Terminal Blog Entry

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

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

[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.

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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.

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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.

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

(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.

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"I wanted the whole world or nothing"

(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.

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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.

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

(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.

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"It means what it says"

(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.

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

(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?

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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.


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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.

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"The time for your labor has been granted"

(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.

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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.

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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?

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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.

(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.


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

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

(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.

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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.

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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.

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

(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.

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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.

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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).

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

(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.

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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.

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

(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.

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

[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.

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"A ram chased my friend in a dream"

(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.

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

[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.

--

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under remodel

sorry if things look a little weird for awhile

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

(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.

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"La tierra vive ahora tranquilizando su interrogatorio"

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

(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.

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