"The Universe is an Intelligence Test"

(video: "The End of the World Cult")


I thought of eventually working in academia as a reasonable career. Surround myself with words at the very least, receive money for food and rent for talking about things I love. But there is something more to this now. There is weakness in academia, poly-solipsism fragmenting the study of life entire into mutually exclusive shards, resentment and fear staring over those thick black lines into that which you do not study. I think writers should know physics, Engineers should understand color, business majors should read about anthropology. There's no way to really do this in the current system, all the spoils of discipline to the autodidacts, but maybe if someone tried . . .

Last night I had a dream that I was afflicted with Amputee Identity Disorder and while living in a root cellar in Arusha I used hedge clippers to cut off the tip of my thumb and my left pinkie as a whole. There was no pain but a sort of relief, a throbbing dissipated that I didn't even recognize until it was gone. Everything else suddenly more in focus. And then upon awaking, how pleasant to see my hands intact.

Added a "Short Stories" link on the upper-right. That'll be the home for new things as they hit PDF export button. Thanks.

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The Quiet is a Scourge

" 'There's no such thing as life without bloodshed,' [Cormac] McCarthy says philosophically. 'I think the notion that the species can be improved in some way, that everyone could live in harmony, is a really dangerous idea. Those who are afflicted with this notion are the first ones to give up their souls, their freedom. Your desire that it be that way will enslave you and make your life vacuous.' "
-New York Times, 1992

Reading Blood Meridian and feeling the seismic presence of it under my feet, the reek of it on my skin, the glare of it in my eyes. It reads like something unearthed and discounted by archaeologists because it simply does not square with our impressions. It seems I should be blowing free dust lodged in its binding.


No amount of stalling or excuses gambled with down-turned eyes will hold back the flood of yuppieness. And so for two weeks straight I'm spending my 5-8 shifts in the basement of a complex bigger than any number of data crunchers could ever need, wasting neurons learning software that makes me grind my teeth. And in several weeks I'll get phonecalls requesting assistance with design that'll scatter the dozen decent lines burned in my subconscious by my morning coffee.

Over the weekend I took a shovel to the ground outside our house. Fixing to make my landlord/brother/notochord's house more rentable. And shoulder deep in the clay, the shovel started hitting smooth river rocks laid down before anyone I know was born and waiting there to satirize the rough earth with their shapelessness and stripes. And sweat dripping off my forehead in the spring desert heat. And great clods of terra diaspora heaping up behind me. And wishing that was how I spent some days in lieu of the ostensible nothing they pay me way too much for.

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"I owe much, I have nothing. The rest I leave to the poor."

Memorial Day . . .

(credit. video:some kid on the Internet, audio:Cage-Grand Ol' Party Crash)


I read an article about kids moving to New York and struggling wit dey bills (you can read the first 9 words here, or try to remember your nytimes password). One kid interviewed pirates internet. Another kids makes his own meals, a big thing of rice and beans that he eats for lunch and dinner. Some of them wait to get haircuts until they go back to visit their 'rents in Ohio or whatever (how do they pay for that?). One guy even, if you can believe this, cuts his own hair. I wanted kids eating out of garbage cans and living in sewer pipes and fighting over their 50 square feet with shards of glass. I'm trying to move to NY . . .and their lives sound luxurious after Detroit and Arusha and Blade Runner and eschatological dreams about living in trash heaps.


Going to Vegas tomorrow to sit in on a meeting and take notes and introduce myself to various bureaucrats and the like. Hot, plastic Vegas where nothing is true and everything is permitted. Every time I travel for work now, I wonder: "when do the numbers start not working out. When do we simply say that a plane ticket is not in the budget?" And how long after this is it until we only fly for funerals or weddings or emergency surgeries?

It's strange who you meet when you stay relatively sober and follow up on invitations when you really just want to drive home from work at top-speed and read Transmetropolitan and see if your plants have grown. Still . . during hang-overs (whiskey, crossfit, whatever) I learned how to edit over the last week or so. Turns out you just quit whining, have a smoke and get to work.

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Pastless, Panic, Paternity

Blogger has somehow lost my last two posts. Whatever.

I was tramping a little bit the last two weeks. Traveled to Houston/Austin and met a friend and enjoyed myself much more than I deserve. Managed to find someplace I think I could live happily. Went to Moab to meet up with some kids I haven't seen in far too long. And laughed harder and more honestly than I have in months. Now I'm home and school's over and it's already too hot to go outside. Spent the day in my basement, and in my garage, trying to write but tapping only a trickle.

My recent dreams have been of seeing myself in the mirror with reckless wispy hair falling out of a clammy skull. And teeth mostly missing save charcoal-colored stalactites protruding from beet-red gums that've peeled away to show chaotic tendons and lamprey-mouth decay. Why is this?

If I had a child I'd assign physical challenges like some kind of Tyler Durden with a den and a library. And he'd come into the house some day after his mission climbing trees out in the suburban half-forest with his broken wrist hanging. And in the car ride to the hospital I'd tell him what Nietzsche had to say about hardship.

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Mississippi Drug War Blues

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"I've spoken to God on the mountain . . .
And I've swam in the Irish sea . . .
I ate fire and drank from the Ganges . . .
And I'll beg there for mercy for me"
-Tom Waits

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elegy. empathy. emphasis

I blame Kerouac for this urge, if not my genes. And my father for the fact that I can never sit comfortably, never let that blood pressure simmer. Someone said I was many things but not laidback, regardless I scrutinized that sentence for everything from flirtation to syntax. There is no offswitch for the currents in this conduit. No call-waiting to split space-time and teleconference.

If someone simply read my words they would not know me. And yet trembling beneath each sentence, like things that live in the soil, there I am. And the anxiety vibrating that ink is the same thing that makes my eyes twitch in the shower and on the commute. The same thing I silence with distractions.

The semester is ending and I am now in legit senior standing. One full-timer's semester from being degree'd in English studies. And most of the time I feel privy to no special knowledge, and then my brother (in arms and furnishings and blood and time) asks me to define Post-Modernism and we talk until my paper is late or we both go to sleep so we can push buttons for money in the morning. There is an infinity, yet, of things to learn. I've just spread out into more of it than I had realized.

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"Find yourself" "mired in work"

Finished this tonight. I think I like it and might be putting it in the "for MFA application" pile. If you read it, please let me know what you think.

Also, final rev of One or Two, subtle differences really.

One a month, on pace for a little more than that.

So. Things didn't work out. And I thought it would mess me up. But, I'm happier than I've been in a minute. Blessings in disguise. I'm so much more comfortable with anger than I am with anxiety and uncertainty. Lessons learned: follow your instincts, speak your mind, remember that everything is voluntary.

“Through every moment of pain in this...I will feel blessed.”

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