"wolves cull themselves"

(video: T4 teaser trailer)

I don't watch much TV. I watch snippets of news and documentaries on the internet and read Al-Jazeera and The Economist, so when my father comes to visit, the gradually senilizing and irrational one, I almost can't believe the things that come out of his mouth. Barack Obama is a closet-Muslim, he's unamerikuhn, he's planning to dismantle the white power structure in toto with a cadre of black preachers and whatever it is they can wield over us. Black English, Black Math, Black Magic. I walk to another room when I heard that the South had the right idea with slavery. I bite my tongue over things I would fistfight another person over. And I'll argue down to the decimal points and dustmites.


I have a small writer's workshop now. We'll meet once a month, like distilling the classroom down to people who give a shit ad transporting the whole thing to the bar so I can pound whiskey while I hear how poorly my month's work has made itself clear. (btw . . I've got something new here). I'm not encircled with friends here. I can go a week without receiving a phone call or text message from a local, I can disappear for an entire weekend without a question. And yet, I've found that somehow my life does treacle out, and when I run into certain kids in certain places, I hear: "what up holmes? I heard you suchandsuched last weekend." And I nod and laugh and think about internet cables strung up under an entire population, littered living rooms listening to pitchfork picks meandering about people one knows, someone here and there tenting their fingers and yawning and voicing some opinion that'll swirl in the hang-over dust and sun and lay used up on the floor.

There's a direct corollary between the sociopolitics of the small town and the behavior of the people there. Some evolutionary knob in our heads tells us that the smaller the community, the more likely we'll have to interact with a static set of malingerers and dotty old women and stalwart homebodies. We play nice with them, and reasonably so. We have a life of reputation to uphold. My transcontinental lifestyle disturbs the setting, living in a capacious ghetto I never had to be straight with anyone but my tribe. Living in Boise I see people everywhere I go. One big, breathing surveillance camera watching itself. Burroughs: "A functioning police state needs no police."

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"there is no remembrance of former things"

(video: The Books-The Lemon of Pink)

Reading The Moral Animal and elucidating all sorts of intuitions about the way we behave. The underpinnings to a male's sexual urges, the different framework guiding a females. The reasons for the approach we choose in all the primal arts of sex and violence and creation. And even in my amateurish understanding of psychology, getting the sense that every theory yet devised about what goes on inside our mind will be explainable by reflecting on the millions of years in which it was forged. I hope its just not idealism on my part that some things will make sense.

This past weekend regrettably ditched a friend and hooliganized every patch of pavement from downtown to the west side to the park with the huge hill in it in the north end. Boise looking meaningful shimmering down there in the desert, lights blinking on and off, irradiating the developed land, giving the kids something to live their lives by. And always cold beer and copious smoke rolling colloidal out of lungs into the atmosphere. And laughing at something unspoken. And I've enjoyed chaos and rebellion and that hypercelebration that leads to what parents might call mistakes. But something went a bit too far. Maybe I'm too old for this, or maybe I'm just not willing to catch hell and sleep a night in jail unless it's something I believe in.

As someone who writes I've at least more than once been asked: "but how do you come up with stuff?". And it's not autobiography, and they are not stories about people I know, and they are not, I don't think, a metaphor for how I feel occupying the lonely planet. I have no idea what anyone's capacity is to wrench a story from the ground or that I am even somewhere in the rightmost sector of it's bell curve. I do know, however, that you have to listen. You have to pay attention. You have to see patterns in everything. You have to dream, hard. You have to make life a rush of experiences and yet space out time to distill it. And then you have to sit down and forget everything.

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division, diligence, depiction

(video: Hip-hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes)

A turbid mixture of plodding along and patiently counting days. Writing the date at the top of the ledger more solemnly on some pages, more frenzied on others. The transilient nature of time spent here like living as nine different people who all hate and love different things. Not multiple personalities, no sharp divides between them, but a haze of cognitive dissonance blurring the edges between each proclivity. To live in some idealized state of Renaissance-personhood, we've got to be able to deactivate whole sectors of our brains, illuminate others that have hibernated and cranked out preconscious reckoning while we've done that other thing. We've got to snuff out the celebration in us to wake up with the alarm clock, and we've got slip into the absurd as we head back home, and we've got to try and enjoy art without destroying it with examination and yet we've got to look at it's pieces if we want anything from it. We've got to revel, rebel, dissimilate . . .in the space between sleep and compensation and capitulation. The only strategy I have is to live in dreams (not ambitions or hopes, but the narrative mess of your sleeping mind), hold onto the strata while you amble through a day. And to figure out just how much banality you can tolerate, and allow for no more. And to occasionally lose yourself in modernizations of old rituals.

The most interesting class, if not ultimately the most beneficial to my academic goals, that I have ever had is going on now. Linguistics this consilient merger of psychology and science and anthropology and human ecology and creation and sociology. I apparently have some latent skill for it, though I don't know whether it is objective or a product of my enthusiasm. The approach is one I talked to myself about in High School listening to english teachers prattle on prescriptively and obsolescent. This language is whatever we say it is. This language is whatever works. A rule that does not help me express myself more clearly or more efficiently or more deeply, is a fetter to be broken.

This won't be news to anyone. But in writing third-person, there is a further categorization of style. There are terms for these, but I don't care what they are: "Transient" delves to some degree into minds of multiple characters and depicts events from somewhere within their perspective, blurring the identification of a singular protagonist and allowing for intrigue, complication, multi-threading. The depiction may be omniscient, but not necessarily. Think Dune. "Focalized" sits the camera within the observational powers of one character as they experience the story. It allows for a high-degree of internalization and runs the mental life of a character in parallel with their actual life. "Objective" is like a play acted. Things simply happen, a protagonist may be identified by how much time they get on the page, or how the reader's response to the character has been manipulated. This approach does not carry with it internalizations. Anyway . . I said all that to say this: I'm trying to write something "Objective". It simultaneously strips literature of one of its great attributes (the ability to illuminate individual perspective) and forces a different interaction with the reader. I can't say anything to devalue any of the three approaches, but there is something timeless (and not neccessarily speaking of a piece's ability to be read across generations, but to exist in a past/futureless void) about this depiction. As though everything is happening in that microsecond before response and reaction, before the concrete becomes the abstract. And yet, the entire thing is entirely made up of its construction; by that I mean, it asymptotically approaches "being what it is". I don't know how to explain that any better.

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"gotta work everyday"

(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.

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

(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.

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"Policing language is a waste of time"

(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.

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"The Universe is an Intelligence Test"

(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.

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The Quiet is a Scourge

" '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.

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