zeitfeist

2011-12-28T12:26:00.001-05:00

   "Some psychiatric patients--plus a certain percentage of people who've gotten so dependent on chemicals for feelings of well-being that when the chemicals have to be abandoned they undergo a loss-trauma that reaches way down deep into the soul's core systems--these persons know firsthand that there's more than one kind of so-called 'depression.' One kind is low-grade and sometimes gets called anhedonia (Anhedonia was apparently coined by Ribot, a Continental Frenchman, who in his 19th-century Psychologie des Sentiments says he means it to denote the psychoequivalent of analgesia, which is the neurologic suppression of pain.) or simple melancholy. It's a kind of spiritual torpor in which one loses the ability to feel pleasure or attachment to things formerly important. The avid bowler drops out of his league and stays home at night staring dully at kick-boxing cartridges [videos]. The gourmand is off his feed. The sensualist finds his beloved Unit [penis] all of a sudden to be so much feelingless gristle, just hanging there. The devoted wife and mother finds the thought of her family about as moving, all of a sudden, as a theorem of Euclid. It's a kind of emotional novocaine, this form of depression, and while it's not overtly painful its deadness is disconcerting and... well, depressing. Kate Gompert's always thought of this anhedonic state as a kind of radical abstracting of everything, a hollowing out of stuff that used to have affective content. Terms the undepressed toss around and take for granted as full and fleshy--happiness, joie de vivre, preference, love--are stripped to their skeletons and reduced to abstract ideas. They have, as it were, denotation but not connotation. The anhedonic can still speak about happiness and meaning et al., but she has become incapable of feeling anything in them, of understanding anything about them, of hoping anything about them, or of believing them to exist as anything more than concepts. Everything becomes an outline of the thing. Objects become schemata. The world becomes a map of the world. An anhedonic can navigate, but has no location. I.e., the anhedonic becomes, in the lingo of Boston AA, Unable to Identify.
   ...It's of some interest that the lively arts of the millennial U.S.A. treat anhedonia and internal emptiness as hip and cool. It's maybe the vestiges of the Romantic glorification of Weltschmerz, which means world-weariness or hip ennui. Maybe it's the fact that most of the arts here are produced by world-weary and sophisticated older people and then consumed by younger people who not only consume art but study it for clues on how to be cool, hip--and keep in mind that, for kids and younger people, to be hip and cool is the same as to be admired and accepted and included and so Unalone. Forget so-called peer-pressure. It's more like peer-hunger. No? We enter a spiritual puberty where we snap to the fact that the great transcendent horror is loneliness, excluded encagement in the self. Once we've hit ths age, we will now give or take anything, wear any mask, to fit, be part-of, not be Alone, we young. The U.S. arts are our guide to inclusion. A how-to. We are shown how to fashion masks of ennui and jaded irony at a young age where the face is fictile enough to assume the shape of whatever it wears. And then it's stuck there, the weary cynicism that saves us from gooey sentiment and unsophisticated naivete. Sentiment equals naivete on this continent (at least since the Reconfiguration). One of the things sophisticated viewers have always like about J.O. Incandenza's The American Century as Seen Through a Brick is its unsubtle thesis that naivete is the last true terrible sin in the theology of millennial America. And since sin is the sort of thing that can be talked about only figuratively, it's natural that Himself's dark little cartridge was mostly about a myth, viz. that queerly persistent U.S. myth that cynicism and naivete are mutually exclusive. Hal, who's empty but not dumb, theorizes privately that what passes for hip cynical transcendence of sentiment is really some kind of fear of being really human, since to be really human (at least as he conceptualizes it) is probably to be unavoidably sentimental and naive and goo-prone and generally pathetic, is to be in some basic interior way forever infantile, some sort of not-quite-right-looking infant dragging itself anaclitically around the map, with big wet eyes and froggy-soft skin, huge skull, gooey drool. One of the really American things about Hal, probably, is the way he despises what it is he's really lonely for: this hideous internal self, incontinent of sentiment and need, that pules and writhes just under the hip empty mask, anhedonia (This had been one of Hal's deepest and most pregnant abstractions, one he'd come up with once while getting secretly high in the Pump Room. That we're all lonely for something we don't know we're lonely for. How else to explain the curious feelings that he goes around feeling like he misses somebody he's never even met? Without the universalizing abstraction, the feeling would make no sense).
   The American Century as Seen Through a Brick's main and famous key-image is of a piano-string vibrating--a high D, it looks like--vibrating, and making a very sweet unadorned solo sound indeed, and then a little thumb comes in the frame, a blunt moist pale and yet dingy thumb, with disreputable stuff crusted in one of the nail-corners, small and unlined, clearly an infantile thumb, and as it touches the piano string the high sweet sound immediately dies. And the silence that follows is excruciating. Later in the film, after much mordant and didactic panoramic brick-following, we're back at the piano-string, and the thumb is removed, and the high sweet sound recommences, extremely pure and solo, and yet now somehow, as the volume increases, now with something rotten about it underneath, there's something sick-sweet and overripe and potentially putrid about the one clear high D as its volume increases and increases, the sound getting purer and louder and more dysphoric until after a surprisingly few seconds we find ourselves right in the middle of the pure undampered sound longing and even maybe praying for the return of the natal thumb, to shut it up.
   Hal isn't old enough yet to know that this is because numb emptiness isn't the worst kind of depression. That dead-eyed anhedonia is but a remora on the ventral flank of the true predator, the Great White Shark of pain. Authorities term this condition clinical depression or involutional depression or unipolar dysphoria. Instead of just an incapacity for feeling, a deadening of the soul, the predator-grade depression Kate Gompert always feels as she Withdraws from secret marijuana is itself a feeling. It goes by many names--anguish, despair, torment, or q.v. Burton's melancholia or Yevtuschenko's more authoritative psychotic depression--but Kate Gompert, down in the trenches with the thing itself, knows it simply as It.
   It is a level of psychic pain wholly incompatible with human life as we know it. It is a sense of radical and thoroughgoing evil not just as a feature but as the essence of conscious existence. It is a sense of poisoning that pervades the self at the self's most elementary levels. It is a nausea of the cells and soul. It is an unnumb intuition in which the world is fully rich and animate and un-map-like and also thoroughly painful and malignant and antagonistic to the self, which depressed self It billows on and coagulates around and wraps in Its black folds and absorbs in Itself, so that an almost mystical unity is achieved with a world every constituent of which means painful harm to the self. Its emotional character, the feeling Gompert describes It as, is probably mostly indescribable except as a sort of double bind in which any/all of the alternatives we associate with human agency--sitting or standing, doing or resting, speaking or keeping silent, living or dying--are not just unpleasant but literally horrible.
   It is also lonely on a level that cannot be conveyed. There is no way Kate Gompert could ever even begin to make someone else understand what clinical depression feels like, not even another person who is herself clinically depressed, because a person in such a state is incapable of empathy with any other living thing. This anhedonic Inability to Identify is also an integral part of It. If a person in physical pain has a hard time attending to anything except that pain, (the big reason why people in pain are so self-absorbed and unpleasant to be around) a clinically depressed person cannot even perceive any other person or thing as independent of the universal pain that is digesting her cell by cell. Everything is part of the problem, and there is no solution. It is a hell for one.
   The authoritative term psychotic depression makes Kate Gompert feel especially lonely. Specifically the psychotic part. Think of it this way. Two people are screaming in pain. One of them is being tortured with electric current. The other is not. The screamer who's being tortured with electric current is not psychotic: her screams are circumstantially appropriate. The screaming person who's not being tortured, however, is psychotic, since the outside parties making the diagnoses can see no electrodes or measurable amperage. One of the least pleasant things about being psychotically depressed on a ward full of psychotically depressed patients is coming to see that none of them is really psychotic, that their screams are entirely appropriate to certain circumstances part of whose special charm is that they are undetectable by any outside party. Thus the loneliness: it's a closed circuit: the current is both applied and received from within.
   The so-called 'psychotically depressed' person who tries to kill herself doesn't do so out of quote 'hopelessness' or any abstract conviction that life's assets and debits do not square. And surely not because death seems suddenly appealing. The person in whom Its invisible agony reaches a certain unendurable level will kill herself the same way a trapped person will eventually jump from the window of a burning high-rise. Make no mistake about people who leap from burning windows. Their terror of falling from a great height is still just as great as it would be for you or me standing speculatively at the same window just checking out the view; i.e. the fear of falling remains a constant. The variable here is the other terror, the fire's flames: when the flames get close enough, falling to death becomes the slightly less terrible of two terrors. It's not desiring the fall; it's terror of the flames. And yet nobody down on the sidewalk, looking up and yelling 'Don't!' and 'Hang on!', can understand the jump. Not really. You'd have to have personally been trapped and felt flames to really understand a terror way beyond falling."

Excerpt from IJ

2011-12-20T17:54:00.000-05:00

'Why do so many parents who seem relentlessly bent on producing children who feel they are good persons deserving of love produce children who grow to feel they are hideous persons not deserving of love who just happen to have lucked into having parents so marvelous that the parents love them even though they are hideous?'

2011-12-19T21:16:00.011-05:00

Here We Aren't, So Quickly

Jonathan Safran Foer

I was not good at drawing faces. I was just joking most of the time. I was not decisive in changing rooms or anywhere. I was so late because I was looking for flowers. I was just going through a tunnel whenever my mother called. I was not able to make toast without the radio. I was not able to tell if compliments were backhanded. I was not as tired as I said.

You were not able to ignore furniture imperfections. You were too light to arm the airbag. You were not able to open most jars. You were not sure how you should wear your hair, and so, ten minutes late and halfway down the stairs, you would examine your reflection in a framed picture of dead family. You were not angry, just protecting your dignity.

I was not able to run long distances. You were so kind to my sister when I didn’t know how to be kind. I was just trying to remove a stain; I made a bigger stain. You were just asking a simple question. I was almost always at home, but I was not always home at home. You were not able to cope with a stack of more than three books on my bedside table, or mixed currencies in the change dish, or plastic. I was not afraid of being alone; I just hated it. You were just admiring the progress of someone else’s garden. I was so tired of food.

We went to Atacama. We went to Sarajevo. We went to Tobey Pond every year until we didn’t. We braved thirteen inches of snow to attend a lecture in a planetarium. We tried having dinner parties. We tried owning nothing. We left handprints in a moss garden in Kyoto, and got each other off under a towel in Jaffa. We braved my parents’ for Thanksgiving and yours for the rest, and how did it happen that we were suddenly at my father’s side while he drowned in his body? I lay beside him on the bed, observed my hand reaching for his brow, said, “Despite everything—“ “What everything?” he asked, so I said, “Nothing,” or nothing.

I was always destroying my passport in the wash. You were always awful at estimating. You were never willing to think of habits as charming. I was just insisting that it was already too late to master an instrument or anything. You were never one to mention physical pain.

I couldn’t explain the cycles of the moon without pen and paper, or with. You didn’t know where e-mails were. I wouldn’t congratulate a women until she explicitly said she was pregnant. You spent a few minutes every day secretly regretting your laziness that didn’t exist. I should have forgiven you for all that wasn’t your fault.

You were terrible in emergencies. You were wonderful in “The Cherry Orchard.” I was always never complaining, because confrontation was death to me, and because everything was pretty much always pretty much O.K. with me. You were not able to approach the ocean at night. I didn’t know where my voice was between my phone and yours. You were never standing by the windows at parties, but you were always by the window. I was so paranoid about kind words. I was just not watching the news in the basement. You were just making a heroic effort to make things look easy. I was terrible about acknowledging anyone else’s efforts. You were not green tumbled, but you were not content to be not content. I was always in need of just one good dress shirt, or just one something that I never had. You were too injured by things that happened in the distant past for anything to be effortless in the present. I was always struggling to be natural with my hands. You were never immune to unexpected gifts. I was mostly just joking.

I was not neurotic, just apocalyptic. You were always copying keys and looking up words. I was not afraid of quiet; I just hated it. So my hand was always in my pocket, around a phone I never answered. You were not cheap or handy with tools, just hurt by my distance. I was never indifferent to the children of strangers, just frustrated by my own unrelenting optimism. You were not unsurprised when, that last night in Norfolk, I drove you to Tobey Pond, led you by the hand down the slope of brambles and across the rotting planks to the constellations in the water. Sharing our happiness diminished your happiness. I was not going to dance at our wedding, and you were not going to speak. No part of me was nervous that morning.

When you screamed at no one, I sang to you. When you finally fell asleep, the nurse took him to bathe him, and, still sleeping, you reached out your arms.

He was not a terrible sleeper. I acknowledged to no one but my inability to be still with him or anyone. You were not overwhelmed but overtired. I was never afraid of rolling over onto him in my sleep, but I awoke many nights sure that he was underwater on the floor. I loved collapsing things. You loved the tiny socks. You were not depressed, but you were unhappy. Your unhappiness didn't make me defensive; I just hated it. He was never happy unless held. I loved hammering things into walls. You hated having no inner life. I secretly wondered if he was deaf. I hated the gnawing longing that accompanied having everything. We were learning to see each other’s blindnesses. I Googled questions that I couldn’t ask our doctor or you.

They encouraged us to buy insurance. We had sex to have orgasms. You loved reupholstering. I went to the gym to go somewhere, and looked in the mirror when there was something I was hoping not to see. You hated our bed. He could stand himself up, but not get himself down. They fined us for our neighbor’s garage. We couldn’t wait for the beginnings and ends of vacations. I was not able to look at a blueprint and see a renovated kitchen, so I stayed out of it. They came to our door during meals, but I talked to them and gave.

I counted the seconds backwards until he fell asleep, and then started counting the seconds backwards until he woke up. We took the same walks again and again, and again and again ate at the same restaurants. They said he looked like them. I was always watching movie trailers on the computer. You were always wiping surfaces. I was always hearing my father’s laugh and never remembering his face. You broke everyone’s heart until you suddenly couldn’t. He suddenly drew, suddenly spoke, suddenly wrote, suddenly reasoned. One night I couldn't help him with his math. He got married.

We went to London to see a play. We tried putting aside time to do nothing but read, but we did nothing but sleep. We were always never mentioning it, because we didn't know what it was. I did nothing but look for you for twenty-seven years. I didn’t even know how electricity worked. We tried spending more time not together. I was not defensive about your boredom, but my happiness had nothing to do with happiness. I loved when people who worked for me genuinely liked me. We were always moving furniture and never making eye contact. I hated my inability to visit a foreign city without fantasizing about real estate. And then your father was dead. I often wasn’t reading the book that I was holding. You were never not in someone’s garden. Our mothers were dying to talk about nothing.

At a certain point you became convinced that you were always reading yesterday’s newspaper. At a certain point I stopped agonizing over being understood, and became over-reliant on my car’s G.P.S. You couldn’t tolerate trace amounts of jelly in the peanut-butter jar. I couldn’t tolerate gratuitously boisterous laughter. At a certain point I could stare without pretext or apology. Isn’t it funny that if God were to reveal and explain Himself, the majority of the world would necessarily be disappointed? At a certain point you stopped wearing sunscreen.

How can I explain the way I shrugged off nuclear annihilation but mortally feared a small fall? You couldn’t tolerate people who couldn’t tolerate babies or planes. I couldn’t tolerate people who insisted that having a coffee after lunch would keep them up all night. At a certain point I could hear my knees and felt no need to correct other people’s grammar. How can I explain why foreign cities come to mean so much to me? At a certain point you stopped agonizing over your ambitiousness, but at a certain point you stopped trying. I couldn’t tolerate magicians who did things that someone who actually had magical powers would never do.

We were all doing well. I was still in love with the Olympics. The smaller the matter, the more I allowed your approval to mean to me. They kept producing new things that we didn’t need that we needed. I needed your approval more than I needed anything. My sister died at a restaurant. My mother promised anyone who would listen that she was fine. They changed our filters. You wanted to see the northern lights. I wanted to learn a dead language. You were in the garden, not planting, but standing there. You dropped two handfuls of soil.

And here we aren’t, so quickly: I’m not twenty-six and you’re not sixty. I’m not forty-five or eighty-three, not being hoisted onto the shoulders of anybody wading into the sea. I'm not learning chess, and you're not losing your virginity. You’re not stacking pebbles on gravestones; I’m not being stolen from my resting mother’s arms. Why didn't you lose your virginity to me? Why didn't we enter the intersection one thousandth of a second sooner, and die instead of die laughing? Everything else happened--why not the thing that could have?

I am not unrealistic anymore. You are unemotional. I am not interested in the news anymore, but I was never interested in the news. What’s more, I am probably ambidextrous. I was probably meant to be effortless. You look like yourself right now. I was so slow to change, but I changed. I was probably a natural tennis player, just like my father used to say over and over and over.

I changed and changed, and more with time I will change more. I’m not disappointed, just quiet. Not unthinking, just restless. Not willfully unclear, just trying to say it as it wasn’t. The more I remember, the more distant I feel. We reached the middle so quickly. After everything it’s like nothing. I have always never been here. What a shame it wasn’t easy. What a waste of what? What a joke. But come. No explaining or mending. Be beside me somewhere: on the split stools of this bar, by the edge of this cliff, in the seats of this borrowed car, at the prow of this chip, on the all-forgiving cushions on this threadbare sofa in this one-store copper-crying fixer-upper whose windows we once squinted through for hours before coming to our senses: “What would we ever do with such a house?”

2011-12-18T01:55:00.000-05:00

if you have a god that keeps you living, by all means, keep her

drunk and hating on fb and the internet and depressed and terrified by the world's condition, esp the USA--True citizens will fight the good fight; everyone else, you will not be judged for absconding

2011-12-03T19:39:00.003-05:00

From: Complaint Dept.
To: Trash
Subj: Fwd:"our grievances," etc. / "Generation?"

We have received several complaints from members of "Generation Generation" (GG)--said members complaining their individual conditions and purposes have been lumped into an array of vague categories. Said members complain the term "generation" is a modern phenomena originally implemented by scholars and critics, as well as members of the world media, to [in words of several GG members] insufficiently explain gaps in paradigm among varying age groups. Said members also complain the term "generation" is a vestige--that whatever antiquated purpose it once served is no longer apt and that in contemporary usage it falls short of conveying genuine "purposes for existence" or relevance to planetary social climate. Members of GG complain of marginalization by what said members refer to as "old people" but that Complaint Dept. understands to be various world media conglomerates, in addition to thoroughly-aged citizens. Members of GG making grand gestures that appear on front pages of said various world media conglomerates' corporate news websites but Complaint Dept. has difficulty discovering any less-grand gestures visible in everyday life. Complaint Dept. generally scoffs at said members of GG, not really apprehending the incoherent voice cacophony. Complaint Dept. is actively lumping all related complaints into a single file and sending them to the Trash committee for final approval for permanent deletion. Kindly revise complaints as attached files and send confirmation upon deletion.

-C.D.

2011-07-22T01:14:00.002-04:00

Nu Song

2011-05-25T10:20:00.001-04:00

The Living

Dinner for a Month

2011-05-15T16:07:00.005-04:00

She scrubbed the blood from the kitchen floor. Her fingers had started wrinkling three minutes ago, aggressively pressed into the rough side of the sponge. The suds turned pink and the yellow sponge became orange, and it was all a lot more colorful than it looked to her as she knelt hunched over the damp mess.

She heaved and grunted, Micah’s sagging, tired face and his mean black eyes burning in her eyes. She had done this many times before. It only got harder. Pink droplets speckled the white tile when she threw the sponge back into the bucket. She wiped the sweat from her temple and tucked a lock of hair behind her ear. She used a paper towel to dry the spot.

The porch door creaked. He had not fixed it. Six years.

She rubbed the toe of her slipper against the blood spot on the porch which trailed down the stairs, down the sidewalk and through the grass to Micah who was in the shed hacking the carcass into pieces with a hatchet and a hacksaw. The thighs and the calves, the eviscerated torso, the neck and head. Layers of unmopped blood dried on the floor, its fresh coat now curdling at the edges of its puddle, spotted with the imprints of flies laying eggs. He had already removed the hooves and antlers. Those he could sell.

“Dinner for a month!” He shouted without looking up at her. His eyes bulged at the greasy fur of the neck, the individual brown and black hairs swishing back and forth with the motions of the blade. His sweat soaking through his blue work shirt and canvas overalls. The red bandana around his forehead soaking up the sweat running down his baldness. She did not scowl or shout or fume or cry as she had the many times before. She watched him destroy his last deer.

Later that night she scrubbed blood from the kitchen floor. She had done it many times before.

2 on memory

2011-05-15T14:39:00.004-04:00

The wind blew and ruffled the papers. Stacks and stacks of vacations and picture albums, yellowing and rotten, flaking off in the dim room, the paper melting into pulp on the wet tile. The flesh is beginning to smell rank under the cast. The candle flame is dancing on the wall. The light that does not know. Now: a muffled rasping. Muffled by swollen bronchi; by drywall and earwax and disappointment. The air billows into the working lung. Heat, wet in the tub--and the flakes of your skin like fish food at the tip of the aquarium.

The smell of this hotel bathroom. You were a child, once, and you feel it now more than since then. Since you can remember. Rubbing the toes together, there's sand between them. Papa is watching the videos of us on the TV, sitting on the floor, leaned with his elbow on the carpet. Now we call him Pop. We find it diminishes us less.

The evening we laid under the stars on the balcony of a timeshare in Nags Head and the next morning I made mom cry.

The wind is blowing and papers are flying in this room, dodging narrowly these memories. Not that it matters because everything is disintegrating. Now, wheezing, the last physical comfort is gone. I am dizzy in the shower. Maybe the main character dies tonight. They will have to watch the denouement drag out as the supporting cast attempts to 'keep it together' (though this is futile because everything is disintegrating). It will matter. It will not matter. The nonfeeling should alarm him, no? He is accustomed to the dying and it does not faze him, laying in the lukewarm water of the humid bathroom. The candle flickering. A dull orb undulating on the wall. The asymmetrical dodecagon cut into the plaster ceiling, revealing clamped quarter inch galvanized iron pipe, and a pocket of dark nothing behind it. Maybe, if a man died in this tub tonight, he'd crawl up into the ceiling through that hole and live off the warmth of the pipes in the winter.

I cry out at night, with a stranger watching me. Spiders and bed bugs and roaches scuttling by my head, across the walls. At night I kiss my best friend's wife and in the morning cannot live with what I have done because I can still feel her warm tongue in my mouth and the ice under our feet.

You give away sanity in small compromises, in the time you have stowed in the loins, the haunches, the tender parts grazed and patted violently, slowly, heavily--the sweaty havoc-- and as you dry, not, for a moment, apart from the being. Now that you have forgotten to believe in a something, in your immortality, in your spirit, stubborn and denying there is a bedrock under the thin artifice of our life--there is nothing. Nothing Because it is more prudent to die than to let the unsubstantiated walk among you. Nothing because you are not moving and you are not making anything, and if your body disappeared now, you would be nothing.

Fall now, asphyxiated, into the tub, the blunt strike of your vertebrae against the soap catch, and drown paralyzed in ten inches of water. Not moving or screaming or thinking about these things. The orange light is slightly visible from the water. No, no, no sad. Decision. No god, no bedrock. No bed. Just the smell of the hotel bathroom in your nose, and that orange glow getting brighter as you crawl into the ceiling.

---

The blue smoke snaking from my cigarette framed the bee. Its wings buzzed loud and I was sitting and looking at it. I felt my leg, which was crossed over my other leg, jerk slightly when I thought about the time my family walked through a hornet colony and was aggressively notified by its residents with a chaotic slew of stingered ears and eyebrows and knee-backs and lower backs, the damp spring afternoon momentarily splashed with the hellish screams of women and children beleaguered by nature. The thought came to me, but I wanted to master my memory. I thought 'my memory is only a part of me.' I saw the bee differently, as a sharply directed yellow vessel, a cell in the hive. Fear receded even as it approached, even as it hovered over my calf, the displaced wind of its sequin wings parting my leg hair like palm trees in monsoon, even as it landed on my calf, at the cusp of the muscle that juts like sculpted by the Greeks. It must have smelled the fear when I felt the sting.

2011-05-04T14:45:00.003-04:00

I, a stone. Look at me--my jagged edges rounded by wind and water. I shimmer smoothly on the lake, skipping on the surface, propelled not by the elements that made me but by that mysterious smoldering forgettable inertia. A daily miracle happens here on the shattered glass of the lake. I move--I skip and skip, leaving ripples of memory echoing endlessly outward to the unfathomable edges of the shore, where maybe a little girl playing in the sand with a wet twig will feel my vibrations around her thin, pale ankles, unknowingly forever changed. I refract across forever, never to stop to sink into the icy underneath, where it is always winter.

from Korca, Albania.

2011-04-21T10:22:00.004-04:00

We drank weak rose petal flavored tea from water we boiled on the electric stove. The tea must have been a dollar (100 lek) for a box of twenty bags. It was terrible tea.

On bad days, the city had rolling blackouts. We hypothesized that any saved money went into the mayor's pocket. The plastic blue and red marble pattern mugs we drank from had a veneer of oil that smelled like soap and old food. The oil never came off because we always did the dishes in cold water.

We sat in a circle, half of us on a couch with a couple of broken metal joints (it was leaned against the wall--this was the only thing keeping it together aside from prayer), the rest of us across the two-foot round tables on wooden folding chairs. We shared exhaustively about our witnessing, how many guests we had brought back and taught the introduction to the Divine Principle to, how many had wandered in and then wandered out. We didn't talk about how many of them were just fucking with us. I really don't think we even noticed. We were too busy saving their lives with our truth, and falling asleep on the couch at nine o clock at night talking about it, a marble red plastic mug of tepid oil tea slipping out of our hand.

2011-04-20T05:52:00.002-04:00

Do not take what does not belong to you.
Nothing belongs to you.

2011-04-11T13:04:00.002-04:00

In Greek Mythology, Sisyphus was a king punished by the gods to push a large rock up a mountain, only to have it roll back down to the bottom, for eternity. The punishment is thought the direst of fates in the myth. But Camus applies this idea to each of us, considering its embrace the happiest of human decisions. What is any of us doing, really, but our best to push our rock up the mountain?

From The Myth of Sisyphus (Camus):

"There is but one truly serious philosophical problem and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy. All the rest--whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories--comes afterwards. These are games."

"Great feelings take with them their own universe."

"If I try to seize this self of which I feel sure, if I try to define and to summarize it, it is nothing but water slipping through my fingers."

"At this point of his effort man stands face to face with the irrational. He feels within him his longing for happiness and for reason. The absurd is born of this confrontation between the human need and the unreasonable silence of the world."

"I don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. But I know that I cannot know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it."

"I have seen people behave badly with great morality and I note every day that integrity has no need of rules."

"All systems of morality are based on the idea that an action has consequences that legitimize or cancel it. A mind imbued with the absurd merely judges that those consequences must be considered calmly."

"If the world were clear, art would not exist."

"Without culture, and the relative freedom it implies, society, even when perfect, is but a jungle. This is why any authentic creation is a gift to the future."

"The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man's heart. One must imagine Sisyphus happy."

Quotes appropriated from here

GIF credit

Happy is a small thought

2011-04-11T12:51:00.000-04:00

To you high-minds griping
about tax cuts for the wealthy,
the uncollected tariffs on heads of
unpunished chairmen; the
continuum of injustice:
Are you looking your waiter
in the eye?;
Treating him fairly?;
Drinking--knowing and grateful
that some Person made this cup?

2011-04-02T01:05:00.003-04:00

I cannot afford not to carry you.

2011-03-22T14:54:00.007-04:00

Terse, declarative sentences. Gruffly sensual and slightly figurative: [tasting] a book. Astoundingly musical: heavy on hard consonants in one- and two-syllable words at the start. Softer and longer--though not loftier--words slipped in as the sentences read on. The second person narrating literally speaks to the reader (breaching him) and character simultaneously which brings striking significance to the passage. The silence of the bed-ridden character--"you"--haunts the reader. Unexpected shifts between narration and untagged dialogue--a controlled ambiguity in the mixture.

Damn good.

From Tinkers by Paul Harding

"This is a book. It is a book I found in a box. I found the box in the attic. The box was in the attic, under the eaves. The attic was hot and still. The air was stale with dust. The dust was from old pictures and books. The dust in the air was made up of the book I found. I breathed the book before I saw it; tasted that book before I read it. The book has a red marbled cover. It has large pages. The pages are made of heavy paper the color of blanched almonds. The book is filled with writing. The writing is in blue ink. The ink is heavy and built up in places the way paint builds up on canvas. The paper did not absorb the ink. The ink had to dry before the book was closed or a page turned. The blue of the ink is so dark that it looks black. It is only in flourishes tailing off serifs or in lines where the hand lessened its pressure on the pen that you can see the blue. The handwriting looks like yours. It looks like you wrote the book. It is a dictionary or an encyclopedia of some sort. The book is full of reports from the backs of events, full of weak, cold light from the north, small constructions from short summers. Let me read you an example. Are you comfortable? Do you want the bed down a little bit more? Would you like some water? No; every one else is asleep. Shall I read you an example? You don't remember writing this? The handwriting looks very much like yours. Very much like mine, too, with the f's that look like elongated s's with dashes through their middles. And the mix of script and printing. Why don't I start at the beginning, with the first entry? No, I'm Charlie. Sam is at our mother's getting some sleep. No, I don't think he smokes anymore, no. Not since he got pneumonia last winter. Yes, we sure have; we've always had family no matter what."

2011-03-22T11:26:00.002-04:00

“A man must have aunts and cousins, must buy carrots and turnips, must have barn and woodshed, must go to market and to the blacksmith’s shop, must saunter and sleep and be inferior and silly.” (Emerson)

2011-03-19T23:49:00.004-04:00

The only way to survive this life is to have a sense of humor about how incredibly fucked up it is.

Any news?

2011-03-14T22:08:00.017-04:00

You could ask me how I am, but would you want to know?
I could tell you I am learning Recuerdos de la Alhambra
on my dad's classical,
playing it four or five times over
every day for the last
several weeks,
still not getting it right.

I could tell you I just started a book called Tinkers,
and that I bought it because I liked the cover,
and it won the Pulitzer prize,
and the first line depicted a man hallucinating to his death,
and that I said to myself,
that's what I'm doing--I need to read this book.

I probably won't tell you I've been
high or drunk every night for the last month,
and that I was looking up the
symptoms of Schizophrenia today
because I'm losing my mind.

I would tell you that today I'm sober and plan to be because
fleeing one monster, I run into the arms of another.

I could tell you I wrote this in blocks of prose
and later broke it up into lines
the way we tore up stale white bread for the ducks
when we were children.
The way a sword beats a snow shovel
(this is how poems are written)

I wouldn't tell you that I still think about you,
but in a different way than before--
like an idol struck dead in a car crash or drowned in a lake.
That sometimes I catch myself missing you,
and wanting to go back.
I would certainly leave out that what's driving me mad these days
is that we are self aware, mature adults and that
we do not go back. Never.

I wouldn't tell you how many times
I've been to your funeral and cried
over your framed portrait, surrounded by a bed
of dried petals.

That I have dreams where I touch you,
and wake up wanting to die.

That I want to preemptively kill the guy you end up with next,
hoping that he's the last, and that he'll make you happy,
because frankly I don't think you'd survive another.

I'd never remind you that I know you in a way no one ever will,
hiding from myself that someone will know you in a way
I never will.

I might tell you I'm done with being afraid,
and I'm learning how to be brave.

I'd still deny the power I know I can have
over the other sex, but I'm afraid of what I've let it do to me.
I have cut the heart into too many shared pieces; now
wondering when
these Best Years of My Life
will be over.

That, generally speaking, I am ashamed.

I want so bad to tell you that
my dad's hometown Ishinomaki,
the town where he grew up,
the town where his brother and mother live or lived,
has been swallowed by the earth and sea.
That it's the first time I've cried over a natural disaster.
That thinking about it makes me sick and
turns these dark days darker.
That rifling through Google Person Finder
and seeing the photos of those with
'information that this person is alive'
just make the
'information that this person is missing'
even more heart sickening.
That my grandmother and uncle are among the unnamed,
possibly one of the thousands of bodies washing ashore,
swollen with seawater.

I would eat up your cursory comfort,
and later wonder what it would take for
you to care about what is coming out of my mouth.
That it isn't so hard to love someone by listening.

Hoping I will have myself reasonably together before any more bad news.

Looking forward to good news.

2011-03-09T01:19:00.001-05:00

Strangest of all are the things we learn to call normal

So, so good

2011-03-08T22:26:00.001-05:00

Wye Oak covers The Kinks

2011-02-16T15:26:00.003-05:00

Today, I let the puppy out. He brought me back a deer leg. Though he looked proud, I had to throw it away and refuse any licking for the rest of the evening.

2011-02-06T10:14:00.001-05:00

The Succubus
Tags: SOUTH
PARK more...

2011-02-04T15:05:00.002-05:00

For optimum mental condition, one must restrain a number of physical comforts.

The Mystery of the Jet Lag

2011-02-04T11:25:00.005-05:00

I woke up two mornings ago around eight. The refrigerator was scarce with things to eat. I found Japanese noodles and fried them with carrots, red onion, and mushrooms. I fell back asleep.

I felt jet lagged when my eyes opened two hours later. My body felt disturbed and deeply tired. I thought it was the emotional stress of moving, of leaving a four year part of my life behind. But it is not like me to get sentimental about places, or for the most part people, anymore.

Maybe it was the bottle of wine I had last night, preceded by the intervention-toned conversation my mom had at me when, in a shaky karate chop of tear-charged parental rhetoric, she linked my drinking and smoking with the alcoholics on her mother's side of the family, the families they destroyed, her cousin whose wife left him so he volunteered for a second tour of Vietnam where he was killed by his own malfunctioning hand grenade, her aunt whose lung cancer spread to her brain, her animosity toward Lexington, her sprawling disappointment with us children, and her fear that I will end up alone, just like my dad's brother, who is currently committed to a mental hospital.

No, that's not it. I got over that conversation. I think about those things all the time anyway.

Maybe it was the puppy chewing on his toy against the hardwood during my sleep. His teeth against the faux bone, the faux bone against the wood, rubbing, gnawing, dropping, clattering. And the fact that I had fallen asleep watching a movie where the clock is always ticking down, and in my dream I was always waiting for the clock to tick down, ticking down fifteen minutes for two hours. It could be that. It could be the puppy.

Or was it the noodles? Food poisoning?

At my feet, when I sleep, there's a wheeled wooden box emitting heat. I went to the tap and filled a glass, something I've done often since sleeping here. I peered over at the box. My brother sleeps with a humidifier in his room. I do not. Once dehydration became a possibility, I began noticing the water vapor in other rooms. Every venture out of the apartment felt like swimming in a glorious fresh water inlet, the cay beneath my feet and all around. Since, I've chosen hydration over heat. I got more blankets.

Writer, Warrior

2011-02-02T20:16:00.012-05:00

ONE OF THE FIRST things I read today, at eight o'clock in the morning: "the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must." The words implanted themselves in my brain and I could not stop thinking about them. It was reflective panic at first: "I'm strong, I always try, I don't victimize myself." I said: Get real. You don't need to tell yourself this. What are you trying to prove, and to whom? And I'm not sure you can understand a packed phrase like this by applying it so broadly.

So I relaxed a little bit. I haven't reached a verdict yet, about myself that is. I'll try not to run around madly, applying this to every sallow-cheeked and well-fed human being I come across, which is what I always do when I stumble on a star-dense kernel of truth.

This phrase strikes me because it resonates with an idea about myself I became increasingly aware of during my last two semesters of school. In my fiction workshops the most common complaint about my stories was the passivity of their characters. Even when I took a composition class, my professor berated me, and it was the hardest habit to break, for overusing passive voice.

My first fiction teacher warned the class about the fallacy of imitative form, "that an artist must communicate; it isn't enough simply to feel." And despite this warning, I ended up putting the passivity of my observations of the worlds into my characters. I wrote about characters sucked into inescapable, ambiguous situations because that's what I was feeling, and I definitely didn't exercise good discipline by letting that happen. Compelling narratives tell the stories of the strong doing what they can to navigate, escape, conquer, placate the actual/emotional/psychological monsoons the universe pulls them into. I fell in love with Ernest Hemingway because he could easily have written himself, undistilled, into his fiction and had it come out just as compelling and meaningful, because he lived truly. He drove an ambulance in WWI, covered the Spanish Civil War and WWII, hunted lions in Africa, became enamored by the bullfighting culture while living in western Europe. He was a boxer, a soldier, an outdoorsman, an athlete before he was a writer.

Anyway, my final semester was laden with heartbreak and confusion I felt unequipped to resolve, and time after time I regressed into a passive state. I always wanted to sleep. I didn't have the courage and strength to take responsibility for myself--the things I'd damaged, the things that I'd have to say goodbye to. I ended up thrusting my fiction classmates into my world of the interesting protagonist getting helplessly gang raped by the elements. Their responses to plot, structure, and characterization were lukewarm.

Without launching into my life's explanation, I'll just say this feeling of helplessness is not new to me. This is why that passage hit me so squarely in the guts, why I was so defensive about it and jumped to rationalizing. But I'm here to say that I am aware of my strength and weakness.

At one of the peak moments of personal hell this last summer I realized how easy it is to become completely self-absorbed, to sew oneself into a cocoon when the going gets sad. It's an extension of that conviction all teenagers project onto the world: that their suffering is unique and impossible for anyone else to understand. A healthy part of life, I have realized late, and probably for the wrong reasons, is growing out of this. The inevitable continuum of life pain is conquered only when faced bravely, when done something about--and it's just a puddle of cold ejaculate on the toilet seat when merely suffered through. At least when it comes to creating art. I clung so long, so destructively, to the tenet that suffering is key to good art. But it's not--it's about saddling it with your bravery, your action, your willingness/ability to communicate.

I can finally accept with open arms the question a highly-trusted mentor told me about six years ago: when you're crawling through the mud, will you help the man next to you also crawling through the mud?

Because he is always there--your brother, your girl, your reader.

how to stop loving someone

2011-01-29T18:08:00.001-05:00

2011-01-21T00:28:00.003-05:00

Hilda and Raul sat squatting over the dead skunk in the hot sun. Raul had a tree branch in his hand and was using it to jab the skunk's side. Earl sat on the porch next to his Ukranian wife, Mischka. He was smoking a Pall Mall and drinking a glass of Mischka's famous-in-Ukraine vodka-aide. He held the sweating glass to his face and sighed. Mischka sneezed when a fly landed on her nose.

"Ew RAUL, don't. DON'T. NOOOOO," Hilda said as Raul's stick punctured the skunk's abdomen. A black fluid began running out. The putrid stink ejaculated into Hilda's eight year old nose, causing her to vomit all over the sidewalk and Raul, who threw down his stick and went crying to his Ukranian stepmother.

"Oh, my little kitten, don't cry," She said absent mindedly, stroking his vomit-covered hair as he pressed his vomit-covered face into her bosom.

Hilda limped up to the sidewalk.

They all stared. Earl laughed his good, toothless, redneck laugh, and soon the others joined.

The door master and the window master: an existential miff

2011-01-20T23:59:00.005-05:00

The door master slid the small glass door shut. He leaned his head against it and looked through the fog of his breath at the foot-long black void encased within. Separate the populations. Teach them a lesson, let them be relieved of their worldly pain. The door master opened the door and with an exacto incised what now appeared a rubbery tendon, flopped between the two halves of the void. The door master began crying, and then he laughed. He looked at the evil half and the good half, comparing them. He'd put all the ones that promoted the evolution, sustaining, growth and harmony of its species in the half. As they developed a language, they called themselves Switzerland (not the one you're thinking of) and expanded their universe outward. Only one thousand years after the evolution of their species into self-aware bi-pedal organisms, they created space travel. They've been expanding at an impressive rate. They haven't had war and famine and exploitative governments to deal with. They got bored, so they started colonizing space. The problem is, they're growing much faster and way beyond what the door master thought possible. He figured the other half of the void would have destroyed itself by now. He'd mapped it out on his laptop and everything. But earth, as they called themselves, hadn't performed as expected. There seemed to be a few kinks in the plan--some unexpected developments had taken place. Some people had been born that kept things structured for a while. Because everyone was too busy raping and killing and fucking each other over, the idea of space exploration was ignored until the last fifty years (that's 910 Swiss years, by the way--interesting note, perhaps longer years had something to do with the persistent and persevering nature of the species--also, reader's note--910 Swiss years is roughly 13 door master seconds) and even now, they're not really getting far. They haven't even gotten out of their galaxy. It's kind of ridiculous. Well, the door master is afraid that if the Swiss reach earth while still populated by the humans, the meeting will yield unpredictable, but probably undesirable and detrimental to the Swiss, results. The door master actually started to get anxious as the one sprawl grew toward the other. HEY DOORFACE, YOUR STUPID VOID IS GETTING ON MY VOID. Oh Gawd. He reached through the back of the glass box into the window keeper's glass box, using the tip of his finger to scooch the Swiss off a small splotch of the window keeper's void. THANKS. BETTER NOT HAPPEN AGAIN. The doormaster sighed. I get no respect.

2011-01-20T23:08:00.007-05:00

Give the gift of joy this winter

COME IN FROM THE COLD

WARM YOURSELF BY THE FIRE:

"SUMMER

OF

TEN"

it's the only thing in life i can guarantee you won't regret.

What, are you chicken

2011-01-16T14:00:00.005-05:00

My mom got chickens last spring. The family's house is in a very rural, very ideal for raising chickens part of Virginia. There were five of them--two black/white, one a solid brown, one a blotched brown, one white. During one of my visits last year, my mom asked me to name the white one. Let's call her Irene, I said. I was fond of the name because it sounds like the name of someone I was close to at the time, but with whom I have since parted ways.

Now, I still have this tendency, residual from superstitious childhood, to see signs in daily life. Maybe not signs, but indicators that there is at least a single thread running through all things, tying them together, and the universe isn't as nearing collapse as it often feels. A couple mornings ago I was taking the dog out and having a smoke by the chicken coop. The coop is split into an incubator-type shelter and an outdoor pen. The chickens were all outside in the pen when me and the dog came around. The puppy, curious and enthusiastic to learn about all things new to him, including stairs, farts, and grass, was intrigued by the chickens and showed it. Unimpressed by his doggish behavior, they all went inside. I beckoned him to come by the fire pit, where our christmas tree lies depressed and helpless awaiting incineration. We stood for some minutes as I finished the smoke, when the white chicken, Irene, emerged. I found it interesting, I thought to myself, oh, this is a sign, or an indicator. How nice, the chicken ran away, but it came back. It disappeared, but it reappeared.

Today at the table (chicken for lunch) my brother let his puppy out to go to pee.
My mom said, Don't you want to keep an eye on him?
I said, Yeah, I see all these hawks hovering about the property, I'd be afraid one of them would swoop down and take the puppy.
My brother shrugged it off.
My mom spoke up, I don't know about the dog, but the chickens. Over the summer, a hawk swooped down and took one of the chickens, a brown one, I think we named it Irene. Neighbors saw the whole thing, which is amazing.
Wait a minute, I said. I thought Irene was the white one.
No, Rockette is the white one. The solid brown one is Nasty. The other brown one was Irene. And a hawk swept down out of the sky over the summer and took it away and ate it, or fed it to its babies.

I spent the brief rest of lunch laughing.

Flexible Reality of the Moral Landscape of Fallout: New Vegas

2011-01-15T22:12:00.003-05:00

The new Fallout game makes an interesting statement about morality. In Fallout 3, one's social standing was measured only by a polar karmic scale. If one performed good deeds--giving fresh water to the radiation-poised drifters, helping a farmer save his flock of brahmin, placating a standoff between a group of the wasteland's most pretentious hotel-dwelling society and a colony of ghouls residing in its basement--his karma went up. He became "better" until he was "good." The same went for evil deeds--stealing, murdering innocents, nuking a defenseless and well-intentioned city. One's karma went down and he became "worse" until he was "bad."

In New Vegas, the West has proven more established and developed than the the DC Metro area. The social landscape is finer with the devastated Las Vegas (post-nuclear moniker "New Vegas"), as the wasteland has been divided into geographically, socially, and (at times) culturally distinct areas. As one progresses through the world, he grows in favor with some groups as he falls out of favor with, and eventually becomes vilified by, its opposing groups. The narrative isn't as morally diametric; it isn't always as clear what the "right" thing to do is. Who is there to trust? The Legion is a clear force of evil with its fascistic morality and man-worship. They enslave other humans. It's clearly not to be supported or tolerated.

Mr. House is a giant robot with connections to and potential to control possibly all computer and robotic equipment in NV area. We have learned in the past that giant talking robot brains are not to be trusted.

The Brotherhood of Steel has fallen to the wayside, and the New California Republic Army is the strongest presence of a group with things under control; a benevolent force with its intentions and military force in support of the people. But does one side with the clear good? I am suspicious of their motives. Their organization and bureaucracy is such that I have no clue who the leader of it all even is. I hear varying opinions of their doings and role, but nothing is conclusive. I am suspicious of any group attempting to gain more control. Their occupation of villages in attempts to gain control of the land is suspect, though.

In all this, I just noticed, 25 hours into the game, that I hadn't given my karma meter any attention. I am "good," a lukewarm rating. But my actions throughout the game have been directed toward whatever opposing quest I am given that I see most fit for the purposes of what I deem good. If that means losing karma and favor with a group in order to carry out a noble mission, then it is inconsequential. It is more like life, where as we grow older we receive fewer and fewer tasks that will either make us "better" so that we can become "good" or vice versa. We find some purpose we can align ourselves to, no matter how individualistic it is, and we act in order to closer approach that in order to better ourselves and things around us. Morality isn't polar in this world, and if it is, we d

Failure.

2011-01-15T19:59:00.004-05:00

Failure. Inextricable failure. I have heard that it is preferable to be either unequivocally good or evil, and that a lukewarm disposition is gross and despicable. I never understood this idea except in its theoretical form until recently. My relationship of over two years crashed into a flaming mess, ending the ongoing streak of pain and masochism with even more pain and masochism. Saying the least, it requires adjustments.

I was lukewarm for two years. I emphatically assured her I wanted to be with her. But her ambiguity about us and about me drove an unmovable spike through our impassioned and semi-joined heads. Looking back, I feel like I was limping for two and a half years. And I sometimes wonder what I even got out of the whole ordeal. My temper is shorter. My confidence is shot. I get this knee-jerk of guilt when I meet an attractive girl, not that it would make a difference, because I have that oh-so-teenagery post-heartbreak distrust of all women. Wondering how the decisions some of them make are so cool and pragmatic, and why after a years-long string of unsuccessful romances I am still asking myself if I am capable of loving.

Taking care of this puppy has taught me. I remember listening to an episode of 'this american life' a few months ago. One story covered the relationship between a woman and her violently tempermental foster son. He had asperger's or some syndrome that made him mentally incapable of most social functioning. So he went into these capricious tirades, throwing objects and furniture, striking his foster family. They finally had to send him to a facility, feeling it was best for him. Anyway, at the end of the segment, when asked if she believed her son loves her, she answered, "well, he doesn't attack me anymore, so yes." The reporter said something about how real love is not soft and cushy, tender, pink hearts, etc., but that it requires the kind of grit of this woman, and is characterized by its unwavering solidity, its ruthless tenacity. After sixteen years of bruises and terror, she is still able to answer the question of love in such a clear and pragmatic way.

I admire it, but I feel utterly incapable of it myself. I do feel more confident than ever in my writing, and in the hope that I am and will become increasingly capable of articulating ideas in all their warped complexity and emotion-caked fallaciousness. But standing in the face of this recent failure, I see my fickle, frail innards exposed. I see so much of the falseness in my thinking, the constant idealizing, the passivity, the cynicism and negativity.

I had a series of breakdowns toward the end. I could only think about my mortality, the terminal nature of life, the utter absence of the spirit and its world. Things were pretty black. There was a big fire, and everything was destroyed in it. The smoke jetted upwards into my face, and I coughed my throat out in the fumes of the memories, warped and bent in an unintelligible, sticky mess of idolatry and lust and incessant, involuntary recollections of car rides through rural Maryland and romantic dinners and sleepy times on couches.

But I don't feel like I'm limping anymore. For two years I feared nothing more than the inevitable demise of us, and now that I've met my worst fear and am still alive, I sense a slow-burning strength and independence that smells like the start of something good.

2011-01-14T23:42:00.003-05:00

I am moving back to my family's home. My brother has been away for the week and I was mandated responsibility for his puppy's life/well-being/food. I am subject to kudo's (the dog) whims, which involve--and this is the definitive list--eating, pissing, shitting, biting my ankles when I walk, biting my belly fat when I sit, and attempting a love-grip to my arm in zealous efforts to copulate with it. There is nothing else on this list, I just want you to know that.

Being home is strange. The school-structured schedule is graciously shucked and now I'm living in this blissful anarchic haze in which minutes don't pass so much as melt into each other like baked crayons. I just sit on my brother's couch and stare through the blinds at God throwing the crayons of time in front of my window, melting in the magma gravel.

But I hyperbolize. The dog and a job have reinstated a relative sense of structure. Kudo is my alarm. In the cold early a.m. I feel his body wriggling, and the sun has not even risen. I feel his little warm body first wriggle, then the four boned limbs lift and in protest I push him down. "Keep sleep," I mumble, which usually works the first couple of times. But the snooze must end. He jumps off the couch and as I listen to the scuttle of his paws across the hardwood, I battle with all my grit and asserted will power to rise before he proceeds to urinate/defecate upon the floor. Usually, I wake to find that somehow, throughout the night, he has taken two dumps and three pisses beside the back door, on the bathroom mat, in the middle of the kitchen, by the stairs, and under the rock band drums. I was lucky this morning. Firstly, he woke me to one of the most epic and phenomenal sunrises I have ever seen. Secondly, I caught him pooping inside and yelled at him to stop. He is more obedient than I give him credit for seeing as he did, indeed stop mid-poop. Not wanting to pick him up, I beckoned him to the back door with the inch and a half of shit dangling out of his butt. With the saddest, most vulnerable- and crestfallen-looking of puppy faces, and utmost loyalty, might I add, he waddled in semi-pooping, semi-cat/duck-walking gait to the back door, beyond where he was admitted to commence his shit.

His big problem is biting, though. Labs are apparently enthusiasts of playing which, unfortunately for the master/alpha male/me, includes use of the teeth as toy swords. It's ok though. I was looking at my scarred up hands today and kind of felt like a badass. It's a secret between you and me that they're puppy scratches, the gentlest of them. I have grown weary convincing this dog by yelling 'no' in a stern, loud, and sudden voice, that biting is not the way to go. I encapsulate him in a blanket and yell through the cloth: "KUDO BITING DOGS GO TO JAIL. BITING DOGS GO TO JAIL. I'M SAVING YOU A LOT OF HEARTACHE NOW. DON'T BITE. IF YOU BITE A LITTLE GIRL WHEN YOU'RE BIG, YOU MIGHT HAVE TO DIE."

It's an important lesson he hasn't learned yet. But he will. Just as this dog has invaded my psychological space--manipulating my schedule, butlering me, biting biting biting constantly--I have realized I can retaliate. Because 'no' wasn't working, I improvised: made Sandpeople noises, and this weird aquatic deep-vibrating yelp. When these did not work, I found that grabbing him by the neck, staring into his eyes and chanting "crab people" for thirty seconds straight, without blinking, tends to faze him. I end the chant and push him away. When he stands up, he seems more placid, a bit confused of his whereabouts, and much less eager. In a word: mindfucked.

It's possible he will find a way to retaliate with even greater force, but I think I've pretty much won this one.

From Robin Wood's Essay, "An Introduction to the American Horror Film"

2010-12-06T20:15:00.002-05:00

"What, then is repressed in our culture? First, sexual energy itself, together with its possible successful sublimation into non-sexual creativity--sexuality being the source of creative energy in general. The 'ideal' inhabitant of our culture will be the individual whose sexuality is sufficiently fulfilled by the monogamous heterosexual union necessary for the reproduction of future ideal inhabitants, and whose sublimated sexuality (creativity) is sufficiently fulfilled in the totally non-creative and non-fulfilling labor (whether in factory or office) to which our society dooms the overwhelming majority of its members. The "ideal," in other words, is as close as possible to an automaton in whom both sexual and intellectual energy have been reduced to a minimum. Otherwise, the "ideal" is a contradiction in terms and a logical impossibility, hence the necessary frustration, anxiety and neuroticism of our culture."

2010-11-15T00:12:00.000-05:00

miss you

2010-10-28T01:11:00.004-04:00

We passed the short Irish man busking on Center Street, playing "Big Rock Candy Mountain" on a banjo. I turned to Harvey and said "do you know this song? just listen to this song." And Harvey told me, "yeah, geez, I love this song. It's about hobo paradise." I thought about that for a minute. I thought about it for a week, and then another week. I sat at my desk at work and kept the song on repeat on my ipod, and I played it and played it. I deleted every other song on my ipod. I spliced it into everything I did. My boss fired me because, after three warnings, I kept writing fragments of the lyrics at the top of sales reports and proposal drafts. It's ok, I thought. I'm fired, but this song makes more sense than life. The song played and played. And I laid in my bed for three months, only getting up to put food in me and use the toilet. I showered weekly. I used speakers for the shower, because playing my ipod in the shower breaks the ipod. So I bought a new ipod and used speakers in the shower from then on. I was watching a spider cross the ceiling one morning when my landlord busted in. He looked mad. I had to take a headphone out to hear him out. He said, you are two months late on the rent. Pay the rent or I'm kicking you on the street. I said joke's on you pal. I've been ready for this moment. I'm going to hobo paradise. I got out of bed wearing my gym shorts and my hoodie. I passed him on the way out. I left my books, bed, dresser, computer, shirts, pants, socks, underwear, small statues and memorabilia, photographs, records, guitars, mandolin, the three year old bag of jelly beans, papa's camera, papers, tax information, and shoes in my apartment I did not close the door behind me. The ATM said there was $287 left in my bank account. I took two hundred because that's all it would let me and I left my card in the machine. I called up Harvey. He met me at the bar and we found the priciest Scotch they had and bought the whole bottle. It was sipping whisky but we slammed back glass after glass until the bottle was empty. We were drunk, but not quite ready. I had spent my last money on the Scotch so Harvey ordered some rail whiskeys and we drank those too. Then I looked up at Harvey and I said Harvey, it's time Harvey. And he looked at me and said I know. So we got off the bar stools and he grabbed the fire axe from behind the bar and started hacking away at the floor. And I slammed the stool legs into the ground to supplement the effort, though I doubt it helped much. The police arrived, but we'd already made a hole large enough to fit through. We climbed through it. I ripped my hoodie on a sharp floorboard but it was ok. It was dusty down there and wet-smelling. The cops were shining their lights down into the hole but they didn't want to come down. So we crawled for hours and hours. I kept looking back to check on Harvey and he was ok for the first few hours. But then he got tired and said he was too tired. So he fell asleep in the dark and I said sorry, I have to keep crawling. So I said you're my best friend Harvey, and I kept on for days and days. My knees were bleeding and my hands were bruised, but I kept going. I saw daylight on the eighth day and I was happy. I came to the end of the tunnel and rolled down a grassy hill into a lake of tomato soup. A wooden-legged police man sicked his bulldog on me but the teeth were rubber. He bit me and it tickled. I burst out laughing and so did the policeman. Even the bulldog was laughing. And we were all happy, all of us. We ate the soft-boiled eggs the chickens laid for us. The bulldog wanted his over-medium, so the chicken laid the egg fried. We ate the eggs with lemonade from a brook that ran from the sunset. I wasn't sad about Harvey. He was ok. He found his was back ok, I was sure of it. Sure of it in a way I had not been sure about things in a very long time. The policeman, the bulldog, and I filled a wooden tub with whiskey from the river and we sat by a campfire that was burning for us already. The sun set slowly and we laid there with our heads propped up on our bunched-up jackets and we sipped the whiskey and talked about the girls we had loved, and how good a cheeseburger with pickles tastes when you haven't had one in several months, especially if you order it at a diner. And so we decided that we'd get a cheeseburger in the morning. So the sun went down and we talked as we drifted off, warm inside from the liquor and outside from the fire. It burned tamely all night, and we fell asleep with out hats tipped over our eyes and the stars out, and we dreamed of cheeseburgers.

2010-09-06T11:05:00.002-04:00

The Pretty Ones

have all been had

coupled and happy, either

stewing the amniote or

tending the nest--

pieces of string and pine needle

little black birds

never go hungry

pretty ones. all been had.

rotted to the core by

ultraviolet desire--wafts,

tans them leather brown

and they sweat

in the heat

hungry, eating, eating--

their waists trimmer, legs longer, breasts fuller

at every stare and smile

--eating, eating, hungry

somewhere in a dark, musty stable

is a broken piebald horse

a man keeps a blindfold over his eyes

and brings him food once a day

to the trough

in the stable.

the horse eats slowly

2010-08-28T00:15:00.001-04:00

I am reclaiming myself from owners.

bourbon breath

2010-08-24T00:55:00.004-04:00

I'm not a coward--mostly because I don't think about whether or not I am one. I don't second guess myself. I roam the internet and comment on what I want. I say what's on my mind and I don't apologize. I don't go back and ask myself if the apology implies weakness. I don't go back and forth. The battle of every day, even at the stupid waiter job I work, ends. I don't have to strike or counter-strike or pre-empt. I don't have to feel sad that the bartender's eyes have bags and he hunches. I don't have to stiffen when the sous chef cocks his head back in utter disbelief when the lesbian at table 45 wants the goat cheese asparagus salad for the first course instead of the mussels or the lamb meatballs. I don't have to question the frequency of my voice. Is it too high? Is it apparent to the liberally tattooed lady at 43 that I am putting on a huge fucking front for her? Does she know that I want to earn 20% off her $88 dollar tab? She will be grateful that I don't gawk at her or judge her, and she will say, "thanks dude" and smile as my equal and hand me back the presenter with a $15 tip. That fat american dad with the dad-shorts from an hour ago can fuck himself. He holds his hands up and half-yells: "Where's our BREAD?" Fuck that guy. I don't sweat him or his depressing middle-American fagmily-- their rolls of complacent fat melting into the swollen wooden booths of the "pub." I don't sweat the fact that I didn't fire back some glib comment. Or the creeping suspicion, constantly denied, that I'm a coward. That I have fear in my eyes, and people see it. That my eyes get puffy when I'm upset or hurt. That I get hurt.

The feeling of being under water. The pressure on my ear drums. The crickets sound pleasant outside my window.

My legs aren't sore. They are stilts.

"Bukowski took poetry back from the clutches of the academics."

And that is all. Chances are if you reading this, I love you in some deep, insignificant way. Insignificant because I won't show it in the morning.

Pretty much:

2010-08-05T02:51:00.001-04:00

School has neutered me.

SFDs (Shitty First Drafts)

2010-08-04T09:03:00.003-04:00

"It's not like you don't have a choice, because you do--you can either type, or kill yourself."

Jack Spicer's Letter to the Ghost of Federico Garcia Lorca

2010-07-28T23:12:00.003-04:00

Dear Lorca,

These letters are to be as temporary as our poetry is to be permanent. They will establish the bulk, the wastage that my sour-stomached contemporaries demand to help them swallow and digest the pure word. We will use up our rhetoric here so that it will not appear in our poems. Let it be consumed paragraph by paragraph, day by day, until nothing of it is left in our poetry and nothing of our poetry is left in it. It is precisely because these letters are unnecessary that they must be written.

In my last letter I spoke of the tradition. The fools that read these letters will think by this we mean what tradition seems to have meant lately--an historical patchwork (whether made up of Elizabethan quotations, guide books of the poet's home town, or obscure bits of magic published by Pantheon) which is used to cover up the nakedness of the bare word. Tradition means much more than that. It means generations of different poets in different countries patiently telling the same story, writing the same poem, gaining and losing something with each transformation--but, of course, never really losing anything. This has nothing to do with calmness, classicism, temperament, or anything else. Invention is merely the enemy of poetry.

See how weak prose is. I invent a word like invention. These paragraphs could be translated, transformed by a chain of fifty poets in fifty languages, and they still would be temporary, untrue, unable to yield the substance of a single image. Prose invents--poetry discloses.

A mad man is talking to himself in the room next to mine. He speaks in prose. Presently I shall go to a bar and there one or two poets will speak to me and I to them and we will try to destroy each other or attract each other or even listen to each other and nothing will happen because we will be speaking in prose. I will go home, drunken and dissatisfied, and sleep--and my dreams will be prose. Even the subconscious is not patient enough for poetry.

You are dead and the dead are very patient.

Love,

Jack

From After Lorca, 1957

2010-07-21T09:58:00.003-04:00

I once loved a girl, but she couldn't take that I visited troublesome houses. She'd say, when I got home, to leave her alone. She could taste trouble on my mouth. When she was gone I missed her, I did...and still went to troublesome places. I couldn't withstand a glorious day without seeing these troublesome faces. And quiet eluded me, and keeps from me still, though I need my own bed and it's solace. Day's noises steal in and copper my will, and I face the evils that follow us. I once had a house, and my family knew where to find me if ever they needed. Troublesome houses were foreign to them. They thought all papa's orders I heeded. Now they can't find me; they don't have my numbers, and just hear reports of my doings. Troublesome houses are not in their minds, though it's in those I do all my moving.

2010-07-07T16:17:00.000-04:00

Me and James picking up the guitar again.

homesick

lennin

2010-06-22T09:00:00.001-04:00

2010-06-20T03:19:00.002-04:00

Years ago, when I was mean to my younger brother and sister, they would sometimes threaten me, saying, "You're going to abuse your children when you grow up."

2010-06-17T22:54:00.001-04:00

It's poison, poison.
Please, ignore me.

2010-06-09T23:33:00.005-04:00

I slept on the couch the first two nights. It is a green suede covered Victorian-style with a seat a bit less than two feet deep. Being a large man, it was not comfortable. I took two ibuprofen to relieve the ensuing back pain after the second night.

Tymon is a good friend. He slept on the couch last night and gave me the bed. This morning he woke with a stiff back, sat down in a chair to go on the computer, and while performing the most routine of stretches, threw out his back. He shot up and stood awkwardly, cringed with a sharp inhalation through the teeth. His face contorted: "What the hell just happened?" After shifting his torso at every angle and posture to try and correct the spinal anomaly, he took two ibuprofen.

Lying on his back and staring into the ceiling panels of his room with blank disillusion, he said in a spacey and distant growl, "Pain is a difficult thing to describe." He took two more ibuprofen.

He laid on the bed, rolling around in search of a comfortable position. He sat in the chair, back and neck stiff. He took two more ibuprofen and downed it with a gulp of whiskey.

An hour later.

2010-06-05T10:31:00.006-04:00

at first--nape and eyelid
lip and lip

the black ocean waving through
the hair waving

--

soft-brown nickel-spot, on the
velvet knoll, tender mound, in the hand, and full

the strap, sliding
the shoulder

hard--
--

--leather belt
grooving the hand-back

pure pelvic, and then--
sand, sand

growing--
the hand

down-er and downer
longer, thicker

lip and lip
returning to the ocean

2010-05-21T01:56:00.003-04:00

I am feeling particularly raw tonight

raw, like the skin has lifted

the pockets of air brushing my

exposed muscles, and it hurts.

i have been plugged into you

these months

and now in this withdrawal

i feel more naked and alone

than i ever have

rougher, meaner--

more reasons now than ever to assert my

violent will against innocents

more reasons now to be an asshole, to

not care or care

to write these things down, and

try to understand

i am feeling this, feeling

this with no you to distract

me from this

i cannot help but wonder

are feeling your injury?

do the bruises, appearing

frighten you?

and your legs crooked and

bowed,

your back's oblique slouch--are you able to move?

are you soaked in your siphoned womanhood?

have you discovered the cord still attached to your navel?

are your hammers stowed?

because yes, to all these questions in whatever

form their application may take to me

i am feeling this feeling,

missing this you, this us,

we were

without the desire to drink, to smoke, to eat

to be distracted,

without these things

i am more myself than i have been

2010-05-14T21:45:00.002-04:00

four more-

accomplished-something

sought-after

articulate-selfishly

suicide-anonymous

socks soaked,

shoes

filled to numb toes with

translucent slush

we know

that's

how the feeling goes away

without repeating itself

ensuring the last word

what a sharp soul!

what a smart heart!

toppling forth at day

a machinated

body shell

though at night it requires

maintenance- two glasses of merlot

an episode

and at night

that phantom limb

put dreams out of that mind

---

the smell

home grown

zucchini frying in

butter

stick of sweat after

good days' work

wrinkles in eyes

laughs in lines

closer to blood

than laureates and sought-afters

rocking chair creaks

wicker seat crunch

woven with thread through

the stirring string section of the final movement

of William Tell's Overture

clank of dishes after dinner

record us at our most peaceful

heavy moments

panging moments

haunting moments

fewer,

less intense

2010-05-14T21:35:00.002-04:00

Family Portrait

the constant need to pick a side--

when i saw them as a dying vessel,

i romanticized every member of the crew--

my brother's humble heart a rock and my sister's

brilliant brain a shining stone

my father's sweat in splintered floorboards that

cut our feet so it hurt and

we remembered it

everywhere we walked

mother who wore her struggle in blood

left stains in birth work i will be

washing out for the rest of my life

i chewed on the map.

a red ink circle marking the

exact spot.

i had to go.

and die

repeatedly before i could even look at it

lichen and moss, a seal behind the till

we all saved our fingers in

we kept the shop open and hid our hands

but the year was hard and we all saw a loss.

i worked up the courage to look again but

found it hard not to regret what i saw

in those years in a haunted bed

the ghost there was not generous with what it had

left behind but i shared the scraps with them

there was the sense of debt and the feeling

of loss

a pang that belted the ears with

force the backs of my legs never

forgot

the crew never forgot the belt either

there were pennies on the ground with everyone's

faces on them

no matter how many times i tried to recover

they never forgave the debt.

a bad dream i woke from into

a harrowing reality no one paid for

still no one has paid for and the

ghost comes every night to collect but i never

know what he wants

we discuss like friends and i muzzle myself in

good faith, but

an unforgivable ploy staged and the romance was

impossible to sustain

my brother's heart faded into an injured gray

the brilliant brain that belonged to my sister

was caked with mold and incomprehension

hate had aged her shut

my parents too tired to put up a fight,

but too desperate to leave,

were the last ones to see the

saloon doors swing shut

2010-05-09T02:14:00.006-04:00

BFA

Oh!

The costs--

cool

these days.

Books, and the Final Frontier

2010-04-07T23:45:00.014-04:00

Technology is not bad. But it has changed the way we consume art and media (and, well, everything). It has changed the way we create art and media. Many of these changes are positive--breaking previous limits of physical mediums we have had to work reluctantly around in the past. This seems relevant chiefly in film and music which are consumed in real time. Editing, filming, recording, production technology can and often do help bring a piece closer to what the creator intends it to be. In this way a film or album can be more immersive, impacting, affecting in that it reaches out to its audience with more fluency and realism unhindered by, for example, shoddy special effects or fuzz from a dusty tape reel.

This is not to say that technological limitations have not bolstered an artist's creativity at times. But I'm getting to that.

That all being said, nothing replaces the brilliance of human imagination, ingenuity, inspiration. George Lucas's last three installments of Star Wars are a perfect example of badly implemented technology. It is an extreme case and it seems as if he thought an improvement in the technology available to him would replace the need to cast properly or for the film to be directed at all. He wore the CG awkwardly and in a disappointingly amateur way, like a teenager wearing an oversized blazer.

I revisited The Birds recently and couldn't help but feel slightly pulled out of the movie by some of the effects used to render the horror scenes. That being said, though, I can't imagine anyone remaking the movie any better than the original. Hitchcock's intelligence and deep-seated understanding of human fear still shines through. In my opinion, the technological limitations allow Hitchcock to shine through with brilliance.

The adverse side of the technology coin does not only affect George Lucas's movie-making decisions, though. It affects each of us with a multiplying intensity. Pitchfork couldn't have said it better: "Instant access to almost any recording has left some of us over-stimulated, endlessly consuming without really digesting what we hear." There is a ring of truth to this that may reflect the opinions of a marginal group of people who see through the commercial appeal of this streamlined, technologized lifestyle and mindset. But how much do these marginal opinions really affect the "world at large?" (using that term at great risk) Let's face the facts: as of this decade CD sales have plummeted. The postal service is nearly obsolete. Most alarming--nay, what scares me shitless--is the question of the necessity of printed books in libraries. "The future, they believe, is digital."

Literature is the bedrock of humanity. It is not important, it is essential--its essence is a distilled version of everything man finds meaningful about himself. Without it, we are nothing--as meaningless as the most devout nihilistic absurdist will ever tell you. It is our folklore, our family, our experiences, fuckups, love, doubt, our scuffles with meaninglessness and shaking of hands with the devil. It is the velvet room where the human race is able to transcend time and space, to separate from the concretion of reality and redefine it through the directly oblique nail-head hitting observations others have found useful. It is the map which none of us truly knows how to read, but which guides us through this hedge maze of life no less. Its narrative births film. Its imagery births art and converses with it. And it, itself, is the saline crust on the linoleum tile, evaporated from the amniotic fluid from which we crawl everyday, barely alive, or perhaps, occasionally, reborn.

"To those who don't understand, no explanation is sufficient and to those who do understand, no explanation is necessary." -Fr. Solanus Casey"

The more I read and try to write, the more I understand the critical value and relevance, both historical and idiosyncratic, of the written word. There is no reason not to believe that, as books become more and more digitized, more and more virtual, the iPod effect will not apply to our consumption and creation of, and therefore overall relationship with, literature. Printed text is more important now than ever. I am, obviously, not against digital writing. It does give me a huge motherfucking pause for thought, however, to think that one day, when printed text is obsolete and paper and ink have been replaced by binary code, that our books will no longer burn, they will be deleted. Books won't be written, they will be talk-and-typed. The synthesis of time/ink, that beneficial resistance of the page--it will all be virtual.

Virtual|ˈvər ch oōəl|- almost or nearly as described, but not completely or according to strict definition

As our lives become more engulfed by technology, as our life drama becomes more intertwined with that fed to us by commercially-driven media, which pure experiences remain, and which will we want to remember? If the future really has no place for books, and the Kindle and Nook truly are the future, then who is to say this same septic greed for information that possesses us when we have the means to get it won't apply to literature, that last remaining vestige of us--burning to the ground our final frontier?

"We are no longer in a state of growth; we are in a state of excess. We are living in a society of excrescence. The boil is growing out of control, recklessly at cross purposes with itself, its impacts multiplying as the causes disintegrate."

2010-04-07T14:35:00.003-04:00

I rank the overall quality of my professors by who I would find it most tolerable to be shipwrecked on a desert island with.

Lathbury would keep the whole crew alive, fed and hydrated. He would eventually find a way to fashion a radio out of a nine volt battery and banana leaves. A passing ocean liner would pick up the distress signal and save us. A public library would be christened in his honor.

Hoffman would keep some of us alive but would eventually cause a rift in the crew by favoring the theatre majors after which there may or may not be a clan war.

Fujiwara would murder us all in our sleep and eat our bodies.

Goodwin would try excessively to strong-arm us into following his advice, alienating everyone and causing the crew to fracture into multiple groups of four or five people. We would all go to different sides of the island and never intermingle among groups. We would all die within a month of shipwrecking, save Goodwin, who would have had the water and food stashed in a sandpit covered by palm leaves all along.

Nanian would quickly convince all the underclassmen he is a god. He would sit in a makeshift throne carved by one of his loyal slaves and incessantly demean his tribesmen for incorrectly chopping firewood, and, splicing commas. Those not involved in his cult would split into factions. One faction may or may not try to assassinate him and free his tribesmen. One faction may or may not fashion a raft and die adrift. One faction may or may not write single-spaced, two-inch-margined fuax-esays of incorectly spelld cliches, with, commas, in, all, the wrong, places on crumpled sheets of looseleaf--just to get on his nerves.

2010-03-13T11:12:00.001-05:00

Alienating
Alienator
Alienates

2010-02-26T20:08:00.001-05:00

This is a rant

2010-02-24T22:16:00.010-05:00

I looked through photos of myself yesterday. They were taken in different places, under different circumstances, taken with different people. I was in different states of mind, believed in different things, or in nothing. I was looking at the camera, or unaware, or pretending. I was whole or heart broken, robust or diseased and frail. The memories were happy, mostly. It was a time when there weren't other, happier photos or times to look back on, and the now was the most valuable and only relevant thing I had. It was a rare time and probably won't ever happen again.

It’s in a person's nature to romanticize the past. I see those old pictures and respond to their face value. That is the danger of those photographs. They remind, but only partially. They remind carelessly and incompletely, leaving out things that, looking closer, were incredibly painful. This is the value of looking closer-- a photograph captures a moment or preserves a memory, so it is rhetorical but there is also a subtext.

This is why a photograph is dangerous. Though it may be composed of everything, say, a painting may be-- a vase or a stranger on the subway or a pile of garbage in an alley-- the probability of the accidental is raised to an infinite degree for the simple reason that snapping a photograph requires fingers, not skill. It requires a free moment, an impulse, and no thought. The content is rarely fully intentional and never really controlled, so our process of observing it follows-- unintentional, uncontrolled. We look at the surface of a photograph and romanticize the memory it represents, but do not dig further into its meaning. It begs the question of real life, a person's history. Do we have the care, maybe the gall, to look at the picture? The face in the corner, laughing, or grimacing--who does it belong to, and does it even matter?

I hate the sentimental pot-shot approach to film photography because of this. People don't take real pictures. They take pictures of trash and lakes and the sidewalk with paint all over it, and most of the time it is meaningless. But it's asserted as something valuable and meaningful as a relic with some vintage appeal, some nostalgic or visceral aesthetic. If we treat it as it's asking to be treated- as some kind of art- then it goes without saying it demands a closer look. When we see its one dimensional reality, the fraud is exposed. It gleans, it doesn't capture. It's naively pretentious, not charming.

Take a goddamn picture of your goddamn friend, maybe in front of Grand Central Station or with their arm around you.

All this is a reflection, though, of how surface oriented we really are. It's like humanity has given up on itself- the ubiquity of information skews the truth until it's a skid mark in your underpants, our society has been liberalized to the point of no restraint and the result is a lazy and apathetic generation with no direction, no unifying purposes and nothing to fight for. Emerson is probably rolling in his grave, seeing what self reliance has evolved into- techno-isolation and a media/advertisement skewed brain. What is even culturally relevant anymore? I've seen people trying to answer this question, but they seem obsessed with the facade of it all- the fashion, the art, the music, the technology and argot. What we seem to be neglecting is that all these things were born out of something at some point. Nobody is paying attention to this, it may gleam for a moment in the eyes but it goes away when you roll over in bed. Everyone is going about their day like this rootless, suspended existence is normal. And it is. Our development is at critical mass and there's an influx of mentality that bolsters irony and diminishes meaning until I can't tell myself apart from the very skeptical orangutans in their cages over there.

At the Zoo

2010-02-24T21:55:00.003-05:00

Me and Charlie were bored so we loaded up on this shit called “bottle-rockets” and walked to the zoo. I live in a real shit-hole part of the city-- the nasty, shaven, stinking underbelly part that most people can’t escape, and don’t usually want to because even though the air smells like piss and Chinese food, that’s what they’re used to. What can you do. I opened the screen door and we started down Henley Ave. It was fucking hot out. The sun beat down above merciless. I didn’t wear a hat, mainly because I don’t wear hats, but all I could think for the whole walk was that I should have worn a hat.

The pills were these round things- weird looking, kind of like miniature pearls, except dark blue. They had some sugary coating so they tasted good going down. But it freaked me out a little. It’s always the ones that taste good going down that fuck you up the most in the end.

“Fuck a duck, it’s hot as balls out here. My head's melting off,” Charlie said.

I told him to shut his goddamn mouth and that he should have worn a hat if he was just going to bitch about it.

“You should’ve worn a hat honkey. You’re going to get a bitch of a sunburn,” he told me.

I told him if he didn’t shut his mouth I would slap him in the face, and then who would be feeling a burn. We were five minutes away anyways. This seemed to cheer him up. So we counted palm trees and noticed that the Mexicans had fled their normal spots and waited under verandas and overpasses for some work.

I ignored the security guard when we passed through the iron turnstiles. I don’t care how powerless he might be in reality- any man in a badge ain’t a man to me. That’s just how it is. That’s how it’s always been for me. Besides, my head was starting to pound hard and my feet were feeling light, so I didn’t feel much like looking at anyone anyway.

We both took a map. I don’t know why- we’ve been here at least twenty times. But every time me and Charlie come to the zoo, we take a map, and walk around and never unfold it or even look at it, and when we leave we throw it away.

“You feeling anything?”

I told him yeah, my head’s pounding and my feet are light.

“me too, and everything is very very... far...”

By the way Charlie said far, I got a little excited. He is a bona fide lightweight, and anything we take always goes to his head twice as fast as mine. Charlie was looking at something to the right, toward the Elephants. I asked Charlie if he wanted to see the Elephants.

“Yeah. Elephants.”

It wasn’t crowded. Parents and their kids were sprawled around, there was a class on a field trip, little kids. No balloons or popcorn or snow cones. This zoo is the toilet of zoos. All the other zoos eat and get what they need and shit out the leftovers and that’s what ends up in our zoo. That’s what I love about the place though. What it lacks in class, it’s got in character. And fuck class anyway. A snow cone isn’t going to win you a fist fight or land you a job interview or give you clout anyway.

I couldn’t feel my feet at all. I looked at the Elephant. His skin was cracked and dry, like the mud in his cage that was probably supposed to be an Elephant pond. He didn’t move around, or even swing his trunk, or even look at you. He just stood there like he was dead. Only he was standing up, and he wasn’t really dead, which seemed to be worse. It was really goddamn sad. I started feeling really sad and angry and I started screaming. Charlie looked at me.

“what the hell are you doing?”

I yelled at him, and I was crying now, that the if Elephants weren’t dying, they were already dead. He tried to look at me but he was unfocused and gone. He started staring over my shoulder.

All the kids and the parents, and that class on their field trip started looking at me. Charlie was right, everything was far away. I could barely heart my own voice but judging by their looks over at me, I could tell I was loud.

Good. I told them all to look at this Elephant. I was sobbing now, but it wasn’t a sad thing. This Elephant was so much sadder than I could be, and this made me even sadder, and sob more, and scream louder. I wanted to save the Elephant. I asked Charlie if he’d help me spring the Elephant loose.

“The fuck you talking... about... man?”

Charlie’s eyes were drooping shut and he was wobbling around. An accomplice was out of the question. I couldn’t spring an Elephant without an accomplice. It dawned on me- if I couldn’t save the Elephant from his cage, I could at least save him from his body.

I ran to the Tigers. There should have been some security guard or some zookeeper jumping me by now, but like I said, the zoo’s a toilet and response time to a whack job is long, at best.

The Tigers were different from the elephants. They weren’t caged, first of all. The two of them sat in an open pit while people looked down at them. Their coats gleamed and their bellies looked full. One sat on the ground with his head up and eyes lulling, and the other walked the perimeter, waiting for lunch, probably.

A sign that read “Feeding Times” was hanging on the cage and under it was a black chalkboard that had “9:00 a.m., 3:00 p.m.” written on it.

I asked a fat sweaty man dressed in khaki walking by what time it was.

“2:45”

Perfect, perfect. My legs were starting to go numb but I was still able to walk without looking too obviously fucked up. I was almost deaf, and getting dizzy, but I still had another fifteen minutes left in me, at least.

A small tan stucco building where the zookeepers went in to access the cage was around back.

As casually as I could, I walked around the side of it.

The door was unlocked.

A girl in her 20s was back there, taking some large cuts of meat out of a refrigerator.

“You can’t be back here.”

She looked scared,

even though she was trying to be authoritative.

That uniform though.

She wasn’t no person.

The Elephant has more feeling than this Uniform.

At least it did, until the Uniform sucked the life out of it.

There was a pile of hay in a corner with a pitchfork stuck in it.

I pulled the pitchfork out and came at her with it. I saw her scream, but I didn’t hear it. At this point I was completely deaf and all the thoughts in my head were wedged together, so tight that there was no air or space in between them and I couldn’t tell one thought from the other. Hitler was somehow involved in the management of this zoo.

She had crumpled in the corner, quivering on her side with her knees pulled up to her chin and her face buried in her legs. I told her to stay put or I’d shove the pitchfork into her throat. I told her what I had to do was important.

I took her keys and tried them in the gate to the Tiger pit until I found the right one. I opened the gate. It was heavy, probably iron, and the hinges were rusted. The meat was laying on the concrete floor next to the girl. I went over and picked it up, coaxed the Tigers out.

The girl had run out of the room, the door was wide open, and now I was alone with the Tigers. I walked backward slowly. They followed me slowly. They had a look of hunger in their eyes. But more than that, it was virility, desire, lust, passion. The Tigers were alive and I thought, the Elephant would be honored to die at these claws.

I stepped out the door of the building, hunched over with the meat in my hand, walking backward still.

Then, I was on the ground. I wasn’t sure what had happened. I looked up and saw that the fat guy that had told me the time earlier was now on top of me, choking me. The Tigers knew, though. They knew what I was doing and that it was for something good and true. Truer than sitting in a pit and being gawked at, or snow cones, or being fat and wearing khaki but knowing what time it was. Last thing I saw was the Tiger pouncing the man. The Tiger's football sized claw ripped into the man’s throat with fluency and ease, like wet paper. The Tiger has not lost his killer instinct, even after being in that pit for god knows how long. that’s what I was thinking when I blacked out, there on the ground.

---

The sun was still up when I opened my eyes. I had feeling in my feet and legs again. I stood up with pain- sore all over from being jumped at such an odd angle. I could hear my scream when I stood up. My left leg was broken.

My scream faded, and the zoo was silent. There was no breeze- the palm trees and brush stood still. I didn’t have time to feel anything about it. I was just silent.

I limped toward the Elephant cages. I passed the body of a little girl, sprawled out on the pavement, her chest bloody and mauled and exposing her pink and red and yellow insides, her limbs sprawled out like a doll. What was left of her face was tight and twisted and afraid. She had brown hair done into pigtails.

My stomach wrenched, but I kept limping. I didn’t have the guts to look at the other bodies. I hoped Charlie had gotten out before the Tigers, even though he'd been twice as messed up as me.

I put my hands on the iron bars of the Elephant cage and looked at him standing there, lifeless, empty and staring. A small black bird landed on his back and just sat there, moving his head around. He fluttered his wings and changed his position, but stayed perched on the Elephant’s back, his little head popping left and right. I expected him to fly away, but he didn’t. So I watched him.

The Ache of Marriage, Denise Levertov

2010-02-17T21:51:00.000-05:00

The ache of marriage:

thigh and tongue, beloved,
are heavy with it,
it throbs in the teeth

We look for communion
and are turned away, beloved,
each and each

It is leviathan and we
in its belly
looking for joy, some joy
not to be known outside it

two by two in the ark of
the ache of it.

2010-02-16T17:01:00.003-05:00

A- "shoot me if i ever become like that"

B- BANG

2010-02-11T11:26:00.006-05:00

“I’m burnt. My knuckles are bloody from punching the goddamn wall.”

“You’re giving up then?”

“I’m not giving up. I feel the need to take a different direction. I’ve tried fighting them, I’ve tried ignoring them, I’ve tried playing their game. I’ve tried quitting. I don’t know what to do anymore. The fogies aren’t killing me- they are weathering me down. Slowly. Sometimes I’ll see a piece of my handwriting or a shirt that got lost under the bed, and I’ll look at how I was a year ago, hell, six months ago, and I don’t like what I see. I can’t see how any ends will justify the ground I’m losing.”

“I see.”

“I mean, what, I’m paying money so some washed up MFA with cowboy boots and a wet empty balloon for a novel can tell me what I do is wrong because he doesn’t understand it, and not to use the word ‘utilize’ because it doesn’t mean anything? Somebody once told me that rock and stone don’t mean the same thing because no two words mean the same thing. I thought that was part of the beauty of words, in their full utility, because a rock sounds and looks different than a stone, and would splash differently if thrown in the water, and leave a different kind of bruise if thrown at you.”

“You mean, if I had two identical objects and called one a rock and one a stone, they would do those things differently?”

“That’s exactly what I mean. Figuratively, at least.”

“I see.”

“There is bullshit flying around everywhere, and all these guys want to do is proliferate more bullshit- smarter, smoother, more economic bullshit that makes the distinction between plural and possessive and isn’t redundant. He said bad writing is like hamburger helper- you have a little bit of meat you want to stretch for six people, so you mix it in with a shit ton of processed crap that is insubstantial and fake, but gives the illusion of more food. Then he lectured us about an essay by EB White about a car. Whenever White’s talking about the car feeling fast, he uses longwinded sentences and hardly any punctuation. But when he talks about the car breaking down, he uses terse sentences, lots of commas. That’s great. That’s really fascinating stuff. But let me tell you, the same guy who telling us about the essay and how great it was, he wrote us all an email later, ending by telling us to drive carefully in the snow. I didn’t believe him. I didn’t believe he gave a shit about how we drove in the snow because he used a comma in an odd place, and it stuck out and was conspicuous, and it reeked of a formal choice. And I like hamburger helper, by the way. I like the way it tastes.”

“The last time I ate hamburger helper, it made me constipated for a whole day.”

“That’s your fault. You need more fiber and you drink too much. Your insides are raisin dry. Here, drink some water.”

“Thanks for looking out for me. Don’t know what I’d do- maybe not drink any water.”

“Keep it to yourself asshole.”

“I eat enough fiber, especially when I need it. I ate a whole box of raisin bran and the next day had the biggest shit of my life. I’ve never been so happy shitting”

“That’s beautiful. Thanks for sharing.”

“If bad writing is hamburger helper, good writing is raisin bran.”

“That’s one way to look at it.”

“That’s exactly how I look at it. Let me tell you, if you get caught up on every fast talking wind bag you come across, you’re going to be spread so thin across half-leads and following the wrong scent you won’t even know what you are. You know why good writing is raisin bran? Because it leaves you empty at the end of the day. It gives you a space. It clears out what’s stuck and not supposed to be there and makes room for something real, if that’s what you want. You’re right about bullshit. I can’t walk to the end of my street without getting hungry for a cheeseburger and memorizing the phone number of eight different dry cleaners. In this world if you don’t pay extra close attention you’re a dead man. Clutter will attach itself to you and just accumulate and accumulate until you aren’t even moving anymore, you’re imagining that you're moving, and your space isn’t a space anymore, but a cemented-in hole. A person is always walking with a stone in one hand and a rock in the other. Strangers, or even their friend or their mother might see two rocks or two stones, or maybe nothing. But that person holding them has a rock and a stone, and even though he isn’t throwing them, he knows, he knows, that if he does they will make distinctly different sounds, and will leave different kinds of bruises if they hit their lover’s back. Literally. One might leave a black mark and the other a scaled down replica of Andrew Wyeth’s painting of the girl in the field.”

11.22.07

2010-01-27T22:35:00.010-05:00

we stand outside barefoot and in shorts, watching our breath. rob's family has joined us outside. he and i shiver with our arms crossed, then flex our muscles and stretch flamboyantly. anxiety hangs in the air, we can feel it in the way our lungs hurt when we breathe and our knees shake when we walk, knowing that it's only going to hurt and shake more once we jump in. so we make these funny gestures to forget and forget until our heads have hit the water.

i look out on the lake. there are sheets of ice covering parts of it, mostly in the middle. we walk to a picnic table which prolongs suspense, but there seems to be a reason for it so we sit. we've never done this before and there aren't plans to do it again, but still, there's something ritualistic in the heart of it. so we take our time and savor the spit in our mouths. we draw out these moments, the suspense, splaying it, finding the heart and meaning of it by doing it. and so there's something beautiful there because we're looking for the heart of something by doing it, and not thinking about it, or holding it to the light and trying to look through it.

his family watches, we are separate from them. the disconnect is subtle but it is apparent. they watch from nearby- they are only watching. they are removed because there is a significant part of them which can not relate to a significant part of us because we are doing something they are not going to do.

i slide my shirt off over my head. i hear static crack as it ruffles my hair. goosebumps on my upper body. the sky is gray, tired, stifling. bogart is wet around his underside. leaves cling dryly to his shaggy auburn fur as he shuffles through the unraked yard. even moving things seem static and it is hard to imagine a world beyond earshot going about its day. the air is cold but still. the lake is still.

we start toward the water. underfoot- cold soil, patches of crab grass, splayed blots of sand all press into our numb feet. we stand taller, walk like we are going somewhere. we descend a short slope and reach the dock. it is made of a dense plastic, manufactured to resemble wood. it is fixated to the shore but not attached to pillars or stilts. the dock bobs steadily, dips with our weight. ice is visible but far off.

no thoughts, there are no more motions, actions, implications. they are all behind us- leverage, not obstacles any more, but a charging mass, an increasing forward motion---

Ann-Margaret

2010-01-27T20:39:00.005-05:00

The opening to this is one of the most striking and stirring things I have seen in film. When I watch it, I feel really happy and really sad at the same time. Her movements, gestures are transparent and underneath them hides nothing- caprice and whim beam through her girlish voice and fluttery finger movements without fail. Pure joy gnashes its ivory teeth against first heartbreak. It erupts in all its unbridled corporeality through her shoulder shudders, sobs, the childish gripping and bunching up of her dress. The camera moves away and we suffer with her in her abandonment. As she chases the camera we understand her susceptible purity and ache for it to remain unmarred forever. We know there is no such thing, but we ache to suspend disbelief. With no background scene to distract the eye, she is the center of her own and our world. She is naked and unashamed like a child, and her longing pours from her eyes into yours, right through the camera and into your heart.

2010-01-19T14:12:00.002-05:00

2010-01-18T22:55:00.001-05:00

2010-01-18T13:41:00.003-05:00

the biggest mistake i have made in writing is not writing what is true. i have lost sight of what is true in my own life, and this is why i could not write about anything that is true. i trudged through mud and climbed a mountain and pioneered a thick and dark tundra. i came out covered in mud and gashes, tired to the bone marrow and bleeding from the heart. i found nothing true in this because i was never looking for anything true. i was looking to suffer, thinking that suffering was the last true thing i had to live for, because everything else seemed to float on the surface and bob in the water, mocking itself. i chose to lay in the sun afterward but the mud dried and became immobilizing. the gashes cankered and my muscles atrophied from lack of use. a hole in the shape of my body was gouged by time into my bed. i did not come close to the edge of death. i crossed the edge, and lived in that world for a year. nothing beautiful arose, only more death. repeated gawks and faux admirations of my unsavory outlook cast things in a concrete. i had to hit my head so many times against its low overhang to realize that just because it is solid, does not mean it is true. relationships deteriorated as i rolled formlessly down a stony hill, convinced these were not bruises, but badges of courage, honorable scars i was acquiring, to be kept, clung to. unconscious, unaware, insane, i stepped on toes and broke them, i burned bridges, i cursed the air and then immediately breathed it, i shook my fists at people i did not know, but hated with the final fiber of my dying being. i neared a fist fight with a drunk man, and carried his anger in my upper intestines for a month, until i took it out and saw my own face in a mirror, poisoned and black. i came close to ruining my old friend's wedding. i came close to ruining a lot of things, because i house my eyes in a ramshackle lean to. i do not need to burn it down, though. i don't need to need it, or want it, or have it, or get it, or remember it, or forget it. i do not need to invent an existential house of mirrors anymore, just to work my way around that sign which keeps everything else in its postmodern shadow, saying NOTHING IS TRUE. we are in an age. times are dark- we need to live ahead of the times, and not behind them. i live one step ahead of myself, two steps ahead of our excessive times. i am in times in which all that is to be had, is already apparent. this is true.

The Next Big Thing

2010-01-10T20:40:00.001-05:00

2009-12-28T13:05:00.004-05:00

there is a curtain between the observer and the stage. the stage is made of light. the curtain obscures nearly everything around the observer but the curtain is also a skull and a rib cage- without it the vital organs are exposed and the brain expands and continues to expand until it either explodes or dissolves into the light. the observer pokes holes in the curtain because the brain is like film and light allows an image to develop on the surface of or inside the observer. the observer cuts large holes initially because light is also blood and it is supper. the observer must continue to puncture the curtain because if increments of light to do not increase the brain implodes or dissolves into its own matter. punctures are bored using an awl. the grip is made of time and the point is made of language, which can be made of letters and sounds, but is sharpest when made of experience. large holes blind the observer. this is why larger holes are always made of smaller holes very close to each other. smaller holes allow a more concentrated beam of light to bore deeper into the observer. a hole that is too small to be seen will cut straight through the observer and to the other side of the curtain, even though there is still a hole.

2009-12-15T23:01:00.004-05:00

there is the tree which

has the fear of disappearing,

above all else. jutting from gaps

in its coat bark, are limbs that,

in the fear of being discovered, have grown

twisted and disfigured after all these

years, so that nobody recognizes them,

and mistakes the leaves for

pine needles, which granted, do not become

the poster objects of the autumn-

but they also do not die afterward

it has been cut and processed

in order to provide the paper which

will one day eulogize itself.

it ignores the gracious suggestion

of rainfall, the precipitated

light gouging its harrowing cask and

feigns to detest mineral slumber.

all cast in the brilliantly rendered

theatre piece of itself-

directed by your family portrait on vellum

to grotesquely imitate a future occurrence

in which the script is rehearsed with a

lighted match, the lines appearing in

smoke

on one side of the breeze is a silent ruffling of

needles that makes its own ears explode, but

the other side of the breeze

cooled the burn of its own bad thought. and

nothing wiped anger off its black heart or the

blood from its bottomless knuckle

like the brunt of sunup

2009-12-15T22:54:00.002-05:00

Anytime is a goodtime for an identity Crisis

2009-12-15T11:54:00.004-05:00

Will work for

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My dreams have always been significant to me. They possess a power and directness that reveals what the conscious mind fears of itself, and thus often hinders itself from seeing. As with any of us, I have been left in confounded, enlightened, inspired, depressed, pacified and angered states by them. I’ve been debilitated to the point of outright horror by dreams, waking to find my trusty rationale somewhere far out of reach, and a sobering sense of paranoia and phobia in its place, throbbing like an open wound. In fact, a series of disturbing dreams rocked the first couple months of this semester, to the point where my daily life was affected. But it was, and could by the nature of a dream only be, my life that was affected.

It was an isolating experience, but the concept became even more fascinating to me as dreams intensified. Their visceral nature makes their full emotional or allegorical value accessible only to me, but the fact that all people share a stake in dreaming compelled me in trying to understand something deeper at the core of them. Rearing the visceral elements into something tangible for others to access, i.e. rendering them through cerebrally and emotionally accurate writing and appeal, seemed like a puzzle waiting to be solved.

In the development of this idea, the synthesis of having a dream and writing it down became essential. I have been in the on and off habit of writing them down for the last few years. Writing in prose always seemed an obvious choice. My task was mainly to remember what had happened for the sake of future reflection, and prose is a default format. Months would pass and these entries would jog my memory of dreams that had happened but that, in most cases, I had forgotten about. Reading, I could see the events play out in my head as they initially did, but I always wondered what had happened to the intense, emotional, id-jarring effect the dreams usually had.

At the start of this semester and the journal assignment, I began logging dreams in verse for a change. It wasn’t until after reading back on what I’d written down before that I understood the effect this change in form had. Whereas prose had merely logged an event- mythologizing memories and converting them into distant and inaccessible arks of vague interest, verse had preserved the dream in the form of an image. The image represented emotions and mental states in a way prose couldn’t.

The state of dreaming can be a highly emotional one, void of rationale. Consequently I have often had a difficult time explaining a powerful dream to another person. It is an experience I had, but didn’t, and I certainly didn’t have it in the “real world.” This always left dreams on the awkward fringe of important and paltry, true and nonsensical, everything and nothing.

With this in mind, integrating dreams in daily life seems rife with contradictions, the fallacies of being overly subjective, and at the end of the day, the question of whether or not it is even important. I suspend Freud for a moment to suggest that a dream evidences something that binds us all as people. It contains the metaphysical seeds of its own elusive nature- kind of, to me at least, like poetry. What draws a person to verse? What makes them pay any special attention to nocturnal narratives? I doubt anyone has the end-all conclusive answer to questions like these. But in the end, we all dream, don’t we?

is it fiction

if it happened

in a dream?

eye of storm-

most violent

wild geese

glistening

tall grass

listening

A field of RFKs

beside his

many graves.

this

room is suffocating hot

out of air?

Wake twice sheets off

Someone watches a naked body

lie and using

ghosts can’t see through sheets, after all

Tell him go away

under skin

sweat affirms the fear this

dull knife

won’t

cut it

all of us in the White Gym

I, spotting Lulu, and

don’t know if they’re ok with that

but they’re saying nothing

and Bobo isn’t here

to kill the buzz

congeal the atmosphere of

war on a spanning scape

creek, field, cliff-

paper guns?

need these grade points

to graduate

be kind

give her the thing

for peace

insomniatic house question:

can’t quite keep my head

straight yet-

which side of 4 am

still healing from that crick

in yesterday’s neck

is all this ruckus coming from?

Is there a heaven

For good ideas

Lost

In the experiment on the

Po -heh tree

anthologized oops

commodified achoo

greeting card:

Happy Birthday,

Stay away

In complete dark

How do you know

Your eyes are closed?

Maggie’s Married to

Someone else now

Loss

I should have been here

When you found out

It’s ok honey

By the way

She is lesbian

Can they tell that by a sonogram?

Yes, now they can-

Pink bubbles show up

They’re small

But it is genetic now

I need a shower reverand

She had a miscarriage –

something to do with a bird

oh no honey

it’s ok, I still love you

I know you still love me

but just to prove it

draw it on this piece of paper

using this crayon

course paper

small crayon

big hand

childish stupid drawing

in front of the others in the room

ball that paper up

take your stupid love back

the look uncomfortable

as if-

why did they ever get married?

The long walk to toilet

The longer walk

I am Marianne

she is seeing a star- he lives

in a glamour manor straight out of Hollywood, 1963

the star sits

without moving his mouth

firing

accusations like paper cuts through

the air, a ticker and the

phrase keeps passing through the space

engraved in her memory

disappearing

Marianne bites back-

I’m out of here, and good riddance to you,

she assures

I am him

he is livid

follow Marianne outside

she is going nowhere

he will help her get there

with a

wooden bat

A neighbor woman with a face too frank

for anything but the news

sees them and calls the police

they meet eyes and know it’s over,

but for whom is the question

contest

literary scavenger hunt

in a library- appropriate

hell and dante’s inferno-

mark doty-petrified wood in a brilliant book

school shooting in the

bathroom, escaping through the

window. grass clump in my

ear. unpleasant. appropriate

gallivanting with you on a cobblestone France, and

you hunched laboriously in your underpants

who is responsible for the bulge

in your shirt?

anyone anyone but him

what

a nightmare

we’re in Prague

I stole a car

the police must be negligent

i’m still at large

but i was doing you a favor

all along

a stone’s throw to your

back screen door, as

no one is home-

they didn’t answer-

come inside its ok-

then why is your mom there-

livid?

duck-

behind that

stone

pillar- but she already saw,

weather her anger with

repeated hellos

hello mrs. Moore

good to see you mrs. Moore-

just smile

she’ll come around

”farmland gone is

farmland gone forever”

boom narrative

2009-12-14T22:57:00.005-05:00

an explosion loud enough to touch your heart

not just shake it but

actually touch it

will tremor next to that ringing in the ears

that follows

but it doesn't detract from the reality that

the blast leaves you naked and ten miles

outside the edge of town,

blind and wandering and wondering

outward

you will encounter the paradox of a wounded man burning

in his darkest hour

begging in a timorous wail for mercy from a

fire that won't listen

stunted kindling suiciding in a concerted

effort to feed the fire, yet break free

from the form of a

life concocted in a pail of human scabs and pure psychopathy

inevitably, blood is far too thick,

and the apple never falls far from the tree,

if it falls at all

your sleepy face

covered in the burns and smudged with ash

doesn't have infinite readings,

it says exactly what it means

2009-12-13T21:41:00.004-05:00

When impressions are at critical mass, then I know.

I have pigeonholed you until you became the hole yourself.

If even for one second someone had showed me what the end would look like, I'd have started on the right foot and continued and continued and continued

Now there are flagrancies yellow-flagging your hair, lost in the dust of the moon.

If even for one second my mother had showed me what the end would look like, I wouldn't have started at all.

But no one is perfect, and so, I, a rabbit, limp forward on the wrong foot, having chewed the right foot off to escape the grim iron teeth of a trap.

If someone had showed the rabbit how that day was going to end, he might not have crawled out of his hole.

Every girl sees, buried deep inside of her, a beautiful princess. That is why we still engage in the same bored mating ritual. Why humans bother to flirt, and kill.

I don't flirt with you. But I didn't stop you when you were digging your own grave. I am sorry, but I didn't know what friends were for back then.

Also, I'd seen a glimpse of what the end looked like.

The possibility that you are right and I am wrong is overwhelming. That is why I am going to cut my hair off and give it to you, then lay down on my couch and fall asleep for ten years.

a self portrait via a study of a type of human

2009-12-09T00:30:00.017-05:00

YOU

YOU YOU YOU YOU YOU , who make things because YOU want to be seen making things because art is cool because you want to be pigeonholed by wine and coffee and cigarettes as writers with black notebooks as painters and drawers with paint and ink splotches speckling a hand which peeks from the sleeve of a wool peacoat fabricated to appear vintage when handing a 20 to the cashier at the thrift store, who the purchaser YOU is better than, by the way, because YOU the purchaser is an advocate, propagator and evening scholar of self- and world-awareness which YOU identify YOURSELF by and because the cashier does not speak fluent english and loves jesus christ- the callousness and ironic sensibilities that ensue, the sarcasm and aloofness that ensues, the fucking games that ensue the asshole that ensues the emaciated sallow subhuman that ensues, needless of the warmth that necessitates by actual blood in veins, not this concoction that has been thinned to a watery viscosity by high life and the irrevocable need to hide in plain sight, another irony lived by, but perhaps the most blood curdling (enough perhaps even to curdle YOUR blood into to something substantial, if YOU'll put YOUR eye on it) freudian slip this quarter moon think tank is capable of- that it is born out of the paralyzing fear that if this is a game as you treat it then you are a collapsible checkerboard and in the end YOU WILL DISAPPEAR COMPLETELY.

worry, because in five years a man will be walking his dog and he will look at his watch and the sunlight's glare off its crystal face will touch the eye of the driver of a passing moving van who, distracted, will not see the woman in the tracksuit crossing the road until it is almost too late, swerving first onto the wrong side of the road and then over the sidewalk and into the park where YOU AND YOUR DEADBEAT FRIENDS are sitting on picnic tables talking about the lines you did off each others tits and dicks and hit you with enough impact to finale the dull charade.

exactly three milliseconds before death your entire life will flash before YOU and YOU won't find it satisfactory- it will feel like a fart that does not completely leave your body- half the soulfart will sprint to the nearest vintage clothier and the other half will stubbornly remain in body, blogging in a grating, nuance-bereft generic, sarcastic VICE MAGAZINE PITCHFORK MEDIA sounding-like-i-don't-give-a-shit-is-part-of-my-job tone- riddled with ironies and botoxed up the asshole with a kitschy repossession of my living room- of YOUR boycotting YOUR own ascen/descension until the afterworld invents an answer to sparks and 80s revival.

meanwhile the rest of us will wager the contradictory nature of all our actions and words over a riveting game of go-fish, and will chase the tails of conscience in circles until a cosmic sneeze resets the clock of ardor

taking as an example our messianic friend who dedicated his life to a furthering debt because every day he wagered that the sun would not rise the next-

we will walk to the golden shore as friends, holding in our hearts an understanding that, even if there are types of persons,

we are types of persons, and that it was never our place to see it that way

2009-12-06T16:24:00.002-05:00

there are those of us live like a skydive. there are those of us who live a job. Mr. Ay may wake up in the morning and think, oh, i will drink coffee with my girlfriend today. i will sell some stocks for a 150% profit and make a mortgage payment. i will buy a turquoise lamp that compliments the grain of my hardwood floor. and then, there is his neighbor Mr. Bee who wakes up in the early afternoon and does not think but rather puts on a coat and sits on his porch with a cup of coffee and stares. wonders how he would go about describing snow to someone who had never seen it before. he walks to the store to buy a loaf of bread, an apple, a jar of peanut butter, a quarter pound of cheddar and on the way back expound the pros and cons of returning to a home which does not bear resemblance to a home. he pays someone so he may live there. if they are going to take his money, he may as well get something out of it. there will be the wish for a home more resemblant to an anchor, not in physical size but in characteristic function and allegorical value. but simultaneously there will be a flash of the english robinson crusoe, who after 28 years stranded on the island, found england a bore and wanted to go back home. robinson has nothing to prove and neither does Mr. Bee. life is an obligatory run through. a practice round for a game that will continually be rained out. the big red curtain.

Mr. Bee lives like a lung. there are elements entering and there are elements leaving, changed. but there is a sacred balance to it all which is understood and never violated. he does not put his hand on anything that the force of nature will not enforce counteraction upon. some call this calculated. Mr. Bee does not call it anything. he does not talk to people unless there is a straight line from object medulla to subject occipital lobe, this is why he does not need to call his way anything. he understands it like a child does not know he already understands everything. he knows it like the back of the hand knows itself.

there is a house he once lived in. a memory remains, though house may be gone forever. it would not make any difference either way, because the memory remains. that period was eventful. he took a bite out of a gingerbread woman for the first time in that house. the act opened a window that he has been trying to close since. not so much for the sake of closing it, but for the sake of being able to. he ate until the gingerbread was consumed and there was nothing remaining but crumbs and a memory- a segue to the memory of a physical window. he would open it and smoke out of it. but the wind would blow the smoke back in. he’d leave the window cracked to air out the room. the smell of smoke in the heaterless room. there are objects in it, but the viewer’s attention is drawn to the empty space in the middle of the floor, making the room an empty space at all times, and a lonely place to look back on, with its smoking window.

synecdoche, ny

2009-12-05T15:41:00.002-05:00

"Here's what I think theater is: it's the beginning of thought. The truth not yet spoken. It's a blackbird in winter. The moment before death. It's what a man feels after he's been clocked in the jaw. It's love... in all its messiness. And I want all of us, players and audience alike, to soak in the communal bath of it, the mikvah, as the Jews call it. We're all in the same water, after all, soaking in our very menstrual blood and nocturnal emissions..."

2009-11-19T23:05:00.002-05:00

I was lying in my bed, listening to the remastered Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band. It was four in the morning and lightning bolts were blazing thoughts and ghost trails and firy rings around my eyeballs. I could not sleep. It was not unusual that I could not sleep. Sleep rarely came anymore. When all the little silver ball bearings have rolled into their little silver holes at the end of the day, then sleep is easy. when some of the ball bearings are still rolling around, shut eye is harder to come by. on this night, it occurred to me that none of the ball bearings were in any of their silver holes and were in fact rolling around in the proverbial attic, getting lost in termite alcoves and being licked up by squatters, who, by the way, often mistook the silver balls for breath mints. some of the silver balls, in fact, had stuck to the crevices in between the ridges of my shoe sole and later had dislodged on the floor of the car, and were rolling around on the floor of the car, which moves even when the ignition is off, because of rotational and revolutionary movements of the planet.

back to my bed- somewhere in astral projection- i was at the perfect juxtaposition of 1958 bled, slovenia and Alphaville and 67 degrees north longitude and middle C and Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds and then it dawned on me- The Beatles are Jesus Christ. At the end of the day, the rock and roll standard. a development as a musical union which is marked by constant expansion in depth and breadth of musical, lyrical, structural, conceptual scope. four creative standpoints (i.e. beatles) contribute to a Holy Quadrilateral of unprecedented and unsurpassed musicultural impact.

i was excited because this thought was new to me, and it occurred to me there was some profundity in it.

after taking a hot bath and reading by candle light, i fell asleep.

the next afternoon i pulled myself out of the tub, thanked allah that I had not drowned over night, and went to the halfway house to meet Beau, where I always met him on Wednesdays.

we leaned on the handrail and smoked cigarettes and drank iced tea, like usual.

i explained the idea to beau, but he did not accept it-

yes- it absolutely makes sense. you have the ghandis, the MLKs, the dhali lamas, the mother theresas- that is, the velvet undergrounds, the bob dylans, the sex pistolses, the nirvanas, the david bowies. but none of them measure up to the power exuded by the beatles. in terms of admitted influence, worldwide appeal. album sales. beatles have sold the most bibles. jesus has sold the most albums.

no- jesus is jesus. the beatles are the beatles. they are separated by an unbridgable disconnect. you can not make a comparison. you cannot mix a religious leader of the 1st century and a rock and roll group of the 20th century in the same pot. the rules are different for each group. each was an opportunist in their own right, but that’s as far as i’ll go in admitting likeness. now, present day, nobody likes anything for what it is, or believes in anything for that matter. it has to go against something that was there before. what makes this different from the beatles or jesus, is that now, the human condition is one of concentrated angst and bitter retribution against a large ghost. the large ghost is made up of smaller ghosts, which are the efforts of every person up until now. more people have lived and died and left craters on the surface of the earth now, than ever before, and that will always be true. you cannot step anywhere without stepping into a crater someone else has already left. this leaves the world in a worrisome place if it still considers originality an ethic. tomorrow the now will change and the law will continue on, like tin cans trailing a hearse that says “just married” on the back of it. you can’t do anything about that, man. just like you can’t predict when the next unprecedented, unsurpassed whatever whosamuhwhatchits are going to leave a really big footprint that covers the other footprints and fool the next insomniac into believing that anything means anything.

i am not arguing against that, i am simply highlighting a parallel, possibly a bridge. i did not know you were such a nihilistic person. it doesn’t become you.

i believe a bridge is built to be burned, eventually

do you like the beatles?

i like the beatles. i like jesus. im just saying your argument is visceral, at most empirical. it is weak in this, and i cannot be convinced by anything you say.

At this, i walked to the jukebox that our supervisor/sponsor Ricky had set up. Ricky was a handy jack of all trades. he had opened it up and taken a soldering iron to its innards and made it so we didn’t need to put quarters in.

the best part was were able to bring in any CD of our choice and have it played through the box. we had whole albums on that sucker. not the a side b side capitalize off of consumer quarters malarky.

i return to the rail, and leaning on it. the first track of Sgt. Pepper’s plays. we stare at the wall through the duration of it. then, “with a little help from my friends” plays and we stand upright, as if it’s some rehearsed thing we do, which it isn’t, and we go to the makeshift billiard room and rack up a game of pool.

2009-11-16T20:37:00.006-05:00

we gather like eggplants

to understand wolves

some argue

eggplants can understand

other eggplants only

but some still find the

written word effective

we write and regret

regret, and write

until they are two empty mirrors

affirming a chasm

to involve an eye

would be a brick wall

materializing three feet in front of

two tons of metal at

immeasurable speed

hear through the vine

proverbial or literal

fragments of a meaning and

vocalized lust broken off, fragments

crossed comets of conversation-

though our heads are hard pressed

to absorb

the clinging gobs

connecting us by happenstance

and strings of

accidents in common

they'll have a peep show,

exposing all naivety to an

audience of wackjobs and whores

who criticize

they (not the wackjobs and whores) can take their scowls in stride

wear them like stripes on

sleeves of scab

laugh

understand or not understand

something

first said

with profound understanding

or perhaps a

week-long hangover

but we are wolves in a black cave

circling the stack of

paltry bird bones

flashing our mandibles

as usual the strongest will

leaves with

bone in mouth

but the cave is still black

he is still hungry

the bone is still meaningless

he will still want to eat eggplants because

he is an eggplant

2009-11-02T17:25:00.003-05:00

Here is a lesson in creative writing. First rule: Do not use semicolons. They are transvestite hermaphrodites representing absolutely nothing. All they do is show you've been to college.

kurt vonnegut

2009-10-30T23:07:00.000-04:00

]

Disorder	Rating
Paranoid Personality Disorder:	Very High
Schizoid Personality Disorder:	High
Schizotypal Personality Disorder:	High
Antisocial Personality Disorder:	High
Borderline Personality Disorder:	Very High
Histrionic Personality Disorder:	Moderate
Narcissistic Personality Disorder:	Very High
Avoidant Personality Disorder:	High
Dependent Personality Disorder:	Very High
Obsessive-Compulsive Disorder:	Moderate
-- Take the Personality Disorder Test -- -- Personality Disorder Info --

2009-10-18T19:54:00.001-04:00

He looked it in the eye and told it NO

2009-10-05T00:54:00.001-04:00

"the folly of mistaking a paradox for a discovery, a metaphor for a proof, a torrent of verbiage for a spring of capital truths, and oneself for an oracle, is inborn in us"

paul valery

beautiful birthday

2009-09-28T00:56:00.004-04:00

i turned 23 and am still alive-

this year, the days are only going to get better. you know, to balance things out.

2009-09-24T07:37:00.001-04:00

read it while it's free.

buy it while it's in print.

2009-09-21T04:16:00.005-04:00

espresso and cigarettes in parisian cafe.

that's the trouble with romance.

---

smelly flat feet or flatulence in bed

just flatulence

public flatulence

pubic fuzz

private fondling.

getting along not getting along

in the bed

talking in the car.

creating a scene over drinks at every-

other restaurant

(little boy looks)

mom

what are they fighting about?

present situation: unclear future: dismal unsure past

romance is a glue

but the glue is not romantic

that's the trouble with romance

getting along, not getting along

in suburb of chicago on sunday street

die Stadtzentrum von Vienna auf Strasse von Sontag

oder

le centre-ville de Paris sur la Rue de dimanche

was ist argument auf deutsh?

HYSTERICAL

jovial cuddle, voluptuous woman

jive cunt, vile wretch

vile WRETCH

CLASSIFIEDS: ROMANCE:

sickly, pasty relationship

seeking tan

willing to pay

in shrugs and sighs

joy and joy and JOY AND JOY

lugubrious, dour, morose, somber seeking a pasty tan

or russian hand massage job

but joy, JOY

BUTT JOY

---

james dean smokes cigarettes

paul simon smokes cigarettes

naomi watts smokes cigarettes

charles bukowski smokes cigarettes// and BEER

j d salinger writes about girl on sofa at party s.c.

kevin barnes sings about s.c.

football club manager of manch. untd. s.c.

passive film protagonist observes but does not confront

loser

novelistic protagonist angsty rebellious--EPIPHANY

still loser

black/white film portrait subject smokes cigarette ((avedon))

(trouble with romance)

this fat winter jacket would make a writer out of anyone

pockets to hold at least

ten packs

---

western europe general,

mid 20th century

cafes and cinemas and apoteks and biblioteks and discoteks

that's the trouble with romance

2009-09-05T16:04:00.000-04:00

half karat diamond

engagement ring

for sale

used once

we won't budge, but

2009-08-13T01:25:00.003-04:00

we age like it hurts,

and we carry the battle scar of every moment gone,

it weighs on us like we've been wronged

by the passing of time.

the torture, the living

intensifies

by exponents and

we don't even realize

until we see better versions of our

selves as younger

individuals

in the pictures of

kids in places we've been.

it's not until those moments

that the grasp slips.

infinitesimal, but

more than enough for confidence to wane

knotted wobble knees

and the "concept of our

reality subject to debate" to reopen like a fresh

wound. the flies buzz and

they will gather

around a stinking body that can't be yours, asking

questions and haranguing with

an infinite insistence, endlessly,

and reminding you

of your stink and your age. how

odious that face

has become and how clean

it once was. the juxtaposition

slides nicely, like two negatives of different times

placed upon one another

and held to lamplight

stubble can prick a lover's face

leave a tingle like

stab like cut

but it's not blood-

doubt seeps

from soft skin.

then guilt

makes for whiter hair

faster and our stomachs churn with an acidic roar, reproachfully

beckoning departure

now---

now, we budge-------

and with such gall---

but only with such----- gall

oh, oh, that flies would die,

i would quell your guts, i would

smooth the wrinkle in that tangled lie

2009-07-15T02:23:00.003-04:00

re beck uh

and then evol?

2009-07-15T01:04:00.001-04:00

2009-07-14T21:44:00.001-04:00

"he makes fun of everybody. jewish people, terrorists."

2009-07-14T02:50:00.001-04:00

i don't need a job but i do need money

2009-07-12T01:09:00.001-04:00

And for the whoring of my pen, my translucent bathroom wall, and the rapid depreciation of the common thought, I'd like to thank:

2009-06-28T20:43:00.008-04:00

And so Ernest, Franz and Miguel observed from the gray, posthumous cloud, shaking their heads as literature evolved itself into its own death.

"language is a constant evolution"

"This careless facet"

"The accidental plot of Tom Anderson"

2009-06-28T20:00:00.002-04:00

five ballet dancers (the future, or anti-)
vs.
my last leg (the opinion)

A Play In a Single Act

Our protagonist sits weary in a leather office chair, donning a wrinkled, maroon polo and an obviously self-administered, uneven haircut. On his twelfth and, alas, final (as his employment has recently been terminated) hour manning the front desk of the prestigious Goober Moon Ballet Academy for Young Guns and Complacent Yuppies, he sits in an unaware daze, blinking emptily at a computer monitor before him. Earlier he had been playing songs on an acoustic guitar which now sits idly in its case on the floor behind him. A group of preteen female dancers not-so-shyly creeps up to the desk to our protagonist and instigates a flash-interchange, their contributions to the quasi conversation betray what our protagonist perceives to be startling:

girl 1"hey do you know how to play guitar?"
me"no i just keep it there"
#1"i heard you playing a song what song was it?"
me"uh, maybe john lennon. or neil young."
#1"oh i LOVE neil young"
me"really?"
#1"yeah and oh do you know dave matthews?"
girl #2 "do you know panic at the dicso? i love panic at the disco"
me"uh"
girls#1-5 chatter simultaneously, unintelligible
girls #2"i love panic at the disco have you heard them?"
me"uh, no, never actually"
girl#1"..on a boat on a boat"
girl#2"panic at the disco, love them"
girl#1"..on a boat"
me"oh ist that uh, andy samberg"
girls#1,2 and 4"yeah! and jizz in my pants"
me"what?"
girls#1-5(shouting)"jizz in my pants jizzed in my pants jizz in my pants"
me"shhhh hey you're not supposed to know that word"
girls#1 and 2"what, jizz?"
me"yeah"
girl#2"why? we're not six"
me"yeah, like ten?"
girl#2"uh no, 12"
girl #1"13"
girls#1-5 incoherent excited chatter, during which girl #4's portable ipod speaker begins quietly playing hip hop music
girl#2"so you NEVER heard panic at the disco"
me"no what is that, is that panic at the disco playing on that thing?"
girl#2"no, they're boys'
me"oh"
girl#1"dyou like dave matthews, or jack johnson?"
me"uh"
girl#2"my favorite song is --inaudible--"
me"wait what?"
girl#2"my favorite song by them is 'lying is the most fun a girl can have without taking her clothes off'"
me"oh thats great"

//curtain//

epitaph for a man i once was

2009-06-25T14:07:00.004-04:00

Dear M. / Mme.,

I received in the post your letter of recognition not a week ago. I must admit I waited months for your reply; at the very least I had hoped for some minor, negligible glint of recognition from your vicinity of the postmaster's jurisdiction. In the months between sending out my initial manuscript via DHL and receiving a worn, cordially salutated rejection via the premodern mail, I came to notice a few things.

It was not so much the noticing of these things that deems them mentionable, albeit writeable and sendable, or mailable, but the unforseen clash of circumstance and impregnation that strikes the best of us and the worst of us, that drives forlorn bank brokers to search their back yards in a milky whisky dance, for just five more minutes with their old dog; that patronized the stitch in the unibomber's cerebellum; that was the fleck of dust itching Mozart's nose and having him sneeze out the Marriage of Figaro.

It was a moth that landed on my sister's retired lacrosse stick. At precisely five thirty two in the morning I had not slept. I had reached such ineffable stuckness that I believe Derrida's head might have exploded had he been there to witness it. My hands were charred with cigarette burns and practically half the liter of Clan MacGregor had found its way to my shirt and bare feet. The backyard lay before my eyelids, sunk not from sleepiness but that powerful fermentation-daze, or headlock, rather, and I stood quickly to walk myself back into sobriety.

As I did, though, I saw it, her stick, leaning against the mud- and beer- splattered brick of my rented house. Nearly neck-deep in unraked leaves and a strewn mess of half-crushed beer cans, the sight was the bizarre love-making of poverty and athleticism. And there, perched like boredom on Middle America, sat the moth, and I wanted to cry. I ignored the notion though and nearly tumbled headlong into my wooden gate leading to the street before putting my hand before me and turning the potential concussion into a mere exit of the yard.

The streets seemed different now, and I wanted to know why. I thought about many things, gazing at the glass three sided box of the bus stop. I noticed the haze of yellow without noticing the streetlamp and I thought to myself that I must have been no more than three half-steps from Suchness at which point I was hurled back into the miserable state of Being.

Rounding the corner of my street, I was about to turn back toward my home when a group of three or four Bro-Types found me walking off my scotch. They hollered at me, no doubt mistaking me for a homeless man. I was, after all, not at my most kempt or focused. I tried to ignore them angrily, but they had become intent on a lynching the moment they laid their quivering, empty, bloodshot eyes on me. I must have been twenty five seconds from home when I felt a clammy hand on my left shoulder.

"hey muhammd hows the taxi business?" at which his lead-faced, shave headed home boy swung his fist hard into my right cheek.

I do not remember anything immediately after that. But when I woke, it was as if the dark of early morning had witnessed the event and, knowing it could do nothing to help, had run to fetch the sunrise. I laid there with my sore cheek embedded in the night-cool, unforgiving pavement, and watched an orange globe peek from the roof of the townhouse on the other side of route fifty. I did not move. No cars were driving by and I was so beautifully alone that I did start to cry. It was not the searing throbbing or box cutter stabs coming from my cheek, or my left leg which had been so obviously broken. It was that the sun continued on, even with me here, not pausing in shock or abandoning its post in sympathy. I respected the sun in that moment, and so potently that I stood to my feet and limped, broken leg and face and all, to a dining chair in my home, where I sat and drank cool, day-old coffee from a tall red mug and thought about the moth on my sister's lacrosse stick.

Don't you realize, M. / Mme., that the manuscript of mine you read was from a different hand that writes you this letter? It had been penned by ink drawn from a well filled with resentment, liquor, confusion, futility and road rage. Though it will be some time before the dew of awakening has dried from my grass, and surely even more time before I am prepared to write or even consider sending to another publisher, I send this sort of epitaph for a man I once was, hoping you will see it, or rather, not see it, the transparent envelope that carries it and all.

My best to you and yours,

H.