"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.

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"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.

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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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"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.

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"unfolding below him like a map in one slow silent explosion"

(quote: William Faulkner, Intruder in the Dust; video: Warren Ellis on writer's block)

I'm writing my personal statement for applying to grad schools. While trying to understand how I should direct a passage of the essay, I listed writers that I feel influenced by (Franz Kafka, William Faulkner, Vladimir Nabokov, Jack Kerouac, Philip K. Dick, David Foster Wallace, Kenzeburo Oe, Cormac McCarthy, J.M. Coetzee, Jonathan Lethem, Warren Ellis, Zola, Samuel Beckett, William S. Burroughs, Paul Auster, several others). And then, looking over the list, I realized that none of these have been suggested or read in my fiction workshop courses. At least twelve short-stories*5 semesters of workshop=60 short stories and nary an author that I would want to emulate. This is not a knock on them specifically, they're all obviously accomplished and highly skilled at the craft. I just don't think the aesthetic of contemporary lit., as canonized by the academic creative writing machine, is particularly exciting. Dusty, wistful, soft . . .victimized, eviscerated, cliched.

Apparently Dick Cheney has been indicted for profiting from a corrupted system of private prisons. He was invested in a company called Vanguard that operates Federal Detention centers, and it appears they ran it little different than an organized criminal enterprise would. The whole thing sounds rather thin and silly, considering Cheney's remarkable tendency towards 'evil'. And, most likely, Cheney will worm out of any culpability whether he deserves blame or not. What's most unsettling about this scandal to me, is that Cheney is even involved in prisons to this degree. He shouldn't have any involvement with any corporation other than blind trusts operated by financial managers. And yet he is. He makes money from the saddest part of our society, the most overt denigration and dehumanization we have in this country. And, not just Cheney's involvmenet, but that there are private prisons at all. As government functionaries we need to have individuals interested in the goings-on of the prison system. But the notion that there are huge companies making profit from building cinder-block incubators for violence and alienation . . .the idea that there is some conference every year in some shithole casino where the salesmen for Vanguard or Wackenhut are showing the heads of Dept of Corrections glossy pamphlets of people being caged like farm animals . . .How the fuck do these people sleep? We need prisons, yes, but how can a person pour their cup of coffee in the morning thinking how to sustain more human beings on less and less. Make the food shittier, make the cells a little smaller, make the rec yard smaller, look for extraneous luxuries to take away, look for opportunities for prison-labor profit. And then, when the new business plan is all arranged, maybe they punch their grandmother in the neck and piss on their neighbor's mail. Well, as long as they can figure out how to make money on it.

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"Cross rubicons you filthy children"

(quote: me; video: clip from Bad Boy Bubby {turn your volume up a bit})

A humanist organization has begun putting advertisements on buses that say something along the lines of: "Why believe in a god? Just be good for goodness's sake". As a phrase I find none of that disagreeable. I don't believe in god, and I find our culture and progress diluted by those that practice within organized religions. I believe that religion is a trait adapted for survival in an environment we no longer inhabit, a vestige of a different time, and irrelevant paradigm that refuses to get the fuck out of the way. But this advertisement nonsense is just that. The struggle of ideas is not won with bus advertisements and silly mottos. This campaign will do nothing but embarrass most atheists and further alienate believers. Consider this: if you are an atheist what is the single most personally annoying attribute of religion (we are not talking here about its tendency towards violence and hatred, the stupefying effect it has on children, the reprehensible behavior it is allowed to excuse)? I think we can all agree that it is evangelism. We do not like the word 'god' on our money, we do not want religion forced on us in television or the public square, we do not want the moral compass of the church taking bearings in our halls of justice. Many atheists say that they don't have any problem with people practicing their 'faith' as long as they keep it mostly to themselves. The tacit agreement behind that is that we keep our understanding mostly to ourselves. And yet, here we are. Evangelizing. Giving the fools an argument for what's wrong with us. Occupying, however inaccurate the term, the 'militant' moniker bestowed by Bill O'Reilly and Bill Donohue and Rush Limbaugh. Religion will end. In a few generations it will finally be shrugged off like an ill-fitting coat. That is not to say that we can't push on it with science, or air it out in the appropriate interpersonal conversation, or write about it on our blogs, or create irreligous art. We simply need to hold the same respect for everyone else that we demand they give us. I don't know what the hell this group was thinking.

It all starts to become real when you get your test scores back and your portfolio is 95% done and your letters of recommendation are piling up in their letterhead envelopes and Wayne State has sent most of your transcripts and your boss tells you "there is no point in doing x, you'll be gone in a year". And if I were to gut a deer and read its steaming entrails they would tell me my best chances for acceptance are the University of Oregon, Ohio State, Brooklyn College, and my second alma mater. Next summer, I'm plotting a month-long Retirement Party that will find me hitchhiking and bussing from Portland, Oregon to San Francisco, California. I will sleep on the beach in Coos Bay, in the salted trees of Siuslaw National Park, in the view of Stinson beach, in the parking lot of Mt. Tamalpais State Park. I want to demarcate my departure, dig a deep slash in it that can never be recrossed. I want to think of nothing save how I will eat and where I am going for 30 consecutive nights. There will be only so many instances in a life that allow for such digressions. Each one must be swallowed whole.

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" . . .Like: 'Momma I want to sing'"

(Quote: MF DOOM, Video: Keith O. Special Comment on Prop. 8)

I've come to realize that my political perspective boils down to a theory of what government has authority to do, and where that authority comes from. The government is our agreement on how to operate, a system developed to collectively protect and promote one another's livelihood. As a consequence we have police and fire and health services and educational systems, and as economic cooperation we have roads and business regulations. I don't believe that any government has the authority to impose rules on anything that doesn't substantially effect the agreement. The government cannot tell you you cannot smoke marijuana, or marry someone of your own sex. It also cannot arbitrarily delegate huge sums of your money through deliberate and secretive strategization. It cannot tell you to protect yourself from anything. It cannot tell you where and when to work. It cannot make you change your personality. It cannot meet nonviolence with violence. We need to rethink what it is that our government does in the sphere of our life. Every government that distends our agreement, or degrades our humanity . . .is a usurper and a tyrant. I think of these things in light of two very recent legal anomalies. Pot took one small step towards legalization, and we will watch as the Federalies attempt to crack down on one more complex of nooks and crannies. This slow progress will make the war on drugs more ridiculous with each DEA budget, and more absurd with each $100 ticket that replaces jail time. Proposition 8, in CA, is a different breed. The most "liberal" state in the union rescinded its decision to allow gay marriage. Homosexuals are less free than the rest of us, even in what people think of as our freest state. This 'rule', outside of the bounds of our agreement, is a lie, an impossibility. The materialization of an ideology based to its core on lies and self-deception and pitiful hatred. We do not have the permission, the authority, to decide another's life like this. We do not have the right to take away that which we cannot give. A supporter of Proposition 8 is a fascist and a repulsive artifact of a past that I want nothing to do with.


The past two weeks I've been swimming in a head cold. I sweat in my sleep, I wake up with a broken nose, food is unappetizing. This gets in the way of everything.

I had the best workshop of my short career. This story excited positive comments from the full round of cynics. There is an old man in the class that seemed bewildered and frustrated about it, he spent 5 minutes articulating some dissatisfaction that no one else could follow. Though of course, that happens every week. I plan on putting the story in the above link in my graduate school application package. I'd appreciate any commentary. It is not of the MFA aesthetic, and that may be what I like about it best.

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"Motherfuckers better realize"

(quote: Saul Williams, Coded Language; video: excerpt from V for Vendetta)

Stress. I started this yuppie gig quite capable of leaving the myriad stressors in the cube. But then it expanded. It required of me to travel outside of its 9-5 domain. It seeded me with worry and doubt, an ever-increasing demand on my nervous system and my time. But it is not these qualities of the thing that I would criticize; things worth doing all require their sacrifices. But it isn't worth doing. At the end of each week, I have nothing of my own. My link to the thing I do is severed by my paycheck, my email, address, the institutional supports that girder my productivity. This is no way to spend 40 hours a week.

In between the various lines of work, I'm applying for Grad School. A professor, very unorthodox, sent the letter to me for review. It turns out I'm significantly better at the literary criticism game that I would have ever given myself credit for. If I were to take the aggregate efforts and credit awarded in my Engineering career and place them next to the state of my English career, it does indeed seem I was in the wrong field the entire time.

The linguistic carnival that is the 2008 Campaign is drawing to a close. Looks like Obama is going to win. But I can't help but pay close attention to the absurdity of the discourse. Obama is a "Marxist", "Socialist", "Communist" when he mimics back the tacit subtext of modern capitalism. Sarah Palin is "folksy" because she is an idiot. No one lies, they "prevaricate", "dissemble", "misspeak", are taken "out of context". Obama is a "Muslim", and thus essentially a demon. Michelle Bachmann and certain parts of Virginia are "pro-Amerikuhn". Plans to reduce taxes for everyone but the top are characterized as tax increases on everyone (after all, we can't have Capitalism without False Consciousness). Meeting someone who once planted a bomb is collusion with terrorists. Owning 13 houses is irrelevant, having gone to Harvard is elitist. If we, as voters, fail to see through the mess the media and the candidates (mostly the Republicans) have made and cannot grasp the false Truth they've arranged, we're taking a further step towards rule by the stupid.

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