"The worker. . .only feels himself outside his work, and in his work feels outside himself. "

(quote: Marx, video: Instruction Manual for Life)

On New Year's Eve the police force of the United States showed their true colors. In Oakland, Houston, N'awlins police used excessive force on minorities that were ostensibly guilty of nothing. Two of them are dead. One has been shot in the liver. Oakland rioted. Police cars were burned, windows were smashed, the local police force was overwhelmed. And the blogosphere chided the rioters for destroying property. See, when it's in another country people say "why doesn't 'merikuh react that way!?", but when they see fire in the streets, and people bleeding from massive headwounds they call it senseless violence. And sure, the violence itself may be regrettable. We shouldn't destroy things like children when we get frustrated. But the police are leaving the city of Oakland no choice. The bullies that chose to join the police force, in particular those that fire on noncriminals and the pigs that protect them, have abdicated their claim to righteousness. The police force exists to protect and serve their community. Police themselves are not above the law. But this sanctioned and tax-funded gang behaves as though they are subject to some separate set of laws. Cops that kill people undeserving are not hauled off to jail, they are asked to resign pending investigation. The bureaucracy protects them. If Oscar Grant, or You, had killed someone in the course of work, you would not be given the luxury of resigning. You would rot in jail. You would scrape together whatever meagre savings you could to hire the greasiest lawyer in the phonebook and you would pray. A police officer is not subject to that set of circumstances in our great nation. And if that is the case, if they claim to be beyond the reach of our common agreement of laws, our response to them must also be outside of the law. The authoritarians set up this cycle of action and response, they have required from us violent retribution. The riots serve to prove the maxim that "Those who make peaceful revolution impossible will make violent revolution inevitable." (thx JFK). I wish it could be some other way.


I have been having dreams about Antarctica. A frozen landscape that does not blink or punctuate its days. Dreams of ice and mud and wind and alien creatures, alien feelings. It is close to another planet as one could hope to find on Earth and still breathe oxygen. The people drawn to it are of a scattered tribe that seek hardship, purity, proof of their existence, expansion of their narrow and tawdry experience. I've found a way to go there. After I complete my MFA (btw, all apps in. Waiting on responses. Smoking, drinking too much, crossing fingers, making claims, feeling superhumanly confident one moment and childishly uncertain the next), I plan to submit a grant proposal to the Antarctic Artists and Writers Program. This will require of me a longish work that is set in the Antarctic and deals with the landscape and the lives of those who live there. The largest boon is that I get to live rent free on the most insane patch of the world I could imagine for several months, and get some choice in what my activities would be while there. Luckily, I have a story idea already . . over the next couple years I can let it gestate and be ready to crank out a massive anti-historiographic metafiction about loneliness, near-death experiences, fossils, and the end-times. All of this, for me, is a perfect opportunity and suggests a possible lifestyle. This grant is only one of many, many funding opportunities for writers. Ideally, I would bounce from one to the next. thank you taxpayers.


I just finished tweaking a short-story. I find that my stories fall into approximately 4 categories: painful and clear, irreal, pseudo-biographical, and hyper/ludicrous. This story falls into the last. I wrote the first draft, all of it, from a hotel room in Santa Ana, CA last year and only this week got around to editing it for mass consumption. If you get around to reading it, let me know what you think. Also, this story, like all of my work that I like is linked to here and in the sidebar under "short stories".

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"I want to remember it. I never want to forget it."

(video and quote: Colonel Kurtz-Apocalypse Now)

Civilization is comprised of a network of ideologies. There are religious ideologies, economic ideologies, the ideology of family, the ideology of the military. Each of these is strictly real and material (that is, they manifest in the material world with rituals, institutions, objects, documents, physical inter-relations, etc). There is no escaping ideology without entering a new one. There is an ideology of science and rebellion, of art, of humanism, of philanthropy, of anarchism, of nihilism. You will never be free of ideologies, only incrementally inching into newer and less false ones. Every ideology, beyond being material, is essentially the imaginary relationships of individuals (though this word is now in some ways moot, replace with subjects) to their real conditions of existence. Ideologies emerge, in part, out of long-held misconceptions about the way things are. This misconception becomes an Ideological Apparatus concerned with maintaining its existence and growing arms and legs. And so subtle hierarchies become material discourses on power. Confusion about the universe becomes religion. Misunderstanding of human nature becomes economics. The biological appearance of families becomes the 'nuclear family'. All of these things form a vast, dominant, oppressive force that encourages our conformity, insures our complicity, and convinces us to perpetuate it.

Ok . . .all that thanks to Marx and Althusser. But, I thought this in the stolid quiet of my office at 6am, the world outside my window matte black, if every ideology is based on "imaginary relationships" (even what we think is the truest possible statement is distorted by the limitations of language, even the purest observation is poisoned by our eyes) then certainly, in all ideologies, their will be a day of reckoning. Not only that, but if one patiently observes an ideology in its death throws, he or she will observe what it was about that system that was imaginary, false, a lie. We are currently witnessing a glitch in our economic system. Some think it is simply a setback like the recessions of the 80s or other earlier economic crises. I don't know what the medium-term economic picture might be, and I am certainly no expert. But what I can say, is that in the failures of the current economic arrangement, the lie behind our economic ideology is exposed. Money is not real. It could be, I'm not saying objects have no value and that there is no sound means of acquiring food by providing services. But in America, money is not real. The government pumps numbers into the system, founded on no actual product or material. Banks charge you interest to provide you with electronic numbers that do not exist as anything but imagined agreements. Mortgages are taken out on property, and the debt is sliced into a million pieces like cake. But it is all simply numbers in an electronic system. This is what causes inflation, in all reality. Having more money than value. If things are worth $100 and you divide it 105 ways, you can hardly call each divided unit $1. And yet that is what we do. The moment that we dematerialized money, that we negated raw mathematics, we started the timer on the ultimate failure of the economic ideology.

Likewise, the economic system holds fictitious tenets of human nature. It presumes rationality in all actions. It starts wars and speculates based on the notion that each human unit is identical to the next. It assumes that free markets will flush out the best of the competitive nature deep within each of us and thus actualize us. All of these things are lies. All of them erode the base of the economic system.





I pushed out 10 graduate applications this week. Three 12 hour days of making checklists and sending electronic money and rewriting personal statements and listening to skull-rattling gangsta rap. Sliding that first completed one into the mailbox, I almost heard the click. New human being, new daily bread, new settings on my alarm clock, new skylines, new means of conveyance, new pollution in my lungs, new garbage in my newspaper, new bass in my headphones, new software to write with, new photos to fuck up, new people to alienate and avoid, new dreams at new altitudes, new brands of alcohol. Most importantly: new trade, new 40hours+, new opportunities. The only lesson I can give on this: Remember that what you do for yourself can never be taken from you. Make a plan and hold it glowing in your ribcage like fascists might drag you from your bed pre-dawn. Hold it above everything: carnal desires, food, your health, your happiness, familial obligations, your god, your illnesses and allergies, the law, propriety, comfort, sanity, bills, everything.

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"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.

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