"Going south, and we are older"

(quote: Beirut, video: clip from Encounters at the End of the World)

I watched Obama's Inauguration Speech, chomping bagels in the conference room, between bands at a house party hours later, and nodded and went goose-bumpy and gave the tiniest fist-pump at moments. I remembered where I was, or what state at least, for previous moments. Recalled the old burning nausea of watching Bush win the second time. Gave up hope in fragments and hang-overs and youtube clips. And Obama made me feel like the problems of humanity might not be insurmountable. That a man with these words, and this backbone, and this brain, might be able to truly 'change' something for the better. The nation truly made a good decision, collectively, for once. We gave credit where it is due, recognized our needs, let the best of our emotions color our choice. And Obama focuses on all things that need focus if we're to really secure our species' survival. But, I realized when he was talking about all the hard-work being done by the unnamed morass, the meaningless struggle of the military, the corporatocracy plundering our 1s and 0s, the desires to live safely and peacefully and retire with dignity, that he never let the American Dream dissolve. He never admitted that our prosperity is won on the backs of those that can't protect themselves. Or that the financial system is not a corrupt business model, but rather an oppressive and failed ideology. That our cultural has evolved into one that equates happiness with mean pleasures and empty, vicarious experiences. The trouble is, that while I think Obama can make inroads on jobs, and healthcare, and our international reputation, this place will still be something that alienates me. I will still shudder at the myth of the American Dream, not because I don't think strong-willed people can do great things, but because it encourages us to settle. It teaches us to be satisfied with mediocrity. Yet, I want everyone's situation to be easier. I want the Israeli's to stop trying to wipe out Palestinians. I want people to have access to doctor's. I want kids in the 'hood to get good educations. It's just that Obama's vision is not my utopia. And the change that would please me cannot be shaped by politics.

I'm becoming obsessed with Antarctica. I spend afternoons reading articles on Big Dead Place, nights watching obscure documentaries on the Ice, pirated versions of The Thing with French subtitles. The appeal is something still metastasizing in my spinal column. In one dream I saw the place in negative, like it was inseparably opposite from my life now. A death-rattle cold taking place of this climate control. Vast expanses of ice and rock substitute buildings and roads and rolling hills. Bureaucracy silly becomes absurd, and everyone drinks to it and curses it, instead of imbibing and regurgitating. Countless decisions simplified by survival instead of the paralyzing anxiety of infinite choices to no consequence. Loneliness like an illness wrought deep in your gut, rather then the demands of trying to be everyone at once. Backbreaking work to pay your privilege to exist in your setting, not your student loans and car insurance.

I'm a gypsy. I just move slow. Plod along like a tortoise till my shell grows moss from each land I rest in. See sunsets become rises from just a few feet to my left. And since I came back from Detroit, the thought of leaving this place keeps me up at night. Anticipation, anxiety, good old Catholic shame and fear. But all of that under a timid bliss. Thinking: Next year this time, I could be anywhere.

»»  read more

"I don't want to go home, where I'm just an ordinary human being"

(quote: RA the Rugged Man, video: Bishop Lamont "Every Day")


A great city is a work of art. An intricate symbol for what it means to be alive loosely fastened to place and time, wrought in concrete and iron and flesh and music. Clinging to the particulate in the smoke of its cigarettes, the reek of its exhaust, the priceless steam leeching from the streets. The feedback of instruments and the sound glasses make clinking together. Great cities loom with their idea, wrenched from the biographies of their most wild-eyed children. They dare those inside of them, and the dared leave them different in the way that we are ever changing to become ourselves. They carry their justification in every line and heart palpitation and criminal act and throwing up of hands. Great cities are not of their country, but of themselves and even when they lay eviscerate and mottled in the hung-over sun each can be differentiated from the next simply by the way their people sigh. Detroit I love you, and I hate you, and you always show me new faces. Always tip my hand, tell me what to write, frame even your banality in the skeleton of what you were, the skin of what you'll be. I no longer make value judgments about your future . . .I simply watch.

I went back to where I'm from for the holidays. This great industrial empire. It is weeping, and it is tired, and it is angry. But it still laughs when I get it drunk. Of the smattering of homecomings, this was singularly the most ecstatic and most difficult. Home crushed me and inflated me, changed my shape for the next six months while I resettle to old forms. My father and I screamed at each other in our haunting suburban basement. And then I told him things I should have said at 17 when it was much easier to simply sneak out and back in. And for perhaps the first time in my life I did not lie to him. I spent many hours downtown with another family and vaguely felt as though I were living on the reputation of a person that I murdered by leaving him out in the cold. Kindled a glowing friendship with someone I was only a smiling acquaintance with. Drank until breakfast cafes opened and we all walked down the middle of the street in the snowy grey. Squeezed onto a couch with warm, skinny legs six inches away and watched the sun come up on the alley and the church just outside the window; all the house asleep save me. For a few minutes I watched someone sleep and it was as if no time has ever passed or ever can . . .like I've always been on that couch and always will be. Attended a party in an apartment that I vomited in exactly three years before when someone else entirely lived there. Shared the city with someone I've come to know by the internet almost exclusively. Had a final night in an old hang-out, one of those departures that rings in your ears and the moment you're alone you simply put your forehead to steering wheel and try to make every detail part of the permanent record. There is a reason why laughing and crying sound the same. I've left so many times, and in so many ways . . .there seems to be no room in my heart for actually being anywhere.

»»  read more

"The lost eyes of a thawed caveman"

(quote: me; video: Ricky's "Meaning of christmas")

Xmas party season. Everything more or less a persistent hang-over for the last few days. And I have little to no actual responsibilities. My classes ended spectacularly. A great grade and excellent feedback in one class, an epic bar-crawl with the members of my other one. Last night had my xmas party for work, which is always excellent. And then two of my bosses and their wives genuinely wanted to 'hang out" and we went to the bar and listened to music and I talked to them about writing. These guys are saints. I'm bringing in stories for them to read in the next few days. And the conversation served as a glowing preamble to the awkward, bent-ear explanations I'll have to give to extended family next week. quoth a boss: "in the annals of history, how many people have gone from engineering to english?"

The world is different walking through it late at night and waist-deep in winter. Everyone is hid out, in front of their screens. Everything is slick or jagged, and smells older than it is. Blackened snow clinging to everything looking fungal and nefarious in the arc-sodiums. And cars tumble along testing brakes and mingling cigarette-smoke with the vapor of their words. And front lawns broadcast to no-one the christmas mythos and Bosch-like populate themselves with jarring juxtapositions such that Frosty waves to Rudolph and Santa lords over them both disproportionate. And a frazzle-haired romantic that listens to BRMC steps from his 70s-era duster and snaps a pic with his gadget. And at some point I sit at the head of the table and drink the bottom-third of fancy cocktails and forgive people in my head. And when we're back out the doors the cold is treatment of an overdose and I gasp and run and clamber half-up a statue. Cut my hand and it bleeds like eyebrows in bar-room brawls. My own blood on the snow, dilute in the ice.


Reading through Gravity's Rainbow again. I made it 2/3rds of the way through, but lost the plot in Africa. This time around there is a certain cognizance of deliberate density. It's wonderfully complex, the detail rich, and every one of them distinct and well-executed and beautiful. But I think I'm seeing some cracks in Pynchon's methods. An immense and complex narrative that does not pause for stragglers, which has an integrity to it. But the big-picture . . .something is missing there. And reading Warren Ellis's Crooked Little Vein which I'm loving. But there's also a problem in his rendering, a sort of chaos for its own sake, covering Burrough's territory but trying to maintain lucidity. The images don't hang together like they could. Well, that's only 10 pages in. So who knows. Anyway, I really like both of these books.

»»  read more

"Notions of chance and fate are the preoccupation of men engaged in rash undertakings"

(quote: Cormac McCarthy Blood Meridian; video: trailer for Synecdoche, New York)


I'm looking forward to xmas in the mitten. Last night I sat in Boise's smokiest bar and read a poem by a friend of mine. He's a Detroiter too, or close enough to count in the MTZ. The image of a figure standing outside a Woodward bar, watching the fleeting past in oil-stained puddles. Nothing can be retrieved or even properly named. And there are absolutely times for nostalgia, as much as I've evaded it. I want to walk across that scarred parking lot behind Jacoby's and feel bitter winter wind. I want my car to spin across the flooded interstate, soaking my tribe in gasoline and overflow. I want to blow my New Year's kazoo from the roof of the Jewish Park Shelton. I want to walk between the arguing deaf in the sharp-edged morning. I want to breathe in the smoke of structure fires, etched against the emulsive sky like the whole city is in my dreams. I want to steal things in a place where property means nothing. I want to chop firewood in the shadow of anonymous wealth wasted. I want to feel nervous and excited and go rigid in the abdomen walking from my car to the place I buy beer. I want to talk to Kazakhs or Albanians through bullet-proof glass. I want heroin addicts to crash their bikes in my driveway. I want ceilings to leak and basements to reek. I want my bars so fucking dark I forget who I came with. I want to look forward to someone driving long distance this weekend to sleep on my floor with me. I want to sit on my porch all day, getting slow drunk listening to psychopaths and making plans to do it all again tomorrow. I want to see the SWAT tank rolling up Trumbull as I stagger stoned gorgeous to a classroom with no windows. I want to make burritos from canned goods with no labels. I want to philosophize until the sun comes up and I'm asleep in the chair alone. I want to come downstairs vibrating with something, and have 8 other opinions on it within minutes. I want to see OneBeLo rock the mic every goddamn weekend. All these things, as clear now as they were then. Whatever the case, in three weeks I'm home. Hopefully I can still keep up.

Saw the above film yesterday. Like every Charlie Kaufman piece, there seem to be waves of appreciation that come on as the time since viewing grows. He is directing for the first time, and I think in some ways his amateur lens shows; but from a story-standpoint it is very unlike anything I have ever really seen. True Theatre of the Absurd. Strangely, the film feels like a week long. And not due to pace, but as a result of the lifetime the film contains. It takes place over the course of at least 30 years (probably more, it's difficult to tell), and the main character (Cardin) seems to have lost his grip on time. This is The World According to Garp gone surreal, the main character being among the saddest figures I've seen in a film. The many love stories of the film are each unique and true and classically rendered. The infinite self-reflexivity of the film's ultimate project is the best argument for the post-modern aesthetic one could ask for. I already like this movie more after writing the above then I did before.


Today, in applying to the University of Minnesota, I had to write 3 additional personal statements. One on my "career plans", one on "diversity", a final one discussing my "self-motivation". The first was brief, simple. The second was mostly about Detroit. I am a white male from the suburbs, yet I think I've gotten my dose of diversity. I appreciated the opportunity to write the essay on self-motivation, I feel I have qualities and accomplishments that a resume can not depict In my two school careers I have consciously avoided most extra-curricular involvement. I have no interest in padding my resume with anything, or spending time that does not feed the revolution in my head. So I'm a member of no organizations, societies, associations. I sit around very few tables and discuss nothing. There will be no greek letters on my tombstone or yours.

»»  read more