Finally, something happened

I've returned from the National Undergraduate Literature Conference (the "Nulk' as we call it) with something along those same lines of irreality, exhaustion, revelation and self-affirmation that once accompanied most weekends.

On Thursday morning I met with 12 people that I had never met and crammed myself into a van to make the five hour journey to the armpit of SLC and hang-out for three days. The gentlemen I sat next to drew The Portable Nietzche from his bag and made an offhand comment about the need to drink a great deal this weekend. I was armed with a fifth of Whiskey, he with a 12 pack of PBR. The group of strangers (and most of them proved to not know each other as well) ended up working very well together. For a few days at least sharing the same sense of witty cynicism, desire for strong drink and the willingness to both make sacrifices for academics and criticize the weak in our field. My room-mate and another kid from the group hung out in our suite drinking until the wee hours. Agreeing on 90% of everything, carefully listening on the remaining 10%.

The following evening we all went out to eat and drank 3.2% beer. Made jokes at each other,increasingly as though we had known each other a long time. My introversion peeled off as I began to really understand these others. The entire situation affirming that I am now studying what I should . Interacting with people that represent the only people I've met that have a # of books read-to-age ratio as myself. Occasionally railing on the stupidity of modern politics and religion together.



My readings went well. The poetry reading accompanied by a fair amount of conversation and questions. Me briefly defending hip-hop. My fiction reading, in my opinion and that of a few others in attendance, was the best of my session (so, as compared to 4 other stories) and came as a refreshing surprise. I felt much more natural than I have ever reading in front of a group. With the support of new friends.


I'm proud of Boise State as well. We were the second best-represented school at the conference. Likewise, in each session with a BSU student I found we (if not making the single best presentation) were often irreverent, thought-provoking and bracingly honest. We attended without professors and began to develop a reputation by the time we left. Students from other schools gathered around to see us off.

The entire thing was incredibly satisfying. I got to present work, and listen to the work of contemporaries. I feel much more established within the English department at BSU, and I have made friends that I will be hanging out with from time to time. A seminal moment in the Boise experience up until now.

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I believe in nothing . . go 'head run the tape

Had the briefest of discussions with a young woman from China that now works out of our office. Despite vast differences in culture, interests and experience I have found our politics align famously. Making me wonder if my mentality too is sprung from an oppression that we refuse to admit. I've nearly stopped paying attention to politics; almost completely resigned to the G3 theory that things need to get much worse before they get better. With my own modification: the world needs to collapse before humanity can restore itself and actualize. Every mention of long-term financial planning or real estate investment or even the tentative schedule of the next year or two seems ridiculous to me in light of shadow governments plotting war with Iran, the looming environmental catastrophe, the erosion of economic stability. Even if the optimistic wager proves true, living in the short-term satisfies me more. As if the only thing that matters is my personal reflection on this quixotic life in that final breath, whenever it may come.

Next week I'm attending a conference to read aloud a story about wading through the remains, and three poems about my paranoia and hesitation and cold looks back over my shoulder. As it turns out I will be opening the conference. The very first reader for whatever reason. Nerves like electricity simply looking at the schedule on the screen.

I'm currently working on a short-story that starts something like this:
“What’s Trump?” the Captain’s demand almost sourceless between the echoing of the chamber and his great mound of white beard.
A collective hesitation as Bean meekly played his card; Gus finally and sarcastically:
“Spades.”
“No table talk!” Ulf, on Bean’s team and down several tricks to Gus and the Captain. His voice annoyed and mostly serious. The Captain played a mistake and Ulf victoriously slapped his laminate right Bauer to the table.

The four of them digest long hours in this fashion. Atrophying under bulky, drab suits to protect them from parasites, viruses and the infection on virtually every surface of the Sewer they collectively scraped and maintained. During downtime they sat in the enormous Combined Sewage Overflow because it was wide enough and tall enough to fool them. And the rectangular sun above let in enough natural light to bathe several city blocks of stained concrete in a natural glow.

Bean hated this job. Being the youngest, they had hired him off the streets one chaotic spring and had a good laugh at his tangible disdain. It was as if the job perpetually offended him. After several months, though, he tempered. His skin sallowed, like Ulf’s, and when fully suited he could almost take a sudden immersion in waste without a grimace.

This was not uncommon. Gus had pulled him out of a freak rush in one of the junctions during a swell the following spring and dislodged Bean’s leaky helmet. Laughing the whole time that he could not really be a sewer man until he’d swallowed a mouthful of the stuff.

“Topside people eat shit all day, they just don’t want to admit it,” he was fond of saying.

The Overflow was perhaps Bean’s favorite place in the Sewer. It was the only underground that didn’t excite claustrophobia. He liked the starkness of it, unencumbered by complexes of pipes or pumps. It was not a place to populate or regulate, but rather a space to pass human matter and the city’s toxic run-off through. Great mountains of water passing back out into the natural world, consuming its own poison. The floor plan was only disrupted by strategic channels and a hand-railing and their table bolted to the concrete floor a few feet from the shaft of afternoon sun. At the far end of the room, there was a rough-hewn rectangle cut in the concrete. Big enough to pilot a Bobcat through. If someone were to now emerge from it, Bean thought, the sudden perspective would be jarring. He would appear tiny and alien, an anonymous figure out there on the underground horizon.

One game bled into the next. Victories merely breaks to smoke a cigarette in, or walk a few feet away and piss. Bean lost focus easily during these marathons. Going mute for long stretches other than a pre-packaged “pass” or “pick it up” and lolling his head back to look up at the distant ceiling. Gus re-told some awful joke, replacing one ethnicity for another, and shuffled. The awkward, stiff cards snapped out in a flourish; tiny machine gun fire. The arrangement of things way up on the ceiling, pipes and gears and catwalks and portholes still painted their urgent red and assembled in symmetry. They allowed Bean to suspend thought for the briefest of seconds before the Captain nudged the excess of his suit and he re-entered.

“Bean, pay attention man. We don’t want to lose another,” Ulf said in his dwindling Swiss accent. “ ‘s all strategy, you have to watch what’s thrown.”
“Strategy?” Gus laughed. “It ain’t even strategy when you play this long. You just know.”
The Captain raised his eyebrow. A white cylinder, abruptly crooked at his confusion.
“You know. A Man just knows,” he continued. Swiped the trick from the table.

The blaring of the klaxons didn’t startle them. They would be virtually unnoticeable if they were all helmeted. Ulf slammed his remaining three cards to the table; his hand was strong and he was livid.

“Just, you know, just as a fellow is about to do something . . “

“Life happens,” the Captain said.

Gus assembled the cards and stowed them in his pouch. The players eased up out of their bolted chairs, and single-filed fifteen or twenty feet to a spot. Ulf wedged up a plate with a tool, and the Captain whistled down a ladder into the Overflow’s nerve center. The rest, Bean next, followed and Ulf again sealed the room. As he stepped off the bottom rung, the small chamber vibrated. Then rumbled. And finally a jolting roar of water overhead.

The narrow hole fit three comfortably, and Bean was pushed right up to the Captain. He looked down at Bean, nearly a foot taller, and said something unintelligible.
“What?” Bean yelled. The roar of the water like the engorged howls of a prison fight above them.

“I said we are getting a lot of overflows for this time of the year,”

“Yes,” Bean said. Dimly cognizant that he might have noticed the same thing. Either way, of little import to him. “Yes we are.”

They would have as many as fifteen minutes down in the chamber with one another. The energy required for conversation keeping them awkward and devoid of nuance. Bean had embarrassed himself a number of times down there, having to shout ever louder “I just wish we could get some time off” and “I said, I don’t think there needs to be four of us.” He now just stayed quite, half-heartedly poised to respond to the Captain should he say something.
A myriad of pipes, confusing and tangled from three steps back, snaked around the room. Terminated at bulging junctions of painted steel, alien panels and gauges that Bean could not comprehend. An entire level of sewer work many levels above him. And yet all the same. Ulf was constantly trudging down here; wiping the filth from his facemask and twiddling knobs heuristically. The knobs really did the work; they told the stuff where to go, which pumps needed to be engaged, which drains needed to be uncovered.

“You think robots might be able to take our jobs?” Bean asked, in the roar of water confusing the out-loud world with the thoughts in his head.

“What’s that, boy?” the Captain shouted back. Gus and Ulf were playing rock-paper-scissors in the white noise. Gus beating him mercilessly.

“I said, you think robots might be able to take our jobs” and the roar whined down as the last few words escaped. Bouncing off the metal pipes and eliciting shaking heads from the others. This merely meant that the largest slug of overflow had passed, there were still millions of gallons to go.

“Bean, my boy,” said the Captain, and wrapped a stained arm around him.

“Do you see these pipes?”

Bean and the Captain were squashed shoulder-to-shoulder, unable to turn fully in either direction. Sullen faces six inches from the pipes.

“Yeah, I see them. Nevermind, I was just sort of . . uhm . . thinking out loud.”

“That’s the problem,” Gus said, “You think too much. What’s there to think about down here?”

“Bean,” the Captain continued, “this set-up you see before you, the controls, the pipes, the valves. It might not seem like much, but without them the City is nothing. A city swamped in its own filth cannot survive.”

“Of course, but we . . .” Bean attempted to interject. The water sloshing above them, the ocean stomach of the bloated city.
“Tut tut . . without the action we take down here, the city is lost. I know it seems as though what we do is rather meaningless, tedious, and facetious,”

“Hey you sound like one of them preachers!” Gus said, pulling an apple from somewhere in the recesses of his suit.

“I sure do,” the Captain beamed “But, Bean, my point is. Something as important as that can’t be left up to computers and robots. You young people think that technology is better than us. But I’ll tell you something . . we made technology. It needs us, not the other way around.”

“Besides,” Gus said, crunching through the snappy skin of his apple “You want to lose your job or something?”

Bean stared straight ahead.
“All I’m saying is, what I’m asking is . . do we need to be down here?”

“Of course we need to be down here. What do you think we’re doing down here all day?” The Captain retorted.

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Don't These Signals Flares Flash?

Read at a Slam Poetry event. This was my first "public" reading of anything. It went well, and while the arrogant part of me believes that the content of my reading was in many ways better than anything else presented, I understand that I don't have a flair for the dramatics. It took enough whiskey and will simply to get up on stage; to then emote the existential grief, postmodern agony, or optimistic fatalism that I felt when writing the pieces . . .well, suffice to say that I'm not there yet. It was a learning experience. Give me another couple months to work out the kinks and attain some level of comfort and I will be winning these. I'm all about staying out of my comfort zone, but its difficult to succeed there; all flailing limbs and desperate shouts.

My brother, who begged to go and ostensibly conceded to my wishes that he not (jesus the nerves), snuck in and hid in the back where I couldn't see. I appreciated it, and we went out for beers afterwards and talked about life and art. Talked shit like the micks we are. Strategized for victory like the modern men we have both become.

My girlfriend of the past several months broke it off the other day. Something I should have probably done a while ago, but refrained from for all sorts of reasons. Namely, that I was afraid to be alone. I don't know if I'm ashamed to admit it or not, but when it happened I felt almost nothing. A twinge of excitement. Impetus to expose myself to new strangers. Excess time to put into writing and studying.

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"Learn to suffer"

I've rediscovered an old friend that I had neglected for a very long time. Physical suffering. Now I don't mean strict masochism in the sense of pain for pain's sake. But rather punishing oneself. Burning oneself in the fire so that only what is divine in mankind is left. My time in the gym over the past few months has been half-ass attempts to destroy the doritos and soda in my system. I've become soft physically and as a result I have softened mentally. My attitude towards this has changed overnight. Discipline in all areas of my life is coming on in stages.

Life is not easy. And if you find it easy, maybe you aren't trying. It's about suffering and joy, sorrow and happiness, struggle and triumph, blindness and finally seeing, fear and love. Our fortune, as human beings, is that we have the resources within us to make what we want out of this. We can transmute pain into wisdom, we can take sorrow and turn it into beauty. We can throw off the shackles of our parents or our hometowns or other's expectations of us and live. This life, being the only thing we have, is ours and ours alone. We are responsible for its failings and its victories. And when we want a thing, it is our action alone that will get it.

This doesn't require anything special of us. It does not require that we are born particularly gifted, because talent alone does not get results. It only requires that we try. And that we try even harder when things become difficult.

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"You have 2 things: A Dream, and a Gig"

Graffitios scuttle from the rubble
on beetle's legs.
Each brick a fingerprint,
or a tea leaf portending
our loss of innocence.

I've never squatted in fields,
nor banked on hollowness
or the way the mind reels.
Tried to hold a level hand,
broadcast some silver lining
in this catastrophe.
Knowing this single moment is the last
that may be asked of me.



This second round of college is much more to my liking, despite the lack of social stimulus and hang-overs. It's 90% talking, verbally or electronically, and apparently on these topics I'm quite verbose. A professor has stopped calling on me (my hand shoots up at every question), a classmate sent me a note ("I just want to comment on your responses to everything so far this semester. I think you do a fantastic job of reading between the lines and the meanings of the essays and certain parts. You are very affluent(?) and knowledgeable when it comes to writing."). Juxtapose this with my scholarship two years ago: showing up surreal, keeping a lid on the poems pressing at my scalp, rushing out the door to struggle and spit over dastardly math problems. This is how it should have been all along.

Likewise, I've discovered that my university values their English department. Making strides to become the great literary institution of the Intermountain West (this piece of land between the Cascades and the Rockies). We have some professors of significance (though I won't be in their classes until the fall at the earliest)

I am, however, beginning to see how my job may interfere with this whole thing. Aside from the obvious protraction of my tenure here (I've come to peace with this, moving slowly allows me to absorb), the yuppie calendar conflicts with 2:00pm writing workshops with heads of the department. The sporadic travel means every registered credit may be the roll of the dice. My benevolent and irreproachable colleagues will likely raise eyebrows the next time I register for classes beginning with ENGL. I try my best there, and I've done well. My slightest twinge of pride tempered by the fact that I daydream about escape. Crawling into the ventilation system while ostensibly moving my bowels. Quick jaunts to Taco Bell that become literal runs for the Mexican border. Rappelling from the roof on extension cords or ties. I just hope that after a couple years the whole thing doesn't assimilate me. Everyone I meet subconsciously warns me with their eyes. . .

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"Inside I'm always nervous, but I never look worried. Come for me."

I've redeveloped an interest in Koans (here's an index: http://www.ibiblio.org/zen/cgi-bin/koan-index.pl ) as of late. These are essentially "lessons" in Zen Buddhism consisting of a story, usually involving Zen masters and their students, which cannot be solved rationally or via any moral or emotional compass. The intent is to focus so much concentration and cognitive energy that one's mind stalls. My interest is in the mechanics of how these lessons work, but moreso in the penumbra they expose between emotion and reason. There are flaws in each, of course, and the ability to reside between the two would be extraordinarily useful at times.

I could generally be described as being rational. I put value on the products of science, am not given to believing in gods or superstitions, I tend to specifically not make decisions based on that which makes me cry. Our emotional senses bring great value to our life, it is through these that we enjoy art and each other. However, as a decision-making and problem-solving tool emotions tend to waver. We choose that which is easiest because it allows us to maintain relationships, we put ourselves or our immediate sphere on a pedestal and ignore the world or humanity as a whole, parents force their children to stay close and dependent out of fear, etc etc.

Reason on the other hand is very "useful". It allows us to write laws, build bridges and cure disease. However, I would posit that in some ways mankind's particular manifestation of reason is maladapted to truly understanding ourselves or our universe. It works too hard to deny the emotional aspect of life, it often stifles creativity in the nascent stages of understanding that require temporary lapses in rationality, it can make art seem superfluous. Our particular brand of reason (and I would say its arrogant to assume we've stumbled upon the "one true" reason) has been forged in the evolutionary furnace for eons, shaped for our particular survival in very particular environs.

Koans, and other practices such as psychedelics, meditation, and creating art, force us to marry these two disparate perspectives. I don't fully understand the Koans I have read, but in my attempts to grasp their full meaning I have found myself tempering reason with emotion or vice versa, and the result is something resembling neither. The result is a impossibly momentary self-awareness and a peace with the magnitude of the incomprehensible. Within minutes however, I find myself back to normal. Frustrated, stunted, struggling with happiness, reveling in sorrow, whatever.

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The Suburbs will not save us, nor the Harlots we made famous

"Nothing's ever been right"
and as I settle for the night,
the volume of the trees screaming
like the engorged howls of a prison fight

I'm convinced the world is going to end, have I mentioned that? And at some point I start to feel disconnected from these problems, already taking the attitude that the world has begun to collapse into some chaotic war fueled by resource rivalries and environmental havoc in turn perpetuated by the greed in all our hearts. And yet, it seems perhaps that's all fantasy; my dream of a time without manufactured obligations, without strict definitions, without anything to do but be myself and coalesce into survivalist tribes. Create mythologies from our dim memories.

I still think it will happen, but the psychology of it is becoming clearer. The great yawn of human history, apes descending from trees to White people nuking Persians is peopled by a vast anonymity, an immense silence and innumerable voids. Being alive in that moment, some sharp turning point in our story and evolution, brings some satisfaction. For at least I will have been there when something important happened.

She once told me that the reason I write is because I want to prove that I exist(ed). And there's palpable truth in that statement. I'm terrified by the humanity I am at once thrilled to be consumed by. Because, what matters when you no longer believe in god or, in fact, in anything but this very moment and the cold rush of ecstasy when you're at your best? A rhetorical question that I can only occasionally answer, and I must say that the notion of being some tiny blip within the universe is the only thing that doesn't make me feel empty. Not to be important to people who capitalize the "I", but to at least have made some communion with reality and left something marginally more durable then the 80-some years I will breathe. I hope that's not repulsively vain.

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