2009-05-07T23:36:00.002-04:00

(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.

+
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?

+
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.

"For smart n####s it's hard to do nothing"

2009-04-29T22:41:00.003-04:00

(Quote: Wale, Video: Nietszche-3 Metamorpheses)

I made a very heavy decision today. Plan B to graduate school was some sort of international escapade. The Mookfish came out here briefly and I was enchanted with the idea of losing myself out in the world. I wanted, and have wanted, and still do want craziness; seeing things so few from my square have seen; obliterate my language and perspective; believe in all new dogmas for just long enough to understand and discard them; see from many sides this addled machine we've created, the world. But, I've had goals for this year ahead of me, and I've slept over them long lonely nights, and saw them written out on the horizon from the peaks of equatorial volcanos, and wrote them on my whiteboard so long ago they can't be erased. And so . . .I'm staying in Boise. I'm staying in Boise and staying in my contemptuous job, because it is the best arrangement for me to write. Boise is the easiest place for me to conduct the research I need to really dig into my novel. It is now just scattered pages, missing some glowing factoid in the center that I can only erect by immersing myself in data for awhile. And Boise is the easiest place for me to finalize my short story collection and prepare for self-publication. And it is the easiest way for me to start a vigorous submission campaign to various journals and outlets. It is the easiest place for all of these things because it requires no energy from me. A move means up to two months lost time in preparation and unpacking and troubadouring and settling. And whatever I do I must work . . .here I can make a substantial amount of money with the monastic life I live and will only enforce more stringently. And that is part 2 of the new plan. Working part-time. THe absolute minimum required of me to recieve benefits, which works out to one fewer day of work each week. I will reapply to grad school, and this extended period of work will allow me to be unemployed for the entirety of next summer. This will be the least amount of time responsible to school or work that I have had since I was 15 years old.

So . . .this isn't a decision that I am intoxicated with. But I feel free now. The decision made. The course set. And all of it, finally, arranged to maximize my time at the keyboard.

I posted the above video because its logic has been long interred in my subconscious. A conversation with my brother recently resurrected it, and in the hours since its been swirling. Reading Nietszche at an age where it could do more damage than drugs, I read these words and vaguely understood them. And then marched out into life thinking my short servitude was already over. Raging out at the mores lion-hearted. But, Nietsztche's point is not to lash out and destroy what's been built around you. Not until you are ready at least. First is the long apprenticeship with burden in the desert. The camel phase. The willingness to be oppressed by whatever systems and theses are in place. And only in that conditioning, that battering load, do you really become strong enough to carve out your own space. To destroy so that you can truly create. My ego had me convinced that I had put up with enough, that I was in a position to start making demands. I realize now that is not the case. I have no qualms with further suffering.

"create and complete"

2009-04-27T21:35:00.003-04:00

(quote: Mark Borchardt video: Intro to American Movie)

Received the last, surprising rejection from Boise State and now will definitely not be attending graduate school in the fall. Still sort of reeling from all that. The absurdity of being "so close and yet so far", that weird exchange of e-mails, getting the news amidst a data entry marathon that had me looking for the appropriate excel tab to paste my disappointment into. There was no real plan for this. And now there are options to be weighed, an examination of priorities, a re-evaluation of what I require to be comfortable. And there are certainly things that can happen with a little will, ranging from fatherly advice to naked recklessness. But when I'm trying to sleep the only thing that seems important is that I make more time for writing. Make the most time for writing. Finals season has me all manic and dramatic and shivery, but in the coming weeks I need to figure out what of many options is most conducive to me writing this big project I've just started to chip away on.

I got a year older the other day. The birthday sort of indistinct from the rest of the week. Long day of work, studying, running errands, going to sleep tired and waking up the next morning the same. I used to have anxiety about getting older. Feeling at 16 or 20 that I was enjoying life as it was, and getting older could only ruin it. And I still get anxious over wasted moments, amplified at landmarks such as birthdays. But I like getting older, mostly. Every day I'm getting closer to myself, getting perspective on all those things I've gone through. Feeling more experienced and capable. Feeling more accomplished and attuned. Feeling a touch more patient and kind. Really starting to see people for who they are, perpetually shrugging of the categories I was trained to think in. Experiencing ever more art in music and film and narrative and design. Evolving in what I see out there in the world, almost giggling when I read something I wrote a long time ago. Or getting shivers when I read the line next to it. The last ten years, if nothing else, have wrought a scattered corpus of words. All stacked up there on my shelves. The bulk of my meagre sentimentalities.
On that note, something I wrote to myself five years ago today: "Go ahead and list for me the dozen reasons you're disgruntled, and start with the things you can change . . ." And something from a year later: "Rilke says that in order to be a writer you must first decide or uncover is you 'must' be a writer. Would you just as soon die as permanently discontinue writing?" . . . kids, ha.

So I don't pay attention to the news anymore, and every time I turn on the radio I hear nothing but how the economy is collapsing, and how we'll all be crushed by some tumbling spire. I just want to note: you'll be ok. I'm not saying you'll be happy or comfortable or things will be easy. That's never the case. But you will be alright. And for people in my age group . . . this is the sort of experience we need. Every great generation has its struggle, the thing that gives its people their wisdom, the thing that makes us draw new lines and say 'never again', the thing that helps us understand ourselves and inspires the great works of art. I'm still pessimistic. I still think we have a long way to go, and I still think in a hundred years we might be doomed. But let's approach it with some equanimity, some reserve, some appreciation, and a willingness to change. To revert if that is what's necessary. To give up things. To want new things.

"You know I can't do that. You know that"

2009-04-19T00:34:00.003-04:00

(quote: DrunkO, video: a talk on Albertu Camus's notion of The Absurd)

Last night I pedaled to the other side of town for a party. It was in a shared backyard, the year's first bonfire and keg event with all the contemporary trappings. And I had good conversations and drank, and reconciled, and many of the transient drinking friends I've come to have in Boise showed up. Late, late in the night I'm sitting back inside. Chatting with this person or that, done drinking really but still in no condition to do anything but talk. And then Drunko shows up. He's this neighbor kid that no one really knows, but of course all are invited and while he's gregarious at first, something seems not quite right. And then he disappears and reappears with a half-gallon of JD, the bottle frosted and cold. And I sit in the chair, and surrounded by people who don't seem to notice, I watch DrunkO chug his whisky. Three gulps, four gulps, five, six. . .All told perhaps 7 or 8 shots of whisky without a breath.

And in moments he's gone from overfriendly to arguing with the host. About god knows what. And then he's in the backyard and those of us in the house sort of look at each other. And then someone comes in and says: "hey man, homeboy is out there swinging on people." We file into the backyard and DrunkO is on the ground, screaming at some dude there standing by the fire. And I coax DrunkO to go out into the front-yard. There is already a cut on his face where his face struck a rock, or a piece of wood, or the keg as he fell. And the small group in the yard laughs at him. He screams at them not to laugh, tells them he will destroy them, that he's so goddamn sick of this shit. And I tell him he has to go, that we can't have this here. That he's drunk and no one knows what he's talking about. And he looks at me, not seeing me as part of that collective enemy yet, and he says "you know I can't do that". Like I know his biography, the contents of his soul, the shit he has endured and cannot bear to go through again.

I haven't touched him with any violence, just a friendly intimidation, a voice like I'm taking care of him, but he must submit. And in the front-yard he seems as though he'll simply wander into his house and sleep it off. And the party starts to reform itself. I was too intoxicated to recall every detail, who all was in the front yard, how long it took him too freak out. But within seconds he was kicking the line of cars in front of the houses, pounding on the hoods with both fists like a gorilla desperate to escape. And I hustle back out and put my hands on him to make him stop. And he swings at me. And I grab him, pin his left arm to his head in a deathgrip, drive him into the ground under my weight. For a few moments, the people definitely collecting around us now, I talk to him. Tell him he has to chill out and go home, that he's making a huge mistake. And he says he will go home, crying now, calling out those bastards in the backyard for their bastardery. And when I let him go and we both stand, he starts to punch me again. And we repeat, my voice growing impatient. And we repeat again. Until we've finally wrestled our way onto his concrete porch and as he stands up he starts to punch the nearest person. I grab his arms, he falls to his knees. And that's when they started to punch him. Some kid I never met before, punching like a fighter, lands who knows how many blows to his face. The first couple at least while I'm holding DrunkO's arms. And I let go, and I try to push away this usurper. I get a punch square in the hand that is now swollen and stiff. And I try to pick DrunkO up and get him into his house. And he tells me "I can't . . he beat the shit out of me" and then I see the blood on the concrete. So much goddamn blood. And then someone else runs up and starts punching him, and I push him off. But there's maybe three kids I don't know working him over now, and I can't stop them. DrunkO lays on the concrete, rolling in his own blood, crying, invalid, wrecked.

I'm shaking. Because I wanted so badly for this kid to be the only one among us all responsible for violence. I felt like the work I did to restrain him was in the interests of safety and defusing the circumstances. And then they had to beat the shit out of him, and me holding the poor dreck's arms for the first hard hits. I stood in the yard looking at him, everyone mostly silent now. Yells to call the police, people telling DrunkO that the cops are on the way. My new friend Tyler saying to me: "hey man, let's go to the gas station and buy cigarettes".

We walk to the Stinker, adrenaline and booze in my blood making me light-headed, painless, emotional but not sentimental, rather charged with being in the present. And we buy cigarettes and come out of the Stinker and two cop cars have arrived at the house. We can see them from the parking lot. And so we walk the neighborhood streets, 3am at the earliest now. Having a smoke, watching the fire trucks show up, more cop cars. And we walk until everything dissolves and tell our various police stories. A seemingly endless list of legal altercations between the two of us, feeling respirated like some sort of moonlit outlaws,going to the late-night pizzeria to swap cop stories with the kid making pizzas there. We all seem to have them. Sneaking a joint three blocks from the house watching the last cop retreat. And then we go back, having been away for an hour, close to two. Everyone is still up. The kid that pummeled DrunkO is in the kitchen, and it slowly dawns on me that only Tyler, DrunkO, myself, and this little piece of shit that couldn't help himself know the story. No one seems to know how he got his face bashed in, and the retard with the boner for hurting people doesn't respond to his friend when he asks "how did he get all bloody?". The police took DrunkO to the hospital, and I imagine that this morning was the worst morning of his entire life. We sat around drinking the man's whisky, all room-temperature now, until 5am. Wondering just what in the hell all of that meant. I've never seen anyone lose their mind from alcohol like that, and I've been drinking as a hobby for well-nigh a decade now. I think we all have some inner conflict, some rift between who we want to be, who we are, how the world sees us. And we mostly trudge along with this burden precariously atop our shoulders, silent in gritted teeth thinking we're the only ones that suffer. No solace for freak-outs amongst your peer-group. No airing of existential grievance or tolerance for sensitivity. No aegis for expressing the absurd, because no one wants to hear it. And I think DrunkO is just a sad, sad man. He drank like that to impress us, to show himself as some kind of rockstar Viking in the bacchanal. And we didn't even blink. I imagine how much that must have burned in him, wanting us to see him. Us only laughing. Some of us resolved to take our shots at him because he's an easy target. Some of us no better than him, worse even because at least DrunkO demonstrated some humanity . . .as fragmented and polluted and chaotic as it is. We laughed at him. We drank his whisky. I washed his blood off my hands in the morning, out of my pants this afternoon.

"There is no dream"

2009-04-14T23:18:00.003-04:00

(quote: Neutral Milk Hotel, video: Krishnamurti Discipline)

I've begun to take action towards moving to Turkey. The plan being to live and teach in Istanbul from roughly August of this year until July of the next. Following that, I will make another attempt to gain entry into MFA programs. The overall failure of the graduate school try stunned me for a a few weeks. It's easy to think that this lack of validation is the best measure thus far of my own abilities. But this is art. It doesn't work that way. It can only be done with no fear of consequences or failure, with an irrational belief that your work is good and that it will only improve. And to write with the discipline and stimulus I need, new surroundings and daily demands are a must.

But the decision to go to Turkey is motivated by many things. I am dissatisfied in my job and all the possible jobs related to it. I have purposely stumbled onto a time in my life with virtually no responsibilities. I have always wanted to spend enough time in a foreign land to be a citizen of it, to meet its people as an equal, to learn the language, to not merely observe but participate in its culture, to break the narrow views placed on me at birth. I am in love with the world. It's so tremendously big and so much different than you'll come to understand it through television. So beautiful that you can only look at it in small pieces. For all my nihilism and misanthropy and doomsaying, I love this place and hope to soak up as much of it as I can. And do my best to interpret this experience in words as I go. I've dedicated myself to narrative. And this isn't simply reading and writing, narratives are the things we live too. The story of people on this place and at this time, the story of your life starting at the moment you saw first light to the moment you see last. And just thinking of these billions of stories as they interweave and conflict and gyrate and come together and split apart, thinking of that hulking place just outside my window, a great human novel in constant motion that can never and should never be written . . .it's enough to keep me awake at night.

Also. The mookfish is coming out, for the foreseeable future. We will have a time.

'The Writer is a Spiritual Anarchist'

2009-04-06T23:07:00.004-04:00

(quote: Saroyan, video: Bukowski Dinosauria, We

The question comes to me now that it's real . . .what relation does the artist have to their parents? Some of us have bohemian 'rents that once tried their own hand in some art or at the very least hold up creativity as something with which to measure other things by. And some parents likely view it as an empty pursuit by which no access to the good life or happiness is granted. My parents are nowhere in this continuum. They barely listen to music, my mother reading glorified romance novels, my father reading nothing at all. They do not watch films, but popcorn movies with whatever actors they prefer. The production of even these instances of art are so mysterious to them that the thing they watch may as well have been dropped from the sky. And yet, I'm trying to include them as much as I can in my circumstances re: graduate school. And somewhere in these last few months it occurred to them that I am writing. A lot. And they wanted to see something.
So . . .after they bugged me over the course of several of our weekly phone calls, I relented and decided to send them something. I thought over a half-dozen short stories that may be suitable. This one discarded for all the drugs done in it, that one put aside because the protagonist is too close to my father, a third overlooked because it would simply be too damn weird for them to ever look at me the same. And I settled on this one as it seemed the most neutral. And even it has vomit, and alcoholism, and swearing, and a man's pubic hair catching fire. They called me today after having read it, and said: "thanks', 'it looks good', 'are all those countries real countries? or did you come up with some of them?'. Now, I don't expect them to provide incisive critique. But I don't know how to talk to them about writing, it is so far removed from their world that I might as well discuss my love for some forgotten tribal rite. And yet I came from them. Somehow.

---------

A fellow student that I've had workshop classes with has been published in a contest wherein this work also competed. She has not been published before and in almost all cases I would be happy for her success despite my slim envy. But the nature of her work, and the small success it has been granted, disturbs me. See, in my inability to get things published or gain acceptance into most of the schools to which I've applied, I've suggested as one of my disadvantages the content of my stories. I've identified a continuity in the themes and characters and plot and perspective and aesthetic of the work that gains traction. And it is not what I do. I've told people that what is looked at as good in 2009 is work that is memoirish, sentimental, banal, depicting love as it has existed on television lo these many years. Work that when it strays from reality, wanders into magical realism and thus calms the chaos and confusion of living in the modern world. Magical realism is a cop-out, a boiling down, a superstitious response to those things not understood. And my fellow student's work is all of these things. I won't go further into detail about the work itself, but when I read it in class I recall thinking and noting that "this, this in front of me, is the opposite of what I want to write". Further, it is done badly. Sloppily, with cliched details, mortified progresion, warmed-over nostalgia.

And, as counterpoint, what I try to write is what I think needs to be done, in this moment, in narrative. A sort of NeoNaturalism in that the characters, like us, are bound to lives they cannot control by forces of nature. And that the predominate element of that nature, in a postsurvivalist world, is the environment created by our own culture. And further, that the environment does not have absolute control over our fate, but that for our constraints to be surpassed we must be willing to accept the greatest risks. Death and its metaphors are the gamble one must tolerate to become something other than circuitry exposed to the weather. And I try to document this alienating environment we occupy, present characters with circumstances at the furthest edge of confusion and possibility and reconciliation. It is not science fiction, but the leveraging of the unusual to suggest how very little sense we can make of this nature that shapes us, and that we fight against, and that we try, riddled with anxiety and doubt, to understand. In this milieu there is no room for hokey magic to resolve complications, there is only the paucity of explanation and the unsettling discomfort of feeling alone and perturbed when everyone else seems calm and aligned. It may not be the materials that everyone chooses, but they are honest ones and they come from a life I have led that has been fraught with uncertainty and nervousness and frustration and ceaseless inquiry to little avail but temporary contentment. I do not traffic in memoirs, because no person can truly understand another and to fictionalize such an account is as if to say that the writer has feared to live the life they depict, and wishes for some other reality that is not true. So. Fuck your memoirs, unless they be your real life. And fuck sentimentality unless you've loved and lost it and accepted it and your scars will not heal. I have some that still raise pink and shiny from my skin. And fuck magic, go to religion if you wish the world to make sense.

" . . .and indeed all was vanity and grasping at the wind."

2009-04-04T19:22:00.004-04:00

(quote: Ecclesiastes 2:11, video: Ecclesiastes Chapter 7)

Amidst many pages of scattered myth and deliberate metaphor and contradictions and the senselessly sanctioned and sacralized, Ecclesiastes is an existential lamentation. In this book there is no immortality after death, no promises of heaven to sate the ache of your drudgery, and no threats of hell to brand you in your misdeeds. You simply live for some period of time, and then die. And the fear of death emerges from the notion that this brief spasm will be all you have of experience: "Nothing is better for a man than that he should eat and drink, and that his soul should enjoy good in his labor. This also, I saw, was from the hand of God." That is, supplanting God with Nature, we are not meant to live in some expectancy of the afterwards. We are to enjoy this thing, and to find labor that feeds our soul.

Further on in the book, Solomon (or whoever wrote this, it isn't historically certain) finds a logic of meaning within the works of man (all of which are relegated to "vanity and grasping at the wind") that he builds out of aphorisms. "For a dream comes through much activity, and a fool's voice is known by his many words". The ideal dream itself is not named, simply what follies to avoid in its pursuit. He identifies things we know to be true about ourselves: "He who loves silver will not be satisfied with silver; nor he who loves abundance, with increase. This is also vanity." God here does not come into the equation. This statements of inerrant truth go on and on. I've read Ecclesiastes three times in as many days, and I can only relate it to Buddhism. But a cynical and hopeless Buddhism, one without proportionate consequence and balance, and without immortality.

I recently read an interview with William Faulkner. I find his attitude towards writing gratifyingly aligned with my own. No claims for parity in talent, of course, but he like me believes in the primacy of the work. Of the sole prioritization of turning thoughts into text. Believes that in the devotion, there is no good and evil:

The writer’s only responsibility is to his art. He will be completely
ruthless if he is a good one. He has a dream. It anguishes
him so much he must get rid of it. He has no peace until then.
Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency, security, happiness,
all, to get the book written. If a writer has to rob his mother,
he will not hesitate; the 'Ode on a Grecian Urn' is worth any
number of old ladies.

This is not something that will be perfected by dalliance. The thing that must be written can only be written under the desperate urgency to write it, the possession by some image that will not die until it has been perfectly depicted, the character that will not cease its pleading until it occupies space outside yourself.

Faulkner talks too about things that relate to the academic pursuit of writing. MFA programs did not exist in his time, yet he calls into question the usefulness of institutions in the path to creation. Nothing good comes from taking money from an institution, he says, and those interested in learning technique might find bricklaying or surgery more fulfilling. There is no learning to write, and this holds true for everything difficult, everything that requires self-sacrifice, there is only the doing it and finding the most direct route from one's imagination to their work. Trial and error ad infinitum, and the binding of a book no gesture that it's truly been completed in its perfect form. We all always approach perfection haphazardly, asymptotically, in awe. And yet all that is needed to engage in this thing is a pen and a pad, no security financial or otherwise, no comfort or appeasement will do the work. It is all on one's shoulders. And this is one part that appeals to me. The abstraction of art places the entire practice outside of human frailties, demands a superhuman convergence of impulse and memory and patience and sensitivity. And it is done by one person, however cobbled from the works of others, it is wrought by one set of hands alone.

I have a faint idea what it is like to be alive.

2009-03-29T00:06:00.004-04:00

(quote: William Saroyan, video: Alan Moore's advice to young artists)

For a minute there I was a nihilist. I came to a philsophical conclusion that I shirked away from telling people because it sounds so bleak and inhumane. The crux is this: that we can never achieve social stability or equality or sustainable prosperity or peace or freedom if our population continues to grow. The thesis, generally, being that a confluence of phenomenon (including but not limited to the Tragedy of the Commons, False Consciousness, the quantitative/psychological constraints of human interaction [i.e. how many people your brain will allow you to know/trust/etc], and a sheer logistical impossibility) strongly suggest that a group as large as, for instance, the United States, could never accomplish utopia. That is, there is no model for governance with a system this large that provides for satisfaction to all of its participants.

First, the Tragedy of the Commons is an observation that self-interest will cause users of a shared resource to abuse their privilege to that resource. In Hardin's original essay he spoke of common grazing areas in a village, but the best way to understand this (I am a transportation engineer after all) is to think of how commercial vehicles (big trucks) operate on our highways. Large, multi-axle trucks do virtually all of the damage to the publicly-funded (i.e. 'common') road system. They do pay higher use fees (above and beyond driver's licenses, fuel tax, etc for passenger cars), and yet without close supervision it would be in commercial vehicle operators' best interest to run the heaviest loads they could at top speed. Human beings cheat to get ahead, they use resources disproportionally, they leave things worse than they found them.

Now, this problem is mitigated in small communities. The home, for example, has many common areas and goods. And they are generally respected because of the authority of the household (complete) and the familiarity between the members. And it could work in a neighborhood, perhaps, where everyone knows each other somewhat intimately and their lives are crushed into shape by their public identity. But expand the numbers of the community to some threshold and people stop giving a shit. This number likely has some connection to the group-sizes that we spent much of our mental development in. Australopithecus hung out in very small groups. A few families. Even allow for a thousand and it might work. But,we live in a country of 300million, in a world of 6billion plus. We are not wired to give a shit about any of these people. The fact that we do is actually sort of weird.

Logistical impossibility doesn't have a link because I haven't heard of anyone who has done a great deal of work on it. The idea is that even in a purely-executed Communist state there would be no way to equitably distribute resources. The same amount cannot be put in each cup, because the things used to fill them are not distributed equally. Arizona does not have the water to survive, but if they are to use the water of some place else how can that water-bearing land be thought to have the carrying capacity of both places? Especially when we humans grow so densely and rapaciously. And live for so long. But further than the efficiency of moving resources around, there is a certain chaos in the economy of ideas when the numbers get this high. anarchists can conspire, religions can procreate, language can vary . . .and in the end you get smaller political communities. These subcommunities distrust each other, formulate nonsensical rivalries. Shun those of the other tribe. Anyway . . .I have many more thoughts on this that I'm going to discuss further in an upcoming blog on Terminalism (this is a name I've given to a philosophy that amalgamates Marxism, Darwinism, aspects of Existentialism, and Absurdism)

'The greatest happiness you can have is knowing that you do not necessarily require happiness.'

2009-03-24T22:13:00.003-04:00

(quote: William Saroyan , video: Hard Time Killing Floor Blues)

Yesterday I recieved notice that I have been accepted to the MFA program at The New School University in New York City. Of the programs I applied to, this one was for me the most interesting, exciting, and attractive. The school is enmeshed with the writing community of NYC and the emphasis is heavily on writing. In the last semester you do not attend class. You simply write and talk about your writing with your advisor. This program in particular looks to provide the greatest degree of freedom. I can truly thrive in this environment.

And it came about as late as it could. I was beginning to get a bit whiny and dejected. 10+ rejections had shown up in my various mailboxes. Copies of the manuscripts I sent sat glowing in the corner, heckling me with their inconsistencies and chunkiness and shortcomings. I began to make plans to move to Istanbul for a year, intending to apply again. Creeping hints of failure assembled in this little pile of quality, off-white stationary. The familiar artistic questions emerge, enlarge, take on a severity they never had. The time-stamped question of "did I do that right?" stretches out over the last three years. And you think for just a moment that you went at it all wrong. That the way to do this wasn't simply working your ass off. It wasn't losing sleep to catch those last drunken thoughts as you drifted into the kaliedoscope. It wasn't soaking yourself with narrative, with exuberance and depression and anxiety. It was something you didn't get. And as a writer you shouldn't have nudged that line, or advocated the tribal philosophy that I did in that work. Expectation was to be honored. And then came the believing in the work and thinking, like Saroyan: "One of us is obviously mistaken". But this acceptance is that slightest of validations, that noteeth smile given by someone you respect. It feels like a punctuation in these long few years, like when I wake up tomorrow morning I can take a deep breath and look around without feeling as though time is wasting.

Moving to New York City is part of the American mythos. Children from the Midwest go alienated in the sterility and shrug off their lineage and descend into it. For the artist, the thing is rite-of-passage and crucible. A place so vast and chaotic any end-result is possible. You may emerge at the other end differently named, battered by a whole new arrangement of affectations and illnesses and habits. New York City is the surreal tragicomedy writ large. So, while I doubt I will spend the rest of my life there, going there is this instinctive pilgrimage. It is a visionquest.

My good friend Dale Eisinger will be attending CUNY for Journalism during the same period I would be attending the New School. This is one of those coincidences that make people believe in god. If I could take any one thing from Boise when I leave, it would be this young man. I look forward to the whole mess we shall shortly find ourselves in.

"we regret to inform you"

2009-03-11T23:22:00.003-04:00

(quote: e'rbody, video: Gnarls Barkley Who's Gonna Save My Soul?

I don't have a lot to say these days. In a kind of limbo waiting for the other MFA shoe to drop, six rejections thus far. One waitlist. However, I'm still a writer. So here is something I just finished. I wrote the first draft of it over a year ago, and changed nearly every letter. It may be the last thing I write in past tense for a very long time.

"Drink up. This night thy soul may be required of thee"

2009-03-01T22:00:00.004-05:00

(quote: The Judge, video: Black Moth Super Rainbow)

I'm submitting a proposal to the Modern Language Association for their annual conference in Philadelphia. The topic is the "Evolutionary Origins of Narrative". This subject represents the confluence of much of the extracurricular study I have done over the last two years, and upon suggestion by a professor multiple thesii immediately jumped to mind. Basically, evolutionary psychologists, philosophers of art, and kids with nothing better to do, are trying to understand what function art serves from an evolutionary perspective. If it is in fact a functional adaptation, in what way does it aid reproduction? There are generally about 5 theories that I am familiar with. Steven Pinker suggests that art has no evolutionary function, that it is a mere byproduct of complex brains. Others suggest that art is simply the effort of individuals to become appealing in the eyes of the opposite sex. Others proclaim that art is a survival strategy that benefits either social cohesion or mental organization. A fifth theory suggests that art began as a means by which to share attention. None of these is quite complex and holistic enough for me. None of them answer the fundamental four questions required to identify an adaptive mechanism (or in Pinker's case, show how art does not meet some of these requirements). The four questions for adaptation, as formulated by Niko Tinbergen are: 'What benefit does the adaptation provide for reproduction?', 'What is the mechanism by which this adaptation occurs?', 'What is the origin of the adaptation in human evolutionary history?', 'When does the adaptation develop in the individual human?'.
Any theory for the evolutionary origins of narrative or art will be forced to handle these four questions. My proposal is to synthesize a new theory focusing on narrative specifically. Essentially, a sort-of anthropology or genealogy of the "Narrative Mechanism" in human behavior. In evolutionary psychology, every definable behavioral phenomenon comes from a 'mechanism', a system of actions, feedback, requirements, problematization strategies, perspective, and subconscious analysis. My paper would, more or less, begin to define the Narrative behavioral Mechanism. Essentially, I believe that narrative as a meme in cultural evolution have worked so well because they are aligned with the way that we sort information already. All of our myths are in narrative form, and the most efficient way to convey some idea is generally to have an accompanying narrative (anecdotes work better than statistics, even when they are misleading). It is a result of our biological understanding of time: we think everything begins, develops, climaxes, and dies. The world around us does this through the seasons, our bodies do this, most phenomenon that we observe seem to behave along the archetypal pattern of narrative. This way of thinking met up with the burgeoning survival value of symbolic language. As we became more complex philosophically, eventually narrative was used as a means of approaching existential anguish (an affliction that may be the true separation of man from beasts). And now in the bourgeois world we occupy, where survival is a given, the role of narrative has been displaced. The art and it's artist have been alienated from their homeland, the Pleistocene. Anyway, much more on this later . . ..

---

I've developed a new hobby. I put a draft of something I've been working on in my jacket and walk the mile downtown and deposit myself on the worst lit chair in all of 10th Street Tavern, and I drink whiskey and make red marks on the paper until something adequate becomes something good. Then after a couple hours, in the dark, I walk back home. I take the most circuitious route possible, with something disjointed and beautiful on the headphones. Look for fences to climb, buildings to surmount, etc. The other night I . . .well, I'll keep that moment to myself. It was wonderful to just be cold in the dark alone. Seeing the life that we avoid with our houses and streetlights and televisions and cars.

"Everything goes by the board: honor, pride, decency … to get the book written."

2009-02-21T02:26:00.004-05:00

(quote: Faulkner, video: Chimpanzee Problem Solving")

The woman that lives next door to me sometimes goes out on her back porch and screams. She screams at god, her children who do nothing for her, some entity that strikes me as The Man but she probably understands as misfortune. Today I was in the backyard enjoying the sunset, sitting on a cooler, having a smoke and a beer, reading. I heard her sliding door creak open, watched through the slats of our privacy fence as she sat down on her step. Heard her beer crack open. And for a moment we just drank together. I read a page of my book. And then she starts to cry. A stifled cry like a war widow. And then the vibrato of sob pooled, where the cry starts to make a whining sound. And then she says something. Then says it louder. Then yells "Why doesn't it work?". The question Camus would have asked had he been an Engineer. And then she scolded her grown gone children, they never help. And then she demanded of god to know why he did this to her. And then she cried, the way we don't think people cry; with that 'huh-uh .. uh-oh" getting loud in the black trees and pink darkening sky. Her shouts lasted longer than my tolerance. I went back inside. Finished my beer. Cracked the window open so I could just hear her. That inconsolable grief. I don't know what a person is to do with that.

Reclusive as the days get longer. Habits developed in winter now wincing at the sun, now demanding some middling interval. Punctuation that let's me breathe. Dwindling social interaction somehow makes every one of them more valuable. But it's only half on purpose, the other part the circumstances of grinding. I've got these two classes that demand a novel of reading and two days of writing per week. And my every opinion in them is contrarian, apparently.

I've been rejected by the University of Pittsburgh. I think that if I get rejected ubiquitous, I'm going to take the survival money I've socked away for grad school and move back east. Not Michigan, but closer; somewhere I don't know anyone. Get a job there working part-time (as much to meet new people as anything. Something physically demanding.) and write. Take two years working on the thing that I plan on doing as my thesis. The Ex Nihilo Creative Writing Program. Sign up now.

"the best, even when I'm cynical"

2009-02-09T23:38:00.003-05:00

(quote: Wale, video: Katie Couric interviews Lil Wayne)

According to Malcolm Gladwell, the heaviest factor determining tremendous success (this is Nabokov-greatness, Ali-greatness, Beatles-greatness) is sweat. 10,000 hours this loose threshold by which one can become actualized in their field. And not 10,000 hours spread across one's life, or engaged in something unstimulating, but dedicated, self-motivated industry in whatever it is one is pursuing. This can be influenced by parents, culture, etc, but the pen-to-pad work needs to be done in earnest. So, 10,000 hours breaks down to three hours a day over a decade. Six hours a day for five years. It is not really even that much time. I have already worked more time than this frying chicken, cutting grass, driving around in vans, writing reports and studies, attending meetings. And I have nearly that much time in academia. But I have to admit . . .I haven't spent that much time committing text. But in six months?

(btw: I've been waitlisted for the Ohio State University Creative Writing Program. If a couple people refuse offers, I may get one. So I guess that counts as what, a tie?)

I'm currently working on a story idea that I would like to eventually (finally?) put into graphic form. The gist is that there is a band of interdimensional time-traveling drug dealers that get caught up in retrieving the organs of historical figures as a favor for an immortality cult. Doesn't really sound like the kind of thing I would normally do, but I'm really excited about some of the subtext at work in it. And I'm starting to define an interesting time-travel narrative mechanism that I've never seen before. Anyway, if anyone knows anyone who can illustrate fairly well and would like to work on a project of unknown duration, and little anticipated rewards beyond working on something interesting . . . lemme know. I want to write some comics (which, oddly enough, is like coming full circle for me. I wrote comic books in third grade).

I had to give up on utopia. There was a time when I thought there was some ideal circumstance for humanity. Some arrangement of resources and talents in which everyone could be happy and at peace. I never really described it to myself, or tried to think my way through all of the logistics and politics. There is just this idyllic scene that I think gets conditioned into us. It's almost like a religious belief, but I don't think it comes from the church. It comes from television and stories, the desire for one's children to be happy and the idealization that is generated by parenting in that direction. The very attempt at a cohesive political process suggests that it could arrive at some perfect orchestra of legislation and strictures, that we could somehow design an ever-growing system that seamlessly reproduces the means of its continual reproduction.
But there is no utopia. And this is not the bleak statement it sounds like. It does not mean that a person can't be happy, that we can't hope for things better than whatever situation we are in. It means that there is no perfection to drive towards. There is no Atlantis or Pala or Land of Milk and Honey. And I don't know that we really want it. Because the one thing that defines us more than anything is how we, individually, handle conflict. And as much as I am given to complain about my job, about neoconservatives, about the various ancillary rackets of academia, about the law, about the religious influence on our common culture . . .I desire a fight. I thrive on the fact that there is something that nearly everyone believes in and that I don't. I am a proud contrarian, and if that utopia is built I'm planting charges at the joints in the plexiglass dome over our global greenhouse. We are not made for peace, and while I would like an undisturbed meal as much as the next prole, any time I'm handed what I need I understand that in the long run I am indebted. All of this is relevant to the current discussions about our economic situation. The only real answer is to divest yourself. You didn't design this bullshit, you are not responsible. And the only way you will ever know peace is to take responsibility for your decisions. And the only way you can take responsibility, is if you are in control.

"there is no greater love than the love i've found amongst this strange, strange world.'

2009-02-09T21:59:00.004-05:00

(quote: mookfish, video: Moab, UT, 2008. Look for the synchronized shiver)

My good friend is off again. This time for the Honduras. And then on to Turkey to teach English. And though I know he has left before, there is some slightly subtle difference now. Like that was training; neccessary, beautiful, enlightening, but still preparation for what he's into now. He's a teacher, and I don't mean that he has gone through the academic channels and become certified and followed rules (though he has done that as well), but he is a shaman, a sensei, a wiseman to be consulted on big decisions and with big questions. So the regular teaching thing doesn't quite work. He has to travel, meet students in classrooms or beaches or campgrounds or bars. And there isn't always a lesson plan, or some specific gem of wisdom to be passed on. Sometimes he just asks the right question, sheds the right light, helps you to step back and frame your quandary/question/naivete in the large and in the small. Sometimes he does these things without even saying a word. I don't know how he would react to this, because he is as humble as they come, but he has taught me about as much as any one person has. Some of the things only now am I understanding. So, it's so great to see him go. And struggle with the anxiety and excitement, knowing that he has carved out some destiny for himself. Good luck, brother. You ever need anything, look me up.

"We will now discuss in a little more detail the Struggle for Existence."

2009-02-03T22:44:00.004-05:00

(quote: Darwin, video: Wale-The Artistic Integrity

For my American Realism course I have to write a research paper from no less than 8 sources. The only limitation is that it has to deal with American literature written between the Civil War and World War I. After the paltry class discussion when the professor asked those gathered to define evolution, I decided that I need to examine Darwin's influence on the written word as art form. While he was only partially a philosopher, he presented an idea which fundamentally alters the picture of the world. For those who do not accept his theory, there is still this pausing gap, this rigidly logical refutation of their "meaning" that they must come to terms with. After Darwin, god became obsolete as a philosophical device. And 75 years later, Existentialism questioned whether, in a world without god, does life have any meaning? My research centers around finding 'transitional fossils' that indicate a progression out of Romanticism, via Darwin's findings. Was Realism a rejection of Romanticism at least partially because Darwin changed how we see nature and our place in it? Are the hard truths revealed by Darwin reflected in the grittier aesthetic of Realism? Does the art of the time hint at our collective philosophical evolution, does it indicate the Existential anxiety of casting out mythology and order?

I can't listen to American news anymore. Even NPR has been seized with the Fear. You cannot turn on a television (I'm guessing) or visit a newspaper's website or listen to the radio without dire news about the economy. Thousands being laid-off, millions more underemployed, our collective investments dwindling in value. It is all either a temporary downturn, or the undulating spasms of a false ideology as it crumbles. And the working class can do nothing in reaction but save a little more, leave out a few luxuries, show up to work, try to sleep at night. And I have no lack of sympathy for those who have lost their jobs, or who are going through tough times. But a lot of us made bad decisions, or are stuck in undesirable circumstances, or both. And the lesson to be learned from this, especially for younger people who haven't yet bought a house they can't afford or squirted out one too many lil'uns, is that the whole dream we've been sold is a joke. Buy a house, slave away at a corporate job, distance yourself from reality with television and sports, capitulate to the reproductive urge. All these things and more have been marketed to us as the ideal, as the swift path to happiness. But it isn't. And every second you spend willing yourself to someone else's system, is another inch you drift from the person you are. Not to say that you should never get a job and work for the Man. But never let it fool you that this 9-5 is your life. And never rely on another's enterprise to make you happy. Whatever you do for yourself, can never be taken away.

I've been writing quite a bit so far this year. Though less and less of it is presentable. I'm so much pickier and careful and thoughtful and (un)conscious. And so now I write the first five pages of a story at least three times before I settle into a groove. Write out not an outline but an ever-evolving aesthetic manifesto each time I want a thing to become a story. When I was maybe 20-years old, sleepless, I developed a crude analogy for what a story needs to be. The Bonfire Theory of Narrative Craft. Basically, it is this: A story, at the broadest conceptual level, must have three elements. The first is the flames. Flames are what are seen from a distance, what dazzles, what draws someone in or scares away an animal. This is the story's "gimmick", what you describe a story as being about in one or two sentences (Choke is about a sex-addict who pretends to choke for money and affection). The second aspect is the "fuel". How the fire is assembled, the structure of the wood aligned such that it burns at the desired intensity. This is the story's plot, the causality, what actually happens, how all of the events are tied together. The final element is the coals. The long-burning furnace of the fire, the part you bake hot-dogs on. The part you could take with you in a clay vessel on your pilgrimage and use to start a fire elsewhere. This is the theme of the story. What the story has to say, why the story is important to tell. What from the story can a person take away and add to their own experience? Anyway. Good stories are built like bonfires. And depending on how you want it to burn, you have to carefully consider all three of these aspects.

I'm occasionally opining for the Boise Arbiter now. Check it out.

"Signs and wonders all along the road"

2009-01-25T23:59:00.004-05:00

(quote: Mighty Mos, video: Bertrand Russell)

My brother leaves Boise in three days. He's packed up his belongings, prepped his dog, cleaned his house and found some young rabble to inhabit it, cast a line for job prospects, and is now counting the hours before he roars off into the mountains to be with the woman he loves. I came here because he was here, or at least that's why I tried to. He's my patron saint, the patience and even hand that laid the groundwork for me to be however rebellious and uncouth I have been. The wise and kind older brother that we should all have, and I cannot say I would have tolerated me as well as he has. He has never failed with an encouraging word, an incisive observation, a veteran bit of experience. And our relationship has grown more complicated in the City of Trees. We shared a dwelling for over two years, and relearned each other's idiosyncracies, talked until late at night in that complex of sentence-finishing and head-nodding that only siblings and spouses can conjure. We went to Africa together, to Amsterdam, to San Francisco. He watched me cry a hundred times for someone a million miles away and said exactly what I needed to hear always. He tried to understand my writing, and even when he didn't ruminated about how important it was that I kept going. And though we carry out our lives differently, and I was often selfish and closed off, I respect him as much as any man I know. He's struggling, like all of us, but he has never been afraid to do the hard thing when it was right. He's the man my father could have been, and one whose respect I will work my entire life to maintain. Thanks, bro. It's been good. I love you kid, and what's mine is yours. For life.

----------------------------------------------------------------

Plans gradually into fruition. Like there is no action but waiting. And all these kilobytes committed to text have simply served to keep me distracted, to keep the nausea down about what may or may not happen six months hence. Anxiety evolves, and the things that made me tremble even two years ago now get swallowed like daily medicine. Money, loneliness, validation, insomnia, stagnation. . .gulp. The next half-decade sits in smoky still-images in my brain: surrounded by spectres, high as a kite, ox-like and obstinate, laughing in the dim morning in my cold bed. I tried my hand at this conventional thing: worked in my office, and put on brown leather shoes, and made the phone calls I had to, and contributed to my retirement fund, and clinked drinks with mid-life crisis casualties. And I didn't fail out, I wasn't asked to leave, and I have burned no bridges, try as I might. The televised 'merikuhn dream just isn't my gig. Even now I can feel the mercury setting in my bones, like concrete turning me into a statue here; groaning and medicating with the other statues in our still, still garden. But I've found a way out, and not a frantic leap from windows, but an almost sanctioned way to stave off my demons and wake up enthusiastic. Almost counting days now . . .

----------------------------------------------------------------

The other night a friend of my brother's, this guy I've known for about a decade now but have never really connected with, asked me about the whole grad school thing. When I told him I was going so that I could write a novel, he asked: "what do you write? I mean, murder-mysteries, or science fiction, or something?" And I didn't know how to respond. What do I write? So I laid out the plans for my novel, the gist, the theme, the setting, one or two of the characters. The thing is, talking to people that don't read much, I have a hard time explaining what my overall project is. I feel like the follower of some unkempt religion, like some excuse needs to be made. But in the glow of my computer, it all makes absolute sense. Finish two more short-stories that are stewing in my skull and turn everything legible into a self-published collection. Draft the text of my graphic novel about time-traveling drug-dealers and immortality cults. Pound out my novel about loneliness and amnesia and Detroit and identity. Congeal my Antarctic dreams into some kind of bleak narrative. The thing is, I have never felt this in charge of my creative impulse. I know exactly what I'm doing, even if part of the plan requires me to give up all conscious control.

"Going south, and we are older"

2009-01-21T00:37:00.005-05:00

(quote: Beirut, video: clip from Encounters at the End of the World)

I watched Obama's Inauguration Speech, chomping bagels in the conference room, between bands at a house party hours later, and nodded and went goose-bumpy and gave the tiniest fist-pump at moments. I remembered where I was, or what state at least, for previous moments. Recalled the old burning nausea of watching Bush win the second time. Gave up hope in fragments and hang-overs and youtube clips. And Obama made me feel like the problems of humanity might not be insurmountable. That a man with these words, and this backbone, and this brain, might be able to truly 'change' something for the better. The nation truly made a good decision, collectively, for once. We gave credit where it is due, recognized our needs, let the best of our emotions color our choice. And Obama focuses on all things that need focus if we're to really secure our species' survival. But, I realized when he was talking about all the hard-work being done by the unnamed morass, the meaningless struggle of the military, the corporatocracy plundering our 1s and 0s, the desires to live safely and peacefully and retire with dignity, that he never let the American Dream dissolve. He never admitted that our prosperity is won on the backs of those that can't protect themselves. Or that the financial system is not a corrupt business model, but rather an oppressive and failed ideology. That our cultural has evolved into one that equates happiness with mean pleasures and empty, vicarious experiences. The trouble is, that while I think Obama can make inroads on jobs, and healthcare, and our international reputation, this place will still be something that alienates me. I will still shudder at the myth of the American Dream, not because I don't think strong-willed people can do great things, but because it encourages us to settle. It teaches us to be satisfied with mediocrity. Yet, I want everyone's situation to be easier. I want the Israeli's to stop trying to wipe out Palestinians. I want people to have access to doctor's. I want kids in the 'hood to get good educations. It's just that Obama's vision is not my utopia. And the change that would please me cannot be shaped by politics.

I'm becoming obsessed with Antarctica. I spend afternoons reading articles on Big Dead Place, nights watching obscure documentaries on the Ice, pirated versions of The Thing with French subtitles. The appeal is something still metastasizing in my spinal column. In one dream I saw the place in negative, like it was inseparably opposite from my life now. A death-rattle cold taking place of this climate control. Vast expanses of ice and rock substitute buildings and roads and rolling hills. Bureaucracy silly becomes absurd, and everyone drinks to it and curses it, instead of imbibing and regurgitating. Countless decisions simplified by survival instead of the paralyzing anxiety of infinite choices to no consequence. Loneliness like an illness wrought deep in your gut, rather then the demands of trying to be everyone at once. Backbreaking work to pay your privilege to exist in your setting, not your student loans and car insurance.

I'm a gypsy. I just move slow. Plod along like a tortoise till my shell grows moss from each land I rest in. See sunsets become rises from just a few feet to my left. And since I came back from Detroit, the thought of leaving this place keeps me up at night. Anticipation, anxiety, good old Catholic shame and fear. But all of that under a timid bliss. Thinking: Next year this time, I could be anywhere.

"The worker. . .only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. "

2009-01-10T16:56:00.008-05:00

(quote: Marx, video: Instruction Manual for Life)

On New Year's Eve the police force of the United States showed their true colors. In Oakland, Houston, N'awlins police used excessive force on minorities that were ostensibly guilty of nothing. Two of them are dead. One has been shot in the liver. Oakland rioted. Police cars were burned, windows were smashed, the local police force was overwhelmed. And the blogosphere chided the rioters for destroying property. See, when it's in another country people say "why doesn't 'merikuh react that way!?", but when they see fire in the streets, and people bleeding from massive headwounds they call it senseless violence. And sure, the violence itself may be regrettable. We shouldn't destroy things like children when we get frustrated. But the police are leaving the city of Oakland no choice. The bullies that chose to join the police force, in particular those that fire on noncriminals and the pigs that protect them, have abdicated their claim to righteousness. The police force exists to protect and serve their community. Police themselves are not above the law. But this sanctioned and tax-funded gang behaves as though they are subject to some separate set of laws. Cops that kill people undeserving are not hauled off to jail, they are asked to resign pending investigation. The bureaucracy protects them. If Oscar Grant, or You, had killed someone in the course of work, you would not be given the luxury of resigning. You would rot in jail. You would scrape together whatever meagre savings you could to hire the greasiest lawyer in the phonebook and you would pray. A police officer is not subject to that set of circumstances in our great nation. And if that is the case, if they claim to be beyond the reach of our common agreement of laws, our response to them must also be outside of the law. The authoritarians set up this cycle of action and response, they have required from us violent retribution. The riots serve to prove the maxim that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (thx JFK). I wish it could be some other way.

I have been having dreams about Antarctica. A frozen landscape that does not blink or punctuate its days. Dreams of ice and mud and wind and alien creatures, alien feelings. It is close to another planet as one could hope to find on Earth and still breathe oxygen. The people drawn to it are of a scattered tribe that seek hardship, purity, proof of their existence, expansion of their narrow and tawdry experience. I've found a way to go there. After I complete my MFA (btw, all apps in. Waiting on responses. Smoking, drinking too much, crossing fingers, making claims, feeling superhumanly confident one moment and childishly uncertain the next), I plan to submit a grant proposal to the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. This will require of me a longish work that is set in the Antarctic and deals with the landscape and the lives of those who live there. The largest boon is that I get to live rent free on the most insane patch of the world I could imagine for several months, and get some choice in what my activities would be while there. Luckily, I have a story idea already . . over the next couple years I can let it gestate and be ready to crank out a massive anti-historiographic metafiction about loneliness, near-death experiences, fossils, and the end-times. All of this, for me, is a perfect opportunity and suggests a possible lifestyle. This grant is only one of many, many funding opportunities for writers. Ideally, I would bounce from one to the next. thank you taxpayers.

I just finished tweaking a short-story. I find that my stories fall into approximately 4 categories: painful and clear, irreal, pseudo-biographical, and hyper/ludicrous. This story falls into the last. I wrote the first draft, all of it, from a hotel room in Santa Ana, CA last year and only this week got around to editing it for mass consumption. If you get around to reading it, let me know what you think. Also, this story, like all of my work that I like is linked to here and in the sidebar under "short stories".

"I don't want to go home, where I'm just an ordinary human being"

2009-01-04T22:16:00.004-05:00

(quote: RA the Rugged Man, video: Bishop Lamont "Every Day")

A great city is a work of art. An intricate symbol for what it means to be alive loosely fastened to place and time, wrought in concrete and iron and flesh and music. Clinging to the particulate in the smoke of its cigarettes, the reek of its exhaust, the priceless steam leeching from the streets. The feedback of instruments and the sound glasses make clinking together. Great cities loom with their idea, wrenched from the biographies of their most wild-eyed children. They dare those inside of them, and the dared leave them different in the way that we are ever changing to become ourselves. They carry their justification in every line and heart palpitation and criminal act and throwing up of hands. Great cities are not of their country, but of themselves and even when they lay eviscerate and mottled in the hung-over sun each can be differentiated from the next simply by the way their people sigh. Detroit I love you, and I hate you, and you always show me new faces. Always tip my hand, tell me what to write, frame even your banality in the skeleton of what you were, the skin of what you'll be. I no longer make value judgments about your future . . .I simply watch.

I went back to where I'm from for the holidays. This great industrial empire. It is weeping, and it is tired, and it is angry. But it still laughs when I get it drunk. Of the smattering of homecomings, this was singularly the most ecstatic and most difficult. Home crushed me and inflated me, changed my shape for the next six months while I resettle to old forms. My father and I screamed at each other in our haunting suburban basement. And then I told him things I should have said at 17 when it was much easier to simply sneak out and back in. And for perhaps the first time in my life I did not lie to him. I spent many hours downtown with another family and vaguely felt as though I were living on the reputation of a person that I murdered by leaving him out in the cold. Kindled a glowing friendship with someone I was only a smiling acquaintance with. Drank until breakfast cafes opened and we all walked down the middle of the street in the snowy grey. Squeezed onto a couch with warm, skinny legs six inches away and watched the sun come up on the alley and the church just outside the window; all the house asleep save me. For a few minutes I watched someone sleep and it was as if no time has ever passed or ever can . . .like I've always been on that couch and always will be. Attended a party in an apartment that I vomited in exactly three years before when someone else entirely lived there. Shared the city with someone I've come to know by the internet almost exclusively. Had a final night in an old hang-out, one of those departures that rings in your ears and the moment you're alone you simply put your forehead to steering wheel and try to make every detail part of the permanent record. There is a reason why laughing and crying sound the same. I've left so many times, and in so many ways . . .there seems to be no room in my heart for actually being anywhere.

"The lost eyes of a thawed caveman"

2008-12-20T22:39:00.005-05:00

(quote: me; video: Ricky's "Meaning of christmas")

Xmas party season. Everything more or less a persistent hang-over for the last few days. And I have little to no actual responsibilities. My classes ended spectacularly. A great grade and excellent feedback in one class, an epic bar-crawl with the members of my other one. Last night had my xmas party for work, which is always excellent. And then two of my bosses and their wives genuinely wanted to 'hang out" and we went to the bar and listened to music and I talked to them about writing. These guys are saints. I'm bringing in stories for them to read in the next few days. And the conversation served as a glowing preamble to the awkward, bent-ear explanations I'll have to give to extended family next week. quoth a boss: "in the annals of history, how many people have gone from engineering to english?"

The world is different walking through it late at night and waist-deep in winter. Everyone is hid out, in front of their screens. Everything is slick or jagged, and smells older than it is. Blackened snow clinging to everything looking fungal and nefarious in the arc-sodiums. And cars tumble along testing brakes and mingling cigarette-smoke with the vapor of their words. And front lawns broadcast to no-one the christmas mythos and Bosch-like populate themselves with jarring juxtapositions such that Frosty waves to Rudolph and Santa lords over them both disproportionate. And a frazzle-haired romantic that listens to BRMC steps from his 70s-era duster and snaps a pic with his gadget. And at some point I sit at the head of the table and drink the bottom-third of fancy cocktails and forgive people in my head. And when we're back out the doors the cold is treatment of an overdose and I gasp and run and clamber half-up a statue. Cut my hand and it bleeds like eyebrows in bar-room brawls. My own blood on the snow, dilute in the ice.

Reading through Gravity's Rainbow again. I made it 2/3rds of the way through, but lost the plot in Africa. This time around there is a certain cognizance of deliberate density. It's wonderfully complex, the detail rich, and every one of them distinct and well-executed and beautiful. But I think I'm seeing some cracks in Pynchon's methods. An immense and complex narrative that does not pause for stragglers, which has an integrity to it. But the big-picture . . .something is missing there. And reading Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein which I'm loving. But there's also a problem in his rendering, a sort of chaos for its own sake, covering Burrough's territory but trying to maintain lucidity. The images don't hang together like they could. Well, that's only 10 pages in. So who knows. Anyway, I really like both of these books.

"I want to remember it. I never want to forget it."

2008-12-09T22:32:00.005-05:00

(video and quote: Colonel Kurtz-Apocalypse Now)

Civilization is comprised of a network of ideologies. There are religious ideologies, economic ideologies, the ideology of family, the ideology of the military. Each of these is strictly real and material (that is, they manifest in the material world with rituals, institutions, objects, documents, physical inter-relations, etc). There is no escaping ideology without entering a new one. There is an ideology of science and rebellion, of art, of humanism, of philanthropy, of anarchism, of nihilism. You will never be free of ideologies, only incrementally inching into newer and less false ones. Every ideology, beyond being material, is essentially the imaginary relationships of individuals (though this word is now in some ways moot, replace with subjects) to their real conditions of existence. Ideologies emerge, in part, out of long-held misconceptions about the way things are. This misconception becomes an Ideological Apparatus concerned with maintaining its existence and growing arms and legs. And so subtle hierarchies become material discourses on power. Confusion about the universe becomes religion. Misunderstanding of human nature becomes economics. The biological appearance of families becomes the 'nuclear family'. All of these things form a vast, dominant, oppressive force that encourages our conformity, insures our complicity, and convinces us to perpetuate it.

Ok . . .all that thanks to Marx and Althusser. But, I thought this in the stolid quiet of my office at 6am, the world outside my window matte black, if every ideology is based on "imaginary relationships" (even what we think is the truest possible statement is distorted by the limitations of language, even the purest observation is poisoned by our eyes) then certainly, in all ideologies, their will be a day of reckoning. Not only that, but if one patiently observes an ideology in its death throws, he or she will observe what it was about that system that was imaginary, false, a lie. We are currently witnessing a glitch in our economic system. Some think it is simply a setback like the recessions of the 80s or other earlier economic crises. I don't know what the medium-term economic picture might be, and I am certainly no expert. But what I can say, is that in the failures of the current economic arrangement, the lie behind our economic ideology is exposed. Money is not real. It could be, I'm not saying objects have no value and that there is no sound means of acquiring food by providing services. But in America, money is not real. The government pumps numbers into the system, founded on no actual product or material. Banks charge you interest to provide you with electronic numbers that do not exist as anything but imagined agreements. Mortgages are taken out on property, and the debt is sliced into a million pieces like cake. But it is all simply numbers in an electronic system. This is what causes inflation, in all reality. Having more money than value. If things are worth $100 and you divide it 105 ways, you can hardly call each divided unit $1. And yet that is what we do. The moment that we dematerialized money, that we negated raw mathematics, we started the timer on the ultimate failure of the economic ideology.

Likewise, the economic system holds fictitious tenets of human nature. It presumes rationality in all actions. It starts wars and speculates based on the notion that each human unit is identical to the next. It assumes that free markets will flush out the best of the competitive nature deep within each of us and thus actualize us. All of these things are lies. All of them erode the base of the economic system.

I pushed out 10 graduate applications this week. Three 12 hour days of making checklists and sending electronic money and rewriting personal statements and listening to skull-rattling gangsta rap. Sliding that first completed one into the mailbox, I almost heard the click. New human being, new daily bread, new settings on my alarm clock, new skylines, new means of conveyance, new pollution in my lungs, new garbage in my newspaper, new bass in my headphones, new software to write with, new photos to fuck up, new people to alienate and avoid, new dreams at new altitudes, new brands of alcohol. Most importantly: new trade, new 40hours+, new opportunities. The only lesson I can give on this: Remember that what you do for yourself can never be taken from you. Make a plan and hold it glowing in your ribcage like fascists might drag you from your bed pre-dawn. Hold it above everything: carnal desires, food, your health, your happiness, familial obligations, your god, your illnesses and allergies, the law, propriety, comfort, sanity, bills, everything.

"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings"

2008-11-29T00:44:00.008-05:00

(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.

"unfolding below him like a map in one slow silent explosion"

2008-11-23T00:10:00.004-05:00

(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.

"Cross rubicons you filthy children"

2008-11-15T22:06:00.004-05:00

(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.

" . . .Like: 'Momma I want to sing'"

2008-11-10T22:47:00.004-05:00

(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.

"Motherfuckers better realize"

2008-11-03T23:06:00.003-05:00

(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.

"A path cut 1,500 years ago"

2008-10-27T21:24:00.003-04:00

(quote: PJ Harvey, video: The Mindscape of Alan Moore)

I'm in Pocatello, Idaho tonight. Another fervid drive out of my town and into the nether regions of the west. And I drove into the rising sun at 7am completely by myself, half asleep at 90 miles an hour listening to the news on the radio devolve into static. A broadcast pure and unadulterated, no spin or bias or ulterior motives; simply the amplified sound of silence. And then I half-assed a training session in the middle of nowhere, bored yokels resenting the armload of software I'm intended to bring down to them like some cybernetic Prometheus. I drink their weak coffee, I eat their shrink-wrapped donuts, I sweat and go cotton-mouthed for lack of sleep. And then I drive nearly a hundred miles and stop at Idaho's Largest Army Surplus store. Several stolid acres of cast-off woolen garments, wrenches the size of a femur, empty .50 caliber shells, watch caps and socks that carry the scratch of eczema in their every fiber. And then to Pocatello where there's a hotel room on the hill waiting for me. I spoil the afternoon poking my head into used bookstores, and eating at a deli watching the college girls come and go from their classes, drinking coffee and watching youtube videos while the guy next to me talks loudly about Fantasy Football, and I can't will the scenester chick in the striped sweater to turn around and look at me. At first glance, speeding by on the freeway, Pocatello seems generic; the staple arrangement of gas stations, hotels, department stores, chain restaurants. All replicas of towns all over the country as though a helicopter deploys them in one drop as guided by socio-political strategy from on high. But then I go way downtown for dinner . . .fifteen miles or more off the freeway, and the old trainyard, and the leftover hotels sided with faded advertisements for products that no longer exist, the long-bearded shaman throwing cardboard boxes from the loading dock of the Idaho Foodbank into a scuffed garbage bin, the three familiar kids smoking cloves on the stoop of a church that has seen a century. All of it so beautiful, the only thing I can do is sit on a patio and drink a local-brew stout and try to make time stand still.

I took the GRE and scored well enough to keep me on any number of admissions lists. I halfway expected this, but the simple process makes graduate school seem all the more inevitable. I'll be moving from Idaho just in time to miss it all horribly. This is how it goes. And, what I've learned since leaving home is that you can never truly go back. How we feel in a place is a tentative, fragile, temporal melange of experience that depends on so much . . . but most of all our presence. It changes as soon as you leave, as you track pieces of it with you like mud and leave a wake of dead leaves and swirling plastic bags behind you. It all settles again looking nothing like it once did. All the detritus rearranged.

I tend to avoid overt politicization on this thing. Unlike in my real-life where, as you may know, I have virulent, angry opinions on politics. But I have to say: we MUST elect Barack Obama. Not because he will heal all wounds or instantly eradicate the world's problems. Not because his motives are pure and perfectly aligned with our ideals. Not because he wants to regulate that which needs to be regulated and institute a new economic justice. Not because he is black, or the most experienced candidate we could hope for. We need to vote for him because he is better than us. He is, most likely, a better human being overall then most of the people that will read this and certainly a better human being than the person writing it. He is intelligent, (com)passionate, steadfast, and most of all fearless. I can't imagine the fall-out if he loses or, worst of all, the the whole thing is stolen right from under him.

"The artist is engaged in writing a detailed history of the future"

2008-10-20T00:07:00.003-04:00

(quote: Marshall McLuhan)

I added a new story to the Short Story page.

"The thing is not yet written"

2008-10-19T01:56:00.004-04:00

(quote: me, video: PJ Harvey-White Chalk)

As part of the grad school application process, I'm currently studying for the GRE. I find myself using bigger words in conversation. Perhaps only my Marxists and Anarchists will see it, but the discourse, the subtext of the GRE . .the actual words they use to compose questions are oppressive and corroborate the dominant ideology. For example: "Fueds tend to arise in societies that lack centralized government, when public justice is difficult to enforce, private recourse is more brutal." and "However, the devious act of physically pilfering something from a record store is hardly present in the action of pressing a keyboard button from the repose of one's home." and an emphasis on the value of Organic Solidarity as described by Durkheim, and a dozen other subtle reinforcements of pragmatic American thought. Also, in the process of preparing for graduate school applications, I'm struggling to figure out what to submit. I like the things I've written most recently, but there is an inkling that these are not the ideal candidates in form or point or style. They are not MFA stories. I have written those too . . .but in the tail-end of this summer I've changed my game. I don't know which is best to present . . .

Everything is becoming very real. The latent precipitating and becoming the standard-bearer, the ache in my bones. Peeling off skin before it's ready, the musculature and capillaries raw and fresh to the air. I can smell it in my sleep. This move was another remove from what I remember. And now I'm a thousand miles, and one more reversal and negation from home. Nowhere is home. Everywhere is home.

I felt a twinge of fear. Good, resource-holding fear like some diluted perversion of what ancestors felt as the seasons changed. The financial crisis, coupled with lay-offs and money-troubles of those around me, engendered one lonely second where I reconsidered the wisdom of this whole MFA deal. And then radical reversion . . .security is a weakness, comfort is for hospice . . .sometimes we have to go into the cold with no jacket.

The Woman In My Life

2008-10-12T23:19:00.009-04:00

I have this cat, Tiva. She rightly belongs to the City of Detroit and its denizens but she grudgingly came out to Idaho with me. The Mookfish obtained her and named her and raised her, and when he went off to the high seas I became her new full-time human. I never had cats growing up; I thought they were silly and maybe even effeminate. I thought I was suited to having a big, muscly dog to wrestle with and pack up in the car for camping trips. And then I was virtually alone in a new place and so was Tiva. And as lame as it sounds, she's the only real possession I have that it would sadden me to lose. She chatters with me, and yells at me, and gives me a hard-time. She likes to sit in boxes and chew on plastic and chase laser-beams and eat tuna. She likes to fight and lay stretched out in the sun. She likes to pretend she doesn't want my affection, and brushes up against me even as I sit here typing. She likes to rub her glands on the corners of things and purr. When I'm having an anxiety-attack, or a temper tantrum, or a rough go of things she hangs out near me and nudges my hand with her head. When I try to read she stands on the book and arches her back. Anyway . . .today I thought I lost her. She went out the door and vanished in our new neighborhood, full of other cats and dogs and supposedly even foxes and maybe coyotes in that big rubble and weed field a few hundred yards away. I put a Hamm's in the cupholder of my brother's car and idled down the street catching eyes from the white trash and African refugees and displaced Muslims of my neighborhood. I interrogated a tiny feral kitty as to her whereabouts. I climbed fences and slinked around trespassing in backyards. And then, after I'd given up, she sauntered up to the door and meowed through the glass. We always appreciate things most when there is the risk that we've lost them.

In preparation for grad school, I've begun to make the rounds and formally request letters of recommendation. It's SOP for academics I suppose, and all three of these professors probably crank out at least a dozen of them each semester. But I still view it as an incredible favor, one I hope I get to pay forward to some gracious genius ten years from now. Last week, I met with my History of Literary Criticism professor to talk about this. She was enthusiastic about writing my letter. And, because I'm risking the creative route, she asked if she could see some of my work. I e-mailed her a story. Somehow, this is the most self-conscious I have ever been about having someone read. And I'm also very interested to see what she thinks. More than that, though, she has taken it upon herself to contact several people at her alma mater. This is a school I would very much like to go to, and one I'm increasingly thinking I have a good chance to get into. Also, I introduced her to Literary Darwinism and we talked until well after her office hours were open and I suggested things she might want to read. I don't know how often that sort of thing happens.

My brother has been laid off from his shit/great job fabricating computer memory. One of the largest employers in ID is making deep cutbacks. The effects of this will ripple through Boise and touch the real estate industry, the service industry, the tax base . . .probably even me somehow. But it's just a sign of things. American life in a few years time will not look like it does now. There is a great reckoning and balance to come. The more I think about this and consider the factors, the more I realize the primacy of some dirt and rock philosophy that we never should have ignored. "The Truth will always present itself". We've been living on credit, on inflated value, on the sweat of others, in a dreamworld in which everyone deserves to own a house and bear children and fill their gas tank and have surgery. That time is nearing an end. 300 million untenable lives, and the imbalances waiting for us there in the future like some Judge Holden to make things as they should be. I am gainfully employed and insured and guaranteed to make X amount of dollars every two weeks for at least the next year. But I've chosen since graduation day to live below my means. To stow what's left of my income after intoxicants and book purchases and tuition and meager groceries and took pleasure in watching my savings account swell. And in that time I never allowed myself the taste of being well-off. I eat off a George Foreman and out of cans. I drink cheap swill most of the time. I steal music and movies. I pedal nearly everywhere I go. I buy everything second-hand. We call what is going on now a "Housing Crisis" or a "Credit Crisis" or an "Energy Crisis", but what it amounts to is that most of us have been living a lie for a decade plus. The Truth is about to present itself.

"A light here required a shadow there"

2008-10-01T23:23:00.004-04:00

(Video: Terrence McKenna-Nobody Is Smarter Than You Are, quote: Virginia Woolf)

As I get older I see things that will not change for me: I will get angry at small things, I will feel tenderness and try to hide it, I will watch people and note their attributes, I will disdain the authoritative, I will revel in the arts, I will seek science to correct my assumptions, I will suffer and celebrate, I will write. And all these things are what comes closest to your soul, comprise your consciousness, hold the names of your ancestors . . . Almost everything else will change: you will learn new things, and meet new people, and scrape by in new places, and the winds of politics will change, and good times will precede bad, and you will cry and laugh. But the anxiety (in all senses) of what life will be like when we are older can be shouldered and absorbed: You are already who you are. There is no other You waiting for its time to emerge.

I do not believe in writer's block. This is not to say that I have never experienced a dearth of fresh thought; I'm often exhausted, hung-over, stressed, anxious, addled. But I've found that even in the most uninspired evening there is revision to complete, reading to do, dreams to interpret, conversations to have. See, sitting at the word processor is only one component, if the largest, of doing this thing. The processor in the head never, ever stops.
[BTW, updated the Short Stories page so it contains everything legible from the last year or so. I've got another three stories in rough draft that will seep onto that page]

I told my bosses that I will be going to grad school next year, confirmed suspicions I know they had by the way they reacted. There was a relief in it, like when the unnoticed machine in the next room stops whirring and you suddenly hear every detail. I had been holding onto this scrap of dishonesty, grasping it close like I belonged to secret societies and my name on their roster spelled disaster. I let it all out, and not a word to mislead: my current gig was the best I could hope for when I graduated, I have enjoyed getting to know these guys, I am willing to accept whatever possible impact this might have on my 'career'. And then these middle-aged men, married, committed to jobs they neither hate or love, smart and insightful and prosaic, spoke words of encouragement. To them this became something I had to do, they tipped their figurative hats to my dedication and my "balls". They asked to read things that I've been working on. They lamented the day when I would no longer be in the office. Even now, they're considering keeping me on the payroll part time . . .so when I'm eating Ramen in some squalid flat god knows where I can plug into the Internet and make more money then I'm worth to anyone.

"In vacant places, we will build with new bricks"

2008-09-24T23:24:00.005-04:00

(video: Paul Newman [RIP] in Cool Hand Luke; quote: T.S. Eliot)

Great stories end and are punctuated by death or departure. And, too, I think our lives are shaped by how we leave and how we die, as much as they are on how we arrive and are born. For the narrative of your live to be of any value it must be fragmented and broken upon hardships, ensconced and mutated by love, stretched thin and cultivated by your work, and fortified and weaponized by your willingness to allow it to change. I have asked for no easy things in life, and despite my fortune I've brooked no accolades undeserving, swiped no credit under false pretenses, assembled no houses of cards that I did not intend to leave to the inevitable wind. Like the myths of Oceania I've always felt my heritage, one I scrapped together from books and hallucinogens and frustration, was to move continually. Make land, and terraform and plant things and watch seasons change, and then disembark. From one island to the next; absorbing, seeing, taking, leaving, until the waters are untraversable and I have to choose sitting still or dying.

All this year I've been on course for one short-story draft a month. I've made it to October, perfectly on course even with a half-dozen things that were discarded on page 8 and mid-month. But now, I need two polished stones from the wreckage so I can mail it to a dozen schools around the country and cross fingers. So it's edit mode for a few weeks, redlining shit I wrote a year ago before I was who I am. As a writer everything that I did not write within the last 10 minutes feels amateur, inexperienced, naive. But the more I read things, and pick through the 120 pages I've committed as draft over the last year . . .there is this thing like pride glowing in my belly.

Seven hundred billion dollars, like some stultified proof that our money isn't real anyway. And then what does the time it took to earn it mean? In percentages, in appendages, in slack-jawed dawns peeling possessions from their packaging. And who are these people that may take it from you? In namesake, in descendancy, in half-solved puzzling over the taut sky darkening. There is no threshold for success, here. Debates pull teeth like 'existential threat', like war undermines our humanity. No advocating violence, but we've killed since time unreal . . .the philosophical catastrophe is that they've come to think our livelihood is their's.

Everything in flux, all ways. Le the universals splinter, spin me blinking, rattle the rented cage of my dented skull. Let the concrete ache in my sodden bones moan. The scalpel that cut me from the motherly carves out wooden identities and arcs dry lakebeds to rest in while storms gather. Only storms and thoughts gather, people collide and swarm. Water finds home where it is low . . .and I am destined to drown.

"Because it's hard. "

2008-09-16T00:06:00.006-04:00

(Video: El-P "Patriotism", Quote: David Foster Wallace in a commencement speech)

David Foster Wallace hung himself the other day. He was not the most unlikely artist to commit suicide, I will admit. And I do not pretend to judge his decision as an individual. I have never believed that suicide is the "cowards way out". He was neither a coward nor a fool, a weakling nor a solipsist. We cannot sit and declaim what he did as a terrible wrong without the impossible empathy of being inside his head. But, goddamnit Mr. Wallace, you cheated ME. You were 46 and one of a handful of writers I actually looked up to and envied for your prowess. For fuck's sake, even your work that I didn't like changed the way I thought about writing. Call me selfish, but Infinite Jest was not enough. You gypped me. I don't know that I can forgive that.

I'm losing the heart for engineering. I was never the most enthusiastic participant in this trade, but I would mostly grin and bear it. I'm in Suburban LA all this week. Drinking whiskey in a generic room, flipping through channels so fast it's just fuzz and scrolling news about Sarah Palin and advertisements for Cialis. Looking out my window and pretending I smoke cigarettes, pondering the mysteries inside the Tustin blimp hangars 100 feet or miles from my plastic rental car. They must house monsters or documents or the control room for the coming nuclear holocaust. During the day I yell to co-workers that I've found access points to coil, moldy cabling and have a foundling's understanding of how these traffic lights work. They all come into work hilariously post-9am and stay paralyzingly late into the eveing: there is no way to get any LAist into or out of work in a reasonable amount of time. Moreover, what I cannot say is how little I care. You cannot be truly compensated for hours or days or nights in your laboratory; there is no equation to rightly convert time to money. I wake up sweating in strange sheets to the sound of the icemaker and fret paranoid over the neurons that have been reassigned during the day; poetry congealed into the arrangement of data, my creative eye poisoned for the sake of seeing plan-sets clearly. The woman riding shotgun rants on the ugliness of corporatization during our mid-afternoon Starbucks break. Santa Ana does not understand irony. This time next year, I will be in grad school, or teaching English to children in India, or working an oil derrick on the frozen sea. One of these.

I called three different people tonight to ease the loneliness of being in a place so strangely populated. My mother did not answer, a kid in Detroit did not answer, a girl I obviously do not understand didn't answer. The simple thing to think is that I could not drum up interest. That people saw my name on the LCD and hit ignore, or caught it a moment later and decided against returning. Or perhaps I'm literally stuck here, the Inland Empire its very own planet with a high-smog atmosphere and godawful exchange rate for cash identical to ours. And then the realization that this is how I feel about every place, simply amplified. I'm a contrarian and understand things based on what about them I hate or am alienated by. And so no place feels like home because it never matches the image in my head (something like this, but with free internet and a weed farm in the backyard) and I'm never satisfied in my relationships because I see right through them to the end. But this anxiety mandates some resolution, at least some comfort in the desire to throw things and kill brain cells. And I've hit upon it, so brutally simple I could have surmised it as a child: there is nothing permanent, and you do not want it to be.

"The time that you've been afforded."

2008-09-09T23:12:00.004-04:00

(Quote: TVOTR, Video: Nietzsche's Last Days)
[I've got a draft of a story here . . .I really don't like the title.]

Moving in coming months. To a one bedroom or studio that I'll furnish with nothing but my floordesk and bedframe and whiteboard and collage and cat. And my only dishes coffee cups and plates handed down to me from a mythic drugsmuggler. All this coincident with being as close to home in Boise as I ever thought I might. No retirement, but the bachelor herd here will be missed. And moving might mean diluting my socialization time, in these 5 unraveling weeks between semesters I've had too much fun to wake up with a clean conscience. I found the Dionysian riot here, it can't always be stopped by force.

I made a friend the other night, and despite her smiles and laughs she was afflicted with depression. To be treated with chemicals. And I said: "On September 4th, 2008 I am really very happy." And I meant it because in the barrage of streetlights and cigarette smoke and declamations of seizure and embrace I truly was. And ignorant of the rising waters and circling helicopters, I stacked up complications and distractions until the Sunday following anxiety bound my arms and legs and I laid fetal listening to the absurdity of Kool Keith thinking nothing was real and everything mattered. I have no time for this.

Each school of literary theory says something. Even when there was no school but one-man philosophers leading us of out caves, things still stand that were said. And even as thought fractured and its pieces grew spines, Structuralism said things, and Marxism said things and the Romantics said things that we can still discuss until you sober up. But, I've come upon the one that hits me hardest. Literary Darwinism is the use of Evolutionary Psychology ("the application of adaptionist logic to the study of the architecture of the mind"-Leda Cosmides) to further understand texts. The field is nascent and fumbling and promising there glistening in its afterbirth. One example is this: a common theme in literature (and in life) is the tension between "selfish" choices (a life of independence, even rebellion) and feelings of brotherhood and concern for one's community or family. In evolutionary biology, we understand that the individual is a survival machine weaponized to replicate the species selfishly. but behaviorally we see altruism as a foundation of society because it is an effective way to survive (cooperation is genetic technology). Selfishness vs. altruism is an ingrained tension that we struggle with our entire life (conservatism vs. liberalism). It only makes sense that great literature should recreate this anxiety. There are other examples. All similarly revealing. Im writing a paper that will partly analyze Heart of Darkness through the means of this criticism.

Thank You

2008-08-26T15:37:00.003-04:00

One of my favorite professors of all time has passed away in a house fire that devastated a neighborhood in southeast Boise. In a matter of five weeks, she changed the way I think about language and thus altered the course of my career and personal philosophy. Her enthusiasm was contagious, her warmth to her students unprecedented, and her teaching abilities nonpareil. Thanks, Professor Ryder, for your dedication and your encouragement, you have had a profound impact on me and many, many other students. I just wish I could have had one more class with you.

"Write your fucking heart out"

2008-08-22T13:10:00.004-04:00

There is some evidence in Evolutionary Psychology that indicates that success breeds success (The Success Cycle) and failure breeds failure (the Maladaptive Cycle). That when we win, we relish the next fight irrespective of talent and capacity. And that when we lose, we tend towards depression and perhaps self-loathing. If true (and the genetic support for this is still murky to me, it has a whiff of group selection) this process led to difference amplification and thus accelerated the developments in men of RHP (Fighting Capacity). What is interesting are the results of repeated failure. We get sad and hopeless and forlorn. Or we get angry. Which do you think is the best strategy to extricate ourselves from the Maladaptive Cycle?

Writing: If I had not had my meagre measure of pain, I could not express it. And if I had lived hermetic and alone I could not name a character or depict expression. And if I had never been in love I could not explain warmth. And if I had never lost it I could not explain the cold. And if I had not screamed my share of rebel yells, you'd have no reason to turn your ear to my calls for philosophical riots or ignoring the rules. And if I had not seen trouble I could not commune with the downtrodden. And if I had not slept joyously after bacchanal and bleary-eyed passion, I could never pound a happy thing into this keyboard. I am a lowercase 'a' artist, these days more than ever, and the only lesson I could ever give to another on it: Be willing to suffer, be reckless at times, be withdrawn at others. Be embarrassed and proud. Be everything, all at once and sleep only to keep from falling down.

Had a saturday of dormant coincidence finding purchase in farewells and the pearlescent pre-dawn after them. Woke up smiling like you'd think I never do if you read this thing. Knowing: You cannot have your name on a dozen rosters and not be noticed by someone, or everyone. And every word you say is inscribed on some ledger, even if the subconscious. I've found a social niche in Boise, or rather a half-dozen of them to poke my head and speak my irreverence in. More and more people to miss with every pined-for weekend. Suddenly, my monklike existence has been dosed by grace like I have been toiling in some medieval cell inscribing bibles by hand, the wind and rain swirling through my window . . . and then one day summer breaks and I notice how many green things have grown at the foot of the monastery's door.

"Beyond a certain point, there can be no return. This point must be reached."

2008-08-19T00:01:00.003-04:00

(video: Cornell West on Real Time, quote: Franz Kafka)

Reading Anarchist political thought and finding nothing there that truly transcends anything. Thus far it leans towards socialism. "From each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs" like a spit in the face to the whole manner in which we've survived through this epic. Granted that was written at a time when less was known about the human mind; but we see in all tendrils of evolutionary psychology and game theory and economics and yes even history that this strategy fails. It creates an artificial environment that breeds an undue quantity of cheaters. It is bound to cast itself into vicious tumult that only a fascist can briefly put right. It channels only the most idealistic, and thus the eventually weakest, tendency of human nature. Yes we could feel empathy for some small tribe that churns out a product. But could those we trade with ever be trusted? Casting your lot with those you know, even if admittedly outside your genetic bonfire, is possible and happens frequently. But sweating out everything for far-off strangers on a planet teeming with those you don't know, people you may have no issue with but yet are subject to different cultural pressures than you . . .how can it honestly be thought that people en masse will toil for the livelihood of people they cannot influence? I have more to say on this, but more reading to do first.

Giddy like xmas eve of '93 for grad school. And it's one year, and one year does not feel like the long yawn it once did. I met with a former professor of mine for sage advice; I will not leave any advantage to rivals or the wind. He's convinced me that I will be successful, that I will end up some place. That he reads applications himself and would vote my work into his institution. Nothing firm there to pin the label "success" on, but I've never worked this hard for something that belonged purely to me. And to know the trench I dig is deep and straight, it makes the shovel move faster.

I like the rabble. I like noise and dirt and spiders and waking up so groggy that one's entire life seems punctuated by a fever-dream that you cannot remember. I like to argue and fight and point my finger at god and government for the weirdness they have wreaked, and I like to scream out that they hold no rule over my life. I'll compromise my free will to science, but no god and no master will take it from me. I like to stagger into work on no sleep with the stink of misdeeds still leeching from my pores. I like to rip a hole in the middle of my yuppie day and bleed from it and ache from it for no other reason but that my body will endure. I like to craft rites of passage via bricolage and name my impulses like dogs in heat. I like working long into the night, save one in five when I run the streets and burn through brain cells and am liable to convert your son or daughter to my cult. It's all completely untenable, and that's the point: so is being alive.

"Who are the children and who the adults?"

2008-08-04T23:07:00.007-04:00

( video: Ira Glass on story-telling, quote: Henry Miller "Lime Twigs and Treachery. btw: well over 200 posts now!)

Your children are the problem. It pains me to say that, and it hurts down to my very genes and spine to persecute perhaps the only purpose true in our swirl. Energy, war, terrorism, angst, exploitation . . . these fruits all see their source in too many fucking people. And perhaps we may just escape this terra damnata, but even in that we'll choose who goes and who stays. We'll excise some gleaming class of beings with no more right to liberty than the sons of oil profiteers and hotel heiresses. And who does not meet those thresholds in this long pause will squabble and legislate and recycle their soup tins and petition the gov't to kick down scraps . . .but no one will ever say: "dose the water supply with birth control", or "implant an IVD with every vaccination".

The burned landscape stands charred lodgepole pine as a warning and a relief. From this things can be recovered. And to create, the old must sometimes be destroyed. And the burn is a year or two old, the upstart forest clambering over itself for the new sunlight with deformed little trees and the splayed hands of ferns. I'm city-born and city-bred, but the shadows and rock and water so fierce you can almost hear it screaming your name . . .in it the most profound thought can be examined: no thought at all.

I had an irreal workshop with a new friend last week. He's read a solid fraction of the things I've written over the last year and thinks that this is the best. Following close-critique of the story we meandered into something a bit more philosophical. And I had to wonder how much calculation and generation I have going on subconsciously, he saw things that are clearly there and are tendrils or tributaries of what I want to say; but I have never clearly thought all those thoughts.

"As well ask men what they think of stone."

2008-07-28T23:24:00.004-04:00

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.

"wolves cull themselves"

2008-07-19T23:16:00.006-04:00

(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."

"there is no remembrance of former things"

2008-07-07T23:57:00.002-04:00

(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.

division, diligence, depiction

2008-07-02T00:29:00.003-04:00

(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.

"gotta work everyday"

2008-06-22T23:18:00.007-04:00

(video: Oprah's interview of Cormac McCarthy pt. 1)

This will be my last full summer in Boise. A fact slowly dawning when I drag myself up creaking from the floor earlier than my body wants to rise. And retrospects to be saved for the proper time, but interaction with fam from past lives has me edgy and forlorn for back east. The work is being put in, the name will get submitted to the proper places, something will certainly happen. And its not as though there is nothing for me here, ingratiated more every drunken night I leave the laboratory, but it will certainly be time to move on as it was time to then.

I went through my room today and threw things out. Ill-fitting clothes, widgets for this purpose and that, a bag of sentimentality that will always burn in my brain. I moved my bed out into the other room and cleared pacing room on the floor. Where that sliver of sunlight comes in now at around 7am, two feet below that space I don't seem to have the heart to occupy anymore. I think we kill brain cells to forget, everything I touch and see in this room saturated with memories some painful enough they serve as their own scar. French words in permanent marker on my desk to remind me of how badly I misstepped. Four vinyl journals for the past 6 years housing all manner of diegetic nonsense, words I don't remember thinking and that I couldn't write again. A knee-high stack of criticism and lonely hours spent. Several hundred books that raised me and put hair on my chest. All these things I keep of course, the rest means nothing. Some synthesis of Bertrand Russell and GG Allin.

Ben Franklin had this thing. He chose to socialize with those he thought would help the revolution. And maybe that explains my being reclusive. I have the greatest peace when I'm with those that are somehow subtly making me a better writer. Challenging notions, invoking jealousy with their own work, showing me some further way to be happy with rien. On Friday I drank too much with someone I hope will trade favors with me in this regard. I gave him some guidance in the gym, and I'm hoping when I'm his student this fall he'll accept nothing but my best. And then tell me why its still shit. Poetry, not fiction, but I've got a grand arrogant thing I want to write that fits right in that niche.

" . . .got a little crust in my third eye."

2008-06-17T00:18:00.005-04:00

(video: William Gibson on writing)

Realizing there aren't 5 people that I don't miss waiting out here in the desert. Like I could carve homunuclus out of hunks of plastic blanched in the sun. And this one has your tattoos, and this one has your scoliosis, this your orange hair, this your sewer's hands, this your piercings, this your meteorite eyes marbled by the heat of their descent. And yes I left. And I'll leave a million times and know a million saints that will bless my path in exchange for whatever discomfort I can provide.

Went to Ohio and communed with one of those above. Drank in a hole where the benches crumble under the intoxication and they'll serve anything as long as it might kill you. And wandered in humidity, me with untold sideways glances. And then a party in a far-flung field that caught me by surprise. Fresh air and fast friends and stories I have nothing with which to contend in the subtle light of citronella candles. And I could have gone on listening and occasionally saying something long into the next day ...which happened and passed quickly no matter how hard I tried.

Hide a secret in the center of a brick hewn from the earth by no hands. I've contributed to the wealth of no man. While my father sleeps I steal anything I can. Kisses from the least of beings, glances that peel everything, and the ammunition that sings my escape plan. There is no evidence, 've interred my whole life in that plaintive land.

"Policing language is a waste of time"

2008-06-10T00:18:00.004-04:00

(video: Network)

After much confusion and bureaucracy and bitching, my explicitly required Intro. to Linguistics course has begun. It's in this contrived glass and drywall nuisance tucked behind the math building, some unholy conglomeration of food vending and study nooks and trendy chairs and tables with locked wheels arranged in a well-researched pattern for optimizing pedagogy. No dismissal of what I'm going to learn there, however. The prof paces back and forth across the front of the room, throwing things up onto the whiteboard ad hoc, relating relevant parables of a life lived spastically, pointing out the skeletons of predecessors who did not take her seriously. The subject matter itself is instantly enthralling, I've studied this thing so circuitously and empty-handed and now to have terms and studies and it is thus far dovetailing nicely with whatever else I think I know about being a human.

Following that I had a further training session in Microstation. Which is one of these tremendously powerful software packages that makes the last several hundred years of engineering seem almost silly. And there are 9 other people in there that are "just like me" . . .coming to this thing on their company's dime so they can return to the cubicle more marketable and talented. And though the time is a sacrifice that is impossible for me to ignore, I'm there doing it and ripping through exercises faster than anyone though I sit there with charged neurotransmitters and the least experience in the room. So . . the point . . .standing around in the lobby waiting for temp. passes and the excitable little man that runs the course to peel himself away from whatever insanely complex project he must be working on, the engineers talk to each other. And, yes, there's talk about our commonalities and overlaps in our respective businesses. But there's something I still can't understand, no matter how often I see it. Actual, genuine interest in landscape architecture and drainage and design standards. Like an alien, I feel.

This weekend I took things right up to that edge called "too far" and woke up with no memory of the drunken stammering and self-aggrandizement that must have esclated and finally plateaued and gradually ebbed into a childish yammering as I fell asleep dreamless. And piecing together what happened, and the relevant outline did emerge sequined with unreliable images and the way light played on things and a few hard-edged words that still cut at the morass, was like relearning to talk or dance in fast forward. Like my brain had been emptied, its contents handled roughly and poured back in. Whatever detritus was added or slurry atomized and lost to the air, there will be this runic punctuation mark there in my memory and experience.

"The Universe is an Intelligence Test"

2008-06-07T12:17:00.004-04:00

(video: "The End of the World Cult")

I thought of eventually working in academia as a reasonable career. Surround myself with words at the very least, receive money for food and rent for talking about things I love. But there is something more to this now. There is weakness in academia, poly-solipsism fragmenting the study of life entire into mutually exclusive shards, resentment and fear staring over those thick black lines into that which you do not study. I think writers should know physics, Engineers should understand color, business majors should read about anthropology. There's no way to really do this in the current system, all the spoils of discipline to the autodidacts, but maybe if someone tried . . .

Last night I had a dream that I was afflicted with Amputee Identity Disorder and while living in a root cellar in Arusha I used hedge clippers to cut off the tip of my thumb and my left pinkie as a whole. There was no pain but a sort of relief, a throbbing dissipated that I didn't even recognize until it was gone. Everything else suddenly more in focus. And then upon awaking, how pleasant to see my hands intact.

Added a "Short Stories" link on the upper-right. That'll be the home for new things as they hit PDF export button. Thanks.

The Quiet is a Scourge

2008-06-03T01:51:00.003-04:00

" '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.

"I owe much, I have nothing. The rest I leave to the poor."

2008-05-27T21:07:00.005-04:00

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.

Pastless, Panic, Paternity

2008-05-19T01:11:00.004-04:00

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.

Mississippi Drug War Blues

2008-05-08T09:34:00.000-04:00

2008-05-08T00:50:00.002-04:00

"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

elegy. empathy. emphasis

2008-05-05T23:47:00.004-04:00

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.

"Find yourself" "mired in work"

2008-04-23T00:34:00.004-04:00

Finished this tonight. I think I like it and might be putting it in the "for MFA application" pile. If you read it, please let me know what you think.

Also, final rev of One or Two, subtle differences really.

One a month, on pace for a little more than that.

So. Things didn't work out. And I thought it would mess me up. But, I'm happier than I've been in a minute. Blessings in disguise. I'm so much more comfortable with anger than I am with anxiety and uncertainty. Lessons learned: follow your instincts, speak your mind, remember that everything is voluntary.

“Through every moment of pain in this...I will feel blessed.”

The two proposition, self-cancelling structure

2008-04-19T19:38:00.002-04:00

We only let the experts conduct research, design experiments, plumb the depths for new factoids. The remainder are to sit in stiff chairs and take notes, dutifully repeat their interpretations and calculations. In free time, grant the kids rooms to smoke and hypothesize in. Let them there ask their questions and fill their whiteboards and laugh at each other when the whole thing goes surreal. The results of any other approach are a tangle, unreliable, executed with hands trembling in excitement. 've got to demonstrate patience before you can actualize the Flow and let the well-honed subconscious automate the details. And in writing maybe it is the same. Donning a white lab coat now to find out.

I prefer the winter, it seems. 15 hours of daylight is enough to almost drag me out into it. The circumspect sun and the smell of spring things bursting and mountain air inflating corrupted lungs; that is all in my phylogeny. But the cold and the dark: 70,000 years ago this is what we lived in, and this is how we were tested. Bottleneck down to 15 thou-, trim off the weakest limbs, teach the sturdiest boughs how to scrabble through anything.

But then again, its coming the time for ill-advised trips out of the city. Into mountains and deserts and maybe bigger cities with more than one area code. Get to see my boy for the first time in a while, more than that we'll spend some 'quality time' . . .like ID has custody and this visit will be unsupervised.

Those Who Wait

2008-04-16T10:48:00.007-04:00

There's a diatribe about emotional commitment every time my stomach rumbles or my alarm clock raps to me or I've just written a page. And it's not merely distracting oneself to ignore the anxiety of being alive . . .

Discipline is what separates us from beasts. And other things. There is no latent human trait that sparks it, understanding that sweat and effort now brings ecstasy later is too abstract to explain in symbols and color. And the only recourse is to enjoy the stress, find beauty in little sufferings, value personal sacrifices. Understand your weaknesses and demand things from them. Trust this . . I really just want to drink and play video games.

And this colors my dissatisfaction in the grind. There is no way to pour myself into this salt mine. Engineering, in this niche, is interesting but I exert no creativity, I feel no responsibility or accomplishment by pushing myself, there is no pride, and, most, there is no joy in this stress. But I'm good at it. This is my safety net for life. Strange: I could have done this straight out of high school.

gratitude, apologies, affection: this is none of these

2008-04-13T12:00:00.002-04:00

On the 12th I was stood up and leaned out into the arboric night for bacchanal and battery. Shots in warm whiskey glasses and eying scenester girls that I've likely met and forgot in similar scenes. This is remasculation, this is like the time I called her by the wrong name in my head. From there parkoured my way with accomplices across all viable blocks. Jumping benches to the delight of weiner vendors, dancing atop concrete displays of corporate insidiousness. A waitress at an unholy amalgamation of Urban Cowboy and every building I avoid, asked us if vodka is the same as tonic. Our drinks were weak and cheap. A woman's globular breast popped out from her tapestry as she rode the mechanical bull. Most people were there to see that.
And then to the late night dance mess at the hipster bar where sometimes friends of mine play guitars and yell drunk things into microphones. This so familiar from dancing Detroit nights that I feel like a partner. Like there is some nonfinancial investment in all this bass and remix. I have friends there I've never spoke to but who recognize my jig. They point when I hit the floor. Art is the tension between what the artist does and what he or she does not do. Here I sprained my ankle because some voice from the 90s demanded that I jump. And I continued to dance because you were not there, and I was. Survivalism something we consider in mornings-after. We took a taxi for a free garbage bag of pizza and conversations with Jabba the Hut, who now sells cellphones on Broadway. We presume his sex slaves have filed civil suits and now live in small towns. I walked a mile to my hovel with that ankle, swelling up as though snakes had laid eggs in it. It does not bend or support weight now that I've leeched the alcohol.

return, more or less

2008-04-08T21:43:00.003-04:00

Had a great workshop, if for nothing but the ego boost. This was the most positive response I've recieved thus far. And with a piece I wasn't totally comfortable with. In discussions with the prof. afterwards, he indicated I'd have no problem getting into an MFA program:"The scene beginning on page 9 is near-perfect".

Enough of that. Reading Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale and finding it inseparable from my dreams, from the videos I watch on the Internet, from the other things I'm reading. I wake up with the sense that I've just survived some tragic, dystopic vignette. I want to sleep twelves hours a day just for my dreams. Just for a sliver of what's going on in there . . .

I think I've exhausted all potentialities, in my head. I'm ready for whatever. Just don't take my basement or my word processor or my weed or my cat or my inspiration. And just don't drag it out: I turn 25 years old next week. The time is now.

"Lost in translation, ya'll just lost in traffic."

2008-03-31T22:51:00.012-04:00

Finished a story tonight. Posting it here along with a revision of the last thing I wrote:

One or Two

Sleep is No Mean Art

Had a fortune cookie in my mongolian yesterday: "Next week at this time, something good is coming your way." Is that right?

eventually

2008-03-25T01:06:00.003-04:00

Studying Engineering was difficult for me. The academic rigors were one thing (and I posit it as the most difficult undergraduate pursuit). But my mind was another. I never thought like an engineer, though I learned to incorporate its virtues into my experience. Learned the morality of function: a thing that does not work is of diminished value, it reverts to the sum of its parts. Learned to be critical of efficiency and logic: go on and pit your syllogisms against Gravity and Entropy. Developed a systematic approach to understanding things. And yet, I dreamed. I wrote poems. I read. I wrote two and a half novels in my time learning Statics and Calculus. And the hunger in my stomach was palpable, barking at the future. Demanding its share of time, its attention. Barking to keep one up at night.

And so, this kid (forget the chemicals and the altercations and the music and the slinking in the shadows). Walked down that windtunnel between limestone monuments, splashed feet in puddles limned with cigarettes, cut swathes through crowds of pigeons. I promised him that I would feed it. That when this Engineering thing fizzled (when I finally suffocated, see, and emerged) I would do whatever I had to do to learn my craft. To sharpen tools I thought I had. To find the truest way to transliterate the world I know into the world that is.

And so today I had this thought about the dim possibility that undergrad would extend another year, and I'd be another two semesters floundering around. Waiting for real concentration, waiting for real challenge. Writing, writing, but without the sobering sense of booktitle English accomplishments. And I just remembered myself walking in that wind, toward the library to rage over math problems I lacked the patience for, making promises. Making promises.

random.

2008-03-19T23:32:00.002-04:00

The Sad Truth About Relationships

Today I listened to my officemate discuss the details of his brother's slow death in another timezone with his sister on the phone. Brain cancer has destroyed an optic nerve, and surgery to correct the growth caused a stroke and complete blindness as well as hydrocephalus and short-term dementia. He wakes up starving from naps and doesn't know where he is or why he cannot see. The news has to be broken to him over and over again. His wife there holding his shaky hand. How can I write something fictive that matters after thinking of that? And how did I spend all day thinking of my personal bullshit?

Western civilization and technology encountered island populations in the South Pacific and even Indian Oceans long after much of the rest of the world was "settled". When westerners discovered Easter Island the few remaining inhabitants (they had cut down all of their trees, understand?) had been living under the impression that the universe consisted of their dying island and an infinity of ocean on all sides. In New Guinea, in the 1930s, a British official encountered a previously uncontacted village. After several days of trying to communicate with them, one villager strolled out to the air strip that had been hacked into the mountainside and lashed himself to the airplane there. He had to see where the thing came from. He was willing to die to see where it came from. There is an island in the Indian Ocean, Sentinel Island, that is occupied by a long dissociated collection of the Andaman tribe. No one understands their language and they have only seen other tribes and Westerners from a distance. What do they make of our helicopters and boats and airplanes?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

Barack Obama just gave an amazing speech about race in America. Watch it.

2008-03-11T22:10:00.000-04:00

Magic Realism

2008-03-08T18:25:00.002-05:00

Reading Like Water for Chocolate

my distaste for magic realism grows. I have no problem with supernatural events occurring in literature, I'm far from a strict realist. But this genre, this device, is philosophically misleading. In Like Water for Chocolate, as in Midnight's Children, or many other post-colonial works, the inexplicable nature of life and our place in it is given a false order. A character is surreptitiously born during preparations for a feast (in fact born into the feast itself), and thus lives a life enchanted with food. She cries so much that when the tears dry, the salt leftover is enough to fill a ten pound sack. She variously cries and bleeds into many meals that have profound emotional effects on the readers. I'm hoping she shits or pisses in a pie before it's through.

So what, exactly, is my problem with magical realism? It is too easy, it is too allegorical, it is too clean. It suggests nothing of the anxiety that we feel towards the world's incomprehensibility, and replaces it with the suggestion that all is right and logical, so long as we bend the coincidences of life to their breaking point. Life does not make sense in easy terms. Magical realism is merely an attempt to usurp religion as the ridiculous cipher for this chaos. It suggests order where there is none.

And yet, I revere works of surrealism. Because Kafka and Beckett and Barthelme do not flinch, though their worlds are fantastic. They use the logic of dreams to characterize our anxiety and confusion. They hold up no answers, just questions all the way down to your spine. . .

Anyway. Everyone seems to love this stuff except me.

Gravity

2008-03-07T23:26:00.002-05:00

The iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total bastard. The iron will always kick you the real deal. The iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But 200 pounds is always 200 pounds. - Henry Rollins

That rebuilding requires destruction. That's what laughs me. That's what I smirk at when I smirk at signals and streaks in windows and solemn slow-suicides lingering in my periphery. I don't want it to not be cold at night, when I pace on patient concrete that waits for our world to end. I ain't sought resolution for this shiver, the slivers from the system I climbed. Let a thing bleed so the flotsam of memories can chunk in the asthma, in the far behind. And epochs ago we strolled thru weeds we'd named in our sleep. Collected rocks to be honed into the thin line between starve and ghost. Turned the nausea of stars into a history wrote. Now I blink slow, every second unfolds like a photograph, like smoke.

helicopters in my blood

2008-02-27T11:03:00.005-05:00

I don't want anything. Arrange this: I don't want money or children or a large television or regular home-cooked meals or reliable transportation or a bed or health insurance or a mailing address or easy answers or the wind at my back. I'm starting to not even care if she thinks about me anymore, or if I'll ever feel warmth in bed beside me, or if I'll ever sleep 8 hours, or if I can bite my tongue through the next million social awkwardnesses, or if I'll maintain my health, or if I'll ever have a night off to stare at the moon, or if anyone wants to read my work. I don't believe in god, "spiritualism", the family unit, the concept of America, liberalism/conservatism, globo-gym fitness, blind philanthropy, the War on ___________ , Hemingway, or corporate consumerism. I haven't purchased anything but food, books, gas, and intoxicants in months. I haven't seen a TV on inside my house in recent memory. I have no plans for anything but homework and work and writing and the occasional coma-like inebriation. I have a knee-high stack of books next to my bed to be read before the summer. I have 82 sprawling days of sweating over riots in places I'll never visit before I see anyone worth leaving my house for. I've got a half-dozen ideas for short-stories that will only be coaxed out onto the page with lean meals, coffee and THC. I have calluses in the palms of my hands that weep pus some mornings, I've developed exercise-induced asthma, gastronomic distress and as many niche aches as your average coal miner. I sleep on my floor because somehow the discomfort comforts me.

And the moral of this is, the more things that I give up, the happier I become. And it doesn't come from cautious meditation after a long cluttered day. Not the forceful forgetting of life. It comes from ruthlessly excising complications, repudiating the patterns your peers and elders fall into, deliberating over your next steps with a scalpel and a spliff. Carefully whittling your concerns down to the few fatal elements that matter. Trim this life to the very second in front of you, rolling out like an epoch into the next.

Misandry, Makeshift, Masculinity

2008-02-20T00:43:00.000-05:00

SYM. That's one of many names affixed to the bulk of my close male friends. Single, young and male. Kay S. Himowitz thinks that because 20-something men are marrying in fewer and fewer numbers, that we have somehow become a universally corrupted lot of slackers. That for us, as men, to ever practice responsibility and discipline we MUST be husbands and fathers and homeowners. The article is filled with several tiers of nonsense, the least significant and perhaps most predictable is that her opinion is rife with fallacious aggrandizing of the mid-century experience. Following that, she has applied the behavior of childish -men across a broad swath of 4 films and two novels to deduce that me and you are slackers who fend off adulthood with a bong in one hand and an issue of Maxim in the other. The most significant and enraging thing here, for me, is that she perpetuates the atavistic stupidity that our ultimate goal should be children and home ownership. Maybe we've grown up watching every institution fail us, and thus feel marriage is a farce. Maybe we watched our parents dilute the vitality of their life by pissing it away on marriage and children before they ever did the things they really wanted. Maybe cultural evolution has allowed us such greater freedom that, while some of us have become slackers, the majority of our unmarried generation has realized they can do anything they want if they simply avoid a few pitfalls.

I start volunteering at a maximum security prison in the next few days. I'll be alone in a room with a guard outside teaching discarded men god knows what. I'm trying to learn something from them. It pleases me that this is a Sacrament. Perhaps the one forgotten by all these assholes trying to tell gay people they can't love each other, and that thoughtful analysis of this complicated world is immoral.

When I went through this Buddhist phase I became convinced that the masculine disposition was what was wrong with the world I saw as corrupted and misaligned.The world is still corrupted and misaligned . . macho fucks are still pissing on the dream and all of that. But now, grown man shit I guess, I've learned to appreciate manhood. No disrespect to the billions of beautiful, bad-ass women out there. But, I learned to heave and pull and have rough edges and floss my sweat and channel the teeth-grinding urge to compete over every inch. All this physical training I've subjected myself to has my sedentary body cranking out unprecedented testosterone and begging for burdens. My libidinal urges raging against long, lonely nights. At the bar I just want to armwrestle with these skinny cats I linger with on free-nights.

Die Homeless

2008-02-15T09:42:00.004-05:00

I came out here in the summer of 2006 after several years of madness under the shadow of the GM center. I had a good job lined up and dear family here, but the real reason for the jump was to pop the bubble of my comfort zone. To reduce my socialization and focus. To break my strongest connections so that when I wanted to again in the future, I could break more without remorse. It took me a year to recover from this severance. And I can't apologize enough, but you understand what I did.

And though I started making a lot of money and securing an envious resume that peers might use to leverage marriage, homes, etc, I moved into a 10' x 10' cell with screaming red walls and sat on the floor to work. Crafted a workspace from materials I found cheap. Enrolled in university and stayed up late perfecting the craft. And despite the boredom, the loneliness, this city's lack of soul, the tedium of a technical profession, the constant longing for people who are not here . . .I learned to write.

Started sweating and losing sleep over a second undergraduate degree. Where people examined me like a foreign object; knowledge of math verging on witchcraft and opinions, rigorous and logical, that were better off left alone. Learned the ins and outs of this wing of academia and understood where I wanted to be in a few years.

And time passed. And I met people. And I went places, and I returned home, and I drank and smoked too much, and I fell in love, and I sharpened my body like a spear, and I visited strange lands, and I developed new reputations and habits and vices, and I relentlessly shaved my head, and I read 50 books, and I wrote a dozen stories. And suddenly its 2008 and I'm looking at the short end of my time in Boise. I quit my job 16 months from now. And I have no idea where I will be a few months after that. And this mystery makes the brevity of the time ahead exhilarating.

"Somewhere between motivated and cold."

2008-02-07T10:47:00.000-05:00

I haven't really had the words for this in awhile. Still reeling from some things that knocked me out of my senses. But I've written two short stories since the new year, and it is feeling quite natural to lock myself down here with my coffee and my entheogen and my wine and my occasional music, and at the very least stare at the empty whiteboard for hours. I've never been the type to walk away and come back to something later. And as much as its ruined for me, my impatience might be the only thing I really have.

My semester is in full swing. I submitted first in workshop (this is now 5 times in a row) and my piece received, on balance, pretty good opinions. For whatever its worth, someone referred to something as brilliant. Which is one of those words only more narrowly defined than 'interesting', positive though at least. It was really an effort to write something simple. Something surreal and minimalist and yet straight and painful. I think I was successful in at least some of this.

My other class is a Senior Seminar course intended to tidy up after four or five years of college, when you're just looking for a break and don't want to think too much. When you've got parties and parent-financed backpacking trips through Europe to plan, that sort of thing. The theme is food, and the professor has revealed herself as prioritizing food and furniture above all else in literature. Tonight I read recipes from the 18th century. I am supposed to have something to say about them on Thursday. I didn't ask for a break.

To maintain happiness, we're supposed to dedicate our lives to some aim. Not to materials or to individual people. We know that these are fleeting. And yet, in 96ish days, the first person in a long time is going to come down into the lab. And we're going to talk for a while. And I can't wait.

School. Snow. State.

2008-01-29T22:36:00.000-05:00

For the first time, I have a writing professor with whom I have previous experience. He taught my intermediate course in the summer wherein I saw legitimate psychosis and met someone and my life branched a little bit and I wrote a pretty good story if I do say so myself. He quite liked my work and I tried to pay attention through distraction and all that. And this fall I wrote a half-dozen stories and learned a lot in my bedroom and in airplanes and at Lucy's and became good friends with people here. And so now I've got him again and in the introductory sessions the class talks about how we define things like "Scene" and "Character" and all of that and I feel like it's really just him and I talking. And I've got more ideas than I'll ever be printing 15 copies of for this course, and though there's the usual roster I think this is going to be a very educational endeavor.But already: I have a low threshold for annoyance. Like there are homicidal chemicals wrestling with Buddhist ones in my amygdala and vas deferens.

Its snowing in Boise like it snows in Michigan in my dreams. And so I run back from class sliding on the pavement and jumping over things onto little dirt piles covered in snow and wish I had the youth or the BAC to take a good diving roll in it and stand up shaking myself off under the sickly orange sky.

A friend of mine in Texas now told me that she ran into a former MI resident that suggested, regarding Wayne State University, that "some of my friends went there . . they weren't very bright." I hope she gets to make him look like a dumb-ass. A lot of the people I look up to the most went there. And a lot of the people who were my friends and went to MSU or some privileged institution became conceited pricks and sold their souls. Motherfuckers never had to struggle for anything and then they have the audacity to tell someone that the name on their hardwork isn't worth a damn . . .

Tragically Hilarious

2008-01-28T21:53:00.001-05:00

Just finished my first submission for class. minimalism. I learned more writing this than anything I've written before, in that: it might not be any good. But I am quite pleased with it.

When I saw Van Gogh's and prowled his paintings in biographical order, I could see the growth from one to the next. At the very very least, I'm feeling pretty prolific.

Let me know what you think.

And oh yes, midget wrestling. And no I'm not an advocate. Student of my culture sort of thing. And I don't know shit about midgets.

simple

2008-01-25T16:47:00.000-05:00

A fantastic overview of the rest of my time in Africa.

Back to something resembling a grind. Two classes with substantial work right off the bat. But I've been hustling in the limbo since last semester and I've got a stack of things to submit. Learned to write something excruciatingly simple in this spare two weeks since returning.. I'll post it here next week after some strange-er eyes than thine have seen it. It's starting to seem that the point is to get as close as possible to writing 'nothing'. That is, our subconscious is not linguistic and thus our experience will not ever truly be captured, so our efforts to hang decorations on our construction are often futile. And yet the beauty of language is an end of its own. Strike a balance in the smoke.

A friend of mine is shooting a film that he wrote and stars in, check out the trailer:
Person of Interest

I don't have much to say that isn't directly related to writing. There is a group of hackers calling themselves Anonymous who are systematically dismantling Scientology, which pleases me to no end. For a minute there I was overwhelmed with a sense of "missing", not loneliness exactly because I've got people here now (not a tribe, but disparate individuals cast across the 208 that I genuinely like), but a futile reaching out in the early and late hours. I've settled into it now. It's one of those vaguely negative mental states that is beautiful and useful and finite.

We're All Tanzanian - January 2008

2008-01-21T23:33:00.001-05:00

I slept over most of Africa. Comfy in the plane eating hobby-kit meals and trying to read more than a page at once without passing into fitful sleep. Waking up, outside the tiny window the Sahara Desert is truly infinite and I dreamt of nomadic tribes who worship the sand. Believe as a primary tenet that the desert extends forever and whisper about the Ocean in hushed tones like they're guilty hope is that man will see some day see it.

After visas and walking across the darkened tarmac like drug-runners and tipping men in olive drab uniforms we drove in the dark across the dark continent. Such a strange way to see a new place. The semblance of farms. Little communities. Advertisements for cellular service vaulted up over the rotting husks of farming equipment. Tank-topped young toughs playing billiards under floursescent lights with disproportionate cigarettes in their mouths.

Beers and British holiday and asking the politest women you have ever met or ever will meet for favors. They shout at their co-workers in Swahili. They flash warm smiles at us. My body refuses to sleep for a dozen reasons that being awake does nothing to resolve. At 5am one morning I peer out the window listening to distant call-to-prayer and watch the upside down crescent hang there as the orange morning pushes its way onto the world. The sun rises and sets faster here, being near the equator the sun breaks the horizon at nearly a right angle. All of its fearsome velocity dedicated to moving up in that sky. A sentinel wielding a varnished wooden stick and wearing too many coats walks by on the esplanade. A few hours later I sit and write in the garden thinking about Burroughs eating supper from a tray in Mexico somewhere as he talks about Orgone with people who think he's insane. Outside of the sanctioned hotel, the real sounds of Africa in barking dogs and diesel trucks revving up hills. We do not see it until we're in the back of the Toyota headed for the gates.

The porters are mostly kids but they are tougher than you. They will carry their own pack of 20kgs, and your pack of 20kgs on their head, and a two-gallon vessel of water or kerosene in their hand. Sweating as we walk through the low, humid jungle. The most beautiful little girl I have ever seen in my life is toting a huge bundle of firewood and asking me for "somzing", anything. We make friends with two Dutch kids who wear blue jeans and would probably give them to you if you asked. I don't know what to say to their enthusiasm. You see, she never showed up. And despite what was said over Tuskers and delicious coffee, I feel that it is all my fault.

We walk through jungle. See monkeys and trees like you would imagine but moreso. At one point the thin stalks of some alien fauna rattle in the light breeze and as beautiful as they sound I can imagine lying there malarial and being driven insane by them. We literally walk under an awning at the first camp as torrential rain begins. Enormous hail. The metal roofs of the huts and mess hall rattling against the elements. Our hut less forgiving of personal space then a jail cell, the rain hitting our little patio so hard that the water bounces in under the door. We eat backpacker food out of little plastic packages that we pass back and forth. The groups next to us, not doing the "hard way" as our finances and egos required of us, are brought out freshly boiled potatoes, delicious smelling stews, real china, tablecloths, meals of several courses. They vaguely acknowledge their guides as their second thermos of tea or their extra loaf of bread is brought to them. I am, for perhaps the first time, dimly proud of my nationality.

The next morning. Over porridge and the chatter of half-a-dozen languages (you see there are many, many people climbing the mountain and staying in the little hut villages), a sunrise quite unlike any that I have ever seen, and would ever see until exactly 24 hours later. And then we begin to hike and every step is getting harder by midday. Porters say "jambo!" as they head in the other direction, well ahead of their group and finding the descent delightful. Our feet begin to ache. The environment is changing from jungle to heath and the plants are shorter. We stay at a high enough altitude that one many begin to feel sick. Everyone sleeps for a long time.

Amsterdam-news years day

2008-01-18T20:29:00.000-05:00

Amsterdam. No longer living historyless behind fresh paint. This place cobbled together out of something from each human tendency. So in the grey, achey morning we mind our step out into the leftovers of new year's celebration. Hazardous taxi rides threatening decapitation to what must be beautiful women tucked under scarves as we careen over drawbridges older than consumerism.
Out of the hotel sidestepping vomit and empty champagne bottles rolling in gutters. Into brimming coffeeshops to find a seat to smoke and caffienate for the whole day is rolling out before us. A look into the eyes of what passes for authority in my life now, and over to the friendliest drug dealer in my life of uncountable friendly drug dealers. Smoke my smoke like turning to fresh pages with this guy, you know the guy that signs my checks. And then out to stoned wander through a city growing familiar.

A language of consonants, and the throat. Young women with bills standing in window frames nearly naked and I'm freezing cold as we eat and traipse and find more places to smoke in. Unamerican thoughts finally processing themselves outside of america. I now think of grad school overseas: cramped apartments up several floors of teetering stairs looking over a garbage strewn canal, pale-skinned women talking to me and blinking through the smoke, books with pages barely clinging to their edwardian dust covers as I read pretending one can have a unique thought.

And the next morning we wake up and are told that Nairobi is on fire and that the road from the airport has been blocked by what are very likely righteous youth outraged and disappointed. And she's there. Seeing it, maybe. The sinking feeling in my gut entangled with some much larger one in hers. We think.
An entire day in Amsterdam Airport trying to change flights for safer ground. A million attempts at communication through every mechanism I can lay my frustrated hands on. I offer my kingdom for 5 minutes on the phone. I cannot offer enough.

An unplanned night in Amsterdam. Freezing under the logos of multinational corporations because where the fuck are we really? And public transit with the maternal instinct personified and more smoke and more alcohol because these things are not strange to us. We're now three drinking 6 varieties of identical Heineken and sprinkling hash on our joints way back in the corner there like we've been living here a decade and we're merely staying warm in the loooong night between leaden days. This city is a place to write poetry after port wine. A place to look down into your reflection in the canal's distorting scum of oil. Somehow a place that has made more sense to me than I assumed.

In the morning, Africa.

2007-12-23T16:16:00.001-05:00

"Voted Unlikely to Suceed . . .

2007-12-19T17:56:00.000-05:00

. . .coz my class was full of naysayers, cheaters and thieves."

Finally found an agreeable way to host PDFs, so here is the final story I submitted for class. It's based in Detroit, has a little bit of people I know in it. I realized writing about the city, or at least constructing narrative within it, is difficult. It's more suited to impressionist poetry and the like. I'm not sure how I feel about this, but it's hundreds of times better than the first draft. To be sure.

I've got draft versions of three other stories that I'll be taking with me on sojourns over the next couple weeks. Try to wrangle them into something unembarrassing. Cormac McCarthy has changed my perceptions on writing. Working to reverse what David Foster Wallace has done. Non-overlapping magisteria perhaps. I learned to revise this semester, at the very least. Learned that there is something that appeals to the thanatos in permanently deleting things I agonized over bringing into creation.

12/13

2007-12-14T00:25:00.000-05:00

My semester is essentially over. This marks the approximate halfway point of the whole Boise, get another degree business. And I now feel innured this institution a bit. I know people here now, and have allowed myself to be absorbed into the culture of the program much more then during the engineering gig. My fiction writing workshop was a bit disappointing . . .just wasn't all that pleased with the things I wrote. And not that encouraged by the classroom environment. The connection between the two is tenuous though. My 20th Century British Fiction course was a bit illuminating, owing to the prowess and demands of the professor. But my classmates were mostly disengaged. . .

It feels absolutely bizarre to be at the halfway point of this place. When I moved out here it felt like an epoch rolling out in front me. Immeasurable to my impatience. Yawning across vital years of my life. But the pressing things been good-god I'm still learning about everything. Swirling up latent entrepreneurialism. Pounding out words in volumes I once aspired to. Gradually revealing some primal discipline. And so I can't possibly imagine where any of this will lead to, like driving at it all with lowered shoulders and hoping you end up somewhere marked success. And I don't recognize anywhere or anything.

That feeling that you're getting old. Like some arrangement of chairs and intentions makes you realize "god damn I'm an adult" and it is not what anyone told you it was. It's daunting but not scary, it does not require perfection, it does not utterly destroy you if you slip. Risk is the most valuable part of life. Hard work is worth it because it makes you good at things, and being good at something is tremendously rewarding. Genuine experience is all that matters. Dahh . . .all the chinese fortune slips I want to write for these kids . . .

Reading Baudrillard between the melange smoke and gangsta rap and flipping ones and zeroes in SimBoise . . .the consumer as progammable and blind. A system of objects erecting itself into crude symbols of the abstract. The real world existing in everything that is not said. "The festival of supply and demand whose effervescence can provide the illusion of culture".

Somehow I feel like going to Olduvai Gorge is a pilgrimage that exceeds the scope and "spiritual" value of visiting the Hajj by orders of magnitude . . .