"A path cut 1,500 years ago"

(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.

»»  read more

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

(quote: Marshall McLuhan)

I added a new story to the Short Story page.

»»  read more

"The thing is not yet written"

(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.

»»  read more

The Woman In My Life

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.

»»  read more

"A light here required a shadow there"

(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.

»»  read more

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

(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.

»»  read more

"Because it's hard. "

(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.

»»  read more

"The time that you've been afforded."

(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.

»»  read more