"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.

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"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.

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