random.

The Sad Truth About Relationships

Today I listened to my officemate discuss the details of his brother's slow death in another timezone with his sister on the phone. Brain cancer has destroyed an optic nerve, and surgery to correct the growth caused a stroke and complete blindness as well as hydrocephalus and short-term dementia. He wakes up starving from naps and doesn't know where he is or why he cannot see. The news has to be broken to him over and over again. His wife there holding his shaky hand. How can I write something fictive that matters after thinking of that? And how did I spend all day thinking of my personal bullshit?

Western civilization and technology encountered island populations in the South Pacific and even Indian Oceans long after much of the rest of the world was "settled". When westerners discovered Easter Island the few remaining inhabitants (they had cut down all of their trees, understand?) had been living under the impression that the universe consisted of their dying island and an infinity of ocean on all sides. In New Guinea, in the 1930s, a British official encountered a previously uncontacted village. After several days of trying to communicate with them, one villager strolled out to the air strip that had been hacked into the mountainside and lashed himself to the airplane there. He had to see where the thing came from. He was willing to die to see where it came from. There is an island in the Indian Ocean, Sentinel Island, that is occupied by a long dissociated collection of the Andaman tribe. No one understands their language and they have only seen other tribes and Westerners from a distance. What do they make of our helicopters and boats and airplanes?


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pWe7wTVbLUU

Barack Obama just gave an amazing speech about race in America. Watch it.

»»  read more

»»  read more

Magic Realism

Reading Like Water for Chocolate

my distaste for magic realism grows. I have no problem with supernatural events occurring in literature, I'm far from a strict realist. But this genre, this device, is philosophically misleading. In Like Water for Chocolate, as in Midnight's Children, or many other post-colonial works, the inexplicable nature of life and our place in it is given a false order. A character is surreptitiously born during preparations for a feast (in fact born into the feast itself), and thus lives a life enchanted with food. She cries so much that when the tears dry, the salt leftover is enough to fill a ten pound sack. She variously cries and bleeds into many meals that have profound emotional effects on the readers. I'm hoping she shits or pisses in a pie before it's through.

So what, exactly, is my problem with magical realism? It is too easy, it is too allegorical, it is too clean. It suggests nothing of the anxiety that we feel towards the world's incomprehensibility, and replaces it with the suggestion that all is right and logical, so long as we bend the coincidences of life to their breaking point. Life does not make sense in easy terms. Magical realism is merely an attempt to usurp religion as the ridiculous cipher for this chaos. It suggests order where there is none.

And yet, I revere works of surrealism. Because Kafka and Beckett and Barthelme do not flinch, though their worlds are fantastic. They use the logic of dreams to characterize our anxiety and confusion. They hold up no answers, just questions all the way down to your spine. . .

Anyway. Everyone seems to love this stuff except me.

»»  read more

Gravity

The iron never lies to you. You can walk outside and listen to all kinds of talk, get told that you're a god or a total bastard. The iron will always kick you the real deal. The iron is the great reference point, the all-knowing perspective giver. Always there like a beacon in the pitch black. I have found the iron to be my greatest friend. It never freaks out on me, never runs. Friends may come and go. But 200 pounds is always 200 pounds. - Henry Rollins

That rebuilding requires destruction. That's what laughs me. That's what I smirk at when I smirk at signals and streaks in windows and solemn slow-suicides lingering in my periphery. I don't want it to not be cold at night, when I pace on patient concrete that waits for our world to end. I ain't sought resolution for this shiver, the slivers from the system I climbed. Let a thing bleed so the flotsam of memories can chunk in the asthma, in the far behind. And epochs ago we strolled thru weeds we'd named in our sleep. Collected rocks to be honed into the thin line between starve and ghost. Turned the nausea of stars into a history wrote. Now I blink slow, every second unfolds like a photograph, like smoke.

»»  read more

helicopters in my blood

I don't want anything. Arrange this: I don't want money or children or a large television or regular home-cooked meals or reliable transportation or a bed or health insurance or a mailing address or easy answers or the wind at my back. I'm starting to not even care if she thinks about me anymore, or if I'll ever feel warmth in bed beside me, or if I'll ever sleep 8 hours, or if I can bite my tongue through the next million social awkwardnesses, or if I'll maintain my health, or if I'll ever have a night off to stare at the moon, or if anyone wants to read my work. I don't believe in god, "spiritualism", the family unit, the concept of America, liberalism/conservatism, globo-gym fitness, blind philanthropy, the War on ___________ , Hemingway, or corporate consumerism. I haven't purchased anything but food, books, gas, and intoxicants in months. I haven't seen a TV on inside my house in recent memory. I have no plans for anything but homework and work and writing and the occasional coma-like inebriation. I have a knee-high stack of books next to my bed to be read before the summer. I have 82 sprawling days of sweating over riots in places I'll never visit before I see anyone worth leaving my house for. I've got a half-dozen ideas for short-stories that will only be coaxed out onto the page with lean meals, coffee and THC. I have calluses in the palms of my hands that weep pus some mornings, I've developed exercise-induced asthma, gastronomic distress and as many niche aches as your average coal miner. I sleep on my floor because somehow the discomfort comforts me.

And the moral of this is, the more things that I give up, the happier I become. And it doesn't come from cautious meditation after a long cluttered day. Not the forceful forgetting of life. It comes from ruthlessly excising complications, repudiating the patterns your peers and elders fall into, deliberating over your next steps with a scalpel and a spliff. Carefully whittling your concerns down to the few fatal elements that matter. Trim this life to the very second in front of you, rolling out like an epoch into the next.

»»  read more

Misandry, Makeshift, Masculinity

SYM. That's one of many names affixed to the bulk of my close male friends. Single, young and male. Kay S. Himowitz thinks that because 20-something men are marrying in fewer and fewer numbers, that we have somehow become a universally corrupted lot of slackers. That for us, as men, to ever practice responsibility and discipline we MUST be husbands and fathers and homeowners. The article is filled with several tiers of nonsense, the least significant and perhaps most predictable is that her opinion is rife with fallacious aggrandizing of the mid-century experience. Following that, she has applied the behavior of childish -men across a broad swath of 4 films and two novels to deduce that me and you are slackers who fend off adulthood with a bong in one hand and an issue of Maxim in the other. The most significant and enraging thing here, for me, is that she perpetuates the atavistic stupidity that our ultimate goal should be children and home ownership. Maybe we've grown up watching every institution fail us, and thus feel marriage is a farce. Maybe we watched our parents dilute the vitality of their life by pissing it away on marriage and children before they ever did the things they really wanted. Maybe cultural evolution has allowed us such greater freedom that, while some of us have become slackers, the majority of our unmarried generation has realized they can do anything they want if they simply avoid a few pitfalls.

I start volunteering at a maximum security prison in the next few days. I'll be alone in a room with a guard outside teaching discarded men god knows what. I'm trying to learn something from them. It pleases me that this is a Sacrament. Perhaps the one forgotten by all these assholes trying to tell gay people they can't love each other, and that thoughtful analysis of this complicated world is immoral.

When I went through this Buddhist phase I became convinced that the masculine disposition was what was wrong with the world I saw as corrupted and misaligned.The world is still corrupted and misaligned . . macho fucks are still pissing on the dream and all of that. But now, grown man shit I guess, I've learned to appreciate manhood. No disrespect to the billions of beautiful, bad-ass women out there. But, I learned to heave and pull and have rough edges and floss my sweat and channel the teeth-grinding urge to compete over every inch. All this physical training I've subjected myself to has my sedentary body cranking out unprecedented testosterone and begging for burdens. My libidinal urges raging against long, lonely nights. At the bar I just want to armwrestle with these skinny cats I linger with on free-nights.

»»  read more

Die Homeless

I came out here in the summer of 2006 after several years of madness under the shadow of the GM center. I had a good job lined up and dear family here, but the real reason for the jump was to pop the bubble of my comfort zone. To reduce my socialization and focus. To break my strongest connections so that when I wanted to again in the future, I could break more without remorse. It took me a year to recover from this severance. And I can't apologize enough, but you understand what I did.

And though I started making a lot of money and securing an envious resume that peers might use to leverage marriage, homes, etc, I moved into a 10' x 10' cell with screaming red walls and sat on the floor to work. Crafted a workspace from materials I found cheap. Enrolled in university and stayed up late perfecting the craft. And despite the boredom, the loneliness, this city's lack of soul, the tedium of a technical profession, the constant longing for people who are not here . . .I learned to write.

Started sweating and losing sleep over a second undergraduate degree. Where people examined me like a foreign object; knowledge of math verging on witchcraft and opinions, rigorous and logical, that were better off left alone. Learned the ins and outs of this wing of academia and understood where I wanted to be in a few years.

And time passed. And I met people. And I went places, and I returned home, and I drank and smoked too much, and I fell in love, and I sharpened my body like a spear, and I visited strange lands, and I developed new reputations and habits and vices, and I relentlessly shaved my head, and I read 50 books, and I wrote a dozen stories. And suddenly its 2008 and I'm looking at the short end of my time in Boise. I quit my job 16 months from now. And I have no idea where I will be a few months after that. And this mystery makes the brevity of the time ahead exhilarating.

»»  read more

"Somewhere between motivated and cold."

I haven't really had the words for this in awhile. Still reeling from some things that knocked me out of my senses. But I've written two short stories since the new year, and it is feeling quite natural to lock myself down here with my coffee and my entheogen and my wine and my occasional music, and at the very least stare at the empty whiteboard for hours. I've never been the type to walk away and come back to something later. And as much as its ruined for me, my impatience might be the only thing I really have.

My semester is in full swing. I submitted first in workshop (this is now 5 times in a row) and my piece received, on balance, pretty good opinions. For whatever its worth, someone referred to something as brilliant. Which is one of those words only more narrowly defined than 'interesting', positive though at least. It was really an effort to write something simple. Something surreal and minimalist and yet straight and painful. I think I was successful in at least some of this.

My other class is a Senior Seminar course intended to tidy up after four or five years of college, when you're just looking for a break and don't want to think too much. When you've got parties and parent-financed backpacking trips through Europe to plan, that sort of thing. The theme is food, and the professor has revealed herself as prioritizing food and furniture above all else in literature. Tonight I read recipes from the 18th century. I am supposed to have something to say about them on Thursday. I didn't ask for a break.

To maintain happiness, we're supposed to dedicate our lives to some aim. Not to materials or to individual people. We know that these are fleeting. And yet, in 96ish days, the first person in a long time is going to come down into the lab. And we're going to talk for a while. And I can't wait.

»»  read more