goals for 2010

Learn to read real literary Spanish. Learn to write in Spanish to get away from anti-poetic American thought disease. Learn basic French.

Write about myself less. Learn how to establish real characters besides good me and idiot me. Figure out what of what seems internally obvious actually needs to be expressed to make something readable. Conversely figure out what must seem pedantic to those who read it.

Delete self hate and self doubt, if impossible then channel aggressively. Get struck by lightning to become more interesting as a person. If I'm not going to drink I should probably at least smoke grass once in a while. Problem of finding that in suburbia in middle age, and navigating parent paranoia while high; possibly not worthwhile.

Try to write a story ala Keret (in the sense that it is short and sad and magical). Try to write a story ala Cortazar (in the sense that it attempts to map the esoteric worlds within the world/within the psyche that are hard to express but very real).

Ride bike to the monument to Emil Carranza out in the pines. Along the way plan a brief first novel; something like Sabato's the Tunnel in the sense that it is short, that it is inflected with darkness and beauty and philosophy. Write brief novel; around 120 pages, then wait a month and cut it to 99 before letting anyone read it.

Observe self observing son and wife; calculate emotional transformation factor in self and others. Consider other people as lab rats to be fictionalized. Consider self pre and post lightning strike; evaluate on quantitative scales with eye toward statistical significance.

Hire Ghostbusters to extract skeleton menagerie from closet. Exercise more. Hang out with friends for remaining therapy -- actual sporadic in-person conversation beyond nuclear family, as opposed to hiding behind Facebook and mutters to self and repeated refreshes of the New York Times web page... looking for dints of liberal bias past.

negative grand canyon

The day we buried you I sealed myself off in a way, like, with death an eventuality one should regard the world at such-and-such distance.

I don't remember you clearly alive in good form, only that you were a rare conduit, a conveyor of magic and spirit. Naturally cancer targeted you especially. One might argue the opposite view that angels brought you away to heaven. Or that believing in angels or heaven is cheap dualism that makes it easier to give up on the world, believing that the next or some alternate one is better to invest in. The way I picture it, you’d laugh and argue that logic is a poison that shouldn’t be sprayed near this particular discussion.

Those of us you left behind formed a silent pact to never deal with the loss, to allow it to submerge and grow in force and weight. For 25 years none of us dealt with your absence. We agreed that it should make a missing puzzle piece, the undiscussed key to our family’s bizarre and indefensible tendency toward entropy and isolation. That absence grew into a kind of negative Grand Canyon, not a mountain, I mean, but a colossal hole in the ground filled near to overflow with decades of human refuse, dirty laundry, broken toys, empty bottles, old newspapers, a kind of personal landfill, a museum of disappointment, each of us taking up residence on opposite sides, meeting in the center only when obligation overcomes the dull fear of being buried under a glimmering avalanche of detritus.

I visited her grave one morning this fall. I’d brought my son to meet her, and I remembered again the morning I'd said goodbye. I thought she’d like to meet him, that she might want to see the way his eyes catch light. That I knew now that our distance was the wrong choice, that it was the opposite of what she would have recommended.

I don’t know why I didn’t come to see her sooner. I can’t think of an excuse that’s sufficient. I only know that I love and miss her, that there’s still her magic in the world. That I feel her presence in the way these pines change colors, in the rare way light sustains itself through winter, bursting sudden through the branches of roadside trees.

matter-of-fact ghosts

When the weather gets crisp and cold like this a stillness spreads across the world and the world gets the quality of early morning pond before sunrise. When the weather gets like this if you drag yourself out of bed early, bundle up, and bring a cheap giveaway thermos of weak Wawa coffee you can sit on a rock or on the damp ground itself to watch the lake, to watch the lake as small washes of implied light demarcate the day. To watch memories of pain surface like sunnies or bass to briefly break the stillness of the morning water.

(Left to his own devices the balding bureaucrat feels another maybe side effect of no-longer drinking: Memories that haven't seen the light of day in ages break years of bad practice, of numbing anaesthetic).

What do you do with the pain you remember, tangled with the pain you caused others? How do you free yourself from it to live in the present? I’ve been tempted to find other ways to numb this dull pain because I don’t know how to look these memories in the face. It’s like being visited by matter-of-fact ghosts, droll ghosts that by this point bore and sadden as much as terrify.

When we were kids we used to go fishing. We mostly practiced catch and release but sometimes in between we would torture the fish. It wasn’t how I thought of it then, it felt more like playing. I remember we would whirl them on the end of the line like a kind of lasso. Sometimes the line would wrap around a branch, resulting in the improbable miracle of fish in a tree. All you needed to catch them was bread rolled in a ball on a hook.

Being exposed to violence and how you pass it onto other beings on some instinctive level. As a child you are simply a conduit of violence; it can pass through you (with you as its instrument) and you don’t even know. As an adult you might not know but you aren’t justified in that, because you’re in a position where you could and should know.

Throwing bread into the water, this time of course without a hook and an intent to twirl. Like apologizing to the fish, or their descendants. If they’re ginger to approach the surface I can’t blame them.

new york tryptich/this golden nature

Morning subway ride with homeless mentally ill passenger his eyes dilated now he looks up you really shouldn't make the mistake of making eye contact now he's looking at you one of his hands is dark silver as if he's painted it and his nails white too the other the color of normal skin -- This silver skinned hand has a quality of menace people keep sitting next to him oblivious at first to the wide berth other passengers have given him and to the hand itself me I can't stop looking at it maybe he's wearing a tight white glove that's so tight you can't see where it separates from the skin maybe he's wearing that glove because he wants to kill us all and leave no prints don't be silly but still this feels like an omen like a departure from a good world this is where the universe reveals the worst it has in store for us gradual from this point people exchange quick looks the guy keeps looking straight at people talking to them in low tones the train won't move, the train keeps stopping and some fucked robot keeps apologizing for the unavoidable delay.

The guy keeps looking straight at people and talking to them: That's how you know someone's crazy in New York City. They look people in the eye and talk to them, like a child would. The train refuses to move.

Afternoon: Feel-good charity delivery for low-income workers, the rub being that the low-income workers are really the company's underpaid employees and the delivery was late and so that thick cloud of dread that hung only over me and the man with the silver hand this morning now has spread to the others around me; to mothers fathers and children waiting for something they thought they could get for free. Instead of giving them something free now we've taken hours of their time so it's like we're paying them by the hour in holiday food.

No one can reach the delivery people. The drivers don't seem to have phones. Perhaps they began driving before the invention of the cellphone and have stuck to CB radios. Stalwarts. Maybe if we had a CB radio we could reach them and tell them if they don't get here soon we'll burn their trucks and parade their heads in the street on pikes. There are kids crying in the lobby.

Night: we're in a fancy restaurant. One of the fanciest restaurants I think we've ever been in and it's making you uncomfortable. Maybe I'm uncomfortable too, but that isn't something I notice these days. We're doing okay though throughout the meal. Then you look across from me at the table and it looks like you're going to cry, like you've caught the dread. Maybe it's too much, that discomfort is turning to full leaden guilt, that you can picture how many folks the tab of this meal would feed for a week, or a month, or a year. To distract you I tell you a story, the story of this golden nature.

This is the story of a New York chef. One night, a Wednesday like any other, he shuts down the restaurant and goes to sleep early. At some point in the night though (here it becomes less a normal night) some pretentious foodie angels descend on a whim from the heavens and imprint two giant Michelin stars on his forehead as he sleeps.

When he wakes up in the morning our chef has a serious hard-on, the kind the label on the pills warns you about, and it just won't go away. He's worried for a minute, but then he looks in the mirror and sees the stars, and this makes him happy, I mean, two Michelin stars. That's pretty good; I mean, before he had zero stars, it hadn't even really been much of a thought. Only now he looks on his face and sees plenty of room for the third. Who's to say there couldn't be a third? Or more?

But still there's the matter of this pesky continuous stiffy. Our chef goes about his business, gets the paper and eats his breakfast. Now it's starting to get a little painful. And now (that's a little better actually) numb. Refreshed, our chef decides to take a shower, but the sound of the water bouncing off of it really makes him notice. Our chef looks down and his dick has turned to gold.

At first he considers going to the hospital, or smashing his penis free of the gold with a hammer. But after an hour or so he's calmed down. It really is a fine piece, he tells himself, it really shines. And what would the papers say? He's got these stars to think about now; the last thing he needs is a scandal.

Time passes and our chef really adjusts. And none are the wiser. There are things he'll never be able to do, it's true -- urinate, get an MRI, go through airport security-- but the man with the golden dick adjusts. He drives to his vacations, he seems to have lost the biological imperative or need to urinate, and his health has never been better.

Perhaps most important, this golden nature of his dick has freed him up to worry less about his libido and more about his cooking. It improves by leaps and bounds, it improves spectacularly; his cooking now is a perfect weave of science and inspiration and sublimated sex -- his cooking now is a celebration of the very essence of living, and those culinary professionals around him seek his presence as one would seek a yogi, or keeper of the flame.

At night he sleeps alone, always alone, and dreams of an inspection (somehow he knows that it's *her* there at the corner table) that glows so flawlessly, the result could never be in question. Later that year the third and fourth star are conferred all together, in the thick of the night by those same asshole angels.

The next morning his doorbell rings and it's her, this time without her disguise, love beaming in her face. They have three years of bliss together, until one day the dread arrives.

non-essential life

It’s the chore you think you're going to finish in an afternoon but after a few big piles it starts raining, and everyone knows it’s folly to rake in the rain. Weeks later you get to a point where there’s one more leaf piled on your front curb than swirling in your yard, you declare a majority, and you check it off your list.

Then some Saturday morning weeks after VL-day you hear an early, rare sound, like something descending too close. You get dressed and go to the front window, hoping in your secret heart to see people hurling themselves down the inflatable slide of a misplaced jumbo jet, or at least buildings on fire.

Men in construction vehicles and men with leaf blowers make slow, reiterant progress up and down the block. There’s a quality of municipal gentility, of man reliant on his fellow man. And also one of alien invasion, of HR sentinels for a superior and disinterested race emptying a target planet of non-essential life.

Now a few spared leaves swirl, a few stay stuck to the street, pressed and faded etchings of recent history. There are days, love, when the things we never say ring loud inside, like lies of omission.

this not knowing the names

Man, I can't wait to really talk to you. Even from what we can say to each other now, it's deep. You have this nascent honed and exact-timed sense of humor, you have communication down with only simple ingredients. So much is shared there already.

So much concurrent difference. We're both bad at goodbyes, and different in that you actually express that. We both love music, only you still let it echo through you and dance at any excuse.

We both play piano. You're pithier in your playing; you express a tired or whimsical or flat-out barbaric mood in 10 to 15 seconds and then move on to the next activity.

I let the piano's predilection for sentiment run its course, putting up a sad little tent in that maudlin space between Ben Folds 5 verses. You know instinctively that a piano can overwhelm a mix, that it can overwhelm a mood. You know that once the spotlight settles on Tori or Billy a kind of calcification begins, a kind of mold begins developing around the ears of listeners, that death wins the day.

Last night you slept through the night, which I thought was a pretty rugged thing for a little person to do. It's dark then, full of monsters and bad dreams whose names you don't even know. This not knowing the names is a source of your strength, and a test of your bravery, and I'm so proud of you, of your every grow and change.

As you learn the names, I get the feeling you'll know better what to do with them. I look forward to you showing us.