"I'm not a hard-ass and I'm not a push-over; I just care about what I do and I expect you to as well"

Classes started yesterday. I know what I'm getting into with my British Fiction class, but my Advanced Fiction Writing Course was a bit more mysterious. The gentleman teaching it is actually a successful writer (though by his own admission he has sold more copies of his book
in Norway than here in the states (we're busy reading Harry Potter and US Magazine). He said a half-dozen-or-so things that really got me motivated (all of these loosely transcripted):

-"As a writer, the way you've been conditioned to read is completely wrong. I will refer to that style of reading as 'The Wrong Way' or 'The Problem'."

-Had sharp criticisms for the tradition of workshop including workshops administered at our University (in response to a detail regarding the Intermediate Class provided by a classmate: "that's total bullshit")

-"There is a market for books. Anyone who says literature is dead isn't paying attention."

-"You get a B if you turn everything in. You get an A if you deserve it. most of you will get B's or fail."

-"Most people say they want to write. I assume you're here because you aren't them."

-"In your response to the readings, don't say you like it or don't like it. A story is not a piece of cake."

etc, etc



Additionally:
I'm going to climb Kilimanjaro in January. The tallest mountain in Africa. One of the most 'prominent' mountains in the world (defined by how much rock is actually exposed. Kilimanjaro rises out of the flat serengeti like a metaphor for the ascent of man.) The excitement and relevance and biography of this event is pretty hard to measure. It teeters on a reunion that means more to me with every approaching second. The inclusion of new party-members each has its importance as well: a journey across the globe with my brother (the first Kellys to travel the world other than for the purposes of killing Viet Cong), an adventure with my boss/friend that will push us past the point of no return in some ways. The hope that this begins an annual tradition of unlikely adventures; casting the rest of the solar cycle in a sort of transient and anticipatory light. The Motherland. I predict a Guerilla touching every continent by the end of the decade.



Also. Aesop Rock released a new album. I won't claim its the best thing ever. But its better than anything he's done since Labor Days.

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"Take Me Home"

I can't write poetry anymore. For the twelve millionth time in my life I stare at a yawning universe of blank paper and find no godly imperative to populate it with the spindly architecture of stunted lines or microscopic stills of the burning panoramas of my dreams. I can't wend some cohesive thread through a complex of emotional truths and somehow remain unscathed by sentimentality or moments of weakness. And yet, try to square this with the literal combustion in my ribcage; my current iteration brimming with "how I really feel about things" and a spectral honesty that I once-only-and-still-best muster quite late at night.

And so instead I try to orchestrate grand fictional schemes, like throw everyone into the fire and burn off their weakness and challenge them to duels with themselves and narcotize their epiphanies and strand them someplace. But this is always what I've done best: shoot from the hip with swagger and sentience, scatter my suffering asymmetrically so you can feel your teeth clack, bang my head against bulldozers, press my back up flat against walls so the impact is not absorbed but shatters my limbs like ceramic. . . Anxiety my lacquer and laxative and language.

You've magnetized me, so the iron in my blood stands at attention and erects abstract sculpture signifying the innumerable times I thought the my Life was over.

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"This ain't a time when the usual is suitable"

Had a discussion(sun-burned and malnourished but happy, right) as I weaved someone else's car across the lonelier parts of Nevada, post culmination and bearing of witness and drinks in Kerouac's bar, about what sort of inorganic and tractable career-path a writer should take. See, the danger is that one can invest their life's-blood and -savings into learning from some wizened and self-appointed guru of the art, only to find that every other organism with a penchant for typing has learned the same litany of bullet-points and things worth crying over. So the system has its trends and its priorities and its gradually (d)evolving traditions and bright lights and chamber music. Like anything, it regrettably rewards the well-done-within-the expected and falters trying to assimilate the new. Contemporary writing, as exemplified in the MFA or academic system, has tremendous strengths in particular areas. It is sensitive to what picky, elitist readers (read: people who want to write) want: that is a piece's awkwardness is covered up, the theme or point or reason to bother is shrouded in generalities and lacquered for easy consumption, the characters have quaint flaws but are in-the-end good people, the emotions are appealed to in a 'pleasing' manner, complications in diction or experimentation in grammar are seen as over-thought and smart-assed, everyone falls in love and it is either requited or refused, etc etc.

My plan is to dive into this homogenizing malaise and try to somehow keep in mind declarations and poetry I once screamed into a figurative megaphone. Try to remember that art is supposed to somehow matter. Try to keep in mind that the world is mind-numbingly complex and tortuously unfair and interminably unpredictable and suspenseful. So right now, I am working on two stories: one involves an involuntary yuppie's existential anuerysm and the subsequent fleeing into the desert, fiery crash and smoking of jimson weed with the last alien (as in alienated) to escape his company whilst they both try to not die or think about life. There's no crying or subtly inadequate epiphanies, no feel good rounding out where "at least he got _____", there's love and relationships but there's no simple resolutions. I don't want to say what it is, because maybe its terrible. The other thing I'm working on is a story that begins during the contentious speech of a Kwame-like figure, promising the world to a teeming mass of the poor, uneducated and drug addicted as Progress behind him literally collapses. The story than simply meanders out into the crowd with no fixed protagonist. I'm not saying I know how to do this. . . .but I consider the material that I've been exposed to as "paramount contemporary writing", the products of MFA programs and the literary journal institution and all of its trappings, and I think that there isn't going to be anyone that can teach me what I need to learn.

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"I love this old hip-hop shit, man"

So, if you've talked to me much or ridden around in my car, you probably know how much I love hip-hop. I'm the equivalent of a Star Wars geek: I know album release dates, real names of MCs, who has worked together, general religio-political philosophies of major MCs, the origin and meaning of obscure terms like "5% Nation", "8 Million Stories", "Overstanding", etc etc. I cannot really trace the pathology that has led me to love this music or to somehow identify with it (though I have tried), but it actually means quite a bit to me. I could expound a great deal, and plan to once I have graduated from the Rock the Bells festival this weekend:




I'm so excited I think I just peed in my pants a little bit.

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Perseid, Pacing, Pulse

There's something about astronomy that alleviates me of the suffering of being alive. Suffering in the Buddhist sense, in that every step we make through our lives is guided by desires and attachments that can do nothing but cause us pain in the end. And somehow under that starry sky, meteors blazing and feeling the time drain away from my futile attempts, I come to the conclusion that I'm not really afraid of anything. That I will tell You anything if You ask. And I've only lied once, but my hand was forced.

And I used to think, so naively, that I had some understanding of what the meaning of life was. Or that it would be possible to distill 20-some-odd years of drug-addled, infuriated and stunted experience into some kind of liturgical and comprehensive Truth. The only thing I know is that, whatever our aims, we must be willing to risk and endure pain and curl up child-like in corners begging the empty sky for forgiveness. And I feel like I am coming up to the point at which every aspect of my life is fair game; everything a potential sacrifice so that I can really feel alive for a few moments. Sanity, comfort, health, reputation, personal expectations, the razor-wire I've enveloped my heart in . . .all of it gone if I can just really feel something. There's a notion, Nietzschean but also much older, that the penultimate stage of our transcendence is to become a child: once the desert has been crossed, and the dragon slain, we must become history-less, infinitely fascinated, a creature of creation and absorption. Most importantly a naked thing, wide-eyed and fearless.

Mook: some lines because I was afraid to spit them when the mic was figuratively passed:

Fabricate a city from the fragments of our absent astronomics, the streets and structures' spindles the tails of speeding comets. And pretend for just a moment that all this children's screaming's histrionics. And a geologic blink in time the sign we've done nothing since we started.

The last time I saw the stars I stood apart from all of this. And the first time I felt the stars I fell down blind and calmly. And the only time I touched your star I could not wash your eyes off me.

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"Unstable as the dust"

On the airplane reading that time does not exist and understanding that I knew this in the womb. That at some point we all had to pretend that things moved forward in order to square our biology with the world, in order to not implode under the sheer weight of a simultaneous experience. And it hardly matters whether I've known this person for 4 years or for a month; the real meat of our understanding being what we do with the scant, immeasurable moments that we share this space.

And so when you, for even the infinitesimal point it is possible, convince yourself that there is no future and there is no past you can simply focus on the idea that this crystal moment is your entire existence. And I feel like if you could truly do it, meditatively and physiologically delude yourself (but what is the truth?) of the solitary second that is right now, it would feel like instantaneous birth and death. And maybe this means that after long nights of revelry and connection the rheumy ache in every crevice is my body slowly coming back to life.

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"Talk bad about the...[D-town]...and I'll bust you in the fucking mouth"

There is no way to really return. There are carefully designed arrangements that provoke many of the same emotions of those long-ago nights in which we destroyed and rebuilt ourselves. There are intoxicants and a shared sense of music. There are genuine laughs that originate somewhere intangible and echo out amongst the ancient brick and rusting cars.

There is no collective of human beings I feel more comfortable with then my tribe in Detroit. No band of misfits I could possibly be prouder to fit in with. But of course things change, that was the nature of the beast to begin with: a dozen hard-headed kids in eternal flux. From our numbers we have produced beauty and truth, and we have embraced ugliness and pain. We have suffered violence and addiction and heart-break and watched sunrises with the dread that we may have to one day plan for things. And now we are all sort of on some brink . . .some of us allowing ourselves to get too old to resist, others diving in with the ambition to change everything by will alone. Some of us etching our turmoil and joy on the universe with abandon. All of us understanding, profoundly, that we have only this instant in which to connect with ourselves as we wish we were.

I don't bear any gifts on re-entry. The best thing that I can bring back to this junta is that I have somehow grown, and that I am willing to share the nature of my metamorphosis and enjoy the change in Them as if it were my own.

I love this city. If you've never really been there, there is no way you can agree. It is filthy, and dangerous, and at times ugly, and cold, and sparse and difficult. Weakness here, and not physical weakness but weakness of character, is stomped into the pavement. You live by bravado and cynicism, and the contradiction of compassion and callousness. People in Detroit don't give a shit about their 401(k) or their blood pressure or their credit card debt; because they've all seen the end in black and white and crack cocaine and crumbling brick and the panic inherent in gunfire and old black women pleading to you, some stranger, for their life. Where I live now is like an amusement park compared to my spiritual home. Here in Boise we pretend that everyone has a decent job and that God Blesses America and that our fellow-man will always play by the rules. The D is the jungle; and we're all warriors in our own way, and we know that every single second is lived on borrowed time, and we know that if something is worth obtaining in life, it is worth dying for.

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I have had so much genuine emotion in the last year that turned out to be based on some miscommunication or misunderstanding on my part. As though the Sanskrit you all speak carries hidden words and fluctuates in temperament. As though the flare guns you are all firing off are celebration instead of panic and stranded nights in ravines. Fuck words at this point. Either Create or Destroy or Express the inexpressible with your bare hands. All I want to do is write, or fight or fuck; because even misconstrued these things stand on their own.

I don't even recognize mistakes anymore. I over-correct for long-forgiven stumbling over words. I cherry-pick whatever detail titillates or devastates me. I assume the world to be either catastrophe or an idyllic morning after. And when we pour ourselves out we risk dispersion and evaporation, but most importantly we may be drank and absorbed.

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